Emmerdale makes me feel I should never have been born
A Down’s syndrome TV plot has campaigners up in arms. None more so than Heidi Crowter – who’s taking the Government to court
TWIRLING the platinum wedding ring around her finger, heidi Crowter is as happy as you’d expect any new bride to be. her home is full of mementoes of her wedding to partner James in July. Photos of the big day are on display in the sitting room of the couple’s two-bedroom flat. And her wedding dress, all froth and tulle, is still in her wardrobe.
‘It was the happiest day of my life. i can’t believe i’ve got such a wonderful husband.’ Meanwhile, James’s love and pride in his wife is palpable.
It is a picture of marital contentment which makes it all the more extraordinary that she is engaged in a hugely controversial legal battle — one she sees as essential to prove that her life is as valuable as any other young bride’s.
Heidi, 25, has Down’s syndrome, as does James, 27. When we meet at her home in Coventry, she is disarmingly outspoken with an infectious giggle. Yet she is also intensely serious when it comes to discussing the changes she wants to make to our preconceptions of people with Down’s — and to the law on abortion.
Currently, abortions after 24 weeks and up until birth are allowed in England, scotland and Wales under three circumstances: if the mother’s life is in danger; if she is at risk of grave physical or mental injury; or if there is a severe foetal abnormality. Down’s falls into this last category, although the majority of cases are detected much earlier in pregnancy.
Still, between 2010 and 2018, 124 foetuses were aborted after 24 weeks following a Down’s diagnosis. heidi sees this as a deep injustice that calls into question the value of her own happy, fulfilled life — and those of other disabled people.
‘How can anyone say my life is less valuable than anyone else’s?’ she says with complete frankness. ‘When babies such as me can be aborted up to birth, it makes me feel like i’m better off dead.’
The issue is set to become even bigger thanks to an upcoming storyline on ITV soap Emmerdale in which leading characters Laurel and Jai decide to terminate a pregnancy after a Down’s diagnosis.
More than 26,000 people have signed a petition calling for the storyline to be scrapped, while charities and MPs have written to ITV boss Dame Carolyn McCall. Nevertheless the first scenes, in which Laurel discovers she’s pregnant, will air this evening with Emmerdale insisting that it has been produced in a sensitive way and in consultation with parents with children who have Down’s syndrome, medical professionals and groups such as Antenatal Results and Choices.
ASPOKESMAN for the soap said: ‘The full context of Laurel and Jai’s story will be portrayed because they only reach this heartbreaking decision after much soul-searching. Emmerdale felt the story of thousands of couples who make this choice every year, feeling unable to talk about it, needed to be told.’
Heidi, however, doesn’t see it that way. ‘ i’m so upset. having this horrible story gives such a terrible message,’ she says. ‘it makes me feel like i should never have been born.
‘I won’t be watching. But i feel angry that there might be people with Down’s who will watch and feel worthless.’
Actress sally Phillips — best known for BBC1’s Miranda and whose 12-year- old son Olly has Down’s — has branded the show ‘irresponsible’.
Sally is also supporting heidi in her campaign to change the law so that foetuses with non-fatal disabilities such as Down’s are treated like other foetuses. ‘Given advances in medical care and quality of life for people with Down’s, the different right to life is beginning to look, not just dated, but barbaric,’ says sally.
Heidi is the first person with Down’s to take the UK government to court and is supported in her legal case by her family and the charity Don’t screen Us Out who see confident, chatty heidi as the perfect poster girl.
Heidi’s fellow claimant, Maire Lea-Wilson from West London, has a one- year- old son with Down’s called Aidan. she resisted pressure to terminate her pregnancy after a scan at 34 weeks detected her son’s condition.
Now the question will be argued in the high Court, after judges gave the green light for heidi’s challenge against health secretary Matt hancock to be heard on the grounds of discrimination against disabled people.
Heidi claims the law amounts to a breach of her human rights. she is stepping into a fraught arena, with any tightening of abortion law potentially seen as a threat to women’s right to control their own bodies. Women in Northern ireland only won the right to have abortions at all this summer, after decades of legal struggle. And, in some parts of Europe, women’s rights are going backwards. New laws in Poland last month ban nearly all abortions and have fuelled fears that any changes to the rules could be the thin end of the wedge.
But heidi is adamant she is not looking to ban abortions. she simply wants parity for disabled people. ‘i believe in a woman’s right to choose,’ she says firmly. ‘But this is all about there being equality in the womb.’
Heidi was born to parents who refused prenatal testing for Down’s; they already knew they would choose to keep their baby no matter what. still, Liz, a nursery teacher, 53, and steve, 52, who runs a car sales business, admit that didn’t lessen their shock and anxiety when heidi was diagnosed within days of her birth in July 1995.
Down’s is caused by the presence of an extra chromosome and carries an increased risk of health problems. it was touch and go whether heidi would survive as she needed an operation at two months to fix a hole in her heart.
Heidi is clearly doted on by her parents and two older brothers: Dan, 28, and Tim, 26, and younger sister, suzie, 23. she attended a mainstream comprehensive in Coventry, where she passed some GCSES. ‘i was bullied a little, but i had friends who stood up for me. Mum told me to hold my head up high and that’s what i try to remember,’ she says.
After school, she studied hairdressing and secured a part-time paid job in a children’s salon in Leamington spa.
She’s proud of her smart little flat in a complex for disabled adults, a few miles from her parents’ home where she lives largely independently with the help of three carers.
It was through her parents that heidi met James in October 2017. ‘When i first saw him i couldn’t believe how handsome he was,’ says heidi. ‘it was love at first sight,’ adds James. he proposed in December 2018 — going down on one knee in front of both sets of parents and, despite the pandemic, they wed on July 4 at hillfield Church, Coventry, in front of 30 guests. The ceremony was livestreamed and 1,000 people watched online. Their wedding has now been viewed more than 35,000 times.
Since then, heidi has been inundated with messages from other people with Down’s who, like her, are enjoying fulfilled, independent lives. ‘i feel fantastic that we are getting somewhere,’ beams heidi. ‘i may look and sound a little different but i have the same dreams and hopes.’
WHILE it is possible for couples with Down’s to have children, it is simply too dangerous for heidi to become pregnant because of her weakened heart, so James has had a vasectomy.
‘it’s upsetting, because i love children,’ she says. ‘But you have to make the most of what you have. And my life is wonderful.’
Wherever one stands on the complexities of heidi’s campaign, it’s impossible not to admire her unfailing good humour and zest for life.
FOR more information on Heidi’s court case go to: crowdjustice.com/case/ downright discrimination/
STANDING in the dock of courtroom no. 3 at Winchester Crown Court 25 years ago last Sunday, the matronly woman in her black suit and white blouse cut a very ordinary figure. If she still wore a gold crucifix around her neck, the one she’d worn throughout her trial, it was hard to make out.
But her cynical bid to be seen as a godly woman had failed. The real Rose West had been unveiled over seven weeks of some of the most harrowing evidence heard in a British court — and which for me after a quarter of a century of crime reporting for the Daily Mail has never been matched for depravity.
She was a sex-obsessed psychopath without parallel among female killers in the UK. A true monster.
The mother of eight had just been convicted of murdering ten young women and girls, including her daughter Heather and stepdaughter Charmaine, and was about to learn her fate. She knew what was coming — a ‘life means life’ jail term but was determined not to break down in public. It was a final act of defiance against those she and her late husband Fred — who escaped justice by hanging himself in his prison cell before trial — had abused, tortured and butchered.
If she was suppressing any emotion, it was pity for herself, not remorse for her crimes.
This case redefined my understanding of the word evil, taking me into a world of unimaginable horror. Journalists covering the trial were offered counselling, and if I had been a parent then, I might have requested some. At the time, some people complained that the evidence was too shocking to read — but there was so much that never made it into print: it was simply too awful.
The Yorkshire Ripper, who died earlier this month, may have had more female victims than Rose West but, having sat through every day of her trial, I can say she was every bit as evil as Peter Sutcliffe. Possibly worse.
Rose West’s case had a lasting impact on how I brought up my two daughters. As they entered their teens, and wanted more freedom, I found myself having to put to one side the irrational fear that they could cross paths with people like the Wests.
When you have spent so long covering the dark side of life, you must guard against being overprotective of your children and somehow allow them to get the night bus or a late taxi home from town.
Statistically it is very unlikely anything bad will happen, but you have to manage those fears more when you have a job like mine.
I am forever haunted by one victim of the Wests, whose parents I interviewed back in 1995.
Lynda Gough was going through a minor teenage rebellion, seeking more independence from her loving parents, when she suddenly left the family home in April, 1973.
The privately- educated 19-yearold’s note to her mum and dad read: ‘Please don’t worry about me. I have got a flat and I will come and see you sometime, love Lyn.’
It wasn’t long before her dad John, who became a senior officer with Gloucestershire Fire & Rescue Service and mum June, a clerical worker, became extremely worried.
Detective work by Mrs Gough, then 39 and a mother of three, led her to 25 Cromwell Street in nearby Gloucester about ten days later. F RIENDS of their daughter had given the worried mother her address. On knocking on the door of the bleak three-storey property, a couple answered and June Gough recognised the dark-haired woman as someone who had called at her home for Lynda a month earlier.
At first the woman was reluctant to admit that Lynda had been there, but went on to have a ‘perfectly reasonable conversation’ with the worried mother. The woman said ‘children had no respect for their parents, lacked gratitude and didn’t understand their feelings’, then admitted that Lynda had stayed there briefly before moving on.
But then June Gough noticed the woman was wearing Lynda’s slippers and a cardigan, and spotted more of her daughter’s clothes on a washing line in the back garden.
When challenged, the woman said Lynda had been talking about going to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset and had left her clothes at the house, but ‘they weren’t sure’ where she had gone.
The conversation came to a cordial end after about 15 minutes
Despite Mrs Gough contacting the police, the benefits agency and The Salvation Army in her efforts to find Lynda, she heard nothing more for more than 20 years.
Then, in early 1994 police began to unearth the remains of young females at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred and Rose West and their ‘House of Horrors’ dominated world headlines.
June Gough realised that the women who had coolly fobbed her off on the doorstep all those years ago was Rose.
As the body count mounted, the Goughs were filled with dread that Lynda might be among the victims. Then on March 7 her remains were found. She had never left Cromwell Street but had been murdered and dumped in an inspection pit of a garage at the property.
Months later, the Goughs invited me to their home in Highnam. The police had not yet told them how Lynda had died, the extent of her injuries or about the paraphernalia found near her remains.
The memory of that meeting with the parents of a teenager tortured, then slaughtered, by the Wests for their sexual pleasure remains very clear in my mind.
I was close to tears as June told how Lynda had left home suddenly, and how their respect for her independence had given way to fear that something awful had happened — eventually assuming their daughter no longer wanted contact.
‘We were sure Lynda would be back,’ Mrs Gough told me. ‘When she didn’t return we thought she didn’t want to bother.
‘I often wondered what she looked like. There was a couple next door in their early 30s and I thought, ‘Does Lynda look like that now?’’’
Before then, June Gough and I were strangers. By the end of it, I wanted to hug her. As a crime reporter, it’s important to feel emotionally involved while remaining objective. That balance was severely challenged in the West case.
In the autumn of 1995, the trial of Rose West began at Winchester and the true extent of her and husband Fred’s depravity was laid bare.
There were broadly three categories of victim: the couple’s own children and live-in nannies, teenagers in care enticed to Cromwell Street with the promise of a bed and companionship, and young women lured into the couple’s car — wrongly feeling secure because of Rose’s presence in the front passenger seat.
Some victims were kept alive for just hours, others for days, during which, bound and gagged, they endured repeated sexual assaults. Then they were brutally murdered, their bodies hacked to pieces and buried under the kitchen and cellar floors or in the garden.
From the state of the remains and the items found with them, plus the testimony of a woman who survived an abduction and rape by the couple, the prosecution QC reconstructed the Wests’ methods.
It was a sickening litany. Most victims are believed to have been knocked unconscious, bound with cords and gagged with masking tape before being tortured.
Police had found hooks drilled into rafters in the cellar, their use not hard to imagine. But most dreadful of all, at least one victim had had plastic tubes stuffed into her nostrils through masking tape wrapped around her face.
Rose West denied everything she was accused of.
Months earlier, two veteran journalists who’d covered the 1966 trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley told me the West case couldn’t be as bad as that of the Moors Murderers. As the full extent of the victims’ suffering was revealed at Winchester, I suspect they revised their opinion. There was no audio recording of torture there had been in the Brady/Hindley case but none of us were left in any doubt about what the victims went through. At her trial, Rose West, then 41, would occasionally wipe away tears. Was she sorry for the victims or, more likely, sorry for herself that Fred’s apparent plan to kill himself to save her from trial had failed?
Opening the prosecution, Brian Leveson QC said at the ‘ core of this case is the
relationship between Frederick and Rosemary West, what they each knew about each other, what they did together, what they did to others and how far each was prepared to go.’
Over the weeks I became utterly convinced Rose was the driving force not Fred, who had been 12 years her senior.
Dim but devious, Fred was a pervert, a voyeur and psychopath plus — despite being a cowboy builder — an able hand when it came to disposing of the bodies.
Rose, from all the evidence, took a special pleasure in torture. She had a vicious temper and pushed the boundaries of violence in her quest for sexual thrills.
Indeed, ‘pure evil’ doesn’t begin to describe her actions between 1971 and 1987.
She tried her best to earn the sympathy of the jury — as well as a crucifix, she even wore a Poppy to commemorate Armistice Day — yet within minutes of entering the witness box, I knew she would be convicted.
Defence QC, Richard Ferguson described her as ‘another victim’ of Cromwell Street, a woman who’d been raped by her own father then bullied, abused and controlled by her husband. She had also lost her family as a result of false murder allegations.
Her theatrics, though, were obvious. ‘He promised me the world, he promised me everything,’ she claimed in three hours of dramatic testimony. ‘Because I was so young, I fell for his lies.’
But the jury saw her for what she was — a woman instrumental in the gruesome murders of her eldest daughter Heather, 16, her step-daughter Charmaine, eight, Carol Ann Cooper, 15, Lucy Partington, 21, Therese Siegenthaler, 21, Shirley Hubbard, 15, Juanita Mott, 18, Shirley Ann Robinson, 18, and Alison Chambers, 17, as well as Lynda Gough, 19.
TRIAL judge, Mr Justice Mantell told the emotionless defendant: ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released. Take her down.’
Former Detective Superintendent John Bennett who led the police case, told my Mail+ True Crime podcasts he believes Rose will never admit her guilt and will take her secrets to the grave.
‘Personally I doubt very much that she will ever say anything more than she’s already said, which is absolutely nothing at all,’ he said. ‘I think she is now... institutionalised. She’s quite comfortable with being who she is, and where she is, and her personal circumstances. There is no gain for her whatsoever to make further admissions or to assist anybody.’
Rose West enjoys listening to The Archers on Radio 4, playing Monopoly, embroidery, cooking and shopping from catalogues, including beauty products from Avon and trinkets from Argos.
We know that in 2014, West’s cell at top-security Low Newton jail in County Durham had a TV, radio, CD player and she had her own bathroom. A prison romance with the now late Myra Hindley in the 1990s, was followed by several relationships with other inmates.
Even in 1995, June Gough had mixed feelings about the sentence given to her daughter’s killer. Yes, the House of Horrors murderess had been jailed for life, but would that be much of a punishment?
Lynda Gough was just an ordinary teenager finding her way in the world in 1973. Had she not crossed paths with the Wests, she would now be 67 years old. Rose West turns 67 later this month.
‘She didn’t have the chance to get married, have children and lead a settled life. It was all taken away from her,’ her mother told me.
The tragedy is compounded by Rose’s enjoyment of prison life. Rarely in all my years of crime reporting have I ever seen a clearer case of the punishment not fitting the crime.
DATING PAST?
I’VE been in two long- term relationships; one for a year and another for seven, but each just ran its course. In the two years since I’ve been on a lot of dates.
PRE-DATE NERVES?
FIFTEEN minutes before the date, I suddenly got nervous about how it would go. This is my first virtual date, but I’ve been on a blind date before and it was a disaster.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS?
LUKE is a handsome lad with nice eyes, long lashes and a rather big beard. I was touched that he had bought me flowers and had them next to him during the date. he was concerned it would be cheesy, but I like cheesy! I felt self- conscious because I was wearing a hoodie and a T-shirt, while Luke looked good in an oriental-print shirt.
EASY TO TALK TO?
HE’S younger than me, but has done so much with his life, which is a big tick. he teaches special needs children and is a vegan — another tick as I’m a vegetarian.
It’s good to meet someone who has a strong moral compass but isn’t preachy or judgy. I explained I had gone back to university and showed him some of my paintings — but not in a ‘look how clever I am’ way. Luke was curious and seemed impressed.
EMBARRASSING MOMENTS?
AS THE date went on, increasingly I felt like a bit of an old fart because Luke is clearly cool.
he goes out a lot and I don’t. am I a fuddy- duddy? It’s possible . . . the highlight of my weekend is listening to The archers omnibus.
DID SPARKS FLY?
IT’S difficult to tell on a virtual date, and I’m not good at picking up signals. I am attracted to him, though — there, I said it!
It was stilted at times because of the internet connection — Luke was using his mobile phone and it kept stalling — but we stayed online for three hours.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET IN PERSON?
YES, and we have been in touch since the date. however, I don’t want to intrude at the moment as Luke’s sister is expecting a baby any day now and they’re close. I’m taking it as a positive sign that Luke suggested we exchange numbers.
WHAT DO YOU THINK HE THOUGHT OF YOU?
I HOPE he thought I was attractive and funny.
WOULD YOUR FRIENDS LIKE HIM?
THEY might question his long hair, which he ties in a man bun, but my friends are extremely welcoming so yes, I suspect they would.