‘They dragged my screaming son from my arms — I will never move on’
This week, the Mail revealed how a man once charged with murder conned family courts into giving him custody of his neighbour’s toddler. Now, the mother tells the full traumatic story of her fight to get her beloved child back
SHE speaks with quiet authority until tears overwhelm her, then gathers herself to recall the moment when her toddler was snatched from her. ‘I was lying on the sofa in a deep sleep with my son in my arms,’ she begins. ‘It was a dark, cold winter night. There was a thunderous banging on the door. Two police officers and a court official barged in, pushed me into another room, threw official paperwork at me and abducted my son.’
Abducted. She uses the word advisedly because this is exactly how it felt to her: as if her young son was kidnapped, with the collusion of the very authorities that are charged with protecting us all.
As this newspaper revealed on Thursday, the little boy was snatched from his loving mother and placed in the care of her neighbour Colin English — a former murder suspect described by a court as ‘deceitful and manipulative’ — and his wife Yvonne, who works with children.
‘Colin was there with the police. He grabbed my son who was screaming. I said to Colin, “I know everything you’ve done. You’re not going to take my son,” but the police pushed me away. You’re helpless. You know you can’t fight them. They had documents that gave them legal authority.’
While the Mail has already recounted the facts of this scarcely believable, Kafkaesque case, this is the first time the mother at the heart of it — a strikingly attractive graduate in her 30s, who cannot legally be named — has told her full extraordinary story.
What she experienced would be enough to break any parent. For the next four months she endured the unthinkable. English, who
‘You’re helpless. You know you can’t fight them’
had ‘ gas-lighted and groomed’ her, stolen from her and forged documents, driven her, in fact, to the brink of a nervous breakdown, was now being permitted, with his wife, to foster her son. And she was powerless to resist.
‘Looking back, I don’t know how I got through those months. I had to go to meetings, arranged by social services, and talk to the evil people who had my son. It was a grief like bereavement.
‘I was allowed to see my son for two hours every three days and I had to have supervised access. I cried a lot but I knew I would sell my soul to get him back.’
She explains she had to go through the family courts while ‘they assessed if I was a suitable parent for my child. And all the time the man who was looking after him had forged my signature on a private foster agreement, stolen from me; controlled me.
‘I spent £50,000 getting my son back. I had to sell the dream house my husband and I had saved so hard to buy so I could pay for the best barristers and solicitors.’
It was only after Colin English and his wife withdrew their bid to retain custody of the child — just before a court hearing — that the toddler was finally returned to his mum.
Our exclusive interview comes after a legal fight by the Daily Mail to force the publication of a damning family court judgment.
In it, the judge said the toddler’s mother had initially trusted Mr English ‘completely’.
But, as his behaviour aroused her suspicions, she turned detective and discovered the truth about the man who had, at first, seemed like an exemplary neighbour.
She found out that in 1991 English, 62, had been charged with murdering a young woman whose body has never been found.
And as he spent his time in custody awaiting his trial, he wrote riddles, which police believed held clues about where the body might be. He later said the puzzles were a ‘hoax’ and he couldn’t believe how gullible the police were.
He was acquitted of the charge, but the mother matched his handwriting — replicated in press reports — with writing on post stolen from her flat. It alerted her to his ‘ evil’ intentions, but unfortunately by then it was too late to stop her son being taken.
She recalls the day her child was returned to her: ‘I felt relief, overwhelming maternal love. I cuddled him and told him, “Everything’s going to be OK now.” I sat by his side all night.’
Even so, her victory feels empty. ‘I have lost confidence in the system that is there to protect children. The police have failed miserably. Social services did not do their job. I’ve lost all faith in them.’
Perhaps most monstrous of all, Colin English has faced no consequences for his actions: ‘He is a danger to people. He and his wife put me through ten years of hell. How Colin English has not faced criminal investigation is beyond me.’
She recalls the way English, a computer programmer, wormed his way into her life. It was 2007 and she had just bought a flat in the converted house where he and his wife also lived.
The bubbly single mother of two young children was working 50 hours a week to support her little family and, it seemed, the Englishes were ready to step in and help the bright young woman who had just moved in.
‘He seemed charming; quiet and placid with a soft Liverpudlian accent. They’d pop in and visit, and then say, “We’re having something to eat. Why don’t you join us?”
‘They came across as the ideal neighbours and because their own children had flown the nest, it seemed they wanted something to do. They’d offer to babysit. I couldn’t fault their kindness. Yvonne was such a gentle soul who seemed genuinely to love children.
‘Colin took a real interest in the kids: I thought that was lovely. And because childcare is costly and I worked long hours, I came to rely on them. He started to pick the children up from school; first once a week, then it became three times. He said, “I’m free; don’t worry about a thing.”
‘I thought, “Wow, this is really good.” The Englishes seemed like such good role models. My dad had died suddenly a few years before; in some ways Colin filled the space he left.’
However, as he was insinuating his way into her life, which included access to her flat while babysitting, bizarre things began to happen — though she didn’t connect the two.
‘Photos disappeared from my laptop,’ she recalls. ‘Emails were deleted. And then my post started to go missing. Official letters went astray — notices from the DVLA, the council, the tax office, my bank, the doctor’s. Later I discovered he’d even put his contact details on my hospital records as next of kin.
‘I told Royal Mail about the missing post and asked them to make sure nothing was left in the communal area, but put through my letterbox. But important letters continued to go astray. It started to make me very anxious.
‘Within a year or so, 50 or 60 items of post went missing. I went to the police in 2008 but they thought I was a time-waster. I started to
question myself: was it me who was mislaying things? But I went to my MP who was determined to get to the bottom of it.’
Prompted by him, the police visited the Englishes’ landlady — the freeholder of the house in which they all lived. She produced the missing mail, which she said, had been put through her letterbox. It was meticulously ordered, with notes on one envelope listing the names of the mother’s closest relatives.
The post was returned to the mother and she kept the envelope with its carefully inscribed list. ‘Something told me it might be useful one day.’
Meanwhile, there were more disquieting incidents: ‘A box containing all my documents including a £300,000 life insurance certificate disappeared. Random texts would appear on my phone; emails would be sent from my inbox. By that time Colin had a key so he could feed my dog. But even then I didn’t suspect him.
‘I felt constantly anxious. Then my older son asked me, “Why does Colin keep going through the cupboards when you’re not there?”
‘When I confronted Colin he said, “Why on earth would I do that? You’re not that interesting.” Now, of course, I know that I was being groomed, that he’d been plotting his evil from the outset.’
And it ramped up in 2010 when social services initiated the first of seven investigations into her after an ‘anonymous referral’ questioned her fitness to be a mother.
Her perplexity was augmented by alarm. ‘ None of it made any sense but I had no choice but to go along with it. The panic attacks got worse.
‘I was desperately trying to stay afloat, to carry on as normal and I’d confide in Colin and Yvonne, telling them about things that had happened to me.
‘Now, of course, I know he was causing the havoc.’
But it took a further five years, by which time she was married, before she realised that Colin English was not the concerned friend he had seemed, but was actually plotting to illegally foster her younger son.
She remembers a friend asking, ‘Do you really know this man?’ and prompted by the question she began to research his background online. It was then that she found about the murder charge — and matched his handwriting in the riddles to the list in her pile of mail.
‘And suddenly everything made sense. It felt surreal, as if I was an actress in a film. There was relief that I wasn’t going mad and the awful feeling that he’d stolen ten years of my life. And now I had to deal with it.’
By then English’s plan to take her younger son was drawing ineluctably to its awful culmination.
Having forged the signatures of the mother and her husband on fostering papers, and stolen official letters, the child’s passport and birth certificate, he mounted his successful campaign to convince social workers she had actually agreed to hand over her son.
The result was that a loving and devoted mother was given five days’ notice that she would lose her child to English.
Staggeringly, neither the police nor social services had properly checked the situation with the mother, despite the fact that a health worker had warned he might be ‘grooming’ her. And she feels they completely failed to help her.
She went to the police and asked them to challenge him with her. ‘They told me that if I felt he was a threat I should dial 999.’ She got similarly short shrift from social services.
So, desperately worried about the safety of her child, she contrived a plan to escape before the court order sanctioning the fostering came into force.
With her husband’s agreement, she fled to a holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight taking the children. Her husband, meanwhile, phoned social services to tell them, ‘She is frightened of what Colin English is capable of doing.’
Believing — erroneously — that they would take his wife’s side and protect her and the children, he told them where she had gone. She, in the mistaken belief that the police would also look after her, had also informed them where she was.
So at around 9pm on a February night in 2016, two police officers — one female, one male — a court official, Colin English and his wife, came banging on the door of the cottage the woman had hoped would be a refuge.
‘I was in a deep sleep so I was startled to be woken by the banging. I thought, “If anyone comes in I will fight them to the death.”
‘ My heart was racing. I was frightened, distraught. I knew it was bad. Colin grabbed my son and he screamed.’
Her voice cracks: ‘ Nothing surprised me by then. I stayed up all night and got the first ferry back to the mainland. Looking back, I don’t know how I got through it.’
And the escalating nightmare continued: she was forced, for four months, to visit her child under supervision, ‘And every time I did, I’d say, “Mummy’s here,” to reassure him.’
She shows me heartbreaking photos of her little boy after she was forced to leave him with English following her access visits.
Meanwhile, she had enlisted the help of law firm Charles Russell Speechlys: ‘It took them a good four or five months to get their heads round what had been going on. And every night I spent without my son I had this feeling of loss and guilt. Could I have done more to protect him?
‘I’d cry inconsolably. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I couldn’t sleep. I thought about suicide but I would not have left my children. We sold our house to meet the £50,000 legal bills. It was nothing, bricks and mortar.
‘I don’t think English believed I’d take him on. He thought I’d be bullied into submission.’
In the event, Judge Janet Waddicor saw through him. Her verdict on his behaviour was damning. Mr English was ‘duplicitous, deceitful and manipulative’ and some of his evidence was
‘I was being groomed. He’d plotted his evil from the outset’
‘I want him to know I’m still gunning for him’
‘fanciful, preposterous,’ ‘ludicrous’ and ‘insulting to the intelligence of everybody’ in the court, she ruled. The Englishes denied any wrongdoing, calling the judge’s findings ‘untrue and without foundation’.
In July 2016, mother and son were reunited, and since then she has continued her quest for justice: ‘However, nothing has happened and I have been ignored. I had lost confidence in the systems that are supposed to protect you; almost given up, until the Daily Mail took up the case.’
East Sussex County Council said that at no stage did it make any decision about who the child should live with and was not a party to the legal proceedings. It added that the appropriate assessments and legally required background checks had been made.
A representative told the Mail: ‘It is clear now that both the parent and East Sussex County Council were misled deliberately by a party in the case, whom the court criticised as manipulative. The decision of the parent to minimise their engagement with us contributed to the challenges within this case.’
Sussex police have confirmed that the mother reported a number of matters to them, and that a formal complaint was recorded by their Professional Standards Department.
Meanwhile, the mother finds it ‘unbelievable’ that English has never faced criminal investigation and is still at large.
‘And I want him to know I’m still gunning for him, and for the police and social workers who turned their backs on me. Will I ever draw a line under it? No. This is just the start of the rebuilding.’