Stephanie Slater
Brutally kidnapped estate agent whose survival was credited to her character and moral courage
STEPHANIE SLATER, who has died of cancer aged 50, was held captive for eight days in 1992 while working as an estate agent in suburban Birmingham, imprisoned in a wooden “coffin” by a sadistic killer, Michael Sams, who had posed as a prospective house-buyer.
She was convinced she would never get out alive, and she subsequently revealed that she had been raped. She was released when her manager paid a £175,000 ransom.
On the morning of January 22 1992 Stephanie Slater, then 25, arrived at an empty house for sale in Turnberry Road, Great Barr, to meet a man wearing a donkey jacket and black glasses and calling himself Bob Southwell who had booked a viewing. In fact it was Sams, 51, who the previous year had murdered a prostitute in Leeds called Julie Dart.
In the bathroom he produced a long homemade knife and a sharpened chisel. When Stephanie Slater panicked and screamed he pushed her into the bath and jumped on top of her, holding the knife to her throat and threatening to kill her. After tying her hands with rope and clamping thick, black plastic glasses over her eyes, Sams tied a washing line around her neck and held it “like a dog lead” as he hauled her from the bath.
He bound her feet, blindfolded and gagged her and forced her downstairs, where he ordered her to lie on the reclined front passenger seat of his red Metro parked outside. Throwing a blanket over her, he tied a cord over her throat and placed a heavy toolbox on her lap.
When the gag was eventually removed, she was forced to dictate a taped message to her boss Kevin Watts, manager at the Shipways estate agency where she worked. It said she would be freed on January 31 if a £175,000 ransom was paid. “I was absolutely terrified,” Stephanie Slater told the jury at the subsequent trial.
At Sams’s dingy workshop in Newark, where he repaired tools for a living, she was forced to strip to her underclothes and given jeans and sweaters to wear. Then he manacled her with metal handcuffs and tied her legs again. “I hope you’re not claustrophobic,” Sams told her, “because you’re going into a box within a box.”
He pushed her into a makeshift wooden container feet first. “It was very tight,” she recalled. “It was like a coffin.” This in turn was inserted into a wheelie bin lying on its side. Sams warned her there were boulders above her head which would crush her if she moved, and that electrodes would electrocute her if she tried to escape.
Recalling her first night, Stephanie Slater said she was so bitterly cold she thought she had died. “I saw a very vivid picture of Christ in front of me in the blackness,” she remembered. “I am not a religious person and this was quite a shock.”
Stephanie Slater devised a survival strategy, and during meal breaks when she was allowed out of her coffin (she was at times handcuffed to a mattress) she chatted to Sams about herself, realising that “screaming, shouting and fighting would not do any good”. Her estate agent’s training in dealing with difficult clients helped. “I wanted him to see me as a human being and not someone he could play God with,” she said. “I wanted him to like me so it would be difficult for him to kill me.” Sams collected the ransom money on January 29 and the following day dumped her at the end of her parents’ street in “absolute hysterics”.
Sams’s ex-wife recognised his voice on a phone call that was recorded by police and used in a Crimewatch television reconstruction. He was jailed for life for the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater and the murder of Julie Dart. All but £25,000 of the ransom money was recovered.
“Before this happened, I had a boyfriend, a job and a company car,” Stephanie Slater said. “I had loads of friends and a great social life. But he [Sams] took everything and destroyed the next 20 years of my life.”
An adopted child, Stephanie Slater was born in the West Midlands on November 9 1966 and attended Churchfields High School, West Bromwich, after which she took a variety of small jobs but quite early on went into estate agency.
She was too traumatised to settle in regular work after her release and she struggled with the level of attention she received. After the trial she moved to the Isle of Wight, where she had spent holidays as a child and where she felt safe. She shared an old gatekeeper’s cottage in Ryde with her friend Stacey Kettner, who ran an aromatherapy shop on the island.
Stephanie Slater suffered from insomnia and anxiety and lived for some time on incapacity benefit. When Sams announced that he planned to write a book in which he would claim he had conducted a love affair with her during her abduction, she decided to reveal to her adoptive parents and the police that she had been raped.
She briefly changed her name to Phoenix Rhiannon, and wrote (with Pat Lancaster) her own account of her abduction, Beyond Fear: My Will to Survive (1995). For many years she gave talks to help the police understand the impact of violence and sexual assault on victims. Latterly she had volunteered as a tour guide at St Catherine’s Lighthouse and it seemed that she was at last finding happiness.
Paying tribute to Stephanie Slater at the end of Michael Sams’s trial, Mr Justice Judge said her survival “was entirely due to her remarkable moral courage and unostentatious qualities of character”. Sams, he added, was an extremely dangerous and evil man. Now 76, he is still in prison.
Stephanie Slater died less than a fortnight after receiving her cancer diagnosis. Her adoptive mother died in 1998 and her adoptive father died last year.
Stephanie Slater, born November 9 1966, died August 31 2017