‘This is a warning to every parent. If it can happen to us, it could happen to anyone’
IT was a normal day at work for Debbie Reid as she answered the phone at her desk.
‘Mrs Reid,’ the voice inquired. ‘It’s the Foreign Office here. Are you sitting down? I’m afraid your daughter has been arrested in Peru for drug smuggling.’
At first she thought it must be a terrible mistake. Her teenage daughter, Melissa, was in Ibiza, having left home only a few weeks earlier to work on the holiday island.
But as the import of the words permeated her brain, she found herself glancing around the office and feeling suddenly alone. Her world had just turned upside down with one phone call, yet everything around her still remained the same.
‘I’ve never felt as lost as I did at that moment,’ remembered Mrs Reid last week.
‘I was in shock at what I’d been told. I was surrounded by people yet I’d never felt lonelier. How could I tell any of them what I’d just been told on the phone?’
A hard-working, law-abiding couple, she and her husband Billy had raised their four children to be the same.
Recalling the moment they learned of Melissa’s actions, Mr Reid said: ‘We were deeply embarrassed by the whole situation and we learned the hard way that you cannot let your guard down and assume that because you’ve brought your children up a certain way, that they won’t get into trouble.
‘Looking back, I’m still not sure why one of our four ended up doing
‘I can’t describe the humiliation’
what she did. You find yourself questioning what you could have done differently as a parent to change things. It took a while to sink in that it wasn’t necessarily our fault that we had turned out to have one bad apple.’
In the days after his daughter’s arrest, Mr Reid flew out to Peru to see her – still convinced of her innocence – but remembers being confronted by a ‘virtual stranger’ when he was reunited with her.
He said: ‘It was a shock to see her. She had been partying hard and her eyes had a dead, zoned-out look that was chilling. It was like I was hugging Melissa’s alter ego. It was her – yet it wasn’t.
‘The last time we’d seen her she was going on holiday to Ibiza, deciding at the last minute to stay out there and work. She’s always been very headstrong and I’d tried to talk her out of going out there without anything definite to go to. She’d held her hand up and said, “Dad, I’ve made my mind up, I’m going”.
‘Now here we were, 6,000 miles away and my 19-year-old daughter was being accused of drug smuggling. It was devastating.
‘I can’t describe the humiliation, not to mention our fears for Melissa’s safety. I’d wake up in a cold sweat worrying about what was going to happen to her.
‘I wanted to believe she was innocent but the doubts kept flooding in. How could the police have got it so wrong? But at the same time, what was she doing there in the first place?’
Before long, he realised he couldn’t believe a word Melissa was saying about the circumstances of her apprehension.
He said: ‘She would lie to my face, telling me the same lies that she’d told the police after her arrest. That was hard to take in the beginning but I realise now she had to stick to her story because she was scared she would be found out.
‘As a family, it was like we’d entered some horrible nightmare, without much hope that it would be over any time soon. Since then, it’s been all-consuming, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. By the time Melissa appeared in court and finally started to tell me the truth, it was hard for us to believe what was fact and what was fiction. For a while, I almost couldn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth.’
Her release last week after three years in prison was like ‘all our birthdays and Christmases rolled into one’, her mother said last night.
At their home in Lenzie, Dunbartonshire, Mrs Reid added: ‘We’re so grateful to have her back safe and well. I don’t think there are many boys and girls who could come through what Melissa did and come out the other side like she did.’
But she warned other parents to be on their guard, saying: ‘There but for the grace of God goes anyone. If it could happen to a family like ours, believe me when I say it could happen to anyone’s.
‘Whether we like it or not, what’s happened is now part of our family history for ever.
‘It’s not something we are particularly proud of, but we expect to bounce back from it and we have confidence that Melissa will make us proud again.
‘She’s a changed girl now and I’m glad to see it. It gives us confidence for the future to see her face up to what she did and show real remorse for her actions.
‘As a family, we now have to try to move on and put it behind us.’