Inside story
As a new inquest opens into the Deepcut deaths, Peter Stanford talks to the father of Cheryl James
Why did my daughter Cheryl die at Deepcut?
Des James remembers the day he was told his 18-year-old daughter, Cheryl, had died during her Army training at Deepcut Barracks in Surrey.
“I was at work in the office of the HR manager. He glanced out of the window and said, ‘this looks like trouble’. There was an Army officer in full uniform marching across the car park towards reception. We were a factory of 500 people, so I knew what he meant: bad news for one of them. Not for one millisecond did I think it was anything to do with me.” It was.
“The officer didn’t have to say anything. I knew from the moment I was ushered into the room with him. He was kind, not callous, but how do you do that well? He could have hit me on the head with a hammer.”
At which stage, this dignified, decent man suddenly breaks down. He turns his head, takes off his glasses and tries to wipe the tears away. “Twenty years on,” he apologises, “and here I am doing this. It would have been better if he had hit me.”
You would need a heart of stone not to want to put an arm round his shoulder, but Des James isn’t the sort who would welcome that. He describes himself as “just an ordinary bloke, nothing special”, and as an oldfashioned parent. When Cheryl signed up with the Royal Logistic Corps as a private in 1995, he placed his trust in the Army to take good care of her, as he had done. Her death on November 27 1995 brought his world crashing down.
We are sitting in a Premier Inn in Woking, where 66-year-old Des, a retired HR director from North Wales, is preparing for the opening of a second inquest into Cheryl’s stillunexplained death. Three weeks after her body was discovered with a single bullet wound between her right eye and the bridge of her nose and a rifle at her side, a Surrey coroner took just one hour to return an open verdict. The Army had insisted it was suicide – and subsequently recorded it as such in their files, ignoring the coroner – but they had not produced any corroborating evidence in court, such as her fingerprints on the gun.
Des and his wife Doreen have been in limbo ever since. She would be at his side today, he explains, but a lifetime’s service as a nurse has left her with severe back problems. A major operation before Christmas, however, may enable her to attend the latter stages of this new inquest, expected to run for a couple of months. She would not want to miss what is the culmination of two decades of patient, polite and persistent requests by the Jameses to the Army, the Ministry of Defence and politicians of all shades for their help in understanding what happened to Cheryl that fateful night at Deepcut. Until a second inquest was finally granted, they have been let down by all three at every turn, says Des. “It wasn’t me or Doreen they were ever trying to satisfy. It was the public. They were trying to satisfy public opinion [that nothing had gone wrong at Deepcut]. That was the whole strategy.”
And this despite the fact that between 1995 and 2002, Cheryl was one of four young recruits at Deepcut Barracks who allegedly took their own lives. The Jameses are in close touch with the other families. Eyewitnesses have contacted them to tell of an abusive culture at the barracks.
“I don’t want to be doing this,” says Des. “I’ve got other things I expected to be doing in my life now, most of them around a beach.”
Yet he relishes the prospect of the new inquest, at which he will be first to give evidence. “I feel there is some finality. For the first time in a court of law, the public will hear the full story. That’s a good feeling.”
He visibly relaxes when talk switches to Cheryl and her childhood. He and Doreen adopted two children – Cheryl when she was 12 months old – and raised them in Froncysyllte, a village near Llangollen.
“She was an absolute joy – inquisitive, sharp, funny, a joker,” he says. But there were bad times, too. When Des’s nephew died suddenly at 18, Cheryl was devastated. “Cheryl was 15 at the time and it had a huge impact on her,” says her father. “We had a tough 18 months, but she came through that.” In part by joining the Army. “After her first 10 weeks of basic training, she came home and she could have been a poster model for the Army. She was vibrant and fit and looked great. She was back to herself.”
She had only been at Deepcut for nine days before her death. Two days before her body was found, she spoke to her mother by phone. “The only thing Cheryl said with any negativity was that she hadn’t got much money. My wife said, ‘don’t worry. Your dad will fix it.’” It was their last contact with their daughter.
What does he believe happened? “I’m not suggesting she didn’t commit suicide. What I am suggesting is that my daughter deserved the simple dignity of a thorough investigation into her death, whether or not those who found her believed that it was a case of suicide.”
He has retained throughout a profound faith in the legal process – even when it comes to the allegation that Cheryl was sexually assaulted shortly before her death. Lawyers for Des last month called on the coroner to hear evidence of such abuse after a witness alleged she confided she had been ordered to sleep with another soldier. “We need to explore that in court,” he says simply. “Surrey Police told me over and over that there was no connection between Cheryl and a certain person, and now there’s a lot of alleged connections. While it is an allegation, I can park it and it doesn’t hurt as much as if, or when, it becomes reality.”
And if it does? Des stops to think for a moment, weighing each word before he speaks, not wanting to preempt the legal process, but at the same time a father confronting an image of his beloved daughter being attacked.
“I’ve always seen myself as being there to protect my family. My nightmare is I wasn’t there for Cheryl, on that night in 1995, when God knows what happened.” His voice is breaking again. “I wasn’t there to sort it out for her.”
‘For the first time in a court of law, the public will hear the full story’