THE blue eyes, widely set and piercing in their intensity, are particularly striking. Then there’s the neat, straight nose, slightly pointed chin and perfect, small white teeth. There’s no denying Natasha Bell is a good-looking girl. She’s nice natured too, articulate and polite — the sort of 21- year-old any man would be proud to call his daughter.
But for Natasha, things aren’t as simple as that. They’re far from simple at all. In fact, an almighty, chaotic, legal, ethical and emotional mess is probably a fair way to describe her paternity.
The man she thinks is her father she spotted in the pages of this newspaper two weeks ago. Even she could see the similarities, and the uncomfortable feelings it stirred in her made her cry.
Angela Nelson and her daughter Natasha Bell, from Hartlepool, County Durham, whose father Ross Mclaughlan insists that Natasha is not his and is refusing a DNA test
But she’s never met him, never even talked to him on the phone, never received a birthday card or felt his hand in hers, despite knowing of his existence for nine years.
The man in the newspaper was Ross Mclaughlan, 55, a former rig worker from Hartlepool, who was desperate to tell his story.
He looked angry, unsurprisingly, since he was talking about the injustice he felt at being landed with a £20,000 maintenance bill for a daughter he said he had no idea existed, but whom the authorities claimed was his — despite another man being named as her father on the birth certificate.
Having read his account, Natasha, a make-up artist who grew up and still lives just 15 miles from Ross in Hartlepool, County Durham, is also angry.
Angry that he still refuses to take a DNA test to settle the matter, and furious at his version of events and his portrayal of her mother, Angie Nelson, whom Ross claims — in a somewhat ungentlemanly manner — not to even remember.
‘I know he’s never met me but I was completely floored by his claims that he’d never known my mum, and how he portrayed her as a liar and a money-grabber,’ says Natasha, staring down at her hands, morosely.
‘It was just so hurtful. He clearly never considered how I might feel reading about his refusal to accept my existence as his daughter.
‘If he’s so sure he’s not my dad, why won’t he take a DNA test to prove it? He says it would breach his human rights, but what about my human rights to know who my father is?’
But Ross is certainly not the only protagonist in this sad story, which began in September 1996.
What no one can dispute is that is when Natasha’s mother Angie, back then a pretty, married woman and book-keeper with a four-year-old son, fell pregnant.
Angie, now a well-groomed, good-looking woman of 52, says she and her then husband, Frank Bell, had separated briefly and she had a fling with Ross who was friends with her boss.
Having struggled to conceive first her son and then a second child with her husband, Angie claims she was undergoing fertility investigations at her local hospital at the time, and consequently she and Ross didn’t bother with contraception on the few times they met.
‘He was a handsome man, good fun and very complimentary,’ recalls Angie. ‘At a time when my marriage was in trouble, my husband worked away a lot and we’d been arguing over little things, I found it very difficult to resist his charms.’ Ross was then in his mid-30s and to Angie it was evident he was not the settling down type — he liked to travel and had never married or even cohabited — so she didn’t set her heart on a long-term relationship.
Ross Mclaughlan from Thornaby on Tees who has had £10,000 deducted from his wages to pay for maintenance
In fact, six weeks after that first sexual encounter, Angie says she and her husband decided to give their marriage another go. Then she found out she was pregnant.
At this point Angie’s and Ross’s version of events start to differ. Angie insists she told Ross she was expecting and that the baby could be his. Ross vehemently maintains he knew nothing of this pregnancy until a letter from the Child Support Agency arrived in 2010.
Perhaps surprisingly, for what would surely have been a highly memorable interchange, Angie does not recall how Ross responded, nor indeed where they were when the conversation took place.
‘He didn’t ask me about it again, and I read into his silence that he wasn’t interested,’ she says.
Meanwhile, Angie claims to have also broken the news to her husband, Frank Bell, that there was a chance the baby might not be his — something he too denies.
‘Frank didn’t probe but I was so confused about whether or not I should keep the baby, knowing I couldn’t be sure who the father was, that, eight weeks into the pregnancy, I made an appointment with my GP for a referral to an abortion clinic,’ she recalls.
‘But I broke down in tears in the surgery. I knew I couldn’t go through with it.’
If her account is to be believed, you don’t have to be a cynic to wonder whether Angie, after years of struggling to conceive — deliberately tricked Ross into fathering her child. This, however, is something she flatly denies.
She also claims Frank agreed that, whatever the biology, he would raise the baby as his own. He was the first person to hold Natasha after her birth at Hartlepool General Hospital, in June 1997, and proved to be a doting daddy.
But then comes another deviation between the various versions of this story. For his part Frank, a mild-mannered, decent man — a long-distance lorry driver by trade, who brooks no nonsense — says he was never given any reason to doubt Natasha was not his child. That is why he readily added his name to her birth certificate, and she still has his surname today.
Natasha Bell, pictured as 1 year old in Bournemouth on holiday, is angry that Ross still refuses to take a DNA test to settle the matter
Both agree that, within a couple of years, their marriage fell apart. And when Natasha was two-and-a-half and her brother, Daniel, seven, Angie moved out of the marital home, taking the children with her.
For the first year, the children saw Frank at weekends but then Angie ‘stopped access’ because, she says, they ‘didn’t enjoy’ spending time with him.
Despite no longer being allowed to see them, and repeated court visits to gain access at great personal expense, Frank continued to pay towards the children’s keep, up to £118 per week via the Child Support Agency, contributions which, over the years, became
