Thursday 1 September 2022 11:46 PM Police 'must act' in toddler outcry: Boy's mother demands investigation trends now
Police yesterday faced demands to investigate an ex-murder suspect who won custody of his neighbours’ toddler after duping social workers.
Colin English, a ‘deceitful and manipulative’ computer programmer, and his wife Yvonne had the boy for more than four months after the courts rubber-stamped a foster agreement with the real parents’ forged signature.
Last night the boy’s mother demanded to know why, despite repeatedly alerting the police over many years, officers have not investigated Mr English, who was previously acquitted of a murder charge in 1991 on a judge’s instructions.
She said: ‘They should take appropriate action against Colin English. Just because this story is now out there does not mean that I and my family have got justice. This is just the beginning.
Colin English, a ‘deceitful and manipulative’ computer programmer, and his wife Yvonne had the boy for more than four months after the courts rubber-stamped a foster agreement with the real parents’ forged signature
‘From the start it seemed to me Sussex Police thought I was a troublemaker, or perhaps the truth is they just could not be bothered. I was offered no support and no advice.’
Former Sussex Lib Dem MP Norman Baker also called for action to be taken.
He said: ‘It appears it is a serious deception involving a vulnerable person, and that’s automatically something the police should be interested in.’
Details of a damning judgment from the disturbing 2016 case were only made public this week after the Daily Mail fought a legal battle to force its publication.
Judge Janet Waddicor ruled that Mr English – whom the boy’s parents initially trusted ‘completely’ – used access to the mother’s flat to steal her letters as part of his campaign to dupe social workers and convince a court that she had to hand over her son.
He also took the child’s passport and his birth certificate to help prove his case and reported ‘groundless allegations’ about the mother mistreating her children to a council’s social services department.
Despite a health worker’s concerns that Mr English was ‘grooming’ the woman, officials failed to speak to the mother before he gained custody, the judge ruled. After their toddler was placed in the care of the Englishes, the boy’s parents were forced to sell their house to pay lawyers to battle to get him back.
In a statement on the case, Sussex Police said they had ‘not investigated any criminal matters in relation to this case and the force has not received any formal complaint’.
This is despite the Mail seeing extensive correspondence between the mother and the force showing she had spent years raising concerns.
It includes an email to the force’s then chief constable, Giles York, in November 2018 in which she described how she was worried about her family and the wider public because of the ‘police lack of involvement’. She added she had previously ‘approached the police on numerous occasions’ raising her concern about what was happening – and on one occasion said she was even laughed at by a PCSO.
The child’s mother first became suspicious about Colin English after discovering that handwriting on a stolen letter matched documents from a murder case he was involved in years earlier.
From online searches, she found out the computer programmer had been charged with killing Therese Clare Terry, who vanished during a trip to Ireland in 1990.
The case was dubbed the ‘Riddler’ or ‘Chess Board Mystery’ because of a number of apparent puzzles Mr English wrote for police searching for the missing woman’s body while he awaited trial.
His handwriting on these clues matched that on a letter ‘stolen’ and later returned to the child’s mother. Detectives had believed the apparent clues – a mixture of maps, dates and chess moves – could hold the answer to Mrs Terry’s whereabouts.
Police even asked British chess grandmaster Raymond Keene to try to crack the case. After 18 months on remand, Mr English was acquitted at Liverpool Crown Court in 1991 on a judge’s instructions without standing trial.
The father of three later claimed the puzzles were a ‘hoax’ and said he couldn’t believe how gullible the police were.
He said Mrs Terry was still alive but had refused to come forward after his arrest to punish him, telling a newspaper: ‘I want her to explain why she left me to rot.’
His handwriting on these clues matched that on a letter ‘stolen’ and later returned to the child’s mother. Detectives had believed the apparent clues – a mixture of maps, dates and chess moves – could hold the answer to Mrs Terry’s whereabouts
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In a later email to the inspector assigned to look at the case, the mother described how she was ‘very upset’ that the case wasn’t addressed years earlier when she supplied the police with post stolen from her which had Mr English’s handwriting on.
She had identified his handwriting based on press reports of sketches drawn by Mr English while awaiting trial on the former murder charge. When she chased up a few weeks later to see what was happening, the officer told her that ‘investigations of this nature can be lengthy’.
A 2019 review by Sussex Police sent to the mother noted she had raised concerns about the
