Rachael Watts shares her story and failures of the police after death of Babes ... trends now
Like many a devoted parent, Rachael Watts has found her children’s burgeoning independence a challenge.
Still, most mothers don’t threaten to call 999 when one of them is a little late home from school.
As Rachael’s eldest, Heidi, 17, recalls: ‘Once, when I was 11, there was a miscommunication about the time I’d be home and my phone wasn’t working. I was legging it down the street.
‘She was there yelling that she was about to call the police. I hated her. I said: “You’re ruining my childhood”.’
Rachael Watts, 40, miraculously survived an attack by Russell Bishop - more commonly known as the Babes in the Wood killer - when she was seven years old. Bishop kidnapped, sexually assaulted and strangled Rachael in 1990, dumping what he thought was her dead body
There’s a terrible poignancy to those words, as Heidi discovered earlier this year when her mother finally revealed why she was quite so zealous about safety.
Rachael, 40, told her daughter the truth about her own childhood: how, aged seven, she had miraculously survived an attack by Russell Bishop, infamous as the so-called Babes In The Wood killer.
In 1986, Bishop sexually assaulted and killed two nine-year-old friends — Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway.
But terrible mistakes made by the police, CPS and forensic services meant that a year later he was acquitted at trial of their murders, leaving him free to kidnap, sexually assault and strangle Rachael in 1990, dumping what he thought was her dead body under a gorse bush at a South Downs beauty spot.
While her testimony helped put Bishop behind bars, it wasn’t until 2018 that advances in DNA technology at last saw him convicted of Nicola’s and Karen’s murders.
Even then, Rachael — whose identity had always been protected by law — didn’t feel able to share her history with her children, let alone the wider public.
Ms Watts, pictured here when she was eight years old, did not open up to her children about what Bishop did to her as a child until earlier this year
But when Bishop died in prison, aged 55, from brain cancer in January, everything changed. ‘Finally, I stopped being scared,’ Rachael says. ‘I was tired of living with my secret. I wanted to let go of the shame he’d left me with — it was his, not mine.’
The case of the little girl who survived an almost unimaginable ordeal has always been very personal to me.
It didn’t just feel close to home, it was close to home, literally. Rachael was a year older than my own daughter and a pupil at the same Brighton primary school.
Interviewing her parents in 1990 — I was the only journalist they trusted to tell their story — after Bishop had been jailed for the attack on Rachael, was distressing yet inspiring.
Their daughter had not only picked out her attacker in a police line-up but testified against him in court. No wonder she earned the title ‘The Bravest Little Girl In Britain’.
I knew that Rachael had managed to lead a relatively normal life. She’d become a mother — she has three children in their teens and one still at primary school. But after Bishop’s retrial for Nicola and Karen’s murders in 2018, she suffered a complete breakdown.
Russell Bishop, pictured, sexually assaulted and killed two nine-year-old friends - Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway - in 1986. He died in prison, aged 55, from brain cancer in January
Then, earlier this year, out of the blue, Rachael got in touch. After decades of living in fear, she said she wanted to take control of her story, to reclaim her identity.
When we meet at her home — she doesn’t want to reveal which part of the country she lives in now — it’s apparent her mental struggles have taken a physical toll. Pale and anxious, she’s starkly different from the beautiful seven-year-old girl I remember.
Still, she is determined to free herself from the hold Bishop had over her for so long. Sitting in her cosy living room, with her daughter, Heidi, and husband Justin close by for support, Rachael recalls the day that her life was shattered: Sunday, February 4, 1990.
On that sunny Brighton afternoon, Rachael roller-skated to a friend’s house on the Whitehawk Estate to ask her to play.
‘I was wearing my brand-new Rupert Bear jumper that Mum had just bought me,’ she recalls. ‘I was very proud of it.’
But her friend wasn’t in and as Rachael skated home she lost control and hit a wall, bumping her head. ‘My dad’s ex-Army and a great believer in getting on with things. He gave me a pound for sweets and told me to go round the block and clear my head.
‘My poor lovely dad still blames himself for what happened . . . but he was planting pansies in the front garden, so he wasn’t far away.
‘I skated to the shop but it was shut. Then I forgot the way home — we’d only moved there three weeks before — so I asked someone for directions.’
Fatefully, the person she asked was Russell Bishop. The petty criminal, then aged 23, was leaning over the boot of his red Ford Cortina. While she knew not to talk to strangers normally, Rachael says: ‘He had a moustache like Dad and was working on his car, and my dad was a car mechanic, so it didn’t occur to me that he was a danger.
‘It happened really fast. He swooped me up and dumped me in the boot. I didn’t have time to think or run.’
Bishop drove off at speed, and Rachael kept an astonishingly level head for such a young child.
‘I’m my father’s daughter, I’ve always been a logical, practical person. I undid my roller boots and took them off so I could do a runner when he opened the boot.
‘I felt around and I found a pen, and a hole in the bonnet lid, and I poked it through and wiggled it and hoped someone might see it. I also screamed but he yelled at me to “shut it” or he’d kill me.
‘I said: “I can give you money: I’ve got a pound.”’
She also found a hammer and ‘banged hard against the lid’. Later, the indents she’d made formed part of the prosecution’s evidence.
The car stopped at Devil’s Dyke, an isolated beauty spot to the north of Hove, near Brighton.
In 1990, the court was told that Bishop strangled Rachael then sexually assaulted her, the oxygen deprivation wiping her memory of what he had done to her. In fact, as Rachael reveals today, she recalled everything — every detail is ‘burned into her brain’.
‘I always knew that he’d raped me and tried to kill me. I just never talked about it . . . I didn’t want to upset Mum and Dad.’
She remembers Bishop lifting her out of the boot and putting her on the back seat. ‘That’s where the rape happened’.
‘He stripped me of my clothes. He made me do a sex act on him. Then he penetrated me somehow. I didn’t know what sex was, or what the “R” word meant — I just kept asking him to stop because he was hurting me.
‘After, I found blood on me and asked if it was his or mine.
‘He put his hands round my throat and
