The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [76]
All the signs seemed good, but how often do you read about cases where the verdict is completely the opposite to what everyone expects? How was I to know what influence Richard had exerted on the jury? Could he have intimidated them like he did everyone else? I forced all the negative thoughts from my mind.
At about three o’clock the phone went again, making me jump.
‘It’s Marie. The result is in.’
‘Yeah?’ I hardly dared breathe.
‘He’s been found guilty of all the charges except one, which he got off on a technicality.’
‘Guilty? So how long will be get?’
‘They won’t do the sentencing for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘But the judge did warn him that he would be going away for a very long time.’
‘Does that mean they’ll be letting him out until the sentencing?’ I felt a lurch of panic in my stomach.
‘No,’ Marie laughed. ‘He’ll be on remand. He won’t be going anywhere for a very long time.’
Chapter Twelve
When Marie rang a few weeks later to tell me that Richard had been given fifteen years, the maximum sentence that a judge could give for the crimes he had been found guilty of, I felt a little pang of disappointment.
‘But that’s really good, Jane,’ Marie assured me.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘it’s just that he took seventeen years of my life, and well, you know … ‘
Once I had got used to the idea, however, I was pleased, and very grateful to everyone who had helped me do it.
‘Just think, Mummy,’ Emma said to me the evening after the sentencing, ‘we’re going up to our own beds now and that horrible man has got to go to sleep in a cold cell. Serves him right for what he did to you.’
The girls know that I had a cruel stepfather who did things to me that you shouldn’t do to children, but they don’t yet know the extent of it. Emma can remember the occasional time when Silly Git had me pinned against the wall by the throat, but I don’t think it worries her because she knows that my story has a happy ending.
The outcome of the case wasn’t happy for everyone. My brothers went after the people who had stood up for me. One of them chased Hayley in her car, eventually forcing her to stop. He ran over to her, kicking at the car to try to get her out so he could get at her and shouting how he was going to kill her. She went to the police but the rest of the family gave him an alibi, saying he was with them at the time she alleged the incident happened. Her family started getting threatening phone calls all night long as well.
My Uncle John also started receiving threatening calls. He was attacked beside the grave at a family funeral as punishment for ‘betraying the family’ and his car was sprayed with obscenities. It was his brother’s funeral, the uncle who had tried to intimidate me as I went into court, who had died soon afterwards from the family complaint of kidney failure. The fight at the graveside escalated when Uncle John’s wife tried to help and got her face slapped for her trouble.
Paul had the windows of his house and his car smashed and Steve’s mum and dad started receiving threats on their lives, notes through the door and phone calls telling them what was going to happen to them, and people sitting outside their house in cars, with the headlights shining through the windows, beeping incessantly on the horns. The police gave us, Steve’s parents and Hayley’s family all alarms in our houses as well as mobile ones to carry around, which we can keep for the rest of our lives. Paul has now joined the police force and had a second son. I’m very proud of him for making something good of his life.
I kept hoping that once Richard had been inside for a while and they had all had a chance to think about things, they would realize that I had done them an enormous favour in rescuing them from a man who had been bullying them all for more than twenty years. I couldn’t understand why it was taking them so long to realize. I presumed they must all still be frightened of him, even though he was inside.
A month or two before the sentencing Steve’s parents had received