The family silenced for sixteen years wrongly accused of satanic
abuse in Rochdale tell at last of their nightmarish ordeal when their
children were stolen by the state
CHILD victims of the notorious
Rochdale Satanic abuse scandal have spoken for the first time about the
horror of their ordeal - and how it ruined their lives.
Now adults with children of their
own, they tell an appalling story that began with a lunatic raid by social
workers and led to a witch-hunt of their parents, shattering five families.
Yet the social workers behind the
ludicrous investigation into devil worship - prompted by the claims of a
disturbed six-year-old boy and exposed at the time by The Mail on Sunday -
are still working with children. And until recently they were allowed by law
to keep their identities secret. Only now can their victims tell the full
and awful truth.
But now sisters Cheryl, Lisa and
Catherine Hertsell, who were 15, 11 and six at the time, can reveal details
of what really happened when they were snatched from their home in the early
hours of June 14, 1990.
Social workers burst into their
bedrooms at 7.29am and ordered them to dress without giving them time even
to brush their teeth or comb their hair. They were taken, with their mother,
for interrogation. Later that day Cheryl and Catherine - now 31 and 21 -
were allowed to return home. But for Lisa - now 27 - it was the start of a
six-month nightmare that was to mentally scar her for life.
Cheryl who, with her sisters,
endured six hours of questioning at the NSPCC headquarters in Rochdale on
that fateful first day, recalls: 'I was in bed when there was a hammering at
the door, then voices shouting. Police came running up the stairs yelling,
"We're CID," followed by social workers. I heard my mum screaming. They were
telling us to get up.
'I asked what it was all about.
They said, "We'll sort it all out when we get where we're going." I wanted
to brush Lisa's hair but they told me I couldn't. We had to go looking
dishevelled and rough. I think they wanted us that way.
'Downstairs our mum was being led
away, hysterical, shaking and crying. It looked like she was being arrested,
and the car roared off with a squeal of tyres. She was the same age as I am
now. I have two children and I can't imagine how I'd feel had I been her.'
The girls were taken into one room,
then separated. Social workers asked them about the family of one of Lisa's
friends, Julie, and said 'things were going on there'.
They quizzed Cheryl about her sex
life with her 18-year-old boyfriend and asked the girls what they knew about
making love.
Seven hours later Cheryl was told
she and Catherine would be allowed home, but not Lisa. Cheryl says: 'There
were four social workers lined up in a scrum, with arms linked. They said
Catherine and I could go, but not Lisa. I said, "Where's Lisa?"
'They had taken her off and locked
her in a room and were keeping her in because of her behaviour during the
interview. I just went mad, but they said, "There's nothing you can do,
that's that." I was screaming and shouting, saying you have no right to keep
her, nothing has happened to her, she is coming home.' Cheryl says it was
the beginning of four months of hell for Lisa before she was allowed to see
her mother and another two before she was allowed home.
Lisa recalls: 'I remember being
interviewed and being asked about my friend Julie's family, her house, what
it was like there and what went on.
'They repeatedly asked questions
about ghosts, saying Julie was in a lot of trouble and if I knew anything I
should tell them. I knew nothing about what was supposed to be going on. I
had told them I liked animals and that Julie and I used to go dog walking.
'They picked up on this and said they had rabbits and I could go and see
them if I talked to them. I was getting very upset and agitated. Then they
locked me in a room. I kept saying I wanted to go home and was banging on
the door.'
Their crude psychology momentarily
over, social workers put Lisa under a police 'place of safety' order.
That first lonely night in a care
home, Lisa ended up wandering the dusty corridors. Alone and frightened, she
sneaked into another girl's room and crept into bed with her. 'She was 15
and she said, "If you get scared you can sleep with me." I cuddled up with
her. I remember it was a long, lonely night and I cried.'
The social workers were trying to
extract admissions from Lisa that she knew about, or had been involved in,
alleged devil worship and satanic sex abuse. The claims had been made by a
disturbed six-year-old boy, who had told a teacher, and then social workers,
of children being kept in cages, sheep slaughtered, ghosts and babies being
killed. Later it emerged that he had been allowed to watch appalling video
nasties by his parents.
The police investigation never
found any evidence to support his claims but they led to 20 children being
snatched from their homes in the dawn raids. Despite the lack of evidence,
social workers kept up a harrowing Kafkaesque routine of interrogation.
Lisa says: 'They interviewed me
over and over again. I didn't know what to say to them. I wanted to write to
my mum but they wouldn't let me. They said I could be writing in code. They
never mentioned satanic abuse, but the questioning went on and on.
'I would keep saying, "I want to go
home," and they would tell me, "You can in a couple of days." It was just
such a cruel lie to tell a little girl of 11. I used to cry myself to sleep.
I wanted my family so much.
'They cut off my long hair, which
reached right down my back, just because they said they had to. Once they
made me sleep in the same bed as a bed-wetter who had nits and passed them
on to me.'
When Lisa was reunited with her
mother four months later, she says: 'We fell into each other's arms and
cried and cuddled. She was upset because they had cut off my hair.'
But it was to be a further two
months before a child psychologist recommended to a court that Lisa be
allowed home. 'It was wonderful to sleep in my own bed again,' she recalls.
But her return home was not the
happy ending the family had hoped for. Lisa grew into a troubled adolescent
and suffered from illness and depression.
Lisa, an attractive, intelligent
woman who achieved GCSEs in English, science and maths, says: 'I ended up
staying off school after being bullied and taunted in the playground. People
would say I was from that weird Satan family.
'By the time I was 17 I didn't want
to go out of the house. I would get panic attacks, paranoia, fear that
people were looking at me or talking about me. I didn't get any counselling.
I had to deal with it all myself. At 18 I was in a real mess and was
diagnosed as having anxiety and depression.
'I still find it hard to form
relationships with men. I think it is an issue of trust. I couldn't hold a
job down for any length of time and I have ended up on incapacity benefits.'
Lisa still suffers from a
distressing, recurrent nightmare in which she is a child who runs to the
front door of her family home but can never get inside to join her mother
and sisters.
The three sisters and their father
John Hertsell, 51, tell their story in a BBC1 documentary, Real Story: When
Satan Came To Town, to be screened on Wednesday.
In it Mr Hertsell, who split from
their mother in the late Eighties - she has since remarried - explains how
the trauma left him too ill to work. 'People used to say we'd done something
to Lisa, we'd buried her in the garden and nonsense like that, but we
couldn't fight back publicly.
'As a family we have all suffered
because of this injustice. And it is ridiculous that only now are we having
the right of reply. Who knows how things would have turned out had this not
happened?
'The night Lisa came home I knew
she was not the same girl they had taken away. She had been conditioned by
them, undergone almost a complete personality change.
'What angers me most is that the
council has never apologised. Their social workers all but destroyed our
family. Now we learn that they kept their jobs and their incomes and their
comfortable lives.
'They weren't afraid to take our
kids off us because of lies they were being told. But it seems they are
still afraid of the truth.' The Mail on Sunday
