p.m.
I refused, saying I didn't care if Cill never went home again and, in any case, I wanted Mr. and Mrs. Trevelyan to suffer. The money ran out before the conversation ended. I did not understand what Roy Trent intended to do. I believed he wanted to threaten Cill to make her keep her mouth shut. If neither of us identified Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson as the boys who committed the rape, then the police would let the matter drop.
I had no intention at that time of doing what Roy Trent asked, but my mother had told my father that I'd described the incident to the police as a gang rape. He was angry with me because of what he'd said to David Trevelyan the night before. By way of punishment, he sent my mother and my brother shopping and anally raped me in front of the television. All I could think about was that it was worse than anything Cill had suffered. My bottom bled for days but I couldn't tell anyone. On Wednesday I started having fainting fits. My mother made my father call the doctor, and though I didn't tell the doctor what was really wrong, my father was frightened.
I became very upset in the wake of this incident on Saturday afternoon. I realize now that I was deeply confused and frightened, but I believed that I would be blamed for everything: the rape, the fight, Cill running away, my failure to tell the police that I'd seen her at Grace's. I was also afraid that Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson would take revenge on me if Cill identified them. I see now that I directed all my hate at Cill when I should have been directing it at my father, but I was too disturbed to understand this at the time.
At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, May 30, I told my parents I was going to bed. They were watching television with my brother and weren't interested in me. I shut the sitting-room door and let myself out onto the street. I was absent for approximately half an hour, but I do not know if either of my parents was aware of this. They have never mentioned it.
I ran down Mullin Street to Bladen Street and turned into the alleyway at the back of Grace's house. Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson were waiting there, even though I'd told Trent I wasn't going to do what he'd asked. They said they planned to give Cill a fright so that she wouldn't name them to the police, and I believed them. They threatened me similarly if I changed my mind about identifying them. I said I wouldn't.
I had no trouble entering Grace's house because the kitchen door was open. She and Cill were watching television in the sitting room with the curtains closed. Cill wasn't pleased to see me, but Grace was. She was worried about news coverage of Cill's disappearance and had already told her that she must go home. I told Grace that I'd been questioned that morning, and that the police were saying that anyone found harboring Cill would be arrested. Grace was so concerned that she became angry with Cill and ordered her to leave. Cill burst into tears and refused, so I helped Grace drag her through the kitchen into the garden. Grace locked the door behind us.
I knew Cill would lash out at me so I ran straight to the fence. I saw Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson in the shadow of Grace's garden shed. I did not speak to them, nor did I hear them speak to Cill. I let myself out through the gate and ran home. I expected to hear the following morning that Cill had returned home.
I remember very little of the next few days because I was so frightened, by both my anal bleeding and Cill's continued disappearance. I attended school on the Monday and Tuesday but spent most of the time hiding or crying. I was shown no sympathy by the teachers or students because they held me responsible for Cill's suspension. On Tuesday afternoon I began to wonder if Cill was still in Grace Jefferies's house, so I sneaked into her garden on my way home from school.
I looked through the French windows into the sitting room. There was blood on one of the panes and the room had been vandalized. I was too scared to try the kitchen door and went straight home. From this point on, my fainting fits and convulsions became so serious that I was taken out of school and my family was eventually rehoused.
I had no contact with Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson until after Howard Stamp had confessed to Grace's murder. I was aware that they had been questioned and released about Cill's rape, but I wasn't confident enough to phone Roy Trent until it became clear that Stamp had killed his grandmother. Roy set my mind at rest immediately. He said they'd threatened Cill with a beating if she named them, then sent her home. He and his friends had no idea what had happened afterward, but they believed she'd gone looking for Howard Stamp and he'd lost his temper with her in the same way he'd lost it with Grace. He described Howard as behaving like a lunatic in the days between Cill's disappearance and his arrest. However, none of us could report it because of our own involvement.
This is the extent of my firsthand knowledge and involvement in the murder of Cill Trevelyan. Anything else I know was told to me by my first husband, Michael 'Micky' Hopkinson, many years afterward.
Micky was always more troubled by his conscience than either Roy Trent or Colley Hurst. He stifled it with drugs and alcohol. He was chronically addicted to heroin by the time he was seventeen and he remained addicted until his death from overdose in 1986. We were married for twelve years and he was thirty when he died. During that time he persuaded me into drugs, forced me into prostitution to fund our habits and had several prison sentences for possession and theft. He also blackmailed my father to buy my silence about the abuse.
I realize now that my relationship with Micky was just another form of abuse. It's a pattern I repeated in my subsequent marriages to Roy Trent and Nicholas 'Colley' Fletcher Hurst.
We were bound together by our knowledge of what happened on May 30, 1970, but I had no idea how dangerous my knowledge was to them until Micky confessed to Cill's murder shortly before he died.
The story he told me was as follows:
Trent, Hurst and Hopkinson had caught Cill as she was leaving Grace's garden and Colley Hurst put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. Because she struggled, Micky showed her his knife and said he'd use it if she didn't do as she was told. She allowed Roy to put a handkerchief in her mouth and tie her hands behind her back, then they walked her to Colliton Way waste ground. Roy and Colley draped their arms over her shoulders, and Micky walked behind with his knife in her back. He said she cried the whole way there but, even though some pedestrians and cars passed them, no one noticed that anything was wrong.
They hadn't intended to kill her, but everything got out of hand when Roy and Colley decided to rape her again. Both boys had been drinking heavily since my phone call to Roy at lunchtime, and Micky thinks she died of suffocation because they didn't untie her or remove the handkerchief in case she started screaming. He said it was similar to the first rape and they only realized she was dead when she hadn't moved for several minutes. He never said whether he raped her, but I think he must have done.
He told me they put her body in one of the test pits that had been dug during the construction of the new Brackham & Wright factory. They shoveled rubble in on top of her, then went home to get some clean clothes. Roy had sobered up enough to realize that if the police took them in for the first rape, they'd find Cill's blood and hair on what they were wearing that night. Micky said he made them change and then slog across town to dispose of the clothes in someone's dustbin.
They never expected to get away with it, but all the test pits were filled in a few weeks later without being examined. Micky told me that Cill's body is under the grassed area where the factory workers eat their lunch in the summer.
