Abducted, abused... survived
(From Times of London)
Lisa Hoodless and Charlene Lunnon were 10 years old when they were snatched from the street by a convicted paedophile. For four days they were held prisoner in his flat and repeatedly sexually violated while the nation held its breath, willing them to be found safe. Alan Hopkinson was found by police with the girls huddled together in his front room. He pleaded guilty to the crime and was given nine life sentences.
And that, for the public at least, is where stories like this usually end. Children don't often survive adbuction by men such as Hopkinson, a truth that weighs heavily on the mind as we await news of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, missing now for more than a week. If they do survive, we rarely hear from them again. There is a bleak assumption that they are sentenced to a lifetime of therapy, hopelessly damaged victims with the spectre of sexual abuse forever hanging over them.
Lisa and Charlene resent that assumption. Today they are young women of 19 and want it to be known that they are fine, actually. They don't underplay the grotesque ordeal to which they were subjected, but they do not agree that they have been ruined by it. Not at all. Sometimes they feel almost guilty about this, as if the very suggestion that you can “come to terms with” or “get over” rape, especially as a child victim, somehow trivialises the act and disrespects other victims. Let's be clear: they do not. What they are saying is that there is a choice about you deal with a catastrophic event. This is how they dealt with it.
It was on January 19, 1999 when the girls were walking to school together in their home town of St Leonards, near Hastings, East Sussex, that Hopkinson, prowling the neighbourhood in his car, struck. In a narrow street, he had almost hit Lisa when she stumbled on to the road and he got out to apologise. Seizing his moment, he started to bundle Lisa into the boot of his car. She screamed but no one came. Charlene, frozen with fear and not wanting to leave her best friend alone, simply allowed herself to be bundled in with her.
Lying in the darkness as Hopkinson drove towards Eastbourne, Charlene tried to comfort Lisa by singing to her. As the more streetwise of the two, she says that, even at 10, she realised from the outset that their kidnapper had a sexual motive. Both were convinced that they were about to be killed, but the presence of the other girl stopped either from becoming hysterical.
Hopkinson, then 45, whom the girls remember smelling “old and manky”, stopped first in a quiet, country layby, pulled Charlene out and, perhaps in some warped attempt to bond with her, made her sit on his knee and answer questions such as her name, favourite colour, favourite food and the names of her parents. He then called in at the house of his elderly parents, who were away on holiday, took Lisa inside, stripped her, tied her wrists behind her neck with a pair of tights and made her answer similar questions, writing down her responses. At no point did anyone hear Charlene, who was screaming loudly in the boot. When Charlene screamed that she needed the toilet, he produced a bucket. But this was merely Hopkinson's preamble. He drove the girls to his flat above a shopping centre in Eastbourne and smuggled them inside, where he began his systematic abuse, repeatedly taking them in turn into his filthy bedroom over the next few days.
It is highly uncomfortable to talk about the subject of child sexual abuse, more problematic still to write about it. Morally, should we leave what actually happened unsaid? Might it provide titillation for another paedophile? Or is it our duty to confront what happened, grotesque as it may be?
Neither Lisa or Charlene become distressed when they talk about it. In fact, they say it sometimes feels like they are recounting a story and it never really happened. “It's weird - when I see old news clips and cuttings [about when they were missing] I think: ‘Oh, I feel really sorry for those girls' but I don't see it as us,” says Charlene, who has perhaps learnt the benefits of dissociation. We conduct this interview at Charlene's house, which is only a minute's walk from Cornfield Terrace, the road where they were kidnapped. Neither has ever felt a need to move away from the area, although they say this is probably only because they know that Hopkinson will never be released.
Lisa remembers the first time that Hopkinson took Charlene into his bedroom while she was again left tied up in another room, her hands and feet turning purple with the pressure of the ligatures. She could hear her friend crying and pleading for Hopkinson to stop, terrified and bewildered about was going on. “That first time, Charlene came back and said: ‘He raped me,'” she says. “I said: ‘What's that?' I had no idea. She had to explain it to me. That's when I knew what was going on.”
Certainly Hopkinson had no mercy for the girls when they were weeping and pleading. Lisa says: “It used to go on for hours. I remember looking at the clock going round from 9 till 11 in the morning.” Charlene could hear her screams through the wall. Lisa learnt to separate herself from the moment, thinking of happier times with her parents to get her through the ordeal. Charlene says that sometimes Hopkinson just ordered her to lie on top of him naked. Cruelly, he had told them that he had asked their parents for ransom money but that they weren't prepared to pay. Yet he let them watch the TV news about the huge police search for them and the agonised faces of their parents at press conferences begging for their return, which clearly contradicted this. The Spice Girls made an appeal for information. Charlene says she could tell from her father's face on TV that he thought she was dead.
But, at the same time, Hopkinson seemed to want to bond with the children, to have a “meaningful” relationship with them. Each time he abused the girls, he claimed to be overcome with remorse. “After he'd done whatever he'd done, he said: ‘Right, I won't do that no more. I'm a bad man,'” Charlene says. “But he always did.” He would tell them stories about other children he claimed to be friendly with and warned them that if they tried to escape there was a madman living next door with a dog who would kill them. Being children, they believed him. “He'd say: ‘At least I'm being gentle with you, not like other men would be,'” Lisa says. Meanwhile, he had removed all the door handles in the flat so that they couldn't escape.
Once, when he was asleep, they plotted to kill him and searched the flat for a knife, but Hopkinson had hidden them all. “We honestly thought that this was it for the rest of our lives,” Lisa says. “I thought that this was going to be our home.” Incredibly, Hopkinson once left the girls alone in the flat while he went to collect his parents from the airport. But all the windows were bolted, the doors were locked and the girls in any case were frightened of the “madman” next door. They raised each other's spirits by cuddling each other and talking about school and things they might do if they were ever released.
Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On their third day of captivity, they as usual begged Hopkinson to let them go, promising that they wouldn't tell, and he suddenly agreed. He let them have their first bath since abducting them and gave them back their school uniforms (he had forced them to wear his own, stinking T-shirts) promising he would drive them somewhere and let them out. The children were euphoric.
What he actually had in mind was killing them. He drove to Beachy Head with them in the boot, then pulled them out to push them to their deaths. Charlene's memory of this is more vivid than Lisa's. She recalls him dangling her close to the edge. “He was laughing, looking right into my face,” Charlene says. “Then he just said: ‘No, I want you for one more day.'” Bizarrely, Hopkinson then put them back in the car and drove them to a fish and chip shop. He told them to wait in the back seat while he went in and bought them sausage and chips. Again they were too frightened to try to escape, not knowing where they were and having been a whisker away from being murdered.
But their rescue was near. The next day police, following up a separate complaint from parents living near by who claimed that Hopkinson had indecently assaulted their daughters, knocked on his door. After panicking for a few minutes, effing and blinding, he simply opened it and told the officers: “I've got the two missing girls in my front room.” They remember being carried out into the sunshine and later, incredibly, gave a photocall on the beach for the press, posing with two huge teddy bears. The public did not know at that point the horror that they had endured.
Hopkinson, a former Bank of England worker and a member of Mensa, had been jailed for seven years in 1991 for kidnapping and assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He had been offered psychiatric treatment as a condition of a two-month parole period before the end but declined it. Having grown up in Zimbabwe and served in the armed forces of the former Rhodesian regime, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in the 1980s, which triggered a personality change. His marriage failed and he lost his job. In a book he wrote as therapy while in prison he noted: “I found the only company I enjoyed was that of children.”
With Hopkinson in prison, the girls' task was to get on with their lives. They returned to school almost immediately, the teachers having ordered the other pupils never to mention the kidnap, but things were not easy. Both went into counselling, which they loathed. To this day, Charlene seems almost as distressed by the memory of “therapy” as she is by the abduction. “It was about the worst thing they could have put me through,” she says, with a visible shudder. “No one understands how horrible that was.” When all she wanted to do was play with her friends, the therapy made her relive an experience that she wanted to forget. Lisa hated it too, so her father let her stop the sessions after four months. Charlene's father, however, wanted her to carry on and she attended for 18 months.
This was the catalyst for the girls' friendship breaking down. “In my head it felt like Lisa had got over it and I hadn't,” Charlene says. “That whole year and a half counselling ... my head was messed up and I just ended up hating her.” Charlene had already suffered turbulent years before the abduction. Her mother had died when she was young and she was placed in foster care for a time. Her father had brought her to Hastings from London to start a new life together. Her way of coping after the abduction was to put on an act of confidence, while Lisa's was to withdraw.
“When I was younger, I couldn't bear to be around Lisa,” Charlene says. “I put on an act and then I'd look at her and remember what really had happened. I hate the fact I used to hate her.” She admits that in a way she bullied Lisa, trying to get people not to like her. Then, when they were 16 and had left school, a mutual friend was killed in a car crash. Charlene telephoned Lisa to talk about the tragedy and apologised for everything she had done. Since then they have been inseparable again and say the only therapy they need is talking to each other. Not that they do this very often these days. They have, they say, moved on. Lisa has a partner and an 18-month-old son; Charlene, who trained in childcare, was in a relationship until recently. Their ordeal, they say, has not made them unable to have relationships with boys, though they cannot, understandably, imagine being with an older man.
And then they say something that may astonish many people. They say that in some ways what happened has had a positive effect on their lives. Both seem vaguely surprised that anyone would want to interview them about it because it is “not that amazing” but, in a climate in which missing girls such as Madeleine McCann dominate the news, they want to urge people never to give up searching because “children can come back”.
Do they not think that it robbed them of much of their childhood? Charlene says no. “What happened - it's not half my life; it's not even that,” she says, clicking her fingers. “It's not the worst thing that has happened to me.” Then she says that a part of her doesn't even regret it happening. “If someone said you can take it back, I wouldn't take it back. It has made me so much stronger. It hasn't brought bad out, it has brought out good. It has made me appreciate things.”
Does Lisa think the incident has devastated her life? “No, not really. I dunno,” she says. “I just feel normal, like nothing's happened really. I don't think I'd be who I am today [without it]. Sometimes I feel selfish; people expect us to be crying in an interview like this because it's getting to us. Sometimes I feel people are thinking: ‘Why aren't you more emotional about this? Why didn't it affect you so badly?'” Both say their parents have been more affected by it than them. But their philosophy, says Lisa, is: “You can either go one way and [think] everything's ruined or you can go the other and put it behind you. That's what we did.”
They know that there has been damage. Charlene cannot walk on the streets on her own and hates being alone in the house (she lives with her father). Lisa suffered nightmares for many months. Neither claims to feel anything for Hopkinson, except that he is a sad, dirty old man who failed to destroy them. Hating him would empower him and make them victims who are defined by his crime.
But their quite breathtaking lack of self-pity and belief that such terrible experiences do not have to be catastrophic is remarkable. Of course, we do not know whether they will still feel like this in future and whether their courage is partly teenage buoyancy. But for parents horrified by the crimes that paedophiles commit, for now it is comforting to see it as an example of the incredible resilience of children.
The Girls That Survived Channal 4 BBC 2/27/08
(From Times of London)
Lisa Hoodless and Charlene Lunnon were 10 years old when they were snatched from the street by a convicted paedophile. For four days they were held prisoner in his flat and repeatedly sexually violated while the nation held its breath, willing them to be found safe. Alan Hopkinson was found by police with the girls huddled together in his front room. He pleaded guilty to the crime and was given nine life sentences.
And that, for the public at least, is where stories like this usually end. Children don't often survive adbuction by men such as Hopkinson, a truth that weighs heavily on the mind as we await news of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, missing now for more than a week. If they do survive, we rarely hear from them again. There is a bleak assumption that they are sentenced to a lifetime of therapy, hopelessly damaged victims with the spectre of sexual abuse forever hanging over them.
Lisa and Charlene resent that assumption. Today they are young women of 19 and want it to be known that they are fine, actually. They don't underplay the grotesque ordeal to which they were subjected, but they do not agree that they have been ruined by it. Not at all. Sometimes they feel almost guilty about this, as if the very suggestion that you can “come to terms with” or “get over” rape, especially as a child victim, somehow trivialises the act and disrespects other victims. Let's be clear: they do not. What they are saying is that there is a choice about you deal with a catastrophic event. This is how they dealt with it.
It was on January 19, 1999 when the girls were walking to school together in their home town of St Leonards, near Hastings, East Sussex, that Hopkinson, prowling the neighbourhood in his car, struck. In a narrow street, he had almost hit Lisa when she stumbled on to the road and he got out to apologise. Seizing his moment, he started to bundle Lisa into the boot of his car. She screamed but no one came. Charlene, frozen with fear and not wanting to leave her best friend alone, simply allowed herself to be bundled in with her.
Lying in the darkness as Hopkinson drove towards Eastbourne, Charlene tried to comfort Lisa by singing to her. As the more streetwise of the two, she says that, even at 10, she realised from the outset that their kidnapper had a sexual motive. Both were convinced that they were about to be killed, but the presence of the other girl stopped either from becoming hysterical.
Hopkinson, then 45, whom the girls remember smelling “old and manky”, stopped first in a quiet, country layby, pulled Charlene out and, perhaps in some warped attempt to bond with her, made her sit on his knee and answer questions such as her name, favourite colour, favourite food and the names of her parents. He then called in at the house of his elderly parents, who were away on holiday, took Lisa inside, stripped her, tied her wrists behind her neck with a pair of tights and made her answer similar questions, writing down her responses. At no point did anyone hear Charlene, who was screaming loudly in the boot. When Charlene screamed that she needed the toilet, he produced a bucket. But this was merely Hopkinson's preamble. He drove the girls to his flat above a shopping centre in Eastbourne and smuggled them inside, where he began his systematic abuse, repeatedly taking them in turn into his filthy bedroom over the next few days.
It is highly uncomfortable to talk about the subject of child sexual abuse, more problematic still to write about it. Morally, should we leave what actually happened unsaid? Might it provide titillation for another paedophile? Or is it our duty to confront what happened, grotesque as it may be?
Neither Lisa or Charlene become distressed when they talk about it. In fact, they say it sometimes feels like they are recounting a story and it never really happened. “It's weird - when I see old news clips and cuttings [about when they were missing] I think: ‘Oh, I feel really sorry for those girls' but I don't see it as us,” says Charlene, who has perhaps learnt the benefits of dissociation. We conduct this interview at Charlene's house, which is only a minute's walk from Cornfield Terrace, the road where they were kidnapped. Neither has ever felt a need to move away from the area, although they say this is probably only because they know that Hopkinson will never be released.
Lisa remembers the first time that Hopkinson took Charlene into his bedroom while she was again left tied up in another room, her hands and feet turning purple with the pressure of the ligatures. She could hear her friend crying and pleading for Hopkinson to stop, terrified and bewildered about was going on. “That first time, Charlene came back and said: ‘He raped me,'” she says. “I said: ‘What's that?' I had no idea. She had to explain it to me. That's when I knew what was going on.”
Certainly Hopkinson had no mercy for the girls when they were weeping and pleading. Lisa says: “It used to go on for hours. I remember looking at the clock going round from 9 till 11 in the morning.” Charlene could hear her screams through the wall. Lisa learnt to separate herself from the moment, thinking of happier times with her parents to get her through the ordeal. Charlene says that sometimes Hopkinson just ordered her to lie on top of him naked. Cruelly, he had told them that he had asked their parents for ransom money but that they weren't prepared to pay. Yet he let them watch the TV news about the huge police search for them and the agonised faces of their parents at press conferences begging for their return, which clearly contradicted this. The Spice Girls made an appeal for information. Charlene says she could tell from her father's face on TV that he thought she was dead.
But, at the same time, Hopkinson seemed to want to bond with the children, to have a “meaningful” relationship with them. Each time he abused the girls, he claimed to be overcome with remorse. “After he'd done whatever he'd done, he said: ‘Right, I won't do that no more. I'm a bad man,'” Charlene says. “But he always did.” He would tell them stories about other children he claimed to be friendly with and warned them that if they tried to escape there was a madman living next door with a dog who would kill them. Being children, they believed him. “He'd say: ‘At least I'm being gentle with you, not like other men would be,'” Lisa says. Meanwhile, he had removed all the door handles in the flat so that they couldn't escape.
Once, when he was asleep, they plotted to kill him and searched the flat for a knife, but Hopkinson had hidden them all. “We honestly thought that this was it for the rest of our lives,” Lisa says. “I thought that this was going to be our home.” Incredibly, Hopkinson once left the girls alone in the flat while he went to collect his parents from the airport. But all the windows were bolted, the doors were locked and the girls in any case were frightened of the “madman” next door. They raised each other's spirits by cuddling each other and talking about school and things they might do if they were ever released.
Then there seemed to be a breakthrough. On their third day of captivity, they as usual begged Hopkinson to let them go, promising that they wouldn't tell, and he suddenly agreed. He let them have their first bath since abducting them and gave them back their school uniforms (he had forced them to wear his own, stinking T-shirts) promising he would drive them somewhere and let them out. The children were euphoric.
What he actually had in mind was killing them. He drove to Beachy Head with them in the boot, then pulled them out to push them to their deaths. Charlene's memory of this is more vivid than Lisa's. She recalls him dangling her close to the edge. “He was laughing, looking right into my face,” Charlene says. “Then he just said: ‘No, I want you for one more day.'” Bizarrely, Hopkinson then put them back in the car and drove them to a fish and chip shop. He told them to wait in the back seat while he went in and bought them sausage and chips. Again they were too frightened to try to escape, not knowing where they were and having been a whisker away from being murdered.
But their rescue was near. The next day police, following up a separate complaint from parents living near by who claimed that Hopkinson had indecently assaulted their daughters, knocked on his door. After panicking for a few minutes, effing and blinding, he simply opened it and told the officers: “I've got the two missing girls in my front room.” They remember being carried out into the sunshine and later, incredibly, gave a photocall on the beach for the press, posing with two huge teddy bears. The public did not know at that point the horror that they had endured.
Hopkinson, a former Bank of England worker and a member of Mensa, had been jailed for seven years in 1991 for kidnapping and assaulting an 11-year-old girl. He had been offered psychiatric treatment as a condition of a two-month parole period before the end but declined it. Having grown up in Zimbabwe and served in the armed forces of the former Rhodesian regime, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown in the 1980s, which triggered a personality change. His marriage failed and he lost his job. In a book he wrote as therapy while in prison he noted: “I found the only company I enjoyed was that of children.”
With Hopkinson in prison, the girls' task was to get on with their lives. They returned to school almost immediately, the teachers having ordered the other pupils never to mention the kidnap, but things were not easy. Both went into counselling, which they loathed. To this day, Charlene seems almost as distressed by the memory of “therapy” as she is by the abduction. “It was about the worst thing they could have put me through,” she says, with a visible shudder. “No one understands how horrible that was.” When all she wanted to do was play with her friends, the therapy made her relive an experience that she wanted to forget. Lisa hated it too, so her father let her stop the sessions after four months. Charlene's father, however, wanted her to carry on and she attended for 18 months.
This was the catalyst for the girls' friendship breaking down. “In my head it felt like Lisa had got over it and I hadn't,” Charlene says. “That whole year and a half counselling ... my head was messed up and I just ended up hating her.” Charlene had already suffered turbulent years before the abduction. Her mother had died when she was young and she was placed in foster care for a time. Her father had brought her to Hastings from London to start a new life together. Her way of coping after the abduction was to put on an act of confidence, while Lisa's was to withdraw.
“When I was younger, I couldn't bear to be around Lisa,” Charlene says. “I put on an act and then I'd look at her and remember what really had happened. I hate the fact I used to hate her.” She admits that in a way she bullied Lisa, trying to get people not to like her. Then, when they were 16 and had left school, a mutual friend was killed in a car crash. Charlene telephoned Lisa to talk about the tragedy and apologised for everything she had done. Since then they have been inseparable again and say the only therapy they need is talking to each other. Not that they do this very often these days. They have, they say, moved on. Lisa has a partner and an 18-month-old son; Charlene, who trained in childcare, was in a relationship until recently. Their ordeal, they say, has not made them unable to have relationships with boys, though they cannot, understandably, imagine being with an older man.
And then they say something that may astonish many people. They say that in some ways what happened has had a positive effect on their lives. Both seem vaguely surprised that anyone would want to interview them about it because it is “not that amazing” but, in a climate in which missing girls such as Madeleine McCann dominate the news, they want to urge people never to give up searching because “children can come back”.
Do they not think that it robbed them of much of their childhood? Charlene says no. “What happened - it's not half my life; it's not even that,” she says, clicking her fingers. “It's not the worst thing that has happened to me.” Then she says that a part of her doesn't even regret it happening. “If someone said you can take it back, I wouldn't take it back. It has made me so much stronger. It hasn't brought bad out, it has brought out good. It has made me appreciate things.”
Does Lisa think the incident has devastated her life? “No, not really. I dunno,” she says. “I just feel normal, like nothing's happened really. I don't think I'd be who I am today [without it]. Sometimes I feel selfish; people expect us to be crying in an interview like this because it's getting to us. Sometimes I feel people are thinking: ‘Why aren't you more emotional about this? Why didn't it affect you so badly?'” Both say their parents have been more affected by it than them. But their philosophy, says Lisa, is: “You can either go one way and [think] everything's ruined or you can go the other and put it behind you. That's what we did.”
They know that there has been damage. Charlene cannot walk on the streets on her own and hates being alone in the house (she lives with her father). Lisa suffered nightmares for many months. Neither claims to feel anything for Hopkinson, except that he is a sad, dirty old man who failed to destroy them. Hating him would empower him and make them victims who are defined by his crime.
But their quite breathtaking lack of self-pity and belief that such terrible experiences do not have to be catastrophic is remarkable. Of course, we do not know whether they will still feel like this in future and whether their courage is partly teenage buoyancy. But for parents horrified by the crimes that paedophiles commit, for now it is comforting to see it as an example of the incredible resilience of children.
The Girls That Survived Channal 4 BBC 2/27/08
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