‘Please, Daddy, no!’ I screamed. I lunged across and grabbed the hammer and brought it down on his head in a moment of blind terror. It was a gut reaction, a pure survival instinct. It was and still is like a terrible nightmare that never happened.
Even as I ran out of the house and down the hill to my car, I was terrified he would be running after me and about to grab me and beat me to a pulp. I fled like a naughty child as if my life depended on it, my veins flooded with adrenalin, my teeth chattering and my entire body twitching with shock. There was a buzzing in my ears and I felt hot all over. I've never been so scared in my life. I thought that any minute he was going to catch me and beat me to a pulp. I didn't realize that he was dead.
The next morning I was arrested and taken into police custody. It was only then I found out that David Howarth hadn't been my real dad; George Heywood, Mum's first husband, was my biological father. Although I'd had my suspicions after overhearing the conversation in Wales, it was still a very strange surprise.
I told the police about all the abuse I'd suffered as a child and they interrogated me in detail about it. There were hours and hours spent going over and over events until I thought my head was going to explode.
I was in a state of extreme fear and confusion as I was marched to the cells and strip-searched. Right from the start prison was a huge shock, a dog-eat-dog world where both inmates and guards seemed out to get me. My nerves were jangling; every sound of a clanging door or a shout from another inmate left me petrified and shaking. I'd killed a man. My life was over. I made up my mind to kill myself as soon as I got the chance – but they put me on suicide watch so there was nothing I could do.
At this stage I'd only been with Tracey for five months. Most women would have run a mile, and with my set of life problems and issues I was sure that's what Tracey would do too. When at last she was allowed in to visit me, my first words were: ‘Just leave me now. It's over.’
Looking me straight in the eye, she said: ‘I'll never leave you, Stuart. I love you.’
A couple of days later, as I sat in my prison cell, a letter was tossed inside. I recognized Tracey's writing and when I picked it up I felt something hard inside. I ripped open the top of the envelope and a white-gold wedding ring fell out and spun across the floor. As I bent down to pick it up, my heart ached. A note from Tracey said simply: ‘I'll never leave you and I will always love you.’ It was the most powerful gesture of love that I'd ever experienced in my life. Who was this amazing woman and what on earth did she see in me?
Over the next seven months while I was on remand awaiting trial, Tracey visited me every single day, bringing me the few items of clothing I was allowed and some CDs to try and relax me. But the regime in prison was a living nightmare. I was in a permanent state of terror at the unpredictable nature of the other prisoners and the cruelty of some of the guards. It culminated one night when I was told I was being moved to a cell just by the sex offenders unit and I totally lost the plot. I had hidden two safety razors in my cell and I used them to slash at my arms until blood was spraying round the room and gushing down my legs.
They stopped me before I managed to kill myself but after that I was transferred to Manchester's Strangeways prison, where things went from bad to worse. There were some sadistic guards in there who used strip search as a form of punishment, and after I complained about it my treatment got even worse. My food bowl disappeared, I was moved to increasingly dilapidated cells, there was verbal abuse and all kinds of insidious harassment. I began to keep a diary of events and that seemed to wind them up even more.
At my trial in March 2001 I was sentenced to two years in prison for taking the life of the man I had always known as ‘Dad’. The judge said he believed I'd had diminished responsibility at the time and told me that the case was one of the most graphic and depraved instances of child abuse he had ever come across, and that my stepdad was a sick and twisted man. Taking into account the time I had already served, I would be released in September, six months hence. But how would I get through those six months without losing the plot completely?
Tracey was the only thing that kept me going, but it was tough for her too. After I was sentenced the visiting was substantially reduced and she was only allowed to come once a week. It got even harder when I was placed on the category A side of Strangeways. Category A is for hardened criminals or those assumed to be a risk to the public or national security. Category A prisoners aren't allowed to leave the wing so any visitors have to come to them. When she visited me there, Tracey had to walk right into the heart of the prison past all the other prisoners, who would whistle, catcall and jeer as she went by.
We sat for an hour facing each other across a table with a guard hovering nearby, only allowed to kiss briefly at the beginning and end of each visit. I desperately needed to hug her for comfort but this was never allowed. Yet Tracey turned up faithfully every single visiting time, trying to lift my spirits as best she could.
After a visit when she knew I was in a bad way, she would drive back late at night and park on the road outside Strangeways where I could see her from my cell window, then she would get out of the car and wave to me, shouting that she loved me. It brought me a lot of comfort on the lonely nights. We'd talk daily whenever I wasn't banged up in my cell and got a chance to reach the phone, and we would write letters to each other as well; sometimes I wrote as many as three times a day.
Tracey's whole life revolved round prison visits: organizing her shifts at work to fit around them, rushing through Manchester city-centre traffic to get there on time, never once letting me down. In many ways, it was as if she served that sentence with me.
I had some counselling in prison with a decent guy called Neil Fox, but in a way it made things worse by bringing the trauma to the surface. Psychiatrists diagnosed me as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because I never knew when some seemingly insignificant trigger would bring back the sights, sounds, smells and sheer misery of my younger days, as vividly as if they were happening all over again. It was as though I was right back in the bedroom at home with him towering over me, shouting abuse.
I clung to the hope that I would be able to turn my life around once I got out. I'm a physically strong guy, used to working hard and bright enough to get good jobs. But in my head, I kept hearing my stepfather's voice saying, ‘You're bad, you're naughty and you're no good. That's why no one loves you.’
I did my best to blank out the flashbacks and to trust the good people around me, especially Tracey, but that childhood conditioning runs deep. I was suicidal throughout the whole thirteen months I served in prison. At times I thought that maybe it was true: that I was a bad person and no one would ever truly love me. There were many days when it seemed there was no way out of the nightmare except death.
On the morning of 19 September 2001, I was wakened at 7 a.m. by a prison guard banging on the cell door with a heavy wooden truncheon. It's a harsh noise that startles even the heaviest sleepers. I boiled the kettle for a quick brew, knowing that I would just have time to gulp it down and get dressed before the screw came back for me.
I took a last look round my cell, which was 18 feet long by 8 feet wide, with mottled, yellowing concrete walls and a single barred window. The bunk beds on which thousands of other men had slept before me had filthy, torn bedding. There was a rickety table, a chair, and the only other piece of furniture was a small chipboard cupboard in which I kept the few items of clothing