BEYOND
ALL EVIL
June Thomson & Giselle Ross
with Marion Scott and Jim McBeth
Copyright
Harper Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperElement 2011
© June Thomson, Giselle Ross, Marion Scott and Jim McBeth 2011
The authors assert the moral right to be
identified as the authors of this work.
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN 9780007438518
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007438525
Version: 2018-07-13
Dedication
To little Jay-Jay, Paul, Ryan and Michelle –
forever innocent, forever loved
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Prologue: Fairy Shoes and Toy Soldiers
Chapter 1 - Beginnings
Chapter 2 - Love of Our Lives
Chapter 3 - Moths to a Flame
Chapter 4 - Rings on Our Fingers
Chapter 5 - Closer to the Flame
Chapter 6 - I Take This Man
Chapter 7 - The Honeymoon Is Over
Chapter 8 - The Way It Is
Chapter 9 - Even in Darkness
Chapter 10 - Nothing Ever Changes
Chapter 11 - Behind Painted Smiles
Chapter 12 - A Deeper, Darker Place
Chapter 13 - If Only ... (June)
Chapter 14 - This Child of Mine
Chapter 15 - So Alone
Chapter 16 - Why Didn’t We Walk Away?
Chapter 17 - These Special Gifts
Chapter 18 - The Joy They Brought
Chapter 19 - Beginning of the End
Chapter 20 - The Final Straw
Chapter 21 - If Only ... (Giselle)
Chapter 22 - Saturday 3 May
Chapter 23 - Mummy Can’t Fix It Now
Chapter 24 - Tranquillisers and Sympathy
Chapter 25 - In the Arms of an Angel
Chapter 26 - Tell Me Why
Chapter 27 - Revenge
Chapter 28 - Brutal and Merciless
Chapter 29 - Cold and Evil
Chapter 30 - Reaching for the Light
Chapter 31 - The Kindness of Strangers
Chapter 32 - The Love They Left Behind
Chapter 33 - This Sisterhood of Ours
Afterword by Ian Stephen
Moved by Giselle and June's story?
Help and Support for Victims
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Foreword
What follows is a conversation between two mothers who are leading each other from the darkness to the light.
Before they were united by two unspeakable acts of evil, June Thomson and Giselle Ross did not know each other. Today they are the closest of friends. In their hearts they wish they had not been brought together by incomparable loss, but now that they have found each other they are able to walk together towards a future neither of them believed was possible.
Only Giselle can appreciate how June has suffered; only June can understand the monumental effort it takes for her friend to rise and face each new day. This bond has already saved their lives, dragging them back from the edge of madness and giving them the courage to endure unimaginable pain.
On the same day, a few miles apart, June and Giselle’s estranged husbands, Rab Thomson and Ashok Kalyanjee, murdered their children. The men were not driven by rage. The killings were planned and carried out with precision, and designed to crush the women they had once dominated.
The names of the lost innocents are Ryan and Michelle Thomson, and Paul and Jay Ross, whom you will come to know and love as little ‘Jay-Jay’. Ryan was seven. His sister, Michelle, was 25, a wonderfully innocent woman-child, who had an intellectual age equivalent to that of her brother. Paul was six and lived for Spiderman. Jay-Jay was two, he loved Bob the Builder, and was still wrestling with the mysterious joys of a world in which he would not grow up.
Their fathers were the worst of all predators, perfect examples of what has become known as the ‘family annihilator’ – parents who kill their own children in an unfathomable act of revenge.
It is a psychological syndrome that is becoming disturbingly prevalent, but which no mother’s intuition or father’s sixth sense can predict.
According to the eminent clinical and forensic psychologist Ian Stephen, such killers are now responsible for more than one-third of all child murders. Throughout the pages of this book – and after the mothers’ story has been told – Stephen will offer his professional insight into the minds of the murderers and the women who once loved them.
It may seem a bitter irony that, while their crimes have united their wives, Thomson and Kalyanjee have also been brought together. They languish in the same jail, where they have yet to offer any explanation or display remorse. Their silence continues to devastate both June and Giselle, for no power on earth can erase the misguided guilt they have assumed – the belief that somehow they should have known.
The mothers have lived with that erroneous belief since their children were killed. At least they are now insulated by sisterhood and the memories of the happy times with their children.