Before I could put any plan into action, he came up the stairs with the same Rambo-style hunting knife he had threatened me with before. His eyes flickered manically. He closed the bedroom door.
Oh my God, I thought, this is it. I am going to die.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, trying to reason with him, keeping my voice steady. ‘Put it away now.’
He stood there naked, waving the knife in my face. I tensed, waiting for the lunge. Instead he grabbed hold of his genitals.
‘I’m not big enough for you, am I?’ he sneered.
Instinctively, I tried to move his hand away, but I grabbed the blade and sliced my hand open. He twisted me around and pinned me to the bed, his 16-stone frame crushing my body, which was barely half his size. I couldn’t move from the neck down. He had the knife to my throat. Sweat was pumping off me. If I showed any fear, though, I was sure he would push the blade into me.
I tried to remain as calm as possible. I knew what he wanted more than this sudden blood lust. It was what he always wanted. Somehow I managed to talk soothingly, longingly – whatever it would take to instigate sex.
He released his grip, put the knife on the bed. While he was distracted I pushed the knife off the bed with my foot.
He grabbed me and put me in a headlock. We fell off the bed with such force it was sent flying across the floor on its wheels. He still had my head in his grip.
‘I’ll do anything, please,’ I said. ‘Just leave me alone.’
He got to his feet, still holding me around the neck, and dragged me downstairs. He was rambling about this fantasy he had of me being abused as a child. It wasn’t true, but he would go on about it constantly.
‘I wished I’d known you as a kid,’ he panted. ‘I would have totally fucked you.’
He was beyond sick. I kept trying to remain calm. I knew that showing any emotion would make this perilous situation even worse. I was shaking, though. My brain went dead. I felt numb, like I was not part of my body anymore.
Knock, knock.
What was that? There was somebody at the door. Thank God.
He answered it. It was Mum. Had she just happened to be passing? Had she sensed my distress? What a relief it was to see Mum’s face, but I could see the worry in her eyes. She knew something serious was happening.
Don’t say anything, Mum, I thought to myself. Don’t say anything.
She reached in and tried to grab me.
‘Come on, now,’ she directed her words to him. ‘Sophie is coming with me.’
‘She’s not going fucking anywhere,’ he said, grabbing me by the back and pulling me in. He slammed the door shut and locked it.
‘I’m going to get your father and sister!’ I heard her shout.
He moved me towards the stairs, but I knew if I went up there I would never come down again.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I pleaded.
He came into the bathroom with me. I slowed everything down, trying to take as long as possible. He twitched impatiently.
My dad wasn’t well. He had suffered a heart attack brought on, I told myself, by my refusal to leave this monster. Like my older sister, Leanne, and my younger brother, Jason, my parents had tried everything to prise me away from him, but they didn’t understand coercive control. They didn’t know how he had manipulated me, taken advantage of my extreme vulnerability. I might have been 17 when I met this 30-year-old, but I was effectively a child, which was the way he liked it.
Asperger syndrome had made me a prisoner of my childhood. When I finally ventured out into the real world I met a monster who wanted to keep me caged in his prison of darkness. He isolated me from the people I loved, convinced me he was good for me and then, when I realised the true extent of his evil, controlled me with violence and my fear that he would kill my family if I disobeyed his commands.
I had treated my family terribly, but now they were my only salvation. Luckily, they only lived a few streets away. It wasn’t long before I heard them back at the door. I was afraid of what he might do, but the delay had momentarily calmed him down. To my relief he opened the door to them. The shock and fear in their eyes were clear to see – but so too was the determination to get me out of there. I was still naked.
‘I need to go and get dressed,’ I told them.
He followed me upstairs. In the bedroom he came so close I could smell his rank, stale breath.
‘I could break your neck now and no one would know,’ he whispered. His hands made a snapping motion.
This was not over. I knew that. Even if I managed to slip past him and out of the house, this was not the end. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
A nursery school, near Mountain Ash, 1996
I knew immediately something was wrong. It didn’t look right and the second I took a sniff, Oh my God. It was disgusting. And they wanted me to drink this? No way.
I tried to explain to my teacher: this milk was not right. But she wasn’t interested. It was like she didn’t care. ‘Drink it,’ she said. And then louder still, ‘Drink it!’
It tasted even worse than it smelled. To this day I can taste it. I only have to look at a milk bottle and it brings the horrid memories of that day flooding back. It is one of my earliest memories, but it is so vivid it’s like it was yesterday. I was only three years old and in nursery.
Just being there terrified me. I hated being separated from my mum. I didn’t like the other children, the noise they made and the fact that they came up to me asking if I wanted to play. Every day the school provided milk for us to drink. Even on a good day it was warm and creamy and not very pleasant, but that day, even at such a young age, I could tell it was off. The other children gulped theirs down and went back to doing whatever it was they were doing. I sat there, trembling and crying, wishing it was over and I could be back in my mother’s loving arms.
‘I can’t drink this,’ I spluttered through sobs.
‘Just drink it, Sophie!’ the teacher said, getting more agitated. The louder she got, the more I cried. ‘You’re not leaving that seat until you drink it all.’
The only way to make this terrifying confrontation end was to drink the foul-smelling, rank-tasting liquid. Slowly, retching with every mouthful, I forced it down. Three hours later the teacher allowed me to move.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’
She had no idea. I haven’t been able to look at a glass of milk since, let alone drink one. I still bear the emotional scars.
By the time I was three it was already apparent that I was different. And to understand how I ended up in the clutches of such a monster when I was just a teenager, it is important to know the challenges of my childhood.
I was the second child of Stephen and Helen Crockett. They had met as teenagers in Mountain Ash, a former mining town in the Cynon Valley in south Wales. Helen was 17 when she got together with Stephen, who was two years older and worked as a labourer and was a reservist with the Territorial Army. She fell pregnant a year later and they married a short time after, and then Helen gave birth to Leanne, my older sister. Money was always hard to find and it was difficult to put food on the table, but theirs was a happy marriage and they’ve been together now for 36 years.
I