I am struggling to make sense
of the events leading up to Rosemary’s death and need to put it down in
words to help me, and maybe others, to understand what she was going
through.
Before she left her home in Dibden Purlieu near Southampton on the night of the 4th/5th of September 2007,
Rosemary appeared to be living a full and happy life. She had the
freedom and trust to do pretty much as she pleased, and she devoted a lot
of her time to exercising other people’s horses in the New Forest.
She had many school friends who saw her as a smiling ray of sunshine who
didn’t take life too seriously and was always making them laugh and making
even the most tedious tasks fun.
She was well liked by adults and she could communicate with them on their
level without putting on a façade.
She was intelligent, witty, bubbly, tall, slim and very pretty with her
long blonde hair, and she loved, and was loved by, her parents and brother
and sister.
So why did she kill herself....?
After she went missing, we searched on her computer and her mobile phone
for clues. The history files from her Instant Messenger chat room
conversations revealed that she had built up an online relationship with
some youngsters who were suffering with depression. Rosemary appeared to be helping them in a
counselling role. Did this lead her into depression? I don’t
think so. I suspect that she sought them out because of the things
happening in her head that she didn’t understand and that she so
convincingly managed to conceal from all her friends and family behind her
happy exterior.
She spoke in the chat room about the weird feelings she had and how she
had trouble sleeping at night. At one point, something was telling
her she had to run, but then she said that she realised how crazy that
was.
When I read this, I tortured myself for a while, wondering why we hadn’t
seen the signs. We already knew that Rosemary had developed a mild
issue with food. She had started to get up later in the mornings and
skipped breakfast before school. I wasn’t always sure that she was
taking a packed lunch with her. When I expressed my concern and
asked her if she had an eating problem she laughed it off with “Don’t be
silly Daddy, I love food”. She always ate well during family
mealtimes although there was evidence in her extremely untidy bedroom that
she was snacking on crisps and chocolate biscuits.
We found out later that the owner of some horses that Rosemary and her
friend helped look after was, in fact, a child psychologist. We took
comfort in the fact that she had thought that Rosemary was an extremely
well balanced teenager with no hint of the turmoil that must have existed
in her mind.
Nine days before she disappeared, she told us that she had quit her
part-time job in a local shop. She was very well liked in the shop
and had a really good relationship with the owner. We found out a
week later that she had been asked to leave because of some petty
shoplifting (a can of fizzy drink and some sweets) which left the owner
with no choice other than to sack Rosemary, especially as she was trusted on the till. The owner was extremely upset
since she had always enjoyed Rosemary’s company, and she told Rosemary
that it was up to her to tell her parents about it.
Did we overreact when we found out?
Rosemary was away in Cardiff at the time with her sister, Lucy. We
decided that Rosemary would be banned from horse riding for a month apart
from Saturday mornings, her internet access would be disabled for a week
and that she had to hand over her mobile phone at 10.30pm each night and
would get it back in the morning, so that she wouldn’t be up all night texting her friends.
In the light of the Rosemary’s trivial indiscretion, a few people who
don’t know us have criticised us as parents for imposing these “draconian”
measures. These people do not realise that apart from some mild
discipline when our three children were very young, we have never needed
any discipline since. They all grew up in a happy, relaxed
environment with both parents working from home and always there for them.
They all knew what was acceptable behaviour and never tested the
boundaries. The manner in which Rosemary lost her job and the fact
that she avoided the truth was so totally out of character and we were
worried that it was the start of her “going off the rails”. We
planned to impose the sanctions because we loved her dearly and didn’t
want her to mess up her life.
Rosemary returned from Cardiff on the 4th of September in the early
afternoon. I just said to her “We need to have a talk”, and her face
fell and she ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. She
refused to come out and was crying and shouting when we tried to speak to
her. She accepted that she had done something stupid, but the way
she reacted did worry me. I found myself trying to remember if there
was anything sharp in the bathroom cabinet, but I quickly dismissed the
thought. This was my wonderful, happy, thoughtful daughter.
How could she want to hurt herself?
She reluctantly joined us for dinner that evening, but the expression on
her face was of total dejection. Afterwards, I helped her find her
phone, which she had mislaid and she went back into her room. Jen
told her that we would “draw a line under this” and that tomorrow will be
a new day. Rosemary had a bath and washed her hair, we assumed in
preparation for the first day back at school in the morning. Lucy
popped in to talk with her and they agreed to go to the beach the
following Sunday.
At 10.30pm, I heard the toilet flush upstairs and realised that we were
supposed to be looking after her phone until the morning. When I
went into her room, she was lying in bed curled up in the foetal position
facing away from me. When I asked for her phone, she switched it off and
handed it to me without any argument. I asked her for a hug but she
refused and then turned back to face the wall. I bent down and
kissed her on her cheek. That was the last time I saw her.
Rosemary must have left home
sometime between 10.30pm and 6am.
The following morning, I went to take her phone back and to make sure she
was getting ready for school. I cannot describe the feeling of dread
when I realised she had gone. She had left without taking her purse
full of money, her MP3 player, her camera and of course, her phone.
Jen and I rushed around the house, garden, office and garage, searching in
vain before I rang the police. Jen rang round Rosemary’s friends but
nobody knew anything. I drove out to the stables where Rosemary and
her friend did most of their riding, in case she had walked there.
At some stage, we checked her phone and found the harrowing messages she
had sent to her chat room friends, saying she wanted to die and that she
could either run away or kill herself.
I went out to the forest in case she was out there trying to clear her
head.
Lucy helped us to locate the Instant Messenger history files on Rosemary’s
computer and we started to realise that there was another side to
Rosemary. We only knew her as the happy, confident young woman whose
smile lit up the room, but her computer revealed a rather sad and confused
child who didn’t understand what was happening in her head. Jen and
Lucy were less concerned than me about this, having first hand experience
of teenage angst and the emotional rollercoaster as hormones sort
themselves out at this difficult age. We also discovered that, a
week earlier, she had visited one of her chat room friends, catching a
National Express coach on a day trip to a town 117 miles away, telling us
that she was spending the day in Southampton with her friends. Was
it the thought that this double life had been exposed that caused her to
flip?
One of the chat room conversations had mentioned that there were “loads of
places to hide in the forest”. I think this was what prompted the
police to set up the searches that were joined by local volunteers and
from organisations in neighbouring counties. The police took it
seriously from the start, especially as they built up a picture of
Rosemary and realised that she was the last person anyone would have
expected to run away from home. Everyone who knew us was distraught
and wanted to help. People drove all over the surrounding area
putting up posters. The charity
Missing People also organised a
massive distribution of posters across the New Forest, Isle of Wight and
London. The organisers of the Bestival music festival on the island
made an appeal.
Meanwhile, the police had escalated the search. Lyndhurst CID handed over
to the Major Crime Unit so that more resources could be made available,
and we had to move out of our house for twenty-four hours while the
forensics team took over. Understandably, the police had to gather
evidence and take statements to eliminate the family from their enquiries.
We accepted that this had to be done for our own protection, but it was
easy to feel that it was taking effort away from the search for Rosemary.
We had to make the inevitable appeal to the media. In a world full
of wannabe celebrities all trying to get on television, we were the last
people who wanted any kind of exposure.
There were sightings reported from several locations, but none of the
descriptions sounded very likely. By a strange quirk of fate,
security tapes from Southampton railway station had been recorded on a
Drax video multiplexer which I had designed for the security company
Tecton an number of years earlier. The MD at Tecton offered a reward
of £100,000 for information leading to Rosemary’s safe return, and
circulated messages throughout the CCTV community to check their
recordings with the lure of £10,000 for confirmed sightings. As a
family, we felt humbled by these offers of help and from everything that
our friends and the local community did for us.
Someone we didn’t even know set up a Facebook account for Rosemary on the
internet, which attracted 8,500 members, all desperate to help, and to
spread Rosemary’s poster across the country.
Eighteen and a half days after we had discovered she was missing, a body was
found by some walkers looking for their dog that had run off in Busketts
Lawn Inclosure in the New Forest. The clothes matched the
description we had given, so we knew it was her before she was officially
identified through her dental records the following day. Before she
killed herself, she had plaited her hair
into twenty-one braids, something she used to do when she was younger.
By road she was about 13 miles from home, but we believe that Rosemary would
have walked along the forest tracks, covering about 10 miles.
Police statistics in similar cases suggest a search area of up to 2 miles,
but we already knew that Rosemary would have defied convention. She
was an exceptional person right up to the end.
I have so many questions.
Was she suffering from a mental illness?
Did she realise just how much love she had from so many people? Did
she know how devastated her family, friends and complete strangers would
be. I have to believe that she was ill - why else would she have
killed herself? I also believe that she didn’t want to hurt anyone
and that was why she walked so far into an area of the forest none of us
knew, in spite of the blackness and despair that I believe had overwhelmed
her mind.
Could we have spotted the symptoms?
Were we bad parents or was
Rosemary just too clever for us? With hindsight, we can see some
subtle signs, but Rosemary was outstanding at everything she did,
including covering up her problems. Should I have pried into her
private life? Absolutely not. Checking the history files on
her computer would have been a gross invasion of privacy, and if she had
found out, this could have triggered a similar implosion in her mind.
We have heard from other people who have lost a child through totally
unexpected suicide. They all seem to be high achievers who perhaps
suffer from the pressure they put themselves under. If they view
their lives as “perfect”, do they feel guilt if they don’t feel happy all
the time, and is this why they hide it?
How has the family coped with what has happened?
We have accepted
that we cannot change the past and have been concentrating on the future.
We are comforted by the fact that Rosemary had fifteen wonderful years and
brought happiness to so many people. As a family, our sense of
humour has always contributed to the relaxed atmosphere at home, and we
have learned not to feel guilty that we can still find things in life to
laugh about.
What do I want now?
I would give up my life if I thought it would
bring her back, but I have to accept that I will never see her again.
I want to start remembering happy memories without feeling an overwhelming
sense of loss and emptiness. I want all four remaining members of
the family to come through this as stronger people - something I believe
can happen. I want youngsters to feel able to talk about their
feelings and inner fears with their parents, friends, teachers or GP, and
to understand that whatever weird stuff may be happening in their heads,
it’s nothing new; many people have experienced it before them. We
already know of several examples where teenagers have used the publicity
surrounding Rosemary’s disappearance and suicide as an excuse to admit to
their parents that they need help. There is an excellent website run by an organisation called
Papyrus,
with information for young people who have thought about suicide, and for
their parents, friends and teachers.
The final thing on my list is the one thing that I know will never happen.
I want people to accept mental illness in the same way they would view a
physical illness. It’s easy to talk about someone as “they’re just mental”
or “a bit of a nutter”. We wouldn’t describe someone with a broken
leg or physical illness in such derogatory terms, so why are psychological
issues treated in this way? As I write this, the Health Secretary,
Alan Johnson has announced that £170m a year would be spent on
psychological therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy. The
other taboo is suicide. I used to think that this was a selfish act,
but now I believe that for some people it is something they cannot avoid
once the blackness has enveloped their minds. It wasn’t the Rosemary
that we knew who killed herself; it was the person she had temporarily
become.
Jen and I don’t want to start a crusade in Rosemary’s
memory. We need to get back to a normal life that we realise will be
different from our previous idea of normal, but I would like youngsters to
be able to talk about Rosemary as a way of breaking the
barriers that they are hiding behind. Maybe these issues need to be
included in the National Curriculum as a part of Citizenship in schools,
with Papyrus
as an excellent starting point. I have heard someone say that
talking about depression and suicide could tip teenagers over the edge if
they are susceptible, but surely that cannot be the case.
HOPELineUK 08000 68 41 41 or 01978 367 333 from 10am to 2pm and 7pm to 10pm, Monday to Friday and 2pm to 5pm at
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HOPELineUK is staffed by professionally qualified advisers who can give support,
practical advice and information to anyone who is concerned that a young person
they know may be suicidal