The Evil Within: Murdered by her stepbrother – the crime that shocked a nation. The heartbreaking story of Becky Watts by her father. Darren Galsworthy

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СКАЧАТЬ Lee!

      The 1970s was the decade of strikes, which led to power cuts and huge piles of rat-infested rubbish on the streets because the bin men weren’t collecting it any more. The economy was prone to inflation – it seemed as if every single time you went to the shops, prices had gone up. This led to workers demanding higher wages, which the government didn’t want to pay, and as a result the unions started to call for all-out strikes. Three-day working weeks were introduced as businesses were only allowed to use electricity for three consecutive days each week, while there were regular power cuts for home users. This meant that the inside of our house was as freezing cold as the outside during the winter months – we had ice on the inside of the windows. I was taught to bake bread at school because the bakers were on strike, like everyone else, and I got in the habit of nicking coal whenever I spotted it just so we could light the fire at night to keep warm. Huddled together by candlelight in the evenings, Lee and I thought it was great fun – but, of course, we were young and didn’t have any responsibilities. I imagine it was quite different for our parents, who had two kids to feed and keep warm.

      My dad was the head of our household and extremely strict, as many fathers were back then. It wasn’t uncommon to receive a beating with his belt if we were naughty. Sometimes if my brother was bad I’d be punished too, and vice versa, which didn’t seem fair. Teachers were also allowed to beat pupils in those days. We were often hit with a bat, like a wooden paddle, in primary school, and when we got to secondary school a cane was used. I was quite an emotional kid, and it didn’t take much to make me cry. When the teacher asked me if I wanted a telling off or the bat, I always chose the bat because I was used to getting beatings at home and knew I could take them. Strange as it may sound, to me words hurt more.

      My mother wasn’t the most maternal person and never stood up for my brother or me. She worked morning or evening shifts at the leather factory, and we would often come home from school to find her passed out on the sofa after drinking gin during the afternoon. I didn’t realise she was an alcoholic until much later. I didn’t really know what that was then, but I knew it was useless trying to get any sense out of her when she’d been drinking. Since she wasn’t capable of making dinner, I learned to make food for Lee and me from an early age. At first it was just sandwiches I made from the food parcels donated to poor families by people at the local church. Later, I learned to make simple meals like egg and chips or sausage and chips, and I often made dinner for my father too. He was always in a better mood if there was food on the table ready for him when he returned home from work.

      Money was incredibly scarce for our family. We didn’t have a fridge – just a wooden cupboard in the back garden where we kept our milk. We were lucky enough to have a black-and-white television, but in those days there were only two channels and it took five minutes to warm up after you switched it on. Lee and I didn’t have any toys but we made our own entertainment, playing in rubbish dumps and skips and hanging out with other kids around the estate. We never received any presents at Christmas from our parents – they didn’t celebrate Christmas at all – but we knew that when we went to visit May, our grandmother on my mum’s side, we would get spoilt.

      Nan always had time for her grandkids and would be sure to feed us up because she knew we weren’t getting enough to eat at home. I loved her dearly, and some of my best childhood memories involve her. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she picked us up to take us into town on the bus and she always had a bar of chocolate for us to share. When I was eight, she gave me the best present ever: my first proper bike. It was a bronze-coloured Panther bike, which was second-hand but still the best thing I’d ever seen. For years, Nan was the only source of love and affection Lee and I had, what with Mum’s drinking and Dad’s temper dominating life at home. I don’t want this to sound like a sob story because others had it much tougher than me, but let’s just say it wasn’t the most comfortable, stable start in life.

      My parents split up when I was nineteen, and my dad then married Denise in September 1985. Through Denise I instantly gained two stepbrothers – Kevin, who was three, and Ben, who was one. My father and Denise went on to have four children together – Sarah, Sam, Joe and Asa. I bonded with them pretty quickly, and to this day they remain among my closest friends. Dad mellowed with age and became a much gentler man than the one I had grown up with, so that today we have a good relationship. My mum died in 2010, from pneumonia, and sadly we never became close.

      I had already left the family home by the time Dad remarried. When I was eighteen I moved out to live with my girlfriend, Angela Holloway, who was a year younger than me. We later got hitched, but the marriage only lasted three years. It was a case of far too much, too young, for both of us.

      During the period when I was married, I used to babysit for the kids of some friends of mine, Mark and Verna West. One day, I arrived just as their other babysitter was leaving, and the minute I set eyes on her I felt as though I’d been struck by lightning. She was so gorgeous I could barely speak to introduce myself.

      ‘I’m Anjie,’ she told me.

      ‘Darren.’

      I felt electricity running all the way through my body, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. She kept glancing at me too, while we chatted about everyday things like the kids we were looking after, where we lived, that kind of thing. It was the strangest feeling, but I just knew there was something special about her. It was as if kindness and light shone out of her, and it was the most powerful sensation I had ever felt.

      However, I was married to Angela Holloway at the time and, after we got divorced, I heard that Anjie was seeing someone else, then in 1986 I heard she was pregnant. I just assumed it was a case of bad timing and nothing was going to happen between us. I never forgot about her, though.

      I was twenty-two when Angela and I broke up. I had a few girlfriends after that but nothing too serious. I was concentrating on my career, and that didn’t really leave me much time for a relationship. At the age of sixteen I had done a youth-training scheme in tyre-fitting and car maintenance, at eighteen I was taken on for an engineering apprenticeship at a company that made precast concrete products, and by my mid-twenties I was working as a sheet metal engineer for a firm called City Engineering. I was very serious about making enough money to have a better standard of living than I’d had when I was growing up. I wanted a decent place to live and enough food to put on the table, and I was prepared to put in the graft to earn them.

      When I was twenty-nine, I met a girl called Tanya Watts, who was twenty-two and worked as a carer in an old-folks’ home. She was with some friends in a local pub, and we got chatting, as you do. We seemed to get on well, I bought her a few drinks, and suddenly, almost before I knew it, we were in a relationship. We moved in to a flat in Cadbury Heath soon after meeting and settled into a life of working, going to the pub at the weekend, and taking the occasional holiday. Her mum, Pat, paid for us to go to Pembrokeshire for a week the first year we were together.

      We didn’t ever get married because the relationship always had problems, but I was excited when our son Danny was born on 19 February 1995. He came into the world at Southmead Hospital – same as his old man. When I held him for the first time I couldn’t help but laugh because he was covered in fine black hair and looked like a baby chimp! I was thrilled to see that he looked exactly the same as me in my baby photographs. It was a very proud moment. I was overwhelmed that I had a son, and I swore there and then that I would always love and protect him.

      Danny and I bonded instantly and I threw myself into being a dad, but I was working such long hours as an engineer that my time with him became sacred. Meanwhile, my relationship with Tanya was deteriorating fast. We began to fight about anything and everything, hurling hurtful comments at each other, often continuing rows into the early hours of the morning. I tried to shield baby Danny from as much of it as possible, but living with Tanya was getting harder and harder for me.

      Sometimes she kicked me out of the flat after СКАЧАТЬ