Fear in fairytale cottage!
Wednesday 14th January 2009
I looked at the man on my doorstep like he was an alien.
'C-can you repeat that please?' I spluttered.
'I'm from The Sun newspaper,' he said again. 'We've had an anonymous tip-off that you're the secret £20 million lottery winner.'
I should be so lucky.
'You'd better come in,' I sighed.
I was having to explain myself a lot lately. And I reckoned I knew why. When my ex-husband, Graham Speed, now 52, and I had divorced back in 1995, things had been amicable between us. After all, we'd had our two kids, Chloe, then 13, and Michael, 11, to think about. We'd been married for 21 years and like all couples, we'd had our ups and downs. Only towards the end, it was all downs and no ups. Things had come to a head
when Graham was rushed to hospital by ambulance after a brain haemorrhage. I'd found him collapsed in the kitchen. It was awful. Thankfully he'd survived. I may have no longer loved him, but I still wanted the best for him. He'd been kept in the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield for a month. As he lay in his hospital bed, we'd talked and decided it was for the best if he didn't come home. So he'd moved out and, soon afterwards, I heard he'd moved in with another woman, Sarah.
We'd divorced two years later, and another two years on, I'd started seeing Graham's stepbrother, Alan May, now 57. I know, I know. Brain haemorrhages, me marrying
his stepbrother. Sounds like an EastEnders plot, doesn't it? But Graham and Alan hadn't grown up together. Graham's dad had married Alan's mum in 1974, the same year Graham and I married, so they'd never lived together. And Graham had seemed fine with Alan and I dating at first. After all, he'd gone on to marry Sarah himself in 1995, the year we divorced.
But when Alan moved in with me two months later, Graham seemed less happy.
First, Chloe came home from a visit to her dad's looking upset.
'Dad says I should make sure I'm never alone in the house with Alan,' she said.
'How dare he?' Alan raged.
'He's just smarting about us getting together,' I sighed. 'Ignore it.'
But a few weeks later, we were visited by two police officers.
'We've had an anonymous tip-off that you've been selling alcohol at the local school gates,'
they told Alan.
Luckily they believed us when we told them it was nonsense. We suspected Graham instantly. But his pettiness didn't stop us getting married in April 2000. Only then the floodgates well and truly opened. Letters came, threatening to ruin me. A postcard was sent to Alan's boss, saying he was 'a bully of the worst kind'.
We showed the letters and the postcard to the police, who gave Graham a warning under the Protection From Harassment Act. Did it work? Did it hell.
Just weeks later, my boss got an email saying I was 'dishonest'. Then Alan was visited by Customs and Excise officers at work after another anonymous tip-off that he was illegally selling imported cigarettes. At the same time, anonymous emails started arriving at his work, saying he was a paedophile. And now it appeared that not only were we lying, malicious paedophiles who illegally sold fags and booze to children, but we were also secret lottery winners.
'I know what I'd prefer,' said Alan, rolling his eyes when I told him later. 'What shall we do with our £20 million?'
I laughed, but jokes aside, this was becoming ridiculous. What was going on inside Graham's head? Had that haemorrhage changed his personality somehow?
In September 2004, Graham came to give Michael a lift back to university. Not long after
they'd driven off, I spotted a piece of paper on the drive. Picking it up, I gasped in horror.
Someone had made a collage using our discarded personal information. It had bits of bank statements on it, details of holidays we'd booked.
'What the hell is this?' I said to Alan, showing it to him.
It was really frightening. Had Graham been through our bins? Before long, it seemed there was no limit to Graham's imagination. If he wasn't writing to our local paper, pretending to be us and saying we were emigrating to Australia, he was endlessly reporting us to the council. In the summer of 2006, when someone falsely told the Inland Revenue I was running a business from my home without paying tax or VAT, I snapped.
'I've had enough!' I exploded to Alan. 'This has been going on for nine years. Nine years!'
Where would it end?
Then came the turning point. One of our neighbours came round to see us with some news.
'Apparently your Graham's been making himself extremely unpopular in Harmston,' she said.
Harmston was the village a mile away, where Graham lived. She didn't go into details, but
it seemed Graham's neighbours had been having problems with him, too. Heart pounding, I called the local police station.
'I'm Graham Speed's ex-wife,' I said. 'He's been making my life a misery for years…'
'Ah,' the officer said. 'We've been hearing his name a lot recently. We'll be round to take a statement.'
It seemed that after numerous other complaints, action was being taken against Graham at last. And now, we knew we weren't alone. We met a couple of the other complainants in the waiting room at Lincolnshire Magistrates Court last October. But we weren't allowed to discuss the case, so we couldn't affect each other's evidence. So it wasn't until a few days after we'd both been in the witness box that we picked up the paper and the true extent of Graham's wickedness came to light. He'd targeted so many people. The wife of
a gynaecologist at Lincoln County Hospital had received dozens of faxes falsely claiming her husband had fathered an illegitimate child. Graham had falsely claimed the landladies
of the local pub dealt drugs and tried to seduce their customers. He'd also spread rumours
that a dog collar ordered by his neighbour for her dog was actually a bondage collar.
The police had spent £200,000 on their campaign to stop him, with one officer working on nothing else for two years. There were more than 70 victims in total. All punished just because they'd met my ex-husband. District Judge Richard Blake told the court: 'To meet Mr Speed walking down the street could be sufficient for him to engage in an evil campaign of slander.'
And I'd been married to him for 21 years! Graham's poor spelling and grammar had led the police to him in the end. And where was he living at the time? In a house called Fairytale Cottage. He certainly knew how to spin a tale or two.
He didn't bother to turn up to court for sentencing, but in his absence, he was given an Asbo, banning him from entering Harmston and from contacting 17 named people, as well as making false claims through the internet or other media. He's now living in Lincoln, seven miles away from Fairytale Cottage, and thankfully, seems to have left us alone. I'll never know if his behaviour was down to his brain haemorrhage or if he's just turned plain wicked.
But when he turned, he really turned.