Mafia Princess (15 page)

I wrote to Bruno and poured my heart out. I’d had enough. Basically I said, ‘I’m fed up with you. I don’t want to be with you any more.’ Being arrested, being in jail, made me free to tell him what I genuinely felt. He was part of my
life but I couldn’t see us being together forever. The depth of feeling, that special closeness, had gone. Outside, I would never have left him. I would always have been there to support him. I would have been obligated to. I always had as a wife. I couldn’t have abandoned him while he was in jail and I was outside, but now I was in the same boat.

Our love relationship was over. It hadn’t been working before he was arrested, for all the old reasons. He took a lot of coke. I didn’t see him for long periods of time. He’d be out until four in the morning. He just wasn’t a family man. He was devastated when I told him how I felt but we agreed to keep writing to each other. His mum came over to Durham and went to see Lara so there was still a lot of connection there. But it made me feel even more lonely, having cut off that link to my husband, one of the men who was supposed to look after me.

I got letters from Dad as well, but because I was Category A they were thoroughly scrutinised and I had to be very careful about what was said.

I got my head down and tried to get on with the practicalities of life in jail. We had bank accounts people outside could put money in so we could buy our own food. The auxiliary officers would go to Sainsbury’s for us. I’d make a shopping list and off they’d go once a week. There was a fridge and you stuck your name on your stuff. It was better to make your own because the servery food came from the men’s side of the prison and you never knew what they’d done to it before it arrived.

I began spending about three hours a day in the gym, where I met Linda Calvey, who was one of the longest-serving prisoners in the system. She was known as the ‘The Black Widow’ because every man she got involved with was soon either dead or in prison. I thought she was nice enough. She had a cloth with white lilies she used at the dinner table and she made a point of telling me that Reggie Kray had sent it to her.

I also got to know a girl called Beba who was in for terrorist offences and was still running a business on the outside. Then I met a Maori girl, a hit woman from New Zealand, who got nabbed on one of her first jobs. Before that, she told me she’d worked as a nanny and spent the winter of 1991–92 as a resident on-call nanny at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St Moritz; she was there when I was and could have ended up looking after Lara, which was a big freak-out for me.

And there was Zoora, an Indian girl who was in for poisoning her husband: she got twenty years. She made me my first curry. In Italy we didn’t have curry so my first-ever curry was made by Zoora who’d poisoned her husband. It was so spicy I’d never have known if she’d mixed arsenic instead of chilli powder into the chicken madras. She claimed she hadn’t killed her husband but they all say that in there. The only one I did believe didn’t do it was Sue, Susan May. She was convicted of battering her eighty-nine-year-old aunt to death. She became like my mum in there. Susan would help anyone.

Durham was the last stop before Rampton, where all the true misfits were sent. But we had some all the same. One
who was only about my age looked like a Honey Monster because she used to scrub her face with a Brillo pad until it was raw. Lots of them would find stuff with which to selfharm; a snapped-off plastic spoon would do it.

There were occasional big family visits. We’d go in the gym area, set up tables and the families would arrive. Normally, there were only eight tables, so there was only room for eight visitors at a time. If the visiting room was fully booked you’d had it. No visit, no lifeline to the outside.

The family get-togethers were great. If I’d spoken to my mum about someone in there she’d get to meet them. We’d be at our own tables, with our families, while the kids played in the middle with some toys. Day to day I would focus on my next visit. It was the only way. We all looked forward to it.

However, we hated the fact that the nonces were there, prisoners who were paedophiles or child killers. They stayed on one side with their visitors. Rose West was one of them and I was surprised to see that her kids came to visit her. They’d testified against her, she got life for abusing them, and yet they were still visiting her. It was spooky seeing her son because he has Fred West’s face. Unless he’s changed it or gone abroad, he’s out there somewhere with that notorious face.

Security was high on family visiting days and once it was almost called off. One girl who’d killed three kids she was babysitting for – she set fire to an airing cupboard and when the house went up she left the children in there – set a fire in one of the education rooms. We were all excited and getting
ready an hour before the doors were to be opened for our families and she torched a room in an attempt to set the prison alight. We wanted to kill her. If the fire had taken they would have cancelled visiting time completely, even though there were families coming from all over the country. They had to lock that girl in because we wanted to lynch her. We would have done. I would have battered her to the point of death, I was so mad. Then I’d have been in there for murder. Manslaughter. She was an evil, nasty piece of work. I don’t think she had anybody coming. She never had visits. She only had a volunteer prison visitor.

We calmed down afterwards when the visit went ahead. That girl was stripped of everything. She wouldn’t look at anybody. I left it at that. She was doing her time, that’s her punishment. The prison didn’t need me to punish anybody else.

I sometimes think back and wonder how I coped with that time. But every case is different. It’s a mistake to judge too quickly on the inside, as it is on the outside. And those in for life had, literally, to live there. I couldn’t bear to stay in the same room as child killers. I might have liked to have taken a crafts class but that’s where they went. It was open to anybody, but I knew the nonces were going and I wouldn’t go because I couldn’t sit there with them.

You were in a prison within a prison already. You were very confined. How could they segregate you further on top of that? The women who were there were going to be there for a long time and they tended to think, ‘Right, you know
what? I’ll just pretend she’s not here. There’s no Rose West, no monsters.’

The most notorious nonce of all, Myra Hindley, was sharing ‘H’ wing with me. I knew all about her. Mum was always reading about murderers and serial killers and, living so close to Manchester, the Moors murders had been part of our lives. There was always a story on the TV or the papers about the search for a body on the Moors. Or some hope that Myra or Ian Brady, who killed the kids with her, would pinpoint the burial spot of the little boy whose body they never found.

Oh, I knew who she was. But not the moment I first saw her. I’d grown up with the image in my mind of the blonde hair and that horrible, dead look on her face. When I first saw her, she walked past my landing using a stick. Her skin was yellow from the Golden Virginia roll-ups she smoked all the time. She ignored everyone around her. She walked purposefully on.

People wonder how nonces can walk around without getting kicked in by someone every five minutes. There were several like Myra in Durham, those who had killed children or burned people alive. It was hard to live with them every day. If you stopped and thought about it really deeply, your head would be mashed: you couldn’t cope with it.

People have said to me: ‘I’d have done her in.’ It’s human nature. They killed innocents who couldn’t defend themselves, so maybe you should hurt them in return. But you can’t. In such a close environment you’d be the one who
would suffer. You would be the one who wouldn’t have any visits. You’d be the one who couldn’t phone home every night. That was my priority. Whatever I felt, whatever I wanted to do, what stopped me was the fact that I knew I needed to hear my daughter’s voice every night.

For Myra Hindley, the other inmates didn’t exist. There was an arrogance to her, as if she was regimented into pretending we weren’t there. I watched her, I couldn’t help myself. It was only a glance. She looked at me from my feet up for a split second, and then looked away. It made me shudder, hoping she wasn’t looking at me in a weird way. I was still a young girl myself, only twenty-four when I arrived in Durham.

I learned from the lifers that the best way was to keep your head down and do your time in the easiest way possible: without getting your morals and your rights and wrongs in the way. For there’s no black and white, only grey. As I found out when I heard the stories of some other inmates.

There was Maria, who was inside with her friend Tina, a couple of harmless-looking young girls. Except they were killers. In Wales, they’d gone to this old lady’s house, a woman they knew, tried to get money from her and kicked her to death. It was a noncey thing to do, you don’t kill an old person.

‘We were on Valium,’ they told me. ‘We were on this, that and the other to the point where we were totally out of control, out of our heads and had no idea what we were doing.’

It wasn’t an excuse but they were actually nice girls to get on with. They were a similar age to me and I had a laugh with them. I couldn’t think about what they had done. They were sorry for what had happened. Had they been knowingly nasty and evil it would have been different. If you believe in God, then you believe that everybody should have a second chance. It’s an instinctive thing; you either like someone or you don’t. Tina and Maria were just normal girls. They had committed a horrific crime. But I would put my hand in a fire and swear they wouldn’t do anything like that again.

What astonished me in Durham was how such normallooking women could be inside for such incredible crimes. Sheila was inside because she set fire to her ex-boyfriend and the girl he was going to marry. She got her new boyfriend and his mate to kidnap the couple. They tortured them, tied them up, splashed petrol on them, torched them and shoved them off a cliff in their car. They didn’t stay around to see the couple jump out, roll around the grass and live, although they were horrendously burned.

We were all in Durham when the papers reported that the couple who survived the attack had got married. We knew Sheila wouldn’t be happy about it and worried that she might cause problems but she was just very moody that day.

She had a tendency to take out her frustrations on Susan May, the one accused of killing her aunt, taunting her that she was guilty, which always wound her up. Sue had a friendship with a guy in the men’s side of Durham who used to send her sneaky sandwiches with a little message inside. It
cheered her up but it was against the rules, and one day Sheila shopped her. She was like that. She was mean.

Once, just before lock-up, she pointed at me aggressively and said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

I looked at her, took my Cartier glasses off and said: ‘No. You’ll see me now!’

She tried to look away and I snarled, ‘You’ll see me now.’

The officers were chanting, ‘Come on, lock up, lock up.’

I said to her: ‘That’s convenient, isn’t it? Come on, what is it you want?’

She made up some pathetic response and backed off. She was quite a strong girl. She was petite, but she worked out a lot. By then, I did and I was bigger so I would have hurt her as much as she would have hurt me. She’d have come down with me.

I also had trouble with a child killer who looked like a creature from
Planet of the Apes.
She was blonde, blue-eyed and freaky-looking. She’d smothered one of her partner’s children but the guy gave up his other kids to be with her and still visited her. Once she’s out, if he’s still with her he won’t be allowed to see his children. I couldn’t believe that man would still have anything to do with her after she killed one of his children!

She was in the servery one lunchtime. I couldn’t stand her and I didn’t like the fact that she was serving my dinner. We could bring in our own porcelain plates from the outside, although we weren’t allowed proper forks and knives. This woman gave me some lip and put rubbish on my plate and
I thought: ‘Stupid cow.’ The lunchtime duty officer was looking out the window and didn’t see the aggro building. I held my heavy plate like a frisbee and threw it at her face. It hit her hard, then shattered on the floor. I was glad. I didn’t care. I knew they couldn’t ship me out to another prison because nowhere else would have me.

The funny thing was, I didn’t get into trouble for that. They never put me in solitary. They never locked me in my cell. I always seemed to get away with things. I never kicked off. I was a pretty good prisoner really. They knew that if I ever kicked off, there was a reason, and I wouldn’t be doing it every five minutes.

Everyone reacts differently in an institution. And weird stuff happens. We all had a period at the same time. How strange is that? And imagine the tension?

Ena, a Dutch drug smuggler, asked for vibrators for all and the officer laughed: ‘We’d can’t do that – it’d be like a swarm of bees in here.
Buzz, buzz, buzz.
’

One night somebody got hold of a load of ecstasy tablets and they had a party in the television room. I didn’t take any because I didn’t want to be crawling up the walls. I had some hash and got stoned at the back of the room instead, watching all these girls get off their faces. They stripped to bras and knickers and danced to rave music. The walls were dripping with sweat; it was like a steam room. Not once did the screws come. They turned a blind eye.

Finally, finally, after more than sixteen months on remand in Durham, they finalised the case against me and gave me
a trial date – 20 November 1995. The Italian courts were still hosting members of the family. I probably could have made it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the person with the most relatives in prison.

They moved the case against Mum and me to Newcastle Crown Court for security in case I might try to intimidate witnesses. Or stage a dramatic escape. But I only wanted to get home to Lara. And make sure Mum didn’t go to jail. Her health was really suffering with everything. The cops didn’t understand any of that.