A woman who was taken by Brighton killer Russell Bishop when she was seven, sexually abused, and left for dead has said she wants people to know what he did to her and that she remembers everything.
Rachael Watts lived through the attack in 1990, and her testimony put the person who did it in jail.
Bishop had already killed two girls and gotten away with it, so when he grabbed her, he was already free.
This year, after his death, she said: “I want you to listen. I want everyone to know how bad he was.”
In her first interview on the air, Ms. Watts told that it felt good to speak out.
The Babes in the Wood murders are what people call the deaths of Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows, whose bodies were found in Wild Park in 1986. These deaths cast a long shadow over the city for many years.
In 1987, Bishop went to court, but he was found not guilty.
He took Ms. Watts hostage and drove her to Devil’s Dyke, a local beauty spot, where he attacked her. He was found guilty in 1990 of trying to kill her, kidnapping her, and sexually assaulting her.
After a DNA breakthrough in 2018, he was found guilty of killing Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows.
Ms. Watts, who is now 40, said that her family kept her secret for as long as they could, but she “wanted to finally come out with it and sort of let go of the secret I’ve been keeping for so long.”
She said that everyone thought she was unconscious during the attack, but she was able to tell her parents only recently that she was not.
She told me: “I was fully aware of everything that he did.
“Everyone had hoped that I wouldn’t remember anything, but I do, and I remember everything.
“So I’m hoping that one day I’ll be better because I can’t imagine living the rest of my life like a prisoner, which is what I’ve become.”
