Читать книгу Beyond All Evil: Two monsters, two mothers, a love that will last forever - June Thomson - Страница 6

Foreword

What follows is a conversation between two mothers who are leading each other from the darkness to the light.

Before they were united by two unspeakable acts of evil, June Thomson and Giselle Ross did not know each other. Today they are the closest of friends. In their hearts they wish they had not been brought together by incomparable loss, but now that they have found each other they are able to walk together towards a future neither of them believed was possible.

Only Giselle can appreciate how June has suffered; only June can understand the monumental effort it takes for her friend to rise and face each new day. This bond has already saved their lives, dragging them back from the edge of madness and giving them the courage to endure unimaginable pain.

On the same day, a few miles apart, June and Giselle’s estranged husbands, Rab Thomson and Ashok Kalyanjee, murdered their children. The men were not driven by rage. The killings were planned and carried out with precision, and designed to crush the women they had once dominated.

The names of the lost innocents are Ryan and Michelle Thomson, and Paul and Jay Ross, whom you will come to know and love as little ‘Jay-Jay’. Ryan was seven. His sister, Michelle, was 25, a wonderfully innocent woman-child, who had an intellectual age equivalent to that of her brother. Paul was six and lived for Spiderman. Jay-Jay was two, he loved Bob the Builder, and was still wrestling with the mysterious joys of a world in which he would not grow up.

Their fathers were the worst of all predators, perfect examples of what has become known as the ‘family annihilator’ – parents who kill their own children in an unfathomable act of revenge.

It is a psychological syndrome that is becoming disturbingly prevalent, but which no mother’s intuition or father’s sixth sense can predict.

According to the eminent clinical and forensic psychologist Ian Stephen, such killers are now responsible for more than one-third of all child murders. Throughout the pages of this book – and after the mothers’ story has been told – Stephen will offer his professional insight into the minds of the murderers and the women who once loved them.

It may seem a bitter irony that, while their crimes have united their wives, Thomson and Kalyanjee have also been brought together. They languish in the same jail, where they have yet to offer any explanation or display remorse. Their silence continues to devastate both June and Giselle, for no power on earth can erase the misguided guilt they have assumed – the belief that somehow they should have known.

The mothers have lived with that erroneous belief since their children were killed. At least they are now insulated by sisterhood and the memories of the happy times with their children.

They have been empowered, each giving the other the strength to tell their unique story – the first true account of family annihilators by women who lived with them and survived.

It is a warning and a cautionary tale, but above all it is a story of love and a testament to the human spirit.

Both women endured dreadfully unhappy marriages. June’s life with Thomson was a dark, turbulent and miserable existence, characterised by mental torture, physical violence and even rape. Giselle’s relationship with Kalyanjee had been a strange and remote affair, of lives spent apart before, during and after their marriage.

In spite of this, their relationships produced treasured children. But on one terrible Saturday in May, the last normal day of their lives, the misery of their marriages swiftly receded into the past.

Both women were on the threshold of a new future. They no longer wanted or needed the men who had ruled their lives but they believed it was important for their children to maintain a relationship with their fathers.

If only they hadn’t. The consequences of their trust were unutterably appalling.

This is the story of the parallel journeys that took them to that terrible day when they and their children became the prey of two monsters in our midst.

Marion Scott and Jim McBeth