UK schoolgirl Shannon Matthews was drugged and tethered to a roof beam after her mother hatched a plot to make £50,000 (US$74,500) from her faked kidnap, a court in the north of England heard on Wednesday.
While police and hundreds of neighbors scoured the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury, northern England, the nine-year-old was doped with a mixture of temazepam and travel sickness tablets at a nearby house, prosecutors told the crown court in Leeds.
Apparently grief-stricken and barely articulate during the 24-day search, Karen Matthews, 33, was actually “a proven, consummate, skillful and convincing liar,” prosecutor Julian Goose said.
The massive police search cost almost £3.2 million, the jury was told.
Matthews hatched the fake kidnap plan with Michael Donovan, 40, the uncle of her partner, Craig Meehan. Donovan broke down within minutes of police finding Shannon in a bed drawer in his apartment half a kilometer from her home.
He burst into tears on his arrest and told detectives: “Get Karen down here. We’d got a plan. We’re sharing the money — £50,000.”
Both deny charges of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice.
Goose said: “The plan was as dishonest as it was wicked. Both defendants stood by and watched the very large police investigation and assistance by many people in the search. It was based on a lie, a trick and a deliberately false complaint.”
The court heard that Shannon knew nothing about the scheme and had been deceived into accepting a lift from Donovan on her way home from a school swimming trip in February, when he promised to take her to a fair. Instead, she was imprisoned at Donovan’s apartment.
She was drugged and ordered to obey a set of rules to avoid discovery, including keeping away from windows, lowering the TV volume, and doing nothing without Donovan’s permission. Meanwhile, her mother spun lies and gave misleading tips to detectives in between making televised appeals for help in finding the child.
The plan had been to release Shannon in Dewsbury market where she would be “found” by Donovan, who would then have claimed the various rewards.
The court heard that police broke into Donovan’s apartment on March 14 after neighbors reported hearing a young child’s footsteps, and Donovan refused to answer the door.
Goose said: “They heard the sound of a girl’s voice from inside a divan bed. It was Shannon, who was heard to say: ‘Stop it, you’re frightening me.’”
The police search revealed a long elasticated strap knotted to a roof beam with a loop at the end.
“This would reach around the flat [apartment] but would not permit anyone restrained by it to leave,” Goose said. “It is a reasonable inference that Donovan used it to restrain Shannon when he went shopping.”
Matthews and Donovan sat in the dock, separated by a security officer and for the most part expressionless, as the court was told of the scale of the search they had triggered. At a time when the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann was still making headlines, West Yorkshire police mobilized 200 officers, searched 1,800 properties, checked every park in Dewsbury, stopped up to 1,760 cars and passers-by a night and drafted in three quarters of all the country’s police dogs.
Separate searches were organized in other parts of West Yorkshire, neighboring Cumbria, Nottinghamshire and more than 800 CCTV tapes and computer hard drives were checked.
Goose told the jury: “Throughout all this, Karen Matthews maintained her lie and Michael Donovan watched as the reward money increased.”
The plot was starting to unravel before the police checked Donovan’s apartment, with neighbors raising issues about Karen Matthews’ behavior.
The court heard how one told police that the missing girl’s mother seemed to be “acting, almost as though she was pretending to cry, when in public, whilst in private, away from the public glare, she behaved quite normally, laughing and joking and even play-fighting with Craig Meehan.”
Goose said that Donovan and Matthews had changed their stories, blamed one another and given conflicting accounts.
But “the truth is that they were in this dishonest and wicked plan together,” Goose said.
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