Life goes on for Stephanie after kidnap

Walking along the beach with just her two dogs for company, Stephanie Slater often wonders how her life might have turned out if the nightmarish events of ten years ago had never happened.

She can picture herself married, perhaps to her ex-boyfriend David, and living in a nice middle-class suburb of Birmingham with a smart car on the drive.

By now, she might have started up her own estate agency or had a couple of children, although she says she was never very maternal.

Instead, at the age of 35, she lives with her best friend Stacey Kettner, 34, in a £90,000 converted 18th-century stable block on the Isle of Wight with a menagerie of rescue animals – a parrot, cockatiel, two canaries, two dogs, three fish, two gerbils and a cat.

She lives on incapacity benefit, due to severe back injuries she sustained a decade ago, and describes herself as ‘a bit of a hippy’. Any chance of a ‘normal’ life was effectively wrecked after she was kidnapped and raped in January, 1992, and held captive in a makeshift coffin for eight days by convicted killer Michael Sams, who demanded a ransom of £175,000.

Following her release, her relationship with David was one of the first casualties of her ordeal when her emotions spiralled on an everdownward trajectory as she tried to cope with what she had survived and the overnight celebrity it brought.

Trying to pick up the pieces of her old life she made love to David, because Stephanie did not want Sams to be the last man to touch her, but the relationship soon petered out as she became withdrawn and tearful before succumbing to a complete breakdown.

She has not had a boyfriend since and has been celibate for almost ten years.

‘It’s not that I don’t trust men after what Michael Sams did to me, because in my opinion Sams wasn’t a man he was a monster, it’s just that for the past ten years I haven’t been in a fit state to have a relationship,’ says Stephanie.

‘I had a complete mental breakdown and was too terrified to open the door or answer the phone, let alone go out on a date with a man. It’s only now that I feel ready for a relationship. I really miss having someone to hug and to hold my hand, but whether I meet someone I like enough to marry, I don’t know. I have to accept it may never happen.

‘I feel like a train which was happily going along one track, then was suddenly jolted and ended up on a completely different one. It’s as if that part of my life stopped at the age of 25 and only now, ten years on, am I ready to pick it up again. I have men friends, but no one has ever asked me out in the past decade.

‘Perhaps I haven’t been giving out the right signals. Over the years I have let myself go a bit, I’ve put on a bit of weight and I want to feel good about myself before I think about going out with a man again.’

Stephanie and Stacey jokingly refer to themselves as ‘the Odd Couple’. Stephanie is the fanatically neat one – her room is ‘anorak tidy’ says Stacey, who admits to being ‘the slob’.

They describe each as soulmates, flatmates, best friends, but despite false assumptions by some people, they are not lovers. Although neither of them has boyfriend, they retain an almost teenage interest in men.

They spend countless evenings fantasising about their dream partner – in both cases tall, blonde and handsome – but recognise that their friendship is now so strong and all-encompassing that there is little space in their lives for anyone else.

‘We have made a pact,’ says Stacey, who is studying criminology at Portsmouth University, ‘that if one of us meets a man, we will not let our friendship get in the way of it. Our dream is for each of us to find someone nice and live opposite each other in separate houses, so we can still be friends.’

Stephanie, who changed her name by deed poll to Phoenix Rhiannon five years ago, in an attempt to escape her past, credits Stacey with saving her life when her will to live gradually deserted her. Even though justice was done and, 18 months after her release, tool repairer Michael Sams, now aged 60, was jailed for life for her kidnap and the earlier murder of 18-year-old Leeds prostitute Julie Dart, Stephanie often felt she was serving her own tormented life sentence.

She was filled with hatred for Sams, a one-legged misfit with a grudge against society, who dreamt up the kidnap plan to make enough money to escape a failing business and troubled third marriage.

Almost every night his face haunted her in nightmares.

‘I’m here because of Stacey. There were times when all I wanted to do was drive over a cliff, but the one thing that stopped me was knowing how upset Stacey would be,’ says Stephanie, whose story is told on Monday night on Channel 5.

‘It has taken me a long time to heal and I owe much of that to her. It took all my strength to survive those eight days and when I was released there was nothing left.

‘My will to live was just ebbing away and, at times, I felt I couldn’t go on. Stephanie Slater was dying and when I finally left her she was in pretty bad shape. I am a different person now.’

Stephanie met Stacey a couple of months before she was kidnapped by Michael Sams on January 22,

1992. She was a traffic warden and would often pop into Shipways estate agents in Great Barr, Birmingham, where Stephanie was assistant manger, for a cup of tea and a chat.

‘Right from the start we clicked as friends. We had the same sense of humour, and felt like sisters. We got on so well, we started to meet up and go for a drink in the pub with my friends,’ says Stephanie.

That carefree, easy-going friendship changed for ever when Stephanie was kidnapped at knifepoint by a prospective client she had met to show around an empty property. Blindfolded, she was driven to the Nottinghamshire workshop rented by 50-year-old tool repairer Sams, where she was raped and held prisoner for eight days, locked up at night in a makeshift coffin.

Not knowing from one minute to the next if he would kill her, she knew her only chance of survival was to try to make him like her, so despite her terror she would politely chat to him about her life, her friends, EastEnders, ever careful of not saying the wrong thing.

During those freezing and seemingly interminable January nights, locked up in the wooden coffin stuffed inside a wheelie bin, she stayed sane by going over the scripts of her favourite TV comedies Red Dwarf and Blackadder again and again in her head.

Had she known that Sams had, in the very same workshop, murdered 18-year-old Julie Dart six months earlier after she became hysterical when he tried to put her in the coffin, she admits she could easily have gone mad.

When she was dumped 100 yards from the home she shared with her adoptive parents Betty and Warren, after her employers handed over £175,000 ransom money, Stacey was one of the first people to visit her.

She soon became the one person Stephanie could turn to, when all her other relationships started to fracture.

‘My parents loved me very much, but they weren’t the kind of people who talked about emotions and I don’t think they knew how to deal with me after my release,’ says Stephanie, whose mother suffered a heart attack two days after her kidnap and later died in 1998, never having recovered from the stress of the ordeal.

‘I became very reclusive and withdrawn. I refused to come out of my bedroom, even for meals. I’d always had a strained relationship with my mum. Her nerves were very bad and she’d been very upset with me when I traced my birth mother,’ she says.

‘All she ever wanted for me was to get married and have children, but none of my relationships lasted more than a couple of months and we often argued about petty things.

‘When I was released I just couldn’t tell my parents about the rape. Seeing my mother’s nervous eyes looking up at me when the police doctor asked me if there had been any sexual contact with Sams, I said no. I thought if I told the truth it would kill her.

‘I vowed to keep it a secret and tried to go back to my old life but it was impossible. It was as if the old Stephanie was dead, when I looked in the mirror I just didn’t recognise myself.’

And similarly, her relationship with David, an ice-skating instructor who lived in her road, soon started to feel the strain as well. ‘We’d been going out for a couple of months before the kidnap and although it wasn’t yet serious, I did think he was the kind of man I could marry,’ says Stephanie.’

‘When I was in hospital after my release he sent me a dozen red roses and when I returned home he came to see me and gave me a hug.

‘But I just wasn’t the same person and he didn’t really know how to deal with me. The first time we made love after my release I got drunk and it was fine, but before long I started to avoid him. If I knew he was coming round I would go out, so I wouldn’t have to see him, and the relationship just fizzled out.’

More often than not, Stephanie would seek refuge in the company of Stacey, who would cheerfully turn up in her Orange VW Beetle to take her out. She seemed to be the only person in whom Stephanie could confide.

‘Stacey was the only person I told about the rape. About two weeks after my release, we were sitting in her car and I said: “I am going to tell you something, but promise that even if we fall out as friends you will never tell anyone else.” I told her what Michael Sams did to me and said: “If I die, go to the police and tell them.”

‘Stacey told me to go to the police, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t want anyone else to know. I felt so dirty and ashamed and I knew how much it would upset my parents.

‘I didn’t think my mother would ever recover from it. I was so determined to keep it a secret, I was even prepared to deny it in a court of law and, yes, when I gave evidence against Michael Sams in court I did perjure myself.

‘I was so traumatised I just couldn’t cope with people knowing he raped me as well. But I now regret not telling the police at the very beginning.’

Stephanie returned to work at Shipways but she lasted just two days. ‘There was a cup of cold coffee on top of a filing cabinet and I accidentally spilt it all over myself. I rushed to the bathroom to clean myself up and when I looked in the mirror there were tears streaming down my face. I knew then that I just couldn’t go on.’

More than that, Stephanie was desperate to get away from Birmingham.

The publicity surrounding her kidnap had turned her into a national celebrity and whenever she went out with her friends people would shout: ‘Seen any nice houses, Steph?’

The arrest of Sams, just one month following her release – the result of his first wife watching BBC’s Crimewatch programme and recognising his voice from the ransom tapes – offered Stephanie little relief. Even after his conviction she was haunted by him.

She had always enjoyed childhood holidays on the Isle of Wight and loved the sea, and decided this might be the one place where she could escape her past and hopefully rediscover the fearless person she used to be.

During October 1993, less than three months after Michael Sams was jailed for life for Stephanie’s kidnap and the murder of Julie Dart, Stephanie packed her bags and set off to start a new life on the island with Stacey for company. They both set off in a spirit of adventure, sharing a rented flat like two university students, each hoping to make a fresh start in a new town.

For a while it seemed as if Stephanie was coping well with the move. She got a summer job as an English Heritage representative at Carisbrooke Castle and Stacey set up her own aromatherapy business.

But the fragile tranquillity was shattered when Stephanie heard that Sams was planning to write a book in which he claimed he’d enjoyed a ‘love affair’ with her during those eight days of captivity. She realised that she would have to go public about the rape.

That Christmas she went home with the intention of sitting her parents down and telling them the truth, but in the event she blurted it out during a row with her mother.

‘I was crying and I said: “Mum he raped me.” She was silent, then went downstairs and told my dad, but we couldn’t really talk about it openly because they weren’t the kind who could discuss emotions. But my mum was devastated and I don’t think she ever really recovered.

‘Sometimes in her anger, when we were arguing, she would take it out on me and say things like: “Trust you to get raped,” or: “It could only happen to you Stephanie,” but she didn’t mean to hurt me, she just didn’t know how to handle it.’

The catalyst for Stephanie’s breakdown was the news that Sams, after details of the rape had been made public, threatened to sue her for libel. Stacey’s aromatherapy business was struggling and they had virtually no money to live on.

Unable to work full-time because of her permanently damaged back – a constant reminder of her nights in the coffin – they had to survive on her incapacity benefits.

‘That was the worst time, it felt as if I was being raped all over again and I felt under siege. I was taking anti-depressants and drinking heavily – not to get drunk – but to try to stop the nightmares and flashbacks,’ she says.’ I was drinking two bottles of wine a night in the hope of sinking into some kind of oblivion.

‘I would freeze if I heard a man speak with the same Northern accent as Sams and I couldn’t bear the sound of the Beach Boys, which he loved playing in the car. To other people California Girls is sunshine but to me it’s darkness.

‘We moved to a very remote cottage and I nailed the curtains to the wall and pegged them down the middle so no one could see in, and even though the house was miles from anywhere I built a 6ft fence around it.

Undeterred, Stacey would come looking for me when, after drinking, I would find myself wandering on the beach in the dead of night. She would try to make me think about my obsessions and say: “Why are you doing this?” when I washed myself red and raw or changed my clothes five times a day.

‘She answered the door and the phone for me because I couldn’t face it. Once I just disappeared out of the house and Stacey spent hours looking for me, desperately worried, and when she finally found me sitting in a pub with a book she was furious and shouted at me and stormed off.

‘She said: “I can’t stand this any more, I’m going home.” The realisation that I might lose my one best friend really made me snap out of it and try to work through my problems.’

Stacey adds: ‘The early years were so difficult and there were times when I just wanted to go home. I felt trapped on the island and Stephanie had these terrible mood swings.

‘We had some terrible rows: it would drive me mad that she changed her clothes five times a day and there was a laundry basket full of clean clothes.

‘We had very little money and my aromatherapy business wasn’t doing too well.

‘But it is much better now. I’m now studying on the mainland, which means I am meeting more people and Stephanie travels up and down the country giving talks about her experience to police forces, so our lives are less reclusive and much happier now.’

Stephanie knows that she is greatly indebted to Stacey and that her dependency on her during those dark years probably wrecked her chances of meeting a partner.

Stacey, however, simply says there was no way she could abandon her friend to what seemed like a terrible and lonely fate.

Far from mollycoddling Stephanie, Stacey often became exasperated by her obsessions and challenged her to think about what she was doing and the effect it was having on others.

They often had furious rows, followed by sulks, but the end result was that Stephanie was forced to see how her, at times irrational, behaviour – though totally understandable – was both selfish and unacceptable to others. Sharing the same black humour, they even joke about Stephanie’s ordeal as a means of diffusing its power to disturb her hard-fought equilibrium.

‘I remember in Sams’s workshop listening to Jimmy Young on Radio 2. One day there was a trailer for a programme on later that night – music from the Cornish tin miners – and I thought: “Oh my God, not only am I going to be locked up in a coffin, I’m going to have to listen to that as well,”‘ laughs Stephanie.

‘When I was released Sir Jimmy very kindly sent me a bouquet of flowers and a message apologising for the ordeal of having to listen to Radio 2 for eight days.’

Gradually, over the years, the obsessions have started to subside, and Stephanie’s rebirth as Phoenix Rhiannon has helped her cut herself off from the past and the person she was.

Moving to the new cottage, 18 months ago, has also heralded a more settled and happy existence.

‘One day I walked into the supermarket and when the checkout girl saw my name on the credit card, there was a flicker of recognition before she looked up and smiled at me very sympathetically,’ she says. ‘I thought: “I don’t want to be Stephanie Slater any more.”

‘She had died a long time ago, anyway. I just wasn’t the same person, so I went to a solicitor and changed my name by deed poll.

‘That day some friends came round and told me they’d seen a beautiful sunset over the sea, a phoenix of red and orange clouds, and that seemed like a good omen.’ The name Phoenix comes from the character in a film she saw when she was 11. ‘I always liked the name, and if I’d had a daughter that was the name I planned to give her, but I have to accept that I may never have a daughter now.

‘All my friends now call me Phoe, although my dad still calls me Stephanie. He understands my decision but he keeps forgetting, although he makes an effort to put Phoe on Christmas and birthday cards.

‘But I am not Stephanie Slater any more. The other day I saw an advert for an Ozzy Osbourne album called Blizzard which I used to love in my other life, so I sent off for it.

‘When I put it on the tape, I thought: “I don’t like this music. Stephanie liked Ozzy Osbourne, but I don’t.” ‘

Last October Stephanie made the decision to finally confront the demons of her past by returning to the workshop in the village of Newark, in Nottinghamshire, where she was held captive. As ever, Stacey went with her.

‘I felt very calm, I didn’t feel apprehensive at all. I could picture the grubby mattress on the ground where he raped me and the coffin where he locked me up, and I felt nothing. It was as if I was bearing witness to someone else’s memories.

Returning to that workshop I laid to rest the ghosts of those eight days and drew a line under them. I thought: “He may have taken eight days of my life, but he hasn’t taken the rest of it.” ‘I didn’t feel sad for myself, only an overwhelming sadness for Julie Dart who died there, and I said a little prayer for her. As I left, I turned round and saw the man who now rents the unit welding an antique metal bedstead and I thought: “It’s only a workshop.”

For the first time in ten years I truly felt that I could move on, that I wasn’t a victim.

‘I like to think of what happened in a positive light. My life as Stephanie Slater wasn’t so great anyway.

‘I didn’t really enjoy my job, I didn’t have a husband, but now I am free to be who I want and I am happy.

‘I talk about Stephanie Slater as if she is someone else and she is now. Being here on the Isle of Wight has been a great healer for me. I would never have escaped Stephanie Slater if I had stayed in Birmingham.

‘God bless her for what she went through, but she is not me. She was terrified of Michael Sams, but I am not.’

Sitting in her pretty, neat cottage sipping a cup of tea, Stephanie Slater – or rather Phoenix Rhiannon – looks a picture of contentment. The only physical reminder of who she used to be is the print which dominates one wall – Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

‘When I look at that picture it reminds me of what I have been through over the past ten years. On the outside I was smiling but inside I was silently screaming,’ she says.

‘But I’m not screaming any more. What happened, happened to Stephanie Slater, not me. She’s dead now, I’m someone completely different. I’m a survivor.’

¿ KIDNAPPED: Stephanie Slater’s Story, Monday, Channel 5, 10.50pm.

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