by vitty 3 Replies latest jw friends
I have just been watching sky news...........................Eunice Spry gets 14 years for the worst case of child abuse in Britain
Unfortunatly, even though there was a interview with one of the now 18 year old son, nothing was mentioned in the report that she was a devout JW.....................shame on her.......................shame on the congregations she attended
She is 62 now so she will a very old women when she gets out
im not familiar with the case, but i am very glad that she got what she deserved... hopefully she rots in there for a few years before she dies!
Here's a blog on this, just posted this morning.
(This entry was written by True Crime Blog UK, where it was first posted.)
Eunice Spry (pictured) had sympathy heaped on her in September 2000 when two of her foster children were killed, and two more were injured, in a tragic road accident.
Andrew Francis was sentenced to 18 months in prison after his 24-tonne lorry ploughed into the back of the family’s van on the M5 near Weston-super-Mare, Somerset. Francis had been tuning his radio and admitted failing to notice the tailback of stationary traffic ahead of him. In the aftermath of the accident, his wheelchair-user wife attempted to commit suicide twice.
After his conviction, Spry, from Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, said:
“I don’t want to sound a vindictive woman. I’m grieving very much for my daughters, but I have constantly thought of the Francis family.
I would have liked more than nine months, which realistically is what he’s going to get for having devastated my family. I’m glad he had a custodial sentence.”
After a house Spry had been renovating was burgled and vandalised, the local community rallied round, donating money and toys for her three surviving foster children. The “grieving mum” said:
“I can’t believe how caring people have been.”
There’s a good reason why she couldn’t believe it: she had no concept of what the word “caring” meant.
Spry, who portrayed herself as a loving mother and devout Jehovah’s Witness, has been found guilty of abusing the three children in her care over a period of 20 years. The catalogue of abuses heard in court is truly awful, and included:
The victims, referred to as Victims A, B and C in court, tried to run away and wrote letters begging for help, but Spry continued the regime of abuse, home-schooling the children so no one would see their injuries. A police video shown in court showed the squalor the children had been brought up in.
One of the victims told a news conference:
“She’d always punish me for the slightest thing. These punishments would be anything from being forced to stay awake all night and constantly being beaten with sticks and poles all over my body.
It was agonising but we had to get used to it. I was deprived of mixing with other children my age. My foster mother never showed me any love or encouragement, only negativity or abuse.
She locked me up in the bedroom once with my sister for about a month. I can’t even remember what I had supposedly done wrong.”
Obviously deep in denial, Spry showed no emotion and no remorse as she denied all the charges, saying:
“I sweated buckets for these children. I’ve worked non-stop. I love them. I still love them.
Anyone who met these three children would say they’ve grown up to be fine, respectable adults. That’s what I aimed to do and that’s what I think I did to them.”
They’re fine, respectable adults in spite of what you did to them, Eunice, not because it.
The 62-year-old was found guilty of 26 charges and cleared of another 12. Amongst the charges she was convicted of were unlawful wounding, cruelty to a person under 16, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, perverting the course of justice, and witness intimidation.
The Chair of the Gloucestershire Safeguarding Children Board, said lessons had been learned from the case, adding:
“Although these children were seen by many different professionals, few were a consistent presence. Information was not shared so that it was impossible for anyone to have a clear picture.
As a result of the Victoria Climbie inquiry, one of the significant safeguards now in place is the requirement for agencies to work far more closely together and for information to be shared.”
Today, Eunice Spry showed no emotion as she was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
By the time children are placed in foster care, they’ve often been through some sort of trauma in their lives; the care system is doubly honour-bound to ensure they don’t suffer any further because of the environment they’re placed in. The victims in this case have shown great courage in coming forward and I hope they receive the counselling they need to overcome the terrible physical and mental abuse they suffered at the hands of the person supposed to be their primary carer.
And here's a story from the Daily Mail (a London-based tabloid newspaper) and from the BBC.
Warning - the pictures here are quite disturbing. If the story is accurate, the cruelty of this JW mother is nothing short of astonishing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=443589&in_page_id=1770
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/gloucestershire/6449027.stm
