To me, dad TERRENCE EAMES sounds like pure evil. I don't see any redeeming qualities at all. This guy terrorized his family for over 20 years with beatings, enforced isolation, threats, and other thoroughly twisted forms of abuse. It appears that only as adults have the children had the courage to come forward.
http://www.burtonmail.co.uk/burtonmail/displayarticle.asp?id=460590
‘Jeckyll and Hyde’ father branded evil
A MOTHER who was beaten and locked in a room with her four children by her ʻJekyll and Hydeʼ ex-husband has branded him ʻevilʼ.
Terrence Eames’s ex-wife was giving evidence at Leicester Crown Court about the 53-year-old Hartshorne man’s alleged reign of terror.
The defendant, of Woodville Road, is accused of 26 offences of cruelty on his two sons and two daughters and two counts of actual bodily harm against his wife.
Eames denies the charges, which relate to alleged abuse at the family’s North West Leicestershire homes between 1987 and 2000.
His former wife, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said during their early married years she was made to stay at home behind closed curtains and friends and family were barred from visiting.
She said: “You couldn’t get away from it (the beatings).
He’s a Jekyll and Hyde. He’s a control freak.”
The child victims, now all adults, have told the court that Eames hurled them downstairs in a cardboard box, inflicting a head injury on one, burned his six-year-old son’s hand on a radiator, shot at them with a ball bearing gun and shut them in their bedrooms.
One of the sons said Eames encouraged him to fight with his brother. The two would be locked in a room and “the one who had the most blood on him would be let out.”
He said his father hit him with a metal bar, a bike chain, cycle handlebars and bats, but “mostly rapped me over the head with the knuckles. Because he wore big rings this would mean I got cut.”
Teaching assistants at the children’s school told how they saw Eames “throwing” the four youngsters into the back of a Land Rover, that they were usually scruffily dressed, never had PE kit and sometimes had bruises.
Adrienne Lucking, prosecuting, said: “The children were too afraid to stand up to him and too afraid to complain to teachers or social services. They lied about their bruises to prevent themselves from being subjected to further beatings.”
Simon Thomas, defending, suggested the children were badly behaved and that Eames had done no more than give them the occasional clip around the head.
Following his arrest, Eames told police that knocking his son into a river and pushing his daughter too high on a swing had been accidents.