The crimes of the father live on and on....
Dad PAUL LONGWORTH murdered the mother of his daughter when the daughter was only six years of age. It wasn't till years later that she found out about this crime on a routine Google search. She knew her father had been put in prison--in fact, she had been forced to visit him there as a child--but never knew why he was there.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/09/16/i-found-out-dad-murdered-mum-when-i-put-my-name-into-google-115875-23422880/
I found out Dad murdered Mum when I put my name into Google
by Fiona Ford, Daily Mirror 16/09/2011
When Abby Longworth typed her name into Google five years ago the most she expected to find were some harmless pictures of herself on nights out with friends.
Instead, Abby made a shocking discovery. She realised she had been kept in the dark about her family history all her life when she discovered her mother had been strangled to death when she was just a child – by her own father.
“It was horrifying,” recalls Abby, 21. “I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the newspaper reports – it was as though I was reading about someone else’s life and not mine.”
With just one click of the mouse, Abby discovered that when she was aged just six her father, Paul Longworth, now 51, strangled her mother, Tina, 29, to death. He had left her body dangling from the banisters to make it look like she had killed herself.
“I was so shocked,” she says. “I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. For years I’d never known what had happened to Mum.”
For Abby, from Manchester, any memories of her mum were fleeting but she remembers a woman full of love for her and for her younger brother Matthew, now 19.
“Mum worked at a school nursery and if I was sick she took me to work with her, tucked me into one of the sick beds and gave me lots of kisses and cuddles,” she recalls.
But on January 8, 1997, her father’s 37th birthday, life changed forever when Abby’s mum seemed to vanish into thin air. The family had gone to Stockport Sailing Club, which Abby’s dad helped run, for a party in his honour.
Abby and Matthew stayed until about 9pm before Tina took them home and put them to bed while Paul stayed on at the sailing club.
“I kissed Mum goodnight and went straight to sleep but hours later woke to hear Mum and Dad rowing,” says Abby.
“I crept out of bed on to the landing but Dad caught me and ordered me back to bed.” Abby fled, but waking the next morning, saw her mother’s 39-year-old half-sister Sarah perched on the edge of the bed.
Her eyes were red from crying as she gently led Abby and Matthew downstairs, where her dad was slumped in an armchair sobbing, surrounded by police officers.
Out in the car, Sarah explained to Matthew and Abby their mother had gone and wouldn’t be coming back. She said they would be living with her for a while.
Too young to understand, they accepted what Sarah told them. “I thought Sarah might have it wrong and Mum would reappear. It never occurred to me she was dead.”
But Abby ached for her mother and constantly wondered when she would be back. She dreamed of her mum suddenly reappearing while her dad tried to make up for his wife’s disappearance by treating Abby to days out at the swimming pool or at the beach.
Then six months later in June 1997 that all stopped when Sarah told Abby her father had gone to jail.
“As always, I had no idea why but I knew it was best not to ask. No-one would ever tell us anything,” says Abby. “It was as though they’d been sworn to secrecy. I would often stay with my grandma who took me to see Dad in jail but I hated it. The smell was awful and the searches before going in were terrifying.”
Despite the prison visits, both Abby and Matthew remained clueless as to what crime their father had committed and still didn’t know where their mother had gone.
Sarah and the family had also moved away to another part of Manchester where nobody knew what had happened to Tina.
But growing up without a mother took its toll on Abby – she was always on her mind. “I was jealous of the other kids who had mums to shout at them about not doing their homework or getting home on time,” she says.
“There was a massive hole where my mum should have been and although Sarah did her best, our relationship was fragile – it wasn’t the same.”
When Abby was 14, social workers told her and Matthew their father had said he’d killed their mum. It came like a bolt from the blue – Abby was more confused than ever.
As far as Abby was aware, her parents had been in a happy marriage. She naturally assumed her father had accidentally killed her mum.
Once again Abby and Matthew had no idea of the truth, but were worried about asking their relatives.
By now, she was so traumatised thinking about it all, she felt the only way to cope was to block it all out and stop contact with her dad.
“It was torture – I’d been cheated out of both parents but what made it worse was it was my own dad who had caused all this heartache,” she says. For two years she carried on in her own world, oblivious. But as Abby Googled her name one day nothing could have prepared her what she discovered.
She heard that her parents’ marriage of seven years wasn’t as loving as she’d thought. In fact, the relationship deteriorated after Paul started hitting his wife.
Sick of being a domestic abuse victim, Tina started an affair and following a row at home on the night of his birthday, Paul strangled Tina before returning to the sailing club and calling 999.
Despite his best efforts to make it look like suicide, a post-mortem revealed 36 strange scratches and bruises on Tina’s body.
Without a suicide note, Paul was immediately a prime suspect. He initially denied murder but was convicted in February 1999 at Liverpool Crown Court and jailed for life. He confessed to the crime eight years later.
It was after the Google incident that Abby became obsessed with the truth and read everything she could about her mother’s murder.
Yet it was all too much to cope with. At 17, she dropped out of college, got a job in a card shop and shared a flat with a girl from work.
She realised there was only one person who could tell her the whole truth about what happened – her dad.
It had been four years since she’d last seen him, but in October 2009 Abby visited Paul in Stafford Prison. “Walking across the room, Dad seemed so haggard,” she explains.
“But I didn’t let that put me off and as soon as I sat down I demanded to know why he’d killed Mum.”
Sadly, his answer left her reeling as he flatly denied killing her mum and insisted he had only admitted murder because he didn’t want Abby or Matthew to deal with the stigma of their mother’s suicide.
“There was no remorse or sorrow, just more lies and betrayal. I was sick of it and stormed out of the prison.”
Back inside her car, Abby broke down and sobbed for everything she and Matthew had lost.
She says: “All I wanted was the truth, so Matthew and I could try to rebuild our lives, but Dad couldn’t even give me that.”
So Abby wrote to the parole board and told them her father wasn’t sorry and even though the judge had said he should serve at least 14 years in prison, she felt life should mean life.
Recently she was delighted to discover her father’s parole has been put back for at least a year.
Now Abby is looking to the future and determined to live her life to the full, for her mother’s sake. She and Matthew are close and she has got a job designing bedrooms.
Abby says: “I don’t remember Mum much but I know she was full of love. This helps me deal with everything.
“I hope she would be proud of Matthew and me and know we live each day trying to fulfill the dreams snatched from her as well as us.
“I’ll never forgive my father for what he did. The least he could do is say sorry.”