On the night before we were due to meet, Andy Woodward took himself away to spend some time alone. He wasn’t feeling great, was the truth. He wanted to find a bit of peace and he wanted to be in a place where he could remember a time in his life when everything felt so much more innocent.
His old primary school was pulled down a few years ago to make way for a housing estate. But the playing fields are still in use and it was here, as a 10-year-old, that he remembers bringing the ball out of defence, playing for his first junior football team, and trying a shot from the halfway line. The ball flew into the top corner and his father, Terry, ran on the pitch to give him a hug. And now, more than 35 years on, something drew Andy back to that same spot. He found a place to sit under a tree and stayed there for longer than he could even remember, lost in his own thoughts.
When he turns up for lunch the next day his mother, Jean, drops him off. We have a hug and he tells me he is OK. And he is, I hope – at least, as far as can be expected when you stop to think about the reasons why he lives with post-traumatic stress disorder. On the surface, he seems OK-ish. It is what goes on beneath the surface, in common with all Barry Bennell’s victims, that worries me.
Andy has his own analogy for it. “It’s like being chained to a wolf. Every day, I’m chained to this huge, terrifying beast. It never leaves me. Sometimes you might feel like you have tamed it, that you have got it under control and everything’s fine. But you’re kidding yourself. Then something happens and it’s baring its teeth again. And when it bites you, it bites you hard.”
At the last count, Operation Hydrant, the specialist police unit investigating the sexual abuse of children in football, had received 2,807 referrals since Andy waived his anonymity, in November 2016, to detail his shattering experiences as a boy in Crewe Alexandra’s youth system and set off what the Football Association chairman, Greg Clarke, has described as a “tidal wave”.
Clarke called it the biggest crisis in the history of the sport and the police statistics are mind-boggling: 300 suspects identified, 849 victims and 340 clubs named. Except those figures have not been updated since March 2018 and will be much higher now. Bennell, as a direct result, is serving a 31-year prison sentence with the possibility of another criminal trial next year for the man described by a judge as “the devil incarnate”. As of January 2018, at least 97 others had reported him on the back of Andy’s interview – though, again, that number is likely to be substantially higher now.
Without Andy, none of this would have happened and Bennell, in theory, would still be living in Milton Keynes, going by the name of Richard Jones and working locally as a laptop repairer. Yet it goes wider than that. Almost every time another of football’s paedophiles appears in court – Bob Higgins, George Ormond, William Toner, Jim McCafferty, James Torbett, Gerald King, Frank Cairney, Norman Shaw and on and on – Andy’s story has been cited as the reason why victims were emboldened to come forward. Plus it has gone viral now: other footballers or former footballers speaking about their own ordeals and triggering movements in Australia, Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands and many other countries. All of it comes back to the man sitting in front of me for this interview.
That doesn’t change the fact, however, that every day is a battle, or that it is not the life he, or anybody, would have wanted. As a boy, Andy was raped more times than he can possibly remember, but certainly in the hundreds. Terry, who had motor neurone disease, died last August. Jean, a tremendously stoic woman, has been fighting cancer. Bennell – cynical, controlling and predatory – had become part of the Woodward family, marrying Andy’s sister, before his luck ran out. It is a struggle for Andy and all the family sometimes. Of course it is.
Plus there is another element to this story that, until now, we deliberately held back. A secret that goes back to the day we met in 2016 when he told me what had happened to his aunt, Lynda, and we decided it was better, at that time, to keep it out of print. Mostly to spare his mum any more anguish when Andy’s interview was already going to be seismic enough. But also because it was not the sort of thing that could be squashed into a couple of paragraphs in a much wider piece.
Lynda was 22, Jean’s older sister, when she went out one Friday night in 1970 to the Princess hotel in Fallowfield, south Manchester. She was also seven months pregnant and when she missed the bus she and a friend decided to walk home, saying goodbye on Kingsway, a dual-carriageway running in and out of the city. “Lynda’s body was discovered the next morning in the garden of number 285,” Andy takes up the story. “She’d been dragged through a hedge, raped, bitten and then beaten to death. She was just a few minutes’ walk from home.”
Andy was born three years later and, growing up, he says the murder was never spoken about. “It was something awful to be buried, kept out of sight. Mum used to break down sometimes when we were kids: shaking and crying, Dad holding her tight. But it was only later I found out those tears were for her sister.”
He can understand now why his mum found it easier to cope by not talking about it, and why the police called it one of the most shocking murders they had ever dealt with. “It was so violent and it seemed like there was no explanation for it. It was random and unbelievably savage. An unborn baby died that night, too. It was a completely unprovoked, opportunist attack. The guy was a psychopath, no question.”
The killer left a ring at the scene, engraved with his name, and the police matched up the bootprints and teeth-marks. His name was Ronald Bennell, an 18-year-old apprentice engineer who was sentenced to life in prison but got out after 12 years and, in 1989, murdered again. The victim that time was a mum-of-three, Pamela Noone, 42, walking through the park under the Seven Arches viaduct in Bramhall, near Stockport. He raped her as well. He was arrested and, a few weeks later, he hanged himself on remand at Strangeways.
By then, Andy was 16 and still being abused at the football club where various first-teamers called him “Barry’s bum-boy”, opposition players referred to Crewe as the “paedo club” and he says the manager, Dario Gradi, once walked in on him, aged 13, sitting on the knee of the youth-team coach, without apparently thinking it necessary to ask what was going on.
That, however, tells only part of the story. Andy’s older sister, Lynda – named after their aunt – had been dating his abuser for the previous two years. The wedding took place in 1991 and Andy had to go through the hellish ordeal of seeing the man who had exploited, controlled and abused him for years becoming his brother-in-law.
Photographs from the day show the church filled with Bennell’s young victims, all living their own secrets. Andy, I note, is not smiling on any of the pictures. Bennell is though. “I remember him grinning at me when he walked down the aisle to say his vows with my sister. He had it all … and here he was, getting away with it. Celebrating a wedding? For him, it was a celebration of his power over everyone there.”
It was 1994 when the truth emerged and Bennell was sent to prison for seven years for raping a 13-year-old boy on a tour to Florida. What nobody had ever done was make the connection between the two men – one dead, another in prison – who had shattered Andy’s family and the fact they had the same surnames. Until, that is, the police pieced it all together. And this, I suppose, is possibly the most shocking part of this entire story. Barry Bennell and Ronald Bennell were cousins, separated by two years. One a cold-blooded murderer, the other described by the police among the worst paedophiles, numbers-wise, in UK criminal history.
“[Barry] Bennell would have known what his cousin did, I’m 100% sure,” Andy says, and for the first time there is a crack of emotion in his voice. “I can only think he took some kind of twisted pleasure out of it: knowing what we didn’t. He even took me to where his cousin lived, visiting his auntie and uncle – Ronald’s mum and dad. There was a picture on the wall of a young man with dark hair and I remember this old couple kept referring to ‘Ronnie’. I didn’t know who he was, or why he wasn’t there. But I know now that the face on the wall was Ronald Bennell.”
The story is told in full in the autobiography, Position of Trust, that Andy brings out on Thursday, and the book is certainly an eye-opener for anyone who might have presumed his life had dramatically changed for the better since he, a former pro at Crewe, Bury and Sheffield United, sat down with me for the first time, two and a half years ago, and asked for the Guardian’s help to persuade others to speak out.
True, there is immense satisfaction about the number of people he has helped and, recalling some of the conversations with other abuse victims, the lives he may have saved. He will always be grateful for the kindness he has been shown. But the emotional damage is catastrophic and will never go away. Plus he has experienced the worst of the social-media era and, in some cases, it has been downright sinister.
The time, for example, he checked his Twitter account a few days after going public and there was a message from an account using Bennell’s name and photograph. “Hi Andy. Am feeling horny. Fancy popping round mine?” it read, attached to a clip of a man sucking a lollipop.
It turned out it was some troll from Crewe who ended up in court and, together with his dad, got sent down for perverting the course of justice. But Andy wasn’t to know that at the time. “Bennell hadn’t been locked up by that stage. As far as I knew, that was him coming after me. I could feel the panic rising through my body. I just dropped to the floor. Even the possibility it was him tipped me over the edge.”
Another time, Andy looked through his friend requests on Facebook and found one from Richard Barry, another of Bennell’s aliases. “What did he want from me? Did he really think we could be friends? Or was there some other sinister reason? I guess I will never know. How do you read a mind that twisted, anyway? As always with Bennell, I imagine it was about control.”
Bennell, now 65, ended up being convicted of 50 specimen charges of raping and molesting 12 boys, aged eight to 15, on countless occasions in the junior setups of Crewe and Manchester City, from 1979 to 1991. Yet Andy missed the first four weeks of the trial because he was on a 30-day residency at the Sporting Chance clinic. He came out like a new man – booze-free, practising yoga, running every morning. Then he sat through the last week of the trial and, to use his analogy, the wolf started baring its teeth again. “That’s the thing,” he says. “You think you have it under control and then, bang, it takes another great bite out of you.”
Since then, his marriage has fallen apart and, though he always seems to have a smile for everyone, he has spent some long, harrowing periods in a whirl of extreme depression, suffering anxiety and panic attacks. His drinking is under control now but there was a point, a few years back, that “if it was not alcoholism it was somewhere close”. Gary Speed’s death sent him on a “long spiral” – the young Speed also used to stay overnight with Bennell, though it is not a subject Andy or the other players like to speak about publicly – and Andy will openly admit there have been times when he has been suicidal or referred to a crisis team on a mental health unit.
When I ask whether he imagines Crewe might ever apologise, the look on his face tells me: stupid question. He tried to sue for damages in 2004 but, with nobody to back him up, lost his case. At which point, he says, he can remember the club’s lawyers high-fiving in front of him.
In particular – and this is hugely important – he wants to analyse Crewe’s line that they never received any complaints about Bennell and that the only reason the man described in court as “an industrial-scale child molester” lost his job was because he did not follow specific instructions in a coaching session.
Crewe’s former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has claimed the club did receive warnings and Andy believes him. “Bennell was a machine for Crewe,” Andy says. “He found them brilliant young footballers, he was one of the best in the business, the ‘Star-maker’ and the players he discovered made this small, hard-up club huge amounts of money. The idea that they moved him out because of a tactical disagreement over a coaching session is, frankly, an insult to people’s intelligence.
“I know what happened because he was living with my sister at the time. He came home one night and started crying because he said he had been told he couldn’t have kids staying with him any longer. My sister told him he would have to stop if his job was on the line. ‘No,’ he said. He carried on. And at weekends, when he had the boys staying, he would pack my sister off to stay with mum and dad so he had the house free.”
The thing about Andy is that, despite everything, he isn’t angry with the world. He is getting by, he says. He has just paid for his mum to have a new kitchen and feeling very proud about it. Very proud of his book, too. He is helping to put together an app called Depresson, which will support people with mental health issues and promote safeguarding, and he is a brilliant public speaker when it comes to sharing his experiences with football clubs, academies and other organisations. People stop him in the street to thank him for what he has done (my favourite being Barbara Knox, Rita from Coronation Street, grabbing his arm in Waitrose). But there is no getting away from it: it’s tough.
The next time we arrange to meet it is up by the playing fields near Bruntwood Park where, all those years ago, a football-mad kid scored from the halfway line and got a hug from his dad as the reward. There is a footpath running behind those fields and, on the way, he confesses he has made this walk hundreds of times. He points out the tree where he sits. Then he leans on the fence and for the next few minutes I let him cry it out.
Position of Trust by Andy Woodward is published on Thursday by Coronet (£17.99). An exclusive extract from the book will be published by the Guardian on Tuesday
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found atwww.befrienders.org.
• You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk. For information on the Depresson app visit depresson.co.uk
