I met Alice at one of the numerous conferences that I have attended up and down the country, over the years. She is an elderly, very frail woman but she finds the strength to attend as many of these social gatherings as she can afford to every year. The support for Alice is one of friendship now because her prison journey ended in 2019 when her husband of over 40 years passed away in prison custody. Whilst I have supported countless others through the trauma of this having happened, I wasn’t involved in Alice’s case.
She was at the conference alone and so at lunchtime I invited her to come for lunch with me at a nearby cafe and we had a conversation that utterly broke my heart and encouraged an awful lot of the content in the book I wrote to offer advice to those who find themselves on these journeys.
Alice’s husband had been jailed for historical sexual offending, he never denied that he had committed the crimes and accepted that he should be jailed, as did Alice. He was in poor health upon reception to prison but he lived through all but 12 months of a 7 year sentence, of which he would have spent 3 and ½ in jail and the remainder in the community, on licence. He was 81 when he was jailed. She was 77. I told her about the work that I had been doing, supporting people just like her for years and told her that I wished that I had been there for her when she needed me.
As the conversation evolved she told me about the difficulties that she had faced losing her children and almost every other family member because she had stood by their father. She told me how she struggled living on a single pension after her husband’s pension had been stopped once he was jailed. She told me how she had been approached by a ruthless law firm who had bizarrely, considering his guilty admission, suggested appealing his conviction and managed to swindle £20,000 out of her, pretty much all of their life’s savings. She spoke about the agony of him dying and her not being able to afford to visit him in the day’s running up to his death.
This story is by no means unique, I am currently supporting scores of ladies whose husbands will undoubtedly die in prison custody. The prisons do signpost loved ones to support organisations which are specifically geared up to assist when a death occurs but Unseen Victims have provided support, often for many years, to these individuals and having formed an alliance and understanding of the journey, this is in every single case, a godsend.
As discussed previously, there are a number of chapters in Unseen Victims (the book) which directs the reader to consider and evaluate the person or organisation that are seemingly being friendly and wishing to assist. These people are incredibly vulnerable and it is imperative that they are forewarned about so many scams or false friends who surface and strike when they are at their lowest point.