Twenty-one young people who have killed themselves in the past 18 months who lived in or were connected with Bridgend in south Wales — and all chose death by hanging. The police now believe they were not part of a suicide cult — so why did they do it?
All at once, Chris Claypole, a slight 49-year-old with milk-white hair and restless hands, stopped talking. Under the fierce lights of a supermarket cafe in Pyle – a town on the outskirts of Bridgend – he had soliloquised for 40 minutes about his 19-year-old stepson, David Dilling, who hanged himself last February, a few hundred yards from where we are now sitting.
Claypole had explained how Dilling, or Dai, as he was known, was a friendly, boisterous boy. He discussed Dilling’s plans to become a painter and decorator. He spoke of his stepson’s distress after the suicide of his closest friend, Dale Crole. He recalled how, for the month between the discovery of Crole’s body and his own death, Dilling would chain-smoke cigarettes and cry in his parents’ house about the soul mate he had lost.
The stories poured from Claypole – between the occasional catch in the throat – like the rain battering the supermarket’s windows. But now, when I ask him the question he has asked himself for 14 months, he stops, if only for a moment. “Why did he do it? I wish I did know,” he says. “That question will go with us to our graves.”
Perhaps by way of an explanation, Claypole then places a mobile phone in my hands. The police discovered it in Dilling’s pocket when they found his body in the early hours of Sunday, February 18 last year. Claypole has carried it ever since. On the phone is a video sent to Dilling by a friend at 6.42pm on Saturday, February 17.
The quality is grainy, but Dilling, light-haired and dressed in a white top, is visible among a group of friends on a Saturday night out. They were drinking, his stepfather explains, on the streets of Porthcawl, a town four miles down the road from Pyle. In the background is a police van – “giving them hassle”, says Claypole – while in the foreground the tipsy gaggle pull faces. The camera settles on Dilling. “Say something,” says the girl holding the mobile phone. “Blah, blah, blah,” he replies, laughing. The video stops.
“That was David all over,” says Claypole. “That was what he was like. Blah, blah, blah.” Just hours after the video was taken, his stepson was dead.
When Dilling made the long walk home that night, and his demons overtook him, he could not have foreseen how much blah blah blah would be spilt in his honour. Because his death, considered on its own – that of a grieving young man who, like so many young men before him, sought to end his mental anguish in the most brutal way – would have remained a private tragedy, were it not for the others.
You will remember the others. Over 18 months, 21 young people, some of whom knew each other, have committed suicide within a radius of 15 miles, in Bridgend county borough – a unitary authority of around 130,000 people in south Wales centred on the town of Bridgend.
All of them hanged themselves. First there was Crole, 18, a “rebel” and occasional petty criminal who went missing and was found hanging in a Porthcawl warehouse in January 2007. Then Dilling died in February. Thomas Davies, 20, who was close to Dilling and friendly with Crole, followed his pals a week later. In April, Allyn Price, 24, hanged himself in Maesteg, having told his girlfriend he had “nothing to live for”. His heartbroken friend, Leigh Jenkins, 22, also from Maesteg, followed in June.
In April, Anthony Martin, 19 – who is, for some reason, often omitted from the list of victims – hanged himself in his one-bedroom flat in Bridgend. In May, James Knight, 26, died in Cefn Cribwr. In August, Zachary Barnes, 17, who was friendly with Tom Davies’s family and known to other victims, was found hanging from a washing line. Jason Williams, 21, a lorry driver who was engaged, also died in August. Andrew O’Neill, 19, from Nant-y-moel, died a month later after being threatened over money.
Liam Clarke, 20, a friend of Crole’s, was discovered hanging in a park in Cefn Glas, Bridgend, on December 27. His friend, Gareth Morgan, 27, a father who had recently split up with his partner and who was friendly with Clarke, hanged himself a little over a week later. Natasha Randall – a coquettish 17-year-old who went by the Bebo moniker of sxiwildchild and who also knew Clarke – hanged herself later that month. Angeline Fuller, 18, who was engaged, killed herself on February 4. Then, in four days in mid-February, three died. Two cousins, Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, and Kelly Stephenson, 20, died on February 15. And on February 19, Jenna Parry, who knew Natasha and Zachary, hanged herself from a weak, leafless tree at a beauty spot on the common at Cefn Cribwr. At the funeral, her parents implored the hundreds of mourners to “let our butterfly be the last to fly away”.
It seemed, for a few nervous weeks, that their call had been heeded. But on April 9, a 23-year-old Cardiff woman, Michelle Sheldon, died after hanging herself during a visit to her boyfriend in Bridgend. Then, on April 20, a 19-year-old, Sean Rees, was found dead near his home in Betws village after a night out in town. And two weeks ago, Christopher Jones, a 23-year-old who worked for Apex Drilling in Bridgend and was expecting his first child, was found hanging in his garden shed in Nant-y-moel.
The media crush that surrounded the suicides of Pritchard, Stephenson and Parry in February has now subsided. That week, remembers Mike Holmes, a pastor in Cefn Cribwr, was a dark period, rife with unsubstantiated rumour: a nine-year-old dead, a 17-year-old hanging in a barn. During this time, the local Samaritans received a surge in calls, and Holmes’s friends in the church hit the streets to comfort young people. “We were terribly worried,” says Holmes. “There was this sense of shock, leading to great sadness, and a sense of fear too… of where is this going? Where is the next one? It was like there was a storm outside, and no one knew what to do with it.”
Now the cameras have left Bridgend and there is blossom on the trees. But still the deaths keep coming. Nobody – not even their intimates – knows why each decided to die. Philip Walters, the area coroner, says impulsive young people rarely leave notes. If they write, they are concise. Gareth Morgan, the oldest victim, simply scrawled: “Mam, I’m sorry. I just can’t do it no more. Tell Leanne I love her. I love you. All my love Gareth.” But even if each victim had left a detailed note, how much more would we know? Suicide’s special cruelty is that it destroys both author and plot. And, into the space where answers should be, conspiracy makes a nest.
There are even those who argue that nothing exceptional is happening in Bridgend. Wales already has the highest male suicide rate in Britain. Bridgend, meanwhile, has never been a stranger to suicide (although the modus operandi, hanging, is relatively new – years ago, the Southerndown cliffs and the high-speed railway took more lives). Recent figures suggest the area is the worst in Wales for suicides of young males between 15 and 24, with figures from 2006 showing 43 in 100,000 young men killing themselves each year (the Welsh average is 19.3).
In themselves the numbers can mislead, because in small areas, one or two deaths can cause a large spike. A full statistical picture of what occurred in Bridgend over the past 18 months will not be collated for some time. But Walters has been convinced since the summer of 2007 that the latest deaths represent a serious problem. “One has to be concerned about it,” he says. “If I look at my figures for previous years in that 15-to-27 age group, we’ve had two, three, and two in each year. To have so many, so close together… Something’s gone amiss.”
Something has gone amiss, but no one theory will do. The police remain defiant that (pernicious media attention aside) there remains “no link between the deaths”. And, in a way, they’re right. How could you explain the rich, complicated lives of 21 individuals, their private insecurities and pain, in a sentence? Suicide, moreover, is a prohibitively complex field, where, says Alan Briscoe of the mental-health charity Mind Cymru, “often the pattern is: there is no pattern”.
But questions remain. Why these people? Why Bridgend? Why now?
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Bridgend, despite reports to the contrary, is an area with some charm. The three old coal-mining valleys leading into the market town of Bridgend, and the coastline around Ogmore-by-Sea, are grandiose. In the town, Sony and Ford are big employers, but there are also plenty claiming unemployment benefit. In the valleys, meanwhile, where the terraced streets are cut into the hillsides, a certain nostalgia persists for the days of generational work. In some parts of Bridgend there is, it should be said, noticeable “social deprivation”, where suicide is known to be more prevalent.
In short, Bridgend suffers the same afflictions as any old working-class region. Its young people – all of whom seem to know each other from school and the town’s one big college – often display a pointed lack of aspiration. There is, particularly among the kids from poorer backgrounds (a common thread among the suicide victims), a heavy-drinking culture, while cannabis, Valium and MDMA are the drugs of choice.
These are generalities. Dr Arthur Cassidy, a youth-suicide expert from Belfast, who has taken a keen interest in Bridgend’s suicides, would rather look at the small picture. Although it will not account for every death, what happened here is, he believes, a “point cluster” – a local phenomenon that tends to occur among young people in groups of anything from three to 11, and within the space of a year. Cassidy’s research, and that of several colleagues, indicates that these clusters emerge among “young people who don’t tend to have intimate physical contact with each other… but who tend to know about each other – friends of friends”. The victims “make contact with people who are thinking along the same lines as them – whether it’s in terms of negative identity or low self-worth”. And one death gives “permission” for another.
It has been widely reported that many of the victims had Bebo sites. Big deal, you might think: every kid has a social-networking page. But Cassidy is concerned about the language young people used to describe their grief online. “There is an unreality surrounding this word ‘suicide’,” he says. “People talk about ‘catching a balloon’ or ‘having a laugh up there’. People say, ‘See you soon.’ Psychologically, this language can be very contagious. It’s a way of sharing norms, and a way of avoiding adapting to the shared values of those in society at large. And it becomes a profound part of young people’s thinking processes.”
Web-speak, it seems, allows a striking lack of seriousness to surround deeply serious issues. On Bebo, deaths are mourned in one-liners, in between the normal traffic of a social network – sexual advances, plans for the weekend. This language, says Cassidy, “seems to signify a type of reasoning about suicide that victims will come back again. It’s as if they’ll try out some mechanistic thing – like hanging by a rope – then they’ll go away, escape the mundanity of the world, and come back again… Death is not seen as absolute”.
Cassidy’s research is chilling. Certainly there is a group of victims who seem, whatever their unique private pain, to have been influenced by previous deaths in their friendship group. The common methodology involved – the fact that each victim chose hanging – hints at imitation. But as one looks deeper into the lives of those who died, the pattern begins to unravel.
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Anthony Martin’s name is not mentioned often, perhaps because he knew none of the other victims. But it should be. Martin, who had a history of depression and self-harm, hanged himself in April last year in the Bridgend flat where he lived alone. His mother, Tracy Roberts, who works in a factory nearby, has struggled to cope ever since. Unopened bills mount up in her Port Talbot council house. Meanwhile, her three daughters continue to grieve. Her eight-year-old girl has even named her teddy bear Anthony.
Cradling a cigarette, Roberts shows me a book entitled What’s the Harm? A Book For Young People Who Self-Harm or Self-Injure, by Lois Arnold and Anne Magill. Martin acquired the book from a drug and alcohol abuse charity two weeks before he died. After his death, Roberts found it in his flat, covered in her son’s scrawlings. It is clear that, despite the book’s intentions, Martin used it as a suicide manual. So, in a passage entitled “Some of these things may have happened to people who self-harm”, Anthony has ringed the sentences: “Not being loved, listened to and cared for enough”; “Being bullied, harassed, hated or discriminated against”; “Having too much expected of them or being put down.” The last sentence is underlined.
In another section, “If you feel like killing yourself”, the authors explain: “We’re not saying ‘don’t self-harm’. But killing yourself is different. We don’t want you to die.” Above this, Martin has written: “Who is ‘we’?” In another passage, “An Escape Hatch – Suicide”, he has underlined the following common reasons for suicide: “They feel desperate” and “it seems like no one cares or can help”. Meanwhile, in a passage that reads “I wanted my dad to feel bad”, Martin has crossed out “dad” and replaced it with “mum”. The chapters entitled “Staying Safe” and “Taking Care of Yourself” are unmarked.
Martin’s suicide marked the end of a long road. A skinny, emotionally sensitive boy who grew up with his mother and sisters in Colchester, he moved with his family to Wales in 2000. When he was four he lost his sister to cot death. Martin, who witnessed his mother finding her, was traumatised by the episode. And when he confided in a friend at Brynteg comprehensive in Bridgend, the rumour went round that he had killed his little sister. This accompanied the “English pig” bullying he already received.
He left school as soon as he could and moved out of the family home for Bridgend, much to the dismay of Roberts, who wanted him to go to college. In Bridgend he stayed at friends’ houses, smoked dope, and worked as a caterer at the Sony factory. He also spiralled into depression. Several times he visited his GP to ask for counselling, without success. His mother became increasingly fraught. Her son was deeply unwell and couldn’t find help. Finally she contacted a friend who worked at a local substance-abuse service called Teds (Treatment, Education and Drugs Services) to see if they would assist Martin. A worker, Belinda, was found. She became a lifeline for him. Regular meetings were arranged.
Around his 18th birthday, Martin, now in his own flat provided by Hafod Housing Association, was laid off, and his depression deepened. He started to self-harm, and was twice admitted to hospital having attempted suicide by overdose. After his first attempt he saw a psychiatrist, who told Martin’s social worker, in his mother’s words, “Anthony was okay, and he didn’t need any help.” The social worker suggested that he be re-evaluated, and eventually Teds was able to link him up to the local NHS trust for further psychiatric help. However, because Martin was a drug-user as well as a mental-health patient – and therefore a “dual diagnosis” patient – there was a weeks-long waiting list for treatment.
It was all, says Roberts, “too little, too late”. In the last weeks of his life his self-harm became extensive – “He had run out of room on his arms and had started on his chest,” says Roberts – and he became frantic. This is when he started writing in the book. Roberts is angry with the publishers, but reserves greater fury for the health service. “As far as I’m concerned,” she says, “the NHS murdered my son by not giving him the help he needed in the first place. Why didn’t the GP implement counselling when he first went to her? Why didn’t they take him seriously? When he was admitted to hospital having overdosed, why wasn’t he sectioned for his own good?”
The answer, in this case, seems to be a simple one: resources. An NHS report obtained by Roberts on her son’s case history explains that Martin had “expressed frequent thoughts of suicide”, and that “small triggers could represent major events for AM”. But, they conclude, some cases “exemplified by that of AM, represented a drain on resources in place because of the high risk and complexity. Such cases do not fit the mould of present resource provision”.
At this, Roberts weeps. “How dare they say he was a drain on resources?” she says. “How dare they say that about my own flesh and blood?”
How many more young people have died because they “do not fit the mould of current resource provision”? After the media interest in Bridgend, the Welsh assembly has made suicide a priority – it is implementing a national suicide-prevention action plan this month – but it is already too late for some. England has had its own strategy since 2002, as has Scotland. Both have been successful. England is on course to reach its target of a 20% cut in suicides by 2010. And Scotland, which has thrown more than £20m at its Choose Life programme, is beginning to reverse its appalling suicide record. In fact, Wales recently overtook Scotland in deaths among young men.
Progress is now being made. Three weeks ago the local mental-health trust, which has sought funding for months for its own suicide prevention strategy, received £1m from the Big Lottery Fund. And Carwyn Jones, the local assembly member, tells me that the council has now made money available for Bridgend’s suicide plan. But the strategy had still, at the time of writing, not been put into practice.
Why has it taken this long? As far back as 2003, Peter Clarke, then children’s commissioner for Wales, said services for adolescents with mental-health problems in Wales were “in crisis” and “wholly unacceptable”. Mental-health services were underfunded, resources stretched, and there were “fewer adolescent mental-health beds per head of population than anywhere else in the UK”. By last year, little had changed. A group of Welsh children’s charities wrote to the assembly: “Despite the intentions of ‘Everybody’s Business’ [a report]… CAMHS [child and adolescent mental health services] provision across Wales is in crisis.”
One of the main failings of CAMHS, says the Children’s Commission, is that it has not done enough to promote emotional health – or “the preventative stuff”, as Maria Battle, the deputy commissioner, calls it. In Bridgend at least, much of that work is taken up by the voluntary sector, including excellent charities such as Yellow Wales, which helps young people find housing, training and jobs, despite receiving no core funding from the assembly. Meanwhile, other voluntary organisations, such as the Bridgend Street Pastors and the Samaritans, have done all they can to reach young people in the community. Mind Cymru have also begun rolling out the successful Asist suicide-intervention programme across Wales, with funding supplied by the assembly.
The fact remains that Wales has serious work to do on its mental-health provision. However, when one looks at Bridgend’s victims, one sees a group who, by and large, did not go seeking help. Anthony Martin, Zachary Barnes and Angeline Fuller had a history of self-harm (though neither Barnes’s nor Fuller’s family could confirm what medical help their children received). But they are in the minority. The Samaritans suggest that four in five young people who commit suicide have not approached a doctor for help.
This statistic, Maria Battle argues, makes the case for better funding for emotional education in schools and providing the universal access to school counselling that has been promised in Wales, but has never fully materialised. But she is also worried about those at the more serious end of the spectrum – those like Anthony Martin.
“As an office, we try and assist many young people and their families getting access to mental-health services,” she says. “And it’s not easy. They’re either not getting any help, or they’re getting stuck in the system – in inappropriate places like adult mental-health wards, or paediatric medical wards. I’ve had families who have been so distressed because they can’t get help for their children… And funding is a big part of that.”
Funding or no funding, the question remains: why has hanging become a possibility for so many? Leah Phillips, a fiery 16-year-old from the valley town of Pontycymmer, seems well placed to provide answers. Her story gained notoriety because she tried to kill herself on January 18, a day after her primary-school friend, Natasha Randall, from Blaengarw, the next town up the valley, died. But Leah – who has two older brothers and lives with her mother, Tina, a supermarket worker, and her stepfather, David, who is on incapacity benefit – has tried to commit suicide three times in the past year.
On January 18, Leah had talked about Natasha. “Why do they do that, Mam?” she asked. Later, with both her parents out, Leah watched a SpongeBob SquarePants DVD with her nephew before sending him to bed. Then, when she was alone, she hanged herself from the banister. Leah’s stepfather came back just in time to cut her down, and a friend administered mouth-to-mouth. She was taken to hospital and nearly died.
Leah claims not to remember the incident. Once, when asked by a doctor why she had hanged herself, she replied: “It doesn’t hurt.” These are her only words on the subject. And her near-death experience does not seem to have blunted her willingness to try again: she hanged herself again just weeks later, only for her older brother to cut her down. Her one previous attempt was in summer 2007, when she took an overdose of paracetamol. Her mother was, in her words, “surprised” that, after this first incident, Leah received no psychiatric treatment, because the hospital psychiatrist decided “she was sorry”.
Tina is a pragmatic character, and she weathers her daughter’s behaviour well. But she is angry about the media’s theorising. “I read the papers,” she says. “There’s an internet cult and all the rest of it. Rubbish. We did have the internet here, but I got rid of it because the kids weren’t using it.”
Instead, Tina believes Leah’s attempts are the development of a difficult adolescence. She describes Leah as a stubborn daughter who will not talk to her parents. She has been running away from home for days at a time, drinking, bunking off school and generally proving a “nightmare” since she was 13. Indeed, Leah only spent – Tina recently discovered – one full week in school between September and Christmas. Leah was hiding the letters from the head teacher. What was she doing when she wasn’t in school?
“I don’t know,” says Tina. “She could have been doing anything.”
When Leah is angry she threatens to kill herself again. Recently she tried to stab another boy who had teased her that “she couldn’t even hang herself tidy”. And while Tina consoles herself that “she hasn’t threatened for a couple of weeks now”, the thought of losing her has had a destructive effect on the family. Her two brothers, in particular, have struggled. “I can’t take much more of this, Mam,” said one in a weak moment. “I wish we could just bury her now.”
Phillips’s story is proof of Cassidy’s finding – “there is so much going on in the lives of these children that their parents have no idea about”. Indeed, three of the parents I spoke to expressed shock at the number of young people who came to their children’s funerals whom the parents had never met. But does it make it any easier when parents know what their children are up to?
Anne and Paul Parry, whose daughter, Jenna, died in February, knew she was in a tempestuous relationship with an older boy. They knew her character was changing because of cannabis use. They were just powerless to stop it.
Contrary to newspaper reports, Jenna was not a habitual self-harmer. She had cut her arms “once or twice, when she was younger”, says her mother, and only because it was a fad among girls at her school. Her “two suicide attempts” had both been cry-wolf affairs involving pills where she had put herself in no danger. The last time, she had vented her relationship frustration on New Year’s Eve, by finishing her packet of antibiotics – “which she knew damn well weren’t going to do anything”, says Paul – and phoning her boyfriend to blame him. She was also, her parents say, bullied at the training centre where she was working to become a beautician. And, despite being popular and pretty, she was deeply insecure about her looks. “On that day she came back from [training],” says Anne, “she said, ‘Oh, Mam, I’ve had enough. Boys are picking on me. [The ex-boyfriend] has a new girlfriend, and I can’t stand the thought of him being with someone else.'” That night, Jenna went out to a friend’s house and smoked some dope before visiting another friend in Kenfig Hill, who gave her Valium. She came back to the house with a “glazed look” before leaving for the final time.
She knew both Natasha Randall and Zachary Barnes. She was also friends with a girl who lived beneath James Knight in Cefn Cribwr, who said she heard the bang on the floor as Knight hanged himself. Did those friendships influence what she did? “I think so,” says Paul. “And it was on TV the whole time.”
“I was worried – all the parents were,” says Anne. “But we kept on talking about it with Jenna. I said, how could [Natasha] do that to her parents?” “Afterwards,” says Paul, “I kept thinking, ‘Yes, she was low. She’s had an argument.’ But when she took antibiotics on New Year’s Eve, that was much more her. She liked a bit of drama, everyone fussing over her. But I can’t imagine her walking out on her own to do what she did. That wasn’t her personality. She wouldn’t cross the road without someone with her. I think if the other ones hadn’t been so highlighted, [hanging] wouldn’t even have been in her thoughts.”
“And I think the drugs had a lot to do with it,” says Anne. “I don’t think she would have done it in her right mind.”
Who would have done it in their right mind? One can, perhaps, understand how, for a few troubled people in a few troubled months, suicide became an option. Friends had done it. Nobody said a bad word about them. In fact, everyone said how much they loved and missed them. They were, briefly, the talk of the town. But the hanging is the hardest thing to fathom. It’s medieval – a brutal way to go. The coroner says not one victim broke a bone in their body, they died so quickly. I asked Cassidy about this. Why hanging? Why had some chosen to do it in their homes and some in the open?
“It’s a masculine-oriented technique,” he says. “It’s linked to high emotional pain. When the females did it, there seems to have been a group-norm effect; they are doing it because they know their friends have done it… There is also the fact that the further away from home one does it, the more delayed the discovery. That is a form of a decoy – a revenge against parents, or partners, or whoever you think has caused you pain.”
Here, sympathy makes way for anger. Because the legacy of the Bridgend suicides is not just a roll call of doomed youth and a gallery of washed-out web-grab portraits. It is Paul Parry’s insomnia, Tracy Roberts’s righteous anger, Chris Claypole’s 20-second video message, and the questions they will never stop asking themselves. Yes, some of these young people could have had better starts in life. Yes, some of them drank too much and took too many drugs. Yes, the Welsh assembly needs to make suicide prevention a priority. Yes, the press could report these events with more care. Yes, suicide clusters exert a dangerous pull. But the heart of the matter is this: every victim, even in their agony, must have known they were about to inflict pain on others. There was a storm outside, and they chose to open the door.