JOHN’S VOICE (off)
You called her Cam just then. Did you always call her that?
LEONORA STANIFORTH
Oh yes – that’s what everyone called her, except her mother. That whole ‘Milly’ thing – the papers completely made it up. We kept telling them no one ever used that name, but they didn’t take any notice. They were just desperate to write a headline saying ‘Milly Liar’.
Cut to: office. A big sleek desk, shelves of legal books and framed certificates on the walls, views of the City skyline outside.
TITLE OVER: Melissa Rutherford, Camilla’s school friend
MELISSA RUTHERFORD
It was only after I left that I realised what an inward-looking place Shiphampton was. It was a real goldfish bowl – everyone knew everyone else’s business. I suppose that’s one reason why the whole Cam thing was such a bombshell. No one saw it coming, and they couldn’t believe something like that had been going on right under their noses and no one knew. And then there was the trial, and there were journalists crawling all over the place and people just closed ranks. They always call places ‘close-knit’ after something terrible happens, don’t they? I guess that’s why. I never thought of that before.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
So it was the sort of place where appearances mattered?
MELISSA RUTHERFORD
God, yes. All those twitching curtains and bitchy gossip dressed up as concern. There was a hell of a lot of keeping up with the Joneses. The Rowans really felt that, you could tell. I mean, there was no question that they were wealthy, but Dick Rowan was a self-made man, and some people were a bit sniffy about that, even in the 1990s. That’s why they had such high expectations for Cam – not so much academically but socially. It sounds like something out of Jane Austen, I know, but I got the impression there was definitely pressure for her to ‘marry well’.
(pause)
She had a lot to live up to. Seriously. I didn’t envy her.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Did you know? About the pregnancies?
MELISSA RUTHERFORD
She never told me. She never said a word about any of it.
Cut to: Leonora
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Did you know?
LEONORA STANIFORTH
No, I didn’t know.
Cut to: Marion Teesdale
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Did you know?
MARION TEESDALE
No. No one at the school knew.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
You understand why people find that hard to believe?
MARION TEESDALE
Of course I understand. But that doesn’t alter the facts. And you need to remember she was a day girl. There wasn’t the same degree of proximity that there was with the boarders.
Clip of hockey match (actual footage).
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
But it’s hard to comprehend, all the same. And you only need to look at this clip to see why. This footage shows the 1997 UK national under-18s hockey championships. After three days of play-offs, during which the teams have all shared changing facilities and dorm rooms, Burghley Abbey are in the closing moments of a hard-fought semi-final against Cheltenham Ladies College. Camilla has already been instrumental in creating one goal, and is about to score the clincher. Watch.
Camilla scores, her team and coaches gather round her, hugging her and celebrating. Freeze frame and gradual close-up.
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
They called her a chameleon girl, little knowing how horribly apt that nickname would prove to be. Camilla Rowan turned out to be more of a chameleon than anyone around her could have possibly suspected. Because the girl at the centre of this picture is nine months pregnant. She has had no scans, seen no midwife, not even visited her own GP. But in less than 48 hours she will go into labour and present herself at the maternity suite of Birmingham and Solihull General Hospital, where she will have a healthy baby boy in the early hours of the following morning.
Later that same day, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, and without the knowledge of medical staff, she will leave the hospital, driving the car her parents bought her for her 17th birthday, and return home to Shiphampton, where she will arrive, alone, at just gone six o’clock, in plenty of time to attend a Christmas party at the local Rotary Club that evening. Indeed, it seems likely that her early departure from the hospital was dictated by the need to make sure she was at that party, so as to avoid raising suspicions with her parents.
MONTAGE: shots of Camilla at the party, dancing with her friends, smiling, drinking champagne, standing next to her father and his friends. She’s wearing a close-fitting sleeveless pale-blue dress draped with tinsel and a paper hat out of a cracker. There is nothing about her appearance that suggests she has just given birth.
She looks completely carefree, doesn’t she? And yet at some point that afternoon, Camilla Rowan did something to her newborn baby. If you believe the police, she killed that child and disposed of its body; if you believe Camilla, she handed it over to its biological father, a man no one has ever been able to identify with any degree of certainty.
What we do know, is that whatever happened to that baby happened very quickly. The drive from Birmingham to Shiphampton would have taken at least an hour and a half, leaving barely half an hour for the handover – or murder – to take place.
So did Camilla Rowan really give the baby to its father? Most young men would run a mile at the prospect of raising a baby single-handed. So it’s hard to believe, but not – of course – impossible. But if that’s really what happened, why has he not come forward? Why has he not produced the child and saved Camilla from a life sentence?
Or did Camilla kill her baby that day, as the police and Crown Prosecution Service still contend? It might be worth noting in this context that a week after these pictures were taken Camilla Rowan had a tattoo done on her left shoulder. It said ‘Dolce liberta’, which is Italian for ‘Sweet freedom’. Is that a clue? Did she decide that, at 17, she just wasn’t ready to be a mother? Anyone could understand that, and most people would sympathise. Or was she terrified of having to tell her parents? Again, no one would blame her for that, especially given what we know of the family dynamic. But if that’s what happened, why didn’t she just give the child up for adoption? After all, she must have realised that was an option. Indeed, we know for a fact that she knew all about it.
Because she’d already done it once before.
- freeze frame -
* * *
I’ve just been watching Infamous – can’t believe I never saw it when it first came out. Is it true they still haven’t found the body?
submitted 8 days ago by HickoryDickory77
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Yeah great series isn’t it? And no – the baby’s never been found. At least it hadn’t the last time I looked at any of the boards and in any case something like that would deffo have made the papers
submitted 6 days ago by Danny929292
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The Rowans were lucky there was no Twitter back then. I mean, the bloody shit they’d have got
submitted 5 days ago by santaclaws77
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They get enough now – try searching #MillyLiar and see what spews out. Just disgusting. Not that I imagine the family look at that garbage. I certainly wouldn’t. It’s all just trolls churning out abuse when they know sod all about any of it. Let’s face it, *all* families have secrets, and *everybody* lies.