TITLE OVER:
INFAMOUS
FADE IN
THE CHAMELEON GIRL
MONTAGE: shots of Camilla Rowan at the Old Bailey trial, interspersed with newspaper headlines – ’Milly Liar: “I did not kill my baby”’, ‘What really happened to baby Rowan?’, ‘Child-killer to serve life’.
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
In the last episode, we looked at Camilla Rowan’s childhood. At her privileged upbringing, her attentive parents, her expensive school. We spoke to her friends, her teachers, people who knew her, all in a quest for clues as to how this golden girl with a fabulous life ahead of her ended up in the dock of the Old Bailey, her only future the four walls of a prison cell.
But there was nothing – nothing in her surroundings, her relationships or her experiences – that could possibly explain the mystery of the chameleon girl. But perhaps we were simply looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the answer lies much closer to home. In Camilla Rowan herself.
TITLE APPEARS OVER, TYPEWRITER STYLE:
Part two
“If I listened to your lies”
Shot of Birmingham and Solihull General Hospital, entrance to the maternity suite. Nurses going in and out, mothers carrying babies, etc.
VOICEOVER
As we discovered in the previous episode, this is where Camilla Rowan gave birth to a full-term baby boy on 23rd December 1997. A baby no one knew she was carrying, who would leave in her arms later that same day, never to be seen again.
RECONSTRUCTION of young woman with baby in hospital bed. Baby’s face not visible.
But this wasn’t the first time Camilla had visited a maternity unit. She’d already given birth in another Birmingham hospital not much more than a year before. She’d already had another child.
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
The Senior Investigating Officer on the Camilla Rowan case was DI Howard Lucas, who died in 2013. His second-in-command was Detective Sergeant Lawrence Kearney, now a DCI, who gave some of the most powerful testimony in the Old Bailey trial.
Cut to: close-up of LK sitting at desk with large sign behind saying ‘South Mercia Police: Protecting People Through Professional Policing’.
TITLE OVER: DCI Lawrence Kearney, investigator on the Camilla Rowan case, 2002-2003
LAWRENCE KEARNEY
On Saturday 9th November 1996 Camilla Rowan presented herself at the front desk of West Bromwich Women’s Hospital. She gave her address as 13 Warnock Road, Cambridge, and said she had unexpectedly gone into labour two weeks before her due date, while visiting friends in Dudley. However, nurses noted that she had none of those friends with her. A few hours later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
VOICEOVER
Adrian Morrison was overseeing the unit that night, and subsequently testified at Rowan’s trial.
Cut to: doctor’s office, desk, window behind.
TITLE OVER: Adrian Morrison, Senior Obstetric Registrar, West Bromwich Women’s Hospital, Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, 1992–2015
ADRIAN MORRISON
It was in every respect a normal, straightforward delivery. The mother was obviously very young, but clearly fit and well and the baby was likewise completely healthy. We weren’t able to access other Trusts’ computer records at that time, and it being a weekend I wouldn’t have been able to contact her GP very easily either. But in any case there was no immediate need. The baby was doing well, and she said she was returning to her partner in Cambridge and would pick up with her GP and midwife as soon as she got home. I had no reason to doubt the truth of what she said, so I was quite happy to discharge them both on the Monday morning.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Did you hear from her again?
ADRIAN MORRISON
No.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
What about the GP she listed on her admissions form?
ADRIAN MORRISON
I only discovered some months later that that practice did not exist.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
Was there anything else about the baby that, in the light of subsequent events, you now consider could be significant?
ADRIAN MORRISON
(hesitates)
Possibly. The child was clearly mixed race.
Cut to: RECONSTRUCTION of young woman in hospital bed. Baby’s face now visible and clearly of mixed-race parentage.
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
So much has changed since the turn of the century that it’s hard to remember that having a baby outside wedlock was social suicide in some circles, or that a mixed-race child could be something to be ashamed of. Times have changed, and decidedly for the better. But back in the nineties, attitudes weren’t always so enlightened, and especially not in wealthy middle-class rural communities like Shiphampton, which were almost exclusively white.
Cut to: sitting room
TITLE OVER: Marion Teesdale, Housemistress, Burghley Abbey School, 1986–2014
MARION TEESDALE
I don’t remember any girls leaving the school because they were pregnant. Some left at sixteen, of course, so I can’t vouch for what happened to them thereafter, but we ensured every pupil received comprehensive sex education lessons in the fourth form, so all our girls were fully informed about both pregnancy and birth control.
Cut to: kitchen
TITLE OVER: Leonora Staniforth, Camilla’s school friend
LEONORA STANIFORTH
I don’t know about ‘comprehensive’ – it was all a bit sketchy from what I remember. It didn’t help that the teacher doing the class was Miss Thorpe, who was about a hundred and five and didn’t look like she’d ever actually done the deed. We were all just excruciatingly embarrassed throughout the entire thing – more for her, probably, than for ourselves. I definitely remember her showing us how to use a condom by sticking it on a test tube. Someone at the back fainted. Actually fainted. I mean, imagine that happening now.
Cut to: City office
TITLE OVER: Melissa Rutherford, Camilla’s school friend
MELISSA RUTHERFORD
I learned more from other girls than I did from school – I imagine most kids do. But if you’re asking about attitudes to teenage pregnancy in a place like Shiphampton back then, then yes, there was a definite social stigma attached to anything like that. Girls who ‘slept around’ were looked down on as ‘cheap’ and ‘common’. As for getting pregnant, that was the ultimate no-no – I think my parents would have literally thrown me out of the house. I can only imagine what Camilla’s mother would have done if she’d known.
JOHN’S VOICE (off)
And if the baby turned out to be mixed race?
MELISSA RUTHERFORD
Oh my God, it doesn’t bear thinking about. The sky would have fallen in.
Cut to: panoramic drone shot over Shiphampton.
VOICEOVER – JOHN PENROSE
With this in mind, it’s not hard to see why Camilla chose to conceal her first pregnancy, even – or perhaps especially – from her own mother. But she was intelligent and well-informed, she had means and more independence than most young people her age. So why didn’t she take steps to prevent the pregnancy in the first place? Or arrange for a termination as soon as she realised what had happened, if not with her own GP, then at one of the many clinics offering confidential abortion services? Camilla Rowan has been asked those questions many times, both before and after her conviction, but no one – as far as I know – has got an answer. None that make sense, anyway.