‘I just wanted peace’: my 35-year fight to bring my abusive father to justice

When Carol Higgins was 15, she walked into Penistone police station in South Yorkshire with her mother to report that her father, Elliott Appleyard, had been raping her several times a week for the previous two years. She might not have used the word “rape”, because she wasn’t sure that was what it was. “I was upset, confused, petrified. I didn’t realise it was criminal because I thought he loved me,” she says. “I felt like I was to blame because I hadn’t kicked and screamed. He’d told me that it was normal. He said he had lots of friends who lived as man and wife with their daughters.”

There was no shortage of corroborative evidence. Her younger brother had seen them “snogging” (his word) and found intimate images of his sister in a tin box by his father’s bed. Higgins had once confided in a schoolfriend and talked to the girl’s parents about it. A neighbour had seen love bites on Higgins’s neck when she was about 13. Higgins’ mother – who didn’t live with the family at that time – had confronted Appleyard about their daughter’s allegations and he had replied: “You fucking prove it.” There was also a large tattoo on Higgins’ back that read, “Caz and Sam” with a rose in between (Sam was Appleyard’s nickname). The tattoo had been his idea and he had taken Higgins to the tattoo parlour, though she had never wanted it. (“I felt cheap,” she says. “He often used to call me a ‘slag’ and I felt like one with that tattoo on my back.”)

Higgins gave a 17-page statement, signed it and was given a painful internal examination. At the end of it, she was informed that Appleyard would not be charged. Apparently, the case wasn’t strong enough. There was no forensic evidence. The police told her that because her brother, who was 14, was a minor, his account was inadmissible. They said that, should the case reach court, her name and sexual history would be dragged through the mud. Could she handle it? Higgins said she couldn’t.

This happened in 1984. Decades later, in 2005, Higgins tried again, phoning West Yorkshire police to report historical sexual abuse, and then again in 2012. In 2013 and 2014, she instructed two sets of solicitors to write to the police on her behalf, and in 2014 she also walked into Normanton police station in West Yorkshire, waited five hours, then gave another police interview. In 2015, she reported it yet again, but in June 2017 she was informed that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had decided against prosecution. Police gave many reasons along the way, but much seemed to rest on her 1984 statement. It had been lost, so there was nothing to compare her account against. (Another time, she was told that it “hadn’t been lost”, it “just hadn’t been found”. Later, she was told it had been destroyed.)

In January 2019, after more pushing by Higgins, who refused to let it rest, Appleyard finally stood trial. It took the jury less than two hours of deliberation to find him guilty of 15 sexual offences against her, including rape and sexual assault. He was sentenced to 20 years. Earlier this year, Higgins also received £15,000 compensation and a public apology from West Yorkshire police, acknowledging that her “extremely serious and truthful allegations took too long to come to justice”.

Through all of this, Higgins has managed life’s milestones – she found a job, met a man, married, became a mother – while pushing for justice and also living in a state of trauma. “I’d have nightmares,” she says. “I couldn’t control my emotions. I’d get triggered all the time: smells – my dad stank – seeing something on TV, seeing someone that looked like him. I’d get drunk to try to escape. I’d cry and shake, hyperventilate and gag – it was coughing, like a purging. I felt like all this evil was stuck inside me, and I just had to get it out.”

Higgins had grown up in Denby Dale, West Yorkshire, where her father worked sometimes as a builder, as well as living off the land, hunting, growing vegetables, selling scrap metal and stealing from skips – which he taught his children to do. He had always been violent: as a child, Higgins saw him hold shotguns to her mother’s head and threaten her with a machete. He regularly beat Higgins and her brother with leather belts, and taught them to fight. “He used to make me and my brother fight like two rottweilers on a rug in front of the fire and he wouldn’t let us submit until he thought we’d had enough,” says Higgins. “You could never say no to my dad and you could never cry. He’d say: ‘If you cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.’”

When she was about 11 or 12, her father began kissing her on the lips and telling her she was beautiful and that she was the only one who understood him. She told her mum, who informed social services, who interviewed Higgins at her school. Shortly afterwards, her mother left home, taking Higgins with her (but leaving Higgins’ brother and half-sister behind with Appleyard). Higgins and her mother stayed with friends, moving around, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. It was uncomfortable, chaotic and lonely. Higgins’ mother was enjoying her new freedom and Appleyard was contacting Higgins, asking if she was all right. “He seemed protective, like a normal dad,” she says. Ultimately, she decided to go back home.

Social services visited again and awarded Appleyard custody – and also warned Higgins that she would end up in a children’s home if she kept changing her mind. In the months that followed, Appleyard would slip her mother’s engagement ring on Higgins’s finger, get her back tattooed and convince her that it was normal to live as a married couple. In 1984, when she was 15, she ran away for good, taking nothing but her bus fare. She found her mum, who persuaded her to speak to the police.

From that point, Higgins says she was in “survival mode”. Her relationship with her mother wasn’t strong enough to stay with her for long and, at 16, she lived alone in part-furnished rented accommodation and worked in a sewing-machine factory. “When I went for that job, I shook so much they couldn’t take me on,” she says. “I broke down and told them everything and so they agreed to give me a chance, thank God.” Her managers supported her. “They looked pretty, they wore lipsticks, they were buying houses with their boyfriends and doing them up,” says Higgins. “Those women became my role models.”

Higgins started going to a gym. “Keeping my body strong helped my mental health and I’ve kept that up all my life.” At work, she made a friend, Julie, who, 35 years later, would testify for her in court. Julie used to help her cover the tattoo with makeup, and when Higgins began the painful process of having it removed (it took six years), Julie often went with her. She urged Higgins to see a doctor, who prescribed antidepressants, which Higgins took for 10 years, and told her about Rape Crisis. On Fridays after work, the two teenagers would take the train from Barnsley to Sheffield and sit together while Higgins spoke to a counsellor.

At 22, Higgins married and went on to have two children. The marriage lasted 10 years. “Neither of us knew what love was,” she says, “and I didn’t know what a normal family was.” When her children were young, she went on a 12-week parenting course to learn how to parent, and volunteered at her daughter’s school to see what childhood was meant to be like.

She took other courses, too – such as how to learn with confidence and how to punctuate with confidence – at Northern College in Barnsley. She joined a church, where she also made friends, attended coffee mornings and took art classes. She began going on holidays. “I wanted light in my life as well as the darkness,” says Higgins. “One of the first things I did after the divorce was buy a tent so I could take the children camping. We went to Hope Valley [in Derbyshire].”

Through all this, Higgins continued therapy – at Rape Crisis, at Barnsley hospital, at a well woman centre. Did it help? “At first I was too numb,” she says. “Sometimes I’d go in and I wouldn’t speak for the full hour. For years, I’d not been allowed to cry or answer or show my emotions, so it took a while. Then the floodgates opened. I couldn’t stop crying or shaking or feeling angry.” One breakthrough was learning how to question things. “I was never allowed to question anything when I was younger, you had to hang on to every word Dad said. It had been drilled into me,” she says. “One therapist told me about thinking for yourself, and asking, ‘What, why, where, when and how?’” It was partly this – and also having her own children, including a daughter – that led Higgins back to the police in 2005 to report Appleyard again. “I wanted my truth out there,” she says. “I couldn’t let him get away with it.”

At times, the battle to get Appleyard charged almost swallowed her. “It consumed my life,” she says. “You could build a house with the paperwork I’ve got on file. Freedom of information requests, boxes of interview transcripts, police files … piles and piles of it.” When the police did finally respond to her reports and launch an investigation in 2015, they refused to allocate a female investigating officer as she had requested, and instead gave the job to someone who (as they later acknowledged in their apology) “had not completed his training”. Higgins stayed on his case, found him witnesses, tracked down their addresses and chased him until he interviewed them. She handed in evidence – medical notes, photographs, recorded phone calls – that no one was asking for but should have been. In 2017, when the CPS decided against prosecution, she appealed against the decision through her “right to review”, writing and rewriting it every day for three months. As a result of this, the decision was reversed, and Appleyard was finally charged.

At the trial, Higgins chose to give her evidence in person. “I was asked if I wanted a screen, or to give evidence by video link,” says Higgins. “No. I wanted to be stood in front of him and show I’m not scared of him any more.” There was a moment outside the court room when she saw Appleyard – by then 71 – sitting, waiting to go in. “He looked with these evil eyes just staring at me,” she says. “I looked back. I felt: ‘This is war now.’ He turned away first.”

Appleyard pleaded not guilty – the defence case was that Higgins was a “fantasist”. Higgins provided a list of 20 possible witnesses and 10 were called – including her brother, mother and neighbour. “At the end, I felt like I’d reached the summit of the biggest mountain I’d ever had to climb,” she says. “I’d climbed Kilimanjaro a few years earlier for charity and when I’d got to the top, I’d shouted: ‘Peace to the world! I am a champion!’ That phrase came out of nowhere. When I came out of the court and walked through the revolving doors at the end of the case, that feeling came back again and that’s what I shouted. Because all my life, that’s all I wanted. I’ve just wanted peace.”

She hopes she will find it now. She still lives in West Yorkshire with her dog, and cases and cases of paperwork. She is very close to her children – her son is visiting when we meet and she had lunch with her daughter a few days ago. They are going on holiday to Cape Verde this autumn. Her daughter, a zookeeper, has said Higgins deserves a “gold medal”, not just for what she has been through but for the way she hid it from her children when they were young.

For Higgins, speaking out is an important part of her recovery. She has self-published two books: Conquering The Impossible: Making the Dream Come True and Conquering the Impossible: Justice , and is working on a third. She is the head of safeguarding for her church, she has given numerous interviews and been contacted by countless survivors of incest and sexual abuse. “It’s a taboo subject, but children are more likely to be raped inside the home than by a stranger,” she says. “I won’t stop speaking out for other people as I know how hard it is to be heard. I feel it’s my calling.

“I’m very fragile, still raw from it all,” she continues. “I still wake up every single morning scared, and have to talk myself round. My therapist used to say it was difficult for me to really heal when I was still fighting my case, consumed by this battle. This year, with the police apology, that’s behind me. I feel less angry. The tears of frustration are going. Now, I’m able to look at my childhood, my family and everything that happened and start to grieve. I think it’s a good sign.”

• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland , or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland . In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html