WRONGFULLY CONVICTED MOTHER WAS ‘COLLATERAL DAMAGE’
A woman wrongfully jailed for a triple murder in south Wales was “collateral damage” as police sought a conviction, her daughter has said.
Nicole Jacob said her mother Annette Hewins had her character and vulnerability “exploited” because she was a young parent.
Annette was jailed after being convicted of arson with intent to endanger life, following the death of Diane Jones and her two daughters on Merthyr Tydfil’s Gurnos estate in 1995.
Her conviction was quashed in 1999 after she had served two-and-a-half years of a 13-year sentence. Her niece Donna Clarke was also wrongfully convicted.
Annette died in February 2017, less than 24 hours after being detained in a mental health unit, after struggling to cope with the miscarriage of justice.
She had started using heroin in jail and had suffered mental health issues.
“I think there was a lot of judgement. It’s a very socially deprived area, and they were just seen as these lower class, lesser people,” Nicole, 31, told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
“I think the fact that they were women and they were mothers, and they were so young - their character was exploited, and their vulnerability was exploited and taken advantage of."
She added that the police “needed to get a conviction”.
“They needed to provide the community with an answer as quickly as possible, and unfortunately mum was collateral damage, and she just helped them get that conviction over the line.”
A traumatic experience
Nicole has been telling her mother’s story on BBC Wales’ Wrongly Accused: The Annette Hewins Story podcast.
Annette was pregnant during her trial, and Woman’s Hour played a clip from an interview she gave to the programme in 1999, when she described the trauma of her baby son, Joshua, being taken away from her while she was in prison.
“I just remember saying ‘get me out of here, I don’t want my baby born in this prison’,” Annette said.
She eventually gave birth in an ambulance on a roundabout near the prison.
She said she spent six hours with Joshua in the hospital before being returned to prison.
“I wanted to spend every minute I could [with my son],” she said.
Nicole said it is an issue that Joshua continues to struggle with, including after he learned a prison officer suggested Annette consider an abortion because her son would be taken away from her.
Nicole said she also struggled in the years after her mother's death, but now felt happy to be able to share her family's story.
“Ultimately now I just hear my mum over and over in my head. ‘Now find the real killers', and that’s what I want. I want the conclusion – to be able to find those answers,” she said.
2024-04-25T11:54:58Z dg43tfdfdgfd