January 31, 2006

One of them hit the headlines by winning Big Brother on Friday night. The other hit the headlines – in the north west, at least – because she was murdered in the most awful way possible.

We’re headlining it as a story all parents should read.

Monday morning had me making a belated visit to the home of the parents of Chantel Taylor, a 27-year-old mother-of-three who had been murdered by a drug-crazed ex-squaddie who was high on booze, heroin, cocaine and cannabis.

Make no mistake – Chantel had been working occasionally as a prostitute to fund her heroin addiction, an addiction that started after the twin blows of her marriage falling apart and her big brother dying suddenly at the age of 31.

She’d met a new boyfriend, a secret heroin abuser, who had introduced her to the drug. Soon she was badly hooked, and under the boyfriend’s influence began to turn the occasional “trick”.

The killer, Stephen Wynne, met her as she walked the streets back in March 2004. They went back to his place. They had sex. They smoked heroin. Then when she got up to leave he struck her in the neck with a meat cleaver, killing her instantly.

Then he dismembered her, hacking her arms and head off with a saw, and hid the body parts in a disused water tank in his loft. He kept them there for two weeks – during which his young son visited the house – until the smell got so bad he had to dispose of them.

So he dumped her head and arms – wrapped in a plastic bag – under a bush in Royden Park, which is an area of natural beauty over here on Wirral. The rest of Chantel, he dumped at the local tip. No parts of her body have ever been found – probably because there was a mysterious bush fire at the exact same spot in the park a month after Wynne left her there.

That’s the background, supposedly. But then again it isn’t. Not really. On Monday, I sat and listened to a devastated but proud mother talk about her little girl’s First Holy Communion; about how she loved horse-riding lessons; about how her favourite food as a child was bananas and custard; about her Kylie and Jason posters; how she loved to go swimming; how she was good at English at school; how she argued with her sister about leaving dolls under the bed “because they don’t like it in the dark”; about her pet rabbit, Bright Eyes.

She told me about her daughter’s “beautiful bow-shaped” lips that she’d kiss her mother with every time they departed; of how, of course, she’ll never kiss those lips again. She described the pain of watching her previously “together” daughter fall into heroin abuse at a time the family was already grieving the deceased brother; and her anger at the drug dealers and “punters” who’d taken such gross advantage of what she described as a “victim”.

I guess what I’m trying to write here is that it’s so easy for people like me to write stories about “junkie hookers” getting murdered. But it’s all too easy to forget that there’s almost always a story behind the story, too.

So well done to the other Chantelle for beating the odds and getting her 15 minutes of fame. I just don’t think she’ll be the one I'll remember.