Shadow of Doubt grandmother says she doesn’t believe Emily Johnson’s torture shed claims
Emily Johnson claims she was subjected to unspeakable horror at the hands of her father in this chicken shed. For the first time, her grandmother reveals why she simply doesn’t believe it | LISTEN
An elderly grandmother who was a key prosecution witness in a controversial recovered memory case now doubts the allegations of abuse and torture that resulted in lengthy jail terms for her daughter and son-in-law.
The grandmother has told The Australian’s Shadow Of Doubt podcast she does not believe her granddaughter claims that she was tortured and raped in a shed next to the family home for years.
Speaking publicly for the first time, she says she was unaware that this was the central allegation in the case until after the trial ended, and she now questions the guilt of both her daughter and son-in-law.
The Australian’s podcast has been investigating the parents’ claims that they were wrongfully convicted on the basis of their daughter’s false memories recovered during counselling. The mother is serving a 16-year jail sentence and the father a 48-year sentence for abusing their daughter over a 13-year period.
The couple’s daughter began experiencing memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father while being treated in a psychiatric hospital as an 18 year-old, after reporting a sexual assault by a sports coach.
She eventually gave police a 78-page statement alleging her father had subjected her to years of violent torture and brutal sexual assaults in a shed next to the family home, where she said she was imprisoned for up to three nights in a row.
At the couple’s trial, the maternal grandmother, ‘Margaret’, gave evidence for the prosecution, saying she had once seen her son-in-law being massaged by his three daughters in an aroused state.
But in this week’s episode of the podcast, she says she had no idea the prosecution was alleging that her son-in-law had tortured his daughter ‘Emily’ for years in the dilapidated shed. She said the shed was open to the elements and so close to the family home that anything going on there would have been audible to the couple’s three other children.
“It was a wire shed. There’s no way a girl could be locked up in there for days and nobody else knows,” she says.
Margaret says police never told her that as a family member, she did not have to testify. She says she was shocked, after her daughter and son-in-law went to jail, to read abut Emily’s torture allegations in newspaper reports.
Margaret said she initially accepted the guilty verdict, even though she had never seen any evidence supporting the torture allegations. But her doubts about the case grew because her granddaughter’s demeanour did not seem consistent with someone who had been subjected to such brutality.
She became concerned when Emily told her she had enjoyed the power she had been able to wield over her parents, and felt guilty about it. Margaret said she did not believe her daughter was capable of inflicting sexual abuse on her daughter, and that Emily had always “adored” her mother.
The parents at the centre of the case were convicted of 86 charges but vehemently proclaim their innocence. They are supported by a son and daughter who say it would have been impossible for the abuse their sister describes to have happened without them noticing.
Margaret said she supports her daughter and son-in-law’s demands for a judicial review of the case.
“It really comes to a point, what actually did happen?” she said. “There’s so many question marks in it.”
*The images used with this podcast investigation are for illustrative purposes only and bear no resemblance to the real people in this story, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.
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