First words of kidnapped Shannon Matthews after being found under bed by police
A detective who walked into the room where she was being kept has shared his account.
The first words police heard when they found kidnapped Shannon Matthews were: ‘stop it, you’re frightening me’, a detective has revealed.
Shannon, then nine, was the victim of her own mum’s plot to fake her kidnapping and claim a £50,000 reward with her boyfriend and his uncle.
Hundreds of concerned members of the public joined the police’s £3.2 million search after Karen Matthews appeared crying on TV after Shannon went missing in 2008.
Shannon had disappeared on her way home from a swimming lesson in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, and was found a month later drugged and tethered in a divan bed.
Matthews later admitted that she and her boyfriend, Craig Meehan, had organised to keep Shannon in Meehan’s uncle Michael Donovan’s flat until it was time to ‘discover her’ and claim the money.
Detective Constables Nick Townsend, 61, and Paul Kettlewell, 68, told The Mirror how they rescued her. A neighbour told them she had heard movement, including ‘tiny footsteps’, upstairs in Donovan’s flat.
‘That’s when my spidey senses really started tingling. I couldn’t believe what I had heard,’ said DC Townsend.
After backup helped the pair get into the flat by ramming the door open, DC Kettlewell said ‘there was a deathly silence’ before he heard ‘a little girl’s voice’.
Entering the room where Shannon was being kept, detectives then heard her say: ‘Stop it, you’re frightening me’.
DC Townsend said: ‘I think Donovan had his hand over her mouth. I knew the voice had come from within the room. I couldn’t work out where it was coming from.’
Shannon then emerged from the bed’s base. Donovan was also dragged out from the hiding place and bit an officer in the process.
He told police: ‘Get Karen down here. We’re sharing the money – £50,000.’
The Detectives shared their story in a new Channel 5 documentary called The Disappearance of Shannon Matthews.
On Wednesday’s episode the pair, who were serving their last few months of retirement, revealed they had ‘bonded like brothers’ after the ‘emotional’ case.
DC Kettlewell said: ‘I was elated. I couldn’t believe we’d found her and she was alive. As we went down the stairs it was like carrying my own child.
‘I passed Nick on the stairs and said: “I’ve got her!” I still get emotional about that moment now.’
DC Townsend said: ‘It’s hard to describe the emotion. You just want to cheer. I can’t describe anything other than euphoric.’
Matthews and Donovan were jailed for eight years in relation to the case. Meehan was jailed for 20 weeks for an unrelated offence after police found child sex abuse material on his computer.
Matthews was released half-way through her sentence in April 2012, and is now living under a different name and in a relationship with convicted paedophile Paul Saunders.
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