Island Life Magazine Ltd December 2011/January 2012 | Page 42

INTERVIEW

Quote
Stephanie Slater:
The amazing story
of kidnap victim
who beat the odds
Exclusive report by Peter White
It will be 20 years in January since
Stephanie Slater was the victim of one
of the most horrific crimes imaginable.
Stephanie was a 25-year-old estate
agent going about her work in the
Birmingham suburb of Great Barr
when she was viciously attacked by a
man she was showing around a house.
She was held at knife point, bound,
gagged, blindfolded, and bundled into
the reclined passenger’s seat of his car,
before being tied down and driven to
Newark in Nottinghamshire where she
was held prisoner for eight days in the
most appalling circumstances.
The prospective house buyer gave
his name as Bob Southall, but in fact
it was Michael Sams, a monster who
six months earlier kidnapped and
murdered Leeds teenager Julie Dart,
an offence he initially denied, but later
confessed to in prison.
After eight days of sheer hell,
Stephanie’s employers agreed to meet
Sams’ £175,000 ransom demands.
Police set a trap to catch Sams at the
pick-up point, with the money being
delivered by estate agent boss Kevin
Watts. But it all went horribly wrong.
Police lost contact with the radio they
had given Mr Watts, and Sams escaped
through the fog.
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That same night, fearing Sams had
picked up the ransom and left her to
die, Stephanie was eventually freed
from inside her hell-hole prison,
driven back to Birmingham by Sams
and dumped in the road close to her
home. But by then police had already
assumed she would never ever be
seen alive again. Several attempts to
find her had failed; surveillance on
her home had ended just 20 minutes
before she walked up to her front door,
and officers had even asked her parents
which one of them would be prepared
to identify her body.
Stephanie was so traumatised by the
atrocities she endured at the hands of
Sams that soon after he was sentenced
to life imprisonment she made her
own escape to the Isle of Wight where
she has lived ever since.
With the 20th anniversary of her
kidnap coming up on January 22,
Stephanie has spoken exclusively to
Island Life about her horrendous
ordeal, how the Island helped her
come to terms with the nightmare, and
what she bravely undertook to try to
ensure the humiliation and suffering
she went through, not just during the
kidnap but also after it, never happens
to anyone else.

Stephanie was held captive in Sams’
workshop, secured in a hand-made
coffin that was so tight she had to
‘corkscrew’ herself into it when her
captor ordered. He then left her
overnight in the coffin, locked in a
wheelie bin in freezing condi tions.
Sometimes she was handcuffed to an
iron bar above her head and told if she
tried to free herself by pulling down,
tons of rocks would fall on her and kill
her.
She was also brutally raped by Sams,
but only ever told her close friend of
that ordeal until years later when Sams
claimed in a book he wrote in prison
that he had had a love affair with her.
During the days she was held, Sams
was calmly serving customers in the
front of the workshop while she had
to sit naked, still gagged, bound and
blindfolded, on a mattress.
Amazingly, during her ordeal she
bravely built a rapport with Sams,
talking about TV programmes such as
Coronation Street and her favourite
Red Dwarf. She believes those
conversations ultimately saved her life.
During her captivity the Press agreed
not to publish the story, but within
hours of her release West Midlands
Police called a news conference, and