Shannon's mother gets 8 years for 'despicable' kidnap plot

Published on Friday 23 January 2009 21:21

SHANNON Matthews' mother was jailed for eight years yesterday for her role in the "truly despicable" kidnapping of her nine-year-old daughter.

Karen Matthews, 33, was found guilty last month of kidnap, false imprisonment and perverting the course of justice.

Michael Donovan, 40, her former partner's uncle, was convicted of the same offences and was also jailed for eight years.

The judge, Mr Justice McCombe, said Shannon had been left "disturbed and traumatised and frightened". He said: "The offences that you committed were truly despicable. It is impossible to conceive how you could have found it in you to put this young girl through the ordeal that you inflicted upon her."

He said it was doubtful Matthews and Donovan could have planned and carried out the kidnap without other people – a pre-sentence report suggested the pair were "not of sufficient intelligence to conceive and implement this plan".

However, police said there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone else, and the case was now closed.

Shannon went missing last February as she walked home from school near her home in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire.

Police launched a massive search operation costing almost 3.2 million, and 24 days later, Shannon was found in the base of a divan bed in Donovan's flat less than a mile from her home. It was later revealed he had kept her imprisoned as part of a plan he and Matthews had hatched to claim a 50,000 reward offered by a national newspaper.

Police believe the pair may have been influenced by the coverage of Madeleine McCann's disappearance, which was a high-profile news story in the months before Shannon went missing.

After she was recovered, Shannon was found to have traces of the "potent hypnotic" drug Temazepam and travel sickness medication Melcozine in her system. It was believed Matthews and Donovan gave her the drugs in an attempt to keep her subdued and drowsy and that she could have taken them for up to 20 months before her abduction.

Donovan forced Shannon to keep to a strict list of rules and officers discovered an elasticated strap in the loft of his flat, which was believed to have been used to tether the young girl when Donovan went out.

Mr Justice McCombe told them: "It is incomprehensible that you could have permitted your friends, neighbours and in your case, Matthews, even your children to sacrifice time and energy in extensive searches for the supposedly missing child."

He said he would not draw a distinction between the two of them in their sentences, adding: "In my judgment, their culpability is the same."

He told Leeds Crown Court that Shannon, now ten, would require "periods of psychotherapy followed by individually-based therapeutic interventions to help her to recover from her experiences".

BACKGROUND

THE full story of the kidnap of Shannon Matthews, below, has yet to come out, her mother's former friend said yesterday.

Julie Bushby, who chairs the residents' association on the Dewsbury Moor estate, said she had no idea who else might have been involved in the plot to kidnap Shannon. She said: "If Karen isn't going to break and say what the full story is, what can us little people do to help her?"

Asked how Matthews would cope with prison, Mrs Bushby said: "I don't know – I'm not Karen. I feel sorry for Karen, I really do, because I think she is carrying the can for other people."

She said the residents on the estate just wanted to get back to normal.

She said if another report of a missing child was to emerge in the future, she believed there would be a similar response to try to find them.