Caroline Phillips

Journalism

Caroline Phillips
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”

Caroline Phillips

Journalism

All Current Affairs articles

My little girl spends hours trying to wash away the memory of what he did

Evening Standard | 12 Oct 1994

ON CHRISTMAS Day last year 10-year-old Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by a family friend. Her assailant, Barry, 50, was convicted after a week-long case which ended on 30 September. He’s now on bail, awaiting sentencing on 21 October. Elizabeth, meanwhile, cries inconsolably in her bedroom with the Phil Collins poster; often she won’t sleep in her own bed or close her eyes all night. She has an IQ of 168, but recently flunked her exams. She goes to the lavatory 50 times a day and, at night, walks along the corridor in her flannel pyjamas, clutching her soft toy rabbit, and spends three hours in the bathroom. Her father thinks she’s trying to wash away her dirty feelings.

View transcript

Random drugs tests to be carried out

Evening Standard | 19 Jul 1994

RANDOM drugs tests are to be carried out on about 12,000 prisoners a year to combat the growing narcotics problem in jails.

It’s estimated that nearly half the inmates of British prisons take self-prescribed medication (heroin, LSD, cannabis and the like) while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That’s a prison population of 49,000 in England and Wales alone. So the forthcoming tests should provide enough material and statistics for Prison Service paper shufflers to write off an entire rainforest.

View transcript

Are the robots killing tennis?

Evening Standard | 20 Jun 1994

IS TENNIS in terminal decline? At the goldfish bowl of the Stella Artois finals day at Queens Club, the smattering of rent-a-celebs watched the singles. Those with their eye on the ball were such notables as Roger Moore and his daughter Deborah, the ubiquitous Ivana Trump and on-off lover Riccardo Mazzuchelli, and Baroness Fiona Thyssen.

View transcript

The day Liona smiled

Evening Standard | 14 Jun 1994

LIONA is 12 and has never smiled. She is physically handicapped, doesn’t speak and doesn’t play. Then she was taken to Thorpe Park on an outing. Suddenly her classmates gathered round her excitedly. Liona was smiling. This was Kids Out, an event involving thousands of boys and girls, including 2,300 from London. As Liona gave her first smile, other disabled and deprived children elsewhere were at 100 similar events.

View transcript

How I cope with 30 naked men

Evening Standard | 19 May 1994

THIS attractive woman spends much of her time with 30 cavorting naked men. She goes out on special occasions with blood and mud on her clothes. She rubs hot stuff on men’s thighs and keeps a bed in the middle of her drawing room. And she enjoys standing in front of 60,000 chaps, some jeering and asking her to strap them up. Sounds odd? She’s Fiona Phillips, physiotherapist to Bath Rugby Football Club and one of the club’s four Deep Heat-wielding dames.

View transcript

My bitterness, by the lover in murder plot case

Evening Standard | 25 Mar 1994

IT WAS one of the most bizarre trials ever heard at the Old Bailey. Susan Whybrow and her lover Dennis Saunders were sent to prison for plotting to murder her husband by tying him to a sit-on lawnmower and aiming it towards the garden lake. This week, after serving three years, a retrial at the Old Bailey found them not guilty of conspiracy to murder and they were freed. Today, for the first time, Saunders talks about that extraordinary affair and why he has returned home and not to his lover.

View transcript

Victims who turn tragedy into a cause

Evening Standard | 10 Mar 1994

MERLYN Nuttall, 29, today uses her real name and has her picture printed for the first time. Formerly known only as Miss X, she was snatched off a Brixton street in February 1992 by Anthony Ferrira, a convicted killer, viciously raped, brutally attacked, set on fire and left for dead. ‘I’m going public because I want to help people who’ve had similar experiences,’ she says. ‘I want them to have someone to relate to who looks well and is getting on with her life.’

View transcript

Why did my Stephen kill himself 19 days after we married?

Evening Standard | 1 Mar 1994

A BRIDE GROOM who killed himself 19 days after his wedding attempted suicide with his former lover hours before he ended his life. An inquest on 16 February heard how Stephen Hartwell, 46, had an emotional reunion with his ex-lover Nicola Cordrey, 22, when she discovered he’d remarried. In a bizarre suicide pact, they put a hose from the exhaust into his car. Nicola said she’d never intended them to die and pulled him, semi-conscious, on to the passenger seat. Shortly after, he drove her home. Then Stephen, a divorced father of two with a printing business, drove off, re-attached the hosepipe and killed himself. The inquest, attended by his first and second wives and ex-lover, heard how he’d split up with Nicola last year just a month before meeting Rosemary King, 45, whom he married three months later.

View transcript

Brutality that hides behind suburbia’s closed doors

Evening Standard | 22 Feb 1994

THESE are true stories of everyday happenings in the genteel suburbs. An obsessive woman looked after a multiple sclerosis sufferer for years and every day scrubbed him in the bath with a Brillo pad. A bearded man attacked his wife brutally and then confided to the police he was a practising transvestite. ‘I’m trying to give it up,’ he explained. ‘As you may appreciate, a beard and dress don’t go well together.’

View transcript

Radical results for jail drug treatment

Evening Standard | 16 Feb 1994

A PIONEERING charity is claiming success against the spiralling problem of drug crime by treating prison inmates for drug and alcohol abuse. The Addictive Diseases Trust rehabilitation programme is the first to establish itself full-time in a British penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey, and has rehabilitated a third of the people it has treated. The work comes at a time of growing public concern about the links between crime and drugs. Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said drug-related crime cost £2 billion a year, half of all property crime was drug related and the number of notified addicts had risen five fold since 1982. The ADT programme began in 1991. It is modelled on 200 such programmes in American prisons, most of which now have drugs-free wings. The reoffending rate among ‘graduates’ of one course in Arkansas is down from 65 per cent to 20 per cent.

View transcript

A fine romance – after the divorce

Evening Standard | 14 Feb 1994

TODAY, Valentine’s Day, divorcée Richard Fleet will propose to divorcée Gina, just as he has every day for the last six months. He’ll arrive from work and say: ‘Hullo love, marry me.’ If she says no and starts arguing, he’ll call and propose later. Sometimes he proposes on one knee, often he begs her, and other times tears of supplication splash down his cheeks.

View transcript

We lost one son – why did we have to lose another?

Evening Standard | 3 Dec 1993

THIS week it was Jacqueline Bodger’s 40th birthday and she attended the inquest to hear why her five year-old son Terry died after going to have six baby teeth extracted, visited the stone which covers the ashes of her eight- year-old child Martin, killed by a car just six years ago, said `goodnight’ in her head to her dead children as she does every night, and sat on the sofa in her sitting-room with her husband Philip just wondering why. We’re talking in their council flat in Hendon. They moved there to start afresh, away from the painful memories of the home outside which Martin was run over. Now Terry’s bicycles stand in the hallway by the front door and and toys lie untouched in his bedroom. There are framed photographs of two smiling, healthy boys on the walls, and 70 sympathy cards line the sitting- room shelves.

View transcript

Favourite Current Affairs articles

Topics

Publications

Archive