Here you are, Anna.
I’m Kate McCann’s worst nightmare. She’s had 6 years of hell. I’ve had 22. It must have been hard meeting meSays KERRY NEEDHAM, whose son Ben is missing
THEY are the mothers in two of the highest-profile child abductions ever.
But when Kerry Needham came face to face with Kate McCann she was lost for words.
Kerry says: “What possible words of comfort could I ever offer her?
“Could I say it gets any better? No. What advice could I give her? What could I tell her to do that she hasn’t done already?
“Meeting me must have been very difficult for Kate — she has had six years of hell, I’ve had 22.
“I must be her worst nightmare because I prove her situation could go on for years.
“The only thing I could say is to never stop searching and never give up. I haven’t, and I won’t.”
Kerry’s 21-month-old son Ben was snatched on July 24, 1991, as he played in fields outside a farmhouse his grandfather was renovating on the island of Kos, Greece.
Kerry, then a young mum aged 19, was at work in a local bar.
Despite a huge global manhunt, Ben has never been found. He would now be 23.
Kerry met Kate — whose three-year-old daughter Madeleine was abducted from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal on May 3, 2007 — at a Downing Street reception to mark International Missing Children’s Day.
Next week a book, called simply Ben, detailing Kerry’s heartbreaking search for her son and the effect it has had on her family will be published.
Kerry says she has wanted to write a book for years, but adds bitterly: “When we approached publishers, they didn’t want to know because they said there was no ending.”
In the flesh, Kerry is much prettier and younger-looking than pictures portray her.
Gone is the short-haired teenager who was photographed looked bewildered after Ben went missing.
Now she is a middle-aged mum desperate for a happy ending that never comes.
Speaking at her home in Sheffield, Kerry says: “Not knowing destroys you, it’s a never-ending nightmare. But if I knew, I could cope.
“If Ben was alive but didn’t want to know me, I would have to deal with that — just as long as I knew. He could be married with kids and may not remember me at all.
“I’ve rehearsed what I would say if I saw someone I thought could be him.
“I wouldn’t say, ‘Hi, I think I’m your mum’, because I fear that could frighten him off.
“Instead I would say, ‘I think I know someone who knows you’, then try to get as much info as possible.
“My theory is that Ben was taken to be sold for adoption.
“Child trafficking is a huge issue — it happens an awful lot more than people realise.”
Kerry is also realistic enough to know that Ben may not be alive.
She says: “All I’ve ever wished for is an ending and if that was the case, at least that is an ending. But I’m still full of hope.”
Kerry believes she will find Ben one day because she has “an overwhelming feeling he is still alive”.
She says: “I just feel it... call it a mother’s instinct, whatever.
“I believe that if Ben was dead, a part of me would know and this driving feeling to search would stop.
“But it never goes. Every day I wake up and think, ‘Right, what next? What can we do now?’ ”
Kerry and her family — particularly her daughter Leighanna — have paid a high price for that search. In her book, Kerry reveals that five years after Ben went missing she embarked on a drink and drugs binge that lasted four months.
During that time she left Leighanna — only a toddler then — with her parents.
Kerry cringes at the memory, admitting: “I know, how could I? How could someone who had lost their first child then leave their second?
“But I truly believe if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here now — I was ripping myself apart.
“I had tried suicide several times and had a recurring dream where I would find Ben with strangers, grab him and run, run, run through the streets of Kos.
“Then I got to a police station and I was begging them to believe the baby was Ben but they wouldn’t.
“They demanded I give the baby back — then I would wake up.
“When we moved back from Kos, I did Ben’s room up with Winnie the Pooh wallpaper and began to hear a baby cry.
“Over and over again I would hear Ben crying. I would often wake up lying on his bed and not remember how I got there.
“No one deserves to live like that — I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Kerry also had to deal with the attention Ben’s abduction brought.
She says: “Everywhere I went, people would point and stare.
“People came up to me in the street and one woman even said, ‘You’re Ben Needham’s mum. I don’t know how you’re still here’.
“That made me feel terrible — as if I should have killed myself.
“I was riddled with guilt for leaving Ben, for not being able to find him... I lost myself.
“Then, when I was 24, I started working at a nightclub. For the first time in years, I was just Kerry — not Ben Needham’s mum.
“People didn’t treat me differently, they didn’t look at me with pity, they weren’t judging me... I started partying after work and taking amphetamines. Drink and drugs helped with the horrible, crushing pain that never went away. I’m not proud of it, but I believe that, in a way, it saved me.”
Kerry finally came to her senses when Ben and Leighanna’s father, Simon Ward, rang to tell her his dad had just died.
She says: “I thought, ‘What am I doing? I have a daughter’.
“I went to my parents’ house and Leighanna ran up to me, saying, ‘Mummy, Mummy’.
“She literally saved me. I had something to live for, something to get up for, someone to make me feel like I WAS a good mother.”
Sitting listening to her mum talk is Leighanna, a pretty, blonde girl who looks remarkably like Ben.
Now 20, she reveals that, at times, growing up in Ben’s shadow has been difficult.
Leighanna says: “I didn’t have any freedom, as you can imagine. Mum wouldn’t let me out of her sight.
“I just wanted to be a normal teenager but I couldn’t, I always had to come straight home at 6pm.
“I understood, of course I did, but at times it felt oppressive.
“Even now, if I go out I have to text Mum several times saying who I am with and where I am.
“But I don’t mind because I know that if I don’t, she will be going out of her mind at home.”
There are lots of photos of Ben dotted around Kerry’s home.
Leighanna looks at one and smiles, saying: “It’s strange, but I have always felt like his older sister because the only images of him I know are of him as a baby.”
Leighanna, a trainee accountant, now helps her mum with the ongoing search for Ben, using social media to spread the word about her brother.
She says: “I’ve known about Ben since I was tiny.
“When I started going for job interviews, they sometimes asked, ‘Do you have any brothers and sisters?’ And of course I had to say, ‘Well...’
“It’s little things like that that make you realise what a strange situation we are in.”
Kerry looks at her daughter with a mixture of pride and sadness.
She says: “I don’t want to grow old like this, never knowing. It kills you.
“I hope there is an ending soon as I don’t want Leighanna to have to live with this for another 20 years.
“I want her and me to have some sort of normal family life — the life we’ve never had.”
Ben, by Kerry Needham, will be published by Ebury Press on May 9, £16.99. Also available as an ebook.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/4913188/kerry-needham-on-meeting-kate-mccann.html
