In recent days the press and media have been full of reports and vitriol over the trial and conviction of Lianne Smith for the murder of her children, Rebecca and Daniel, in a hotel at Lloret de Mar Spain. We express our great sadness and anger at the loss of those young lives. But should we direct our anger at Lianne, as is the case with the mainstream media? Or is there more to this case that has still not been reported, and others must also share the blame?
We believe that that the real truth of the events in the hotel Miramar Spain is still to be told.
How can we say this? Because Lianne Smith contacted the UK Column a few weeks after her arrest in Spain for killing her children. She had learned of my talk “Child Stealing by the State” and wanted to contact someone who knew about the abuses in child protection.
Then, and in the following 2 years, Lianne has only ever asked for the real truth about what she did and why to come out, so other parents and children do not suffer. Why did her first comments ring a bell with the UK Column? Because other mothers have admitted to us that they had considered killing their children, rather than allowing them to be taken by Children’s Services, to suffer horrific abuses within that system. Those mothers did not kill their children, but their honesty revealed the intense trauma that they were suffering as they were ‘hunted’ for their children. The word ‘hunted’ is their description, not mine.
Stressed, traumatised and disturbed, Lianne finally killed her children to protect them. She is the first to take that terrible step, but the deeply personal admissions to the UK Column suggest there will be other mothers like her.
After carefully deciding to stay with her story, we met both Lianne and Martin Smith, took statements, reviewed evidence and exchanged correspondence and telephone calls. This material shows that individuals, organisations and state machinery in Britain have not told the truth. We also attended court for Martin Smith, and Lianne Smith’s recent trial in Girona.
We reported Martin Smith’s court case in our January 2011 edition. The trial was littered with bias and irregularities that led to complaints being made against presiding Judge Irwin. Jurors slept, the public was barred from seeing the case, police accused members of the general public attending of being ‘terrorists’, police witnesses left the court to make secretive telephone calls, and mistakes in key DNA evidence were not revealed during proceedings. Nor did Martin’s defence team ask key questions about hearsay evidence made against him.
Martin hanged himself in Strangeways prison in January this year. An alleged suicide at the very time that he had started to fight for truth in his own case. His cell was quickly cleared of documents and other possessions by the police and it is believed that, contrary to normal procedures, these items have still not been passed to the Coroner. A date for an inquest remains in a year or two.
The UK Column has never worked on hearsay. We check our facts and we investigate the stories that we print. We are interested in truth, not profit. We report on matters in the public interest. Someone must, as the mainstream press and media increasingly do not.
I make this statement because the Lianne Smith and Martin Smith cases are a minefield of media hate - hate for Lianne Smith as a child murderer, hate for Martin Smith (deceased) as a paedophile, and hate anyone who doesn’t follow those emotions.
Yet simple investigation into these cases reveals many questions that need to be asked. The first being - what would actually drive a mother to kill her children rather than allow Social Services to take them?
Lianne’s story is not the story in Spain - tragic and terrible though that was. The real story starts with her being ‘flagged” by Cumbria Social Services because she dared to home educate her children.
Her story continues with her professional work, knowledge and experiences with education and children’s services in Cumbria. A period in which she learned the truth about abuses within the child protection system, including plans to make anyone who came into contact with children ‘quasi social workers’, who would watch and report for the state system. Lianne vowed to expose and deal with these and other abuses, and she said so publicly. Her bravery was rewarded by colleagues warning her that she was making enemies in the system. The UK Column is aware of more than one case of the sexual abuse of young boys in the ‘care’ of Cumbria Childrens Services.
Later Lianne reported major breaches of Child Safeguarding procedures by Staffordshire Social Services as they hunted her for her young daughter.
To date there are no real reports of Lianne’s kind personality and background, her respected professional work, her struggle to challenge social services. Hounded for her young children and desperately trying to protect a partner, who was then innocent - since no trial had taken place - Lianne was left alone in her world of fear, stress and mental turmoil in a foreign country. Her mental state at the time of the killings was recognised by the Spanish jury - a fact that was mostly denied in UK.
She is now branded as a prostitute by the police, her eldest children and sloppy journalism, with no factual, provable evidence to support the accusation.
The same sloppy press and media state that Martin Smith was not the father of Becky and Daniel, the children tragically killed by Lianne. They do not report that prosecution and defence teams knew at his trial that key DNA evidence had been ‘mixed up’. That ‘mix up’ was never reported or corrected. Had that happened Martin might have been alive to day as a free man. After all, he was accused of repeated rape without using contraception.
Lianne awaits sentencing. She will not only serve a sentence in prison. Her real sentence will be the memories of her children and what she did. Why she did it, is still to be told. The UK Column has promised to help get the real truth out. We stand by that promise and hope that good people out there will assist us in that task. We will comment further once her sentence has been passed.
