What happened to Rachel Watts and where is she now?
RACHEL WATTS found the courage to come out public with her life-scarring story.
This is what happened to Rachel Watts and the person who threatened her safety, Russell Bishop.
What happened to Rachel Watts?
Rachel was on her way to a friend’s house in Brighton on Sunday, February 4, 1990.
However, she found that her friend wasn’t in that day and so she decided to go back home.
While roller-skating, she lost control, hit a wall and bumped her head.
Upon arriving back home, her father gave her some money for sweets and told her to go to the shop to try and help her forget about the bump.
She went and found the shop closed.
The family had only been living in that house for three weeks and Rachel forgot the directions back.
Rachel asked someone – who turned out to be Russell Bishop – for directions back.
However, Russell was of no help, as Rachel told the Daily Mail: “He had a moustache like Dad and was working on his car, and my dad was a car mechanic, so it didn’t occur to me that he was a danger.
“It happened really fast. He swooped me up and dumped me in the boot. I didn’t have time to think or run.”
While in the boot, Rachel thought of ways of survival.
She found a pen and put a hole in the boot hoping that someone would see it and she even tried screaming.
However, Bishop told her to “shut it” or else he would kill her.
She even prepared her roller skates in hand so she could run off as soon Bishop opened the boot.
Rachel even tried to tell him that she’ll give him the £1 her dad had given her for him to let her go.
It was all for nothing, and the car then stopped at Devil’s Dyke.
In 1990, the court heard that Bishop strangled Rachel before sexually assaulting her.
The oxygen deprivation left Rachel unconscious and doctors said that she probably woke up after at least 20 minutes.
She said: “I was lying in mud underneath gorse bushes. I was naked, bleeding and freezing.”
Rachel found the strength to claw her way out and found a couple, David and Susan, parked nearby who helped her.
Rachel’s scars and bruises recovered, however, her mental health could never be the same again.
Where is Rachel Watts now?
Rachel Watts is now a mother of three children – two teenagers and one in primary school.
She is also married to Justin who has been very supportive and they both share a love for online computer games.
However, she still suffers from anxiety, PTSD and agoraphobia, which is a fear of being in a situation where no help or escape are possible.
Rachel will be starting specialist trauma counselling to try and recover her mental health.
What happened to Russell Bishop?
Bishop spent 28 years claiming that he’s been framed and that he’s innocent.
In May 2016, Rachel was contacted by police again, this time to let her know that Bishop is being charged with the murders of two girls.
The girls were both nine years old – Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway.
There was another retrial in 2018, in which he also admitted what he had done to Rachel without apologising.
As Rachel said, Bishop tried to justify his actions in court saying: “He said he only attacked me because people had wrongly blamed him for killing the girls.
“He said he wasn’t a paedophile but was suffering from ‘psychological trauma'”.
Bishop was sent away to prison and in January 2022, aged 55, he died of brain cancer.