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“Can you imagine what it’s like to go to bed and not know if you wake up having two more daughters?”
Jane Cannon uttered the “horribly prophetic” words during a meeting with a counselor less than 48 hours before her daughter Sam Gould committed suicide.
Tragically, Sam’s twin sister Chris also committed suicide a few months later.
As investigations are underway to examine what happened, Jane and her husband Ian Gould wonder what else could have been done to save their daughters.
Growing up in Sawbridgeworth, England, they were “normal, healthy, happy girls,” says Jane.
Chris and Sam were “normal, healthy, happy girls,” their mother says.
Born in November 2001, they were brilliant from a young age.
Ian Gould, who is also a twin, says their philosophy as parents was “to expose them to as much fun and activity as possible.”
They talk about the girls dancing ballet by the pool while on vacation in Egypt, their membership in various sports teams and their “lifelong hobby” on horseback.
Sam and Chris, with their parents Jane and Ian in Turkey.
However, Ian and Jane note that there were early signs in their childhood that things were “not right”.
This included Sam plucking her eyelashes, eyebrows and hair. The girls had the lowest scores their school had ever seen on psychometric tests.
“We’re just parents. We weren’t trained to understand what was going on and unfortunately none of the professionals did either,” says Jane.
In 2014, when the family lived in Fulbourn, some friends expressed concern that Sam and Chris were posting “suicidal and anorxic thoughts“on social networks.
A year later, it was discovered that Sam had injured himself.
Ian, who worked for an intellectual property company, and Jane, then head of a department in the Home Office who had received an appointment from the Queen, felt “completely helpless”.
They decided to quit their careers to focus on helping their daughters.
At age 14, in May 2016, Chris attempted suicide.
The following month, Chris revealed that she and Sam were sexually assaulted from 5 years old as a teenager and named her alleged abuser.
Jane says the revelation left them “in total shock.”
“I don’t want you to misinterpret the words disbelieve, because at no point do we believe them, but that’s what your brain is telling you, ‘That can’t be true.’
“We have done everything we can to protect our daughters; how could this have happened without knowing it? ”
In a way, this moment gave you an opportunity.
“We thought ‘this is it, this is the answer we were looking for’, why two girls who had it all fall apart.”
Hampshire Police investigated the case but, at a time when the girls were grappling with their mental health issues, they don’t want to present video evidence, which Ian said was the only option available to them.
Officers closed the case in late 2016, without interviewing the alleged assailant.
“We had to tell the girls that the police weren’t going to do anything about it, that they weren’t even going to question him,” says Ian.
“That’s what really stuck in my mind.”
Chris and Sam felt “crippled and amazing,” their parents add.
The girls were each other’s “best advocates” and were “fiercely, fiercely loyal,” says Jane.
The two spent time in mental health units as inpatients, but were separated, according to standard procedure with siblings.
Despite being 113 km apart, they were determined to keep in touch.
But Chris was transferred to another unit that doesn’t allow any form of communication, which his parents said was “the worst separation.”
Ian and Jane fought to have their daughters diagnosed with a specific mental illness, despite signs of emerging borderline personality disorder.
Jane says the disorder appeared to be a “diagnosis of Voldemort” for the girls, comparing him to the Harry Potter character who cannot be named.
“Since they didn’t want to name him, we couldn’t find out about it,” he says.
“The girls were desperate to know what was wrong with them, they themselves said, ‘Why am I feeling this, what is wrong with me?
“The professionals refused to give them an answer, although over time the answer became clearer and clearer. [sobre su diagnstico]”.
Both girls had a passion for rock music and the family visited the Reading Festival in August 2018.
On September 1, Sam and his parents watched a movie together and everything seemed normal.
But in the early morning her mother found her dead. She is 16 years old.
Sam’s death had a profound impact on Chris, who saw paramedics attempt to resuscitate her.
Chris slept in his sister’s bed one night, but never felt able to spend the night in the family home again. In November I turned 17, the first and only birthday without Sam.
His parents were “very grateful” for the level of flexibility, after Sam’s death he offered the nearby mental health unit, which they normally didn’t do.
Chris has become “more like an outpatient”.
But tragically, Chris committed suicide on January 26, 2019, four months after his sister.
When asked what impact Sam’s death had on Chris, Ian and Jane replied almost in unison that it had “killed” her.
Jane adds, “From that point on she would tell anyone… it was ‘when’ and not ‘if’ she was going to meet her sister.”
“Our whole life revolved around ‘How can we try to make Chris’ life worth it? How can we keep her alive to help her see that she can be a surviving twin and create a life? ‘
“Even though he still had mental health issues, by 2018 he had started to get on with his life’s journey. If Sam hadn’t died he would now be in college doing something fantastic. , and we have no doubts. ”
Sam and Chris on their first day of school.
While investigating the causes of Chris’s death last month, professionals admitted there were “inconsistencies” in his diagnosis, which the coroner found “confusing” for Chris.
Coroner Nicholas Moss said the mental health unit seemed “reluctant” to use the term borderline personality disorder in teens like Sam and Chris.
He said this was evident “even when a highly specialized second opinion endorsed” this diagnosis, and warned that there were “risks” associated with this reluctance.
In his 62-page findings, Moss said Chris’s suicide didn’t mean the professionals or his “devoted parents” had let him down.
“On the contrary, it demonstrates the widespread and traumatic damage caused by the alleged abuse, horribly magnified, in Chris’s case, by his sister’s suicide“, He said.
Ian and Jane repeat their words. “All the professionals who looked after the girls said the same thing: their death was caused by their illness and their illness was caused by sexual abuse,” says Jane.
After the girls died and after additional police work, a letter was sent to the alleged perpetrator alerting them that there was an allegation.
The prosecution said there was not enough evidence to press charges.
The coroner expressed concern that there was “no follow-up” on Sam and Chris while they were still alive, in order to keep open the possibility of providing testimony at a later stage, at use as evidence.
He added that there was no indication of what should be communicated to alleged victims of child sexual abuse “who are mentally ill and who are initially unwilling to testify as evidence.”
The National Council of National Police Chiefs is revising its guidelines “to see if there are any gaps that need to be addressed.”
La polica de Hampshire dijo de su investigacin: “No haba pruebas suficientes en este caso para proporcionar una perspectiva realista de condena, y la decisin de no tomar ms medidas tuvo en cuenta los deseos de las vctimas y las preocupaciones ms amplias de la familia en this moment”. ”
He said that after the deaths, the way similar cases were handled changed.
Cambridgeshire Police noted they had stepped up their approach to investigating child sex abuse and were reviewing the coroner’s findings.
A spokeswoman for the foundation that runs the mental health unit said it would also review the coroner’s findings and that the changes she made included a new service for youth in mental health crisis.
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