Kelly Higgins still remembers the cuddles from her childhood – warm, protective, soothing. When she was scared or sad, they brought her comfort.
But today, those memories prompt powerful emotions for Kelly now a mother of three.
For while most children remember such tender embraces from their mother or father, for Kelly her sole source of childhood affection was her babysitter, 16-year-old Suzanne Capper.
Kelly’s final memory of Suzanne is her waving goodbye after she picked her up from primary school in early December 1992.
Shockingly, as she was to discover, Suzanne was tortured to death days later, in a killing so violent, so heinous, it almost defies belief.
And Suzanne’s killer?
Kelly’s own mother, Bernadette McNeilly.
Kelly Higgins (pictured) was scarred by physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother and her fellow occultist friends
Bernadette McNeilly (pictured) and a gang of Satanic co-conspirators kidnapped and tortured Suzanne Capper before burning her alive in December 1992
Suzanne (pictured, as a bridesmaid) was subjected to horrific torture and set alight. She died from the injuries sustained
The horrifying murder was driven by petty and false accusations including an argument over Bernadette McNeilly’s pink duffel coat.
A believer in the occult and a devoted fan of horror movies, McNeilly and a gang of Satanic co-conspirators kidnapped and tortured the teenage Suzanne before burning her alive in December 1992.
McNeilly even became known as the ‘Chucky killer’ for playing a dance song sampling the character’s voice from the infamous horror movie at top volume, in order to inflict psychological torture on a helpless Suzanne as she was bound to a bed.
She was also alleged to have used the character’s catchphrase ‘Chucky’s coming to play’ as she jabbed Suzanne in the arm with a needle filled with amphetamines, as part of the relentless abuse the girl was subjected to over the eight days she was held captive before she died.
But for Kelly, now 40, Suzanne made up the only happy memories of her entire childhood, which was scarred by physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother and her fellow occultist friends.
‘Suzanne is my only pleasant memory. When I was beaten, she would give me a cuddle. Once, she bought a loaf of bread in. She was the light in the dark in that house,’ says Kelly told the Daily Mail.
Aged just seven at the time of Suzanne’s murder, Kelly remembers hearing screams as the teenager was forcibly shaved from head to toe, beaten and locked in a cupboard after being lured to their house in Moston, Greater Manchester.
Little did she know then that the screams were coming from her beloved babysitter.
The trauma of these horrifying memories would lead to years of counselling for Kelly.
‘When I was younger, a lot of my counselling was about hearing the girl who was killed scream out,’ she recalls today.
‘My biggest memory was hearing her scratching on the wall.
‘But then they moved her [to another house] so I could not hear her.’
Pictured: This is the bed on which Suzanne Capper was held captive before being tortured and murdered
Pictured: On this street was one of the two houses where Suzanne Capper was tortured before being killed
There Suzanne was subjected to more horrifying torture – tied spreadeagled to a bed with cords, power cables and chains, her teeth removed with pliers – before being dumped in scrubland, set alight, and left to die.
Meanwhile Kelly had been brought in to clean the bedroom where Suzanne had been held – before police stormed the house to arrest the babysitter’s killers.
It was a gruesome finale to a truly terrible childhood for Kelly in which her twisted mother beat her and would have sex in front of her with a stream of lovers.
And far from being full of remorse when she went to prison for her crime, Kelly reveals her mother felt no such thing.
Instead she became friends with notorious child killers including Myra Hindley and Rose West.
Along with Bernadette McNeilly, three others were convicted of Suzanne’s murder: Jean Powell, 26, and her ex-husband Glyn Powell, 29, were given life sentences. Anthony Dudson, 16, was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
Jeffrey Leigh, 27, was sentenced to 12 years for false imprisonment; Clifford Pook, also known as Clifford Hayes, 18, was sentenced to 16 years in a Young Offenders’ Institution for false imprisonment and conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.
All are now free – Leigh in 1998, Pook in 2001, McNeilly in 2015, Jean Powell in 2017 and Glyn Powell in 2023 – despite persistent campaigning by Suzanne’s mother Elizabeth Dunbar and veteran Manchester MP Graham Stringer opposing their release.
Mr Justice Poots, sentencing them in December 1993, said the killing was ‘as appalling a murder as it is possible to imagine.’
What is incomprehensible is how the cue for this terrible crime was something entirely insignificant, as Kelly reveals.
One afternoon in December 1992, Kelly recalls waving off Suzanne from their front door after she had picked her up from school.
She remembered thinking Suzanne’s jacket looked familiar.
‘My last memory of Suzanne was when she picked me up. She gave me a hug, watched me cross the road safely, then turned and ran,’ she said. ‘I remember thinking: she’s got my mother’s coat on.’
Jean Powell (left), 26, and her ex-husband Glyn Powell (right), 29, were given life sentences
Pictured: Police officers search an address in Moston at the time of the kidnap and murder of Suzanne
Pictured: This is the house where Suzanne lived in Moston. She was brutally murdered after days of torture
A Daily Mail article on Suzanne Capper’s killers being jailed in December 1993
It later emerged that McNeilly believed Suzanne had stolen her pink duffle coat – which in part led to the killing.
Kelly’s existence was one of neglect against the backdrop of theft, drug-dealing, wild parties by her mother and her gang of benefit-claiming neer-do-wells.
‘There are no good memories of Bernadette at all,’ Kelly said.
‘I was physically, mentally and sexually abused [by a member of her mother’s gang].
‘But I have always been led to believe my mother was the ringleader.
‘She used to get a man called ‘Blackman John’ in to leather me. But she was already beating me and tying me to chairs before she met the others.’
The torture only intensified when Bernadette McNeilly met Jean Powell in 1992 – and moved in with her and her three children, along with Kelly, despite the fact her own house was practically next door.
McNeilly, 24 at the time, was sleeping with Anthony Dudson. Jeffrey Leigh, 26, visited the house to buy drugs. All were regular users of a cocktail of substances.
In this new house of horrors, Kelly was subjected to twisted games including being made to stand on one leg for as long as possible with beatings afterwards, while the gang laughed.
Kelly said of the abuse: ‘The laughter about that happening was really bizarre – pure evil. It was fun for them.
‘There was the sexual abuse. My mum used to have sex with people right in front of me – regularly.’
Kelly recalls being made to hold her hand over a fish tank and being told, at the age of seven, that it contained a flesh-eating piranha.
And in a horrifying incident, she was made to watch as the gang took a live swan into the house, daubed it with occultist symbols, and beheaded it.
‘When you cut an animal’s head off, the body is still moving,’ she said. ‘Blood was everywhere. I was screaming. The swan was still running around with its head cut off.’
She added: ‘They used to make me hold my hand out at night and smack me with a ruler. I was put in a room screaming and crying. I remember always being hungry. I was starving.’
She recalled trying to steal a box of cornflakes from the kitchen out of famished desperation – only to spill it everywhere in a panic.
She tried to hide in an upstairs wardrobe – but a trail of blood from a cut on her foot as she fled the kitchen led ‘Blackman John’ to the door and she was beaten by him.
Jeffrey Leigh (left), 27, was sentenced to 12 years for false imprisonment; Clifford Pook, also known as Clifford Hayes (right), 18, was sentenced to 16 years in a Young Offenders’ Institution for false imprisonment and conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm
When she was lured to the house, Suzanne was stripped and had her head shaved before being beaten with a piece of wood and a belt
Elizabeth Capper, the mother of murdered teenager Suzanne, at her daughter’s funeral
‘These are very clear memories,’ says Kelly today.
Suzanne Capper was 16 when she was introduced to the Moston gang by Clifford Pook, Jean Powell’s brother, and began babysitting Jean Powell’s three children.
Suzanne was vulnerable: she had spent time in the care of social services in 1990 before moving in with her stepfather after he separated from her mother. Then, around 1992, she increasingly spent her time at Powell’s home.
A kind but lonely girl, she was described as putting up with the abusive behaviour of Powell and Bernadette McNeilly rather than having no friends at all.
The warped friendship was not to last.
When McNeilly and Dudson contracted a lice infection, they were convinced Suzanne was to blame as she regularly slept in a bed at Powell’s house that they used for sex.
The ‘stolen’ duffle coat further infuriated them.
And so, on December 7 1992, they lured Suzanne to the house, telling her a boy she was interested in was waiting to meet her.
It was a lie. When she arrived, Suzanne was stripped and had her head shaved before being beaten with a piece of wood and a belt.
Then she was locked in a cupboard overnight.
When it became clear Kelly and the other children could hear her crying, a decision was made to move her.
Suzanne was then carted to Bernadette McNeilly’s house down the street where the torture continued: bound spreadeagled to a bed with electrical flex, she was blindfolded and gagged, injected with drugs, and poked between the eyes with a lit cigarette.
Pook laughed as he yanked out two of her teeth with pliers. He kept them as trophies. The pliers were later found by police on a shelf next to a Christmas tree.
After leaving her in her own filth for days, the gang dunked Suzanne in a bath of concentrated disinfectant and scrubbed her with a yard brush.
The abrasion was so harsh the marks even showed through the burns later inflicted on her body.
Finally, the gang embarked on their final mission to do away with her once and for all.
Under the cover of darkness on December 14, as Kelly slept, Suzanne was bundled into a stolen Fiat Panda dressed just in her knickers by the Powells, McNeilly and Dudson, who drove her to scrubland at Werneth Low, near Stockport.
They pushed her down an embankment, where McNeilly doused her in petrol and one of the group set her alight.
As she burned alive, they sped off singing ‘Burn, baby, burn!’, from The Tramps’ hit Disco Inferno, convinced they were getting away with murder.
However they didn’t bet on a final act of stunning courage from Suzanne. Despite suffering 80 per cent burns, she stumbled back up to the road and staggered a quarter of a mile seeking help.
After being rushed to hospital, she gave police the names of her captors, and the address where she had been held. She then slipped into a coma from which she would never wake, dying on December 18 1992.
Coroner Leonard Gorodkin would later say she had ‘suffered tremendously’, with ‘no chance of survival’.
Within two hours of Suzanne being found, the gang’s devil den in Moston was raided by police.
Newborn Kelly Higgins is pictured with her mother Bernadette McNeilly in 1985. The abusive mother would go on to murder Kelly’s babysitter
Kelly (pictured) did not find out the truth about her mother’s role in the horrifying murder of Suzanne Capper until more than a 15 years after her shocking death
Kelly recalls the moment vividly: ‘I wasn’t allowed to go to school that day. I remember very clearly I was crying and begging to go to school.
‘I wanted to go because I got fed at school.
‘Then I heard the noise of the police and ran downstairs to the front room. I was screaming for my mum – because no matter how much of an abuser your parent is, she is still your mum.’
In surreal scenes, she then waved off Bernadette McNeilly ‘like it was normal’ as she was driven away in a police van.
Kelly was passed into the care of her father, who would later give her back to social services as he struggled with drug addiction.
She eventually found a loving foster home, but her new family struggled to cope with a child who now had complex emotional needs due to her traumatic experiences with Bernadette McNeilly.
But Kelly later found happiness with a new foster family.
Despite begging not to, Kelly claims she was still made to visit her abusive mother in Durham Prison by social services.
Kelly has unhappy memories of visiting her mother and has revealed that it was during one visit in 1996 that she encountered one of Britain’s most notorious killers.
She says today: ‘I remember seeing Myra Hindley. I needed the toilet and they took me onto the wing to go because it was during a lock-up.
‘When I got home, I told my foster parents there was an old lady with a stick looking down at me from a prison landing.
‘My foster parents got a picture up on the computer, asked me, ‘Is this her?’. I said ‘yes’ – and my foster mum said I had just seen Myra Hindley.’
Kelly claims that her mother became close to Hindley and there were even rumours of a jailhouse romance, although she never saw evidence of this on her prison visits.
Bernadette McNeilly was also said to be on good terms with serial killer Rose West, another resident of Durham.
Kelly did not find out the truth about her mother’s role in the horrifying murder of Suzanne Capper until more than a 15 years after her shocking death.
As a child she was told her mother had been involved in a killing, and that’s why she had been jailed, but did not know her beloved babysitter was the victim.
It was during a reading of a book called ‘Sadistic Killers’ that she saw McNeilly had tortured her beloved babysitter to death.
‘I always knew she had killed a child. [That it was Suzanne] was obviously a shock to me.
‘I rang my mother and I was screaming I never wanted to see her again and she said ‘Okay Kelly. Bye.”
Kelly has not heard from her mother since.
Scarred by the memories of visiting her mother in prison, she has now applied for a Parliamentary petition to strip the parental rights of criminals jailed for child abuse.
At present, parents in the prison system retain a veto over decisions affecting their children in foster care and those that have not been adopted.
She explained; ‘If you were beaten by your mum or dad, if you were scarred, bruised, burned with cigarettes, anything like that, your parents still keep their parental rights.
‘Children should not be forced to visit parents who have been their abusers. Parental rights need completely reassessing.’
McNeilly was released in 2015, reportedly taking a new name. As of 2019, she was reported to be living in a halfway house in Reading with Karen Matthews, who was jailed after faking the kidnap of her young daughter Shannon Matthews in 2008, and was working in a BP petrol station near Twyford.
Today Kelly, who works as a beautician and is happily married with a son aged 21 and two daughters aged 17 and 12. She remains understandably traumatised by her upbringing.
‘I was abused at the hands of my evil mother and there is still no circle of protection for me. I am not allowed to know where our mother is.
‘I am not allowed to talk about her name change – just what I can find out through the media.
‘I am as all right as I can be. But it is difficult to live your life grieving for the mother you never had.’
