Since she heard that Robert Howard was dead, Priscilla Gahan has felt overwhelmed by emotions that she thought she had managed to bury during the 21 years since he raped, imprisoned and strangled her when she was 16.
“I am really, really angry,” she says. “He should have been done for attempted murder for what he did to me.
“He never intended me to get away. Someone needs to be held responsible for the way they handled my case – even if he hadn’t gone on to kill two other girls.”
Howard, who was 71, died in Durham prison on October 2nd, of natural causes. He was serving a life sentence for the murder of 14-year-old Londoner Hannah Williams in 2001.
He had raped and strangled the teenager and buried her on waste ground. Her body was discovered during excavations for the Channel Tunnel a year later. Gahan gave “similar fact” evidence against Howard at his trial in Kent in 2003.
Two years later, Howard was charged with the murder of 15-year-old Arlene Arkinson who was last seen with him in the early hours of August 14th, 1994.
Her body has never been found despite extensive searches. Similar fact evidence was not called and the jury was unaware that Howard had a long history of convictions for sexual violence.
They did not know that when he went to a disco in Bundoran, Co Donegal, with Arkinson, he was out on bail facing charges of having raped Gahan. He was acquitted of the murder.
Police reaction
“When I was in England for his trial for killing Hannah, the Kent police said to me, ‘Do you realise your evidence is going to put this man away for a very long time?’” Gahan says.
“Yet when I went to the police in Castlederg in 1993 after he raped me their attitude was scary.
“They banged the table and shouted at me. I felt they didn’t believe me. They didn’t seem to take it seriously.”
Gahan lives now with her partner and teenage children in the village where she grew up in Co Westmeath.
She had left her childhood home there when she was 15, following a friend to the North.
She got a job in a restaurant in the small Border town of Castlederg in Co Tyrone and lodgings with a middle aged woman, Pat Quinn, whose daughter, Donna, was around Gahan's age.
“I was quite wild and I was running away from daddy,” she says. “Looking back I see that it wasn’t his fault. He was on his own with 10 children and he couldn’t control us.” Her mother had been killed in an accident when Gahan was five years old.
Pat Quinn’s partner was Robert Howard. He attached himself to Quinn’s daughter and her circle of teenage girlfriends, including Arkinson and Gahan.
“He was like a daddy who didn’t try to stop you doing anything,” says Gahan. “He was from the South, like me, and he used to take me up to the bog because it reminded me of home.
“He bought me presents all the time – he always had plenty of money. Looking back I can see he was setting me up.”
Looking back, Gahan can also see that Howard did reveal glimpses of a sinister side. “He said he hated Arlene and would like to strangle her,” she says.
“I realise now he was having sex with one of the other girls.”
Elaborate trap
In 1993, Gahan fell for an elaborate ruse Howard contrived. She told everyone she was going to Westmeath for the weekend, but secretly went to Howard’s flat, expecting to meet a young man she fancied there.
Instead Howard was alone. He brought her to a pub in another village.
“When we got back to his flat I had a terrible headache and he gave me pills. I think he must have drugged me. Next thing I remembered was waking up and he was coming on to me.”
Horrified, she told him to stop. He became violent and put a noose around her neck.
“It was as if he had left and someone else was there,” she says. He held her captive, raping her repeatedly.
“I was roaring and crying and he told me to shut up, that he was going to do what he was doing whether I was alive or dead,” she says.
On the third day, while he was asleep, she escaped out of an upstairs window in a room where he kept caged birds and ran to the RUC station.
She gave her statement and was forensically examined. Photographs were taken of the strangulation marks on her neck.
Howard was arrested and given bail to live with the Quinns. A curfew was imposed – he was instructed not to go out at night or into pubs.
This did not stop him going with Arkinson and others to a disco in Bundoran, Co Donegal on August 13th, 1994.
Police Ombudsman Al Hutchinson found in 2008 that police were unaware of the bail terms.
The Ombudsman’s report did, however, criticise the RUC for failing to move swiftly to arrest and investigate Howard.
Arkinson, vulnerable and just 15, had disappeared having last been seen in the company of a man whose criminal record included the attempted rape of a six-year-old girl, the attempted rape of a 29-year-old woman and the rape of a 58-year-old woman – a man who had been described by a psychiatrist as an “explosive psychopath”.
Even though Howard’s story was riddled with inconsistencies, it was 46 days before he was arrested.
After a period in care, Gahan returned to her father’s home in Westmeath. “I was terrified Howard would come after me,” she says.
“I went to England and got a job. I liked it and was just getting settled when I got word I had to come back to give evidence.”
She came back, and waited – but she was not called.
Originally charged with multiple rapes and with buggery, Howard was found guilty in his victim’s absence of unlawful carnal knowledge.
“It was as if I had gone along with it and the only thing wrong was my age,” she says.
Murder suspect
Howard was released on bail pending sentencing. He was by this stage suspected of having murdered Arkinson.
Forensic psychiatrist Ian Bownes was asked to assess Howard at this time.
He described Howard’s pattern of identifying vulnerable victims, his use of a “sophisticated grooming process” his capacity to “escalate his offending behaviour” and the extreme unlikelihood that he would change.
Judge Smyth gave Howard a three-year suspended sentence and told him to stay away from teenage girls.
Howard went to Scotland and took up with a woman who had a 10-year-old daughter.
Then, exposed by a newspaper for his past, he moved to London, where he targeted, groomed, raped and murdered Hannah Williams.
“Sometimes I feel guilty that I got away,” she says. “I know what those girls he killed went through. Sometimes I think that if I had been stronger I could have got the police to take me more seriously and then he would have been in jail.
“I feel I should have gone to see him in Durham and got him to tell me where he buried Arlene.
“I feel guilty that I was too strict with my own teenage daughter. I feel that people are looking at me, judging me.”
Most of the time she knows that she is not the one with questions to answer. “I want them all to know I am not a terrified 16-year-old now. I am a woman with a lot of questions.
“One of the judges said lessons had been learned in Howard’s case. It is not true. The only people who have learned anything are his victims and I have no doubt at all that there are a lot who have never spoken out.”
