2002-2003

2002, the year of the World Cup in Japan and Korea. Sandra was still staying in Inchture with me. I’d finished my studio training and was in the process of sourcing a building in Aberdeen to use as a studio. Sandra travelled to Aberdeen with me one day to search for premises. We pinpointed a building which I later leased and started the studio fit out.

Now starting a business entails a variety of financial and banking transactions including new business accounts, leases, car leasing and borrowing. With all that comes credit checks and with credit checks comes downfalls if all is not in order. Sandra  knew that of course and for a while now her buttocks had been getting a tad squeaky, hence her lack of enthusiasm at our impending financial improvement. She was starting to worry.

This next bit is important and carries a lot of evidence. I was at home one day and received a call from the leasing company dealing with the lease of my company car. They had carried out a credit check and couldn’t lease me the car. They told me I had a bank loan for £10,000 with The Royal Bank of Scotland and had never paid an instalment. That was news to me as I didn’t recall having taken out a loan. I called the bank to find out what was going on and, right enough, there was a loan of £10,000 in my name, none of the instalments having been paid. I asked the bank to send me the paperwork, which they did. Sure enough there was a bank loan for £10,000, taken out in my name. The silly thing was the documentation wasn’t signed by me. My name was written in Sandra’s handwriting. Not only that, the witness signature on the documentation was Suzanne, one of Sandra’s friends. I called the bank and told them it wasn’t my ‘signature’, which they should have checked in the first place.

Let’s give a few lines to Suzanne’s witness signature. I have two trains of thought here. Either Suzanne was party to the fraud or Sandra, yet again,  dumped on a very close friend from a great height, making her believe it was my loan she was witnessing. I know they were best of friends but I’m not so sure Suzanne would have knowingly committed fraud. Suzanne, I hear, is another of Sandra’s best friends she no longer talks to. One of the best friends who apparently took her to Spain. Oh dear!

When I found out about the £10,000 fraud I spoke to Sandra about it. She claimed she did it for her brother, so he could get double glazing. Really?

On top of the £15,000 fraud Sandra was also in a serious amount of debt, to the point she took out a trust deed. I know her debt amounted to at least a further £15,000 and possibly more, even up to and beyond £30,000. I doubt the £10,000 loan was for her brother.

So here we have it, the fraud and the debt are the reason Sandra had to leave and she left shortly after I found out about the loan. She had to leave because she had to eventually force the sale of our family home to help pay her debt. Not only that but that’s the sole reason she didn’t want to move house several years earlier. Had we sold up then we’d never have secured another mortgage for another house due to her fraudulent activity, her bad credit and the bad credit she bestowed on me. That’s why she was so flat when I took my redundancy and took on the studio franchise. That’s why we couldn’t move to Sheffield and improve our lives to such an extent  that our offspring would have had sufficient help with deposits to buy houses, cars and get married. The long term effect of Sandra’s complete lack of foresight and her lying and stealing had a huge adverse affect on her whole family.

She knew her time was up and she was on the verge of being found out. She was a very worried person by the beginning of the 2000s. Look at what she had to hide. At least two affairs, very possibly three, £15,000 bank and credit card fraud and a heap of debt which held her family back. On top of that an unwanted pregnancy she claimed was mine. Rotten to the core.

This is when Sandra left. I said goodbye to her one morning, went to Aberdeen and came back to a delivery of large boxes in the living room. She couldn’t even have them delivered to our garage for me. Twenty years of loving and she shafted us all. Not just me, her family. I appreciate she made it difficult for herself with mistake after mistake and lie after lie to hide these mistakes but at some point she should have held her hands up. An affair and £5000 of credit card fraud takes a lot of forgiving, particularly when I paid for that initial fraud to enable us to move on. But I forgave. And we moved on to the discovery of a £10,000 bank loan fraud and another affair. Not to mention my suspicions over an earlier affair. That’s a lot to take in and a lot not to be bitter and depressed about.

Yes, rotten to the core.

Throughout the summer of 2002 I was back and forth to Aberdeen, overseeing the studio fit out and holding exhibitions in preparation for opening the studio. It took a bit of time to get planning permission as it was a listed building so we had to apply through Historic Scotland, which took an age. Due to that we had to put the opening off until October of 2022.

During this time I was still speaking to Sandra. Or rather she was still speaking to me. I never actually stopped. That’s where our kids get the huffing influence. She felt it necessary to take control of me seeing Sophie though, making my working in Aberdeen an excuse. However, we were still getting on. I’d swept the £10,000 fraud under the carpet as it was no longer my issue. The studio was taking shape and one Thursday on my way home from Aberdeen I called Sandra to arrange to go and see Sophie. I think we may have arranged it earlier. When there we were having a decent and emotional chat and I asked her to come and see the studio. She wanted to and we agreed we would go up to Aberdeen the following Thursday, as a family. What happened next was unexpected.

On the Monday or Tuesday Sandra was arrested for the £10,000 fraud. I’ve no doubt she was fingerprinted and kept in a cell for a while. Not a pleasant experience. I know, I used to process prisoners. It may have been the following day she called me. Or maybe I called her as a policeman had come and told me she’d been charged. She was obviously upset on the phone and I remember her asking how I could do that to her after twenty years. Really? She did it herself. Happy to walk away and leave me with a loan of £10,000, no repayments having been made, the consequence being me having to give up the studio franchise due to an inability to borrow due to a poor credit score. Or, of course, forking out £250 per month to pay for a loan on her behalf, having watched her ruin our family. Oh, and all after twenty years. I wasn’t taking responsibility for that loan, like I did for her with the £5,000 fraud. This is a woman who, within that twenty years, had at least two affairs, possibly three, an unwanted pregnancy she was happy to say was mine, along with committing fraud twice. That’s the arrogance part of her sociopathy.

That arrest, by the way, is why Sandra no longer talks to me. Plain, simple and undeniable. It’s so sad that she perpetuates bitterness and blame borne from her own illicit actions.

What happened next is despicable. On the way home from Aberdeen one evening I stopped at the the shop in Invergowrie, a regular occurrence. On leaving the shop I bumped into Stephanie and Sophie. Stephanie walked away and I put my hand on her shoulder. On returning home Sandra asked if I had touched her and she told her I had.  What happened next beggars belief and illustrates the evil in the woman. I was charged with assault. Sandra felt it appropriate that she force her 9 year old and 14 year old daughters into court to testify against their dad. That was pure and vindictive revenge for her arrest, an arrest she blamed me for. She used both her young daughters to gain revenge. What kind of mum would do that to her daughters? When I went back to court to have my name cleared the judge remembered the two young girls standing in court six months earlier, his disgust being obvious.

The stuff Eastenders is made of.

Talking of affairs, here is a wee story that says it all. As explained, Sandra had an affair with her best friend’s husband in the mid 1990s. Possibly her second affair. In 2000-01 she had an affair with Vic. In late 2001 she sent the following letter to my parents accusing me of having an affair with the woman I eventually met, who came along after Sandra’s two (or three) affairs, and pregnancy. This she claimed was why she filed for divorce.

Did I say sociopath?