Post by Graveyardbride on Dec 18, 2014 11:59:02 GMT -5
Repressed Memory, Black Magic Trial in Wales
Sixty-five-year-old Albert Hickman and his wife Carolee Hickman, 64, of Wales, have pled not guilty to historic charges of rape and sexual abuse dating back 40 years. A schoolgirl terrified by threats of black magic, made by a woman claiming to be a witch has told a jury how she was sexually abused and raped over and over again. The alleged victim, now in her 50s, said the horror of what she believes happened to her while at comprehensive school had been buried for 40 years before memories resurfaced.
The accuser told Cardiff Crown Court she went to Carolee Hickman’s Bridgend home while playing hooky from school with friends, aged 11, but was soon being terrified into submission. “Carolee said she was a witch and would come and get me and would make my mother ill – she even said she could kill my mother if she wanted to,” the alleged victim said. “She had a knife with a jeweled handle kept in a wooden box with carvings on the top. She cut my hand and sucked the blood out of it. There were tarot cards she used to tell our fortunes and she even had a black cape.” Asked if the cape could have been one Hickman wore as a member of the Salvation Army, the woman told the court: “She had two – the black one with a hood and the one she wore to the Salvation Army.”
Carolee Hickman denies indecently assaulting the girl and aiding and abetting her husband to commit rape while they lived in South Wales during the 1970s. Former RAF mechanic Albert Hickman has pled not guilty to rape.
The alleged victim said she and friends visited Mrs. Hickman in Cricklewood Close because she would allow them to smoke and even drink while her husband was away working. “She told me she was a member of a coven and moved on to kissing me, then touching me and me touching her, both of us naked in bed together," she said. “I was on the bed when she held my arms while he [Albert Hickman] raped me.” The witness said fear about what could happen caused her return to the Hickmans’ house over and over again. Becoming upset, she told the court: “I didn’t want to go and be raped daily by her – I was too frightened not to go.”
She said the abuse came back to her bit by bit when she started having counseling following a series of family tragedies, including close bereavements and cancer. Her counselor said alarm bells rang when the woman talked of a dark cloud hanging over her, not just since the illnesses and deaths as you would expect, but for 40 years. “I asked about her childhood, but she could remember very little”, the counselor said “I would ask her to try to think back – it was her choice – but she was so frightened she didn’t want to look there. She knew she lived under a black cloud, but was petrified of finding out why.”
Eventually she did think back, it was said and the first returning memories were of black magic, pornography and a woman. “She remembered darkness and suffocating because a man was on top of her and a woman was holding her down. She was controlled by a fear that she must not tell anyone.” The alleged victim added: “I don’t know how the brain works, how it gets rid of bad things, but I remembered nothing – apart from over the years, every now and again Carolee’s name would pop into my mind and I would feel frightened.”
Barristers for the couple suggested that any talk of the occult by Mrs. Hickman to the woman and her friends would have been only about thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. “She did talk about him but what happened was nothing to do with Dennis Wheatley – it was her doing these things to me,” the alleged victim told the court.
It was also put to the accuser that she had based her evidence on information on the internet about the Hickmans. But the woman said information found online had been searched for by her daughter and not her. “My daughter put the name in (Google) and said there was something about a Carolee, two men and another woman and convictions for child abuse in Telford,” she said. “Then my daughter said ‘But it can’t be anything to do with you, mum, because it’s about the occult.’ I felt sick – I had not told her about the black magic. I burst into tears and told her to shut it down. What are the chances of me picking a name from all people I have known and finding they are people who did these things. They raped and abused me and frightened me – it was those people sitting behind you.”
The court was told that Carolee Hickman laughed out loud when police asked if she were a witch. She denied indecently assaulting a schoolgirl in the 1970s and said she had never seen the girl before.
Detective Constable Joanne Lewis told the jury she found a large number of books on spells and the occult when she arrested the grandmother and her husband at their home in Shropshire. The woman admitted she has an interest in witchcraft, but said that had not developed until she left Bridgend and was married for the second time following her divorce from Hickman in 1985. “I’ve got books on spells,” Carolee Hickman admitted, “but I wouldn’t know how to do them – I wouldn’t know where to start. I had tarot cards too, but I didn’t understand them either and a cloak ... and a wand which I bought on eBay. It was just a bit of stick – a right ripoff.”
The court also learned the Hickmans were jailed at Northampton Crown Court in November 1982 when Albert Hickman was charged with five sex offenses and Carolee for indecent assault and aiding and abetting another man to rape a 14-year-old girl as part of a devil-worship ritual. Pornographic material and items used in black magic were seized from the other man’s home.
Sources: Liz Keen, The Mirror, December 18, 2014; Walesonline, and The Devil in Wales.
