I have touched before on the story of Carol Felstead, who was possibly the first ‘accredited’ satanic abuse cult victim. Carol died on the 29 June 2005 aged 41 – from ‘unascertained’ causes according to the Coroner.
Part of the difficulty in following Carol’s sad story is that those who surrounded her at her death had re-named her Carole Myers. So, it is Carol Felstead’s family who have finally won the right to a new inquest concerning the death of someone named as Carole Myers, but known to them as their sister, Carol Felstead. A small detail but only one of the myriad changes that had been wrought of the life and times of Carol Felstead.
When Carol died, naked from the waist down, surrounded by medication, the authorities were alerted to her death by a telephone call from the former head of Ethics of the British Medical Association, Dr Fleur Fisher, who claimed to be on a train heading for Manchester, 200 miles away. Dr Fisher has never been called upon to explain how she could know the reason for Carol’s death nor direct the emergency services to the exact placement of her body in the rear bedroom.
Nor has Dr Fisher ever explained why she called Carol’s insurance provider, claiming to be her ‘unofficial Mother’, nor why she later claimed to be Carol’s next of kin to arrange her cremation and to empty her flat of its contents. Despite her repeated attempts to prove to the authorities how ‘close’ she was to Carol, she was never asked to give evidence at the original inquest.
20 years beforehand, Carol was a trainee nurse, when she had the misfortune to come into contact with Dr Fleur Fisher, who was then a humble family planning practitioner in Carol’s GP’s surgery.
Dr Fleur Fisher became a respected figure at the British Medical Association. She was also one of a group of ‘true believers’ who were convinced that Satanic Abuse existed in Britain and could be rooted out by therapy using high doses of medication and dubious ‘recovered memory’ and mind control techniques. She worked alongside Valerie Sinason, a child psychotherapist based at the Tavistock Clinic in London; Dr Rob Hale, a consultant psychotherapist, psychiatrist and adult psychoanalyst, also at the Tavistock; and Vera Diamond, now deceased, a Harley Street self-styled psychotherapist who specialised in mind numbing relaxation therapy and deprogramming brainwashed cult victims.
Along the path of Dr Fisher’s transformation into respected establishment medical figure – Carol was also transformed.
From slightly confused teenage trainee nurse, into a victim of ‘extensive physical and sexual satanic abuse’ – a highly prized exhibit for the fledgling ‘Satanic Abuse industry’ then recently imported from America. Carol was systematically cut off from her family, and came to believe that she had given birth to six children, been abused by ‘two top Tory politicians’, that her Mother and Father were high priests of the Satanic movement who had ‘sat her on the body of her dead older sister before setting fire to the house in an attempt to kill her’. She was jealously guarded by those who were building a business model based on such ‘truths’ – and repeatedly told that contact with her ‘abusers’ would only delay her recovery.
Carol died after almost 20 years of such questionable treatment by a succession of doctors, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and unqualified counsellors who implanted the notion – and then perpetuated a false belief- that she had been a victim of Satanic ritual abuse.
After her death, when her family were finally alerted to these questionable allegations, they were able to prove that her ‘older sister’ had died of a heart complaint two years before Carol was born, and the ‘house fire’ was a full year before she was born.
The family have fought a fierce and relentless battle for nine years to uncover the full involvement of figures such as Dr Fisher and Valerie Sinason in the events that culminated in Carol’s death.
Last week the Westminster Coroner’s Office finally agreed to hold a second inquest into the death of ‘Carole Myers’.
It is hopefully the final indignity that the family have to be grateful for the opportunity to look into the death of the mythical figure known as ‘Carole Myers’, a figment of the minds of religious fundamentalist figures and ‘right-on’ social workers who dreamed up the entire ‘Satanic Abuse Theory’ that led to the current moral panic in the United Kingdom. One day they may be dignified with answers as to what happened to their sister – Carol Felstead.
They want to hold to account those who treated Carol for more than 20 years for ‘ritual’ abuse which never occurred by a Satanic cult which never existed.