Gypsy Jane - I've Been Shot Four Times and Served Three Prison Terms?This is the Incredible Story of (15 page)

Then, about a week later, Sharon turned up at my door. She explained to me that the other women, Phoebe and Tracey, knew about me and each other. Phoebe, who had the baby, was terrified of me so I told her to bring her to me and to tell her that she had nothing to fear from me. That night she brought 29-year-old Phoebe with her one-year-old baby son, who was named Matt. The boy was the spitting image of Matt and I fell in love with the baby and felt so sorry for Phoebe. My heart went out to her. She was so terrified that it hurt to see it. She thought she couldn’t go to Matt’s funeral because I would do her if she did. I said, ‘I only just found out Matt had two other families and a child when Matt was shot.’

I asked if Tracey had any kids with Matt. She said they didn’t and I told her that meant baby Matt was going to get everything that had belonged to his dad. ‘He’s Matt’s blood,’ I said and promised to go with her to sort it out with Tracey. We arrived at Tracey’s house at 3am that same morning and woke her up. When she opened the door, she knew who I was straight away. She said she hadn’t been seeing Matt when he was with
me and that Matt had left her. I told her I didn’t give a shit about Matt any longer and that I was only there for his boy.

‘Everything of Matt’s goes to the baby,’ I told her.

That night she signed everything over to baby Matt and agreed to deliver by the weekend. So I had done what I’d gone to do. The baby’s mother was at peace and we dropped her off and I went to the gypsy site to stay for a while with Sharon. I needed to prepare for Matt’s funeral and Sharon was there for me all the way. But I began to think about the other woman, Tracey. Although she didn’t have any kids with Matt, she had been with him for 17 years and she did have 4 kids by another man. I know how much my own son loved Matt so I knew her kids must have loved him as well. I decided to go back and see her alone.

I could see this woman was hurting, even as she tried to reassure me that Matt had finished with her by the time he had got together with me. I told her I wasn’t there about Matt. I couldn’t care less about him at that time. I was there to make sure she was OK. In any case, she didn’t know that saying that Matt had finished with her only made it worse for me. I would never want another woman’s man. I’m not like that and it hurt me to hear her say that. She said I was his soul mate but, again, at this moment in time I hated Matt for all the lies. I felt betrayed and didn’t believe he was my soul mate.

‘I didn’t even know him really,’ I told Tracey. ‘He was
just one big lie.’ How they both coped with knowing he had other women was beyond me.

I was there a few hours before I phoned the gypsies to ask them to come and pick me up. I now felt as much for Tracey as I did for Phoebe. My heart went out to both of them. We were preparing for the funeral, which was to take place near Maidstone in Kent, and I don’t know what I would have done without Sharon. I decided that Matt was to be cremated and that John, Phoebe, baby Matt, Sharon and I would be in the first car and Tracey and her family would be in the second car. I didn’t care who was in the other cars. This didn’t go down too well with Phoebe. She didn’t even want Tracey and her family there but I insisted that Tracey and her family went. It was Matt’s day. She said it wasn’t fair on the baby. To be honest, I’d had enough of her and I told her this wasn’t about her or the baby and that she should stop using baby Matt as a weapon.

I played ‘See You On The Other Side’ by Ozzy Osbourne for Matt at the funeral. Although I hated Matt in my mind for what he had done, in my soul I knew I still loved him. I just didn’t want to admit it. The lyrics of loss and leaving summed up my feelings perfectly. The funeral went well and, when it was over, I told both families that, if ever they needed me, I was just a phone call away. I thanked Sharon for being there for me and left Matt’s ashes with Phoebe and then I left for home.

It felt good to be back. I’d been away for a few weeks
sorting out the funeral and helping both women and just wanted to get back to my own life. When I got home, a few people came to see me to wish me well and among them was a woman called Toni. She was a Scorpio, same as Matt, and I met her through another friend and liked her straight away. It was mad because, subconsciously, I thought that, being a Scorpio, she would be like Matt. I felt I’d looked to the right and buried Matt and looked to the left and met her.

I had another mate named Clare until the day I went around to Clare’s house and she and her man were rowing. I was at the front door and wanted to leave but she asked me to come in. I didn’t want to but I saw the fear in her eyes so I did in the hope that me being there would put an end to their arguing. Clare was trying to get him to leave but he was coked out of his head and not having it. I wasn’t going to get involved so I sat at the kitchen table wishing I wasn’t there as they screamed at each other. Then it got physical and he punched her in the face.

My motto was never to get involved in a domestic but I wasn’t going to sit there while he beat up my friend. I jumped up and said it would be better if he left for a couple of hours and came back when everything had calmed down. He made the mistake of telling me to mind my own business. Then he went for me. Big mistake. I picked up a vase from the kitchen table and smashed it straight across his head. He fell to the floor and there was blood everywhere, the water in the vase
mixing with the blood. It splattered on the walls and across the floor and the bloke screamed for Clare to help him. By then he was trying to get out of the house. But she dragged him back inside because of all the blood. It was mental. I told her I was leaving and I told her to call him an ambulance and get rid of him. Then I went. I’d done him good and proper but he’d asked for it.

Later that night I phoned Clare to make sure she was OK and she told me she was up at the hospital. She said I had been out of order and shouldn’t have done her fella. As you can imagine, that made me angry and I told her that he might use her as a punch bag and get away with it but no one would punch me. Our friendship ended that day but Toni said I was right to have done what I did and she stayed my friend. Toni and I became best friends and I grew to love her like a sister. She had a beautiful family with her man Steve, who loved her with every breath that he took, and a daughter. She had the perfect family in my eyes.

Then out, of the blue, one day Toni said she had fallen for an MP. I couldn’t believe it. I was just worried for her and but she said it was nothing to do with me and, to be honest, she was right. It didn’t have anything to do with me so I just turned a blind eye and prayed she would come to her senses. She then eventually told me she was going out with another man. She said this bloke’s dad had died and split £250,000 between his four sons. Just like that, she said she wanted the money. Her new fella would get at least 60 grand, she said. I
couldn’t believe my ears and put it down to wishful thinking. Yet I was having my doubts about Toni.

I met a friend I hadn’t seen for a while. She told me her brother had recently had some bad luck with money and was staying at hers while he got back on his feet. We exchanged phone numbers and said we would see each other in a few days. That night her husband texted me and asked me if would I go on a date with her brother. He was Bob – a nobody. I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way. I mean he wasn’t a gangster or a wannabe gangster. He was just Bob. By now I was 43 years old and I’d been out with murderers, gangsters and all the madmen of life and I just wanted to be normal. So I agreed to see Bob, who was just three years younger than me.

Bob had been out of work for a few years due to coming out of a relationship. To me, he was a breath of fresh air and I was falling in love again. I had money. I was ducking and diving, doing a bit of this and a bit of that but none of the other, if you know what I mean. Nothing too heavy. Well, I had tried the straight life and it hadn’t worked, through no fault of mine.

Bob stayed at mine some of the time and, after a few weeks, he wanted to sleep with me but I couldn’t. It didn’t feel right because I lived with John and I didn’t feel comfortable. We had to find a place of our own. Bob said he had a house he had bought for £40,000 but that it was derelict and nobody had ever lived in it. It
was in a bad state. There were no doors, not even a toilet, and squatters had been in too. The garden was overgrown and had been used as a dumping site. Now I had the money to fix this house up and make it our home so we started to work on it. John was 23 by now and he gave me his blessing. Bob went back to work at his dad’s forklift-truck garage and I did up the house and turned it into a home. Bob didn’t bring any wages home because he owed his dad some money from when he had been depressed and his dad had supported him. He was paying him back out of his wages. At least, that’s what I was told. I didn’t ask any questions and, anyway, I didn’t mind because he was making amends and trying to get back on his feet with my help.

Bob was no longer a layabout in scruffy clothes. He was back to being a working man and started to dress well. Oh, how I fell in love with a nobody. As I said, don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t mean it disrespectfully. I mean, in my world, Bob was a nobody. But I was tired of that world now. I was sick of wannabes. The guns, the knives, the drugs, the gangsters and murderers. I was finally away from all the badness of life. All I ever wanted to be was a nobody, living a normal life with a loving family. Do you know what nobodies have that I’d craved all my life? Peace of mind. To me, Bob’s family was the perfect family you read about in a fairy tale. I thought I had arrived at where I wanted to be, with a bloke who was on the straight and narrow.

I spent thousands on the house. It was our dream home. I put chandeliers in every room. I fitted a new kitchen and landscaped the gardens. I did it all myself because Bob was working all the hours that God sent with his dad – or so I thought. Then one day he forgot to take his phone with him to work. A message came through from his dad. If Bob didn’t phone his dad, his dad would come and tell me. I didn’t understand so I went to his house and asked him what was going on. His dad invited me inside and said he felt embarrassed about the situation. ‘Bob hasn’t been coming to work, Jane,’ he told me. ‘And it isn’t fair on us, as we are paying all his bills and paying him his wages as well.’

I couldn’t believe what I was being told. I knew Bob’s wages were going to pay off his debts but, if he wasn’t going to work, where was he going? I told him I got Bob up at 6am every day, cooked him breakfast and he left for work at 7am. He didn’t get home until 11pm because he was working hard to pay them back and I thought the debt was being taken out of his wages.

That was when Bob’s dad told me the full story about how his son had worked for them since he left school and then got the house for £40k. He had put down £10k as a deposit before his life started to fall apart. He had taken first a £50k loan, then another £25k out on the house. Bob broke up with his girlfriend and went into a depression until I met him. They said he was doing well until the past few weeks, when he stopped going to work.

I promised them that I would sort it out and they would never have to pay another bill of Bob’s. I promised to take over his debts personally and promised that Bob would be back to work the next day. When Bob came home that night, I confronted him. He gave me a story and even though it sounded far-fetched I wanted to believe him. I had put everything into this relationship and my dream was now looking like a nightmare. I just didn’t want to accept that things could be so bad. So I believed him. I accepted he had been going to work and doing his best. He said he had been going to work and his dad was wrong. For some reason, I believed him.

When people used to ask me what I saw in Bob, I’d say that, in my lifetime of war, I’d finally found peace. Well, that was just a fantasy. Evil was now entering my life from a man who was a nobody. This innocent and pure man was to be my ruin. He was the biggest traitor I’d ever met but at this moment in time I chose to believe him because I didn’t know what was going on behind my back. I ended up offering to take over his debts. I even thanked Diane for everything she had done for Bob and told her to send over details of his debts. When she did, I saw that nothing had been paid off of his £115k debt. But I just brought the payments up to date with my own money and put everything back on track. I told Bob to bring his wages home every week. He got £400 a week and I went halves with him on all the bills. He was left with £200 and I made sure the right amount went
into his account to pay his massive debts and the weekly bills. Life seemed to be OK for a couple of months.

Then one day Bob phoned me and said he had gone to the bank to get a tenner out and there was no money in his account. I told him he was mistaken, as I had receipts for £1,700 that had been paid in but he just repeated that there wasn’t a penny in the account.

‘Get a printout or don’t come home,’ I told him and put the phone down. The statement showed that someone had been taking money from our bank in Elm Park, where I had made deposits, and also from a branch in Epping, where Bob’s dad’s firm was. I was furious but he made out he didn’t know anything about it. I wasn’t stupid though and I told him we were going to the bank together the next day to ask what had happened. ‘Whoever took this money out has a card and they will be on CCTV so the bank security team will get to the bottom of it,’ I said. And that was all I needed to say.

In desperation, he said that whoever had done it must look like him. I might have been gullible after the first time Bob lied to me but I wasn’t having it again. I didn’t want to hear more so I threw him out, there and then. As I went through the bank printouts, I could see that no bills had been paid and that in three weeks Bob had taken out £1,700. As fast as I was putting it in, he was taking it out again. Bob had £200 a week for himself but he had never seemed to have any money. Yet he never even bought so much as a fag because I used to buy
them and anything else he needed. I phoned his dad and asked him to come and explain what was happening. I was in war mode now. For the first time in a long time, the Gran made an appearance.