THE woman who survived after being kidnapped and attacked by Babes In The Wood killer Russell Bishop has broken her silence after 32 years and told how she begged the monster to spare her life.
Rachael Watts was roller-skating near her home in Whitehawk, Brighton, when she was abducted by Bishop and bundled into the boot of his Ford Cortina.
He drove her to Devil's Dyke where he subjected her to a horrific sex attack then left her for dead, naked and freezing.
Rachael, who was seven at the time, tried to barter with Bishop to release her, offering him the £1 pocket money her father had given her earlier that day.
Now 40 and a mother of four, Rachael has waived her legal right to anonymity and told The Sun on Sunday how she wants to “let go and stop being scared of people finding out”.
She said: “I don’t remember anything about my childhood before I was kidnapped, but every detail of that day is burned into my brain.”
Rachael and her family had only recently moved to Whitehawk and on February 4, 1990, she had set out to see a friend. She roller-skated home after finding out her friend was not in and, after falling over and hitting a wall, her dad gave her £1 to buy sweets.
She went to the shop but it was shut and, after forgetting the way home, she asked for directions from a stranger - who turned out to be Bishop, who had walked free from court three years earlier after being cleared of killing "babes in the wood" Karen Hadaway and Nicola Fellows.
He immediately grabbed Rachael and put her in the back of his car. In an attempt to raise the alarm, she took off her roller skates and began to scream.
She said: “He yelled at me to shut it or he’d kill me. I said ‘I can give you money, I’ve got a pound’.”
The car stopped at Devil’s Dyke and Bishop forced Rachael on to the back seat before stripping her naked and carrying out a sexual assault.
Rachael recalled that, after the attack, “he put his hands around my throat and he choked me. I tried to say ‘I can’t breathe’, then I passed out".
She was unconscious for several minutes and woke to find herself alone on the isolated South Downs.
“When I woke up, everything hurt. I was in mud underneath gorse bushes - he must have shoved me there to hide my body. I was naked, bleeding and freezing,” she said.
She saw the headlights of a car and thought it was Bishop, but instead found a couple drinking coffee after a day out.
The horrified pair wrapped the terrified child in a jacket and called the police.
After a visit to hospital, Rachael went home but the memory of Bishop’s attack haunted her.
But it was thanks to her evidence and astonishing ability to identify Bishop that he was convicted of attempted murder, indecent assault and kidnap in December 1990 and sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in prison.
Then in December 2018, followng advances in DNA technology, he was finally convicted of the murders of Karen and Nicola.
Bishop, who lived in Hollingdean, died in prison in January, but Rachael said she “didn’t celebrate” the news.
She said: “I am speaking up now because I can. When he died this year, I finally started to recover.
“I hope that there’s a place in Hell for him.”
A fundraiser has been set up to help Rachael raise money to rebuild her life.
To donate to the Go Fund Me please visit: https://www.gofundme.com/f/rachael-russell-bishop-survivor
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