JustPearlyThings - June 22, 2023


Innocent Gets Arrested For Wanting To See His Son


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

132.86983

Word count

1,497

Sentence count

2

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I speak to the mother of a young boy who was murdered by his own mother. This is the story of the tragic murder of Archie Sprigs and the impact it had on his community.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 me do an anger management course which was kind of ridiculous in time with no evidence no evidence
00:00:09.840 okay
00:00:12.560 anger management course okay in time i did manage to see my son they had arranged
00:00:20.720 meetings at child contact centers this went on on and off for
00:00:32.960 around 18 months how often were you able to see him once a month once every few weeks something like
00:00:40.400 that okay um i i made a further application at which point a things were taken more seriously so
00:00:52.320 my son was appointed a child a legal guardian uh kafkas higher up than kafkas officer and a
00:01:01.040 district judge was appointed district judge mcqueen and many more reports were written
00:01:10.640 many more allegations were made by my ex this dragged on and on and on for years until eventually
00:01:19.200 well eventually i did get a shared parenting order after
00:01:28.160 almost well how long would that be three years of private law court battles but things had happened
00:01:36.320 in the meantime but um i should probably start talking about okay so just i'm going to get to
00:01:44.320 that but the shared parenting order that was um so you did this for three years you had to take an
00:01:50.480 anger management course yes you had to do you only got to see your son once a month um for child contact
00:01:59.680 centers which those are essentially just to make sure i have it right they're centers that it's like
00:02:04.960 for abusive parents right yeah because it's like saying you can't be trusted to have the kids so you
00:02:10.960 have to see them at a child contact center yeah it was appalling and essentially they have no evidence
00:02:17.600 that you abused your son that's absolutely right okay and um when you got the shared parenting order is
00:02:26.720 that 50 50. 0.89
00:02:30.640 not quite um i it's kind of the norm for this country where i would have him for every other weekend
00:02:39.360 um every wednesday and half of all school holidays and the weekend started friday evening and ended monday
00:02:48.400 morning where i we we were not to have uh we weren't initially to
00:02:57.040 uh to i was not initially to take my son um to his mother uh it was seen as easy if we took him to
00:03:07.760 school and picked him up from school so we didn't have any direct contact which is fair enough okay
00:03:14.080 but the three years that's where um i know you mentioned there's like more to the story so that's
00:03:20.880 when the crazy stuff happened there's a there's a hell of a lot more um this is when the tragedy of
00:03:28.080 archie sprigs becomes
00:03:32.320 significant that
00:03:37.600 archie springs okay so for people that don't know who is archie springs
00:03:41.920 archie sprigs was my son's best friend and he was murdered by his mother
00:03:48.000 in
00:03:52.080 forgive me 2017
00:03:57.040 and um
00:03:59.520 yeah
00:04:02.320 anyway um i should probably start at the beginning with that but um okay
00:04:07.760 that
00:04:11.200 before me and my ex split up um we were we had become aware of leslie speed 0.96
00:04:18.000 and her son archie sprigs who had moved into the rushbury neighborhood
00:04:24.320 leslie is that the woman from earlier is that someone else no this is this is archie sprigs's
00:04:29.280 mother this is not emily s this is okay but this is another very similar character from the
00:04:36.160 in the neighborhood okay leslie speed leslie speed
00:04:39.600 okay so we had um we'd become aware that they'd entered the neighborhood um some years before
00:04:52.240 actually archie was quite naughty um it was known that she'd come from a deprived background in a rough
00:05:01.840 area of a local town and social services i'd basically moved them into the neighborhood
00:05:09.120 as you to kind of separate them from that lifestyle to
00:05:13.440 to reform them really it was known inverted commas that she had been abused by archie's father
00:05:22.800 that's certainly the story that was spun for us now we were good samaritans we saw ourselves as
00:05:31.920 pillars of the community and we said well yeah of course we'll help out we'll we will invite them
00:05:39.920 into our community but we'll keep them at arm's length okay because there's clearly problems there
00:05:47.360 that was my kind of take on it and that was my ex-wife's take on it 0.92
00:05:53.120 as time went on archie's uh behavior improved he he became a lovely little lad and i like to think
00:06:00.880 my son had something to do with that that he befriended him my son was quite a good influence on him
00:06:07.520 and archie became lovely and used to enjoy him coming around to play and all that sort of thing
00:06:14.560 and that's before we kind of split up and then we we split up then emily esp and leslie speed both 1.00
00:06:23.680 became kind of thorns in our side really that uh we'd we'd we'd been asked and encouraged to
00:06:30.400 rushbury school to see things like sports day and to get involved in in school functions um but
00:06:38.480 leslie speed with emily esp these women and others and other mothers would kind of kind of shepherd 0.98
00:06:46.480 my son away from us me my mother others in my family would approach would approach him
00:06:54.160 they'd all kind of present a wall of mothers between us and him spirit him away
00:07:00.880 between you and archie between me and my son between you and yours so you would try to speak
00:07:06.880 to your son and then these group of mothers came together that's right yes okay very much so and and
00:07:13.360 that included the archie's mom which is leslie yeah and the other lady and then emily so leslie emily
00:07:23.600 and your ex-wife okay that's right and others and others but and even even school teachers uh female 1.00
00:07:32.640 school teachers kind of would negative there was a there was a wall of negativity against us presented
00:07:39.600 from these these women and things started getting kind of ridiculous that the the the type of allegations 1.00
00:07:51.120 made against me got more and more ridiculous in instances became more and more ridiculous the
00:07:57.280 the thing that that sticks out in my mind really was that my son had broken his arm as a a play
00:08:05.600 and a soft play place and i'd become aware nobody actually told me but i'd become aware
00:08:11.040 and i wanted to go and see him in hospital and comfort my son um it was said by emily esp that
00:08:25.760 that um my ex-wife had requested an armed guard be put on duty in the hospital so that i would not be
00:08:35.360 able to go and see him right then some some weeks later you know i'd occasionally sent text messages to
00:08:46.400 to my ex-wife usually on the lines of how is my son doing when can you know can we not please make
00:08:56.160 some progress please you know all helpful all supportive 13 over a six month period now i was arrested by the
00:09:04.320 the police and um thrown into a cell at questions only later did the police actually read the text
00:09:12.640 messages and and they let you were arrested for texting her yes 13 over six months 13 texts over
00:09:22.000 six months and that was with the non-molest because of the non-molestation no the non-molestation order
00:09:27.200 had actually lapsed by that point so there was nothing stopping me so there's no reason you couldn't
00:09:32.720 text her legally but she just had you thrown in jail and the police complied yeah yeah it was if
00:09:40.960 look if a woman says it's harassment it's harassment right what would the police say 0.99
00:09:45.680 like why if i had a police officer here what would they say like why would they comply with that
00:09:52.080 because i suspect my best friend is a police officer and i suspect that they would say that
00:09:58.880 she is seen as a vulnerable adult that she has made certain allegations and so she is put on a kind of
00:10:06.480 short list or an asterisk is put next to her name so whenever she makes an allegation
00:10:12.240 then things happen very quickly she's taken very seriously um but you know the police is
00:10:19.840 pretty competent you know they they they arrested me and only then did they think to read these text
00:10:31.520 messages i mean this isn't this obviously the wrong way around but first thing you do oh an allegation
00:10:37.280 has been made let's get him put him in in a cell and then we'll bother doing our job right
00:10:43.360 so only a few weeks later i i was told by my girlfriend at the time that oh there's a boy
00:10:52.880 being murdered been murdered and they're showing
00:10:57.920 the road that your son lives on so i look in a local paper and i i see my god and knowing the kind
00:11:05.680 of allegations just getting more and more you know i punched her in my sleep once apparently you know
00:11:12.320 just this the allegations are getting crazier and crazier