- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 21 2001 17.20 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday January 21 2001
For two years, Shone has lived next to the Kilshaws, the couple who last week shot from anonymity in the Welsh village of Buckley to international infamy. The pair gleefully revealed last Tuesday that they had paid £8,200 to adopt twin American girls that had been put up for sale on the internet by their natural mother.
But instead of sharing the happy news, the world was horrified. Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, described the events as 'appalling'.
There was more anger when it emerged that the couple had apparently taken the twins, six-month-old Beverley and Kimberley, from a Californian couple, Richard and Vickie Allen, who believed they were the rightful adoptive parents. Loading the children into a people carrier in San Diego, the Kilshaws had driven more than 2,000 miles across America with the Allens in hot pursuit. After reaching Chicago, they booked flights home to Manchester before the distraught American couple could catch up with them.
It emerged that the Allens had already paid Tina Johnson, the head of an adoption brokers called the Caring Heart Agency, £4,000 for the babies. After two months caring for the twins, the couple claim they were tricked into handing the children back to their natural mother, Tranda Wecker, for a visit. Instead, she gave them to the Kilshaws. It is claimed that the British pair knew the Allens had already paid for the twins.
The 'adoption couple', as they have become known to weary locals in north Wales, will begin their battle for permanent custody of the twins on Tuesday at the High Court in Birmingham. The Allens have also called in lawyers, who said the FBI would see if any US laws had been broken.
Amid growing public disquiet, last Thursday night Flintshire social services, backed by police officers, swooped on the Beaufort Park Hotel near Mold where the Kilshaws were staying, courtesy of a US TV network. After a tense, three-hour confrontation between social workers and the couple, and in the glare of flashing cameras, the sleeping babies were removed under the terms of the 1989 Children Act. Within an hour, the twins were with foster parents - their fourth set of carers in their short lives. Amid chaotic scenes in the cramped hotel, friends of the Kilshaws fled in tears leaving the couple to angrily denounce the authorities who had applied to make the children wards of court.
It was thought yesterday that the Kilshaws had fled to France with the help of a tabloid newspaper, crowning a week of often bizarre and heated media interviews in which the couple had railed against a host of perceived enemies, blaming everyone but themselves for the debacle. They ignored worries that the twins' welfare might have been at stake during the punishing round of radio and TV appearances, a factor that finally persuaded social workers to act.
In a media frenzy, the couple quickly became objects of public hate as lurid details of their chaotic private lives spilled across newspaper front pages and television screens. Journalists fell on north Wales. Callers jammed radio chat shows savaging the couple. Their decision to publicise the adoptions was a PR disaster.
One man, though, had a more simple explanation for the farce. 'The Kilshaws are like kids in a sweetshop,' said Shone. 'If they want something - be it a horse, a car or even a child - they get it, and then they discard it once they're bored.'
Whitehouse Farm is not the typical country retreat of a practising solicitor. The only signs of Alan Kilshaw's reported wealth and respectability come from the Toyota MR2 sports car parked in the drive.
Last week a heap of manure lay near the front door. Shopping bags blew around the lawn and birds perched on two dilapidated cars rusting in the back yard. Through the dusty windows of a ground floor room, a fax machine whirred, yet another request for an interview.
With the couple and the accompanying media circus now gone, neighbours and disgruntled locals yesterday offered a glimpse of the sometimes bizarre life the Kilshaws have led. There was the ever expanding collection of tenants and pets, and a road rage incident in which they were said to have fought bitterly with another driver at the foot of their road.
One man grumbled about the caravan park the couple had opened in their back garden and muttered darkly about Judith. Then there was the 'the milky man', the apparition of an old man in a milkman's coat who the family were convinced haunted their home.
Judith, 47, moved into Whitehouse Farm with Alan, 45, two years ago. Before that she was a divorcee who had found solace in the clubs of Frodsham, Cheshire, near the estate where she lived. Alan was her white knight, whisking her and 18-year-old daughter Caley away to the detached expanses of the farm.
When Alan, Judith, their sons James, seven, and Rupert, four, and Caley moved in to the farmhouse, they held a party for friends and locals. About 50 people drank white wine in a marquee erected in the then immaculate garden. Shone, their new neighbour, felt comfortable enough with the latest additions to Well Street.
Then the pets came. 'They got a couple of dogs within the first month,' said Shone. Their cats quickly grew to 18 in number. They started buying up horses, most of whom were old, tired ponies bought from travellers at the horse market in Beeston, Cheshire. 'When they see an animal they like they just get it,' said Shone. 'Within the first six months they got to be overrun with 13 horses so they had to rent out a new field.'
Then the two pot-bellied pigs arrived, and began roaming the farm freely, often breaking out into the neighbouring property. Shone said Judith did not realise the smell of pigs distressed horses and, when her foals and ponies snorted, she thought they had gone mad.
Shone's stablehands often treated the Kilshaw horses. They recall them being poorly fed and ill. 'They weren't responsible animal owners,' he said.
Besides the occasional altercation, the Kilshaws kept their distance from other villagers. Alan, a director and spokesman for the obscure anti-European political group the Democratic Party, ran his solicitor's practice singlehandedly from the study - known as 'Whitehouse Chambers'.
He specialised in housing law, helping tenants take their landlords to court.
When the Kilshaws did socialise, it did not go that well. Twice, Judith went for a drink in the British Eighteen Club in Buckley, a reserved bar for ex-servicemen where even the stand-up comedians are asked not to use 'bad' language.
Judith first graced the club 18 months ago and, after a few drinks, was asked to empty her glass and leave after a complaint about language from a female member.
About a year later, Judith returned with Caley, who was then underage. After a few drinks she was again asked to leave after fighting in the ladies' toilets with a younger woman. She has not returned.
One of the Kilshaws' later parties at the farm - with a tarts and vicars theme - ended with equal embarrassment when police were called after a complaint about the noise. One partygoer recalls the Kilshaws taking a fair time to realise that the officers were genuine, and not stripogram entertainment ordered by their guests. Later, Judith added to her increasingly bizarre reputation in the village when she called in paranormal investigators after a vision of an old man in a dairyman's coat which one son had nicknamed 'milky man'. The investigation was even filmed.
The procurement of the twins was supposed to be the final step on a long and difficult journey for the Kilshaws, anxious to expand their family yet further.
Judith had had a lengthy search to overcome fertility problems. She looked for children to adopt in Thailand and China. She tried IVF a number of times. She admitted to one newspaper that she had given her husband's sperm to a friend who was having problems conceiving after giving birth to a stillborn child.
But the most curious attempt to conceive involved the help of her estranged eldest daughter. Even she was prepared yesterday to dish the dirt on her mother.
Louisa Richardson, 22, moved out of the former family home after the failure of Judith's first marriage to civil servant Mike Richardson. Yesterday she spoke of how she had raised a child without the support of her mother in a freezing cold caravan.
Yet this turn of events had not stopped Judith from making an astonishing request of her eldest child. Kilshaw asked her daughter if she could 'rent' her womb, and so have Louisa be the surrogate mother to her stepfather's child. Louisa says she was offered £3,000, and declined.
Flintshire social services declined to comment as to whether the Kilshaws had requested permission to adopt before, but it is understood the couple were older than the usual limits allow. They had certainly not been open about their new American arrivals. One of the lodgers who lives in their farmhouse told The Observer that he thought the twins were Judith's granddaughters, and not her adopted children. 'The first I knew about the adoption it was in the papers,' he said.
At 6pm last Friday night, a thick mist surrounded the phalanx of satellite dishes and TV crews at the Beaufort Park Hotel. The Kilshaws had been taking interviews from dawn till dusk. A policewoman arrived and knocked on their door. 'Mr Kilshaw, it's the police,' she said. There was no reply. It appeared the couple had forced the lock on the hotel room window, escaped on to the wall below and sneaked off into the arms of a Sunday tabloid, which has paid them handsomely for their story.
