Steve Wilson killed his two boys, Bret, eight, and Brad Lee, seven, in 2002, leaving their mother utterly heartbroken
Denise Williams endured the ultimate agony when her two sons Bret, eight, and Brad Lee, seven, were murdered by their father Steve Wilson in February 2002.
In a harrowing yet inspiring new book, Denise, 38, tells her story of falling under the spell of her control-freak husband, suffering a decade of domestic violence before finding the strength to leave, and Wilson’s despicable act of revenge.
In this exclusive extract, Denise, of West Bromwich, West Mids, tells of her world collapsing and learning how to live again.
When my husband called he was breathing in a deep, heavy, stressed way.
In a half whisper he spoke 10 words before cutting me off. “I’ve killed the kids. Now I’m going to kill myself.”
I couldn’t hear Bret or Brad Lee in the background. I could always hear them whenever Steve called. But not this time.
I remember nothing of being driven in a police car to West Bromwich station.
Torturous hours passed as I waited in the family room, sobbing and twisting tissues into tiny pieces until there was a pile of Kleenex confetti by my feet.
The TV showed a documentary about the Moors murderers. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley both had the dead-eyed cold stare I’d seen in my husband hours earlier.
Furious that I’d told him our marriage was over, he tried to run me over in his car before screeching off with my sons in the back.
But Steve wouldn’t hit our boys. It was me he despised, not our sons.
It was 10pm when the sergeant returned. Officers had stuck their heads around the door every half hour or so.
This time the sergeant was with a female colleague.
He knelt in front of me and held my hand. I could see tears in his eyes. “Denise, we have found the boys,” he said.
“Great. That’s brilliant, that is. When are you bringing them here to…”
The sergeant gently raised his hand. “Denise,” he said, slowly shaking his head.
“We have found the boys and they are dead. I am so sorry.”
Numbness. Disbelief. Total shock. Screaming. No no no! Clenching my fists, my teeth. Agony in every part of my body. Blacking out.
I awoke on the floor, a doctor standing over me. “My boys. Please tell me that didn’t happen. I had tea with them only a few hours ago.”
I didn’t want to speak to anyone. All I wanted was my boys. The ache for them was so acute it made my chest feel it was buckling, folding in half, closing tight.
“Take me to Steve,” I said. “Take me to him right now and I will kill him. I’ll do to him what he did to my boys.”
Of course, the police couldn’t let me near Steve.
And they couldn’t let me see Bret and Brad Lee until I’d given long interviews about my 10 years with my husband. I told them everything.
About marrying aged 16, being beaten for the first time while heavily pregnant with Bret and weekly since.
How he’d made me look and dress like his late wife – then forced me to eat her ashes.
I recalled the times Steve broke my nose, kicked my face until I was unrecognisable, lashed out so ferociously I couldn’t walk for a week and tracked me and my boys down the dozen times we fled to women’s refuges.
And I described how, days earlier, I’d left for the last time. I’d gone in to Bret and Brad Lee’s bedroom at 2am to gently wake and bundle them into the waiting taxi.
But, to my horror, I found Steve laying in a drunken slumber between them.
He would have killed me if he’d woken. So my final, and fatal, decision was to leave without Bret and Brad Lee.
I was distraught during that drive to my friend’s home.
But Steve had never raised his hands to his boys, and I’d have no problem winning custody, according to the solicitor I’d secretly seen.
I would have gone back to Steve and endured 100 times the physical and mental abuse for the rest of my days if it meant Bret and Brad Lee could still be alive.
But Steve had driven his sons to a remote spot in Handsworth and, in his car, stabbed them in the neck with a screwdriver.
He killed cheeky, adventurous Brad Lee first so sensitive Bret had to endure the sight of his daddy murdering his brother.
People always say, “Why didn’t you leave Steve years ago?” And I say, “If I did, I’d have buried smaller coffins”.
Because just before Bret and Brad Lee’s funerals I saw their murders had a sickening inevitability.
Steve wanted to destroy everything that was mine.
He got rid of my friends, shut out my family.
He took my youth by making me a pregnant stepmum at 16.
And he stole my freedom by keeping control of all finances.
But when Bret and Brad Lee were born I had maternal love that Steve could not take.
I realised he resented the love Bret, Brad Lee and I shared and hated me more than he loved them.
Finally, 13 months after my boys’ deaths, Steve was jailed for two life terms with no chance of parole for double murder.
The day he was sentenced, a man called Keith Young killed his four sons in the car at a beauty spot in Wales.
Earlier, he’d told his estranged wife he would harm them.
I’ll never be sure if Keith had copied Steve after reading court reports, but I have carried the guilt of that and of every one of those despicable crimes ever since.
Three days later, on Mother’s Day, Steve was found hanged in his cell.
Finally, I could breathe again. But it took a long time to rebuild my life.
People kept asking how I was coping and I told them I was fine.
Because I had a perfectly logical answer to everything: suicide.
My life was all about a future with Bret and Brad Lee, so without them I had no future.
The afternoon I seriously considered driving at full speed into a wall, I knew I needed help.
At the boys’ funeral, a man called Kevin Griffiths told me he’d known Steve for years and always suspected he’d been violent.
“Please call me if you ever need to talk,” he urged, pushing a scrap of paper with his number into my hand.
That day I found the scrap of paper. And within minutes of receiving my garbled, tearful message, Kevin arrived.
We had barely exchanged a couple of words before then but talked all night. Kevin was calm, gentle, wise and a good listener.
Kevin is now my husband and we have three beautiful children, Owen, 12, Katie, eight and Grace, four.
Working hard at my insurance office day job, and evening shifts at a chip shop, keeps me busy and makes me feel I am doing my best for my family.
Sometimes grief bears down so heavily I fear I might not be able to face a new day. Then I hear Kevin and the kids downstairs and am reminded my family needs me.
And I am so grateful to them.
They have shown me kindness and love do exist.
And they have taught me there is light at the end of the longest, darkest tunnel.