Jeny Susan Joseph Serial Actress
'I shared my life with a serial rapist': Susan George on her relationship with the racehorse owner who held her hostage
Any woman who has been let down by the man she loves will understand 'the need to know', as Susan George puts it.
'You need to know how many other women there have been,' says the former hairdresser, who lives in rural Wales. 'I did. I couldn't bear to know the actual details, what he did to them, but I wanted to know how many there were.'
What's chilling is that Susan, 46, is not talking about infidelity, but about how many other women her lover has raped.
Terrifying ordeal: Susan George was stalked, raped and held hostage by her ex-boyfriend - racehorse owner Michael Thomas
She still shakes her head in disbelief at the realisation that her former partner Michael Thomas - a seemingly charming, respectable businessman, who ran his own haulage firm and owned racehorses - was 'pure evil to the core'.
Meera Jasmine (born Jasmine Mary Joseph on 15 February 1982) is an Indian actress who appears in South Indian films, primarily Malayalam and Tamil films.She was a popular lead actress during the 2000s. Meera Jasmine won the National Film Award for Best Actress in 2004 for her role in Paadam Onnu: Oru Vilapam, and is a two-time recipient of the Kerala State Film Award for Best Actress.
She had known for a while that there was something disturbing about Michael, and had left him after a two-year romance because of his mood swings and possessiveness.
But the penny only dropped that he was a rapist and potential killer when he had pinned her down, in a pool of her own blood and vomit, and told her she was going to die.
And it was only when he was in the dock, being held to account for his attack on her, that she discovered she wasn't his first victim.
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Court proceedings were halted when another ex-girlfriend came forward to claim that Michael had raped her, too. Then came another. And another - all telling haunting stories about being attacked by a man who had once professed to love them.
Susan learned, to her horror, that one of the women he had tried to rape had been attacked while her two-year-old child clung to her leg.
'I hadn't just been sharing my life with a rapist, but a serial rapist who treated women like pieces of meat,' she says.
'On the night I thought he was going to kill me, it all came out. I'd known that he'd had a tough childhood, and there were issues with his mother.
'At one point that night he started ranting about how all women were like his mother - all bitches who deserved to die.'
Susan was with this man for two years. She knows what question is coming.
'Even now people say to me: 'How could you not have known?' My answer is that you never know. If everyone who did these things looked like a paedophile or a rapist, we could all avoid them.
'But in real life, serial rapists look like decent blokes. They sound like Michael. They are Michael.'
Jailed: Michael Thomas spied on Susan from her garden shed for 10 days. He was sentenced to 16 years
Susan's story sounds like a movie script: she was stalked, raped and held hostage by someone she had willingly been in a relationship with, her ordeal ending in a dramatic police swoop with her tumbling from a moving car.
What's particularly shocking about her story is that it is so rarely heard. It is the legal right of rape victims in Britain to remain anonymous. The vast majority do.
'And that's what encourages men like Michael that they can get away with it,' she says.
'Even in court, women don't want to say what happened because it is too humiliating. Well, I did say it, because I did nothing wrong.
'And I will say it now because it might be the only way to bring other women out of the woodwork. How many others has he done this to?'
Susan's dreadful story begins in 2005 when she - an attractive divorcee with a grown-up daughter - met Michael through mutual friends in Ebbw Vale, Wales.
'I'd always loved to ride and groom horses, and I started to do some work for him at his stables,' she says.
A romance developed, and after eight months' dating the couple moved together into a rented house in the Welsh countryside.
'Did I love him? Well, it was moving that way. I thought he was a nice, decent, honest bloke who was hardworking and fun to be with,' she says.
They settled into a quiet routine. Although both were working - Susan as a hairdresser, supplementing her income with horse grooming - she ran the domestic side of the house.
Within a few months, however, 'issues' started to arise.
'He was sometimes short-tempered, about daft things such as if I went over budget by a fiver at the supermarket. I'd say: 'Don't be ridiculous', and he'd get in a mood.
'I started to do more grooming work, which would mean being out later at night, and he wasn't happy about that. He started to become possessive - he wanted to know where I was.
'Once we had a row and he said: 'I'll bury you', which stopped me in my tracks. What an odd thing to say!'
With hindsight, there were glaring clues that Michael was a man with a past, but Susan admits she 'was completely blind' to it.
'The biggest clue - which I should have paid heed to - was that his own son was afraid of him. He was a lovely boy who came to stay every other week, but he was nervous around Michael.
'Other relatives were, too. When we were with his family, people would be on eggshells, saying: 'Don't get Michael started.' '
Had she asked more questions, she would have discovered that one ex-partner had pressed rape charges, but Michael had been acquitted. Now, Susan is convinced he was guilty.
'I'd be sneaking into my own home, sitting in the dark sometimes to put him off the scent. He would bang on my door, shouting: 'I'm going to f****** kill you'
'He told me so, on the night he tried to kill me. He said he'd raped her, too. He was proud of it.'
As the months went on, the relationship deteriorated. One weekend, while Michael was away at a race meeting, Susan turned on the TV to see how his horse was doing.
'I caught a glimpse of him in the enclosure, and he seemed to be holding hands with someone. When he got home, the car smelled of perfume. It turned out he'd had a one-night stand. I was devastated, and told him it was over.'
She left; he persuaded her to come back. He threatened to kill her if she left again, then broke down 'and told me he deserved to die for what he had done to me'. She speaks of tears and confusion, on both their parts.
'We limped on for six months or so, but it was never the same. He hadn't laid a finger on me, but I was afraid enough to want out.'
When she did eventually move out, she told Michael she was going to live with her sister, but he tracked her down to the quiet residential street where she had rented a house.
'When he first banged on the door, I was so shocked I didn't know what to say. He just pushed his way in. He went round the house, ranting about how dare I do this to him.'
Over the next few months, Michael frequently turned up at her door, or sat in his car outside for hours on end. Susan became a virtual prisoner in her home, but when she called the police, they said there was little they could do.
'I'd be sneaking into my own home, sitting in the dark sometimes to put him off the scent. But it didn't work. He would bang on my door, shouting: 'I'm going to f****** kill you', but whenever the police came, there would be no one there. I'm convinced they thought I was a nutty woman.'
She dropped the matter when things went suddenly quiet. Because Michael wasn't physically outside her home, she thought things had 'calmed down'.
Peep holes: The shed where Thomas watched his former girlfriend for 10 days before attacking her and holding her hostage
But what she only discovered later - when Michael was in custody - was that he had, in fact, embarked on the most chilling of projects.
He had moved into her garden shed, setting himself up with a bed and gouging peepholes in the wood to spy on her. For two weeks, he lay in wait, keeping tabs on Susan's comings and goings.
Around 2am on December 28, 2008, however, he pounced, and she shakes violently as she relives what follows.
'I'd had a bath and gone to bed, but in the early hours was awakened by a loud bang. I learned later that he'd tried to break in through the roof, and the sound was the clatter of tiles.'
In the darkness, however, that wasn't clear. Terrified, but confused, she went downstairs to investigate. What she didn't know was that Michael had jumped down again and was by now in her back garden, waiting for her to open the back door.
'I did so to let the dog out and there, in front of me, were two legs. It's only when I looked up that I realised it was him. He had a hammer in his hand and he went for me, shouting: 'I'm going to kill you!' He grabbed my hair and I flew back.'
Terrified, Susan did her best to outwit her attacker.
'After the initial fight, I tried to calm him down. I said: 'Come on, calm down, you don't want to kill me. Let's have a cup of tea'.
'I knew I had to get the police. The only thing I could think of saying was 'Oh, I've left the electric blanket on'. I don't even have one, but amazingly he let me go.
'I got upstairs and I was bending over by the bed, trying to press the numbers into the phone, but my fingers were shaking so much I couldn't. Then he was right behind me...'
Over the next few hours, Susan was raped and assaulted repeatedly, suffering appalling internal injuries. Eventually Michael brought her to the kitchen and told her she was going to die, and that he was then going to kill himself.
'The reality is that he could be out in eight years, which is a joke. How many years' torment has he put us all through already?'
'It sounds daft, but all I could think of was how in films people on death row are allowed a last cigarette. I said to him: 'I just want one, before I die.'
'Incredibly, he agreed and we got in the car to go and get some cigarettes. He had a knife pointed at me and I was driving with the full beam on, hoping - praying - that the police would pull me over for it.'
At a service station, in nearby Abergavenny, there was an ambulance in the forecourt.
Susan remembers: 'My head was a blur. I was thinking that if he saw me go towards the paramedics, he would know I was spilling the beans and he could still get me - run me over, drag me away.'
Instead, she walked into the garage, as Michael had insisted she should do.
'I said to the young lad: 'Please call the police. That man in the car has just raped me and he is going to kill me. Please get my details on CCTV. Please.'
'Poor lad. He was only in his teens. He looked in a worse state than I did.'
Jeny Susan Joseph Wedding
As she drove off, Susan had no idea if her pleas would be taken seriously, or dismissed as 'the rantings of a nutter'.
But a police operation had swung into action, and a squad car lay ahead of them. 'Michael looked at me and went: 'You lying bitch!' We were at a roundabout and I opened the door and threw myself out.
'When I looked up there were police all over the place and Michael was fighting them. There were two on the ground. It took six officers to restrain him.'
Last year Susan's evidence played a major part in having Michael jailed for 19 different sex and violence offences, including seven of rape.
Now she counsels other rape victims full-time, and urges them to tell their stories - at least in a courtroom, if not publicly, like this.
Susan Henninger Joseph
She is still angry with Michael, and with his family whom she believes could have saved her, and perhaps others.
But mostly she is angry with a justice system that saw him jailed for just 16 years, despite the devastation he has caused his victims.
'The reality is that he could be out in eight years, which is a joke. How many years' torment has he put us all through already?
Meera Jasmine
'I've had three - so, with the others, that makes at least six, nine, 12 years of hell. And that's only the victims we know about. How many others might there be?'