I will always be haunted by the Man in Black

13 April 2012

Even now, nearly eight years since her ordeal, Amanda Lawson often wakes with a start.

It is her tormentor's voice which haunts her sleep most of all: low, throaty, but strangely benign - like, she says - that of a Bond villain.

The comparison is apt.

Multi-millionaire Christopher Dawes had a dangerous penchant for bizarre mind games, a ruthless demand for complete control over all those in his sphere and an unquenchable thirst for power.

It was this cartoonishly malevolent eccentric - a man who dressed all in black, right down to his painted toenails - who was waiting for Amanda, a former model turned hairdresser, in his lair on the secluded Channel Island of Alderney on December 23, 1998.

She had been invited by the computer tycoon to a business meeting. Instead she was forced to smoke crack cocaine and was repeatedly raped during four days of captivity.

Amanda, 42, has just made legal history by winning £259,000 compensation for her ordeal from his estate - seven years after his death.

Dawes was never charged with rape, as three months after the allegation was made the 39-year-old died after crashing his £640,000 McLaren F1 supercar into a tree. But a High Court judge ruled that there was 'overwhelming' evidence the 'predatory' tycoon had attacked her.

Last night Amanda, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, told how the ordeal has blighted her life, how she still fears one of Dawes' henchmen might kill her and how it led to her split from her interior designer boyfriend, Mykal Pinder - whose call to the police led to her rescue - but who never believed her story.

She said: "Mykal never believed what happened. I managed to make several calls from the island over those few days but I never really spelt out that I had been raped and was in real danger. Dawes had told me the phones were bugged and I thought that if he knew I was trying to escape he would try to harm me.

"When I told Mykal to call the police he waited for 12 hours before doing so because he wasn't convinced that I was being kept prisoner.

"He thought I was making the whole thing up.

"When Dawes took the phone from me when I called him and said, "She doesn't want to talk to you" -he was convinced that meant I was having a good time.

"In the end we couldn't go on, because he would never believe that something that completely destroyed my life even happened."

When she headed for the Channel Islands, she was looking forward to an exciting future. She vividly recalled the 'glamour of it all' as she was flown to Alderney in Dawes's private helicopter.

Australian-born Dawes, who owned hotels and property on the island, had said he wanted to talk about setting up a model agency. Amanda was taken to one of the hotels, Devereux House, where the tycoon was waiting. Estranged from his English wife Angela, he lived there alone, waited on by a retinue of unquestioning staff.

Although at first he appeared courteous and charming, Amanda was startled by his appearance.

"He was dressed completely in black, wearing a see-through vest and leather trousers, his feet were bare and his toenails painted black,' she said.

He immediately led her to his bedroom and invited her to sit on the edge of his bed while he lay back on the pillows. When Amanda nervously started talking about the agency, 'he turned nasty'.

She added: "His bedroom was filthy, there were dirty clothes all over the floor, ashtrays overflowing, and empty vodka bottles. The only place to sit was on the bed.

"He told me all the rooms were bugged and had cameras in. There were security men around, even sitting at hotel reception. I felt trapped and tried to talk about the modelling agency, but he insisted on quizzing me about my sex life with my boyfriend."

She managed to elicit few details about his business plans - instead it became clear that he was simply intent on acquiring a harem, with Amanda as one of his concubines.

She said: "He wanted to set up hotels all over the world and have models in them, relaxing around swimming pools. The idea seemed to be that he would conduct his business deals and then the girls would provide sex for the men.

"It was a horrifying vision. At that point he asked me if I'd ever smoked dope and I casually replied yes."

Dawes went to another room and reappeared with a glass pipe filled with crack cocaine and forced it into her mouth.

Breaking down in tears, Amanda said: "I went cold with fear. I thought this cannot be happening. I was hoping he was going to stop, to take pity on me. Instead he gave me a tumbler of neat vodka. I pretended to sip it. He started pulling my trousers off, and I begged him to stop.

"I was desperately pleading with him, telling him I had a boyfriend who I loved, but he just ignored my pleas and raped me."

It was the start of a four-day ordeal in which Amanda was raped several times, forced to smoke more crack cocaine and invited to take part in a three-in-a-bed sex session.

At one stage Dawes took her on a midnight drive around the island, driving at crazy speeds in his sports car and skidding on the wet roads.

Amanda said: "I felt he wanted to kill himself. But I also felt he wanted someone to die with him. It was as if he'd done everything and there was nothing left except to die.

"When I heard about his death I wasn't surprised, I knew it would end like that."

After police finally rescued Amanda, they told her many girls had fallen prey to Dawes.

She said: "At that point I just wanted to forget I had ever met Dawes. But after the police told me there had been other incidents, I felt he should be brought to justice. I wanted to stand up to him, I couldn't let him get away with it."

Her 21-page statement and an examination by a doctor prompted a police investigation. Detectives raided Devereux House and another of Dawes' hotels, Chez Andre, and made the island's first cocaine seizure.

Charged with possessing drugs, Dawes was held for three weeks until a friend put up £10,000 bail. He fled to another of his mansions, Merks Hall in Essex, and just weeks later died in the burning wreckage of his car.

The case against him was dropped because police had no one to charge. But Amanda, of Thornton Heath, South London, received counselling from Victim Support - and they encouraged her to seek justice through the civil courts.

She said: "They helped me to believe in myself and gave me the will to carry on. I could have lost everything in my fight for justice but to get my life back I had to prove I was telling the truth.

"His lawyers offered me £130,000 before the case started, but I thought eight years of my life was worth more than that. He destroyed my life, shattered my confidence and left me terrified that I would be assassinated.

"This was never about money, it was always about the judgment, the fact that a High Court judge believed my story against that of a powerful millionaire who sought to control everyone and everything. Plenty of people didn't believe me and during the court case I was accused of being a liar and a drama queen by Dawes's legal team.

"But I was determined he would not get away with it, I wanted everyone to know what he'd done.

"There were times when I wanted to give up. Some days I felt suicidal, that I would never beat him and I would be better off dead. But now I feel vindicated.

"I gave evidence for seven hours - it was like being back in that bedroom with Dawes, I could feel his presence again. I still feel scared, that feeling will never go. Even though he's dead, I'm always looking over my shoulder wondering if one of his henchmen is there to kill me."

"I've been struggling on benefits for seven years after what he did to me, because I've never been able to work again. I still suffer nightmares.

"I've had two relationships since then. Both ended because I have been so needy and mistrusting. I'm very wary of men now.

"If I see anyone who looks like Dawes, I have to move away, it terrifies me."

The sight of one guest at a friend's wedding made her go cold with fear because he bore such an uncanny resemblance to Dawes.

She said: "Even though he had died a few months earlier, I was convinced it was him. I began to wonder whether someone else had died in that burning car and he'd played a trick to escape the police.

"The man was a friend's boyfriend and I couldn't look him in the eye, I was shaking so much."

Amanda is trying to start a new life but fears the evil spectre of Dawes will never be laid to rest.

She said: "He will always haunt me for as long as I live."

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