Michelle Noble is recalling the moment when, home alone aged 14, she heard footsteps on the stairs leading to her attic bedroom.
Thinking it was her older sister, she called her name a couple of times, but there was no response.
Smiling bleakly, she recalls: ‘Well, I knew it couldn’t be her when I called a third time because she’d have had a right go at me for all the yelling.’
The humour is a heartbreaking attempt to hide her pain.
Michelle is soon sobbing as she reveals the person who did open her door that night: an intruder who proceeded to rape her, changing the course of her life for ever.
Incredibly, Michelle’s attacker was a policeman — a fact she believes is responsible for justice not being done either at the time or to this day, 33 years on.
Although he was ‘required to resign’ for ‘discreditable conduct’, Michelle was told there was not enough evidence to prosecute her rapist.
Last November she was inspired to try again after victims of Jimmy Savile — who also hid behind a veneer of respectability — came forward in their droves.
But Michelle has since hit a brick wall. Nottinghamshire police say they cannot reopen the case without fresh evidence. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) has told her all records relating to her case have been destroyed, giving succour to those who question the veracity of her claims.
All I can say is that, having spent some time with her, I utterly believe Michelle — as does her local MP, Gloria De Piero, who is backing her.
Age of innocence: Before the alleged attack Michelle, pictured as a teenager, was a Grade A student hoping to become a pilot
‘Although I had long blonde hair, I was a real tomboy. I always wanted to prove I was the same as the boys, that I was as good as them.’
The first dent to her confidence came when her parents separated acrimoniously when she was 11. She lived with her mother and her father moved out.
‘It was a very difficult time,’ she says. ‘We children were caught in the middle of it all. I stayed with my maternal grandparents a lot and became very close to them.’
She admits she went off the rails a little and by the time she was 14 had found herself an ‘unsuitable’ boyfriend of 18 who she liked ‘because he had a motorbike’.
‘He was big and tough and I thought he could protect me,’ she says, with a weary roll of the eyes. ‘Silly little girl . . .’
For it was this boy that inadvertently led her into the path of her alleged rapist. She says it was while visiting him in a young offenders’ institute that police arrested her, mistaking her for another girl who was wanted for breaking into the local community centre.
She was taken to a police station in Leicester, where she was held in the cells for several hours. ‘I was terrified,’ she says. ‘I’d never been anywhere near a police cell: I didn’t know what to expect.’
She was later returned to her local police station where her attacker — a plain-clothed CID officer — told his colleagues: ‘This is not the girl — you’ve got the wrong person.’
The same policeman then contacted Michelle’s father. He was in the local pub and had drunk slightly too much to drive. So the policeman offered to drive her back ‘to make sure she got home safe’.
‘I was just relieved to be going home,’ she says. ‘I’d had the most traumatic, scary day. I didn’t think for one moment I had anything to fear from a police officer.’
It was ‘around 8pm’ and the house was empty: her mother was out with friends and her sister at her boyfriend’s. Michelle let herself in and the policeman queried whether she shouldn’t lock the door behind her.
‘I told him I couldn’t because my sister was yet to come in,’ she says. ‘He checked I was sure I’d be all right and then he went. I just wanted to go to bed so I went up to my room.’
Minutes later she heard someone climbing the stairs. That’s when she called out to her sister. There was no reply.
Then her bedroom door opened to reveal the policeman who’d dropped her home.
Michelle has maintained a poised, sometimes bubbly, façade until this point of her story. But it is instantly shattered as she relives the unthinkable, with a startling, almost childlike honesty.
‘He said: “You want f******.” I just froze.’ She starts crying again. ‘I just let him do it. That’s the thing I can’t bear. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t know what to do.’
When asked whether this may have been an act of self-defence in itself — for fear he’d do worse should she struggle — she says: ‘I don’t know what I thought, I just froze in fear. The things that stick in my mind are him pulling my trousers down and my pants. His face and his breath; him over me.’
She visibly shudders and then admits she later ‘lied’, telling people he had pulled her top over her face so her arms were constrained.
‘It was my way of trying to pretend to myself I couldn’t see what was going on,’ she says, her voice wavering. ‘I also couldn’t cope with the fact I didn’t fight… That’s still hard today.’
For a moment it appears painfully apparent that she’s still entangled in a childish instinct to blame herself rather than her attacker.
‘For years I didn’t even think of it as “rape”,’ she says. ‘That’s not because it wasn’t, but because I was in denial. I was in my 30s and a friend referred to me having been “raped” and it really shocked me.
‘At the time I thought it was the way I was dressed. That’s what you do; you blame yourself. I had a shirt and trousers on, but they were thin trousers so I thought: “Could you see my underwear through them?”’
What she seems to find most painful is that her father interrupted the attack. He had come back from the pub, concerned for his daughter’s welfare. ‘I heard him running up the stairs shouting: “Shelley!”’ She stops, tears streaming, unable to go on for a moment. ‘Shame he wasn’t there a few minutes earlier,’ she whispers.
Michelle says the policeman placed his hand over her mouth and told her he’d make sure she went into care if she told anyone what had happened.
By the time her dad had flung the door open, he was trying to hide, lying by the side of the bed.
He had pulled up Michelle’s trousers and tidied his clothes.
‘My dad grabbed hold of him, and he said: “I was just searching under the bed,”’ she says. ‘It must have been the first thing that came into his head.’
Her dad ‘threw him out’ but when he asked what had happened, Michelle stuck to the story: ‘Nothing, he was just searching.’
It wasn’t until her mother returned an hour later that she admitted the truth. At which point she was sent to bed while the police were phoned. The following days passed ‘in a dream’. She was taken, alone, to a medical examination organised by the police: ‘The doctor looked at me like I was a piece of dirt.’
In the two days that had passed, Michelle says she’d had a bath so there was no semen or other forensic evidence of the rape. There was also no bruising because, Michelle says, she had not resisted the attack.
She says the doctor ordered her to remove her clothes and looked at her ‘down there’ before saying: ‘You’re nothing but a little slag.’
‘I glanced up at the woman police officer in the room for help,’ she says, ‘but she just looked vacant.
‘Looking back, I try to think that perhaps she was having a hard time of it, too: perhaps she found it difficult to stand up to the men there.’
Michelle then claims she and her father were subjected to a campaign of harassment by police officers. She claims two colleagues of the policeman would approach her and her father in public, and urge them to drop the case.
Three months later, in March 1981, her parents were informed there wasn’t enough evidence for a criminal prosecution.
On August 10 that year, a month after a disciplinary hearing, which the officer appeared at with his wife, the family received a letter from the Police Complaints Board saying he had been ‘required to resign immediately’. The letter continues: ‘The Chief Constable is very concerned that the officer should have behaved so irresponsibly, and some measure of his feelings can be gained by the severity of the punishment awarded.
SOURCE-DAILYMAIL
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