Laura Johnson was just six when it dawned on her that her mother might be a bad person.
Lisa Hayden-Johnson was feted as the nation’s most devoted parent, a woman fighting tooth and nail to manage the litany of life-threatening conditions that afflicted Laura’s younger brother Matthew.
Accompanied by Matthew in his little wheelchair, she appeared on TV: GMTV with Fiona Phillips and The X Factor with Simon Cowell, and had breakfast at Downing Street with then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Matthew, dubbed Britain’s sickest child, was also given a Children Of Courage award by Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall.
But at the family home in Brixham, Devon, it was clear to Laura that her mother’s claims – that Matthew had cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, anaemia, was allergic to almost all foods and unable to walk, eat or even breathe unaided – were simply not true.
‘Out in public he would be really poorly,’ recalls the now 27-year-old in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail this week.
‘Then we’d get home and he would be normal. We’d play outside together, eat normal food together. He didn’t need the wheelchair or the oxygen. It didn’t make any sense to me.’
Eventually it also didn’t make sense to the doctors who – fooled by his mother’s lies and faked test results – had treated Matthew for years.
In reality the little boy was physically healthy and, following a two-year police investigation, Hayden-Johnson was jailed for three years at Exeter Crown Court in January 2010 after admitting child cruelty and perverting the course of justice.
Lisa Hayden-Johnson (right) was feted as the nation’s most devoted parent, a woman fighting tooth and nail to manage the litany of life-threatening conditions that afflicted Matthew Johnson
Matthew’s sister, Laura, revealed may also have been targeted by Hayden-Johnson as a
But the horrific saga of the woman back then dubbed ‘Britain’s most evil mother’ didn’t end there. This week, Laura revealed her fears that she may also have been targeted by Hayden-Johnson as a child.
Having begun to look back over her own medical records in recent years, she now questions if she was a ‘test subject’ for her mother.
‘She was claiming I was having seizures and I was being put on very strong medication for it until I was six or seven. I was attending lots of appointments. There is mention of safeguarding concerns,’ says Laura, who has no memory of this time but has not suffered seizures since.
Speaking to family members, Laura has also discovered that her mother’s claim that she had a twin who died in utero was false.
She told the Daily Mail how she and Matthew, now 25, are still coming to terms with their past and how their attempts to reconcile with their mother after her release from prison in 2011 ended in further heartache.
The siblings first decided to speak out by taking part in a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Love You To Death, which aired this week.
They wanted to raise awareness of what it was like to be on the receiving end of what was referred to at Hayden-Johnson’s trial as Munchausen syndrome by proxy but is today called by medics ‘fabricated or induced illness’ (FII). Both terms refer to behaviour where a relative or carer makes up a person’s illness to get attention and win emotional sympathy. The C4 programme also featured their estranged mother.
Partially obscured from the cameras to conceal her identity – and still in pathological denial about her crimes – the now 52-year-old made the astonishing claim that pleading guilty was ‘my biggest mistake’ and she didn’t actually do anything wrong. ‘How can I be Britain’s most evil mother? I just did my best, that’s all I did,’ she says in one jaw-dropping moment. And in another: ‘I never smacked my children. I never did anything like that. I never hurt them in any way.’
Her children do not share her assessment – quite the opposite, in fact.
Matthew had an oxygen tank which was carted around on a Thomas the Tank Engine trolley
Lisa Hayden-Johnson poses with her husband and their children Matthew and Laura
‘I’ve had a very long time to process everything that happened,’ Laura told the Daily Mail. ‘Now I want people to understand FII from a child’s perspective and how it destroys lives.’
While her brother’s suffering, she says, was heavily talked about, she was given little opportunity to speak about the mental cruelty inflicted on her. Her fondest memories of her childhood are of the time she spent with her father while her mother dedicated herself to Matthew’s ‘care’.
But there were happy mother and daughter shopping trips during which they would try on make-up and spray tester perfumes. She recalls trips to the cinema and outings to the zoo.
‘Apart from the medical stuff we had such a good family and a lovely home,’ she says.
Yet it was the ‘medical stuff’ that took centre stage in their lives after Matthew’s birth, nine weeks prematurely, in 2001.
Placed on a ventilator in a special care baby unit, his mother was lavished with attention by sympathetic staff, friends and relatives, something she was clearly reluctant to give up when he was discharged.
She called out ambulances in the night and told doctors he couldn’t keep his food down.
Over six years Hayden-Johnson, who was born in Croydon and said she had nursing qualifications, managed to bamboozle doctors into performing unnecessary surgical procedures.
They believed her claims that Matthew couldn’t swallow and, when he was four, fitted him with a nasogastric feeding tube. By the time he was six he’d had four invasive operations and nine general anaesthetics. His mother even spiked his urine samples with glucose to support her claim that he had diabetes.
Lisa Hayden-Johnson spoke on camera for the first time since her release from jail this week
Matthew, now 25, also appears in the documentary which investigates his mother’s deception
Matthew’s sister Laura, 27, has nightmares featuring screams as his feeding tubes are changed
Her lies also proved to be highly lucrative. Aside from thousands raised by local charities, she garnered £130,000 in disability living allowance claims and a car from Motability, as well as gifts and free holidays.
Laura, who was three when Matthew was born, was taught early on that she needed to look after her supposedly sick little brother.
‘From a very young age I was carrying his oxygen tanks up and down the stairs,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I think back now to all those times and how I didn’t need to go through any of it because none of it was true.’
Her father was a supermarket manager and his shifts meant that her mother attended the majority of Matthew’s appointments. At the time of the investigation, police said they viewed him as another victim, persuaded by his manipulative wife that she knew what was best for their son.
‘All these things were happening while he was at work so he wouldn’t question it,’ Laura says. ‘He didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong.’ The penny dropped for her, she says, around the age of six when Matthew was in hospital having just had an operation.
‘We were meant to be going on a cruise that had been donated to us, and Matthew and I were really excited. But the doctors said there was no way he could go; he needed to go home and rest.
‘We were both in tears and my mum said: “Look, we are going to go, but when the doctors come back in, keep crying so it looks like we’re not going.”
‘I knew that lying wasn’t right but I loved my mum. I wasn’t old enough to understand that it wasn’t OK and wasn’t normal.’ Hayden-Johnson’s deception was uncovered in 2007, when increasingly suspicious doctors suggested measuring Matthew’s blood sugar levels over three days in hospital. No doubt realising she was about to be rumbled, Hayden- Johnson failed to take her son to the appointment.
Lisa Hayden-Johnson and Matthew at the Children of Courage Awards at Westminster Abbey
She claimed she had been sexually assaulted after stopping her car to help a motorcyclist and faked injuries by cutting herself. When police told her they were about to arrest a man for the crime, she panicked and confessed to making up the story.
After her arrest, officers searching her home described Matthew’s bedroom as ‘like a scene out of TV’s Casualty’. Beside a specialist bed were dozens of boxes of equipment and medication. They found bags of glucose, used to tamper with his blood and urine samples, stashed in a wardrobe. Downstairs they came across photos and videos showing Matthew running along a beach without his wheelchair and tucking into a pub roast dinner.
Having pleaded guilty just before she was due to stand trial, Judge Stephen Wildblood described her behaviour as ‘cruel, manipulative, perverse, disordered and pitiful’.
Laura was 11 when her mother went to jail. ‘Instead of grieving for her I went straight to anger,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I felt betrayed. It was a very, very, very difficult time.’
Her father divorced Hayden- Johnson and took Laura and her brother to live in Sheffield, a move which Matthew has described as the moment ‘I feel like my life started’ and which ‘gave me the space to kind of thrive’.
Not so for Laura, who missed her friends in Devon and was bullied at her new school.
She and Matthew wrote to their mother in prison but there was never any acknowledgment in her replies that she had done anything wrong. ‘She would just ask how we were getting on at school or say that she’d stuck the drawings we’d sent her up on her wall,’ says Laura.
When Hayden-Johnson was released 19 months into her 39-month sentence, arrangements were made by Social Services for the children to see her under supervision.
‘I was scared to go into the room,’ recalls Laura, by then 13. ‘I was still very angry. I sat away from her. It was very awkward. I remember her saying she was sorry but I was too young to ask what exactly she was sorry for.’
Over the next three years, one-hour visits in a contact centre evolved into monthly trips out with their mother and a social worker. Laura flipped between hating her mother and longing for her love.
After finishing her GCSEs and struggling badly with depression, Laura was invited by Hayden-Johnson to move in. While her father was unhappy about the development, Laura was 16 and free to make her own decisions. ‘It felt really good to start with,’ she says. ‘She bought me a whole new wardrobe of clothes. She helped me enrol in college. I had my first boyfriend at that time and she was giving me motherly advice. I didn’t think anything bad could come of it.’
Within six months, however, things changed.
Hayden-Johnson started complaining of her own health problems, telling Laura that misdiagnosed diabetes had left her with nerve damage in her hands and feet. She started wearing splints on her arms and getting Laura to take her to physiotherapy sessions.
‘She’d get screws stuck in her foot and they’d pull them out at appointments and she’d say she couldn’t feel them,’ Laura recalls. ‘I don’t know if she was putting them there herself.’
Before long, Laura was pushing her mother around in a wheelchair as if she was her carer.
Laura says Hayden-Johnson also claimed she had a regression disorder which saw her behave like a five-year-old whenever she had what she referred to as one of her ‘blips’.
‘She would be watching Peppa Pig and trying to self-harm and then she would snap out of it. She would go out barefoot in her pyjamas and I’d end up calling the police.’
Eventually Laura could take no more and went to live with her boyfriend. It was then that she ‘saw what a normal family is’.
At that point, she says, her mother’s medical conditions magically disappeared.
Three years ago she cut ties with her mother in a text message she shared with the Daily Mail.
She wrote: ‘I can’t forgive you for what you caused Matthew when he was a child and also what you have done to me in the past and more recently. I appreciate everything you did for me when I came to live with you but that was met with a lot of unnecessary hurt too. I’ve tried to help you but you won’t accept you need help.’
That was abundantly clear from Hayden-Johnson’s appearance on the C4 documentary, during which she appeared to be sitting in a wheelchair. Having married for a second time, she is living under a new name in Devon. She denies ever having FII, saying: ‘I don’t fit that category,’ and adding, ‘I didn’t do that sort of stuff to Matthew.’
Lisa Hayden-Johnson was jailed in January 2010 for faking her son’s severe illnesses
Her only admission of wrongdoing is that on one occasion she used her own urine instead of her son’s so she could get him out of hospital. In reality, dozens of tests were tampered with.
Asked if she thought she might benefit from therapy, she smiles and replies: ‘No, I’m happy. I have an amazing life. I’ve married the most amazing guy and I’m really, really happy. Life is very good.’
Laura believes her mother should have got a longer sentence but that she should have spent it in a psychiatric unit where she might have received help.
‘As far as I’m aware she did have some mental health support in prison but the way she talked about it, it was clear it didn’t have any impact on her,’ she says. ‘The crime was addressed but not the issue.’
Indeed, Hayden-Johnson refers to the time she spent behind bars as ‘my holiday’.
A former neighbour in Brixham says that after her release from prison she moved back to the family house with a new partner.
‘You would have thought she would have kept her head down and tried to show some humility but she started partying like there was no tomorrow,’ the neighbour told the Daily Mail.
‘She and her partner were drinking, shouting and playing stupidly loud music all hours of the day. People begged her to keep it down but she wasn’t bothered.’
The house was eventually repossessed and she and her boyfriend moved to Plymouth.
The landlord of another property rented by Hayden-Johnson says he received abusive late night phone calls and threats of physical violence from her and her boyfriend and that bailiffs came looking for her after she left. ‘She is constantly on the move so that people can’t find her,’ he says. ‘She wasn’t a very nice person.’
Today, despite everything she has been through, Laura displays an extraordinary ability to show compassion towards her mother.
‘I’m so angry at her for the past and what she put us through,’ she says. ‘But I still want her to get better and accept she has a problem before she hurts anyone else.’
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