Heidi Liddle, a dance teacher who led the Taylor Swift-themed workshop attacked in Southport, has described feeling “tortured” by a “crushing” guilt over the atrocity. In tearful testimony to the inquiry at Liverpool town hall, she said she constantly replays the attack and questions what more she could have done.
Liddle shielded a little girl in a bathroom during the attack, with the perpetrator banging on the door until police arrived. She said the trauma has “fractured every part of my brain and my life” and that being treated as a witness rather than a victim during the police investigation made her feel her experience was “immaterial, trivial or even worthless”.
Her colleague, Leanne Lucas, who was stabbed five times, said she felt “ostracised” in her home town of Southport. She described being called both a hero and a villain, adding: “I am neither. I am just Leanne, the woman who did her best in an unthinkable situation.”
The inquiry, led by Sir Adrian Fulford, is examining failures to prevent the killing of three girls – Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine – and the attempted murder of eight other children and two adults on 29 July last year.
