The mother at the centre of the ‘paternity fraud’ case spoke for the first time yesterday about the torment she has faced over her daughter’s true identity.
Lydia Chapman has been widely vilified after being accused of deliberately deceiving her former husband, Mark Webb, about the paternity of daughter Elspeth – but now justifies her actions, saying she did what she needed to do to try to keep her family together.
For nearly two decades, despite her doubts, she kept up the pretence that her husband was Elspeth’s biological father.
Lydia Champan, with daughter Elspeth (right) and daughter India
Finally she confessed the truth: that her eldest daughter had been conceived following a brief night of passion with a married friend.
And last week, Mr Webb, 47, lost a long court battle to claw back the money he had spent on Elspeth’s upbringing.
So far, Lydia has been condemned for keeping Elspeth’s true parentage a secret. Now, in an emotional interview with The Mail on Sunday, Lydia reveals why she not only deceived her husband but also kept the devastating truth from her daughter.
To the outside world, she appeared the devoted wife with a fulfilling married life in rural Wiltshire but secretly she found herself at the centre of a very modern moral dilemma.
Although many readers will find her attempts to justify her deceit uncomfortable, she believes she did her best to save her marriage.
Lydia, now 45, grew up in a close and happy family in the small market town of Devizes, Wiltshire, the eldest of three daughters of Tony, a tyre fitter, and Gloria, a secretary. At the age of 15, she met Mark Webb at a friend’s house.
‘The first thing I noticed was that he had this dominating character. It wasn’t exactly that he was full of life or jokey, more that there was a confidence about him,’ she says. ‘He seemed so much more grown up than I was. But then, I was still just a child.’
Mark made Lydia feel like an adult, and despite her parents’ concern at their relationship because they felt she was too young, Lydia became smitten.
But Lydia says he quickly became controlling. Despite her dreams of becoming a nurse, Mark did not want her moving away to college and instead Lydia left school at 16 and did a secretarial course.
For 17 years, Mark Webb, pictured on his wedding day to Lydia, was unaware someone else was Elspeth's father
The pair bought an old house in town and Mark repaired it with her father. But he began to show signs of a worrying temper. ‘If something he was doing wasn’t going well he would punch a wall or throw something across a room. He just wanted to destroy something.’
Although his behaviour scared her, she says he was never threatening. But they argued frequently and every few weeks he would say he was leaving, which she believes was his way of manipulating her.
Despite this, the couple married when she was 19 in June 1982, selling their car to pay for the wedding. Mark had a job for a company that manufactured parts for telegraph poles. He started off on the production line and was gradually promoted. She was working as a secretary for a computing company.
‘I think I helped him become ambitious,’ says Lydia, ‘although he was very reluctant to buy a house and would have been happy in a council house, like the one he’d grown up in.
‘He was bitter about that, and kept telling me I had a better upbringing. But his parents were just like mine, really.
‘He always felt I was too close to my family. If ever I thought something he didn’t agree with, he would blame my family. But if I was being swayed by them it was for good reason. Their opinion counted.’
The first few years were ‘like playing happy families’, Lydia says. Both keen runners, they joined a local club and would go to the cinema. However, she says Mark’s controlling behaviour began to take its toll.
‘He used to tell me no one else would love me, that I would be on my own if he left. That really dents your confidence and self esteem,’ she says. ‘But you don’t realise it’s happening. I was in denial for years. You also don’t want to acknowledge it to your family.
‘I started off as a bubbly person and that all changed. I got more and more worn down as the months went on. Friends said I used to be quite opinionated but as the marriage developed I would adopt his opinions.
‘It was difficult to explain because he would never put me down in public but he shouted a lot at home and I’m just not used to that, coming from a mainly female house. I was terrified. But I still begged him to stay with me.’
Allen Mottram is Elspeth's biological father, having made Lydia pregnant 22 years ago
Lydia also began to suspect that Mark was having affairs. ‘I’d confront him about my suspicions but it would only end up in a row,’ she says.
Lydia says that it was this fragile emotional state, at the tender age of just 22, that led her to drink heavily at a work conference she had helped organise in Windsor. Also there was Allen Mottram, who was known as David, a colleague who had become a friend.
‘I wasn’t used to lots of alcohol,’ Lydia says. ‘For me, two glasses of wine and I was drunk. But I had started drinking more and more. I don’t want to say it happened just because I was drunk but you certainly do things you wouldn’t normally under such circumstances.
‘I had been friends with him and he was a high-flyer, older than me at 36 and married. But we got on well.’
What Lydia insists happened next may sound difficult to believe. She says there was a mix-up at their hotel and David’s booking had been lost. David has since claimed she seduced him.
‘This was the first time I had really been away from home and I said, “Well, just stay with me, I’ve got twin beds.”
‘And that was it. That was Elspeth. There was no passionate sex scene. I just drank too much.’
Lydia, horribly ashamed of her indiscretion, hid from Mottram at work and says they barely spoke afterwards. She went to a family-planning clinic and took the morning-after pill.
While she felt guilty, she says her suspicions about Mark’s affairs prevented her from confessing. It was only a couple of months later, when she began suffering morning sickness, that she realised she was pregnant. Ashamed of her indiscretion and unable to talk to friends, Lydia confided in her GP.
She says: ‘He told me that if I had been having regular unprotected sex with my husband and a single one-night stand, the chances were the baby would be my husband’s. He was very matter-of-fact, and told me to go away and stop wasting NHS money.
‘I hadn’t spoken to anyone else, and I left convinced that the baby was Mark’s. It was far easier than to confront the doubt.’
Knowing David was married, Lydia did not tell him about the pregnancy either. Mark later claimed that the pair concocted a conspiracy of silence to cover up their guilt but Lydia dismisses this as ‘nonsense’.
Mark also claimed his wife and David met again at a barbecue when Elspeth was three months old and had sex at a local picnic site, which Lydia adamantly denies.
Lydia often wondered over the first few years whether Mark was Elspeth’s father. ‘I had no idea which man was the father, but there was no conspiracy,’ she says. ‘Everything pointed to it being Mark.
‘Everyone says I must have felt guilty but I didn’t, not really. The love for the child takes over and Elspeth was loved by both of us.’
Mark became the doting father, suspecting nothing, and a couple of years later the couple had another child, India.
He was a good father and idolised Elspeth with her blonde curls. In hindsight, Lydia says Elspeth resembles David but says she did not look at Elspeth and think of him.
However, for Lydia, who was by now working in a number of menial, part-time jobs, the marriage was crumbling again as she believed her husband was still having affairs. She said he would shower before supposedly going running or cycling.
One Boxing Day, when India was around seven months old, he told Lydia he was going to decorate his receptionist’s mother’s house. When she asked him why, he told her she was cruel for trying to prevent him.
‘There were so many incidents like that, and eventually I decided I needed a proper job to gain some independence,’ she says. ‘I had begun to think about leaving him.’
She contacted David, who had set up a new IT company in Swindon, and asked him for a job. They had been in touch sporadically as friends and she claims that rekindling their relationship was not on her mind.
‘He was a friend and he knew I was unhappy. I told him everything –about the affairs I thought Mark was having. I didn’t tell him about the other arguments but I think he probably knew.
‘He had noticed I was acting differently. I had lost so much weight – as you do when you’re stressed and running round manically.’
She and David began sleeping together again but Lydia describes it as an occasional comfort – once or twice a year in a house owned by the company – rather than a fullblown affair.
‘There was never any sense that it would be more than it was and neither of us considered leaving our partners to be together,’ she says.
The mask had, however, begun to slip. Lydia was drinking more to hide from the emotional distress and she began to wonder whether Mark was Elspeth’s father. At a party in around 1990, she thinks she may have confided in one of David’s friends – and that word may have somehow got back to Mark.
‘Mark rounded on me once and said, “Tell me Elspeth’s mine. In fact, no. I don’t want to know anything.” It was never spoken of again. We decided to keep the marriage together, even though I suspected he had a few women on the go at that point.’
Lydia suspects that Mark had as many as ten affairs during their marriage. Some were work colleagues, one a barrister and another a school matron. She says she found out from other people over the years.
All the while, she and Mark continued to sleep together, and had a third daughter. The Mail on Sunday has agreed not to name her to protect her identity while she is still at school.
The new child made Lydia more determined to keep her family together. She stopped seeing David and left her job with him. All the girls were happy and had won music scholarships to private schools.
‘I was trying to keep the family together, to put on a brave face to everyone outside, pretending it was all OK. All I’ve ever wanted to do is provide a family home the same as I had: happy for the children. But he seemed to want to destroy it.’
It was Mark’s affair with a work colleague in 2000 that finally brought everything to a head.
‘This was the first one that I found out about, which was devastating and completely collapsed the marriage,’ she says. ‘I came downstairs one evening and there was a message on his phone saying, “I love you, Mark, I will always want to be with you.”
‘I knew who she was as I’d met her and Mark kept going on about how wonderful she was. That was the hardest night. I confronted him – the ranting, raving, screaming woman. And he admitted it.
‘The children were crying and it was devastating. At that point, I was very ill and depressed because of the stress of it all. I had a massive nervous breakdown which resulted in hospital treatment on several occasions. I was depressed and not eating properly.
‘It all came out at once, the whole story. I finally confessed everything to my friends and to my parents. I told my mum I didn’t think Elspeth was Mark’s. At this point I wasn’t even sure why I thought that. She just looked different and I had buried it for so long.
‘There’s a Salvador Dali painting of a cupboard with lots of drawers and I always think, “That’s me.”
‘Everything was closed away, all the emotional stress contained. But one day a drawer opened and it all came out.’
The marriage finally ended in 2001 after a drive to a concert in Cheltenham turned into an enormous argument.
Mark again told Lydia he wanted to leave – and this time Lydia filed for divorce. She told her family that staying in the marriage would destroy her.
Lydia says she was so ill that she can’t remember the monumental moment she told Mark about her suspicions about who Elspeth’s real father was. But she does recall a more sensible chat they had some time later, in which they agreed to keep the truth secret, and when Mark promised he would always treat Elspeth as his own.
‘I was more upset than he was,’ she says. ‘I don’t remember him crying. I had been terrified of confronting him with this as I’d lived with it for so long. But there was relief, somewhere, that it was all out. He seemed eerily calm, although I guess his anger was more slow-burning.’
As for Elspeth, she discovered the truth in 2002, when, at home from boarding school at the age of 17, she read her mother’s diary and found an entry about a love child.
She says she knew it referred to her as soon as she read it. The entry was ‘full of self-loathing and guilt’.
In 2004 she and her mother arranged a DNA test. When the results came through, Elspeth was at university in Exeter. Lydia believes that she was so emotionally fraught at the time that her reaction was numbed.
‘It was great to finally know,’ she says. ‘I had convinced myself for years that David was the father and then for more years that Mark was. It answered a niggling question. But what might sound odd is that it didn’t change things, not really. Mark was to all intents and purposes the father that Elspeth had always known.’
But Mark clearly did not feel the same way. As soon as he received the results, he went to the courts to get a document which allowed him to get Elspeth’s birth certificate amended.
He had a big black line drawn through the entry for ‘father’. ‘Mark has seen it as a loss,’ Lydia says. ‘He was told by a counsellor to treat it as a bereavement. But Elspeth isn’t dead. He went around telling everyone that he only had two children. He would walk into the house and take India out for lunch but not Elspeth. He’d just ignore her.’
Elspeth was hurt by his rejection, never more so than when he returned a pile of Father’s Day cards she had sent him over the years.
Lydia said she was devastated to see what Mark was doing to Elspeth.
‘As a mother, to see that unconditional love withdrawn was heartbreaking. It felt like he had been able to deal with it before it became public, but once that happened his pride got in the way.
‘I saw my daughter abandoned. She was distraught, and spent most of the time in tears. I was seething with anger.’
David was ‘quite shocked’ to find out he was the father, Lydia says, although the pair haven’t spoken in years. He did send a letter once, through a solicitor, saying he was sorry about her divorce and that Elspeth seemed to have turned into a ‘lovely young lady’. And in 2003, he came to see Lydia in an amateur dramatics production of, ironically enough, Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce.
David and Elspeth are slowly building up a relationship and he has visited her in Rome, where she now lives.
Meanwhile, despite his promises, Mark would not let the paternity issue lie and started court proceedings against his former wife claiming she conspired to deceive him with ‘17 years of lies and deceit’.
It reached the Court of Appeal, the first such case to do so, but his claim was found not to have substance.
‘He is out to humiliate me,’ says Lydia. ‘He still wants to have some control after all this time. He was treating Elspeth as an unwanted toy he could just take back to the shop. In court he was just so cold. I kept wanting to scream at him, “How could you do this to her?”
‘Elspeth kept trying to get his acceptance again and again and he kept rejecting her.’
But, perhaps surprisingly given her ex-husband’s campaign, Lydia will not prevent her daughters from seeing him, saying: ‘That’s up to them. I’d be as bad as him if I started trying to control them.’
Now 22, Elspeth teaches English in Rome, while India is training to be an opera singer. Mark and Lydia’s youngest daughter attends a choir school.
Meanwhile Lydia, who is now remarried to Max, whom she met on the internet, is trying to start again.
‘I’m starting to remember the person I was,’ Lydia says. ‘It will be a long haul for all of us, especially Elspeth. But we’re strong and we’re a family. That’s the most important thing.’
…and this is what her daughter Elspeth says
My childhood was happy. I was close to Mark and confided a lot in him.
When I found out he wasn’t my dad, I was shocked, I had no idea, Mark was very upset but said I would always be his daughter.
But he started to change. By the time I finished school we were barely speaking.
He wanted me to come and live with him. I had to decide who to side with, a horrid decision. But I couldn’t leave Mum, she would be devastated. Because I made that decision, Mark said he couldn’t trust me.
He was really hurt that I wasn’t his daughter, his pride had been damaged in the worst way for a man. He felt humiliated. He was a broken man.
Mark got his name struck off my birth certificate – that really hurt. I don’t know whether I still see him as my dad but he’s my dad in my memories.
The Christmas before last, he sent back a bundle of my Father’s Day cards to him, ones hand-drawn by me. It really hurt.
I saw Mark in court and it was awful. It was the hardest time of my life. Although I wanted his request to be dismissed, I didn’t want him to be humiliated further.
I just wanted him to leave Mum alone for his sake as well as hers. It’s such a waste of two lives.
January 25th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment
