‘The Witch’: UK mother of 10 jailed for keeping ‘house slave’ for 25 years

Amanda Wixon, 56, arrives at Gloucester Crown Court for sentencing. Photo / Getty Images

A woman who was kept as a slave for more than two decades has said she “lived in fear for 25 years”.

Amanda Wixon, 56, subjected the woman to years of abuse, which included banning her from seeing sunlight and preventing her from going outside.

The woman, who is now in her mid-40s and has a learning disability, now refers to Wixon as “The Witch”.

Speaking for the first time since the full extent of her ordeal was revealed, the woman wrote in a victim impact statement: “For 25 years, I lived in fear, control and abuse. I was treated as though my life, my freedom and my voice did not matter.

“Although my abuser has now been found guilty, the trauma and the nightmares are something I still carry with me every day,” she said.

The victim was taken in by Wixon, a mother of 10, for a weekend at the age of 16 in 1995, and was imprisoned until 2021 in an ordeal a judge described as “Dickensian”.

She was beaten, hit with a broom handle, which knocked out her teeth, and prevented from leaving Wixon’s squalid home in Tewksbury, Gloucestershire.

The victim, referred to as K, also had washing-up liquid squirted down her throat, bleach splashed on her face and her head was repeatedly shaved against her will.

Wixon limited the victim’s food, meaning she had to live off scraps, could not leave the house and was forced to secretly wash at night.

On Thursday, at Gloucester Crown Court, Wixon, a scratch card addict, was jailed for 13 years, after being convicted of false imprisonment, forced labour and three charges of actual bodily harm.

The victim added in the statement read out by prosecutor Sam Jones: “I am now living with a wonderful family who show me kindness, patience and support.

“Their love is helping me slowly rebuild the life that was taken from me and begin to feel safe again.

“Nothing can give me back the 25 years I lost.”

The woman now attends college and lives with a foster family, who revealed the extent of her trauma.

The court heard the victim broke down in hysterics after bumping into Wixon at the supermarket while the court case was ongoing and she was on bail.

Her foster mother told the court: “She called her The Witch. She’s really scared of her. She’s petrified, actually.

“She was running around. It was horrible. She was just going through the aisles and saw her. And that was it. She went absolutely mad in the supermarket.”

Pocketed $227k of victim’s benefits

The court previously heard Wixon had the victim’s benefits paid into her own bank account, pocketing a total of £100,000 ($227,868) in the process.

The woman only escaped when she used a secret mobile phone to raise the alarm and one of Wixon’s own sons reported his mother to the police.

Detective Superintendent Ian Fletcher from Gloucestershire Police said they found K with abscesses in her teeth, callouses across her feet and severely malnourished.

He added that K’s dream was “to see sunlight”, something that Wixon prevented every day.

“They put black bin liners over the windows on one occasion because they were seeing her looking out of the window and seeing the outside,” he said.

“Our victim was totally dehumanised.

“I don’t think Wixon saw her as being a human being. She saw her as a slave to use for her own will to make her life better. She was treated very, very differently to Amanda’s own children.”

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