TORTURE TORMENT
Battered boyfriend was ‘10 days from death’ after being starved, stabbed and doused in boiling water by controlling girlfriend
A BATTERED boyfriend has revealed he was just “10 days away from death” after being starved, scalded and stabbed by his controlling ex-girlfriend.
Alex Skeel was beaten and tortured by control freak Jordan Worth, who poured boiling water on him and threatened to run him over and kill him if he tried to escape.
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She made him sleep on the floor for nine months and kept him from talking to his family and friends. But Worth was the first girlfriend Alex had ever had.
He told the : “The hospital told me I was 10 days away from death.
"You’re far more of a person if you speak out.
";You’re only going to get better if you talk about it.”
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Earlier this year Alex told The Sun how he thought his ordeal was just how relationships were, although he suspected it was not normal.
Even when worried neighbours called police, 22-year-old Alex pretended his injuries were self-inflicted.
He was taken to hospital with burns to his arms and legs, which he had tried to treat by wrapping in cling film.
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Medics found further burns and stab wounds, but still Alex returned to the house he shared with Worth, also 22, in Stewartby, Beds.
Finally, days later, a police officer persuaded him to tell the horrific truth.
Alex said: “He saved my life. He sat me down in his patrol car and said, ‘Look, I know what’s going on.
These wounds were not committed by you. Just tell me the truth’.”
Worth was arrested and Alex was taken to a hotel for the night and given a McDonald’s meal.
He said: “I hadn’t eaten properly in nine months. I was starving and it was the best meal I’d had in all that time.”
He then moved back with his parents in Bedford. He said: “When I first got home last June, I had lost three stone and weighed just seven stone.
“I had open wounds that had been infected and I was worried I might lose a limb.
“I was told if I had stayed much longer I would have died. The doctors and the police were of the same opinion — that I had about ten days left.”
Alex met Worth when they were 16-year-olds supporting friends at a drama production.
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He recalled: “She was the only girl who seemed to have been interested in me up to then.
“She actually came up to me and began speaking.”
Worth soon started exerting control, first in seemingly harmless ways such as saying what Alex should wear.
He added: “She constantly played games with me. She would disappear if we were out, hiding so that I would be worried.”
Gradually she stopped him meeting friends and relatives and took over his Facebook account.
Alex said: “She told me relatives had died and after I was upset, she told me they hadn’t. I didn’t see my family for two years.
“It was like she was trying all the time to see how far she could go so. If she got away with punching me, she would then use an object like a bottle or a hammer or a knife, which she would use to whack me with across my head.
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“I started to throw away each weapon she used but she would always find another. It went from a bottle to a plank to snapped poles where she would hit me and stab me with the end, to knives and hammers.
“Then she started to stab me. My hand had three tendons severed, clean cut in half. My wrist was cut as well.
“Then it got to the stage where she would throw boiling water over me.
“The first time I was asleep in bed in a hotel room with her and she poured boiling water over my back.
“Another time she just filled up cups and threw them at me.
“I had burns across my forearms and down my legs. I had stab wounds and bruises all over my body and my hands.
“Because of the lack of food, I was suffering memory loss and I couldn’t think straight. All the time this was happening to me, she said, ‘If you ever try to escape, you will die, because I will run you over in my car’.”
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Worth would further torment Alex by giving lurid details of men she cheated with. He said: “It was all part of the abuse.”
The abuse continued even when Worth, who comes from a loving family, was taking an art degree at the University of Hertfordshire.
Alex said: “She was scared that while she was out of the house I might tell someone what was going on. So I had to go with her every day to Hatfield while she attended lectures.
“I would just be on my own around the campus, but I quite liked that and no one was being violent to me.
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“Even on the journeys to the university and back, she would be hitting me in the car.”
Today’s Sun told how Worth, now of Ingoldsthorpe, Norfolk, was jailed for 7½ years after admitting controlling or coercive behaviour, wounding with intent and causing grievous bodily harm.
She was also given a restraining order for an indefinite period. Worth and Alex have two children, who we are not naming.
He said: “When it was happening to me, I didn’t know if it was going to get any better. It was all about being too scared to speak out.
“My attitude all along was that I would never be someone who would take their own life and, although I never thought that I wanted to kill myself, I was in such a state that I could understand why someone could do it.
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“I don’t waste my energy thinking about her, I have moved on. I don’t have any feelings towards her.”
“I don’t want sympathy. I just want to use my situation to help other people who are going through a similar ordeal to show them you can get through it.
“My ambition is to create a charity so people feel comfortable coming forward about this. If I can help just one person that will be the best thing I’ve done in my life”.
Meanwhile he had a warning for Worth’s new boyfriend. He said: “If he was now here, I would show him one of my wounds and say, ‘That’s what you could get’.
“ ‘Either run now or you are going to find yourself stuck in this awful relationship with her and she will end up controlling you like she did me’.”