The Chucky Doll Murder

I’m sure all you murderous felines know who Chucky is. And no, I don’t mean that loveable Rugrats character who was scared of everything. I’m talking about the murderous doll from the movie Child’s Play. But what people may not be familiar with is the fact that Chucky was the inspiration behind the horrific, prolonged torture and horrific death of a teenage Manchester girl. I am referring to the torture and murder of Suzanne Capper.

I just want to issue a disclaimer. This article will have graphic depictions of the torture of a minor that lasted for a prolonged period of time. If you are squeamish, you have been warned.

Suzanne Capper was born in Manchester, England in January 1976. Her biological father left before she was born and her mother, Elizabeth, tended to neglect her for her job and so she could date random men. Her mother eventually married a man named John, who Suzanne began to see as her father and when he and Elizabeth eventually divorced, she chose to move in with him. At this point,. family and friends described her as a “high-spirited, well-mannered girl”. At 16, Suzanne began to act out. She was skipping school and not going home, opting to stay with random friends instead.

This would lead her to move into the house of her former babysitter, Jean Powell. Jean was 26 by this point, a grown-ass woman with three kids. Jean worked under the table cleaning for a friend and she eventually forced Suzanne to drop out of school and help her with the cleaning. Despite her making money, Suzanne never saw a cent of it. Jean would take all her money. She would also force Suzanne to babysit her children, cook, and clean their house as well.

Outside of the cleaning job, Jean was selling drugs and stolen car parts. When she wasn’t working, her hobbies included getting high, drinking, and having sex-filled parties. Most of the time, their parties were in the living room on the bed. I cannot reiterate enough that there were children in this house.

By this point, you may be thinking “what the fuck?” and you would be right to think that. It gets worse from here, so much worse. You see, John knew about Jean’s reputation from Suzanne’s older sister, Michelle, who used to live there, but no one could have imagined what was going to happen, and even though he begged and pleaded with Suzanne to come back to live with him, she refused.

The people living with Jean could only be described as the cast of a shitty B-list horror movie, or an episode of Jerry Springer. Besides Jean, there was Jean’s ex-husband Glyn Powell, Jean’s 24-year-old neighbor turned roommate who also had three children Bernadette McNeilly, Jean’s current boyfriend Jeffrey Leigh, Suzanne’s ex-boyfriend Clifford Pook, and Bernadette’s 16-year-old boyfriend Anthony Dudson.

Bernadette was 24. Anthony was 16. Let that sink in. That shows exactly what type of person she is.

Throughout her stay, Suzanne would be bullied relentlessly by Jean and Bernadette. Despite the abuse, Suzanne kept going back to them because of the attention she desperately craved due to the neglect from her mother. Michelle would later say that Suzanne never seemed scared of them and would let them take advantage of her almost cheerfully. She also mentioned an incident in Autumn of 1992 when Suzanne showed up at their mother’s house, bruised and begging Elizabeth to let her stay overnight because Jean had beaten her up. Elizabeth told her no, saying she didn’t want to upset her new boyfriend and sent her back to Jean’s. Once again, a man was more important than her teenage daughter. It is widely believed that Suzanne would still be alive if Elizabeth would have let her stay overnight.

In the beginning of December 1992, Bernadette accused Suzanne of stealing her pink duffle coat. Her and Anthony had also contracted pubic lice, also known as crabs, and because Suzanne would sometimes sleep in the same bed as Bernadette and Jean, she began to say it was Suzanne who gave them crabs, despite the fact that the group was known to be swingers and would sleep with each other as well as other people. I am by no means slutshaming or bashing swingers, I am only bringing this up to illustrate that Bernadette’s claims of Suzanne being Patient Zero when it came to the crabs was unfounded. They could have gotten the crabs from anyone.

After the fight, Suzanne left and moved back in with John, but on December 7, the group showed up and told her that the boy she had a crush on was at the house and wanted to see her. She went with them, once again despite John’s pleas, but when they got her back to the house, she soon realized that that had been a trap and the boy was not there. Bernadette, Cliff, Jean, Jeffrey, and Glyn held her down and shaved her head, eyebrows, and pubic area. Bernadette told Suzanne that this was her punishment for “embarrassing them” because they had had to shave off all their pubic hair to get rid of the pubic lice.

Now, my precious felines, this next part is going to be rough. I recommend scrolling past the next few paragraphs if you are sensitive to graphic depictions of extreme torture.

The group placed a plastic bag over her head and repeatedly hit her with belts and long wooden spoons. They beat her so badly that one of her arms would not be usable for the remainder of her short life. It hung limp at her side. In between beatings, they shoved her into a crawl space until they wanted to abuse her some more. When her screaming and crying began to upset the children, they decided to take her to Bernadette’s house.

Once more, I feel the need to remind everyone reading that small children were witnessing this up until they moved her. A lot of articles tend to leave out the children or mention them as a kind of footnote, but I want to be very clear that there were six small children living there who witnessed the sex, drug use, alcohol use, and eventually the torture. That would be damaging for anyone to witness, much less children who are still developing. How these children never got taken away is a mystery because if the adults had crabs, which could be transferred via shared toilet use, those children also had crabs too.

Anyway, once they got Suzanne to Bernadette’s house, they tied Suzanne to an upside down, old mattress and stuffed socks in her mouth. This would become her new home for the next five days as they continued their systematic torture. This week would infamously become known as The Week of Sadism. They injected her with amphetamines and burned her with cigarettes. According to Anthony, he watched as Clifford pried open Suzanne’s mouth and told her he was going to rip her teeth out. Clifford smashed her teeth with the pliers before trying to pull a tooth out. The tooth snapped and chipped so he hit her teeth a few more times until he was finally able to pull it out.

When she began to stink due to not being allowed to bathe or shower, they threw her into the tub and bathed her with a concentrated disinfectant until some of her skin came off. Bernadette would tape headphones to Suzanne’s head that would play rave music. The song that was typically used was “I’m Chucky, wanna play?” by 150 Volt. The song featured samples of the famous Child’s Play villain, Chucky, saying “Hi, I’m Chucky. Wanna play?” Members of the group would say that Bernadette, in a meth-fuelled binge and believing she was actually Chucky, would actually each torture session with those exact words, which would cause Suzanne to scream in terror. Jean said she was scared of Bernadette and only went along for fear of what Bernadette would do if she tried to stop her.

Bernadette would also rub chile powder, salt, and pepper into Suzanne’s genitals before coaxing Glyn, Clifford, Jeffrey, and Anthony to sexually abuse her.

At some point, a friend named David Hill was asked to “house sit” for them. Now, you would think this would be where she would get rescued, but you’d be sadly mistaken. According to David, Suzanne had a cloth over her face and dried blood all over her body. She was hairless. He also recalled hearing them mention something about an “experiment” involving pulling her teeth out with pliers and feeding her moldy bread. When he was left alone with Suzanne so the group could go out, she begged him to let her go. He told the police “She asked me if I could help, but I told her I couldn’t. I asked who she was. She said her name was Suzanne. She asked me if I could untie her. I said I couldn’t do anything.” He went on to say that he was too scared of them to do anything. He thought they would do the same thing to him if he let her go. He said he was scared of Bernadette.

In the early morning hours of December 14, 1992, the group decided it was time to get rid of Suzanne. They had gotten bored with her and were also worried that eventually someone would get suspicous. They drove out to Stockport in the middle of a remote forest. They pushed her down an embankment where Bernadette poured gasoline on her before flicking a lighter directly onto her gas-soaked clothes. Suzanne went up in flames instantly. As she screamed in agony, Bernadette laughed, danced, and sang “Burn Baby Burn” from the song Disco Inferno. The group, thinking Suzanne was dead, left.

By some miracle, or perhaps curse, she was not dead yet. She managed to drag herself back up the embankment and walked a quarter-mile up the road where she was found by Barry Sutcliffe and two coworkers as they were on their way to work. Barry brought her to a nearby house so they could call 911.

The house happened to belong to Michael and Margaret Coop. Michael described Suzanne’s condition as “both her hands appeared like ash. Her legs were just like raw meat and her feet appeared to be badly charred. I was struck by how polite she was. She was constantly thanking my wife for her assistance.”

Margaret said “I instinctively went to put my arms around her but she pushed away and shrieked in pain. She could not bear to be touched. Her head was shaved and there were new, deep cuts to her head. Her face was almost featureless. Her hands were red raw and black at the fingertips. Her legs were red from top to bottom.” Suzanne drank six glasses of water with the help of Magaret as she waited for the ambulance.

Suzanne was so disfigured that she was unrecognizable. The only way the police identified her was via a partial thumb print. When John and Elizabeth went to see her, they didn’t recognize her. At the hospital, she was able to tell police the names of the people who did this to her before lapsing into a coma. Four days later, Suzanne succumbed to her injuries.

At first, when police questioned the group, they all denied everything, but as questioning got more intense, they turned on each other like the animals they are.

During the trial, Judge Francis Potts sentenced Jean, Bernadette, and Glyn to life imprisonment with a minimum of 25 years before parole. Jeffrey was sentenced to 12 years. Anthony was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years. Clifford, who was a minor, was sentenced to 15 years.

As of the posting of this article, Jean, Glyn, and Anthony remain behind bars.

Bernadette, Jeffrey, and Clifford are free and able to go about their lives as if nothing happened. Personally, I feel that Bernadette should have rotted in jail, considering she was the ringleader. None of them should be allowed to walk free.

What really gets to me is how Elizabeth acted after Suzanne’s death. She didn’t do anything to help Suzanne or get her out of the situation, yet after her death, she acted like she was completely shocked by what had happened, despite not letting Suzanne stay with her that night and choosing a man over her daughter. Everything about this makes me frustrated. This whole murder could have been prevented if Suzanne’s family had done more. The only person I truly feel for is John because John tried.

That’s it for the case of Suzanne Capper. Don’t forget to clap, share, subscribe, and comment.