The neighbour told LBC she has “had trouble sleeping, lying in bed thinking someone's living like that just a wall away"
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The next-door neighbour of a woman who kept someone as a slave for 25 years in Gloucestershire has told LBC of the ‘shock’ she felt when she found out.
56-year-old Amanda Wixon from Tewkesbury has been sentenced to 13 years in prison, after she was found guilty of modern slavery offences including forced labour.
The mother of ten kept her victim, who we’re referring to as K, in her home on Despenser Road and forced her to clean – subjecting her to years of abuse including pouring washing up liquid down her throat and beating her with a broom.
Sarah, who has asked us not to use her real name, lives next door to Wixon.
She told LBC she has “had trouble sleeping, lying in bed thinking someone's living that just a wall away. It makes you reflect. Because it still doesn't seem real.
“You know, it all kind of sort of plays on your mind and yeah, I kept overthinking, wondering if I did know. How I didn't know. Because that's what you read when you read things like this. You go, how does nobody know? And I'm one of those neighbours. I didn't know.
“I've said it myself, when I've read stories – someone must have known something, saw something, heard something. But I look around and I think, would anybody know if there's someone in there? In any house… It plays with your mind a bit.”
Sarah told us she’d “never seen” the victim “but apparently, she did ask after me and my partner at the court, so she knew us. I didn't know her. Makes me feel awful. It doesn't just impact them, does it? It's the whole community, the neighbours, friends.”
Jessica Atwal also lived in the area as a child and told LBC Amanda Wixon should “rot in hell”.
She said she only realised K was still living with Wixon in late 2020 because she happened to catch a glimpse of her.
She said: “I was out in my garden with my friend… and there was just a knock on the window and as I'm looking around thinking ‘where's that come from?’ – we look up into the bedroom of next door, and she was just there waving. I hadn't seen her since 2016.”
During Wixon’s trial, Sam Jones, prosecuting, told the jury: “She was kept in and prevented from leaving the address and she was assaulted and hit many, many times and forced to work with the threats of violence.
“She had been denied food and the ability to wash over many years.”
Judge Ian Lawrie KC said there was a “Dickensian quality” to the story after the woman, who has learning difficulties, left her own “dysfunctional family”.
Police went to the house in March 2021 in response to a report made by one of Wixon’s sons about the woman.
Officers described the woman’s bedroom as looking like a “prison cell”, with other bedrooms untidy and dirty.
She told police: “I don’t want to be here. I don’t feel safe. Mandy hits me all the time. I don’t like it.
“I haven’t washed for years. She doesn’t let me.”
There were no medical records or dental records for the woman, and she had not seen a doctor in two decades.
“The lack of records from the hospital, the doctor and the dentist or any involvement with social services for 20 years provides further support of her never being allowed to leave the house,” Mr Jones said.
“By the late 1990s it appears the woman disappeared into a black hole. Not a single meeting that left a record or a single sighting of her outside the house,” he added.
When LBC confronted Amanda Wixon about her crimes, Wixon replied: “I do feel for her, but what they claim that I done I never done.” The 56-year-old has now been sentenced to 13 years.