This evil child rapist is my husband ... and he drove our poor

DEVASTATED Sally McNamara believes her child rapist ex-husband drove their daughter to suicide.

"He may as well have forced the tablets down her throat himself. I consider what he did to be murder," Sally said.

Depraved Hugh Patsy" McNamara, a former gardener of Rod Stewart's, is serving 10 years for sexually abusing another girl.

But Sally believes sick paedophile Patsy also preyed on their daughter Clare, who was only 18 when she killed herself in February, 1996.

Sally said that a confidante of Clare's told her how Patsy, 46, had tied his daughter up and subjected her to terrifying ordeals.

"We are told he raped her, used her as a prostitute and had her locked up as a prisoner in his house," she said.

"He would bring other men in to her and she would be abused in a way you could not bear to imagine. Not just what you think of as sexual abuse, but sick, warped things."

Sally is certain the attacks took place in London in 1995 when Clare went to visit her father - who had separated from Sally and left Northern Ireland five years earlier.

Grief-torn Sally, 43, said: "He is a monster - a fiend. We used to sit and shake with fear when he came home at night."

Clare swallowed 72 paracetemols and spent 10 days in a coma before she died of liver and kidney failure.

Her evil father coolly visited her bedside as she lay dying.

"To think of him sitting there holding her hand like the dutiful father makes me sick," Sally said.

Luckily, before Clare slipped away, Sally's sister Agnes North found a suicide note from her, detailing sexual abuse she had suffered.

It did not name Patsy, a petty thief, but Sally is convinced that he was the perpetrator.

The mother of six, from Kircubbin, County Down, said: "I believe he got away with murder because she did not name him. But we believe he was responsible. She confided in a friend about what he had done before she died.

"That was not enough because it was hearsay, but luckily there was a witness to his abuse of another girl."

At the inquest into Clare's death, coroner John Lecky said her handwritten notes painted a picture of "sexual perversion and violence".

In a heart-rending account written in a school exercise book, called My Life, Clare poured out her pain, which began when she was about 10. "My father went to prison for nine months and it was the best nine months of our life," she wrote.

"But unfortunately he got out again. And then things got back to the way they were. Life was once again hell. And that was around the time the Sexual Abuse started." Clare's inquest was told how McNamara - who ruled his family with fear and violence - beat Clare with a bat and forced her to perform degrading sex acts on him.

In her note, she continued: "I can remember every single detail. It will be something I will never be able to forget...every time I think about it, it burns my heart."

Sister Agnes took the desperate note to the police and then dramatically confronted Patsy at the hospital where Clare was dying.

She said: "I did not tell Sally straight away because I did not know what it would do to her. One of the other children told him:'You've destroyed us'.

"It was the first time I had heard one of the family speak out against him. My other sister told him, 'I hope you burn in hell'.

"I remember his exact words. He said, 'I never meant to hurt any of my family'."

Smooth-talking womaniser Patsy is believed to have fathered 27 children by 19 women. He had served time for theft and fled to England in 1990 when wanted by police on a robbery charge.

But it was on charges of rape and sexual assault that he was finally nailed - two months after Clare's death, when other victims came forward to give damning evidence.

At first, Clare's family did not realise her death was suicide. Sally said: "We did not know what was wrong with her and the doctor even asked if she had taken an ecstasy tablet. But we knew that was not right because she was so anti-drugs."

Clare, who dreamed of becoming a lawyer, was a popular girl in Kircubbin, her home town.

Sally said: "She was always taking the mickey out of people in the nicest possible way. There was not anyone who met her who could dislike her."

She added: "Patsy never got back in touch after he ran away. He made no attempt to come to Clare's funeral.

"He would have been arrested if he had tried. There were undercover detectives waiting to question him."

Other children told officers they had suffered terrifying physical abuse.

Patsy made videos of his perverted sex with one girl who he had started abusing when she was 11.

Vile Patsy also forced her to have sex with his brother, Harry McNamara, who admitted to charges of indecent assault and served 18 months.

Patsy pleaded guilty to six charges of rape and twelve charges of serious sexual abuse all relating to the girl's nightmare.

Another girl was also assaulted and made pregnant by Patsy while she was still at school. Her crucial testimony pinned a sexual assault charge on him after police traced her to the Continent, where she now lives.

Sally said: "The only reason he pleaded guilty was because he was looking at a life sentence otherwise. Of course, the jury could not hear any mention of Clare, or he would have been let off on a technicality because they would have been prejudiced."

Sally has decided to speak out now because of reports that Patsy's life in Magilligan prison is a cushy one.

A prison source told our sister paper The Mirror that the top category sex offender is so comfortable that inmates called him "the Governor".

The source said: "Unlike most paedophiles, he doesn't keep a low profile, but struts around like he owns the place."

Sally said: "It would be just like him to have everybody believing his lies.

"He has always had the gift of the gab and nobody believes how evil he is. I used to have to endure people telling me they could not believe he was capable of committing his crimes.

"I'm sure he will convince everyone that he is reformed and be released early. But he will be a danger to young girls for as long as he lives."

Sally learned from a friend of Clare's that she had been held prisoner and tormented while in London with her father. "She went over to stay with him in September, 1995 because he said he could get her work in a bar.

"The other children tried to talk her out of it. But I think she thought she could deal with him. She was 18 then.

"She may have been as young as 10 when he first assaulted her because it says in her note it happened when he came out of prison. It's every mother's nightmare. I just can't believe how cunning he was to hide it from me." Sally said: "When Clare came back from London she was painfully thin. She had cut short the long hair she had always loved.

"She was OK on the surface, but everything was obviously bubbling away underneath. Three weeks before she committed suicide Clare had seen Patsy when he was back in Northern Ireland briefly. Perhaps that brought the horror back.

"I think Clare could not live with what he had done to her any longer."

Sally said she had lived in "total fear" of McNamara when they were married. "He used to beat me all the time. I would walk around in a daze doing everyday things, permanently terrorised. Then he would be charming to other people and do things for them. That somehow gave him more power over us."

When Patsy fled Northern Ireland in 1990, he moved to Essex and got a job at rock star Rod Stewart's mansion in Epping.

He worked there on and off for two years. "I hate to mention Rod Stewart but it must be a chilling thought for him that his children could have been near Patsy," Sally said.

Agnes told how, when Clare was in a coma, Patsy bragged that Rod Stewart's wife Rachel Hunter had rang him asking after her welfare.

Little did Rachel suspect that the evil smooth-talking monster was the cause of Clare's plight.

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