THEY were twins whose silence condemned them to life inside Britain’s most infamous psychiatric hospital alongside killers and psychopaths.
Identical sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons spent 11 years incarcerated at Broadmoor – for setting fire to an empty building.
The 19-year-old twins – who spoke only to each other in a secretive language – were sanctioned under the Mental Health Act in 1982 for what would today be recognised as selective mutism.
Inside Broadmoor they rubbed shoulders with gangster Ronnie Kray, stared down Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and were told by paedophile Jimmy Savile: “I’ll have you first and you’ll be second.”
Now surviving twin June, whose sister Jennifer died within hours of leaving Broadmoor, has spoken publicly about her ordeal for the first time in 20 years, saying: “I don’t hold a grudge.”
June, now 60, recalls Ronnie Kray being desperate to meet her and Jennifer, saying: “He came over to our table [in Broadmoor].
“He bowed down, took my hand and kissed it and said, ‘Hello June, I’ve been hearing about you.’
“We used to get a birthday card and Christmas card from Ronnie every year.”
June also tells how she avoided fellow inmate Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 13 women during a reign of terror in the late 70s.
She tells BBC podcast June: Voice of a Silent Twin: “I saw the Yorkshire Ripper eating a burger across the field and it looked like he was watching me. I thought he might be getting close, so I didn’t want to look at him.”
The sisters were only freed after a campaign by investigative reporter turned mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace, who recalls them meeting pervert Jimmy Savile.
Wallace recalls Savile – who astonishingly had keys to Broadmoor after advocating for the hospital – jumping on a table in front of the twins.
The journalist, who founded mental health charity SANE, said: “Dressed in this garish shell suit with sparkly trainers and gold rings, he leapt onto our table.
“He looked at the two girls, pointed and said to June, ‘I’ll have you first’ and then to Jennifer, ‘You’ll be second’.
“I said, ‘Jimmy, you better get off’ and he just jumped off. And that’s when the two girls pointed to their heads and said, ‘We thought we were the mad ones’.”
Wallace said she felt a “chill when I looked into his eyes” and wrote to the Department of Health expressing “great concern about his behaviour in Broadmoor” – but says she got nowhere.
The horror of the girl’s fate has long fascinated the public and their story was made into a 2022 movie called The Silent Twins, starring Black Panther actress Letitia Wright.
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The daughters of Caribbean couple Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, the family moved from Barbados to the UK in the early 60s as part of the Windrush generation.
They were born in 1963 at a military hospital in Yemen where their father, a staff technician for the RAF, was based.
The twins and their two sisters and brother were the only black children in the community in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales, and were so badly bullied at school they were allowed to leave class early each day to avoid their tormentors.
They walked in quiet unison and whenever one did something the other would do the same, from sipping a cup of tea to touching their hair.
I saw the Yorkshire Ripper eating a burger across the field and it looked like he was watching me. I thought he might be getting close, so I didn’t want to look at him
June Gibbons
They spoke to each other in a made-up language that was a mixture of sped-up English and Creole, and their heavy lisps made it difficult for other people to understand what they were saying.
June said: “We had a speech impediment. Our parents couldn’t understand a word that we were saying, nobody understood – so we stopped talking.”
In 1974 a medic administering vaccines at school noticed June and Jennifer’s strange behaviour and sent them to therapists.
At one point they were sent to separate boarding schools to break their isolation, but became catatonic when they were parted.
During their teenage years they locked themselves away in their bedrooms, playing with dolls and writing books and plays.
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At 18 they started spending time with two boys they knew from school who, June says, introduced them to glue sniffing, smoking and drinking vodka.
She said: “The two of us were out of our minds. We were out of our depth, beyond help.
“So from going to be writers, we started destroying the town…vandalising places.”
That spiralled into petty theft, before the pair set fire to a tractor showroom. They wrote in diaries that they had first checked to make sure the building was empty.
When the case got to court, the Judge shockingly decided that the best place for the Gibbons sisters was Broadmoor, where they would get treatment – which June says meant being drugged up.
Broadmoor’s most infamous patients
BEHIND the walls of Broadmoor Hospital live some of the most notorious male criminals in the UK.
Based in the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire, it is the oldest of the three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England, the other two being Ashworth Hospital near Liverpool and Rampton Secure Hospital in Nottinghamshire.
The hospital originally opened as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1863 and has been run by West London Mental Health (NHS) Trust since 2001.
Today it is the most well-known high-security psychiatric hospital in England, housing many infamous criminals.
Most of the patients suffer from severe mental illnesses and many also have personality disorders.
Today the hospital is only home to male inpatients after the female service at the hospital closed in 2007.
Broadmoor Hospital has space to cater for 240 patients who suffer from mental illness and personality disorders.
Infamous inmates over the years have included Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, Charles Bronson, Ronnie Kray, Ian Ball (who tried to kidnap Princess Anne), and Robert Napper, convicted of murdering young mum Rachel Nickel on Wimbledon Common in July 1992 in front of her young son Alex.
It also housed neo-nazi David Copeland, known as the “London nail bomber”, Daniel Gonzalez,who murdered four people and injured two across two days in London and Sussex in September 2004, and Peter Bryan, who killed three people while on release from various mental hospitals.
She tells the podcast: “We wondered how long it would go on for. Our parents were always saying, ‘Keep up the good work, it won’t be long and you’ll be home in six months’.
“We believed them but it just went on and on.”
“We were in our twenties so we were begging the doctors to let us out.
“We still wanted to be able to have children and get married before it was too late. All our dreams… we wanted to achieve.
It will never leave me, it was always be there, Broadmoor and Jennifer
June Gibbons
“Girls were coming onto the ward and would be discharged after two or three years.
“We’d say to the nurses, ‘How come she’s getting out before us when she’s done something horrific?’
“I wanted to read books and do a bit of writing but the medication messed my head up, made me tired and clumsy and lethargic.
“I was always asking the doctor to reduce it little by little, they said in a few weeks time, a few months… the whole time I was in that hospital I was trying to come off the medication.”
June tells how she dated a robber while Jennifer dated a killer in Broadmoor.
She said: “Jennifer’s boyfriend was in for, well, he killed two women. It was horrific… he bashed two people over the head.
“Jen was saying to me, Iis it wise to be going out with him? Will he do the same thing to me?’, that sort of thing.
“It was a bit alarming at first but we got used to it, what they’d done.”
Jennifer later wrote: “What a mess I’ve landed myself in. I’ve been linked with a murderer and I’ve accepted his gifts.
“I feel so low, cheated. He said he didn’t mean it… it could have been an accident. I don’t trust him now.”
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The girls were finally sent to an open prison in March 1993 but Jennifer died of heart problems aged 29 within hours of her release.
Before closing her eyes for the first time, she told her sister: “We are free at last.”
June finally won her hard-earned freedom months later but says the institution robbed her of the chance of ever having a normal life.
She said: “It will never leave me, it was always be there, Broadmoor and Jennifer… when I make my coffee in the mornings I get memories of making coffee in Broadmoor.
We went through a lot of heartache but I just can’t hold on to anger… I’ve got to move on and be peaceful in my life and be grateful
June Gibbons
“As I get older the memories are getting more vivid.”
June, who now lives back in Wales, added: “The first 30 years of my life was very turbulent but I had somebody to be with. I had a companion and I thought that would last forever.
“I hoped that (one day) I would accept a proposal of marriage and by now still happily married with three children and six grandchildren.
“These dreams are gone now. But anger? To be angry for what reason? At the end of the day it was still a life and we were still alive.
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“We went through a lot of heartache but I just can’t hold on to anger… I’ve got to move on and be peaceful in my life and be grateful.
“It’s mind boggling really. From our humble little bedroom playing with little dolls, the whole world now knows about the silent twins.”
