Following a traumatic birth, Ruth Appleby wanted nothing more than to cradle her baby daughter in her arms.
Named Rebecca, she had been whisked away following Ruth’s Caesarean section, and whenever the then 29-year-old asked nurses when she could see her, the reply was always ‘soon’.
It was left to her husband Howard to tell Ruth the devastating news that it would never happen: Rebecca had, inexplicably, died within hours of being born.
As the obstetrician later explained, it was like a ‘bad lottery’.
The profound heartbreak Ruth felt is one that only the unenviable few who have lost a child will truly understand. ‘My whole world fell apart in that moment,’ as Ruth puts it. ‘I’ve never felt such sadness in all my life. It’s always left a huge vacuum.’
That sadness, however, would go on to be compounded by a further almost unimaginable trauma. For 18 years later, in 2010, Ruth made the extraordinary discovery that the grave she had visited and laid flowers on countless times over the years did not appear to contain her daughter’s body, but that of another, older, child.
That realisation took Ruth on a desperate journey – one which endures today – underpinned by two central questions.
‘Could my daughter still be alive?’ she asks. ‘If those remains are not, as I believe, Rebecca’s, then whose remains are they?’
They are questions that have latterly been asked by thousands of other mothers who gave birth in Spain from the Forties through to the Nineties and who were unwittingly caught up in what became known as the Spanish baby scandal.
The implications are shocking. It has now been established that under the fascist regime of General Franco, who ruled the country from 1939 until his death in 1975, babies were taken at birth from couples who opposed the dictator or were deemed ‘unsuitable’ parents – like single mothers – and given to approved childless couples.
By the Fifties, it is thought organised criminal gangs had become involved, selling infants for adoption to make money in a practice in which everyone from nuns, priests, nurses and doctors have since been implicated.
Astonishingly, it is thought the stealing of babies continued long after Franco’s death. Indeed it may have gone undiscovered were it not for the advent of DNA technology, which allowed those harbouring suspicions access to possible proof their babies were still alive, having been raised by others.
After the first case went public in 2011, it is now estimated that as many as 300,000 children could have been taken.
Ruth is believed to be the only English woman engulfed in the scandal – targeted, she believes, as one half of a British couple with no other family in Spain. After many years desperately searching for answers, she contacted the ITV programme Long Lost Family, who took on her case and will feature it next week in a devastatingly poignant episode.
Now 61 and a teaching assistant in her native Richmond, north Yorkshire, Ruth went on to have two more children, Rosie, 29, and 23-year-old Benjy. She has carved out a happy life, but not a day goes by when she doesn’t think about her firstborn, who would now be 32. ‘She is always with me,’ she says. Ruth was just 18 when, back in the 1980s, she agreed to go to Spain with her then boyfriend Howard, who had been offered a teaching job there. She had no way of knowing at the time, of course, but it was a decision that would have life-long consequences.
‘I said yes without really thinking about it, as you do at that age,’ Ruth recalls. ‘I planned to go for a year, but stayed for 24.’
Like Howard, Ruth also got a teaching job, and the duo moved around the country before settling in the picturesque coastal city of A Coruña in the rugged north-west province of Galicia, following their marriage in 1984.
Eight years later, in 1992, Ruth learned she was pregnant. ‘I was overjoyed, we both were,’ she says.
The couple were told at their scans that the baby was a girl, and chose the name Rebecca. ‘We were both so looking forward to meeting her,’ Ruth says. In early December, two weeks overdue, Ruth was admitted to the local hospital where, two days later, she was induced.
Not long before, she underwent an unsettling encounter with a nurse, whom she overheard telling a patient with a delicate pregnancy to ‘be careful’. ‘She said “because otherwise, your baby will die” ’ – then she looked at me and said “Like this lady’s baby is going to die”.’ It was odd, but I put it down to the fact she was a grumpy old lady, and it was a Friday, and she wanted to finish work.’
As Ruth underwent her eventual Caesarean, Howard paced the corridors until he was told their baby had been delivered and settled in the hospital creche.
‘He saw her briefly, and said she was absolutely beautiful. But after about five minutes the nurse said he needed to go home as it had been a long day,’ Ruth recalls.
Two hours later, he received a phone call from the hospital asking him to return. ‘When he got there he found doctors waiting for him. They told him in a stairwell that the baby has passed away,’ Ruth says.
Recovering from surgery in her room, Ruth remained unaware of this unfolding tragedy, until her husband was finally allowed to see her.
‘As soon as he came in, I could tell from his face something was wrong,’ she recalls quietly. ‘And then it was just devastation. I hadn’t even got to hold her.’
An hour or two later, a doctor came and used the words ‘bad lottery’ to explain what had unfolded. ‘He said they always had about five cases every year, that I was young and could have more,’ she says.
Ruth recalls events then moving with bewildering speed. ‘The hospital told me they would sort everything out,’ she says. ‘They said Rebecca would have to be cremated, but I didn’t want that, so I refused. They then told my husband which funeral parlour he had to go to, which looking back was odd, but at the time I wasn’t in the mindset to question it. We were both in deep grief, and I was also quite ill with an infection.’
By the time Ruth was discharged several days later, she found to her bewilderment that the funeral had already taken place without her, and Rebecca’s tiny body laid to rest in a picturesque cemetery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean – or so she and Howard were told.
‘We went to the cemetery that day, and there were already flowers there at the grave site,’ she says. She does not know who left them, and while the couple were issued with a death certificate, they were so blinded by grief they did not properly look at it.
Ruth and Howard could do nothing else than try to piece together their life. She says. ‘I suffered severe depression. Friends supported me tremendously, but it was an incredibly difficult time.’
Eventually, she and Howard felt strong enough to try for another baby, and in 1995 Rosie was born, followed in 2001 by brother Benjy, following deliveries at the same hospital where Rebecca had been born that Ruth describes as ‘full of anxiety’.
‘The day Rosie was born in particular I was so nervous, just terrified that the same thing was going to happen. Thank God both were fine,’ she recalls.
Ruth and Howard raised their children in Spain until their separation and divorce in 2004, after which Ruth decided to return to Yorkshire. ‘We’ve had a very civilised relationship,’ she says. ‘And of course he would like the truth as much as me.’
Then, in 2010, Ruth made the decision to have Rebecca’s remains brought back to Yorkshire. Having taken great comfort in being able to visit her grave, she now wanted to be able to do so back in the UK.
‘It was an incredibly difficult decision,’ she says. ‘I worried about disturbing her peace, which is so sacred, but after a lot of thought, I felt it was the right thing to do.’
To that end, she arranged to have Rebecca’s remains cremated to return to England, and flew out to Spain with her solicitor, as the law requires, to oversee the removal of her daughter’s coffin from her grave.
Nothing could have prepared her for what unfolded next: the coffin proved to be too large for the chest sent by the crematorium and without a word of warning, the cemetery workers took a crowbar and opened the lid.
‘It was barbaric, there’s no other word for it,’ Ruth says. ‘It was already a deeply emotive situation, because I was reclaiming my daughter which is quite hard to process, and I was absolutely reeling from the lack of respect. I remember saying repeatedly to the solicitor “What are they doing? What are they doing?” Basically I went into emotional and physical shock.’
What happened next was equally devastating: inside the coffin were the remains of a complete skeleton which could to Ruth’s eye in no way be that of a newborn baby.
‘It’s an image I will never, ever forget,’ she says. ‘Like something from a nightmare.’
Yet, overwhelmed by everything that was unfolding, Ruth allowed the cremation to go ahead, something she now bitterly regrets. ‘For a long time, I beat myself up about that. But I didn’t properly put things together at that time. I was just doing everything to stay on my feet and gradually I’ve learned to forgive myself. Because the whole thing was too big to confront.’
Ruth brought those ashes back to the UK, where it would be another year before she learned something that would cause her to question everything she had been through.
In 2012 – a year after the wider scandal of the stolen babies had swept the Spanish news – a Spanish friend came to visit and told her about one of the cases that had hit the headlines.
‘It was from the Sixties, but it was basically identical to my experience,’ Ruth recalls. ‘And it was very odd, because almost instantaneously and simultaneously as well, I felt “This is evil – but it could also be a miracle.” ’
Ruth then went to retrieve the paperwork issued around Rebecca’s death, among which was an envelope she and Howard had never opened.
‘They give you these things at a time when you’re traumatised, and you trust them, you believe them. And death and burial certificates aren’t really something you want to look at.’
What she found floored her. ‘The license to have her buried was blank,’ she says. In other words, there was no authorising signature from the authorities.
There were other anomalies, among them an appointment card for a six-week check-up for the baby. ‘Why would you make an appointment for a dead baby?’ she asks. ‘When I looked closely there was not one single paper that doesn’t have something strange on it.’
With alarm bells ringing, Ruth contacted North Yorkshire Police, who requested a hospital report which, on arrival, showed four different times of death for Rebecca with a variant of two hours between them.
’There should only be one time of death, of course,’ Ruth says. Extraordinarily, though, that is as far as Ruth’s campaign to get to the truth ever went, for despite taking her case to the Spanish police and even Interpol it was ultimately decided there was no case to answer.
Having exhausted all legal avenues in Spain, she has since petitioned endlessly for her case to be reopened.
However, despite the fact that in 2018 Spain’s left wing government approved a parliamentary commission to help families who believe their loved ones were stolen – and some have been reunited with their long lost children – her own case has not progressed.
‘It’s frustrating and heartbreaking in equal measure, because the longer time goes by, the more it means the people who hold the answers are getting older, and there is a chance those answers may be lost forever,’ she says.
It is why she contacted Long Lost Family last year, who in turn asked Ruth to undertake a DNA test to see if there was a match to any other living blood relative on any of the widely available databases.
Sadly, there were no hits.
That does not, of course, mean that there may not be a match in the future. Her greatest wish is to meet her daughter, but failing that, it would bring her enormous peace to know she is alive and happy. ‘That she’s out there having a happy life and a good life would be enough,’ she says. ‘But of course to meet her would be a dream come true.’
It is a desire shared by her son and daughter, who have long known of the existence of an older sister. ‘I actually went to a child psychologist for some advice on how to talk to them about it, because I didn’t want to mess up,’ she says. ‘They definitely feel that they potentially have an older sister out there.’
Ruth has taken comfort from meeting other parents caught up in the scandal. ‘With some, we just hugged each other on the first meeting without saying a single word, because we knew exactly what each other was thinking,’ she says.
‘We have a very strong bond because they are the only ones who can really understand what you’ve been through and there’s some solace in that.’
Ruth adds: ‘I will keep trying to find the truth until I take my last breath. Because I can’t achieve any inner peace without it.’
Long Lost Family Special: The Spanish Baby Scandal is on ITV1 at 9pm on Tuesday, January 21.
