A chilling remark exposing Karen Matthews’ true feelings about her daughter’s disappearance has been revealed by one of her former neighbours in a new Amazon documentary.
Matthews, from Dewsbury, Yorkshire, was dubbed ‘Britain’s worst mother’ after engineering a plot with Michael Donovan, the uncle of her then-boyfriend, to kidnap nine-year-old Shannon.
The pair held the young girl captive for 24 days in a plot to claim a £50,000 reward. Her captivity began when Donovan enticed the nine-year-old into his car on the way home from a school swimming trip on February 19, 2008.
Police launched a £3.2million search for missing Shannon, only to discover that she had been tied up in Donovan’s home.
The youngster had been sedated with the adult sedative temazepam – not only during the kidnap but for up to 20 months prior – and provided a list of rules on how to behave to avoid being detected.
She was eventually discovered by police hidden in the drawer of a divan bed in Donovan’s bedroom, just a mile from her Dewsbury home.
When Shannon was first reported missing on February 19, 2008 residents of Dewsbury’s Moorside Estate flocked to support Karen through the trauma of having a missing child.
But in a new Prime Video documentary, neighbour Petra Jamieson reveals how casually Karen spoke about her daughter’s kidnap ordeal.
Only two weeks after Shannon had been found, Petra went with Karen to a local fish and chip shop to buy dinner for her family.
Aware of her daughter’s plight, the proprietor said the food was on the house – iliciting a bizarre reply from Karen.
Petra said: ‘She looked at me and just said she should “get rid of one of my kids more often”. At the time, I just slapped her on the side of the arm… “Why would you say that?”‘
In the new two-part documentary, The Hunt for Shannon Matthews, Petra recalls Karen begging for the return of her ‘beautiful princess daughter’.
The pair had become close friends since Petra lived just two doors down from Karen and their children attended the same school.
Petra recalls Shannon as a ‘pleasant, lovely girl to have around’, who never caused any trouble and would just happily play with her siblings in the garden.
Speaking in the doc she said that when Shannon was found the community was ecstatic and ‘bouncing around’.
But Petra said she could not escape the oddness of the remark in the chip shop – or how much her friend ‘liked the attention’ of being in the media.
She said: ‘She liked the fact that she could go into town, and everyone recognised her. People had sympathy for her and compassion, giving her hugs.’
Petra says she never suspected that Karen was behind her own daughter’s disappearance and was horrified upon learning the truth – having once been her former friend’s biggest defender.
In a 2008 Channel 4 Cutting Edge documentary Shannon Matthews: The Family’s Story, filmed before the truth came out about the kidnap plot, Petra can be seen fuming after reading a newspaper story in which Karen’s parents claimed her children were physically assaulted by her partner Craig Meehan.
The chip shop incident outlined by Petra is not the only example of Karen’s seeming lightheartedness during her daughter’s ordeal.
Local journalist Richard Edwards also describes in the documentary how he went to interview Karen at home – only for her to pop out from behind the door as if she was playing hide and seek.
Matthews and Donovan were both jailed for eight years at Leeds Crown Court in January 2009 and each served four years of their sentences before being released in 2012.
Shannon and her siblings have been granted new identities and lifelong anonymity following a High Court injunction in 2020 and are kept apart from mother Karen.
Petra says that she struggled to believe that her friend had hoodwinked her so completely.
She said: ‘Even though she admitted it, I wanted to see if she would sit and admit it in the court. At the end, she still couldn’t be honest. She lied and lied and lied. Is that because she thought she could get away it? Who knows?’
Karen Matthews’ fellow plotter Michael Donovan died in April last year after collapsing at Three Valleys Hospital in Keighley, West Yorkshire.
He had claimed to be a forensic psychologist named Wendy in a series of bizarre emails when attempting to shift the blame over the plot.
Donovan alleged Matthews had threatened to burn his house down if he did not go through with the twisted kidnap plan of her daughter.
In email to the Mirror, he told of having at least four different aliases – and the newspaper reported he had emailed others over the past year using the name Wendy.
He wrote in one message to the newspaper: ‘The plan to keep Shannon was only for a full week and not any further but Karen Matthews got greedy.’
He also claimed Matthews’ threats of setting his property ablaze scared him while he had Shannon in his flat, and that he had concerns for her life.
He claimed the original plan was to release Shannon near Dewsbury town centre and then pretend to find her – picking her up and dashing her to the nearest police station to collect the reward and appear the hero.
Speaking on behalf of Matthews, her boyfriend Paul Saunders, a convicted paedophile, told The Daily Mail last year that Karen was innocent.
Despite Matthews’ conviction, Saunders insisted: ‘She’s innocent. It was Donovan who did the crime and kidnapped Shannon. She had nothing to do with it. People have got this all wrong.
