A HOLLYWOOD movie about twins who grew up in Haverfordwest and were locked up alongside the likes of the Yorkshire Ripper and Ronnie Kray in the notorious Broadmoor Hospital, has received rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival.
The Silent Twins is the true story of twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons who only communicated with one another after suffering torrid abuse as children, before going on a crime spree in their teens that left them incarcerated in one of Britain’s most dangerous institutions.
No one imagined the twins would end up locked away for 11 long years after being sentenced at Swansea Crown Court for crimes including arson and petty theft that would have got a year or two at most.
Now the twins' story has been made into a feature film by Focus Pictures to be released in the US and UK.
June and Jennifer were the daughters of Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons who moved from Barbados to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s.
The twins were born in 1963, at a military hospital in Yemen where their father, a technician with the RAF, had been deployed.
The family soon relocated - first to England, and then to Haverfordwest in the 1970s.
Described as being ostracized, with the twins and their siblings being the only black children in the community, teachers at Haverfordwest County Secondary School, which the girls attended, said they used to let the pair leave early to avoid being bullied.
The twin sisters became inseparable, speaking a special language to each other that only they understood while becoming selectively mute to everyone around them.
In their later teenage years, the twins began using drugs and alcohol and went on a spree of crime and vandalism, which led to their being admitted to Broadmoor Hospital - a high-security mental health hospital.
The twins were sentenced to indefinite detention under the Mental Health Act 1983. They remained at Broadmoor for 11 years.
The mysterious death of Jennifer
According to investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace, who wrote a book on the twins called The Silent Twins, the girls had a longstanding agreement that if one died, the other must begin to live a normal life.
The sisters then began to believe that it was necessary for one of them to die. After much discussion, Jennifer agreed to sacrifice her life.
In March 1993, the twins were transferred from Broadmoor to the more open Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, where on arrival Jennifer could not be roused.
She was taken to the hospital where she died soon of acute myocarditis, a sudden inflammation of the heart.
There was no evidence of drugs or poison in her system, and her death remains a mystery.
READ MORE
- May the Force be with you! Falcon Exhibition shortlisted for Project of Year
- Twin-credible! Has Pembrokeshire school set a Welsh record?
Creative den of stories
The twins were temporarily separated to try get them to ‘open-up’, however this failed and when they were reunited, the two spent several years isolating themselves in their bedroom where they began to try launch writing careers.
Each kept an extensive diary and wrote a number of stories, poems and novels and pooled together their unemployment benefits in order to get one of the novels published.
June now lives in west Wales near her family.
'The Silent Twins' stars Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrence. The movie is released on September 16 in the US and in December in the UK.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here