Examples
INS Features team has helped many people tell their story through newspapers and magazines.
Here are just a few examples of our work.
'My killer stepdad took me to his victim's grave' - Closer, 21 - 27 January, 2012
Jade Garlick stood by her stepdad, Adrian Prout, when he was convicted of murdering his wife, Kate - but then he made a shock confession. Here, she tells her story for the first time.
When Adrian Prout was jailed for murdering his wife after she demanded an £800,000 divorce settlement, his friends and family tirelessly campaigned against his conviction.
The landowner always claimed primary school teacher Kate, 55, had run away after an argument and there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.
His loyal girlfriend Debbie Garlick, 41 - who started a relationship with prout just seven months after Kate's disappearance - and her daughter Jade, 18, believed him.
Jade was so convinced he hadn't done it, she launched a Facebook page declaring his innocence and planned to lobby MPs and the Queen. But her world came crashing down when Prout, 49, failed a lie detector test he had taken to clear his name. He subsequently confessed to Kate's murder and led police to the woodland spot at his Gloucestershire estate where he had burried her.
I asked my fiance to take a lie detector test to show he didn't murder his wife... but it proved he was the killer - The Mail on Sunday, January 8, 2012
Debbie Garlick wanted to save her baby's father from a miscarriage of justice... instead she discovered the horrifying truth
It was the nauseating moment Debbie Garlick realised the man she planned to marry, the father of her baby daughter, was a cold and calculating murderer. Sitting in the overheated visitors’ room at Rye Hill Prison in Warwickshire, Debbie tentatively posed the one question she hadn’t dare ask in the four years since meeting him. She looked across the table at her fiance Adrian Prout and, heart palpitating, said: ‘If you have done something to her we need to know, so that her family can give her a proper burial.’
Despite his constant denials and no body ever being found, Prout was serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife Kate. Debbie dreaded the answer because, until that moment, she’d had total faith in the man she had grown to love and had campaigned ferociously to have released. Prout, a 49-year-old businessman, stared at her coolly and answered quietly: ‘She’s had one.’
In that short, callous statement, just two months ago, Debbie’s hopes and dreams for the future came crashing down around her. ‘My stomach turned over,’ she says. ‘I felt hot and started shaking uncontrollably. I realised then that everything we had been building together was a lie, along with every word he had ever told me.’
Debbie, 41, went straight to the police and within eight days they had discovered Kate’s body in a shallow grave where the calculating Prout had buried the attractive retired school teacher under the cover of darkness.
For four years, Prout had never changed his sob story. He claimed that Kate had stormed out of the marital home on Bonfire Night in 2007 to ‘wind him up’ after a series of rows and just disappeared. A jury, however, found him guilty of murder in 2010, after the prosecution read out damning passages from her diary. Debbie, who met Prout a month after Kate’s disappearance, stubbornly refused to believe he was responsible for such a heinous crime, insisting he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. But suddenly, the horrific truth was there and she had to face it.
Miracle of the M5 crash survivor: Girl whose whole family died in motorway horror speaks of her extraordinary recovery... and how she plans to be back in high heels for her wedding - The Mail on Sunday, December 18, 2011
Emma Barton had bruising on the brain, two collapsed lungs, five broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, crushed foot and her spleen was removed. She lost her father and sister in the motorway disaster.
To Chris Burbull, Emma Barton is far more than simply the woman he plans to marry next summer – she is a living, breathing miracle. Even as he holds her hand in the sitting room of their home, he struggles to take his eyes off the extraordinarily determined young woman he came so desperately close to losing.
Last month, the couple, Emma’s father Michael and her elder sister Maggie were driving home on the M5 in Somerset after attending a family funeral when they were caught up in a horrific pile-up involving 34 vehicles. Seven people, including Michael and Maggie, died and a further 51 were hurt. It was one of the worst traffic accidents in Britain. Police are still investigating whether fog or smoke drifting over the motorway from a fireworks display in nearby Taunton contributed to the disaster.
Emma was left critically injured when, during the incident, a lorry collided with the Ford Fiesta in which she, Chris, Michael and Maggie were travelling. As she lay unconscious in the intensive care unit at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Chris issued a heart-wrenching plea to his fiancee on her Facebook page. ‘Baby please pull through. I can’t live without you,’ he wrote. ‘I love you so much – please, for me.’ Of all the tragic stories to emerge after the catastrophe, it was perhaps the plight of Emma that most caught the public’s imagination. She was just 13 when her mother Teresa died from a brain tumour and now she had lost her father and sister.
But despite that and her own extensive injuries, Emma’s recovery since that dark day has been nothing short of remarkable. Although it was feared she might need to spend 12 months in hospital, she returned home a mere three weeks after the crash.
‘When I first saw Emma lying there in her hospital bed it ripped me to pieces,’ says Chris, 23. ‘She wasn’t moving. She had all these pipes and drips coming out of her body. I prayed to anyone who was looking down for her to pull through. ‘Words can’t explain what I felt when she first opened her eyes again. My heart jumped. It was like someone suddenly knocking on your door when you’re on the verge of losing everything, and saying, “By the way, here’s £5 million – you’ve won the lottery.” ’
Charity worker Emma, 19, takes up the story: ‘They told me I was pretty much dead when I came in. ‘I had bruising on the brain, two collapsed lungs, five broken ribs, my pelvis was fractured in two places, my foot was crushed and my spleen had to be removed. 'Everyone is so shocked at my recovery – not even the doctors can believe it.’
Teen orphaned in M5 horror tells of night her whole life changed for ever - Sunday Mirror, December 18, 2011
M5 crash victim Emma Barton will never forget the moment she first opened her eyes five days after the horrific pile-up last month.
And neither will her fiancé, Chris Burbull, who was by her hospital bedside, willing her to survive. As her eyes locked into his, 19-year-old Emma saw his joy that she had woken from a coma. But in a second she saw it change to anguish. And then the words she dreaded came tumbling out. “Do you know what has happened?” he said. “I am sorry… but your dad and your sister didn’t make it.”
Chris, 23, watched helplessly as a single tear rolled down Emma’s cheek before she sank back into sleep. “My first reaction was that I didn’t want to know anything,” says Emma, who had lost her mother when she was only 13. “I didn’t want to hear anything more.”
Today the couple speak for the first time of the hell of being caught up in Britain’s worst M-way crash in 20 years. Chris recalls the moments leading up to the terrifying 34-vehicle pile-up as he drove a friend’s Ford Fiesta into a wall of fog. He was told that after the crash he had run badly injured across the blazing carriageway calling for help amid the screams of victims after a lorry ran into the back of the Fiesta. He reveals how police relentlessly grilled him about what happened – and how in the aftermath he is battling guilt over an accident that was not his fault.
Grief-stricken Emma tells how her first reaction when shown pictures of their crashed car was: “How did I get out?” She also reveals how she clings to her memories of her father Michael, 67, and sister Maggie, 30, two of seven people killed in the Bonfire Night tragedy. Her dad died of chest injuries. Maggie suffered neck, chest and abdominal wounds. Emma knows it is only a miracle she didn’t die alongside them. She suffered 20 separate injuries, any of which could have been fatal. Doctors expected her to be in hospital for a year.
'Amy was so ashamed of being an alcoholic, she wouldn't even drink in front of me' - Daily Mail, November 4, 2011
In a revealing - and moving - interview, Janis Winehouse insists that her daughter DIDN'T have a death wish.
Amy Winehouse made a point of never drinking in front of her family. She knew she was an alcoholic and hated the fact. She told them she couldn’t bear how it made her feel, and what it was doing to her — but she promised them that she was going to stop.
Just as the 27-year-old-star had, in 2008, seemingly single-handedly conquered her life-threatening addiction to drugs, so she seemed determined to do the same with drink.
But she made it clear she wanted to do it on her own terms and in her own time, without interference. Taking the words of her favourite Frank Sinatra song, she told her family she wanted to do it ‘My Way’.
Amy’s mother Janis, 56, dabs at her eyes with a tissue as she remembers her daughter’s utter conviction. ‘I think Amy felt she was invincible,’ says Janis, in her first interview following last week’s inquest into the Grammy Award-winning star’s death on July 23.
‘Amy didn’t want to die; she didn’t have a death wish. She had a huge zest for life. There was so much she still wanted to achieve.
‘Amy was incredibly strong, both physically and mentally, but alcohol addiction seemed to creep up on her and then just took her by surprise.’
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More of our work
Groom spared jail for attacking bride - Reveal, November 2009
A groom who assaulted his bride on their wedding night was spared jail after his now-estranged wife sent magistrates a letter begging for mercy.
Stephen Grimwood grabbed terrified Denise Manning by the wrists and threw her on the bed of the bridal suite at the posh hotel where they had held their plush reception.
The 38-year-old then placed a pillow over her head in a bid to stop her telling her family of the drunken row before she managed to escape and alert workers at the Hotel in Windsor, Berkshire.
However, at a sentencing hearing, Miss Manning aged 33 years, who has not spent a single night living with her husband since the March 28 incident, begged them to spare the worried defendant jail.
Couple wed after 34 year wait - Sunday Mirror, November 15, 2009
Childhood sweethearts Dee Mair and Gary Matthew, who were split up by their concerned parents as young teenagers,
finally got married 34 years later.
"We were young and in love all those years ago, just like Romeo and Juliet. Although we went our separate ways, there wasn't a day I didn't think of Dee..."
Joanna Kennard - Holiday Rape Victim - Fabulous, May 5, 2009
"The man jumped at me from the darkness and I tried to scream for help, but he punched me harder and harder."
"My mouth was filling up with blood and all I could see in my mind was an image of my seven-year-old daughter Lacey," she says quietly. "I just kept thinking: 'This can't be the last day I ever see my daughter..."