The Hidden First Plot: Jean Daddow, Drugs and Coercive Control

It is well established that Jean Daddow and her son Roger Blackman concocted ten different plots to assassinate Terry Daddow before he was shot in November 1991. My research confirms the existence of a 'new' plot that began well before all the others, not long after my father married the Black Widow. From early 1990, Jean Daddow was secretly lacing my father's food and drink with cocktails of Class A drugs. Already suffering from depression, the illegal drugs caused him to have a slow, inexorable mental collapse, which no medical professional could explain. Isolated and made helplessly reliant upon his doting wife, dad could be more easily picked off when the woman he described as his 'nurse' deemed the time was right. This story of murder is also one of coerce and control, centring on a drug-riddled eleventh plot.

By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Oct 04, 2026

After Terry Daddow was put out of the house and my parents divorced in 1986, when I was 11 years old, I saw many changes in my father, none of them positive. One was that we barely saw him, which was not what any of us, including mum, wanted. Contrary to claims made later in court by my father’s killers, my mother never blocked access to his children – we just never or rarely saw him. When we did he barely resembled the affable character we had grown up loving. He looked the same, but it was like spending time with a completely different person. He seemed edgier, disinterested, and it was hard to know what to say to him. He was not present in the moment. On one occasion, this would have been 1989 or 1990, dad drove me and my brothers to Hemsted forest (around thirty minutes away) for our annual Christmas Eve walk among the towering, densely-planted conifers. We used to go as a family but by then mum and dad were not on amicable terms, yet mum still wanted us to do something with him at that special time of year. It was a rare trip out together. We did not know it at the time but it also would be our last with him.  

It was a calm, overcast day under smooth, leaden-grey skies. We left home just after lunch, telling mum we would be back for tea as dusk fell. The forest was pretty empty, most people preferring a morning walk when it was brighter. We proceeded to get completely and utterly lost: all the tracks and clearings looked the same. We walked in ever decreasing circles without luck for what seemed like ages. As darkness fell we were still searching for the car and wondering where we could set up camp with a fire. It was kind of cool but not cool at the same time. I tried to hide it but I was terrified. It felt like we were in the black woods of a Grimm Brothers fairytale. Needless to say – this is the era before mobile phones, remember – my mum was beside herself when we got back many hours later than planned, well after our bedtimes. My dad got severely reprimanded, yet it barely seemed to register. As Christmas Eves went, I had had more fun ones. It was emblematic of a father who in many discernible ways had become a stranger to himself and to us, especially after he married his new wife Jean at Gretna Green, of all places, in June 1989.

Through 1990 and 1991 we got used to not seeing him and were adjusting to life as a true one-parent family. Then one morning, out of the blue in early-mid 1991, my father barrelled up to the house uninvited. His car was parked skew-whiff across the drive. He looked dishevelled, was acting very strangely and his eyes looked ‘wobbly’. He was veering between aggression and passivity, his speech was slurry, and he looked spaced out. We had never seen him like this, even at the darkest moments of my parents’ marriage breakdown. We thought he might be drunk but I had nothing to compare it to because I had not seen him drink much when he lived with us. Bottles of alcohol in our lounge drinks cabinet could sit there for years untouched, apart from the odd Christmas unveiling for an hour or so. My mum barely touched a drop and he was a convivial social drinker at best. My mum was clearly afraid of his erratic behaviour that day, ushering me and my younger brother upstairs out of his way. The fearful visit ‘peaked’ when he accused my older brother of being my mum’s ‘lover’ as she tried to get him out of the house. Drunk or not, you would recognise your own 20-year old son. How he drove home is anyone’s guess. He was not himself. And those eyes. 

During dad’s murder trial, which lasted from February to April 1993, it emerged that he had become involved with a family for whom drugs were a lifestyle choice and a vital source of cash. Jean’s son Roger Blackman was a significant middle-tier drug-dealer, a frequent user who surrounded himself with other druggies and petty thieves to fund his habit. He took cannabis, amphetamines and Ecstasy. He had a favoured cosh he would use to extract payments from hard-up customers. In the bungalow, ‘Rovael’, Blackman shared with my dad and Jean before they moved to the cottage in which Terry Daddow’s life would be taken, Blackman permanently had kilo-blocks of marijuana on his kitchen scales ready to cut and sell to his ‘clients’. This was his word for 'friends'. Searching Rovael after Blackman’s first arrest in January 1992, police found a drugs ledger-book containing Blackman's record of the drugs he sold, to whom, monies paid and monies owed. He was fastidious about, and obsessed with, cash down to the last penny, just like his mother. In that book of accounts was the name of one Robert Adam Bell, who, through a devious series of machinations on Blackman’s part, had been duped into becoming Terry Daddow’s assassin.  

Blackman hated my father for splitting up his parents’ marriage, as if his mother was not equally to blame. My father would, in turn, have hated sharing a house with his new stepson, for he was as averse to drugs as he was to alcohol abuse. As a child in Cornwall he grew up with a father, William, who, when drunk, would beat dad senseless when he tried to protect his mother and three younger siblings from his crazed outbursts. Dad’s younger brother Roger explained the true horror of those childhood experiences to me in interviews for my book. Dad himself repressed those memories and never spoke of them, or his father, to us. Yet, according to what the murderers told everyone in court, and which the craven press unquestioningly reported, Terry Daddow had become exactly the kind of man he always hated: a violent, abusive drunk. Possible? Yes, but only if we accept what the Black Widow said about him at face value, and this was a woman for whom lying and narrative deceptions were a full-time occupation.

I now have an alternative hypothesis as to what actually went on behind the closed door of the idyllic Chapelfield Cottage in Northiam, where dad and Jean set up home at the beginning of 1990. There, if it was not already happening, my father experienced a coercive relationship in which drugs of all kinds (prescription and illegal) were used to pacify, isolate and control him. The Black Widow made him believe, through the covert administration of a range of Class A substances, that he was experiencing some kind of prolonged psychological break down. She further convinced him that his divorce and workplace stress were the proximate causes of his melancholic malaise. Igniting his levels of paranoia to nuclear levels, she further convinced him that the only saviour from his ‘condition’ was not his family or friends but she herself. I plan to write a follow-up blog explaining more about coercive control, which was only made a crime in England and Wales in 2015. It will foreground the recent research into the ways in which drugs can be used in coercive controlling relationships, and how my father’s final years alive exhibit all the hallmarks of him having lived with, then been murdered by, a coercive controller. 

I was first alerted to the possible merits of the coerce and control component of this story by the Senior Investigating Officer. He told me that dad's autopsy showed evidence of -tears in his stomach lining consistent with prolonged ingestion of class A substances. As I have already explained, I can say for a fact that my dad would never knowingly have taken such drugs. As part of my ongoing battle to track down primary sources relating to his murder, I am awaiting the outcome of a Freedom of Information Request made to Sussex Police to be sent a copy of the post-mortem. This will help corroborate and give detail to that finding, along with an indication of the extent to which such substances may have been ingested.

Soon after that revelation I read the trial testimony of the hitman, Robert Bell. Whatever his bad character and the unreliable tales he spun about other matters in this case, Bell kept referring to a plan Jean and her son enacted to drug my father to an early grave. It is established that they had access to the drugs (the means) and a strong motive (money), so it would stand to reason. Moreover, Blackman's ex-girlfriend reported hearing Jean ask her son if he knew anyone who could kill her husband-to-be even before they got married, forthe princely sum of £1,000. When Blackman recruited Bell to be their hitman in spring 1991, he told Bell “he would like to kill Terry Daddow”. Under oath, Bell further testified that “For probably 12 months leading up to my meeting [March 1990 onwards, Blackman] had tried to poison Terry Daddow on a number of occasions with LSD…Roger used to find it quite funny”. Blackman and his mum, it transpires, were as sadistic as they were narcissistic, unrolling a subtle first plot from 1990, making 11 in total, not the ten on which previous accounts of this murder fixate. We can surmise that they wanted dad to drop dead from drug poisoning so it would look like natural causes. Or perhaps he would crash his car and kill himself, to look like death by misadventure. They would not care that others got hurt in the process. The main thing was their hands would be clean: they were all about getting others to do their dirty work for them. We also know that Blackman later tried to have the hitman killed before he could testify against his co-conspirators in court. The method? Poisoning Bell's drugs with 'dirty' substances. Dad was one victim of drugging; Bell escaped, but could have been another; how many more were there in Blackman's life? 

Having inadvertently been ingesting a regular flow of Class A drugs over a prolonged period, the depression for which dad was receiving professional psychiatric support and anti-depressants seemed to be making him worse not better. No longer able to hold down his job at the bank, he retired on health grounds in May 1991. Characteristically, Jean told everyone it was stress and depression getting the better of him. Self-presenting as a martyr who was as supportive of her husband as ever, together, she said, they would get through it. It would have been hard for anyone to discern it at the time, let alone my father (always a challenge with coercive, controlling relationships), but Jean was carefully guarding access to him, while consistently spreading partial information about him. All of it was designed to paint the picture of her as the victim only of loving a sick man. Builders who worked on their house for months on end said they never once set eyes on him. All they heard from Jean was that Terry Daddow's illness caused him to be violent, abusive and reclusive. One of the tradesman nearly confronted him but said it was none of his business, and she said she loved her husband despite his temper.  

Jean Daddow also complained she did not like being stuck at home with her debilitated husband. As usual, however, the truth was the exact reverse of what she said. Perpetually laid up in bed and sedated, my father was more easily controllable. My uncle Roger recalls trying to phone dad to arrange visits, to be told by Jean that he was asleep at all hours of the day and night. As described above, we know that we never saw dad either, and when we did we had encounters like Hemsted forest and his wobbly-eyed threats on unannounced visits to our house. Multiple brain scans after dad’s retirement, which scared him stiff, could not get to the bottom of what was causing his mental degeneration and psychotic episodes. They were never likely to, because there was nothing wrong with his brain. He was ingesting mind-altering chemicals secretly administered by his wife. What Jean presented as a medical mystery had a rather more prosaic cause.

In some of dad’s last recorded letters to his GP, he wrote of seeing flying geese, of floating, of not being able to feel his legs, of crying whilst “feeling no emotion”, and of memory blackouts. He feared for his life and that he was going insane. After one notable ‘turn’ over the weekend of 9-10 November, he wrote to his GP on 11 November: “The speed with which it all happened frightened me and I am now afraid to go driving on my own”. But he said he took comfort from the fact that “Jean is a great nurse”. That 'turn', we now know, was the result of Jean slipping a cocktail of 32 crushed-up Ecstasy tablets into his tea. The hitman delivered them to her in an envelope, disguised as a badger conservationist, him being there to recce the house and get the lie of the land before the assassination. Two weeks later, Terry Daddow was shot dead on his doorstep. Of the many plots the Black Widow devised to kill my father, the much-overlooked first plot, centring on drugs, coercion and control, was perhaps the most callous and insidious of all. He always professed to be scared of dying young like his own father. In the end Jean Daddow, Roger Blackman and Robert Bell made sure he did, but not without first dehumanising him, restricting his autonomy and causing him immense suffering. Finally, three decades later, dad's curious behaviour in the months before his death makes a lot more sense.  

If you, or someone you know, is experiencing coercive control in a domestic setting, do not wait: call the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000247, the Samaritans on 116 123, or the police on 101 (UK).

Images from Murder Most Foul, Quarterly No.9 (Magazine Design and Publishing Ltd, 1993).