"Sadistic" foster mother, Eunice Spry, was found guilty yesterday of horrifying abuse of three children in her care over a period of 20 years

Foster mother inflicted 20 years of sadistic abuse on three children

Extract:

"A "sadistic" foster mother was found guilty yesterday of subjecting three children in her care to a horrifying catalogue of physical and mental abuse over 20 years.

Eunice Spry, 62, beat the children with sticks and metal bars, scrubbed their skin with sandpaper and forced them to eat lard, bleach, vomit and even their own faeces.

She treated the children, two girls and a boy, as if they were her slaves, ordering one of them to stay in a wheelchair for four years even though she could walk so Spry could claim benefits for her.

Spry, a Jehovah's Witness and a pillar of her local community, would punish the children because she thought they were possessed by the devil. Once she kept two of them imprisoned, naked and starving, in a room for a month.

She forced them to run up and down the stairs and "tortured" them by making them take part in the "invisible chair" game, squatting for hours on end until they collapsed - then they were beaten.

The abuse, which lasted from 1986 to 2005, was not spotted by the authorities and last night the Gloucestershire Safeguarding Children Board (GSCB), the body now responsible for monitoring organisations in charge of children's welfare in the county, admitted mistakes were made."