STONE COLD KILLERSTONE COLD PLOTTER? THE TRUTH ON SUMMER TAYLOR-BRADDON IS FINALLY HERE.
By Adelaide James
O ver the last few days , the nation has been gripped with a tale that seems far stranger than fiction itself. Bestselling crime writer Summer Taylor-Braddon finally tied the knot with childhood sweetheart Ruari Braddon—the very man who recently shot to fame on YouTube for his videos on Dartmoor Archaeology—and yet disaster struck upon their honeymoon.
The two lovers were honeymooning on Lombok, and then of course, the devastating tsunami struck. Taylor-Braddon was able to get herself to safety very quickly—something that makes sense, given their hotel wasn’t anywhere near the affected area—yet curiously Ruari Braddon was later reported missing.
Now, there are several things about this that simply do not add up. Firstly, the missing man’s phone was at the hotel. As were his shoes and all of the clothes that he was said to have taken with him. His wallet and all personal possessions were also there. Therefore, why was Ruari Braddon out and about, seemingly with nothing on, with no phone or wallet? The only thing I can believe for sure he had on was his wedding ring. And why was he so far away from his new wife?
The location that Summer Taylor-Braddon reports that she was when the tsunami struck was a good hour’s car-ride away from her new husband. Why was he down on the coast, again, seemingly naked, and why was she not?
Of course, we cannot speculate that Summer knew the tsunami was about to happen, can we?
Well, as it happens, perhaps we could. Early 2017 saw the publication of Taylor-Braddon’s first novel, Swept Away . It is a love story in which the main couple get separated, you guessed it, by a tsunami. In blog posts published around that time, Taylor-Braddon freely admits that she did a lot of research on how to spot when a tsunami is coming and the warning signs you get right before they strike. Therefore, I propose it is possible that Taylor-Braddon realized what was going to happen.
And that leads me to my next point: she purposefully asked her new husband to get swept away—or to at least appear like he has been. To go ‘missing’. Here, I have two theories. One, is that she asked him to hide, so she could publicize his disappearance. I spoke to her publisher recently and a marketing consultant there told me that sales of Swept Away, were down. This would seem like the perfect opportunity to increase her publicity, would it not? Real life playing out exactly the way she had written it? Is Taylor-Braddon actually psychic? Or is this all a scam?
Or we have my other theory: Taylor-Braddon is a killer.
It is strange, is it not, that all of Ruari Braddon’s belongings were in his hotel? Even his swimming trunks. And we know that Taylor-Braddon has a dark mind. Her second and third novels proved that, for they followed a serial killer as she went on a rampage, killing so many people, yet she was never caught. She was able to outwit everyone.
Things weren’t always rosy between Taylor-Braddon and her new husband. While they had been childhood sweethearts, a source close to Taylor-Braddon told me they’d have plenty of arguments, particularly over Braddon’s fondness of a tipple. Or perhaps, more than a tipple. ‘It wasn’t uncommon for him to drink eight pints a day,’ my source told me.
And Taylor-Braddon didn’t like this.
It’s a common known thing, that people drink on honeymoon, and what if things got just a bit out of hand between this couple?
What if Taylor-Braddon killed her new husband in a moment of cold, calculated murder? Her internet search history is certainly questionable, and what better cover is there for that than saying that you’re just a crime writer?
So, Taylor-Braddon was left with a body. A body to hide. Something she would appear an expert at. And then the tsunami struck. She could so easily have dumped the body in the hours before, ready to be swept away, while she went to higher ground, ready to play the hysterical wife who can’t find her husband.
One thing is for sure: Summer Taylor-Braddon is a skilled writer, and I think she’s pulled the wool over all of our eyes.
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S ummer Taylor-Braddon : We were warned that our situation—Ruari’s disappearance—would be all over the British media. Not just when I arrived back, but that vultures like you had already been talking about it. And I was naive, I thought that it could only help. The publicity. I just wanted to find Ruari. That was all I wanted. I’d have done anything—and I thought the more people who knew, the better.
But it didn’t take them long, really.
I remember the first time I saw you, Adelaide. You knocked on our front door. I was back in Devon then. You said that she’d traveled a long way to see me.
Adelaide James : I had.
Summer Taylor-Braddon : I thought you were nice—I didn’t realize then that you’d already published that piece about me.
But you published another, didn’t you? Two days later.
I still can’t believe it—how anyone could’ve thought that I had killed Ruari and let the tsunami take the blame. You really went for that in your second article, lifting passages from the novels I’d written and showing how apparently it was proof of what I’d done. You made such a big thing too, out of me needing publicity because my book sales had dropped.
I’d actually signed a new deal just before Swept Away released—January 2017. A lot happened that month, didn’t it? It had been a moderate advance with the new deal, but I remember my agent saying to me, amid all this happening in the summer, that she was really going to push for a six-figure advance for my next one. But I couldn’t even imagine myself writing again, not with all this going on. Yet it was this that was making my books sell more. Everyone was talking about me.
There was a whole new group of readers I got—they all came flooding in, wanting to read my murder mysteries and psychological thrillers to see if I could’ve done this. They came up with all sorts of ridiculous theories. Painted me as a killer. There were whole online forums dedicated to the discussion of this.
And, well, every journalist on the planet seemed to run with that.
Mum’s house was egged. Threats came in—not the death threats then. I mean, there were some of them online, the police told us, but we had actual threats arriving in the post to us. And people outside.
We stayed in a hotel for a bit, in Paris. It felt weird, flying off again with Mum, but Matilda had a shoot there, and we joined her. It was only a few hours though before our location was published and cameras were flashing outside the hotel windows.
I was in tears. Mum was in tears. Even Mattie was.
It all caught fire, you know? This small thing that you had said—had written—it blew up from there. The papers said I was guilty, had fled the country, but that French officials didn’t want me there. That was apparently why I returned to the UK. Not because I live there. Not because our location had been compromised.
And it was all because of you, Adelaide James. You turned it into a witch hunt. A proper witch hunt. You’ll have seen the reports about the injuries I got, right?
All I’d tried to do was go down to the Co-op. We’d run out of milk. And bread. Pretty much everything. Mum had put an online order with Morrisons in, but the driver hadn’t been able to get to our house with all the paparazzi and reporters outside. I don’t know if he’d tried to deliver it to us and found he couldn’t, or if he’d just turned straight around and left.
But he wasn’t coming.
Mum was sobbing by then. She looked pretty sick, getting iller each day. Her kidneys—though we didn’t know she’d got kidney disease then—but also the stress.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll get the shopping tonight.”
“You can’t go out there!”
But I could. And I would. I told her I’d wait until it was dark, then sneak out the back. I had one of Ruari’s big hoodies and I’d wear that. I did wear that. Put my hair under a baseball cap—I think that was Ashley’s. He’d left it behind, years ago. Not sure why I still had it, but I tucked my hair into it. Wore dark glasses, even though it was nighttime when I went out.
And it worked. I remember just walking down Station Road, and no one really paid attention to me. Of course, not many people were about. It was what, nine? Maybe half past. It felt like freedom.
I can’t describe to you how amazing it was, how amazing it felt, just being able to do the shopping, like a normal person.
I didn’t even see the person. Or the bottle of wine in their hand. Not until it was too late.
Six hours later, medics were still picking glass out of my scalp.
Adelaide James : You’re good at painting yourself as the victim, aren’t you?
Summer Taylor-Braddon : You know what? I’m just going to ignore you until it’s actually your turn to speak. Because you may think you’re the interviewer, but this is my project.
It didn’t take long before the papers found out about Ruari’s mother. What had happened. And they connected it to me. That said that I’d ‘struck before’. They called me a clever killer—but not clever enough. Clever but not clever enough, and so many people believed that.
I remember reading loads of stuff posted on social media, all about me. My readers were claiming to know me. My dark fiction was a mirror to the dark interior that lurked inside my twisted mind. It’s obvious she’s not right in the head , one person wrote.
I wasn’t right in the head. How could I be?
I still remember the swirling comforting hand of the sea. The relief it had promised me in a reunion with Ruari. I dreamt of it each night.
More than once, I wanted to die.
But I didn’t do anything like that again. Even when I wanted to. Because for one, Mum made sure I was never on my own. She even slept in my room with me, most nights, and she always had plans for us to do in the day, things that took up literally all the time.
Not menial stuff, mind. Important stuff. We were fundraising for extra searchers to go to Indonesia to look for Ruari. We were trying to combat the media’s lies, trying to talk to lawyers and solicitors and all sorts of consulates and important people.
But I couldn’t go out on my own. Not to the Co-op, not anywhere.
And after a while, mum stopped trying to get me out of the house.
I just wanted to stay inside all the time. I’d watch mind-numbing TV in the gaps when there were no online meetings for me to attend. I’d do jigsaws. I’d talk to Julia and Hana, but gradually they stopped calling. Well, I mean, it’s not fair to put it all on them. I never really made an effort either. And they’d done more than enough, trying to help me.
It took months for me to recover from that assault at the Co-op, physically. But it was longer than that, inside. And I’ve still got the scars. Ones you can see and ones you can’t.
We blamed the press for it. Mum in particular blamed you, Adelaide.
“She does this with everyone she writes about,” Mum told me. She’d been researching you. Looking at other people you had gone after. Some ballerina at a London school who you accused of killing her twin. Something like that. All lies.
But now you were doing it to me. And I thought that maybe when I was in hospital, recovering, that you’d have stopped. I thought you couldn’t possibly do any worse.
I was wrong.
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