A maoist cult leader who raped two of his followers and kept his daughter a “slave” for 30 years has died in prison aged 81.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, from Enfield, called himself Comrade Bala and brainwashed his cult into thinking he had godlike powers. One of his followers was a young woman from mid Wales who turned her back on a privileged life to live her life with Balakrishnan, isolated from her family, friends and society.
Sian Davies, a GP's daughter from Tregaron, Ceredigion, had always had the best of everything. Educated at a boarding school in Malvern in Worcestershire and then Cheltenham Ladies College, she went on to study law at Aberystwyth University. After graduating she headed to London to study at the London School of Economics where she met Balakrishnan in the mid 1970s.
It was at this time she became a "professional revolutionary", devoting herself to a communist group known as the Workers Institute based in Acre Lane in Brixton, south London. It seems Sian Davies played a central role within the cult, paying bills, organising rotas and working as a personal chauffeur to Balakrishnan.
Despite him having a wife, Chandra, Sian Davies had a daughter, Katy Morgan-Davies. She never played with other children, never went to school and was kept hidden for decades.
Sian died on Christmas Eve in 1996 - eight months after falling out of a second floor window at her Brixton home. She never recovered from her injuries sustained in the fall. An inquest into her death in 1998 concluded with an open verdict and the coroner expressed frustration at not knowing why or how Ms Davies fell from the bathroom window at the house.
Her family believe she had been trying to escape the cult.
Police arrested Balakrishnan and his trial in 2016 heard how he used violence, fear and sexual degradation to control his victims, saying he had an invisible machine called Jackie that could read their thoughts and control people. He was jailed for 23 years after being convicted of offences including child cruelty, false imprisonment and assault. You can read more about that here.
Katy Morgan-Davies, who waived her right to anonymity, gave evidence against her father in court, and began to get to know her family from Wales soon after. She never knew Sian was her mum until after she'd died. Describing her ordeal as "horrible, so dehumanising and degrading", Ms Morgan-Davies said at the time: "I felt like a caged bird with clipped wings."
The court heard Balakrishnan established the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the 1970s in south London and convinced his followers into thinking he could read their minds. He warned them a supernatural force called Jackie would cause natural disasters if he was ever disobeyed.
Balakrishnan died in HMP Dartmoor on Friday, the Prison Service said. It added that the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman had been informed.
