The Mark Widdowson Blogs

My name is Mark Widdowson, I am a twenty-six year old journalist, maybe not a brilliant reporter but one who managed to get a story any hack in the business would kill for. I left school at sixteen with a couple of GCSE’s one of them in English. I bummed around for a couple of years working as a waiter and then I realised that what I loved was writing stories and I came up with a blog about the Sheffield music scene which attracted a few hundred followers. I met a journalist from the Doncaster Free Press at a gig one night and she got me thinking about submitting pieces for the paper. Amazingly they liked them and I got work as a Freelance, covering gigs and then gradually they sent me to other jobs as they came to trust my copy. As I lived in Sheffield I offered some pieces to the Sheffield Star and Telegraph and I almost made a living, though a pretty precarious one. Last year I was sent to cover a developing story about Jess Jennings this forty-year-old hairdresser from Edlington. I was told there had been a commotion at St Peter in Chains, Doncaster’s Catholic Church, this homeless guy had been causing trouble and the Jennings woman prevented the parishioners from calling the Police and was reputed to have sparked a massive change in the man. Rumours spread that she was a healer and was causing quite a stir. So my Editor, who was always on the lookout for the strange and peculiar to spice up the paper, was on it in a flash. I was sent because I had shown a bit of a flair for Church stories. You see my other GCSE was in RE and being Roman Catholic, growing up going to Church I understood how it all worked. I had covered a few fetes and a story about a vicar having a couple of affairs in a Doncaster Parish which ultimately made it into the tabloids, always a feather in the cap if your story goes national. I interviewed the down and out guy and Jess had obviously affected him deeply. I stopped going to mass as soon as I was old enough to decide for myself and rarely thought about religion, unless it was part of a story but I do have to admit to becoming obsessed with Jess Jennings. She was not like anyone I had ever met. Things always happened around her; there was never a dull moment. At first my interest was because she made such good copy but it didn't take long for it to become personal. I tried on a number of occasions to get an interview with her and she, as she always did with the press, refused point blank. Then when I was out in Bamford on the day she met the lad who had escaped from a psychiatric ward, I was going to file the story with the Star, but she grabbed me on the train back to Sheffield and said that if I was ready to stop working for the Press she would give me exclusive interviews and access to her work. What a choice, where do I publish then, I asked her, write an independent blog, she said. She told me that she wanted people to know about her work for the Great Turning from the point of view of someone like me, someone who has all the instincts and independence of a journalist, but without an Editor’s axe grinding in the background. So that’s what you have in your hands now, my blogs, written quickly from the frontline of Jess Jennings’s extraordinary journey. I wrote them as they happened, on the hoof. Just posted them up there and then went off again chasing after her, all over the country. The Editors I had worked for were going crazy for more copy as she became more and more notorious. I could have made a fortune. But what had been a journalist’s fascination became a personal odyssey. I never dreamed that I was caught up in such a remarkable chain of events. The days in London were astonishing and what happened to her at the hands of the authorities demands to be told. I want it out there before they catch up with me and try to silence me. So I have just tidied up the blogs using what I know now, they are, however, from my vantage point, the unvarnished truth. I have tried not to put too much of my own spin on what happened so that you can make up your own mind about her. I have to tell you that I would be very dubious about her if I read these blogs for the first time, but I want to guarantee that this is what I saw and heard, in fact some of it is from the horse’s mouth! I don't know what I make of the last part, she did not reappear to me personally but I spoke with others close to her who say they saw her and I do trust them, they have no reason to bullshit me. When this comes out I will be abroad, I am scared of the consequences and need to be somewhere they cannot reach me. My blog was taken down a few times and I had to keep reposting it on new sites. In the end I gave up and have used the money given to me by one of her Agents for Change to self publish this book. However you have got hold of it, think that maybe you were meant to read it. Make of it what you will, but ask yourself this question, whatever you think happened to Jess Jennings after her death, what would make the powers that be in this country and beyond feel so threatened that they decided to do away with her?