Life changed dramatically for Jamie-Lee Arrow when she was 9 years old. It wasn’t because she was experiencing the same type of events that seem life-ending to children her age. Her parents had already split. She wasn’t transferring schools or losing all of her friends in Skara, Sweden. When Jamie-Lee was 9, her mother sat her down to tell her that her father had killed his girlfriend. Later, as the details of the death became public, she learned that not only had her father killed this woman she cared for, but he was also a cannibal
Jamie-Lee said her father could be kind and funny or a monster.
Jamie-Lee, now a mother of two, recently appeared on the British daytime tv show This Morning, to discuss her appearance in the Discovery+ documentary about her cannibal dad, Evil Livers Here: The Killer Speaks.
One of the show’s hosts explained how difficult it was for her to watch the doc, seeing Jamie-Lee’s father, Isakin Drabbad, treat her so cruelly, the Daily Mail reports. During the segment, Jamie-Lee explained the dichotomies of her childhood.
“When I grew up I had my dad and my mum, at my dad’s house it was like stepping into a horror movie,” she said. “My dad was very unpredictable, he could go from being the kindest, funniest, most charming dad, to being this monster.”
Jamie-Lee said her father wanted her to worship the devil.
Jamie-Lee explained that her father was fascinated by the devil and tried to share his ideology with his daughter. “He often spoke about the devil and demons. He always had these paintings all over the flat. He liked to draw the devil, really scary pictures. He wanted me to turn against God and worship the devil. We’d lay in the bed in darkness and ask me if I could see faces,” she explained.
When Jamie-Lee encountered bullies at school, her father gave her voodoo dolls to solve the problem and take revenge. “That darkness was so normal to me,” she said. “It was my everyday life.”
Drabbad and his victim met at a mental institute.
Eventually, Drabbad introduced his daughter to the new woman in his life, Helle Christensen. Jamie-Lee quickly took a liking to her. “When they first met they were really nice to each other, I really liked her. I thought she was so beautiful … They met in a mental institute, so they both had their problems so that relationship turned really toxic, really quickly,” Jamie-Lee said.
Jamie-Lee’s mother broke the news.
The relationship ended in Christensen’s death on November 12, 2010, when Jamie-Lee was around 9. Her mother was the one to break the news. “When she sat me down, at first I didn’t want to hear it,” she said.
But there was a part of her that already knew. “My first reaction was, ‘Was it dad?’ she asked her mother. “She said ‘yeah.’”
Then months later, the story got even more disturbing. “I read the word cannibal in the newspapers a few months after that, but I didn’t know what cannibal meant,” she said.
“I didn’t go to school, to shops, watch TV. She wanted to protect me,” Jamie-Lee said of her mother who encouraged her not to find additional details about the case. But eventually, Drabbad told her himself.
The murder affected how people treated Jamie-Lee as well.
“When I went back to school all my friends acted differently towards me, everyone was asking about the murder and my dad. People were scared of me and my dad. It really felt like I had been robbed of my identity after the murder,” Jamie-Lee said. In the aftermath of that trauma, Jamie-Lee turned to drugs and alcohol during her teen years. She also reconnected with her father, who was now in a psychiatric ward.
“My dad became the one I turned to because he was the only one that was accepting of my lifestyle and wasn’t judging me and was treating me the same way,” Jamie-Lee said. “It was only natural for me to become closer to him.”
She went two years without seeing him after the murder, but says she was tricked into seeing him.
“When I first saw him he was so normal and didn’t even mention the murder,” she said. “When I started seeing him on my own he was slowly brainwashing me into becoming like him. He made himself my entire universe.”
Eventually, their relationship became strained once again. Still, Jamie-Lee says she will always love her father.
“It’s hard, I will always love my dad, I don’t love what he did but it’s hard to sit there and watch someone so evil talking to me and try not to feel the love for them and try to remind myself this person is not good for me, I can’t have him in my life.”
But, she does refuse to introduce her children to Drabbad and the darkness that comes with him.
“I believe it’s pretty much impossible to stop loving your parents … but that doesn’t mean he can be a part of my life … It’s like I’m grieving an alive person.”
