Jamie-Lee Arrow was nine years old when she realized that going to her father’s house was like stepping into a horror movie.
On the podcast “Tenía la duda” hosted by Spanish journalist Judith Tiral, the young woman was invited to talk about what it was like to be the daughter of a cannibalistic killer. However, the most terrifying thing was not the crime, but how he continued to manipulate her from inside the psychiatric hospital.
Her parents had separated, and her life was split between two homes. At her dad’s, Isakin Drabbad talked about the devil, demons, and evil spirits. He would lie down with her in bed, in the dark, and ask her: “Can you see the faces on the wall?”. He repeated it so often that the girl eventually started seeing them.
In November 2010, in Skara, Sweden, Jamie was sitting at the table when Helle Christensen, her stepmother and the woman she considered a second mother, served her food and whispered: “Enjoy your food, because this is the last time I’ll cook for you… because Isakin is going to kill me”.
That was the last time little Jamie saw her.
After an argument that lasted nearly an entire day, Isakin took her life. According to reports, he cooked part of her body with salt and cannabis leaves, and ate it. He confessed to the murder and cannibalism, and in 2011 he was committed to a psychiatric institution.
But being locked up didn’t stop him from continuing to torment his daughter.
Jamie was bullied at school over the crime her father had committed; however, she continued visiting him for years. As she told it, her father’s words had been her “law” ever since she was little: she came to describe him as a kind of god to her.
She struggled with addictions and left school at 15, clinging to her father, who tried to teach her how to manipulate others and convince her that everyone hated her. In her own words, he was trying to turn her into a little psychopath, and the two of them were just the two of them against the world.
It was only around the age of 17 that she began to question him, when Isakin started telling her that horns were growing on his head and asked her to touch it to feel them. Jamie felt nothing and, for the first time, wondered if her father was crazy.
By then, however, his influence was still enormous. Jamie remembers that she was going through an extremely vulnerable time and wanted to end her life, so she turned to him for help. Her father told her there was “only one solution” that would make her happy and powerful: selling her soul to the devil.
It happened, according to her account, inside the psychiatric institution itself. In the visitors’ room, Isakin asked her to close her eyes, take his hand, and repeat some words addressed to the devil. When they were done, he told her: “Now you are free, Jamie”. Then he asked if she could feel the demons surrounding them and assured her that one day they would start talking to her.
Jamie returned home terrified. She says her father’s words kept repeating in her head over and over. She covered her ears so she wouldn’t hear anything and looked around, afraid she would start seeing what he had promised her. She ended up hugging herself, trembling and practically unable to speak or breathe. She was convinced she was losing her mind.
Finally, she told her mother: “Dad sold my soul to the devil. It’s too late. There’s no going back”. Her mother hugged her and replied with something Jamie had needed to hear since she was a little girl: she would never have to become her father’s darkness.
Jamie survived the killer. However, it took many more years for her to escape the world of demons her own father had built inside her head.