“I’ve always hated my mom for how she treated my dad during the divorce.” – Laura Bailey

There’s a special category of lie that’s so stupid, you start to wonder what kind of person would think it’s even worth telling your hairdresser, let alone the police.

This is one of those.

When Debra Gunn, Laura’s mother, came over to the Isle of Man in the summer of 2023, I didn’t think much of it. In hindsight, it was clearly part of the campaign to manufacture “evidence,” rewriting the story so it would become “he-said, they-said.” Strength in numbers, if not in logic.

One afternoon, I left the house for a few hours. When I came back, the entire spice and sauce shelf in the kitchen, a huge open rack that I’d built up over years, had been stripped bare of every jar, bottle, and bag.

Now, these weren’t supermarket condiments, those were above the hob. There were imported bulk spices, home-fermented sauces, and ingredients you couldn’t find on the island. Many of these were gifts from friends and family, pieces of my life scattered across the world. Cooking was one of the few places left in that house that was still mine.

So imagine coming home to find all of it gone.

I searched the kitchen. Nothing. Then I went outside and found two big black trash bags sitting by the curb. Inside were the missing jars and bottles, many smashed or leaking, everything coated in a sticky, sour mess of cumin and homemade vinegar. Hundreds of pounds worth of ingredients destroyed for no reason I could fathom.

I dragged the bags back inside and salvaged what I could.

Later, Debra’s version of the story made it into a police report. According to her, they’d simply been tidying up the kitchen. One could be fooled into thinking they were doing something nice for me, almost framing it as an olive branch. Apparently, I’d been “spying” on them to have even noticed.

Spying. On my own kitchen shelves.

This is what passes for logic in that family.

Do something outrageous, provoke a reaction, then call the reaction a crime.

At the time, I thought it was just another petty act of sabotage. I didn’t yet understand it was rehearsal for much bigger stories.

It’s an important chapter in the Bailey playbook; their destruction is always followed by feigning hurt and a lecture about gratitude.

As I would come to find out, the secret ingredient in every Bailey family recipe was barely plausible deniability.