EXCLUSIVEBritain's sleaziest landlord put me through hell: Heidi thought Tory councillor Robert was perfect. Then one terrifying night she discovered he'd violated her most intimate moments in the way every woman fears the most
As far as residents of the West Yorkshire borough of Calderdale were concerned, Tory councillor Robert Holden could do no wrong. Whether volunteering to help the elderly, fixing laptops at his computer repair shop or renting out his spare room to those in need, he was always on hand with a friendly smile and helpful advice.
They could scarcely have suspected that behind the charming façade lay a prolific sexual predator, preying on the same vulnerable women who’d turned to him for help. Over a 14-year period Holden, 51, covertly filmed at least 28 female tenants at Row Farm, his spacious four-bedroom house in the quiet market town of Sowerby Bridge, with secret cameras in the bathroom and bedroom.
He would probably still be filming now were it not for the courage of his final victim, Heidi Marney, who found the camera that had captured her in the bathroom and reported him to the police.
Yet the mother-of-two’s terrifying ordeal was not over. After Holden was arrested for voyeurism offences in November 2020, he branded Heidi a liar. Such was his impeccable reputation, the locals sided with him.
While he continued to chair parish council meetings, she suffered panic attacks, convinced she was not the only woman Holden had spied on. She was right. Last March, Holden pleaded guilty to 31 charges of voyeurism and seven of computer misuse – he had also accessed private images from devices customers entrusted him to mend.
Although he admitted filming 28 women between 2006 and 2020 – capturing them undressing, showering and engaged in sexual activity – the precise number of his victims may never be known.
On sentencing him to six years and two months at Bradford Crown Court last September, Judge Sophie McKone accused Holden of hiding ‘behind a veil of respectability’ while conducting ‘voyeurism on a vast scale’. She said: ‘It’s hard to think of a worse breach of trust.’
Tory councillor Robert Holden was sentenced to six years and two months last September
Heidi, who has bravely waived her anonymity appearing in a Channel 5 documentary this week, tells me: ‘Everybody loved and trusted Rob. He was the kindest man you could meet.’ But: ‘I realised he was grooming me and many others and wanted to bring attention to that. He had a strategy of how he would manipulate his victims. The common denominator was that we were all vulnerable.’
Therapist Heidi, 32, who now lives in Calderdale with partner Sam, 39, a director, and has two daughters, aged six and six months, was a newly-single mum and ‘hurting’ when she saw Holden, a family friend, advertise for a lodger in December 2019. Holden told her that she and her then baby daughter didn’t need to pay rent, that he liked having tenants because he was so often out at work: ‘He was so supportive.’
On her first night in the house, as she sat in Holden’s oversized bathtub, she recalls an ‘overwhelming feeling I was being watched. If somebody’s staring at you, you can feel it’.
Heidi Marney found the camera that had captured her in the bathroom and reported Holden to the police
There was a television in the bathroom, with a sensor with a red light attached to the wall in the corner. Suddenly struck by the idea it might be a camera, Heidi sent a picture of it to a friend, who said it was to enable satellite television. Asking herself why ‘the nicest man on earth’ would record her she ‘shrugged it off’.
The two bonded over Holden’s home-cooked dinners as Heidi helped him organise his clutter. ‘He took on a caring role. I was grateful. The conversation was good. It was a lovely dynamic.’ After her evening bath, she’d go downstairs every evening ‘and we’d put the world to rights’.
By lockdown the following March, Holden was posting about their living arrangements on Facebook. ‘He’d call me his jail mate,’ she says. When lockdown lifted and they went to the pub or shopping together, she noticed ‘he would give off the impression we were a couple’.
Not in a physical sense, she explains – there was not so much as a hand on her shoulder – but ‘the way he would look at me and say: “Heidi, before we go home I’m going to get some steak for tea.” He wanted everyone to know we were going home together.’
Although she felt uncomfortable, the suggestion that the pair could be lovers – at 27 she was half his age – seemed so preposterous that the best course of action seemed to be to humour him. ‘He was never creepy. He didn’t make advances.’
He did, however, start to reference previous lodgers by name, boasting to Heidi that some had felt so comfortable with him they’d walk around the house naked. Holden also had a reputation for throwing ‘hot tub’ parties in his garden with glamorous young women.
However, Holden’s behaviour became increasingly licentious. After drinking three bottles of red wine on an hours-long council meeting on Zoom one evening in April and listening to music with Heidi, he told her she had great breasts and ‘as he got more drunk I’d put a song on and he’d said: “I love this song, take me to bed right now, make my babies.”’
Still fearful of over-reacting, she says, nonetheless, ‘that’s when I realised the dynamic was not the uncle/niece dynamic I had in my head. I was full of rage.’
Heidi stopped going downstairs to talk to Holden in the evenings, but struggled to escape her landlord in the morning, when he would take a lengthy bath with the door wide open. One morning she told him she needed to brush her teeth. Holden said he’d cover himself while she retrieved her toothbrush.
Heidi stopped going downstairs to talk to Holden in the evenings, but struggled to escape her landlord in the morning
‘He had a massive dressing gown I assumed he’d use as a shield,’ she says. Instead, he was ‘literally cupping himself’. She wasn’t frightened. ‘I thought: “You’re pathetic.”’
Even then, she found it hard to reconcile his behaviour with his outwardly respectable persona. After a few weeks, she began to question herself, wondering if she was wrong to give him ‘the cold shoulder’ when he’d been ‘kind enough to let me stay in his house’.
Yet she started to feel suffocated. When her friend suggested she try a dating app, Holden had a face like ‘thunder’, she recalls. When he found her looking at properties on Rightmove he was similarly displeased, insisting she stay with him.
In an underground car park in Leeds on her way to meet a date, Heidi received a text from Holden. ‘Weird,’ it read. ‘I swear I’ve just seen you. You must have a doppelganger. I’m in Leeds.’ She recalls: ‘I wasn’t visible, so I knew for a fact he hadn’t seen me.’
Alarmed, she checked the ‘Find My’ function on her iPhone that allows users to track friends. It said Heidi’s MacBook had tracked her from Row Farm at 16.14pm. Holden’s text had arrived two minutes later.
Heidi had bought the MacBook from him. He’d set the password. ‘I felt physically sick,’ says Heidi, who summoned the courage to confront Holden about his text back at Row Farm. ‘I said: “You didn’t see me. You tracked me. You’re lying. My MacBook has told me.” He kept insisting: “I was in Leeds.”’
Fearful of escalating the argument, Heidi retreated to her room to call her aunt, a police officer. As Heidi relayed her initial suspicion she was being filmed in the bathroom, and the rest of Holden’s unsettling behaviour, her aunt told her she needed to check for cameras.
Holden covertly filmed at least 28 female tenants in his spacious four-bedroom house. Pictured: Holden manipulating a hidden camera in the bathroom
After he was arrested for voyeurism offences in November 2020, Holden branded Heidi a liar
Waiting until Holden was on a Zoom council meeting, she smuggled a kitchen knife under her sleeve upstairs, and, balancing precariously on a stool and two paint pots to give her height, disassembled the sensor on the bathroom wall.
As the front came off, two words came into terrifying view. Camera. Microphone. ‘I was having a panic attack, a breakdown.’
Heidi grabbed her daughter and barricaded herself in her bedroom with a chair against the door, texting her aunt a picture of the camera. ‘I completely froze,’ she says.
At 12.30am, police arrived to arrest Holden. Heidi’s relief as she saw the lights on the drive was marred with a sense of guilt at upsetting Holden. ‘I was crying my eyes out. After fleeing the house, she wasn’t allowed back while police gathered evidence and went to stay with her mum. ‘I was in disbelief, then I was angry, then I was upset, then I was violated.’ She was still grappling with a maelstrom of emotion days later when she heard Holden, released on bail, had attempted suicide, and was telling locals Heidi was intent on ruining his life. Holden had ‘won awards for his charitable efforts,’ she adds. ‘He was a pillar of the community. I was just a girl who fell on her feet moving in with generous Rob.’
And while police told her not to talk about the case for fear of jeopardising a future trial, ‘he was allowed to have his say,’ she stresses. People ‘thought I was this narcissistic liar doing it for my own game, because that was the story he was spinning. I was victim shamed.’
Former friend and councillor Paul Bellenger corroborates her story on the documentary: ‘We thought something had blown up between them and Heidi was making this story up to get Rob into a lot of trouble.’
Meanwhile, police thought Heidi was the only victim. Yet when she Googled the bathroom camera’s serial number, she realised it had been out of production since 2017 – and couldn’t have been put there just for her. ‘I thought: “This is a predator. This isn’t just a silly man. This is highly manipulative and intentional.”’
Heidi scoured his Facebook friend list and her memory for the names of his former lodgers to create a database of potential victims to contact.
‘I was relentless. I said: “You were living there for two years. You will be on the cameras. Please will you put yourself forward.” ’ Initially, however, she says, ‘they believed him’.
One victim, speaking anonymously on the documentary, who viewed Holden as ‘like a brother figure’, recalls going into ‘total denial. I said: “Maybe you’re imagining it.” I didn’t want to believe he was capable of that.’ Melanie, another woman on the documentary, who moved in with Rob after her bungalow flooded and was recorded in the bath, recalls telling Heidi: ‘Rob’s a nice guy, he won’t have done that with me.’
Now, she says, ‘thank God for Heidi … it would have carried on for another 20 years’.
An order had been placed on Holden not to contact Heidi. But, she says, ‘I’d think I was seeing him everywhere. I’d have panic attacks. I’d wake in the night and not go back to sleep. I’d think, “Is he going to turn up? Is he going to rape me?” Even though he never laid a finger on me.’
She worried he was hacking her phone and became fearful of using social media. Eventually, other victims came forward and in March 2022, Holden was charged with 31 voyeurism offences, 32 computer misuse offences and three indecent images offences. Heidi’s relief was compounded by sadness. ‘I had a lot of messages saying, “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you.”’
She magnanimously told locals she understood – that she would have sided with Holden as well in their shoes. Harbouring anger, she decided, would delay her ability to heal.
Yet Holden still refused to face up to his crimes, failing to turn up to his court appearance at Bradford Magistrates’ Court the following month. That June he was arrested nearly 3,000 miles away, in Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa, a move so audacious that Heidi laughed when police called to break the news. ‘I said: “I told you this was going to happen. Why didn’t you take his passport?”’
The extradition process from the archipelago is complex – a fact of which Holden would have been all too aware. It was September 2023 before he was brought back to England and remanded in custody.
Last March, he pleaded guilty to 31 offences of voyeurism and seven offences of computer misuse at Bradford Crown Court. Sentencing was delayed until last September when the horrifying impact of his crimes became clear.
There had been a camera in a bedroom – although not the bedroom Heidi was sleeping in at the time she was a tenant – as well as the bathroom.
The cameras were connected to digital devices set to record 24 hours a day. Holden kept images in neatly labelled files and recorded himself masturbating over some. One victim was just 16.
In her victim impact statement another woman said she felt ‘stupid, empty, worthless and ashamed’. Another told him: ‘Not only did you violate my most intimate moments, but you smashed my heart into pieces when I realised you weren’t the person I thought you were.’
Another explained how she had lost her children and her job as a result of the trauma, saying: ‘My life has fallen apart.’
Heidi’s got her own home now, installed with a full alarm system, her success at bringing Holden to justice proof that ‘he messed with the wrong person’.
Peeping Tom: The Landlord And His Secret Cameras is available to stream on 5.
