‘My life spiralled out of control when I was sold for sex aged 12 – by my own mother’

Tyne Yates was just 12-years-old when her life spiralled out of control when she was sold for sex by her own mother.

She was ‘bought’ for just £250 to a middle-aged man in a notorious area of Blackpool as her drug addict mum watched.

Tyne lifts the sordid lid on how she was sucked into a life of child grooming, depravity and sleaze as part of a Channel 5 documentary looking into the disappearance of school girl, Charlene Downes.

The now 29-year-old charts her own journey as she went off the rails – despite her middle-class background.

Tyne said: “I went from being a kid looking for excitement to being passed around groups of men for sex.

“As I got older, turned my back on my family, I got hooked on drugs and arrested countless times. I ended up a street prostitute, just like my mum.

“It all started with bunking off school and hanging around in the town centre, just like Charlene Downes and a lot of other young girls.

“It torments me knowing that I probably know her killers.

“We were doing the same things with the same people at the same time.

“When I look into the eyes of some of the men that prowl the streets preying on vulnerable young girls, I can’t help but wonder if one of them was the last face that she ever saw.

“Something horrible happened to her and it could easily have been me.”

The Murder of Charlene Downes is a three-part documentary, starting on Channel 5 tomorrow.

It has unprecedented access to family, friends, suspects as well as police and legal experts.

It tells the full story of Charlene’s disappearance and one of the biggest investigations in police history.

Charlene vanished in November 2003, aged 14.

Two local takeaway workers stood trial for Charlene’s murder in May 2007 but were not convicted.

The prosecution claimed that Charlene’s body had been cut up and minced into kebabs, her bones crushed into tile grouting.

After a planned retrial was abandoned in 2008, her parents began to give up hope of ever finding the truth.

Tyne, a friend of Charlene’s, tells how she was marched down the notorious back alley just yards from the world-famous Golden Mile and in the shadow of Blackpool tower where her world changed forever.

She said: “My mum was different to most of the other mums. She was a heroin addict and a working girl.

“She really struggled with life but she was exciting to be around. It felt dangerous. I looked up to her. She was my mum and I loved her.

“Then one day a man approached us in the street and asked her for sex.

“He said he wanted me and not her and that he’d pay a lot extra. I remember being led down the alley way by mum.

“I still had my school uniform on and my bag. She told me everything would be ok, and it was all just part of life. I believed her.”

Speaking from her one bedroomed tiny bedsit in Blackpool, Tyne wipes away the tears as she recounts the moment that changed her life forever.

She said: “Afterwards, she gave me my cut. A ten-pound note. I felt rich. It all seems so sad and pathetic. Bur that’s what happened to me.”

“Not long after that, I met Charlene Downes.”

The two schoolgirls came from very different backgrounds.

Charlene was from a poor working-class family who had moved to the ‘Las Vegas’ of the north in search of a better life.

Tyne tells how the two girls quickly became friends and would meet up and trawl around the takeaway and arcades looking for adventure but ended up selling themselves for fast food and pocket money.

She said: “Charlene was fun, she was my friend. She was a year or so older than me, but not very streetwise.

“I started to pass on to her all the tricks that my mum had shown me.

“She had a very different background to mine, but we had so much in common.

“We had a regular route through the town that we would take, calling in at certain take away shops and arcades.

“She liked to dance for the drunks outside pubs. The Carousel Bar on the North Pier was a favourite place to steal drinks from the tables.”

“When I heard that she had gone missing, I wasn’t too concerned at first.

“She was wild and anything was possible. I honestly thought she would turn up sooner or later but the days turned into weeks then months and, here we are: sixteen years on and there’s still no sign of her.

“I have had police swoop on me thinking I was Charlene a few times.

“We are the same height and build and look similar, I suppose. It’s hard to take in that she has gone.

Tyne’s mother, Lisa died in 2007 aged 38.

She added: “Sometimes I still get scared when I think about what happened to Charlene.

“I hope one day the mystery will be solved, Karen and her family can have some justice and my beautiful friend, Charlene will be at peace.”