June and Jennifer Gibbons did not communicate with anyone except for each other for almost 30 years
The eerie story of the ‘silent twins’ who didn’t speak to each other throughout their lives before one died has been explained through a chilling theory.
June and Jennifer Gibbons were born on 11 April 1963 to parents from Barbados who had emigrated to Great Britain in the early 1960s as part of the ‘Windrush generation’.
Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons, their mum and dad, noticed during their upbringing that they weren’t speaking normally, and they even made up their own language to communicate with one another.
This, coupled with the fact that they were the only Black children in a British school of white people, meant that they were constantly bullied – which made them rely even more heavily upon each other.
Psychologists who examined the twins also found that they could communicate without speaking, while they would also copy each other’s behaviour for bizarre reasons unknown to the professionals.
Twins June and Jennifer Gibbons didn’t communicate with anyone, and were heavily bullied in school (Alamy/PA)
They tried to force the twins to speak to others by sending them to separate schools, though this only made things worse as June and Jennifer became almost catatonic before being brought back together.
Continuing to speak their language, which was essentially a sped-up Bajan Creole – a language spoken in Barbados which combines African and British influences and that is widely spoken on the Caribbean island.
But the twins’ version was so sped up that most people couldn’t understand.
June later told the BBC in 2023: “We had a speech impediment. Our parents couldn’t understand a word that we were saying, nobody understood – so we stopped talking.”
The pair started to write fantasy fiction, including stories of violence and crime, with some of these getting published.
But in real-life, the pair started hanging out with some boys they knew from the area, and began experimenting with drugs and alcohol, before carrying out a series of crimes.
After being arrested for arson in 1981, they were sent to the infamous Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital, where they were drugged with anti-psychotic medication.
June and Jennifer allegedly met characters such as Ronnie Kray and Jimmy Savile during their 11 years in the hospital.
After being transferred to a lower-security facility in 1993, Jennifer allegedly died from a sudden inflammation at the heart, aged just 29.
June began communicating normally after her sister’s sudden death (Alamy/PA)
Following this tragic event, June suddenly began communicating normally with others, claiming that she only did that because her sister was gone.
Though the exact cause of Jennifer’s death was never announced, it is believed that she ‘sacrificed herself so June would be truly liberated’, despite the fact that no drugs or poison was found in her body following an inquest.
June was then released a year after her sister’s death, moving to live near her parents in Wales as her community accepted her.
She also began writing again, while the twins’ unique story well and truly has a place in popular culture with books, songs, documentaries and TV series coming out about June and Jennifer.
However, June admitted that her time at Broadmoor has left scars, further explaining to the BBC: “Every other day I think of Broadmoor and when I think of Broadmoor, I think of Jennifer,
“She’s still with me after 30 years. Every other morning I think I’m in Broadmoor, I wake up in the morning, hear the jangling of the keys, it’s still with me even to this day,” she admitted.
June concluded: “Every day I wake up and say to myself, one more day for me and one more day for my sister
“I live for her. What I see and do, she does as well.”
Featured Image Credit: Alamy/PA
