A long-lost father and daughter are both facing jail after being reunited on the internet and starting an illicit sexual affair ‘as boyfriend and girlfriend’.
Office worker Nicola Yates, 26, tracked down her real father Andrew Butler, 46, through the family tracing website Genes Reunited.
The pair discovered they had been living just streets apart in Birmingham for years and got together after two decades apart.
But it was claimed that when they met again for the first time, Yates, who was 20 at the time, enjoyed a ‘highly charged, emotional reunion’ with her father, who at the time was in relationship with another woman nearer his age.
Suspicions were aroused about the pair when she began to spend more time with Butler and developed more intense feelings for her natural father.
Relatives were later horrified to discover the young woman and Butler had become illicit lovers.
The daughter and father were arrested in September last year after her family alerted police.
Yates and Butler both admitted having sex with an adult relative after appearing at Birmingham Crown Court, pictured, earlier this month
Yates, from Castle Vale, Birmingham, and Butler, from Yardley, Birmingham, both admitted having sex with an adult relative after appearing at Birmingham Crown Court earlier this month.
On the first occasion, Yates was given a community order for 18 months.
Incredibly, the couple had admitted the same charge four years ago and were both punished for the offence – but reignited their affair for a second time afterwards.
On the first occasion, Yates was given a community order for 18 months and Butler received four months jail.
But in 2008 the pair started up their affair again, to the horror of relatives who thought Yates had put her incestuous relationship behind her.
Her family’s worst nightmare returned when Yates announced she had a ‘new boyfriend’ but was reluctant to introduce him to her family.
Insiders say the then 23-year-old tried to keep her new man’s identity under wraps. Her mother Katrina, who split with Butler 20 years ago, asked to meet him but Nicola ‘kept putting her off’.
It is now known that the daughter and father were secretly living together.
Around the same time fun-loving Yates updated her social networking sites, revealing a string of intimate facts about herself including that her favourite pastime was ‘sex, sex, and more sex’.
And five things she said she could not live without were: “Family, Andy, Mobile, Money, Straighteners.”
When Yates’s sister Natalie, now 19, discovered sexual phone pictures of the pair, she showed them to their mother, who is said to have exclaimed in horror: ‘That’s my ex-husband!’
The pair, both on bail, will now be sentenced for a second time for the same charge next month. The penalty for the sex offence can be a two-year jail sentence.
Yates confirmed the affair when approached, saying: ‘It’s all true. My head’s all over the place at the moment,’ she said.
‘I’m just waiting for the court case and then I want to move on with my life.
‘I got in touch with him in the beginning because I wanted a proper father – daughter relationship. I hadn’t seen him since I was very little.
‘I don’t really know how or why it happened, why things developed the way they did.
‘I can honestly say I will never see him ever, ever again. I don’t want to have anything to do with him ever again.’
Incest remains one of society’s last taboos and is an unthinkable concept to most people.
Yet research by the British Medical Journal showed that half of those separated from relatives at a young age experience strong sexual feelings when they are reunited.
Psychiatrists believe the natural repulsion brothers and sisters feel for one another as children acts as an inhibitor to committing incest.
But those who miss out on this time can develop powerful, obsessive feelings for their sibling in adulthood.
