Body of Evidence. Part II

A murder happens, the culprit is caught, convicted and sent down. The case is closed and we are done with it. But that isn’t always the case for the victims and certainly not for their surviving loved ones.

Here are four murder victims. Apart from being murdered, what do they have in common? The ultimate exquisite torture for their loved ones: they have never been found. Sometimes, it just isn’t enough to catch the murderer and know that he’s locked up, perhaps for life. The sentence on those waiting to find and decently bury their lost loved ones lasts at least as long.

Muriel McKay was abducted in 1969, a pathetic case of mistaken identity by kidnappers who mistook her for the wife of Rupert Murdock. Her case has recently been described in detail by the Radio 4 series “Worse Than Murder,” and that sums it up. What could be worse? After a long and desperate police campaign to find and free Muriel, it was accepted that she had been murdered, and her murderers, Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein, were caught and convicted of her murder and kidnapping in September 1970. But the culprits have never been able to pinpoint the whereabouts of her body and to this day her children are left desperate to find out where she lies.

When Fred and Rose West were arrested (for the second time) in 1994, the world was stunned by the utterly twisted depravity of their crimes as cellars and yard of their Cromwell Street house in Gloucester were searched and excavated, revealing body after body. Fred West killed himself while on remand and never came to trial, but Rose was convicted and sentenced to life in 1995 for twelve acknowledged rapes, tortures and murders. But it is almost certain that fifteen-year-old Mary Bastholm was another victim in 1968 and her body has never been found. No-one has been charged with her murder. Meanwhile, the surviving children and acquaintances of Fred and Rose have not “moved on” to sunny uplands. Many have succumbed to depression, drug abuse and suicide attempts, including  some successful ones.

In 1986, twenty-five-year-old estate agent Suzy Lamplugh went to an appointment with a client in broad daylight in London and vanished. Seven years later she was officially declared dead, presumed murdered, but no trace of her body was found. Twenty-five years after her disappearance, John Cannan, in prison for abductions, rapes and the murder of Shirley Banks, was named as Suzy’s murderer. The Crown Prosecution Service decided there wasn’t sufficient evidence for a prosecution, even though the police considered it overwhelming, so officially the case remains unsolved. What is definite is that, despite all their efforts to have her found, her parents Paul and Diana Lamplugh died without ever knowing where John Cannan had hidden her.

And of course there were the stomach-churning moors murders by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the early 1960s.  There was more than enough evidence to convict them, with or without bodies as proof. One victim, sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, was murdered in 1963, and her body wasn’t found until twenty-four years later in 1987. But twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, snatched by Brady and Hindley in 1964, still lies buried somewhere on the moors east of Manchester and his mother, Winnie Johnson, who never ceased hoping that he would be found, died without knowing, in 2012.

It is a painful scenario – one of the worst I can think of, and it is at the heart of my new novel, COLD IN THE EARTH, which will be published this Thursday, 7th November. How can people move on if a murderer is caught, tried and convicted, but the victim is never found or even acknowledged as a victim by the law. That has to be worse than murder.