Justice for Colette: My daughter was murdered - I never gave up hope of her killer being found. He was finally caught after 26 years

by Kirby, Jacqui

  ‘That’s my sister!’ Mark howled, his cries echoing around the deserted farmland.

  In front of his eyes lay his frail little sister naked, bruised, battered and dead. My nightmare premonition had come true.

  She’d been strangled – the life squeezed out of her innocent and now broken body. She lay like a rag doll, cold and lifeless at the bottom of the hedge, and had been arranged by her killer in a sickening sexually explicit pose. He had even tied her blouse and bra around her wrist as some sort of twisted trophy or calling card.

  The horrors of what he saw that day changed Mark in an instant. No brother should have to see his sister like that. My son’s life would never be the same again.

  Back at home, I remained seated by the front-room window waiting for news. I was as pale and as frozen as a porcelain statue. A police officer had been dispatched to keep guard outside at the end of our drive.

  I knew my daughter was dead before my son had even made it through the front door. When Mark and Ron pulled up in the car outside, I instinctively rose from the armchair where I had been sitting. As I did so, I saw the policeman shaking his head sadly, looking towards the house. I knew in that instant that my beautiful Colette had gone.

  A scream came from deep within me and it didn’t stop. I saw Tony and my mother – their lips were moving but the only sound I could hear was my own desperate screams.

  Then Mum picked up the phone and began to dial a number.

  My screams didn’t stop until the doctor arrived with a couple of needles. He’d come to inject me with a tranquilliser. My eyes glazed over, a kind of numb relief came over me. Zombie like, I was led to bed, where I stayed for the rest of the day until the effects of the drug wore off. Then I was injected again, and again. This pattern of drug-induced numbness continued to keep me in a blurry, semi-detached haze for around ten days. It was meant to protect me from the horror of our reality and to give me time to adjust to the news that I would never see my lovely Colette ever again.

  Our nightmare had begun.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE AFTERMATH

  The doctor had filled the syringe with tranquilliser to sedate me. But there was something that I needed to do. I picked up the phone, dialled a number and waited for an answer. Then, in a calm voice, I spoke. ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t be in to work today because Colette’s been murdered,’ I said in a monotone voice. I was functioning on auto-pilot. The words came out of my mouth like I was a robot.

  At that time, I worked for Lancôme as a beauty consultant in Debenhams department store in the centre of Nottingham. I loved my job and had served everyone from Barbara Windsor to Dale Winton, who at that time was working for the local radio station. He’d always been so polite and lovely towards me. In fact, I had built up a warm and loyal base of customers, so it was a real wrench not to be there and to have simply disappeared overnight.

  The company was very good to me and gave me full paid leave to cope with my grief. Each week, a huge box of flowers would arrive for me from my work colleagues. I couldn’t have wished to work for better people. As well as flowers, staff and area managers would write and telephone me regularly to check how I was coping. It was beyond the call of duty and I will be forever grateful to those who made those early days so much easier to bear.

  One of these people was my mother. For the first two weeks, she moved into our home to cook and clean and generally keep an eye on us all. I couldn’t have coped without her strength and support. But, despite all the lovely home-cooked meals she made, I couldn’t eat. Instead, I survived the next two weeks on a diet of prescribed tranquillisers and milky drinks. I couldn’t even stand food near my mouth; it just made me retch. It seemed wrong somehow to even want to eat – or to live – with Colette cold and dead.

  I drank Ovaltine made with milk. I would be just about alert enough for when the GP arrived for his daily visit. He would walk into the house, pull out and prepare a hypodermic needle, stick it into my arm and allow me to drift off into a zombie state once more. While the sedation brought me a sense of calm, I hated the feeling of hardly being able to stand up. I would fall about and sway like someone who had had too much to drink. I just felt hollow inside – like the walking dead. No emotions, no feelings, just complete emptiness.

  As word about Colette spread, more and more people arrived at our home with flowers. Soon the house was full to bursting point with different bunches everywhere. They were in the lounge, dining room, kitchen, hallway and they even lined the stairs. A carpet of flora filled every step until we finally ran out of vases – our own and others that we’d had to borrow from neighbours and friends.

  But no amount of united grief or compassion would bring my little girl back. Before this nightmare, I’d been a happy, outgoing person. Now I was a shell of my former self. I was shattered, my confidence fragmented into thousands of pieces like a broken mirror, hopeless and waiting to be repaired. All the joy in my life had drained from me the night that Colette died.

  The doctor arrived one day and, upon being hit by the overwhelming floral scent filling our home, he reeled back in disgust. Then he began to shout.

  ‘This house is like a shrine,’ he exclaimed.

  We were dumbstruck, as if life couldn’t get any more surreal. We turned to stare at him; he was our doctor, a pillar of the community. He was normally so gentle, professional and cheery. His words had jolted us all.

  Then he turned his attentions to me. ‘And as for you, Jacqui, if you don’t eat soon, I’ll be treating you for anorexia.’

  I was stunned. The doctor wasn’t an unkind man; he was just trying to shock me back to some sort of normality.

  ‘Do you really think Colette would want to see you like this?’ he asked, holding up one of my pathetic gaunt arms to inspect. He gestured towards my concave torso with a jab of his hand.

  I tried to shrug but I didn’t have the energy. I just felt weak, like a battered rag-doll, the stuffing knocked clean out of me.

  The doctor turned to Tony and other relatives sat in the room. ‘And, while you’re at it, get rid of some of these sodding flowers!’

  He was right about the flowers, of course. Nothing or no one could pierce the pain of my loss. I also knew that he was saying these things to try to help me, to shock me. But no one could because I didn’t want to come back to the normal world and my life as it would now be. I didn’t want to eat, to breathe or even to live. I just wanted to die and lie alongside my little girl. To protect her.

  Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I refused to let the doctor inject me any more. He insisted that I had some other kind of tranquilliser, this time in tablet form, but he scaled his usual daily visit down to every few days. On the face of things, it looked as if I was coping, working through my loss, but I was far from doing either of these things.

  My haze of grief continued as I went into denial that Colette had gone. I would sit by the window or on the chair in the hall, waiting for her to come home. Every day I searched for her outline. At times I thought I saw her but it was always someone else’s daughter. I willed her to walk up the driveway and into our home. I pictured her usual smile and cheery ‘hiya, Mum’, as she strolled in through the front door, hanging her red jacket up on the usual peg.

  But there was no outline, no smile, no Colette.

  Instead, well-meaning strangers knocked with more condolence cards and more bunches of sodding flowers.

  The police came to see us. Someone had to identify Colette’s body. They wouldn’t let me go as they didn’t think that I’d be able to cope with the sight that awaited me at the mortuary. Also, for my own sanity I needed to remember Colette for the beautiful girl she had always been. I didn’t want horror visions to seep in and tarnish the happy memories that I held dear in my heart. I didn’t want to see my daughter dead and lying alone and lifeless on a mortuary slab.

  Instead, Tony and my dad Arthur went to identify her battered body. She was black and blue all over – an alien and bro
ken version of herself.

  My father was not a well man. He suffered with angina and other health issues, and he never got over what he saw that day. But somehow he held the hurt and buried it deep down inside. Arthur was a proud man; a strong, hard business man. But the shock of seeing his granddaughter in this state haunted him for the rest of his life. He died broken-hearted less than six months later. He was just 65 years old. Colette’s murderer had now claimed two lives. I had saved myself from this horrific vision but the shock had killed my dad. I wondered then how we were supposed to cope in the forthcoming months.

  If I did manage to get past the front door, I became too terrified to go back in fearing that her killer was waiting for me. The question of mistaken identity was raised by the police investigation team – it was suggested that I might have been the intended target – so I became a virtual recluse in the sanctuary of my own home and suffered constant panic attacks.

  For days, I just drifted in and out of oblivion. I didn’t know what day of the week it was, or anything else for that matter – nothing seemed important any more. My baby had gone.

  The police had a lead. A car had been stolen from an area five miles south of Nottingham. The red Ford Fiesta had been taken around 4.30pm on the Sunday afternoon – less than four hours before Colette went missing.

  The police also informed me that a resident in the area where Colette had walked had heard screams around 8.14pm. The time perfectly matched the moment that my daughter had gone missing. The unnamed resident had looked out and spotted a small car moving off at high speed. It was a red Ford Fiesta.

  Days later, I was told that a grief-stricken Russell had placed a notice in the paper to his sweetheart. It read: ‘Colette, words cannot express how I feel. I’ll never forget you and you will be forever with me in my thoughts. All my love forever, Russell.’

  I was grateful for Russell’s kind words. It helped me enormously to think that others ached for Colette as much as I did.

  Two days after the murder, the police received another strong lead. A landlady from the Generous Briton pub, in the nearby village of Costock, had telephoned them to say that she had served a man who had been acting suspiciously around 9pm on the night of the murder. He was a stranger to her. She served him an orange juice and lemonade, and he also bought a ham sandwich. He then had another half of orange and lemonade from her; she got talking to him and asked why he was in the area that night.

  ‘I’ve come off the motorway at the wrong junction,’ he began, before suddenly changing his story to say he was visiting a friend who’d had an accident.

  As he spoke, the landlady glanced down and noticed that this strange man had bloodstains on his hand. He saw her eyes dart from his bloodied hand and back to his face. Suddenly, he withdrew the bloodied hand into the sleeve of his jacket and made a hasty retreat to the pub toilet. The woman heard him wash his hands before drying them with a paper towel. Moments later, he left the pub and disappeared back into the darkened night never to be seen again. When reports of Colette’s murder began to appear in the local newspaper and also on the regional TV stations, the landlady, unnerved by what she’d seen, called the police a few days after the murder to tell them all about the suspicious man.

  The police went directly to the pub where the landlady recounted the entire story to them. Officers went into the men’s toilet to retrieve all the paper towels from the wastepaper bin. Little did we know at this stage, but future advancements in DNA technology – then still in its infancy – would use this vital piece of evidence to eventually nail Colette’s killer. The landlady had come face to face with the man who’d killed my daughter. She agreed to help the police by allowing them to bring in a hypnotist so that she could recall the brief encounter in minute detail. The landlady proved to be a brilliant witness and provided the police with lots of information about the man and what he looked like. The police then issued a photofit of this suspect. I hoped and prayed that stopping off for a drink in a pub – as if in celebration of Colette’s murder – would be this ruthless killer’s undoing.

  All the hand towels were sent off for analysis to be expertly examined, but back then, with DNA techniques still in development, all the scientists were able to establish was a blood grouping on one. But, as the techniques became more refined, they were able to unlock more and more DNA from that single towel with which they would eventually pinpoint Colette’s killer. That single paper towel was to play an absolutely vital role in the future of the investigation.

  The police were also looking at the stolen car. It had been removed and transported to the Home Office Research Unit, based in Sandwich. I was informed that a team of forensic experts were going to carry out a series of tests on the car’s interior. If the killer had left his mark, the police would find it.

  The following day, an inquest into Colette’s death was held at Nottingham Coroner’s Court.

  A statement was read out from Detective Superintendent Denis Hanley of Nottingham CID. He said Colette’s body had been spotted in the field by a passing motorist on the Monday morning – the day after her disappearance. A post-mortem examination had been carried out which revealed that she had died from asphyxia as a result of manual strangulation. Tony was there, and he broke down in tears as he listened to the details.

  The inquest was adjourned for the time being. Afterwards, Tony was in such a state that he had to be helped from the court. Meanwhile, I was at home, as I wasn’t fit to attend. I was barely able to get up in the morning, never mind show my face in public.

  Because of the opening of the inquest into her death, for the first six months we were unable to bury my little girl in case her killer was caught – back then bodies were kept longer so that defence teams could perform their own post mortem. These days more consideration is given to the victim’s family and bodies are released quicker.

  Colette’s body was placed on ice as we waited for an arrest which didn’t come.

  Every night, I’d climb into bed thinking of my daughter lying in the mortuary. The image haunted me. Although I’d refused to go and see her, I couldn’t help wanting to know what my daughter now looked like. Before my father died, I’d needed to ask him what this monster had done to my little girl. He told me that Colette had been peppered with cuts and bruises and was black and blue all over. After hearing my dad’s description, this was all I could see in my mind’s eye: my baby girl lying in a huge fridge covered in bruises, tinged blue from the cold. I wanted to lie beside her, to die with her. I just wanted to wrap her in my arms and keep her warm. I didn’t want her to be alone or feel frightened.

  I tried hard to visualise Colette as I wanted to remember her, laughing and joking, lighting up the room with her innocent sweet smile. But, try as I might, I just couldn’t shake this horrific new vision from my mind. I tortured myself daily with it until it was all I could think of. I’d now forgotten how to function. My world had become so grim that I allowed the blackness of it to wash over me. I just couldn’t get this image of her out of my mind.

  Why Colette? Why not me? Was it our fault she was dead? Should we have insisted again and again until she finally agreed to allow one of us to take her to Russell’s house in the car? There were so many questions but no answers. All I had was a mountain of grief.

  But friends and family helped me through. My good friend Sue Copley was my rock. Sue used to come and sit with me each day. She sat there for so many hours. On the good days, she’d sit and wait in a chair in the front room; on the bad ones, she’d perch herself on my bed, watching, waiting for me to come around.

  My mother would come in and sigh sadly when she saw the pair of us. ‘She’s out of it, Sue. The doctor came and gave her another injection this morning.’

  But Sue was adamant that she would wait until I came around. ‘I don’t care; I’ll sit on her bed for as long as it takes. I just need her to know that I am here for her.’

  Each time I awoke, Sue would be there for me.

  I t
hink I used to feel awkward when people fussed round me because I didn’t really know what to say, or what I was expected to say. But Sue never expected anything from me. Knowing that she was just there for me gave me the strength that I needed to carry on. She was a brilliant friend to me in those early days and still is to this day – the same goes for her husband Pete.

  Then the phone calls started.

  A girl rang just days after her murder. ‘Can I speak to Colette?’ she said.

  For a moment, the mere mention of my daughter’s name took my breath away. Who would ring asking such a question?

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked, numb and confused.

  ‘A friend,’ the girl said.

  ‘Well, if you’re a friend, you will know that she’s dead,’ I replied, slamming down the receiver.

  I remained there, trembling with anger. Why would someone make such a call? Surely they must have known what had happened? Colette’s murder was all over the news channels, so much so that I couldn’t bear to turn the TV on for fear of seeing her lovely face staring back at me. Now she was public property, hijacked by the media who were eager for updates on the ‘murdered teenager’.

  After that, every day like clockwork, between 2pm and 3pm, the phone would ring. I would answer it but no one would speak – instead there was just heavy breathing. The calls kept coming for hours. I would shake every time the phone went. I was convinced that it was Colette’s killer taunting us, watching on from his secret lair.