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

  To make matters worse, we were still getting the ghoul hunters parked outside.

  ‘Why won’t they just leave us alone?’ I wailed.

  Colette’s funeral was held the following month. I was told that it was time she was buried so that I could come to terms with the fact that she was dead – a kind of closure.

  I was not allowed to have my daughter cremated in case her killer was caught. But I was tortured with the fear that they would not let her rest in peace and that the police might order her body to be exhumed. The thought terrified me.

  The doctor and the vicar told me to stick it out, to demand that my wishes be granted – that Colette be cremated. In the end, I reached a kind of stalemate with the police on the matter, so the vicar insisted that I have her buried. But first he made me a promise.

  ‘If you have her buried and the police catch him, I promise that I will go to the bishop himself if I have to in order to stop them from exhuming Colette’s body.’

  I reluctantly agreed. It was the only reason Tony and I allowed her to be buried. The vicar and my doctor were in firm agreement. This was the only way, emotionally and mentally, that I would ever come to terms with the fact that Colette was dead and never coming home

  Financially, we were struggling though. I wanted Colette to be buried with dignity but I didn’t have a clue how we were going to afford it. One day, the police arrived with a cheque for £2,000. To this day, I still don’t know where it came from, but it was money to pay for Colette’s funeral. I was adamant that my daughter would have a beautiful funeral. I insisted on a beautiful coffin made from the strongest wood they had – I wanted Colette to be protected as much as possible so she could rest in peace – and a black marble headstone with gold lettering. On top of this I had ordered extra funeral cars for all the family and close friends.

  Tony wanted a fitting funeral for Colette, but he did ask me why I had to have all these very expensive things.

  ‘Because she didn’t arrive in this world a pauper and she’s certainly not going out that way. She didn’t deserve to die so she’s not going to have a pauper’s funeral. Even if I have to have a bank loan to bury her, I will.’

  I couldn’t believe that I had to explain myself to Tony; it was as though a conflict between us had begun.

  It was just before Easter in 1984 when my family and I filed once again into Plumtree church. My daughter’s funeral was kept secret from everyone as the police didn’t want ghoul hunters or the press present. In short, we didn’t want a circus. I was drugged up to the eyeballs; the doctor gave me some kind of special drug to get me through the day. The detectives were paranoid that news of the funeral would somehow leak out. It was hard for us all as there was so much security – including a police guard – outside the gates leading to this little church.

  The local funeral directors, Lymes, had organised everything with precision. Despite the tight security and secrecy of the funeral service, Mr Lyme himself walked all the way from our house to Plumtree church, wearing his top hat and tails and carrying a silver cane in front of the family car. Only close family and friends were invited, but the church was packed.

  The Godfreys were there, including Russell. I felt for Russell in particular. After Colette’s body was found, he’d been taken away by the police for routine questioning about her murder. That poor boy. He was just 17 years old and terrified. We knew that he’d done nothing wrong but the police were just doing their job. They had to question everyone involved to rule them out by a process of elimination.

  I was concerned about his parents. Did they think that we had asked the police to question Russell? I prayed that they didn’t and that they knew us better than that. We knew he was innocent from the start. I worried how they were coping with it all. But I was more concerned about Russell. If it hadn’t been for his quick thinking and telephone call to me the night Colette vanished, we wouldn’t have alerted the police and carried out the search. At least he had given the police a fighting chance of finding Colette. Only they didn’t find her quickly enough to save her life.

  Now, in the cramped, icy cold church, Russell looked heartbroken and awkward, but I was glad he was there. He stood united among some of Colette’s closest friends. It felt odd to see so many young people at a funeral. Even more surreal was that the girl lying in the coffin was my sweet 16-year-old daughter. You never expect to be burying your children. If Colette had been sick, then maybe I could have planned or prepared for something like this, but she was a perfectly happy and healthy young girl.

  The police told us that, had she lived, Colette would have been severely brain damaged because of her injuries. She would have had no quality of life, they said. But how could they know for sure? At least I would still be able to hold her in my arms and to protect her from further harm.

  It was a very solemn funeral service; I saw a sea of faces but took in no one in particular. Everyone looked shell-shocked. Most people were crying, while others couldn’t even look at one another, let alone Colette’s coffin resting at the front of the church.

  I was red-eyed and crying throughout. When the tears ran dry, I became numb and shut off from everything and everyone. I didn’t hear anything that was said by the vicar, Stephen Oliver, in the church. I don’t remember the music and I don’t recall any readings. One thing I did notice was the white flowers – I’d insisted that everyone send them, and they had. White because it represented purity and, until that bastard fouled her body, Colette was as pure as the driven snow.

  We stood shivering around the graveside. I dropped a single red rose on to the top of her coffin as it was lowered into the ground. I looked around. Mum, Tony and Mark were standing near, ashen-faced. Someone began to throw soil into her grave. In a heartbeat it suddenly became too much to bear. I knew that this was my final goodbye to Colette. I felt the strength drain from me suddenly; my legs buckled and I fell to my knees on the cold, damp earth at the edge of the graveside. I remained that way. No one knew what to do. Some people were upset and had to walk away. I think I would have remained there forever but as I glanced up I saw my son’s face crumpled in pain and anguish. I had to be strong for him. I composed myself and allowed others to hold me back up. This was my final goodbye.

  I thought about my father’s funeral just weeks before. He’d died just six months after Colette, but we buried him before her. I had never been very close to my dad, as he and my mum had divorced years earlier. But now to be burying two members of my family in such a short time was too much to bear.

  When I was a child, my father had always been very strict. We had a regimented upbringing and he had a bad temper. But all of that had now been forgotten. He was my dad and I had loved him. During the latter years, Dad had tried to make amends. He did this by spending time with Mark and Colette. Now it hit me hard, knowing that he’d tried to be there for her and me but that, in the end, none of us could protect Colette when she’d needed it most.

  My father had been a tall man, standing at over 6ft 2ins. On the day he died, he’d been having a shower when he suffered a massive heart attack. He fell out of the shower and landed heavily behind the bathroom door. No one was able to get through the door to rescue him. By the time the ambulance had arrived, the paramedics managed to shift the door but it was too late – my father had gone. We buried Arthur in a churchyard in Bulwell, Nottingham. His funeral was very emotional for us all.

  I struggled to cope with two deaths in the family. It affected every area of my life. Now, it seemed as if the threads holding my marriage together were slowly beginning to come undone.

  It is often said that grief can unite a family but, in our case, it tore us slowly apart, bit by bit. We’d been there for one another in the beginning; when the police found Colette’s body, the ongoing investigation and her funeral, but the following months were harder. I wanted to talk about Colette constantly, but Tony just wanted to shut his emotions away. I thought he was being cold. Our daughter had been murdered but he wou
ldn’t talk about her when that’s all I wanted to do. I now realise that he was just dealing with things in his own way.

  Mark shut himself away in his bedroom at night. He was constantly haunted by what he’d seen that day.

  One day, he turned to me. ‘Mum, what’s happened to us? What’s happened to you and Dad?’ he asked.

  I had no answers. The truth was I didn’t know. All I knew was we’d lost our little girl and now we’d lost one another. What, indeed, had happened to us?

  Colette’s murder had been a hand grenade thrown into the middle of our happy family unit. We’d all been blown to smithereens by the impact and were now shards of our former selves, fragmented and broken.

  And all the time the police continued their hunt for the man who had not only taken Colette’s life that day, but whose brutal actions were slowly destroying us all.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE INVESTIGATION

  As the police investigation got going, detectives involved in the inquiry received repeated requests for interviews from newspaper journalists. I found these particularly harrowing as the last thing you want to do is to speak to a stranger about the murder of your only daughter.

  I was a normal mum-of-two who had been catapulted into a huge media spotlight and I was finding it difficult to cope. To make matters worse, Tony couldn’t bring himself to do press interviews. As time went on, he withdrew from everyone; there was no right or wrong in all this, it was just his way of coping. So in the end it was down to me.

  Looking back, I now realise that Tony was dealing with Colette’s murder in his own way but –rightly or wrongly – just when I needed his love and support, I felt totally and utterly abandoned. I was at the mercy of a press hungry for news and updates on how we were coping. I knew that this insatiable hunger must be fed so that Colette’s case did not flicker and fizzle out of the news. If it did, I thought we would never stand a chance of catching the monster that had done this.

  Deep down, I wanted to be left alone to grieve in private – to die quietly, even – anything to get away from this unfolding nightmare. But the opposite happened.

  The nightmare intensified. Everyone wanted a little piece of me. People were coming at me from all different directions; I felt pulled and tugged at until there was nothing left for my shattered family. The pressure was unbelievable.

  I was like jelly inside. I could barely function. I needed support, not to be fed like fresh meat to the hungry wolves of the media. I didn’t have a single ounce of strength left inside me – there was nothing left to give. But I knew that I had to do this and do it alone. I had to force myself and summon up courage from deep down within. I needed to do this for us, but, most importantly, for Colette.

  The police hunt continued. A picture had been built up of both Colette and her killer’s movements on the night she was murdered.

  Colette had left home at 8pm to walk to Russell’s house. She saw some friends on the way and stopped to speak to them briefly – this was the last time she was seen alive. She failed to arrive at Russell’s home and her naked body was found at 9am the next morning. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

  A man was seen in West Bridgford area – only five miles away – at 4.30pm on the day she was murdered. He was hiding in hedgerow, watching girls riding horses. A rag was later discovered there by police, which contained semen; he’d been masturbating while watching those girls.

  It was from here that he stole a red Fiesta. The car was seen in numerous locations throughout Keyworth and the surrounding areas. Between 6.20pm and 7.20pm the same evening, the driver was said to be stalking girls and asking repeatedly for directions. He’d attempted to abduct another girl. He’d tried to convince her to get in the car saying it was warm and dry and that he wouldn’t bite, but she’d refused – it had saved her life. One witness even claimed that he had a knife; he’d seen it in the suspect’s hand as he walked back to his car. The same resident was so concerned that he’d taken a note of the car registration and given it to the police.

  At 8.14pm, another witness in our village heard screams and the sound of a speeding car. Police now believed that this was the moment Colette was abducted by her killer.

  Within two days of Colette’s murder, the landlady from the Generous Briton pub called the police. A man had been in there drinking around 9pm on the evening of the murder. The landlady noticed that he had blood on his hands; he later washed them in the gents’ toilets and police were able to retrieve the paper towels from the wastepaper bin. They had all been sent off but only one contained blood – Colette’s blood.

  Two-and-a-half weeks after her murder, detectives received the killer’s Ripper-style letter taunting them, boasting how he’d never be caught. Both the towel and the letter were now vital clues in the hunt for my daughter’s killer. They had detectives working on the case around the clock. But they also needed my help.

  The police were eager to keep Colette’s murder appeal in the press, so they arranged for me to do an interview with the city’s evening newspaper, the Nottingham Evening Post. It was 22 December, and we were facing our first Christmas alone without Colette. I was worried that the excitement of forthcoming festive frivolities would take over and that people would forget about her and just move on. In short, I was terrified that the case would go cold.

  ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I admitted to Tony the night before the interview.

  It would be the first time that I had spoken publicly about my daughter and our loss. But Tony didn’t want to do it either. If I didn’t, who would be there to fight her corner for her? Colette couldn’t do it; she was dead and as cold as the ground where she’d been left to die. I had to do this for my daughter, to get justice for her.

  The police needed me to keep Colette’s name in the public spotlight, help jog memories in the hope that the next phone call could be the one to nail her killer.

  With a heavy heart, I sat down at home one afternoon with a newspaper reporter from the Evening Post. He was a polite man but he had a job to do, so I sat back waiting for him to fire his volley of questions at me. This had now become my job and another thing to deal with. The journalist asked me how we would get through Christmas, a special time of the year for any family, but our first one without Colette.

  I thought for a moment. ‘The evil man who killed Colette has destroyed all our lives as well. We will not be celebrating Christmas,’ I explained numbly.

  The reporter wrote everything I told him in neat shorthand in a notebook perched on his lap in our tiny living room. It felt odd, alien, to be doing this, the kind of thing that you see portrayed in films or on TV. But now it was being played out in the front room of our home – our lives had become the drama that everyone was talking about.

  I tried my best to convey to him the enormous hole in our lives left by Colette’s brutal murder. But how could anyone even begin to comprehend such a massive personal loss? In the end, I just told the truth.

  ‘If I am in the house on my own,’ I began, ‘I can’t go upstairs after eight o’clock because that is the time that Colette disappeared from our lives forever.’

  I felt silly admitting it but it was true.

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ I said. ‘I can’t bear to be on my own in the house at night.’

  The reporter nodded as he wrote. ‘What about Colette’s bedroom?’ he asked gently.

  ‘I haven’t been in Colette’s bedroom since it happened. I just can’t go in.’ I was choking back my tears.

  The reporter was sympathetic and allowed me a moment to compose myself. I reached for the tissues and dabbed away my tears but nothing could hold them back now as they went into freefall, tumbling down from my face and on to my lap.

  ‘We are all absolutely devastated by what has happened. We have only just started going out and meeting people again.’

  My voice was trailing off in a whisper.

  ‘In a strange sort of way, I feel as if I’ve done something wrong. It�
��s a strange feeling, I can’t explain it. It’s like a nightmare.’

  The journalist asked about the killer’s letter to the police weeks before that had recently been made public. He wanted to know if I thought it was from Colette’s killer. I told him I did. I also added that, in a roundabout way, the killer claimed he did not mean to kill Colette, but that, as far as I was concerned, it was premeditated. Suddenly I went into a rage.

  ‘I wish there was some way I could fight to bring back capital punishment,’ I shouted, unable to contain myself. ‘I want the maximum penalty for this man.

  ‘Colette was just at the stage where she was blossoming into a young woman,’ I said, now a little calmer. ‘She had just started work.’

  I smiled as I remembered. ‘She was always laughing and playing practical jokes. There was always laughter in our home. Now there is only this deathly silence.’

  It was true; since Colette’s death, it was as though the three of us, Tony, Mark and I, had forgotten how to communicate. It was so frustrating that Tony would not talk about Colette. For years, I held this resentment towards him inside me, but now, only years later, do I realise that it was his way of dealing with her death – a form of self-protection.

  The journalist asked if I had anything to add.

  ‘This man must be caught, not for Colette’s sake but for the sake of other youngsters. He must be put away so that he cannot do this again,’ I insisted.

  The reporter nodded in agreement, closed his notebook, shook my hand and thanked me for my time. It had been a difficult interview, the first of many which would need to be done over the forthcoming months and years.

  The following day, the newspaper ran my interview on the front page with the headline: Murder Mum’s Nightmare. It read:

  ‘There are no decorations on the walls. There is no Christmas tree, no presents. For Jacqui Aram, husband Tony and son Mark, Christmas 1983 will be a nightmare.