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

‘She’s let you cry on her shoulder,’ Doris said accurately.

  ‘I get Phillip. She calls him Pip.’

  This took my breath away again. Colette’s ex-boyfriend Phillip lived across the road from us. Everyone knew him as Phillip, but to his family and Colette he was just ‘Pip’. No one would have known this.

  ‘I get Malcolm. That’s an M. M near a railway – Melvyn or something.’

  I shuddered and then spoke. ‘It was a Melvyn who saw the man a few minutes before Colette went missing.’

  ‘Colette saw him – Melvyn,’ said Doris. ‘Was she waiting at a bus stop or near a bus stop?’

  Again, this was wrong. Colette had been walking alone up Nicker Hill.

  ‘He pulled up, said, “Where are you going?” Without thinking she got in the car.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. Colette was too sensible. She’d never get in someone’s car unless she knew them.

  ‘She says “Rose”. Rose has not been very well. Went to hospital. Wedding Anniversary, happy times…’

  Rose was Uncle Ken’s mother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease recently. We’d been to see Ken on the day of Colette’s disappearance and had spent a long time discussing Rose’s deteriorating health.

  ‘She fought hard, Peter,’ Doris explained, directing this towards Pete, the police officer.

  ‘She had a chain on.’

  I grabbed at the edge of the chair until my knuckles went white. Colette was wearing a gold box chain. It was plain with no pendant. No one, other than me and the police, knew about the chain; it had gone missing during her struggle with the killer – never to be seen again.

  ‘He pulled it off,’ Doris said, referring to the chain. ‘He twisted it and pulled it off.’

  Doris narrowed her eyes once more, deep in concentration.

  ‘Maniac. Bite marks. I didn’t deserve to die the way he killed me,’ she said.

  I felt sick. What bite marks? What hadn’t they told me? I glanced towards Pete in horror.

  Pete looked at me and began to explain. ‘She had some bite marks on her body. Small bite marks from animal wildlife but we never told you.’

  I felt a sick kind of relief wash over me. I thought this depraved monster had somehow sunk his teeth into the flesh of my beautiful little girl. I felt small tears prick up again in my eyes, filling them until they spilled down my reddened cheeks. I felt so sad, so empty inside. I just wanted my lovely girl back with me and to be taken from the middle of this surreal nightmare, still unfolding before me.

  ‘I wasn’t there, Mum,’ Doris replied, again taking on the voice of Colette. ‘It couldn’t hurt me. Melvyn saw the car. I didn’t deserve it, I was a good girl.’

  The words cut through my heart like a knife. That’s exactly what Colette would say.

  ‘Mum knows I couldn’t go with any Tom, Dick or Harry. He lives here – someone she knew. I get a builder’s yard, or building worker. They’ll get him.’

  ‘There’s a builder’s yard near Perkins,’ I told her.

  Perkins was a new restaurant that had opened and there was a builder’s yard at the back of it. But until this moment it had had no significance to either me or my family. Meanwhile, Pete continued to write everything down.

  Doris concentrated for a moment and then spoke: ‘He left me. He just left me, just a bra on.’

  This was astonishing, no one knew about the trophy bra that this sick bastard had tied around my daughter’s wrist – no one except for the police and my family.

  ‘Just left me like a load of old garbage,’ added Doris.

  He had. He dumped my baby at the bottom of an old hedgerow in the middle of a deserted field, as though her precious body had been a pile of rubbish to be disposed of, away from prying eyes.

  ‘I get the name Pat, Pam or Ronnie.’

  I thought of my mum’s new husband. ‘That’s her step-grandfather,’ I explained.

  But Doris already knew. ‘There was a divorce,’ she told me correctly. ‘Her real grandfather’s still on this side,’ she said.

  ‘I get the name Frank. Do we know any Franks? I’ve got Tony again. He can’t talk about it – he’s a very quiet man. I’m getting this builder’s yard – building trade again. I get Pip and she goes back to Steven, Andy. She met the bloke Saturday evening with her boyfriend. Disco.’

  This I will never know for sure. Colette could have met this man anywhere before, even at the salon where she worked. She could have just walked past him as a random stranger on the street; we will never know for certain if he saw her before he committed this heinous crime.

  She went on to describe in detail what Colette had worn that night from the cream silky blouse to the black corduroy trousers with the little fasteners, which tied at the ankle. She even mentioned a jumper of mine that Colette had borrowed without my knowing. I’d looked everywhere for it.

  Doris continued, ‘I get a builder’s yard again. Briggs or Gregg. I get a Ken.’

  ‘That’ll be Uncle Ken,’ I told her.

  ‘She talks about this auburn hair again. She mentions the name Richardson – building trade. She says he had a mark on his left arm. I can’t get it properly – a tattoo or something. She talks about a house number – it has a four – 14, 4 or 40 something. I get the name Jeffrey with a J or a G. I’m getting builders again. I get a road to do with water. It begins with a W.’

  Suddenly, Pete spoke: ‘Wynbreck.’

  Wynbreck was the name of a road not far from our house – could it have significance?

  But I thought of another road beginning with a W, one which made more sense.

  ‘Willow Brook,’ I replied.

  It was where Russell’s home was situated off Nicker Hill, in Keyworth, where Colette was walking the night she was abducted and murdered.

  ‘I’m also getting Park Road or Park Avenue.’

  These had no meaning to me.

  ‘There’s a common recreation ground – a field or open space, then to another place.’

  I thought of Nicker Hill, where Colette had walked that night, which has fields along one side of the road.

  ‘There’s a footpath leading to the other place,’ added Doris.

  Suddenly Colette’s voice came through once more. ‘It’s all right, Mum. I was unconscious. I didn’t feel any pain.’

  I gasped, automatically clasping my hand against my mouth. This was horrible and at the same time comforting. My head was scrambled with all the information coming from this elderly, silver-haired lady. I scolded myself for having doubted her and this process.

  ‘Adrian … Jason. Have you got a dog?’

  ‘Colette had one,’ I replied, my voice cracking with emotion.

  ‘Was it Suzy or something like that?’ she asked, meaning a name with the same-sounding ending.

  ‘Mitzy.’

  Doris looked at me and nodded her head in confirmation. ‘Colette says, “Look after Mitzy for me, Mum.” I get a builder’s place again. Phillip, Andy.’

  ‘There’s Andrew,’ I offered. He was a good friend of Mark’s; Doris even went on to guess his surname correctly.

  By now Doris was exhausted and almost finished. In a way, I wanted this conversation to go on forever. In a strange kind of way, it felt like real contact with my lovely daughter. Doris had told me so much that she could never have known. I longed to speak to Colette to hold her in my arms but I couldn’t. This was the closest I’d been to her since that fateful night. I could tell Doris was nearly done, but there was more.

  ‘There are fingerprints in the car – he’s very clever,’ she said.

  Then Colette’s voice once more: ‘I tried to get out, Mum – very low seat – lying back. Not front. Dragged into the back of the car.’

  Finally, Doris said she had the name Julian, and Howard too. But she didn’t know whether Howard was a Christian name or a surname.

  With that, she looked over at me. That was it; there was no more information she could give us. Doris was an elde
rly lady and she looked exhausted.

  The whole session had taken just under an hour, but it felt as if we’d been in that hotel room all afternoon. I felt exhausted, emotional and drained. I was also very, very spooked out by the whole experience.

  As we turned to leave, Pete and I shook Doris’s hand and thanked her for her time. Pete packed away his notebook and headed for the door.

  As we did so, Doris called out to us. ‘By the way, Pete, congratulations!’

  He turned to look back at Doris, his face puzzled.

  She smiled. ‘You’ve just become a grandfather!’

  Pete shook his head in disbelief, but I could see that he was clearly stunned. ‘No, Doris,’ he replied. My heart sank. Had Doris got it so wrong? ‘I’m not a grandfather – I’ve just become a great-grandfather!’

  Doris nodded and smiled knowingly. ‘What did she have?’ she enquired.

  ‘A little boy,’ Pete answered, smiling warmly back at her.

  ‘Good. Congratulations again!’

  I looked at Pete in astonishment. How could she have known that? It was all so weird. I was still drugged up so I felt like I was in some kind of surreal limbo. I was living my life in a tunnel. All I could think of was the police finding this animal and bringing him to justice. But now here I was in some plush hotel, listening to what Doris Stokes, a world-famous medium off the TV, was saying. I half-believed everything because I wanted to believe what she’d told me was true. I almost needed it, just to draw some comfort from it. But, I also reasoned that there had been a few things she had said which made no sense whatsoever.

  However, Doris had changed my mind about mediums that day. I was certain that she possessed some kind of gift. Nevertheless, she hadn’t given me the sort of information that I wanted – clues that would help catch my daughter’s killer. Naively, I’d thought somehow that I was going to come out of her hotel room knowing who had killed Colette. I thought that she’d be able to describe this man, put a name to him, but it wasn’t like that. I suppose that my expectations had been too high.

  Once home, I relayed the conversation to Tony, who listened intently to every single word. Until that day, Tony, like me, had thought that the whole thing had been a load of old mumbo-jumbo, but Doris had completely changed my mind. So much so that, a few days later, I asked Mum to go with me to see her at Nottingham Theatre Royal.

  The theatre was packed but we weren’t picked out from the crowd – there were no more messages for me that evening. To be honest, I was relieved. This was much too personal to be part of a theatre entertainment show. I wasn’t ready then to share this bit of my daughter with the world; there was too much about her already in the press. I needed to preserve a little piece of Colette just for me.

  Afterwards, and quite out of the blue, I received a parcel through the mail addressed to me. I still don’t know to this day who it came from, but it was a book, written by Doris Stokes entitled Voices in My Ear. The postmark on the front of the brown envelope showed it had been posted in Nottingham. I wondered if it had come from Doris herself, but she had long since left Nottingham after the show. There was no accompanying note and no explanation, just the book. Maybe it was just a coincidence – but what a coincidence. No one, apart from my family, Doris and the police knew I’d gone to see her that day. Still, in the forthcoming months, I drew strength from the book and from what Doris had told me. Maybe there was more to the afterlife, after all.

  One day, Tony and I were called to the police incident room for a general update on how the investigation was going. As we walked towards the grounds of the station, we noticed a van parked outside, a mobile cafe situated next to the local football field. There were police officers working on the beat, gathering information on the ongoing investigation and using the cafe to get hot cups of tea and coffee.

  On the way into the station, we saw that they were also arranging for photographs to be taken of local men who had been pulled in to help with the inquiry. As we walked through the main doors, one of these men approached Tony.

  ‘Don’t tell me that they’ve pulled you in as well for a fucking picture to do with this kid that’s been murdered,’ he sneered.

  Tony didn’t know the man and he didn’t know us. It was just bad timing, someone letting off a bit of steam at being called in to have his photograph taken. Indignant at having to take time off work, time out of his busy social life to help with something which meant nothing to him but everything to us.

  I felt Tony’s arm stiffen in anger. Then he took a deep breath and calmed down, but I wanted to smash this man’s face in and Tony knew it. He quickly grabbed at my hand as I felt my fist clench.

  ‘Leave it,’ Tony whispered to me. ‘Just leave it.’

  The man wasn’t worth it, Tony knew it and so did I, but how dare he talk about my daughter’s murder like that? It was a small inconvenience for the general public to go through to get her killer off our streets. What if it had been his daughter? How would he have felt about it then?

  We walked into the incident room to see the leading officer. As we entered the office, my eyes scanned across the many men sitting in it. I tried to pick out one or two but couldn’t – to me they were just a monotonous blur of faces. Over 50 officers had been working on the inquiry and over 2,000 statements had already been taken.

  Sitting quietly at the back of the room was Kevin Flint, a talented young police detective. I didn’t know it at that time, but not only would Kevin be the man who restored my faith in the police, but he would also be the kingpin in finally bringing my daughter’s killer to justice.

  The briefing was both short and simple. There were leads but nothing definite. I could sense the feeling of frustration in the room.

  In early 1984, months after Colette’s murder, a detective came to see me with some news.

  ‘There’s a new programme that’s going out called Crimewatch UK. The same format has been running in Germany for a few years but they are going to screen it in the UK. The flagship show for it here will feature Colette’s murder appeal.’

  I looked at the officer. I’d never heard of such a programme and, until that time, crime had never been prominent on British TV, apart from in the odd film shown on a Saturday night. Instead, it was all fluff, chat shows and other light entertainment that filled the airwaves.

  ‘It’s already been recorded,’ he informed me.

  I was astonished as I didn’t recall being told about it up until that moment. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter – anything which might catch Colette’s killer was worth a shot.

  But the officer shifted in his seat. He wasn’t finished. ‘The only thing is the reconstruction had to be recorded on the wrong side of the road because one of the householders on the correct side objected to us filming there.’

  ‘What!’ I said. ‘Why?’

  The officer explained that the gentleman worked in the legal profession and didn’t want his property caught in a film clip to be broadcast on national television. So, instead, it had been filmed on the opposite side of the road from where she had been abducted that night, but all you could see was fields and darkness, not houses and streetlights.

  I was furious. Shouldn’t people be trying to help the inquiry instead of hindering it? I thought. Would it not confuse matters to show Colette on the wrong side of the road when she was abducted? Would it confuse vital witnesses and stop them from coming forward with information?

  Still, the reconstruction had been done and it would be screened on BBC1 on 7 June 1984, eight months after Colette’s murder.

  The night it was shown, I refused to watch. Instead, when I heard the music, I went upstairs and out of earshot. I don’t know whether Tony sat and watched it as we never discussed it – I didn’t want anything to do with it. Mark had also refused to watch it.

  It was the first case to be featured on the flagship show. I hoped it would bring someone forward. In the days following the screening, the police told me that they had had
a huge response and were sifting through new information. As a result of the appeal, police received hundreds of tip-offs and were able to eliminate lots of suspects from their enquiries. However, the killer still remained at large. To make matters worse, there had also been a lot of timewasters including one woman who had called in and cried down the phone, saying she knew who’d done it. When the police looked into it, they discovered that she had been spurned and was accusing her lover of Colette’s murder. It was all nonsense of course – she’d done nothing other than waste valuable police time.

  There were lots of leads that were followed up, but they didn’t lead to anything conclusive. Some friends told me the show had been good, but others who had watched the programme now avoided speaking to me. I don’t know if it was embarrassment on their part or not knowing what to say or do. People seemed to feel uncomfortable talking about death, especially when it involved my only daughter. But this just made me feel even worse and more isolated.

  It was national news now. But, even though the net had been cast far and wide, the police were no closer to catching Colette’s murderer than they had been on the day he had killed her. It was becoming hard not to lose all hope that I would ever see justice done for my lovely daughter.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BREAKDOWN OF A MARRIAGE

  After Colette’s death, I went to see my doctor. He was a strong and dependable, no-nonsense Irishman, so he always said things exactly as they were.

  ‘In situations such as this,’ he told me, ‘most marriages crack under the pressure after losing a child so suddenly. Something like this will either make or break a marriage. But 99 per cent of marriages break under the strain.’

  I listened to his words and shook my head vehemently. ‘I’m not worried about Tony and me,’ I said confidently. ‘This won’t break our marriage – we’re stronger than that. We’re built to last. Nothing will ever break us up.’

  I didn’t mention the conversation to Tony when I returned home that afternoon. I didn’t think it had any significance as I was certain that, as a couple, we were infallible.