by Paul
‘It’s your own fault your daughter was taken,’ it read. ‘She should have been bathed and in her bed but she was out playing on the streets. It is disgusting. A little girl with cerebral palsy should have been watched 24/7. You don’t deserve the children you have.’
Coral and I had received literally thousands of letters from members of the public and I can probably count on one hand those which were anything less than completely sympathetic to our distress. Yet no matter how many people contacted us wishing to express their condolences for the loss of April, it was always letters like these that stuck in our heads.
Countless people – our families, friends, the police, our counsellors and other bereaved parents like Sara Payne – had continually told us that we weren’t to blame for what had happened. April was taken because she came into contact with an evil and depraved man, they reminded us, not because we were bad parents. Still, it was hard not to let cruel words like these get to us and leave us wondering if we’d really done everything in our power to protect our little girl. With the benefit of hindsight, we’ve realised that these letter-writers are cowards with empty lives. None of them seem brave enough to put their names to their vitriol and anyone who finds time to needlessly goad a grieving family has to take a long, hard look at themselves before dishing out accusations.
‘My emotions are everywhere today,’ I wrote that evening. ‘I just find myself wanting to cry all day. I’m so lost. I don’t know what to do and I have no goal in life now April is gone and I feel useless because of my eyesight. I’m just running on my love for April and hers for me, as well as my love for Coral, Jazmin and Harley. But I wonder, is love enough? I’m buckling and twisting under the pressure. I’m crying at the smallest things again. I’m just depressed and I want my girl back. I want to hear her sing, to give her a cuddle and look into those two, lovely brown eyes.
‘I love you, April. Dad xxx.’
My mood was lifted the next day when the Sunday edition of the Sun released a link to our petition, along with a big article about the campaign. It featured coverage of Coral’s meeting with Sara and they’d also included a link to the video they’d recorded on the website. I hoped it would encourage more people to take notice of what we were trying to do.
I thought it would be a good idea for us all to get out for a bit, so Coral, Jazmin and I went to New Quay to visit my mum and Dai, while Harley stayed at home and played with his friends. It was nice to get out and enjoy the good weather and we went for a coffee and a sandwich. I suggested we all go to the beach but Coral quickly vetoed the idea. It was a different beach from the one we’d visited the previous day with the photographer but we’d had so many happy afternoons there with April that she just found it too painful.
I noticed that Coral had thrown herself into the campaign and seemed permanently glued to her phone or the laptop. I worried that she may be doing too much too soon, but she insisted she was fine and, in a way, it was good for her to have a focus.
The next day we went shopping in the town and were stopped numerous times. It was the first time many people had seen us since the trial and they all wanted to hug and kiss us. While we appreciated the gestures, it was a little unnerving for Coral, who had become extremely claustrophobic. My mind flashed back to the day we went Christmas shopping in Aberystwyth and how panicked she had been when a stranger wanted to hug her. Thankfully these were all people we recognised and she coped well considering. We then took Harley to the cinema to see Too Fast Too Furious 6, which he loved.
‘It’s good to get out and try and be a normal family,’ I wrote that night. ‘But deep down, we will never be normal again. Sometimes I find myself staring at April’s school photo or a small photo of her we have in the kitchen, which I like, and I just cry for a while. I’m lost and I don’t really know quite why I’m crying but the tears just overflow and pour down my face.
‘April, your mum is keeping to her word and trying to help others, keeping your name out there for a good cause. I’m trying my best to help your mum and look after her, Jazz, Harley, Autumn and Storm, as I promised. I love you, beautiful, and miss you so much. Driven by love, I can’t fail.
‘Love, Dad xxx.’
12
Downing Street
A fortnight after the end of the trial, we received a phone call from Ryan at the Sun, who asked if we would be interested in travelling to Downing Street to meet the Conservative MP Claire Perry to speak about our campaign. Claire Perry was a mother-of-three who had been elected to the House of Commons in 2010, after giving up a career in banking to enter politics. Since then, she’d enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence and was now an adviser to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, with a specific interest in online child protection.
Although the meeting would involve another exhausting trip to London, we immediately agreed to attend. We’d been told that government ministers were due to meet with internet service providers within the next few weeks and we wanted the chance to have our say before then.
As is often the case with MPs, the meeting with Claire Perry was arranged rather hastily for the afternoon of Friday 14 June 2013. The Sun only managed to confirm the details late on the Thursday afternoon, so Coral and I had to hurriedly pack some bags and jump on the 6 p.m. train to Birmingham, where we’d catch our connection to London Euston.
We arrived in London around 10.30 p.m. and took a taxi to our hotel. The traffic was terrible and we were both tired and hungry, but luckily we had a very amiable driver who introduced himself to us as Larry.
‘So, what brings you to London, then?’ he asked us. We’d jumped into the back of the cab and he’d driven off without looking properly at our faces. It was obvious that he assumed we were tourists.
‘We’re going to Downing Street tomorrow,’ I told him. ‘Our daughter was taken away by a paedophile last year and we want to see if there’s anything we can do to stop child porn on the internet.’
I thought Larry might crash into the car in front of him as he spun round to take a good look at us. Thankfully the roads were so congested we were moving at a snail’s pace. Surveying our faces, I saw an expression of awful realisation spread across his face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, quietly. I sensed genuine pity in his voice. ‘I didn’t recognise you there.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. We were so used to being stopped by strangers that it made a nice change.
‘All the taxi drivers have been talking about this,’ he went on. ‘We think it’s amazing, what you’re doing. We’re right behind you.’
It was 11.30 p.m. when we got to our hotel and I tried to press a handful of notes into Larry’s hand, but he waved them away.
‘Put the fare towards the garden you’ve been building for April,’ he said.
‘What a lovely bloke,’ I said to Coral, as he drove away. It was nice to hear first-hand how much public support we had.
We quickly grabbed some food before heading to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned for a few hours before it was time to get up. Ryan met us shortly before noon and we sat in the hotel lobby discussing what the meeting would involve.
Ryan explained that we wouldn’t be the only family in the meeting. Natalie Sharp, whose twelve-year-old daughter Tia had been murdered two months before April’s disappearance, would also be attending with her boyfriend, David Niles.
Tia was reported missing on 3 August 2012, after apparently vanishing from the home of her grandmother, Christine Bicknell, in New Addington, near Croydon, South London. The previous evening, Christine’s partner Stuart Hazell had been babysitting Tia while Christine worked a night shift at a local care home. Hazell told the police that Tia had gone to buy shoes at a shopping centre five miles away and failed to return.
The police searched for Tia for a week and Hazell, a window cleaner, feigned devastation. He even attended a candlelit vigil wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with her picture and the word ‘missing’ and was supported by relat
ives as he appeared to break down. But, unbeknown to Tia’s family, Hazell had developed an unhealthy interest in child pornography in the months leading up to her disappearance. He had downloaded countless illegal images, which he kept on a memory card hidden behind a door frame in the kitchen. Most of the children pictured were pre-pubescent girls and Hazell seemed to have a particular interest in girls who, like Tia, wore glasses.
However, on 10 August, police found a body in a bag in Christine’s loft, wrapped in a black sheet. It had already begun to decompose and a post-mortem later confirmed it belonged to Tia. An exact cause of death was never established, but police said she was most likely to have been suffocated.
Hazell was arrested and charged with Tia’s murder the next day. The police later discovered that, while he pretended to be distraught in front of television cameras, Hazell had continued to access illegal incest websites on his phone. He had also taken pictures of Tia’s body, naked and in a sexual pose.
The following May, he went on trial at the Old Bailey in London, just over a week after the case against Mark Bridger began at Mold Crown Court. However, after five days, Hazell changed his plea from not guilty to guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of thirty-eight years. The judge, Mr Justice Nicol, confirmed that Hazell’s semen was found in the room where Tia slept. Tia’s DNA had also been discovered on a sexual device in the bedroom Hazell shared with her grandmother.
Coral and I were both shocked by the parallels between Hazell and Bridger. We were particularly alarmed by how easily Hazell appeared to have accessed illegal images using the browser on his mobile phone. Some of the search terms he used were ‘naked little girlies’, ‘illegal underage incest pics’ and ‘daddy daughter pictures’ – all of which returned results.
Tia had idolised Hazell, even calling him Granddad, and her family had trusted him to look after her. But, fuelled by the filth he was able to access with just a few clicks, he began to descend into depravity. When Tia vanished, no one had any idea that Hazell had been gripped by this dangerous obsession, or that he’d been secretly filming Tia in her underwear whenever she had a sleepover at her grandmother’s. Like Bridger, he was not known to the police for offending against children and outwardly showed no signs of a sexual interest in young girls. The only way anyone could have foretold what these monsters were capable of was by looking at their internet history – but no one ever did.
It was devastating for Coral and me to hear that another family had gone through such similar events but it only increased our determination to do something about it. Would Bridger and Hazell have gone on to do such awful things to April and Tia if they hadn’t been able to get their hands on such sick material? Would the police have investigated them sooner if they’d been alerted to what these men were searching for? Since the trial, we’d begun asking ourselves these questions on an almost hourly basis. We’d never be certain, but we wanted to do everything in our power to make sure other parents didn’t have to go through the nightmare of wondering what might have been.
Ryan had arranged for a taxi to pick us up at the hotel around 12.40 p.m. and we were driven to the back entrance of 10 Downing Street, which was being manned by two armed guards. Natalie and David were waiting for us and we said a polite hello, before being allowed in. I was thankful that the guards used their common sense and didn’t try to search us, as I knew that this would have made Coral anxious and claustrophobic.
I’d often seen the front of 10 Downing Street on television, but I had no idea how grand its interior would be. Everywhere we turned we were greeted by sweeping staircases, crystal chandeliers and marble pillars. It was like entering another world. A year ago, I would have been extremely nervous about being in the home of the Prime Minister. Now our family had been through so much that nothing could faze me.
A photographer then took us to the front entrance, where Coral, Natalie, David and I posed for pictures. Afterwards, we were taken upstairs to a conference room where Claire Perry was waiting.
She rose to greet us and the first thing I noticed was how tall and elegant she was – she must have been at least six feet tall. She was very personable and charismatic, shaking hands with David and me and hugging Natalie and Coral before we sat down to chat.
It soon became obvious that Natalie was a bit more extroverted than us, and she quickly became very animated when she was asked for her opinion on how we could best combat child abuse online.
‘I want to see a change in the law in our innocent angels’ names,’ she told Claire. ‘Those little girls just cannot die in vain. This has happened twice now, to Tia and to April. Not again. Never again.’
She then made the point about how alike the cases were and Coral and I found ourselves nodding in agreement – it was truly frightening.
‘We don’t want there to be a third, fourth and fifth family sitting in here in the same situation because we haven’t moved and done anything,’ I added.
‘Your sacrifices won’t be in vain,’ Claire said, before telling us she would give David Cameron some feedback on our meeting.
Ryan and the photographer then left the four of us alone with Claire, so we could have a private conversation. Natalie became very tearful when she spoke about Tia’s funeral and this seemed to set Coral off. We still hadn’t been able to make preparations for April’s funeral and, until we’d said our final farewell, it seemed like our lives were still on hold.
‘We haven’t even got a body,’ Coral sobbed. ‘Just a few small skull bones.’
I placed my hand over hers, before Claire took her in her arms and gave her a hug. There was a quiet, respectful silence for a few minutes before we continued with our discussion.
‘There needs to be zero tolerance on indecent images,’ I said, once we’d all composed ourselves. ‘We think there should be dedicated policing of the internet to make sure this happens.’
David, who had been fairly silent until now, nodded and said it was unthinkable that another family should go through the pain we’d all experienced.
‘We’re all right behind you,’ Claire said. Although she’d been very sympathetic to us and had said all the right things, I had to force myself to remember that she was still a politician. Words were meaningless – it was action we needed.
‘That’s rare for MPs,’ I replied. ‘Will you be able to keep us up to date with what’s happening?’
Claire agreed and we were taken back downstairs and out through the back of the house. On the way to our taxi, we walked through the garden where David Cameron often made televised speeches. I recognised it instantly, as I’d seen various Prime Ministers address the nation from the same spot over the years. Before April was taken, I might have been excited to see such an iconic place but now it was just yet another painful reminder that we’d never be mixing with such rich and powerful people if we hadn’t lost our daughter.
A few days later, Channel 5 News contacted us to ask if we would give a televised interview on online child protection. The interview would be filmed to coincide with the summit the government had organised with major internet providers on the issue. Now we’d spoken to Claire Perry, Coral and I had privately agreed that we’d like to meet David Cameron, to discuss the issue with him. We would use the interview to appeal to him for a meeting.
One of the presenters, Tessa Chapman, came to the house and asked us a few questions about the campaign. After all the travelling we’d been doing it was nice to do the interview in more comfortable surroundings. Coral and I settled ourselves on the couch and we each fixed a pink bow to our shirts. Tessa was very friendly and sympathetic and made us feel at ease.
‘Do you think that the access Mark Bridger had to these images created the man he was?’ she asked us, once the cameras had started rolling.
‘I do,’ Coral replied. ‘He got all these things up on the computer and, a few hours later, our little one had disappeared.’
‘It certainly fuelled somebody who was in that
frame of mind,’ I agreed. ‘Anyone else who is thinking of children in this way, these images will only set them off.’
‘During the summit that is happening today, the government will essentially ask internet providers and search engines to police themselves,’ Tessa said. ‘Do you think they need to be forced to do more?’
‘They need to do a lot more but everybody needs to do something,’ I replied. ‘It’s not just Google and the search engines. If an individual stumbles upon something online, they should report it. Tia Sharp and April’s cases were linked to the internet and they happened within a few months of each other. If these things don’t get sorted out, this is just going to escalate. Mark Bridger downloaded 400 images and nothing was flagged up.’
‘He had all these images and nobody realised,’ Coral said. ‘Not even the police. No one.’
‘They came off several sites,’ I went on. ‘It’s very hard to believe that the big internet companies could let that happen.’
‘It makes me furious,’ Coral said. ‘Words can’t express how mad I am. It’s disgusting what happened and how he got these pictures. The companies that allow them should have a massive fine and the money should be put back into the police so they can carry on flagging people up. The people who do it should be charged and put on the Sex Offenders’ Register.’ She took a deep breath, before continuing. ‘That list should be made public – not their addresses, just their names – so people know who they are and what they’ve done.’
Tessa then asked us a few questions about April. We both found it relatively easy to talk about the campaign, as we’d become so passionate about it, but speaking about what we’d lost and why we were here was when it got tough.
‘April was a fighter in life and this will be her last fight,’ I told Tessa. ‘In death.’ I said the last two words slowly and carefully. It was still so hard to accept April was gone forever. ‘I hope it will be a legacy for her.’