Justice for Helen

by Marie McCourt

  I’m pleased to say that we’ve always had a really good relationship with the landlords. When we or the police have approached them to double-check something, they’ve always bent over backwards to help.

  * * *

  Seeing village life go on while my daughter was still missing was hard so the trip to Rome couldn’t have come at a better time. My brothers promised they’d continue searching while we were away.

  Our parish priest wrote to the English College in Rome to request an audience with the Pope. They couldn’t promise anything, but would try their best. ‘Just being there will be wonderful,’ I assured John. My novena candles were the first things I packed.

  Checking into our hotel, the concierge handed over a thick, creamy envelope. As John opened it, his face lit up. ‘These are better than Cup Final seats,’ he grinned, holding out two tickets for a Papal Audience.

  Our hotel was close to St Peter’s Basilica. Stepping into the cool interior, I was drawn like a magnet to Michelangelo’s Pietà – the statue of Christ’s body draped in the arms and lap of his grieving mother after his crucifixion. I gazed at it, taking in every tiny detail, feeling Mary’s raw heartache. It shames me to admit it, but I envied her saying goodbye to her dead child. Even if we found Helen tomorrow, I’d never be able to wrap my arms around her, kiss her sweet face and tell her how much I loved her. The most I could do now, as her mother, was bring her remains home and lay them to rest in consecrated ground. Determination rose within me: by God, I would do that.

  A few days later, we were ushered into the Vatican audience hall, and my heart sank at the sheer number of people assembled. I learned afterwards we were one of 15,000 people who had attended that day.

  ‘We’re never going to get close to him,’ I despaired. Excitement rippled through the room as Pope John Paul II appeared in the distance. Just knowing we were in his presence was an honour.

  Craning our necks, we watched him make his way up one side of the giant room, greeting people and shaking hands, before starting on our side. We were on the front row so had a good chance but as the minutes ticked by, I grew more jittery: ‘He’s not going to reach us,’ I fretted.

  As he blessed a newly-wed couple – still in their finery – I remembered with a pang that I would never see Helen as a beautiful bride, or a flushed, new mum holding out her newborn to show me. Simms had stolen so much from us.

  Pope John Paul II was two feet away, one foot away . . . My knees quaked, my hands trembled.

  Suddenly, an ambassador next to us – who had blanked our greeting when we first sat down – launched forward, blocking my view. The back of his head bobbed as he gabbled earnestly. The Pope listened patiently, shook his hand, tried to move on – but the ambassador was having none of it. He continued to hold the Pope’s hand, talking ten to the dozen.

  Pope John Paul II had now focused his attention on John and me but the ambassador was still hovering, still jabbering. Finally, the Pope slipped his hand away and rested it on mine. It felt warm, dry and safe. In official photos, you can still see the ambassador hovering, grinning inanely, looking for a moment to re-join the conversation (John had him airbrushed out when we got home), but I didn’t notice.

  Gazing into the Pope’s gentle, questioning face, I was in an absolute trance. I swear I could hear choirs of angels singing. John nudged me and gestured to the photo I was clutching of Helen.

  ‘Father,’ I began, falteringly. ‘This is my daughter. She was murdered. Her killer is in prison but he won’t say where she is. I pray every day to find her so I can lay her to rest.’

  His brow furrowed in concentration. ‘But how? How can there be a murder conviction without a body?’ he asked in beautifully accented English.

  ‘Forensic evidence and DNA, Father,’ I explained. ‘They found her blood. The police proved it was him.’

  As comprehension filtered through, Pope John Paul II nodded. My voice cracked. ‘All I want, now, is to find my daughter.’ Understanding, empathy, pity all flickered across his face. Then he reached his left hand and tenderly cupped my face. It was like coming home. I wanted to stay like that forever.

  He blessed Helen’s photo. Then, taking John’s hand so we were all connected, he said gently: ‘We will pray, together, for your daughter to be found.’ He closed his eyes and his lips moved as he prayed silently. Then his piercing, soulful blue eyes gazed into mine. He patted my hand and then he was gone.

  I sank into the chair, stunned. Helen’s photo had been blessed by the Pope! Our Holy Father had prayed for her to be found. Tears ran down my cheeks as I grabbed John’s hand and kissed it. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered. ‘Thank you for doing this for me. And for Helen.’ I literally floated out of that room – I’d gone as high as I possibly could in asking for prayers that Helen would be found.

  My faith has not only helped me over the years, it has saved me. Without it, I wouldn’t be here. I’m not sure I would ever have deliberately harmed myself, taken my own life. But without my faith, my beliefs, who knows?

  What I could easily have done so many times, particularly during the ‘No’ year, was given up. Laid down and never got up again. I could have refused water and food. The life would have left my body and all this pain would have been over. But where would that have got me? Helen would still be missing. I was her mother, it was my job to find her. That meeting with the Pope helped me come to terms with the life I was now leading. Over the years, I came to see my quest as a mission – a calling, even.

  Every evening in Rome, after dinner an opera singer would open the piano and sing. On the evening of our audience with the Pope, he serenaded me. I closed my eyes, thought of Helen and let the music wash over me. It was like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption when opera plays over the loudspeaker and Morgan Freeman describes it as ‘something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it’.

  John also hired a car and drove miles to San Giovanni Rotondo so we could visit the shrine for Padre Pio, the Italian stigmatised priest (he had developed Christ’s crucifixion wounds) who was made a saint in 2002. When Helen was thirteen, she’d accompanied my mum on a church pilgrimage trip there. I desperately wanted to walk in her footsteps.

  We arrived just in time for mass. Afterwards, we went to the back of the church and knocked on the door. The priest who had cared for Padre Pio answered. When we explained our reason for visiting, he took us down to the crypt and the cell where Padre Pio lived and prayed. Standing in the gloom of this holy, blessed place, I could feel Helen all around me. She had stood in this very spot just a few years ago.

  That trip, and another to Lourdes, revived me; they gave me the strength to keep going through that long, yawning winter. That second Christmas and New Year without her was actually harder than the first. At least then we’d had hope that Simms would confess at the trial.

  I remembered Christmases past with Helen coming home laden down with yet more gifts and scurrying upstairs to hide them. ‘Just a few little extras,’ she’d say when I queried the cost.

  I still went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Outside, I ached, watching parishioners place festive wreaths on graves – they had no idea how lucky they were.

  The lack of sleep was also taking its toll. Evenings would find me struggling to keep my eyes open, but the second I crawled wearily into bed, my brain fizzed into life.

  Where are you, Helen? I’d think. Send me a sign, anything.

  And then the guilt would creep in. How could I lie on fresh sheets, under a soft duvet, when my daughter was out there somewhere in the dark and cold? What sort of mother was I? Was she calling out to me but I wasn’t listening well enough? I’d fine-tune all my senses and strain every sinew to hear a whispered word, a clue as to where she was. My brain would roar with effort. Nothing. Wearily, I’d slip back downstairs to pore over the search folders again, hoping to uncover something overlooked. If all else failed, I’d put the TV on quietly and stare blankly at an old black a
nd white movie.

  Every morning, I gave a jolt of surprise at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Was that really me? Dead behind the eyes, lines of misery spreading like giant hogweed around my sunken eyes and mouth. One day, I put my hand up to my hair: it had gone brittle and grey, just like that.

  Helen would have applied a deep conditioning treatment, encouraged me to get it coloured. But Helen wasn’t here.

  Simms, on the other hand, was always there, always on my mind.

  * * *

  John once persuaded me to have a day out in York. While checking the map, I realised that if we kept on the M62, we’d reach Hull where I knew Simms was in jail, temporarily, until space became available in a secure unit. In a flash, I’d turned to John: ‘I need to see where he’s being kept.’

  Having to buy essentials for an impromptu overnight stay in York was worth it to satisfy myself that Simms’ new home was miserable. I don’t know anyone else who has done this, but I have been to see every single prison he has ever been in bar one (Long Lartin, in Worcestershire, was too remote).

  Full Sutton was far too bright and modern. And Garth didn’t look too bad, either. However, Hull, Wakefield and Wormwood Scrubs – bleak, sprawling, Victorian prisons – were decidedly grim.

  The grimmer they were the better, I felt.

  We checked into a little hotel, clutching brand new underwear and toothbrushes in a plastic bag. Heaven only knows what the staff thought of us. We still use the term ‘overnight carrier bag’ rather than a case or holdall.

  Simms’ first application for leave to appeal, in October 1989 (funded by legal aid, no doubt) was thrown out by a single judge sitting in private.

  Our relief was short-lived. He could still apply again – to a full court. And he did so.

  The appeal was adjourned again and again. Finally, at the eleventh hour, we learned from Merseyside Police that it was going ahead on Monday, 8 October 1990 (back then, families were the last to know about that sort of thing). We paid through the nose for train tickets to London.

  I clutched my prayer cards as we entered the High Court. If the three judges sitting today agreed with Simms, they could order a retrial or even quash the verdict completely. Simms wasn’t allowed to be there but his junior barrister David Turner put forward the case. He conceded that Simms had been linked to the killing by a ‘brilliant scientific investigation’ and ‘at the end of the day, the jury could have had no doubt that he was involved in the disposal of her body’. However (here we go), even though Simms had instructed his legal team to seek an acquittal, Mr Turner argued that the trial judge should have directed the jury on the alternative and lesser verdict of manslaughter.

  At the word ‘manslaughter’, my mouth fell open.

  Simms, he continued, was physically strong and an expert in Thai boxing. Miss McCourt was slight. It could be that he never intended Miss McCourt really serious harm.

  I gasped in disbelief as he explained that an argument had developed inside the pub. He had hit her once, then hit her again . . . the fatal blow.

  I was trembling like a leaf. He was admitting it: he’d hit her. And he’d killed her.

  Mr Turner continued. There were factual errors in the judge’s summing-up and his address to the jury was ‘too colourful’, he claimed.

  After just a brief hearing, the judges ruled that there was nothing ‘unsafe or unsatisfactory’ about the jury’s verdict.

  Thank God.

  I’ll never forget the response from Lord Justice McCowan: ‘You lawyers want to have your cake and eat it,’ he said sternly. ‘At no time during the trial did you bring the issue of manslaughter into the courtroom. You know very well that had the trial judge done what you have just put to us, you would have immediately asked for a retrial on the grounds that manslaughter had never been put forward.’

  The grounds of appeal amounted to pure speculation, he continued. Simms had never run self-defence or provocation as a defence and for the judge to have given the jury directions on manslaughter would have positively harmed the defence case.

  Shakily, I left the court, clutching John’s arm. It was over – Simms could go no further, in an English court, at least, with his ridiculous appeal. There were always the European courts, but even he must see it was futile by now. Surely, now he would tell us where Helen was.

  Once more, I was leaping to answer the door or phone convinced that Simms had finally cracked. But as each day passed, without news, my despair intensified: it was unbearable.

  Helen’s case was so unique that it continued to attract the attention of journalists and TV producers. Two weeks after Simms’ appeal was turned down, in October 1990, the BBC broadcast a film based on her murder as part of its respected Indelible Evidence series. Presented by the late Ludovic Kennedy (later, Sir Ludovic), it looked at cases where forensic evidence played a crucial part.

  Crews had descended on Billinge to film the reconstruction section, even hanging a George and Dragon sign on the new pub. Through newspaper interviews, I urged viewers to watch the programme entitled ‘Murder In The Wind’. I wanted any doubters to see just how guilty Simms really was. And I also hoped it might trigger new information on Helen’s whereabouts.

  We watched in stunned silence. Ludovic made it abundantly clear he was in no doubt at all about Simms’ guilt (I later learned from a reporter that Simms was allowed the use of a prison video recorder so he could view the programme).

  After midnight, we were still discussing the episode. Maybe right now, someone is picking up the phone to Merseyside Police with crucial information, I wondered hopefully. Suddenly, a loud crash from the front of the house had us leaping out of our seats.

  ‘What the—’ John cried, racing to the front door. Someone had smashed the rear windscreen of his car. They’d done a thorough job – lobbing a large stone and two house bricks.

  Neighbours reported seeing two men dressed in black running away. Merseyside Police investigated and guarded the house for a few days but the perpetrators were never caught.

  It had to be connected to the programme. A small part of me felt hurt. I was the victim in this. My daughter had been murdered and yet someone had deliberately put bricks through the window of a car on my drive. Another part of me felt a flicker of fear: what would they do next time? But more than anything else, I felt incandescent with rage: ‘How dare they?’ I fumed.

  If Simms’ cronies, or whoever they were, thought I was going to crawl away quietly, they had another thing coming. This was just the start. Until he told me where Helen was, I would keep shouting from the rooftops. The longer he stayed silent, the louder I would become.

  ‘I will not be frightened off,’ I insisted to reporters.

  I’d always vowed I would not lower myself to ask Simms where Helen was. But, as his cruel silence continued, I became more desperate. As the third anniversary of Helen’s murder approached, an awful realisation started to form: ‘I’m going to have to write to him,’ I blurted to John.

  I could see the surprise on his face. ‘I know I said I wouldn’t,’ I admitted. ‘But this is the stage I’m at. This is what he’s driven me to. The searches are too dangerous and I’m terrified for you all. I can’t go on like this.’

  He agreed. Over the next few weeks, helped by my good friend, Kath Moodie, I made countless drafts. I scribbled words out, then put them back in. Flashes of inspiration would come to me in the night and I would sit up to scrawl a new line. Finally, I was copying out my last draft. I struggled on how I should address him. He might balk if I just put ‘Simms’ but he certainly didn’t warrant a title of ‘Mr’ – I settled on Ian Simms.

  I started off by telling him how much I loved my daughter and how it was almost three years since I’d seen her smiling face and heard her infectious laughter. I tried to empathise, saying that the night of her murder had marked the start of a nightmare for both me and him. I could even understand why he was insisting he was innocent – as he was worried his girlfriend woul
d stop visiting him if he admitted what he’d done.

  I pointed out that the love for my daughter, and the fear for my family’s safety on our dangerous searches, had driven me to write to him:

  As a mother, I beg you to end this nightmare for both of us, now, before it’s too late. Please let me give Helen a Christian burial for both our sakes.

  He was serving a life sentence, I said, and would never be free until he showed remorse and admitted what he had done. And I warned that until he did, he would ‘never be free of me’:

  I will not allow either you or Helen’s case to be forgotten.

  Finally, it was signed and sealed. Merseyside Police arranged for me to hand deliver it to the Governor at Wakefield Prison. The Sunday Express offered to take me there. John couldn’t take time off work so I accepted gratefully.

  Walking up to the prison entrance, I introduced myself: ‘I am Mrs McCourt. I have a letter for the Governor,’ I said. The envelope trembled in my hand.

  The guard recognised me. ‘Ah yes, would you like to come in, Mrs McCourt?’ he asked. On seeing the photographer, his expression hardened. ‘But you can’t,’ he said brusquely. ‘And put that camera away.’

  Holding the door open, he waited patiently. I stared down at the ridge that the doors slotted into, and my breathing quickened. I’d imagined myself striding in, head held high, handing the letter over, seeking assurance that it would be given to Simms immediately. I willed myself to take just one step, but it was like standing in quicksand. The monster who had killed my daughter was in this very building. For all I knew he could be watching me right now. My legs were shaking so much, it was all I could do to stay upright. I felt like a waterfall – all my energy pooling into a puddle around my heels.

  ‘I— I don’t want to go in,’ I stammered. ‘Please. Will you promise me you will give this to the Governor.’

  He nodded and took the letter from my hand. ‘He’s in his office waiting for it to be delivered,’ he told me. ‘I’ll take it to him straight away.’