Search for Claudia Lawrence: One year on (From York Press)

Search for Claudia Lawrence: One year on

8:40am Wednesday 17th March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

12 months after Claudia Lawrence vanished, NICOLA FIFIELD finds out how her family and friends are coping.

The father's story

WHEN Claudia Lawrence disappeared a year ago tomorrow, her family and friends never imagined they would still have no idea what has happened to her.

Claudia, who turned 36 last month, has seemingly vanished into thin air. Not even a £600,000 police investigation has shed any light on where the University of York chef is.

Police suspect she has been murdered, but there is nothing to prove this – and her family and friends are still clinging on to the hope that she will come home.

“I miss her more than I can say,” said Claudia’s father, Peter Lawrence, speaking at yet another press conference.

“We always saw quite a lot of each other and not being able to do that is very difficult. One word sums up how I feel and that is ‘dreadful’. Claudia is a very big part of my life and for the past year she’s been missing.”

In the early days the solicitor held weekly press conferences at his home in Slingsby and he continues to make a monthly appeal for help in finding his daughter.

“I never set off with the intention of having this second career for a year,” said Mr Lawrence.

“I certainly didn’t want it, but it’s got to be done and I’ll keep going until we get an answer. At the beginning I thought it would be a few days, a week. I never thought we would be here a year on. I suppose I’m an eternal optimist and I thought that first press conference would bring out the information we needed and we would get a resolution.”

The last time anybody heard from Claudia was at 8.23pm on March 18, 2009, when she sent a text to a friend making a loose arrangement to meet up later in the week. Shortly before, she spoke to her mother on the phone.

The following morning, Claudia never turned up for her 6am shift at the University of York’s Roger Kirk Centre canteen.

North Yorkshire police, who still have 20 to 30 officers dedicated to the case, believe the most likely theory is Claudia has come to harm after meeting someone she knew as she walked to work that morning. Her house in Heworth Road – a few doors down from her local, the Nag’s Head – remains just as she would have left it had she set out on the walk at about 5.30am on March 19. The only belongings that appear to be missing from her home are the Karrimor rucksack she carried her chef’s whites to work in and her mobile phone.

Mr Lawrence, 63, who is divorced from Claudia’s mother, Joan, said: “There was no apparent reason for Claudia to go off and if there had been, she would have told me first. She certainly wouldn’t have been daft enough to go off without her passport, her bank cards and any spare clothes, it’s just a nonsense. I think she was taken, whether it was by someone she knew or not I have no idea, but the police’s argument is that in a place like York she is more likely to have been taken off by someone she knew than by a complete stranger.”

The investigation into Claudia’s disappearance has been the largest inquiry by the police since the week-long hunt for quadruple murderer, Mark Hobson, in 2004. At the height of the Claudia investigation, 100 police officers were working on the case and over the past year more than 300 properties and about 1,000 rooms at the University of York have been searched. But no significant clues have emerged. However, one clue that does remain open is a possible sighting of Claudia standing with a hooded man who was smoking with his left-hand, on Melrosegate bridge at about 5.10am on either March 18 or 19. Just last month police released CCTV footage of a man matching this description walking past the post office in Melrosegate shortly before 5am on March 18, but nobody has come forward to identify either men. Despite the apparent lack of progress in the investigation, Mr Lawrence is not critical of the police.

He said: “They have started with a disadvantage in that there was no crime scene and for obvious reasons they weren’t alerted until about 36 hours after Claudia disappeared. My concern is that someone has got the information the police need, but they are not giving it. Somebody can’t literally disappear into thin air in this country. Somebody must know something.”

If you have information, phone North Yorkshire Police on 0845 60 60 247. Alternatively phone Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

The mother's story

THE mother of missing York woman Claudia Lawrence has spoken of the awful moment when she heard her daughter was missing and the year of anguish the family has lived through.

Joan Lawrence, who lives in Norton, stayed with her daughter, Ali, and her grandchildren in Derbyshire, last weekend, as the painful anniversary approached.

“It was on Mothering Sunday weekend last year that Claudia disappeared. I have never spent it on my own in the past, and I certainly didn’t want to this year.”

Mrs Lawrence recalled how she had spoken to Claudia twice within a few hours the day before she disappeared.

They had spoken on the phone for about 20 minutes in the afternoon in what she described as a “girl talk” conversation, and then again in the evening when she needed information about a coach company.

“I remember we were both watching the same TV programme – Location, Location, Location,” said Mrs Lawrence.

It was the following morning that Claudia disappeared.

“I find it hard to believe we are a year down the line from the date which will be in my mind for the rest of my life. I can’t begin to describe the feelings that went through my mind when we received the call that Claudia had disappeared. I was numb at first, stunned, this sort of thing happens to other people. You don’t expect it to happen to you and your family.”

Mrs Lawrence said: “The support from family, friends and local people is wonderful. It’s a huge comfort to me and I am so grateful. The pain never goes away, the emptiness inside me. The reminders are all over my flat, presents, notes, cards, photographs. Many is the time I come across something by accident and stop and shed a tear. I have now to find a way forward once these painful anniversaries are past. It must be kept in the public eye and I shall do my best to do that.

“We can’t let people forget her – someone, somewhere knows something.”

The friend's story

A YEAR has passed since her best friend inexplicably vanished from her life – but Suzy Cooper still believes they will see each other again.

“I have this hope that we will get her back,” she told The Press, in the Nag’s Head in Heworth – the pub where Suzy spent many happy hours with Claudia and their close circle of friends.

“But I do also believe that if we do, she won’t be the same Claudia as we knew before.

“Obviously she will have had an experience that will have affected her and that worries me a lot, but I do have a belief still that we will find her.”

Suzy, 45, who knew Claudia for two-and-a-half years before she went missing in March last year, said her inability to give up hope made it very difficult to think about the future.

“I do realise that I’ve probably got to focus on my life a bit more, but that is going to be hard because I’ll feel guilty about the fact I’m not concentrating so much on Claudia, I would feel like I’m letting her down.

“None of us knows how long it’s going to go on and that’s the hard part about it. We want it to end. We want her back. We want this whole thing to be over.”

She said the past 12 months had been the most difficult of her life. “I remember saying to my employer after just two weeks, ‘I can’t do much more of this, it’s got to stop soon’,” she said.

“Everybody wants answers. It’s such a mystery and that not knowing is really hard. It’s so speculative.

“I haven’t got an instinct at all about what’s happened and I think all possibilities need to be looked at.

“It could be someone she knew who took her, but it could be a totally random attack by a total stranger.

“It’s all guesswork and that’s the problem. The only thing I do believe is that she went missing on the Thursday (March 19). From what I saw when we went into her house that’s what I believe. That’s what it looked like.”

Since Claudia went missing her private life has been intensely scrutinised, particularly after the detective leading the investigation described her as having “complex” and “mysterious” relationships.

But Suzy, who lives in Tang Hall, York, said although it was probably true Claudia had been in about 12 relationships in the past five years, this did not make her a bad person.

“The fact that this has been focussed on has created an image of her that’s not right,” she said.

“Yes, she has had some relationships in the past, but she’s no different from any other person in that respect.” Suzy said although it was possible the wife or partner of one of the men Claudia had been in a relationship with might have been responsible for her friend’s disappearance – as was suggested this week by Claudia’s sister, Ali Sims – she was not aware of any bad feeling towards Claudia.

“She is a very loving, caring and sweet person who wouldn’t purposefully hurt anybody,” she said.

One of the unanswered questions in the investigation is why Claudia, who has been described as a “prolific texter” – sending up to 1,000 text messages a month – did not reply to a text sent to her by a friend, Steve Sammons, at 9.12pm on March 18 – the last text received by her phone.

But Suzy said we should not read too much into this.

“There could be a number of reasons why,” she said.

“One is that it was our friend in Cyprus and every time we text him it costs money, whereas when we text our friends in this country it is free.

“There’s also the context of the text. It was to do with the fact she might have been going out there for a holiday and maybe she hadn’t decided yet whether she was going and she didn’t have an answer.

“She may well also have gone to bed early.”

So many questions remain unanswered – but Suzy, like all Claudia’s friends and family – are still hanging on to the hope that somebody will come forward soon to answer them.