It had taken place in 1997, in the drowsy, innocent summer before Princess Diana was killed. That’s what always placed it in the public’s mind. The widespread disbelief and shock that had been felt after the murder. And then, six weeks later, after a car accident in Paris, when the grief of the nation was compounded as life became tinged with unreality and everything that was accepted before seemed to disintegrate, leaving people floundering, not knowing what to believe in any more.
Kirstie was the only daughter of Debbie and Robert Swann. They lived in Grassington in North Yorkshire, in a terraced house on the edge of the Dales. On 15 July, a five-months-pregnant Debbie took Kirstie to the local playground, a short walk from their home. There, she met her friend Christine and the two women chatted by the trailer café beside the play area. Debbie had watched while Kirstie busied herself in a tiny maze just inside the playground fence. She had ordered a coffee and turned away to pay when it had arrived. When she circled back to look at the play area, Kirstie was gone.
Debbie had been at the park for less than half an hour.
At first, she thought she was panicking unduly. She checked the maze and walked quickly over to the other side of the playground where the mouth of the old canal had been, looking underneath benches, the see-saw, the roundabout, calling Kirstie’s name. When the toddler failed to appear, Debbie began to cry. She raced out of the playground and down to the line of oak trees, shouting for her daughter, desperately searching for a flash of her blonde hair. Christine had run the other way to look, behind the café, and soon all the other mothers had joined in the search, Styrofoam cups dropped, abandoned on the asphalt.
Then the police arrived and fanned out across the grasslands bordering the park. Kirstie’s father, Robert Swann, was contacted, haring to the playground to kneel before his wife, breathless and pale in the face. Paramedics were called for Debbie, to force her to sit and rest, for fear her distress would endanger her unborn child.
The search continued for two days. The sound of Kirstie’s name echoed through the village as people shouted for her while they searched. Journalists descended on the community. For the first twenty-four hours, Debbie refused to leave the playground, sitting huddled on an aluminium chair beside the café, willing her daughter to appear, making bargain after bargain with a god she had never believed in, promising anything just to be able to see her little girl again. In the end, she agreed to move after the paramedics told her flatly that the heart-rate of the baby inside her was weakening and, if she didn’t allow herself to be hydrated, he could die.
Rigid with grief, Debbie was driven by ambulance to the local hospital whilst Rob stayed, walking endless miles over the wine-coloured heather of the Dales. Scores of policemen and women accompanied by hundreds of volunteers from the village inched forward in sombre lines, looking for any evidence of the missing toddler. As daylight faded, a soft and unrelenting rain began to fall.
On the second day of the hunt, they found Kirstie’s body. She had been covered by a sodden mound of branches and leaves in a grass-covered gully half a mile from the playground. She had died from blunt trauma to the head. She had hundreds of tiny scratches all the way up her arms and down her legs. Half of her left earlobe was missing and her left arm was broken. Police detectives gave a statement to the press, stating in shocked and disbelieving tones that in their view Kirstie had been tortured for several hours before she was murdered. Torture that involved deliberately slicing her arms and legs and biting off part of her ear.
The following day ten-year-old Laurel Bowman was arrested for the toddler’s kidnap and murder.
Laurel and her six-year-old sister Primrose – known as Rosie – had been seen by numerous people at the playground. After the investigating officers had interviewed all those present, it became horrifyingly apparent, from several eye-witness reports, that they had led Kirstie away. The story screamed from every front page. The Flower Girls the tabloids called them, fair-haired Laurel and dark-haired Rosie.
The sisters came from what police described to the press as a ‘normal’ family. Their mother was a dental receptionist; their father the manager of a small travel agency. They weren’t rich but lived in a respectable household and nothing in their lives would have led anyone to predict that their child would commit such a heinous crime.
St Michael’s Primary School, which the girls both attended, issued a statement saying they were not considered troublesome in class, that they had friends. They were just ordinary children. Much was made of the fact that Laurel had squeezed her pet hamster to death some months before Kirstie’s murder. Amy Bowman, her mother, had shakily explained to the police that this was not, in fact, the case. The animal had escaped its cage, crawled underneath Laurel’s pillow one night and she had slept on it, unintentionally suffocating the creature. But by that stage, nobody was interested in the truth. Laurel was the personification of wickedness and she must pay for her crime.
The girl insisted she was innocent, saying to the police and the social workers that they had just wanted to play with Kirstie, taking her from the playground and down to the old dried-out canal. But that wasn’t wrong, was it? Their mother often left them to play down there. Laurel said she had liked ‘the baby’, as she described Kirstie. She wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her. But, as they’d trundled down the bank, the little girl had stumbled and fallen and hit her head. Laurel and Rosie were frightened then, scared of the trouble they would be in, and so they abandoned her there and ran home, going upstairs to play until Amy called them down to the kitchen for their tea. Laurel didn’t know how the marks on Kirstie’s arms and legs had got there, or what had happened to her ear. Maybe it was animals, she had suggested. Or a man who came along later to hurt her.
When the police questioned Rosie, she wouldn’t speak. One of the officers present, who was interviewed years later for a book on the case, described her state as catatonic, her eyes ‘big as saucers’ while she sat on a chair with her legs dangling, not yet long enough to reach the ground. During the interview she merely shook her head repeatedly, her mouth pinched tight. Only after an hour of cajoling by the social workers and her mother, who was allowed to sit in with her, did Rosie reveal that she remembered nothing. She could recall going to the park with Laurel, but after that, the whole afternoon was a complete blank.
At the time, Laurel was ten years old and thus considered fit to stand trial for Kirstie’s murder. Rosie, on the other hand, was not. At six, she was below the legal age of criminal responsibility. One year and four days after the body of Kirstie Swann was discovered, Laurel Bowman was found guilty of her abduction and murder and sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure, with a recommendation made by the trial judge that she should be eligible for parole only when she turned eighteen. Rosie and her parents were given new identities and moved out of Yorkshire to a secret location kept hidden from the press and all who had known them before.
Joanna has lived with the impact of this crime ever since. It stretches like a conduit from Kirstie, through her sister Debbie, and into her work. Even once Laurel was imprisoned, the girl’s punishment has never felt weighty enough, not in comparison with the devastation her crime has wrought. In 2005, when she was eighteen, Laurel came before the parole board for the first time. Joanna didn’t sleep during the campaign she mounted to keep her niece’s killer behind bars. She was interviewed with Debbie and Rob on national television; on radio; in every newspaper, arguing that Laurel should never be allowed to leave prison.
The final decision was covered worldwide. In light of the nature of the torture that Kirstie had suffered; Laurel’s continued denial of any culpability; and the public outcry to the possibility of her being freed after serving only seven years, parole was denied. Laurel was moved from the young offenders’ institute where she had been detained to date, to an adult women’s prison.
Bang to Rights were tireless in their lobbying. In 2000, when the European Court of Human Rights denied the then Home Secretary the right to fix tariffs for public interest prisoners, they instead petitioned the Attorney General to keep Laurel incarcerated. When she was found to have been granted permission to study for a BTEC in Childcare Development inside prison, they ensured that this was plastered all over the tabloids, which meant Laurel was quickly reassigned to a less contentious study programme. BTR continued to campaign against her release, and in 2010 she was denied parole for the second time.
Debbie had given birth to her son Ben four months after Kirstie was killed. He was now nineteen and as committed as his parents and aunt were to the campaign to ensure Laurel Bowman would never be allowed to leave prison. Every anniversary of Kirstie’s death saw Joanna and BTR and at least one parent on morning television or giving a press interview, describing how the life they had known previously had ended on the day that Kirstie was murdered. If Laurel were allowed to leave prison before serving a minimum term of at least thirty-five years – the normal tariff for a violent child murder – it would be as if she had got off scot-free, they argued. Where was the justice for Kirstie – for all of them – in that?
Now Joanna stares over the desk at Will, while chewing her fingernail down to the quick. ‘We’ll argue it’s unreasonable,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I’ll get on to the Attorney General’s team right now.’
‘Yep,’ he answers, turning his eyes back to the BBC website on the screen. ‘But . . .’
Joanna leaps to her feet and marches to the window where she looks down on the narrow street below. Normally there is a fruit and vegetable market bustling beneath them, the smell of fried okra floating in the air. On New Year’s Day, though, the street is bare and disturbed only by a pigeon waddling down the centre of the road. She watches it move, thinking back to those first days after Kirstie’s body was found. How it was all she could do to keep Debbie breathing and calm, contain her hysteria for the sake of her unborn child.
‘But what?’ says Joanna, turning back to face Will. ‘I mean, she can’t apply for permission to review the decision of the parole board again. We’ve been through this. Time and time again, right?’ She eyeballs her friend, who has leaned back in his chair, his expression pained.
‘I just think we might need to steel ourselves for the worst this time,’ he says at last. He holds up his hands as Joanna starts to speak. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘But eighteen years is a decent stretch. She was a child when she went in. She’s nearly thirty now. I’m worried that you’re not taking on board the fact that some people might consider it enough. They might think she’s paid her dues.’
‘She beat Kirstie to death,’ Joanna spits. ‘She cut her arms and legs so badly that my niece would have died from blood loss if she hadn’t been beaten to death first. She bit off her earlobe. She’s never shown any remorse, never admitted her guilt. Is this really someone you want loose on our streets? Wandering into school playgrounds? Where’s any evidence of her rehabilitation? She can’t even say sorry for what she’s done, because she isn’t sorry.’ Her tone is scathing. ‘She couldn’t care less. And meanwhile Debbie and Rob have to live with what she’s done – every single day. The parole board are competent. More than competent. We say they are capable of deciding whether prisoners should be released on licence. And they have said that Laurel isn’t safe. But that’s not good enough apparently. Because she’s got more time on her hands than . . . I don’t know what. She can sit around the livelong day, bringing legal challenges against their decisions!’
Joanna hurls her paper cup into the waste bin and snatches up her backpack. ‘I need to call my sister,’ she says. ‘I just hope she hasn’t seen the news before I speak to her.’