Friday 24 April 2015
Local Man Arrested Twenty Years After ‘Drowning’
by
Lesley Wade
Former Coxwold and Ridinghouse Bay resident Mark Tate, 40, was arrested late on Wednesday night on historical abduction and assault charges after an intensive police search spanning three counties that ended in a hostage-taking situation in a bed-and-breakfast establishment in the Highlands of Scotland.
Tate was believed to have ‘drowned’ twenty-two years ago in a tragic accident off the coast of Ridinghouse Bay in the early hours of Monday 2 August 1993. Reports at the time claimed that a party at his aunt’s house on Ridinghouse Lane had got out of hand and he and one of his guests, Kirsty Ross, 15, had drowned during a late-night swim whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Kirsty Ross’s father, Antony Ross, also died that night after suffering a fatal heart attack while trying to save the youngsters from the sea. Her brother, Graham Ross, suffered long-term memory loss as a result of the trauma and was never able to recall what exactly had led up to the drownings.
However, in an extraordinary series of events earlier this month, Graham Ross, 39, recovered his memories of the night of the drownings after seeing a man he believed to be Mark Tate on the streets of Victoria in central London. He subsequently followed the man home from work and imprisoned him in an empty flat near the accused’s home, where, under duress, the accused confessed to faking his own death on the night in question.
Mistakenly believing that he had killed Tate, Ross fled to Ridinghouse Bay where he suffered another episode of severe memory loss. Local artist, Alice Lake, 41, rescued him from the beach outside her house on the evening of Wednesday 15 April and has been helping him try to recover his memory ever since. A chance meeting between Ms Lake and Mr Ross, and Mark Tate’s current wife, Liljana Monrose, 21, in the Sugar Bowl Café on the High Street on Monday morning led them all to the home of Tate’s aunt, Mrs Katharine Tate, 62, of Coxwold.
It was here that the full story of the events of 2 August 1993 was finally revealed, leading to Mrs Monrose calling the police and the subsequent nationwide police hunt for Mr Tate.
Mr Tate was recognised by the landlady of his remote bed and breakfast in Loch Hourn, Invergarry, in the Highlands of Scotland from a photo she’d seen in a newspaper that morning. Unaware of the police hunt due to lack of internet or television access, Mr Tate was taken by surprise by the police and, according to local reports, took the landlady and her daughter hostage in a locked room. The siege lasted for three hours before police managed to knock the door down and disarm Tate. He is currently being held for questioning at Invergarry Police Station, on historical charges of assault, sexual assault, abduction, unlawful burial, identity fraud, blackmail and drug dealing.
After receiving his DNA test results, it is also possible that police will be questioning Tate about a string of sexual assaults on women over the preceding twenty-two years, but this has not yet been confirmed.
In Next Week’s Ridinghouse Gazette:
Lesley Wade’s exclusive report from the day that Graham Ross met Katharine Tate and finally found out what really happened to his sister all those years ago.