The Disappearance of Katy Harper
Part 1
A slideshow of family photos passes across the screen, spliced with home videos of Katy Harper growing up. She’s playing outside a brown-bricked bungalow as a child, one podgy hand clasping a black railing, and she’s squatting up and down, giggling into the sunshine. ‘Are you dancing?’ a woman’s voice says, to which Katy replies gleefully, ‘Yash.’
The image fades and a picture of Katy from university appears, with white block letters over the top reading ‘THE DISAPPEARANCE OF KATY HARPER PART 1’.
A black screen with white text reads:
‘KATY HARPER WENT MISSING TEN YEARS AGO. NO ONE WAS CHARGED WITH HER DISAPPEARENCE. THE THREE SUSPECTS NEVER SAID A WORD.
‘UNTIL NOW…’
An empty brown leather armchair comes into view. It looks like someone’s living room. A Jack Russell walks across the screen, and the camera spans the room showing dreamcatchers, shelves of crystals and books on acupuncture.
A woman walks into shot. She has chocolate brown hair and pale skin, a piercing just below her lip. She looks uncomfortable but friendly as she lowers herself into the chair. She smiles, her cheeks turning a little rosy from the warmth of the lighting.
A name flashes up beneath her: Joanna Bridges, Katy’s best friend.
‘Katy was very studious. She had a silly side,’ she muses, ‘but she had a dry humour, a very quick wit.’
Photographs of Katy and Joanna appear, from when they were eleven years old to what must be the last pictures taken of Katy, when they were both twenty.
‘We met when we were in year seven, we both liked the same music, she was funny, and I had a big laugh. It didn’t take long for us to become friends and then we were pretty much inseparable ever since.’
The screen changes to a wide shot of the brown-bricked bungalow, zooming in until it’s framing the front door. Inside, a woman looks out the lounge window at an empty garden. She has curly dyed red hair, a strip of dark roots down the centre of her parting. She turns to the face behind the camera and smiles sorrowfully.
She walks over to the kitchen table, a patio door with frosted glass behind her, a tabby cat sat on the wooden table purring into her ear as she strokes it calmly.
A name beneath: Grace Harper, Katy’s mother.
‘The day Katy went missing, it was cold, unusually cold for that time of year. I had to put the heating on for the first time, something I always put off for as long as I could.
‘Katy was working. She had afternoon shifts as a researcher at a local news station on Fridays and Saturdays, just to bring in a little money and to get experience whilst she was studying at university. When she left the house that morning, she said she had some things to do in town. I didn’t ask her what, because I tried not to be nosy, and she was always out and about. In fact, she was the nosy one, but that’s what made her a good writer. She wanted to be a news reporter, she was adamant about that.
‘She went to work at 3pm like she usually would, and she left at 10pm, a little later than the end of her shift. She was supposed to finish at 8.30pm, but she got caught up in her work. She was like that though, a bit of a perfectionist.’
Grace straightens her back and the cat jumps off the wooden dining table, as the camera slowly zooms in on Grace’s features.
‘She didn’t make it home.’
The shot fades to a black and white photograph of Katy, smiling into the camera, her long fringe tickling the top of her glistening eyes. The scene reopens on Joanna, clutching a tissue in her hands, pulling at it gently with clasped fingers.
She sniffs before looking up, trying to smile. ‘She left work and didn’t make it home.’ She shrugs. ‘She was seen leaving work, but after that,’ she shakes her head, ‘nothing.’
‘The police were very thorough in their investigation,’ Grace says directly. ‘But no one saw anything.’ Her voice shakes like she’s on the cusp of tears, but she blinks them back. ‘They explored all possible routes home.'
Grace becomes a voiceover to an interactive map that starts at the NTV studio in central Bristol and traces several routes leading back to their house in South Bristol. The walks all vary between thirty-five and forty-five minutes, depending on the route.
‘They didn’t find any evidence of Katy walking home that night,’ Grace says. ‘But maybe she wasn’t coming home. She messaged her boyfriend at the time to say she needed to speak to him, that she was going to his flat by the harbour, but even then, all those possibilities of finding Katy’ – highlighted routes flash up on the screen – ‘all slowly disappeared.’
The scene goes back to Joanna, who now has a small dog curled up on her lap which she strokes fondly. ‘The only other possibility is that she didn’t take one of those routes home, because she didn’t plan on going home or to Graham’s flat.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ a distant voice asks.
‘I don’t know what I mean … maybe she had plans that I didn’t know, or her mum didn’t know.’ She shakes her head. ‘But that wasn’t like her, she wouldn’t want her mum to worry, she wouldn’t want that.’
'They talked to a lot of people at the time who could possibly know where she was, or could have been linked in some way, but there were three people the police were interested in.’
‘But they never found her, they never got a body, they could never prove or formally charge anyone, so …’ She shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
The camera switches back to Grace.
‘Did you find out where she went the evening before she went missing?’ a faceless voice says from behind the camera, barely audible.
Grace nods. ‘She was meeting with her ex-boyfriend, Graham.’ She hesitates. ‘I don’t think she wanted me to know that.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I didn’t particularly like him.’
The tone of the documentary shifts slightly, ominous music plays in the background and the camera tilts to the left, almost by accident.
The screen fades to black and reopens on a white room, an empty grey plastic chair in the middle of it. A man in a navy suit walks in and sits down. He’s around forty years old and has neatly combed fair hair and greying stubble.
The text below him reads: Detective Inspector Harrison Lane.
‘I was the detective assigned to Katy’s case.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘Like with most missing person cases, time is of the essence. Katy’s disappearance was called in the night after she went missing, almost twenty-four hours after she was supposed to have left work. The first thing we did was try to establish Katy’s possible routes home, but there was never any evidence suggesting she took any of those routes, so it left us with the possibility that she didn’t go home. We did discover that she left work at 10.03pm when her fob was used to exit the lobby at work. We spoke to friends and family and they all confirmed it was very unusual for her not to be in touch with her whereabouts, especially if she told her mum she was coming home, but decided not to. That’s what made it very concerning for us.’
Joanna appears on screen.
‘The last message I got from her was whilst she was at work. It was at around 7pm and we were supposed to meet for breakfast the next day. The message read: “Doesn’t look like I’ll make it to breakfast tomorrow, something urgent has come up and I need to talk to Graham.”’ She pauses. ‘Her boyfriend at the time.’
Detective Inspector Harrison Lane appears on screen.
‘Graham was a person of interest as Katy had sent that message, the last message she’d sent that night, to her friend Joanna saying she needed to meet her boyfriend urgently.’
The screen flashes back to Joanna.
‘Her and Graham were on and off for about two years, but he could be a little jealous. She used the word “controlling” at one point, and she didn’t like that. She was very independent, and I think that’s where they had their differences.’
The screen flashes to Grace.
‘He was older than her, late twenties and already a junior prosecutor, also very ambitious, but I always thought he wanted a wife, not a partner. He put a lot of pressure on Katy to move in together and she told me she didn’t want to. It became apparent to me that he was a lot more serious about their future together than perhaps she was. I think she might have gone to break up with him that night, for good.’
The screen goes back to Detective Inspector Harrison Lane.
‘So, that’s who we spoke to next.’
The screen fades to black and a shot of a small terraced house, painted bright blue, comes up on the screen. The camera zooms in on the white door, flower pots sitting either side, as we enter the house, and switches to a shot of the lounge inside.
A man, around thirty-eight, with thick wavy brown hair and dark eyes sits on a leather sofa. He’s biting his lip and running his hands nervously down his smart jeans. He straightens the collar that sticks out over a dark green sweater.
Below him reads: Graham Mitchell, Katy’s boyfriend.
‘This is the first time I’m speaking publicly since Katy’s disappearance. There was a lot of attention on me at the time, that I could have had something to do with her going missing, and I just wanted to remove myself from all of it.’
‘Why have you decided to speak now?’ A woman’s voice asks.
‘I was so worried about anything I said being analysed and over-analysed and that it could detract from the real issue, that Katy was missing.’
‘Did you speak to the police at the time?’ the voice says.
He nods. ‘Yes, I was questioned, but I was with my mum that night. I got a message from Katy at 6.40pm saying she was going to go to my flat after work, but I messaged back to tell her I wouldn’t be there, I was staying at my mum’s. My mum had broken her arm the previous week and needed a hand with stuff, so I was staying there for a while.
‘Katy had a key to my flat, so they thought she might have gone there anyway, but CCTV shows that no one entered my building that night. I thought she might come straight to my mum’s house, but I didn’t hear from her for the rest of the night.’
‘What did you make of the message she sent her friend Joanna?’
He shrugs. ‘Honestly, I didn’t know what to make of it, but it seemed innocuous enough to me. There’s always been an urgency to Katy, so whatever she wanted to speak to me about, well, it could have been anything.’
The screen flashes to Detective Inspector Harrison Lane.
‘Graham had an alibi: he was with his mum. He replied to Katy’s message, but didn’t get a response back. There was an explosion of curiosity around him, that he was involved in some way. He was photographed coming into the station, and the press got hold of the nature of his relationship with Katy, that it wasn’t good.
‘An early theory we had to work with was that Katy was going to break up with him that night, and he got angry and something occurred. We had the message to the friend that Katy was going to meet him that night. And then there was more.’
The screen flashes to Graham.
‘I had to take time off work. My life, it fell apart, and every day that Katy didn’t come home, that she wasn’t found, it became harder.’ He shakes his head. ‘I had no idea what she wanted to talk to me about that night, but the problem was that we’d had a bad fight the day before. I didn’t tell the police straightaway, and that caused more suspicion. And as time went on and I saw her face everywhere, it felt like saying anything negative about her was inappropriate, because it didn’t matter. All that mattered was finding Katy and making sure she was safe. I didn’t realise how much it affected the investigation into her disappearance.’
There’s a beat, a slight pause. He shifts uncomfortably and rearranges his arms, clasping his hands together.
‘Katy wasn’t always faithful when we were together.’
The screen flashes to Joanna.
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t really want to talk about that. I don’t believe she ever was unfaithful to Graham, no. It’s just what he claimed. He seemed to think this other guy could have been involved.’
A woman asks. ‘What other guy?’
Joanna glances away sheepishly before staring at the person behind the camera.
‘Katy’s English professor.’
The screen fades to black.