In a case that horrified the UK, the abduction and murder of eight year old Sarah sparked outrage and changes to child protection legislation.
Sarah Evelyn Isobel Payne was born on October 13 1991 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey to parents Michael and Sara, she had two brothers and a sister. Sarah and her family lived in Horsham, Surrey.
Eight year old Sarah and her family had been visiting her grandfather, Terence and his second wife Lesley in Kingston Gorse, West Sussex on July 1 2000. The family had been together on the beach before Sara and Michael left their children to play as it was such a lovely evening, Sara's last words to them were her usual to always stay together.
Sarah had been playing hide and seek with her two brothers Lee and Luke (aged 13 and 11) and sister Charlotte (aged 5) in a cornfield near her grandfathers home, after being found by Lee, he apparently bumped into Sarah making her cry but she calmed down and the siblings then went to the rope swing but Sarah jumped off and started to run, Lee had chased after his sister as she went to run out of the cornfield but he caught up and told her to wait so he could get their other siblings, their mother had always told them to stay together, but Sarah didn't wait, she had slipped through a hedge and onto the country road, her brothers were only metres away but their little sister had gone out of their line of sight.
He saw someone speeding away in their white van when he went to see where his little sister had gone but there was no trace of Sarah, he assumed she had gone back to their grandparents home. He later said this of the moment; "I was about 10 seconds away from catching up with Sarah but I had to go back and get Charlotte because I couldn't leave her."
Luke Payne recalled being worried after his brother had told him about a white van parked close to their grandparents and after Lee had described a scruffy looking man who had grinned and waved at him earlier in the day, it made Luke fear that there could be a pervert picking up children. After Lee got back to his grandparents he was shocked to discover Sarah had failed to turn up there. The family started a search in the hope that Sarah had fallen as it wasn't like the little girl to not be where she said she was.
Soon a huge search by police and volunteers was conducted to find the missing girl with the story soon becoming nationwide news with Michael and Sara making many appeals for the safe return of their daughter. As is procedure during missing children cases, any sex offenders in the area are questioned this included a man named Roy Whiting who lived nearby in his sea front flat in Littlehampton which was only 5 miles away from the scene of the abduction, many other offenders were questioned including one who was actually arrested, it isn't clear what they were arrested for and if it was related to Sarah.
On July 10, police made the promising announcement that a girl matching Sarah's appearance had been seen at Knutsford Services on the M6 motorway in Cheshire on the morning after her disappearance. Three days later the Payne's were warned by police to prepare for the worst and that their daughter may not be found safe and unharmed. On July 17, Luke Coleman, a farmhand, came across a naked body in a shallow grave in a field near Pulborough, West Sussex, around 15 miles from Terence Payne's home. The following day it was confirmed that the body found was that of Sarah and a murder investigation was then launched. Coleman later testified at his horror at finding the remains of Sarah, he could not remember the position the body had been lying in due to shock but could vividly remember that a number of her limbs were detached from her body and that she had no clothes on.
Three days after Sarah's body had been discovered police found one of her shoes on a roadside in the village of Coolham, three miles from Pulborough.
After being questioned for a long period of time on July 2, Roy Whiting was arrested by undercover police while walking to his van. He spent two days in custody but as there was no evidence to press charges, Whiting was released on bail. During a search of his van police found a receipt for petrol from a station not far from Coolham which contradicted Whiting's alibi at being at a funfair in Hove until 5.30pm and not returning home until 9.30pm on July 1. Upon his release Whiting went to stay with his father in Crawley.
On July 23, Whiting stole a Vauxhall Nova in Crawley and was pursued in a high speed chase with police that ended after he crashed into a parked vehicle. Whiting was arrested for dangerous driving and was eventually jailed for 22 months. After his arrest police started to forensically examine Whiting's 1988 white Fiat Ducato van that he had only bought on June 23 2000. On February 6 2001, Whiting was officially charged in the abduction and murder of Sarah.
The trial started on November 14 2001 at Lewes Crown Court with Whiting denying all charges. Key witnesses included Sarah's oldest brother who had seen a scruffy looking man with yellowish teeth when he grinned, who had waved at the siblings while driving through Kingston Grove on the evening of July 1, he also described seeing Whiting's van speeding away with the wheels spinning and skidding making a screeching noise, Lee Payne failed to pick Whiting out of a suspect line up. Forensic tests on Sarah's shoe had found fibres from Whiting's van, this was the only item of Sarah's clothing to ever be found. A strand of blonde hair had been found on a t-shirt in the van with DNA testing establishing there being a one-in-a-billion chance of it belonging to anyone but Sarah. There was also witnesses who saw a white van parked by the roadside and after pulling off a track on the evening of July 1 near the site where Sarah's body had been discovered.
The trial revealed how Whiting snatched Sarah as she left her siblings after he had clearly been watching them and threatened her with a knife before stripping the eight year old and indecently assaulting her but stopped short of killing her. Jurors heard how Whiting had turned his van into a "moving prison" equipped with knives, rope, baby oil and plastic tie handcuffs. Pathologist Vesna Djurovic told the court that Sarah had suffered a violent death probably due to asphyxia (either strangled or smothered) in a sexually motivated attack, she described how decomposition had made it impossible to say what other injuries the little girl had endured. When she was found, her naked body had dry vegetation attached to it and her hair had come away with the roots but her hair had contained valuable evidence linking Sarah to Whiting's van.
After a four week trial Whiting was found guilty of the abduction and murder of Sarah and was sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge branded Whiting an "evil man" and "a cunning and glib liar". After his conviction, Whiting's other crimes were made public, past crimes are usually kept secret as to not influence any jurors and to make sure the accused are not tried on any previous evidence or offence and to stop Whiting from attempting any appeals and successfully get out of prison due to any of the technicalities mentioned.
Whiting had been convicted previously of abducting and indecently assaulting an eight year old girl in Crawley in 1995 and after admitting the charges was sentenced to four years in prison, he was released in November 1997, having only served two years and five months. He would have been out sooner had he not refused to undergo a sex offenders rehabilitation course, he was also one of the first people in Britain to go on the Sex Offenders Registry.
Whiting showed no emotion as he was sentenced with the judge telling him:
"I am quite satisfied that you indecently assaulted her in it (the van). As we all know, you stripped Sarah naked and you suffocated her and buried her and got rid of her clothes - you are indeed an evil man. What is more you did the same thing in 1995, but that girl you mercifully did not kill."
The judge then revealed a psychiatric report from the 1995 attack that classed Whiting as a high risk repeat offender and that he had told police that he had "learnt his lesson" from his previous conviction when questioned about Sarah initially, the judge described Sarah's murder as "truly appalling" adding:
"You are every parents and every grandparents nightmare come true. You are and will remain an absolute menace to any little girl. It's one of the rare cases where I shall recommend to the appropriate authorities that you be kept in prison for the rest of your life so that no further child is added to your list of victims and the lives of a third family are not ruined."
After being exposed as a multiple time sex offender to children it created an uproar from the country and calls for the government to allow the public to have access to the Sex Offenders Registry, the day after Whiting was sentenced the Home Office commented that it wouldn't be possible as it would run the risk of paedophiles then going "underground" making it harder for police to monitor and track them down and there was the concern of vigilante attacks.
Sarah's case was commended for it heavy use of forensics, over twenty forensic experts worked to make sure that the case was air tight and the estimated cost of the investigation was more than £2 million. On November 24 2002, Whiting has informed that he must serve a minimum of 50 years making him ineligible for parole until 2051, meaning that he had to live until at least 92.
In June 2004, it was revealed that Whiting was appealing his conviction for a reduction of at least fifty years off his sentence. On June 9 2010, his appeal succeeded in him getting ten years off his sentence, his legal team argued that his fifty year term was motivated by politics and intense pressure from the public and media. The new sentence means Whiting is eligible for parole in 2041, when he will be 82, Sara Payne was present and stated she was disappointed by the decision and that life should mean life.
A campaign was started in July 2000 named Sarah's Law, it was spearheaded by the News of the World after the Payne's expressed their initial (and correct) belief that their daughter had been the victim of a sex offender. Sarah's Law proposed access to the Sex Offenders Registry so parents could know if there were any sex offenders in their area, Sara Payne has always maintained that if such a law had existed before her daughters death then Sarah's life could have been saved. A modified scheme became active in 2008 where parents can enquire about certain individuals who have access to their children, after it's success, the Home Office announced it would now cover the whole of England and Wales by spring 2011.
Sara wrote a book in 2004 named, Sara Payne: A Mother's Story, it was about her daughters murder and the aftermath which included the campaign for Sarah's Law. In July 2001, it was reported that the Payne family received £11,000 compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority, Sara described the offer as a "sick joke" and "derisory" even though it was the maximum that could be offered.
Sara Payne was made a member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in December 2008 for all her work behind Sarah's Law. She suffered a life-threatening stroke at her home in December 2011 but has recovered. With the News of the World hacking scandal making headlines it was revealed that Sara had been a victim of the hacking to which she refused to believe as the newspaper had been so supportive to the Payne Family, she even wrote an editorial in the final edition. Police initially didn't believe she had been a victim as her name had not come up in records but investigations into one of the other victims saw personal details relating to Sara come up. The phone that had been hacked had been given to her by the editor of the newspaper at the time, Rebekah Brooks.
Michael Payne suffered greatly after the loss of his daughter seemingly never being able to truly move on, he and Sara separated after eighteen years of marriage in August 2003 and he sank into a deep depression and became an alcoholic. He was sentenced to a 16 month jail term for attacking his brother with a glass in December 2011 following a drunken argument. On October 30 2014, Michael was found dead at his home at the age of 45 in Maidstone, Kent with police stating his death as not suspicious.
Whiting was attacked with a razor in prison by a fellow prisoner on August 4 2002 when he was fetching some hot water at Wakefield Prison. Convicted killer Rickie Tregaskis who was serving a life sentence for the 1997 murder of a disabled man in Cornwall was revealed as the culprit, the attack left Whiting with a six inch scar on his left cheek, it was only in the wake of this attack did Whiting finally admit to the murder of Sarah. Whiting was once again attacked by another prisoner, this time being stabbed in the eye and yet another attack happened on November 8 2018 when he was stabbed by two prisoners in his cell.
A Channel 5 documentary claimed that a rogue detective had broken off from the official line of inquiry at the time and it was solely down to him and his team that Whiting was not able to destroy the evidence that convicted him. The group of officers had grown frustrated when the main team had been searching fields and doing door to doors so they decided to look into offenders in the area and within a day had Whiting as their prime suspect. It was this team that spoke to the paedophile in the first 24 hours of Sarah going missing, something they state Whiting had not been expecting. They noted how the sick killer showed no empathy or concern and didn't even seem fazed by the idea he was being looked at. These officers stated that if it wasn't for them that by the time the official investigation had gotten into looking at sex offenders, Whiting would have definitely gotten rid of all of the evidence and would have been free to commit further rapes and murders.
At Apollo's Raven we remember Sarah's case very well as it was highly publicised while we were children, July 1 is even our founders birthday. How someone could hurt such an innocent little girl is inconceivable and Roy Whiting is truly an evil man, Sarah was let down by authorities who allowed a man who was classed as a high risk repeat offender and someone who refused to attend a rehabilitation course to walk freely, we were shocked to learn the short sentence Whiting was given for his first crime and that he served a little over half of it. Sara Payne has shown incredible bravery and heart to campaign so that no other child will have to endure the pain her family went through and she should be proud that Sarah's legacy has helped save other children.
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