Cath Staincliffe - Letters To My Daughter's Killer

17 Brinks Avenue

Manchester

M19 6FX

The allotment has gone to seed. Melissa and Mags have kept up with two of the beds and some sections are covered with old carpet, but the remainder is choked with weeds and spinach that has bolted. I’ve not come here today to plant or dig, but to sit in the soft sunshine and consider what to do. Across the allotment bees drowse and a robin is busy finding worms.

My thirst for vengeance, my dwelling on you and your crime, my hatred – these things keep the wounds of my grief open. I pick away at them. Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sores have become infected. My wrath and my fixation on hating you, defining you as the murderer and nothing more, leaves Lizzie permanently cast as your murder victim above all else. It leads me nowhere, this raging hatred; it fills my head with you, it pins my eyelids open and forces me to see Lizzie in that lake of blood, Lizzie warding off the first blow, terrorized. I don’t want to live the rest of my life thinking of my daughter like that.

How can I forgive you? Do I want to forgive you? Do you deserve it? You won’t even admit what you have done. I’ve been studying accounts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. So many victims, such a huge abuse of state power. The victims had the opportunity to retell the horrors of apartheid; the abusers were offered amnesty for full disclosure of politically motivated crimes. Very different from the Nuremberg Trials in the wake of World War II. The one punitive, the other attempting to restore justice and heal society.

In South Africa, people felt they achieved the truth to a greater degree than any reconciliation. Some argued that reconciliation should not be an alternative to justice but something that follows on from it. I have my justice, because you are locked up, but I am not reconciled.

So many of the other cases I read about, of forgiveness or reconciliation, are underpinned by faith, Christian faith mainly. ‘Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.’ I do not believe in gods or ghosts or fairies. There are some breathtaking examples of bereaved relatives forgiving absolutely, unreservedly, relinquishing the anger and the hatred and letting go of any desire for revenge. I cannot imagine it.

What I can connect with is how these charitable people frame their emotional state before the act of forgiveness. Speaking of the yoke of bitterness, the cancer of hate and the power that the murderer exerts as long as he defines their waking lives.

There’s a Sartre quote: Freedom is what we do with what’s been done to us. I’m not free. I may as well be in that cell with you. My hatred, my anxiety, my rage are the shackles I adorn myself with. The longer I resent you, despise you, rail against you, the longer I suffer. But how else am I to be?

Ruth

17 Brinks Avenue

Manchester

M19 6FX

Kay calls with the news that you have confessed. I almost fall over, it’s such a shock. There’s a flight of elation immediately afterwards, a giddy sensation. I am vindicated.

Only later do I begin to think about it more carefully. Is this a gambit so that you can be released sooner? You have to serve a minimum of seventeen years before you can be considered for parole, and you’re just shy of three years in prison. No one is eligible for parole unless they show remorse. So if it is a tactic, it is very forward planning.

I don’t care, actually. If you’re now admitting your crime, I see an opportunity to get to the truth. That’s what people wanted in South Africa and the other countries that emulated them: truth and then reconciliation. And I decide that for Florence, for myself, for Lizzie, I must find a way forward.

So we will start with the truth. You will tell me everything. All I need is to find a mechanism for contact with you.

Tony thinks I am insane to want to communicate with you. He doesn’t seem as damaged by Lizzie’s death, not as embittered by it. He’s heartbroken; a pall of sadness clings to him these days, unshakeable. But he is not livid as I am. Perhaps your betrayal feels greater for me because I saw the fruits of your handiwork and sheltered you for the days that followed.

Kay tries to put me off when I ask her about it. ‘Restorative justice can be very helpful for low-level crimes – antisocial behaviour, theft, robbery – but it is not used for a crime of this magnitude.’

‘There was a case in America,’ I say, ‘I saw it on the Internet. A couple who have been able to meet the man who killed their daughter.’

‘That’s very unusual,’ she says, ‘and I’ve never heard of it happening over here.’ She agrees to make some enquiries. A couple of weeks later and she’s telling me she’s not made any progress.

‘If Jack was willing,’ I say, ‘and I was too, how can that be a bad thing?’

‘You need a professional to set the whole thing up. And I’ve not been able to find anyone prepared to work with you.’

‘Kay, I’m drowning.’

‘I’m sorry, Ruth. I can’t help. I don’t think it can be done.’

I spend hours hunting people online – psychologists, mediation specialists. I send emails, they come back with apologies, with rejections, no can do.

I want the truth, to know exactly what you did to Lizzie, to know precisely how she died, to see your remorse. There is no prospect of forgiveness or even acceptance without that. There are so many questions only you can answer.

Ruth

Thursday 25 October 2012

I am cleaning the oven, a job I loathe, which means I leave it too long and then it’s even harder to do.

Florence is at the kitchen table, messing with Play-Doh.

At first I think I’ve misheard. I’m on my knees, head in the oven, trying not to breathe in the fumes.

‘Daddy hit Mummy.’

I shuffle back, and turn. ‘What?’

‘Daddy hit Mummy.’ It is the first time that Florence has ever initiated any discussion of the tragedy with me. Though I’ve been warned that she may well revisit the murder time and again as she grows, needing to refine her understanding as she matures intellectually and emotionally, whenever I bring it up she is silent.

‘He did,’ I say slowly. ‘He did, and Mummy died.’

‘Lots of times,’ she says.

I have never been specific about the murder; she knows nothing about the poker, about the dozen-odd blows. Or have I? Did I say ‘lots’ to explain why Lizzie was hurt so badly she wouldn’t get better? ‘Was it?’ I say.

‘Sick of it,’ Florence says, and she bangs her hand on to the Play-Doh. ‘Sick of it!’ An echo. An echo of Jack? Or maybe Lizzie?

Getting to my feet, I strip off the rubber gloves but keep my distance. I don’t want to crowd her. I stare out of the window; Milky is perched on the wheelie bin at the end of the garden, washing himself.

‘Who said that: sick of it?’

‘Daddy. Very cross.’

‘Yes,’ I say blandly. ‘Was he downstairs?’

‘One day and another day…’ She makes a noise in her throat as if she’s unsure how to phrase it. ‘One day,’ she starts again, ‘in the bedroom and one in the kitchen and lots of days.’

‘Daddy hit Mummy on lots of days?’ The fizz of adrenalin whips through me. Tightening everything.

‘And then she fell down dead.’

I glance over and she’s poking holes in the pink dough with her fingers.

‘Did you see Daddy and Mummy have that big fight?’

She shakes her head. ‘Stay in your room,’ she says sternly.

My eyes water and I blink fast. Have I got it right? Did Jack tell her that? Or did she hear what was unfolding and know she had to stay in her room because the violence was a familiar situation?