Had the tragedy of chance not thrown them together that summer's evening two years ago, then some other parents, somewhere else, would almost certainly have been in mourning. The perverted irony of this case is that as far as Sarah's killer was concerned, it might just as well have been.Īny little girl would have done for Roy Whiting, on any day. So when hope died, and Sarah's naked body was found in a dismal roadside grave, there could hardly have been a mother or father anywhere who didn't imagine that it could so easily have been their own child. Practically every day, you could catch her increasingly desperate parents on a TV screen somewhere, pleading for help, refusing to give up hope. She had been kidnapped in daylight just a short distance from her grandparents' home.įor weeks afterwards, her little face beamed out almost everywhere from ' missing' posters or newspaper appeals. The summer holidays had barely started when she was snatched from a cornfield and bundled into the back of a van, another victim to add to Britain's bleak catalogue of abducted children.īut there was something about the disappearance of this bright-eyed eight-year- old that dominated the thoughts of parents across the land. Sarah Payne is a name few parents will ever forget.
