[tense music playing]
[narrator] Every 90 seconds, someone is reported missing.
Many return to their families, but for others,
something has gone seriously wrong.
A young woman has disappeared on her way home from work.
[John] We started ringing around
hospitals, our friends.
[Gaynor] I thought, "Oh, my God, something's happened."
That's when I went into panic, then.
[narrator] This is no ordinary missing person's inquiry.
[Tom] It was a very, very unusual investigation.
[narrator] What happens in the police investigation that follows?
[Charles] There were human hairs trapped in the knot in the electric flex,
and it also had bite marks in it.
[narrator] What happens to the family at its heart…
I would rather be the mother of a murdered child,
than be the mother of a murderous killer.
[narrator reading]
Helen was a much-wanted baby.
When I got married, I couldn't wait to be a mom,
and when she was born, she was just amazing.
She was mischievous.
She'd take the mickey out of everyone.
She loved her family.
Michael, her brother, when he was born,
he wasn't my baby, he was her baby,
and she always had that nursing instinct in her, you know?
[John] I did meet Marie, and we obviously started
getting… into a serious relationship.
She had the two children, she was divorced, I was divorced.
I always said that the children came first with Marie.
I think Helen, uh, initially, building that relationship
was a little difficult, but once you got to know her,
she was a great girl, full of life, you know, she bikes with friends.
She was never cheeky.
-She was always full of fun, wasn't she? -Yeah.
And if you had anything on that she liked,
-she'd borrow it. -[chuckles] Oh, yeah.
[John] We did have nights out together, her and her boyfriend, Marie and myself,
and now just had a very good relationship.
And she always said she was looking forward
to being a bridesmaid at our wedding,
and, uh, sadly, she wasn't.
[narrator] 22-year-old insurance clerk, Helen McCourt
is looking forward to a night out with new boyfriend, Frank.
[Gaynor] Helen and I worked together in the Royal Insurance,
and she phoned me up numerous times during the day,
because she was going out with a new boyfriend that night,
and she was really excited, and she kept phoning me up saying,
"Do you think I should wear this outfit?" Then she phoned me back 10 minutes later,
"I've changed my mind, what do you think of this outfit I should wear?"
And she was just so excited about getting out that evening.
[Marie] She was just her normal self.
You know, she caught her bus,
her train, she went in to work.
She'd rung me three times from work.
[Charles] She had planned to meet her mom in the city center for lunch,
but the weather was so dreadful, that that was canceled.
However, the rest of the working day continued as planned,
and the intention was,
she was going to be coming home at tea time,
at the normal time, uh, because she had a date
with her new boyfriend at about eight o'clock.
[Gaynor] And it was terrible weather, and it was really, really windy,
so if you didn't have to go out,
you wouldn't really have gone out that night,
but obviously she was looking forward to going out with a new boyfriend,
so, she was going to go, no matter what the weather was like.
[Marie] And it got to about 5:40, and she still wasn't there,
and, I heard on the news that the trains
from Lime Street to Wigan had been delayed
because a tree had blown on the line.
So I relaxed then, because I thought,
"Oh, that's the reason why she's a bit late."
And then when I got here, Marie said, "Oh, she's not… Helen's not got home,"
but, with the weather,
immediately thought, well, there's bound to be
some disturbance, you know, with public transport, 'cause she travels.
But, as the minutes ticked by, and Helen failed to arrive,
she became increasingly concerned.
[Marie] And so we waited and waited.
Uh, Michael was working,
and when he came in, I said, "Is Helen with you?"
And he said, "No, Mom, I've not heard from her,"
so, that's when I went into panic, then.
If she missed her train at Lime Street Station in Liverpool,
she'd go to the call box and ring me and say,
"Mom, I just missed me train," she'd say, "so I'll be 15 minutes late."
[John] Helen was always making Marie aware of where she was,
what time she'd be home.
She would have rung her mother, because that's what she did.
[Charles] Concerned that Helen might've suffered
some kind of accident due to the high winds
that were battering the Northwest at the time,
she, uh, she became increasingly concerned
that something serious had happened.
[John] We started ringing around hospitals, our friends.
[Gaynor] I just… I thought, "Oh, my God, something's happened.
She must've had an accident on the way home
because the weather was so bad.
[John] We couldn't understand if she had called in anywhere,
because she was so adamant about getting home.
[Charles] Eventually they decided after drawing a blank
to retrace Helen's journey to see if there were any incidents
on the route back towards Liverpool
that could account for her disappearance.
[John] Frank, Marie and myself went in the car,
went to Royal Insurance, tracked from the Royal Insurance
to the underground, uh, station, no sign of her.
Lime Street Station, checked with the railway people,
yes, the trains were still running fine.
And that's when I think we started worrying,
and we immediately said, "Right, we'll go round
to Copperas Hill Station and report her missing."
[Tom] When a person is reported missing from home,
depending on the circumstances,
for example, if a person went out to the pub for a night
with a gang of people, and didn't come home,
and the parents reported them missing, it might be unusual for the parents,
but there might be background circumstances why they didn't come home,
for example, the met somebody, gone back to their place.
So initially, most inquiries we would say,
uh, leave it for 24 hours or so to see if they came back,
and if they didn't,
then depending on the circumstances of how they went missing,
then, the case would build,
the approach to the missing person would build.
Well, we knew the basic facts that she'd been going home,
because we knew she was due to go out,
and that she just hadn't turned up,
so, those circumstances were very, very unusual.
[Gaynor] We just expected to hear that she'd be found somewhere injured.
Obviously there's no mobile phones in those days,
so, communications took a little longer to get through,
so we just assumed she'd be found in a hospital somewhere,
or-- and everything could come to light.
[Charles] And the police, to their credit, responded extremely quickly,
considering it was an adult, and she'd been missing for so little time.
[Marie] I was getting really upset by then, you know,
because it was coming up to near ten o'clock at night,
and, I didn't know where she was,
and, I've always known where she was.
[John] Marie always knew her timetable, if you would, a schedule,
So, you know, we knew with her not being home,
something had gone wrong.
[narrator] Helen's been missing for four hours.
Well, I was still hoping against hope that,
yes, perhaps she had been injured.
[Charles] The officer that Marie spoke to at the police station in Liverpool
was very accommodating and sympathetic,
and said that she could ring him every hour from then on,
uh, to check up with progress.
[John] Marie was ringing on the hour, every hour
till four o'clock when the two police officers came out.
[narrator] 22-year-old Helen McCourt
has vanished on her way home from work.
I was in some fog, because all as I could think of was,
"Where is Helen?"
I'm sat in the chair, looking over towards the window
with the Venetian blind slightly open,
and I seen a car pull up outside, and I thought,
"Oh, they found her, she's home,"
and I run to the door, and the two officers come in,
and I said, "Where's Helen?"
And they said, "Well, we've just come to ask some questions, Mrs. McCourt,"
you know, so they came in,
and I just thought, "Well, they're taking this seriously.
Something must have happened to her."
[Charles] This was really the start of the investigation becoming local,
and another five hours later,
and there were police all over the place conducting inquiries.
[Pat] We didn't know until the following morning.
Michael phoned up and said, uh, "Helen's missing."
You just can't take it in when it happens. You really can't take it in.
I was actually cursing her, to be honest,
I was saying, "For God's sake, Helen,
you know, phone or something,
let us know what's-- Where you are."
But deep down I knew she wouldn't do anything without telling Marie,
because her and Marie were always were very, very close.
[narrator] Helen's disappearance is so out of character,
the police immediately launch an appeal.
[John] The news broke at ten o'clock on the Wednesday.
That went out on the radio.
And, obviously it…
Once that went out, TV were out as well, you know,
just the general report that a girl was missing.
The facts were so strange.
She was, she'd contacted her mother to say,
"I'm coming home, I'm going out."
Her age, she was a bright girl, she knew what she was doing,
and it was just so strange for her to go missing
in that short distance between the bus stop and her home.
[Gaynor] When you see it come on the news, you automatically think,
"This is real, now this is real."
And that's when I thought,
"Wow, they've- That the police are moving quickly on this."
[narrator] Away from the media,
the police's investigation is well underway.
[John] I know that the police, obviously,
when they have an investigation like that, they start with the family,
and work outwards.
[narrator] The Serious Crime Squad are involved.
[Tom] There's no suspects really missing from home,
so you speak to the person reporting it, the family,
the parents, the brothers, the sisters, the families,
and see when they last saw them.
Obviously, I was interviewed, Frank was interviewed,
you know, my movements.
I do know that the police went to my place of work,
went with people I was working with that evening,
'cause I worked overtime, and you know,
and that was disconcerting.
Luckily, I'd called into my ex-wife and my two sons' home,
so they knew what time I'd been there,
knew what time I'd left, you know, traveling time,
so, everything was covered.
[Tom] The family was distraught. They don't know where Helen is,
and they just wanted her found as quickly as possible.
[Charles] Once the police had established that Helen had indeed
completed her public transport journey, they then began to focus
on the very short journey on foot she would have had to have made
between the bus stop on Rainford Road, and her home in Standish Avenue,
which was only a five-minute walk, even in bad weather.
[narrator] The police retrace Helen's last movements.
[Tom] She'd provisionally been seen near where she got off the bus in Billinge.
[John] We knew it was serious, you know, when we realized
how active the police were, you know.
We could see them in the village,
they were stopping traffic as well.
You know, "have you seen this girl hanging posters out?" et cetera.
[Charles] As Billinge woke up on the Wednesday morning,
the police operation was really beginning to ramp up.
There were 120 officers in the town center.
They'd set up an operation center at the old school hall.
There were divers dispatched to look in Carr Mill Dam,
and house-to-house inquiries were being conducted.
[Marie] The police had decided they were going to search
every house and, uh, building.
[Charles] One of the first premises they visited
was the George and Dragon Pub on Main Street,
where they encountered a man called Ian Simms.
[narrator] Landlord Ian Simms had taken over the pub a year earlier.
We didn't know the man, really.
Yes, we'd been in his pub three or four times,
so we, you know, we didn't know what his character was like,
or anything like that.
The pub was full of young people,
and quite often he'd flirt with them.
Helen wouldn't succumb to those flirtations.
She just thought he was a bit of a silly old man.
He did start sending her drinks over,
so, I told the police that.
[Tom] They thought he had a bit of a unhealthy interest in her.
So after we spoke to the family, we went down to the George and Dragon,
and saw the landlord in there, and the manager in there.
We started talking to them, asking them questions.
Mr. Davis, the SIO was there.
He wasn't happy with the way Simms was reacting to the questions.
Did he know where Helen was? When did he last see her?
Any idea where she was? And of course all this, he would say,
"No, I haven't seen her. Don't know where she is."
He'd told them he was married, but he did have a girlfriend.
He was just a bit strange. He was… You could see he was nervous.
Uh, he was fidgeting, he was twitchy.
You could see his Adam's apple was bobbing all over the place.
He was, just… He was very, very nervous.
Mr. Davis wasn't happy with them, and told us to take him
down to the police station for further interview.
We then became suspicious about him,
about his possible involvement in Helen's disappearance.
[police siren wailing]
[narrator] Statements are taken from Ian Simms, his girlfriend,
and the pub manager.
When they then started going over their statements,
they seen there's a big difference
in the landlord's statement to the barman's, and the girlfriend's.
Their recollection of the Tuesday evening
was very similar,
but his was totally different.
[narrator] Two days before her disappearance,
Helen had been in the George and Dragon Pub.
[Gaynor] The pub was a fun pub, which were quite common at the time,
so, it attracted a lot of young people.
In this area, that would be, like, the main place to go.
[John] They used to have good parties down there,
and you know, theme nights, stuff like that, discos.
If there was anything going on, she'd take a camera along.
She'd take pictures of all the people.
[Gaynor] I'd seen Ian Simms in the pub.
She wasn't very enamored with him.
She didn't like his behavior.
He was married, he had a young mistress.
On the Sunday, there had been some sort of an altercation in the pub.
There was some pictures being shown,
and someone had got upset about pictures being shown.
A girl had kicked off about the photos
that Helen had of her previous boyfriend.
[Gaynor] I think it had led to a bit of a scuffle in the ladies' toilets.
And, it resulted in them being told they'd been barred from the pub.
She told me about it, and I was very shocked,
'cause it just wasn't Helen to be getting into fights,
or situations like that,
so, it was so it was out of character to have been involved in that.
[narrator] It's 48 hours after Helen's disappearance.
The police are becoming more suspicious of Ian Simms.
It's the seriousness, not just an ordinary missing case, now is it.
It's a serious missing person's case,
because we suspect something bad has happened to Helen.
So we're trying to get out of him as quickly as possible what he knew.
[Charles] Around about the time that Helen alighted from the bus,
a man later told police that he heard
the sound of a high-pitched scream cut off abruptly,
coming from what seemed to be the rear door
of the George and Dragon Pub.
[Tom] Well, we knew now that obviously he was, uh,
becoming a suspect in the inquiry,
and that we interviewed him again,
and we told him that his girlfriend had given a completely different story
about his movements that evening,
and he eventually said, admitted that he told lies.
[Charles] In the meantime, police began to focus on the George and Dragon,
starting with the landlord's car.
And it was then that they made their first big breakthrough,
which was traces of blood, and an opal and sapphire earring,
found in the boot of his Volkswagen Passat.
When confronted with the information about the blood,
uh, Simms at first said
that it must have belong to his dog, which had cut its paw,
but science was sufficiently advanced by 1988
for that swiftly to be dismissed.
Two officers, police officers, plain clothes came,
and they showed me this plastic vial, you know,
what you see forensic scientists and medical ones
when they're taking samples, and they put them in,
and there was an earring in it, and they said, uh,
"Does this mean anything to you?"
And I just looked at it and I said, "It's identical to Helen's earring."
And I know Marie asked him, "Do you think you've,
you know, when do you think you'll find Helen?"
And they just answered, "You know, we may never find her."
I think we knew the worst had happened then.
They now began seriously to suspect Simms,
and he was arrested on suspicion of murder.
The shock of realizing what had happened to Helen,
that she was no longer a missing person,
and it was, you know, a murder investigation.
[narrator] Merseyside police have quickly responded
to the disappearance of 22-year-old Helen McCourt.
Despite no body being found, critical evidence has led them
to arrest local man Ian Simms within a matter of days
on suspicion of murder.
It must have been devastating for Marie and the rest of her family
to be informed by the police
that they were now treating her disappearance as a murder.
When the police came to see me and informed me,
it was a relief, in a way.
Alls I was thinking of is, I wanted Helen back, dead or alive.
I wanted my child back.
[Gaynor] Helen's family must have just been distraught,
'cause they couldn't understand why he would want to murder Helen.
You can't actually believe it.
It takes a long, long time before the reality of that situation hits home.
If someone's run over and killed and you have to go and tell the family,
that's bad enough, but to say that Helen has probably died a violent death.
[narrator] Police are only able to arrest Simms on suspicion of murder.
Now they need to build the case to get their man.
We'd arrested him on suspicion.
The hard part then is trying to prove it,
to gather the evidence to substantiate a charge.
Forensic inquiries then began to focus on Simms' flat
above the George and Dragon.
And very quickly, a number of blood traces were found.
One, uh, in the flat itself had a fingerprint on top of it,
which was later identified as Simms'.
Fibers recovered from Helen's coat
proved to be a perfect match for those found on the carpet
of the George and Dragon Pub.
The forensic scientist, Dr. Eric Moore, said there was evidence
that she had been dragged forcefully across the carpet.
The back of the earring was found, fibers off her coat.
It all started getting to match.
[Charles] Helen's disappearance had been given a great deal of media coverage,
both locally, regionally, and nationally.
While the operations were continuing in Billinge,
uh, 15 miles away on the Manchester Ship Canal at Hollins Green,
a man was walking his dog when he came across a bloodied towel.
Walking a little further along, he found another towel,
and an almost complete set of men's clothing, including underwear.
[Tom] When the clothing was found,
part of the clothing was found to be promoting a beer
that at the time was on sale in that pub in the George and Dragon.
[Charles] Officers removed a bracelet and two rings from Simms,
and mud was found on there
which matched the mud at the Hollins Green scene,
and also that found on clothing.
[narrator] 20 miles away,
a young boy notices something strange by the River Irwell.
[John] He saw some bags stuffed down the banks of the Irwell.
Looked like a handbag had just being thrown and burst open,
and a denim jacket hanging in the tree.
And when he comes to look inside the bag, took it back to his dad,
his dad immediately saw,
uh, an ID card with Helen McCourt on it,
and he said, "That's the missing girl."
[Tom] In the pub, Simms kept a big dog, I think it was a Rottweiler,
and he used to have it tied up with a piece of flex electric wiring-
flex-type thing.
When the- Helen's clothing were found in Irlam,
they found the clothing, and they found flex.
[Charles] There were human hairs trapped in the knot in the electric flex,
and it also had bite marks in it,
which were matched with the teeth of Simms' dog.
[Tom] Me and my partner, Jim Stephens,
we went up to see the family.
We wanted, seemed strange at the time, but we needed to know,
could we get any DNA samples,
hair, blood, anything which would get her DNA details,
because DNA was just coming in then, it was new.
Helen's dad, Billy, her brother, Michael, and mother, Marie,
had all given samples themselves.
[Tom] And we were looking then at taking her hairbrush, pillow,
and things like that, where we could get samples of her hair
and from where we got a DNA profile for Helen.
They found her clothing, and they found flex,
and mingled into it were pieces of hair.
So, when that was taken and examined,
they found out that the hair matched Helen's hair
from the DNA profiling, and that the flex was the same type
of flex that was used to tie the dog up in the pub.
We were able to tie the fact that Helen had been in the pub,
because they found fibers from the floor carpeting on her coat
linking Helen to the pub, to Simms, to Simms' clothing,
and Simms to Helen's clothing.
Overwhelming forensic evidence.
So, this was a major, major case where DNA played
a crucial part in linking the murderer to the venue, to the victim.
[Charles] The hairs removed from the flex
suggested that Helen had been strangled with it,
using considerable force.
Some of the hairs were broken, and others were torn out at the roots.
As the evidence began to build up, the police must have begun
to realize that they had a very serious case on their hands.
For Marie, it must have been absolute agony,
and she was feeling so powerless at that time.
I just wanted her to be found, dead or alive.
[narrator] With overwhelming forensic evidence,
the pressure on the police to find Helen McCourt intensifies.
Police appealed for the public to come out and help
in the search for Helen.
This was now a murder inquiry,
so people were made aware that they would be looking for a body.
[Ian] Uh, we thought that only the family would turn up,
but, people were coming from everywhere,
hundreds of people coming out to help,
which I thought was absolutely fantastic.
A little over a year after Helen McCourt's disappearance,
Ian Simms was in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court,
and during a 3-week trial, he continued flatly to deny
that he was responsible for her murder.
He never looked as if he showed any remorse at all.
You could see in his face, it was just blank as if,
"Oh, I've done nothing wrong," you know, and he just sat there,
and he just completely ignored everybody else,
and that's the kind of attitude he had.
He was a very cold person. He obviously had committed a murder.
He wasn't admitting it, even though there was
overwhelming forensic evidence linking him to the murder of Helen.
And he was just sat there telling lies, and that's it, it wasn't him,
having no consideration for the family.
It is, very, very emotional, plus the fact that
with the courts that small,
you're practically on top of his family as well.
I thought about his family, his wife, his mother,
and his two little children, and I thought,
"I would rather be the mother of a murdered child
than be the mother of a murderous killer."
[narrator] Throughout the trial, Simms refuses to give any information
about what he'd done with Helen's body.
I think it's an unreal situation that you're in.
You don't know how to feel, um…
And it is very, very, obviously, very emotional,
um, but just wishing all the time we could get Helen back,
and why will he not tell us what have you done with her?
[Charles] A jury returned a verdict after just five and-a-half hours
of deliberations following a 3-week trial,
and it was an emphatic, guilty verdict.
[narrator] Ian Simms is sentenced to life imprisonment
with a minimum tariff of 16 years.
[sighs with relief] Well, when he stands up and said guilty.
When he was found guilty and I heard all this evidence was that,
"Well, surely he'll tell me now."
In fact, listening to all the evidence, it was overwhelming.
It was both circumstantial as well as DNA.
The feeling of relief wasn't there.
It was nice to know that he's been found guilty.
Great, but we couldn't put Helen anywhere. That's the hard part.
[Gaynor] For years, you try and understand,
or get some understanding of why,
what possessed him to do this.
And I just don't think you can get any reasoning out of it.
I think he's just got a psychopathic mind,
and there is no reason or logic behind the actions.
There was cheering in the court,
but, it could only be a partial victory,
because Helen's body had still not been found,
and that made it a very unusual case in British justice.
[Tom] It was a very, very unusual murder investigation.
It's the first conviction where the conviction
has been based in large part on DNA without a body.
[Charles] This murder case was a breakthrough one for DNA testing.
It was in its relative infancy back in the 1980s.
Although it had been proved to be accurate to a degree,
statistically it eliminated a lot of people.
This was really the first time, though,
that a conviction was secured mostly on this.
There was a lot of other evidence circumstantial,
but the blood and the hair and other traces
were certainly very significant in securing Simms' conviction.
That's when you think… [sighs in relief]
"Yes, you're proven guilty, why don't you tell us now?"
[narrator] Ian Simms still doesn't tell the family where Helen's body is.
We can't see any sense in it, really,
because, it would have made his sentence shorter.
Whether he wants, is hiding something else, I don't know,
but I just cannot grasp why he has served 31 years
unnecessarily, in a way.
With the evidence that there is, I have no qualms
about calling him a murderer, and as the judge said,
"What you've done puts you in the first division
of cold-blooded murderers."
[narrator] Ian Simms has been found guilty of murdering
22-year-old Helen McCourt.
Despite this, there are still questions to be answered.
[Charles] We can only speculate as to what the motive was.
Some say that it was just a row, which escalated
after she'd gone to the pub to smooth over the incident
that had happened a couple of days earlier.
It's also been speculated that she was threatening
to expose his illicit affair,
but there was no justification for what he did.
I've covered a lot of murder cases since then,
and have never come across another one remotely like it.
The sense of a lack of closure
is still painful for the family.
Marie feels that time is running out for her.
[Ian] It's not just one person who's suffering, the parents.
It's the whole family, they feel it. Everybody feels it.
It prevented our children from having a normal life,
and they were at the age where, you know, they were going out.
[narrator] Helen's family continue searching for her remains.
[Tom] The family are still out on a regular basis,
trying to find out what's happened to Helen.
[Pat] You can't go for a walk, you can't take the dogs for a walk
without looking at fields and thinking,
"She could be there."
She could be anywhere.
She could be under that tree, or by that fence.
And that's the first thought that comes into your mind.
It really is, it's frightening.
Even when the police were still searching,
we were going down, you know, "Can we help?"
They wouldn't actually let us search with them,
but they say, "Can you search that field?
Can you, you know, go along that verge,
or can you go along that, say, canal or brook, or things like that."
And when they did eventually stop, we continued,
I would say practically every Sunday, not just up to the trial,
for three, four years.
[Ian] Sunday was Marie's day.
The whole family would get together, friends.
I'd say to Marie, "Where do you want us to go this time?"
And she'd pick a particular place where she thinks she might be,
and we'd go, get all the tools out, and go searching.
[John] Very big searches, 30 to 40 people going out on a Sunday,
clearing ditches, in canals, going into old quarries,
cleaning whole mine shafts, things like that.
We were doing very good methodical searches.
It's like now, if we heard the police had found a body,
we automatically phone Marie up and say,
"A body's been found in such and such a place.
You need to find out, it could be our Helen."
You automatically build yourself up.
You get so deflated, it's unbelievable,
knowing that it's not the person you're looking for,
but, then you start thinking,
"That's some other person's family, and they're going to be suffering."
So, you know what they're feeling like, then.
Our Marie will never rest until Helen's found.
I can never come to terms with the fact that, um…
That I won't ever be able to give Helen a burial.
[narrator] In the family's church yard, Marie has a commemorative bench.
[Marie] It's a marble seat in Helen's name, that, her killer,
he can prevent me from giving her a proper burial here,
but he can't prevent me from having her name in the church graveyard,
and it will be there for as long as the church and grounds are here.
You see a lot of the people coming out,
and they nip over, and they go… [kisses] …onto her picture.
God bless Helen, you know? So she's in people's minds all the time.
I feel it for Marie, because she can't go and talk to Helen.
I know she's got that bench outside the church.
She can go and sit on that as if Helen's there, and that's it,
but she can't go to a grave where her child's body is.
It goes on and on, and it affects everyone to a degree,
and it impacts your life in a way that
you just wish no one had to have their life impacted.
Your trust in people goes.
[narrator] Marie, her family and her friends
continue to push for a change in the law with what they call Helen's Law.
Helen's Law is there to prevent killers
from hiding their victims' bodies,
and putting their victim's families through hell.
They ruin their lives.
No body, no parole.
[John] What we're asking for is a change in legislation
that till they cooperate with the authorities,
and say where the body is, and it's recovered,
that they are not liable for parole.
Because without that body,
it's just an ongoing trauma for the family.
[Gaynor] Losing someone to murder is horrific enough.
Not having a body,
and someone withholding that information for you
is absolutely soul-destroying.
I don't even know how someone can be seen to be remorseful
if they're withholding that information.
There's no compassion for the family.
It's just a total controlling thing.
[Ian] The yellow ribbons we've put up now are for Helen's Law,
and the amount of people in the street who have asked me,
"Why are they up, are they for Helen?" And I just say, "Yes, get this law passed,
so that what's happened to us doesn't happen to anybody else."
[Marie] I think that when we get Helen's Law,
that will give me a certain amount of peace,
because I will feel through her death
has come about a better law,
where innocent families don't have to suffer,
wondering where their loved one's remains are.
[John] I'm sure she would have been a mother,
probably even a grandmother by now.
It's a big hole. It's still Helen's room upstairs.
She'll always be around us.
Long as we breathe, she'll be with us.
[Charles] There are several victims in this case.
There always are in murder cases, of course,
not just the person who's been unlawfully killed,
but one has to feel particularly sorry for Marie,
and for brother Michael,
who haven't been able to obtain this closure,
and it's been an open wound for them.
She was loved by everyone, she really was.
I just hope and pray to God that I can,
that she can be found,
and she can be put to rest in this graveyard.
No one ever wants to bury a child.
She deserves a proper, peaceful rest.
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