'Parent's nightmare' gets life for Sarah Payne's murder

Sarah Payne's mother wants information about paedophiles made public. BRONWYN SELL reports.

LONDON - To the four Payne children it appeared the perfect place for a game of hide and seek on a bright summer's evening - a field of wheat bordered by a hedgerow, 150m from their Nan's house in Kingston Gorse, West Sussex.

One child would hide in the corn while the others searched, with the help of the family dog.

From his van on the road, 42-year-old Roy Whiting, a lonely mechanic, would have heard giggles and delighted squeals and the excited barking of the dog as each child was found.

But he was no benign witness to their game. He was a convicted paedophile prowling for his next victim.

Earlier, Nan had cooked the children their favourite meal, shepherd's pie, and afterwards they had walked to the beach with their parents, Sara and Michael.

The children - Lee, aged 13, Luke, 11, Sarah, 8, and Charlotte, 5 - had played in rockpools.

When their parents decided it was time to go home, they begged to be allowed to stay.

"It was such a lovely evening that we decided that they could," said Sara Payne. "Always my last words to them were please stay together.

"As we were walking along, I looked back and they were playing on the beach."

It was the last time she saw Sarah alive.

Shortly after 7.30 pm, the children tired of the game in the cornfield. It was Sarah's turn to hide but Lee bumped into her and she started crying. She was always crying, said Lee. No doubt wanting her mother's comfort over her brother's impatience, she set out towards the hole in the hedge which led to the lane where her grandparents lived.

Luke ran after her and told her to wait while he went back to comfort Charlotte, who had been stung by a nettle. From the other side of the field, Lee - perhaps remembering his mother's instructions - ran towards Sarah. But the corn slowed him. As he got halfway across the field, she slipped through the hedge.

By the time the three children followed, Sarah had disappeared. The only person visible was a man in a white van, who grinned and waved at Lee as he sped past.

"He looked scruffy," said Lee. "He looked like he had not shaven for ages.

"His face was dirty and he had yellowish teeth when he grinned ... He looked like he had been through some bushes."

That was Saturday, July 1, 2000. Sixteen days later, farmhand Luke Coleman was clearing ragwort from a field next to a highway 33km away, near Pulborough.

He saw what he thought was a dead deer - a common sight so close to the road.

As he got closer, he realised that it was the body of a child.

"I could see a leg with a foot pointing diagonally upwards and I could see it was naked. It was lying long-ways parallel to the hedge. It did not appear to have any hair on the head.

"And I could tell from the smell in the air that the body was decomposing. It looked to me as if animals had interfered with it."

Sara Payne's face turned white as she heard the farmhand's evidence at Whiting's trial. By then she had sat through six days of the 16-day trial. She had heard that Whiting had suffocated her daughter in a sexually motivated homicide.

He had visited two parks and a fun fair earlier that day, looking for a victim.

Police had found in his van a rope, plastic ties, masking tape, an 8cm knife, a spade, a shovel, a pickaxe and a bottle of baby oil. He had washed the van with a high-pressure hose the day after Sarah went missing.

It was impossible to tell if she had been sexually abused because the body was too decomposed.

Sara Payne had taken the stand, nervous but stoic, to describe her last day with Sarah. But the thought of animals dragging her daughter's body from its shallow grave was too much. She and her husband left the court.

Yesterday, when Whiting was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Sarah, her parents silently embraced and cried as the public gallery burst into cheers around them.

Whiting muttered to himself and showed no emotion as Justice Richard Curtis sentenced him to life in prison.

The judge told Whiting: "You are indeed an evil man. You are in no way mentally unwell. I have seen you for a month and in my view you are a glib and cunning liar.

"You are and will remain an absolute menace to any little girl."

Sarah Payne's death was one of those crimes which touches a country.

From the day she disappeared the frozen smile and trusting brown eyes in her photograph became a symbol of lost innocence in Britain.

The public grew increasingly incensed as her parents and the police searched for Sarah and then for her killer.

Even before the arrest there was talk of publishing a paedophile directory, of toughening the sentences for crimes against children.

The Paynes, supported by tabloid newspaper News of the World, have started a campaign for a Sarah's law, which would make information about convicted paedophiles available to the public.

Outside the court, Sara Payne urged the Government to lock up paedophiles for life.

"Let's make sure this stops happening time and time again. People are being let out of prison when everybody concerned knows that this is going to happen again.

"It is down to the Government, and the Government only can make those decisions. Right now we've got a lot of work to do. It doesn't stop here."