‘The stress has broken me down over the years. I try to minimise it’
John McAreavey continues his fight for justice for Michaela. In a rare interview, he talks to Niamh Horan about what has helped and what’s next
IN the age of 24-hour news, when people move on to the next story quicker than they pour their morning coffee, John McAreavey has been confronted with a strange kind of compassion fatigue.
It’s almost 10 years since his late wife Michaela Harte’s murder, and people wonder if it is time to ‘move on’.
“A lot of people tend to think that, as time passes, you should just forget about things you know?” he says, incredulously. Last week he found “a lot of response coming through [on social media?] from people saying to ‘get over this’”.
At a level, he can understand that. “Fortunately [most people] have never experienced trauma or injustice,” he says, acknowledging that “it’s a very, very difficult thing to understand” why he would continue the fight for justice all these years later.
In 2011, 27-year-old Michaela left him at the restaurant on their Mauritian honeymoon and headed for room 1025 of the Legends Hotel to collect chocolate to have with their tea. Unbeknownst to her, her killer or killers were in the room, and police believe Michaela disturbed them as they were stealing the couple’s belongings.
As John waited, he watched a video on his phone and took pictures. Twenty minutes later —when Michaela failed to return — he went to check on her and was met with a scene that would change his life forever.
Now, almost a decade on, he made headlines again last week after he questioned the timing of the latest police probe. It came a week after he criticised Liverpool FC’s newly signed commercial deal with the Mauritius tourist board: “It actually made me feel unwell,” he says, citing “the trouble that they went through over 30 years [to get justice] for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster and how they had to fight so hard and so long”.
As for the past 10 years, John says he can handle the grief, the groundless rumours that he was responsible for his wife’s murder and even a shambolic court case — in which the two hotel workers he believes were responsible eventually walked free. But the idea that he would ever give up the fight for Michaela?
Impossible.
“This isn’t healthy for me [to come out in the media again]. It’s very painful every time I decide to say something more. It gives me great anxiety and stress. There are wounds there. You don’t have to poke too far to feel that again. And I have often asked myself, ‘Can I continue to do this and to bear that weight?’ but the reality is I couldn’t contemplate not doing it. How could I reconcile in my head that I am going to leave it now? I just don’t know — even on practical terms — how that would be. I’m not that type of person.”
The grief takes a physical toll: “Stress hormones in my body would have really broken me down over the years. Very bad stomachs, just making you actually physically sick. People talk about stress, they say ‘stress is a killer’ and sometimes it’s an off-the-cuff remark, but it actually is. It can kill you. It really can. I am very conscious of that. I try to minimise it as best as I can.”
Meditation and physical exercise help, but in the early years, he literally had to sit with the pain.
“I didn’t really want to hear from anybody and I didn’t really mean to be mean about that. I used to get these people with the best will in the world and they would have reached out and told you that they had lost someone — be it a mother, father, wife or husband — and it was nearly always accompanied by [so] ‘I know how you feel’ and that really used to annoy me because well a) you don’t know me, b) you never knew Michaela, and c) you didn’t know the relationship, so how could you know how I felt?
“And I suppose it was very much a case of ‘well if you lost someone, this is the scripted way you are going to feel and we all go through that’. And that just did not sit well with me.”
In the beginning he was at a complete loss: “I used to spend the early days Googling, but there is nothing out there that can help you overcome a traumatic death like that. It was the worst case possible — to lose someone in that way — and to lose someone so young.”
Eventually, he says, “what I did learn was that I had to own my grief. I had to feel every inch of it. I didn’t want to be three or four years down the line having blocked everything out and then have all of these unprocessed feelings.”
He recalls: “I really wanted to feel the depths of those lows — and God they were low. But it was important to feel and honour it.”
Gratitude helped: “I was very, very thankful for everything I had with Michaela in that relationship and I was thankful for the time we had together and, I suppose, I am an eternal optimist and so hope starts to creep back in and you eventually start to experience the good again.”
A strange question, perhaps, but how did he actually ‘feel’ his feelings? “It’s not a mad question at all. People just don’t know how to be present any more. For me, I wanted to be alone and to be by myself and that was the time I really got to understand what my feelings were. It’s very important to spend time alone — it’s very different to being lonely.”
Most people were lost for words, and that was OK. “It can be just a look in the eye or a hand on the shoulder and someone saying, ‘I’m thinking of you,’ and when that’s sincerely said you can always receive it in the best way.”
But he has also been met with the other extreme. During the trial of the two chief suspects, hotel cleaners Avinash Treebhoowoon and Sandip Moneea, a Mauritius radio station conducted a poll to ask who people believed was responsible for the murder, and 75pc of the island’s public pointed the finger at John. At the time, he said he didn’t care what people thought, but did it hurt more when baseless allegations trickled back home?
“Ach no, it honestly doesn’t. I just think it’s [down to] how fickle people are and it’s just ignorance,” he says. “As with most things in life, anything you say about another person, it’s all to do with your perspective and what you are going through at any given time.”
He encourages people to listen to a podcast available on iTunes and Spotify, which details the case, the evidence found in the room and the mistakes the police made. For those who believe he has no hope of justice in a country that was seen to have conducted a bungled police investigation and shambolic two-month trial, he points to other cases around the world which give hope.
“I take inspiration from Stephen Lawrence’s mother, who fought for so long when her son was murdered. It can be done, if you are prepared to stay on course.”
Doreen and Neville Lawrence fought tirelessly for justice for their 18-year-old son who was murdered in 1993. Their campaigning led to police reforms and brought the world’s gaze on the “institutional racism” of the Met Police. His killers were found guilty — 18 years after the murder.
John recalls how his sister Claire reached out to Doreen Lawrence: “The biggest thing that she communicated was the level of patience required and to understand that it’s going to take time.”
So what next? “I want the two men who were previously acquitted arrested again for her murder... They deserve to be in court again. They deserve to sweat again.
“This isn’t about vengeance. It’s about right and wrong. If you kill someone, you have to pay.
“I just have to continue to think that there is an opportunity to get justice because Michaela deserves that. It’s the least of what she deserves.”
He has reached out to Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney for help and hopes that the Irish Government will assist him in putting pressure on Mauritius authorities to bring about a retrial.
His recent criticism has already being making waves: “Whatever I seem to say on Twitter regarding Michaela’s case does get over there. So, I know what I am doing. I know that I have to press the right buttons. It’s a very useful platform.”
Another possible route then. Since the case, streaming platforms have won hundreds of millions of subscribers. Netflix in particular has focused the true-crime genre and a number of its cold-case documentaries have led to retrials. Is it something he would consider?
“It’s something I have been asked before. It’s a genre that’s come out in the past five years that really does grab people’s attention. I watch them and very much enjoy them.
“But I guess the only way I would contemplate something like that would be to ask, does this help or hinder? You would be very much opening yourself up. Would it be worth that? I don’t know. I have to have consideration for my wife and family so I don’t know.”
The interest in his story has not abated. “I have been approached by God knows how many programme makers over the years... I would never say never to anything that I felt could help.”
Whatever happens next, he is clear on one thing: “I owe it to Michaela to fight to the very last.”
‘I take inspiration from Stephen Lawrence’s mother, who fought for so long when her son was murdered’