A grieving dad’s message for Grace Millane’s family
There was a moment during the trial of his daughter’s killer when Kiwi journalist Mark Longley rested his hand on the door of the courtroom and thought, ‘‘if I run now, I could make it to Turner before the police can stop me’’.
‘‘I just wanted to shut him up,’’ says Longley of Elliot Turner, the man in the dock for Emily’s murder. He didn’t run. Instead he trudged back upstairs to the public gallery and sat through another day of evidence describing the final moments of his daughter’s life.
That was almost eight years ago, but Longley still knows better than most the maelstrom of emotions the family of murdered backpacker Grace Millane will have been feeling. Touching down in a strange city, not for travel or pleasure, but for the most difficult few weeks of their lives.
Longley flew the other way across the world back in 2012 to see his daughter’s killer tried for murder. The brutalist 1970s architecture of the Winchester Crown Court no doubt suited his mood as day after day, he and his family watched witnesses come and go and lawyers pick holes in Emily’s character.
Longley had covered courts in his working life before, but says he was stunned by his feelings of powerlessness. He was Emily’s dad – but that meant nothing, he could say nothing; in court, he was simply an observer.
Longley’s a humble guy, and not one to suggest he has all the answers. He had ‘‘a couple of email conversations’’ with David Millane before he and Grace’s mum Gillian arrived, and extended an invitation for a beer if they’d like that – but he understands if they prefer to be left alone.
In the end he found Emily’s trial helpful. He wanted the truth to come out, to wipe away the picture painted of his daughter as an ‘‘out of control teenager’’. He knew there would be victim-blaming about Grace, too, and suggestions she somehow brought it on herself. But there’s a line, he says, and murder is stepping across that line in anyone’s language – and on Friday the jury agreed that no matter what line the defence was running, no-one consents to murder.
After all the Millane family have been through – the few days of slim hope after she disappeared, that terrible flight, the hope lost when her body was found – he really hopes they have found some solace in the guilty verdict.
‘‘If you get the resolution you want, you can close that part of things off and you don’t have to think about it again,’’ Longley says. With Turner in prison, he’s been able to shut off all thoughts of him. The worry about the trial is gone, and that chronically overused word for the small comfort a passage of time gives to the bereaved – closure – is a possibility. And then you can go back to thinking about your daughter as she was before.
Before her 22nd birthday, Grace was an artist and a hockey player; a university graduate and an avid traveller, a sister and daughter, funny, smiling, loyal. It’s those things Longley hopes will be front of mind for her family.
He says Emily is with him every day, but especially when he takes walks with his 5-year-old son. He chokes up a bit as he explains he used to do that, every Saturday, with Emily when she was a child. They both loved that routine. He misses her, he thinks about her, but he doesn’t think about her death anymore.
He does talk about it, in his capacity as a trustee of the White Ribbon Trust. At the Auckland vigil for Grace last December, Longley talked to a hushed crowd about seeing his own daughter’s body in the morgue in England for the first time. He apologised to the crowd for that (as if he has anything at all to apologise for) and his description brought many to tears.
He talks about it in public, he said, because it’s the best way to ask people to change their attitudes to violence against women so no other parent has to stand in front of their daughter in a morgue somewhere.
‘‘If you get the resolution you want, you can close that part of things off.’’ Mark Longley