THE MOST SHAMEFUL MISSING PERSONS CASE EVER?

Ever since Katrice vanished on her 2nd birthday in 1981, the investigation has been a litany of failures and shabby neglect of her family. After the recent arrest — and release — of a suspect who could have been quizzed years ago, is this...

RICHARD LEE was at the gym when the call came last Monday, his mobile phone close to hand beside the step machine. Even now, 38 years since his daughter Katrice seemingly vanished without trace from a German supermarket on her second birthday, he is perennially braced for news.

Nonetheless, the information he received from the Royal Military Police felt, he says, like ‘a bolt out of the blue’. After years of false leads and futile hope, someone had been arrested in connection with Katrice’s disappearance.

An outwardly stoic retired sergeant major, Richard, 69, admits he has been able to concentrate on little else since that call, which reduced him to tears at his three-bedroom semi-detached home in Hartlepool, County Durham.

‘Your mind runs riot,’ he says, of the possibility that he may finally find out what happened to his daughter. ‘I’ve always believed Katrice was abducted. I’ve always believed she is out there.’

But his tears have been fuelled by fury, too, towards the RMP, the army body responsible for policing service personnel abroad, whose botched investigation he blames for the fact that he last saw his daughter when she was a curly-haired toddler who loved dancing around her parents’ living room to Abba.

Katrice disappeared in November 1981 during a trip to buy food for her birthday party from a NAAFI store on an army base in Paderborn, Germany, where Richard had been deployed with his family. But the RMP would only treat Katrice’s disappearance as a missing person inquiry.

They failed to close borders and it was weeks before they even interviewed staff at the supermarket where Katrice vanished in the few seconds it took her mother Sharon to fetch some crisps. Nor did they notify hospitals of an eye condition Katrice had that would have helped to identify the little girl.

FINALLY, in 2012, the Ministry of Defence apologised for its ‘flawed investigations’ and a review team was appointed to reassess the case, but Richard believes the RMP has done little to redeem itself since.

He claims that in May last year, after police excavated a German riverbank close to where Katrice was last seen, the realisation that bones they uncovered belonged not to his daughter but to a horse was broken on social media before police told him.

‘ They informed Instagram, Facebook and Twitter that it wasn’t Katrice but they hadn’t informed the family,’ he says. ‘This is why I feel angry. ’

Yet he was still initially grateful for the call last week to tell him about the arrest of a man in Swindon, Wiltshire. ‘I thought, “my God, they’re actually treating me as the father of a missing child, a human being”,’ he recalls.

‘Then the alarm bell rang. The man said the “review team” had pointed this individual out. This suggested to me that the information was there all the time and hadn’t been acted upon, just as the information that led them to the riverbank last year had been on file for 37 years.’

When Richard said as much to the army major in charge of the case, the response was obfuscating: ‘He said, “I can’t give you an answer on that because it might jeopardise the case should it ever come to court.” ’

The next day, Richard received another phone call from the RMP to say the man arrested had been released without charge.

Richard believes the events of last week were more an attempt by the RMP to save face than anything else.

‘It was an exercise in covering up the mess from 1981, I’m sure of it,’ he says. ‘He said, “We would ask you not to speak to the Press.” They wanted to do it below the radar and not have it reported on.’

Yet Katrice’s mother Sharon, a 66-year-old administration worker — divorced from Richard in 1991 but united with her ex-husband in their desire for answers — said last week that she was ‘very happy with the investigation team from the RMP this time around’.

Speaking from her home in Gosport, Hampshire, she added: ‘I want the police to carry on their investigation and then, when the time is right, to tell me why this arrest was made. I don’t want this arrest and search to be the end of it.’

The couple’s daughter Natasha, 46, also from Gosport, who was seven when Katrice disappeared, told the Mail that while she was ‘gutted’ to hear of the arrest last week, she would not say any more for fear of jeopardising the investigation.

So have officers made a breakthrough, or is this another red herring from a blunder-prone police force whose previous behaviour pushed an already fragile family to the brink?

The Mail can reveal that the man arrested — whom we are not naming — is a 74-year-old former soldier who served at the same base as Richard.

With a police cordon outside his semi- detached home in Swindon and two tents erected in the back garden last week, there was, naturally, talk among local people.

They describe the arrested man as smartly dressed, friendly and bespectacled. A family friend told the Mail that the man’s partner was distraught after police came to their house last week: ‘You’d be horrified to be told he was suspected of that, wouldn’t you?’

It seems the ex- soldier had no inkling he was under suspicion either. An acquaintance recalled seeing him happy last weekend: ‘He seemed his usual self. He’s a comedian. He likes to crack jokes.’

THE ex- serviceman is only the second person to be arrested since Katrice disappeared. Richard, who has been with his current partner Irene, 68, for 26 years, still remembers the events of that day 38 years ago vividly.

Despite the drizzle on November 28, 1981, residents of the Paderborn base were in buoyant spirits. It was