GUILT OVER THE MOMENT SCHOOLGIRL WAS TAKEN
in 2014, bought a sawn-off shotgun in case Whiting was found not guilty.
Lee, 30, who was then 13, remembers seeing Whiting’s van drive past the field and now thinks he did a U-turn to snatch Sarah and drive off.
He said he saw Whiting at the wheel grinning and said he looked like a “real dodgy person” who waved at them as he drove away.
He said he was “literally 30 seconds, if that, behind her” but after she disappeared he thought she was hiding.
Lee described the moment Whiting smiled at him as “very uneasy”.
He added: “When it comes to feeling guilt about the situation, I did beat myself up for years.”
He said: “There’s never going to be a day when you’re going to turn round and be like: ‘I’m over that now.’ because that’s just not going to happen.” Luke added: “I always wonder where she would be. Whatever she would have been doing, she would have shined.” Sarah’s sister, Charlotte, 23, five years old at the time, told the programme she suffered anxiety attacks as she grew up. Sarah was abducted by Whiting as she played in countryside close to her grandparents’ home near Littlehampton, West Sussex. Her body was found in a field 15 miles away, 17 days later. Whiting, then 41, was sentenced to life imprisonment for her abduction and murder. After his conviction, it was revealed he had been jailed for four years in 1995 after admitting abducting and indecently assaulting a nine-yearold girl in nearby Crawley.
Sarah’s mother Sara Payne tells the documentary of the moment she saw Whiting in court for the first time and realised he “wasn’t a monster”.
She said: “I realised, he’s just a sad, lonely person that actually goes after children because he couldn’t have a relationship with an adult.
“And it sort of really hit home then, that I’d allowed him to take up far too much of my mind space, and I think it was at that moment, I thought: ‘No, no more.’” ¬
Sarah Payne: A Mother’s Story will be on Channel 5 tomorrow night at 9pm.