‘I will never forget her beautiful face’
Lisa Hession, 14, was killed on a cold December night. Chief reporter NEAL KEELING reflects on a case that has stayed with him for three decades
33 YEARS AFTER MURDER OF TEENAGER, M.E.N. REPORTER RETURNS TO THE UNSOLVED CASE THAT STILL HAUNTS HIM
I WILL never forget her beautiful face.
Bright-eyed, lush wavy brown hair, and half a smile. It is a school photo which haunts me and thousands of people in the town of Leigh. The girl is Lisa Jane Hession. Her picture, in which she wore a green cardigan, crisp white shirt, and Bedford High tie, was issued by police.
Another picture, taken while on holiday in Majorca, in which she is suntanned and glowing in her favourite turquoise dress, on the brink of the womanhood she would never know.
In a room at Leigh Police Station, Det Supt Terry Millard, then head of GMP’s Serious Crime Squad, spoke to a throng of regional and national journalists.
It was the morning of December 10, 1984, and it was the first murder I had covered as a reporter. I was 25-yearsold and it was a test, professionally and emotionally.
Stark details of how 14-year-old Lisa had been found two days earlier, and a predictable but justified warning to parents, it quickly transformed into a front page story.
After the press conference I drove the short distance to Lisa’s home in Bonnywell Road at the junction of Eton Street.
Today, the 1930s estate looks almost identical, except for a few streets of new housing. Neat, clean, well-kept avenues of semi-detached homes with a mill close to the town centre dominating the immediate horizon.
In 1984, newsroom ethics were not what they are now. Three times I was sent to knock on the door of Lisa’s home to try and speak to her mother, Christine. I had walked up garden paths before when there had been a death in the family, but never when a loved one had been murdered.
Christine answered each time and spoke softly from behind the door. She told me she understood why I had to call but did not feel up to talking.
Her civility and politeness when I was intruding into unimaginable grief has remained with me.
As was common practice 33 years ago, especially in close-knit communities, I remember the curtains of neighbours’ houses in Bonnywell Road being closed all day in a mark of respect for Lisa’s family.
Lisa’s attacker has never faced justice, which amplified the poignancy of my walk this week along Bonnywell Road and the alleyway where she died from asphyxia.
In a sexually-motivated attack, the killer gripped her striped T-shirt around her neck with one hand and had his other over her mouth.
A man walking his dog with his 13-year-old son found Lisa in a ginnel behind Rugby Road, at five minutes before midnight on Saturday, December 8, 1984.
She was lying on her back at the back gate of a house.
As I walked back from the alley to Bonnywell Road, the sadness deepened. She had been 100 yards from home and safety. Dark clouds refused to let in any glimmer of winter sun as I retraced her final steps to nearby Buck Street - the last place she was seen alive.
On the day she died Lisa had been to a Christmas party at a friend’s house in Leigh Road, about two miles away.
A typical pop music-obsessed teenager, she would have danced to the chart-topping The Power Of Love, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Christine had allowed her to go, on condition she was back for 10.30pm.
She left the party at about 10.15pm, kissing her boyfriend Craig Newell, then 16, goodbye at the gate.
She walked through the town centre and onto St Helens Road, before she was seen turning into Buck Street. At that point she was a minute walk from