I fear I may never get justice for my beautiful daughter
eight, was travelling when she met Shoda in the Indian state of Goa in early 2015.
He persuaded her to move to Kashmir to live on his family’s houseboat on picturesque Dal Lake. Her parents begged her not to go.
Kate, also mum to Tom, 36, and Ben, 31, said that Sarah spent every waking hour cooking, cleaning, shopping and painting the boat.
Bank statements sent to her family home showed she had paid £6,500 into Shoda’s account.
Kate and Vic, a retired IT entrepreneur, were so worried they made a plan to travel to India and get their daughter to neighbouring Nepal.
Kate, who worked in marketing, said: “If I tried to call, she’d sometimes whisper, ‘I can’t talk now, Mummy’.
“I managed to speak to her the day before she died. She said, ‘I know what I’m doing Mummy, and I am leaving, trust me’. I replied, ‘Just get the hell out of there’. I went out for dinner with a friend who offered to take time off work to come to India with me. Of course, we now wish we’d gone out a lot earlier. There are so many ‘if onlys’.”
Kate and Vic instinctively knew Sarah was in trouble when the phone rang in the early hours of April 6.
She said: “I knew before Vic answered the phone. I didn’t want to answer it. Oh God, I thought I was losing my mind.” Kate can still recall the days after the murder in agonising detail. She said: “On one TV report, I saw a big box being carried out of the houseboat. It still tears me in pieces.”
A postmortem found Sarah died from stab wounds to her neck and lungs. Then her body was returned to Guernsey, where Vic had the excruciating task of identifying her.
Kate said: “We went to the funeral parlour a few days later and they showed us into the room. I can’t remember what I said to her. I just fell on my knees.
“All you could see was this little face, everything was totally bandaged up.
“I thought, ‘It doesn’t look like my Sarah, where is her beautiful hair?’ But a couple of my friends went back and washed her hair and put flowers in it.”
The family received hundreds of sympathy cards, including one from
When the phone rang I knew Sarah was in trouble before Vic answered it KATE GROVES ON LEARNING NEWS OF DAUGHTER’S MURDER