MISSING CHEF’S BEST
IT is a recurring dream that has haunted Jen King for the last 10 years. Her missing friend Claudia Lawrence strolls back through the door of their local one night.
And she is full of remorse for vanishing without trace.
“Claudia kind of goes all coy as she tries to explain where she’s been – and she says to me, ‘ Well, you know, it just spiralled out of control’, says Jen.
“And then I wake up and realise it’s not true. If only it was. I don’t think for one moment she’s responsible for herself going missing, but that’s what it’s like in my dream.”
Jen, 34, who once shared a house with Claudia, still lives in hope that detectives’ fears are wrong – and that the York chef, who should be celebrating her 45th birthday next week, was not murdered after she vanished in March, 2009.
Claudia’s disappearance was both shocking and utterly baffling. Not a single clue was left behind.
The last known contact was a text she sent to a friend at 8.23pm that night. She had also spoken to her parents Peter, 72, and her mum Joan, 75, that evening,
And after she failed to turn up for her 6am canteen shift at York University next morning, her mobile and the rucksack in which she carried her chef ’s outfit on her two-mile walk to work were never found.
In the decade since, North Yorkshire Police have spent £1 million on the case.
Claudia kind of goes all coy as she says to me ‘It just spiralled out of control’
PAL JEN KING ON DREAM SHE HAS ABOUT MiSSiNg fRiEND
AGONISING
And as she grieved for her missing pal, Jen found herself terrifyingly caught up in an investigation that focused on 35-year-old Claudia’s sex life. Five regulars at her local were arrested on suspicion of murder, all released without charge.
One was Jen’s partner, and six years after Claudia’s disappearance she had her home turned upside down by cold case detectives from a newly created Major Crime me Unit.
It was a full agonising year ar before the Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was no evidence linking him to the case.
Four years on, Jen says the he police obsession with Claudia’s sex x life still rankles.
“She was a single girl,” she says. “She was entitled to have dates ates and to go out with guys and do o whatever she wanted.
“There was nobody y serious I knew about at the e time she disappeared.”
“I don’t have any animosity towards the police. I have to believe they did what they did with the best of intentions – they were trying to find my friend. But all that should have happened in 2009. Then, we expected every single one of us to have our houses searched as part of the investigation. We would have welcomed police into our homes and let them tear the them apart if it would have satisfied th them we were innocent.
“But the way it was done – n nothing can quite prepare you for i it when you know you have done n nothing wrong.”
The friends met in 2006 when J Jen started working as a barmaid at the Nags Head, a few doors from Claudia’s home in Heworth. “The following year I ended up moving in with her when a relationship ended,” says Jen, who slips into the present tense from time to time as she talks of the pal p she misses so much. “We were