Real-life ‘Missing’
Who abducted Katrice Lee?
In October 2016, nearly four decades after the disappearance of his own daughter, Richard Lee turned on his television to watch the second series of the BBC fictional crime drama, The Missing. He had no prior knowledge of the series and says he had not been consulted by the programmemakers, but watched dumbfounded as a plot unfolded bearing cruel symmetry to the real-life story that devastated his own family.
On November 28 1981, Katrice Lee went missing on her second birthday from a Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) shopping complex in Schloss Neuhaus, Paderborn, West Germany, near to the British garrison where Richard was posted as a staff sergeant with the 15/19 King’s Royal Hussars.
The Missing begins similarly, with a young girl disappearing from a British Army garrison in Germany. But in the programme, the girl – or at least someone purporting to be her – returns to her anguished parents after an absence spanning 10 years. Art may mirror real life to a point, but for the Lee family there has been no such closure.
Richard, who is 68 and nowadays lives in Hartlepool, says even today he remains in the same state of agonised disbelief as when he first discovered his daughter was missing. “My heart went into my mouth,” he says. “And it feels like it is still there today.”
This week, the Royal Military Police (RMP) will commence a major search of the area near to where Katrice vanished. Around 100 soldiers will comb the banks of the River Alme during a five-week forensic excavation. At the same time, an e-fit image has been produced of a man reportedly seen at the NAAFI supermarket holding a child similar to Katrice who was spotted in a green saloon car near to the river following her disappearance.
It has taken nearly four decades for the family to get to this point, and in the Nineties, Richard and his wife Sharon (with whom he has another daughter, Natasha) divorced, in part because of the strain. Like many parents of the missing, Richard and his ex-wife cling on to the possibility that against all odds Katrice may still be alive. He believes his daughter may have been snatched and sold for profit to a childless couple.
“I have never lost my hope,” he says. “These past years have been like walking down a dark tunnel just feeling the walls. There is a tiny light at the end, but it hasn’t yet diminished.” Lee joined the King’s Royal Hussars as a boy soldier in 1967 and by the time he was posted to Paderborn had already served in Northern Ireland. Sharon was pregnant with Katrice at the time, while Natasha had been born five years previously.
Like her parents, she has campaigned tirelessly throughout her life for answers as to her sister’s disappearance. Compared to the constant violence of Northern Ireland, Paderborn was considered a more relaxed posting. The Lee family lived in military accommodation away from the main barracks in a complex of homes nicknamed “Legoland” for their blocky architecture.
Richard Lee had just returned from an exercise and the garrison of around 2,000 soldiers was beginning to disband for Christmas leave. Sharon’s sister, Wendy, and her husband, Cliff, were visiting that day for Katrice’s birthday party, which was planned that afternoon.
Lee recalls his daughter as “very forthright and intelligent” and a “daddy’s girl”, with a smile that still causes him to choke up whenever it springs into his mind.
They had already bought Katrice’s toys but needed to visit the NAAFI to stock up on a few extra party supplies. Richard drove them down in his Austin Allegro estate and dropped Sharon, Wendy and Katrice off while he attempted to find a parking space.
He waited outside, but after a while “realised something wasn’t right”. He then walked into the shop and saw his wife in tears in the manager’s office.
Katrice – who was wearing red wellies, a turquoise duffel coat and tartan dress – had vanished in the busy supermarket when Sharon left her with Wendy near the checkout after returning to get some crisps.
The initial investigation led by the Royal Military Police focused on the theory that Katrice had fallen into the River Lippe, which is a tributary of the Alme. Lee describes the investigation as a “complete and utter sham”, and says the family were shrugged off and lied to by those in command.
Statements from shop staff were not taken for weeks while details of an eye condition Katrice suffered and could have helped identify her were not passed on. He says it felt as if the regiment was closing ranks around him. “In the immediate aftermath, you would have thought my family had cancer,” he recalls. “You would walk down the street and people would cross the road.”
Timothy Irish, now 56, was a trooper with the King’s Royal Hussars based at Paderborn at the time, and was in the garrison the day of her disappearance. He recalls being told to report to the guard room with his fellow troops, and informed they were to be loaded up on to Bedford trucks to help search for a little girl who had gone missing.
“I can remember being waistdeep in the side of a lake that the river feeds into with a rope on a grappling hook throwing it into the water and dragging it back,” he says. “Unfortunately, nothing came up.”
Irish says at no time were they informed of who they were looking for and at sundown he was pulled off the search.
“I believe the more senior ranks among us knew who it was, but we didn’t. For us that was it. We didn’t get told anymore and didn’t hear anymore. It was almost as if it just got swept under the carpet.”
Eventually, the Lee family left Germany without their missing daughter and the case went cold. “We just felt incomplete,” Richard says. “It was such a hard thing to do.”
The Lee family has campaigned against the Ministry of Defence for years to see the paperwork relating to the case, but so far has been refused on the basis that the case remains open.
A re-assessment in 2000 led to the arrest of a former soldier, who was released without charge. A Crimewatch appeal in 2012 (and again in 2017) sparked a flurry of new information as well as a photofit of how Katrice may look today. The latest RMP investigation is backed by Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, who has praised the “courage and dignity of the Lee family”. While scathing of the early investigations, Richard – who is travelling out to Germany tomorrow – says it now seems as if they are finally being listened to by the RMP. Perhaps, he says, over the next few weeks, he and Sharon will learn of their daughter’s fate.
But even as they watch soldiers picking their way along the muddy riverbank, the agonising hope remains that one day their daughter could still come home.
‘My heart went into my mouth … and it feels like it is still there today’