‘My missing Claudia is always on my mind’
Eleven years after he last saw her, Peter Lawrence’s grief is sharper than ever, he tells Cara Mcgoogan
The continuous grief Peter Lawrence has felt ever since his daughter, Claudia, vanished on a March morning in 2009, always sharpens at Christmas. A time when the family would be cheerful together is now a stark reminder of their loss, he says. “But it’s something we have to go through.”
The last Peter heard from his 35-year-old daughter, a chef at York University, was a text message on the evening of March 19 2009. Her Vauxhall Corsa had broken down, but she was happy to walk to work rather than borrow his car. The next day, she vanished.
When we meet at his bungalow in Heworth, York, there is little to remind Peter, 73, of Claudia, save for a small cardboard box bearing her picture and the all-too familiar words: “Missing. Have you seen her?” He doesn’t display the Christmas cards or presents from her which he still keeps because, he explains shakily, “She’s always there, she’s always on my mind.”
Claudia, who would now be
45, was an adventurous child who loved riding. She grew up in Malton, a village near York, with her mother, Joan, and Peter (they separated in 1996), and elder sister, Ali. Claudia was the less academic of the two, but she cut her own path, going to catering college and becoming a chef.
“She was always quite a shy person,” Peter, a retired partner at a solicitors’ firm, reflects. “With her good friends she could get quite lively, but she’d turn away from a camera.”
The last time Claudia was seen alive was on her way home from work, a journey immortalised in CCTV footage. She was due to meet her friends Suzy Cooper and Jen King at the local Nags Head pub, the centre of her social life. But she never appeared.
“I was worried, because it just wasn’t like her to not turn up,” says King in a recent Channel 5 documentary, who remembered her friend as “beautiful” and “lovely”.
Claudia did, however, text both her parents that night; Peter about her car, and her mum for a chitchat. She said she was going to bed around 9pm. The final message on her phone arrived from a friend in Cyprus, but it isn’t clear whether she ever read it.
On the morning of March 20, Claudia’s colleague at Goodricke College called Peter to say she hadn’t arrived for her 6am shift. A search of the house where she lived alone, and which still stands as she left it, led Peter to believe she had left that day for work. Her fluffy, white slippers were by the front door and there were unwashed dishes on the side. Her chef whites and mobile phone were gone, but her handbag, with her driving licence, bank cards and passport, was hung on the end of her bed. At 12.08pm, Claudia’s phone was intentionally switched off, having never left the York area.
Over the past 10 years, North Yorkshire Police have twice investigated Claudia’s disappearance, reportedly spending more than £1.5 million on the initial investigation and a cold case review. More than 627 police officers have been involved, collecting more than 2,500 witness statements, looking at over 400 fingerprints and reviewing 159 people.
But holes still remain, and while five men have been held on suspicion of murder, and a further four have been arrested or questioned under caution, all have been released without charge.
Over the years, theories have included that she fled in secret to Cyprus, that she was sex-trafficked to Amsterdam, and that she was a victim of convicted killer Christopher
Halliwell. Peter remains unconvinced. “She had her own house, a good job,” he says. “She wasn’t a person likely to be sex trafficked. And she wouldn’t have just disappeared into thin air.”
Instead, he believes someone Claudia knew, or at least recognised, abducted her on the walk to work that morning; the police agree this is the most likely explanation. With every year that passes, it is harder to hold on to hope that his daughter is still alive.
“It’s very difficult after more than 10 years to think that she might be – or what she might be going through if she is,” he says. “It gets more difficult as time goes on. It’s the not knowing that eats into you.”
For her part, Joan refuses to believe Claudia is dead, she told the documentary. “Until you get the knock on the door, I still have hope.”
The police investigation is now “reactive”, but with each new documentary and anniversary, more people come forward. “It’s nice to know people are still prepared to contact the police,” says Peter. “We just need it to be more significant. One day it will be.”
He implores anyone with knowledge of what happened to Claudia to break their silence and end the family’s torment.
On the 10-year anniversary of Claudia’s disappearance in March, York Minster held a service for her. Peter missed it – he had just suffered a heart attack. “I should have been there but I wasn’t,” he says. “I was lying in hospital.” Things were made worse too, he adds, by the fact Claudia’s birthday would have been just weeks before.
In 2011, Peter began campaigning for Claudia’s Law which, since coming into effect in June, allows relatives of missing people to take control of their estates before they are presumed deceased. One family has enacted it to date, but Claudia’s own is yet to decide if they will use it themselves. “We need to talk about it as a family,” Peter says.
Claudia’s home has been frozen in time since she disappeared. Many of her possessions were taken as evidence, but her clothes still hang in the wardrobe. Peter visits every now and then, mostly to satisfy insurers; he sees it as “a shell that has to be looked after”.
He has found solace through the Missing People charity’s choir and, when we meet, has just returned from their carol concert in Edinburgh. Being part of that community “helps a lot because many of the people in it are in similar positions,” he says. “People very kindly say they know what you’re going through, but they don’t.”
Time has created such a gulf between father and daughter that, after a long pause, he says he can’t remember their last Christmas together. He does, however, cherish her final gift: a musical pedometer, typical of her tendency to “buy funny presents”.
It is now their 11th Christmas without Claudia, says Peter, inhaling sharply. “We’re not doing anything specific but we always think about her and the fact she’s not with us.”
His elder daughter and two grandchildren, aged 11 and 15, alternate Christmases between him and Joan; this being his fallow year, Peter will spend it with friends.
The family rarely talk to the boys about their aunt, only one of whom met her. But, “they know who she was,” says Peter, who is determined that he won’t die before finding out what happened to Claudia.
Until then, whenever he goes for a walk beneath a blue sky, he asks a question: “Claudia, are you seeing this?” One day, he hopes she will answer.
‘People very kindly say they know what you’re going through, but they don’t’