Pc Harper’s widow tells of wedding anniversary despair
THE widow of Pc Andrew Harper has spoken of “her endless sprawling dark” in an emotional message posted on social media to mark what would have been their first wedding anniversary.
Lissie Harper published the letter to family and friends just days before an Old Bailey jury cleared Pc Harper’s killers of murder, instead finding them guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter.
The couple had been married just four weeks when the 28-year-old police officer was dragged for a mile to his death by the getaway car as he tried to arrest three teenagers caught stealing a quad bike from a house in Berkshire in August last year.
In the message, Mrs Harper, 29, wrote: “I will never again know love like that” and then, in reference to their wedding day, added: “Twelve months since I walked down an aisle of incandescent light … it feels only yesterday that I stood in front of a vision of hope and happiness and love.”
She wrote of “the tears in your eyes that only I could see and the sheer happiness radiating from mine… No one will ever know a love like ours. A most perfect day that will swim in my mind forever”.
Of their anniversary, she said: “This day should have been wildly different, instead of celebrating with you on our first anniversary, I am alone in utter disbelief. How surreal it is that these days one year apart are at complete parallels, like a different world entirely. One of dazzling light and the other of endless sprawling dark. What I wouldn’t give to be back on that beautiful sunny day, dressed in white with your hand in mine and a lifetime of happiness swirling around our minds.”
Henry Long, 19, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, both 18, will be sentenced on Friday.
Concerns were voiced by the judge that jurors were at risk of intimidation in the first trial – abandoned due to the pandemic – and a juror dismissed in the second trial after smiling at the three killers while they sat in the dock and mouthing “Bye boys” to them in a friendly manner.
Sir Mike Penning, a former policing minister, will today write to Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, requesting she look at the case.
‘This day should have been wildly different, instead of celebrating with you on our first anniversary, I am alone’