17 years on, Bashir confesses: I did take clothes of Babes in the Wood schoolgirl
DISGRACED former BBC reporter Martin Bashir has admitted he took the clothes of a murdered nineyear-old girl that were then lost – after claiming for almost 20 years he could not remember doing so.
In a handwritten letter to the girl’s mother Michelle Hadaway, seen by The Mail on Sunday, Bashir accepted for the first time that he worked on a BBC programme about her daughter Karen’s murder and had been entrusted with her clothes.
He said he was ‘deeply sorry’ that the clothing in which Karen was murdered – which he revealed he took ‘to the BBC’ – went missing.
Karen Hadaway and her friend Nicola Fellows were murdered in Brighton in 1986 in what became known as the Babes in the Wood killings. It was not until 2018 before roofer Russell Bishop was convicted of their deaths. He’d been acquitted at an earlier trial in 1987.
In 1991, Bashir, who was then working for the BBC programme Public Eye, persuaded Karen’s grieving mother to hand over the clothes after promising to subject them to DNA tests in the hope of identifying the killer.
The family asked for them to be returned in 2004 so they could be given to Sussex Police, who were reviewing the case, only to be told they had gone missing.
Despite Bashir leaving Michelle with a signed receipt, his agent John Miles said in 2004 that the reporter ‘genuinely couldn’t remember anything about the case’.
Asked about the clothing in May this year, Bashir said: ‘I may have lost it but I don’t remember.’
In November, The Mail on Sunday revealed that BBC Director General Tim Davie had offered the Corporation’s ‘sincere apologies’ to Ms Hadaway after a new inquiry had failed to track down the clothes, which included Karen’s school sweatshirt, T-shirt, knickers and vest. He also asked Bashir to apologise directly to her. The MoS can reveal that two weeks later Phil Harrold, Mr Davie’s chief of staff, sent Ms Hadaway a sealed envelope containing Bashir’s 242-word handwritten letter.
‘Martin Bashir has sent us the enclosed envelope to pass on to you,’ Mr Harrold said. ‘We have not opened this... and nor are we aware of its contents.’
In the letter, Bashir confirmed that Ms Hadaway had ‘kindly’ met with him and provided Karen’s clothing in the hope that it would help research for an ‘important programme’. He acknowledged that the loss of the clothes must have added to Ms Hadaway’s pain and suffering – something he described as ‘a matter of deep regret’.
Ms Hadaway last night branded Bashir’s apology as ‘utter nonsense’ and ‘too little, too late’. She added: ‘When I met him, my husband had just had a breakdown and been in hospital for seven weeks – completely broken because he couldn’t do anything about his little girl’s killer. The BBC was our last hope.
‘We’d been let down by everyone. Bashir spent hours with me, we met twice – how could he have forgotten me? When he pretended he never met me, I felt more powerless than ever. My husband died not long after of a heart attack. His heart was broken, literally.’
She is also angry that Bashir used his letter to highlight how Sussex Police had already obtained the forensic evidence it required from the clothes before they went missing.
‘The original forensics were a disaster,’ she said. ‘That’s why the BBC were planning a programme.’
Bill Warner, a former detective inspector who reviewed the case, told the MoS in September that it would without a doubt have been useful for police to have had the clothes for forensic tests in 2004.
Ms Hadaway is now taking legal advice and is considering pursuing the BBC for compensation.
Bashir, the BBC’s former Religion Editor, quit the Corporation in May before the publication of a damning report by former Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson into the deception he deployed to land his 1995 interview with Princess Diana.
‘Bashir pretended that he had never met me’