I waited 35 years to learn truth about father’s death

TRACY King refers to her father as Mike in the book and other names have also been changed. “His death was in a shopping centre in the middle of my estate and very public,” said Ms King. “Five boys were originally arrested for his murder. One of them was charged with manslaughter but he was eventually acquitted. They went to the same school as me, a couple of years above, so I avoided going in. For 35 years we thought there had been a miscarriage of justice. Eventually though we learned our family had been told the wrong story the whole time. “For so long we had believed it was a malicious gang who had got away with it.”

It wasn’t until 2020, when Ms King reached out to one of the boys who was arrested but never charged, that things began to change. She had reassured him she wasn’t harbouring any ill-will or blame. Instead she was trying to piece together her father’s final moments. In a video call, he told her about an argument that had gone wrong, in which her dad was not the ‘luckless victim’ she had always wanted to believe. The boy cleared of manslaughter was not a karate expert, he told her, and the pair barely knew each other.

Neither had the accused lad jumped from a wall to land a karate chop to the back of her dad’s head. Instead he’d clumsily defended himself in a scuffle after her father lunged at him.

Ms King was told the group had tried to help her dad after he collapsed but two men had rushed over and said they’d ‘better scarper’ so they did. She later spoke to the boy who was cleared of manslaughter. They embraced and Tracy realised she ‘had to accept’ that the reality she and her family had lived with since 1988 was “not the truth”.

‘Learning to Think’, is out now in hardback, eBook and audio.