Is that outfit really suitable when children are watching, Amanda?
It’s the choir made up of families of missing people tipped to make tomorrow’s final of Britain’s Got Talent. Here, one of the mothers tells how the disappearance of her son 27 years ago has destroyed her life
SHE recently joked that she was hoping to ‘spark complaints’ from viewers with her racy wardrobe choices for the Britain’s Got Talent live shows.
But Amanda Holden appeared to go a step too far last night for a show that is watched by many young children.
The 46-year-old, who also has two children, walked on to the stage for the semi-finals last night in a plunging khaki dress that served to prove she was bra-less. Her figure-hugging gown – slashed to the navel – showed off her cleavage and even host Ant McPartlin was taken aback. He remarked: ‘Look at what Amanda’s wearing… what Amanda isn’t wearing!’
Fellow judge David Walliams also took a dig at the star, telling a female choir: ‘You’re really classy, none of you are wearing a really inappropriate low-cut top.’
Holding on to Simon Cowell’s hand as she descended the stairs, the glamorous judge came dangerously close to revealing more than she bargained for as she headed to her seat. The show’s twitterati were quick to describe their shock. One posted: ‘Does Amanda Holden know this is a family show and doesn’t need to dress like a stripper?’
Another wrote: ‘Is it Amanda’s birthday? She’s dressed in that festive suit,’ while a third added: ‘I think David speaks on behalf of all of us about Amanda’s dress.’ Her racy outfit came after she joked at the weekend: ‘Will people be complaining to Ofcom? I hope so, I really do.’ She added: ‘I haven’t done my job if they aren’t!’
FOR emotional impact, few acts could compete with the choir preparing to sing their hearts out in the Britain’s Got Talent semi-finals tonight.
Their audition song was a beautifully poignant ballad called I Miss You, and it moved the celebrity panel — including Simon Cowell — and hosts Ant and Dec to tears.
How could it not? For this 30-piece choir was like no other, its singers performing in part for an audience that is not here to listen.
Formed by charity Missing People, it consists of several people who have endured — and continue to endure — the unimaginable agony of losing a loved one to an unknown fate.
Some of them have made national headlines, among them Peter Lawrence, whose daughter Claudia went missing in York eight years ago, and Rachel Elias, sister to missing Richey Edwards of the band Manic Street Preachers, who vanished from a London hotel in 1995.
Others, like 67-year- old Denise HorvathAllan, a gently spoken blonde from Richmond in west London, are less well-known. Yet the devastating pain and loss they feel is the same — a ‘rollercoaster to Hell’, as Denise puts it. ‘Life ends when you lose a loved one this way, especially a child,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t get easier, it gets harder with each passing day.’
And in Denise’s case, there have been so many of those days. She last saw her beloved 20-year-old only son, Charles, on a December day 27 years ago as she boarded a plane home to England from Montreal, Canada.
She’d flown out to visit him while he was backpacking, and they’d spent a blissful few days together. Her last image of her son was of him waving from the airport lounge. Five months later Charles vanished while working in a small tourist city in British Columbia. The circumstances of his disappearance remain mired in rumours and hearsay, but nothing has ever been proved. He was declared officially dead seven years ago, but his body has never been found. Caught in limbo between grief and hope, Denise, like many in the choir, has made it her life’s work to find out what happened to him — a quest that has cost her her business, her home, her marriage and her health.
As she speaks about her almost inconceivable agony, she hopes it will help people understand what drives her and her fellow choir members.
‘You have to keep going. How can you stop? As long as I can stand, walk and talk I will search for him until the day I die,’ she says.
Originally from Halifax, Charles was born in Canada, where Denise had moved aged 18 to work as a nanny, and met his father Max. Charles was born in 1968: ‘ He was the most beautiful baby, a clone of his father with a mop of dark brown hair,’ Denise remembers now.
The family returned to England, and while Denise and Max’s relationship broke down, Charles remained in contact with his father following his return to Canada.
After leaving school he announced to Denise — by then remarried to second husband Stuart, and a beauty therapist with her own salon — that he would like to spend a few months in the land of his birth.
‘I bought him a return ticket as part of his present for his 21st birthday, which fell the following August,’ recollects Denise. Charles left for Montreal in September 1988.
Three months later, Denise flew out to spend an early Christmas with him. Charles had stayed in regular contact via phone and fax.
On April 17, 1989, in what would be his final call home, mother and son discussed plans for a birthday rendezvous in Hong Kong, where Denise had spent her childhood. Four weeks later, Charles wrote to his mum via fax from Kelowna in British Columbia, asking her to look into booking an air ticket.
‘It was a lovely letter, full of chatter about his travels and his work,’ recalls Denise. ‘ He asked after our cats, and sent his love to my mum, his nanna Edith, who he adored.’
It would prove to be his last contact. With the days rolling by, and awaiting a call from her son to confirm he wanted her to book his Hong Kong flight, Denise started to feel uneasy. By the end of May, she called the Kelowna detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
‘They didn’t take it remotely seriously — to them this was a 20-yearold guy living the high life away from home,’ she says. ‘But I knew in my heart something was badly wrong.’
Weeks passed in which an increasingly frantic Denise repeatedly telephoned the police only to find herself rebuffed until, on August 10, 1989, she demanded that Charles be officially reported missing.
But the situation did not improve. While Charles now had police file number 1989-21784 to his name, the local detachment remained uninterested. ‘They were not only unhelpful but hostile and intimidating. They saw me as a nuisance,’ says Denise.
She knew that if she wanted to discover what had happened to her son she would have to travel to Canada to find out for herself. She spent thousands of pounds on adverts in local newspapers across the country before flying out in June 1990.
On arrival in Kelowna, Denise and her mother Edith were able to piece together some of her son’s movements. He had been staying at a local campsite, Tiny Town, doing odd jobs to pay his way.
On May 26 he had undertaken some work at a local theme park and later that day cashed his pay cheque at a local bank. ‘From then on we don’t know what happened,’ says Denise quietly. ‘The trail went cold.’
By now the police shared her conviction Charles had come to some harm. ‘The officer told me: “It’s the belief of this detachment that your son is dead. We may not find his body or what happened to him.’’ It was utterly callous.’
With nowhere left to turn, a griefstricken Denise had no option but to return home, where she sleepwalked through her days, hoping for news.
It would take another two years before she could afford to return, in March 1992. She returned to the same motel, and during her stay received an anonymous letter informing her Charles had been knocked out by two men while at a party at the campsite and had died. His body, the note continued, was in the lake by the bridge.
Denise passed the information to the police. ‘You swing between fear and hope. I desperately wanted resolution, but at the same time, if it
was Charles…,’ she peters out. An underwater camera search of Okanagan Lake — paid for by Denise at a cost of $1,000 a day — did find a body, but it was an elderly suicide victim, not Charles.
It was the first of many false leads. Over the years, several more bodies have been recovered from the lake and in the logging country around Kelowna. none was Charles.
And so for Denise the horror goes on. For nearly three decades she has searched tirelessly, returning to Canada as often as she can.
It is a search that has taken an enormous toll: her second marriage has crumbled, she has lost her beauty therapy business — which she sold to help pay off the thousands of pounds worth of debts she has racked up in travel, accommodation and printing posters and leaflets — and even her family home had to be sold.
Today she lives in a smaller rented property. ‘ There is no money left. nothing,’ she says.
Her health has suffered, too: she has stress-induced psoriasis and has had several trapped nerves from sitting too long at her computer, endlessly surfing for even the tiniest piece of information.
Then there is the isolation. Her parents, grandmother and Charles’s father have all died, and there are few people left who really understand her ongoing grief. ‘It’s a very lonely place when you have lost someone this way,’ she says. ‘ The years go on and people don’t know what to say to you. They don’t cross the street exactly, but the phone calls stop. Some say: “But it was so long ago.” But this is my only son.’
Joining the Missing People Choir,
which was formed in 2014, has, at least, allowed Denise to spend time with people who can truly empathise. ‘The circumstances might be different, but we all share the same pain,’ she says.
Tonight, the choir will find out if they have made it to the final, while some have tipped them as the series winner.
For some this means the trophies of fame and fortune, but for Denise it’s something different. ‘ The bigger the platform for us the better,’ she says. ‘It takes only one person to recognise someone and help bring them home.’
Today she remains convinced that her son lost his life in the summer of 1989. ‘how and why I don’t know, but I do know something terrible happened to him that prevented him from calling home,’ she says. ‘All I want to do now is find his body and bury him.’
She has had to prepare herself for the possibility that she may go to her grave without knowing the truth. But she will never stop trying. Of course, Denise’s isn’t the only heartbreaking story in the choir, as LUCY HOLDEN reveals here… MAN WHO MADE SIMON COWELL CRY PeTeR BOXeLL, 70, whose son, Lee, disappeared in 1988 when he was 15, wrote the lyrics of the Missing People Choir’s audition song. The moving ballad I Miss You brought the BGT judges to tears. Lee, from South London, had gone to a football match but never came home.
One theory is that he got caught up in trouble at an unofficial church youth club in the area known as The Shed. It was being run by a paedophile called William Lambert, who was using it to sexually abuse young girls.
Lambert was jailed for 11 years in 2011. One police theory is that Lee, who sometimes went to the club, saw abuse taking place and was Never give up: Missing People Choir (inset) member Denise Horvath-Allan has searched for son Charles for 27 years killed. Despite an extensive search, his body was never found.
In 2013, Peter Boxell had a dream that he was singing to his son Lee, and woke up with some of the lyrics still in his head. The Missing People charity introduced him to James hawkins, a musician already in charge of several other choirs. The Missing People Choir was James’s brainchild. The result of their collaboration was I Miss You. MOTHER WHO WILL NOT GIVE UP HOPE SARAh GODWIn’S son Quentin — known as Q to his friends — was last seen alive in 1992 when he told his sister that he was off to his after-school supermarket job.
The 18-year- old lived in new Zealand with his family. The Godwins had emigrated there from their hometown of Surrey.
The only clue was a note found in the teenager’s bedroom. ‘You could read it as a suicide note or just a deeply unhappy note,’ Sarah says. Quentin had been diagnosed as bipolar. In 2014, an inquest concluded that Quentin was dead. however, his mother continues to believe that he could be alive, and maintains hope. SISTER OF MISSING FAMOUS GUITARIST RACheL eLIAS’S older brother Richey edwards was the former guitarist in the Manic Street Preachers. In 1995, hours before the band were due to fly to America for a promotional tour, he checked out of their hotel.
he drove to the Severn Bridge in Wales, a known suicide spot, abandoning his car. his body was never found. Since his disappearance, fans have ‘spotted’ him all over the world. Rachel has vowed never to abandon her search. CLAUDIA’S FATHER NEEDS ANSWERS PeTeR LAWRenCe is the father of Claudia Lawrence, the 35-yearold chef who vanished in York in 2009. She was last seen in the afternoon of March 18, and reported missing when she failed to turn up for work the following morning.
Six weeks after her disappearance, police reclassified her missing person’s case to a suspected murder enquiry.
‘I’ve always thought she was probably picked up on the way to work by someone she at least recognised, in the very early morning in that quiet residential area. What happened after that, I have no idea,’ says Peter. YOUNGEST MEMBER WAS LEFT IN LIMBO eMMA CULLInGFORD, 33, is the youngest member of the choir. She spent an agonising month wondering what had happened to her 57year-old mother, Sandra hall, who went missing from her home in Bognor Regis in 2013, whilst struggling with bipolar disorder.
After telling family she was heading to church, she instead caught a train to the nearby village of Barnham and took her own life.
It took a month for police to find her body, leaving emma and her sister in ‘agony’.
‘It’s strange to say I’m lucky as I got closure. I can’t imagine that feeling of not knowing lasting for decades,’ says emma.