Killer drove past and waved with Sarah in his van, says her brother
THE killer of Sarah Payne waved and smiled at her brother as he drove her to her death.
In a chilling interview, Lee Payne, who was 13 when his eight-year- old sister was abducted in West Sussex in July 2000, recalled the moment Roy Whiting passed him in his white van. He had no idea his sister had been snatched and was inside Whiting’s vehicle. Instead he thought she was hiding in a crop field where they had been playing.
Mr Payne said: ‘The corn was quite high, it was above our heads, and Sarah had fallen over. She decided she wanted to go home, so she stormed off.
‘She beat me out of the field, walked around the road which is 100 metres, if that. By the time I was there, she was gone. I was literally 30 seconds, if that, behind her. As I was walking up the road, Whiting drove the other way in his van, gave me a little wave as he went.’
He added: ‘He gave me quite a big smile ... very scruffy and dirty, kind of like a mechanic who hadn’t washed in weeks. Horrible yellow teeth, and just looked like a really dodgy person. The way he smiled was very uneasy, didn’t make me feel comfortable at all.
‘And the way he was kind of speeding past me, I mean I was a young kid walking down a country lane and he was kind of hurtling past me which
‘He looked a really dodgy person’
was a bit intimidating. I knew there was something off about him, he wasn’t up to any kind of good.’
Mr Payne said it took him until the day after Sarah’s disappearance to think about having seen the van. He immediately told the police.
Sarah’s other siblings, Luke and Charlotte – who were 12 and five at the time – also told an upcoming Channel 5 documentary of the impact their sister’s murder had had on them. Luke said he struggled to sleep and ‘dreads’ going to bed ‘because it’s just you and your thoughts’. Charlotte said until she was 18 she ‘was too scared to even go out of the house sometimes’.
Sarah’s mother, Sara, told the documentary – which airs tomorrow night at 9pm – the final words she said to her young daughter were: ‘Be good. Do as your brothers say. Stay close.’
She said her children waved at her as they went off to play, adding: ‘I waved back, and that was about it.’
Recalling the four-week murder trial, she said: ‘Roy Whiting never looked at me. At all. Not the whole time he was giving evidence, not the whole time we were sat next to each other.’
Whiting was convicted of Sarah’s abduction and murder in December 2001 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. In 2010 he had his 50-year jail term reduced by ten years by a High Court judge.
He abducted Sarah near the home of her grandparents in Kingston Gorse.