I’m joining the police to keep Mum’s memory alive
Her WPC mother was murdered on her 4th birthday. Now, as the prime suspect is finally arrested 14 years later, Lydia Beshenivsky makes this astonishing heart-rending pledge...
AGED 18, Lydia Beshenivsky is the spitting image of her late mother, murdered police officer Sharon. Those who knew the 38-year-old constable before she was shot dead on her daughter’s fourth birthday say she laughs like her as well. She’d like to be a policewoman too, just like Mum — much to her father’s understandable horror.
‘They all say I’m just like her, but I don’t remember her at all,’ says Lydia.
‘I wish I did. There’s just a hole where she used to be and no memories to fill it. There’s literally nothing there. It’s become more of a heartache as I’ve grown up because, obviously, I want to know her. You think, “I wish I could do this with her or that with her.” But you can’t. She’s gone.’
Lydia’s brother Paul Junior, 21, puts an arm around his sister as her pretty face crumples.
Two months ago, Lydia celebrated her 18th birthday. The same day she went to her mother’s police memorial in Bradford, as she does every year, to lay some flowers.
‘I’ve done it since I was 15,’ she says. ‘My birthday still gets celebrated, but thoughts of Mum are still there. You think, “why did she have to die on my birthday? Why did she have to die at all? Why are there such sick people out there?” ’ She’s not just referring to the gang who shot her mother dead as she responded to a robbery at a travel agent in Bradford in 2005.
‘About a week before my 18th birthday, I started getting messages on social media from a lot of Asians who were all related,’ she says. ‘They were saying, “I know who your mum is. My cousin killed her.’’ ’
Lydia sent the messages to her mother’s colleague, PC Teresa Milburn, who was also shot on that terrible day but survived to give evidence at a trial a year later. Lydia hasn’t heard from the despicable trolls since. This is a particularly difficult lt time for PC Beshenivsky’s children.
On January 14, the man accused of being the gang’s mastermind, Piran an Ditta Khan, 71, was finally arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a 15-year ar manhunt. He is the seventh suspect ct to be charged in connection with th Sharon’s murder.
He appeared in court in Islamabad ad last week where his extradition was as discussed. He will remain in custody dy until another hearing on Wednesday.
You only need to spend five minutes es with Lydia’s father Paul to know he’d ’d far sooner see him tried in the country ry to which he fled, where justice demands ds an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. ‘It would be better to see him in a Pakistani prison where he wouldn’t n’t get treated as well as he would over er here,’ Paul says.
Indeed, such is the leniency in Britain in that most of the armed gang involved ed in PC Beshenivsky’s murder were re released before her children reached ed the adulthood. ‘One got eight years but didn’t even do four. One got 20 and was out in ten. It’s when you get that call telling you one of them is just being released that you think to yourself, “really?” he adds.
Paul, 57, was told 24 hours before Khan’s arrest was made public that he had been caught.
‘Bradford police rang on January 14 saying they’d got somebody and were 99 per cent sure it’s him.’
It is the fourth time since his wife’s death that he has had his hopes raised. In December 2006, police thought they had pinned him down, but when they got there someone had spirited him away. Paul adds: ‘ Three years afterwards they had another lead but nothing came of it. The last time must have been about 18 months ago.
‘When they rang this time and confirmed it was him you feel . . .’ Paul’s face reddens as emotion overwhelms him. ‘You just hope this will bring closure,’ he says. PC Beshenivsky was just nine months into her job when she was shot dead while responding to an armed robbery on the afternoon of Lydia’s fourth birthday.
She had wrapped her daughter’s presents, baked the cake and was nearing the end of her shift when she answered the call to go a travel agent, where an attack alarm had been activated. Her last words to her husband were, “make sure you’re home early”. ea He was — but she never returned to the Yorkshire moors farm where they th raised their children.
Such was the horror of that day that ne neither Lydia nor Paul Jr can remember be life before it. ‘Everything is a kind of blur,’ says Paul P Jr, who was seven at the time. ‘I look at photos and remember some th things but, apart from the them, there’s no not much else.
‘I find that harder than anything, not be being able to remember the past.’
He, like his father, prefers to ‘brush hi his sadness under the carpet’.
‘I know Dad doesn’t like speaking ab about it so it doesn’t get brought up be between us,’ he says. ‘He knows I don’t lik like speaking about it either. But Ly Lydia’s quite open about it.’
Khan was arrested on what would ha have been their mother’s 53rd birthday. ‘T ‘That was really strange’ says Lydia. ‘I didn’t know he’d been caught until Dad told me that night but when I was driving home from work [at a nearby livery stable] I sensed Mum was around me. I just went cold. It felt really weird, not frightening, just cold.
‘But his arrest doesn’t change anything. It hasn’t brought her back.
‘When I think about what she did and what she could have done . . . ’ She pauses, then thrusts her chin in the air. ‘I’m applying to join the police to
‘I had a sick message saying “my cousin killed your mum” ’
‘I see photos and want to follow in her footsteps’
‘I can’t wait to get that police uniform on’
keep her name alive.’ This is the first time Lydia has spoken publicly about her wish to pursue the career that took her mother’s life. She told her father two years ago, shortly after West Yorkshire Police presented her with her mother’s badge number, 6410, on her 16th birthday. He hoped it would be a passing fad, like the week she decided to go vegetarian, but it isn’t. ‘My heart sort of sank when she told me,’ says Paul. ‘Not because of what she wants to do but because of what’s happened.’ Paul Jr continues. ‘I’ve already lost one member of my family, I don’t want to lose another. ‘I was cross when she told me, but if that’s what she wants to do, it’s what she wants to do.’ He looks at his father and you sense this is a conversation they have shared many times. A keen equestrian like her mother,
Lydia achieved a distinction in her Level 2 Horse Care and Management diploma and is now completing Level 3.
Last summer she attended West Yorkshire Police’s Mounted Section in Wakefield for a week’s work experience and has now set her heart on joining them.
‘I worked as a groom for a week and it just opened my eyes. I thought, “I really want to do this.” Now I can’t wait to get that uniform on,’ she says.
‘When I see photos of my mum I feel proud to say she was my mum because she looked after her community. Now I just want to follow in her footsteps.’
You can see why her dad worries. Paul would do anything to protect his children. He says telling them and their half-brother Samuel, 27 — Sharon’s son from a previous relationship — that their mother was not coming home was the hardest thing he has ever done. Paul says: ‘ What I find bizarre is I’ve lost my mother and my father but when I see pictures of them I don’t feel sadness.
‘Yet, with Sharon, even when I talk about her now, I fill up. It’s 15 years on and it’s still raw.’
He wells up as he says this. ‘I don’t like speaking about it because I don’t want to promote sadness. I went to therapy after it happened.
‘This therapist must have been 25. I said to her: “Have you ever lost anybody in your life?” She hadn’t. I said, “how can you sit there and tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing?” That’s when our conversation ended.
‘She wrote her notes up and I got to read her report. She wrote, “mentally unstable” and highlighted it.
‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just the way I deal with things — brush it under the carpet. I think it’s because every time it’s brought up you go back to that moment and relive it. When I saw the police car at the top of the drive, I thought it was her coming home.
‘That was the start,’ he says. ‘The biggest thing that sticks in my mind is thinking how the hell I was going to explain it to them all. Obviously I had to do it. I couldn’t get someone else to do it, but I just didn’t know what to say or how they were going to react.’ The children screamed, shouted, sobbed. Lydia says she cried because her brother wept, Paul Jr because his father was in pieces and his dad because . . . well, who wouldn’t sob to hear a four-year-old girl asking her Daddy what it felt like to die.
‘We weren’t the easiest kids to control. I remember when you were little you were quite an angry child,’ Lydia says to her brother. ‘Dad bought him a big teddy. He used to tie it to the bed, destroy it, punch it — everything.’
‘I can remember the day it happened like it was yesterday,’ says Paul Jr, who works with his father in his building and landscaping company. ‘ I remember being picked up from school, going home. Dad telling me, Lydia and Sam what had happened.
‘I didn’t understand what with being so young. “What do you mean she’s not coming home?” He said she was a star in heaven.
‘I’ve not cried for a long time until recently but I used to cry every night or at least every week. I was just missing her. It wasn’t where is she, but why? “Why her? Why can’t you be here now?”
‘It was hard,’ says their father, who admits he was probably overprotective over the years. ‘You want the best for your children but you can’t save them from that pain. I wanted to take them away from s society because I didn’t like what society was doing. In reality I took them away from growing up in a sense because I put them in a little bubble and sort of kept them in it.
‘Certain things we laugh about n now.’ Paul looks at his son. ‘He was in his teens when he w went swimming with a couple of hi his mates . . . ’
B Both Lydia and Paul Jr, who are fa familiar with this story, laugh. ‘W ‘What were you, about 14? He di didn’t know how to get home so he we went to the local Morrisons and sa said, “I’m lost.” They rang the po police who rang me. When I spoke to him I said, “where are you?” He sa said, “Morrisons”, as if there was on only one in the whole country.’
L Lydia looks at her father fondly. ‘H ‘He’s always been protective. I th think it was for the best given what wa was going on. It felt safer at th the farm.’
T The ‘farm’ was on the moors ab above Halifax where I first met this fa family shortly after Sharon’s mu murder. Paul was devastated. He co couldn’t stop sobbing, couldn’t sle sleep and was dousing his terrible gr grief in whisky.
Y You couldn’t help but worry that th this family would ever find ha happiness again in such misery un until Paul met Michelle Sh Sherbourne, 49, a child-minder, an and single mother of two children, Ja Jade, now 29, and Jack, 24.
S Some time after Sharon’s death sh she began child-minding, cooking an and generally running the home — an and she and Paul fell in love.
W Within a year family meals were ea eaten round a polished oak table in a kitchen with a cream Aga an and a tapestry that read ‘ Home Sw Sweet Home.’
Michelle is a cheerful, generoushearted woman who doled out discipline and cuddles to the children in equal measure.
They were a family again. She taught Lydia to tie her laces, ride her bike and chased away the nightmares that disturbed the children’s sleep. ‘Michelle didn’t give birth to us but she treated us like her own,’ says Paul Jr. Lydia agrees. ‘She was a mum,’ she says.
Michelle and Paul became engaged in 2009 and married four years ago. For some, particularly Sharon’s family and close friends, the relationship was conducted with indecent haste.
For Paul and his children it was a godsend. He was terrified it would be snatched from him. The family sold their farm and moved to their present semi-detached home near Bradford three years ago.
It’s one of two houses Paul and his son have built on plot of land and is ‘a stepping stone’. They miss the farm terribly.
‘Lydia’s always been into her horses. I promoted it because it kept her in her little bubble and off the streets.
‘She had to get up at the crack of dawn to sort them out and lived and breathed horses.’ ‘Horses are my happy place,’ Lydia says.
‘I used to take myself off to see the horses and I’d feel better. I’d talk to a horse as if it were my mum. I’d have liked to do the horses with her.’
Paul’s face is full of love for his daughter. ‘I suppose she’ll be sitting on a great big animal. It’s not like she’ll be walking the streets or going into people’s houses.
‘I’d like to keep her in a safe bubble but she’s growing up. She’s finding her own world out there.
‘I don’t know if that’s good or bad but it’s what she wants.’