Let’s celebrate women’s nerves of steel
He last saw his cousin a few weeks before his murder. At the time, Bickley was applying to university (he went on to read fine art at Middlesex) and Stephen was studying for his A-levels at Blackheath Bluecoat Church of England School, and had dreams of becoming an architect.
The pair bumped into each other coincidentally outside an art shop near Trafalgar Square. “He was buying pencils for his architectural drawings,” Bickley recalls. “We talked about buckling down for the exams. I was joking around, but also told him I was really proud of him.”
He has stayed in touch with some of Lawrence’s school peers and says they have gone on to “really good careers and become solid grounded people”. His younger brother, Stuart, who Bickley helped get measured for his wedding suit at Savile Row, is now a successful teacher in south London. “Stephen definitely would have realised his ambitions,” he says. “He had flair and he was committed”.
Instead, in a phone call in the early hours of April 23 1993, Bickley was told that his cousin had been stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack.
In the painful blur of the days that followed, Bickley became a “doorman” at the Lawrence home, attempting to marshal those coming and going. Later still, he helped chair weekly meetings of police and public sector organisations at Woolwich Arsenal, alongside the Lawrence family solicitor, Imran Khan. The failings of the investigation, he says, became plain at an early stage.
“The police attitude then was [to be] disinterested. It felt as if they were there because they couldn’t ignore us. Not because they wanted to be there,” says Bickley. “There are a lot of police officers that genuinely care. But at the time I think they felt it was a lot of fuss over nothing.”
Despite the police receiving numerous tip-offs naming the five murder suspects – Gary Dobson, Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris – the initial investigation was hamstrung by a failure to secure proper evidence, and the killers remained free.
In 1999, the Macpherson report exposed the “institutional racism” of the Metropolitan Police at the time, which even extended
(it was later discovered) to recruiting undercover officers to spy on the Lawrence family. The report also blamed “professional incompetence” and the failure of senior leadership. To this day, the National Crime Agency has an ongoing investigation into whether this was the result of police corruption, as one of the killers, Norris, was the son of a notorious local gangster.
Over the intervening two decades, Bickley has attended all the public hearings at which the Lawrence family have tried – and failed – to secure justice for their son. He has seen, at close hand, the strain it placed upon Neville and Doreen’s relationship, which led to their eventual divorce in 1999. “They became islands to each other,” he says. “In their attempts to cope with their own grief they just became two people occupying the same space, but not together.”
It was only in 2012 that new forensic evidence led to the trial and conviction of Norris and Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The three other members of their gang remain at large.
Bickley was present at the Old Bailey and recalls being sat in the public gallery alongside the families of the murderers.
“They [Norris and Dobson] looked pathetic,” he says. “They were broken and soulless, and I had no feelings for them. It wasn’t even anger. I felt vindicated not having them in my m mind in the first place.”
Bickley adds that he has sympathy with Doreen – now Baroness – Lawrence, who earlier th this month called for the Met t to be honest about the likeli likelihood of convicting anybody else over her son’s murder. “It’s not giving up, but more lik like a feeling of this can’t go on indefinitely,” he says. “She needs some light. She j just wants closure. An h honest answer.”
A As for the other three sus suspects? Bickley insists “th “they have no place in my mind or heart” bu but he hopes they may sti still face justice in the Br British courts. “I can’t liv live with hate,” he says. “I “It’s done more damage to me than good.”