MY HERO husband
PC Andrew Harper’s widow Lissie on the legacy of HIS SHOCKING DEATH
CRIME
The Killing of PC Harper: A Widow’s Fight for Justice Tuesday, ITV HD, 9pm
ON15 AUGUST 2019, PC Andrew Harper went to work as usual. But the 28-year-old, who had married his childhood sweetheart four weeks earlier, never made it home.
He’d been called out to a burglary in Sulhamstead in Berkshire. But as he tried to stop the young robbers, his feet became entangled in a tow rope attached to their getaway car, and he was dragged at speed along country lanes for more than a mile.
PC Harper’s body was found lying in the road by his colleagues, but he’d been so badly injured he was unrecognisable. The shocking circumstances of his death made headline news.
‘It was a blur of heartwrenching pain,’ his widow, Lissie, tells Sir Trevor Mcdonald in an ITV documentary about her husband’s killing.
‘We’d gone from the happiest day of our lives to the worst in such a short time. To know that someone you love has been taken in that way isn’t something
I’ll ever fully accept.’
Three teenagers were charged with murder, and Harper’s family expected a conviction. But following a trial at the Old Bailey, they were cleared of murder, having claimed that they hadn’t realised they were dragging PC Harper behind them.
Instead they were convicted of manslaughter with the driver, Henry Long,19, jailed for16 years, and his passengers, Albert Bowers and Jessie Cole, both18, sentenced to13 years each.
FIGHTING FOR CHANGE
‘I remember hearing one of the jurors read out the verdict, and thinking, this is so wrong,’ says Lissie. ‘They had no remorse or guilt or sympathy. I don’t think they thought for one second about Andrew.’
Lissie has channelled her anger into ‘Harper’s Law’, proposing an automatic life sentence for anyone guilty of killing an emergency worker while committing a crime. She hopes it will be passed later this year. ‘I’m doing it for Andrew,’ she says. ‘I want to create some kind of legacy and something I know he would be proud of.’