After everything she has been through, Joan Lawrence could be forgiven for thinking that nothing could shock or upset her any more.
The grieving mother, now 81, has lived with the agony of a lost loved one for 15 years – ever since her daughter Claudia all but vanished into thin air on a cold March morning in 2009.
Despite an extensive police investigation and a cold-case review in 2013, no one has ever established what happened to Claudia, or where she might be.
Yet recently, Joan has had to deal with another piece of devastating news that has further shattered the fragile equilibrium she has worked so hard to maintain all these years – that her daughter’s childhood best friend was brutally murdered by her abusive former partner. Lisa Welford, 49, was killed by Vincent Morgan in April this year, her head forced under water causing a cardiac arrest during a cold-blooded attack that happened just a short distance from Joan’s home in Malton, North Yorkshire.
Little wonder that Joan – speaking in the wake of news of Morgan’s conviction for murder at Leeds Crown Court this week – says she felt ‘numb with shock’ when she learnt of Lisa’s desperate fate.
‘It’s hard to put into words how shocked I was when I heard Lisa had been killed,’ she tells the Mail, adding that it left her ‘heartbroken.’
‘The hardest part is knowing that she died in such terrible circumstances. I was devastated when I discovered how brutally she died. No woman should ever have to die this way. It horrifies me to think of how much Lisa must have suffered. I keep thinking how could such a sweet, young girl’s life turn out like this. Lisa deserved so much better.’
Lisa and Claudia had once been inseparable after meeting when they started at the same private infant and junior school in Malton aged four.
Joan Lawrence, now 81, has lived with the agony of a lost loved one for 15 years – ever since her daughter Claudia all but vanished into thin air on a cold March morning in 2009
Despite an extensive police investigation and a cold-case review in 2013, no one has ever established what happened to Claudia, or where she might be
Joan has had to deal with another piece of devastating news that her daughter’s childhood best friend, Lisa Welford, was brutally murdered by her abusive former partner
‘I’d known Lisa since she was a little girl, and she was the sweetest of children,’ Joan recalls. ‘Lisa and Claudia had such a special relationship. They became best friends. They went to each others’ birthday parties, and we even went on holidays together. We all spent so many happy times together. After the girls left school, they did go in different directions – Claudia trained to be a chef and Lisa became an electrician – but they always remained friends.’
Joan also stayed in touch with Lisa’s mother, Rita, and when Claudia went missing she was one of the first to offer her support.
‘Rita was there for me,’ says Joan. ‘Lisa also sent me a note and a picture of her and Claudia together from when we were all on holiday in Torquay. I didn’t for a second think that, 15 years later, I would then be comforting Rita.’
When she heard the news about Lisa, Joan took a card and flowers to her old friend, and reveals they have since had ‘many heartbreaking conversations’.
‘It’s hard to believe, after all the happy years our daughters spent together, we are now grieving for the loss of our girls. The circumstances are different, but we have a shared pain,’ she says. ‘Rita is constantly in my thoughts.’
Joan, of course, is one of the few people to know the pain Rita is feeling, although she has no closure of her own. Claudia was 35 when she disappeared from her two-bedroom terrace home on the outskirts of York. Despite a number of arrests being made and North Yorkshire Police even extending their search to Cyprus, no one has ever been charged.
It places Joan in the small, unenviable group of parents with missing children whose fates remain unknown.
‘The most terrible limbo’, as she calls it. ‘You’re grieving, but you can’t grieve properly. At the same time, I consider myself lucky that I had Claudia for 36 years.’
Claudia and her older sister Ali were raised in the handsome market town of Malton in what Joan, who takes great comfort from her faith, calls a ‘Christian upbringing’. ‘She knew right from wrong and we never had problems with her,’ she says.
Little wonder that Joan – speaking in the wake of news of Morgan’s conviction for murder at Leeds Crown Court this week – says she felt ‘numb with shock’ when she learnt of Lisa’s desperate fate
Lisa and Claudia had once been inseparable after meeting when they started at the same private infant and junior school in Malton aged four
It was comfortable, too. Before Joan and Claudia’s father, Peter, divorced in 1996, the Lawrence family had a nice house, a large garden and assorted pets. Animal-loving Claudia grew up riding ponies and cuddling the family’s King Charles spaniels. She attended private school in York, then catering college, eventually taking a job as a chef in the canteen at the University of York.
It was, as Joan puts it, a ‘normal’ life. That is, until that day in March 2009 that would turn Claudia’s disappearance into one of the nation’s most baffling unsolved mysteries.
The facts are well documented. On Wednesday, March 18, the last day she was seen, Claudia finished her catering shift at 2pm and was recorded on CCTV making her way home to her cottage in Heworth, around three miles from the city.
That evening she spoke on the phone to her father and her mother, the latter around 8.30pm. ‘We were both watching the same television programme, Location, Location, Location,’ Joan recalls.
Claudia told her mother she planned to get up around 5am the next day to walk to work as her Vauxhall Corsa was in a garage for repairs. It was a 45-minute walk.
Mobile phone records show she received a text message from a friend living in Cyprus just after 9pm, though she did not reply.
It would be the last-ever communication. Claudia did not show up for work the next day or to meet her friend, Suzy Cooper, that evening at her local pub, The Nag’s Head, situated just four doors down from her cottage.
When she failed to respond to calls, Suzy assumed she had fallen asleep, although Joan remains baffled as to why Suzy did not go to her house. ‘It was just a few doors away – wouldn’t you just pop down and try?’ she asks.
Joan said she had a ‘normal’ life that is, until that day in March 2009 that would turn Claudia’s disappearance into one of the nation’s most baffling unsolved mysteries
Claudia with her father Pete. Before Joan and Peter divorced in 1996, the Lawrence family had a nice house, a large garden and assorted pets
A timeline from 2009 of Claudias last known whereabouts before she vanished
Either way, when she still failed to respond to calls by Friday morning, Suzy called Claudia’s father, Peter, who used his own keys to enter her cottage.
Inside, there was no sign of a break-in. Claudia’s bed was made, there were a few dirty dishes in the sink. Only her chef’s whites, mobile phone and hair straighteners were missing. Data later showed that her mobile phone never left the local area and was deliberately switched off some hours after she failed to turn up for work.
As it was Mother’s Day, Joan was staying for the weekend with Ali, who was by then living in Derbyshire with her young family. The first she heard of what was happening was on Friday afternoon, when Peter, who died in 2021, called and said: ‘Claudia’s disappeared.’
He had already alerted the police and, in retrospect, Joan finds even this puzzling. Why did both he and the police assume Claudia was missing before checking to see if Joan or Ali had heard anything from her?
‘You would think that would be the first thing they would do,’ she says.
When I ask how mother and daughter responded to the news, Joan’s eyes fill with tears.
‘I can’t talk about that,’ she says. ‘Some things must remain private.’
What she knows now is that it was the start of a nightmare from which she has never emerged, and which she believes has been prolonged by any number of police errors.
She professes astonishment that the photo released by police showed Claudia with blonde hair, not dark brown with auburn streaks as it was when she went missing. ‘I offered them an up-to-date one but they didn’t use it for four years,’ she says.
Nor was any forensic search undertaken at her cottage for six weeks. Joan says: ‘Everyone knows that the first few days after someone goes missing are crucial. And they messed it up.’
Vincent Morgan in April this year killed Lisa Welford. He forced her head underwater causing a cardiac arrest during a cold-blooded attack that happened just a short distance from Joan’s home in Malton, North Yorkshire
Perhaps most distressing of all, Detective Superintendent Ray Galloway – the man in charge of what was by then a suspected murder enquiry – made an appearance on BBC TV’s Crimewatch and described Claudia’s love life as ‘complex and mysterious’. Today Joan is clear she sees it as a form of ‘victim-blaming’ that drained sympathy for Claudia – who, like many women her age, had merely had a number of different partners in the years before her disappearance.
This information potentially alienated other witnesses. ‘It was a lot of crap that wasn’t true,’ she says firmly.
‘He should never have said it. Everyone round here knew it wasn’t true – it was a small community and people know what’s true and what isn’t.’
Galloway is now retired and Joan is withering in her assessment of his conduct. ‘I met Galloway once for 15 minutes in the whole five years he was in charge,’ she says. ‘He walked into my house and didn’t even say sorry for my loss. With that whole team, there was no sensitivity, no tact.’ She points out that she was forbidden from even entering her daughter’s home. ‘I’m her mother, I was close to her,’ she says. ‘I could have spotted something that might have been useful. But more than that, where is the compassion?’
Nonetheless, for all Joan’s anger, North Yorkshire Police did seem to leave no stone unturned. Over the next few months, they took 2,517 statements, checked 1,771 vehicles, searched 38 homes and business premises, examined 64 scenes and tested more than 200 items for DNA, all of which yielded no concrete evidence.
The assumption was that Claudia had probably been abducted and murdered shortly after leaving home on March 19 by a local man known to her.
The investigation had all but stalled when, in 2013, under the remit of a newly-established Major Crime Unit, fresh eyes were put on the case under the supervision of Detective Superintendent Dai Malyn. Joan says:
‘I felt he listened and had common courtesy.’
The team undertook a new forensic search of Claudia’s home and the discovery of a man’s DNA on a cigarette butt in her car led to arrests. But no one was charged and Joan remains convinced other leads were missed.
‘Claudia would not sit in a car with someone who smoked. She loathed the smell, she wouldn’t stand anywhere near someone smoking, so that had to come from someone she didn’t know, not an acquaintance,’ she says.
Then, in August 2021, Joan learned that police, now led by Detective Superintendent Wayne Fox, who was appointed senior investigating officer in October 2020, were searching a gravel pit in Sand Hutton, North Yorkshire.
Today she is still none the wiser about why they did it.
Joan also stayed in touch with Lisa’s mother, Rita, and when Claudia went missing she was one of the first to offer her support
On Wednesday, March 18, the last day she was seen, Claudia finished her catering shift at 2pm and was recorded on CCTV making her way home to her cottage in Heworth, around three miles from the city
‘They sent 70 officers to a small village and expected it not to create headlines,’ she says. ‘Something significant clearly triggered it, but they wouldn’t tell me what and I still don’t know to this day. Much of the time the police just do not bother to keep me informed.’
Twice in recent years, Joan adds, locals have identified potential new persons of interest, only to be thwarted by police.
‘One man went into a pub in Malton, and he knew things about Claudia that made the landlord suspicious,’ she says. ‘He tried to keep him talking while he called the police to get them to come along. But the local police said they couldn’t send anyone, it had to come from York, and they didn’t come.
‘He couldn’t keep him talking indefinitely and off he went. The same happened in a cafe near the station. I have been contacted several times by people with new information, but when I take it to the police they don’t listen.’
When the Mail contacted DS Fox, he said that while the inquiry has been in a ‘reactive phase’ since 2017, he wants to make clear ‘the investigation is not closed’.
He added: ‘Even after such a passage of time, our Cold Case Review Unit continue to receive information. Every new piece of information is carefully assessed against the significant volumes of material that has been gathered over the course of the investigation. If a specific line of enquiry is developed from receipt of new information, and grows in significance, we will take decisive action, as we did when extensively searching the gravel pits at Sand Hutton in August 2021.
‘I hope the scale of activity which took place within that operation clearly demonstrates that, if information is capable of being effectively developed, North Yorkshire Police will work tirelessly in our continued search for the truth.’
In the meantime, theory after unlikely theory has bloomed in the vacuum that Claudia’s absence has left behind – among them that Claudia was trafficked abroad or that she decided to start a new life in Cyprus, where she had previously holidayed and had friends.
One theory Joan does not dismiss out of hand, however, is that her daughter may have fallen victim to double murderer Christopher Halliwell, a taxi driver serving a full life term for the sexually motivated murders of Becky
In the last 18 months alone, there have been two particularly poignant milestones: Joans own 80th birthday and what would have been Claudia’s 50th birthday in February
Police officers conduct a search in woodland as North Yorkshire Police investigate the disappearance of Claudia Lawrence at Sand Hutton Gravel Pits on August 26, 2021
Godden-Edwards and Sian O’Callaghan in Wiltshire.
Halliwell has since been linked to many other violent offences against women involving assaults, rapes, disappearances and murders, with the date March 19 featuring in a number of these cases.
I ask Joan what she thinks happened to her daughter, and now I see laid bare the grief that she has tried to manage throughout our interview. ‘I honestly don’t know. I just don’t know,’ she says, her face stricken.
It is a haunting question that has underpinned the past 15 years as she navigates milestone after heartbreaking milestone. In the last 18 months alone, there have been two particularly poignant ones: her own 80th birthday and what would have been Claudia’s 50th birthday in February.
Joan, tiredness sweeping over her features, says: ‘I can’t remember what I did on her birthday.’
She has watched Claudia’s friends get married at the church where she was christened, knowing she would have been a bridesmaid, then godmother to the children that followed, while Ali’s sons, now 19 and 15, have little to no memory of their aunt.
Joan knows that time is running out, although she will never give up hope.
‘Someone out there knows what happened,’ she says. ‘We just need to find them.’
And in the meantime, she will say her prayer, night and morning, hoping that one day it will be answered.
Those prayers now include Rita. ‘I don’t think any parent can recover from losing a child,’ she says. ‘It’s the wrong order of things.’