Sarah Payne: A Mother’s Story treaded softly
Channel: BuzzVideo yuotube
Date: 2017-07-19

he image of eight year-old Sarah Payne wearing a red pullover and smiling sweetly is seared into the national consciousness. This was the picture circulated by police following her abduction and murder in July 2000. Now, 17 years later, her death was revisited in a Channel 5 documentary that handled the case with appropriate sensitivity yet nonetheless made for devastating viewing. 

Sarah Payne: A Mother’s Story didn’t tug at the heartstrings – it sandblasted the emotions. The pain visited upon the girl’s mother, Sara, and the rest of the family – a vortex of guilt, anger and psychological scarring – was viscerally evoked in a broadcast so unflinching it often verged on unwatchable. 

Most visibly traumatised was elder brother Luke, the last family member to see Sarah alive. In the 13 seconds in which she disappeared from his sight as they played in a cornfield adjoining their grandparents’s house in West Sussex, convicted child abuser Roy Whiting had snatched her away in his van – waving to her siblings as he sped off.

“I don’t get a lot of sleep," said Luke. "I dread the night, because it’s just you and your thoughts."Likewise changed forever was Sara Payne,  who would go on to become a campaigner for greater transparency regarding the presence of sex offenders in the community ("Sarah’s Law", by which parents have controlled access to the sex offenders register, went onto the statute books in 2008). 

Yet despite the strong and determined face Sara presented to the media – she was awarded on MBE for her advocacy – she struggled, too, and in 2009 suffered a near-fatal stroke. Part of her had wished for the end so that she could be closer to her daughter: "I felt guilty for not being with her." The family were, similarly, in little doubt that grief for Sarah contributed to the death at age 46 of her father, Michael. 

Easier to sit through were the procedural elements of the story as Detective Martyn Underhill, one of the investigating officers in the case, outlined the unlikely circumstances by which they finally got their man. Whiting was a predatory sociopath who knew what he was about, refusing to engage with the authorities and leaving behind little circumstantial evidence.His eventual arrest sprang from a bizarre twist after he stole a car and led police on a cross country chase. This put him behind bars and gave detectives an opportunity to forensically survey the van into which he had bundled Sarah. The vehicle was riddled with DNA evidence linking him to her kidnapping and death. 

The documentary also probed the mob justice that erupted as it emerged Whiting, despite a previous conviction for child abduction, had been free to operate with impunity. This hysteria was to a large degree whipped up by the News of the World which, backing the family’s call for a change in the law, cast itself as the scourge of sex offenders in the community. But Sara Payne defended the campaign, pointing out that it raised awareness of the dangers sexual deviants posed to children.   

The tone throughout was solemn and understated. The family clearly wanted to speak and their testimony was horribly gripping. Revisiting a high profile child murder a decade and a half later could easily have tipped into sensationalism. To Channel 5’s credit, Sarah Payne: A Mother’s Story treaded softly and let the terrible facts speak for themselves.