The horrified mum of Claudia Lawrence says her daughter’s home needs to be searched again after discovering a hidden loft. Claudia, 35, went missing in March 2009 after she failed to turn up for her 6am shift at work.
Despite two police investigations and several searches, Claudia has never been found and seemingly vanished without a trace. Now, Claudia’s mother Joan Lawrence, 81, has agreed to meet a police boss inside her daughter’s home in Heworth, North Yorkshire, where she discovered a secret loft a few weeks ago.
“It’s very hard as a mum to carry on each day alone and not knowing,” she tells the Mirror. “If things had been done properly at the beginning of the search for my daughter, maybe we would have answers by now. I have no idea if the attic was ever searched but it wouldn’t surprise me if it hadn’t been.”
At first officers treated it as a missing person inquiry before changing it to a suspected murder case. Describing the latest discovery of a secret space, Joan said: “It’s quite hard to see. You have to go into the wardrobe doors and it’s a tiny tiny loft opening above the clothes. When we lifted the hatch you could see bits of furniture and table legs, it’s very very small.”
During her visit they also found an unopened chewing gum packet and an open packet along with tissues inside the wardrobe. Joan made a return trip to the house for a recording of the ‘Answers for Claudia’ podcast. Journalist Tom McDermott has teamed up with Claudia’s mum, Joan Lawrence, who has spent 16 years fighting for answers.
Claudia lived alone in a terraced house in the Yorkshire town. The hidden loft was found above clothing behind Claudia’s wardrobe doors. When the hatch was opened Mrs Lawrence said they could see bits of furniture and table legs.
A police spokesman said: “The new Senior Investigating Officer intends to visit Claudia’s home for familiarisation purposes only, this is not for the purpose of conducting any operational or forensic enquiries.” It was claimed that police had previously looked inside the loft with a camera but may not have searched it in detail.
In the latest episode of the podcast, Tom and Joan discovered “items of interest to the police.” Acting on a tip-off to the podcast, they found some personal items in the pockets of Claudia’s jackets – two tissues and an opened packet of chewing gum which could hold vital DNA.
Joan has been planning to hand over her daughter’s “haunting” house to help a women’s charity and the garden used to provide therapy. Currently cobwebs hang from the ceiling all over the house which appears stuck in a time warp with a toastie machine still lying on the kitchen counter. She has slammed police blunders over the years after it was first treated as a missing person inquiry.
When Joan was finally allowed back into her daughter’s home, which had been treated as a crime scene, she was shocked at the state it had been left in. Ten years ago she told of her dismay after discovering the wasteland behind her daughter’s home had not been searched.
“I’m absolutely appalled. It beggars belief. The original team made so many mistakes. And this is yet another one,” she told the Daily Mirror at the time. “They could have missed vital clues that might have led to knowing what happened to Claudia, and prevented the years of heartache we have had to suffer.” Claudia had bought the house in 2007, about 18 months before she went missing.
The loft was discovered after two witnesses came forward with new information about the disappearance of Claudia Lawrence. They contacted a Podcast that has been looking into the chef’s disappearance alongside Joan for the last two years.
One witness called Dave told them he saw the missing chef wearing a black leather coat before she vanished, which led Joan to look for it in the wardrobe and then spot the loft hatch. A second witness told the podcast how she fears she may have seen Claudia’s missing rucksack. Both said they told the police at the time.
But the information prompted Joan to check Claudia’s leather jackets in her wardrobe and that’s where she found a coat with two tissues folded over in a pocket and an open half empty packet of empty chewing gum folded over at the top in another. Then they spotted the loft, describing it as 40 to 50cm wide.
Journalist Tom McDermott said on the ‘Answers for Claudia podcast’: “Joan asked me to press to see if it was open and I did… pressed the loft, hatch went up and once we got over the shock…it felt like the most sensible thing to do was inform the police what we’ve found.
“We informed the SIO that we found the tissues and the loft and they said they would spend a period of time looking back over their records and accounts of what happened in the house and what they’d searched before making a decision about what they’d do next.”
The Podcast said the police told them whilst they hadn’t been up to the loft in their initial searches they did use a camera device to have a quick look inside. The reporter claims the police then said they will ask for Joan’s permission to return to Claudia’s house.
“The police are going back in,” the journalist said. It will be the first time they have gone inside in almost a decade. The witness called Beth told the Podcast: “My mum called me Miss Marple from a very young age because I didn’t miss a trick. I’m keenly observant. She was out walking her dog by the Tees River, about 30 miles north of where Claudia lived
“As I was walking up past the trees I saw this bag…it was sitting in the hollowed out of a tree. To me it looked like it had been placed to find. So I opened the bag and all that was inside was a packet of cheese sandwiches in tinfoil. And I don’t know what made me think ‘just leave, just leave it. To my detriment I did leave it…now with hindsight I wish I had. I remember the colour, the size…it was a purple blue colour.”
This was the same colour as Claudia’s rucksack which has never been found and would carry her chef’s whites. After Claudia went missing Detective Chief Inspector Lucy Pope held up a Karrimor brand rucksack which they said was identical to the one missing from Claudia’s house.
Beth says she saw a newspaper article about this and: “I then went, that’s the bag I found…that is the bag I found.” When she told her mum about the bag, she was told to turn round and get it but when she did it was gone.
Describing himself as ‘Ex Army,’ Dave, was a delivery driver taking cash all around the country. Dave worked for a company that collected notes and coins from arcades and piers. “I was looking at the road…. in between lane one and lane two there was this woman just standing pretty much on the white line…with her arms out…my colleague in the passenger seat said ‘just watch out’.
“…I just remember seeing the face of this woman just standing here and she looked absolutely petrified. I must have missed her by inches…” He says he remembers her being soaking wet in a black leather jacket. “I just seen this face pop up on the news and it says a missing woman from York… I just went to my wife …‘that’s her. That’s the woman off the A1, that’s her’. I remember getting goosebumps.”
His sighting was on Wednesday, March 18, and Claudia was seen after this when she went to work that day so it is believed it was dismissed by police. “The image of her face will never leave me till the day I die,” Dave said.
This evening police sent us a statement to say: “The new Senior Investigating Officer intends to visit Claudia’s home for familiarisation purposes only, this is not for the purpose of conducting any operational or forensic enquiries.”
