The BBC has reached a settlement and further apologised to the mother of the murdered schoolgirl Karen Hadaway, who claimed that Martin Bashir took her daughter’s clothes and never returned them.
Karen and her friend Nicola Fellows were sexually assaulted and strangled in Brighton in 1986 at the age of nine in what became known as the Babes in the Wood murders.
In 1991, Michelle Hadaway said that the former BBC reporter asked for her daughter’s clothes for DNA tests for the BBC Two social affairs programme Public Eye.
The investigation was never aired, with Hadaway saying that her calls to the broadcaster were ignored.
The families of the two girls spent decades fighting for justice after their killer, Russell Bishop, was initially acquitted of their murders in 1987.
Ian Heffron, Nicola’s uncle, had contacted the BBC in 2002 and 2004 for the clothing after reform of the double jeopardy law, which would allow Bishop to be retried.
After another trial in 2018, Bishop was found guilty of the murders and was jailed for a minimum of 36 years. He died in 2022 aged 55.
In 2021, the BBC conducted a review of the case in a fresh effort to try to locate the clothing. The BBC director general, Tim Davie, said the corporation’s investigators had spoken directly to Bashir but he had said he “doesn’t know where the clothes are”.
Davie apologised to the family but said “regrettably 30 years on, little more can be done to find the missing clothes”.
On Thursday, a BBC statement said: “In 1991, Mrs Hadaway entrusted the BBC with the missing clothes, on the understanding that they would be forensically examined.
“The BBC did not examine or return the clothes and was not subsequently able to find them as a result of searches in 2004 and 2021.
“We should have taken better care of Karen’s clothes and we did not.
“We accept that we had a duty of care to Mrs Hadaway and we fell well short of that and we have previously apologised to her privately.
“We are very sorry.”
The terms of the settlement have not been revealed.
Bashir left the BBC in 2021 after questions were raised about how he had secured an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, for BBC One’s Panorama programme in 1995.
An inquiry found he had acted in a “deceitful” way and faked documents to obtain the interview.
PA News contributed to this article
