Like any prospective grandparents, Lynnette and Steve Williams can’t wait for the new arrival that will bless their lives. In a few weeks their daughter Scarlett is due a baby boy.
“It’s a burst of sunshine for all of us,” says Lynnette. “I’m really chuffed, especially for Scarlett. She’s always wanted children, I hope motherhood brings her the happiness she deserves.”
Happiness is something that has been in short supply for this family since the murder of younger daughter Georgia 10 years ago this month.
And even with the joyful event for Scarlett, now 32 and a trained midwife, something will be missing.
“Georgia would have been a mad auntie, she’d have done all sorts with him,” says 62-year-old Lynnette. “I’m hoping our grandson has a little bit of the spirit that his auntie had.”
That spirit was snuffed out when 17-year-old Georgia was lured to the home of college pal Jamie Reynolds on May 26, 2013, on the pretence of helping with a photoshoot of a fake hanging. Instead the scenario was horrifyingly real.
Sadistic Reynolds strangled the A-level student, took photos as he abused her body and then dumped her naked corpse in woodland.
Now Georgia’s mum Lynnette has chronicled their loss in her book, Our Georgia. It reveals their sense of betrayal at the failures that left snuff movie-obsessed Reynolds free to kill.
And it details their fight for answers from West Mercia Police, the force Steve served in as a murder squad detective.
“We still have nightmares,” says Lynnette. “One of us will wake the other up at night screaming. We help each other through them. I relive the day as soon as I wake up or when I try to sleep. I feel drained most of the time, it’s on your mind constantly. It never goes away.”
Steve, 67, whose grief forced his retirement from West Mercia’s Major Investigation Unit, adds: “They say time heals, but it doesn’t. You just get used to living with the pain.
“Physical pain I can stand, but I’ve never known mental pain like this. It’s torture, years of torture.”
Georgia was planning a career in the RAF when her parents waved her off from the family home in Telford, Shropshire.
Reynolds – then 23 and one of Georgia’s wide circle of friends – lived a short walk away. He had begged her for help realising his dream of becoming a photographer, but the ruse was part of a murder that had been years in the making.
Recalling the moment when two plain-clothes officers – Steve’s work colleagues – arrived at their door to give them the devastating news, Lynnette says: “I was yelling, ‘Don’t you say that!’ I remember Steve running from the room to throw up. I ordered them out of the house, part of me thought if they weren’t there, it wouldn’t be true.”
Two days later, following a Crimewatch appeal, Georgia’s body was found near Ruthin, North Wales.
Reynolds was charged with murder, and Steve and Lynnette made a harrowing journey to lay flowers at the scene. “I couldn’t believe our lives had come to this,” she says. “Sat in a police car with a bunch of roses on our way to visit the woods where this murderer had dumped our daughter.
“The way Reynolds killed her was awful enough, but the way he treated her afterwards was utterly callous. To be found naked, with police poring all over you – it was so degrading for her. If it’s possible, I hate Reynolds all the more for that.
“I’d been having nightmares about these woods, imagining them as dark and scary, and crawling with insects. In the end, I was relieved we went – the day was warm and sunny and it was the kind of place Georgia would have gone camping with her mates.”
On June 14, Telford was brought to a standstill as a motorbike escort led Georgia’s funeral cortege. The night before, her family lined the route with bows in orange and turquoise, her favourite colours.
“I was never going to be able to help out with a wedding or christening,” says Lynnette. “I just wanted to do the best I possibly could for her.”
As they wrestled with their grief, they learned Reynolds was already on police files after a near identical attack where he tried to throttle a teenager five years before.
It emerged officers were given evidence of his obsession with images of women being hanged – but let him off with a warning.
Two years later when he rammed a colleague’s car after she spurned his advances, police wrote it up as a traffic accident.
Steve and Lynnette fought for two inquiries which uncovered a litany of failures by police, social services and mental health teams. “We were promised lessons had been learned, and action would be taken to prevent the same mistakes happening again,” says Lynnette. “We were told we’d be involved in police training – we did one session and never heard from or saw a soul since.”
Reynolds got a whole-life sentence, meaning he will die behind bars, with the judge remarking he was a “serial killer in the making”.
“I was dreading him getting anything less,” says Lynnette. “I couldn’t stand the possibility he might one day be walking the streets again, or I might turn a corner and come face to face with him.
“I even imagined him maybe getting married and starting a family of his own – it was torture he’d deprived Georgia of all those milestones.”
Two years later, following a relentless battle, three police officers and one civilian worker were disciplined. All four kept their jobs. Steve adds: “It was like kids having their wrists slapped by their head teacher.
“Then you watch TV and some child’s been killed because a social worker didn’t do their job, or the Met police don’t deal with one of their own properly and he goes on to kill, and it makes you so angry.”
West Mercia Police claimed there was “no causal link” between its officers’ actions in dealing with Reynolds in 2008 and Georgia’s murder five years later.
The memoir reveals how Lynnette and Steve used human rights laws to back the force into admitting it failed their daughter.
Settling a compensation claim out of court in 2016 – a week before the third anniversary of Georgia’s murder – West Mercia Police admitted it breached its obligation to “protect life” under the Human Rights Act.
“To have them turn around and say, ‘We didn’t do enough to protect your daughter’ totally vindicated what we’d been saying,” says Lynnette.
The couple now split their time between a new home in Market Drayton and Spain. “Telford’s full of painful memories,” she says.
The Georgia Williams Trust, which funds sports, music and outdoor adventures for young people, is still going strong.
“I like giving out the money,” Lynnette says. “It’s like Georgia handing it out, saying, ‘Enjoy yourself, do well’.”
* Our Georgia, Mardle Books, out now - CLICK HERE
