Lauren Holmes was 11 when she discovered how her sister, Collette, had died. There were woods near the family home in Corby in Northamptonshire, and Lauren had ignored her mother’s warning that they were unsafe.
“We knew we weren’t allowed to go there,” Lauren remembers, “but we did, and we got chased by a local lad. Two of my friends ended up in hospital getting thorns removed because they’d tried to escape through the brambles. That evening, everyone’s parents gave us a real rollicking, but my mum was just silent. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t shouting. I was sent to my room and she came in and threw a load of newspapers on my bed, and she said: ‘This is why you’re not allowed to go into the woods!’ I felt shocked and guilty. It was a hard way to find out.”
The newspapers explained that a local man named Adam Stein had abducted six-year-old Collette Gallacher in February 1986 as she waited for a bus to take her to school, the same school where her mother worked as a playground assistant and dinner lady. Corby in the 1980s was a much smaller place than it is today. Struggling with the fallout of the closure of the British Steel plant, which had been Europe’s largest steelworks, there was high unemployment – but there was also a sense of community in the streets around the Gallachers’ home. “Everyone knew each other,” Lauren says. It was not unusual for a six-year-old to be sent off to school alone.
On the day of the abduction, “someone asked my mum where Collette was, and that’s when they realised something wasn’t right,” Lauren says. The search for Collette lasted five days, and Stein was one of the many locals who volunteered to look for her, before her body was found in the attic of the house that he shared with his wife and young son. Stein admitted rape as well as murder, but the sexual assault charge lay on file – a decision sometimes taken if a defendant has also pleaded guilty to more serious charges. Lauren and her younger half-sister Claire believe this was in order to spare the family from sitting through details of the attack in court. Stein was jailed for life and told he would serve a minimum of 20 years. Thirty-seven years later, Collette’s sisters are still fighting to make sure he does not escape justice.
Claire Holmes was not yet born and Lauren was only 15 months old when Collette was killed, but her murder still dominates their lives. Their mother, Karen, did her best to shield them from what had happened but when Claire, now 32, was nine or 10, she stumbled across a box of newspaper cuttings. “I was in my mum’s room having a nosy around, as I shouldn’t have done. We always knew we had a big sister, that a bad man had taken her, but it was a taboo subject. My mum still struggles to say Collette’s name. My grandad had to explain it all.”
From the kitchen table of the house she shares with her partner and (at times) their eight children, Lauren, 38, has been working with Claire to put pressure on the government to prevent sex offenders from changing their names after release. They have also had to fight to have their sister’s murderer placed on the sex offender register.
In April, they travelled to London to meet Damian Hinds, minister for prisons, parole and probation, to explain their concerns that weaknesses in the law make women and children more vulnerable when sex offenders are released from prison.
Lauren, who works as a carer at a home for adults with a rare genetic condition, feels she has become a part-time detective, working with the local Corby journalist Kate Cronin to investigate why her sister’s murderer was sent back to prison after his release in 2016. It appears this was connected to driving offences, and she discovered he had changed his name and begun a relationship with a vulnerable teenager during the short period he was free. Claire has begun a degree in criminology, spurred on by her concerns about flaws in the justice system.
The sisters want to make it clear that their activism does not stem from vindictiveness. “This is not a witch-hunt. We hoped he would be rehabilitated in prison, but everything we now know suggests that hasn’t happened,” Claire says. “The latest parole statement that we have says that he is still having bad thoughts about children, and not understanding the consequences of his actions. From all the information we have, he does not seem to be a man who has changed.”
They are cautiously optimistic that their campaign may be getting somewhere. In March, the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, organised a debate on sex offenders’ name changes, while Bolsover’s Conservative MP, Mark Fletcher, had a 10-minute-rule bill on the same subject; both argue that it is too easy for sex offenders to conceal their identities.
“A sex offender can change their name and with little difficulty receive a passport or a driving licence with their new name,” Fletcher told MPs. “At no point are you asked if you have a criminal background. In some cases this can lead to a DBS check under their new identity.” A DBS, or Disclosure and Barring Service, check is required for some jobs or voluntary roles, particularly in healthcare or in positions that involve working with children.
Collette’s sisters did not intend to devote so much of their lives to campaigning, but the target of their concern has evolved over the years. Stein was refused parole several times before being released in 2016 and returned to prison in 2017. He was released again in 2021 and sent back in July 2022. After his first release, they were dismayed to discover that he had not been placed automatically on the sex offender register. Their campaigning resulted in his name being added, but they are still uncertain about whether the initial failure was because he did not have a conviction for rape or because the offence predated the launch of the register.
A newspaper article by Cronin prompted a woman to get in touch to say that while he had been out of prison in 2016, Stein, then 58, had changed his name and struck up a relationship with her, when she was 18. He admitted that he had been in prison after killing a child, but told her it had been an accident.
The sisters were concerned that Stein’s ability to change his name made it easier to conceal his past. “You shouldn’t be able to hide when you’ve committed crimes of this nature. That should be something that you carry for the rest of your life,” Claire says.
The Safeguarding Alliance warns that the child sexual offenders’ disclosure scheme (also known as Sarah’s law, named after eight-year-old Sarah Payne, who was murdered by a paedophile in 2000), which allows parents to check if a person has a record for child sexual offences, becomes useless if the offender has changed their name.
Asked why this weakness has not already been fixed, Fletcher said this was “a bit of a head-scratcher”. There is the possibility that post-prison rehabilitation would be undermined for those who have reformed and want a new start, but the government is not making this case, just arguing that sex offenders are already required to notify the authorities if they change their names and face an extra five years’ imprisonment if they fail to do this within three days of the change.
Campaigners point out that many fail to do so. Freedom of information requests from the Safeguarding Alliance show that about 900 sex offenders went missing between 2017 and 2020, while 16,000 had in some way breached their notification requirements in the past five years. As Fletcher told MPs: “It doesn’t take a genius to realise that sex offenders are not the most trustworthy group.”
Champion, meanwhile, has pointed out that some perpetrators change their name before being formally charged with an offence, “meaning their birth name remains unmaligned”.
Collette’s sisters are hopeful that reform may be included in the victims and prisoners bill currently going through parliament. In the meantime, they have been working with Cronin to try to get more information about whether Stein still poses a threat to the public ahead of his next possible release in 2024.
Cronin’s attempts to obtain more information about him have been complicated by the name changes. “It’s not about pitchforks. It’s about keeping women and girls safe,” she says.
The family are dismayed that they are still fighting to ensure Stein is properly monitored after his release. “His name is constantly in our mouths,” says Claire. “It would have been lovely to know that he had been released and quietly got on with his life. It does happen. People do change their lives – but that’s not been the case. We feel like we can never have peace.”
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
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