There is only a handful of ways in which an ordinary life can suddenly become flooded by limelight. One of them is murder. Another is scandal. Florence Siddons’ family has suffered both.
It is the nature of ordinary families that they are caught off balance by these kind of catastrophes. Suddenly they are dealing with lawyers and policemen and journalists and they make mistakes and lose all control of events. But Florence Siddons is naturally fuelled by so much bloody-minded determination that, from the very beginning, she has failed to succumb.
Disaster enveloped Florence Siddons 13 years ago in the Spring of 1978. She was then aged 64 and living in a council house in Sinfin, a working class suburb of Derby, where she had been since the war. She worked in a shoe factory. Her husband, Fred, a bricklayer, had died the previous summer and her four children had long since left home, but she still cared for her 16-year-old grandaughter, Lynn, who had been raised by her and called her Mum.
On a Monday morning, April 3 1978, Lynn said “Ta-raa, see you later” and went off shopping. When Lynn had not returned by four o’clock, Mrs Siddons went off to look for her. She remembered that Lynn had talked about visiting a boy down the road, Roy Brookes, a shy frail 15-year-old. Roy Brookes told her that he and Lynn had gone walking but then Lynn had vanished while he was peeing in the woods. She thought that sounded odd. When Lynn had still not returned by ten o’clock, Mrs Siddons called the police, but they said it was too dark to do anything and, anyway, Lynn was probably just stopping out late with a boy. She told them they were wrong.
The next day, two things happened that were to colour the rest of her life. First, Roy Brookes and his mother came to see her and told her that Roy had seen a strange car up by the woods at the same time that Lynn had vanished. Florence Siddons knew there was no road anywhere near those woods and, full of suspicion, she called Roy Brookes a liar. Then the police came back and said they had looked in the woods and there was no sign of anything and Lynn had just run away. Florence Siddons knew Lynn better than that, so she decided to do the police’s work for them; she called her four children and they started their own search.
For the rest of that week, while the police shook their heads, the Siddons scoured the woods, poking under hedgerows, using their family dogs and metal detectors to help. They went to the Easter fair and showed Lynn’s picture. They even persuaded Derby County to appeal to fans for information at their game on Saturday. And when Roy Brookes’ stepfather, Mick, tried to tell Florence Siddons that Lynn often spent the night in derelict buildings, she knew that was nonsense because, since her husband’s death, Lynn had been sleeping in the same bed as her, so she called Mick Brookes a liar too.
On Sunday, they found Lynn’s body, stuffed under some bushes down by the old Trent and Mersey canal about 20 minutes walk away. She had been stabbed too many times to count. Within 48 hours, the police had charged Roy Brookes, but even though Florence Siddons knew the boy was a liar, she told the police that they had got the wrong person.
The police said Roy had confessed. She tried to tell them that Roy was too puny to have killed Lynn or to have dragged her body into the bushes. Then, at the inquest, she discovered that, although Lynn had been stabbed more than 30 times, the thing that had actually killed her was asphyxiation, and she knew that Roy had not even mentioned that in his confession. By now, Florence Siddons had another suspect, and a few months later, on the eve of his trial, Roy gave a psychiatrist a new version of events which confirmed her view.
Roy Brookes blamed his stepfather, Mick. He said Mick was always talking about Jack the Ripper and about stabbing women and he said his stepfather had told him to get Lynn on her own down by the canal. Then he had followed them down there, grabbed Lynn from behind, stabbed her, then stuffed her mouth with mud and water to finish her off and threatened Roy that if he told anyone, he would kill Roy’s mother, too.
The police arrested Mick Brookes. He denied everything and was released. But at Roy’s trial, in November 1978, the stepfather was accused in the witness box of murder and produced an alibi which collapsed to the point where he was accused of talking nonsense. The jury said young Roy Brookes was not guilty of murder. The judge said he agreed. Florence Siddons no longer had any doubt that Mick Brookes was the real killer. The police said they could do nothing, so she set out to prove it herself.
She needed evidence. She did not even have a phone or a car to work with, but she teamed up with her two daughters, Cynthia and Gail (who was Lynn’s real mother) and the three women started to rummage through Mick Brookes’ past, sifting his life for clues that would put him behind bars. They began to find things.
There were fragments of his personality: the woman who had known him as a child and said that from the age of ten, he had been fascinated by knives; the teenage girl who had been to wild parties at his house; the remains of burned pornography they found when they searched his garden in Sinfin.
And there was direct evidence. One Sunday afternoon, his wife, Dot, called Florence Siddons and told her that Mick had run off to a caravan site in Skegness with a 16-year-old girl and that she was ready to talk. Later that week, Dot Brookes spent four hours with the Siddons family lawyer describing, first, how their sex life was dominated by Mick’s fantasies about stabbing, then how she had found Mick burning a knife and a pair of trousers on the evening of Lynn’s murder and, finally, how, after months of anxious questions, Mick had turned on her and shouted: “If you must know, I did kill Lynn – and I fucking enjoyed it.”
All this time, a deep hatred was stirring in Florence Siddons’ heart. One Christmas, she was in Woolworths in Derby with Lynn’s mother, Gail, when she saw Mick Brookes. She started shouting at him, calling him a murdering bastard and chased him out into the street. Sometimes, she simply stood outside his house and stared while he hid behind the curtains. Her family and friends felt the same. They pushed messages through his letter box, some of them anonymous, calling him a murderer, warning him that someone had been hired to kill him. They painted “murderer” across his front path. He moved to a secret address on the other side of Derby. Within two weeks they found him and broke his windows and shouted through the letter box that they would burn him out. He moved again. They found him again.
Florence Siddons went public with her campaign. She wrote to MPs and newspapers. She organised protest marches to Derby police station and she and Gail traipsed round doorsteps and supermarkets gathering 6,000 signatures on a petition to reopen the case. She produced a car sticker – “Who murdered Lynn Siddons?”. Then she handwrote posters which answered the question. A local MP warned her she might get into trouble naming Mick Brookes. “I don’t mind,” she said. “I’m doing it for Lynn.”
She and her two daughters kept trawling for clues. When Mick Brookes abandoned his young girlfriend and went home to Dot, they persuaded her to hide a tape recorder under the marital bed in the hope of recording a confession. But then Dot decided she loved Mick after all and she went to the Siddons lawyer and withdrew her statement. Undaunted, the women appealed for information in a local newspaper and two men came forward to describe how they had met Mick Brookes in a pub during the trial of young Roy in November 1978. They had known him for years and he had confided in them that he was worried about going to jail. They had asked him why he should worry, since it was his stepson who was on trial. “Well,” he had replied. “We are both involved.”
As the evidence accumulated, Florence Siddons twice persuaded the police to file new reports with the DPP, in 1980 and 1982. But, each time, the DPP refused to order a trial: Brookes’ stepson was an accomplice and, therefore, an unreliable witness; his wife could not be forced to testify against him; the evidence of the two men in the pub was only hearsay. Florence Siddons said this was all legal loopholes; murder was murder and she was not giving up.
Every week, she went to the cemetry and put fresh flowers on Lynn’s grave. Every night before she went to bed, she thought about Mick Brookes and how she could put him away. She carried a knife in her handbag in case she met him. When her daughter Cynthia saw Brookes and his wife walking in the street, she drove straight at them and sent them running for cover as her car mounted the pavement. She was fined £100 for reckless driving. In 1983, Mick Brookes tried to escape by changing his name to Mick Goodwood and moving to Peterborough. Florence Siddons traced him. She and her two daughters drove down to Peterborough and sat grimly staring at his new hideaway.
To keep the case alive, she filed for criminal compensation. She was awarded £27. In 1984, despairing of ever persuading Derby police to do justice, Florence Siddons secured an independent inquiry by officers from Merseyside. By now she was armed with still more evidence: an old friend of Brookes had decribed his obsessive stabbing of photographs of naked women; the man who had moved into Brookes’ last house in Derby said Brookes had confessed to him “I did it but they will never get me for it”; and Brookes’ own brother had been to the police to tell them that Mick had burned a pair of trousers on the day of the crime.
But when Merseyside police produced a report, recommending that an outside force should start a new murder inquiry, their advice was ignored, and Florence Siddons was forced to adopt a new tactic which is now poised to make legal history: she and Gail sued Mick Brookes for damages for the murder of Lynn.
It has been a long struggle. They were granted only limited legal aid and had to organise a sponsored walk and open a stall selling second-hand clothes to raise money. A High Court judge then ruled that they could not sue because too much time had passed. They appealed and won with a judgement that added that one or both of the Brookes was certainly guilty. Then Mick Brookes got legal aid and appealed, saying they had no right to sue him, but he lost. Finally, in July this year, Florence Siddons and her family arrived in the Royal Courts of Justice with their witnesses and their unblunted determination. On Monday (Sept 30), the court will announce its decision.
At home in Derby, Florence Siddons, now aged 77, has still not succumbed. “I would never forgive him. You read about people who talk about forgiving but I couldn’t. When I think of what he did to Lynn – for nothing, for fun – it makes me sick. Lynn’s not here and he’s got away with it. It’s bad enough when you don’t know who the murderer is, but when you know him… It’s such a waste of life.
“It were the police who messed it up. I’m not saying all policemen are the same. There are some good ones but there are some who have made a lot of mistakes. If I’d have sat down and thought about how long it would go on, I wouldn’t have started. But if I start something, I like to finish it. Perhaps when it’s done, Lynn will rest.”
