Alix Sharkey - My Brother the Killer: A Family Story

For my mother, my daughter and my wife.

Tilbury Docks... are very modern, but their remoteness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, the days of failure attending their creation, invested them with a romantic air. Nothing in those days could have been more striking than the vast, empty basins, surrounded by miles of bare quays and the ranges of cargo-sheds, where two or three ships seemed lost like bewitched children in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic cranes. One received a wonderful impression of utter abandonment, of wasted efficiency.

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906)

Dear Stuart,

Almost 20 years have passed since we last met, on a muggy afternoon in August 2001. Shortly afterwards you were arrested for Danielles abduction and murder, and remanded in custody to await trial. Ever since your conviction in December 2002, you have been serving a life sentence behind the watchtowers, razor wire, steel doors and three-foot brick walls of a Victorian prison in West Yorkshire. I assume thats where you are now, as you read these words.

Despite never having visited, Ive read that HMP Wakefield is Western Europes largest maximum-security prison, housing over 700 of the UKs most dangerous offenders: serial killers and rapists, child murderers, psychopaths and paedophiles. Apparently, even the guards call it Monster Mansion.

I guess by now it must feel like home.

In your absence the world has changed drastically. Smartphones and tablets, video streaming, Google Maps, YouTube, Skype, WhatsApp, surveillance drones none of these things existed when you were last a free man.

What else has changed? My attitude.

In my previous letters sent during your first few years in prison you must have noticed my soothing tone, the way I avoided any hint of accusation, any suggestion that you might be guilty. I was trying to start a conversation in the hope you might one day tell me what youd done with Danielles body.

This time, I wont mince my words.

You know how I know youre guilty, Stuart?

I mean, leaving aside all the overwhelming evidence? Circumstantial, perhaps, but strong enough for a jury to convict you in under eight hours. But all that aside?

Your silence.

Imagine if we swapped places. If I were innocent and unjustly convicted as you once claimed to be while you were walking around free as the breeze? My screams for help would have deafened you. My letters of outrage would have swamped you. I would have begged, hounded, shamed and harassed you until you secured my release.

Likewise, if you were innocent, I would never have heard the end of it.

For the first few months after your conviction I waited, giving you the benefit of the doubt. I thought, Maybe hes still angry with me because I suspected him. But if hes truly innocent, as he claims, and this is all some terrible mistake, then sooner or later hell explain his side of things. Eventually hell ask for my help.

You never reached out. Not a peep.

Thats how I know youre guilty.

So why kick this hornets nest? In many ways it would be easier to let you continue your charade and eke out your days, slunk in your corner, cut off from the world. And certainly, for a long time, my best course of action seemed to be denial, pretending not to know or care about you. I felt ashamed to be your brother, a nauseating fear of being associated with your crimes, of being judged along with you. That fear turned in on itself, until I began to wonder if we shared the same genetic predisposition, the same pathological tendencies. Even after I managed to quell those doubts, there was still the lingering fear that maybe I couldnt access the darkest parts of my psyche. Perhaps my deepest nature was inaccessible, hidden even from myself?

I tried to run away. And for a while at least I managed to escape. After I moved to America, I sometimes forgot that I had a brother serving life for killing his teenage niece. And you made that easy, because you never reached out to me. Perhaps you wanted to be forgotten, in the hope that your crime would be forgotten, too.

Trouble is, I cant go on pretending that I dont remember, or that this is out of my hands, or all in the past, or nothing to do with me. Maybe youve found a way to compartmentalise or trivialise your crime, but I wont be able to look myself in the mirror unless I try one more time to put this right.

The impetus for this book was anger. I was enraged when I realised you might be released without ever telling Danielles parents what you did with her body. Then I got angry with myself. Id left it far too long to speak out. And many times during the writing of this book, I became furious whenever I thought about you. But though I despise you for what you did, Im no longer angry with you. And even though the law has now changed, making it far less likely that you will walk free without giving up Danielles body, I still feel a responsibility to challenge you.

And so Im hoping that if I tell the truth, maybe you can, too. Not only would that be the right thing to do, but I suspect deep down you want to make amends and ask forgiveness. To give closure to Danielles parents, Tony and Linda, who welcomed you into their home as part of their family.

Equally, I have come to rescue our mother from an ugly legacy. Im not going to let her life story be defined by your imprisonment for the murder of a little girl who trusted you. I want people to know that she tried her best, even if her naive attempts to protect you sometimes enabled your depravity. Despite those failings, she was and still is the best thing about our family, and if there is anything honest or kind or brave or noble in any of us, we learned it from her.

Naturally, she still loves you, and has never abandoned you.

My feelings towards you are a little more complex.

But Stuart, I do not hate you. I have no hatred for anyone. True, I cannot love you as I once did. Your cruelty makes that all but impossible. Yet I still feel something, some kind of brotherly affection or at least, attachment. Some desire to save you from yourself, to prevent you from wasting the few years that remain to you.

Over the last three decades I have moved often, from London to Paris, Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Along the way I have discarded piles of ephemera, including photographs, artworks and numbered editions, sketchbooks, notepads and scads of personal documents. Yet when I set out to write this book and went searching through the small trove of personal papers I had always clung to, I found your prison letters, many dating back to the late 70s. Across tens of thousands of miles, over continents and oceans, for almost five decades those letters came with me.

And Im still trying to understand: why?

Anyway, here we are again.

This is my last prison letter to you, an attempt to reconcile your brutal crime with the memory of a beautiful young boy, my little brother Stuart.

I want to believe that kid still exists.

I want to believe I can still find him and rescue him.

Maybe after I lay out the story of how we got here, well have a better idea of what comes next. So lets pick this up at the end of the book.

See you on the other side.

Alix

Its a mild Thursday afternoon and the sky is the colour of gunmetal, a typical British summer day. Having left Paris on the 10.15 Eurostar, I arrive at London Waterloo around lunchtime. Running early, I buy six newspapers at WHSmith and settle into a corner of Costa Coffee with my sandwich and Americano. I really dont need the caffeine because my pulse is already racing as I leaf through the British press, dreading the moment when I turn the page to find a photo of myself, and learn theyve finally linked me to the missing girl.