.

TIA SHARP

 

 

 

 

 

by Katherine Smith

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2021 Katherine Smith

 

 

 

Contents

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

 

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

 

A list of sources used in the research of this book can be be found at the conclusion of the final chapter.

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Stuart Hazell is not as famous as Ian Huntley but the similarities between the two men were both dark and uncanny. Both of these notorious (and now thankfully incarcerated) figures took the life of beloved children. Hazell and Huntley both lingered on at the scene of their crimes and tried to pose as innocent men in the middle of police investigations and escalating media scrutiny. In this one might argue that they had little choice. To flee would be to draw suspicion. Hazell and Huntley also both attended family candle lit vigils for their victims and conducted television interviews in the limbo between their crimes and their eventual arrests. Though these men were equally monstrous and equally dangerous, Ian Huntley was considerably more adept at posing as an innocent person than Stuart Hazell. Huntley was meek and articulate when he spoke to the media. He was perfectly calm and even conveyed a projection of simulated empathy. Hazell, by contrast, was twitchy and nervous. Stuart Hazell projected desperation.

 

When the two girls in Soham went missing and Ian Huntley was interviewed on television, no one watching at home had a sudden sixth sense that he was the person responsible. Huntley was not overtly and obviously suspicious. This was not the case with Stuart Hazell. When Tia Sharp went missing and Stuart Hazell was interviewed by ITV, many viewers were absolutely convinced that Hazell was responsible for Tia's disappearance. The television interview only confirmed the deep suspicions and grave doubts many already had about this ramshackle man they'd seen fleetingly on the nightly news. Stuart Hazell always looked suspicious. He had the sort of face and body language that set off a million alarm bells.

 

There was a very small window in time where Ian Huntley might possibly have felt as if he was in control of events in Soham. He might even have felt he stood a slim chance of getting away with his crimes. There was never a moment though where Stuart Hazell felt in control of events. Stuart Hazell was always doomed. This was the major difference between the two men. Huntley seemed more intelligent and cunning than Stuart Hazell. He appeared to have some sort of plan. Stuart Hazell's situation, in contrast, was so hopeless and fragile that it remains something of a mystery why it took a week for him to be exposed and arrested. In the book that follows we will examine how this came to be.

 

Stuart Hazell was living with Tia's grandmother Christine in New Addington at the time of Tia's disappearance. This was where Tia was staying for the weekend when she vanished. Tia Sharp spent many happy weekends at her grandmother's house. Stuart Hazell, though he was only in his thirties, had become a sort of step-grandfather figure to Tia. Quite often he would be left alone with Tia and act as a babysitter to this twelve year-old girl. The pair had become close and Hazell had been around the family since Tia was a baby. The night before she vanished, Stuart Hazell and Tia had spent the night together in the house while Tia's grandmother was out working in a care home.

 

As far as the police could deduce, Hazell was almost certainly the last person to speak to Tia before she disappeared. It appeared, even at the time, that he was quite probably the last person to see her. What wasn't in doubt was that Stuart Hazell was the person Tia was spending time with when she went missing. Hazell was essentially her guardian when she vanished. And yet, mystifyingly, Stuart Hazell was not treated as a suspect by the police when the investigation began. The media and the general public were sure Hazell was guilty (it was difficult to see how anyone BUT Hazell could have been responsible for Tia's disappearance) but the police appeared to be hedging their bets.

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In hindsight, Stuart Hazell should have been arrested the night Tia was officially reported missing. A trio of factors though in this bleak and harrowing case clouded the obvious. These factors all played a pivotal part in prolonging and complicating the investigation. What should have been an open and shut case became something more complex and strange. Factor one was the persistent and vigorous loyal and vocal support the Sharp family afforded Stuart Hazell. They simply refused to even consider the possibility that he might have had anything to do with Tia's disappearance. They were 100% convinced that he was completely innocent. The Sharp family didn't have a bad word to say about Stuart Hazell. It was absolutely unthinkable to them that he might be capable of harming Tia.

 

The media (and public) focus on Stuart Hazell was something the Sharp family found to be an intense irritation - to the point where to they took to social media and the local newspapers to defend him from innuendo and grave whispers. The Sharp family felt strongly that the media and public's obsession with (and patent dislike of) Stuart Hazell was merely diverting valuable time and publicity away from the main focus of the investigation - which was to find the missing Tia. When Tia was missing, hardly a single press conference or interview with the Sharp family passed without at least one request for the media to lay off Stuart Hazell and leave him alone.

 

The police could not help but notice how staunchly and consistently the Sharp family defended Stuart Hazell and vouched for his character. Even when the evidence pointed firmly in the direction of Hazell, the dogged and sincere defence by this family must have - at the very least - given the police pause for thought. Hazell's friends, own family, and work colleagues were also supportive of this increasingly besieged figure. In the aftermath of this case, people were crawling out of the woodwork to say that Stuart Hazell was an awful person they had never trusted. These people were silent though when Tia was missing. No one connected to Stuart Hazell pointed any public finger of suspicion at him during the search for Tia Sharp.

 

The second (and wholly unexpected) factor in this case that worked in Hazell's favour was the neighbour who reported to the police that Tia had walked past his house alone on the day that she went missing. Unfortunately this sighting, which turned out to be bogus and false, only served to verify (or at the very least support) the equally false and bogus statements Hazell had given to the police and the media. The neighbour, a man named Paul Meehan, was judged to be a credible witness by the police and as a consequence lent credibility to the account Stuart Hazell had given of what happened the day Tia went missing. This was a disastrous twist in the case because it gave Stuart Hazell a benefit of doubt that he didn't deserve.

 

Hazell had told the police and the media that Tia had gone off alone on a shopping trip to Croydon and never returned. Paul Meehan therefore seemed to confirm that Hazell was telling the truth. His evidence suggested that Tia had left the house alone - just as Hazell had insisted. If she really had walked past Meehan's house alone then Hazell was not only telling the truth but - crucially - was not the last person to see Tia before she vanished. The police had to factor all of this into their investigation and (crucially) their attitude to Hazell. Stuart Hazell could doubtless hardly believe his luck when a neighbour independently came forward completely out of the blue and backed up his fictitious story that Tia had left the house alone that day. Incredibly, there was no collusion at all between these two men. Hazell didn't even know Paul Meehan very well.

 

Meehan's alleged sighting of Tia gave Hazell some unexpected breathing space and complicated a police investigation that needn't have been complicated in the slightest. The investigation into Tia Sharp's disappearance should have been the simplest police case of all to solve. This should never have been a complex and time consuming investigation. It is the last factor then that is the most difficult to understand. The third and final factor that complicated this investigation was something that should have been very preventable. Something that simply shouldn't have happened. The third factor was plain old police incompetence. The investigation into Tia's disappearance was a rather embarrassing fiasco for the police.

 

A simple fact in the Tia Sharp investigation is that the police failed no less than three times to conduct a thorough search of a very small house. Had they done this when Tia was first reported as missing then Stuart Hazell would have been arrested in a matter of minutes and hours rather than days and weeks. Stuart Hazell must have been astonished when police officers came and went from the house in New Addington three times without deducing that the solution to his case was staring them in the face all the time. All they had to do was look in the loft - the first place that any police officer on a case like this should have been searching in thorough fashion.

 

A common question people have about this case is how such a vile man as Stuart Hazell came to be babysitting an innocent twelve year-old girl. The Sharp family though had never seen any evidence that Stuart Hazell was a vile man. Hazell WAS a vile man (and he had the criminal record to prove it - including racist assault) but the Sharp family had known Stuart Hazell for ten years and in all that time they had never even seen him lose his temper. His conduct with the children in the family was perfectly normal and responsible and he had been unfailingly supportive and decent to Tia's grandmother Christine.

 

Despite the critical media coverage in the aftermath of this case, Stuart Hazell did not suddenly turn up on Christine's doorstep one day and become Tia's step-grandfather and babysitter the following weekend. It had taken ten years for Hazell to assume this level of trust and responsibility in the family. If you can't trust someone after a decade of experience then when can you trust them? That was the logic of the Sharp family and it was hard, even in the midst of the intense media flak they faced after the case, not to have some retrospective sympathy for the position they had taken. How could they have guessed the depths of danger and depravity which resided in Stuart Hazell? How could they have known that this danger would unexpectedly manifest itself after ten years of placid trustworthiness?

 

There were some attempts in the media to portray Tia Sharp as a victim of social deprivation or Broken Britain (a popular tabloid and political term at the time - the term was basically a stick with which to thrash working-class communities). This was a simplistic and inaccurate connection. The implications of this sociological reduction were ludicrous. It portrayed the working-classes as feckless paedophile criminals. Paedophiles exist in all social stratifications. To suggest otherwise would run contrary to factual evidence and not make any sense. The victims of these predators are not confined to any single class either. And though Tia's family struggled financially (as many families do) she was not deprived nor abused. She was loved and well looked after.

 

Stuart Hazell was proven to have an addiction to accessing criminal images and films of underage girls on the internet. This was obviously something that he did in private and kept to himself. The Sharp family had no idea that Hazell harboured these dark and criminal desires. Christine, who lived with Hazell, would later say in court that she didn't even know Hazell knew how to use the internet. Hazell depicted himself as clueless when it came to matters like technology. If the family of Tia Sharp had the slightest inkling of Stuart Hazell's true nature then Tia would never have been allowed anywhere near him and Hazell would not have been living with Christine in the first place.

 

The media criticism of the Sharp family was at times unfair and laced with snobbery. It is true though, as we shall see, that the family was not perfect. They knew Stuart Hazell had a raft of criminal convictions (all for offences like theft, GBH, and drug dealing) as long as a telephone directory. They'd also had their own encounters with the police. These were all negatives for the family but the broader implication that they'd somehow brought this tragedy on themselves was patently wide of the mark and cruel.

 

The case of Shannon Matthews was still fresh in the memory when Tia Sharp went missing in 2012. The media (and indeed the people of West Yorkshire) felt duped and angered when Shannon's disappearance turned out to be a bizarre money-making hoax by Shannon's mother. There seemed to be a strange carry over from this case into the Tia Sharp case. The media and public seemed wary of trusting another working-class family again so soon and taking them at face value in a similar sort of case. After the case had concluded, the media ran articles in which they seemed to suggest the Sharp family had brought this all on themselves - as if this sort of thing was all par for the course when it came to working-class people. This was absurd. The Tia Sharp case was a singular tragedy.

 

There is a perception in true crime cases that working-class families in situations like this do not generate the same amount of sympathy and publicity as the McCann family did in a similar scenario. In this book we will examine the Sharp family in more detail and try to understand why Christine and Tia's mother Natalie seemed to emerge from this case - against all conceivable odds - as unsympathetic characters. As we will see, some of this was the fault of Christine and Natalie and some of it was simply unfair.

 

It is curious how Stuart Hazell, in comparison to other notorious British criminals of the modern era, seems to have faded somewhat from the collective consciousness. Tabloid newspapers are obsessed with incarcerated murderers and their life in prison but you rarely read anything at all about Stuart Hazell these days. Maybe Stuart Hazell was too obvious. He looked like a criminal to begin with. People thought he was creepy even before his arrest. When he was arrested it was one of the least surprising true crime twists imaginable. True crime documentaries are more interested in criminals who seem more complex and manipulative. In this they perhaps underestimate Stuart Hazell. Hazell's awful crimes would not have been possible without some manipulation of the Sharp family on his part.

 

It is certainly true that Ian Huntley has always been more interesting than Stuart Hazell to the media and the true crime genre. Huntley was working as a janitor at the school of his two victims. His girlfriend, who seemed perfectly normal at first glance, was working at the school as a teaching assistant. Huntley appeared to be a fairly well liked member of the village community. If you watched him circa the Soham case being interviewed with no knowledge of who he was you would think he was a fairly normal and decent young man of reasonable intelligence. You wouldn't have him pegged as an obvious monster. Hazell had none of these qualities. He looked like a dodgy creep to begin with and so it came as no surprise to learn that he really was a dodgy creep.

 

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Hazell's infamy now is the interview he conducted with ITV when Tia was still officially missing. The Sharp family had arranged this interview so that Stuart Hazell could declare his innocence and draw a line in the sand. The interview was designed to quash the media and public whispers against him. This famous ITV interview, which we will examine in the book, is, with the knowledge of the grim circumstances in which it took place, now morbidly compelling and bleakly fascinating. This interview is to body language students what The Catcher in the Rye used to be to the English A 'Level syllabus.

 

In the book that follows we will see how trusted Stuart Hazell was by the Sharp family and how was able to develop a close bond with Tia Sharp. This book will also attempt to deduce what happened the fateful and tragic night that Tia lost her life and then somehow make sense of the bizarre situation that Stuart Hazell, thanks to some very basic police mistakes, found himself trapped in. Although 2012 is slowly starting to feel like a long time ago, this case is still fresh in the memory of those who followed it at the time. The Tia Sharp case was unbearably sad and at times perplexing. We will attempt to see what, if any, lessons this tragic case ultimately left us with.

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

During a long warm summer, on the evening of Friday, the 3rd of August, 2012, a twelve year-old schoolgirl named Tia Sharp was reported missing in New Addington. New Addington is an area of South London within the London Borough of Croydon. It is located south east of Croydon and south of west of Bromley, close to the border with both the London Borough of Bromley and the county of Surrey. New Addington began life as a new 'garden city' in the 1930s - although by 2012 it would probably be fair to say that New Addington hadn't quite met the more fanciful and vaguely pastoral dreams of those original planners. New Addington had its fair share of problems (what place didn't?) but it was a proud working-class community of 25,000 people that had its own rather unique sense of identity. New Addington was neither high rise nor tranquillity. It was simply New Addington.

 

New Addington was not perfect by any measure of the word. It was no stranger to drugs, youth crime, social deprivation, unemployment and gang violence. In 2011, New Addington was caught up in the London riots and some of the shops and flats on the Central Parade were destroyed. Members of the community poured out onto the streets to protect other shops and properties from the opportunistic delinquents determined to take advantage of this sudden if temporary breakdown in society. "We are a small community and there is a lot of history here," said a local man. "We just united to protect our village and to offer additional support to the police. We don't need the army, we have our own Addo army."

 

When the disappearance of Tia Sharp became national news, New Addington was subject to the expected slurs and subtext of disdain that laced the columns of journalists who had apparently never encountered any working-class people or working-class communities before in their own sheltered lives. As they surveyed the surfeit of bookmakers, payday loan shops, fast food takeaways, and little pebble dashed houses valued generously south of £300,000, the media were like astronauts tentatively exploring some strange alien world.

 

New Addington was dubbed a 'ghetto' and somehow implicated in the awful tragedy that was unfolding. This was both unfair and far too simplistic. There had been similar tragedies and missing child cases in picturesque middle-class villages and rural communities. The community in New Addington, which rallied around the Sharp family when Tia was missing and did all that they could to help search for her, deserved rather more than to be broad brushed as a benighted ghetto of illiterate criminals.

 

Tia Christine Sharp was born on the 30th of June 2000 in Croydon. Her mother Natalie (born in 1981) was still a teenager at the time of Tia's birth. Tia's grandmother Christine was only 15 when she became pregnant with Natalie so the age gap between grandmother, mother, and Tia was not as pronounced as one might usually expect in a family. Tia's grandmother Christine was present at the birth of Tia and these three family generations would always remain remarkably close. Perhaps it was their relative closeness in age that made them such a tight knit trio. Natalie, Tia, and Christine had a seemingly unbreakable bond.

 

Tia was Natalie's first child. Later on she would have two further children - Tia's younger brothers. Natalie described the arrival of Tia as like the best Christmas present you could ever receive. Tia was the perfect gift. She was an adorable baby and little girl. Tia's biological father was a man named Steven Carter. Carter split from Natalie when Tia was still a baby and he then moved out of London to Northampton. The relationship between Steven Carter and Natalie Sharp fractured to the point that Carter, after the separation, found his access to Tia become frustratingly restricted and infrequent. "I had Tia every holiday until things turned sour between me and her mum," he later said. "If that hadn't happened there's every possibility Tia would have been staying with me that August."

 

Natalie married again but this marriage didn't last very long. When Tia disappeared in 2012, Natalie was in a long-term relationship with a 29 year-old unemployed man named David Niles. Niles was Tia's step-father and had watched her grow-up. Tia and Niles got on well. She was very fond of him and David Niles loved Tia as if she was his own daughter. There were no real problems between Tia and her step-father.

 

Tia became a pretty girl with long brown hair, big expressive dark eyes, and a charmingly sheepish sort of smile that could light up a room. Although small for her age at 4'5 she was a child with a big personality. Tia was chatty and not afraid to venture forth with her own opinion on something when the mood took her. Her mother described her as "lively, bubbly, happy" and a "typical 12 year-old" with "more front than Brighton". Natalie said that Tia was a charismatic child and the "colour of all colours". You definitely knew about it if the occasionally obstreperous Tia Sharp was in the room.

 

Tia's eyesight wasn't great and so she always wore spectacles. The slightly bookish appearance this sometimes gave her was not entirely deceptive. Tia was intelligent for her age - as her good grades at school evidenced. She was a smart kid with a cheeky and outgoing personality. Tia was beloved and adored by her family. She made friends easily too and was popular with other children. Tia loved music and would often pretend her BlackBerry was a microphone to dance and sing along to her favourite songs. She wanted to be an actress or a nail technician when she grew up. Either of these (rather disparate) occupations sounded pretty good to young Tia.

 

Despite her intelligence and popularity at school, Tia's attendance record wasn't the best. It often fell below 80%. She didn't always turn up to school. The school authorities were rather puzzled by this given that Tia attained good grades and seemed such a cheerful and popular sort of girl. Action against Natalie Sharp for Tia's poor school attendance was prepared by the educational authorities. Tia Sharp's family was also referred to Merton Social Services more than once. There were reports that drugs were used in the home. Tia was present during police searches of the family home in 2004 and 2008 in which drugs were found. The police also visited their South Mitcham flat once in response to a blazing argument between Natalie Sharp and David Niles.

 

However, there were never any signs of child neglect or abuse and no action was taken in regard to the children. It was never in doubt that Natalie Sharp and David Niles loved Tia and always did their best for her. Tia had a phone and the clothes she wanted. There were birthday cakes and family outings. Tia had a happy childhood in a loving home. Social services later suggested that they had asked the school to keep a close eye on Tia but her school said that they received no such instruction. Ultimately, this bureaucratic misunderstanding probably wouldn't have made any difference to the tragedy that was about to unfold.

 

Tia Sharp's family lived on the Pollards Hill estate. Pollards Hill is a small residential district straddling the south London boroughs of Croydon and Merton between Mitcham and Norbury. Tia's family lived on Lancaster Avenue in a block of low rise flats. Tia would often go to New Addington though at weekends to stay with her grandmother Christine. She seemed to enjoy the chance to get out of Pollards Hill and have a change of scenery at her grandmother's house. At home Tia had two younger brothers and space was at a premium. Tia had to sleep on the settee in the living room at home because there were only two bedrooms in the flat. She especially liked to stay at her grandmother's house because she had her own bedroom there. It was a rare treat for Tia to have her own room and a bed to sleep in.

 

Tia's grandmother lived at Number 20 The Lindens in a little terrace house. Tia was actually born in this house as Natalie and her first husband had lived here with Christine when they first got married. You could argue that New Addington had one arm tied behind its back right from the start when the town planners didn't really bother with schools in their blueprints. The original concept in the 1930s was to build small cheap homes for working-class people who would (it was presumed) work in the nearby countryside.

 

The planners obviously didn't think that working-class people would have any need for nice schools in the area so they didn't really bother with this part of the equation. As a consequence, New Addington became a very working-class sort of place. Anyone with money moved out to find a place with nice schools for their kids. By 2012, the rural jobs presumed by the 1930s planners were also rather more thin on the ground than they had been all those years ago and the area was more urban and blighted with unemployment.

 

Christine's house was typical of the area. It was very small and looked like something that had been built very quickly. The top half of the house was slated and the bottom pebble dashed. There wasn't much of a garden. Just a little square of grass at the back and front. These little streets criss crossed the area with small footpaths separating them. Car access was limited and while this was undoubtedly a pain for people with cars it did at least make life in some of these houses more peaceful. They didn't have to put up with the close swoosh of traffic or people constantly reversing in and out of parking spaces on their doorstep. Beyond the streets and away in the distance were pleasant views of tree tops and signs of woodland. The Lindens was within easy walking distance of some woods and fields.

 

Christine was the matriarch of the family. She was 46 years-old and had been married a couple of times. Christine was quite a stern looking woman on the surface. She had short brown hair, was a tad frumpy, and didn't seem to smile much. Christine appeared quite intimidating if you were being honest. She always looked slightly annoyed by something. But we only saw Christine through the prism of this dreadful case. In those circumstances of course she would appear miserable and glum. Anyone would. Behind the scenes Christine was much more vulnerable and emotional.

 

Christine was living at the house in The Lindens with a part-time window-cleaner named Stuart Hazell. Hazell had become such an important and trusted part of the Sharp family circle that routines developed which often included him. One familiar routine was Tia going to stay with her grandmother and Hazell in New Addington at the weekend. Hazell would usually travel with Tia on the terminal tram that linked New Addington to Croydon. Tia had texted Hazell on August the 1st with the following message - “Can I stay at your house all weekend?” Hazell texted back several hours later - “I will ask Nanny :)” Tia's stay was - as usual - approved by Christine and it was Hazell who went to fetch Tia.

 

Tia loved to go and stay with Christine and Stuart Hazell in New Addington. Not only did she have more space and peace and the luxury of her own bedroom (what growing young girl doesn't want her own bedroom?), she was also able to play games on the Playstation that Hazell owned and stay up late watching television. When she came over to stay, Tia and Stuart Hazell would shop together at the Co-op on the Central Parade and stock up on her favourite treats. Tia, like most children, loved things like sausage rolls, ice lollies, pizza, and chips, and she would be indulged in these foods. That was another reason why she loved staying with her grandmother and Hazell. She could eat whatever she wanted to. Weekends away in New Addington must have felt almost like mini holidays to Tia.

 

Stuart Hazell, at 37, was a decade younger than Christine - although it would be fair to say that he wasn't exactly the most youthful looking 37 year-old you'll ever encounter. The thin weasel like Hazell had a craggy wrinkled face, bags under his eyes, a boxer's nose, numerous tattoos, and narrow beady blue eyes. His blonde hair was always shaved in a near skinhead. Christine had met Hazell when she was working as a barmaid at the Raynes Parks Tavern in South-west London. He moved into her house and they became a couple. Hazell and Christine had separated a few times but always seemed to end up back together.

 

This was a rather strange family arrangement because Stuart Hazell had supposedly shared a previous fling (which apparently lasted about two weeks) circa 2002/2003 with Tia's mother Natalie before

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 22.01.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-7259-0

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