Nikki Allan’s mother gets justice but she is left asking why killer wasn’t pulled in by police

Sharon Henderson can’t stop crying. Her tears are part fury, part despair and part relief. Last week, jobless paedophile David Boyd was finally convicted of the truly terrible murder of her seven-year-old daughter Nikki, more than 30 years ago.

When the jury returned its verdict, she sobbed. ‘My legs went. I couldn’t stand up,’ she says.

Sharon, 56, has spent the best part of her adult life trying to find justice for her little girl but, half mad with grief, she was dismissed as, in her words, ‘a nutter in society’, arrested numerous times and committed to a psychiatric hospital.

She never gave up. ‘What mum would?’ she asks me. ‘She was my bairn. I’m still trying to cope with her being in that cemetery. I can’t imagine my daughter being in a grave.

‘I never saw her [after she was murdered]. The coffin was closed. I wanted to say goodbye to her, but I couldn’t because of what Boyd did to her.’

Boyd was a local 25-year-old whom Sharon knew through his girlfriend, Caroline Branton, who used to babysit for the family.

What he did to this shy, sweet-natured child in October 1992, was stab her 37 times and batter her with a brick, before dumping her body in a derelict building.

Crime scene images of her broken body lying on that concrete basement floor deeply affected even the most seasoned court reporters when they were presented in evidence at Newcastle Crown Court earlier this month.

Boyd had sat, impassively, through the three-week trial, much as he had when he was first arrested, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I am unstoppable’.

And well he might have remained, had it not been for Sharon’s Herculean efforts that eventually led the Chief Constable to order a new inquiry 25 years after the murder.

Using the latest DNA techniques, Boyd, who lived in the same block of flats as Sharon and her daughters, was revealed as Nikki’s killer. Sharon had pleaded with the shockingly inept Northumbria Police force to investigate him for years.

‘When they arrested him the police knocked on my door,’ says Sharon. ‘They were smiling at me and one of them said, ‘I’m only going to tell you this once: we’ve arrested him.’ I looked at them and said, ‘You’re only going to tell me once? After what I’ve been through all these years?’

It later emerged in court how, six years before Nikki’s murder, Boyd had come to the attention of police for harassing young girls and had also exposed himself to a woman out jogging.

Also, eight years after killing Nikki, he’d been placed on the Sex Offenders Register for indecently assaulting a nine-year-old girl, an offence for which he was jailed for 18 months.

While awaiting sentence Boyd told his probation officer that at the age of 22 he began having obscene sexual fantasies about young girls. He said it was a ‘phase’ he went through.

Yet none of this had registered with police, despite Sharon’s constant harrying.

Sharon says she wasn’t in court when this shocking evidence was revealed. ‘It was too upsetting seeing him there every day,’ she explains. ‘My daughter Stacey [who was two years older than Nikki] phoned me about it crying. She thought I knew but the police hadn’t told me. I put the phone down and vomited.

‘Why didn’t anyone listen to me? I can’t understand how Northumbria Police could have known there was this man three doors down from us who’d committed crimes against children and they didn’t look at him straight away?

‘He was a stranger living with his partner. I’d thought he looked creepy so, all the time [after Nikki’s murder], I was asking the police, ‘Please look at this address. Find out who he is.’ But nobody listened to me.

‘They left him out there to assault a little girl but even then — even when he was on police files as a convicted paedophile — they didn’t listen to me. It’s unbelievable.

‘All these years — 30 years — I’ve been getting in a mess, drinking too much, arguing with the police, asking for meetings, getting angry, getting arrested, knocking on people’s doors, asking questions, looking for answers, looking for the evil b****** who murdered my little girl. All the time, there’s a paedophile living three doors down from us and the police don’t pull him in.’

Tears stream down Sharon’s cheeks. It is impossible not to be deeply moved, not just by the rawness of this mother’s grief and anger, but by the sheer force of will that drove her to keep pressing for justice after getting knocked back time and time again. Many would have given up.

She is an emotional woman with a huge heart. The mantelpiece in her immaculate home on a narrow street in Sunderland is crammed with cards from friends and well-wishers. Every vase she owns is full of flowers that keep arriving. In one are purple-pink roses that, she tells me, are the same colour as the coat Nikki was wearing on the day she disappeared.

‘It hurts to think about her,’ she says. ‘That’s why I don’t like going to sleep because I dream about her. What’s happened is with me all the time.’

Hours before we meet, officers had arrived at Sharon’s home to take her victim impact statement for when Boyd will be sentenced next week.

They brought with them a photograph of Nikki. It was taken just a few months before her murder and Sharon hasn’t seen it for years.

She tells me much of the ‘evidence’ police took away with them 30 years ago disappeared. Now, this photograph of a pretty, fresh-faced child has been recovered and duplicated goodness knows how many times by police, so she can hand out copies to family and friends.

When the officers left, Sharon says she ‘just sat and cried. It was heart-breaking.’

‘This is how she is,’ she says, stroking her daughter’s cheek on the photograph. Sharon slips into the present tense as she allows herself to remember the terrible evening that unfolded in the quadrangle courtyard of the four-storey block of flats called Wear Garth where they lived.

She was, she says, a ‘normal single mother’ with a twin-tub washer in the kitchen and four children under nine. ‘We didn’t have much money, but I wouldn’t call where we lived deprived because there were a lot of hard-working families who’d been there for generations working down the docks.

‘That evening, I’d been at the twin-tub washer and had a headache. I said to the children, ‘I’m just going upstairs to nanas [her stepmother Jenny] to get some painkillers. Nikki wanted to come with me. So she put on her coat.’ She falls silent for a while staring at the purple-pink roses.

‘My dad had the Hoover on and Nikki was terrified of Hoovers. She began crying as Jenny was looking for the painkillers.

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Dad said, ‘Sharon, sort this out’ so I told Nikki to go home, and that I’d only be two minutes. God, I wish I’d never said those words. It’s just a saying, isn’t it? ‘I’ll be two minutes’. I have to live with having said that.’

Sharon believes she remained in her stepmother’s flat for 20 minutes or so. She returned to her own flat about 9.30pm and Nikki wasn’t there.

‘I thought she was with a little kid she’d met on the veranda [walkways that stretched the length of the block on each level], so I wasn’t panicking. I just started shouting for her.

‘The estate was very quiet. There were no children. I was looking at the verandas to see if there were any little heads bobbing [above the brick wall]. The kids hide sometimes when they don’t want to come in. The first house I knocked at was one of Nikki’s schoolfriends. She wasn’t there. I looked next door. It was all silence.

‘That’s when the panic started to set in. I went back to Wear Garth. There was no sign of anybody. I went back into my house and started looking under things. I thought she was hiding. Then the panic set in really bad.

‘I was standing at my door shouting. Other parents came out. They started shouting and the noise just got bigger and bigger.’

A neighbour called the police who told Sharon to stay in her doorway. ‘The only way I can describe it is it just exploded like that.’ She mimes an explosion with her hand.

‘From silence to just everybody shouting for Nikki. I can remember sitting down on the step. I just kept watching the veranda. I thought she was frightened to come in because she’d wandered off somewhere.

The police arrived, shortly followed by a police helicopter. ‘It was like another life,’ says Sharon. ‘Everything changes. You’ve got all these people around you and all you want to know is where she is. People are saying, ‘Keep calm, keep calm’, but I didn’t know how to keep calm. Then the doctor came and gave me an injection.’

Sharon can only recall snatches of what happened afterwards.

‘I felt like I was floating. I heard somebody running in the hallway. People were shouting, ‘What did Nikki have on her feet?’ They were saying something about a coat.’

The next thing she remembers is being in an ambulance. She was taken to hospital where she was given a 40mg dose of the sedative Temazepam, which is prescribed for anxiety and insomnia.

Sharon was, she says, ‘like a zombie’. She would remain on the powerful sedative for three years.

Sharon was sent home the following morning. Within hours, Nikki’s body had been found.

‘I was sitting at home like a zombie, when someone said to me: ‘They’ve found Nikki. She’s dead’. I scream. Most of the windows in the estate open because I scream so loudly.’

The next few days passed in a fog. ‘I can remember bits. It was like everybody was floating. I was just walking around.

‘This man walked up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear about your loss.’ I just stood and looked at him because I’d never seen his face before. He went into the house where Boyd was staying.’

That man was George Heron, a loner who became Northumbria Police’s prime suspect. He was arrested and charged after he confessed to the murder but was cleared on the direction of the judge a year later.

Heron, whom police have now apologised to, was subjected to ‘oppressive’ questioning and denied having any involvement in the murder 120 times during three days of interviews before making some kind of confession. Meanwhile, Boyd and his girlfriend disappeared from the estate.

Half mad with grief, Sharon was drinking heavily to dull her pain. She took to staking out the derelict building where her daughter’s body was found, searching for clues, wanting to be close to where she was in her last hours on Earth.

‘I talked to her, called out to her. I just remember sitting outside that building all the time until the police used to come and move me.’

Eventually, Sharon was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for three months. She grew stronger as she stopped taking the drugs, but her drinking continued. She concedes now she was ‘angry, a mess’.

‘The CID kept saying for years they weren’t looking for anyone else,’ she says. She began to try to ‘figure things out’ for herself.

‘I drew a diagram like this,’ she says, showing me a pen drawing of the quadrangle on which her flat, her step-mother’s flat, Heron’s flat and the flat in which Boyd was staying are marked.

‘I remembered Heron walking past me a few days after Nikki’s death and going into Boyd’s flat, but Boyd said, when he was giving a witness statement, that he’d never met Heron. Boyd was the last person to see Nikki alive. It didn’t add up.’

Sharon started her own enquiries. She gradually got closer to Boyd’s now ex-girlfriend Caroline Branton and her daughter, and even moved across Sunderland to live a few doors from them, to try to track him down.

In 2017, she had a meeting with the Chief Constable in which she begged him to reopen the case before his retirement.

A cold case team making use of advances in DNA technology, began working on the murder, and Boyd was traced to a flat in Stockton-on-Tees, 30 miles away. He was tested and found to be a one in 28,000 match for microscopic samples found on the waistband of Nikki’s cycling shorts, under the armpits of her T-shirt and under her coat.

Investigators began to examine Boyd’s background and his movements before Nikki’s murder as other suspects, including Heron, were eliminated. Boyd was charged.

During his trial, the court heard how he’d cased out his killing site at the abandoned Old Exchange Building in Hendon, Sunderland, three days before he enacted his evil plan, and lured Nikki away.

Heartbreaking CCTV which was too grainy to identify faces showed her skipping happily along with the man she thought she could trust.

He will be sentenced this week. Sharon hopes they’ll lock him up, throw away the key.

Can she finally rest now? She cannot speak for tears now.

‘This has been our lives for 30 years. And he’s been free for 30 years; free to hurt other children. The police are useless and should be investigated themselves for everything they’ve put us through. Why didn’t they listen to me?’

Why indeed.