So when hope died, and Sarah's naked body was found in a dismal roadside grave, there could hardly have been a mother or father anywhere who didn't imagine that it could so easily have been their own child. Practically every day, you could catch her increasingly desperate parents on a TV screen somewhere, pleading for help, refusing to give up hope. She had been kidnapped in daylight just a short distance from her grandparents' home.įor weeks afterwards, her little face beamed out almost everywhere from ' missing' posters or newspaper appeals.
The summer holidays had barely started when she was snatched from a cornfield and bundled into the back of a van, another victim to add to Britain's bleak catalogue of abducted children.īut there was something about the disappearance of this bright-eyed eight-year- old that dominated the thoughts of parents across the land. Sarah Payne is a name few parents will ever forget.
