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04/12/01 - On video, brothers trace
Sarah's steps
By Paul Harris
Daily Mail
IT looked like a home movie of two small boys playing
in a cornfield in the setting summer sun. In different
circumstances the mute, jerky video might have served
as a proud mother's record of her sons.But Luke and
Lee Payne were walking in the footsteps of their murdered
sister.
The man in a suit at the edge of the screen was a senior
detective, and behind him their mother was almost in
tears. For this was the last known Journey of Sarah
Payne, recreated by the two boys who were with her until
just before she was abducted.
When she disappeared at the far end of that field, they
never saw her again. Yesterday a jury watched as the
video reconstruction was played on two TV screens. Roy
Whiting, the man accused of kidnapping and killing the
eight-year-old, sat a few feet from Sarah's parents
Sara and Michael Payne as, for nearly 40 minutes, Lewes
Crown Court fell silent.
The jury had asked to visit the abduction site but was
told by the judge it would be impossible to recreate
the exact scene as it was on July 1 last year when Sarah
vanished from a lane near the field at Kingston Gorse,
West Sussex. Instead, the jurors asked to see two police
videos that Luke and Lee helped make.
Sarah and her brothers had been playing with their little
sister Charlotte on a beach near their grandparents'
home before walking to the cornfield to play hide-and-seek.
Sarah ran off alone towards her grandparents' house.
Sixteen days later her naked, mutilated body was found
in a shallow grave a few miles away.
The prosecution claims that Whiting bundled her into
his van in the lane beside the cornfield and killed
her soon afterwards. The 42-year-old, a mechanic and
jobbing builder, denies abduction and murder. As the
film was played, Sarah's grandfather Terry Payne rarely
lifted his stare from the floor.
Her grandmother Lesley watched motionless, a hand almost
covering her mouth. Sara Payne spent much of the 40
minutes with her head on her husband's shoulder. Occasionally
a smile crept across her face as she watched her sons
on film. The camera showed her cradling Luke to her
chest at the end of the reconstruction. When he looked
up again, he was crying.
The case continues. |
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