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| Yiannoulla 'Lucy' Yianni - 1965 -1982 |
I wish I could remember the name of our beleaguered Biology teacher - mine
and Yiannoulla Yianni's. We did tease him pretty badly, but we thought it was a
bit rich him not bothering to mark our homework, then giving us a load of grief
because we laughed at his striped pullovers and baggy trousers.
I remember Yiannoulla a lot more clearly than
I remember him. Her family called her Lucy. Her mates called her 'Noodles'. We
were in the same year, and shared a few subjects together. We weren't in the
same registration class, but she was my mate for Biology, and sitting with her
made it a lot more fun. She was a lot of fun. I can hear her voice and her laugh
in my head to this day - 34 years later. She was dry, and witty, with a superb humour
and deadpan delivery.
She always dressed smartly too. I remember the
little jacket she used to wear with her neat straight skirts, pastel sweaters,
and court shoes. She used to wear combs in her hair, trying to tame it, and
would wear it up on one side, always with something pretty holding it in place.
And she was Greek. Proper Greek. Serious
Greek. Not just a smidgeon like me. She was a north London Greek Cypriot girl,
with all the traditional background and home life that comes with it. No
messing. She had family around her – including a protective father and brothers,
and you couldn't imagine anyone trying anything on with her or her sister with
them around.
I remember every detail of her face, how her
eyes twinkled when she smiled, and she smiled a lot. She had what most would
call a "sunny disposition".
We were all on summer break when my mother
called me into the kitchen and directed my attention to the local paper.
"Isn't she a friend of yours?" She asked, pointing to a picture.
I looked over her shoulder. It was a picture
of Yiannoulla.
"Yes, that's 'Noodles'," I smiled.
"Why, what's she done?"
But it wasn't what she had done that was the
focus of the piece and the reason her picture was in the paper.
It was what had been done to her.
Words leaped out from the page as I read.
'Strangled'
'Sexually assaulted'
'Teenager'
"But maybe she's ok", I read on
frantically, "- maybe she's just in hospital…"
'Dead'
Her parents had come home to find the place
in chaos, and their daughter stripped and lifeless on a bed.
Not surprising. The chaos, I mean. Nobody
would have got the better of Yiannoulla if she said 'no'. She was a Quintin
girl. She would have fought with everything she had. She wouldn't have gone
quietly.
The Police tried to piece things together,
but her agonised parents had gone berserk, smashing things up in the house,
making forensics harder to gather.
They did their best. Every boy and every
teacher at school was pulled in for finger-printing. There had been no sign of
forced entry, you see, and as Yiannoulla wouldn't have let anyone in the house
she didn't know, they reckoned it had to be someone from the local community.
A cabbie reported he'd picked up a fare in
Belsize Road that day who'd been acting suspiciously. A man. Sweating and
agitated. He told the Police where he'd picked the guy up and where he'd
dropped him off, but they couldn't find him.
Yiannoulla's family had a shoe repair
business in West Hampstead, and my mother and I would often see her dad
standing outside laughing and joking around as we went to the mini-mart in the
same street.
As the funeral came and went, and months dragged by with no leads, her father found a few £thousand for a reward for any information. It would have been just about all he had. Next time we saw him, standing in the doorway of his shop, he was a changed man. Thin, pale, haunted. His eyes were hollow, and his smile was completely gone.
Months turned into years, and years turned
into decades. The Police had interviewed over 1000 possible 'witnesses', but
all came to nothing. Then in January 2016, a man was arrested for an unrelated
offence, and his DNA was found to be a match for material found at Yiannoulla's
murder scene.
Not to put too fine a point on it, that
'material' was semen. When it came to his trial in July of this year for the brutal
rape and murder of my friend, the 'suspect', James Warnock, tried to claim that
he had been in a "secret, consensual sexual relationship" with her.
But his memory failed him. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s, working class girls in their mid-teens, even if they were not
modestly brought up Greek girls like Noodles, just didn't sleep around. They
read 'Jackie' magazine (where just snogging someone meant they were your
boyfriend), and quaked at the thought of "going all the way" with a
boy for fear of pregnancy. GPs could still inform your parents if you asked for
the Pill, and if it got out that you'd "done it", you faced being labelled
a 'slag'. Indeed, what George Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins referred to as
'slum prudery' was very much the norm among the girls of Quintin Kynaston
School. It wasn't so much that girls were saving themselves for marriage, but there
was still definitely the expectation that if you got pregnant, you would have
to get married. So, if you didn't want to get married, you didn't play Russian
Roulette with the possibility of getting pregnant.
In this age of Rihanna, Beyonce, twerking,
Miley Cyrus's ever-lolling tongue, ladettes, 13-year-old mothers, and Robin
Thicke's 'Blurred Lines', such attitudes must seem like a distant fairy tale. James
Warnock was clearly counting on it when he tried to besmirch Yiannoulla's
reputation in Court 6 of the Old Bailey. Perhaps he had genuinely forgotten the
culture of the time, but he made a grave mistake expecting everyone else to
have forgotten too.
Thankfully, the Jury didn't buy it. Not least, one assumes, because the Post Mortem results read out in court revealed that before Warnock decided to knock on her door, barge in, and help himself to her, Yiannoulla had been a virgin. Indeed, as it emerged that she had been chased around her home, and had tried to lock herself in her brother's room to evade his brutal attack (which included partial drowning, and mutilation of her genitals, the court - and her family - heard), the fable of a 'consensual sexual relationship' was revealed to be just that – a fantasy, cooked up by a cold-blooded, cold-hearted psychopath, who thought he'd got away with it, and got sloppy, leaving his forensic footprint all over another dodgy scene, and, as an added bonus, failed to clear his computer cache of kiddie porn as well.
Nick, nick.
When I read the news on Friday that he'd been
found guilty, I admit I collapsed. My
legs just gave way, and I burst into hysterical tears, right there in my
office.
I wasn't expecting that. Neither were my
colleagues. The brain is a funny thing. Like many of Yiannoulla's friends, I
had given up hope long ago that she would ever get justice. I had thought that
whoever it was had just got away with it. That it would be an unsolved crime
forever.
I had to go for a walk around town. All the
while I was walking, I was saying to myself: "they got him… My God... they actually got him…" as if saying it over and
over would make me finally believe it.
Today, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 25 years. The judge apparently told him he would "die in prison", whilst he stood impassively in front of Noodles' traumatised family and friends. Truthfully, I felt it would have been better justice, if only poetic justice, if that minimum had been 34 years - one for every year her family suffered not knowing who had murdered their girl, or why. At least now they know who. As to why, though...Seems he just he felt like
it. Certainly it appears he's demonstrated not a second of remorse.
I realised something as the tears of relief rolled
down my face last week, hearing that he'd been found guilty. All these years, I have felt strangely guilty too: guilty that I got to grow up - and
grow old - and she didn't.
I remember I looked up at the blue sky, and smiled.
"You can rest now, Babe…" I said.
Although
her poor father died a little while ago, hopefully now, Yiannoulla's mother, brothers
and sister will finally be able to get some rest too.
