The family of Arlene Arkinson are still looking for closure more than 10 years after her death. The system that allowed Robert Howard to be acquitted of her murder only adds to their hurt, writes Susan McKay
'Look at the lovely funeral Hannah got," says Jolene Arkinson to her mother, Kathleen. The women study the photograph of the white coffin in a carriage, laden down with wreathes of white flowers and drawn by two white horses. This was the funeral in 2002 of 15-year-old English girl Hannah Williams, murdered by Robert Lesarian Howard. He dumped her body in a railway tunnel near her home in Kent, where it lay undiscovered for a year. In 2003 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for her murder. The Arkinson family is convinced that in 1994, seven years before he raped and strangled Hannah, Howard murdered Kathleen's sister, Arlene, who was also just 15 years old.
After a lengthy trial earlier this summer, Howard was acquitted of Arlene's murder. Then, last week, after other charges of sexual offences against the 61-year-old Laois man were dropped, a Belfast judge lifted the media ban which had prevented journalists from revealing that Howard had a horrific 40-year history of violent sexual crimes against women and girls. The Arkinsons believe the jury should have been told about his brutal past.
"If they had known, they'd have convicted him," says Kathleen.
The Arkinsons knew. Arlene's father, Willie, spends hours and hours watching television in the livingroom of the family home where Arlene grew up in the small Tyrone town of Castlederg. The room is full of photographs of Arlene. He was watching the news one day in May 2002 and heard Howard had been arrested for Hannah's murder. "We just thought - another wee girl," says Kathleen. One week later, Howard was brought to Enniskillen court, where he was charged with Arlene's murder.
Kathleen and other members of the family were brought over to Kent to give evidence at the trial for Hannah's murder. "We were there to give evidence about the way he operated," she says. "He'd meet an older woman, pretend to be in love with her, and get access through her to young girls. He groomed them. The way he got Hannah was the exact same way he got Arlene."
The Arkinsons had always believed Howard murdered Arlene, but in the court at Maidstone, they heard things that made their blood run cold.
"We nearly passed out in court when we heard all the background," says Kathleen.
They heard a young woman from their own town give evidence that in 1993, when she was just 16, Howard had imprisoned her at his flat in the main street of Castlederg. He had put a noose around her neck and had repeatedly raped and buggered her, tightening the noose when she tried to refuse him. He also threatened to kill her. She eventually escaped after two days, by breaking out through a window.
The girl and her family reported these crimes to the police at the heavily fortified RUC station just a short distance from the flat. Howard was charged, and released on bail. He went to live with a local woman with whom he was having a relationship. Her teenage daughter was a friend of Arlene's.
Arlene had been living with Kathleen's twin brother at the time she disappeared, and before that lived with another sister. "Her mother died when she was 11 and she was never the same since," says Willie, with whom she would still often stay at weekends. "I used to hear her up in her room crying, 'I want my mummy.' " Precocious in some ways, Arlene was also still quite childlike, her family says. She spent hours dressing up, putting on her make up and doing her beautiful long hair. She was a bright school student, and artistic.
Jolene Arkinson remembers the night in August 1994 when she last saw her young aunt. "I was nine and she was babysitting while my mummy was out at the bingo. We were playing housey up on my bed, and the phone rang downstairs. She went down and when she came back she said it was her friend. She said, 'They want me to go out.' She didn't want to go. She was chewing her knuckles and looking out the window."
After Kathleen came home, at around 11pm, the girl arrived at the house to collect Arlene. "She told us it was her and her boyfriend and her mother and Bob - that's what they called Robert Howard - that were going out," recalls Kathleen. "They said they were going to Bundoran and they'd be back at two. I gave Arlene an Irish pound I had." Arlene didn't get dressed up.
The friend's mother wasn't in the car. They drove to the disco at the Palace Hotel across the Border in the Donegal seaside resort of Bundoran. In the early hours, Howard drove them back. "He dropped off the girl and her boyfriend at Scraghey and he said he'd leave Arlene home," says Kathleen.
He drove off with her into the lonely, mountainy area of lakes and bogs and windy roads that veer between Donegal and Tyrone, and that was the last that was ever seen of Arlene.
Howard claimed he'd dropped her off in the centre of Castlederg at 2am, but it was quickly and widely believed that he was lying. He was drummed out of the town soon afterwards, and lived rough in a van across the Border in Castlefinn for a while. "Near a school," says Kathleen. Local men put him out of Castlefinn, and he moved back to the North, where he was tried in 1995 for the attack on the 16-year-old in Castlederg in 1993.
A psychologist prepared a report on Howard which revealed that he admitted having a "strong desire to dominate teenage girls both sexually and physically" and concluded that his offending behaviour was likely to escalate and "the risk of him reoffending was high". Howard claimed the girl consented to sexual acts with him. The judge ruled that it would be too traumatic for her to give evidence. Howard was convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge and given a three year suspended sentence.
He moved to Scotland, but was put out of Glasgow by locals who learned of his record. He moved back to Ireland, living in Wexford and Laois, before returning to England.
Born in Wolfhill, Co Laois, in 1944, Howard was in trouble by the time he was 13. Convicted of burglary, he was sent to St Joseph's industrial school near Clonmel for two years. Many former residents have alleged sexual and physical abuse of boys there.
In 1965, in London, he went into the bedroom of a six-year-old girl, and, pretending to be a doctor, sexually assaulted her. He was convicted and given nine days in borstal. In 1969, he broke into a woman's home in Durham and attempted to rape her. She escaped by running naked into the garden.
This time, his sentence was six years, but he was freed in 1972 and deported back to Ireland.
He moved into a guesthouse in Youghal and got a job in a local factory.
Soon afterwards, he broke into the home of a 58-year-old woman, dragged her upstairs, breaking her ankle in the process, tied her up and raped her, twice, before escaping in her car. He was caught and convicted.
The judge described him as an "explosive psychopath". He got 10 years, but was freed in 1981. In 1983, in Dublin, he married a 29-year-old civil servant, and was cruel and violent to her during their three-year marriage. In 1988, in Dublin, he was convicted of burglary and jailed for 15 months.
Howard has lived in many places in Ireland, North and South, and in the UK.
He has been considered a potential suspect in numerous rapes and in at least five disappearances and murders. The case dismissed this week included allegations dating back to 1988. It emerged this week that another young girl had alleged he raped her in 1993 in Castlederg - she reported it in 1997 but no charges were brought. A friend of Hannah Williams gave evidence at Howard's murder trial that he had attempted to lure her into the tunnel where Hannah's body was later found. The Arkinsons believe that Howard targeted other girls in Arlene's circle, too. "Arlene was the third girl that night that was asked out," says Kathleen. "The others weren't allowed to go." Bernadette Williams, Hannah's mother, last week condemned the authorities in Ireland and the UK for failing to treat Howard's crimes seriously. "Each time they freed him they let a very evil, dangerous man out onto the streets," she said. She also spoke about meeting the Arkinsons. "We just fell into each other's arms," she said.
There have been extensive searches for Arlene's body in the 11 years since she disappeared, most of them in vast mountainy places - difficult terrain. Local people from both sides of the border have helped the PSNI and gardaí. Tracker dogs, helicopters and all the latest technology has been employed. One paper last week reported a former garda inspector claiming that he knew where Arlene was buried, and that it was a lonely spot in a bog near Pettigo. He said Howard had returned there with his girlfriend several months after Arlene's disappearance, claiming he'd lost his watch. Another paper reported a woman who claimed she believed Howard might have had Arlene's body in a suitcase in her guesthouse.
The Arkinsons were certain that the evidence about Howard's past would also be given when he went on trial for Arlene's murder. "The last thing Mrs Williams said to us was, 'We'll see you in Ireland,' " says Kathleen. But prosecutors in Belfast decided against attempting to introduce such evidence.
Now the Arkinsons are backing calls for a change in legal practice in the North. "A lot of people have been hurt," says Kathleen.
"No one knows how many, and a lot of them could have been saved if Howard had been locked up years ago. Our lives have been destroyed. We know in our hearts Arlene got the same death as Hannah. We didn't get justice for her and we can't even give Arlene a Catholic burial." Arlene is commemorated on a stone beside her mother's grave.
There is to be another search for her body later this year.
