Original subtitles

- It's a shop which is famous for being the favourite watering hole of Patsy.

In 'Absolutely Fabulous'. What you don't expect to happen in Harvey Nichols,

is for anyone to be shot in the head at point blank range.

He'd gone up behind her and shot her in the head from behind,

then she hit the floor and he shot her in the face 3 times.

As far as we were concerned, once the professionals, the police were

involved, the problem had gone away, the professionals had dealt with it...

Colin Sutton was a detective chief inspector

and senior investigating officer at the metropolitan police.

He led the investigations into some of the most complex, high profile cases ever,

bringing dagerous criminals to justice.

In this series, he will take you inside those cases,

and show you how he caught these criminals,

using nothing but pure detective work.

This is "The Real Manhunter".

It was a Tuesday evening in September 2005 and I was on-call SIO for West London

and I remember getting the call and 'control' that give us the jobs said,

'I've got a double fatal shooting for you Mr Sutton'. At the time we had been

suffering from a few shootings in West London, most of them in Harmston,

Stonebridge Park Estate and that sort of thing, I assumed that's where I'd be going

and I think I might have said that to them 'Whereabouts in Harmston am I going?'

and he said 'No, it's a bit of a funny one, it's at Harvey Nichols'.

I was in the office, Colin was the kind of guy that... he was a DCI,

and it wasn't that normal really for DCI's to come running around

the office and say, 'Come on Dave, we're going out', you know?

Ordinarily a DCI would say, 'A job has come in, I want you to go to...

When you get there let me know', that type of way, but.

Colin was a... as a detective that wanted to be involved.

I think most of the team would have gone home by then, it was in the evening,

but I had a system whereby we sort of ring each other round

and I scrambled the team to come to tonight's, which was Harvey Nichols.

These cases are obviously rare, fortunately. It's got huge profile, it's a

major London store, a young woman being shot at her place of work, truly awful.

How can that happen? Why can there be a double fatal shooting at Harvey Nichols?

It's got a touch of glamour to it, what you don't expect to happen in.

Harvey Nichols is for anybody to be shot in the head at point blank range.

When Clare was little, she was incredibly shy, she didn't like to be

in the limelight, as she got older in her teens, her confidence started to grow.

She was very gentle, she was very loving and very trusting.

She came from a... you'd probably describe it as quite a middle-class

family background, she was a little bit inexperienced in the ways of the world

in many ways and certainly in terms of relationships with men.

She'd love a party, she was like any other 21, 22-year-old.

The only difference was that Clare was somewhat naive I think,

she had dated very few boys and she always had

high expectations of any relationship she was in.

Clare was... she was a bright, intelligent, articulate, very attractive

young lady who wanted to work in the field of doing make-up and so forth.

She had been working there for some time, she absolutely loved the job.

She was beautiful, she was beautiful inside and out.

She was always interested when she was about 12, I recall her...

she loved to apply make-up. She would experiment,

which sort of got her into that sector.

Michael Pech was a security guard at Harvey Nichols, he was Slovakian.

He'd been in the Slovakian army where he had learned firearm skills.

He'd come to Britain, got a job working at Harvey Nichols

where he met Clare who was a beautiful young woman.

He was 10 years or so older than her, he'd

seen a lot of life, he was in the military.

He obviously just fell completely in love with her,

he was just absolutely besotted with her. She didn't want the relationship

to be that serious that quickly and didn't know what she wanted I think,

but knew that she didn't want to be tied to Michael Pech in the way that he did.

But you can't always predict how somebody

is going to react to those sort of circumstances.

A girl had been shot and that this guy had shot himself,

we knew that before we got there. We didn't know any detail about what

the relationship was, who he was, we just had a girl that had been shot.

It would appear, on the face of it, to be a fairly tight investigation

because a suspect is there and they are deceased,

therefore a lot of the work that would have been involved in

identification and interview strategy etc, is not necessary.

So, it was obviously one of those really tragic cases, but it was also one of those

where you can't jump to conclusions or make assumptions, and although it looks

for the world that it is a murder and then followed by a suicide, you still have to

respond to it, there has still been a murder hasn't there?

There is a murder there even though the suspect is now dead,

and you need not to make the assumptions and go there and do

all the things to investigate, investigate the scene,

preserve it and make sure it's done properly.

So, we responded to it as if it were a murder with no suspect.

It was obvious really quite quickly because you very quickly

research the people concerned and identify that there are issues within this case.

Certainly, those of us in the office that were looking at the people concerned

knew that this would develop into a major crime and a major investigation

for the police service and the criminal justice system really from day one.

Harvey Nichols in London's Knightsbridge. World-famous department store

with its wealthy clientele, in a very wealthy area of the capital.

Not the sort of place that I'd expect to get sent to for a double fatal shooting

but that was the call I got in September 2005.

I just happened to be in Central London when I got the call,

so I happened to be here before a lot of my team,

but I needed the normal sort of forensic work done and local inquiries.

So, I called them all over here, that then gave us the problem

of 'where can we do the briefing?'. Since we were all in the cosmetics department,

there are all the chairs where customers sit to get make-up applied to the staff,

and we were able to use those and you've got this slightly surreal scene of

a murder squad sitting down on the make-up chairs

with me behind the counter giving them the briefing.

So, you had a counter in front of her,

highly polished ceramic tiles on the floor, the usual sort of

beauty products all around her and you couldn't at first see her,

but he had gone up behind her and shot her in the head from behind

and then she hit the floor and he shot her in the face.

What we were told by the eyewitnesses, was that Clare Bernal was working

as usual on the cosmetics counter, Pech had come into the store,

he'd shot her twice then she'd fallen to the ground

and he turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head.

The distressing thing from our point of view was...

the amount of blood.

The shooter, Michael Pech, who had killed himself,

was not far away with a hand gun, cartridge cases dotted about.

We were able to do some immediate searching and we actually found

4 cartridge cases, but we could only really account for 3 of the shots,

2 in Clare and one to Pech at the end.

So, we dealt with the scene, retrieval of the weapon, retrieval of the bodies.

Colin had to deal with the press outside, management of the store.

We needed to find that 4th bullet.

I in fact got a call from the senior executive at Harvey Nichols who said,

'When can we have our shop back? It's costing us 10s of thousands of pounds

every hour we are shut'. I pointed out that probably one of his loyal

and wealthy customers wouldn't be too impressed if they

moved something on a shelf and found a bloody bullet behind it,

and he understood that instantly and said, 'Mr Sutton, do what you need to do

and just tell me when we can have our shop back'.

At the time, my role was known as 'receiver' in the incident room,

therefore I'm not deployed to the scene. The team were deployed,

I remained in the office sort of instruction to the set of,

to the set of circumstances that the team would bring back.

I was still busy with the scene, so I just had a conversation with my brother

and said, 'do us a favour, would you go and pick up the post-mortem the next day,

because I'm going to be here all night and tomorrow'.

I attended the post-mortem as a part of the process to prove causation of death.

During the post-mortem, both Clare and Pech were in the same mortuary.

I remember thinking at the time, 'somehow, this is not right'. The process was fine,

and it was perfectly normal, but from a moral and personal perspective

it did not feel right to see the two laying effectively in the same place.

As my team carried on with the normal things that you do in the early hours

of a homicide investigation, I knew that we were going to have to find out

why a man who said he loved and

cherished a young woman, had walked

into her place of work, into a shop and brutally shot her, killed her

and then killed himself. The big question we needed to answer quickly:

Was he acting alone?

There was just so many questions,

'what's somebody doing with a handgun in Harvey Nichols?'

'Why has it come to that?'. It's all set really in a situation of so much sadness,

because you've got this very attractive 22-year-old girl who we then found out

really loved her job, loved what she was doing working there and had this

difficult relationship with this man who used to work there.

It transpired that Clare Bernal, who was the victim,

shouldn't really have been working that evening.

She had swapped shifts with her flatmate for various reasons

and when the story started unfolding and we realised the shooter,

her ex-boyfriend Michael Pech, had gone there to find her, we assume

he must have gone to her home first to find her. He would have expected her

not to be at work, she shouldn't have been in work that day.

He used to work for Harvey Nichols, he was a security man, that is how they met,

and he had access to her rotas and shifts. There then became the worry

that if he's gone to this flat that she shares with a colleague,

what's happened there? Have we got another victim, the colleague,

lying dead in this flat in Dulwich where they lived? So, that became a priority

for us, to get down to Dulwich to check on the safety of Clare's co-worker.

When we discovered that Clare was not meant to be working, that she had actually

swapped her shift with her colleague and flat mate, we realised the likelihood

was that Pech would have come here to Dulwich to the flat they shared first

because that's where he would expect Clare to have been.

That then raises issued of 'was she safe?' We came to the flat, knocked on the door

and got no answer, we were sort of debating whether there was a real risk,

and should we try forcing entry and we were just sitting

outside in a car here at the end of the road and this young lady comes along

in a tracksuit and gym bag and she sat on the wall just over there,

just outside the entrance to the flat and was talking on a mobile phone.

We went and approached her, and we realised that she was talking

in a language that sounded like Russian and we knew that that's where.

Clare's friend hailed from. We asked her and she said.

'Yes, I'm sitting here because I can't get into the flat

because I haven't got a key and I was waiting

for Clare to come back with the key'. We then had to break the news that Clare,

her friend, her colleague and her flatmate, was dead.

Having found out that.

Clare's work mate was safe, what we needed to do was do a bit more investigation

into Michael Pech. Of course, at that point we don't know who he is,

who his associates are. Is he a one off? Is he a so called 'lone wolf' and

is it only about Clare, or does he live,

frequent, associate with a lot of people

who are armed and are there any more firearms and ammunition back where

he lived and all things like that. So, we found out he lived in a house in.

South Tottenham and again, while those on the team were doing what

they can with the scene and witnesses at Harvey Nichols.

Tony McEwan and I go to South Tottenham to this house and it was a house

on the end of a terrace and it was quite derelict almost,

it was not in very good condition, the grass was 3 feet high in the garden,

there was a window or two broken and the front door was kind of hanging open

but sort of ajar when we got there. It's in the early hours of the morning

and we've got a panda car from the local police station in Tottenham and

a couple of uniformed police officers that came with us.

Although we know were going in there thinking we might be looking for firearms

or people with firearms, we knew that we had no chance of

getting armed backup. It's one of these situations

where it's obviously dangerous but it's not dangerous enough.

We just knew we couldn't get that sort of backup, and you do,

quite often as a police officer. Tony and I just sat there and

looked at each other and said 'Well, we know it's not 100% safe but 99%

of the time it will be, so come on let's do it'. And we went into this and we

have got a torch, a mini-Maglite, that's all. The house was sort of dark

and creepy really because it was all a bit threadbare.

We found out there was actually 7 men sleeping in the house that night.

All of them from Eastern Europe and all of them

working on building sites and Pech had

been the 8th man living there. There was... one of the young men,

I think a man named 'Georg', was about 6 feet 8 inches tall and he was huge.

He was Polish and could speak very good English and he kind of translated

for the rest of them and was absolutely helpful, in fact he took Tony and I then

to Earls Court and pointed out the hotel he knew Pech had been staying

once he got back. We were able to search his room there, we found nothing,

no more firearms but one of the newspapers reported the next day that

armed police stormed a house in Tottenham, and I remember Tony McEwan saying,

'Unarmed police with a sense of humour and a biro stormed a house in Tottenham!'

When we spoke to Clare's friend outside the flat in Dulwich,

she was obviously devastated at the death of her friend, flatmate and workmate.

But as she started to tell us more about what had gone on in this relationship

between Clare and Michael Pech, we came to realise there was

an awful lot about this murder and suicide that we had yet to understand.

In late 2004, Clare had moved up to London, she was working in Selfridges

for a short while and then she was moved to Harvey Nichols.

So, Clare was working on a beauty counter in Harvey Nichols where

there were 4 women who would rotate. One was a senior woman,

she had been there for 30 years, then there was Nataliia, who was...

she was a bit older than Clare and she played a key part in what happened

to Clare, and there was another young woman who was working there part time.

These two young women and Clare moved into a flat in Dulwich together.

Late January, Clare started speaking of Michael Pech.

She said he would come up to her counter and that he was a security guard.

I think it was some time in February he asked Clare out.

To begin with, I think you have to look at the origins of their relationship.

Clare had only gone out with Pech on a couple of occasions.

The girls apparently... they didn't like him.

They didn't want him to come to the flat, they made it very clear that

they didn't want him to visit the flat that they shared.

They only dated for 3 weeks and that's the way it looked like,

they'd meet for coffee, they'd meet up, but it was getting to the point

where he wanted to be with her all the time. He resented when she came home,

when she came to visit me and when she wanted to go out with her friends.

He had become very obsessive and very serious

about their relationship very quickly and Clare didn't really know

how to deal with that, she knew that wasn't what she wanted.

So, after 3 weeks, he... it was a pre-planned holiday to visit his mother

in Slovakia, he was from Bratislava. He'd...

asked Clare

to go to the airport

to see him off, he returned from.

Slovakia, duly Clare went to the airport

to meet him and I didn't hear from her until the following day, she phoned me up,

she was very upset. She said that he said, 'Look Clare, I've got a really heavy case,

I don't want to trudge it across London, is it alright if I stay over?'

and Clare knew her flatmates were uncomfortable about him staying but...

he did. The next morning, she said to me, 'I just wanted him to go mum'

So, this is the call, 'I wanted to be

on my own, I was tired, I took him...

walked with him, he insisted on me walking with him to the station,

he wouldn't catch the train, then the second train came in'

and we're talking about February, late February and it's cold,

she just wanted to be on her own. He hadn't taken his case, the case was

still in the apartment and he said, ' I'll collect it later on' and she said,

'You do what you like!' because although Clare was very loving,

very pleasing and very giving, she also had a very stubborn side.

Even when she was little... so if she made up her mind about something

that was it, totally, you could not budge her. She said,

'You do what you like Michael, I'm going back, just get out of my sight'.

She went back to the flat, she went upstairs, took his suitcase

and put it straight outside. With that

he refused to go, he sat there outside.

The girls at this time had come home, they, in no uncertain terms

told him to go. Reluctantly after 2 hours, he left.

There must have been something about him that concerned her

because she quickly tried to move on, she did not want to have a relationship.

He was obviously one of those men who felt that if he couldn't have her,

no one would. He became obsessed with her.

On this call I had with Clare, she said, 'Mum, I've had enough,

I'm going to end the relationship, this is making me feel really uncomfortable

and he got really quite aggressive with the girls'.

So, she messaged him and said, 'Michael, look this isn't working out.

We can be friends, but I don't want us to have a relationship anymore'.

That's when the stalking began.

She'd had conversations with her friends and family explaining that it was...

this relationship was causing her difficulties because she felt

it was all going too far and he wanted it to be much more serious than she did.

I guess that's kind of how the relationship fizzled out

but Pech was not the kind of man to take 'No' for an answer.

The next day, there he was as a security guard, he had every reason to

stand close to Clare's counter, he was very apologetic, he said,

'Clare I'm really sorry, I've got problems at home, I didn't mean to upset you,

can we still be friends?' and she said, 'Yeah,

we can be friends, that's fine Michael'.

He must have messaged her 50 times that day

and every opportunity he was going up to her counter.

The stalking by Pech of Clare Bernal just became so bad, there was one point where

she was averaging 50 texts or calls per day from him

and she didn't want to know, she wasn't returning them.

He was quite obviously obsessed.

Over the next 3 weeks, he became

increasingly more present in Clare's life.

The very first day after she ended the relationship, he followed her home

with a bunch of flowers and she said, 'Michael, please leave me alone'.

She left the flowers outside as a demonstration that she meant

what she said. Wherever's Clare, he was.

He would stand in line of her counter, he'd watch her in mirrors,

he'd follow her home, he'd plead with her. During those three weeks,

he was getting increasingly more agitated.

Really engaged on a course of stalking of her

and he would appear at her flat, he would appear

at railway stations when he knew she was travelling to and from work.

There was an incident... So, here we are now in the 4th week,

she was on the platform of the tube and she saw that Michael

was coming towards her, she ran, and she jumped on the train,

he jumped on the train after her, he was sitting opposite her

and she was crying and she said, 'Michael if you don't leave me alone,

I'm going to have to report you' and he went very close to her face and said,

'If you report me, I will kill you'. She felt at the time that her world

was shrinking, it started to affect her health,

she was having sleepless

she was making mistakes at work, she was being told off at work.

Eventually, Clare felt that she had no choice but to take

the appropriate action about this stalking that she was suffering.

One of the girls reported him,

the head of security saw that it was true,

and he said, 'Go up to another counter', but he ignored it.

The reaction of the management at Harvey Nichols was to make sure that.

Pech was deployed in a different part of the building

but he was using the internal CCTV to see where Clare was

and then going to be close to her and talk to her.

Completely against the instructions he received from his management and he was

warned about it, he persisted and eventually he was suspended by them.

But, they could only suspend him from the store, he was still standing outside,

following her home. Clare was advised by the head of security to go to the police,

because that was the only wat that it could potentially stop,

that there could be a restraining order.

Pech continued this behaviour, Clare got quite disturbed when she heard

that he had been asking around colleagues what the penalty for murder was in the UK.

His stalking behaviour continued and eventually

she had no choice but to go to the police and report him.

They came and actually arrested him while he was at work at Harvey Nichols

and at that point, Harvey Nichols said, 'Sorry, that's it,

you're sacked' and he was fired from the job.

He was escorted out by 2 police officers, in front of Clare, Clare phoned me up,

she was crying and said, 'Mum, he looked so angry with me'.

And yes, Clare felt guilt that she had been the one to get him dismissed.

The police took the report seriously and investigated it

and Pech was charged and had to appear at Court.

That was possibly the catalyst that tipped him over the edge,

that was probably the thing that he realised then that his dream

of a relationship with Clare Bernal was never going to happen.

After Pech was arrested, life got back to normal for Clare,

he was no longer harassing her, police dealt with it.

Unbeknownst to us, he had gone to Belmarsh prison for breaking bail conditions

and then he was given the same conditions with a pending court case

to be heard towards the end of August.

He wasn't given a custodial sentence, from his stalking crime that he had

committed against Clare. This is one of those situations where the police,

etc., try to do what they can. The crime as I'm sure any

young women who are subject to it will tell you,

is truly awful and it takes real guts

for young women to come and report it and keep reporting it

and it's terrifying for them. The police in this situation did what they could,

they charged him, put him before the court process and then he was released.

Having been charged with harassing Clare, Pech was bailed by the court,

there would have been conditions for him to not go near Clare,

but of course can the police enforce those conditions 24 hours a day?

No they can't. What I find bizarre in this case is despite being on bail from a court.

Pech was able to return back to Slovakia, enroll on a firearms refresher course...

It looks like he took that cliché view 'well if I can't have you, nobody can'

because what he did was got a coach journey to and from his homeland.

While he was there he took a proficiency test to get a license for an

automatic pistol and quite lawfully bought the pistol and ammunition,

but then hid it in his holdall, got on the coach, went back to the UK,

smuggled this gun in with the ammunition through Dover, through customs.

Ultimately this is a man who was clearly disturbed, it's easy to come by guns

in Europe at times, if you're really looking for one. How hard is it to get it

into the country, that's debatable. It's not as difficult sometimes,

unfortunately, as you'd think it could be. Anyway, he managed it.

This thing was extraordinary really, despite being on bail, he was able to

come in without any apparent proper searches of his possessions

being carried out. So, here he was, back in London, having been freed

on bail from the court, now armed with a gun, still totally obsessed with Clare

and with clearly only one thing in mind and that was to kill her.

And you've then got tragedy waiting to happen, you have a frustrated...

demented man almost, in possession of a machine

pistol that he can use, with ammunition and he's taken

the decision 'I'm going to kill her then I'm going to kill myself'.

There was a dark cloud hanging over Clare that she might have to

see Pech again in court. He was still pleading 'Not guilty' to harassment

and threats to kill. As it happened, it was settled out of court

at the very last minute he pleaded guilty to harassment and Clare was advised

to drop the 'threats to kill', it would be difficult to prove and

she happily accepted that. She said to me, 'Mum, finally I can put this whole

awful episode to bed, he will get a minimal fine,

maybe community service...'

and these words will... will always be with me, she said,

'now finally people will believe me'.

As far as we were concerned,

once the professionals, the police were involved,

Michael was no longer a problem,

the problem had gone away, professionals had dealt with it'.

Pech appears at court on the harassment charge, he pleads guilty,

Clare is quite relieved by that because it meant she didn't have to go and

give evidence against him and she is now thinking

the whole thing is over, that it's behind her.

Within a few days of pleading guilty,

he had gone on to take Clare's life

and that was because he had been bailed by court which clearly

did not see that she was at serious risk from any harm from him.

What nobody expected was that he was going to

take a large dose of cocaine, go into the store with an automatic pistol,

killing her and then killing himself. That's what he did,

while he was on bail.

Clare was working a late, there were 4 witnesses,

one young woman who was directly opposite Clare,

I found out that this young woman put her hand up

and looked at Clare as if to say, '10 minutes to go'.

Clare gave her this beautiful smile, and then she saw a shadow behind Clare.

And in that instant she thought maybe it was a boyfriend who was meeting Clare.

Then, he, Michael raised a gun

and he shot Clare in the back of the head, she fell

and with that he shot her 3 times in the face, he then turned the gun on himself.

Clare was laying there in an enormous amount of blood and

the suspect, the shooter, Michael Pech, who

had killed himself was not far away.

Through the weakness of the law, he was able to go into Harvey Nichols,

early one evening, and take her life in the

most horrific fashion with her colleagues,

members of the public standing there as this lunatic goes up

and she would have perhaps known what was coming,

she must have been terrified of him.

I think it was about a quarter to 2 in the morning and there was a loud

bang on the door and my partner went down, my ex-partner went down,

and I could hear that it was the police and one of the police officers said,

'It's Clare' and I then knew at that moment...

She'd gone.

I said, 'How did it happen?' and they said, 'She was shot'.

I said, 'It was Michael, wasn't it?' and they just nodded.

In that moment...

It's so enormous, your brain can't take it in,

you can't process it.

As I guessed from the very start there was a very huge amount of media interest

in this case because it was so unusual, and it was so tragic.

As the story unfolded and as more became known about Clare

and about Michael Pech and about the court cases,

it was not only tragic, but it was sort of avoidable.

Clare's case was so high profile, it wasn't that she was a young beautiful girl

who was stalked and murdered, it was where it was,

it was Harvey Nichols, the most glamourous store in the world.

The press were... I would say were very helpful in that as well because they...

I think that they saw the issue, that they saw that this was a chance

to do some real good, to make a real difference,

so that people in the future wouldn't...

or be less likely to suffer in the way that Clare did.

There were a lot of magazines and TV programs that wanted Clare's story

and wanted to hear it from her mother's point of view,

but I felt that Clare wasn't around to fight her battle

for want of a better word and I needed to be Clare's voicepiece.

I underestimated the danger that Clare was in but so did the professionals

and so did Clare, nobody understood the dangers of stalking.

I needed to know everything and the only door that was open really

was the inquest, there were women out there, 10 thousand women

at the time who were reporting domestic violence

and some of them had their faces slashed

and nobody had seen the risk that Clare was in

and also it didn't follow the normal pattern of behaviour of stalking.

They knew that I was intent on getting the inquest,

looking into the circumstances leading to Clare's death because there

wasn't domestic homicide reviews at the time. It hadn't become law...

It was, I guess at the time, the response of law enforcement and

the courts to stalking as a kind of a crime and phenomenon in its own right

was pretty much in its infancy. Though there were measures

you could take and there were offences he was committing,

it kind of wasn't joined up in the way that it is now.

Because it was so high profile, I got to meet some amazing people

that have been quite important in my life.

I got to meet Carol Faruqui whose daughter Rana

was stabbed 16 times by an ex-boyfriend.

I met Stella Moore, whose daughter Tania was shot dead like Clare.

I also met Frank Lane who is the CEO of the charity I work for,

supporting bereaved families after domestic homicide

and steering them through the review process or inquests.

Great credit to Clare's family, particularly to her mother,

they went on to try and toughen up those laws

to prevent any similar tragedy from occurring again.

Together we started to attend conferences,

started to understand far more about mental abuse, coercive control,

whether obsession and fixation can have fatal consequences.

Stella decided to work locally

and Carol Faruqui and myself,

alongside other professionals decided to set up

a charity called 'Protection against Stalking'.

I'm Jan Berry, I was a police officer for 38 years,

I finished off as a police chair of England and Wales,

nowadays I'm a trustee with a domestic abuse charity

and I'm the co-CEO of 'Protection against Stalking'.

I've always greatly admired people who have taken total tragedy

in their own lives and turned it to good.

I was asked to help Tricia and maybe

re-focus Protection against Stalking, I didn't have any hesitation in agreeing.

When protection against stalking became a charity in 2010,

the first thing it did was to establish the national stalking helpline.

Today it's still managed by the Susie Lampley trust

and it's really the first point of call for anyone who is a victim of stalking

or sometimes for professionals who want to understand it a little bit more.

They then have then got the legislation change where there were

2 offences which said 'Stalking' in their title.

The section 2A which is a lesser offence, but it still carries a sentence,

or the section 4A which is fear of violence. So, a victim doesn't have to be

physically abused or if they can demonstrate that they have fear,

then it has a sentence up to 10 years. So, in record time,

in 10 months we managed to get that through.

Then made sure that there was greater awareness and training programs out there,

stalking is still not well understood by criminal justice professionals,

by community safety partners, so there is still some work there.

It's not properly understood by the public, so if you are being stalked,

you don't necessarily know about it. So, we want to carry on

raising awareness but most importantly we want to provide support

or ensure that there is support for victims of stalking.

It's difficult to understand how

somebody could react to rejection by somebody they thought they loved

and wanted to be with, by killing that person.

What the investigation did throw up was

some serious questions about the laws of harassment,

I think what it showed was that Clare's murder was totally unnecessary.

If the law and the systems had been working properly

and the issue of harassment had been taken seriously

by the judiciary, which I don't believe they were,

Clare would still be alive to this day.

If only you could put the clock back, but that's not possible,

if only we had hindsight. I'm so proud of Tricia that even now,

15 years on, she's still using her experience to help other people

and I'm delighted to work with her and give her that bit of support as well.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing as they say,

but nobody understood stalking then,

Clare didn't understand stalking,

she didn't even know she was being stalked.

It happens and we know that it happens, it doesn't make

it easier to understand how someone can react like that.

Clare's mother used the tragedy to the best effect that she could

by making herself a voice for victims of stalking and making herself

part of the pressure on the government to change the law,

to make the law stronger and to give the courts and the police

more powers when they are dealing with these offences

when they are trying to protect, more often than not,

vulnerable young women from unwanted attention from men.