Original subtitles

-On Saturday, July the 1st, 2000,

8-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Payne

was snatched from the street

in front of her grandparents' house

at Littlehampton in West Sussex.

For the next fortnight,

the whole of the U.K. was gripped

as the police desperately searched for the little girl.

-Everybody wants to find that child because a missing child

is every parent's worst nightmare.

-But Sarah would never be found.

She had been abducted and murdered by a 41-year-old

convicted pedophile called Roy Whiting.

-This was a girl he didn't know who fell into the hands

of what could only be described as a monster.

-Whiting was the number-one suspect,

but the police had no evidence

and had to release him back into the public.

-I mean, I had nightmares about it.

I literally had nightmares over the first few weeks.

What happens if he takes a third child?

-The whole of the U.K. wanted to see justice

served upon Roy Whiting,

one of the world's most evil killers.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

It was a news story that broke hearts across the nation.

When the body of Sarah Payne was found on the 17th of July, 2000,

it brought the search for the 8-year-old girl

to a devastating end.

She had been missing for over 2 weeks

after being snatched from the street

by a known pedophile called Roy Whiting.

The search for the blonde schoolgirl

had captivated the whole of Britain.

-She's a soft, gentle little girl.

She hasn't got a horrible bone in her body.

Somebody out there must have seen her.

They must have seen her on that road.

They must have seen her.

-Sky News anchorman Jeremy Thompson

was just one of those following the story.

-The scale of the search was huge, right across the country.

Everybody was looking for Sarah Payne,

hoping that they might help police to find her.

In the end, of course, as so often happens

in these sort of cases,

the perpetrator was right under the police's nose,

just a few miles away from where Sarah Payne had gone missing.

-It was a case that affected everyone involved,

including lead detective, Martyn Underhill.

-That picture shows innocence.

It also shows happiness.

Those eyes, those beautiful eyes are smiling at you actually.

They show completeness, and all that was taken away.

And her photo will live forever.

-The murderer, 41-year-old Roy Whiting,

had long been suspected as her killer,

but it took over 7 months to gather all the evidence needed

to finally put him behind bars.

-He was a loser who was a loner,

and he'll always be remembered for the wrong reasons,

which is he was a monster who killed a little girl.

-This killer's story begins almost 60 years ago.

Whiting was born on January the 26, 1959,

in Horsham in West Sussex,

and he grew up in nearby Crawley.

-It was a family that was beset by quite a lot of tragedy.

So there were six children, and three of them died in infancy,

so an awful lot of trauma

to cope with quite early on in his life.

-Life for the young man didn't get any easier.

Whiting's parents, George and Pamela,

divorced when he was in his teens.

-Roy Whiting left school

without any qualifications whatsoever.

He was somebody who didn't really get along in school.

He wasn't particularly academic.

He didn't really fit in at all,

whether socially or in terms of his studies,

so he was always a bit of an outcast.

-Whiting was clearly a bit of an oddball, a loner.

Friends described him as a bit of a Billy-no-mates.

-When you combine that with the insecure attachments

he had within the family

that the lack of relationship with his mother,

the disrupted relationship with his father,

it does start to write a bit of a script.

-As he entered adulthood,

Whiting found a passion for cars,

and he began working in a local garage.

-In 1986, he married a woman he'd met

when she was working as an attendant at a petrol station,

and they had a child together,

but they separated and ended up getting divorced.

-By 1990, 31-year-old Whiting

was living alone in his hometown of Crawley.

-It's pretty clear to me that Whiting

developed an increasing interest in young girls,

girls in their early years,

and he, I'm sure, fought to some extent

to control that obsession.

-Pedophilia is actually a sexual-social disorder

that manifests itself in deviant behavior.

That's what it is.

It's like you have a disturbance

of sexual disorder in your brain,

and instead of doing nothing about it,

you go and you attack kids.

-I think he probably recognized it in himself

but didn't quite know how to handle it,

and so I think you got that classic mental conflict

that afflicts pedophiles and indeed affects serial killers.

Part of them thinks, "I want to do it," and part of them thinks,

"No, you mustn't."

-But Whiting struggled to control his depraved urges.

-Eyewitnesses, neighbors,

people in the vicinity where he lived talked later

about how they believed that he was seen

quite often "scouting for girls,"

somebody said, that around school going-home time

that he would set off in his van

and head off to local schools to see what he could see.

-So he's probably doing two things at this point in time.

He's fantasizing about what he would do

if he was on his own with one of these children.

He's also identifying vulnerabilities.

He's getting familiar with this victim group.

He really is a predator getting ready to pounce on his prey.

-At the age of 36,

Whiting couldn't resist his urges any longer.

-On the 4th of March, 1995,

he gave in to what you might, I suppose,

describe as the wolf within him and abducted a young girl.

-He literally scooped her up off the street,

took her away to a wooded area where he sexually assaulted her,

so this was a really horrendous crime.

-Soon after the abduction,

Whiting had sold his car to avoid detection,

but the police soon tracked it down,

and forensic evidence within left them with little doubt.

-It became abundantly clear to the police

that this was indeed the car

in which the poor girl had been abducted.

They arrested and charged Whiting

with a sexual attack on a young girl.

-In June 1995,

Roy Whiting was sentenced to just 4 years in prison

for the kidnap and assault of a 9-year-old girl.

-Before he went to trial, a psychiatrist examined him

and came to the conclusion that Whiting was not a pedophile,

that this was a one-off event

and that he was very unlikely to re-offend.

While he was in prison, however,

there was a second psychiatric report

which suggested that not only

was he likely to re-offend again,

but he was certain to, effectively,

that this was a man who was obsessed with young girls.

-Whiting served just 2 1/2 years of his sentence,

and in 1997, he was back on the streets,

albeit with a mark against his name.

-He was one of the first people to get placed on what was then

a new thing called the sex-offenders' register.

Registered sex offenders have to be known to the police,

and where they live is important,

and there has to be an accurate record of them,

and they have to report to the police on a regular basis.

-Whiting didn't return to Crawley and instead headed

for Littlehampton on the south coast of England.

-Well, after leaving prison,

Roy Whiting moved to a seaside town,

a town full of families, a town full of children,

and this was no accident.

And essentially he tried to blend in

on a superficial level in terms of jobs,

in terms of appearing to be an average guy,

but this wasn't going to last because he was very intent

that he was going to offend again.

-They know they can never curb the urge.

They can postpone the urge for years,

but they will come again, and they will attack again.

-He was quite, I think, ashamed of who he was.

He didn't like himself very much,

and he wanted to exert power.

He wanted to exert control,

and that's what turned him into the predator he became.

-On July the 1st, 2000, Sara and Michael Payne

had taken their four children to Kingston Gorse

in Littlehampton to visit family.

It would be a day that would change their lives forever.

In the late evening, 8-year-old Sarah

was playing with her brothers and sister

in a field opposite her grandparents' home

when she suddenly vanished.

-It seemed that Sarah was a few yards behind the others,

and they were out playing, and suddenly they look around,

and she was no longer there.

She had disappeared.

It was well into the evening before the family got concerned

enough after they had searched themselves

before they raised the alarm.

-Sarah's older brother, Lee,

told police that he saw a man in a white van speeding away

just after losing sight of his sister.

There was a real possibility that she had been snatched.

-This was something that happened very, very quickly.

It was a real blitz abduction.

There was no grooming.

There was no kind of manipulation.

It was something that happened very, very fast.

-The best advice we had was a child

abducted by a pedophile will be dead within 6 hours.

-The police had to work fast.

They needed to track down the man in the white van.

Their hope was he would lead them to the 8-year-old girl,

and Sarah Payne could be brought home.

Her distraught family dialed 999.

-The call came in at 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday night,

and by 10:00, the balloon had gone up.

And that's a policing term for you escalate

it right to the top to the assistant chief constable,

the deputy chief constable.

The balloon goes up.

Everybody is called in.

And within 2 hours of Sarah Payne going missing,

there were over 100 cops involved in the case.

-Officers search through the night,

but by morning, they had no luck.

As news broke across the country,

the media reached Littlehampton in their droves.

-It is possible that she moved some distance

that she could still be hidden somewhere,

but we do have to consider there is a growing possibility

that actually she has been abducted.

Time is still of the essence, and for that reason,

we are prioritizing that line of inquiry.

-It was probably 24 hours after the little girl

was reported missing that police started to put out word

that they were concerned that there was a missing girl,

which has the effect of recruiting the general public

to be out there as extra eyes and ears

to perhaps keep an eye out

for this little girl to search for her.

I'm sure in the first 24 hours,

most people were looking in the vicinity

of the grandparents' home thinking,

"Well, she's just got herself lost.

She's wandered into the woods.

She's in the field, or she's wandered off down the road."

And it would have been only slowly

that the concern would have started to dawn

that perhaps she'd been abducted

rather than just wandered off and got lost.

-The police only had one lead to work with.

Sarah's 13-year-old brother had seen a man

behind the wheel of a white van

driving away from the scene of the abduction.

-He was very clear that Sarah fell over and cut her knee.

She ran diagonally across the field to go back to Nana

because Nana was at the end of the field,

but her house overlooked it, so Sarah runs across the field.

Lee thinks, "I'm going to get in trouble

because I'm the oldest child. I need to supervise this."

Sarah disappeared into a hedge.

When Lee came out through the same hedge seconds later,

there was no Sarah,

and there was a white van driving on the road.

-As the police search for potential suspects,

the hunt for Sarah continued.

-Within a couple of days, I can remember the scale of this story

started to escalate quite rapidly.

The way the police were describing this,

they were really concerned.

In other words, abduction quite quickly

had become a possibility,

and they were asking the public to help.

And very soon, the public around the area in West Sussex

were out in quite big numbers sort of combing fields and woods

and trying to look for this girl.

-Within a couple of hours,

we had over 100 police officers involved,

and by the Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon,

there were 500 police officers involved.

And by that Tuesday, so 3 or 4 days into the incident,

there were over 1,000 police officers involved,

so at one stage,

one in three police officers in Sussex

were working on this case.

It was staggering.

-Everybody wants to help.

Nobody wants to see a child missing.

Everybody wants to find that child

because a missing child is every family,

every parent's worst nightmare.

-A school photograph of a smiling Sarah Payne

was splashed across front pages in a bid

to try and find the little girl.

-That photo of her in her school uniform

just swept the world,

and I think there's not many things as a police officer,

after all the service I've had

and the murders I've investigated that shock me.

I was really surprised to see so many satellite vans

outside Littlehampton Police Station, from Japan,

New Zealand, America, Sweden, Norway.

Every country in the world sent a satellite van

to report on this case.

-As the search continued,

the police were focusing their efforts

on one suspect in particular.

Just 24 hours after Sarah Payne's abduction,

they had visited with a local man who had been placed

on the sex-offenders' register 3 years previously,

41-year-old Roy Whiting.

-We knew where he lived, and he was being

regularly visited by our sex-offender team.

He didn't have a white van, though.

He was clearly the most appropriate person to look at

because of what he did in Crawley a few years before,

where he'd abducted a child and then sexually abused her.

The only bit of the jigsaw missing was the white van,

and, of course, when the officers finally traced Whiting

on the Sunday afternoon,

less than 24 hours after the abduction,

there was the white van that no one knew

he had just bought from Southampton.

-They chatted to him.

He said he'd been at a funfair in Hove

just down the coast at the time that Sarah went missing,

and so he couldn't have possibly been anywhere near the scene.

-I think that the way that he actually told that lie,

the fact he had the confidence to tell that lie,

that suggests to me

that he thought he was going to get away with this.

He thought the police wouldn't dig too deeply.

-But as they left, they both said,

"I'm not very happy about this.

Let's keep an eye on him and see what he does,"

and they sat in their police car outside the address.

Literally minutes later,

Whiting comes out and goes to the white van

and goes to open the door

and out falls a receipt.

-The two detectives immediately got out of their car

and headed back towards Whiting

for a closer look at the receipt.

It was from a petrol station on a road far from Hove

dated Saturday, July the 1st, the day

Sarah Payne had been abducted.

-The receipt clearly shows that he lied

because the A24 is several miles north of the A27.

He's going towards Crawley, and it's nowhere near Hove.

So that small receipt falling out the door

as the officers stepped up to question him again,

the second time they had spoken to him, showed,

one, he lied about where he was on Saturday night,

and, two, that he'd been in a different location

to where he said he was.

And those officers made a very brave decision

to arrest him on suspicion of abduction.

-Police seize the white van for forensic testing,

and Whiting was taken in for questioning,

but he wasn't telling the detectives anything.

-We know you're a pedophile, and we know you lied

about where you were Saturday night.

But, of course, we didn't have Sarah.

We didn't know if she was alive or dead.

We didn't know where she was, and he was going, "No comment,"

so the inevitable happened.

We had to release him.

-Throughout, he doesn't explain at any point to the police,

doesn't help the police with their inquiries.

He does his best to conceal his guilt.

He does in no way tries to relieve any of the suffering

that Sara and Michael Payne were going through.

Heartless would be a pleasant way of describing Whiting.

-At a press conference on Monday,

July the 3rd, 2 days after her disappearance,

Sarah Payne's parents made an emotional appeal

for her safe return.

-We need her home now today as quickly as we possibly can.

She's our life.

-The thing that impressed everybody,

and the thing that made people cry in the room

was her undying belief,

her unswerving belief, that Sarah was coming home,

and every day in every press briefing

she spoke to Sarah and said,

"We were coming. We know you're there. We love you."

Well, I'm getting emotional doing it now,

and she did that day in, day out for a long time.

And it was hugely emotional, and it was also hugely genuine.

People saw it for what it was, and it was incredible actually.

-Sarah, if you're watching, Mommy loves you.

And we miss you, and we're looking for you,

telling you we're going to find you.

We're going to find you.

-Two weeks pass without any sign of Sarah Payne.

Chances of finding the missing 8-year-old girl

were becoming slim.

-As long as there's no news, there's always hope that a child

who has vanished will be found again,

but as every policeman and expert will tell you,

if they're not found within the first 24 or 48 hours,

there is a law of diminishing returns,

the chances of finding them alive and well

start to reduce quite radically.

Everybody was desperate that this bonny little child

who they'd seen in pictures, who they heard from the parents,

they had heard from her brothers and her sister,

they all wanted her to come home safe,

but you knew that behind that,

people's hopes were finding it hard to maintain hope.

The longer it goes on,

you know that that hope is perhaps ill-founded.

-The police were certain that convicted pedophile Roy Whiting

was responsible for Sarah's disappearance,

but they have so far found no evidence

to link him to the crime.

-I lost sleep over this.

I mean, this is a guy who had abducted a little girl

and horribly abused her sexually.

This is a man who is suspected of abducting

and possibly sexually abusing another little girl

who could still be alive and we can't find her,

and we've got to let him go

because there's not enough evidence to charge him.

And what happens if he takes a third child?

I mean, I had nightmares about it.

I literally had nightmares over the first few weeks,

but you have to work within the law,

and we didn't have enough to charge him,

and he was bailed and released.

And a few of us held our breath.

What's going to happen next?

-Over a fortnight after the disappearance

of 8-year-old Sarah Payne,

the police were sure that a local man, Roy Whiting,

was responsible for her abduction,

but they had no solid evidence to prove it.

As the search continued for the missing schoolgirl,

breaking news on July the 17th, 2000,

confirmed what everyone had been dreading.

-Then came that day that we'd all feared,

I'm sure the whole country had feared.

The police announced that they had found the body

of what they believe was a child about 30 feet away

from a relatively main trunk road,

the A29, partially covered just off a foot park.

And I think we all held our breath collectively

in news studios and newsrooms

and around the country and homes right across the nation

hoping that it wasn't the worst

but fearing that it probably was.

-The first thing I can confirm with you now is,

as a result of the postmortem that was carried out

in the early hours of this morning,

this is now a murder inquiry.

[ Camera shutters clicking ]

The second thing that you will obviously

be wishing to anticipate

is that we have been able to identify that the body

in the field a half a mile from here is Sarah Payne's.

-That was a black day for the inquiry

and a black day for the country really

because everyone was still living

in hope of the little girl coming home,

and she didn't come home.

She was found lying dead in a field,

and she deserved better than that.

-Sarah had been found

in a shallow grave on the edge of a farmer's field.

-Experts believe that the burial site

where Sarah's body was found was dug by Roy Whiting

very soon after he'd murdered her,

so here is a sexual offender

who wants to get this all over with very quickly,

and it's almost as if he's just closing that chapter, saying,

"Right. That's done. I'm moving on."

There's absolutely no sense of remorse,

no sense of empathy with Sarah whatsoever.

He's got what he wanted, and he's finished.

-There was no forensic evidence on Sarah's body,

so once again, the police were left frustrated.

They had a receipt that proves that Roy Whiting

was in the region at the time, but that was all.

They needed some hard evidence,

and a 999 call soon gave them that.

-The day that her body was found,

that prompted the lady to pick up the phone

and say, "I should have told you before,

but I saw a child's shoe at the Coolham crossroads,"

and that shoe transformed the case.

-This innocuous tip-off led police

to the small hamlet of Coolham in West Sussex,

just 8 miles from where Sarah's body had been discovered.

They were certain the shoe could help unlock the case,

and about 150 meters from the road

where it had first been spotted,

they found it, discarded in a field.

-That was a very emotional time because Sara and her family

were just coming to terms with losing Sarah,

and then you do what every cop dreads to do,

which is walk in with a plastic bag, an evidence bag,

and say, "I'm sorry, but is this yours?"

And we realized the significance of what we had.

We had a man who was going, "No comment."

We had a man that we just didn't have enough to charge,

and suddenly, we found the shoe.

It was on a direct route from the petrol station

to where she was found murdered.

It was hugely important and very emotional for the family to say,

"Oh, my God. That's my daughter's shoe."

-The small child-size-13 shoe was sent off

for forensic testing.

Martyn was confident they would find something

they could use as evidence.

-It was a Velcro shoe, and Velcro is one of

the most aggressive forensic capturers

you will ever find.

A piece of Velcro will grab hundreds of things a day,

and that's what this did.

This strap on this girl's shoe

had literally hundreds of fibers,

bits of grass, bits of earth, hair.

-The number-one suspect, Roy Whiting,

had moved back to his hometown of Crawley

and was living with his father.

Rumors of his involvement in Sarah's murder

had spread like wildfire.

-By this time, Whiting was known locally

as a person of interest in the inquiry,

indeed the possible killer of Sarah Payne,

whose body has then now been discovered.

Vigilantes attack Whiting's father's house.

They threw bricks through the window.

They shout outside, and so Whiting takes himself off

and, of all unlikely things, goes to camp in a tent

not all that far from the estate in Crawley

where he abducted the girl in 1995.

-Feeling the pressure, Whiting's next move

was a bizarre one.

-Whiting is clearly tormented,

and during this period of the summer of 2000,

he decides to steal a car.

-And then when the police went to stop him,

he drove off at speed

and in fact drove down a road the wrong way,

and a high-speed chase ensued.

-Faster and faster, Whiting,

driving this rather tired Vauxhall as quickly as he can,

eventually crashes it into another car.

♪♪

He's caught by the police who chased him,

and, of course, is charged with stealing the vehicle.

-This really is quite kind of out of control.

It's quite reckless.

And it's because he's not thinking that far ahead.

He hasn't actually considered the eventuality

that he needs to get away,

and when he does realize that that's a possibility,

he does the most ludicrous things

because he hasn't got a plan.

-On July the 23rd, 2000,

Roy Whiting was arrested and charged with dangerous driving.

He would have to remain in custody until his hearing.

-And that was an amazing moment for me

because the risk level, the threat to the public,

disappeared,

and we knew we had him.

And all I had to do was keep that man in prison

until we could prove he killed or abducted Sarah Payne.

-Whiting's time in custody would give detectives

the chance to build a case against him.

They knew that if they were going to arrest him

for Sarah's murder, they had to get it right.

-While he's in prison, police go back

and re-examine his white Fiat van.

Bear in mind, a white van had been seen in the lane

where Sarah had gone missing.

And they find in it, eventually, through very,

very meticulous forensic testing,

a blonde hair.

The blonde hair was a 10 million to one shot

that it had to be Sarah Payne.

There was really very little forensic doubt.

-The blonde hair discovered on Whiting's sweatshirt

was a huge breakthrough in the case,

and more strong evidence

was still to come from the forensic teams.

-We found fibers in that shoe which linked Whiting to the shoe

and linked the shoe to Sarah.

I think it was the icing on the cake for the case.

It was the missing piece of the jigsaw, and then we had him,

and we had him big time.

-And slowly they were able to build

a strong enough case against Roy Whiting

to charge him with the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne.

-It felt good actually.

I just kept thinking, "You can't do this anymore now.

We're not going to let you do this anymore

because it's not okay, what you did."

And then the hard work started.

We had to get the case to trial.

-On February the 6th, 2001,

while serving 22 months for the car theft,

Roy Whiting was arrested in his prison cell

and charged with the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne,

7 months after the disappearance of the schoolgirl.

-Soon after being arrested in Kent this morning,

Roy Whiting was driven in a people carrier back to Sussex.

As he arrived at Bognor Police Station,

an egg was thrown at the vehicle by one of several onlookers.

-I got home and cried.

That was the culmination of months of work

to not just deliver for Sarah's family,

I had built a relationship with the Payne family.

I respected the Payne family, and they deserved us doing this.

They deserved justice, and so lots of emotions

going through me.

I've done this for the Payne family.

I've also done this for the public

because by charging this monster,

we're keeping a third kid safe.

-But Roy Whiting wasn't going to go down without a fight.

The 42-year-old was going to deny

all the charges against him.

His trial was set for November 2001.

He was going to plead not guilty to the murder of Sarah Payne.

Detectives hoped that the three key pieces of evidence

they had would be enough to convince the jury

to put him behind bars forever.

-When you look at the Coolham shoe,

and when you look at the red sweatshirt,

I mean, there was a lot of either luck or fluke

in the way this case came together

because we only found out months into the inquiry

that he spent Sunday morning

steam-cleaning the back of that van.

Now, we'll never know because he's never spoken to us,

why didn't he steam-clean the front of the van?

If he'd steam-cleaned the front of the van as well,

the red sweatshirt would have gone,

and we would have lost a crucial piece of evidence,

arguably the most important bit of evidence against Roy Whiting.

And the Buck Barn receipt, I mean,

he could have just thrown that away at the time.

The chance of it falling out on the floor and an officer saying,

"What's that? Let me look at it," was incredible.

All those three things came together to create

a pretty convincing piece of evidence,

but it's never lost on me

that actually all those three things could have disappeared,

and we would never have solved that case.

-Prosecutor Timothy Langdale QC came up against a wall

of denial from Whiting.

-Well, his defense, to put it bluntly, was,

"I didn't do it,

and I have no idea how there would be a hair of Sarah Payne's

on anything in my van.

And I'm not responsible for her death."

-The judge had ruled the jury were not allowed to know

about Whiting's previous conviction for sexual abuse

on a child in 1995,

which made the case against him harder to prove.

It was an emotional 19 days in the courtroom.

-I think one of the most moving moments at the trial

was when it was put to him that effectively he threw

this poor, innocent girl

into the back of a white Ducato van,

which he turned into a moving prison.

It defies imagining what she must have suffered.

There is no possible way anyone could forgive

that kind of atrocity,

that kind of depraved behavior.

This was a girl he didn't know, entirely innocent,

cheerful, smiling,

as every picture always showed her,

who fell into the hands

of what could only be described as a monster.

-After 9 hours of deliberation,

on Wednesday, December the 12th, 2001,

the jury had reached their decision.

Roy Whiting was guilty of the murder of Sarah Payne.

-I can't believe for one moment that had he got off

the killing of Sarah Payne

he wouldn't have returned to the same modus operandi

that he'd used in 1995 and 2000.

It would have been a tragedy.

-The 4-week trial was torturous for the Payne family,

who were in the courtroom throughout.

-The pressure in particular on Sarah's mother, Sara Payne,

must have been enormous hearing all this evidence

about the terrible death of her daughter

and having to sit there and listen to Whiting.

And one member of the family, I seem to remember,

and again one can perhaps hardly blame him, said,

"May you rot in Hell," or something to that effect,

but that was the only time anybody gave vent

to any kind of emotional response,

and that was after Whiting had been convicted.

-On December the 12th, 2001, Judge Mr. Justice Curtis

sentenced Whiting to life imprisonment.

He was sent to Wakefield Prison.

It was only after the trial that Whiting's previous conviction

was read out to the court.

-The judge said he'd be recommending

that Whiting be kept in prison

for the rest of his life.

This was met by the loudest cries of, "Yes," in court.

Whiting was taken away to begin that sentence tonight.

-This doesn't make us happy, but justice has been done.

Sarah can rest in peace now.

But let's make sure that this stops happening

time and time again.

-It's always shocking to think that somebody

can be convicted of an act

as awful as a pedophile attack,

to be put away in prison,

to be put on the sexual-offenders' register

and yet to be free to harm again not that long after.

It's 5 years later.

Surely our system is better than that,

that it should better prevent these repeat offenses

this Whiting managed to carry out.

-The reverberations surrounding the tragic murder of Sarah Payne

can still be felt today.

-One thing I think in the news we tend to forget about

is the aftermath of these terrible cases,

and it was a long time afterwards

you start to be more aware of the tragic impact

that a child's abduction and murder

has on all those around them,

the whole family, probably friends as well,

traumatized by it, never to be the same.

And in the case of the Paynes, Sara, the mother,

appeared to be very strong

and pushed through her great political campaign

to get legislation changed.

-To have something in this country called Sarah's Law,

which was the equivalent to an American device

called Megan's Law.

In other words, you had the right to know

where registered sex offenders lived in your area,

and Sarah Payne's mother campaigned with the help of

"The News of the World" to introduce this right.

-But it seemed that in the struggle to do that,

to compensate for the loss of her child,

that immense pressures were put on the marriage with Michael,

and eventually he had problems with alcoholism,

mental issues, depression.

-And, sadly, Michael left us too early,

and there's no doubt about it

that the contribution of Sarah's abduction,

of Whiting's murder of his daughter,

and the stresses and strains

that produced led to his early death.

I hope he's now with Sarah.

-Sarah's mother had a stroke,

now walks with some considerable difficulty

and has throughout behaved with the most enormous dignity

and complete grace to this utterly poisonous man.

I think her behavior has been exemplary.

-I have the utmost respect for Sara.

She was incredible, and my admiration for her

in the way she steered her family,

her children and her friends through this was incredible.

-The abduction and murder of Sarah Payne has become

one of the most infamous crimes in British history.

-I think murders like this, the murder of Sarah Payne,

captures so much attention

because this could have been anybody's child,

anybody's sister,

yeah, anybody's daughter,

and it's about that idea of risk,

that idea of stranger danger

as being something that really feeds

into the paranoia of parenting in contemporary society.

-It was a watershed because it changed the way

the police and society look to child abduction.

I think it really brought the horror of child abduction

into everyone's house for the first time.

It was about the time that 24/7 TV arrived,

and it was a massive case, and it still is actually.

People still talk about the Sarah Payne case.

It's changed history.

Her legacy is that a lot of children are now safer

than they were in 2000,

and that's a hell of a legacy for any person.

-Since Roy Whiting has been in prison,

he's been viciously attacked on two occasions by fellow inmates.

He will be eligible for parole in 2041 at the age of 82.

-I tend to think of him as being more pathetic than evil,

but in the end, he did the most evil of acts.

He killed another human being, and in this case,

he killed an 8-year-old girl.

There are few worse crimes in our society,

so he will go down as an evil man.

-I think the family need closure even now.

They would want to know what happened to their daughter.

There are various unanswered questions.

I don't think Roy Whiting will ever speak now,

and I hope he rots in Hell.

-The whole of Britain was heartbroken

when the body of 8-year-old Sarah Payne

was found in July 2000.

Everyone had hoped she would return home safe,

but there was to be no fairy-tale ending.

Thanks to persistent police work,

Roy Whiting is now behind bars,

and the memory and the legacy of Sarah Payne

will long outlive her sick killer.

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