Whenever particularly sozzled, Claudia Lawrence liked to play the same Elton John track, Your Song, repeatedly at the Nag’s Head pub, Heworth, York, to amused groans from all those present until eventually someone intervened to prise the next pound coin destined for the jukebox from her hand. Usually only to play and wail along to Motorcycle Emptiness and a maximum of two other songs on repeat for an hour or two instead. When I first heard the terrible news she had disappeared, via Facebook, I revisited such memories I had of Claudia and her friends in hopes they’d stick in my mind longer, become clearer, perhaps even reveal something that might help investigators piece together what happened.

Leaving my bar job at the Nag’s the September before she disappeared, I missed six potentially vital months of goings on that could plausibly have nothing to do with finding out what happened to Claudia had she been abducted by a stranger or by someone totally unconnected to the Nag’s Head crowd. However my frame of reference, obviously, is the pub. Some insist police have been looking in the wrong place all this time. That any and all arrests made have been empty gestures intended solely to save face on the police’s behalf. While it’s true no-one arrested has ever been charged with Claudia’s murder, despite repeated requests for trial being submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, all those who were are either regulars at the Nag’s Head pub or closely associated with someone who is. And of course to this day, a decade later, no crime scene or body has ever been found.

I’m unsure how many arrests have been made since 2009. Apparently the official number is nine. Of the six people discussed in the media I know all of the suspects except Shane Ruane, David Robinson and Paul Harris. I’ve been reluctant to add to conjecture about people who were it not for Claudia’s disappearance would be described as some of her nearest and dearest and therefore people she could be judged by and precisely because of it are some of the natural suspects. I’m going to focus on her friend’s ‘misdemeanours’ a little though because I think they might help contextualise the many ghosts of Claudia’s.

I remember the day I found out she went missing well. Already mulling over the death of a guy I knew, aged just 22, on March 18th, which just so happened to be the last day anyone ever heard from Claudia, I felt sick. We were never close, and I hadn’t spent a significant amount of time with him specifically for a couple of years, but I was nonetheless saddened to learn that such a vibrant spirit had succumbed to the troubles I’d heard rumours he’d been struggling with and fighting for a while. The last time I bumped into them both was during the same night out in December 2008. A question mark hung over Claudia’s fate that didn’t his but I feared she had met a grizzly one.

“He died as he lived” his younger brother told me at a club in York a couple of weeks after he passed away when I expressed my condolences. I wish that he hadn’t because I couldn’t help but think snarky to the point of venomous thoughts in response, knowing full well they were misplaced and unfair, especially towards him and especially so soon, even if unuttered. The last time I saw him was at the funeral service a week later sat with the rest of his family and his girlfriend. The anguish in his eyes distant and strained. He’d been forced to anticipate this ending for his elder brother long before he actually died. I lit a candle for Claudia and Ed in the church foyer that morning thinking it only a matter of weeks, if that, until inevitably she’d be found, whatever the outcome. How wrong I was. Bittersweet giggles rippled through the church as speakers reminisced about Ed’s many hilarious, often inebriated antics — some I was present for, many I was not — brightening the eerily dim light. Any niggling sense of guilt felt by his nearest and dearest through to us well-wishers from his past temporarily stemmed as we simply remembered Ed being Ed, according to them.

A male friend who’d had several drunken fights with him in clubs over the years inquired gingerly about the service when he visited a month or so after the funeral. Turns out he’d never heard This Woman’s Work before — the song that played as Ed’s coffin disappeared behind the curtain — and after doing so it became an instant favourite, playing it four times in a row before I gently insisted he didn’t a fifth. “Remember the dead for who they were!” he chuckled without a hint of malice or irony before changing the subject and playlist completely. I knew in his own weird way he’d been touched by Ed’s death too of course. But had he actually learnt anything?

The last time I bumped into Claudia was over Christmas in 2008. Not at the Nag’s Head like usual but in York city centre outside a late night bar deceptively named Dusk — probably its least busy trading hours — at around 1am. I’d bumped into Ed earlier that evening. I have no idea if they knew each other but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Claudia wasn’t at the Nag’s Head that night but she definitely was with a couple of her male friends I knew from there. As well as a few people I didn’t know at all. Surely it’s just as plausible that she spent more time than usual in Acomb prior to disappearing, as North Yorkshire Police confirmed from her mobile phone data early on in the investigation, because she wanted to socialise away from certain people or situations at the Nag’s, as it is that she did so to meet up with someone romantically who either lived in Acomb or for whatever reason regularly frequented pubs in the area.

A Facebook exchange I saw between two people I know who knew Claudia said she last visited the pub on Sunday, March 14th, 2009. Media and police reports purport that she failed to meet her friend Suzy for a drink on Thursday evening. Suzy was made aware Claudia had missed work by a mutual friend after which time the alarm was raised with her father, who then rang the university. The police weren’t notified until Friday morning by Claudia’s dad Peter after according to Neil Root’s book he visited her house with her friend George on the Thursday evening with his spare key, thinking that she may have suffered a medical emergency at her home. If I suspected there’d been a medical emergency, I’d prefer to check the house with a female friend. Perhaps George had medical training Jen and Suzy didn’t, or they weren’t available at the time, or Peter for whatever reason wanted to check the house with George, or George insisted on going with him.

Finding Claudia’s house empty, with no obvious sign of disturbance, her slippers had been left by the front door like usual, as if she’d left for work on Thursday morning, used breakfast dishes resting in the sink, her electric toothbrush left out on the side. Gone was her rucksack, chef whites, mobile phone and hair straighteners. Left behind were Claudia’s bankcards, her passport, and most of her worldly possessions.

Suzy had last met up with Claudia the previous Friday. Knowing broadly the regularity with which they all drank at the Nag’s, that Claudia’s last Sunday was spent in part at the pub on a busier, livelier, racing weekend — I think it was Cheltenham — where not only were more locals present than usual but also randoms and visitors from further afield means increased likelihood an incident or conversation had occurred that preceded her disappearance and probable murder in the eyes of the culprit. An Express article — note I refer to numerous Express articles throughout, the newspaper that pushed the story Claudia was involved with a policeman when she first disappeared, decide for yourself why that might be — quoting a colleague claims Claudia told them on March 18th that she’d been out in town on a date on the Sunday evening, presumably after she’d been to the Nag’s in the afternoon, drinking until 4am, narrowing her possible location to a select few bars and clubs in York city centre on which they were surely caught on CCTV. Was this person someone Claudia already knew, or someone she had met at the Nag’s that day?

Claudia last attended work on March 18th 2009. She is seen on CCTV first leaving the university, then posting a letter in a postbox outside Melrosegate post office. What could this mean about the letter? She may have made use of the university facilities to print out a form or document on break or after work; I’m pretty sure she didn’t own a computer, so that would make sense. She doesn’t buy a stamp from the post office, meaning either the letter was free post or she had a stamp with her. If she had walked to work that morning from her own address with the letter in her bag, why didn’t she post it then? Upon returning home after being given a lift by a colleague driving past her on Melrosegate — I’d be interested to know if this person had given Claudia lifts before or if March 18th was the day they found out where she lived — she left the house once more, chatting to an acquaintance then returning home within fifteen minutes.

Her most vocal critics didn’t seem to know her well. Those who didn’t frequent the pub lock-ins yet spoke with authority as if they were covert orgy sessions, not-quite-suburban York’s answer to Eyes Wide Shut, the exaggerated sentiment of which really has echoed throughout media coverage of her murder inquiry since, tabloid and otherwise, always baffled me — that being said, I didn’t know many of the alleged ‘facts’ back then — because all that ever seemed to happen at them centred around the same eight to twelve drunk people singing joyously if out of tune along to the pub jukebox, spilling drinks on themselves, dancing, and being ‘handsy’ to the extent some social circles just are more ‘handsy’ with each other generally. For usually no longer than a couple of hours after last orders in the main bar at their local boozer most Friday and Saturday nights for a few years.

The pub I used to work at remains ‘cloaked in mystery’ whenever talk about Claudia’s whereabouts is raised claim the investigators and journalists interviewed in the 2013 Donal McIntyre documentary. Locals to this day apparently remain suspicious of both. Threatening journalists attempting to report on Claudia’s disappearance has been common according to one startled Sky news reporter, who says he’s never experienced as much resistance fact finding a murder inquiry as he has done with Claudia’s. Though I detect from his reference to ‘market town’ in the video edit he’s referring to people he encountered in Malton. Evening Press journalist Nicola Fifield recounts similar experiences in reference to the lock-ins at the Nag’s Head pub. McIntyre’s doc ultimately concludes that Claudia most likely met her demise or at the very least with the culprit the evening of March 18th 2009. Either at her home or elsewhere. Indeed my own questions as a civilian to people I knew from the Nag’s, people who knew I knew Claudia too, whenever I’ve bumped into them since have been met with a resounding “We don’t know” no matter how I phrased things.
When I inquired for information about what was going on at the pub and with Claudia around the time she disappeared, the potentially vital six months that I missed, the answer was the same: “We don’t know.”

Interviewees in the documentary describe an overarching climate of fear compounded by anger at police tactics that helped drive a wedge between investigators, the media, and the people who knew Claudia best, leading to an oft repeated ‘wall of silence’ that still managed to throw around far too often anonymously sourced hearsay with abandon while there was a market for it. One Yorkshire radio journalist opines with relish in the documentary that locals simply didn’t like a light being shone back on their lives.

Whenever I agreed to work the lock-ins I was always one of the last to leave the pub, closing down the bar and so forth. While it’s possible that people hid around corners and then returned once I’d left, obviously I never witnessed any of this. For the majority of the time pub chef Ray lived in one of the B&B rooms so if anything sordid regularly went on in any of them he would no doubt have had an inkling about it, Jim and George too, and the police, surely, would already be aware.

Eyes Wide Shut vibes aside, the infidelities I sensed were going on didn’t involve Claudia at all but as far as I suspected most probably did take place in the B&B rooms. Occasions when certain perhaps emotionally inappropriate relationships became physically inappropriate too were always extremely blatant. Everyone in the bar in so far as the lock-in crowd were concerned were aware and accepting at them and discreet about any night before occurrences during regular drinking hours. So, I can say with a degree of certainty adultery amongst the group was far from constant. But it did happen. However I don’t think I saw Claudia being blatant with anybody, married or otherwise, the entire time I knew her, although I did George, Pete, Jen, Suzy, and many others. I’ve read someone say, anonymously of course, that Claudia would regularly invite men back to her house from the pub lock-ins but if she did so I didn’t notice, unless of course she asked by text, in which case how could I have.

What I did notice is that some of the men, Alistair Cooper springs to mind, disclaimer I liked Alistair least out of their gang, another friend and perhaps lover according to some who was one of the four men arrested on suspicion of Claudia’s murder in 2015, whose son worked behind the bar during university breaks, seemed to me to be amongst the most uncouthe men towards Claudia, despite himself being married, who’d often also tut along with her critics behind her back. Usually to passive silence from her other friends if they were within earshot. Did any of them ever tell Claudia about this? I really don’t know. I just know that I didn’t. Alistair was respected by Claudia and her pals though and in many senses was one of them. But I wouldn’t put it past him, though he wasn’t the nastiest piece of work there, to overreact had Claudia ever decided to get her own back on him in some way. This made his absence from initial appeals for information and the Neil Root book all the more conspicuous to me, although in fairness he tended to avoid group photos and events when I knew them all too.

Alistair used to wear a sandy coloured mid-length mac coat. The description of a man seen standing outside Claudia’s house between 6.45 and 6.55am on March 19th could potentially be him. I remember the coat because of its distinctiveness from his usual attire. If he is responsible and Claudia’s murder was not premeditated it’s plausible that he loitered in a catatonic state after whatever happened happened, presumably inside Claudia’s house, outside it. Had she been killed on March 18th and Alistair isn’t involved it’s possible her abductor sent him a text, if not from her phone then from someone else’s claiming to be her, or perhaps she had two phones, asking him to meet her at her house on Heworth Road at that time in the morning, or someone deliberately either bore false witness or broadly matched his description and wore a coat similar to his. If he was involved, and he and whoever he was in cahoots with muddied the waters just enough, perhaps his choice of coat and the dithering that would on one hand imply Claudia’s murder hadn’t been premeditated was being worn specifically because any witness descriptions would point vividly to him.

George’s admission in the local paper that he’d been aware of three married men connected to the pub that Claudia had entered relationships with during the time I knew them all shocked me, made me re-evaluate a lot of the assumptions I held back then, whilst retaining skepticism on the basis that he didn’t have to say that, and that he said so at least in part in response to accusations being levelled against him … Something about an Evening Press article I read where George reportedly gave someone a Heimlich manoeuvre on a bus, and another about Pete Ruane’s I think relative Terry Ruane, a taxi driver, being a ‘witness’ at a wedding of two strangers in a York registry office, one of whom happens to either be or share a name with a London BNP candidate, is interesting.

Co-Landlord George and his friend Steve Sammons, who for not too long lived in Cyprus but would visit the pub I’d say every four to six weeks over at least a six month period — I think I enquired once or twice about why he was back and forth from Cyprus so much, the reasons he gave varied — themselves first met at international school in Bahrain. I could be misremembering his circumstances or the Express article I read could be misquoting him, I think Neil Root’s book restates them as having regularly socialised with Claudia and her friends at the pub only before he first moved to Cyprus. Indeed, Claudia’s friends and family have complained about mistruths, inaccuracies, and ‘jealous rumours’ in the past, but writing as fact that he spent time with her at the Nag’s only before he first moved to Cyprus seems obviously and totally untrue to me, and in my opinion also anyone else who knew and spent any time with them back then.

Though I was never privvy to this information because I never explicitly asked them George and Steve might have known Claudia longest out of the Nag’s Head crowd. She did seem particularly familiar with them anecdotally and had twice visited Steve and another friend in Cyprus. Suzy and Claudia were also close but really even their friendship was relatively new. They met I think a year or so before I did them so they’d have known each other for around two and a half years when Claudia first went missing. On the rare occasion that Claudia stood up Suzy I noticed Suzy would always text or try call her but she would never make the thirty second walk down the road to knock on her door and see if she was at home.

Jen became close with them both — a drinking duo up to then — after she’d been working there on and off for about three years. She had agreed to work a few hours behind the bar again not too long before I got the job in 2007. The three of them would meet regularly enough to say that the Nag’s formed the centre of all their social lives at that point in time. Occasionally, they’d meet at the pub then catch a taxi to town, or vice versa, and I remember Claudia sometimes visited friends at pubs in Acomb. She mentioned more than once to me at least two of her ex boyfriends who she was in ongoing contact with in 2007/8 when I knew her. One of whom she used to meet up with from time to time and, at one point, I’m fairly certain, she was considering getting back together with on a long distance basis.

Jen was the heart and soul of the Nag’s, more so than most people who drank there. Even the old boys who’d frequented the place for decades. She was on friendly terms with the broadest cross set of people who called the Nag’s their local as far as I observed. Everyone’s friend and/or adopted daughter bar the odd transient bar sleaze, Jen knew the job better than both landlords, and was often relied on as such. Which I think that she relished. Jen was mature minded for her age too — Claudia was definitely the baby of their group despite being ten years Jen’s senior — so it didn’t surprise me that she tended to date older guys. While I knew her, she became involved first with a surly and unthinking builder in his thirties called Simon, who I think broke her heart a little, then eventually Pete Ruane, who was also one of Claudia’s friends, possibly at the tail end of a marriage with children, hence perhaps there’s a custody/divorce settlement element to any refrain to fully co-operating with police, and in his forties at the time. Ruane, a builder, and his brother Shane (who I’m pretty sure didn’t frequent the pub while I worked there because I don’t recognise him) were among those arrested on suspicion of Claudia’s murder in 2015 who were then later released without charge due to lack of evidence. As far as I heard Jen remains in a relationship with Pete today and works in an executive administrative role at his building firm.

Dan Whitehand, Claudia’s ex-boyfriend, and the most obvious suspect, was in my eyes to the point of suspiciously convinced, but who knows, that Claudia’s abductor and probable killer had some connection to Cyprus, saying so in a number of interviews, citing an array of ‘shady characters’ he knew Claudia remained in contact with and had met whilst holidaying with him in Cyprus in 2006 and 2007. North Yorkshire police spent a week there questioning various people she knew and spent time with on the island, including a guy who had been transporting vans to Italy when she went missing, which I think is where the human trafficking and fake passport line of enquiry originated. Character witnesses in Cyprus were much more gracious about Claudia than some of her friends asked back home. Dan, Suzy and Jen expressed the most true to life observations about the unique and warm but complex person I and many others unapologetically remember Claudia to be.

Claudia’s dad Peter Lawrence expressed his support for the progress police made after their review of the investigation with a new team in 2013 — the same year that the Neil Root book and Donal McIntyre’s documentary were released — which found previously missed clues and produced hitherto ‘unprocessable’ evidence that still ultimately went nowhere. Family and friends alike were critical of the mismanaged trajectory of the investigation and narrative underpinning it up to then but there was also a distinct sense that police mistakes were providing fuel and cover for those with something to hide. Peter believes that his daughter was abducted on her journey to work and that ‘all roads lead back to the Nag’s Head pub’: which he attributes to ‘intuition.’ According to Neil Root’s book, Claudia’s mother Joan and sister Ali suspect that a jealous woman or someone Claudia had either rejected before or never been on good terms with rather than a current or former lover is responsible for her disappearance. Later, Joan entertained the possibility that serial killer Christopher Halliwell might be responsible for her daughter’s disappearance, although police I think quickly ruled him out.

Peter and Joan have been estranged since their divorce in 1999, reuniting I think just once for a Crimewatch appeal. Their estrangement is quite pronounced in the Donal McIntyre doc; Peter makes no appearance at all, and Joan making the point that she “can’t get her head round” why police weren’t called until forty eight hours after Claudia first disappeared I think highlights that it was Peter, and his network, responsible for those first few decisions, rather than Joan and hers….

There is a particularly ‘candid’ Daily Mail article quoting an anonymous source claiming to be a close friend and confidante of eight years from June 2009, meaning this person knew her when she still lived in Malton. They describe Claudia as easily led. I agree with this much, adding that she was extremely childlike when excessively drunk, usually in a fun rather than bizarre way that was safe because the people around her genuinely seemed to have her back and making sure she got home okay entailed walking with her thirty seconds down the road, four doors down from the Nags. Where I disagree is the gold digger implication. She really wasn’t like that at all. She had her house, which either her family helped pay for or she secured herself with inheritance money and savings.

Working behind the bar at the Nags when I did means I witnessed first-hand the social aftermath of what I believed back then to only be news about Claudia’s extramarital relationship with Lee Horwell, which played itself out in a voyeuristic manner Claudia herself either wasn’t fully aware was happening or she wasn’t openly fazed by. She didn’t stay away from the pub until the gossip had died down. Not even on the first day people found out. While this did seem a little off to me I still admired her reserve because it wasn’t Claudia who had cheated on her spouse after all: Lee did. Had Claudia gone missing even half a decade later her treatment by some elements of the media would have been more restrained where it should and much less so where they didn’t, but perhaps should have, tread.

I’m also 100% certain that Claudia didn’t tell me about the affair with Lee herself. Rather, Suzy and Jen took me to a side to explain-discreetly-the situation one lazy Sunday day shift back in 2007. By which time I had read between the lines from what I’d managed to glean from the whispers circulating the pub over the preceding days anyway. So it was more like confirmation. Everybody knew. Not once did I hear Suzy or Jen gossiping at the bar or anywhere else about Claudia. It really was only ever some of the men who indulged, and so openly, in that kind of thing.

I won’t recount fully what Reddit account union_jane writes in the thread but what prompted me to tweet with their story in mind is a memory of the male regulars joking about a ‘DVDDDDD!’ for a while in the early days; always without context but always with wry smiles. I assumed that it was middle age pub humour or the Peter Kay impression of the month, and, in fairness, it could easily have just been a coincidence. Even if it wasn’t Claudia’s disappearance could have nothing to do with this particular aspect of her life, perhaps it had nothing to do with her at all, despite being in the right ballpark, a possible crime of so called ‘passion.’ Perhaps some marriages/relationships are open marriages/relationships. Perhaps some aren’t. Perhaps some participants are/were well known locally thus had more to lose reputationally and so despite their innocence were unwilling to cooperate with police investigations fully early on when it really mattered.

Nowhere does the Reddit user explicitly write that man X was on the tape, nor that the men who are were either masked or mostly out of shot and thus unidentifiable in a way that Claudia apparently wasn’t. Which could be significant. The author of the Reddit post says that her friend’s mother told her the police know all about this. If such a DVD indeed exists then multiple men could have been identifiable thus incriminated by its discovery. X (could be Lee, could be someone else) is likely to have told at least some of them about his now ex wife finding the DVD in his car. And who did she tell?

Most of the regulars I think could have best been described as Claudia’s jovial drinking buddies. Their relationships seemed to me at least to extend about as far as the pub doors, like so many forged via the local boozer tend to. Not that they weren’t friendly towards one another within those doors of course. But there was gossip too, like at most local pubs. Obviously much of it had nothing to do with Claudia however that which did tended to revolve around her romantic life. Snide comments about her rumoured preference for married and monied older men spouting predominantly but not exclusively from the mouths of people I barely if ever saw her speak to would abound where I saw only chatting perhaps towards the flirtier end of the spectrum, judging from the man’s demeanour as opposed to Claudia’s in most instances, that I genuinely doubted went any further. Mainly because she always implied to me that her romantic life beyond Lee, which I also didn’t notice at the time, involved men she had met and knew outside of the Nags, and I believed her. Another rumour I’d hear was that a few of the regular’s wives refused to drink at the pub specifically because Claudia would drink there.

Lee seemed genuinely depressed after their split. Depressed about Claudia, depressed about the breakdown of his marriage, and he was open about his feelings. There was a bit of a scene outside the family home when his wife first found out and a few of the neighbours drank at the pub, so word spread that way too. Lee would still chat with the drinking group immediately after the break up though. He would still frequent the lock-ins — presumably in between attending the doomed marriage counselling sessions detailed in a 2009 Daily Mail article quoting his now ex-wife — keeping a polite distance from Claudia all the while. There was never any visible tension between the two of them from what I could discern although I did on occasion catch him giving her puppy dog eyes across the bar. And I’m pretty sure that sometimes, Claudia noticed. Their friendship, perhaps more, seemed to heal naturally over time regardless as they began to speak again. I always regarded Lee as a sweet, ultimately timid person, a heart on sleeve kind of guy, and for better or worse I think that Claudia did too. That she remained friends with most of her exes, as sister Ali said, is certainly worth bearing in mind.

If the culprit really is one or more of the regulars, Lee would be the last person I’d have guessed was involved. Though at 5ft6, he does match the broad description of the left handed smoker seen arguing with a woman on Melrosegate bridge at 5.35am on March 19th, who has never been identified. It struck me that the man Claudia had an affair with two years prior, the affair that even I, as in not just Claudia’s immediate circle, and the pub community knew about, matched the broad description of the man seen on Melrosegate bridge. Then again, I’d have said the same about lab technician Michael Snelling, who was arrested in 2014, had his work place and his and his elderly mother’s properties in York and North Shields searched by forensic investigators the same year, the first time was back in 2009, as well as the biology department at University of York where he worked as a lab technician, but obviously police found reason to conduct a more thorough search five years later, and to this day I think he remains one of the main but never charged suspects. So who knows. His conditional bail was removed later that year and far as I heard he has long since left York.

Towards the outlier of their drinking group, Geordie Mick — as most people knew him — was a quiet but cheery man. Mild mannered, if not a little bit odd, a loner sometimes, and more of a casual Sunday lunchtime and early weekday evening drinker. Never sinking more than three pints of bitter in one sitting. Barely if ever joining in with the weekend after hours lock-in crowd. When I worked at the Nag’s he’d give Claudia a lift to the University of York canteen I’d say at least once a month because he also worked at the Heslington site and Claudia didn’t always want or was able to drive there herself after a particularly heavy night at the pub. For a while, around one Sunday every six weeks or thereabouts when I suppose technically George’s visitors were in town they would all congregate at the Nag’s, drinking until late, and Claudia usually had to start work early the next day. Which is where Snelling offered to help. I do remember thinking that she and Snelling, who socialised most over Sunday lunch time when I knew them, were particularly at ease with each other while Claudia generally was quite reserved in her body language. Who would most likely have given Claudia Lawrence a lift to work while her car was being fixed? I and no doubt many others would have said Michael Snelling, among others.

If the light coloured Ford Focus seen braking abruptly outside Claudia’s house at 5.42am on March 19th 2009 — leaving an appropriate amount of time to drive leisurely from Claudia’s home to the university for her to be dropped off, change into her chef whites and then begin her 6am shift on time — is in fact Snelling, though I believe his car was light blue, it’s worth pointing out he’d have had to loop round on himself to be driving in the direction the car is in the video, if he drove directly from his home that is. Police surely already know from CCTV and witness statements the route Snelling took to pick up Claudia and/or their regular meeting point, at roundabout what time, and if anything was different or suspicious that morning.

The quickest route that corresponds with the video images on Heworth Road would be, regardless of which way he had driven to get to that point, to drive straight up Heworth Road, towards the stray, round the roundabout, and then back onto Heworth Road. For this to be true, there would be video evidence of the car driving in the opposite direction a few seconds earlier, in which case police are holding that footage back. I want to say that a car braking outside Claudia’s house that’s already facing towards the university is more likely to be a taxi driver. However, though not a driver myself, I have noticed that instead of embarking on awkward turns to change direction in a car, particularly on busy roads and side streets, which admittedly wasn’t the case at quarter to six in the morning on March 19th 2009 on Heworth Road, non-taxi drivers will opt to drive up adjacent street/s then back round on themselves so as to be facing the right direction on the road leading towards their destination when they first collect their passenger.

If Snelling is the driver of the Ford Focus presumably he drove from his home. The most intuitive route I can think of from Burnholme that corresponds with the CCTV footage, if indeed he did not drive up one side of Heworth Road and straight back down the other, would probably be along Hempland Lane. Either follow Hempland Lane round and take a left on Stockton Lane, then another at the top of Heworth Road. Or, more direct, from Hempland Lane turn left onto Hempland/Oakland Avenue (as opposed to turning left onto Heworth Village where there’s the Walnut Tree pub and Clockhouse dentist’s, ergo more obvious indication of the presence of CCTV) then right onto residential Forest Way, Lime or Chestnut Avenue, left again onto Stockton Lane and once more to Heworth Road. Note that this route drives nearby if not potentially directly past the houses of many Nag’s Head locals. Including a few whose homes were searched in relation to the murder inquiry.

Note also the police released two sets of CCTV footage of the light coloured Ford Focus on the NYP website. The footage from the vantage point of the main road to me appears darker than it does in Lime Court, also the timestamp seems to have been edited out of the latter. The vehicle is less decisively silver looking in colour for this reason. It looks smaller in size, narrower and blunter in shape than the images captured from the main road, some would argue to the point of being a different car altogether; an illusion resultant of the camera angle and distance from the main road in Lime Court perhaps, or discrepancies in the editing and uploading process between news sources, but if not, could it instead be a message from which only the guilty parties can glean a very specific meaning?

That it was supposed to be her day off, if media reporting is accurate, increases the probability that her abductor knew Claudia through work, either as a colleague, security or grounds personnel, student, a complete stranger, or someone localised enough to Claudia they knew about specific and last minute changes to her weekly routine. Which they also had a broad knowledge of.

Why would Snelling or anybody else have turned up at 5.42am on March 19th to pick Claudia up if she hadn’t made arrangements for them to do so? Why wouldn’t anyone else on that street speak up if they knew anything about it? Total coincidence? Perhaps. This is why the days and hours leading up to Claudia’s disappearance are so vital. Given the car braking abruptly outside Claudia’s home, if not to collect someone stood waiting there, is it possible the driver witnessed something, perhaps even ran someone over? Never coming forward to confirm their identity and explain their subsequent movements and reason for braking surely means that short of being the abductor or an accomplice they are covering for someone they know, perhaps a family relation, were bribed, or are dead.

If I told a taxi driver I needed to be at Goodricke College/Roger Kirk Centre in time to begin my 6am shift, 5.42am would be around the time I’d expect the taxi to arrive, if not a little bit later. Claudia had set off by foot, in her own vehicle or had been collected around that time to make the journey to work tens if not hundreds of mornings before.

In a hurry, a car driving past Claudia’s house at 5.42am could potentially have time to catch up with her walking to work while she’s still on the main road, before she turns off onto the university campus. The first and perhaps only set of cameras on Melrosegate that film Claudia posting a letter on the afternoon of the 18th but not at all the next morning or indeed ever again are mounted outside the post office. Which is a minimum five minute driving distance to Goodricke College where I think Claudia was supposed to work that day, and ten minutes paced walking distance to the Roger Kirk Centre cafe where she usually worked. The latest time she could have reached that point on her journey without risking being late would be between 5.45 and 5.50am. That leaves the Ford Focus specifically no more than three to eight minutes to catch up to her before the very latest plausible time she could have reached Melrosegate Post Office, had she been expecting a lift the rest of the journey to Goodricke College that morning. The timing doesn’t sit well, increasing the probability that if involved in any way at all and if Claudia really did leave her house to walk to work that route the morning of March 19th, the driver of the Ford Focus is most likely an accomplice rather than the abductor. At the same time, such a narrow window of opportunity might help explain why there are so few detailed and corroborating witness accounts besides the early hour.

It could be that after Claudia’s text exchange with her friend from Malton the evening of March 18th someone visited Claudia’s house and they made arrangements face to face. Perhaps Snelling, perhaps someone else who either just so happened to own or have ready access to a light coloured Ford Focus or was driving one that morning specifically because they knew Snelling’s was a similar model and colour. It could also be, in fact I’m pretty sure it is the case that police aren’t releasing vital information about calls and arrangements Claudia made and read that day/night. Maybe the braking car, albeit if not a coincidence and totally irrelevant to the investigation, ergo a complete red herring, though it does remain suspicious no one ever came forward, was a way to evidentially imply Claudia’s abduction took place on the Thursday morning rather than the Wednesday night, or that the abductor was the driver of that car.

I suppose the question now is, what can be proved? Did Claudia leave the house on Wednesday night after her phone conversation with her parents? Did someone visit her? When she first disappeared I think there was access to the Nag’s Head car park from the alleyway at the back of her house, crude though it was, and lined with nettles. A year or two after she disappeared a dilapidated fence was rebuilt and shrubbery planted as part of a renovation. North Yorkshire Police say the Vauxhall Astra they were keen to identify the driver of was parked for at least 30 minutes. Given the direction of traffic and direction the van is parked in, the limited parking space and room to manouevre, the CCTV at the other end of Heworth Road and in Limes Court that films the Ford Focus the next morning, this much is clear: If there isn’t footage of the Astra driving towards that end of Heworth Road and/or past Limes Court’s cameras, that means
1. The van had previously been parked in the Nag’s head car park or turned around in it. Did they enter the pub in between?
2. The van had turned around in the courtyard area outside the Nags Head, right in front of the windows
3. The van made that turn at the traffic lights at the Costcutters end of Heworth Road and did a 180 before coming into far view of the main road camera at the other end of Heworth Road
4. The van was parked in the driveway or garage of a house on Heworth Road. If parked further out in grassy areas perhaps bus CCTV would have caught it. Owner/renter of the car could live at the address, or could be a friend etc.

Why is it that the alleyway at the back of Claudia’s home wasn’t meticulously forensically searched until 2013, five years after she disappeared? Early on investigators believed Claudia had been abducted on her way to work, primarily due to witness testimonies. I remember George say that the CCTV camera in the rear car park at the Nag’s hadn’t worked for months prior to Claudia’s disappearance. This was back in 2011, the summer before I moved to Germany, when I visited the pub to say hello to a few people and enjoy Sunday lunch. I’ve tried to recall if it was also the case and at least semi-common knowledge the cameras were often faulty or switched off when I worked there too. On reflection I think they were. Sometimes in a bid to minimise energy bills. A few of the regulars deemed it a security issue and had conversations about it at the bar and I remember thinking “well, if they were switched on there’d be proof that you regularly drink-drive home.” If Claudia left her house voluntarily via the front door that night she’d have either got into a car or been seen walking towards the Stray end of Heworth Road on Lime Court’s cameras. But not if walking towards the other end. She would, however, have walked past the bar windows of the Nag’s and surely would’ve been seen by someone inside, depending on the time. Assumedly the police have done all they can to ascertain exactly who was at the pub on March 18th, their comings and goings that evening, who had vehicles who didn’t, because if Claudia was abducted from her house that night the only way she’d have been bundled into a van or car without reasonable risk of being seen, unless at night, indeed from a risk perspective it would make more sense to do it then, and logistically if Claudia was either dead or under their control at her home, they could have waited until the pub closed to move her, unless she was expecting someone, perhaps a totally innocent someone, perhaps not, was in that car park and the surrounding space, or via a back garden on Heworth Road/Place or East Parade. Which, I think, is what first brought buy-to-let home owner and Railway carriage cleaner Richard Cartwright, who died of a heart attack a month after Claudia disappeared, to the attention of investigators. He’s seen walking into the alleyway and back out again a minute later multiple times in the days and weeks leading up to Claudia’s disappearance but he’s far from the only person filmed doing so. I don’t know if the clips police released were deemed to be him or not or even if he was posthumously ruled out of the investigation.

Cartwright rented out houses on Heworth Road and East Parade to students, both St John and Uni of presumably because they are located in proximity to both campuses. I saw his photograph in the local paper and I don’t recognise him from the Nag’s when I worked there. According to media reports he did not know Claudia to talk to or even by sight but I’d be surprised if he didn’t know at least one or two of the suspects. It is possible one or more of Cartwright’s properties were empty when she vanished, but is less likely to have been the case if it was term time. If there had been, for example, a spate of burglaries in the area in the weeks leading up to Claudia’s disappearance, which according to a Websleuths commenter is true, it’s certainly plausible Cartwright was being the diligent landlord, checking the back gates of his properties at ‘opportune’ times in the morning and evening for broken locks and other signifiers of recent theft, hence his numerous video evidenced strolls into the alleyway running between the back gardens on Heworth Road and East Parade in the days and weeks leading up to her disappearance.

Claudia’s disappearance could potentially also be the result of a burglary gone wrong then in which case. Given her missing work bag and the lack of a crime scene at her home, any burglary she may have accidentally or purposefully disturbed must have taken place early that morning and most probably was about to take place at a neighbour’s house. Otherwise, Lime Court is student halls accommodation. Police searched the buildings and I think there were rumours that the alleyway behind Claudia’s house was a drop off point.

According to another commenter on the Claudia Lawrence Websleuths page they spoke with a former bar man at the Nag’s and he told them police told him they had recently questioned members of staff at a large company in York. Not about their direct involvement in Claudia’s murder but in covering up for the suspects in presumably a professional capacity. If this is not untrue and white collar then think accounting, insurance, auditing; obscuring incriminating purchases or unexplained cash deposits and expenditures. Non white collar scenarios I can think of are such that obliviousness to what the workers involved were doing is less believable and would have had to have taken place much closer to the fact. That could be a large building company, security firm, taxi or bus company, postal or courier service, factory workers, or similar.

The two male members of staff I remember from the pub are Alistair Cooper’s son and David, who’d worked at the Nags for around ten years when I started working there and dealt with the early morning beer deliveries. I would be surprised if he didn’t see Claudia making her way to work from time to time. Dave when I knew him was just recently married to a nurse called Tina who he’d drink with at the pub after finishing his day shift, and they lived together a minute away at the top of Heworth Road. The driver of the white Vauxhall Astra caught on bus CCTV police were keen to identify but never did happens to be parked outside their house. I’m pretty sure neither of them could drive when I knew them, but Tina was taking lessons.

A few details about the pub: Co-landlord Simon ‘George’ Forman tended to work most evenings; counterpart Jim Melson — who walked with a limp, as did long serving barman Dave — being in charge of the morning/Sunday lunch side of the business. Which included B&B duties. Breakfast and Sunday lunch were served by Jim and cooked by chef Ray who lived in one of the B&B rooms. People rarely stayed in the vacant ones and the money problems this contributed towards sparked mostly passive aggressive tensions between the two landlords, who I think were co-franchising from a brewery, though I have no idea which one. George was a heavy drinker, but no more so than anyone else he hung out with, including Claudia, while Jim was tee-total I think for health reasons, he had a young daughter after all. If nothing else, the weekend lock-ins were a revenue stream George not unlike many landlords had fashioned into a social circle via a semi-selective shooing policy come last orders, which I think pissed some people off.

Rarely sober enough to drive home after a weekend evening shift George, as well as some of the more intermittent members of the group who lived further afield thus visited the Nags less frequently, would often stay over in the spare rooms at the weekend. I don’t remember seeing money change hands or processing card payments for these rooms but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, perhaps at mates rates. George also used to joke about the tension the lock-ins caused in his marriage. I think his wife had set a curfew of sorts that he would regularly break at the weekend. As far as I heard, George left the pub around two years after Claudia disappeared and was divorced soon-after.

Due to the nature of her disappearance, I imagine that Claudia’s phone records were a first port of call for investigators trying to find out what happened. I do wonder about co-ordination between police and the media at this time: As in, was Lee’s number still a regular, perhaps incriminating feature in Claudia’s phone and text records when she disappeared, this is two years after their split and she had been in several relationships since — hence why the police questioned him, or did interviews with witnesses reveal details about the affair itself and he was brought in for questioning for that reason? Because writing about it definitely set the tone for reporting to come. I hope that Claudia ran away, whatever implications that may have on her character because of the limbo her loved ones have been trapped in ever since, because then at least she’d be alive, wherever she is, and had chosen to disappear when she did. Which is preferable to having to accept the much more likely and depressing scenario favoured by the police, the media and local community that Claudia was subject to great harm and most likely murdered at the hands of another person or persons she probably knew, intimately well perhaps, but who for whatever reason has so far managed to evade justice and is therefore most likely still at large. I hope that Claudia ran away somewhere warm and idyllic by the sea, wherein each passing year has been happier and more fulfilling than the last for her. Maybe one of the ‘rogue’s gallery’ of men she reportedly socialised with, if they’re innocent, actually just sorted her out with a fake passport so that she couldn’t be traced and for whatever reason Claudia just upped and left everything and everyone behind of her own volition. It doesn’t matter and actually it’s none of your business if so, you evil little bitch.