Mother of tragic Sarah Payne reveals heartbreaking letters she wrote to murdered tot to get her through the agony of losing her ‘angel’

SARA PAYNE smiles softly as she imagines what her beloved daughter Sarah would be like today as a 25-year-old woman.

But she is happiest thinking of what her child was like at eight — a little girl with a trademark giggle who made everybody else laugh too.

Brave Sara has written a book featuring a series of heart-breaking letters she has penned to the murdered daughter she calls “my angel”.

Today, in an interview she describes as “the most honest I have ever given”, she says: “I talk to Sarah almost every day in my head about mundane things like the weather. It helps me feel closer to her.

“Writing letters to her has helped to make up in a small way for the teenage years and beyond that I didn’t get with her — it has made her more real. It is hard to imagine how she would now be as a 25-year-old. I can hear her giggling. I can see her mischievous smile.

“For me I want to always ­remember her as that lovely, sweet eight-year-old girl.”

In an emotional interview to mark the release of Letters To Sarah, the 48-year-old has revealed how she still connects with her daughter by cuddling her favourite pink blanket.

She also strokes a lock of her blonde hair and even read the entire Harry Potter series in a bid to keep the little girl’s spirit close.

Poignantly she adds: “I’ve just started to forgive myself for not being there for Sarah.”

Sara’s daughter vanished on July 1, 2000, after playing hide and seek with her siblings in the countryside close to her grandparents’ home near Littlehampton, West Sussex.

Seventeen days later, after a search by thousands of police, her body was found in a field 15 miles away.

Sarah’s killer, smirking loner Roy Whiting, then 41, had lured her into his white van.

Sara told The Sun on Sunday: “Sarah was at her happiest, playing and laughing the day she never came home.

“From the moment Sarah was taken, a fog descended and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe, sleep, I couldn’t see. I was walking around and people were talking to me. I was answering but it wasn’t me.

“I was out of my body and looking in, rather than being aware of my own feelings and what I was doing.
“The 17 days until she was found felt like 17 years.”

Sarah’s brother Lee — now 30 and a father of one — was 13 when he ran to look for Sarah and saw Whiting’s van speeding off.

Her other brother Luke, 12, and sister Charlotte, six, had already run to their grandparents’ house.

Sara said: “My other children had barely lived. They weren’t ready for the atrocities but they got them anyway.

“The moment they learned Sarah was missing they turned from boys into men and in Charlotte’s case it made her a woman in an instant.”

Sara recalled the fateful day she was told Sarah’s body had been found. She said: “The children found out before I did. For 17 days I had thrown myself into positive thinking. I didn’t let anyone around me have bad thoughts.

“You weren’t allowed to think of death or kidnap. You were only allowed to think of when we were going to find her.

“A police liaison officer came round. He was ashen-faced. He said, ‘I need to talk to you, on your own, in the garden, away from the kids’.

“I went cold and there was like a loud bang in my head as if the worst was coming. Michael, Sarah’s father, was out so we waited a couple of minutes for him.

“But as we waited, my two boys ran into the garden, tears streaming down their face, saying, ‘Is it true? Is Sarah dead?’ I just froze.

“They had heard it on the lunchtime TV news before I had been told.

“My boys were angry, saying, ‘You said you would tell us as soon as you knew?’ Everything had fallen to pieces. It was then I started to talk to Sarah in my mind.

“The new book is really about putting those thoughts on paper, helping me feel connected to her.

“I started watching her favourite movies, imagining I was watching them alongside her, and would read books with her in mind.”

That included all seven of the Harry Potter novels — the fourth of which was published just a week after Sarah’s death.

Sara began this task during Whiting’s trial in 2001, at the end of which he was sentenced to life.

She explained: “I wanted something to take me away from life, so in my mind I started reading the Harry Potter books to Sarah. It was escapism and just silly and magic, which is what Sarah loved.”

It was also at the four-week trial at Lewes Crown Court that Sara first had a vivid real-life sense of Sarah laughing — something that still comes back to her, even now. She said: “Ever since Sarah was found I heard her giggle at ­inappropriate moments.

“It first happened in court when Roy Whiting was leaning back on his chair and he was next to a little door and a gate. It kept swinging open even though the guards kept closing it.

“That was when I first heard it in my head. It was one of her ­giggles at the top of her voice and it felt like she was right there, being mischievous.”

In the wake of Sarah’s death, Sara threw herself into campaigning for Sarah’s Law, which allows anyone to formally ask police if someone with access to a child has a record for child sexual offences.

She also had another daughter, Ellie, in 2003 — just months after parting from Michael, who she had been married to for 13 years, blaming the split on the strain of ­coping with murder.

Years of stress and campaigning resulted in her suffering two aneurysms. The last, in 2009, left her in a coma, with doctors telling family it was unlikely she would survive.

Sara, who now has limited movement in her left arm and short-term memory loss, said: “Things changed after the strokes. I couldn’t let my kids lose their mum as well.

“I knew I had to be easier on myself so I started working less.”

In 2014 the family was dealt another blow when Michael, whose despair had driven him to drinking, was found dead at his home. But Sara, now a gran of four, says their lost little girl has ­managed to bring comfort through it all and still brings the family together.

She said: “I try to include Sarah in the children’s lives.

“We have a huge picture on the wall of the family and right next to it is a large picture of Sarah. She is still one of the gang. She will for ever be part of the family.

“Sarah had a pink blanket that’s safely put away but every now and again it goes missing. It is always with one of the other children.

“The coroner very kindly cut me a loop of Sarah’s hair. And every now and then I look at it and touch it and remember she was real . . . not a picture on a poster or any of those things.

“Sometimes I just need to know that she was actually here and that she’d come from me.” The book has also helped preserve the links between mother and daughter.

Sara said: “Seeing her become a teenager, slamming doors, tantrums, staying out late — this book touches on what it is to miss those things.

“It’s me talking to her as much as I can.”

Sara added: “I feel that in the past few years we have reclaimed Sarah on her anniversary of her death and birthday from Roy Whiting. July 1 has nothing to do with that man.

“That is a day when all the family get together and remember the day we last saw Sarah.”

• Sara’s book, Letters To Sarah, is out on Thursday. It is published by John Blake and costs £8.99.