Elaine O'Callaghan: a remarkable woman like her daughter Sian

I WAS working the weekend when Sian O'Callaghan was murdered 19 months ago.

It was my turn to run the newsdesk, for what had been a quiet news weekend in Swindon.

Come Sunday morning, we'd already had a splash in the bag for the front page of Monday's Swindon Advertiser, but then an email from Wiltshire Police dropped into the newsdesk email about a 22-year-old woman who'd been missing since going out with friends in the town on Friday night.

She was last seen leaving a nightclub in Old Town shortly before 3am in the early hours of Saturday morning and police were growing increasingly concerned about her whereabouts.

To be fair, you get quite a few of these police appeals; sometimes they are elderly folk who have mental issues who take themselves off and sadly never return. Other times, it is children or young adults who have had a disagreement at home, go missing for a few days and inevitably return.

Ironically, as I write this blog, we've got a 14-year-old girl currently missing who was last seen in the Pevensey area of East Sussex. Police say they do not believe the teenager has come to any harm, but they are trying to find the youngster who has been seen in Brighton and Maidstone.

So in the media world, you're making these subjective judgements - is this a major story, has some harm come to this missing person, or is this a family tiff which will turn out right in the end?

With Sian (pictured above), when you looked at her photograph - a pretty, girl-next-door type, with a very respectable background - you sensed even then, when she had been missing for more than 30 hours, that something was up. If she really had been on the razzle the night before and ended up sleeping off a hangover on a friend's couch during Saturday, then surely her family would have heard from her later that day.

But by Sunday morning, Sian was still missing and instinct told you there was not going to be a happy outcome.

What was remarkable was the public's reaction to her disappearance; it pulled the town of Swindon and, in fact, the county of Wiltshire together. There were huge public searches around the Savernake Forest towards Marlborough, posters of Sian were put up around the town, candlelit vigils were held for her safe return, it was a remarkable story which attracted huge media attention.

Naturally, that brought out the very worst from the national media who poured into Swindon to cover this breaking story. Sian's body was found near to the picturesque village of Uffington, over the border in Oxfordshire, five days' later.

When taxi driver Christopher Halliwell, who was this week convicted of Sian's murder, was arrested, some of the antics of the nationals were unbelieveable in getting information and photos of both Sian and Halliwell. There was no tact, decency or decorum. It was a scrum with no scruples.

Worst of all was when Halliwell was charged with Sian's murder the following Friday after Sian's disappearance the previous weekend. It meant, according to the laws of the land, notably the Contempt of Court Act so as not to prejudice a fair trial, that the media has to limit its reports of the charging of the taxi driver to 10 basic facts. You can't comment, you can't provide prejudicial background - it's a straight up and down report.

So when I walked into WH Smith on Saturday morning, the red tops had totally ignored the contempt laws to splash their front pages with comments from Halliwell's family together with major background pieces on the man. We played it absolutely straight at the Swindon Advertiser, yet it was an unfair playing field and the Attorney General wasn't going to do anything about it.

However, that's the difference between national and local newspapers. Local newspapers live in the communities they serve to face the consequences of their actions. The nationals can saunter in with their wallets, get what they want by treading over anything in their wake, and leave just as quickly.

Sadly it was ever thus in this dog-eat-dog media world. Yet the Adver's reporters, thanks to really good contacts with the police, played a blinder in their coverage of Sian's disappearance which earned enormous respect in the local community.

What we may have lost by not pushing the story over the legal envelope, we gained when I got a phone call out of the blue from Sian's family days after Halliwell was charged.

Sian's mother Elaine wanted to chat along with her partner Pete. We were not straying into contempt territory, since any published story would not deal with the specifics of the court case or Halliwell - this was about Sian and her death, which was indisputable fact. It was up to the court to decide who was responsible for Sian's death and how.

Elaine and Pete came to my office in Old Town and for almost two hours we chatted about Sian; about the sort of young woman she was, her passion for children, her work and her boyfriend, and about Sian's devotion to her family.

Elaine also spoke in detail about that traumatic week when they first discovered her daughter was missing and then the acceptance that she was gone. It was, at times, quite chilling stuff. But Elaine, with Pete pitching in, spoke at length. It was as if they were off-loading. They wanted to put something in the paper, they wanted to thank Swindon for its love and affection towards Sian.

Elaine explained her sense of relief when they found Sian's body so that there was some form of closure. "I always had hope, but I still tried to prepare myself for the worst." she told me ."It was the worst of the worst that I could've imagined, but they'd found her. It was a relief in a way. I would have hated to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and looking at every brunette girl, wondering if it was her."

I couldn't imagine the place where Elaine O'Callaghan found herself at that time. How she had the strength to hold it together so soon after losing her daughter in the most awful of circumstances. But then Elaine smiled fondly as she showed me a cute photograph of eight-year-old Sian dressed as a flapper girl, wearing a string of pearls around her neck getting dressed for a fancy dress party.

“She loved kids and would’ve loved to have had kids of her own,” said Elaine. “Some of her friends have children. She would have been an excellent mum. She was a very much go-with-the-flow person and had a very happy nature. She lived for the day. I can’t really think of any times when she was short-tempered. She loved kids and would’ve loved to have had kids of her own.”

At Bristol Crown Court yesterday, Halliwell was jailed for a minimum of 25 years after admitting the murder of Sian O'Callaghan, though he escaped prosecution over a second killing, despite leading police to the victim's body, because of a police mix-up.

Can it be closure for Elaine O'Callaghan and her family? It is hard to know. All I know is that Elaine O'Callaghan is a remarkable woman and I would think her daughter was too. You can never forget.