‘The Answers Lie in That Pub’ – The Woman Who Disappeared in Her Own Home

Claudia Lawrence loved Elton John’s “Your Song”.

Friends remember how, during evenings spent at The Nags Head in York, there would often come a point where she’d put the song on the pub jukebox and everyone would cheer. Your song? This was Claudia’s song. Then she’d put it on again. Another cheer. And again. And again. Eventually, the song would be met by groans across the pub and a friendly intervention to prise any remaining pound coins from Claudia’s hand. But there would be laughing and smiling. Everyone loved Claudia. Here, in the pub just a few doors away from her home in Melrosegate, Claudia was queen.

Ten years have passed since the most recent of those nights. The Nags Head is under new management now. Many of the regulars have moved on. You don’t hear Elton John on the jukebox anywhere near as much as you used to. It’s a different place. The journalists who decamped here in 2009 took something with them when they left.

Claudia hasn’t been seen for ten years now, since the 18th of March, 2009 – the day she became the face of missing people within the British Isles. The 35-year-old York University chef who was there and then was not. Where she went remains a mystery. “We’re still hoping that someone will give us some answers,” says Claudia’s father, Pete Lawrence.

Peter, 72, a solicitor until he retired last year, has put himself in the public eye constantly these last ten years, in order to keep his daughter’s name out there. Earlier this year, after extensive campaigning, Peter succeeded in getting a new law passed – named in tribute to his daughter, “Claudia’s Law” allows family to step in and manage the affairs of a loved one who has been missing for 90 days. “One less burden at a time when families are at their emotional lowest ebb,” says Peter.

He sounds exhausted. “Every time there’s something like this about Claudia, there’s a response,” he says of a new documentary coming out about his daughter. “The police are expecting a good one, so hopefully there’ll be a new lead that comes out of it…”

The questions remain endless. We know that Claudia made it to work on the 18th of March, 2009. CCTV at the University of York’s Goodricke College captured her arrival at 5:57AM. Then, at 2:31PM, she was seen embarking on the three-mile walk back home. Claudia’s car was in the garage for repairs at the time. She’d been walking to and from work that week. That particular afternoon, a female colleague picked her up and gave her a lift. Shortly after arriving home she left again and was seen posting a letter outside the parade of shops near her house. She had a conversation with a woman with a pram and passed The Nags Head, before her last confirmed sighting at 3.05PM. Then the speculation started.

We do know that later that night, at 8:10PM, Claudia called her dad. Then her mum. She texted a friend. At 9.12PM she received a text message from a friend in Cyprus, her favourite holiday spot – though it’s not known whether she read the message or not.

Work the next day was due to start at 6AM. Claudia never clocked in. The following evening she was due to meet her friend Suzy Cooper at The Nags Head. Claudia didn’t arrive. Suzy, feeling this was out of character for her friend, called Peter. Then Peter called North Yorkshire Police, before he and George Foreman – the pub landlord – entered Claudia’s flat.

“I think I thought I’d find her lying on the floor,” said Peter. What they found instead was worryingly normal: slippers by the door; her handbag, containing money; her driving licence and bank card on her made-up bed. Jewellery on the chest of draws. Breakfast dishes in the sink. Gone was a rucksack containing her chef’s whites. They have never been found.

Peter made an appeal for information at a press conference on the 23rd of March, describing his “living nightmare”. Two days later, after the CCTV footage was released, Detective Superintendent Ray Galloway – who was leading the investigation – said he believed Claudia may have come to harm after meeting someone she knew.

On the 16th of April, police shared news of the alleged sighting of a man and a woman rowing besides a car on Claudia’s route to work, early on the morning of the 19th of March. It’s said that two men were seen trying the door to Claudia’s house in the week before she disappeared. On the 6th of May, police said they had received more than 1,000 calls from the public. That they had taken 1,096 statements. That they had searched 1,270 properties.

On the 15th of May, police released footage of a man acting suspiciously on Lime Court, near Claudia’s flat, in the early hours of the 19th of March. Later, it was revealed that additional footage appearing to show the same man exists, from the prior night, in the same location. And then everything became chaos.

On the 2nd of June, Detective Superintendent Ray Galloway went on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme and said Claudia was involved in relationships “of complexity and mystery”. The investigation was irrevocably altered, the statement so infused with intrigue that the new narrative somehow became that Claudia was a homewrecker. That she targeted married men for kicks.

Her best friends, Suzy and Jen King, tried to stop the tide. They told all who would listen that this wasn’t the Claudia they knew. Their Claudia was shy. Considered. Fun – but never in the reckless sense. Still, at one point, someone stopped Peter in the street to tell him his daughter “deserved it”.

“[Galloway] later clarified what he meant by what he said,” says Peter, “but once he’d said it, the investigation immediately changed. He has since said to me that he didn’t intend for it to come out quite like it did.”

Despite North Yorkshire Police’s investigations taking them to Cyprus – with the unlikely theory that Claudia secretly absconded being briefly indulged – most leads returned to the pub, The Nags Head. As Claudia’s private life was raked over in the tabloids, more questions emerged.

The following 18th of March, a year to the day of Claudia’s disappearance, it was said that two days before she went missing she’d spent the night with an unknown boyfriend. This person’s identity – like the rowing couple, like the man caught on CCTV outside her house, like unidentified DNA taken from a cigarette butt found in Claudia’s car – has never been established.

To date, nine people have been arrested, five of whom have links to The Nags Head. All have been released without charge. Peter has long suspected that many interviewed haven’t been truthful with detectives. That people are covering for each other. He’s even said – having himself spent plenty of time with Claudia at the pub – that he might even have conversed with those responsible for his daughter’s disappearance. “I can only hope that time breaks people’s loyalties,” he says. “The police think that will happen.”

“My feeling is that the answers to what happened to my daughter lie within the clientele of that pub,” he continues. “People know things they’re not saying.”

Ten years on from the disappearance of Claudia Lawrence, the absence of her singing, laughter and life continues to weigh heavy on her father’s soul.

‘Claudia Lawrence: Missing Or Murdered’ is available to watch on My5.

@jamesjammcmahon