Disgraced former BBC reporter Martin Bashir has admitted he took the clothes of a murdered nine-year-old girl that were then lost – after claiming for almost 20 years he could not remember doing so.
In a handwritten letter to the girl’s mother Michelle Hadaway, seen by The Mail on Sunday, Bashir accepted for the first time that he worked on a BBC programme about her daughter Karen’s murder and had been entrusted with her clothes.
He said he was ‘deeply sorry’ that the clothing in which Karen was murdered – which he revealed he took ‘to the BBC’ – went missing.
Karen Hadaway and her friend Nicola Fellows were murdered in Brighton in 1986 in what became known as the Babes in the Wood killings. It was not until 2018 before roofer Russell Bishop was convicted of their deaths. He’d been acquitted at an earlier trial in 1987.
In 1991, Bashir, who was then working for the BBC programme Public Eye, persuaded Karen’s grieving mother to hand over the clothes after promising to subject them to DNA tests in the hope of identifying the killer.
The family asked for them to be returned in 2004 so they could be given to Sussex Police, who were reviewing the case, only to be told they had gone missing.
Despite Bashir leaving Michelle with a signed receipt, his agent John Miles said in 2004 that the reporter ‘genuinely couldn’t remember anything about the case’.
Asked about the clothing in May this year, Bashir said: ‘I may have lost it but I don’t remember.’
In November, The Mail on Sunday revealed that BBC Director General Tim Davie had offered the Corporation’s ‘sincere apologies’ to Ms Hadaway after a new inquiry had failed to track down the clothes, which included Karen’s school sweatshirt, T-shirt, knickers and vest. He also asked Bashir to apologise directly to her. The MoS can reveal that two weeks later Phil Harrold, Mr Davie’s chief of staff, sent Ms Hadaway a sealed envelope containing Bashir’s 242-word handwritten letter.