the times | Monday October 5 2020 1GT 7
life
Can a team
of student
detectives finally
find answers,
asksDamian
Whitworth
been staying at a campsite and that
the management there had thrown
away most of his possessions and
divided some items among themselves.
During a subsequent trip, in 1992, she
received an anonymous note from
someone claiming to have seen
Charles die after being knocked out by
two men at a party at the campsite.
“His body is in the lake by the bridge,”
the note read. Volunteers dived in the
lake, taking a submersible camera that
Denise paid for, and found a body.
The authorities initially said it was
Charles before informing her that it
was a man in his sixties.
Denise was never able to trace a
young woman who tried to contact
her at her motel with information, but
never returned. She has the name and
photograph of another woman who
has reputedly said that a biker was
responsible for killing Charles to earn
respect from a gang. Frustrated by
the authorities’ apparent failure to
re-interview witnesses, Denise has
taken to banging on doors, and just
last week managed to get a friend to
pass on a message to a man who she
has been told has knowledge of what
happened. “He was very nasty to her
and said it was none of her business.”
Singing with the Voices for Missing
choir, which appeared on Britain’s Got
Talent in 2017, brought publicity and
“sightings” of Charles from as far
afield as Australia. She doesn’t mind
these false alarms; it means that
people are still looking for him. Denise
is worried that potential witnesses
might die before their stories are
heard. “I’m 71. I’d like to know before
I go to my grave where his body is.”
Bennett, who will oversee an
“incident room” at the Leeds Beckett
campus, says they will go back to the
beginning in Charles’s case. “There
are so many different scenarios that
we need to look at. We’re not
guaranteeing that we’re going to find
Charles. If we can do anything to help
even just provide a better picture of
what might have happened, I think
we owe that to Denise.”
Last month Denise, who I met near
her home in southwest London, went
to the High Court, where she was
granted a presumption of death
certificate for Charles. “It drained my
soul,” she says. “I wanted to scream to
the judge, ‘He’s not dead, he can’t be.’
But it was necessary because I’ve got
to deal with his financial affairs.”
On the day of the hearing she learnt
that Leeds Beckett University was to
begin reviewing the case. “It was
amazing. I am so fortunate I’ve finally
got some help.” She hopes to go with
Grimstead to Canada to pursue the
investigation. In the early stages of the
search her mother, Edith, joined her.
Edith died in 2006 and is buried in
Cambridge. Charles’s name is also on
the headstone, with the inscription:
“Lost, summer 1989.”
“Hopefully we will find where
his remains are,” Denise says. “And
I will bring my boy home and lay him
to rest there.”T
he last time Denise
Horvath-Allan
heard from her son
was on May 11, 1989.
Charles, who was 20
and from Yorkshire,
had been travelling
across Canada since
the year before. His mother had
given him an open-ended ticket as
an early 21st birthday present and he
had been exploring and working in
the country of his birth, stopping
off to see his father, who lived in
Ontario, before arriving in Kelowna,
a laid-back city that sits amid
mountains and pine forests on
Okanagan Lake in British Columbia.
In the pre-mobile phone age,
mother and son found that one of the
best ways to stay in touch was to send
each other faxes. The letter that
Denise received on May 11 was full of
Charles’s detailed plans for a trip to
meet her that August in Hong Kong.
There they would hold a joint
celebration of his 21st birthday and her
40th. He was a little worried about
earning the money for the plane ticket,
but was determined to make the trip.
Then he vanished. By the end of
May, Denise was starting to worry that
she hadn’t heard from her only child,
who had worked hard to stay in touch
while travelling. She called the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police in Kelowna,
but they weren’t much interested in
a young British traveller who hadn’t
checked in with his mother.
The weeks passed, along with the
date for their planned reunion in
Hong Kong. Insane with worry,
Denise initially engaged in long-
distance telephone badgering of the
police and insisted that a missing
person report was filed in August.
She placed adverts in local
newspapers, but it wasn’t until June
the next year that she was able to
leave Yorkshire, where she had a hair
and beauty business, to fly to Canada.
She hasn’t stopped looking for her
son for 31 years. But after 16 trips to
Canada, the discovery of a body that
she was wrongly told was Charles,
financial hardship and endless
disappointments, she still doesn’t
know what happened to him.
Now she hopes that a group of
students in Leeds might have the time,
energy and enthusiasm to finally find
the answers. Locate International, an
organisation set up by a former senior
detective to conduct cold case reviews
of missing persons investigations, hasdecided to try and get to the bottom
of Charles’s disappearance. A team of
students studying criminology and
other relevant subjects at Leeds
Beckett University are to run a fresh
investigation supervised by former
detectives and with expert support.
“The torture of the past three
decades is unreal. It’s been a tough,
long, lonely road,” Denise says.
“The authorities in Canada said my
son was a runaway, a homicide, a
suicide. They couldn’t make their
minds up. They were negative.
The students have a positive
attitude and hopefully they will
find the answers I’ve searched
for for 31 years.”
In 2018-19 more than 4,
people had been missing in
the UK for more than a year,
while more than 1,000 bodies
remain unidentified. Locate
International, which is run by
volunteers, was set up last year
by Dave Grimstead, 56, a retired
detective inspector with Avon and
Somerset police who also served with
the Metropolitan Police and the
National Crime Agency. He has
extensive experience of investigating
murders and conducting reviews of
the cases of long-term missing people.
Overstretched police forces often
do not have the time to devote to
these cases. “The real gap is around
unsolved missing people cases that
don’t get the same level of attention as
reviews of murders or serious sexual
offences,” Grimstead says. He was
inspired by the work of the Cold Case
Investigative Research Institute
in the US, where students work
alongside professionals.
Locate International, which is
working with three universities and
plans to expand to 11 within the next
six months, works with families who
have often done their own sleuthing.They lend fresh eyes to those who
are emotionally involved and may
be overwhelmed by the information
they have gathered. Grimstead’s teams
start by digitising the material and
building timelines, and then begin
a painstaking pursuit of leads. Any
promising new information will
be passed on to the National
Crime Agency and local forces.
A case like that of Charles
Horvath-Allan seems challenging
because the mystery began a long
time ago, a long way away, and
the trail was cold even before
police began looking for him.
Kirsty Bennett, a criminology
lecturer who worked for West
Yorkshire police as a researcher
and is writing her doctorate
thesis on cold case reviews of murder
cases, will supervise the Leeds
students’ review of the Horvath-Allan
case. “One of the key things with cold
cases is the changing of alliances over
time,” she says. “Is there somebody
who is fully aware of what happened,
but was terrified at the time to say?”
“More than one person in Kelowna
knows the fate of Charles,” says
Denise, “but people are just too afraid
to come forward.” Charles was an
intrepid young man, who had horrified
his mother by joining the French
Foreign Legion when he was 17. She
was relieved when he left after less
than a year, and supported his
ambition to backpack across Canada.
He was a kind, loving “beautiful soul”,
she says. On his trip he did a variety
of jobs, including modelling at a
Quebec fashion show.
When she first went to Kelowna,
Denise discovered that Charles hadDenise Horvath-Allan
and her son, Charles.
Below: Charles as a
child with his motherI wanted to
scream to
the judge,
‘He’s not
dead, he
can’t be’
BRONAC MCNEILL FOR THE TIMESd idd
d
p b C H b t t p K
le
Y
a
thesis