The Sunday Times Magazine • 17he replies. “Now I wonder what sort of a
God could allow this to happen to a young
woman, who only wanted to do good in
the world, to let her be abused and
tortured in this way?”
On the other side of the room, Bethany
Haines has been talking to a group of family
liaison officers from the British police who
have accompanied the Haines and Henning
families from the UK. When I walk over
she tells me how difficult it has been
explaining to her six-year-old son what
happened to her father.
“I had to tell him that my daddy was
killed by some really bad men and that
Mummy is going to bring them to justice.
Each time I see him, he asks, ‘Mum, have
you put the baddies in court yet?’ ”
As part of a plea bargain, Kotey may
spend 15 years in jail in the US and then
be allowed to serve the rest of his sentence
in the UK. Although he has shown no
remorse he has offered to meet family
members, say his lawyers. He is hoping to
avoid being sent to a notorious maximum
security prison in Colorado where inmates
are kept in isolation.B
ethany has been given a date
to meet Kotey in August —
she is hoping to find David’s
remains: “That man may have
information,” she says. The
Muellers, too, have agreed to
a meeting, desperate to discover how their
daughter died.
Haines, by contrast, is uncertain whether
he wants a face-to-face encounter with one
of his brother’s torturers. “I’m very much
in two minds,” he says when I join him,
Dragana and Athea for dinner.“Of course I have all sorts of questions.
But that black part of me that’s been a part
of my life since David was taken — that’s
gone, and I worry that meeting Kotey
would give them some hold over me again.”
Dragana is similarly divided. She regrets
having cried into the microphone during
her statement earlier that day. “I wanted to
be composed,” she says. “But he set me off
by fiddling with his beard, I wanted to say,
‘Stop it, what do you think this is?’ ”
She had explained to the court how hard
it was to tell Athea “why Daddy wasn’t
Skyping us any more”, adding: “I did not
want to tell her what had happened to her
daddy. I tried to make her life as normal as
possible under the circumstances. But they
stole my daughter’s happy childhood.”
I ask her how she and David met. “I saw
these wonderful two blue eyes looking atHaines erupts with a bellow of laughter:
“Oh no, that look! My God! That’s
definitely David.”
The next morning I find Haines eating
breakfast alone in the hotel lobby. We are
soon joined by Dragana and Athea. Bethany
is sitting at the next table with Paula and Ed
Kassig, the parents of Peter, an American
aid worker who was beheaded aged 26. At
another table are the Muellers.
The British and American families share
a WhatsApp group, but until recently had
never met. Like Mueller, Haines refers with
a laugh to the club to which no one wants to
belong — a popular joke among members
— and whose support has proved
invaluable to him.
“All the feelings that you feel as a single
person — the anger, the love, the loss —
everything becomes much bigger andLeft: Marsha and Carl Mueller hold a picture of their daughter, Kayla, in 2020.
Right: Kayla appears in a “proof of life” video sent by the jihadists in 2013Kotey, one of the torturers, has offered
to meet family members face to face.
The Muellers have said yes, desperate
to discover how their daughter died
me and I was speechless,” she says, recalling
their first encounter in Croatia in 1998,
when David was assisting in the country’s
postwar reconstruction. “When he went
back to Scotland, he was sending me 20
messages a minute,” she recalls. “When he
got back to Croatia, he moved in with me.”
She puts an arm around her daughter.
“Now I have my little baby with me,”
she says, cuddling her. “She’s the reason
I’m still around.” Athea, said to take after
David, is gazing up at her mother with
a lowered head and raised eyebrows.
“When she looks at me like this, I know
who’s looking at me.”not like a weight on your shoulders but
with many hands holding it. And for me,
that does help.”
Ed Kassig wanders over to say goodbye:
he and Paula are heading home. Kassig
thanks Haines for his support. “The only
reason we’re still standing is this ...” His
voice trails off as he takes in all the other
family members with a gesture of his arm.
Haines, for his part, may be back in
August. He hopes to do a tour of American
schools to combat one of the national
scourges — not Islamic radicalisation but
racial hatred. “In the end,” he says, “it’s the
same message.” ■The American aid worker Peter
Kassig with his parents, Paula
and Ed. Kassig was captured
in Syria and beheaded in 2014BBC, AP