|
 It
is 10 years since 16-year-old prostitute Natalie Pearman
was murdered and her body dumped at a beauty spot near
Norwich. The case remains unsolved - along with nine
other murders and disappearnces in Norfolk.
RICHARD BALLS
reports on 10 heartbreaking mysteries which are still
unsolved .
When she was 14, Natalie Pearman did a
pencil drawing entitled ‘Time Running Out’.
Depicting a girl sliding from the top of an hourglass
towards the bottom, where a sinister-looking man was
waiting, it was to prove chillingly prophetic.
Two years later she had been strangled
and her partially-clothed body dumped in woodland at
Ringland Hills, on the edge of Norwich.
For the rebellious teenager from Mundesley, so desperate
to seem street-wise, time had run out in the most brutal
fashion imaginable.
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| Natalie Pearman. |
The aching agony suffered by her mum,
Lin, a care-worker, has been deepened by the fact that
the man who strangled her daughter has never been caught
– and Wednesday marks the 10th anniversary of the
day her body was found.
The identity of the man who strangled her daughter is
one of 10 mysteries Norfolk has never given up.
“The week before the anniversary is absolutely
horrendous,” says Lin, whose marriage broke up
as a result of her daughter’s death. “By the
time you get to the date you are completely washed out
and I always have to take time off work because I’m
not fit to think straight, let alone look after other
people.
“My other children have lived with this all their
lives – Georgina was only five when it happened
– it’s not easy for them.
“There is the hope that we would know a little
more about the reason why she died and that the person
who did it would be brought to justice and would not
be able to do it again.
“For 10 years, whoever has done it has been leading
a normal life . . . and we have been paying the penalty
for it.”
Natalie was born on Christmas Day 1975 and grew up in
a loving home.
She went to dance classes like so many little girls,
and loved to draw and paint.
She enjoyed a good relationship with her family and
was doing well at North Walsham High School, where she
had shown an aptitude for sport.
But in 1990, the picture suddenly darkened.
Her mum never discovered the details,
but Natalie had her first sexual encounter, and it soon
became clear she had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
Through them she was introduced to a man who supplied
her and her fellow innocents with drugs – a flat
above a nearby shop being the focal point for their
activities.
In the quiet seaside village of Mundesley, this was
doubtless an exciting, exhilarating world for a teenager,
and Natalie Pearman hurled herself into it.
Her personality began to change. She strayed from home,
sometimes returning in the middle of the night high
on LSD, cocaine and magic mushrooms, paid for through
her job at a burger bar.
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| TEN YEARS ON – The pain
of Natalie Pearman’s mother, Lin, doesn’t
get any easier. |
At home, meanwhile, her stepfather, Chris,
was out of work and having to cope with his mother’s
terminal cancer and Lin was trying to look after their
three younger children. The emotional strain became
too much and, a month before her 15th birthday, Natalie
was placed into care.
She was placed with two sets of foster parents and later
at a children’s home, but by the time she was 16
she had broken off contact with Social Services.
She moved into a flat in Drayton Road, Norwich, with
two young lads, both of whom were allegedly pimping
– one loosely described as her ‘boyfriend’.
She herself turned to prostitution to feed her drug
habit – or, as likely, that of others – and
changed her name.
To punters cruising up and down Rouen Road, she was
Maria, or, on some nights, Vicky. Hers had been a rapid
descent.
At around 3.45am on November 20, a lorry driver taking
a short cut through Ringland Hills spotted what he thought
was a bundle of clothes in a layby.
It was Natalie’s body.
The previous night she had walked from her flat in Drayton
Road to Tombland, shortly after 11pm, where her first
customer of the night was a taxi driver.
He drove her to Whitlingham Lane, Trowse, had sex with
her on the back seat of his cab, paid her £20,
and took her back to the city centre.
It was not long before she found another punter who
took her to his home and paid £30 for her services.
She was then dropped her off at the corner of Rouen
Road and King Street, where she was seen moments later
by the owners of a Norwich restaurant as they drove
past. It was the time Natalie was seen alive.
Eerily, Natalie had made an almost unprecedented visit
to the family home just two days before her murder.
On a Wednesday lunchtime, caked in make-up and looking
every bit the cheap hooker, she strolled into the quiet
cul-de-sac.
Lost to her family for almost two years, she had telephoned
her mum out of the blue looking for a copy of a passport
so that she could go to Spain. What she said to her
mum haunts her to this day.
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