142: Day 3: Out Of Sight: Missing People

At Blue Dot, we're designers.

Before you see any new furniture from us, we've already seen it a hundred times.

From that first sketch to our fifth prototype, we dig at every detail and scrutinize every sit until the final silhouette emerges into everything good design should be.

Useful, timeless furniture enjoyed by everyone.

Blue Dot.

Visit us at blue dot.com, B-L-U-D-O-T.com to enjoy 20% off at our annual sale.

Do your eyes look tired even when you're not?

Visit lowlids.com to learn about my ultimate secret for more open eyes.

That's lowlids.com to learn more.

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome back to our mini-series for the Paul Foot Awards.

We're speaking every day this week to a brilliant journalist or team of journalists shortlisted for this year's Paul Foot Award.

So without any further ado, let's get on with today's mini episode and find out who is up for the award today.

My name is Charlie Prinkhurst-Cough and the publications of these stories were published in were The Guardian and the Reuters Institute for the Study, which are analysis.

Can you tell me what is the story that brought you to the Paul Foot Awards this year?

So I started researching how the media reports on missing people and how we can improve our coverage for Reuters and published a research paper with them and then sort of summarised that for an opinion piece of The Guardian.

And then I pitched a series of long-form articles also to The Guardian looking into some of the issues that were kind of raised in my research.

And specifically, I started with the story of a woman named Fiona Holm who went missing in 2023.

And her body still hasn't been found.

The genesis of this story came some years ago, didn't it?

I think you wrote about something that happened when you were working as a young reporter.

Was it at the Times?

Yeah, so I wasn't working as such, but

I was on work experience.

And I think it was in 2014 I was there.

And I've spoken about this quite a lot, actually, in the past, but

it is important context, I think, because it has genuinely shaped my whole career, this incident.

Basically, I was on the news desk and a news editor came in to the newsroom and he sort of announced to the newsroom that there was a particular missing case that he wanted a reporter to cover

and the way in which he described the reasons for covering this case were based on the characteristics of the the girl who'd gone missing and he said that she was pretty that she was middle class he said that she was creative

and most importantly he said our readers are going to love her i'll always remember that he was like our readers gonna love her it was just shocking because I was sitting there as the only brown person in the room and hearing him say that they were making coverage decisions based on something

that they absolutely shouldn't be based on.

And so, yeah, that sort of stayed with me for a long time.

And then as I got further in my career, you know, I covered a few other missing cases.

And I had a friend or, you know, person in my wider friendship group who also went missing.

And so, yeah, it's just an issue that I care about a lot.

And the statistics are extraordinary.

It's 170,000 people, as you've reported, who go missing in the UK every year.

And the public coverage of these cases is, as you've said, really limited and quite heavily filtered through the characteristics of the people who've gone missing and the decisions news editors are making about what they think is going to either sell papers or get viewers.

I think it's important when we talk about that 170,000 number that we recognize that most of those people do come home.

So and I think that's kind of one of the issues that we have with the coverage is that we focus so heavily on the crime aspect

of missing cases that we miss the reasons for a lot of these people going missing in the first place.

Of that, you know, that large, large figure, which is horrifically large, let's not downplay it.

Like, you know, that many people should not be going missing.

But only a tiny percentage of those cases are related to crime in any way.

So you have that initial filter, and then within that, you have the filter of, you know, the characteristics, the fact that if you you are a white woman for example um you're gonna get more coverage than than pretty much any other demographic if you if you have the misfortune of going missing and i think again just to to round round this up i think it's very important to say that it's not that you know myself or anyone else who's working in this area thinks that um there should necessarily be less coverage of some missing cases.

It's just about creating equity and also interrogating the type of coverage that all of these cases get, because I think even for the women who are getting a lot of coverage around their cases, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's helping find them or it's helping to interrogate the reasons why they have gone missing also.

So can you tell me a little bit about the case of Fiona Home?

Fiona Home went missing on the 20th of June 2023.

She was, by all accounts, an absolutely amazing person.

She had children who adored her.

She was funny.

She was a little bit sassy.

I remember her daughter told me that she always put like all of of the sauces on the chips.

Like if she got like, you know, like a chippy, chip shop chips, she would put like all these different sauces on them.

And her family were just so good at painting like a picture of her that felt so vivid and so complex and so whole.

And she had a big family as well.

So like it's, I think she was one of something like,

I want to say nine siblings.

There was like a lot of them from a Caribbean family.

But she had the misfortune of meeting a man called Carl Cooper.

And she was sort of dating dating him, seeing him on and off for about six months I believe before she went missing.

But the really shocking thing about her case is that Carl Cooper had actually been arrested the year prior in 2022

for the murder of a woman called Naomi Hunt and she was also a black woman in her 40s like Fiona was and she was found her body was found very sadly

on Valentine's Day in 2022, I believe.

So she'd been stabbed to death and Naomi called the police on him on multiple occasions for assault.

She alleged that he was stalking her and all this kind of stuff.

After she was found murdered, he was arrested and then let go and then he started seeing Fiona and she disappeared and then the police really swiftly after that arrested him for the murder of both women and so I sort of sat through the court case in summer of 2024 and he was ultimately convicted for both of their murders.

But obviously there's these sort of gaping questions that emerge there.

Why was it that he was arrested for Naomi's murder and then let go?

Fiona also called the police on him on multiple occasions.

She alleged that he attacked her with a screwdriver.

I think she even showed the scars from that incident to her sister.

And yet she wasn't protected.

And so My story was kind of looking into how the system failed Fiona and just hopefully making the reader sort of question some of their own biases.

Can I ask how you perceive the point of missing persons journalism?

Because I think it's a really interesting story in the way that you are trying to deal with coverage that hasn't been written in many ways.

You're trying to point out gaps and omissions in the way that missing persons journalism is conducted in the UK.

What do you see as the purpose of it?

That's a really brilliant question because I think that it serves multiple purposes.

I think what what I am doing at the moment is, yeah, you're totally right.

It's not just news reporting.

It's not just

here's information about a missing person.

Where are they?

Let's find them.

Which I think is what the purpose of a lot of missing person coverage is and should be.

But this is hoping to take a step beyond that.

And that's what I think makes it investigative because it's looking at these failings and it's asking deeper questions about society and about the world.

But to, I guess, to answer your question, I think the point of coverage that most journalists believe believe is that they are helping to contribute to the search to find this person.

But unfortunately, the reality is that there's very limited statistical evidence showing that journalistic coverage is useful necessarily for helping find people.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing it.

We absolutely should.

And there's lots of anecdotal evidence that sometimes our coverage can be helpful.

But it does mean that we need to take a massive step back within our industry and question our sort of righteousness when we sort of move in ways that are quite unethical around telling these stories and sort of can maybe sometimes congratulate ourselves for some of this coverage when actually, like, the moral imperative for it is not as clear-cut as you might presume.

How do you think?

I mean, I suspect there's a fairly obvious answer to this question.

How do you think the media can improve their coverage of these cases?

Well,

well, Andy, I've written a whole

spreadsheet for people to take a look at.

I mean,

I can list it, but let me read out maybe some top lines for you.

Just to choose three things that I think we can do a bit better.

I think the first thing we can do is do a better job at respecting privacy and sensitivity.

And so, what I wrote is that everyone has got the right to be forgotten.

And it could be hard, obviously, for journalists to get stories over the line without family and friends willing to give interviews.

But approaches during times of crisis should absolutely be considered.

And often, you'll find that they're not.

And there are families that I've spoken to both on and off the record who've just told me about how traumatizing it was really to have journalists approach them in ways that that lacked sensitivity.

I think the second thing and I think what I attempted to do with Fiona's story is this idea of engaging with complex stories.

So one thing that I heard again and again from reporters and sometimes from editors is that they're quite wary of stories where there's a history of say substance abuse or where the person has gone missing before.

There's a preference for stories where the disappearance is unusual, where there's a mystery and where there's suspected foul play.

But what I've written here is that simple stories aren't always what the public want or need.

And I think there's a real strong case to be made for looking at sort of some of these bigger, broader, thematic stories that come out of those 170,000 people that go missing each year.

And then the final thing, I think, and yeah, just I guess it's good to mention them, is just highlighting support available to missing people and their loved ones.

So obviously there's a really brilliant charity called Missing People and it's a great resource.

I believe can and should be used similarly to the way that the Samaritans are used for suicide reporting.

So, missing people, they've got lots of resources available online, and they've also kind of come up with their own guidelines for journalists to use in the newsroom if they have any sort of questions or thoughts about missing people.

And they're also very open to having phone calls of us and chatting through stories with us, so that's good as well.

We're coming to the end of our time.

There's just one more question, which I try and ask at the end of all of these, which is where does the story go next?

We're still awaiting the results of the IOPC investigation.

You know, there were allegations of misconduct within the police service.

There was a particularly shocking thing, which is that after Fiona disappeared, a person, an anonymous person, called in to the police service and said, I believe that Karl Cooper has murdered Fiona and this is where he's buried her body.

And that phone call was dismissed as a hoax.

And so, you know, just repeated failings throughout this case, throughout Fairness case, and throughout Naomi's case.

So, it'll be really interesting to see what the IOPC has to say.

And I'm keeping a sort of close eye on them.

And then, beyond that, I think, in terms of my wider work around missing, it's about data research, it's about interrogating other stories around missing, it's about looking at the social issues that are pervasive around missing.

So, would that be children in care homes, whether that be homelessness?

You know, this is part of a much bigger story to do with the

disintegration of the social fabric that we live in.

And

yeah, I really want to just keep on investigating these stories and telling them to the very best of my ability.

Thank you so much for your time and congratulations again on your shortlisting.

Thank you, Charlie.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks so much to Charlie.

Extraordinary story there.

Really interesting about the way the media operates.

We will be back again tomorrow with episode four.

See you then.

Want to know my ultimate beauty secret?

It's a prescription eye drop that

Tell your doctor your symptoms and medical history, including blood pressure or blood flow issues, and heart, brain, or eye disease.

This is not a complete list of risks.

Learn more at upnik.com.

That's upnu.com.