Everything modified when Tracy met the person she thought killed her dad

Tracy King’s younger life was blighted by her father’s killing: not solely by profound grief and loss, but in addition abject terror, as a result of she believed his killers — seemingly wrongly acquitted — roamed free close to her house.

For 34 years this misunderstanding solid a malign shadow. ‘I thought my dad, Mike, had been killed with a karate chop to the head by the ring-leader of a gang of five violent youths who had fled the scene after the fatal attack,’ she says. ‘The dread, that I could be passing them in the street or at school, consumed me.’

Tracy stopped going to classes, stopped sleeping and says she lived ‘in a state of constant exhaustion and fear’. ‘I didn’t understand how to deal with the enormity of my emotions,’ she provides. ‘My Mum, severely agoraphobic and anxious herself, was ill-equipped to help me. I had a noise in my head like tinnitus or the buzz of a thousand bees. Our doctor prescribed sleeping pills.

‘I remember sitting by the side of Mum’s mattress sobbing, holding the packet. I didn’t intend to take them. I didn’t need to die. I simply needed to cease the noise that plagued me.’

The trauma continued, unresolved, into her grownup life. Then, two years in the past — when Tracy was 46 — she confronted it head-on. Writing her new memoir, Learning To Think, she determined to analysis her father’s dying.

With astonishing braveness, she organized to fulfill Andrew Reynolds, the person she believed had killed him — it was a gathering that will shatter each conviction she had harboured.

Today, as a substitute of clinging to the reality as she perceived it, she admits, with spectacular honesty, that she was fallacious. ‘I met the man who killed dad… and I liked him very much,’ she says. ‘Andrew is a kind, thoughtful person without a shred of hatred or aggression. He told me how very sorry he was that he had struck the blow that ended my dad’s life.’

That was Tracy’s first shock: Reynolds’ real contrition. But there was extra: ‘Since I was 12, I had been convinced the dad I loved so much — my dear, kind, clever, flawed father, who was so engaged with my learning and taught me to be curious — had met a brutal death at the hands of an aggressor.

‘This belief tortured me for decades. But then, in 2022, Andrew’s story shifted my perspective on the occasions that modified my life that night in 1988. It was liberating to know the reality finally.’

Today Tracy, 48 — a author, producer and science communicator — lives in London along with her companion and two cats. She is amiable, talkative, likeable, approachable.

She was a assured, irrepressible youngster — ‘rent-a-gob… a showbiz version of my more introspective older sister Emily,’ is how she places it — till her beloved dad was killed.

The household lived hand-to-mouth on a council property within the Midlands. Her father Mike, 44, a former RAF engineer, labored in a succession of low-paid jobs.

But Tracy remembers his questing thoughts: ‘He was interested in logic, puzzles, but also fostered my creativity. He took us on walks and we’d fake to be hobbits or spies. He was additionally anxious, an alcoholic, and we have been poor. We struggled to outlive.’

Tracy’s mum, Jackie, liked writing, literature and poetry, however agoraphobia made her anxious and over-protective of her kids.

The day Mike died started fortunately sufficient. Emily, then 14, had an area authority-funded boarding faculty place and he or she’d come house for a go to, so the household determined to rejoice with a uncommon takeaway.

Mike went to order the meal and known as Jackie from a public telephone sales space to inform her he was going to pop into the pub as he waited for it. It was their final dialog.

When Mike didn’t come again, Jackie and the ladies assumed he’d received waylaid within the pub, which wasn’t uncommon. Later that night, police arrived on the home to say Mike had collapsed and been rushed to hospital — the place he was on life assist.

‘I felt disbelief, dread and overwhelming fear,’ Tracy remembers. ‘The next day they turned off the life support machine. I wasn’t there. Mum didn’t need us to see dad within the hospital mattress connected to tubes. I needed to cry however shock doesn’t at all times present in tears. Every muscle was tense, my throat and chest a strong mass.’

Doctors instructed the household that Mike’s dying had been attributable to an aneurysm — a burst artery within the mind — a random ticking time-bomb which had exploded minutes after the telephone name to Jackie.

Then got here a recent and horrifying twist: simply because the household was adjusting to the shock of their loss, police arrived to inform them they have been investigating Mike’s dying as a possible homicide. A manhunt was underway with 15 CID officers on the case.

A gaggle of teenage boys had been sitting on a low wall near the telephone containers taunting Mike, calling him names — till one, Tracy was led to imagine, all of the sudden flew at him with a karate chop that immediately felled him.

‘Dealing with bereavement, I suddenly had a reason to be terrified, blinded by a fog of rage,’ says Tracy. ‘Life would never be the same again.’

Her overriding emotion, other than unhappiness, was ‘abject fear’, her terror centring around the youths — 14-year-olds Reece Webster, Chris Hendon, Anthony Mears and Ian Burrows — she believed had been concerned within the dying, together with 17-year-old ringleader Reynolds.

‘We didn’t know these youngsters, apart from Reece, a neighbour who had performed with Emily and me. The imaginative and prescient of Dad being knocked out by Reynolds performed over like a movie reel as I attempted to sleep. The police have been adamant: Reynolds, a martial arts black belt, had landed the deadly blow.’

The 5 boys have been arrested on suspicion of homicide, held and questioned for a number of days. Four have been then launched with out cost; Reynolds was stored in custody.

‘I’d been a instructor’s pet, a mannequin pupil, however to get to high school I needed to stroll previous the spot the place Dad had died,’ Tracy says. ‘A rumour circulated that the boys had made off on BMX bikes, running over dad’s head. Mum, affected by her personal fears, didn’t power me to go to high school.’

It was over a 12 months earlier than her father’s case got here to courtroom. While her mom and the household went in to comply with the proceedings, Tracy and Emily waited outdoors within the foyer.

The 4 boys could be known as as witnesses, milled across the courtroom precincts. Reynolds was held in a police cell. Tracy noticed his mother and father sitting close to them as they waited for the case to start. ‘They looked like a nice couple,’ she remembers.

The trial was purported to final 5 days, however on the second day it collapsed and Reynolds, to shock and fury, was acquitted of manslaughter.

‘All I remember was our family’s outrage, their competition that the entire thing had been a farce, a miscarriage of justice, their agency perception that Reynolds had received away with the killing.

‘I didn’t return to high school in any respect after that. I used to be too scared of assembly the youths who have been now – to my full dismay — free to roam our property.’

Instead, she educated herself with the assistance of her mum, who inspired her love of studying: ‘I devoured the classics – Hardy, Orwell, Dickens — taking no interest in teenage hobbies such as fashion and boys.’

Tracy flourished academically, gaining {qualifications} in laptop research, and excelled in her first job, leaving with a powerful CV.

Until 2020, she continued to reside uneasily along with her dad’s brutal dying. As properly because the karate chop, she believed his assailants had fled after he collapsed.

When Tracy began to jot down her e book, she started to query accounts, trying to find the reality.

The concept of contacting the ‘gang’ — now all grown males — made her really feel sick, however she shortly discovered Reece on social media. Assuring him she harboured no ill-will in direction of him, she urged a Zoom assembly. To her shock, Reece agreed.

‘As the screen flickered into life, there he was,’ she recounts. ‘There was no stabbing pain in my heart, no sickening lurch of recognition; just a slightly familiar man with a kind and unthreatening gaze.’

What Reece instructed her throughout their two-hour dialog was completely sudden. In truth it overturned every thing she believed.

Yes, the 5 youngsters had been sitting on the brick wall close to the telephone field and, sure, that they had been taunting Mike — however removed from being floored by a vicious karate chop from Reynolds, it was her dad who’d struck the primary blow.

‘One of them, Chris Hendon, had apparently called him a slap-head; perhaps even said “f*** off old man” when asked to be quiet.

‘But after the call, Dad had retaliated by hitting Chris quite hard in the face. Chris tried to hit back but the punch did not really connect and Dad reeled backwards towards Andrew, who threw out his arm in self-defence. His fist connected with the side of Dad’s head. It was a tough hit — one of many boys heard my dad say, “Bloody hell, that was a good one,” earlier than collapsing to the bottom.

‘I was very calm when I heard this. Although Dad was a kind and loving man — he had never been remotely aggressive towards any of us — these events made sense.’

She tracked down and spoke to 2 extra of the 5 males — Chris Hendon and Anthony Mears — discovering their separate recollections persuasive.

‘They told me their memories, the subtle disparities in their accounts making them all the more convincing. There was nothing for them to gain from speaking to me. I respected them and I believe what they told me,’ she says.

In 2022, Tracy spoke to Andrew Reynolds on the telephone.

She remembers the quickening of her heartbeat earlier than the hour-long name, the massive effort of will and braveness it took.

‘My heart hurt, my head was buzzing,’ she says. ‘The first thing he said was how sorry he was. He told me he’d been sitting on the wall that night time ready for his girlfriend. The boys weren’t a gang; they weren’t even pals. Andrew was 17 and got here from an owner-occupied a part of the property.

‘After Dad had punched Chris, Andrew recalls he’d additionally kicked him within the abdomen. Andrew had taken a swing in self-defence.’

Reynolds wasn’t a black belt in something: ‘He didn’t leap off a wall and land a karate chop to the again of my dad’s head, however clumsily defended himself within the scuffle as my dad lunged in direction of him.’ Mike had then staggered away, fallen to his knees and collapsed. It was, she concedes, a really troublesome dialog. 

But additionally ‘warm and positive’. ‘What happened had clearly affected him deeply his whole life. He told me barely a week had passed that he hadn’t thought of it, how he tried, in useless, to assist my dad. I favored Andrew very a lot; for his real regret, his sincerity.’

In late 2022 they met in a pub within the city the place they’d each lived as kids.

‘He seemed nervous, but as we’d spoken on the telephone a number of instances, I trusted him,’ Tracy provides. ‘I looked at his hands and thought about how the karate chop that had never happened had haunted me.

‘He said again how sorry he was and as we left I opened my arms for a hug. We parted as friends.’

They’ve since stayed in contact just a few instances a 12 months by way of textual content. ‘I feel no guilt at all for liking him. He is a lovely man.’

Today Reece, too, stays a buddy. ‘We talk regularly. I realise now he was a daft kid, not party to a murder.’

Reece’s life had been turned on its head by the accusation: ‘His grandmother never spoke to him again. His father disowned him.’

She now realises she misunderstood massive swathes of her father’s dying. Rumour and gossip added to the worry that consumed her. The police investigation had concluded that Reynolds in all probability acted in self-defence, which made his acquittal on manslaughter fees the fitting verdict.

And, maybe most conclusively, the boys had in actual fact tried to assist Mike when he fell — the police concluded they might’ve stayed on the scene till the ambulance arrived have been it not for 2 adults who instructed them to ‘scarper’.

Does she forgive Andrew Reynolds for hanging the blow that killed her father? ‘The fact is,’ she says, ‘I do not blame him. I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ After years of unresolved trauma over her father’s dying she has now had remedy.

‘And knowing the truth about what really happened to him has been liberating,’ she says. ‘Actually, it has set me free.’

Some names have been modified. Learning To Think by Tracy King (£16.99, Doubleday) is out now