For years, Joanne Sheen and her associates had the form of ‘mum gang’ you yearn for after watching Motherland. Then at some point the mother-of-three mysteriously disappeared. Now, after her stays have been revealed by a wildfire, her finest buddy breaks her silence

The friendships forged as women navigate parenthood can last lifetimes.

As Rachel Roussel remembers her particular circle of young mums, funny-yet-poignant moments in the TV show Motherland spring to mind.

There were six ‘mum’ friends, all living a stone’s throw from each other in Southampton, muddling through, seven children between them, taking turns to host their infamous Halloween parties and bonfire nights.

At 5ft 10in, Rachel was among the tallest of the group. Joanne Sheen – Little Jo to everyone who knew her – was the smallest, yet the one with the most infectious laugh.

‘She was barely over 5ft tall. I remember being at a festival and making her stand against the height chart at the fairground rides,’ Rachel laughs. ‘She was a dinky little thing. Little person, but big personality.’

Her friendship with Joanne, a mother to three daughters, spanned 15 years. She last saw her seven years ago when they were hurtling into those mid-life years. By this point, they were no longer neighbours, in and out of each other’s houses. In fact, their lives had gone in very different directions – Jo’s in one that worried Rachel.

‘By that point I could go for weeks, months, without seeing her, then I’d bump into her in the street. It happened a few times in that last year. Once, I just saw her coming before she saw me and I put my arms out and when she ran into them, I physically lifted her up and spun her around.

‘We must have looked so odd. I remember there was a telegraph pole and I kind of wrapped us around it and said “I’m keeping you here. I’m not letting you go”.’

A few months later, another similar chance meeting was to prove their final goodbye. In late 2019, her friend – who had been gradually slipping out of Rachel’s life; perhaps out of her own life too – simply ‘disappeared off the planet’. She was officially reported missing in February 2020, sparking a huge police investigation.

For nearly seven agonising years Rachel lived in limbo. Although police had made clear they were dealing with a murder investigation, she simultaneously grieved for her friend while hoping that one day she would hear that laugh across the street.

Last month, that hope died, when human remains were found in an area of scrubland in west London, about 65 miles from Southampton.

Forensic analysis would confirm that they belonged to Jo. The freak circumstances were unusual. Wildfires in the area had destroyed vegetation, leading to the grim discovery.

The news, even though not unexpected, still hit Rachel ‘like a thunderbolt’.

‘I’d come into the house with bags of shopping and had been aware that I’d missed some calls. It was my husband who told me,’ Rachel remembers. ‘He said “they’ve found Jo”. It was just so awful, the way of it, the circumstances. That night I remember not being able to sleep.

‘I always thought that if they found her at least there would be relief for her family – because her poor girls were going through hell with the not knowing.

‘But that night, all I could do was picture Jo lying there, all that time, on her own, just waiting to be found. ‘I’d thought about her every single day. Her family, friends, we’d all driven around endlessly, looking for her, asking, “Where are you, Jo?”’

Police would establish that the last sighting of her had been on December 5, 2019, travelling from Fareham to Southampton, with a friend.

Rachel says that what followed – with Jo an official Missing Person – plunged her friends into a surreal existence.

‘You see these things on Netflix, but to live them is something else.’

The hunt for answers about what had happened was vast. The police investigation comprised 4,000 lines of enquiry; police took more than 300 statements. The family pasted thousands of leaflets, each one bearing Jo’s face. They cooperated with police in a public appeal in the spring of 2020, releasing balloons the following autumn to keep up public interest in the mystery, and pleading for anyone with information to speak up.

In 2022, after Jo’s handbag and a pair of trainers had been found under a pier at Southampton’s Mayflower Park, a reward of £20,000 was offered for information. Earlier there had been arrests of three men and a woman, but all were released without charge.

And still no clue about where Jo was, whether she was alive or dead. Rachel even tells me she harboured ‘wild’ hopes that Jo had just gone back to Ibiza where the pair had previously been to a hen party, becoming one of those women who walks out on their own life.

For seven years, on her birthday in January, she would leave a variation of the same message on her social media.

‘Something like “wherever you are, Jo, I hope you are happy”,’ she explains.

Rachel, now 47, is speaking to me just after news breaks that Jo’s remains have been identified. Hampshire Police arrested a 56-year-old man at an address in Southampton on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. He has since been released on bail.

Jo’s eldest daughters Hayley and Layla – part of that little posse of mums-and-children – are now in their late twenties and both became mothers themselves while Jo was missing. Layla now has a little boy, and Hayley two daughters, the youngest just three months old.

Jo’s third daughter, now 11, has been living with her father.

‘Everyone has tried to protect her from the worst of it,’ says Rachel. ‘All those girls have been to hell and back and it’s so sad because Jo would have been a wonderful grandmother. She adored them all.’

Although the sisters are too upset to speak, they did give Rachel, who manages a charity shop, their blessing to speak today about the Joanne she knew. And they gave the Daily Mail this statement: ‘We are grateful for the special memories we have of our mum, and forever thankful that she gave us each other’.

Now they are all just waiting for Jo’s remains to be released to them, so they can ‘bring her home’. Rachel has set up a Go Fund Me for funeral costs. ‘You feel so powerless because there is so little anyone can do, but I realised I could do this.’

The treasured photographs on Rachel’s phone tell their own story about the women’s friendship. Rachel and Jo met in 2003 when Rachel – a new mum then, to baby Leo, moved into a council flat in the Townhill Park area of Southampton, where there was already a little network of mums.

Jo was five years older, with two girls and Rachel immediately felt welcomed, supported. ‘We turned into a really tight-knit group,’ remembers Rachel. ‘We’d stand chatting for an hour after school drop off, then it would be back to someone’s flat for a coffee.

‘The children were at the centre of everything, so we’d do birthdays together. Halloween was a big one. There would be costumes for the adults as well as the kids!’

‘I guess we became a family,’ she says. ‘Seeing each other daily, being in and out of each other’s lives, you become close.’

As the kids grew, they weathered all manner of storms together: financial uncertainty and relationship issues.

Both women would split up with their partners during that time. They witnessed some dramas in each other’s lives; clearly had each other’s backs. ‘She loved me. I loved her. It is love, isn’t it, a sisterly love?’

But life moves on. In 2010, several of the blocks where the ‘mum-friends’ lived in flats were demolished, the friends rehoused and ‘scattered’. It wasn’t miles away, but far enough to make a difference. ‘Our situations changed, and Jo’s situation changed – not for the better.’

By now Jo was in a new relationship, and pregnant.

‘There was going to be a gap of 16 years between Jo’s girls and her new baby,’ Rachel recalls. ‘I remember saying to her “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. It’s going to hit you like a freight train”. Let’s be honest, having a baby isolates you. You barely leave the house. It can be lonely.’

For a while after Jo’s third daughter was born, the status quo was maintained. ‘My youngest was at nursery so I’d call and say “I’m coming round” and she’d get the kettle on.’

When Jo’s baby arrived she took hand-knitted matinee coats. But there was a shift in Jo’s demeanour that made Rachel ‘concerned’. ‘I do wonder if post-natal depression was a part of how she was feeling.’

She won’t get into her friend’s descent into drug addiction beyond saying that, having been in a relationship with an addict previously, Rachel knew the signs. ‘People commonly think it’s about teenagers and young people experimenting, but addiction is a powerful thing.’

Whatever, she became increasingly distressed at how her friend was looking (‘let’s just say tired’).

There were concerns among the whole friend group but Jo didn’t make it easy for anyone to voice those. ‘She could be quite stubborn. She’d say “I’m alright”.’

It was difficult too, because the children were always present when they saw each other.

‘She knew we were there, but she was very much a closed book when it came to all that.’

Eventually, Rachel was left with little option but to back off.

‘I had to, for my own mental health. I’d go round to see her and come back upset and my husband would say “you can’t keep doing this to yourself”. It’s that classic thing of not being able to help someone until they let you.’

There was an entire network of people who wanted to help Jo, it seems (as well as her daughters, she had three sisters and a brother) but at the time of her disappearance, she had no fixed address and no bank account. Friends and family had become used to not hearing from her for weeks on end. It became their ‘normal’.

‘She was terrible with mobile phones – the worst person with them,’ Rachel remembers. ‘She’d lose them all the time, and you could never get hold of her.

‘But then you’d be on Facebook and see she was active online and message her, and she’d give you a new number – only for it not to work a few days later.’

The way she was living explains why her family only sounded the alarm in February 2020 – after Jo missed an entire Christmas and New Year. The questions about when, how, and why Jo died are almost too difficult to contemplate, and this is what the family now face. First, though, will be the funeral, which will be a determined celebration of life, Rachel insists.

‘Everyone who mourns her is going to have different memories. Mine are of bonfire nights, sparklers, birthday parties, kids everywhere and Jo laughing louder than anyone. I can still hear that laugh.’

https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-loving-memory-of-joanne-little-jo-sheen