I have been a father now for nearly thirty years. As most readers of my columns will know, we were blessed with triplets and they were, remain and always will be the centre of my and Julie, my wife’s, world. Before we had children, and in fact before I even met Julie, two families watched their daughters go out to play after school one evening never to return. The pain, anguish and, as it turned out, injustice they have suffered ever since is something that I can’t begin to imagine.
The Babes in the Wood Murders: What Happened in October 1986
Forty years ago this Friday, on October 9th 1986, nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway left their Moulsecoomb homes to enjoy the autumn sun before being called in for tea. That was the last their families saw of them. The following day their bodies were found abandoned and brutalised in a wood in Wild Park and subsequently Russell Bishop, a man known to them and their families who they should have been able to trust, was charged with their murders. Due to a number of errors the following year he was acquitted, casting him free to not only cynically lead a campaign to catch “the real killer” but also to abduct and attempt to murder a seven-year-old girl just over two years later. It took a change in the law, developments in science and thirty-one years for Bishop to be retried and convicted for these terrible crimes. He died in prison just over three years later and few mourn his loss.
The Lifelong Pain of the Fellows and Hadaway Families
Many police officers, lawyers and residents of Brighton and Hove were touched and affected by Nicola and Karen’s deaths but however much the murders got to them each would have been able to move on in their own way. None would bear the lifelong pain the girls’ families have.
I have met and had various conversations with Barrie Fellows, Nicola’s dad, over the years and each time the grief and devastation he lives with day in day out is plain to see. The absolute distress that he, his then wife Susan and Michelle and Lee Hadaway – Karen’s parents – suffered from losing a daughter that way was multiplied for Barrie when he was accused by Bishop, the courts, the police and the press for terrible crimes against Nicola and, by suggestion, the murders themselves. Shortly after the girls’ deaths, when the rawness would have been battling the numbness, Bishop while on bail called on Barrie. His first words were, ‘I didn’t top the girls.’ No, ‘How are you, Barrie? Are you OK ?’ just a brutal denial of something he was plainly responsible for.
Jonathan, Barrie and Susan’s son, died just before Bishop’s retrial having spent his whole life riddled with the guilt that he wasn’t there to save his younger sister. ‘The murder destroyed him,’ said Barrie. Whilst he did his best to reassure Jonathan nothing was his fault, because of Bishop’s lies, those of his then girlfriend Jenny Johnson and the turgid legislative and court system he never got to see justice delivered for his beloved sister.
Who Nicola and Karen Might Have Become
Nicola and Karen would now be forty-nine and who knows what they would be doing with their lives? From all we know they would have grown up to make their parents and families incredibly proud and would have been wonderful and loved friends and family members making a real contribution to their communities. Instead they are frozen in time as little girls from whom innocence and life was robbed by a monster and whose terrible deaths left families with a pain and void that no amount of time could ever heal.
Remembering Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, Forty Years On
Each time I drive past Wild Park and certainly at each anniversary my thoughts go out to the little girls and the families they left behind. I can never comprehend the true depth of their pain nor the agony of having such virulent accusations thrown at them but what I am certain of is the flame of love in their hearts for Nicola and Karen will never be extinguished.
So, take a moment this Friday to remember the little girls, what they were and what they could have been and if you have your own children hug them a little tighter and give thanks that you have not suffered the unimaginable pain of the Fellows and Hadaway families.
I originally wrote this for my weekly column in The Argus, published on Monday, 5 October 2026.
