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Swan Road Estate in Rothehithe @WikiCommons
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN: On Thursday 18th of September 1985, 23-year-old Mirella Beechook, a separated mother of two girls made an emotional appeal before the cameras and those words that no mother should ever utter - “bring her home, dead or alive, please just bring her home”. Her 7-year-old daughter Tina was missing, and Tina’s friend, 4-year-old Stacey Kavanagh had been found strangled. But who was the maniac in their tightknit community who had murdered them?
THE LOCATION:
I've stopped adding the pin to the map, as MapHub are now demanding £8 a month, and I'll be damned if I'm forking out hard earned cash for something probably one person looks at a month.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Were two children brutally murdered out of malice or madness? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing in the Swan Road Estate in Rotherhithe, London, SE16; four miles further east than we’d usually walk, but as a case too fascinating to pass, it’s not coming soon, but now to Murder Mile. Mere yards from the bank of the River Thames sits the Swan Road Estate, five five-storey red-bricked tenement buildings built by London County Council from 1902 to 1908 to house the families displaced when the Rotherhithe tunnel was built. Like a ring of solid brick, on the outside sits Winchelsea House, Seaford House, Rye House, Hythe House and in the middle is Sandwich House overlooking a courtyard. As a tight community, this courtyard used to be a safe space where kids played footie squealing at a pitch which deafens all dogs, dads ‘fixed’ Ford Escorts with a hammer and a spanner, mums hung out skiddy y-fronts, and babies lay cooing in baskets thanks to its milk and a shot of rum. Ah the 1980s. Yet, that courtyard has been little more than a parking lot for transits and hot-hatches ever since the abduction and murders of two of its children in 1985, which rocked this estate, the whole nation, and left every parent asking why this killer in their midst had taken the lives of two innocents so cruelly? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 316: Malice or Madness? That morning, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake had rocked Mexico City leaving 1000s dead, and with the Birmingham race riots still fresh and Live Aid still echoing, it was the worst day to make an appeal on ITN News, but the clock was ticking. As a small, elfin-like woman whose West Indian skin was pale with worry, tears rolled down the face of 23-year-old Mirella Beechook as she stated to the cameras those words that no mother should ever utter - “bring her home, dead or alive, please just bring her home”. Two girls had gone missing, her daughter still was, but hours before, the other was found dead. Wednesday the 18th of September 1985 had begun like any other. It was warm and sunny, as at 3pm, nattering with a gossip of other mothers, Mirella stood outside the gates of Albion Primary School, awaiting her 7-year-old daughter Tina to run into her arms. Tina was timid, quiet, but always neat, always smiling and as her father Ravi said “she was a real mummy’s girl”. As a trusted family friend and neighbour, she also picked up Tina’s pal, 4-year-old Stacey Kavanagh, as although the Swan Road Estate was barely a minute’s walk away, the Brunel Road was too dangerous to cross for any child, being thick with trucks and sexual predators. Although 20 years on, the Moors Murderers were fresh in everyone’s mind, child-killer Robert Black was prowling, ‘stranger danger’ adverts were played in every school, and barely three days before, 6-year-old Barry Lewis from nearby Walworth had been snatched by paedophile Sydney Cooke and his gang of murderous child rapists. Back at the Swan Road Estate, safely within sight, Stacey ran to her parent’s council flat at Winchelsea House, and on the opposite side of the courtyard, Mirella & Tina entered their flat at Sandwich House. With three hours of sunlight left, grabbing her red canvas shopping trolley, Mirella & Tina headed out to get something for tea. Before Stacey went out to play, seeing the story of 3-year-old Leoni Keating whose raped and drowned body was found in Suffolk, her heavily pregnant mother Lynn warned her “See that little girl? She won’t see her mum again. Don’t talk to strangers and don’t leave the square”, as the courtyard was a place she could always see her, and was surrounded by the people she trusted. That would be the last time she would see her daughter alive, and it happened in the blink of an eye. Mirella & Tina walked one block south to The Corner Shop at 39 Brunel Road, a grocers which was once a sitting room, and being the 1980s, it sold such delights as Vienetta, Arctic Roll, Opal Fruits, Space Raiders, Skol lager, Angel Delight, Hobnobs had just been launched, Marathons weren’t Snickers, and Wagon Wheel’s were still big-ish not bite-sized, but it was only then realising that they realised that Stacey had followed them. As one of the few grocers on this street, Mirella only went in to get ‘the basics’, and sometime between 5:15 and 5:30pm, she said she left the girls outside the shop, and was only gone a minute, maybe two. 23-year-old shopkeeper, Enver Chakarto served her, but when Mirella came out, the girls had gone. She said, “I wasn’t immediately alarmed, I assumed they had gone home”, that maybe Tina had taken Stacey back to her mother. Being a short walk, it only took Mirella two minutes to get back to her flat on the first floor of Sandwich House, but when she got there, the red front-door was locked and it was in darkness as she had left it. “When I didn’t find them, I went to Stacey’s flat to see if the girls were there”, and at 6:20pm exactly, the world of Lynn, Mick & Danny Kavenagh came crashing down. On her doorstep stood Mirella, her face a mix of panic and hysteria, rocking back and forth, and with her lips twisted, she spoke the words no mother should hear “the girls are missing”. And as she held Lynn’s hand, in her other, she held something she had found in the street - one of Tina’s red shoes. As fear set in, Lynn told Mick, “I thought she was floating in the river”, as The Ropes was a place the girls often played and was last seen by the neighbours. As word spread, every resident fanned out to find what should have been two easy-to-spot girls – 7-year-old Tina, West Indian and Asian in a yellow blouse and pink trousers, and 4-year-old Stacey, white, pale, Irish, dark haired and a foot shorter. But with Tina’s other shoe found nearby, and nothing else, at 7:35pm, as dusk fell, they called the Police. Their daughters had been missing for two hours, so as Mirella & Lynn kept their doors open in case the girls came home, Mick & Ravi joined the Police as neighbours swarmed the streets, search-dogs scoured the parks, and divers plumbed the depths of the murky river, only no-one could find them… …until 11pm, when all that changed. Barely three-quarters of a mile south, near the Globe Pond in Southwark Park, covered in early autumn leaves behind a little iron railing, a tiny pale body was found by a Police dog. Strangled with a severed electric flex but no sign of sexual assault, Stacey lay dead, her body hurriedly hidden by a killer in panic. Both girls were warned about the dangers of strangers, but having vanished from a safe space in a few minutes, two levels of grief now hung over the Swan Road Estate; anger at the maniac who murdered 4-year-old Stacey Kavanagh, and dread that 7-year-old Tina Beechook was missing, and possibly dead. Interviewed by the Daily Mirror beside her red front-door, Mirella said “the longer it goes on, the more I have to get ready for bad news. I can’t pretend she is still alive. That’s too much to hope”. Because, as every parent knows, the longer a child is missing, the less chance they would ever see her again. Up until that point, Mirella’s life had been one of hardship… …and this would be the culmination of her struggle. Mirella Beechook was born Marie Jacklin Mirella Ramdin on the West Indian island of Mauritius in 1962. With her mother dying when he was only 9 months old, she was raised to be a happy, contented and outgoing girl, but was later left devastated by the lie that her grandmother was not her mother. In 1974, aged 12, she left the sun-kissed tropics of Mauritius to live in the impoverished concrete slums of Peckham in South London, with her wayward father who resented supporting her and her sister. Owing to frequent fights culminating in an argument where she was beaten with a belt, in 1977, aged 15, Mirella left home, she slept rough, she ended up at the St Giles Centre for Homeless Woman, and diagnosed with “a depressive disorder of a neurotic type”, she became withdrawn and was often ill. She said “my life fell apart”, being separated from her grandmother and isolated in Britain, she became reliant on Mogadon to pacify her anxiety and insomnia, as well as the strong sleep syrup, Night Nurse. Being barely educated, her mood wasn’t helped by her belief in what we would term as ‘black magic’, as unlike the ‘voodoo’ in the Haitian culture, Mauritius is an island riddled with superstition, where a person’s fate is fed by sorcerers and witch doctors, as well as curses, voodoo dolls, and ‘the evil eye’. Aged 16, she met 23-year-old Poorun Beechook, a self-proclaimed financial consultant known as Ravi, and that year on the 6th of December 1977, they married, and days later, Mirella was pregnant. It was a real turning point in her life, as on the 22nd of July 1978, she gave birth to the first of two daughters. Tina Chandranee Beechook was happy, loved, and always smiling as if life was good, but it was a hard time for the Beechooks, as with Tina’s younger sister Sabrina born a year later, being homeless, they were rehoused into a small flat onto the Swan Road Estate – and although safe - five times they were threatened with eviction for non-payment of rent, and their gas and electricity was frequently cut off. Ravi was often said to be working late, but in truth, he was living with his girlfriend, Gita in Stratford. Trying to keep the family together in the only way she knew how, Mirella put voodoo effigies of him under his bed, with Ravi later stating ”I felt dizzy and had a blinding headache… I don’t believe in this nonsense, but I pulled the pin out, I suddenly felt better”. And yet Mirella’s ploy to keep him had failed. Having abandoned them in July 1983, living on just £23 40p a week in social security, Mirella started shoplifting, taking Tina with her, and getting her daughter to beg for money on the streets. By July 1984, as a first offence, Mirella was fined and bound over for the theft of some household basics; five flannels, a bath towel, a plug, a tablecloth, two pillow cases and two quilts from a store on Lewisham High Street, but being sent to prison for a later incidence of theft, between November 1984 and March 1985, the same year that she would go missing, 7-year old Tina lived with her aunt in East London. By late summer; with her psychiatrist unsure what to believe as Mirella blamed everything on voodoo, social services having effectively abandoned her, and her mental health in a spiralling decline having become hooked on Night Nurse (drinking as much as a bottle a day), she was obsessed with the idea that Ravi’s girlfriend had put a spell on her, and caught shoplifting again, she was recalled to prison. In June 1985, Tina was again sent to live with cousins in Upton Park while Mirella served a three month sentence. Released on Saturday the 13th of September 1985, she had only been back in her flat on the Swan Road Estate for five days, when Tina & Stacey were abducted, and both possibly murdered. It was a tragedy upon a tragedy upon a tragedy… …yet this child killer was someone known to every resident. With neighbours and officers searching every street for the girls, constables were placed on the estate 24 hours a day to reassure the residents, especially their grieving mothers, Lynn and Mirella. Raised with street smarts, it had been drummed into both girls to “stay away from strangers”, and they were told that if anyone tried to get them into a car, to kick, scream, shout, and do anything to get attention. Last seen at roughly 5:30pm, around rush hour, outside of The Corner Shop on the busy Brunel Road, Ravi stated “whoever did this must be sick… (Tina) wouldn’t even go to the shop with me, only her mother, she would never go off because someone offered her sweets… she must have been forced”. Yet, Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Gregg who headed up the investigation said “it could be someone who knows the children well”, as no one had seen them abducted or lured away in a car. As a veteran across many of South-East London’s most infamous murders and kidnapping, DCS Gregg was a man trained to read body language, he could smell out the truth as well as a lie, and seeking any information on who abducted Tina and murdered Stacey, it was he who set up the press conference. It was a bad morning to make an impassioned appeal for a missing child on ITN, as with an earthquake in Mexico, 4-year-old Barry Lewis missing and 3-year-old Leoni Keating found dead, even as Mirella pleaded “bring her home, dead or alive, please just bring her home”, this could easily fall on deaf ears. The search was thorough. It had to be as the detectives were certain that wasn’t a random snatching by a paedophile in a passing car who spotted two young girls outside a sweet shop, this was likely to be a man – maybe a friend, a neighbour, a cousin, or a parent - who lived nearby and was still lurking. Everyone was a suspect until proven otherwise, and as they dug deeper, they observed every detail. Making door-to-door enquiries, they cross-referenced every witness statement to seek out any lies. As the divers searched the river, a photographer captured the faces of everyone who was watching. Although both Mick and Ravi diligently aided the search, they too were questioned about their timings for the girl’s disappearance, as were their mothers, even Mirella, who was the last to see them alive. Across the estate a genuine outpouring of emotion wept. In the park where Stacey’s body was found, mothers and daughters laid posies and teddies. And at the girls’ school, the headteacher said “there has been no fights, no noise, no nothing. All through assembly, we cried. At playtime, nobody played”. As is standard, any known sex-pests, abusers, addicts or anyone with an unhealthy interest in children was questioned, and with every skip, drain and derelict warehouse searched, even though a child’s coffin spattered with pig’s blood was found in a squat, it turned out to be an old prank, left to rot. The TV appeal brought a few fresh sightings, many of them false, but it also drew the Police’s attention to someone whose lies had hampered the investigation from the start, along with their crocodile tears. When officers interviewed Enver Chakarto, shopkeeper at The Corner Shop, he gave a very different account of Tina & Stacey’s last sighting, as given by Mirella. Mirella had claimed, she arrived between 5:15pm and 5:30pm, she entered the shop alone leaving both girls outside. But Enver said, “it was 4:30pm, only Tina and her mother came in, they were only here for a minute” and he didn’t see Stacey. “Half an hour later”, so 5pm, 15 to 30 minutes before Mirella said they’d arrived, “Tina was back here with her mother, (Mirella) asked if I’d seen Stacey as she had followed them down to the shop”, and then both Mirella & Tina left. Later stating “I was surprised to find out Tina had gone missing too”. By his account, Tina & Stacey disappeared separately and roughly half-an-hour apart, where-as Mirella said that she went in alone for just a few minutes, and when she came out, both girls had vanished. It was a crucial discrepancy, which led the Police to suspect Mirella as the girls’ killer… …but why did she do it? Was it malice or madness? Was it revenge or voodoo? Mirella would state “it just happened. It was the shoplifting. I thought they would put me in jail”, as with another court date pending, “I was fond of Tina. I didn’t meant to do it to her. Nor to Stacey”. Dr John Hamilton, medical director at Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital stated “she desperately wanted to hit back at her husband, Ravi, who had abandoned her. She wanted to hurt him by taking their own child’s life, and killed her neighbour’s child as well”. In a letter to the trial judge, Mirella blamed it on her addiction, writing “I was very drowsy with the Night Nurse I took”. At no point was she remorseful, “I can’t believe I’m in prison for this kind of crime. It’s like a nightmare”, only thinking about herself. And yet, as she wheeled that red canvas shopping trolley to The Corner Shop, both girls by her side, inside she had stashed a cut electrical flex from a vacuum cleaner, which she used to strangle Stacey. The timings were key to Mirella’s conviction. As always, Mirella picked up Tina (and Stacey) from school at 3:15pm, and they were home by 3:20pm. Lynn recalled seeing the news report on Leoni Keating at 4pm, and warning Stacey “See that little girl? She won’t see her mum again. Don’t talk to strangers”, and as she went into the courtyard to play, it’s likely that Stacey merely followed her friend, Tina, as she walked with her mother to the shop. She wasn’t killed out of malice or revenge, she was strangled because she got in the way of Mirella’s plan. At roughly 4:30pm, Enver recalled Mirella & Tina entering The Corner Shop, as the school rush had stopped and he was preparing the evening papers for the paperboys. He couldn’t recall Stacey being there, but maybe, as Mirella said “she had followed us down to the shop” and was a few steps behind. Now, with a tiny witness in tow, who hampered Tina’s murder which Mirella had planned to blame on Ravi, instead of stopping, as the ultimate revenge in what the prosecutor described as “an explosion of vengeful hatred against her faithless husband”, she would frame him for the murder of both girls. No-one saw them abducted, as both girls calmly followed Mirella, the good mother to Southwark Park, barely a 12 minute walk south, a place they loved and felt safe, surrounded by trees, ducks and swings. Arriving at Globe Pond, a favourite spot, Mirella recalled “I told Tina ‘go and play’” and as she dashed to the playground, it was then that the bible-toting Killer inside her head who she called Simon goaded her to ‘Strangle! Strangle!’, and luring Stacey into a bush, she wrapped the cut electrical flex around her neck, and unseen by anyone, she covered the tiny body with the autumn leaves, and walked away. Tina had no idea that her friend was dead and when her mother said that Stacey was missing, believing her wholly, they returned to The Corner Shop at roughly 5pm, asking if Enver had seen her, as a cruel part of Mirella’s alibi, playing the role of a frantic mother… just half an hour before she murdered Tina. She didn’t tell Lynn that her 4-year-old daughter Stacey was missing, until 6:20pm, 80 minutes later. Mirella lied “I was not immediately alarmed, I assumed they (Tina & Stacey) had gone home”, but in truth, when they returned to the dark silence of their first-floor flat at Sandwich House, later admitting to a psychiatrist “I drew images, pictures of my dead daughter”, that she stripped her naked, strangled 7-year-old Tina with her hands (having used the cut flex on Stacey) and hid her body under the bed. At 6:20pm, Lynn heard her doorbell ring, and later recalled “every time I shut my eyes, I see (Mirella) standing there, rocking back and forth, her lips kind of twisted… holding Tina’s red shoe”, but seeing Mirella in an odd state of panic “I remember she said ‘the girls are missing’, then hysterically laughing”. Everything ran through Lynn’s mind, the places she told her daughter never to play, the predators who may have abducted her, the accidents which could have happened on the busy road, but not the friend and neighbour she trusted who held her hand, with the same hand which had strangled her daughter. But it was as Mick returned at 11pm with the tragic news that Stacey’s strangled body had been found, he recalled, “Mirella was leaning against a wall, she didn’t seem upset. I couldn’t understand her lack of emotion”. But was this malice or madness? On Saturday 21st of September, Mirella stated “I rose early”. From under the bed she had slept in for the three days since the girls had gone missing – with a constable guarding her front door - she pulled out Tina’s bloated, maggot riddling corpse, shoved it into the red canvas shopping bag, and called Ravi. “She said she wanted to talk, I said ‘let’s go into the flat’, she said ‘no’ and took me by the arm. We walked and she said ‘I hope you can forgive me’, I asked why, she said ‘Tina’s in the flat’. I shook and thought she meant Tina was alive. She said ‘no, she’s dead’, I said ‘did you kill her?’, she said ‘yes’”. At 10am, the whole of the Swan Road Estate fell into silence, as a small body covered in a white sheet was removed from the flat on a stretcher, Ravi was in tears, and Mirella was led away in handcuffs. Held on remand at Holloway Prison, she told the psychiatrist “we loved each other so much. It’s like a nightmare when I close my eyes, I see them both in white lace, two angels smiling at me. I will never see Tina again, but she will always be with me… my path forever and ever until we meet in heaven” . Mirella Beechook was branded a ‘child killer’ by the press and her shocked neighbours… …and yet, there was a hint to Mirella’s murderous motive, which occurred just six years before. As I said at the start, Mirella was a mother of two daughters, not one. When Tina was just 15 months old, her sister Sabrina Beechook was born, but she didn’t live with her mother, and for good reasons. At the end of October 1979, 22 days after her birth, 17-year-old Mirella bought her baby into hospital, again she was alone, as Ravi had chosen to head overseas, leaving her alone and unable to cope. Diagnosed with gastro-enteritis, Sabrina had a common stomach bug, serious in babies as it can lead to dehydration, diarrhea, vomiting, bloody faeces and death. Every day, as a loving mother, Mirella sat beside her baby’s incubator, kissing her and cuddling her, but Sabrina only got weaker and sicker. Uncertain why she was getting worse, a sharp-eyed nurse spotted a sleeping pill beside the cot, the broken tip of a pin in the nappy, and with the baby’s blood proving positive for Mogadon, Mirella was arrested for child endangerment. Tried at the Old Bailey, she was given just three years’ probation. The safety of Mirella’s two daughters were reviewed by Southwark Socials Services, and although both were put into care, Sabrina was later adopted, but in March 1980, Tina was returned to Mirella, and she was removed from the ‘at risk’ Child Abuse Register as social workers deemed her ‘a good mother’. On Monday the 23rd of June 1986, a seven day trial began at The Old Bailey before Sir James Miskin. Having pled guilty to strangling both girls and hiding their bodies, the jury had to decide if Mirella had intentionally murdered them, or if she was deranged and her responsibility diminished. On Tuesday 1st of July 1986, a jury of seven men and five women deliberated for two hours, and returned a verdict. Guilty. She was given a double life sentence with no minimum period. Lynn Kavanagh stated “I’m glad she won’t hang, as I want her to remember my face forever”, as sat just yards from her in court, “I want her to see my face staring into her soul. I want to haunt her the way she has haunted me”. As of today, her fate is uncertain, as in 2006, Mirella Beechook renamed Jacqueline Evans appealed her sentence, but this was rejected, so whether she remains inside is uncertain. But one detail still hangs over this case, with it said that she was 2 months pregnant, did Mirella have another child? The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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