Sarah Payne was an 8-year-old who was the victim of an abduction and murder in West Sussex, England, in July 2000. Her abductor, Roy Whitening, was sentenced to life imprisonment on June 23, 1995. Her disappearance occurred during the evening of July 1st in 2000, and it took place in Kingston Gorse in a cornfield near her house. That day, Payne was playing with her two older brothers and her younger sister.
Later in the day, Sarah hit her head while playing a game of hide and seek. She then ran off into the corn field to get to her grandparents’ house. Next to it was a quiet country lane where Sarah was kidnapped by her abductor. Her siblings were just a few meters away from Sarah, but they did not notice her getting abducted. Only a few minutes later, they noticed she wasn’t with them anymore.
After that, the police began to search for Sarah, and the search became nationwide very quickly. Her parents, Michael and Sarah, started conducting interviews daily on television and began to make the newspapers pleading for their daughter’s safe return. Numerous police and volunteers decided to look for any clues of Sarah around Littlehampton that could help the case move forward. On July 10, police received a report about how they saw a little girl who matched the description of little girl Sarah Payne in Knutsford Services on the M6 motorway in Cheshire, in the morning, the day she went missing. Three days later, the Police contacted Sarah’s parents and explained to them that they should prepare for the worst since they might not find Sarah safe and alive.
Her parents were shocked at the news the police gave them, but they did not lose hope in finding their daughter safe and alive. Sadly, on July 17, they found the body of little girl Sarah in a field near Pulborough, West Sussex, 15 miles away from Kingston Gorse where Sarah had gone missing. Detective Inspector Paul Williams, whose duties included keeping tabs on local sex offenders, drew up a “hit list” of the five most likely to have taken Sarah. Later that day Police went to Roy Whitening’s residence but did not find him there. Since there was no sight of Whitening, they decided to come back later in the evening, and they started to question him for over an hour. After the interview with Whitening, the police had many suspicions and decided to return just to find out Roy had tried to escape, but the police ended up catching him
Roy Whitening was in custody, but the only problem was that they didn’t have enough evidence to put him in jail or to charge him, so he was able to make bail. After that, Roy Whitening left and went to live with his father. Three days later, after they found Sarah’s body, what seemed to be a shoe was recovered from a roadside in a village called Coolham, which seems to belong to Sarah Payne. On July 23, they investigated and found out that Whitening stole a car, which was a Vauxhall Nova in Crawley, and Whitening was chased by police at 70 miles per hour. After Whitening was caught, he was in jail for 22 months. Not only that, but one of Sarah’s brothers confessed that he saw a scruffy-looking man who drove past by the cornfield the day Sarah went missing. Luckily, after the police gathered enough information, they were able to charge Whitening with the abduction and murder of Sarah Payne. Roy Whitening was later sent to the court, where he was sentenced to life in a maximum prison, and later died by being stabbed in prison.
