True Crime Story(61)
SARAH MANNING:
It was my first time liaising on anything like this, so my primary concern in that meeting was to establish what would be required of the Nolans and of me. Carys explained that it was important for her team to speak to everyone—of course the family—but mainly the people involved in the incident or incidents that we hoped to restage. For us, that meant the party on the fifteenth floor, the fallout over Zoe’s missing clothes, the revelation of an explicit video and her subsequent argument with Andrew, ending with Zoe walking up to the roof alone. Essentially, they’d need to reinterview everyone.
CARYS PARRY:
While we tried to avoid insensitivity in what was usually a highly charged situation, we also needed to present as accurate a picture as possible. We needed to know what had happened before, during and after the event, and what the overall effect had been. We interviewed subjects, then wrote scripts based on what we found. We were a small team, so the scripts only really passed through us and our program lawyers before they were ready to shoot. And we wanted our audience to connect as much as possible with victims, to encourage witnesses to come forward, to trigger memories that could prove vital, so the more detail the better.
It wasn’t unusual for some families to get protective or even demanding. I’d say that was their right. But Mr. Nolan was forceful from the off, and he became insistent on two key points. First, he wanted some of Zoe’s actual singing to appear in the reconstruction—that’s exactly the kind of flavor that can make a personality stand out, so it was easy to agree to. Second, he wanted Zoe’s twin sister, Kimberly, to portray her.
SARAH MANNING:
Carys resisted the idea of Kim portraying Zoe. She explained how traumatic a reconstruction can be. The production company encouraged some victims not to attend their reconstructions at all, to make sure they had someone they trusted with them if they decided to watch it. Rob seemed confused, frustrated by all this. He said something like, “It was Zoe who went missing. Kim’s not a victim of anything at all.”
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
I wasn’t like Zoe and definitely not like Dad. I wasn’t a public kind of person. Dad thrived on the attention, but to me, it was intrusive, so when he told me about the reconstruction, I just shut down. People were already looking in on our lives, but this felt like moving into a glass house. I hadn’t left Manchester over Christmas, and I stayed on at university because it was the path of least resistance, on autopilot, not really doing anything. So I remember our talk about the reconstruction because Dad dropped into the tower unexpectedly. I didn’t even know he was in town.
He sat on the edge of my bed and told me the producers would only go forward with it if I played Zoe. I’d lived my whole life as something like my sister’s understudy, so it made some kind of sense. I don’t think I even said anything. I think I just nodded and he left.
ROBERT NOLAN:
In my mind, Kim was enthusiastic. She saw like I did that she was the perfect person for the job. With the reconstruction finally walking on its own two feet, I turned to a more long-term media plan. It was too soon to establish a charity in Zoe’s name, our Nolan Foundation, but I didn’t want to be on the back foot if the time came, so I started making arrangements. I envisioned it mainly as a scholarship for gifted young women. I never went to college myself. A lack of opportunity more than a lack of talent, but it had been Zoe’s dream to study music, and if I was about to find myself locked into this thing for years to come, I wanted to make sure other young women weren’t having those dreams snuffed out.
FINTAN MURPHY:
I ended up staying in Manchester over Christmas, which was a difficult decision. My mother was in assisted living by this point. She had severe mental health problems that had deteriorated as I got older. My father, Patrick, had been bedridden with depression when I was a boy. It gave expression to a feeling my mother had always nurtured, that I was weak in some sense, that I’d crumble and let her down one day as well. Perhaps she had some inkling about my sexuality even then, even before I did. So she initiated a program geared toward toughening me up. All the old ways—sending me out to walk a mile in the rain, making me carry sacks of spuds back from town. Then she started trying to scare me. It started with me coming in and finding her collapsed on the floor one day. Except her eyes were wide open, and after the initial shock passed, I realized she was pretending to be dead. She could lie like that for hours, unnervingly still, never blinking, not responding. She wouldn’t get up until I’d calmed down, then she’d emphasize the importance of the lesson, that one day I would find her dead, and I had to be ready for it. Once I got used to that, she started to die in front of me all the time. She’d have heart attacks, brain aneurysms, or strokes and fall down on the ground. Sometimes she’d wet herself, even void herself for the full effect.
It was just the two of us by my teens, and there was something so self-evidently mad about her that I almost found it less disturbing than I should have. It’s amazing what can seem normal when it’s all you know. I spent my first five years dressed as the little girl she’d actually been expecting, which was confusing to say the least. Her issues grew worse as she started to drink more. I came home from school once thinking she was out for the evening, then got woken up some hours later by the sound of screaming coming from under my bed. I mean bloodcurdling stuff. She’d been hiding there the whole time, just waiting for me to nod off. She’d hide behind curtains, under her own bed, in other rooms and do the same thing. She was committed by one of my aunts before I went away. She was safe at least, but it made staying in town and trying to help the Nolans a difficult decision for me.