Anyway.
E（x）
16.
“Unidentified Man”
As Christmas comes and goes with no contact from Zoe and no news on her whereabouts, the Nolan family are forced to explore new avenues to try and keep the story alive.
ROBERT NOLAN:
When I saw leads wouldn’t just drop out of the sky, that the cash in her account and the man in the picture might somehow come to nothing, I started working on ways to keep Zoe’s name and face out there. The students were coming back to Owens Park after the Christmas break, so Sal and me moved out and went back home. She’d wanted to go back before Christmas. We fought up and down about it, but in the end, I had to admit nothing was doing. I still found myself driving back to Manchester most days.
SALLY NOLAN:
I couldn’t live and breathe it like Rob. It was like scratching at the wound and reopening it, and I said that to him. He said, “Well, I want to keep scratching at it. I want the wound to stay open. I want to rub people’s faces in it.” So he took indefinite leave from work—he was still plumbing at the time—and that’s what he did. He’s never stopped rubbing faces in it since.
ROBERT NOLAN:
I had plenty to do. The police had set up a tip line, and as much as the press might have intruded on our lives, as long as they said, “Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Zoe Nolan should contact the police,” at the bottom of each story, I didn’t care. I’d been pushing for everything I could get, just day-to-day, always on the back foot, always reacting, but I saw I needed to start thinking strategically, short term, long term.
In the short term, I knew the best way to get visibility for Zoe would be on TV, a reconstruction of the night she went missing. Someone saw something. Someone had to. I wanted to kick at the bushes and see what creatures came out.
SARAH MANNING:
Rob Nolan was talking about a reconstruction from the first week we met. At the time, that seemed premature—there was still the chance of Zoe walking back into their lives any day. We didn’t have the more troubling aspects of her history of self-harm and drug abuse. We didn’t know about the money in her account or have this photograph of an unidentified man hanging over us.
Now, with all those loose threads in our hands and none of them leading anywhere, with no new developments and a stale tip line, it seemed like the moment to go wider. I contacted the BBC’s Crimewatch on behalf of the Nolan family and set up a meeting on January 15. One of the producers came to Manchester to discuss the suitability of the case with us. That meeting was my first real warning sign. Where I’d expected to be representing the whole family, maybe even some of Zoe’s friends, the only person who showed up was Rob. He hadn’t told anyone else about it.
CARYS PARRY, Former show producer, Crimewatch:
When we were exploring the possibility of a reconstruction, the duty of care to families and victims was always at the forefront of our minds. We never pursued a story without the consent and wider involvement of the police and the family. We never wanted to intrude without everyone’s blessing, basically, but when I met with Mr. Nolan, I could see he was highly motivated for this to go forward. For my part, I felt the story sat comfortably within our purview. It seemed like exactly the kind of situation where we might be able to help.7
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.