Editor’s Note:
The final part of True Crime Story has, by sad necessity, been compiled from notes and recordings that Evelyn Mitchell left behind but never got the chance to transcribe or arrange herself. According to her files, she made preliminary notes on this case starting in 2015, spoke to Robert Nolan in late 2017, then began interviewing Andrew Flowers, Fintan Murphy, Jai Mahmood, Kimberly Nolan and Liu Wai in early 2018.
By March 25, 2019, nine months after completing the first part of this book and just over two months after sending me its prologue, Evelyn Mitchell was dead. Although the text that follows was not arranged by Evelyn, the transcriptions were largely taken from interviews she conducted in the last months of her life. These interviews represent her final work on the book and on the case, culminating in the breakthrough that revealed a killer.
Part Four
Friends Reunited
24.
“After Life”
In late 2018, seven years after the events surrounding Zoe’s disappearance, the Nolan Foundation, the charity established in her name, is rocked by press allegations of impropriety at the highest level. But as Fintan struggles to save the organization, an even bigger story lurks just around the corner.
SALLY NOLAN:
I was down in the garden when I heard a car. It’s an old farm cottage at the end of a lane, so if you hear someone, they’re usually there to see you. I walked around but only in time to see a cloud of dust, something driving away. Then I went into the house and saw twenty messages flashing on the machine.
That’s how I knew it was all starting again.
MARCUS LEE, Former journalist, Mail on Sunday:
In a story like this, you’ve got to do the work. It’s not enough for you to just transcribe the he-said-she-said and press Print, whatever people might think. So we were making a list and checking it twice, doing our due diligence. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, I’d love to wreck so-and-so’s life today, and certainly not someone who might have done nothing wrong. With that said, when you’ve got something as spicy as this in the bag, you know someone might get burned. You do your subject the courtesy of a phone call and give them the chance to respond to the story, even to get out ahead of it.
Very often, that’s where some kind of arrangement’s reached.
Say you’ve got the dirt on a celebrity and they don’t want it coming out. They might offer you something instead—wedding snaps, an interview, dirt on someone else, whatever. The rule of thumb is, if you see someone famous giving a guided tour of their house, they probably got caught with their pants down. Point being, we weren’t expecting anything like that in this case, because he didn’t really have anything left to barter with. By Friday, December 14, we were crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, and the relevance of that time of year was lost on no one.12
FINTAN MURPHY:
I’ve spent the last seven years working almost exclusively for the Nolan Foundation. We kicked off as a scrappy kind of start-up charity with two main objectives: to keep Zoe’s name and face out there—ensure that coverage of the case wouldn’t simply cease without new developments—and to try and enact some kind of public good.
And I think we’re doing well on both fronts. Our profile’s risen considerably in recent years due to our work around Zoe’s Law—a sadly unsuccessful but nonetheless conversation-starting effort to criminalize all relationships between teachers and students. Most educational faculties have internal policies in place discouraging such relationships, but in cases where participants are of legal age, it’s still largely advisory stuff. It was our feeling that although it may not have played a direct role in Zoe’s disappearance, she had been in such a relationship. It may have been a factor in her feeling the need to keep secrets from her family, perhaps even in her suicide attempt of 2011.
We wanted a law in place that acknowledged not only the age of consent but the skewed power dynamics inherent in such relationships. Unfortunately, the bill was rejected in 2017, not because it lacked merit but because we couldn’t point to any direct evidence that Zoe had been in a relationship with Michael Anderson. It was a disappointment, but it still led to our successful Never Forget campaign. Then in 2018, the September just gone, we saw our sixth generation of Zoe’s Angels enrolled in higher education, and of course we’d made preparations to mark the seventh anniversary of Zoe’s disappearance the following week. That was when I got the unwelcome phone call from Mr. Lee.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
As soon as the Christmas lights start going up, you know the anniversary’s right around the corner. It comes quicker every year. You brace yourself for whatever’s about to float to the surface—a memory, a feeling, a regret. I certainly wasn’t bracing myself for major revelations, though. Not some kind of eleventh-hour break in the case.
I was busy with work. To catch everyone up, my father cut me off, and although I’d failed my first year of university, subsequently dropping out altogether, I’d still managed to get a job at PC World in Manchester, selling electronic equipment for marginally more than a slave’s wage. In the five years I’d been working at the branch in the Trafford Centre, I’d leapt up the ranks—from lowly junior sales assistant to exalted senior sales assistant. Unfortunately, my rocket-fueled ascent came during a time of belt-tightening and upheaval for the firm, and I’d been notified that my role was under consultation. That was a nail-biter for me because I lived month to month, and the prospect of being shitcanned from my shit job was keeping me up at night. So no. I had no real sense of impending doom, but only because I was up to my tits in it already.
FINTAN MURPHY:
When you find yourself in a situation where years of good work might go down the drain because of some thoughtless, stupid actions, your first recourse can be to bargaining. At least, in this instance, my first recourse was to bargaining.
MARCUS LEE:
Murphy was hostile. Don’t let the charity show fool you—I had to hold that phone about a foot away from my ear when I called him. An expletive-filled rant about what I could and couldn’t do, where I could and couldn’t stick things, and a veiled threat of legal action. Like I say, you’re basically giving them the FYI, so it’s an eventuality you’re always prepared for. For my part, I was just trying to explain that our story could be all to the good. Zoe Nolan might be the center of his universe, but she’s not the center of anyone else’s. Our reporting would be putting her back in the public eye more than anything his precious foundation had managed. When he’d calmed down a bit, he asked me for the name of the person who’d made a complaint, which of course I declined to give him, and then he asked me not to go to print, imploring me on the grounds it might “hurt” Zoe.