Nick’s Story
Nick and Simon were identical twins born and raised in rural Cumbria. Their early childhood was spent growing up on the edge of the Western Lake District, in a remote Cumbrian village. The kind of place with no shops, public transport and just a couple of pubs.
“Outside of school, we’d spend endless hours just exploring the fields, woods and rivers around us, building dens, and walking endless miles having adventures in the remote Cumbrian countryside – looking back, it was the stuff of dreams. From aged twelve or thirteen, we’d often go out together cycling (just the two of us) for days into the Lake District camping on the edge of Ullswater or Coniston and come back when we’d finally run out of food and money”.
Their early years as twins saw them so identical that they were like two halves of one person. “We looked identical, dressed identical, and felt identical, did everything together. Only those really close to us could tell us apart. Teachers really struggled.”
“You have this incredibly close bond as a twin, you know what that other person is saying, sometimes in groups Simon and I would finish each other’s sentences or we’d be with friends and family and say the exact same thing at the same time. Being an identical twin is like having a mirror version of yourself, there is such deep empathy, close companionship, partnership and a real desire to protect each other, no matter what.”
As they got older, they started to want to form their own identities, aside from being a twin.
“There was a distinct point where we got into our mid to late teens where we were starting to want to be more independent from each other, a kind of divergence, a kind of discovering our own selves”. But despite this, they always remained close.
“Even when we started to live apart we’d go to a shop independently and buy the same pair of shoes almost at the same time… You have this very unique, kind of sixth sense with each other, an incredibly close connection.”
Nick describes Simon in his adulthood as a bit of a ‘maverick’, who loved his nights out, living life on the edge a little bit, casinos, late nights and just spending (sometimes crazy) time with his friends.
“Simon just lived life to the full – he was like a thirty year old going on twenty. He hadn’t settled down and got married like I had at this stage of our lives”
A few weeks after Nick and Simon’s 30th birthday, Simon went on a night out with some friends to celebrate. At around 1:45 in the morning, having lost his friends in a nightclub, Simon was seen on security cameras leaving the club alone. He was planning to walk to the house of the friend he was due to be staying with, however, he got “desperately lost” on the way there, heading in the opposite direction. He bumped into two teenagers close to a parade of shops, and asked them for directions.
“It was just an incredibly unlucky meeting with two random strangers because they were, what I would describe as career criminals at a very young age – very dangerous people to meet alone on dark late night.”
The two teenagers “tricked” Simon, telling him they were heading the way he was going and offering to take him. “I don’t know how much Simon realised the danger he was putting himself in at this stage”. One of the two boys had just been released from a Young Offenders Institution that morning and the other was on a curfew. They were under the influence of drugs and they were in the process of stealing a car. They led Simon into a nearby park, which was dark and isolated. Once they were in the park, the teenagers began attacking Simon in an effort to rob him. However, Simon only had a bank card and a watch on him. The teenagers “unleashed the most horrific attack on Simon”.
“He was stamped on, he was knocked unconscious several times” whilst the two boys constantly asked Simon to repeat his pin number until they had memorised it. “I later found out that Simon was crying, he was begging for them to stop”
“He was just going through absolute terror in the last few moments of his life”
The teenagers then lifted Simon and threw him, unconscious, into the fishing pond. “I think they thought that if they did that, that he would wake up… maybe they were thinking it would wash off any evidence that was on him”. Instead, Simon drowned.
They stole £500 using his bank card, stole a car and went home. Simon’s body was found in the pond in the early hours of Saturday morning by a man walking his dog. Without anything on him, Simon was an unidentified victim. Simon’s friends and family slowly started realising that he was still missing from his Friday night out. Nick was travelling through Cumbria with his wife at the time and was “oblivious to anything that had happened”.
When Nick got the call from his father, it was the exact moment he was driving past the hospital where he and Simon were born. “I just screamed, we didn’t even ask anything, he just said you’ve got to come home immediately”. Nick drove home, stopping during the journey to call his Dad to ask more about what had happened, “he’d been beaten up and found drowned, and we don’t know much more”, was the response. Nick and his wife arrived at his parents house to a “fuzzy haze of grief, shock, horror, disbelief.”
Working with the police over the following days, “they quickly latched onto the fact that there is an identical twin here, and it’s quite a unique situation”. Nick was asked to do media appeals, and even appear as Simon in a reconstruction, wearing his clothes and mimicking his actions on the night he died for an appeal on Sky and ITV. Named the ‘Twin walk of courage’, Nick started in the nightclub, where the DJ stopped the music and made an appeal, and then was filmed walking to where Simon had been murdered. “The whole publicity thing was so crucial in catching the killers.”
Nick also went to visit Simon’s body with his family at the mortuary. “The first time I’d ever seen a dead body – it was like looking at myself. A surreal moment to say goodbye to my beautiful twin brother aged 30 – a moment I will never forget.”
The perpetrators were caught after two weeks, and were charged for killing Simon. Nick was shocked to find out that one had been 16 at the time, and the other was 19 years old. “My brother had been murdered by effectively a school kid.”
In July 1999, the court process commenced, and both the young people were tried together. A unanimous verdict found them both guilty, and they were given life sentences for murder.
After serving over a decade in prison, the perpetrators started to come up for parole, and Nick and his family were invited to share Victim Personal Statements (VPS) at each hearing. Nick and both his parents would visit each prison to read their statements out, directly in front of the perpetrators, seeing them in person for the first time since the trial 14 years earlier.
“We would walk out of prison after each hearing feeling that we’d said something for Simon… it gives you a voice.” Seeing the perpetrators’ reactions to the harm that they had caused was a turning point for Nick.
“It was just an incredible moment… I could see in both offenders that they were very emotional, having effectively seen an identical copy of the person they’d killed many years earlier– Simon was living on in me.” Although it was a powerful experience, Nick never got the chance to hear the perpetrator’s voice “you can’t ask questions… you’re not allowed to have any dialogue with the offender at these hearings”.
“Prior to meeting the offenders in their respective parole hearings, I had had previous thoughts about truly harming them, torturing them, even killing them – hurting them so much for what they had done to Simon. It shocked me to know I could think like that. They were just evil monsters. But when I saw the ‘evil monster’ crying and showing human emotion as I read out my VPS, it was truly a defining moment for me. In a second they changed, a cloak was removed and they weren’t monsters any more.”
One of the perpetrators had heard about Restorative Justice through a Sycamore Tree programme in prison. At the same time, by chance, Nick also heard about the Restorative Justice process for the first time, while he was attending the same perpetrator’s parole hearing in prison.
After a long period of preparation and planning, in March 2015, Nick travelled to HMP Woodhill to meet one of the men that had so brutally murdered his identical twin, “Of course, you think ‘am I betraying my brother’s name by meeting his killer? What would Simon think? What would Simon do if he was me right now?’” Despite his hesitations, Nick decided it was something he needed to do.
“I needed to connect with the person that had killed Simon, I needed to talk about the last few moments of my brother’s life – it was like bringing Simon alive in the last moment before he died. And I also wanted to tell him how hurt I was. It was about me just getting answers really and asking questions. It’s like those missing pieces of a jigsaw, I wanted him to help fill in the pieces of the jigsaw.”
In the meeting, the perpetrator struggled to look directly at Nick, effectively an older version of the man he had killed right there in the room in front of him.
The meeting enabled a killer to become human to Nick. A human who was struggling to get out from the shell of a violent criminal. He showed much remorse for his actions, demonstrating that he was “deeply ashamed and deeply sorry for what he’d done”. Meeting the one of the people who killed his brother face-to-face truly helped change Nick’s perspective on who he was, “he wasn’t that monster that I had continually visualised in my dreams and thoughts, he was actually a human being crying out for help. The transformation in my thinking from someone who I had basically said ‘rot in hell’, to almost in effect ‘I wish you all the best’ when he came out of prison was incredible.”
Whilst “nothing ever takes away what he did to Simon – the evil terror of that night”, ultimately, hearing from the perpetrator brought Nick some of the answers he had waited so long for. “That was the special thing, he just gave me the answers, he wanted to help me. He was honest and unsparing and that was so important to me.”
“The whole Restorative Justice process was a hugely defining moment for me and my family – life changing in many ways.”
Following the Restorative Justice meeting, Nick started volunteering in prisons up and down the country to share his story and help them understand the lifetime of ripple effects of crime on victims, their families and friends. During this time many offenders he has spoken to have talked of the powerful impact of hearing his story, and how they have committed to a positive life outside crime, upon their release.
He hopes to continue to inspire people to take part in the process of Restorative Justice if it is right for them.
Nick has now written a book about his journey, a deeply personal memoir, chronicling the loss of his brother Simon, the aftermath of dealing with murder, to eventually meeting one of the two perpetrators in prison.
“Writing the book was something I had always wanted to do… I don’t want the memories to be lost. I want Simon’s story to spoken. I want the truth to be told. The book has helped me put more of the pieces of the jigsaw together”
“I hope that sharing my story, Simon’s story, can help many people on all sides for many years to come”.
You can get Nick’s book, Face to Face, here.