She convicted her rapist years after her death - The Sunday Story

Summary

The Story — “She convicted her rapist years after her death” (May 24, 2026)
Hosted by Lottie Hayton (The Times)

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Episode Overview

This deeply moving episode of The Story follows the case of Susan “Sue” Firth, who was raped at knifepoint in 1985 and died 12 years later after a long decline, never seeing justice in her lifetime. Decades later, advances in DNA evidence—and the courage and meticulousness of Sue’s original police statement—led to a groundbreaking trial. Host Lottie Hayton speaks with Sue’s brother Martin Sills, key police investigators, and friends, retracing the episode from the night of the attack to the 2024 conviction. The case sets a legal precedent in the UK, marking the first known use of a posthumous victim statement to convict a rapist.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sue’s Life Before and After the Attack

• Lottie visits Martin Sills on Skiathos, Greece, reviewing old family photographs and discussing the profound change in Sue’s demeanor after the attack ([01:40–03:02]).
• Quote: “She’s too thin. Her face is thin. Her eyes are dead. The light’s gone.” — Martin Sills ([02:49])
• Martin recalls Sue as fiercely protective and popular: “She taught me how to ride a bike. She beat up all the bullies that came anywhere near me...She was ferocious when she was younger.” ([05:57])
• Sue’s sociable, funny, and motivated personality is described, highlighting the depth of her loss ([06:34]).

2. The Night of the Attack and Investigation

• Sue was attacked in a Sheffield car park after leaving a nightclub ([07:28]).
• Despite being traumatized, she reported the crime within hours, bringing her dress as evidence ([03:02],[09:40]).
• Quote: “She did absolutely everything that we would hope that she would do. There was no delay in reporting.” — Dave Stopford ([03:18])
• Police acted swiftly but faced technological limitations: “DNA testing at this point in 1985 was not being used in criminal forensics…” ([12:09])
• No suspect was found; the investigation faded due to lack of evidence and leads ([12:18]).

3. The Aftermath – Sue’s Decline

• Sue’s life spiraled: she struggled with depression, an eating disorder, and worsening diabetes ([13:43]).
• Martin describes a pattern of worry and hospital visits as Sue’s health failed ([15:30]).
• Quote: “She was only 39, so I think that the impact had been that bad on her body that it just gave up.”—Martin Sills ([03:47], [15:13])

4. The Cold Case Reopened

• In 2019, Dave Stopford’s cold case team reviews Sue’s file and is struck by the severity and tragedy ([18:48]).
• The file is sparse but contains her statement and forensic notes. Officers consult original case detectives for evidence continuity ([19:42]).
• Quote: “We wanted desperately to find who’d done this to her.” — Dave Stopford ([20:28], [21:55])
• Advances in DNA analysis enable a fresh look at Sue’s turquoise dress ([22:24]).

5. Crucial DNA Breakthrough & Identification of the Rapist

• After multiple attempts, a DNA match in 2023 points to David Hill, long unnoticed; his DNA entered the database after a recent arrest ([22:40]).
• The revelation shocks Martin, who had believed the case was closed forever: “Surreal. After all that time, you think you’re never gonna hear anything again…” ([25:09])
• The police notify Martin after decades and charge David Hill, a former nightclub bouncer ([24:17]).

6. Legal Barriers & Precedent: Using a Deceased Victim’s Statement

• Key legal challenge: The trial hinges on Sue’s statement being admitted as evidence despite her death. A “hearsay” hearing is called ([26:06]).
• Quote: “We put to the court everything we knew about the victim to prove that she was a trustworthy character...” — Dave Stopford ([26:15])
• The judge allows the statement; friends and family testify in court ([26:38]).

7. Trial Outcome and Emotional Impact

• The trial concludes with a swift unanimous verdict: David Hill found guilty and sentenced to 15 years ([28:06]).
• Quote: “It don’t make up for anything, but knowing that he’ll die in prison is some comfort because he’s had 30 years free, 40 years free that Sue never got.” — Martin Sills ([28:21])
• The prosecution’s success is bittersweet for police and family, as Sue never saw justice, and her life was irreversibly damaged ([28:40]).

8. Broader Significance and Call for Other Victims

• Martin and police hope others who may have been attacked by Hill, or by other perpetrators, come forward thanks to the publicity and precedent ([29:42], [31:22]).
• Quote: “It ruins lives…at least they can get some kind of closure.” — Martin Sills ([30:51])

9. Sue’s Lasting Influence

• Martin reflects on the enduring impact his sister had on his life, crediting her for his courage, career, and zest for life ([31:41]).
• Quote: “She gave me the…she was the push behind me. Even when she died, she was always there.” — Martin Sills ([31:41])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “She did absolutely everything that we would hope that she would do. There was no delay in reporting.” — Dave Stopford ([03:18])
• “She was only 39, so I think that the impact had been that bad on her body that it just gave up.” — Martin Sills ([03:47])
• “We wanted desperately to find who’d done this to her.” — Dave Stopford ([20:28])
• “Surreal. After all that time, you think you’re never gonna hear anything again...it was quite traumatic then.” — Martin Sills ([25:09])
• “We put to the court everything we knew about the victim to prove that she was a trustworthy character and would have made a good witness.” — Dave Stopford ([26:15])
• “It don’t make up for anything, but knowing that he’ll die in prison is some comfort because he’s had 30 years free, 40 years free that Sue never got.” — Martin Sills ([28:21])
• “She gave me the...she was the push behind me. Even when she died, she was always there.” — Martin Sills ([31:41])

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Timeline: Key Segments & Timestamps

• Sue’s life, photos, and defining trauma: [01:32–03:02]
• Attack and immediate aftermath: [07:28–12:18]
• Sue’s decline and death: [13:21–16:24]
• Cold case team takes up the file: [18:48–20:28]
• Breakthrough DNA match & David Hill identified: [22:24–23:58]
• Family notification & emotional impact: [24:17–25:31]
• Legal process for posthumous witness statement: [26:06–26:32]
• Trial, verdict, and reactions: [26:38–28:40]
• Legacy and appeal to other survivors: [29:42–31:41]
• Sue’s enduring legacy for Martin: [31:41–32:48]

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Takeaways

• The case is historic for its legal innovation: using a posthumous victim’s statement to convict for rape in the UK.
• It shows the power of perseverance in cold case investigations and the essential role of early, brave, and thoroughly documented victim statements.
• The emotional consequences of violent crime ripple through decades, touching survivors, families, and communities long after official investigations have ended.
• Publicity and hope: Martin and investigators urge other survivors to consider coming forward, seeking closure even decades on.

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For the full written feature by Lottie Hayton, visit thetimes.com (link in episode description).

Transcript

[Lottie Hayton]

Par le tu francais hablas espanol?

[Martin Sills]

Par le italiano.

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[Lottie Hayton]

Before we begin, a warning. This episode contains discussions of rape, so do take care while listening from the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Lottie Hayton. You took this one?

[Martin Sills]

Yeah, yeah. Took it and developed it when she was about, I don't know what you say, about 16, 17. Yeah, yeah. She was five years older than me.

[Lottie Hayton]

So I'm sitting in the kitchen of Martin Sil's beautiful home on the Greek island of Skiathos. Now 64, he's showing me some family photos of him and his older sister Sue.

[Martin Sills]

That one's a bit younger.

[Lottie Hayton]

And Is that you two?

[Babbel Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Lottie Hayton]

Oh, that's adorable. How old were you there?

[Martin Sills]

Four or five? Yeah. She still looks about 10, nine or 10.

[Lottie Hayton]

Yeah. Many of the photos were taken by Martin, who loved photography as a child. As he places each in front of me, he tells me if they belong to the time before or to the time after. That's so.

[Martin Sills]

She went on holiday to Malta once and I don't know who the other lady is, but that was before and this was after. This is about 19. 1993. 94. Yeah, something like that.

[Lottie Hayton]

To Martin, there is an invisible line that divides these pictures. A shadow that falls across Sue's face. In the time after that, he can instantly see.

[Martin Sills]

She's too thin. Her face is thin. Her eyes are dead. The light's gone.

[Lottie Hayton]

In the early hours of September 7, 1985, in Sheffield, sue was raped at knifepoint. Within four hours, she had filed a police report, given a detailed victim statement and endured medical examination.

[Dave Stopford]

She did absolutely everything that we would hope that she would do. There was no delay in reporting.

[Robert Varey]

Gives us a fighting chance on several fronts, really.

[Lottie Hayton]

On the basis of Sue's medical examination and her witness statement, a manhunt ensued, but ultimately it yielded nothing. Sue's life spiraled and 12 years later she died.

[Martin Sills]

She was only 39, so I think that the impact had been that bad on her body that it just gave up.

[Lottie Hayton]

But sue, her story and her witness statement were not forgotten. Now, four decades after the original attack, Sue's rapist has been found, convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Sue's belief statement was used in court as evidence to convict her attacker. Her case has set a legal and forensic precedent which could transform the way that rape is tried and prosecuted in this country.

[Martin Sills]

I'm proud of what she did. She must have gone through hell at the time to make the statement and go through all the medical examinations the same night. Yeah, she was a brave girl.

[Lottie Hayton]

The story today, the woman who convicted her rapist nearly 30 years after her death.

[Martin Sills]

When sue died, that's 97. I never really got another job, worked again. I just really. My heart wasn't in it. I'd burnt out, really.

[Lottie Hayton]

Martin moved to Skiathos in 2002, five years after his sister's death. He came here for a week's holiday and wound up staying for the next 24 years. It's a sunny spring morning when I meet him. Birdsong keeps floating in from the property's enormous, slightly wild garden. His partner, Lisa, offers me and my producer Taryn freshly baked pastries as we sit down to talk about Sue. This is the first time Martin has come forward to talk about what happened to his sister.

[Martin Sills]

She was a big figure in my life, massive. I wish she was still here now. She'd love it here.

[Lottie Hayton]

Sue was five years older than Martin and he doesn't remember a time that they weren't close.

[Martin Sills]

She taught me how to ride a bike. She beat up all the bullies that came anywhere near me. She's only five foot tall and she'd take. She'd go over and she'd have a go at boys a lot bigger than her. And she was ferocious when she was younger.

[Lottie Hayton]

As adults, they grew even closer. Martin essentially followed his big sister around the country, often living on the top floor or in the spare room of her homes.

[Martin Sills]

She was good, fun to be with. In those days, women didn't drink pints. So she'd drink two halves and she used to out drink me. Even though she was only five foot tall, she loved going out, she loved having a party.

[Lottie Hayton]

Sue had a way of drawing people to her. She had friends from all walks of life. She was funny, confident and loved to travel.

[Martin Sills]

She was a great cook. She had a little sideline business at one point when she was younger, making frozen chillies for people that couldn't cook. And so all her friends used to go around for dinner, find out she'd made this chili and ask her to make them one, put it in the

[Lottie Hayton]

freezer and she would sell it to them.

[Robert Varey]

Yeah.

[Martin Sills]

Oh, yeah. She'd give them nothing.

[Lottie Hayton]

In 1985, sue was 28 years old and living in Sheffield with her then husband, Alan Martin. Lived in the same house on the top floor. One night, sue went out with two of her closest friends, Anita and Sue, to a bar and then to a famous nightclub in Sheffield city centre.

[Martin Sills]

She came out of a nightclub called Josephine's, where everyone used to go in and they got an underground car park.

[Lottie Hayton]

It wasn't particularly late, just gone midnight. Sue walked by herself back to her

[Martin Sills]

parked car and the first I got to hear about it, I can't remember who told me, I think it was either her husband or sue told me that this guy came up to her with a knife and forced her back into the car and raped her in the car.

[Lottie Hayton]

After raping her. The man left through the passenger door, warning sue not to do anything, just stay put in the car. Sue would later say that this was a pointless instruction. She could only sit, frozen and silent, in shock for the next 10 minutes. Finally, somehow, she mustered the strength to drive home. When she arrived, she was almost incoherent from the trauma that she had endured. When she could finally make herself understood to her husband, she was adamant about what she wanted to do next.

[Martin Sills]

She told her husband and said, look, I want to report this. Which was a traumatic thing. In the 85, there was hardly any support.

[Lottie Hayton]

Alan, Sue's husband, was actually a police officer himself. They contacted the police who came to their home and then still in the early hours of the morning of September 7th, they went together to a police station in Sheffield.

[Robert Varey]

Bear in mind, it was 1985 and it was a different time for us all then.

[Lottie Hayton]

Robert Verrey was a police constable in South Yorkshire at that time. He was on call that night because

[Robert Varey]

of the new phrase nighttime economy. We actually had a team of detectives working full nights in the centre of Sheffield.

[Lottie Hayton]

Robert was in the middle of his shift. When sue and her husband arrived at

[Robert Varey]

the station, that's the first I knew about it. When they were in the foyer at the police station and the front desk had run up, said, there's a woman here who's making an allegation of rape.

[Lottie Hayton]

Not only did sue present herself to the police within hours of the attack, she somehow had the presence of mind to bring with her anything that could be useful as evidence.

[Robert Varey]

She'd brought the dress that she'd been wearing to the police station and I can remember that vividly. In fact, when they rang me about it, I remember that it was a turquoise color with a. A black panel down the front of it. She gave us that that would have been packaged in it as an exhibit.

[Martin Sills]

I think Sheffield had one of the first sort of rape suites, if you like, where there were people there on hand to help and offer support and the medical examinations and everything. But she said it was hell going to do that, sort of, because there were still a few people that didn't believe it had actually happened. But she stuck to it. She stuck to her guns and never, ever wavered in a story or anything.

[Lottie Hayton]

Robert recalls sue being so distraught that it took a while to calm her down enough that she could relay what had happened, but she did, giving a devastating, detailed account of what had just happened to her to a female police officer. The police snapped into action immediately before the nightclub closed at 2am, officers had arrived at the scene, were speaking to staff and trying to see if any evidence could be retrieved.

[Robert Varey]

Bear in mind that in 1985, there weren't a lot of CCTV coverage, and certainly not in the. In the city center, but there was cameras outside the. The nightclub and we were able to. We retained some, or we got some footage of actually leaving the nightclub, walking towards the car park.

[Lottie Hayton]

And did you see anything else on that footage? Did you see anyone that we now know?

[Robert Varey]

No, there was nothing at all in terms of that. There was nothing apparent that would say the offender had followed her down to the car park. It's more likely that he would probably be waiting for her in the car park.

[Lottie Hayton]

The crime was treated as a major incident, with details circulated to all divisions of South Yorkshire Police and surrounding forces. They also appealed to the public for information. Unfortunately, their search was futile.

[Robert Varey]

I think that we'd exhausted everything after about two months. When I say that, you know,

[Lottie Hayton]

there

[Robert Varey]

was no cctv, that was the thing about it. We got the clothing and we'd sent her clothing off to be examined and then found Some seminal staining, DNA testing

[Lottie Hayton]

at this point in 1985 was not being used in criminal forensics. Even with samples taken from her clothes. Without a suspect, the police had nothing to go on.

[Robert Varey]

It would have been a recommendation from me as a sergeant to my inspector to say this is all we can do and this is all we have done. Doesn't appear that there's much more we can do suggests it remains on file.

[Martin Sills]

The police really took it to heart and really went after looking for this guy but nothing ever came up. They never found him. I was furiously angry. You know, it's your sister and someone's attacked your sister. But there's nothing you can do. You help us, you've got to wait for. You can't go out and look for him yourself because you don't know what you're looking for. I don't know what I'd have done anyway if I'd caught him. It's not in my nature. But yeah, you, you just cope with life at the time the best you can. You've got to go to work. You can't. So it's not sort of a recognized thing. I'm sorry. My sister was attacked so I had three weeks off. So he just got back in the next day and yeah, it was difficult.

[Lottie Hayton]

While Martin was furious with the man who had violated his sister, sue soon moved into a different, in some ways more worrying state.

[Martin Sills]

I think she was numb. I don't think she took it in for quite a while. She functioned at work, she carried on, she got under the promotion. Looking back now you could tell it was taking its toll every day.

[Lottie Hayton]

As the years passed, Sue's health slowly declined. She developed an eating disorder which hampered her and doctors ability to manage her type 1 diabetes. Through it all, Martin and Sue remained incredibly close.

[Martin Sills]

The first thing we used to do every morning is I'd call my mother and she'd tell me how sue was because sue had already called her. So that was our sort of morning routine. Wherever we were, we'd always ring up and make sure everyone was okay.

[Robert Varey]

Yeah.

[Martin Sills]

And so when the phone call stopped, he knew something was wrong. And then I was at work one day, I'd moved to London, I was working in the city and I was at work one day and Sue's boss rang me up and said she's had a really bad car accident up in Hull.

[Lottie Hayton]

At the time, sue was working at Midland bank, traveling all over the country to train their big corporate clients on how to use new electronic payment systems. While on a work trip in Hull Sue's car collided with a truck.

[Martin Sills]

I think she'd actually tried to kill herself because she was. It was nine o' clock in the morning and she on a long straight road and she pulled out no traffic and hit a truck head on. So she had perfect visibility. There was no nothing coming the other way. Massive fractured skull and lots of other injuries that took her a while to get over that. So the head injuries I think helped as well. Didn't help. So a mental state went downhill more and more after that each day. It's like a down the spiral. 40 years, it's still raw.

[Lottie Hayton]

Over the next few years, sue was in and out of hospital. Martin or their mother Mavis spent much of their time in a chair at her bedside.

[Martin Sills]

And for about three or four years, every now and again I'd get the phone call on a Wednesday or a Thursday night, you know, you've got to come up, she's dying. It's a hard jump in the car, drive to Sheffield, drive back the next day when she was okay. But then one day I got a call saying, you know, you've got to come. So 36 hours I was at the hospital and went out to get something to eat and she died while I was at lunchtime the next day. I think her organs just gave in. She had kidney failure, just type 1 diabetes related things where your organs just gradually give up. But she was only 39, so I think that the impact had been that bad on her body that it just gave up.

[Lottie Hayton]

Coming up against the odds, Sue's rapist finally is found.

[Dave Stopford]

He's had opportunities to live a full life and that was robbed from the victim and she didn't have that opportunity. So it leaves you with a feeling of injustice to some extent that he had all that.

[Lottie Hayton]

That's in just a moment.

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[Dave Stopford]

Susan was came to our attention just really as one of many hundreds of cases, but because it was a stranger rape and also using a weapon, it became a priority.

[Lottie Hayton]

In 2019, Dave Stopford, head of the Major Incident Review Team at South Yorkshire Police, came across Sue's case. His team, made up of retired police officers, reviews cold cases and they decided to reopen Suess.

[Dave Stopford]

Then the work began, looking at the samples, but also there was a lot of work to do on an investigative side to trace people, to fill in some of the gaps because the case papers that we had were really incomplete.

[Lottie Hayton]

On the case file was a typed copy of Sue's original witness statement and just a few other papers.

[Dave Stopford]

We'd got a submission form which the original officer in the case had submitted to the Forensic Science Service at the time, and we'd got a lot of notes that the scientists had made. But much beyond that, we hadn't got very much at all.

[Lottie Hayton]

And is that normal in cases like this?

[Dave Stopford]

It's not unusual, but this was particularly sparse.

[Lottie Hayton]

I would say some of the original material in Sue's case file had been destroyed over 40 years of changing filing systems. But this didn't deter Dave and his team as they began to put the various pieces together. They contacted the officers who led the initial investigation, including Robert Verri, whom you heard from earlier, to help fill in the gaps.

[Dave Stopford]

Both the officers that we spoke to, one of which was Robert Verri, and he was able to recall the case straight away and was able to fill in a lot of details, gives a statement about how the process would have worked at the time and proving the continuity of the exhibits as well. We have a lot of cases across our desk and, you know, I wouldn't say that there's any of them that we want to succeed on above others, but when we discovered the seriousness of the offense and also then we start to try and initially to trace the victim. Of course, we discovered that she died 12 years later. And getting to know the people who she was friends with and her family, although obviously we never met her, you start to understand who that person is. And she seemed to be a lovely person, extremely honest, hard working, gregarious. But after this offense, everybody says that her character declined, she started suffering from depression and her friends and relatives pulled this attack as the cause for her demise. So you can understand that we wanted desperately to, to find who, who done this to her.

[Lottie Hayton]

Despite the scarcity of information to go on, Dave and his team started to make progress.

[Dave Stopford]

It's just piecing it together really. I know it's a sort of cliche to say it's like a jigsaw, but it is. It's. You find little bits of evidence, you put them together and that leads you on to other bits.

[Lottie Hayton]

One crucial piece of evidence in Sue's case file were the samples retrieved from her turquoise dress. 40 years of scientific advancement in DNA testing meant that this time the investigation could go much further than it had in 1985.

[Dave Stopford]

So, first of all, we took the swabs to the scientists and they were able to get an incomplete DNA profile. So what that means is that we couldn't put it onto the national database, but we could compare it to the samples that were on the national database. It was compared and it returned negative, so it didn't have a match. So what we did then was a year later we tried again in the hope that the perpetrator had since committed an offense and had his DNA taken, but again, there was no match. So a further year went by and we tried again and on this occasion, David Hill's DNA matched. And the reason for that was that he'd been arrested in the meantime for a public order offense and had his DNA taken. And that's exactly what we were hoping for. We get quite a lot of cases where we don't get a match, where we don't get sufficient samples. And so when we do, and particularly a case of this nature, it was, it's very uplifting to a whole team, you know, it's what we've come to work for.

[Lottie Hayton]

Results like that after 40 years. Sue's rapist was identified as David Hill, a 75 year old man from Rotherham. He had worked as a bouncer at Josephine's nightclub prior to the attack on Sue.

[Martin Sills]

I'd moved house 25 times and they still found me. Wow, they were absolutely amazing.

[Lottie Hayton]

South Yorkshire Police once David Hill had been found and charged with the rape. The police immediately notified Sue's brother, Martin.

[Martin Sills]

I didn't know Sue's case was in, still alive and involved. So it came as a bit of a shock, didn't it?

[Lottie Hayton]

Martin and his partner Lisa, who lives with him in Skiathos, had gone back to England for a visit. When they arrived home, there was a letter waiting for him from the South Yorkshire Police. They were asking him, are you the Martin Sills who's the brother of Susan Fir?

[Martin Sills]

I rang them up and said, like, yeah. And they said, we've got someone, and we charged him. Yeah. So it was so conclusive, the evidence, that they just charged him straight away.

[Lottie Hayton]

I asked Martin, how did it feel learning Sue's rapist had finally been caught.

[Martin Sills]

Surreal. After all that time, you think you're never gonna hear anything again. Obviously, my sister had died. You put all these things to bed into different chapters and all of a sudden, back they came. It was quite traumatic then. It was every day, thought about it every day, what was happening, you know, when is it going to trial?

[Lottie Hayton]

The most important step ahead of the trial was getting the typed copy of Sue's original witness statement, the one she'd reported to police that same night in wrenching detail to be admitted as evidence, despite the fact that sue had died. CPS told me there was no way to prove it was rape without it. But it was unusual for a posthumous written witness statement to be used in court. In fact, as far as the judge could tell, there are no stated cases where a written victim statement has been used in a rape trial in the uk. After the victim's death.

[Dave Stopford]

What was required, I think I alluded to earlier, was a hearsay hearing.

[Lottie Hayton]

Dave Stopford, head of the Major Incident Review Team, again, where we put to

[Dave Stopford]

the court everything we knew about the victim to prove that she was a trustworthy character and would have made a good witness. And that enabled the court to accept her evidence without her being there with the witness statement.

[Lottie Hayton]

Hearsay application granted. On January 19 this year, the trial began on February 12.

[Martin Sills]

I couldn't go, couldn't go to the trial. Trial would have been too much to hear all that again. But Susan's best friend, who was with her at the time, that night, Anita, she went and gave evidence, but then her husband, also her ex husband, drove, flew over from Thailand to give evidence. So that's a couple of surprises.

[Dave Stopford]

Those people who were present in court and they'd friends, relatives that stayed in court throughout the hearing. So once a person's given their evidence, they're free to leave. But they all stayed and heard the evidence right through to the end. And it was a two week trial, you know, it wasn't a short trial. So they stayed right to the end. And they stayed because from their memory, they wanted justice done. The prosecution case went very well. I think the defence case was quite weak and so we were very hopeful of, of getting the right verdict. But of course, until the jury do come back and say guilty, it's a very tense moment and unfortunately they took very little time, a couple of hours, to decide that he was guilty and returned a guilty verdict unanimously. Everyone was in tears, basically. It was, it was such a relief.

[Lottie Hayton]

David Hill was found guilty of the rape of Susan Jane Firth and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Martin South Yorkshire Police, Robert Vary and Sue's friends attended the sentencing.

[Martin Sills]

And then we went out for a few drinks in Sheffield with the police. It don't make up for anything, but knowing that he'll die in prison is some comfort because he's had 30 years free, 40 years free that sue never got.

[Lottie Hayton]

Yeah,

[Dave Stopford]

it's bittersweet because the fact that the victim had deceased and wasn't able to be there and that David Hill had lived his life to some extent. You know, he's a 75 year old man now. He's had opportunities to live a full life and that was robbed from the victim and she didn't have that opportunity. And her life spiraled after this event. When she was from being 28, her life spiraled downwards until she died 12 years later. So it leaves you with a feeling of injustice to some extent that he had all that and we did what we could do and plead before court when we were able to, but it seems, it seems unjust.

[Lottie Hayton]

It's of course, been a very long time and I'm sure hugely difficult. Why is it important for you to speak about Sue's case now?

[Martin Sills]

Because what the police said at the time, after the court case, I was talking to one of the detectives and he said, we appealed everywhere for anybody else that had been attacked by this guy to come forward. And he said, because rapists don't go from zero to knife, there's usually a few incidents in between.

[Dave Stopford]

You know, it's, it's quite often said that somebody who, who commits a rape many years ago will have started with something like an indecent exposure or an indecent assault, and gradually they commit further to more serious offenses. This is as serious a rape as you can get in some terms. It's Very difficult to judge one rape against another, but to rape a complete stranger in an underground car park with a knife to her throat, to me, it doesn't get much more serious than that for a sexual offence. And so if this was the very first offense he committed, he'd. It started at a very, very serious level. And that doesn't seem to be the progression that most offenders make.

[Martin Sills]

I'd like to talk, try and get anybody else that's been attacked by him to come forward, or anyone that's been attacked in the past. It ruins lives. They can get some kind of closure on it. Don't collect people will ever move on from it, but at least they can get some kind of closure on the person that did it. So that's the reason, really try and get any other victims to come forward.

[Lottie Hayton]

Nearly 30 years after her early death, Sue's voice and strength managed to convict a rapist and opened the door for a transformation in how rape is prosecuted in Britain. For Martin, the influence of his big sister in his life has never faded.

[Martin Sills]

Memories. So many of mine are because of Sue. It wasn't for Sue, I wouldn't have gone to London. I wouldn't have made a decent career. I wouldn't have enjoyed myself. So many memories since sue died, that wouldn't have been possible. If she hadn't been such a big influence, I'd still be in Midland bank now. Well, probably not a bit older, but made me realise I was capable of so much more than just sitting in a bank for the rest of my life. She gave me the. She was the push behind me. Even when she died, she was always there.

[Lottie Hayton]

This episode was produced by Taryn Siegel. Thank you so much to Martin Sills, Dave Stopford and Robert Varey. And thank you to South Yorkshire Police and the Crown Prosecution Service for their help with this podcast. The executive producer was Tim Walklate. Sound design and theme composition were by Mao Lisetto. I'm Lottie Hayton. You can read my full [e-mail] we'll put a link in the description of this episode. Thank you for listening. See you again soon.

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