Fiona Holm loved people. “She’d be talking to everyone,” her daughter Savannah says, laughing about what would happen when her mum came on to the ward where she gets her sickle cell treatment. “I’ll tell her, ‘Can you sit down next to me?’ And she’ll be like, ‘All right, I’m just going to go speak to my mate.’ And I’m like, ‘Who is your mate? You don’t know no one in here!’ She’d be asking everyone, ‘Are you OK, are you warm? Your eyes are really yellow – have you been taking your medicine?’”
There’s a pause. Savannah is clearly wishing she could have her mum back on the ward with her. She is supposed to go to the hospital every three months for her treatment. But since Fiona went missing a year and a half ago, she’s barely been able to muster up the energy to go. Her health is suffering.
“I just can’t do it,” she says, “and the reason why I can’t do it is because every hospital appointment or every time I’m admitted to hospital, my mum’s been with me.”
Fiona, who was 48 at the time, was last seen alive on 20 June 2023. Within weeks, a former boyfriend, 66-year-old Carl Cooper, had been arrested and charged with murdering her and another woman, 41-year-old Naomi Hunte. Savannah, and much of her family, believe that Fiona was let down again and again: by the state, the police and the media.
Her body hasn’t been found. But they’re not giving up hope.
The trial of Carl Cooper begins on a grey day in June 2024, just under a year since Fiona was last seen. We’re at Woolwich crown court, a decrepit building in south-east London, not far from the areas that Fiona and Cooper used to frequent. There is just one attempt to make it a more pleasant space: on a wall outside court one, where the murder trial is being held, are laminated printouts of poems, seemingly themed around springtime. “Thy mind is ever moving / In regions dark to thee;”, reads Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee by Emily Brontë. “Recall its useless roving— / Come back and dwell with me.”
Despite being held at Belmarsh, the prison next door to the court, Cooper is sometimes late to proceedings because of delays with transporting him out of the cells and into the police van. When he appears for the first time, he looks tired and feeble. He has hollow cheeks, high cheekbones and a small chin. His expression somewhat imperious, he leans back against his chair, one eyebrow slightly raised, his mouth in a downward turn. He was born in Jamaica, and the defence makes much of his inability to read and write. On the first day they bring a “patois interpreter” into the courtroom, but it turns out she isn’t needed and is sent home without making a contribution.
Naomi Hunte had been seeing Cooper romantically for over a year before her body was found in her flat in Plumstead on Valentine’s Day in 2022. She had been stabbed multiple times. In the months prior, she had reported Cooper to the police on at least four occasions. In the police body-worn footage played to the court, Naomi, a pretty black woman dressed all in red, spells out how he made her feel.
“I think he’s obsessed with me,” she says to one officer. “I’m really scared now.” She tells police that Cooper has been stalking her, harassing her, and waiting outside her house. He has been banging on her door and bombarding her with telephone calls. She calls him a “nutter”, a “coward”, a “psychopath”. Their relationship wasn’t simple: off again, on again. But one thing is clear: she didn’t always feel safe around him.
It’s uncertain from the trial what exactly was done to prevent Cooper from harming Naomi after she reported him to the police, especially in relation to her allegations of stalking.
“Any suggestion of stalking should be taken extremely seriously as the risks to the victim can escalate quickly,” says Saskia Garner, head of policy and campaigns at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. “What is vital is that the police recognise the red flags and ask the right questions in order to identify if stalking is occurring.” In the aftermath of Naomi’s death, police quickly identified that Cooper had been the last person to see her alive. He was arrested but, due to a lack of evidence, was later released under investigation.
“We didn’t have any direct evidence to say that Cooper murdered Naomi,” says Det Ch Insp Kate Blackburn, the lead investigator on the murders of Naomi and Fiona. “It wasn’t a straightforward case. Otherwise he would have been charged at the time he was arrested. We don’t release people for murder on a whim.”
Naomi’s father, Basil, dressed smartly in a black hat and suit, attends court almost every single day. On one occasion, Blackburn remembers, he wears socks that say “Number one dad”. Naomi was his only daughter. The only time I see him stand up to take a break from proceedings is the day when the evidence focuses on Naomi’s blood. Even though the court covers the murder of his daughter first, he stays on to support Fiona’s family for their half of the trial.
From the public gallery, many of Fiona’s relatives and friends peer down, focusing intently. They’re accompanied by a police liaison officer who explains what’s happening, but they can’t always hear well. Later, the closest family members are allowed into the courtroom, positioned in front of the press desk, only a few metres away from where Cooper sits, behind glass.
In the absence of a body, the evidence in Fiona’s case focuses heavily on bloodstains found in Cooper’s flat, which he blames on an injury she sustained from a beer bottle, and some “home improvement” work he did after she disappeared. As with Naomi, the prosecution claims that Cooper was the last person to see Fiona alive.
Cooper now wears a bruise-coloured jumper on some occasions, even as the weather takes a sunny turn. He’s developed a nasty cough, looks even frailer, even older, though he is more animated when Fiona’s portion of the trial begins, especially when family members take to the dock.
“She was my best sister. She’s funny, caring, just Fiona,” says Elise Skillen, Fiona’s younger sister. Her composure breaks; she bursts into tears. “She trusted too much,” she says.
Skillen’s evidence is mostly about the times she visited Cooper’s home after Fiona went missing, trying to find her. Instead, on one occasion, she found that he had sold what looked like her clothes to a man in a van outside his flat. “I knew straight away they were Fiona’s. It made me feel sick,” she says. “I was sick when I smelled my sister.” The family called the police to report Cooper’s suspicious behaviour and he was promptly arrested. The force say it had been working on a case against him since February 2022, when Naomi was murdered, and that even without the presence of Fiona’s family he would have been arrested later that day.
But, as the defence points out as the trial drags on into its third week, the evidence against Cooper is circumstantial. There are no witnesses, no murder weapons with his DNA on them. In the case of Fiona, there’s not even a body.
In the poem-lined corridor outside the courtroom, the families hug, mutter, and hope and pray that Cooper will be found guilty. People whisper rumours about him in my ear. For them, Fiona is still spoken about in the present tense. But they are sure he was the one to take her away from them. They’re just not sure that the jury will see him in the same light.
In a boxy, balconied new-build high-rise flat in Lewisham, Savannah, 28, and Skillen, 40, sit side by side. It’s the first time I’ve seen them since the trial and in the muggy midday light it’s clear the niece and aunt don’t much resemble one another. Savannah is dark-skinned, a little taller than average, slim-faced; Skillen is lighter-skinned, round-featured, a little shorter than average. “She’s stronger than me,” Skillen says at one point, holding back tears that threaten to flood. Savannah just makes the tiniest shake of her head. From photographs, Fiona looks like a mix of them both; slim-faced like Savannah, a similar skin tone to Skillen.
What Savannah and Skillen share is a keen intelligence, a sense of humour and a sense of injustice about what has happened to their mum, their sister.
“It’s not right. It’s really not right,” says Savannah.
We start at the very beginning. Fiona was born at a hospital in Surrey, Skillen says; one of 10 children, to a father from Barbados and a mother from Glasgow. While their mother looked after the children, their father mainly worked as a baker. Fiona was a middle child, with seven brothers and two sisters. I ask how the family viewed themselves, “Middle-class?” Skillen says with a question in her voice, then she chuckles. “Common? I don’t know!”
Fiona, they quickly establish, was the type of person who did things that other people only say they will. “I was ill quite a lot when I was little and Fiona used to come and stay in hospital with me,” says Skillen. “I used to look up to her a lot when I was younger … She always had time for everyone.” Over the years, she became well known in her local area of Blackheath for her friendliness and kindness. Perhaps the most remarkable thing she did was take in a homeless man, Michael. She saw him begging outside Blackheath station and stopped to help him, encouraged him to go back to her house to wash. They became friends and she would cook him food and have him stay with her for a while. This wasn’t one-off behaviour, Savannah and Skillen explain.
“We used to tell her off,” says Skillen. “We’d say, ‘It’s too dangerous, Fiona.’ There was another homeless man in Blackheath, Kevin. She used to make him egg sandwiches.”
Savannah, a twinkle in her eye, interjects: “She used to tell me he was Santa Claus.” We all laugh. And this is how the conversation goes: spliced with sadness, yes, but also with plenty of joyful memories of Fiona. A woman with four beloved children. Whose favourite colours were pink and purple. Who was meticulously clean. Who was called Nanny Fee Fee by Savannah’s young daughter. Who was a creative, loving, fun mum, who wrapped Savannah up tight when she was born because she was so worried about her being cold due to her sickle cell disease. Who always came to the hospital and who was generous to a fault with her time and her money.
But her remarkable capacity for kindness also exacerbated Fiona’s vulnerabilities, says Skillen. “I think she knew that people took her kindness for weakness.”
From a young age, it was clear that Fiona had some difficulties. When she was in her 30s she was diagnosed with autism and, according to Skillen and Savannah, had the “mental age of a 15-year-old”.
“When I was a teenager, I thought she was amazing,” says Savannah. “Like, yeah, she’s my best friend. Let’s go do this, let’s go do that. She’ll be like, come on, yeah, let’s go do it! But as I got older and had my little one I could see it.”
“Mum always knew it,” says Skillen. “Mum did try and get her help, but I don’t think it was acknowledged like it is today.”
“Nan got told she was crazy, because she was crying all the time,” adds Savannah. “Told that she was exaggerating.”
“She wasn’t believed, really,” says Skillen. “This is what we mean. Fiona’s been failed her whole life.”
According to the family, Fiona developed an addiction to alcohol after a traumatic incident in her 20s. Though she had some long periods where she was able to maintain sobriety, it marked her life, and those of her children, immensely. Skillen has looked after the youngest of Fiona’s children, who is still in primary school, since she was around three. Savannah, and various other family members, spoke during the trial about creating boundaries around seeing Fiona when she was drinking, as they found it too upsetting.
“I said to my mum in March, ‘I don’t want to talk to you until you’re ready for the right help. I’ll be there to support you,’” Savannah explains, recounting the months before Fiona went missing in 2023. “But she wasn’t ready.”
More than 170,000 people go missing in the UK each year. Of that number, very few remain missing for more than a week, and fewer still wind up making the national press. A murder trial, though, is always going to garner a certain amount of attention. On the first few days of Cooper’s trial there are a handful of journalists who show up, though that number dwindles as the case drags on, and there remains very little public awareness.
In court, police liaison officers inform me repeatedly that the family do not want to speak. Meanwhile, I’m pulled away for private conversations by relatives who tell me that officers have told them not to engage with me. Savannah and Skillen agree to an interview almost immediately after the trial. The family are deeply unhappy about what they see as a slow start to the police investigation, delays in sending officers to Cooper’s house and, separately, a lack of media coverage compared with other cases they have seen. They want to start to rectify that.
“With Nicola Bulley, she was always on the telly,” says Skillen. “I think I saw Fiona once. Once. And if it’s a double murder I think it should have been a massive case. Not just one woman – it’s two.”
“Even with this Jay Slater going missing,” Savannah chimes in. “Why are they covering him so much?”
“Well, you know why? He’s a white boy,” replies Skillen. “His family is probably going through what we’re going through. But it’s just not fair.”
There’s an expression that springs to mind here – “missing white woman syndrome”. The media often give far more coverage to white, middle-class women and girls who go missing than to missing people of colour, the working class, and various other marginalised groups.
“Generally, where the vast majority of the population is white, it’s probably going to be a fair statement to make that anybody who is not white will get less coverage,” says Prof Karen Shalev, leader of the Missing Persons Research Group at the University of Portsmouth. In the news hierarchy, she adds, victims are chosen through the “vector of innocence”.
“Good versus evil” is “easy to sell”, she says. People with a more “complicated existence” – where there’s a history of substance abuse or where the person has gone missing more than once, for example – are viewed as being harder to create compelling narratives around. “So you see the media initially, normally, try to come with an angle to pitch any person as innocent,” she adds.
The reality is that most victims contain multitudes. They are not only unblemished and innocent; they are as complicated as any other person. And in any case, personality or traits shouldn’t prevent press coverage that may help families and friends find out what happened to them. As Fiona’s sister Helena put it during the trial, Fiona “wasn’t an angel but she wasn’t a bad person”, either.
The family believe that Fiona, who had struggled with addiction and had gone missing at least once before (for a few days in 2021), fell victim to the news hierarchy.
“It’s ’cause Fiona is black,” says Skillen. “That’s the long and short of it. And because she’s a drinker.”
“Yes, she may have had her problems,” adds Savannah. “But I guarantee you that she is a better person than most people in this world. She would go out of her way for anyone, even if it was a person who she didn’t know.”
The first time Savannah and Skillen saw Cooper in person, they were terrified. After the family realised Fiona was missing in late June 2023, they scoured her house for clues. Fiona, normally meticulously clean, had left it in a bit of a mess; there was no electricity, mould was growing in the fridge and there was wet laundry in the washing machine. In a notebook on Fiona’s dresser they found handwritten notes. The family don’t know when they were written but one said that life didn’t treat her well because of her autism, and one was addressed to Savannah, saying that she hoped she had a good life and that she loved her loads.
“Maybe she had a feeling that something was going to happen,” says Skillen.
Worried by what they’d found, they called the police and went to Cooper’s flat, looking for her, on multiple occasions. The pair had been dating for roughly six months, having met around December 2022, and Elise had dropped Fiona off at the flat on a few occasions.
When they arrived, they realised he had painted the outside of the windows of the ground floor flat with white paint. They scraped some of it off and as they peered in, saw Cooper standing in the dark. “I saw his eyes,” says Skillen. It was frightening; she let out a scream. “Then he went to hide.”
They returned on multiple occasions, calling Fiona’s name, speaking to the neighbours, trying to find out if anyone knew where she could be. “I didn’t think he killed her. That was the worst thing. I thought he was keeping her against her will,” Skillen says.
They feel that the missing persons unit who originally took on Fiona’s case didn’t do its job adequately, and that they had to take on a lot of the fight to find Fiona themselves. Since Fiona went missing they have launched a campaign to find her via Facebook, denounced the media for their lack of coverage, highlighted a £20,000 reward to find her body, and searched parks, bushes, abandoned garages, abandoned arches and even rivers, getting in the water to look for her.
Shortly before the trial, they discovered the police had received a phone call from an anonymous source, who said that Cooper had murdered Fiona and that they knew the location of the body. The phone call came four days before Fiona was first reported missing by her social worker. But the police originally filed it as a hoax.
“For somebody to know then that she’s dead or that Cooper’s done a murder, that week is really significant,” says DCI Blackburn, who adds that the homicide team were not made aware of the call until very close to the trial.
The family also feel frustrated with themselves for missing the signs of Cooper’s abuse. Fiona had started to withdraw from them, they believe. She started worrying about her looks and her weight in a way that she hadn’t before. As with Naomi, Cooper had demonstrated possessive behaviour: following her, accusing her of infidelity. On one occasion, two months before she went missing, Fiona called the police, accusing him of attacking her with a crowbar.
“He wants to kill me,” she told police in body-worn camera footage viewed by the court. “He said, ‘I want to stab you five times.’” Cooper was arrested for grievous bodily harm but released without charge. Savannah’s father, Fiona’s ex, witnessed the attack, and Fiona later showed scabbed-over scars to Skillen. On another occasion, she said that he had stabbed her with a screwdriver. The homicide team investigating Naomi Hunte’s death were told about his arrest for the crowbar attack, but, according to DCI Blackburn, this didn’t add enough to the case for them to re-arrest him over Naomi. The family believe that connections weren’t made where they should have been, and that this amounts to a dereliction of duty.
During the trial, the defence tried to depict Cooper as a “quirky”, unintelligent, harmless old man, and cited the Central Park Five case (when five young black men from Harlem were wrongly convicted of assaulting a woman in Central Park) – but Cooper didn’t help the case. He continuously talked over the prosecution while they were questioning him, and at one point suggested that Hamas might have been guilty of kidnapping Fiona. On 28 June, the jury found him guilty of both murders. A few days later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving a minimum term of 35 years. It is likely he will spend the rest of his life in jail.
On the day of the sentencing, Fiona’s family read out impact statements. “We are tortured by the fact that Fiona’s body has never been found, and we are not able to lay her to rest,” Skillen said in hers. “I will not beg him, but Fiona deserves to be laid to rest … I can’t stand the thought of her being out there alone.”
In November, I meet DCI Blackburn at her office in Lewisham police station, where she heads up the specialist crime command unit. At any given time, she explains, she has about 20 active cases. She was aware that the Cooper case was unusual from the get-go because “generally, it’s quite easy to charge someone with murder” due to the risk they might pose. As far as Naomi was concerned, they struggled to find enough evidence early on to get over the threshold for charge. They knew that Cooper had a “violent past”, but had never been convicted of anything before, which made him a “rare beast”. This was compounded when Fiona went missing. In a “no-body homicide”, as DCI Blackburn puts it, it’s quite uncommon to get a conviction. However, she says, “The death of both women supported the other. The evidence of the two cases together supported each other.”
As a white officer, she says, she sometimes feels she is on the “back foot” when trying to explain police decision-making to black families, or why the media aren’t taking an interest in certain cases. She remembers holding a press conference after Fiona first went missing, but very little coverage coming out of it. “We will work just as hard if you’re a convicted serial killer and you’ve been murdered, or if you’re an old lady who’s been robbed on the way home,” she says.
She doesn’t believe that the force dismisses the cases of missing or murdered black women. That said, she does concede systemic issues with “very inexperienced” officers who are tasked with handling serious crime. Four officers were placed under investigation for misconduct, after a review into the management of Fiona’s allegation of assault (when Cooper attacked her with a screwdriver and threatened her with a crowbar) found that more thorough inquiries could have identified key witnesses who could have helped to bring him to justice at an earlier stage. “We have always been clear that we made mistakes when dealing with allegations against Carl Cooper,” commander Paul Brogden, the head of specialist crime at the Met, said in a statement. “For those mistakes we are extremely sorry.”
DCI Blackburn won’t say whether or not Naomi and Fiona’s deaths could have been prevented, just that “with the police, we’ve got to get it right, haven’t we? We’ve got to get it right every time, because people do come to harm if we don’t.”
Since the end of the court case, the family has been busy. In September, they wrote to the Met, asking that both cases be re-referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) for an independent investigation. By November, the IOPC confirmed they would be investigating, telling the Guardian that, “In October 2024, we received referrals from the Met of complaints made by the families of both victims, alleging serious shortcomings in the force’s investigations prior to their deaths.” The investigation, they added, “will look at prior police contact relating to both victims”. It is not clear whether the previous, more limited misconduct probe has been rolled into this investigation.
Fiona and Naomi’s families are hoping that the IOPC will do a full investigation into both cases, the extent to which both women were failed, and whether their deaths were preventable. It’s important to them that the cases are considered together, and the fact that both women were black is at the forefront of investigators’ minds.
“Both Naomi Hunte and Fiona Holm were vulnerable black women who called on the police for protection from Carl Cooper, a man who was known to the Met to be a serial perpetrator of high-risk domestic abuse,” says Sophie Naftalin, a partner at Bhatt Murphy solicitors, acting on behalf of the families.
“In Fiona’s case her report of a serious assault in April 2023 came when Carl Cooper was already under investigation for murdering Naomi, but the evidence suggests that within the Met there was a complete failure to adequately information-share, which led to a failure to adequately assess and act upon the risk that Carl Cooper posed to Fiona. Both these deaths were preventable. My clients are deeply pained by the inference that Naomi and Fiona were both treated with contempt by the police because they were black women with mental health conditions and not therefore considered to be deserving of protection or help.”
In the meantime, Fiona’s family have begun to say goodbye. Originally, her mother didn’t want to even accept Fiona’s death certificate. But eventually, says Skillen, “she said, ‘We have to do a little memorial.’” This took place in September, and was a coming together of family and friends, with a large turnout. They released balloons in her memory.
But because of what they see as Cooper’s cowardice, his inability to accept his guilt and to help the family, they cannot fully mourn. As Chantal Korcz, communications manager at the charity Missing People, explains, the grieving process for missing people is quite different from those who have faced other types of loss. “These people live with something we call ambiguous loss. They never know,” she says. “Do you give up? When do you give up? Do you mourn the person? What if you mourn the person and the person is still alive? ‘Missing’ is such a unique thing. It doesn’t affect just a person, like a small family; it affects a wider group of people.”
Skillen wipes a few more tears away as we continue to talk. “This could be 10 years and we get a knock at the door and they’ve found her. And what: we’d have to do this all over again? We can’t really grieve fully. Even though we’ve been at the court, we actually don’t know how she died. We just know he killed her. We’ve always known that.”
One day, if Savannah can, she wants to go to the prison where Cooper is serving his sentence and sit down with him face to face. See what he has to say for himself. Get him to explain exactly what happened to her mum.
Fiona remains sharp in their minds, still making them cry, and laugh. I ask: what’s one of your favourite memories of her?
A jumble comes out all at once. The time she accidentally put bleach in the fish tank and killed Savannah’s fish, telling her that they had gone to swim in the ocean as she flushed them down the loo. The fact that she loved to dance, and used to call herself a gymnast. The bags of chips she used to buy, “with about 10 sauces on it”, the leftovers of which she used to feed to the foxes. The special bonds she had with both Savannah and Skillen’s children. They laugh as they tell these stories; some of the sadness leaves the room for a moment.
Fiona, in their eyes, was imperfectly perfect. A menace and a delight. A woman who is missing and missed.
For advice, support and options if you, or someone you love, goes missing, text or call Missing People on 116 000; or visit www.missingpeople.org.uk
Research support by Kimi Chaddah
