Katrice Lee: Family still longing for answers 40 years on

Katrice Lee's disappearance has confounded investigations over four decades

Katrice Lee was with her mother and aunt in a supermarket ahead of a party to celebrate the toddler's second birthday. She disappeared and has never been seen again. Forty years later, her family are still longing for answers.

Love and laughter filled the Lee family's flat as they prepared to mark their youngest daughter's special day on 28 November 1981.

Their married quarters near a military base at Paderborn, in what was then West Germany, had been home since father Richard took up a posting as an Army sergeant two years earlier.

But that joy at breakfast time - as they sang Happy Birthday and cradled Katrice in their arms - would soon be replaced by dread and horror as she vanished without a trace.

That morning, realising she had forgotten to buy crisps for the party, mum Sharon had left Katrice with her aunt Wendy at the checkouts of the Naafi (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) supermarket.

Within moments the youngster was gone, having run out of sight in an apparent attempt to follow her mum. As the minutes ticked by, Mr Lee, who was waiting beside his car as the drizzle fell on that cold and overcast Saturday, grew increasingly uneasy.

"I stood for what seemed like a lifetime. It was probably about 30 minutes. Even though it was very busy, I knew Sharon wouldn't take that long because she would've diligently followed her list and got every item she could.

"I had a gut feeling something wasn't right. I then thought I'd better see if they needed help to carry things or whether something untoward had happened."

The Lees married in 1972 and moved to West Germany while Sharon was pregnant with Katrice (bottom left)

With no sign of the trio in the shop's food and drink area, he wondered whether they had perhaps gone to buy an extra present in another section of the complex.

Then, through the open door of the manager's office, he spotted his distressed wife and her sister.

"I asked what was going on. Wendy immediately said 'Katrice has gone missing'.

"Soldier-mode kicked in. I grabbed every soldier I could see from my unit in the supermarket. It was at least half a dozen, if not more.

"We did a ground search around the area, but to no avail.

"If you lose sight of your child your heart goes in your mouth. I've never felt anything like it. That was the start of our nightmare.

"Our world changed that day. For it to have happened on her birthday of all days rubs salt into the wound.

"Katrice was a typical two-year-old - as cantankerous as any young child - and we were as normal a family as it was possible to be in the armed forces and living abroad."

The toddler was a typical two-year-old, her father says

The area around the Naafi complex in Schloss Neuhaus that day was "pandemonium" and a "mass of bodies" of soldiers, their families and civilians attending a college open day, Mr Lee explains.

Katrice's sister Natasha, who was then aged seven, recalls struggling to understand when her father suddenly arrived home in the hope the missing youngster had somehow managed to make her way back.

The scale of the tragedy dawned on her hours later when she saw her distraught mother.

"I could hear her screaming, it was blood-curdling. I can still hear those screams now. It is something that will never ever leave me," Natasha recalled.

In the critical hours and days that followed Katrice's disappearance, Royal Military Police (RMP) investigators conducted a botched probe.

Presuming the toddler had drowned in a nearby river, border guards were not alerted that a toddler had gone missing.

Shop workers' statements were not taken for several weeks and hospitals were not informed about an eye condition Katrice had which might have allowed health workers to identify her.

Convinced that theory was implausible given the distance to the water, what he describes as its "shallow depth" and no sign of a body along its route, Mr Lee is firm in his belief: "Katrice was picked up by somebody [in the supermarket] who walked out with her.

"She is living a lie with a family who have hidden her true identity from her."

Mr Lee (centre) travelled to the site of an excavation in Germany in 2018

The authorities' probe, he says with clear frustration, "went quiet within 18 months". After Mr and Mrs Lee separated in 1989, they left Paderborn and divorced the following year.

Mr Lee, by now a sergeant major, was discharged from the Army in 1999 following 34 years of service.

The family's desperate fight, though, continued.

In 2012, the RMP apologised for failings in the initial investigation.

The government agreed to review the case in 2017 and that same year a photo-fit of a man seen putting a child in car, made shortly after Katrice went missing, emerged.

The following year, focus shifted to the bank of the Alme river, near where Katrice vanished, as more than 100 soldiers carried out a five-week excavation.

Looking on as the diggers churned up the earth, a shaken Mr Lee confronted the possibility she may be dead.

For his eldest daughter, that period brought a "devastating" mix of emotions she found hard to process.

"It was supposed to be the best year of my life because I was getting married.

"I wanted to enjoy the build-up, but at times I felt ashamed because I resented the fact that Katrice was missing - 2018 was supposed to be my year, but instead they were digging for a body.

"I've got to live with the moment I thought that. If it had given my parents answers, regardless of them being terrible ones, then that should've been that."

The torment of Katrice's disappearance was felt strongly in the run-up to Natasha's wedding

The £100,000 operation unearthed no clues about Katrice's fate and the site was ruled out for further examination.

Six months on, Natasha married her partner, Mike Walker, and in a poignant tribute her gown included a cherished memento - a button from her lost sister's red cardigan.

"That's all I had [of Katrice]. She should've been walking behind me as my bridesmaid, but she wasn't. She was a button on my wedding dress."

A potential breakthrough in September 2019 came to nothing when a former serviceman was arrested and released without charge following the search of a house and garden in Swindon.

The family suffered further disappointment last December when the RMP announced it was scaling back its investigation after being unable to identify any new lines of inquiry.

Their agony has been compounded by what Mrs Walker describes as a "relentless" hounding by hoaxers claiming to be her long-lost sister.

In an effort to keep the case in the public eye, Hartlepool MP Jill Mortimer raised the matter in Parliament earlier this month and secured an agreement from Prime Minister Boris Johnson to meet Mr Lee "father to father".

The Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, said its "thoughts and sympathies remain with Katrice Lee's family" and that it would investigate "should any new information be reported".

Natasha walked up the aisle with a button from Katrice's cardigan stitched into her gown

On the anniversary of Katrice's disappearance, though, the family's pain is as deep as ever.

"Forty years on, I'm still trying to get over what's happened," admits Mrs Walker, of Gosport, Hampshire. "I don't think I will until we know what happened.

"It's left me with emotional scars. I'm trying to deal with those slowly and take every day step by step. I can only imagine how my parents feel.

"My mum carried her for nine months and gave birth to her. For my dad, it must be soul-destroying.

"I can remember laying in bed not long after it happened and my dad sitting next to me. I was in tears and he was stroking my head, telling me everything was going to be OK.

"I didn't realise until years later he would shut himself in the bathroom and cry. He wouldn't do it in front of me or my mum. He was broken."

Despite the passing years, Mrs Walker clings to hope that welcome news will eventually materialize.

"Every day we wake up thinking this could be the day we get our answers. I can only hope she is alive and well and has lived the best life possible.

"I don't want my sister to be laying in woods somewhere, buried in the ground, and nobody being able to say goodbye to her or having a grave to go to."

Natasha struggled to deal with a mix of powerful emotions in the run-up to her wedding

Ten days ago, Mr Lee, now 72 and living in Hartlepool, returned to Germany once again where he "relived his nightmare" in an effort to keep Katrice's plight in the public eye at home and abroad.

Although the Naafi supermarket has long since gone, much of the surrounding area remains eerily familiar to him.

His battle, he says determinedly, will go on.

"I often get asked 'Does it get easier [with the passage of time]?' No, it doesn't. People also say 'Give up, she's gone, accept it'. They can't be parents or they wouldn't make those comments.

"I find it frustrating other high-profile cases have had so much publicity and funding. No one child is more important than another.

"I wouldn't want to take her from her life, but I could be a grandfather and not know it.

"If I don't speak out, how will people know Katrice is still missing? How will she find her real parents?"