Unfortunately, the DNA sample from Kimberly Nolan proved inconclusive. The young woman who had been used to replace Lucille Boivin was later identified as Elise Pelletier, a girl, a foster care runaway from Brittany in France. Michael and Kevin both confessed to her kidnapping and to her murder. Neither man has ever acknowledged a role in the attempted kidnapping of Kimberly Nolan, but we know several things with certainty. The first, that the brothers made a fortnightly drive from Paris to Calais, from there to England and to Manchester, a “booze cruise” to a family pub in a town called Prestwich. The second, that they made such a drive on November 7, returning one day after the attempt was made upon Kimberly. The third, that Boivin hired the Matthews brothers to find a suitable girl on November 5. And the fourth, that Kevin, the youngest brother, had worked on the building site near to Canal Street. It seems highly likely that the brothers happened to be in this nightclub, noticed a resemblance between Kimberly and Lucille, and made an unplanned, unsuccessful attempt to take her.
After she proved unsuitable because they believed she had a titanium screw inside her knee, they decided against taking a girl from England, making a separate and sadly successful attempt much closer to home. What we can say with 100 percent certainty is that the girl executed and burned in Boivin’s house was not Zoe Nolan. As far as we can tell, neither Boivin or the Matthews brothers ever even knew of her existence.
* * *
9 All interviews with Henri Caron were conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
10 All interviews with Lieutenant Colonel Victor Bisset were conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
11 All interviews with Ricky Payne were conducted by Joseph Knox and added to Evelyn’s text in 2019.
From: [email protected]
Sent: 2019-03-16 01:07
To: you
Just tried calling. I know ive missed msgs, sry things have been crazy and. I mean not good crazy. Horrible horrible run in with Rob Nolan. Really bad, shouting, drunk, demanding to know where Kim was, but worse waass just.
I’ve been up late with my headphones on transcribing kims last tape. I thought I could hear something so I took them off and realized someone was buzing the door. I checked the time, this was only half an hour aho, half midnight, then went to the intercom and answered. There was no one there. So I forgot about it, put my headphones back on and then heard it go off AGAIN.
Went to the intercom, no one there. AND REPEAt. Thr third time I went down the hall, stairs, etc to the street entrance and opened it.
There was a MAN standing on the other side of the road watching me. I’m trawling back through the personal ads but can’t see any more listings for me/my number/my address. This is something else. I’m fully fucking freaking out will you call me when you see this?
XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXX XXX
Exx
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: