Frustratingly, no evidence of Zoe’s whereabouts was found.
On the evening of December 16, 2011, with advance knowledge of the Christmas party taking place at the tower, Sullivan moved freely through the building, using the name Fintan Murphy and affecting to be an invited guest. Such was his boldness that he even introduced himself to Kimberly as a close friend of Zoe’s. Although he claimed to have left the building following Andrew and Jai’s physical altercation, Mahmood has never been able to recollect being escorted outside. The most likely scenario would see Sullivan stealing the sex tape recording from Kimberly’s laptop in the days leading up to the party, then leaking it in an attempt to isolate Zoe from her friends. Knowing of Zoe’s burgeoning reliance on pills, Sullivan would have had a chance to attack or subdue Zoe on the roof, creating a diversion with the smoke alarm (or perhaps just taking advantage of a real emergency), before storing her body, dead or alive, inside the crawl space beside her own bedroom. A crawl space he had already remade as a shrine to her, decorating the walls with photographs stolen from Jai and dressing a mannequin in clothes taken from Zoe’s room.
Perhaps Sullivan intended to hurt Zoe, and perhaps he didn’t.
Perhaps, having grown so obsessed, he could not bear the thought of her leaving for the Christmas holidays. DNA evidence showed no traces of Zoe’s blood behind the wall, but police noted at the time that the space had been “forensically” cleaned. Had he stowed Zoe’s body there, his options for removing her would have been ample, with fully forty-three days passing between her disappearance and Sarah Manning’s discovery of the crawl space. With that said, Sullivan’s best opportunity to remove evidence came on the morning of Zoe’s disappearance, when around a thousand students moved their belongings out of Tower Block for the Christmas break, unimpeded by the police. Under his birth name, Sullivan made money by renting out speakers and DJ equipment. A young woman who hired speakers for the party on the fifteenth floor has since identified the man who delivered them as Connor Sullivan. Although she did not remember seeing him collect the speakers the following day, she claimed that both the equipment and the flight case it had arrived in were gone when she woke up on the morning of the seventeenth.
That Sullivan went on to so convincingly present himself as Zoe’s friend likely comes from his close reading of her personal messages and from the secrecy Zoe felt forced to live her life by. The lies, fabrications and falsehoods he went on to employ are almost too numerous to name. He stole Zoe’s red jacket from Kimberly’s room after she was assaulted outside Fifth Avenue nightclub, and he later lied about reviewing CCTV footage from the night in question to cast doubts on her. He planted evidence incriminating Michael Anderson. He stole a Rolex watch belonging to Andrew Flowers. He made anonymous tips to newspapers, listing the locations of Andrew, Jai and Kimberly. He became the head of a charitable organization under false auspices. He turned a blind eye to Robert Nolan’s behavior. He leaked the full video of Andrew and Kimberly to divert damaging attention away from the foundation, and he very likely murdered Igor Turgenev, otherwise known as Vlad the Inhaler, who is assumed to have stolen Andrew’s Rolex from Sullivan’s home. Whether Turgenev stole the watch after meeting Sullivan through the foundation or whether they had some deeper relationship is now impossible to determine. There are many such question marks still hanging over Sullivan. I find myself thinking about the young woman who hanged herself in Alex Wilson’s room in 15C, two years before Alex arrived to live with Zoe and Kim. I find myself thinking of Alex herself, who also went on to take her own life. We will never know if Connor Sullivan had some part to play in this.
Was he a monster? Or just misunderstood? So many of Sullivan’s actions had no practical application to his darker agenda. Although his charity work was initiated by a tragedy he himself likely caused, he did tireless and valuable work on behalf of Manchester’s homeless community afterwards. Although he may have had personal reasons to shift the investigation’s focus to a promising suspect, he went without sleep to expose the abusive link between Zoe and Anderson, seeming genuinely disturbed by it. And although it profited him nothing, he worked closely with Jai on his rehabilitation, collecting him from hospital appointments, finding him places to stay, and even becoming his employer. Was he wearing a mask in these moments, or was he in many ways the decent man he presented as, albeit one with a terrible secret?
Although no evidence of Zoe’s whereabouts was discovered in Sullivan’s home, her DNA was found across scores of stolen personal items—clothes, hairbrushes, hygiene products—that had been lovingly preserved for eight years. She remains a mystery to us now, unknowable in death as in life, with reported sightings still coming in from places as far afield as Africa, Australia and Havana. On dark days, when black clouds start ganging up and threatening the sun, I sometimes choose to believe these sightings, imagining her happy, laughing, under her own power and abroad for her own reasons. At such times, I remember why fiction is so often preferable to fact.
Evelyn Mitchell had been working on versions of this book for several years, poring through information readily available to the public, but it only began to cohere when she started speaking to Zoe’s friends and family. She had been collating interviews for some time before Turgenev’s murder and continued to do so for some time afterward. She became close to the people who had been in Zoe’s life, including Sullivan, and suffered a terrifying and anonymous ordeal as a result. She never chose to let this ordeal define her, always dealing with it through humor, resolve, and bloody-minded determination. Her work revealed a monster, and when she confronted him with the truth, he killed her for it.
Whatever happened inside that house, Evelyn got up and walked away, determined that Connor Sullivan would never make her his victim. He never did.
Addendum: