Forgotten Mothers UK
General => Articles => Topic started by: Forgotten Mother on June 29, 2026, 05:28:48 PM
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https://www.dailymail.com/lifestyle/article-15923307/little-sister-murdered-meet-Vickie-adopted.html
My little sister was murdered before I could ever meet her
Seven-year-old Stacey's killer was never caught. Now, 30 years on, her sister Vickie has finally got the case reopened
By Kathryn Knight
As she walked to school on a bone-chilling January morning in 1993, the then 13-year-old Vickie Robertson saw something that stopped her in her tracks. Pasted on to lampposts at her local bus station in Bracknell, Berkshire, were posters featuring the smiling face of a young blonde girl. Her name was Stacey Queripel. She was seven years old and had been found dead in nearby woodland. ‘Do you have any information?’ the poster asked.
Vickie recalls now: ‘Even though we had never met, I knew immediately who she was.’
For Stacey was not a stranger, but Vickie’s younger sister. Removed from her dysfunctional family home at the age of just three, Vickie had been adopted but knew her birth mother had gone on to have another daughter. She had seen photographs of Stacey over the years in one, the little girl is proudly holding a picture of the big sister she never met and had long harboured dreams of their eventual reunion. ‘Like most people who are adopted, I’d clung to the idea of meeting a blood relative, especially a young sister. I had all these ideas about how we would be friends even if we hadn’t grown up together,’ Vickie says. ‘Now all that was gone.’
And gone in the bleakest way imaginable. Stacey had been murdered, strangled poignantly with her own plastic necklace. The tragedy was devastating enough, but the finger of suspicion soon fell on Stacey and Vickie’s mother Gilliane, who was arrested and questioned twice although never charged. In fact, no one has ever been brought to justice. Thirty-three years after Stacey died, her killer remains at large an injustice Vickie has dedicated her life to overturning. ‘No family, whatever their circumstances, should have to wait 33 years for answers,’ she says.
It is one reason she is campaigning for the introduction of Stacey’s Law, which would require serious unsolved cold cases across the UK to be reviewed within five to ten years. ‘We have so many people in this country who are forgotten and I don’t want Stacey to be just another statistic,’ Vickie says. ‘It is shocking that we do not have government guidance on case reviews that is standard across the country. Justice should not be a postcode lottery. Stacey was a living, breathing human being with her whole life ahead of her. That was taken away from her. She was entitled to justice just as much as anybody else.’
Today, the softly spoken and personable Vickie is a 47-year-old mother of four children aged between 14 and 22. Yet, as well as a parent, she also still sees herself as the big sister to the sibling she never met. ‘That’s the thread that weaves through my life,’ she says.
It is a life story shot through with trauma and dysfunction. Vickie’s mother was a teenager when she gave birth and did not put her father’s name on the birth certificate. ‘To this day, I don’t know who he is,’ Vickie says.
The main male figure in their Bracknell household was her stepfather, a volatile and cruel man. ‘I was so young that my memories are fleeting, but I remember enough and the scars on my body are a legacy of the things I can’t,’ Vickie says quietly. ‘There was a lot of violence, towards both me and my mum.’
One attack on his small stepdaughter was serious enough for him to be imprisoned for assault. Although Vickie is still trying to obtain the court records and does not know the precise details, she knows he returned home after only a few months behind bars. Soon afterwards social services intervened and Vickie just three years old was permanently removed from the family home. ‘I was taken away by a social worker in a yellow car,’ she says. ‘Mum didn’t even turn up to say goodbye. I remember looking through the back windscreen, hoping she would come. She never did.’
Vickie had no way of knowing it would be the last time she would ever see her mother, although Gilliane attempted to maintain some contact through social workers. Gilliane went on to have two more children first Stacey and then another daughter, who was also subsequently adopted and whom Vickie has never met. While Stacey had a different biological father, Vickie is unsure under what circumstances she remained in the family home given her stepfather’s conviction. Though, following the adoption, Vickie did not have direct contact with her birth mother until she was 18, occasionally photographs would be sent by Gilliane to her adoptive parents, which they could pass on to her. For the young Vickie, they became something precious to hold on to a link to the relatives she hoped one day to know. ‘I yearned to meet them,’ she says.
Then, aged 13, came the hammer blow when Vickie saw the poster about Stacey’s death. ‘I didn’t know Stacey’s surname,’ Vickie says. ‘But even though I hadn’t seen a picture of her for a while, in my heart I just knew it was my sister.’
The instinct proved correct; after Vickie confided in her adoptive mother, two police officers came to the house and confirmed the dreadful truth. Stacey was, indeed, her sister - and she had been murdered. Days earlier, on January 24, 1993, the blonde seven-year-old had apparently vanished from her family home and been reported missing by Gilliane. At around 9pm, her body was discovered in nearby woodland. A post-mortem examination later concluded she had been strangled elsewhere with her necklace before being dumped in the woods, as investigators noted her shoes were clean despite the muddy undergrowth. ‘I remember just feeling shock and disbelief,’ Vickie recalls.
The maelstrom of emotions was quickly compounded by news Gilliane had been arrested. ‘I can’t explain what it felt like to see my birth mother’s face peering out from the national news linked to Stacey’s murder,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t get my head around it.’
Nor could she escape it. ‘By then it was national news and locally it was all anyone could talk about. I still lived in the same town so you couldn’t get away from it. It was everywhere – on the radio, in the newspapers, everywhere you went.’
‘Why did she die?’ screamed one headline.
It was a question that, although Vickie did not know it then, would never be answered. While there was evidence of significant dysfunction within the Queripel household the inquest later heard numerous men regularly passed through the property to smoke cannabis and Gilliane had struggled to cope with her spirited daughter the circumstances of Stacey’s death have never been fully established. Perhaps most painfully of all, Vickie was not allowed to attend her sister’s funeral because it was being televised. ‘Police and social workers said it was to protect my identity,’ she says. ‘I know they were trying to do the right thing, but it left me feeling so isolated and alone in my grief,’ says Vickie.
‘I felt guilty too. I was Stacey’s big sister. I should have been there to protect her. I had this strong sense that it should have been me.’
Those feelings only intensified as the weeks turned into months and no charges were brought, despite the coroner at Stacey’s inquest ruling she had been unlawfully killed. ‘It felt like Stacey had been forgotten about,’ Vickie recalls. ‘It was a really difficult time. My adoptive family was quite tumultuous and I had all these conflicting emotions about being adopted. I felt very lost.’
There were nightmares, too, from which she would wake screaming. By the age of 15, overwhelmed by grief, confusion and feelings of abandonment, she tried to take her own life. Thankfully she survived and today she describes it as a painful but pivotal turning point. ‘I realised I did want to be here after all,’ she says.
After leaving school at 17, Vickie began a catering apprenticeship before, in her early 20s, meeting the father of her eldest son. By then, having turned 18, she had been given correspondence from Gilliane via her social worker. ‘She didn’t really mention Stacey in the letters, but by then I had already decided I didn’t want anything to do with her,’ she says. ‘I wrote back to say I wasn’t interested. I knew meeting her wouldn’t give me any closure.’
She has had no contact with her birth mother since. ‘I know she is still alive, though she has moved out of the area. Beyond that, I don’t know and I don’t want to know.’
Tragically Vickie would later find herself trapped in a cycle bearing painful similarities to the one she had escaped as a child. After separating from her eldest son's father, she met another man who initially appeared to offer safety and stability. Instead the relationship quickly became abusive. Volatile, possessive and jealous, he controlled every aspect of her life, even ordering her to destroy photographs from her past because they were ‘disrespectful’ to him. He was also physically violent. Looking back Vickie recognises the signs of coercive control: the gradual isolation from family and friends, the constant put-downs, the violence, followed by apologies, declarations of love and promises to change. At the time, however, she felt trapped. Having fallen pregnant not long after they met, she went on to have three more children in the space of five years. ‘I was either pregnant or breastfeeding,’ she says. ‘I tried to leave many times, but the post-separation abuse was so bad that it was easier to go back. Part of me desperately wanted to believe his promises because he was the father of my children. This cycle went on for a long time, and it is only now that I can see the desperate irony of the fact that the life I had escaped from as a child had become my normality.’
The unexpected turning point came in 2015, when Vickie saw news footage of Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian refugee whose body washed ashore after he drowned in the Mediterranean alongside his mother and brother while attempting to reach Europe. The image shocked the world and for Vickie it sparked something deeply personal. ‘He was a very similar age to my youngest child at the time, and I was really struck by the story of a mum just wanting to get a better life for her son. It sparked something within me that made me want to look outwards.’
TWO TRAGIC SISTERS
1983 - Three-year-old Vickie, born to a teenage mum and an unknown father, is removed from the family home by social services after her violent stepfather returned to the family home after his release from jail.
1985 - Stacey is born to Gilliane, Vickie's biological mother, followed by another daughter. Stacey remains in her mother's care but her other sister, like Vickie, is adopted.
January 24, 1993, 5.30pm - Stacey is seen for the last time by her mother. The little girl apparently went to bed early after an argument.
January 24 1993, 8pm - Stacey's mother realises she isn't in her bed and reports the seven-year-old missing.
January 24, 1993, 9pm - Stacey's body is found in the grounds of South Hill Park by a police dog handler. At first it is thought that she was strangled accidentally when her plastic necklace caught on a tree, but it soon becomes clear she was murdered.
Aftermath - Stacey's mother Gilliane was arrested twice on suspicion of murder but released without charge. In 2023, a cold case review was finally opened, but Stacey's murder remains unsolved to this day.
That realisation led her to begin working with refugees and in time gave her the confidence to leave her abusive partner for good. He was eventually convicted of multiple offences, including assault by beating and stalking. Vickie later established her own survivor-led support charity called Kaleidoscopic, which provides long-term support to hundreds of victims of domestic abuse across the country, including a specialist playgroup where mothers can connect with others who have faced similar experiences. She has received a British Empire Medal for her work with refugees and domestic violence sufferers. And, in what she describes as a ‘full-circle moment’, one of those support groups takes place close to where Stacey’s body was found. ‘I’ve created a place of safety in a place that held such terrible memories and that feels wonderful,’ she says.
Stacey’s grave lies nearby, a simple headstone beneath a statue of a young girl holding out her hands. Vickie tends it lovingly, just as she tends her sister’s memory with equal devotion, telephoning Thames Valley Police every year to ask about the state of the investigation into her death. Every year she was told little had changed. Then, three years ago, with the support of her local MP James Sunderland, she was informed a cold case review was finally being opened. It was a victory of sorts but, as Vickie points out, three years on she still appears no closer to the answers she has waited decades for. ‘Every year that passes makes it less likely that someone will be held accountable,’ she says.
It is one reason she has campaigned so passionately for Stacey’s Law. ‘Some police forces regularly review unsolved cases but others don’t, and justice shouldn’t depend on where you happen to live,’ she says.
While she cannot discuss details of the case because of the ongoing review, Vickie does not believe her birth mother was responsible. ‘What she knew or didn’t know, I cannot say. But I do not believe she killed my sister,’ she says.
‘I will fight until my last breath to make sure Stacey isn’t forgotten. People talk about cold cases as though they’re files gathering dust on a shelf. But Stacey wasn’t just a case. She was my little sister.’
* To support Stacey’s Law visit petition.parliament.uk/petitions/765952