I'm Rob Rinder and this unsolved murder case has stayed with me for 20 years

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

There are some cases that follow you home. Not immediately. At first they exist only as paperwork, evidence and legal argument. You tell yourself you’ve done your job professionally. You move on. Another client. Another trial.

But every so often, years later something returns uninvited: a face, a photograph, a fragment of testimony, a mother’s voice. For nearly 20 years that case for me has been the unsolved murder of Lucy Hargreaves.

Lucy was 22 when she was shot dead in her home in Liverpool in 2005. Afterwards, the killers set fire to the house. Upstairs, her partner and small child escaped through a window. Even now, writing those words, I feel the same chill I felt when I first read the case papers as a young criminal defence barrister.

The trial itself carried an atmosphere I have never forgotten. This was Liverpool at a moment of deep distrust between parts of the community and the police. Rumour travelled faster than evidence. Fear sat everywhere. Witnesses changed accounts or disappeared. Around the case hung the presence of organised criminality and intimidation.

At the same time, investigators were relying on relatively new forms of mobile phone evidence – cell site analysis, call patterns – the digital breadcrumbs of movement and association that have since become commonplace in trials.

I was junior counsel for the defence team. At the close of the prosecution case, the defence submitted there was no case to answer: in other words, that even taken at its highest the evidence could not properly sustain a conviction before a jury. The judge agreed. The case was stopped before the defence was ever called.

To non-lawyers that can sound like a trick, like justice interrupted by procedure, but it is one of the system’s most important safeguards. A jury should never be asked to convict on evidence incapable of safely sustaining guilt.

Afterwards I did what the profession requires of us. I said nothing publicly. Barristers are not pundits offering emotional commentary after the event. But silence does not mean indifference and Lucy’s case remained with me in ways I found difficult fully to explain even to myself.

People often ask how a barrister can defend somebody accused of something terrible. The answer is because the alternative is infinitely worse. Once a state starts imprisoning people because of suspicion, atmosphere or public certainty, freedom becomes conditional.

I grew up conscious that freedom and the rule of law are not inevitable things. My grandfather survived Nazi tyranny. He understood where societies can drift when fear overtakes principle and when states cease to be properly accountable. Perhaps that is one reason I have always believed so deeply in juries and due process.

Yet those principles do not make Lucy Hargreaves’s death any less horrifying. None of them erase what her family have lived with for 20 years.

Returning to this case for my new documentary forced me to confront something lawyers are trained to suppress: the emotional afterlife of a case. Criminal courts are designed to reach verdicts. Human beings do not work so neatly. Cases may conclude. Grief does not. Legal process has an ending. Loss doesn’t.

Meeting Lucy’s family for the first time was one of the most moving experiences of my professional life. There was extraordinary dignity in them but also something else: the exhaustion of people forced to carry unanswered questions for two decades.

You realise quickly that justice is not a television ending where everything resolves itself in a final act. Sometimes the law reaches the only conclusion it properly can and still leaves pain radiating in every direction.

Rob Rinder: The Crime I Can’t Forget is on Monday 8 June at 9pm on Crime + Investigation.

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