The minute they received the call saying their teenage daughter Leah hadn’t turned up for work, Claire and John Croucher instinctively knew they would never see her again.
In a case that shocked the nation, 19-year-old Leah disappeared while walking from her home in Emerson Valley, Milton Keynes, to work on 15 February 2019.
When John received a call from Leah’s work friend at 5.10pm asking if he knew where she was, his blood ran cold. The teenager lived with her parents and they would have known if she was ill at home that day.
Neither Claire nor John could reach her by phone.
‘We knew this wasn’t Leah. She hadn’t run away. She came from a loving home and we were going on holiday to Cape Verde 10 days later. We were all packing. She’d been out and bought some new holiday clothes,’ John, 53, tells Metro.
The couple rushed home from their respective workplaces to find Leah’s curtains open, her bed neatly made, her passport in a drawer and £500 worth of foreign currency safely stowed. There were no signs she’d run away.
Claire and John were distraught, as were Leah’s older brother Haydon and sister Jade. They were half-siblings from a previous relationship, but the family were as close as they could be, adds John.
The family called the police that evening and a missing person investigation was launched.
For weeks, Haydon walked around Milton Keynes in a high-vis jacket with ‘Have You Seen Leah’ printed on the back, while he and Jade handed out leaflets and put up posters and banners.
Despite their efforts, online suspicion turned towards Haydon and John.
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‘I had to turn myself off from it because all I was interested in was finding my daughter. What disturbed me even more was when they started on my son. That really hurt,’ John remembers.
‘They accused him of throwing her down the stairs because she might have been pregnant, and said I’d helped him hide her body. Just absolute fictitious rubbish.’
As weeks turned into months with no sign of Leah, Haydon’s mental health spiralled and he told Jade he couldn’t cope with the anguish.
On Thursday 14 November 2019, Jade and his mum Tracey found him in his flat. He had taken his own life.
John believes the trolling contributed to his death.
‘Haydon was diagnosed bipolar, Leah went missing and he just couldn’t cope. And then he kept reading what everyone was writing about him.
‘If you’re already suffering from mental illness anyway, it’s going to prey on you. It did contribute to his downfall.’
‘It just felt like a complete dream and a nightmare’
Losing Haydon while already trapped between hope, grief and terror over Leah’s disappearance caused the family unimaginable pain.
John explains: ‘It just felt like a complete dream and a nightmare, like the entire world was spinning around me, and nothing felt real. I was in complete shock, but trying to keep it together for Claire and Jade.’
‘There’s no words that can describe it – you are completely and utterly broken, but you have to carry on.’
Claire, 51, tells Metro: ‘The only way to cope was that you couldn’t think of both children at the same time. While we’re thinking of Leah, we feel guilty that we’re not thinking of Haydon.
‘While we think of Haydon, we feel guilty about Leah.’
‘You couldn’t take them both at the same time because it was just physically too much for your brain to manage.’
Meanwhile, Leah remained missing, as armchair sleuths and online trolls continued to spout their theories.
The family hunted Birmingham on a false lead and sent police to friends and acquaintances.
‘I had no loyalty to anybody. I wanted to find her if she was out there, but it felt like an empty act giving the police ideas of where to look for her because deep down I knew they weren’t going to find her there,’ says Claire.
For years, the family lived in limbo.
Each day, Claire would go downstairs, make tea, light a cigarette and go into the garden to call Leah, leaving tearful messages asking her to come home. But it was false hope, she concedes. She knew Leah wasn’t getting the messages.
Worst-case scenarios whirled around her mind: she believed Leah had either been kidnapped and sex trafficked, or murdered.
Meanwhile, the family – who are sharing their story in the U and U&W documentary The Search for Leah Croucher: A Parent’s Nightmare – endured more cruel trolling, hoaxes and ransom messages.
‘You hold on to that little grain of hope [that she is still alive], and it just festers. I didn’t realise how much hope we had until the night we were told she’d been murdered,’ Claire says.
On Monday 10 October 2022, more than three and a half years after Leah was last seen, a contractor contacted police after a landlord living abroad asked him to investigate a foul odour at an address minutes from Leah’s home. He found black bags in the loft surrounded by dried blood.
‘Our world had already ended’
As soon as family liaison officers arrived at their home, Claire, John and Jade knew their daughter’s body had been found.
Leah and personal belongings were discovered at the address, less than half a mile from her home. Outside, attached to a telephone pole, was a missing poster bearing the teenager’s face.
‘We were just in despair. Our world had already ended. This was a different hurt,’ John says.
‘I stood outside in the garden thinking to myself, I can’t believe how much hope I had, and I can’t believe how stupid I was to have that hope because I knew it was rubbish. Why did I let it grow over the past four years?’
‘It’s been the most difficult experience of our life ever, and I wouldn’t ever wish it on my worst enemy,’ Claire adds tearfully.
Four days after Leah was discovered, Thames Valley Police said they believed a man named Neil Maxwell had killed her.
He had previous convictions for sexual offenses against women and girls and was wanted for sexual assault in 2018. He was found dead on 20 April 2019, having taken his own life two months after Leah went missing.
‘What he did to her is unspeakable. We have to live with that.,’ says John.
Five months after her body was found, the Crouchers went ‘all out’ on their daughter’s funeral, giving her the celebration they would never be able to give her through birthdays or a wedding.
Hundreds of people lined the streets of Milton Keynes to say goodbye as Leah’s coffin, draped in Harry Potter heraldry, was carried in an ornate carriage drawn by black horses. But there was still no peace for the family.
An inquest in 2024 found failings in the monitoring of Maxwell, a convicted sex offender. The coroner concluded Leah was ‘unlawfully killed’ by Maxwell, that she was most likely the victim of an ‘unwarranted sex attack’ and that failures in his monitoring by the probation service and police ‘may have played a part’ in her death.
When a probation representative explained that the systemic failings that had allowed Maxwell to slip through the net had not been repaired, meaning it could happen again, there was an audible gasp from the public.
John says living with the fact that the authorities failed to look after their daughter is a ‘horrific’ burden, and the family are appalled by plans to release sex offenders back into the community through the early release scheme.
They want people to sign their petition for Leah’s Law: a mandatory minimum prison sentence for anyone convicted of a third sexual offense.
Mandatory minimums already exist for domestic burglary and Class A drug trafficking.
‘There’s no justifiable reason sexual offending should be treated more leniently. By a third conviction, it is self-evident that the offender has not been sufficiently deterred from further offending.
‘Nobody should have to endure what we’ve gone through,’ John says quietly.
‘We’ve got one child left, and we want to keep her safe. I worry every time she goes out and about down to the local shop to buy a pint of milk,’ adds Claire.
‘I know how many pedophiles and sex offenders that are walking around the streets. We could lose a third child, that is the terror that we have. I want some reassurances that the one child we have left is safe, and I don’t have that.’
When asked how they keep going in the face of such dreadful grief? Claire admits they have no other option.
‘That monster took our daughter, and he took John’s son. He’s not getting us as well.’
You can watch The Search for Leah Croucher: A Parent’s Nightmare on U and U&W on 13 and 14 October.