The police were watching him leave the station, and the journey made no sense at all. A month after Laura vanished, her husband climbed onto a local bus and rode three miles down the coast to a small seaside town. He crossed the road, waited at the opposite stop, and rode straight back. Nothing about that trip looked normal.
But nothing about Hassan Al-Shaddanawi had ever been what it seemed. Laura May Vaughan was twenty-six when she answered a lonely hearts ad that read: “Doctor wants to meet English princess. ” She had grown up in Hartlepool, worked for a travel agency, and dreamed of far-off places. She wanted love, and she thought she had finally found it.
Within two years, she and this charming, well-spoken man were back in Hartlepool, living with her father. He called himself a doctor, a property developer, an entrepreneur. He owned houses. He ran a carpet shop.
He planted Christmas trees on a plot of land. Nobody had a bad word to say about Laura. Kind, warm, gentle. Maybe a little naive.
She had a son, Rashid, and she was studying travel and tourism, hoping to better herself. Then, on the morning of June 15, 1993, she dropped seven-year-old Rashid at school and went to college to sit an exam. She never came home. That evening, she was supposed to meet her husband.
He told her father she was working late. Days passed. No word, no phone call, no postcard. Her car sat parked outside the family home.
Her passport had never been used. Her bank cards had never been touched. Her husband insisted she had simply gone on holiday somewhere in the Middle East. Her family pushed him to report her missing.
He resisted, again and again. Finally, after twenty-three days, on the 8th of July, he walked into a police station. The detectives who interviewed him were struck by how calm he was. No tears.
No urgency. Just a smooth, polite account of a vanishing wife. They took a statement that ran to nearly fifty pages. Part way through, he told them he had a prior appointment and left the station.
They followed him. That’s when they saw him board the bus, travel to Seaton Carew, stare at an allotment, and return. He claimed he didn’t drive. Strangers called in to say they had seen him driving.
He claimed he was a qualified doctor. The police found he had no medical credentials. He claimed to be a devoted husband. The public began to reveal that he was nothing of the sort.
Then the call came that changed everything. A local tradesman told police that Hassan had paid him to take away a brand-new shed from his allotment and burn it. The shed had only been built the day before Laura disappeared. It had no windows.
Just a door. The workman had decided the shed was too good to burn, so he took it apart and sold it to a man in Middlesbrough. Forensic officers dismantled the shed again and took it to their laboratory. In the middle of the floor, the boards had been gouged out with a hammer and chisel, then covered with a thick layer of creosote.
Beneath the damage, between the slats, they found head hair and blood. Not just a cut. Significant blood loss. Something very serious had happened in that shed.
Even then, investigators couldn’t prove the blood belonged to Laura. DNA techniques were new and difficult. Initial attempts failed. But they had enough to arrest him.
When he saw photographs of the shed floor, Hassan was visibly shocked. He hadn’t believed the police would ever find it. At first, he answered questions. Then he stopped.
Meanwhile, the police uncovered the motive. While married to Laura, Hassan had started a second relationship in 1988 with a woman he met at a bus stop. He had a secret child with her. He had told her his marriage was effectively over.
When social services became involved and threatened to take the child into care, Hassan stood up in a Leeds family court and claimed his wife knew all about the affair. Laura’s neighbors later said they heard an almighty row coming from the family home shortly before she vanished. Rashid remembers it now as the worst memory of his childhood. “I just remember me dad attacking me mom.
Then he set about me. ”
He now believes that was the day his mother learned the truth. And that is why she disappeared. Two days after that fight, Hassan met with his lover and a social worker to say he was ready to move in with his second family.
If killing Laura meant he kept his sons, that was a price he was willing to pay. The women were expendable. The boys were everything. In October 1994, Hassan stood trial in Newcastle for the murder of his wife.
He showed no concern. He seemed sure of himself. He knew they didn’t have a body. Without a body, getting a conviction is hard.
But the prosecution had a dramatic piece of evidence. They reconstructed the shed inside the courtroom, in full view of the jury. Then came the breakthrough. A new Home Office-approved technique allowed scientists to extract a DNA profile from the blood on the shed floor.
They had no confirmed sample from Laura to compare it with. So they took DNA from her son Rashid and her father. The results matched. To be certain, they asked Laura’s father for any mail she had sent.
He found an old postcard from Malta, mailed five years earlier. Laura had licked the stamp. The DNA from the gum of that stamp matched the blood in the shed. It was a watertight case.
The defense tried to argue that witness sightings meant Laura might still be alive. The jury deliberated for two days and returned a guilty verdict by a majority of ten to one. The judge said: “You deprived your son of his mother. This is a wicked crime.
”
Hassan was sentenced to life with a minimum of sixteen years. For nine-year-old Rashid, the verdict brought no relief. “To me, both me parents had gone. I lost both me parents that day.
”
He moved to Durham to live with his great-aunt. He had to make new friends, start a new school, rebuild his entire life. For years, he had nightmares. But the hardest part has never gone away.
Laura’s body was never found. Hassan has never shown remorse. He has never told anyone where her remains are. When Laura’s family begged him for an answer, he gave them nothing.
In 2005, police received a tip that Laura had been buried on Seaton Carew Golf Course. They dug up what they thought was her body. It turned out to be the remains of her German dog. In 2013, Rashid received a phone call from the probation service.
His father had been freed and deported back to Jordan. The parole board had said Hassan was still dangerous, but the Home Office sent him home anyway. He continued to protest his innocence fully to the end. Today, Rashid has a headstone with his mother’s name on it.
He and his young son visit it. They let off a balloon and lay flowers down. He still just wants one thing. “I just want to know where me mom is.
That’s all I want. I just want to finally bury her. ”
But the man who took her has never said a word.
