‘We can’t grieve properly’: Daughter wants face-to-face with mother’s killer to ask where her body is

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A heartbroken daughter has revealed she wants to visit a double killer in prison to make a desperate appeal for him to reveal where he hid her mother’s body.

Savannah Holm said she can’t grieve properly until she is able to lay her “one in a million” mother Fiona Holm to rest after she was murdered by abusive handyman Carl Cooper.

Mystery remains over how the slight 66-year-old disposed of Fiona’s body without detection after she was killed in his rented garden flat in a Victorian terrace on a leafy residential street in Catford, southeast London, last June.

By the time police searched the property the following month he had carried out a “wholesale redecoration” of his living room, cutting down the net curtains, stripping the wallpaper and setting a series of fires in the garden as he covered his tracks.

But forensic analysis identified Fiona’s blood in multiple locations, including the walls, door and a wifi router.

Last month he was jailed for life with a minimum of 35 years for murdering Fiona, 48, and a previous partner Naomi Hunte, 41, the year before. Prosecutor Joel Smith KC told the jury: “Ms Holm was killed in the flat. She bled in the flat.”

Savannah, 27, the eldest of Fiona’s four children, said her mother’s body not being found “doesn’t make sense” as she revealed she fears Cooper may have dumped it in part of a sectional sofa he had taken to the tip during the clean-up.

By the time police tracked the white leather corner sofa to the local tip, it had been shipped to Sweden where it was incinerated.

“For some reason, I just keep thinking that my mum is in that sofa,” Savannah said. “When you have a look at the video of the man taking the sofa out… it looks heavy. It’s just a theory but we don’t know.”

Now she plans to challenge her mother’s killer face to face after she applied to visit him in prison.

“I have requested to speak to him because I feel like he’s the only one who can put us out of our misery,” she told The Independent.

“I think even if he doesn’t say where she is he could at least tell me, you know, his last moments with my mum. I know if it was me who murdered someone I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

She spoke of the family’s anguish at being denied the opportunity to lay Fiona – described as a “funny, kind and generous” woman who would go out of her way to help anyone – to rest with a proper funeral.

“The worst thing about it is because we still don’t know where she is we are still waiting for her death certificate,” she added.

“We are still going to have to go and empty out her house and try to sort out all of her stuff.

“It’s like we can’t grieve properly – it’s like there is a big hole there.”

Fiona’s sister Elise Skillen, 39, added: “I thought after the trial it might be a bit easier but it’s actually harder. We still don’t know the exact day she died and where she is. And that’s the worst thing. Because no one deserves to be killed. She’s my sister and she’s just out there.

“How are we supposed to move on? We will always be waiting for this phone call. It could be 10 years. Even the little kids don’t understand. My son asked the other day why has Auntie Fiona not had a funeral.”

The family hit out at police failures to protect Fiona from the controlling and abusive killer, who had been released under investigation for Ms Hunte’s murder 16 months earlier when he killed for a second time.

Both women had reported him to the police for domestic abuse.

Fiona was last seen on CCTV at an off-licence near Cooper’s flat on Broadfield Road at 10.48pm on 20 June last year, while her bank card was used to withdraw £40 nearby at 11.11pm.

“I think he thought Fiona didn’t have a big family and people who cared about her. I think he thought he was going to get away with it again,” Ms Skillen said.

The Metropolitan Police investigation into the search for Fiona is ongoing, and there is a £20,000 police reward for information which leads to her remains being found.

Following Cooper’s conviction, Detective Chief Inspector Kate Blackburn of the Met’s Specialist Crime Command said: “The trial being over does not mean that our efforts to find Fiona will stop.

“Despite Cooper cruelly denying Fiona’s family the opportunity to bury her, my team and I are, and will remain, committed to finding Fiona and returning her to her family.

“We also will continue to investigate the possibility that Cooper had help to remove Fiona’s body, and will arrest and charge those I have sufficient evidence to do so.”