The Disappearance and Murder of Tia Sharp
In 2012 Tia Sharp disappeared and was later found murdered, what happened to her and how it happened shocked people everywhere.
Tia was born on June 30th, 2000 in London, Croydon. Her mother was very young when she had her so Tia’s grandmother Christine parented alongside her mother. They were described as three best friends before they were mother, daughter and grandmother as they were an extremely tight nit family. Tia was described as a very vibrant young girl, she was extremely confident and when she walked into a room you knew she was there. She would always make jokes and was not afraid to share her opinion.
Natalie often smoked cannabis and the family was seen as quite dysfunctional even though they were very happy and there were no signs of abuse or neglect. In 2002, Natalie started seeing 27-year-old Stuart Hazell but the relationship only lasted a matter of weeks. However, Stuart ended up with Natalie’s mother Christine just a few months later which lasted a considerably long amount of time. Although this changed the family dynamic Stuart had a very positive impact on the family with Tia and her two younger brothers saw him as their grandfather.
Tia loved her home because it was filled with toys but she did like her own space, hence why she enjoyed being at her grandparent’s house as she could have her own room with a PlayStation. Her grandmother Christine would often work nightshifts so a lot of the time Tia was left with her grandfather Stuart but she was comfortable with him and he was very well integrated into the family.
At Tia’s 12th birthday celebration Natalie gave her the option to have three friends over but she decided she wanted to go to her grandparents’ house instead. Tia was so excited she messaged her grandparents that she was going to stay over and Stuart replied that Christine had a night shift but she is fine to stay over. The following day Natalie dropped Tia off at the tram which she got on to her grandparent’s house. From there Tia and Stuart went shopping for some food for the next few days. They were having a great start to the weekend, Christine called Stuart whilst she was at work to check in and he told her he had just made them dinner and she could hear Tia laughing in the background whilst playing on the Playstation.
The Disappearance
The next morning on August 3rd Christine returned home from her night shift and Stuart informed her Tia had gone out into Croydon town to see a friend. By 6:00 pm that night Tia still had not returned and Christine grew concerned, wondering why she had been out for so long. With that, she called Natalie querying whether she had come to pick Tia up but she had not so naturally panic set in. Natalie, Christine and Stuart all got in a car and set out to search the surrounding areas just in case she was out on the streets playing with a friend which would be perfectly reasonable as it was summertime so she may have forgotten to message.
Nevertheless, by 10:00 pm it became evident that the police needed to get involved as the severity of the situation began to grow. They went to the police station and filed a missing person report. As Stuart was the last person to see Tia before she went shopping he was a person of interest.
Immediately the grandparent's home was searched since that was the last confirmed place she was seen, the police did not find anything which could help them apart from Tia’s phone which was found in her room. They were initially suspicious as to why she would leave her phone when she was going out but presumed she had just forgotten it and had made the plans with a friend before leaving.
The search for 12-year-old Tia Sharp became huge news, her family printed T-shirts, created posters and banners plastered with Tia’s face to get the word out about her disappearance. Hundreds of people volunteered to help with the search yet four days went by and there was still no sign of Tia. 800 hours of CCTV footage was collected to try and follow Tia’s steps from her grandparents’ house into town. Be that as it may, none of the footage from buses, trams or shops along the way have any images of Tia. They also checked the shopping centre footage and she was not seen, it was as if she had disappeared into thin air.
Nonetheless, police still had reason to believe that she did leave the house that day as Stuart and Christine’s neighbour confirmed that he had seen her leaving the house. In missing children cases the family is always looked at first to rule them out so the police checked the grandparents’ house again but this time with sniffer dogs but the dogs did not pick up on anything.
Stuart Hazell felt that police and the general public were treating him as a suspect and looking at him under a microscope. He decided to clear his name by going on TV six days after Tia’s disappearance on August 9th, he defended himself against any rumours and also begged for Tia’s safe return. Once the interview was over police got a body language expert to look over the interview footage to see if there was anything suspicious. They concluded it was inconsistent with that of a concerned family member and seemed extremely animated as if he was trying to convince someone of the story he was telling.
The universal gesture for ‘I don’t know’ is shrugging but when Stuart was answering yes to questions he would shrug his shoulders. He was also spewing meaningless facts trying to fill in every detail and not make any mistakes which is unusual if you are telling a true story you miss parts or go back to things you want to correct. So, it seemed completely rehearsed. In a normal conversation, the average person will blink 20 times per minute but in this interview, Stuart's blinking rate was around 40–45times per minute which is double what it should be signifying he was nervous.
As a result of the suspicious interview, police told Christine and Stuart they would search their house for the fourth time, they informed them a forensics team would come over to search the home for DNA.
That morning on August 10th, 2012, Stuart woke up early and told Christine he was going to buy the newspaper from the local shop. When Christine got up she noticed a very strong smell travelling throughout the house. She searched the fridge, under the furniture and cleaned out the drains to try and find the source of the smell but she could not find it. A few hours later the police arrive at the house and Christine tells them about the smell, they immediately get a bad feeling and sent the forensic team in.
Tia Found and an Investigation Begins
The forensics team followed the smell up to the attic and pushed to the side of the loft they found Tia’s body.
Her body had been there for a full week, decomposing 12 feet above her mother, family, reporters and police. Her body was wrapped up in a black bedsheet and black bin liners, it was taped so tightly to avoid any smell coming out. Her body was immediately taken for post mortem but due to the level of decomposition, it was extremely difficult to identify her body. As her body had been wrapped up so tightly in the summer heat she was visually unrecognizable. For this reason, they had to identify Tia Sharp using dental records.
The police decided it was in Tia’s family's best interest to not see her body in that state as it would be too scarring for them. So, the last time Natalie saw her daughter was the day she put her on the tram to her grandparents’ house. As a result of the level of decomposition, her cause of death has never been identified but it is believed that she was smothered, possibly by a pillow, but suffocated in some sort of way.
Hours had gone by from police’s initial discovery of Tia’s body and Stuart had still not returned from going to get newspapers. This made him the police’s prime suspect. On the day he knew the police would be forensically searching the house he had conveniently gone out. Quickly a London-wide search began looking for Stuart and police swiftly got word he was on a train heading to Central London. It was put out on the radio and TV that police were looking for him. His face was already well known as Tia had been missing for a week and he had done public appeals with the family as well as the interview a couple of days before.
He was spotted very intoxicated in a corner shop in Central London trying to buy more vodka and speaking to people in the shop asking him to find his granddaughter. The shopkeeper recognised him and alerted the police but by the time police arrived he had left.
Police bought sniffer dogs to track down his scent and found him laying down on the floor under some bushes in a local park drinking vodka. He was arrested on suspicion of her murder, Christine was also arrested because police believed they may have done it together. After two days Christine was released on bail because they did not have enough evidence that she was involved in Tia’s murder. For a long time, she was not allowed near Natalie, her other children or her grandchildren nevertheless shortly after she was completely cleared from any part in Tia’s murder.
They continued the search of the house and found all of Tia’s clothes bagged up in the loft/attic and a separate bag with Tia’s broken glasses in. Police also found an SD card pushed into a door frame of the ground floor of the house which was purposely hidden by someone, so they took it to the police station.
Meanwhile, Stuart’s questioning was underway but his version of events had changed completely to the version he was giving over the last week. He claimed he and Tia had been playing and Tia fell down the stairs at this time he was on a mixture of cannabis and alcohol so he passed out moments later. It was not until he woke up the next morning and saw Tia still laying on the floor that he realised she was dead.
Ashamed and upset, he felt guilty that he was intoxicated and could not build the strength to tell Natalie and Christine what had happened under his supervision. So, instead of telling them the truth about the accident, he decided to pretend that Tia was missing. He undressed her, put her body in bin liners, wrapped it in tape and bought her body to the loft. Alongside this, he took her clothes and glasses and put them in separate bags. Police had looked at the SD card and from what they had found knew that Stuart was not telling the truth as he had a clear motive for killing Tia.
The Truth and The Trial
The police found hundreds of images of young girls, including Tia herself and revealing pictures and videos of Stuart pleasuring himself. The girls in these videos looked very similar to Tia, with dark hair and glasses. None of them looked any older than 13. It was very clear he had an attraction to young girls and Tia specifically.
In one of the videos of Tia, she was applying moisturiser to her legs and was completely unaware she was being filmed. He had taken another video whilst Tia was asleep, he stalked his way around the bed, shoving the camera in her face. Every time Tia stirred or made a noise he would pull away because he knew what he was doing was wrong.
These were videos of a young girl he had bought up as his granddaughter since she was 2 years old. She loved him and had no idea his intentions for their relationship were completely different in his eyes. The videos that depicted Stuart performing sexual acts on himself included the use of objects that were recovered from the house. A vibrator was recovered from the home, and when tested the blood DNA belonged to 12-year-old Tia Sharp showing the murder was sexually motivated.
Stuart Hazell’s search history revealed he regularly looked for incest, paedophile and rape porn; displaying a clear pattern of inappropriate interests.
Pathologists looked at the last picture that was recovered of Tia Sharp which suggested from the blood pooling already on her body she was already dead at the time the photo was taken. This picture is extremely disturbing. Stuart had positioned her body in a sexual position and taken the photo from a specific angle to prolong the sexual gratification he received from the murder. He probably looked at the photo several times following Tia’s murder.
Almost a year after her murder the trial began in which Stuart Hazell pled not guilty. Even though he was very confident in his plea, throughout his trial he refused to look at Natalie and Christine.
When the photos from the SD card were shown in court several people including Natalie had to leave because they were crying so much. Observing the extent of the violation he had done to this innocent 12-year-old girl that he raised as a granddaughter, that she trusted and seeing what he did after she was dead was too much for the entire courtroom.
A few days into the trial Stuart changed his plea to guilty of murder for the simple reason he was too scared and did not want to deal with the cross-examination of his story. If he pled not guilty he would have to tell the courtroom his version of events of Tia falling down the stairs and asked numerous questions regarding this. He knew he could not handle this because his story was inherently dishonest.
The prosecution contended that Stuart Hazell killed Tia Sharp after he made sexual advancements towards her, which made her extremely uncomfortable as she could not consent. She then probably threatened to tell someone so he killed her to avoid this happening. Sadly, someone she probably trusted the most in the world had such terrible intentions for her.
On May 14th, 2013, Stuart was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 38 years, so he will be 75 years old when he is eligible for parole. Whether he gets it or not is a different question.
Additionally, the neighbour who stated he saw Tia leave that day was sentenced to 5 months in prison for wasting police time as he could not have seen her leave because she was already dead. He specifically said it was Tia he saw leaving the house not a random girl but why he lied to the police is still unknown. The police were more inclined to believe Stuart’s story that Tia left the house that day based on the neighbours’ account of events.
If they had known it was a lie they could have forensically searched the house sooner and questioned him more in-depth, potentially learning what happened earlier. Tia Sharp was a kind, young girl who had her life taken away from her by somebody she trusted and called her grandad. He became an integral part of the family over the years and when Tia went missing he pleaded with people to help find her yet he knew where she was all along. Stuart’s sick fantasies ultimately became a reality and led to the untimely death of Tia.