Anguish of the parents who came so close to saving free-spirited Sarah who went off to explore India: So many of us have been there. But this story had an impossibly cruel twist...
Victor Groves took the call at 5.43am
last Saturday. The time is important, because at that moment life as
they knew it stopped for Victor and his wife, Kate. Now their lives will
forever be defined by ‘before and after’ 5.43am — when they learned
that their daughter, Sarah, had been murdered while travelling in
Kashmir.
They had begged 24-year-old Sarah not to go to the region. Ownership of the territory is under dispute by India and Pakistan, and the area has for many years been targeted by terrorists and militants.
So fearful were Mr and Mrs Groves for their daughter’s safety that they had booked a trip to Nepal, where they were planning to meet her at the base camp of Mount Everest next Friday.
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The trip was arranged
specifically to persuade Sarah to leave Kashmir, but tragically she died
before that planned reunion with her parents.
As well as being grief-stricken over her death, her parents have had to endure the agonising and inevitable ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’.
What if they’d flown out to Nepal two weeks earlier? If only they’d just got on a plane and dragged her away from there.
Yet it wasn’t an act of terrorism that led to her death, as they had so feared, but a chance encounter with a deranged 7ft Dutchman by the name of Richard de Wit.
Two days before the murder, De Wit, 43, booked onto the New Beauty houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Sarah had been staying on the boat for a month with her new boyfriend, Saeed Ahmed Shoda, whom she had met on her travels, and his family.
In the early hours of Saturday
morning, De Wit broke into Sarah’s room and stabbed her more than 40
times. He tried to flee, but was arrested by police hours later.
Today he remains in custody, but has not yet been formally charged with murder. Police say he has confessed to the killing. Immediately after his arrest, De Wit apparently told them ‘the Devil took hold of my body’.
But in a dramatic development yesterday, police revealed that De Wit had bought the knife with which he stabbed Sarah hours before the killing, suggesting it was a premeditated act. It had initially been believed he already had the knife in his possession when he arrived in Kashmir.
The Mail has established that De Wit bought a so-called ‘Rambo’ knife at the Fayaz Hard Store in Srinagar. ‘The foreigner came into our shop and asked for a knife,’ the shop owner told the Mail. ‘I had no idea why he wanted a knife or what was his intention.’
Ahfad Ul Mujtaba, deputy inspector general of Kashmir Police, said: ‘Our investigation team has found that the murder weapon — a 12in knife — was not on Mr De Wit as he travelled into the state.
‘He had, in fact, bought it from a shop in Srinagar. He revealed this information to my officers after continuing questioning.
‘It would now seem that Mr De Wit had prepared way in advance and had planned to kill the girl.’
Certainly, it is interesting to note that in his ‘possessed’ state after the murder, De Wit had the presence of mind to grab his passport and stuff £2,000 cash into his underwear before he fled the scene.
This week, those who knew Sarah spoke of her warmth, kindness and infectious enthusiasm for life. To her friends, her violent death in a remote corner of India is as incomprehensible as it is senseless and unjust.
For her parents, it is a catastrophe from which recovery is impossible. This is Mr and Mrs Groves’s personal tragedy, but every parent who read about their daughter’s murder in a far corner of the world will have felt chilled.
The
story will have particular resonance for the parents of intrepid
middle-class girls yearning to explore the world on far-flung
adventures.
Sarah was born in Manchester in 1988, moving to Guernsey when she was four with her parents.
Both Mr and Mrs Groves have been married before and Mr Groves has two sons from his previous marriage.
Mr Groves, 70, was a successful businessman who owned a number of IT companies. Sarah and her older half-brothers, Ben, 26, and Tom, 31, grew up in a large manor house on the island.
Sarah was educated at two prestigious independent Catholic schools, first at Blanchelande College in Guernsey, then as a boarder at the £30,000-a-year St Mary’s College in Ascot, Berkshire.
She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London before returning to Guernsey, having decided to become a fitness instructor.
After qualifying, she worked for two years at the five-star Old Government House Hotel, leaving last August after deciding to go travelling.
In October, she arrived in Tanzania, where she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, before flying to New Delhi in February this year. She was undeterred by Foreign Office advice that women should use caution when travelling in India; there have been a number of sexual attacks against British women in the country including in Goa, where Sarah travelled after Delhi.
In Goa, Sarah met Saeed Shoda, 25, a Kashmiri who was on holiday there. They became besotted with each other, and Saeed invited her to stay on his parents’ houseboat on Dal Lake.
Sarah had been planning to go on to Sri Lanka, but was so taken with Saeed that she agreed to change her plans.
Sarah’s parents were besides themselves with worry when she told them she was heading to Kashmir. What parent wouldn’t be concerned about their daughter travelling to a place with such a troubled history, to stay with a family they knew nothing about?
‘We tried so hard to stop her going,’ Mr Groves told the press conference. ‘It is nothing against the guy, but sadly she met someone and, instead of going to Sri Lanka, she went north.’
Sarah travelled to Kashmir last month and moved onto the New Beauty houseboat, which has a number of basic, furnished rooms for rent to tourists.
She seemed to
settle in well enough with Saeed’s family. She helped his mother,
Hafiza, paint the railings on the deck in preparation for the summer
visitors, calling her ‘mother’ in Kashmiri.
She spoke to her parents nearly every day on the phone, but those conversations did not assuage their fears for their daughter.
Victor and Kate, 66, decided to book a trip to Nepal — and persuaded Sarah to meet them there as a way of enticing her away from Kashmir.
‘We didn’t want to separate them [Sarah and Saeed] long-term, but Sarah wanted to see so many places and she got caught up in something which meant she only saw two places,’ Mr Groves told the press conference.
He also spoke heart-rendingly of the close bond between Sarah and her mother.
‘The relationship between Sarah and my wife, Kate, was always very, very close. They made each other laugh all the time,’ he said.
On Thursday of last week, De Wit turned up at Dal Lake and booked into the New Beauty houseboat.
The following day, Saeed left to visit friends for a couple of days. He says he invited Sarah to go with him, but she chose to stay behind.
Sarah and De Wit were the only guests on the houseboat, in a stroke of appalling bad luck for her.
De Wit had been regarded as odd for a long time, but by now he was psychotic.
In the Nineties, he became a councillor for an extreme Right-wing party in his home town of Ridderkerk. In 2000 he met his future wife, Uma Rupanya, while on holiday in Thailand. They had two daughters before marrying in November 2002.
Over the last two years or so, De Wit had been showing increasing signs of paranoia. He was under psychiatric care and taking anti-psychotic medication. Last October, he abandoned his wife and children to go travelling. In a video posted on YouTube from Zurich in December last year, De Wit said he had been receiving psychiatric treatment, but believed his doctors had been acting on behalf of the security services to spy on him and others.
He claimed to have been visited by intelligence agents who believed he was a far-Right republican posing a threat to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
De Wit was quite clearly deranged, though whether his doctors made any attempts to locate him after his disappearance is not known.
This week, his wife said he had stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication and had begun smoking cannabis.
Sarah was introduced to De Wit
on the Friday, when they had a brief chat. According to one local who
spoke to Saeed’s family, Sarah had borrowed the Dutchman’s camera and
put her memory card into it, although this has not been confirmed.
Could it be that this innocuous act fuelled the paranoid delusions in the Dutchman’s mind, and he thought she was spying on him?
What is known is that before he attacked Sarah, he had taken drugs — reportedly heroin or cannabis.
On the Friday evening, Sarah shared a vegetable stew with the Shoda family in their corrugated hut beside the houseboat.
It seems Saeed’s mother was uneasy about Sarah staying alone on the houseboat with De Wit, and asked if she wanted to spend the night in her room. Sarah declined, saying she wanted to read her book.
In the early hours of the morning, she was disturbed by the Dutchman, who forced open the door to her room armed with a 12in knife. Sarah suffered 45 wounds to her body, most of them defensive cuts as she bravely tried to fight off her attacker. But she also received two fatal wounds, one to her neck and another to a lung, and bled to death.
The Shoda family were woken by
screams and what sounded like an argument. Saeed’s brother and father
ran to investigate, and found Sarah lying in a pool of blood in her
room.
Out on the river, they saw De Wit rowing a boat towards the shore, but it capsized, and he had to swim ashore. He flagged down a taxi but was arrested in Qazigund, 50 miles away, still wet and wearing no shoes.
Later, Saeed’s mother discovered a missed call on her mobile from Sarah, who had desperately phoned for help. A doctor from the post-mortem team who examined Sarah’s body, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Mail there was no sexual assault before she was killed.
Hours after his daughter’s death, Mr Groves took that terrible call at his Guernsey home.
‘It was dark, I didn’t know where the phone was, and I stumbled around to pick it up,’ he said. ‘Someone with an Indian accent said: “Mr Groves, your daughter is dead, she has been murdered.”
‘I didn’t know if it was genuine, and rather suspected it wasn’t, but the person on the other end of the phone seemed to know a lot about the situation.
‘I immediately called Guernsey Police, who confirmed two hours later that it was genuine.’
The Groves’s beautiful daughter had been taken from them in the most traumatic circumstances imaginable. On Tuesday, Sarah’s body was taken to Delhi and it is believed — though not confirmed — that it was repatriated to Britain later in the week.
In July 2012, Sarah had posted a message on Facebook that turned out to be tragically prophetic, in which she wrote: ‘Quit your job, buy a ticket, get a tan, fall in love, never return.’
Over the past week, her parents and brothers have managed to find some strength from the overwhelming support they have received from Sarah’s friends, and from many more people who did not know her.
She was a young woman adored by everyone, and those who knew her feel the loss acutely — none more than her grieving parents.
At the press conference earlier this week, Mr Groves, hunched over a desk, was a broken figure. Referring to his daughter’s murder, he said: ‘That’s where we are now and, sadly, where we will always be.’
A bleak and heart-rending statement of fact that no one, however much they would love to, can contradict.
They had begged 24-year-old Sarah not to go to the region. Ownership of the territory is under dispute by India and Pakistan, and the area has for many years been targeted by terrorists and militants.
So fearful were Mr and Mrs Groves for their daughter’s safety that they had booked a trip to Nepal, where they were planning to meet her at the base camp of Mount Everest next Friday.
Scroll down for video
Tragic: Sarah Groves, 24, from Guernsey, was found stabbed to death on a house boat in Dal Lake, in Srinigar, Kashmir
As well as being grief-stricken over her death, her parents have had to endure the agonising and inevitable ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’.
What if they’d flown out to Nepal two weeks earlier? If only they’d just got on a plane and dragged her away from there.
Yet it wasn’t an act of terrorism that led to her death, as they had so feared, but a chance encounter with a deranged 7ft Dutchman by the name of Richard de Wit.
Two days before the murder, De Wit, 43, booked onto the New Beauty houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Sarah had been staying on the boat for a month with her new boyfriend, Saeed Ahmed Shoda, whom she had met on her travels, and his family.
Confessed: Richard de Wit, 43 was arrested in connection with her murder
Today he remains in custody, but has not yet been formally charged with murder. Police say he has confessed to the killing. Immediately after his arrest, De Wit apparently told them ‘the Devil took hold of my body’.
But in a dramatic development yesterday, police revealed that De Wit had bought the knife with which he stabbed Sarah hours before the killing, suggesting it was a premeditated act. It had initially been believed he already had the knife in his possession when he arrived in Kashmir.
The Mail has established that De Wit bought a so-called ‘Rambo’ knife at the Fayaz Hard Store in Srinagar. ‘The foreigner came into our shop and asked for a knife,’ the shop owner told the Mail. ‘I had no idea why he wanted a knife or what was his intention.’
Ahfad Ul Mujtaba, deputy inspector general of Kashmir Police, said: ‘Our investigation team has found that the murder weapon — a 12in knife — was not on Mr De Wit as he travelled into the state.
‘He had, in fact, bought it from a shop in Srinagar. He revealed this information to my officers after continuing questioning.
‘It would now seem that Mr De Wit had prepared way in advance and had planned to kill the girl.’
Certainly, it is interesting to note that in his ‘possessed’ state after the murder, De Wit had the presence of mind to grab his passport and stuff £2,000 cash into his underwear before he fled the scene.
This week, those who knew Sarah spoke of her warmth, kindness and infectious enthusiasm for life. To her friends, her violent death in a remote corner of India is as incomprehensible as it is senseless and unjust.
For her parents, it is a catastrophe from which recovery is impossible. This is Mr and Mrs Groves’s personal tragedy, but every parent who read about their daughter’s murder in a far corner of the world will have felt chilled.
Sorrow: Mr Groves and his son Ben wept as they speak of the devastating impact Miss Groves' murder has had on the family
Grief: Victor Groves, centre, father of murdered
backpacker Sarah Groves, is flanked by his sons Ben, right, and Tom at a
press conference where he described the dawn phone call which told him
his daughter was dead
Sarah was born in Manchester in 1988, moving to Guernsey when she was four with her parents.
Both Mr and Mrs Groves have been married before and Mr Groves has two sons from his previous marriage.
Mr Groves, 70, was a successful businessman who owned a number of IT companies. Sarah and her older half-brothers, Ben, 26, and Tom, 31, grew up in a large manor house on the island.
Sarah was educated at two prestigious independent Catholic schools, first at Blanchelande College in Guernsey, then as a boarder at the £30,000-a-year St Mary’s College in Ascot, Berkshire.
She studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London before returning to Guernsey, having decided to become a fitness instructor.
After qualifying, she worked for two years at the five-star Old Government House Hotel, leaving last August after deciding to go travelling.
In October, she arrived in Tanzania, where she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, before flying to New Delhi in February this year. She was undeterred by Foreign Office advice that women should use caution when travelling in India; there have been a number of sexual attacks against British women in the country including in Goa, where Sarah travelled after Delhi.
Crime scene: Journalists and policemen stand
outside the houseboat where Miss Groves was found dead on Saturday, on
the Dal Lake in Srinagar, India
‘She
was happy, but we were keen that she didn’t stay too long,’ Mr Groves
said this week at an anguished press conference in Guernsey.In Goa, Sarah met Saeed Shoda, 25, a Kashmiri who was on holiday there. They became besotted with each other, and Saeed invited her to stay on his parents’ houseboat on Dal Lake.
Sarah had been planning to go on to Sri Lanka, but was so taken with Saeed that she agreed to change her plans.
Sarah’s parents were besides themselves with worry when she told them she was heading to Kashmir. What parent wouldn’t be concerned about their daughter travelling to a place with such a troubled history, to stay with a family they knew nothing about?
‘We tried so hard to stop her going,’ Mr Groves told the press conference. ‘It is nothing against the guy, but sadly she met someone and, instead of going to Sri Lanka, she went north.’
Sarah travelled to Kashmir last month and moved onto the New Beauty houseboat, which has a number of basic, furnished rooms for rent to tourists.
Fought for her life: The body of Sarah Groves,
who was stabbed to death on a houseboat in Kashmir, India was
transferred to Delhi today after doctors revealed she fought valiantly
for her life
She spoke to her parents nearly every day on the phone, but those conversations did not assuage their fears for their daughter.
Victor and Kate, 66, decided to book a trip to Nepal — and persuaded Sarah to meet them there as a way of enticing her away from Kashmir.
‘We didn’t want to separate them [Sarah and Saeed] long-term, but Sarah wanted to see so many places and she got caught up in something which meant she only saw two places,’ Mr Groves told the press conference.
He also spoke heart-rendingly of the close bond between Sarah and her mother.
‘The relationship between Sarah and my wife, Kate, was always very, very close. They made each other laugh all the time,’ he said.
On Thursday of last week, De Wit turned up at Dal Lake and booked into the New Beauty houseboat.
The following day, Saeed left to visit friends for a couple of days. He says he invited Sarah to go with him, but she chose to stay behind.
Sarah and De Wit were the only guests on the houseboat, in a stroke of appalling bad luck for her.
De Wit had been regarded as odd for a long time, but by now he was psychotic.
In the Nineties, he became a councillor for an extreme Right-wing party in his home town of Ridderkerk. In 2000 he met his future wife, Uma Rupanya, while on holiday in Thailand. They had two daughters before marrying in November 2002.
Over the last two years or so, De Wit had been showing increasing signs of paranoia. He was under psychiatric care and taking anti-psychotic medication. Last October, he abandoned his wife and children to go travelling. In a video posted on YouTube from Zurich in December last year, De Wit said he had been receiving psychiatric treatment, but believed his doctors had been acting on behalf of the security services to spy on him and others.
He claimed to have been visited by intelligence agents who believed he was a far-Right republican posing a threat to Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.
De Wit was quite clearly deranged, though whether his doctors made any attempts to locate him after his disappearance is not known.
This week, his wife said he had stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication and had begun smoking cannabis.
Love for life: Miss Groves' boyfriend, Saeed Ahmed Shoda, 26, says his life has been 'shut down' by her murder
Could it be that this innocuous act fuelled the paranoid delusions in the Dutchman’s mind, and he thought she was spying on him?
What is known is that before he attacked Sarah, he had taken drugs — reportedly heroin or cannabis.
On the Friday evening, Sarah shared a vegetable stew with the Shoda family in their corrugated hut beside the houseboat.
It seems Saeed’s mother was uneasy about Sarah staying alone on the houseboat with De Wit, and asked if she wanted to spend the night in her room. Sarah declined, saying she wanted to read her book.
In the early hours of the morning, she was disturbed by the Dutchman, who forced open the door to her room armed with a 12in knife. Sarah suffered 45 wounds to her body, most of them defensive cuts as she bravely tried to fight off her attacker. But she also received two fatal wounds, one to her neck and another to a lung, and bled to death.
Anger: Miss Groves Kashmiri boyfriend Saeed
Ahmed Shoda told ITV Daybreak of the moment he came face to face with
her suspected killer as both faced questioning over her death at the
local police station
VIDEO Sarah Groves boyfriends describes meeting suspected killer
Out on the river, they saw De Wit rowing a boat towards the shore, but it capsized, and he had to swim ashore. He flagged down a taxi but was arrested in Qazigund, 50 miles away, still wet and wearing no shoes.
Later, Saeed’s mother discovered a missed call on her mobile from Sarah, who had desperately phoned for help. A doctor from the post-mortem team who examined Sarah’s body, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Mail there was no sexual assault before she was killed.
Hours after his daughter’s death, Mr Groves took that terrible call at his Guernsey home.
‘It was dark, I didn’t know where the phone was, and I stumbled around to pick it up,’ he said. ‘Someone with an Indian accent said: “Mr Groves, your daughter is dead, she has been murdered.”
‘I didn’t know if it was genuine, and rather suspected it wasn’t, but the person on the other end of the phone seemed to know a lot about the situation.
‘I immediately called Guernsey Police, who confirmed two hours later that it was genuine.’
The Groves’s beautiful daughter had been taken from them in the most traumatic circumstances imaginable. On Tuesday, Sarah’s body was taken to Delhi and it is believed — though not confirmed — that it was repatriated to Britain later in the week.
In July 2012, Sarah had posted a message on Facebook that turned out to be tragically prophetic, in which she wrote: ‘Quit your job, buy a ticket, get a tan, fall in love, never return.’
Over the past week, her parents and brothers have managed to find some strength from the overwhelming support they have received from Sarah’s friends, and from many more people who did not know her.
She was a young woman adored by everyone, and those who knew her feel the loss acutely — none more than her grieving parents.
At the press conference earlier this week, Mr Groves, hunched over a desk, was a broken figure. Referring to his daughter’s murder, he said: ‘That’s where we are now and, sadly, where we will always be.’
A bleak and heart-rending statement of fact that no one, however much they would love to, can contradict.