When a five-year-old Joanne Law awoke at her home near Newcastle on a March morning in 1973, she knew instantly that something was wrong. Instead of her loving mum lying next to her – they usually shared a bed – there was her father Gilbert, a violent schizophrenic whose erratic moods and vicious temper ruled their family.

‘He was fully clothed, his eyes totally wired. I asked him, “Where’s my mummy?” and he said, “She’s gone.” I didn’t understand. I thought he meant she had gone to the shops.

‘It was only later I started to realise she was never coming back.’ Joanne’s mum Ann, just 34, had indeed ‘gone’, never to be seen again.

Her disappearance triggered a catastrophic chain of events with far-reaching consequences for Joanne and her older brother, Trevor.

‘The loss of my mum has underpinned my whole life,’ says Joanne, the sadness evident in her voice. ‘I have missed her so much, but never more so than when I had children, when things went wrong, when I had breast cancer in my 40s. All those times you really need your mum.’

Worst of all, 52 years on, Ann’s body has never been found – and no one has ever been brought to justice: the result, Joanne believes, of a catalogue of police failures that horrified her so much that, aged 21, she became a detective herself.

‘Had her case been handled properly, I might not have spent 50 years wondering where my mum is buried,' says Joanne Law

‘I made the decision when I was 13: “I’m going to do your job and I’m going to do it better,”’ she says grimly. ‘I wanted answers. Even though I couldn’t save my own mum, I could save someone else’s.’

Now 57, Joanne retired from the police service as a detective sergeant in 2017, following 30 years’ service with a string of commendations to her name, much of it for her work with female victims.

After exhaustively searching the medical records, police statements and court records surrounding her mum’s disappearance, she now knows a great deal more but she still doesn’t have all the answers she craves.

What she did uncover is now the subject of a compelling and deeply moving six-part podcast, created with author and feminist campaigner Julie Bindel to mark the 52nd anniversary of Ann’s disappearance.

Entitled Dig Up Your Mam – a reference to the chilling night, nine years after Ann’s disappearance, when Gilbert called his son Trevor and asked him for help, using those very words – the series is both a tribute to Joanne’s lost mother and a rallying cry against misogyny.

‘Had her case been handled properly, I might not have spent 50 years wondering where my mum is buried,’ says Joanne. ‘Being a police officer gave me a unique perspective on the investigation – or lack of it. At times it’s been phenomenally frustrating.’

But this is also a story of courage and determination. Married with two grown-up children, the striking-looking Joanne Mackel, as she is now known, is enjoying her retirement in a beautiful home in Morpeth, Northumberland, following her successful career. Despite everything, she has built a happy life.

Yet the photos of her glamorous mother dotted around her home are a reminder of the enduring loss and heartache.

An identical twin, Ann and her sister Margaret were naïve, sweet-faced brunettes when they started dating local friends Gilbert – known as Ghilly – and Eric.

Joanne adds, ‘It was only later as a grown-up that I realised my dad was gay, and he loved Eric. I think the sisters were a cover for their relationship.’ Eric and Margaret would marry but later divorce.

Initially besotted with the tall, handsome and dapper man she’d married aged 22, Ann quickly discovered his dark side. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Ghilly often failed to take his medication and the relationship quickly descended into episodes of domestic violence, which only worsened when Trevor was born in 1964.

‘He was very possessive, and he didn’t like sharing her,’ Joanne says. ‘It’s clear from her medical records that he was forcing her into sex.’

Joanne at the age of four with her parents Ann and Gilbert

Despite being just a toddler, Joanne remembers witnessing much of the violence: ‘I saw him kick her to the ground or kick her in the belly. But on other occasions he was just staring into space. I think sometimes he didn’t have a clue what he was doing.’

There were happy times, though, courtesy of Ghilly’s job in the merchant navy, which took him away for months at a time. ‘When it was just me, Mam and Trevor, it was a completely different atmosphere,’ she recalls fondly. ‘We’d skip to school, flip pancakes. My mum had this very high-pitched giggle, and she was full of life and fun. But the moment Dad came back it was a different story.’

Today, Joanne thinks her father should have been sectioned, for the family’s safety. Medical records show he tried to push Ann out of a moving car – he succeeded only in crashing into a wall – and on another occasion deliberately left the gas cooker on while the family were home.

Looking for answers, Joanne became a police detective

This was the Sixties when, by and large, the culture was ‘get on with it’. Nonetheless, Ann was unhappy enough to leave endless times, taking the children to stay with relatives. Sadly, without the offer of a permanent roof over her head, she was always forced to return home.

But in 1972, Ann filed for divorce while Ghilly was away at sea. She changed the locks and took out a restraining order against him. Ghilly, however, ignored the order and in February 1973 bullied his way back into the family home. ‘Mam phoned the police. I don’t know exactly what happened, but she ended up letting him stay, which was almost certainly under duress,’ Joanne says. ‘Twenty days later, she went missing.’

Joanne recalls hearing shouting the night before – followed by an ominous silence. By then nearly ten, her brother decided to investigate under the pretext of getting a glass of water. ‘Mam was lying on the floor, and when Trevor went to touch her, Dad said, “She’s asleep.” He accepted it in that moment

but obviously with hindsight and adult eyes, he realised he’d seen her dead.’

The next morning, Joanne woke to her dad in the bed and the declaration that her mum had ‘gone’. While she can’t remember much of the days that followed, she now knows that Margaret reported her twin sister missing to police the following day when she failed to turn up for a rendezvous at the seaside.

‘I think my mum’s body was still in the garage when Margaret came knocking,’ says Joanne. ‘And I think Margaret knew right away that my dad was involved. Later on, I tried to discuss with her what had happened, but she’d never open up.’

Given Ghilly’s record of violence, you might think the police would consider his role in Ann’s disappearance, but they unquestioningly accepted his explanation that his ‘flighty’ wife had ‘gone off with some fella’.

‘They didn’t even search the house – because if they did they would have seen her coat and handbag were still there,’ Joanne says. ‘Her shoes were still at the front door. She had two kids that she loved. And bear in mind she’d been to the police on more than one occasion.’

While Margaret travelled to London to try to generate publicity for her missing sister – her case was featured in several national newspapers – it made little difference.

‘No one from the police followed up, not once,’ says Joanne. ‘No one bothered to say, “Shall we check in on what happened to Ann Law?” She was just forgotten.’

Courtesy of her own investigation, Joanne now knows that three weeks after Ann vanished, Ghilly sold all of her clothes and jewellery in Hexham market before boarding a merchant ship to Trinidad and Tobago, where he arrived a month later.

Prior to that, he had arranged for his children to be taken into foster care, an ‘unofficial’ arrangement that led Trevor and Joanne into another desperately unhappy chapter of their young lives. Their extended family had refused to take them in: ‘They didn’t want us,’ she says simply. ‘I suspect it was too much hassle.’

They were sent to live with Thomas and Christine Hammill, so-called ‘friends’ of the family. In reality Thomas Hammill was a paedophile. The results were devastating: both Trevor and Joanne suffered years of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Thomas repeatedly raped Joanne until she was 13, as did his biological son, Martin.

As she got older, Joanne told social workers about the abuse but, astonishingly, they told her it was safer to stay there because there was a risk her father could kill her.

‘Unbelievable, really,’ she says. ‘It was basically stay and be raped or be murdered.’

Determined that she would mould her own fate, Joanne focused on getting fit and attaining the academic qualifications she needed to join the police. ‘I thought, “I’ve got a choice: I can sink, or I can rise up and challenge them.” And that’s what I did.’

Later, in 1999, Joanne, then 31, had the satisfaction of testifying in court after Thomas Hammill was charged with sex offences. This came about after 1997’s Operation Rose, an investigation into child sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Joanne says: ‘I was in one of the homes they were looking into, because I had eventually been placed there, having begged the social worker to get me out of the Hammills’ because of the abuse. I decided to tell my police colleague everything I knew, and the next thing, I’m at trial giving evidence.’

But Hammill was acquitted due to procedural mistakes by the Crown Prosecution Service. By this time, her brother Trevor’s life had descended into homelessness and addiction.

One night in 1982, he had been subjected to a particularly horrific ordeal when, along with Margaret’s son Stephen, Trevor was contacted by an agitated Ghilly – with whom they’d had sporadic contact over the years – asking if he wanted to ‘dig up your Mam’. 

The two teenagers – Trevor was just 18 – were taken by Ghilly to a beauty spot by the River Tyne at Bywell, between Hexham and Newcastle, where, armed with spades Ghilly had brought along, they started digging. ‘Trevor was so overwhelmed, he just let Ghilly lead him,’ says Joanne.

‘He was so driven to find Mam that you could have put her under Buckingham Palace and he would have just gone.’

Stephen recalls in the podcast: ‘The ground had already been disturbed, and I could see someone had been digging. Trevor started digging with his dad. I’m holding the torch and Trevor’s digging.’

No body was discovered, but the episode prompted both boys to go to the police, who in turn took the astonishing decision to place Trevor in a cell with his father to help extract a confession. ‘Can you imagine how frightened and messed up Trevor must have been?’ says Joanne. Indeed, he was so traumatised that he struggled to talk about the incident and Joanne learned what had happened only after reading a headline in a local newspaper.

Unethical though it was, the police tactic worked – to a degree. Insisting that Ann had collapsed from taking drugs and drink, in a rambling ‘confession’, Ghilly said he had been too scared to take her to hospital and wanted to ‘help’ the children by giving her a peaceful final resting place.

‘So even then, he was trying to make himself a victim’, says Joanne, witheringly. While far short of a full confession, it was enough for Ghilly to be tried for Ann’s murder in November 1983, only for the case to be halted when he had a psychotic episode while giving evidence.

A second trial six months later in June 1984 ended with the judge ordering a not guilty verdict on medical grounds, although he directed the CPS to keep the case on file in case Gilbert was ever deemed fit to stand trial again. He wasn’t.

Yet, according to Joanne, her father went on to build himself ‘quite a nice life’. ‘He worked as a taxi driver, he went on holidays, he even married again. There were intermittent episodes of psychosis but in between he had a normal life.’

And thus, the search for justice stalled. Years passed, then in 2001 Joanne heard the devastating news that her beloved brother had collapsed and died of peritonitis, brought on by heroin use. He was just 34 – the same age as his mother when she disappeared.

Four years on, in 2005, and with Gilbert now dying, Northumbria Police approached Joanne to see if she would visit the father she saw sporadically – always hoping in vain he would give her the truth – and wear a wire in a last-ditch attempt to get a confession.

‘I refused,’ she says. ‘I thought it was a monstrous thing to do. The police had all the time to have him prosecuted and they were trying to use me as a convenient and easy way to get to him.’

Following his death later that year, she felt just one emotion: ‘Relief – because he was out of my life.’ In 2010 a cold case review led to another excavation at the same spot that Gilbert took Trevor and his cousin to dig. ‘But no one bothered to ask me any questions,’ she says.

Once again, the dig was fruitless, meaning that Ann’s body has still not been found.

Where is she? Under the A1, for which their family home had been bulldozed? Somewhere at the former power station where her father was briefly a night watchman? Or, indeed, somewhere by the River Tyne?

Joanne has had to accept she may never know – and that for all the women she has helped, and the cases she has solved, her mother’s murder is the one that will always evade her.

Deep down, though, she acknowledges that in some ways it might be easier that way.

‘My rational brain knows what happened, but the childlike part of my brain still wants to believe that one parent didn’t kill the other one,’ she says.

‘Everyone has to deal with the loss of their mum at some point, but I haven’t got any place to put mine. By telling her story I can put her on the internet for ever.

‘And if it makes people realise that you can rise out of a traumatic childhood with hard work and determination, then that will be a fitting tribute to my mum.’

Dig Up Your Mam with Joanne Mackel and Julie Bindel is available now at juliebindel.substack.com, and all the usual platforms.