‘I’m determined to find out who killed my sister Natalie Pearman’

Natalie Pearman was just 16 when a lorry driver found her dead in a lay-by.

The teenager was murdered in November 1992, just a few hours after she was last seen working in the red light district of Norwich.

Three decades on, the case remains unsolved, despite police interviewing 4,000 people in relation to the case. Officers also believe they have the killer’s DNA profile.

Here, in her own words, Natalie’s younger sister Georgina Simpson speaks about life growing up in the shadow of a sibling she barely knew and her ongoing fight for justice.

I have a memory of Natalie but I don’t know if it even happened or if my mind kind of made it up.

It’s like not knowing yourself. It’s like there’s a big part of your existence in your life that you have no clue about. I would have loved to know more about her because I believe she’s so much more than how she died.

I don’t remember a particular point that I found out about her murder. Me and my brother were considered too young to know.

We knew that this huge terrible thing had happened, but we didn’t talk about it. It was like there was always this big pink elephant in the room and no-one’s allowed to mention it.

It wasn’t until I started to grow up and started to do some research of my own that I actually found out what exactly had happened.

But there are so many questions that I couldn’t ask.

I didn’t want to cause my older siblings or my mum any distress by talking about it because they’d already been through enough. I just had to find out for myself and that was probably the hardest part.

They would probably say that I could have asked them at any point, but I didn’t want to hurt them and bring it all back so I didn’t.

My older siblings say that Natalie was funny, was a good gymnast and loved horses. My older brother said he remembers her laughing a lot but looking at the pictures she always seems sad.

She was a normal kid. There were no signs of anything until she hit teenage years and things started to go wrong.

My siblings say she was hanging around with the wrong kind of people and getting herself into trouble.

I think she wanted more than our tiny little seaside village of Mundesley, where we grew up. She wanted to experience life and she got herself into trouble.

That’s when mum put her into foster care and then she was failed by the system repeatedly. From what I know, she was allowed to see people from the troubled times that she maybe should have been kept away from.

I don’t think that the media assisted whatsoever, because they were more focused on the fact that she was a sex worker than the fact that she was a child.

I think that if she wasn’t doing that job the media portrayal of her would have been entirely different.

The main point should have been that this child was found strangled. Not that a sex worker was found strangled.

I feel anger when I see those reports. I don’t know if it would’ve made a difference in the case, but I believe that if this was to happen now, it would have been perceived completely differently.

The understanding of these ladies and the job that they do is so much different now and people understand and sympathise with them more than they did 32 years ago.

She was branded, essentially.

Being an idiot and watching all of those Netflix dramas, I thought it would be a case of ‘they’ve got his DNA, let’s ping it through the system and find a match and case closed’.

I didn’t realise how much more there was to it than that.

The detective on the case told me there was an 80% chance that we’ll never find the killer. That was like being hit by a bus.

But I do have hope and I’ve carried hope for such a long time. There are people that have these cases solved years and years after. Why can’t we be one of those people? There’s nothing to say that we won’t be that lucky.

I’ve always believed that someone knows something and has never said it, either through fear or their own personal reasons.

Natalie was a kid who was failed and murdered. No-one should have to deal with that, let alone deal with it for 32 years afterwards.

We need to do something now.

Norfolk Police’s cold case manager Andy Guy said: “Natalie’s case continues to be a live investigation and information relating to it is regularly received from the public, which is always acted upon.

“We do hold a DNA profile of the individual whose identity remains unidentified. Anyone who has information regarding Natalie’s murder is encouraged to contact the cold case team”.