Taken: The Agonising True Story of My Missing Sister by Sharon Hamilton

Taken: The Agonising True
Story of My Missing Sister by Sharon Hamilton
‘God only knows what fate befell Vicky after, cold and alone at that bus
stop, she accepted a lift home. I don’t want to imagine what she went
through. It’s just too painful. To think of my beautiful Vicky lying alone,
buried in a garden four hundred miles away from home just crushed me. In a
strange way, I think the fact she was found at the other end of the country
made it worse. On her own for nearly seventeen years’. On 10 February 1991,
schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton left her sister Sharon’s flat to catch the bus
home. Her family never saw her alive again. Almost seventeen years later her
remains were discovered buried in a garden four hundred miles from home by
police looking for another teenager. In the years after her disappearance,
Vicky Hamilton’s fate had captured the public’s imagination. It was front
page news for months, and a major publicity campaign resulted in a number of
sightings in London. Her purse was found, discarded and empty, in an
Edinburgh bus station, and hopes were raised …and then dashed. Police even
talked to psychics in their efforts to find her. It was to become Britain’s
longest-running juvenile missing person inquiry – and Sharon was at the forefront
of every lead and effort. In this loving memoir, for the first time, Sharon
tells the full story of the difficult years since Vicky’s disappearance. She
writes touchingly about their childhood and movingly of how the family coped
when, tragically, two years after Vicky’s disappearance, their mother died
and, though barely out of her teens herself, Sharon decided to bring up her
two other young siblings alone. The search for Vicky is now over. And finally
justice has been done. Only now can Sharon begin to grieve for the loving,
vibrant sister that went missing all those years ago.