The truth about Tasha

The other week I received a bundle of newspaper cuttings from a woman called Susan Craig. She was a schoolfriend of my sister Tasha who was brutally murdered in the grounds of their school in 1973.

As I write, I'm looking at a picture of an ambulance leaving the school surrounded by police cars. The caption reads: "The body of Natalia Semler (Tasha) leaves the Madeira campus in a rescue squad van." I feel sick typing these words.

I had recently written an article on the murder for an American magazine, and what was meant to be a cathartic exercise - an attempt at finding closure - turned out to be one of the most destructive and painful things I have ever experienced.

After the story was published, dozens of emails reached me, many from Tasha's classmates wanting to share their grief. One evening I came home to find an email in my inbox from a woman whom John Gilreath, the psychopath who murdered Tasha, had tried to date. It ended: "Quite possibly my mother saved my life." I sobbed the entire night.

A researcher from Oprah called, hoping I would cry on tap at her inane question: "How did you feel the day you learned your sister was murdered?" Then last week I spoke to Craig, now a police commissioner in the US, who tracked me down and is trying to start a fund at the school in Tasha's memory.

What has become clear in the past few weeks is that for more than 30 years I have carried a story in my head that is completely untrue. My sister's murder turns out to be doubly tragic because it should never have happened.

As Craig said to me on the phone: "Who dropped the ball?" The truth is, many people did. The head of the psychiatric hospital who released Gilreath too early, the headmistress who had failed to protect her girls despite at least one previous attack by Gilreath at the school, the police who failed to find her in time on that day almost 37 years ago.

It was 29 October 1973, two nights before Halloween, and I was 12 years old. My two older sisters, aged 16 and 14, attended a private school called Madeira in MacLean, Virginia, where daughters of the top political brass go. I have a younger brother, too, who was eight at the time.

At some point that afternoon my mother discovered Tasha had missed the bus home. My older sister came home without her. The calls to classmates started soon after and my parents grew increasingly anxious. I eventually said my prayers and went to sleep. The rest happened during my last innocent child's dreams.

That day, Tasha had been seen just after 1pm. She had hidden her bike (all the girls biked across the school) behind the bushes by the school chapel. This was - Craig explained - because girls were known to grab each other's bikes. At that point Gilreath, a 23-year-old carpenter's assistant, 6ft 7in tall and weighing 14 stone, must have been watching from the shadows in the thick wood that surrounded the school.

Fourteen-year-old Tasha was 5ft 1in tall and weighed just six stone. She must have been rushing to lunch when he grabbed her (the classmate who was with her just before she was attacked has since contacted me). Crucially, none of her teachers reported her missing throughout the afternoon lessons.

The following account of how she was murdered was written by Craig to the parole board - each year friends and relatives were asked to write letters to protest Gilreath's annual application for parole. (I read it for the first time in 2005 when Madeira School rang to ask me to petition the parole board now that my mother, who used to do it, had died, and they forwarded me years of previous correspondence.)

"On Tuesday 30 October, Tasha's battered, bruised, scraped and dirt-stained body was found nude from the waist down by her father and family dog," Craig's account says. "Tasha's hands were bound by blanket scraps and tied to a tree. Her hands were blackened by the tightness of the bonds. Her screams had been silenced by a gag stuffed in her mouth. There were dozens of cross-marked puncture wounds on her back and lower chest that were thought to have been inflicted by a pointed, sharp instrument. He had probably used a Phillips-head screwdriver to puncture her flesh.

"Tasha's had been a particularly brutal murder as numerous cuts and bruises on her face and body clearly indicated prolonged torture," it says. "But she had put up a furious resistance. She had bled profusely. The temperature had dropped to -1°C while she had been bound. She died from shock, exposure and fatigue. She had endured 10 hours of agony before she died."

After my parents raised the alarm, there were several visits to the campus with helicopters and sniffer dogs. Because of heavy rain the dogs were unable to pick up Tasha's scent, and the search was called off at 4am. Not long after my father returned to the school with Tasha's dog Tilly. It took the golden retriever a matter of minutes to find her body.

A newspaper clip states: "Semler found his daughter's body in a wooded area 300 feet down a steep embankment behind the campus chapel. Horan (the attorney) said the girl, clad only in a sweater and bra, was lying back. Her hands were stretched behind her head and lashed onto the tree with blanket strips. Her riding britches and underwear were found next to the body." This is what my father discovered in the dark, cold, wet night. Her hands were so tightly bound that the police had to use a special knife, a newspaper cutting says. My father must have tried first.

He has never told me what happened that night. Among the bundle of cuttings from Craig last week, I was shocked to read the following passage: "The father initially refused to tell police the location of the body until they agreed not to discuss the case with newsmen. Police said that Semler insisted on consulting an attorney before approving release of the identification. This apparently was because of the ill-health of the girl's grandparents. Rescue squad men assisting in the removal of the body were sworn to secrecy, one fire official said yesterday."

With my sister still bound to a tree, my father had the force of mind to negotiate. My mild-mannered, gentle, intellectual diplomat father who has never spoken to me about Tasha's murder in his life (but accepts that I am now committed to learning the truth) had reserves of courage I knew nothing about.

Once you enter violent pictures into the mind, they stick. My default memory is now of Tasha screaming and gagged, thrashing about with every ounce of energy she had left as her classmates walked close by. Tasha was alive until at least 9pm, the police reports say. Had anyone noticed at lunch, or even in the first lesson after lunch, that she was missing, Tasha would have been found and saved. Even daylight would have saved her as the police walked by her body several times in the dark of night.

My father took up a posting in Berlin and we left America in a huge haze of notoriety. Everyone knew of the murder and the fact that my parents successfully sued the hospital that released Gilreath, who was subsequently sentenced to 50 years in prison, where he died last year.

As for my family, we buried Tasha, then never spoke about the events again. It's only now that I partly understand why; Tasha's death could have been avoided at so many stages.

What I learned last week was that Gilreath had been charged with eight counts of sexual assault, including on not one but two girls from Madeira. In 1972, he'd grabbed another 14-year-old girl, held her prisoner on a rock on the Potomac River, molested her, then let her go. He was given a 20-year suspended sentence (the girl has since had a series of breakdowns and is now permanently under psychiatric care) but was discharged from the psychiatric hospital less than a year after the attack. Neither the judge nor the school was notified.

Gilreath's other 14-year-old victim, who was snatched outside the chapel at Madeira, repeatedly called the psychiatric hospital to check he was still incarcerated. Five weeks before he murdered my sister, the former victim was told by a probation officer of Gilreath's release. Horrified, she immediately told her parents and the headmistress of Madeira, Barbara Keyser. Both dismissed her as being hysterical.

The girl had always thought that Gilreath was "coming back to get her". She was sick on the day Tasha went missing. Gilreath returned to the exact same spot near the chapel and listened to the same school bell. This time it was my diminutive, beautiful, animal-loving, hospital-volunteering, bubbly blonde-haired sister (who I am told looked like the former victim) who innocently sped by.

That night, while my parents hysterically searched for Tasha, the Madeira boarders were trapped inside their dorms, where they slept, I have just learned, unsupervised. The next morning the girls and teachers of Madeira School were summoned into the chapel where they briefly said a prayer for Tasha, then were told by Keyser, who is now dead, to return to their classes and never talk to anyone about the matter again.

Madeira would like to forget Tasha ever existed. What school wants murder discussed over lunch? Now they can't. Though they abandoned her in the most profound way, silence is not an option any more. I am going to help Craig raise the money (if we can raise $50,000 the school has to start a fund). I have suggested a scholarship to help underprivileged girls - Tasha always thought of others first.

I am left with residual anger and possibly more trauma than I started with before I embarked on this search for the truth.

And yet there is a sort of happy ending. Last week my 14-year-old son was hit by a car at his boarding school. It was the driver's fault. He is fine, thank goodness, but all the neural highways of my brain perked up at once. You never recover from trauma but you learn some valuable lessons.

If there is one thing I know it is that death happens easily and randomly. My son was spared death by some great stroke of luck. Maybe it was Tasha looking out for us? And maybe I had to keep going until I learned the truth? Now I can finally try to forget the murder and remember Tasha as the wonderful person she was.