Nearly a year ago I was in Goa. the temperature is a steady 25-30 degrees the whole year round and this suited me, with my arthritic joints and the rain beating down from a grey sky back in Scotland.
My wife and I stayed in an Indian family's house let out to travellers like ourselves. They were Christians with a Portuguese name I can't recall, a smiling couple with two-daughters and a son. The house stood at the end of a shaded, sandy pathway off the road leading down to the beach, 10-minutes walk away. Overhead, the leaves of the palm trees shaded the garden from the sun and several cats lay spread out on the grass.
On the approach to the beach you traverse a narrow path about 30 metres in length and bordered by hedges at the end of which are several shacks that serve as restaurants for the tourists run by world-weary young men whose faces said they had seen it all. Their whole attitude spoke of louche dealings and an excess of opiates. It was on this narrow pathway that 15-year old Scarlett Keeling was abducted, raped and murdered.
I remember seeing the notice on various shacks around the beach area asking for information concerning her death. She was an extremely attractive girl, one of nine children from four different fathers. Her mother, Fiona McKeown, certainly led an alternative lifestyle, living off benefits in a cabin standing on a plot of land in Devon.
As expected, the comments in the Mail were nasty:
So lets get this straight...all those children, 6 months holiday in Goa... parents don't work - state benefits ...hmm amazing.
She should NEVER have left that girl alone.
What a grotty dump to bring children up in! And the mother's lifestyle has done her face no favours, she would easily pass for a 60 yr old.
But others praised her ability to live her own way:
Whatever this family's lifestyle, they are the victims of a horrendous crime. Why is the press now turning on the mother? Has she not suffered enough? I may not choose to live my life as they do, but I can certainly respect their choices in life. Nobody deserves to lose a child in such circumstances. Muck-racking such as this only exacerbates the family's misery.
My sympathies, indeed.
Subsequently, two youths were arrested, Samson D'Souza and Placido Carvalho, the former of whom confessed 'under duress'. Charges were eventually dropped and in March, the shack was dismantled.
I was in Goa in 1985 and I remember it as a quiet place, especially Calangute and Baga beaches. Anjuna, where Scarlett was murdered, had a market then run mainly by Iranian immigrants escaping khomeini's autocratic rule. They sold straw hats, shell necklaces, sandals and drugs, among other things, mostly to the German tourists who liked to sunbathe naked on the white sands, much to the discomfort of the Indian ladies on holiday and to the amusement of their husbands.
Now, Scarlett's mother is returning to India to try to reclaim organs that were removed from Scarlett's body. They had tried to convince her at the time to have her cremated and to take her ashes back to England. But McKeown refused and had her daughter's body returned intact, minus the organs. She believes that Scarlett was being groomed to be a carrier of drugs. Witnesses who saw D'Souza lying on top of her in the early hours of the morning were allowed to leave the country.
This all fits with what I know of the police in India, probably the most corrupt force in the world. They say she died of a drug overdose. The Times stated: Digambar Kamat, the chief minister of Goa, also turned down a request from Fiona MacKeown, Scarlett’s mother, for India’s equivalent of the FBI to investigate her daughter’s death. “The mother should have taken care of the child, since she was a minor,” he said. “She left a minor girl in someone else’s custody. Tourists should be more responsible and careful.”
Somehow, I doubt if I will return to Goa, The only state in India that doesn't seem to represent the country in the same way that Mumbai is cosmopolitan rather than deshi. There are too many Scarletts there and not enough justice and protection of the individual.
