Liverpool remembers murdered son

By COLE MORETON


Liverpool, a city famous for its gifts of gab and melody, was struck dumb. Outside the Town Hall, in the shopping centres, on the street in Walton where Ken Bigley lived, a silence was kept for two minutes from noon local time.

After all the pleas, petitions and prayers, and after three weeks of watching and waiting - even daring to hope, right up to the end, that there might be mercy - there were no words left. The Bigley family had nothing more to say, for the moment.

Having campaigned so energetically and loudly even when the diplomats pressured them to shut up, Ken's brothers had asked that they and their mother should be left alone to grieve. There were no crowds and no cameras outside the family's terraced house in Bedford St, just a lone police car and a pile of bouquets by the closed front door.

"You can't even talk about it," said an elderly woman waiting to sign a book of condolences at the Town Hall. "Dreadful," she muttered. "Dreadful, dreadful." There were other books at the Roman Catholic cathedral and the Bigleys' parish church.

"All murders are bad, like, but this is worse," said a man at the Town Hall who stressed, like many others, that Bigley was "one of us".

"Think about it," he said, shaking his head, "and you cry." The book was on a desk, next to a burning candle, a spray of lilies and a picture of Ken Bigley, smiling.

"He was coming home," the lady said quietly. "Ken. His job was finishing today."

- INDEPENDENT


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