Michaela Penelope Parris-Lord: March 2008

Sky's Asia correspondent Alex Crawford gives a personal account of meeting the mother seeking justice over the murder of her daughter Scarlett Keeling in Goa.
OK, Fiona MacKeown was unwise. OK, she was naïve. OK, she may live a very unorthodox lifestyle. But let us remember, please, that she has lost a child in the most horrible of circumstances.
From the reaction of some commentators, she might as well have been running a brothel, sold her daughter into sex slavery and then watched while she was slaughtered. The reaction among some is staggeringly unsympathetic - and a lot of it, I would suggest, is based on prejudice.
Yes, Fiona MacKeown may have had nine children in Britain, where that is viewed as wanton irresponsibility by some. Yes, they may have different fathers, at least four. Yes, she lives with her large family in a group of caravans on a nine-acre site in Devon. Yes, she has tattoos and a lip ring.
But where does that translate into bad, uncaring mother? Perhaps in bourgeois Clapham or in the Home Counties where most of the tabloid female writers are penning their scathing commentaries? And yes, they are mostly female, I am ashamed to say.
My crew - cameraman Jamie Matthews, producer Neville Lazarus and myself - have spent most of the past nine days in Fiona MacKeown's company. Until her children were sent back to Britain, we spent a lot of the time with the six children with her too. Unlike the tabloid newspaper writer who seemed to suggest Ms MacKeown's lack of tears made her want to 'scream at the TV', we have watched while she bent over double with grief, her body heaving with sobs as she showed us pictures of her daughter's battered body.
I have hugged her, unable to offer up any comfort while tears ran down her cheeks. She is cool, she is composed, she is assertive and articulate in front of the cameras, but please don't suggest that she isn't hurting, that she isn't feeling remorse and wishing she could turn back the clock.
We were the only TV channel in town showing any interest in her allegations and Ms MacKeown was desperate to get someone to listen to her, to get someone to believe her. She had forced herself to go back into the mortuary having already been there once to identify Scarlett, and she took photograph after photograph of her daughter's back, arms, legs, even her genital area to show the extent of the bruising and abrasions.
Now imagine that. Her child is dead. She is lying on a slab with her face cut from ear to ear by the initial pathologists who were told she was an unidentified body (and had to take dental records). It takes a certain steeliness, strength of character, determination, call it what you will, for a mother to do that.
The police were telling reporters that Scarlett's body had no marks, that she had been drunk and her body had been found 'floating in water'. She had drowned and there was no suggestion of foul play. Just another tourist who had soaked up too much of Goa's paradise.
Short of dragging reporters into the morgue and tearing off the sheet covering Scarlett (which at one point she threatened to do), she felt driven to take the photographs to try to prove somehow she was right.
Nearly three weeks after her daughter was found dead on Anjuna beach - she has a) instigated a second post mortem b) managed to get police to launch a murder inquiry c) prompted an internal police inquiry to find who covered up the crime and d) provoked questions in the Indian Parliament questioning safety in the tourist hotspot.
Now in any other world that would be pretty damn amazing, but instead Fiona MacKeown - a single parent who doesn't conform - is being roasted in parts of the media for somehow being partly to blame for her daughter's death.
There's no doubt she made one heck of a bad decision to leave her behind while the rest of the family travelled to nearby Karnataka. It is one she obviously regrets and no-one would attempt to try to explain that away.
But let's remember Fiona MacKeown had been in the country for nearly three months by this time.
She had befriended the people Scarlett was staying with. They were an upstanding church-going Roman Catholic family and although Scarlett had struck up a friendship with a 25-year-old tourist guide called Julio Lobo, like many Indian families, he continued to live with his older aunts. The two families had met, had shared meals together, and felt they knew each other.
Fiona MacKeown didn't feel she was leaving her 'alone'. She felt she had found an option which suited both - it gave Scarlett the freedom and independence she desired and her mother peace of mind that she was being looked after by caring and responsible adults, albeit a family she had known for a relatively short period of time.
Scarlett came and joined the rest of her family for two or three days every week and there was phone contact every day, her mother says. She has found out through reading Scarlett's diary that she was having a sexual relationship with Julio and says she knew nothing of that before. But even if she did know, even if she made a mistake by leaving her behind, my goodness she is paying for that error now.
Surely we should have some compassion for a woman whose eldest daughter has been violently killed and who is trying to do the right thing?
One British journalist wrote: "Since Scarlett's brutal killing, Fiona MacKeown has fought for her daughter. Would that she had exercised half that dedication and sense of responsibility while Scarlett was alive and in need of a mother's care."
I am sorry but does that writer know anything about what sort of a mother Fiona MacKeown really is? She may have a lot of children but does that give the journalist the right to suggest she somehow loves any less or cares for them any worse?
Ms MacKeown seems to me to have an independence which is admirable, a strength of mind which is remarkable and a determination which is born out of love for her children. She frankly doesn't give two hoots what people who don't know her think of her.
"They are making judgements and they don't know me or my kids," she says. "Anyone who knows me knows I am a good mother and I love my kids."
She is not, as the writer assumes, a "middle class person who should know better". She lives on a farm feeding her kids with vegetables and fruit they grow themselves. Home for them is a series of caravans with no mains electricity - just a generator - and no heating.
She lives an unconventional life and sends her oldest children to an alternative, liberal charity school in Devon. Yes, she does claim some benefits but she raises money through the farmers' market to help pay for the schooling and she cooks there two days a week to help out. Education and the right sort, is a priority. She has even home-schooled her children and during the long holiday in India, she had arranged for them to do remote learning. Her partner Rob Clarke did not pay for the holiday as one newspaper suggested. The family saved up for about nine months and when they still didn't have enough money, they sold some of their animals to cover the costs.
Yet despite money being an issue, she turned down £10,000 offered by a British tabloid for her exclusive story, believing she needed ALL the media on board to get to the truth.
Having spent many days with them, the children appeared polite, well-mannered, well-fed and loving. She seemed patient, caring and reasonable with them. They in turn, are not loud, spoilt or mercenary. They sat quietly for hours drawing pictures, playing cards, occasionally watching television (which they don't have in England), while television crews moved around them and reporters took up all their mother's time. There weren't the loud, noisy squabbles that I am constantly having to monitor with my own children. They didn't have the modern-day accessories of iPod, laptop, Playstation or Nintendo which seem to be necessary to appease many children. I never saw her shouting at them to get them all out of the door and on the way to her various appointments. She had a natural authority with them and they respected her and were demonstrably affectionate with her.
"I don't know anyone who is with their kids for 24 hours of the day," said Fiona MacKeown.
She's right. I know plenty of my friends who have teenage children and who often leave their older kids at home while they have a night out. Occasionally there are wild parties and too much alcohol drunk and lots of clearing up to do in the morning and groundings to be handed out. But please, if Scarlett Keeling had been murdered on one such parents-night-out in the UK, would we still be having this holier-than-thou debate?
Let's remember the crime here is rape and murder. Not going on holiday to India, not leaving your fifteen-year-old behind, not having tattoos or an alternative lifestyle.