The extraordinary story of how a runaway teenage girl was sought by police as a missing person for more than 50 years can be told for the first time today.
The bizarre case of Sheila Fox – a 16-year-old from Coventry who vanished in March 1972, leaving her family desperately worried – went viral last week.
There was huge international interest after it was announced that Sheila had been finally found some six decades after disappearing, following a ‘cold case’ appeal. A police spokesperson said: ‘We are delighted to announce the conclusion of one of our longest-running missing person investigations.’
But the West Midlands Police announcement conspicuously did not reveal any further details of what had happened to Sheila beyond explaining that they had now made contact with her.
Now, however, has unearthed the extraordinary back story of the teenager who ran off just days after her 16th birthday – and what happened to her.
And we can reveal that she has been hiding in plain sight – living openly just 80 miles away from the family home she’d run away from. And has even married and had a family of her own.
The story begins at a modest terraced house on Gulson Road, an unremarkable street of terraced houses less than a mile from Coventry’s iconic modernist cathedral.
It was here, in a neighbourhood described as ‘working class and very close-knit’, that Sheila was born, on 26 February 1956 – only then she was christened ‘Sheelagh’ in honour of her parents’ joint Irish heritage.
Both her mother, Anne, and father, Chris, a bricklayer, hailed from Co. Wexford, and had moved to the Midlands after the end of WWII when Chris found work there as a bricklayer rebuilding the city which had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe.
Sheelagh was the first of the couple’s four children to be born in England. Her elder brothers John and Chris Jr and sister Brigid were all born in Ireland and moved to Coventry as young children.
Sheila appears to have had a conventional childhood in the city, at one point anglicising the spelling of her name to Sheila, presumably in a bid to blend in with her English classmates.
And she was apparently intending, as was much more normal in the 1950s, to leave school at 16 which would have happened in July 1972. Instead she would leave Coventry and her family abruptly that March.
And it was at this point that the story of Sheila’s life as a missing person began.
The precise circumstances of what prompted her to run away from home remain unclear though the accepted version of events among members of her wider family is that she had embarked upon a relationship with an older man and her parents disapproved – or she feared that they would if they found out
According to her cousin Kevin Fox, the family story was that she had ‘run off with the insurance man, ‘the man from The Pru’.’ [‘The man from the Pru’, short for Prudential, was a popular insurance advertising slogan at the time Sheila vanished.]
If this were the reason for her running away, it would echo the later (1967) Beatles song She’s Leaving Home, written by Paul McCartney: ‘Friday morning, at nine o’clock, she is far away. Waiting to keep the appointment she made, greeting a man from the motor trade.’
Sheila’s frantic parents quickly reported her disappearance to police – providing them with a solitary grainy black and white photograph of her gazing wistfully into the distance on a recent seaside family holiday to help identify her.
Her movements immediately after leaving Coventry are not clear. But what is clear is that if Sheila hadn’t run away because she ‘got in trouble’ – as the expression for unplanned pregnancies at the time had it – she soon would be.
Just 16 months after disappearing, Sheila gave birth to a son Robert, which turned out to be her only son, in July 1973.
Rob’s birth certifcate shows he was fathered by a man called John Foster, who is described as barman from Enfield, north London.
By that time Sheila had changed her surname to Foster, suggesting that Sheila and John had married.
Teenage mum Sheila remained estranged from her parents and siblings at this point and would remain so for another decade or so – before herself making contact again. Or at least trying to.
‘She got back in touch with her family in the 1980s,’ recalled Kevin, 75, who still lives in Coventry. ‘But by then the whole family had moved to Canada.’
While Sheila was out of contact, having and then raising a son, Chris and Anne Fox and Sheila’s three older siblings had indeed emigrated.
They left Coventry for Delta, British Columbia in 1976 to start a new life, perhaps partly to put the trauma of Sheila’s disappearance behind them.
The precise details of what happened when she tried to get back in touch are unclear but it’s believed that word reached the Fox family in Canada and the whole notion that Sheila was missing was laid to rest at this point – but apparently no one got around to informing West Midlands Police that they were back in contact.
Cousin Kevin recalls: ‘We all thought at the time that her parents would have informed the police that she’d been found, but who knows? Maybe they did and the message got lost in the records.’
It is also unclear what happened to her relationship to John Foster, but by 1983 Sheila married divorced father-of-two Jack Thorpe, who is seven years her senior, taking his surname, as did her son, Rob.
Jack, a chauffeur, had grown up in north West London and it’s thought the couple were living in the area at this time and subsequently. Certainly from 2003, they were in a flat just off London’s North Circular Road in Cricklewood.
Then in 2015, Sheila and Jack Thorpe bought a flat in Watford, where they still live. Rob, now 51 and himself also married, lives around the corner from his mother and her husband in the Hertfordshire commuter town. He works as a lorry driver.
It was at the Thorpe’s flat in a new build block just outside Watford town centre, that tracked down Sheila this week and asked her about her sudden international fame courtesy of being ‘found’ by West Midlands Police.
Sheila declined to comment in detail on her strange life story, saying only: ‘It all happened a long time ago, I’ve moved on, it’s all in the past. It’s been a misunderstanding and I don’t want to say any more.’
But two comments she reposted on Facebook in recent days might also provide a clue to the way she now views those tumultuous events from so long ago.
One, posted around the time of the new police appeal, three days after Christmas, was by US author Morgan Richard Olivier read: ‘You did the best you could with what you knew at the time.
Don’t let new wisdom lead you to condemn yourself over old struggles. Forgive yourself and move forward.’
Another in a similar vein, posted a week ago, read: ‘Life doesn’t allow for us to go back and fix what we have done wrong in the past, but it does allow for us to live each day better than our last.’
Sheila’s mother Anne died in Delta, British Columbia in August 1996, and her father Chris passed away there in 2019, aged 98.
In 2018 when her brother Christopher died, aged 71, Sheila demonstrated that any suggestion that she was estranged was no longer the case.
She posted a loving tribute, writing on Facebook: ‘Remembered with love. Sleep well.’
A month later, on his birthday, she posted on legacy.com: ‘No card today. No cake! Heavy hearts and tears. Blessed to have had you as my brother. Sheila x.’
Her surviving siblings still live in British Columbia, Canada.
But the sudden fame that the police announcement brought to Sheila seems to have amused her wider family.
Cousin Rob Kevin told us: ‘In any case, when it came on the news that police were issuing a new appeal after 52 years, we all had a good laugh and I’m not sure who put them right, but I was a bit surprised to see them patting themselves on the back for the investigation!
And another relative, publisher Ella Fox-Martens, 26, tweeted a link to the story writing: ‘This is my grandfather’s cousin. Just unimaginable scenes in the family group chat at the minute.’
Later she added; ‘The most telling part being that she’d been back for years! ‘A bit late in the day,’ as my great aunt put it.’