He Was Convicted of Her Murder but He Took Her Location to His Own Grave

On the afternoon of February 9th, 1988, 22-year-old Helen McCourt called her mother from work. She was coming home early. She had a date that evening with a new boyfriend and wanted enough time to wash her hair. “Can you have my tea ready?” she asked. Her mother said yes. It was the last conversation they would ever have.

Just over an hour later, Helen stepped off a bus only 500 yards from her front door. A witness would later report hearing a woman scream, and then everything went silent. A jury eventually convicted a man of Helen’s murder, but nearly 40 years later, her body has never been found, and the man who knew where she was took that secret to his grave.

Welcome to Cold Case Unlocked. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from tonight. New here? Hit like and subscribe. It helps us bring more cases like this to life. Her name was Helen McCourt, born July 29th, 1965, in Merseyside. 22 years old, an insurance clerk working in Liverpool, commuting home every evening to the village of Billinge, where she lived with her family.

 Confident, organized, dependable. Her younger brother Michael described her that way, and it rings true in every detail of this case. She was the kind of person who called ahead, who made plans and kept them, who asked for her tea early because she had somewhere to be, and she wanted to be ready.

 She had a mother who loved her, a brother Michael, who was 19 when they lost her, and who would spend decades alongside of his mother carrying the weight of it. She had a new boyfriend she was excited about. She had plans for that Tuesday evening. She had also worked at the George and Dragon pub on the main street in Billinge J the year before.

 She knew the landlord. She knew the regulars. She knew everyone in there the way you know people in a village where everyone knows everyone. Two days before she disappeared, she had been involved in a heated argument at that pub, a confrontation with another woman. The landlord had stepped in. He had taken sides loudly, crudely, in front of his customers, and had used obscene language on Helen.

 He had told her she was no longer welcome there. However, as someone who loved peace, Helen had stopped at the George and Dragon on her way home that stormy Tuesday evening to try to smooth things over. To make sure she was welcome back in a place she had worked, in a village where everyone knew each other, where you couldn’t afford to have enemies.

 She had no reason to be afraid. She knew him. He was the landlord. He was 31 years old, had two small children, a wife, and a mistress. He owned a pub on the main street of a village of a few hundred people. The familiar face behind the bar, the man you’d known for years, the man you trusted with your Tuesday evening without thinking twice.

His name is Ian Simms. What happened inside the George and Dragon between quarter past five and half past five on February 9th was not clearly established in a courtroom because the suspect never admitted it, and Helen McCourt has never been found until this day. But the forensic evidence presented at the trial led prosecutors to conclude that Helen was murdered there, and the jury accepted that conclusion.

Investigators also recovered a flex from among Helen’s clothing, which prosecutors argued had been used during the attack. Her body was removed and disposed of somewhere in the northwest of England. Her clothing was taken separately and dumped near the Manchester Ship Canal at a place called Irlam. Her handbag, her coat, her jeans, her scarf, scattered like things thrown from a car window at speed.

 But her body was never found. Ian Simms was questioned by police in the days after Helen disappeared. Investigators noted that he became agitated during questioning in a way that would become suspicious. His Volkswagen Passat was searched. In the boot they found blood stains, an earring, the matching pair given to her by mom on her 21st birthday sitting in the boot of a pub landlord’s car.

A few days later a man walking his dog along the Manchester Ship Canal found blood soaked towels and several items of men’s clothing. One item carrying a beer brand logo popular with the George and Dragon pub. All of it was tested, all of it matched her blood. At first Sims denied the clothes were his, then his wife identified them.

 His mistress identified them independently. He changed his story. He said they were his but had a new explanation for that too. At his trial at Liverpool Crown Court in March 1989, Ian Sims told the jury he was the victim of an elaborate plot. He claimed someone must have broken into his pub while he was upstairs.

 He murdered Helen, dressed themselves in his clothes, stolen his car, used it to remove her body, brought it back later unnoticed without a sound while he was in the building above. According to his account, a phantom killer had staged an entire murder scene inside his pub and he had heard nothing, noticed nothing, knew nothing.

The jury looked at that explanation and reached their verdict in a matter of hours. The DNA evidence dismantled Sims’s account of what had happened. Professor Alec Jeffreys, the scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting just 3 years earlier, had been brought into the case. Working from blood samples taken from Helen’s parents because there was no direct sample of Helen’s own DNA, Jeffreys confirmed that the blood found in Sims’s car and flat was 126,000 times more likely to have come from Helen or a close relative than from

anyone else in the world. This was one of the first uses of DNA fingerprinting in a British murder prosecution. No body, no confession, no direct witness to what happened inside that pub. Just an earring, a boot full of blood stains, and a number 126,000. The jury decided that was enough. On March 14th, 1989, Ian Simms was found guilty of the murder of Helen McCourt.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 16 years. The judge said in sentencing that Simms had desecrated Helen’s remains and cast her clothes to the rats, denying her family the chance to pay their last respects. Those words were said in open court in 1989. They are the most honest description of what Simms did to the McCourt family, and he lived every single day for the next 34 years without disclosing where he kept her body.

 Not in prison, not at any parole hearing, not when Marie wrote to him. A mother writing to the man who had killed her daughter, asking him to tell her where she was. His response to that letter was a document that Marie described as cold and threatening. It promised justice once he was released. For more than three decades, he never disclosed where Helen was.

He aimed it at a family from inside a prison cell and held it there for decades. In 1989, Marie McCourt buried an empty grave. There was nothing to put in it. No body, no remains, no physical piece of her daughter to hold or keep or visit. She could not plan a funeral. She could not hold a service in the churchyard.

 She could not do the one thing, the single, basic, ancient human thing that every family is owed when they lose someone. She could not bury her child. “He has taken away the final thing that we would even give to an animal, a pet,” she said, “and that is the right to a burial.” She said it in interview after interview after interview across 30 years.

 The words never changed because the situation never changed. Helen was still out there. Simms still knew where, and the law at the time had no mechanism to compel him to say. After serving the minimum 16 years of his sentence, Ian Simms became eligible for parole in 2004. For Marie McCourt, every hearing brought the same question.

 Would the man who knew where Helen lay finally tell the truth? He never did. She attended hearing after hearing, reading victim impact statements, and pleading with parole panels not to release him while he continued to withhold the location of her daughter’s body. She even confronted Simms face-to-face, bringing the threatening letter he had sent her from prison and evidence she believed reflected his continuing lack of remorse.

 Despite every opportunity, he remained silent. Convinced the law had to change, Marie launched a campaign she called Helen’s Law. No body, no parole. She gathered more than 600,000 signatures, lobbied ministers, appeared in the media, and refused to let her daughter’s case be forgotten. Twice the proposed legislation fell when Parliament dissolved for a general election. Each time, she started again.

In November 2019, despite Simms still refusing to reveal where Helen was, the parole board recommended his release. Marie challenged the decision all the way to the High Court, but the judges ruled that the law gave them no basis to keep him imprisoned simply because he would not disclose the location of Helen’s remains.

Ian Simms was released in February 2020 after serving 31 years in prison. Nine months later, Helen’s Law finally received royal assent, requiring parole boards to consider an offender’s refusal to reveal the location of a victim’s remains. It became law because of Marie McCourt’s determination, but too late to affect the man who had inspired it.

 Then in 2022, 2 years after his release, Ian Simms died. The cause of death was not given publicly. He was 66 years old. He had been living somewhere in England under license conditions. He had served 31 years for a murder he maintained until the end he had not committed. He died as he had lived since 1989 without saying a single word about where Helen was.

Marie McCourt later said she felt a huge relief adding that knowing that Sim has finally left the earth adding that he got what he deserved. She went on to say she now hopes maybe he spoke to somebody in prison or maybe one of his friends or family who were perhaps too scared to come forward when he was alive will do so now.

Relief and hope in the same breath. That is what 34 years produces. A woman in her late 70s relieved that a man who threatened her from inside a prison cell is dead and still hoping someone he confided in might pick up the phone. In 2023, Marie McCourt was appointed MBE member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the families of murder victims.

 She received it at Buckingham Palace. She said she now regularly helps other families of murder victims find the bodies of their loved ones. She was given an award for helping other people find what she has never been able to find for herself. Helen McCourt born July 29th, 1965 22 years old insurance clerk. She called home from work on a stormy Tuesday afternoon and asked for her tea ready early.

She was going out that evening. She had a new boyfriend. She needed time to wash her hair. She got off the bus at quarter past five 500 yards from her door. A man on another bus heard a scream that stopped. She was the kind of person who made plans and kept them who called ahead, who sorted things out who walked into a pub on a stormy evening to smooth over an argument because that is what you do in a village where everyone knows everyone and you don’t want to leave things unresolved.

 An opal and sapphire earring given to her for her 21st birthday front half in the boot of a car back half in a flat above a pub. That is every physical trace of Helen McCourt that has ever been recovered. One earring. Her mother has been searching for the rest of her for 36 years. She has drained ponds. She has crawled through mine shafts.

 She has followed every lead anyone has ever offered. A hospital incinerator, a glass factory furnace, a car park next to a canal. She has found nothing. Helen McCourt is out there somewhere in the northwest of England in a place that only one man ever knew. And that man is in a grave he chose and she didn’t. If you know anything, if Ian Simms ever told you something, if you have ever had a reason to think you know where Helen is, the McCourt family is still asking.

 They have always been asking. After 36 years of asking, they are still asking. Marie McCourt said what she wants. She said it plainly once in a way that doesn’t need repeating or explaining. “All that I can ask now is that I can give whatever is left of her a burial in the churchyard, so that one day when I come to die, I can be next to her.

” That is all she has ever asked for. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment hit hardest. Hit like, subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.