- [talking about Alison Day]
- Stewart Goodwin: The fact that she was a young, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl helped enormously in getting her image into the popular papers. Red-tops would ring the press bureau on an hourly basis for news. And a missing person, the first question they'd ask was, "What colour is the child or the person?" And if we said black, they'd say, "OK, move on." Now that would be a shock now to people to hear that, but that was a fact that that was going on in the '80s.
- Stewart Goodwin: Charlie Farquhar turned up as a detective superintendent with about 27 years' service.
- Simon Farquhar: My dad had been in the Flying Squad for three years in north London, and then he was moved to Romford to the Murder Squad, and he inherited two inquiries that were going on at the time. One of them was the disappearance, the murder, of Alison Day. And he was given the inquiry with the instructions to basically close it down. "We don't have the resources, and there just isn't the evidence. We're not going to get anywhere." But what he actually did was he went to the officers on the ground and basically asked them what they thought, and they all said, "We want to give this another go. We haven't had the chance to give this a proper go here." And eventually there was a showdown about this. And he said to his boss, "You can close it down if you want to, but *you* can be the one that tells Mr and Mrs Day that we're not going to look for their daughter's killers any more."