The Nottingham inquiry heard its last day of evidence on Friday, closing 14 weeks of testimony about the killings of Barnaby Webber, Grace O'Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates and the failures that surrounded them. Emma Webber said the process had left her mentally exhausted after nearly five months of evidence.
Webber said she had thought she already knew most of the failures by public bodies before the hearings began, but the evidence still brought new hideous revelations almost every day. She said she felt the inquiry had been intense and draining, and that it was strange to reach the last day after so long listening to what happened to her son and the others killed on 13 June 2023.
The inquiry has heard from 164 witnesses and examined the hours around the attacks as well as the aftermath. Valdo Calocane, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2020, stabbed the three victims to death in Nottingham and tried to kill three other people the same day. Among the evidence was the fact that it took 91 minutes from the first call to Nottinghamshire Police about the attack on Grace and Barnaby at about 04:00 BST until Calocane was found and arrested, by which time he had already attacked Ian Coates.
Those hearings have also exposed failures that go well beyond the killings themselves. An officer sent a WhatsApp message about Barnaby Webber’s wounds, and the inquiry heard the teenager was described as properly butchered. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has launched multiple investigations into the actions of officers from Nottinghamshire Police and Leicestershire Police, underlining how the case has turned into scrutiny of the public bodies meant to respond, not just the man who carried out the attacks.
The most painful evidence for the families has come from the way the aftermath was handled. Ian Coates’s body was kept at the crime scene for nearly 15 hours and covered in blankets for two hours before a forensic tent was available. Elaine Newton said it felt like her father had been killed twice after being told he had died in a car crash before learning more than four hours later that he had actually been stabbed. She said she had lost all trust in the NHS and the police, and that it was not just Valdo Calocane who killed Ian.
Friday marked the end of evidence, not the end of the inquiry’s impact. Webber said there was much that was going to happen on the back of it, and the unanswered question now is how far the findings will reach when the recommendations and accountability finally arrive.
