As a local funeral director handed Danielle Gillam-Kirton a small urn containing the ashes of her parents, who were among the nine Britons killed in a Spanish wildfire this summer, she had no reason to suspect there was anything more to remember them by.
After all, a female police officer had assured her that the burnt-out black BMW 5-series car, in which they had vainly sought to escape when flames raced towards their hilltop villa, had been forensically searched and ‘nothing’ more had been found.
Soon afterwards, the lives of popular expats Pete and Fran Gillam were celebrated at a moving memorial service in the village of Bedar, 60 miles from Almeria, where they had retired after building a successful business in the education sector.
For Danielle, 42, an assistant headteacher and mother-of-three from Nottinghamshire, and her elder sister, Natalie Lindsay, it was a small but important milestone in the healing process.
Two months on from the deadly July 9 conflagration, however, closure is nowhere in sight. As with some other bereaved families, Danielle says she is locked in an ‘ongoing nightmare’. Though she is too measured and dignified to say it in so many words, it is being caused by the shameful incompetence – and some might say the cold indifference – of the Spanish authorities’ handling of the aftermath of the wildfire.
Instructed to go to a municipal car pound where the wrecked BMW had been dumped and photograph it for an insurance claim, she and her husband, Mark, were surprised to see a padel racquet belonging to Mr and Mrs Gillam lying in the open boot.
This was on August 12, four weeks after they had been assured that nothing had been left inside. If police searchers had overlooked the racquet, or chosen to leave it there, they later surmised, what else might the car contain?
Then on August 19, after securing permission to return to the pound, this gnawing question was answered in the grimmest way imaginable.
Pictured: Danielle Gillam-Kirton parents, Pete and Fran Gillam who were among the Brits killed in Spanish wildfires this summer
A female police officer had assured her that the burnt-out black BMW 5-series car (pictured) had been forensically searched and ‘nothing’ more had been found
Pictured: Billows of smoke rise into the sky as flames tear through the fields of Almeria, Spain on July 10
‘Firstly, we found my father’s mobile phone lying on the central console, where he always left it,’ Danielle told me this week.
‘And there were all their keys, some coins, and bits of jewellery. The clothes they had taken with them [when they evacuated] had gone, but the [clothes] hooks were still lying down, as if they hadn’t been disturbed.’
But it was when she reached down to pick up a large object lying in the steering well that Danielle recoiled in horror.
‘Oh my God, it’s a bone!’ she cried out, instantly realising she must be holding part of her father’s body.
‘I’m no scientist, but it looked to me like every picture of a hip joint, or part of a pelvis, that I’ve ever seen. My husband then recovered fragments of other bones.
‘One looked like part of a rib and I think there were some forearm bones. I was convinced it was my father, and I was beside myself.
‘I kept saying, “I can’t believe he has been left here for five weeks”.
As shock gave way to anger, she photographed the remains, placed them in a tub, and took them to Bedar town hall.
‘Look, these are my father’s bones! Look at them!’ Danielle challenged the mayor, Angelo Francisco Collado. ‘He was as shocked and horrified as we were,’ she says, and urged her to take them to the Guardia Civil, the national police who conducted the search.
There she met with a very different response. Though she was told the bones would be examined at a Madrid forensics lab, senior officers added dismissively that they must belong to animals.
Since the bones were so big and the only sizeable creatures living in the Bedar Mountains are goats and wild boar, this prompted Danielle to ponder sardonically how and why a ‘cow would have climbed into the passenger seat of the vehicle during a fire’.
Two forensic anthropologists have since examined the pictures she took and both say the bones are human.
One told the Daily Mail: ‘There were bone fragments from a finger of an adult, a portion of the pelvis and a fragment from the scapula, which are not something easily confused with animal bones.’
Danielle is now convinced that the police didn’t even trouble to search the car, which would mean that the female officer was either given the wrong information or lied to her.
However, on Thursday, when I last spoke to her, she was in purgatory. For she had just received a message from the British Consul saying that three weeks after handing the bones to the police, they were yet to say where they were being kept, and whether they had been tested.
‘I understand that, for them, my story is just about one night that happened months ago, but for us this is an ongoing nightmare,’ Danielle told me, her stoical demeanour giving way to tears.
‘It seems we are fighting an uphill battle for decency and respect. Surely they [the Spanish authorities] want to alleviate our distress and give us comfort. But there is just this silence… we feel quite alone with it.’
The Bedar wildfire in July, thought to have been sparked by a fallen power cable, went curiously under-reported in Britain given that nine expats were among the 15 multi-national victims killed in one small village.
Perhaps this was because people back home were absorbed by the World Cup, Wimbledon and our own heatwave problems. But near Almeria temperatures soared close to 40 degrees.
The ninth British victim, Michelle Leake, had survived her 40 per cent burns for eight weeks but succumbed to complications from her injuries in a Seville hospital on Tuesday.
Danielle says she is locked in an ‘ongoing nightmare caused by the shameful incompetence of the Spanish authorities’ handling of the aftermath of the wildfire
Pictured: Burnt out vegetation following the wildfires in the Spanish province of Almeria
The care worker died a heroine, having stayed with the 93-year-old woman she was looking after, Audrey Curry, as the fire closed in, before carrying her in her arms as they attempted to flee.
Ms Curry was a neighbour of the Gillams on a mountain locally known as ‘English Hill’, whose panoramic views of the Almeria coast make it a desirable settlement for more affluent British incomers. Accessible only via one perilously narrow and twisting road that was challenging for me to negotiate this week, even in daylight and good weather, one shudders to imagine how difficult it must have been for panicking residents shrouded in smoke and flames at nightfall.
The Gillams had reached only the second hairpin bend, about 300 yards from their elegant, ochre-coloured villa, when they became hopelessly trapped.
Perhaps because he suffered from asthma, Pete remained inside the car to the last, while Fran, who may have been trying to direct other stuck vehicles, was outside on the road.
Ms Curry is thought to have died near this same spot, now marked by a bouquet and the distinct outline of the Gillams’ BMW scorched in the tarmac.
The other victims were living or staying in Paraje el Curato, another remote hamlet of high-end villas, a few miles from English Hill.
Inching along its only access road, with its sheer drops and impossible bends, one wonders whether planners gave any thought to the safety of its residents when they signed off on the development.
Given that this area is notoriously vulnerable to wildfires stoked by the searing summer sun and whipped by fierce winds that howl through the canyons, were the incomers warned that they were settling in the heart of a potential inferno?
Certainly, their family members say they received no warning before the July fire sealed them into the hamlet, which now resembles an eerie moonscape of blackened rock and skeletal trees.
The contrasting condition of the villas bears testimony to the wildfire’s devilish capriciousness. While some were badly damaged, others remained untouched as the wind meant flames suddenly leapt in different directions.
If we believe officials such as Mayor Collado and Antonio Sanz, the regional minister responsible for emergency response, it would have been counterproductive to send out a blanket evacuation order to Bedar’s 970 residents using Spain’s recently installed ES alert system, which sets off a mobile phone alarm.
Though the system was used when wildfires raged in other parts of Spain, where only one person died, they insist the best option was for a local official who knew the terrain to deliver the warning house-by-house.
The dangerous task was left to Bedar’s lone police officer, Diego Castro, but how many homes he reached is a moot point. Danielle says all her parents heard was the sound of his siren as he rushed past their villa.
As with many of the expats, the Gillams were not members of a municipal WhatsApp group where the town hall belatedly posted some warning messages. It is mainly used by Spaniards.
Soon after the fire, however, Andalucia’s regional president, Juanma Moreno, added to the families’ distress by claiming residents were given ample time to evacuate but some had ignored the advice.
‘Failure to follow those recommendations probably caused the tragic outcome,’ he said, effectively accusing them of causing their own deaths.
Among those incensed by this hasty and wholly unproven claim is Duncan Chard, whose elderly parents, Michael and Christine, were killed.
Originally from Bristol, they retired to Bedar 25 years ago, and Mr Chard, 82, had built their home in el Curato himself to ‘create their little bit of paradise in the sun’.
‘My father has two prosthetic knee replacements,’ his son said this week. ‘There was no way he was going to try to run for his life through the valley unless that was his only option as a last resort.
‘He was being brave. He died fighting. He did not die because he was being stupid or not following instructions.
‘There were no instructions. What the Spanish authorities said afterwards has been very hurtful… they are trying to protect their arses.’ The Chards had tried to drive to safety in a convoy of five or six cars carrying several other residents, three of them British.
Finding the only road out impassible, however, they were forced to retreat down a dirt-track until they reached a dead-end.
The only man to get out alive was Malcolm Timbrell, 70, who found his property when he and his wife, Annette Kilgore, 69, appeared on the Channel 4 programme ‘A Place in the Sun’.
Remembering they had left their cats, Charlie and Lilly, in the villa, he dashed back on foot to fetch them. When he got back, he took shelter in a car that for some reason didn’t combust in the fire, but Annette was in another of the vehicles that burst into flames.
As the fire moved towards the trapped group, at terrifying speeds of 300 yards a minute, they gathered on a natural platform, below which was a valley of tinder-dry bush and scrub.
Yet they still had good phone signals, and from Belgium, Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt was in contact with his 63-year-old father, Stanislas, for about an hour before the end came.
A keen wildlife photographer, Mr Verdonckt knew the terrain ‘like his backyard’, his son says, but as he described his fast-diminishing options he says he remained admirably calm.
It is unclear why a helicopter wasn’t sent to rescue them from the platform, but it is thought it was too dangerous to land in the high winds and thick smoke.
A Spanish man whose two friends were among the group told me he repeatedly phoned 112, the emergency number, and gave their GPS co-ordinates, but by the time a fire truck was able to reach them it was far too late.
Mr Verdonckt had escaped with his black rescue dog, Schubi, and asked Thomas to take care of him if he did not make it out alive. But four days later, when the Belgian virologist had discovered that Schubi had died by her owner’s side, he returned to recover the dog and was deeply disturbed by what he saw.
He found himself trampling on the victims’ scattered remains and remnants of their belongings: their spectacles, buckles, shoes and jewellery.
He assumed they would soon be cleared away. Yet to his anger, on August 9 when he returned with other relatives to create a memorial for the victims – a cairn of painted stones bearing poignant messages – the bones and personal effects were still there.
Determined to spare people from suffering the same indignities when, as it surely will, the next wildfire comes, several families, including the Gillams and the Chards, have banded together.
Their aim is to have the fire investigated, to understand how it occurred, whether mistakes were made in dealing with it and if so by whom – and how it might have been prevented.
As Danielle told me, their intention is not to scapegoat any individual but to gain answers to the many pressing questions surrounding this avoidable tragedy, and in so doing help to save lives.
It is a noble aim.
The police and governmental officials might begin to make redress by explaining how Danielle was put through the torment of finding her father’s bones – and return them to her for burial as soon as possible.
- Readers wishing to support efforts to establish how this tragedy happened and help prevent loss of life in wildfires can visit helpbedar.com to contribute
- Additional reporting by Gerard Couzens
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