When the film-maker Carol Morley read that the skeleton of a young woman
had been found in a London bedsit, she knew she had to find out more…
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On 25 January 2006, officials from a north
London
housing association repossessing a bedsit in Wood Green owing to rent
arrears made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the skeleton of a
38-year-old woman who had been dead for almost three years. In a corner
of the room the television set was still on, tuned to BBC1, and a small
pile of unopened Christmas presents lay on the floor. Washing up was
heaped in the kitchen sink and a mountain of post lay behind the front
door. Food in the refrigerator was marked with 2003 expiry dates. The
dead woman's body was so badly decomposed it could only be identified by
comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her smiling.
Her name was revealed to be Joyce Carol Vincent.
I first heard about Joyce when I picked up a discarded copy of the
Sun
on a London underground train. The paper reported the
gothic circumstances of her death – "Woman dead in flat for three years:
skeleton of Joyce found on sofa with telly still on" – but revealed
almost nothing about her life. There was not even a photograph of her.
The
image of the television flickering over her decomposing body haunted me
as I got off the train on to the crowded platform. In a city such as
London, home to 8 million people, how could someone's absence go
unnoticed for so long? Who was Joyce Vincent? What was she like? How
could she have been forgotten?
News of Joyce's death quickly made
it into the global media, which registered shock at the lack of
community spirit in the UK. The story ran on in the British press, but
still no photograph of Joyce appeared and little personal information.
Soon
Joyce dropped out of the news. I watched as people discussed her in
internet chatrooms, wondering if she was an urban myth, or talking about
her as though she never mattered, calling her a couch potato, and
posting comments such as: "What's really sad is no one noticed she was
missing – must have been one miserable bitch." And then even that kind
of commentary vanished.
But I couldn't let go. I didn't want her to be forgotten. I decided I must make a film about her.
At
this point all that had been revealed in the press was that Joyce
Vincent was 38 when she died, had been born in west London to parents
who were from the Caribbean, and that some of her family had attended
her inquest. Some reports suggested Joyce was, or had been, engaged to
be married, and that before living in the bedsit she had been in a
refuge for victims of domestic violence. But she didn't fit the typical
profile of someone who might die and be forgotten: she wasn't old
without family; she wasn't a loner, or an overdosed drug addict; nor was
she an isolated heavy drinker. Who she was and the circumstances of her
death were a mystery.
I placed adverts with various publications
and internet sites. On a poster on the side of a black cab I asked: Did
you know Joyce Vincent? Meanwhile, as I waited for any response, I
contacted people who were involved with bringing Joyce's story to light.
I met Alison Campsie, news editor for the
Tottenham & Wood Green Journal,
whose journalist David Gibbs had reported on Joyce Vincent's inquest.
She told me that while the paper would have liked to have pursued the
background to the story, they didn't have the time or money, and that
even the BBC with all its resources had tried and failed to run an item
on Joyce.
In the Three Compasses pub below her office, I talked to
Lynne Featherstone, MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Joyce's
constituency. Lynne had urged the police to reopen their investigation
into Joyce's death but they decided there was nothing to answer to in
terms of foul play. The coroner recorded an open verdict, with the cause
of Joyce's death "unascertained". "We don't know how big a part Joyce
played in her own isolation or whether it was more down to society
neglecting her," Lynne told me.
Lynne wrote to the local council,
the utility companies, and the housing association about Joyce's unpaid
bills, questioning why alarm bells didn't ring earlier – but she either
received no reply or little insight. "The point is, Joyce Vincent is
dead, no one murdered her, and no one seems to care that much. I gather
she was very beautiful, which for reasons totally spurious makes it more
poignant because we always think beautiful people have everything go
their way."
On the way to her next appointment Lynne drove me to
Wood Green, to the back of Shopping City, where lorries rumbled in and
out of a delivery depot. She pointed to the housing estate above the
mall known locally as Sky City, where Joyce had lived and died. I looked
at the red brick walkways and tiers of water-stained grey concrete,
interspersed with metal grilles, indistinguishable from the car park or
the shopping centre below. "I suppose, in a way, we all walked by,"
Lynne said. As I stepped out of her car she wished me luck.
Dominating
the skyline was a round blue sign for Shopping City – a beacon to
commercialism. In one of the flats I saw an open window with a billowing
net curtain and I thought of the window in Joyce's bedsit that had been
open for the two years she lay dead, insects crawling along the
windowsill, the escaping smell of her decomposing body attributed to the
rubbish bins below. I walked around to the other side of the complex –
to the high street, hectic with shopping activity and traffic. The main
door Joyce used to access her part of the estate is here, sandwiched
between the usual chain of shops.
Inside the entrance I avoided
the lift and climbed the empty grey concrete stairs. I walked along a
walkway, meeting nobody. In contrast to the hordes of people below, it
was desolate. I found Joyce's bedsit, with its glossy green door, at the
end of the walkway. With only one neighbouring flat, and no flat above
or below, it felt architecturally cut off. I knocked on the doors of
other flats in the block, but no one answered. I wondered if I would
ever meet anyone who actually knew Joyce.
The first response to my
adverts was from Karen, but it turned out she never knew Joyce. "I was a
neighbour. I lived on her doorstep. I got my old diaries out. Had I
seen her? Had I written about her? All the neighbours – where were we?
Why didn't we talk to her?" Karen said she had always liked living in
Sky City but that as she lives alone, and is the same age as Joyce was
when she died, she now worries whether anyone would notice if anything
happened to her.
Months passed. I spent time in libraries and
public records offices, piecing together some of Joyce's history through
official records, locating previous addresses and relatives. I managed
to track down people who knew Joyce, but they wouldn't talk to me. Then I
received an email from Martin Lister, who had seen my advertisement. He
wrote to me in the hope that the Joyce in question was not the same
Joyce he went out with in his twenties. We quickly established that it
was. On the phone he said it just didn't add up – "she never drank much,
she never took drugs" – but the thing that most surprised him, he said,
was that she ended up in social housing.
I arranged to meet
Martin outside Shepherd's Bush underground station. In his late 40s, he
wore a green Brazil baseball cap, and was all friendly smiles. In his
local pub I thanked him for seeing me. "Well I want to thank
you," he said, his pale complexion flushing pink. "Therapy, is how I feel about it."
While
he had confided the news of the circumstances of Joyce's death to
friends, he was glad to have the opportunity to discuss her at length.
They had met in 1985, when he worked negotiating client renewals for a
shipping company in the City. Joyce was 20 years old and secretary to
his boss. "She was always asking me to go for a drink, but it never
occurred to me that she was asking me out. I thought, what a shame she
doesn't have any friends. I didn't read anything into it."
Eventually
Martin went for a drink with Joyce and they subsequently dated for
about three years. Afterwards they kept in touch, on and off, until
2002. Looking back, Martin was unsure if he ever knew exactly what was
going on in Joyce's life. "You look back and think, I wish I'd asked
more, wish I'd understood more."
They had good times together. "We
were always doing something," Martin reminisced, "racing at Goodwood,
tennis at Wimbledon, classical music, opera. We liked restaurants too."
Martin shook his head, baffled at Joyce's outcome. "She always wanted to
improve her mind. Actually, she told me she'd had elocution lessons and
she sounded – I wouldn't say posh, but you wouldn't know she was from
London, she just sounded very well-spoken, almost BBC really. In reality
she grew up off the Fulham Palace Road in west London and she used to
say, 'I don't know why people say it's so lovely round there because it
certainly wasn't when I was growing up.'"
Pulling some photographs
from a carrier bag, Martin looked at one wistfully before handing it to
me. It was the first photograph of Joyce I had seen. I held it
carefully, trying to take in every detail. "People used to say she
looked like Whitney Houston," Martin said proudly. He sipped his wine
and looked at another photo. "Her hair came from her mother's side. Her
mother was Indian, she died when Joyce was young, 11, I think. She had a
real bond with her mum, especially as she was the youngest. She had
four sisters, but I think she was the only one to be born over here –
the sisters brought her up really. Her dad was a carpenter. I never met
her family, which I thought was a bit odd.
"I don't understand.
She worked her way up, had really good jobs. She earned excellent
money." His voice was tinged with sadness as he said: "Apparently she
wanted to marry me, but being a typical bloke I was like – no, no, don't
be ridiculous. I didn't want to settle down."
Martin opened a
sizeable old Filofax to find Joyce's name. Her contact details had been
TippExed over a number of times. "It was alarming really, how often she
moved – at least once a year."
I asked Martin to appear in my
film. I stressed how Joyce's story was a very modern one. She was born
in 1965, the year the Post Office Tower opened, which Tony Benn later
referred to as a symbol of our age – an age in which we worship the
internet, television, mobile phones. I told him how ironic I thought it
that Joyce should be forgotten and unreachable in this so-called period
of communication.
Martin listened politely, thought for a while,
and then said, "We'll see". It was not until a few years later, sitting
in the same pub, that he finally agreed. "I can't say no, I've got to do
it for her," he said then.
A few weeks after meeting Martin, I
went to the Horn Pub in St Albans with John Ioannou, who was once
friendly with both Martin and Joyce. Known as John the Greek, he was
exuberant and talkative. He recalled reading the story about Joyce in a
newspaper, but didn't connect it to the Joyce with whom he had once
shared a house for a while. He told me he felt an enormous amount of
guilt because he spoke to her on the phone in 2002, but never found the
time to meet her.
He described his gang of home-counties friends
whom Joyce had hung out with in the 80s. "We were a bunch of blaggers.
We did things way above our class. A few of us came from money, but most
of us didn't. We used to mix with proper posh people and go sailing, go
to glitzy nightclubs. Right poseurs we were. We used to make up names.
Joyce called herself Rachel Prejudice."
I showed him the
photographs I'd gathered of Joyce. "The trouble with Joyce was she was
very fanciable," he said. "Wherever she went and whatever she did, there
were people trying to get her into bed. It was a burden that she was so
beautiful and she was very clever, a lot more intelligent than she let
on. I think she had several lives."
John asked what had attracted
me to Joyce. I replied that I couldn't leave her to be forgotten – and
that I had discovered there were a lot of things that connected us: we
were exactly the same age, we shared a name – Carol, her middle name –
and at one point we even lived on the same street. Joyce lost her mother
when she was 11 and I was 11 when my father died, so I felt I
understood something of the loss she had suffered. I told John that the
title of the film,
Dreams of a Life,
captured what I was trying to do – dream up Joyce's life and ambitions
through the information I gathered and the people who knew her.
John
said: "I want to know Joyce's story myself, and that sounds ridiculous
coming from someone who knew her. There must have been signs she would
end this way, but if there were she covered them up with this
happy-go-lucky, having-a-great-time act." John shook his head and
sighed. "She died of neglect. We all loved her, but not enough to stop
her dying."
On the train back to London, I reflected on how nobody
she knew really worried about Joyce when she fell out of touch with
them, as she often did – they just thought she was off somewhere having a
better life than they were. Her aspirations and desires, her immaculate
way of presenting herself, masked any deeper troubles she may have had.
As
I continued my research I tracked down some of Joyce's former
colleagues who were willing to appear in the film. Kim Bacon and Dan
Roberts worked with Joyce at Ernst & Young, one of the biggest
accountancy firms in the world. They told me Joyce worked for the
company for four years and had a very responsible job in the treasury
department, "moving the company's money around". It was during this
period that Joyce was engaged for two years to someone I tracked down
but who wishes to remain anonymous.
Her colleagues were surprised
when she decided to quit in 2001. Kim said: "There do seem to be
conflicting stories about what she did when she left." Joyce told some
people she was going travelling with 20 people, and others that she had
been headhunted. All that is known for sure about what happened to her
in the time between her departure from the firm and her death is that
she spent some time in a refuge for victims of domestic violence in
Haringey.
Dan said: "I know it sounds odd, but it seems like we're
talking about two different people. I just can't connect the Joyce who
died to the Joyce that we knew." Kim nodded in agreement: "I mean she
gave this impression of being a happy, bubbly person but it does make
you wonder what was really going on."
I showed them the
Sun article
that started my quest. Kim studied the accompanying photograph of the
bedsit. "The place she ended up living in doesn't tie up with her
persona. I always imagined she lived in a really nice Victorian house,
lovely furniture, nice things around her, everything immaculate and
perfect. Not somewhere like that."
They looked at the photos of
Joyce I'd gathered. "This is the sort of thing you'd imagine being on
Facebook," Kim said. Dan agreed – "but we didn't have Facebook then.
It's different now, you can keep in touch with people very easily." Dan
looked around the pub we were in, where they used to socialise with
Joyce. "It's shocking to think that two years after she left work she
was dead," he said. Kim put the photos down. "I really don't
understand," she said. "She was a very popular girl and I don't know why
we didn't keep in touch. I feel a bit guilty about that."
As time
went on I received a lot of messages via Friends Reunited from Joyce's
old schoolfriends. All concurred that she was beautiful, well turned
out, funny, down to earth, and all mentioned that she loved to sing –
one message even urged me to tell the world about Joyce's fantastic
singing voice.
It was two more years before I found Kirk Thorne, a
musician, and a friend and landlord of Joyce's in the late 80s. Kirk
had once recorded Joyce in his studio.
I sat with him in the
garden of the same modern house in Wapping that Joyce had once occupied.
He told me that since he received my message about Joyce he had spent
hours speculating on how she ended up as she did. "I can't understand.
She had a lot of friends and a good social life. She was not a girl that
came in and sat in front of the telly. If she was white she could have
been a debutante – she was upwardly mobile, a high flyer."
Kirk
was especially surprised that by the age of 38, Joyce was living without
a man. "Joyce was the kind of person that would worry most women. She
was a threat. Good-looking, intelligent, successful and on a mission for
the type of man all women are after."
He showed me around the
studio he had built at the bottom of his garden. It was here that Joyce
once dressed up as a maid and served tea to Captain Sensible, the punk
legend. It was also here that she first fulfilled her dream of being a
recording artist. Kirk had lost the tape, though at my insistence he
promised me he would have another hunt for it. He wondered if Joyce
might have been happier if she had pursued her singing and taken a
different path in life. "She had a clique with all these City bankers –
they didn't suit her, but she liked it," Kirk said. "I think she was on a
search for something she wasn't going to find. I used to think that
what she needed was a good black man. She was my flatmate, not my
family, so I didn't tell her."
Catherine Clarke became good
friends with Joyce while renting a room in Kirk's house. I tracked her
down in Florida, where she recalled that Joyce only had one other close
female friend. "Mostly it was men. Men who had crushes on her, men who
followed her – there was always a story about a guy that had the hots
for her. It was just unbelievable how intense guys would get with her."
Catherine
said she was not surprised that Joyce ended up in a refuge for victims
of domestic violence. "Guys would come on so heavy and not let go. I can
only think she became isolated from her family because of a guy that
she chose. Maybe she was ashamed of the situation she got herself into.
To go into a women's refuge, for Joyce, would have been a big thing."
I
tracked down another of Joyce's friend's – the American disco singer
Judy Cheeks, who once took Joyce out to dinner with Stevie Wonder. On
the phone from the States, Judy said she last spoke to Joyce in the late
90s and found her still looking for Mr Right. "I had no idea where she
was heading. It appears no one did. I often thought of her and always
assumed she had finally found her ideal husband, had a few kids and was
happy."
Over time I received a number of phone calls from Joyce's
former boyfriends. Mostly they were calling me for information, so
disturbed were they that the Joyce they went out with could have ended
up being so overlooked. Most of them didn't want to appear in the film,
but were willing to give me snippets of information. Jason, for example,
told me that when he met Joyce he was a working-class boy from a sink
estate, and Joyce was five years older than him and wanted to be a pop
star. "I used to resent her for that. I used to resent her for having
dreams… what a fall from grace." Jason told me that before he went out
with her, Joyce went out with a baronet and an MP, but he couldn't
recall their names. He also thought that Joyce once knew the American
soul singer Betty Wright.
So I wrote to Betty in Miami. A couple
of months later I received a phone call from Alistair Abrahams, Betty's
one-time tour manager and Joyce's former boyfriend. Betty had told him
about my letter. Stunned by the news, he invited me over to see him in
London the following day.
In his early 50s, with long dreadlocks
swept back behind his shoulders, Alistair showed me into his living
room. Originally from Zimbabwe, he delivered his accented words slowly
and cautiously as he described Joyce and the two years they lived
together in the early 90s. "There were a lot of exciting things
happening to me and her arrival coincided with a lot of that change, so I
used to call her my lucky charm. She was always immaculately attired
down to the bows on her underwear. But she wasn't just physically
beautiful, she had an aura about her."
Alistair explained that Joyce never really talked about her life before she met him. "Have you ever seen the movie
The Man with No Name? That's how she was – she came with no past."
While
Joyce lived with Alistair she came into contact with many of the
musicians he knew and worked with. "We had great times. We had Jimmy
Cliff to stay at the house, Gil Scott-Heron and Isaac Hayes came for
dinner. For her it was exciting, vibrant, thrilling. It was a good
time."
He asked me if I had found out how Joyce had died but I
told him that not even the pathologist came to a conclusion. "Perhaps
she suffered a fatal asthma attack, or do you think it was something
more sinister?" he asked. I replied that Joyce's death would always be
shrouded in mystery and open to speculation, but what was more important
then dwelling on how she died was to remember her life.
"I was so
committed to Joyce almost in a paternal way. I think that's what she
wanted out of a relationship, someone she could rely and depend on. She
was a chameleon in many ways – she adapted to the environment she was
in. I introduced her to Ben E King and the next day she bought his
album. After I'd introduced her to Gil Scott-Heron, when she met him
again, she had this wonderful knowledge of him, she was asking him
questions about the civil-rights movement and
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised."
Alistair
recalled the time he surprised Joyce by taking her to Wembley in 1990
to see a Nelson Mandela tribute concert. "Something very momentous
happened – she met Nelson Mandela, she shook his hand. In fact I spoke
to my brother yesterday and he thinks he may have seen her at the
concert, when it was on the TV."
I ordered up the film of the concert,
Nelson Mandela, International Tribute for a Free South Africa,
from the BFI National Archive. I trawled through it, ever hopeful,
constantly pausing when I spotted anyone remotely resembling Joyce.
After a few fruitless hours I began to prepare myself for disappointment
when the programme cut from the stadium crowds to Nelson Mandela
backstage, addressing the musicians who had taken part in the show. As
he ended his passionate speech they cheered in appreciation, and there
was a cut to a wide shot from the rear of the room – featuring an array
of backs of heads.
And then I saw her. It was Joyce, unarguably.
She turned and smiled at someone behind her. Catching the light, her
earrings gleamed. She turned back and I panicked, I had lost her.
But
she turned around once more. It was Joyce – moving and alive. I had
found her. The power of the moving image hit me, the power to resurrect.
I
rewound the tape and timed Joyce's appearance. Four seconds. I slowed
the footage down and watched. One hundred frames, hundreds of dancing
pixels.
Joyce, who died alone in her bedsit, anonymous and
seemingly forgotten, had once had her image transmitted live to millions
of living rooms in the 61 countries where the show was broadcast.
The
video cut away from Joyce to the Wembley crowd and I thought of her,
backstage, in her element, on a high, talking to Anita Baker and Denzel
Washington, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, in a room with verifiable
stars. She was 26 years old, ambitious, beautiful, full of hope for the
future. She had her whole life ahead of her but in 13 years she would
die and nobody would know and nobody would notice.
I resumed the
tape and carried on watching the show, eager to experience what Joyce
once had. Nelson Mandela arrived on stage to rapturous applause and the
crowd sang, louder and louder, "You'll never walk alone".
Dreams of a Life, written and directed by Carol Morley, will be shown at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival. The film has been shortlisted for the Grierson award for best documentary at the LFF. It will go on general release in March 2012. www.dreamsofalife.com
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary
