When 74-year-old Henry Clarke heard one of his dogs barking at his home in Jamaica’s Montego Bay, he went outside to investigate. As he stepped outside, he was shot three times and died from his injuries a few hours later.

It was 28 December 2010, more than 50 years after Clarke had travelled to the UK as part of the Windrush generation and six years after he had returned to Jamaica.

More than seven years on, Clarke’s family are no closer to finding out who killed him. His adult children, Sharon and Colin Clarke, say they have been met by a wall of silence from both the UK Foreign Office and the police in Jamaica about the progress of the investigation.

Clarke’s murder was one of thousands in Jamaica over the last decade. Returnees like him are considered to be soft targets by criminals and are perceived to have money. After the Guardian reported a warning from senior Jamaican police officials that expats who returned to the island were in particular danger, families have come forward to complain that deaths of loved ones have not been adequately investigated.

Clarke and his wife, Daisy, who emigrated separately in the late 1950s, met and married in the UK. They fulfilled their dream of retiring to Jamaica in 2004



Sharon Clarke said that when she and her brother went to Jamaica after their father’s murder, police told them it would take some time to investigate the case.

“I thought ‘fair enough’,” she said. “But I didn’t realise that more than seven years later we would be no further forward. The Foreign Office and the Jamaican police just say every time we contact them ‘investigations are ongoing’.”

Sharon Clarke, whose father Henry Clarke was brutally murdered in Jamaica at the end of 2010. Sharon is still campaigning for justice and a proper investigation into the murder. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

After the murder of Gayle and Charlie Anderson, two retirees from the UK, on 22 June this year, Jamaican police promised to review all unsolved cases.

There are no published statistics on the number of returnees killed in Jamaica each year, but a Guardian analysis of government data has found that at least 85 British, American and Canadian nationals have been murdered on the island since 2012. Of those, at least 30 were British. Eight were killed last year, the highest annual murder toll of Britons on the island for at least five years.



Last year, Jamaica recorded 1,616 murders, the highest in six years and equivalent to 31 a week. So far in 2018, there have been more than 600 killings, mainly linked to gang activity.

Like the Clarkes, the family of Keith Murrain, 54, are seeking answers and justice. Murrain was found dead in a shallow grave just outside Spanish Town on 27 June 2014. His killers had pounced as he stepped from his rental car after being picked up at Kingston’s Norman Manley airport. His throat was slit and his body mutilated.



While families such as the Clarkes and the Murrains welcome the pledge to improve the response to murders, it is doubtful the police will be able to bring all of the perpetrators to justice. A Home Office report in March this year said Jamaican police were underpaid, poorly trained and generally lacking in resources. Combined with police corruption and a “sluggish” court system, the obstacles to ensuring that justice is done are many.

Police make arrests in just 45% of homicides annually and just 7% of perpetrators are convicted, according to the Home Office report.



The FCO knew there was a problem with the murder of returnees but nothing was said to people like my parents. Sharon Clarke

Sharon Clarke said that at one point Foreign Office officials questioned whether her father’s case fell under their remit as they were unsure whether, as part of the Windrush generation, he was a British citizen. He was.

The family have had several different caseworkers at the Foreign Office. “I’ve been disappointed with them. It’s always a case of us chasing them and getting no answers. So many other families are in this situation and like us haven’t got justice. The FCO knew there was a problem with the murder of returnees because they were dealing with so many cases. But nothing was said to people like my parents who were retiring there, to warn them of the dangers,” she said.

The family believe that the police missed many opportunities to gather forensic and eyewitness evidence at the scene of the murder. “My only hope that this murder will be solved is that gangs operating at the time may have broken up now, some people may have died or been put in prison and so the people who know who murdered dad may now be prepared to grass them up.”

Murrain’s brother, Trevor Murrain, criticised the Jamaica Constabulary Force’s “shoddy” handling of his case and said the family had been left in the dark for years by detectives in the Caribbean and the British government. He said the family’s Foreign Office caseworker had not replied to their last two requests for an update, sent in March and May this year.

Keith Murrain ran a company exporting tractor parts to Jamaica and had flown to the island to investigate suspicions that his business partner had been siphoning off company funds. Within 24 hours of arriving in the country, he was found dead. Police never arrested a man considered by the family to be a suspect. A year after the killing, a “person of interest” in the case was shot dead by police in an unrelated shootout between gangsters and officers.

The brothers’ 87-year-old mother, Josephine Murrain, said the unanswered questions had left her unable to mourn her son’s death properly. “It makes it worse for me,” she said. “They’ve handled it bad from day one. My life is not the same any more since they murdered Keith over there.”

Murrain, who spoke to the Guardian after visiting her son’s grave in Birmingham, said she had repeatedly asked the Jamaican police to let British detectives assist their investigation but they had refused. She said she had also asked the Foreign Office to look into the murder but she “came up against a brick wall all the time”.

She said: “I can’t wait for them to solve Keith’s murder. Every night I go to bed I cry tears – every night God sends. My heart is bleeding every day. I said on his grave today that I hope one day, before I reach here myself, I will get justice.”

The Clarkes are determined not to give up until they get justice for their father. “I just feel so isolated, alone and helpless,” said Sharon Clarke. “We’re having to chase all the time, are ignored and made to feel like a pest and that nobody cares. But we have to continue. If it was Colin or I who had been murdered, my dad would be doing this for us.”