By SIMON TRUMP

Last updated at 01:43 27 April 2008

For 30 years, the disappearance of 13-year-old Genette Tate as she delivered newspapers in the Devon village of Aylesbeare has been one of Britain's most notorious unsolved crimes.

Her body has never been found, there has been no trial and precious few clues.

Not surprisingly, the mystery has blighted the lives of her parents John Tate and Sheila Cook.

Scroll down for more...

Haunted: Maggie Heavey today - she has never come to terms with the disappearance of Genette

But it has also ensured that life would never be the same again for Genette's best friend, Maggie Heavey, the last person to see her alive.

This month it emerged that the Crown Prosecution Service is considering a case file linking Genette's disappearance to infamous child killer Robert Black, who is serving life for the abduction and murder of three girls in the Eighties.

The news has prompted Maggie, now 42, to speak publicly for the first time of the devastating effect the tragedy has had on her own life.

It is clear that Maggie is haunted by her past. Before Genette's disappearance, she had been a bright, happy-go-lucky 12-year-old with a promising future.

She did well at school and spent her spare time playing in the fields, hills and woods around her home.

The photo released at the time: Maggie says she could not understand why a more-up-to-date picture was not found

But in an age before counselling and psychological help became routine, a grieving Maggie was subjected to weeks of intensive questioning, sometimes under hypnosis, from detectives facing huge pressure to solve the case.

She was bullied and even called "murderer" at school. The whole experience, she admits, made her "hard and bitter".

She became angry and withdrawn and left school at the earliest opportunity, despite gaining a creditable seven O-levels.

It was as if Genette's disappearance caused Maggie's future to become cruelly derailed.

Now she can only look back at the wreckage of a life characterised by shattered relationships and mistrust – a life in which alcohol has numbed the pain.

In the mid-Seventies, the modern world was just beginning to impact on Aylesbeare, a village of a few hundred people set in unspoiled countryside a few miles outside Exeter.

It had a 13th Century church and a 400-year-old pub and there was scarcely a car to be seen in its pretty, hedge-lined lanes.

By 1978 Genette's parents had already divorced and were each living with new spouses.

Her father John, then 36, was a sales representative suffering from the early stages of a muscle-wasting disease that has since confined him to a wheelchair.

Her mother Sheila, 33, had remarried and moved to Bristol.

The passage of 30 years has not dimmed Maggie's recollection of the fateful day Genette – Ginny to her friends – vanished.

"If I shut my eyes, I can still see that scene now," she says.

The picture she describes is of a sun-dappled rural idyll. Ginny is on her newspaper round when she happens across Maggie and another school friend, Tracey Pratt, who asks for her mother's paper.

As Ginny cycles off, the two girls lie down on the verge to read a story about a UFO sighting in the area.

They get up, turn the corner of Withen Lane and there is Ginny's bike, its back wheel still spinning, and papers fanned out across the Tarmac.

"At first we didn't think anything was wrong," adds Maggie. "We thought she'd hopped over a gate to spend a penny behind a hedge and we tried to sneak up on her, but she wasn't there.

"Then we called her name for a long time, really loudly, and there was no answer. Then we thought, 'Oh well,' and started pushing her bike home because otherwise she'd get into trouble for leaving it.

"At home I told my mum what had happened. When Ginny's dad turned up, I started to realise it might be something serious."

Ginny disappeared at 3.37pm on Saturday, August 19, 1978, a moment from which Maggie has never since been able to escape.

"I can still see Ginny as clear as if it was yesterday," she admits. "I can hear her and, most of all, I can recall the gentleness of her ways.

"It's not just me being sentimental – she was the kindest, most thoughtful, most honest person you could ever meet.

"All I want to know is where she is now. If she's dead and if her body is found, then I could grieve. But until they find her I can never really rest."

Maggie also wants an answer to a question that has turned endlessly in her mind.

"Ginny was starting to grow up. Her body was developing and she wasn't the elfin-faced little girl in the photograph that went out at the time," she says.

"I could never understand why that was the only picture of her. It was taken when she was about nine. Ginny was 13 when she disappeared.

"Why did her dad not have a later picture of her? I thought that was odd.

"Maggie first met Ginny when she joined Maggie's primary school at the age of eight.

"I really took to her – she was so smiley and sunny and we just clicked," says Maggie. "But there was something downtrodden about her. Not crushed but controlled, perhaps. She seemed genuinely frightened of her father.

"What her dad didn't know is that we used to experiment with make-up, clothes and hair, like young girls do.

We wanted to look more grown-up and when Ginny was done up she could have passed for years older.

"It crossed my mind that she might have wanted to run away and that she had faked her disappearance."

The control that John Tate had over his family even led police to suspect him, but he was eliminated from inquiries.

Maggie had been brought up in a loving, secure environment with her late mother Betty, father Paddy and four brothers, two either side of her.

Scroll down for more...

Traumatic: Maggie Heavey, centre, and Tracey Pratt, left in a reconstruction of Genette's disappearance in 1978

A world where an adult could harm a child was entirely alien to her and only fuelled the idea that Ginny may have deliberately disappeared – a thought that to this day stops her from properly putting the tragedy behind her.

"Part of me wants to believe that one day she'll turn up on my doorstep,'" Maggie admits. "It would have been Ginny's 43rd birthday next month.

"All her friends would have been there. We'd all still be together and we'd all be married and happy. Why can't I see her just once more or even find out for certain if she's dead?"

Maggie's voice trails off. She lights another of the cigarettes she chain-smokes and pours another drink.

The police still have a mountain of paperwork and other material from the case – including Ginny's bike – securely locked in a 10ft by 12ft cage at their Middlemoor headquarters in Exeter.

The bike has been examined and re-examined by forensic experts.

One of the most crucial breakthroughs came in 2003 when a DNA sample was recovered from a jumper of Ginny's, kept lovingly by her mother. Police have so far been unable to match it.

In the immediate aftermath of Ginny's disappearance, Maggie had not expected such a difficult time from the police.

"For about six weeks after Ginny went, I was constantly questioned by detectives, often three times a day,"

she recalls. "I don't know if they thought I was involved.

"They kept on and on, coming back to our house. Once, when they arrived on a Sunday lunchtime, my mum had had enough. She said, 'Sorry, but you're not invited to eat with us today.' But they took me off again anyway.

"I was even hypnotised in the hope that I could unlock clues from my subconscious. A policeman's wife who lived in the village reported seeing a maroon car at the time, but Tracey and I could only recall a beige one.

"When I was under I came up with a car number. It belonged to a brown car owned by someone nearby who was eliminated from the investigation."

Maggie admits: "I just couldn't cope with the constant hassle. To make matters worse, there were reporters and TV crews everywhere. When I went back to school, I was bullied and called a kidnapper and a murderer.

"One day in the dinner queue I exploded. Three of the worst offenders were sniggering, 'There's killer Heavey,' and I lost it.

"I ran along the counter and kicked the ringleader straight in the face. I never got any problems after that, but I did still get into a lot of trouble.

"The teachers seemed to understand that I had been changed by what had happened to me. Losing Ginny had made me hard and bitter. I didn't trust anyone.

"I got my seven O-levels and got the hell out of there."

Maggie started work as a nanny two days after leaving school. The job lasted four years until she was forced to give up.

She was having a baby and she had to return home to nurse her mother, who was slowly dying of cancer.

She tried to keep working part-time, juggling caring for her child and looking after her parents.

By the time her mother died in 1990, drink had become Maggie's crutch. She began a new relationship with a work colleague of her father, and they married in 1993.

"I loved him, and I still do," she confides. "He's the father of two of my three children. But I destroyed our relationship.

"I would go to work in the morning with a bottle of Coke laced with vodka. My drinking alienated my husband and there were problems growing between us.

"But instead of dealing with them I just drank. I would have another half-bottle of vodka on the way home just to help me face him."

In 1998, Maggie's world collapsed again when her husband announced he was divorcing her.

She locked herself away with her burgeoning addiction – soon to grow to three bottles of vodka a day – until an older brother took her to a rehabilitation clinic in Exeter where she stayed for two weeks.

It helped, for a while.

Since 2000, Maggie has slowly lost contact with her family. Her father, now 80, still lives in the family home in Aylesbeare, barely 100 yards from Ginny's old home at Barn Cottage.

"Maggie seemed to take it all in her stride for a while, like children do," he says. "But gradually we noticed a change in her personality. She became depressed and in those days there was no such thing as counselling.

"She began drinking to erase the memories and she's drifted away from us. She gave up on life. She couldn't get over the loss of her friend and finding the bike like that. It haunted her."

Maggie agrees. "I just feel so abandoned. I have never got to grips with that feeling. I wish I could go back and have my time again. I would never let Ginny go."