Robert Maltby is nervous as he opens the door to his parents’ house. He still lives on the quiet cul-de-sac in Bacup, Lancashire, a 10-minute walk from the skate park where a gang killed his girlfriend and left him for dead. The unprovoked attack, in 2007, on two young goths in a Pennine town, was so violent that Sophie Lancaster’s swollen face bore her killers’ footprints. The boys had stamped on her head and kicked it like a football. In the language of the courtrooms and newspapers in which the crime would reverberate for years, the attackers were “feral thugs” who had “degraded humanity”.

Lancaster, who was 20 and about to start an English degree, had been cradling Maltby’s lifeless head after the teenagers had first knocked him unconscious. He lay in a coma for a week before emerging to recover his physical and mental health, but also to be defined in any other terms. “That’s why I’ve been very reluctant to talk to journalists,” Maltby, now 31, says in his first full interview, 10 years after the attack. He has just walked up the hill from the shoe warehouse where he’s working. “It’s the thing I never want to be written on my headstone. I’m trying to be ‘Robert Maltby the artist’, not ‘Robert Maltby the victim of a horrific attack with the dead girlfriend’.”

Maltby, who last year completed an illustration degree almost a decade after his art studies had been cut short, describes watching “two truths” diverge after his girlfriend’s death. His nerves lift as he explains the gap; he is composed, fast-talking, thoughtful. It struck him first at the public funeral, he explains, where more than 300 people gathered three months after the attack. Lancaster died after 13 days in a coma when her family agreed to turn off her life-support machine. Maltby only falters when he recalls saying goodbye at her bedside. “That was … a day,” he says, taking a long pause. “That was a day.”

By the time of the funeral, which TV news crews also attended, Maltby’s brain had begun to repair and he found it even harder. “My initial memory was seeing the coffin and thinking, that’s too small,” he says. “Her entire life shouldn’t have fitted into that small box. That’s when I began to crumble. And I’ll be honest, I was resentful of the fact so many people were there. They had the best intentions, but I was thinking: ‘Did you ever eat a meal with her? Did you know how she took her coffee? You just saw this archetype on the news. You didn’t know her.’”

The couple had met through a friend two years earlier, quickly forming a deep bond. “We’d see friends at weekends, but day-to-day it was just the two of us,” he says. “It was always just Rob and Sophie.” They lived together and talked often about the future. As the 10-year anniversary of the attack approached, film-makers came to Maltby with an idea. He had expected interest in the crime to return, and felt ready, if still reluctant, to express his side of the story. He worked closely with producers on Murdered for Being Different, a factual drama about the crime and the police investigation, and agreed to do one newspaper interview. Yet even the BBC3 film, which includes a graphic reconstruction of the attack (“My eyes refused to focus on that part”), could not show how Maltby came to feel trapped. On one side, the need to put some distance between himself and his attack - to rebuild a life. On the other, the horrible sense that the woman he loved was becoming a memory beyond his reach or recognition.

Memorials to Sophie Lancaster in Stubbylee Park, Bacup. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

It was always like: Sophie was killed because she was a goth. No, she was killed because some arseholes killed her Robert Maltby

The timing of the attack did not help; it was one of a series of unconnected crimes that triggered a period of intense media coverage and national soul-searching. On the same night, 25 miles away in Warrington, teenagers attacked Garry Newlove outside his home. He died two days later. The next week, a 16-year-old boy in Liverpool shot and killed 11-year-old Rhys Jones. The following June, three teenagers stabbed Ben Kinsella to death in north London after a minor disagreement with the boy’s friends. There seemed to be a pattern; groups of young men, who were known to police but not to their victims, committing horrific attacks in public without provocation.

Coverage of the crimes and the campaigns they inspired focused variously on knives, binge drinking, antisocial behaviour and troubled families. The Sun launched its “Broken Britain” campaign in January 2008. These were teenagers “with nothing to lose, whose ignorance or violent behaviour is rampaging unchecked and creating a moral vacuum”, the newspaper wrote. Within days, David Cameron backed the campaign, accelerating his own crusade to mend “our broken society”, a phrase he repeated throughout his Conservative party leadership.

In Bacup, tackling hate became the focus for the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, launched by her family in her memory. She and Maltby were attacked because, as goths in Lancashire, they looked different. In the eyes of their attackers, they were “freaks” or “moshers”. After an initially friendly encounter in a petrol station soon after midnight, where Maltby had been buying cigarettes, he remembers feeling anxious as he and Lancaster went with a group of local teenagers to Stubbylee Park. The attackers had been drinking on the skate ramps. He is relieved that he does not remember what happened next.

As the couple chatted with the group and shared cigarettes, Ryan Herbert, then 16, and Brendan Harris, 15, suddenly began kicking and punching Maltby in a frenzied attack that left him unconscious, his brain bleeding. Lancaster knelt by his side when the gang attacked her before fleeing. “There’s two moshers nearly dead up Bacup park; you wanna see them – they’re a right mess,” they boasted to friends that night. After a trial in March 2008, Herbert and Harris received life sentences. Brothers Joseph and Danny Hulme (aged 17 and 16), and Daniel Mallett (17), also from Bacup, were convicted of grievous bodily harm and have since been released from prison. The judge told the young men that their behaviour “degrades humanity itself … it raises serious questions about the sort of society which exists in this country.”

The goth community rallied to Lancaster’s cause. The metal festival Bloodstock still has a stage named after her. Thanks in large part to campaigning by Sophie’s mother Sylvia, several police forces, including Greater Manchester, now treat crimes against goths, punks and other alternative subcultures in the same way they do racist or homophobic attacks. The crime inspired cartoons, music and a 2011 BBC radio play made up of poems by Simon Armitage. Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster was later adapted for television.

But for Maltby, struggling alone in Bacup, the “goth murder” narrative widened the gap between his and the public understanding of what had happened, and who Lancaster was. “I have never seen it as a hate crime,” he says. “It was always like: ‘Sophie Lancaster was killed because she was a goth.’ No she wasn’t: she was killed because some arseholes killed her. Why can’t we ask what it is about them that made them want to murder someone? Not what it is about someone that made them be murdered.”

Today, Maltby wears tracksuit bottoms, Converse trainers and a black T-shirt. He would not stand out as “different” in any town, and says that on the night of the attack he wore blue jeans and a green hoodie. Among several dramatic changes taken by the new film, the cost of the leather clothes worn by the actor playing Maltby struck him as a bit far-fetched. Only the couple’s piercings and Lancaster’s braided hair set them apart that night.

To Maltby, the media focus on their appearance in the aftermath of the crime felt like a form of victim-blaming. “Besides being patronising, the goth thing was also an oversimplification of a much broader social issue,” he explains. “Life hasn’t progressed in these poor areas. There is still that dissatisfaction, that stagnation. These areas are still forgotten, and forgotten people will feel like … well, it can breed nihilism. I’ve never tried to demonise the attackers and, in many ways, they were victims.”

Black roses … Sophie and Robert as depicted in BBC3’s reconstructions. Photograph: BBC/Des Willie

There is no panacea, no one big thing that snaps you out of it. It has been gradual and hard. Robert Maltby

Maltby prefers to deal with the men by thinking little about them, although he does worry about bumping into the three who are free. “Would I even recognise them?” he wonders. “Sometimes I get on a bus and see someone and I’ll go: ‘Are you them?’”

About five years ago a letter arrived from one of the two men serving life. “It felt like an apology written by someone trying to get a shorter sentence. It was the hollowest thing I’ve ever read.”

At 5pm on a school day, the skate park at Stubbylee Park is busy with children on micro scooters. A young sycamore tree, planted for Lancaster by her family, is flourishing nearby. Maltby accepts that still living so close to the scene of his attack has not helped his recovery. But he had nowhere else to go and relied on his mother, who works in a local shop, and his father, a draughtsman. After the funeral precipitated a steep decline in his mental health, he became a recluse. On receiving proper treatment, eventually he felt ready to return to the park, and then to visit Lancaster’s grave in a nearby village. “I said: ‘I’m sorry, I have to find my life again’,” he says. “If anything, it was a ceremony for myself, to go: ‘Look, this has happened but now I need to be me again.’” Going back to university became part of that process. He studied illustration with animation at Manchester School of Art and moved to the city for his final year. But none of these moments felt like breakthroughs. “They were both incredibly profound and entirely meaningless,” he says. “There is no panacea, no one big thing that snaps you out of it. It has been gradual and hard.”

Maltby’s brain fully recovered, and – while he no longer receives treatment – he does take antidepressants. More than anything, he feels like his life was put on hold that night in 2007. But now he wants to find work as an illustrator and is building up an impressive portfolio. For the past year or so, he has been in a long-distance relationship with Karah, an American he met online who shares his love of cats and the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy American Gods. They watch it in sync over Skype. The couple spent Thanksgiving together at Karah’s home in Baltimore and she came to a Maltby family wedding earlier this year. He plans to move to the US for six months, to draw and to be anywhere but Bacup during the anniversary of the attack.

Maltby was not in court when his attackers were sentenced, but a lawyer read out a statement. “Before all this happened I was settled into a life quite independent,” he said. “Now I’m finding the whole world a terrifying place.” Today, he no longer lives in fear, but finds life “terrifyingly meaningless”, albeit in a strangely reassuring way. “Life is chaos, anything can happen and it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things,” he says. “No matter how significant something is to you, the universe doesn’t care. But there’s something freeing in that: do what you want, what makes you happy.” So while Maltby has no plans for 11 August, he will be guided by Karah. “I think she will want to express a normality more than anything. She’ll be like: ‘I know this is a major thing, but remember that you’re loved elsewhere’, you know?”

Murdered for Being Different is on BBC3’s iPlayer channel from Sunday

This article was amended on Thursday 15 June to clarify Maltby’s view that it was the media focus on their appearance in the aftermath of the attack which felt like victim-blaming.



