Linda Briggs—Iris

Iris is Linda Briggs’s friend and companion through the disappearance and eventual identification of Linda’s daughters, Theresa and Bernadette Briggs. Her support takes concrete forms: she brings Linda a box of missing-person T-shirts funded by their community, helps carry the girls’ images into public view, and remains beside Linda when the family’s hope gives way to grief. Across these scenes, friendship is not an abstract assurance but a shared effort to make the girls visible and to endure the news of their deaths together.

Friendship and the campaign for visibility

Iris enters the account carrying a large cardboard box. Inside are T-shirts printed with an image of the twins laughing together, taken from their Instagram page and previously released to the press. Beneath the photograph, the shirts ask whether anyone has seen Terri and Berri and give the missing-persons hotline number. The image turns a familiar picture of the sisters into a public appeal that can be worn and circulated beyond the family home.

The shirts have been paid for through a collection among the neighbours and the twins’ friends. Linda explains that the group will wear them until the girls are found and safely home, so the campaign belongs to a wider circle rather than to the family alone. Iris’s delivery is therefore both practical help and evidence of collective effort: she brings the finished objects into the house, while the neighbours and friends have supplied the money and undertake to wear them. Linda, in turn, gives some shirts to Gary Baxter to distribute, extending the campaign beyond those already gathered around her.

Public attention and the girls’ representation

The campaign takes shape against a news environment that has not treated the missing girls as equally worthy of attention. A newspaper article speculates about whether the twins were connected to the same man, a grooming gang, or had simply run away. It also calls them little tearaways and depicts Linda in a photograph with a cigarette in her mouth, beside an image of the house and its untidy garden. The coverage makes both the girls and their mother subjects of public judgement at the moment when the family needs people to look for them.

Linda articulates the class divide she sees in that attention: the pictures of other victims have been widely circulated, she says, while her daughters are poor and working class. She imagines that a more affluent family, pictured with a pony, would receive a different response. Against that disparity, the T-shirts offer a direct, portable counter-image: the twins appear laughing together, accompanied by an appeal for information rather than a description that casts suspicion on them. Iris says the group intends to make Linda’s girls as important as The Phantom and his victims. Her comparison links the shirts to the broader imbalance in publicity, while insisting that the twins should not disappear behind the more sensational case.

Support as the search turns to loss

Iris’s role changes in force, though not in kind, when the search ends in the discovery of the twins’ bodies. When Linda learns that both girls are dead, Iris puts an arm around her and bursts into tears. The gesture does not solve the questions surrounding what was done to the girls; those answers are still unknown. It places Iris beside Linda at the first moment of confirmed loss, sharing a response that the investigation cannot provide for her.

The contrast with the earlier T-shirt campaign is stark. The shirts were made to be worn until the girls came home, and their hopeful image joined neighbours and friends in a public search. After the news, Iris’s support is no longer expressed through a plan to bring the girls back but through physical closeness and shared mourning. The friend who helped circulate their photograph now remains with Linda as the meaning of their absence becomes irreversible.

At the mortuary

On the afternoon of 5 March, Iris accompanies Linda to Sunderland Royal Hospital with family liaison officer Wendy Sawyer. They are taken to the mortuary and then to a viewing room, where the bodies lie covered on metal tables. Felix Carver turns back the sheets so Linda can identify her daughters. She confirms that they are Theresa and Bernadette, her girls, and explains that she needs to see and hold them properly; for the moment, the forensic post-mortem means she can only confirm their identities.

After the identification, Linda and Iris cling to each other and sob. Their embrace gives the relationship its most direct expression in the book: not a promise or a solution, but mutual presence at a moment neither can undo. Wendy turns away, finding the scene almost unbearable, yet continues because the task matters and someone must undertake it. Iris’s place beside Linda is similarly grounded in action. From the community-funded shirts to the mortuary, she accompanies her friend through the changing meanings of the search, first helping insist that the girls be seen and finally sharing the grief of seeing them identified.