Danielle Gillam-Kirton found bones she believes belong to her father inside the family's burnt-out BMW five weeks after a wildfire in southern Spain killed her parents and seven other British expatriates.
Gillam-Kirton, 42, an assistant headteacher and mother of three from Nottinghamshire, had been told by a female police officer that the black BMW 5-series had been forensically searched and that nothing more had been found inside it.
Her parents, Pete and Fran Gillam, were among nine Britons killed when the fire swept through the village of Bedar, 60 miles from Almeria, on July 9. The couple had retired to the area after building a successful business in the education sector.
Gillam-Kirton and her elder sister, Natalie Lindsay, had already held a memorial service for their parents when, on August 12, she and her husband, Mark, visited a municipal car pound to photograph the wrecked BMW for an insurance claim. In the open boot they found a padel racquet belonging to Pete and Fran Gillam, four weeks after police had said the car had been cleared.
Bones found in the wreckage
After securing permission to return to the pound on August 19, Gillam-Kirton searched the car further. She found her father's mobile phone on the central console, along with keys, coins and pieces of jewellery. The clothes the couple had taken when they evacuated were gone, but the hooks they had hung from were still down, undisturbed.
Reaching into the steering well, she found what she believed was a bone. "Oh my God, it's a bone!" she said, telling the Daily Mail it looked like a hip joint or part of a pelvis. Her husband then recovered further fragments, including what appeared to be part of a rib and some forearm bones.
"I kept saying, 'I can't believe he has been left here for five weeks,'" she said.
Police dismissed find as animal remains
Gillam-Kirton photographed the remains, placed them in a tub and took them to Bedar town hall. "Look, these are my father's bones! Look at them!" she told the mayor, Angelo Francisco Collado, who she said was "as shocked and horrified as we were" and urged her to take the remains to the Guardia Civil, the national police force that had carried out the search.
Officers there told her the bones would be examined at a forensics laboratory in Madrid, but added dismissively that they were probably from animals. Gillam-Kirton noted that the only large animals in the Bedar mountains are goats and wild boar, prompting her to question how a cow would have climbed into the passenger seat during a fire.
Two forensic anthropologists have since examined photographs of the remains and told the Daily Mail they are human. One said there were bone fragments from an adult's finger, a portion of the pelvis and a fragment of the scapula, which are "not something easily confused with animal bones."
Gillam-Kirton now believes police never properly searched the car, meaning the officer who told her nothing was found was either misinformed or lied to her. She said the British Consul told her this week that, three weeks after she handed over the bones, officials had still not said where they were being kept or whether they had been tested.
"I understand that, for them, my story is just about one night that happened months ago, but for us this is an ongoing nightmare," she said. "It seems we are fighting an uphill battle for decency and respect... there is just this silence, we feel quite alone with it."
Nine Britons among 15 killed
The Bedar wildfire, thought to have been sparked by a fallen power cable, killed 15 people of multiple nationalities, nine of them British, but received relatively little coverage in Britain, coinciding as it did with the World Cup, Wimbledon and a domestic heatwave. Temperatures near Almeria reached close to 40 degrees Celsius at the time.
The ninth British victim, care worker Michelle Leake, survived burns to 40 per cent of her body for eight weeks before dying from her injuries in a Seville hospital on Tuesday. She had stayed with 93-year-old Audrey Curry, the woman she was caring for, as the fire closed in, and carried her as they tried to flee. Curry was a neighbour of the Gillams on a mountain known locally as "English Hill," popular with wealthier British residents for its coastal views and reachable only by a narrow, twisting road.
The Gillams had reached only the second hairpin bend, about 300 yards from their villa, when they became trapped. Pete, who suffered from asthma, is thought to have stayed in the car, while Fran was outside, possibly trying to direct other stranded vehicles. Curry is believed to have died near the same spot, now marked by a bouquet and the scorched outline of the BMW in the tarmac.
Warnings that never came
The other victims were staying in Paraje el Curato, another hamlet of high-end villas near English Hill, also reachable only by a narrow road with sheer drops. Officials, including Collado and Antonio Sanz, the Andalusian regional minister for emergency response, have said it would have been counterproductive to send a blanket evacuation alert to Bedar's 970 residents through Spain's ES-Alert mobile phone system, which had been used elsewhere in the same wildfires in an area where only one person died. Instead, they said, the safer option was a house-by-house warning delivered by a local official.
That task fell to Diego Castro, Bedar's only police officer. Gillam-Kirton said all her parents heard was the sound of his siren as he drove past their villa. Like many expats, the Gillams were not part of a municipal WhatsApp group, used mainly by Spanish residents, through which the town hall had posted some warnings.
Juanma Moreno, president of the regional government of Andalusia, later said residents had been given enough time to evacuate but that some had ignored the advice, adding that "failure to follow those recommendations probably caused the tragic outcome."
"He died fighting"
Duncan Chard, whose parents Michael and Christine Chard died in the fire, rejected that claim. The couple, originally from Bristol, had retired to Bedar 25 years earlier, where Michael, 82, had built the family's home in el Curato himself to "create their little bit of paradise in the sun." "My father has two prosthetic knee replacements," Duncan Chard said. "There was no way he was going to try to run for his life through the valley unless that was his only option as a last resort. He was being brave. He died fighting. He did not die because he was being stupid or not following instructions. There were no instructions. What the Spanish authorities said afterwards has been very hurtful... they are trying to protect their arses."
The Chards had tried to escape in a convoy of five or six cars carrying several other residents, three of them British, but found the only road out impassable and retreated down a dirt track to a dead end.
Trapped as flames closed in
The only survivor from that group was Malcolm Timbrell, 70, who had appeared with his wife, Annette Kilgore, 69, on Channel 4's "A Place in the Sun." Timbrell ran back on foot to fetch the couple's cats, Charlie and Lilly, then sheltered in a car that did not catch fire; Kilgore was in another vehicle that burst into flames.
As the fire advanced at speeds of up to 300 yards a minute, the group gathered on a natural platform above a valley of tinder-dry scrub. Phone signal held, and in Belgium, Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt stayed in contact with his father, Stanislas, 63, for about an hour before he died. Stanislas, a wildlife photographer who knew the terrain well, reportedly remained calm as he described his dwindling options.
It is unclear why a helicopter was not sent to the platform; officials believe high winds and smoke made a landing too dangerous. One Spanish man, whose two friends were in the group, said he repeatedly called Spain's 112 emergency line with their GPS coordinates, but the fire truck that eventually reached them arrived too late.
Returning for a dog, finding remains
Stanislas Verdonckt escaped with his black rescue dog, Schubi, asking his son to look after the animal if he did not survive. Four days later, Thomas-Wolf Verdonckt learned the dog had died beside its owner and returned to recover the body, finding victims' scattered remains and belongings, including spectacles, buckles, shoes and jewellery, still at the site.
When he returned again on August 9 to help build a memorial cairn of painted stones for the victims, the bones and personal effects were still there.
Families demand an inquiry
Several families, including the Gillams and the Chards, have joined together to press for an investigation into how the fire started, whether mistakes were made in the response, and how future tragedies might be prevented. Gillam-Kirton said the aim was not to blame any individual but to get answers and help save lives.
