The fresh investigation into missing Madeleine McCann, and the discovery of little “Maria” in a Roma camp in Greece with people who were not her biological parents, has thrown the issue of human trafficking and missing children into the spotlight. Julia Breen talks to Richard Lee, who has dedicated his life to finding his daughter, who went missing 30 years ago from an Army base in Germany

LITTLE Katrice Lee, bouncy brown curls and dark eyes, was refusing to get into the trolley. It was her second birthday and she was shopping with her mother for food for her birthday tea. It was the last payday before Christmas, November 28, 1981, and the shopping complex by the Schloss Neuhaus British Army base near Paderborn, Germany, was exceptionally busy.

Katrice’s mother, Sharon, was carrying her to the till in her arms when she realised she had forgotten to get crisps. It would be the last time she ever held her child. She dashed back to the right aisle, leaving the toddler with her aunt, Wendy.

When she returned moments later, Katrice had disappeared. Wendy thought she had followed her mother down the aisle. She has not been seen since.

Royal Military Police at the time concluded that the little girl had drowned in a nearby river, but her body was never recovered.

The RMP relaunched the case last year, and evidence from an expert who looked at the water ratio and rainfall at the time showed that she was very unlikely to have drowned.

Understandably, Richard Lee, from Belle Vue, Hartlepool, is still furious at the way the investigation was handled.

“The police are now saying they are 99.9 per cent certain that she didn’t go in the water,” he says. “That is an admission that my family was correct at the time. We knew she hadn’t drowned.”

Mr Lee feels that the incorrect assumption made by police in 1981 – and the subsequent lack of inquiries – meant the “golden hours” in a missing persons investigation were gone, and Katrice was lost to her family.

The family – in particular Mr Lee’s ex-wife Sharon, who now lives in Southampton – felt they were unfairly blamed for the disappearance and, by the Government’s own admission, were treated appallingly.

It was six weeks from Katrice’s disappearance until police interviewed the cashiers in the shop – and one cashier came forward ten years ago and said she had never been interviewed. The initial investigation did not consider the possibility that Katrice might have been abducted, even though the shop was not inside the military compound and was on a civilian street.

The family received an apology from the Ministry of Defence about the last year.

NOW 63, Mr Lee, once a sergeant major in the King’s Royal Hussars, still believes that his daughter is alive and was abducted.

Recent high-profile cases of child trafficking and abduction have given him, his now ex-wife Sharon and their daughter Natasha – Katrice’s elder sister – fresh hope of finding her.

“Thirty years ago, no one wanted to talk about the fact childtrafficking existed,” he says. “It wasn’t spoken about. I cast my mind back to the early days.

People didn’t know how to talk to me about the fact Katrice had gone. It was as though I had cancer.

The one good thing that has come out of high-profile cases like that of Madeleine Mc- Cann is that people are not frightened to talk about it now.

“However, there are a lot of people who have come to me since they saw the Madeleine case on Crimewatch, saying ‘Why didn’t you get this kind of coverage?’.

“I questioned this in the early days and the police claimed they could not get the newspapers interested, which I didn’t believe.”

Mr Lee says that not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of Katrice, and hopes that one day he will get answers about what happened to her.

“I have to stay positive,” he says. “There are too many negatives otherwise and you would go crackers.

MR Lee describes his daughter’s absence as an “open wound” and said that, in the past, his life had been so bleak he had considered suicide.

Instead, he fights on for answers. His hope is that one day he will see Katrice again, although he has only recently accepted the fact that she will be a grown woman.

“That is the sad part,” he says. “What we have in our minds is a child that is frozen in time.

“The police got some age progression pictures out last year and we are now accepting that this is the reality. We are now looking for a young woman, possibly with her own children. I could be a grandfather.

“But we have to be realistic. Katrice probably doesn’t know who she is at all. We cannot change what happened, but at least we will have answers.”

After a Crimewatch appeal, and a piece which ran on its German equivalent programme XYZ, Katrice’s DNA is now on the national data bases in Canada, the US, Europe and New Zealand.

One day, Mr Lee believes, he will find his daughter.

Until then, he will never abandon hope.