In the summer of 1998, shortly after his 30th birthday, Nick Dawson was driving through Cumbria with his wife, when his phone started ringing. He didn’t answer but it rang again and again, so he eventually pulled over and picked up. It was Nick’s dad, he had something to tell him. His identical twin brother, Simon, had been murdered.
On an August night, Simon had been out at a nightclub in an area of Wirral he didn’t know well. At some point he lost his friends and asked two young passersby for help with directions to the home of a friend he was staying with. The two young men – aged 16 and 19 – agreed to help but instead tricked him, led him into a nearby nature reserve and stole his bank card.
They began to stamp on and kick him until he was black and blue and unconscious. Then, they threw him into a pond, where he drowned. Simon’s body was found floating in the water.
Nearly 30 years later, Nick is now 58, and has long been haunted by the final moments of his twin brother’s life. “The pathologist at the trial said Simon had been alive when he was thrown in the pond. If they’d left him on the bank, he might have survived. I’m sure he would have been utterly terrified. I sometimes think, did they enjoy what they were doing to him? What was going through their minds? They were utterly over the top and he didn’t stand a chance. They were high on drink and drugs, and perhaps had they not been so high, they might not have been so psychotic”.
The impact on his family is, understandably, profound. “I can now talk about it without crying, but my poor mum, she still can’t,” says Nick. His dad, who has since passed away, would spend the remainder of his life writing to prime ministers and home secretaries, telling them what had happened, so immense was his parental grief. He described the offenders as having “tortured and executed my son”.
Nick and his brothers were brought up in a rural village on the west coast of Cumbria, in a big house with a huge garden in which they made dens, rode their bikes and ran around. “It was a lovely childhood,” says Nick. “Simon and I were best mates growing up, we were almost one single unit.”
Nick and Simon went to different universities and settled in different parts of the UK, with Simon working for his dad’s printing business in Cheshire and Nick working in the South of England for BP. But the twins were still very close. Just a few weeks before Simon’s murder, he and Nick had a joint birthday celebration with their parents and older brother – everyone together and happy.
“[At my wedding] Simon was in buckets of tears,” remembers Nick. “He was very happy for me, but it’s that twin thing where he felt he was losing me a bit, too. Since Simon’s death, I have a very different, complex sense of loss as the lone twin.”
Nick and Simon as children, with their mother (Photo: Nick Dawson)The killers were caught soon after Simon’s murder, just as Nick was getting ready to go on Crimewatch to appeal for information. There was a murder trial during which both of the accused pleaded not guilty (“A deeply upsetting, horrific time”, says Nick). But the verdict was unanimous. Carl Harrison was 19, and he was given a life sentence of at least 12 years. Craig Roberts was 16, and he was sent to prison for at least 10 years. “A life sentence doesn’t usually mean life,” says Nick, “so we knew they’d come out at some point, but we forced ourselves to put that painful idea to the back of our minds”.
For the first few years after the murder, Nick says he became isolated and withdrawn. “I was torn between being there for my wife Julie – we’d only been married six months – but also wanting to support my parents. They were, of course, so devastated that they clung on to me and for the first five years of our married life, they were always at our house, coming on holiday with us and my mum would be crying. There was huge collective grief. I had huge bouts of anger towards the killers, and this hatred would flash through me at unpredictable times. At times, I wanted to kill them.”
Nick had a lot of therapy, and after four years, he and his wife had their first child. Given what happened to his twin, did Nick feel extra layers of worry about his own children? “What happened to Simon makes it easy to fear the worst,” says Nick. “When my daughter was 15 and out with friends, I’d have panic attacks that something horrible was happening to her, especially if she didn’t call me. The call from my dad [in 1998] was so shocking, that that shock is always on my mind. It’s not normalised, the shock is still there now, 28 years later.”
Simon and Nick celebrating their 30th birthday together (Photo: Nick Dawson)For years, Nick wanted the killers to rot in prison. Lock them up and throw away the key, let them suffer forever – they’re monsters. A decade later, there was a parole hearing [a meeting where a panel decides if a prisoner can be safely released back into the community before finishing their sentence] for the offenders.
Nick and his parents were invited to go and give a victim impact statement. “I spoke from the heart, and you could see they were both really quite shaken by it, particularly, I think, my mum’s statement, which was heart-rending. I’d imagined them to have the faces of evil monsters, but here were just human beings who had murdered my brother.”
That parole hearing sparked Nick’s curiosity, particularly about Craig – the younger killer – because he was in therapy at HMP Grendon, a prison which tries to rehabilitate violent criminals through group therapy. “He was clearly doing a lot of work to look at his behaviour,” says Nick.
So, when Nick was offered the chance to meet and talk to Craig face to face, he decided to say yes. This was the process of restorative justice, where a victim and perpetrator voluntarily meet and discuss what happened, and how the crime has had an impact. “It’s a risky process,” says Nick, “because you can go in there to meet the offender and it might knock you back many years of recovery and acceptance. I went home and thought about it for weeks, and talked to my wife. I decided to do it.
Nick Dawson at the ‘Punch’ after-show discussion (Photo: Jake Bush)“Craig was ready, and I was ready, and though it took 17 years for that to happen, in most murder cases it never does. My parents were adamant they didn’t want to do it, and didn’t want to know much about it, but they were supportive of me. I had a lot of unanswered questions about Simon’s death, and strangely felt that Craig could help me bring Simon alive in those last few moments. I was clinging on to knowing how, exactly, Simon died, and I think some of that is down to being a twin. I also wanted to know who this man was, how he had become a killer at 16.”
When the day of the meeting came, Nick sat on the verge of tears in the prison chapel with Julie and waited for his brother’s murderer to walk in. “Craig – who was now 33 – sat down at the chair opposite me. Initially, he couldn’t look at me, as he was very nervous.
“The success of the meeting is critically dependent on the facilitator, and ours did it brilliantly. I’m friends with her to this day. She said, ‘Craig, why don’t you tell Nick how that day [of the murder] began?’ Craig quite quickly got into a zone where he wanted to talk, and help. He was gentle, but honest, and he didn’t shirk responsibility. He didn’t remember everything, as he’d been drunk, but obviously something like that you never forget.”
Nick felt the most powerful moments were when Craig looked him properly in the eye, and took him through everything step by step. He also said sorry. “He was very sincere, and it’s quite something to get that apology, face to face.”
There were some painful details that Nick couldn’t bring himself to broach, like how when Craig was arrested he was wearing Simon’s watch, and how when he and Carl killed Simon they stole £500 from his bank and bought new clothes. “The loss of life and the immense destruction that act of violence has caused… all for a new pair of trainers,” says Nick.
‘I had a lot of unanswered questions about Simon’s death, and strangely felt that Craig could help me bring Simon alive in those last few moments’ (Photo: Nick Dawson)What was also helpful, though, was for Nick to hear about Craig’s childhood. He’d been abused by his alcoholic father, there was sexual abuse, he’d been in foster care. He was a deeply angry teenager, and in the meeting he referred to himself as having been “evil”. To Nick, Craig was now a victim, too.
“I didn’t shake his hand, I vowed I wouldn’t do that, as it didn’t seem right. But the meeting was transformational. It’s helped me live with what happened, and the hatred is by and large gone.”
Craig was released in 2019, and Carl was released in 2026. Nick went to the last parole hearings for the offenders. “I said words along the lines of, ‘I believe that you’re ready to come out and I want you to live a positive, peaceful life, and never come back to prison’. Where once I’d have been furious and pained to think they were having any sort of life, I now wanted that for them’.”
Nick is now a champion of restorative justice. He was part of a West End post-show panel in 2025 for Punch, James Graham’s play which tells the true story of Jacob Dunne, a Nottingham teenager whose single punch on a night out killed a stranger. Nick goes into prisons to talk about restorative justice, and tell prisoners about the impact that violent crimes have on families like his.
Recently, he was walking through a prison when he bumped into a prisoner who he’d told his story to six years earlier, at a different institution. This offender told Nick that his story had changed his life, and would live with him forever.
“He was now working really hard on himself, and on getting out of prison. It was good to hear that, because most perpetrators never hear first-hand the devastation they cause. If talking about my brother helps even one family avoid this pain and grief, then it’s been worth telling this story.”‘Face to Face; Finding Justice for My Murdered Twin Brother’ by Nick Dawson is available in paperback now. For more information about restorative justice, visit Why Me?, a national charity, for which Nick is an ambassador. You can contact them on info@why-me.org or call 020 4591 1970. More information can also be found via the Restorative Justice Council.
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