The sister of Christopher Harrisson today said she hoped the guilty verdict would help bring closure for Brenda Page’s family.
Celia Harrisson – who was a bridesmaid at Harrisson and Brenda’s wedding in 1972 – said she has not spoken to her elder brother since the early 1990s but has been following the trial closely from her home in England.
She also spoke about how the crime impacted her family, in particular her mother, Nancy, and father, Bill, who she said were “haunted” by the case and the fact their son was a prime suspect.
Celia, 73, said: “My parents felt deeply for Brenda’s parents. Brenda came to stay with them quite often and my mother and Brenda exchanged quite a lot of letters together. I know they loved her very much.
“My mother died a year after her death but it really haunted my father for the rest of his life. We knew Kit was the prime suspect, so it was something that kept being relived because the case was opened quite a lot of times. So it was a sort of a dark cloud over us all really.”
‘When I was quite small he was fun to be with’
From a young age, Christopher ‘Kit’ Harrisson had a great interest in bugs and beetles.
Celia says it was a passion he perhaps inherited from their father, a chartered accountant by trade but whose true loves were birdwatching and fishing.
The eight-and-a-half-year age difference between siblings meant Celia and her brother, who attended the Quaker-run Leighton Park boarding school in Reading, did not spend a huge amount of time together as children.
“He was around at home when I was very little, but not so much after that,” said Celia.
“When I was quite small he was fun to be with. But when I was 12 he was off at Cambridge University, so our paths didn’t cross very much.”
Celia was a bridesmaid at the couple’s 1972 wedding in Ipswich, but only met Brenda a handful of times.
She said: “Unfortunately I don’t have a huge amount of memories about Brenda because I never really got to know her very well, but you could tell she was a lovely, lovely person and incredibly intelligent.”
In the years following the 1978 murder, Celia saw less and less of her brother.
She said: “I wouldn’t use the word estranged. No one cut Kit off. He was welcome and used to go and stay with my father.
“But he didn’t really communicate with me – he was in Scotland and I was doing other things, so there wasn’t an estrangement.
“He never really kept in contact with me before the wedding or even after the wedding, even though I was a bridesmaid.
“The last time I actually spoke to Kit was at my father’s funeral in the early 1990s.”
‘It’s a terrible thing to know your son is the prime suspect’
Celia said the case weighed heavily on her father Bill as there was always a question mark about Harrisson’s possible involvement in Brenda’s death.
“We knew Kit was the prime suspect and that’s what kept coming up but one never really knew,” she said.
“It worried my father a lot because it was such a terrible thing to hear what happened to Brenda. It’s a terrible thing to know your son is the prime suspect. It troubled him deeply.”
During the court case, Christopher Harrisson was portrayed as a violent husband, prone to angry outbursts and who had also threatened his ex-wife’s life.
Asked whether those descriptions reflected the brother she knew, Celia said she did not wish to comment, but added: “All I could say is I’m not surprised. No, it didn’t surprise me at all.”
Celia said she hopes the verdict will bring peace and closure to Brenda’s family.
“The only thing I would want to say about the verdict is that there is closure, particularly for Brenda’s family,” she said.
“I really want to express how difficult it was for the family and how deeply saddened we felt for her family as well.”
