Lily relative attacks killer’s name-change

Reporter: RICHARD HOOTON
Date online: 16 December 2009

A RELATIVE of Failsworth murder victim Lily Lilley has hit out at social services for offering her killer a taxpayer-funded change of identity.

Taxpayers face footing the bill to provide killer Lisa Healey and her child with new identities when she is released on parole later this month.

It’s believed social services is behind the move so that Healey’s daughter can grow up without the infamy surrounding her mother’s name.

Healey (26) has served 11-years for the brutal murder of Mrs Lilley in 1998. She was just 15 when she joined with fellow schoolgirl Sarah Davey, then 14, in beating and gagging the frail 71-year-old widow before bundling her body into a wheelie bin and dumping it in the Rochdale Canal.

Healey gave birth to a daughter in April after a relationship with an inmate from another open jail.

Ken Bell knew the pensioner as Auntie Lily, she was his mother’s cousin.

Mr Bell, who lives in Mexico after moving from Failsworth, blames social workers for the possible name change, saying: “Why should the people of Britain have to pay for a change of identity for this murderer? Yet still the social workers want to spend a fortune to give the killer a new identity, even though it will serve no purpose whatsoever.”

There have been two separate murders in the family. In 1986, Mr Bell’s cousin Edward Pither, of Nelson, Lancashire, was murdered by two burglars in his own home.

Mr Bell writes outspoken internet blogs on his family and politics, one can be found at www.exile-blog.blogspot.com/2008/01/two-murders-in-one-family.html. It shows a nostalgic photograph of Lily’s wedding.

Mr Bell worked as a projectionist at the ABC Cinema in Oldham in the 1970s. He moved to Mexico City in 1992 and, after attending Ruskin College, Oxford, as a mature student and then the University of Manchester, he worked as professor of North American History at the Universidad de las Americas until retiring through ill health.

He recalls his Auntie Lily fondly and says it was to much amusement in the family that Lily Hyde became Lily Lilley when she married.

Her husband Jack died in 1981 and their only son John, a mechanic, married and moved in 1970 to Tasmania where he is believed to have three children. Mr Bell lost touch with the family when his own mother died in 1989.

The Chronicle this week revealed that Mrs Lilley is buried alongside Jack at Failsworth Cemetery but there is no lettering to inform people of her resting place. A family friend is looking to raise funds to lift up the headstone, clean and letter it.