On February 2 1990, Lesley Moreland and her husband Vic were having an evening meal in their Hertfordshire home when the doorbell rang. "Police, Enfield," said the man on the doorstep. Their younger daughter, Ruth, lived in Enfield. "I am very sorry. I have come to tell you that your daughter, Ruth, is dead. She has been found in suspicious circumstances."
"There is no easy way to convey that sort of information," Moreland says now. "I was just stunned. It was extremely difficult to take in."
Eleven years later, Moreland has written an account of her daughter's murder and her own long battle to be able to meet, in prison, the man who carried out the killing and to find something other than bitterness and revenge in her quest. An Ordinary Murder is published this month. It is no ordinary book.
Five years ago, I was at a seminar on crime and media organised by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. I was there as the Guardian's crime correspondent to discuss media coverage of crime, but by far the most interesting contribution of the evening came not from the platform but from a woman in the audience - Lesley Moreland.
Her daughter, she said, had been murdered. The murderer was not a stranger but someone who had been introduced to Ruth by her ex-boyfriend. He had a history of violence towards women. After a day of drinking and taking drugs (including LSD), he had gone to her house and stabbed her to death.
The first point Moreland wanted to make was "the way victims of violent crime are portrayed in the media as people whose lives have fallen apart and will have no further meaning". She elaborates on this in her book: "While this may be their initial reaction, it is not the full reality in the longer term. This image provides no alternative role models for future victims of violent crime."
One of the most overused clichés in crime reporting is the expression "coming to terms with". Exactly how do you "come to terms with" or "make sense of" the murder of a child?
Moreland, who has worked in the voluntary sector for 30 years, decided the last thing her lively, attractive daughter would have wanted was for her to live the rest of her life in anguish. She gradually decided she wanted to meet the man who had taken her daughter's life. "I wanted to find out more about what kind of person he was and what had been going on in his life before he killed Ruth. He didn't give evidence at his trial, so there had been no opportunity to form a first-hand opinion of him. I wanted to hear from him directly, in his own words, what had happened and why he killed Ruth. I felt he owed me an explanation."
Andrew Steel was jailed for life, with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 13 years. What troubled Moreland, she says, was that he could just "sit it out" in prison. "He would be with people who knew neither him nor us, and I couldn't see how he could be helped to understand what he had done and why. People said I should forget him but this was impossible."
The criminal justice system was not used to such requests from the relatives of victims and for years Moreland found her attempts to meet Steel rebuffed. Finally, four years later, she was given permission to meet him, in 1995, in the company of a prison probation officer.
At their meeting, Steel told Moreland that Ruth had been kind and supportive to him - which made the killing even more difficult for her to understand. He told her that when he had staggered into Ruth's home that night, she had told him to go away and had hit him, and he had "totally lost control". He explained that his own mother had said she would never forgive him for what he had done and he told Moreland that he cried every night. "You and me both, sunshine," she thought.
"Adrenalin levels were running high," Moreland says. "It was a very high-risk thing to do for everyone and it could have gone badly wrong. I wasn't scared in terms of feeling under threat, because I knew the officer who was going to be with us. My fears were that either he wouldn't be able to speak about it because he was so overcome or daunted, or that he might attempt to tough it out and not engage with me."
At the end of the 90-minute meeting, Steel said he was scared and ashamed. They shook hands before he was taken back to his cell and Moreland was told later that after the meeting, he'd had his first night of undisturbed sleep since killing Ruth.
Moreland's book has a twist to it because there is another story within it, of her correspondence, starting the year Ruth died, with Micheal, an American prisoner now in his 15th year on death row in Texas. She got in touch with him via an organisation that matches penfriends in and out of prison. Eventually she also met the daughter of the woman he had killed.
"She was the same age as Ruth and I wasn't a dissimilar age to her mother. By the time we met, we'd had a lot of email and phone contact, but I did wonder how she would feel when she came face-to-face with me. The fact was, I had this personal friendship with the man who had killed her mother." Moreland says they "negotiated the potential problems" and now have "a comfortable and warm relationship".
Through her experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Moreland was able to explore the ways in which the relatives of murder victims and the murderers themselves are treated in the different cultures. She has traced the ways in which people can survive, can lead their lives amidst it all. People have different ways of doing it. Neither her husband nor her other daughter has read the book and she feels perhaps they never will. "They are both very private and they would not have chosen to bring the circumstances of Ruth's death into the public arena. But one of the themes of the book is that people react very differently and there has to be support for them to do that. It is much to their credit that neither of them asked me not to write it."
Many will understand the reaction of her family, but others who read the book may also feel that Lesley Moreland, by exploring a different way of confronting murder, has opened some locked doors within the criminal justice system. With luck, it will renew the sometimes floundering debate on the issue of "restorative justice".
Micheal is still on death row; Steel remains in prison and will not be released for a while. Moreland, meanwhile, has plans for another book on a different subject.
"I still struggle with the issue of forgiveness," she concludes. "It doesn't dominate my life but it niggles away in the background. I don't cry so often now but my heart still contracts painfully if, while we are eating our evening meal, the doorbell rings."
• An Ordinary Murder by Lesley Moreland is published on March 22 by Aurum Press at £14.99.
