On a cold November morning in 1982, Margaret Burgon, a 36-year-old mother-of-three, made a solemn vow as she stood beside a grave in Northamptonshire, watching as a coffin was slowly lowered into the ground.
‘I said, “I promise you won’t be forgotten”,’ she recalls.
That heartbreakingly tiny coffin held the remains of a newborn baby, who had been murdered, then left in a plastic bag at Northampton railway station.
Despite a six-month police inquiry, she had not been identified – and neither had the woman who had given birth to her.
Margaret and her husband George, the vicar who presided over the baby’s funeral that morning, thought of her as a ‘fallen sparrow’, after a Biblical text which refers to how God mourns the loss of even the smallest thing.
The poignant mystery of how the baby came to be abandoned made headlines around the country, as police appealed for anyone with information to come forward.
Margaret Burgon and her husband George, the vicar who…