Boy found dead in Sussex: ON TV TONIGHT, January 19, True TV cold case investigation starring Emilia Fox into boy who disappeared 42 years ago on the day Prince Charles married Diana

Memories came flooding back when, out of the blue, I received a phone call about a murder I’d covered as a reporter more than 40 years ago.

On the line was a producer of a ‘cold case’ TV programme, investigating the killing of eight-year-old Vishal Mehrotra, whose body was found just south of the A272 near Rogate in February 1982.

The documentary team had tracked me down from library files of Midhurst & Petworth Observer stories I had written about the case.

My mind turned back to when I was a 21-year-old senior reporter at the newspaper office in North Street, Midhurst. Amid the weekly town and village bulletins, annual fetes and parish council meetings, a murder was big news.

I first heard about the case when a local policeman told me a body had been found in a marshy copse by two brothers out pigeon shooting. The remains were so decomposed that identifying the victim was difficult before the advent of DNA analysis.

A few weeks later, a reporter phoned me from the London Evening Standard, asking what I knew about Vishal Mehrotra. The name meant nothing to me. ‘He’s the boy found in the field,’ the caller told me.

I jotted down a few details then rang the news desk of our sister evening paper, The News, in Portsmouth to dictate a new front-page lead for that day’s Sussex edition.

One unusual aspect of the case was that most people remembered where they were and what they were doing on the day Vishal went missing - it was July 29, 1981, when the then Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. The event was seen by millions of TV viewers and celebrated across the nation with street parties.

Vishal and his family had watched the procession from his father’s Fleet Street solicitor’s office before returning to Putney Underground station. While his nanny and sister went off to some shops, the 3ft 9in boy set off to walk the 300 yards home. He was never seen alive again.

Seven months later, and nearly 50 miles away, Vishal’s remains were discovered at the three-acre Alder Copse at Durford Abbey Farm, Rogate. A covering of leaves indicated the body had been there since before the previous autumn.

At first, the pathologist would only say the victim was a person under 20, but Vishal’s body was finally identified by dental records.

Police followed up a sighting of a man with a boy looking like Vishal at Beacon Hill in the Harting Downs, three miles from where the body was found.

Among the thousands of other leads was a driver who remembered seeing a car parked at a strange angle in the early hours on the Midhurst to Petersfield Road - so odd that he decided to note down its number.

Under hypnosis, he reconstructed leaning over for a cigarette packet and a pencil. With one hand still on the imaginary steering wheel, he tried to scribble down the car registration.

Though he could even recall the number of cigarettes in the packet, he could not remember the licence plate of the car. But he was able to tell detectives in detail exactly where he had later thrown the packet.

Two officers from Chichester travelled 240 miles to a road in Cornwall - where the man’s subconscious memory had indicated the exact hedge - and spent a frustrating day searching for the clue.

Every owner of the make and model of the suspicious car was traced via the licensing computer at Swansea.

Police also interviewed travelling showmen whose caravans were parked opposite Alder Copse. There had been a fair in Putney the day Vishal disappeared.

During the long investigation, five men were separately arrested over the murder but all were eventually eliminated. The case remains unsolved.

As a newspaper journalist, there’s always an adrenaline rush when a big story breaks, especially near deadline. There aren’t many times I’ve said ‘Hold the front page’ but the day the Rogate body was identified was one of them.

The true human misery of some of the news we cover often only catches us long after the paper has been sent to print.

Alone that night in 1982 in my little cottage near Tillington, I thought about poor little Vishal and the fear and horror he must have experienced. First I shuddered, then I broke down in tears.

In my journalistic career, I went on to join the national press and ended my working days as deputy editor of the free Metro newspaper. I now write about cruising.

But the memory of the Vishal Mehrotra case has never left me. I sincerely hope this TV programme, and my small part in it, will at last help identify his killers and give his grieving family some much-needed answers.

:: The Footsteps Of Killers programme about Vishal Mehrotra will be shown on Thursday, January 19, on Channel 4 at 10pm. The episode will also be available to watch on All4.