This is the seventh in a weekly series looking at how the relatives of victims of crime have been coping with their loss. The series, entitled ‘Victims’, will hopefully point the state in the direction of those in need of emotional assistance and help prod people with information on these heinous acts to share them with the authorities.

TIME has not eased the pain for the relatives of Claudette Reid-Nelson.

Certainly, the 49-year-old shopkeeper’s grandchild who found her dead in bed four years and six months ago is still trying to block the image of her bloodied body and near-severed head from his mind.

And residents the rustic district of Warwick, Manchester distinctly remember the horrific day the child made the discovery.

The young boy had gone to find out why his grandmother, who would normally be up and about tending to the needs of her grandchildren, had not awoken.

The child instead found his grandmother’s motionless body lying in a pool of blood in a room at the back of a small shop she operated.

Reid-Nelson’s head was only attached to her body by a small string of flesh. A bloodied black and white merino lay beside the her body, while outside the shop, a bloodied jeans pants and a large kitchen knife were found by residents and handed over to homicide detectives in Manchester.

For Michelle Reid, that sight will remain with her for life. Reid is one of four siblings who have been left behind to honour their mother’s memory.

“It doesn’t feel comfortable. It don’t feel good at all. It is a terrible memory that I can’t begin to explain,” Reid told the Sunday Observer.

The merino was similar to one that Reid-Nelson’s spouse, Joseph Francis, was known to wear. Francis was nowhere in sight that morning as an entire community wailed and mourned the murder of one of their own.

The murder shook the normally quiet village, whose residents had never experienced a murder in their community before that unforgettable morning in June 2004.

The residents say days before the incident, Francis was allegedly seen sharpening a large knife and threatening to kill.

“We heard him, but nobody nuh take him serious,” a resident said.

From all accounts Reid-Nelson, who was also a farmer, was an enterprising woman and had held a dance at her shop the night before she was killed. Francis reportedly began acting strangely sometime after midnight and began chasing patrons away from the dance. The following morning, Reid-Nelson lay dead.

The dead woman’s children said their mother had made $80,000 from the dance, but that money could not be found.

“Him always a bad her up fi money and we think is the money make him kill her,” Reid said, “Him leave all the way from St Catherine and come kill my mother.”

The residents of Warwick, especially Reid and her sisters, were sore afraid for two years after their mother’s murder as Francis had not yet been caught.

“Many times we believe him would come back and do other deeds because him live here long and know the place good,” Reid said.

The crime had drawn national attention and soon a reward of $100,000, contributed by Reid-Nelson’s relatives, was offered for information leading to the capture of Francis, who had managed to elude police efforts to nab him.

But in the early hours of the morning of Saturday, September 9, 2006, Francis’ time on the lam would come to an inglorious end. He was held after a team of six cops, acting on a Crime Stop tip, fought their way through thick woodlands in Orange Vale, a district deep in Northern St Catherine.

It was one of several districts that cops said Francis was known to frequent.

After moving through the bushes in the dead of night without a flashlight for more than six hours, the determined cops found Francis cooped up in a three-foot shanty covered with branches and bushes.

Francis crawled from under the crude structure barely clothed and with dirt caked into his matted hair, beard and unto on his body.

One of the officers who participated in the manhunt said Francis was living like an animal.

The cops say Francis begged for his life and thanked the cops for finding him and saving him from his wretched existence.

Since then Francis has been in custody, but to date his murder trial is yet to get off the ground.

The lengthy wait for justice to be handed down has made the pain and grief harder to bear, Reid told the Sunday Observer.

“Everytime is something else. Him in jail two years now and nothing don’t start yet. Justice takes too long to be served in this country and that is a big part of the problem why people sometimes take matters into their own hands,” the grieving woman said.

Like many others who have suffered great emotional trauma after seeing their loved ones brutally murdered, Reid is a staunch supporter of the death penalty.

“If you kill somebody then you must expect to die same way. I want them to break his neck. My mother never deserved to die like that,” Reid said.

But the murdered woman’s relatives are not the only who have been left behind with bitter memories. The entire district of Warwick also mourns the terrible act.

“The district will never be the same after that. We never hear of anything like that in Warwick and even though people are going on with their lives, the pain and shame is still fresh in our minds,” a former resident of the community said.