Lucie Blackman's Dad Set Up A Trust In Her Honor That Still Operates Today
The newest Netflix true crime documentary,Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case, dives into the tragic case of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old women from the United Kingdom who mysteriously went missing while living in Japan in 2000.
The documentary details how Lucie, who worked as a British Airways flight attendant, took a gap year in Tokyo with a friend, Louise Phillips. There, she took a job as a hostess at an upscale nightclub called Casablanca. But while Lucie was living an exciting life in the metropolitan city, things quickly went south. She disappeared less than a month after her move and was never seen again.
As the documentary explains, Lucie had gone on a date with a client just before her disappearance. Her roommate, Louise, received a call the next from someone who said that her friend had joined a cult, and finding the call suspicious, she got in touch with Lucie's family back home, The Independent says.
Missing features interviews with Japanese detectives who worked on the case, along with journalists and Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman. With all the attention on Lucie’s disappearance, it’s understandable to have questions about her parents and other family members. So, who are Lucie Blackman’s parents and where are they now? Here’s what you need to know.
Who is Tim Blackman?
Tim Blackman is Lucie Blackman’s dad, and he’s featured pretty prominently in the documentary, telling his version of events. The property developer most recently lived in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, at least as of 2008, per The Mirror.
In the doc, Tim walks viewers through the days after his daughter’s disappearance, including his rising worries about her safety.
“I was immediately thinking, well, there must be some rational explanation, some reason why she's not been able to get in touch,” he says. “There were three or four more calls and I knew that something had gone wrong. That feeling of complete blind panic just crashes in on you.”
Tim ended up flying to Tokyo to try to learn what had happened to his daughter, and worked hard to rally public support for the search by holding press conferences and befriending journalists to make sure that his Lucie's disappearance was in the news, the Daily Mail reported. He even put up posters of Lucie on lampposts across Tokyo when he felt enough wasn’t being done to find his daughter.
In fact, journalist Jake Adelstein said in the documentary, per the Daily Mail, that Tim was a “very flamboyant showman who would use his charisma to stir up things so that something got done.”
Unfortunately, it still took the police seven months to find her body.
Who is Jane Steare?
Jane Steare is Lucie’s mother. While she was involved in the search for her daughter, she does not feature prominently in the documentary and hasn't spoken publicly about the tragedy for years.
The couple has two other children.
Tim and Jane are also parents to Lucie's siblings, Sophie and Rupert. Sophie is Lucie’s younger sister and Rupert is her brother, per The Sun.
In 2006, Tim said that his children had been deeply affected by Lucie’s loss, telling The Guardian that Sophie had tried to take her own life because of her immense grief. Tim also said that Rupert had been “tortured and damaged” by the loss.
“I not only have to contend with the death of Lucie, but the terrible and tragic damage to both my other children as a constant reminder of this terrible crime,” Tim said.
Are Tim and Jane still together?
Tim and Jane are not married, and actually divorced before Lucie disappeared, some time around 1996. They continued to have a contentious relationship during Lucie's disappearance.
Jane spoke against Tim in 2007 after he accepted more than half a million dollars from associates of Joji Obara, the Japanese millionaire who was found guilty of abducting Lucie. (As The Independent explains, the court didn't have enough evidence to convict Obara with Lucie's killing. Instead, he was found guilty of mutilating and disposing of her body.)
Tim said he had planned to put the money into a trust in Lucie’s name, but Jane told the Daily Mail that she was never consulted about it. “It is like fighting two battles—one against her killer and one against my former husband,” she said. “Whose side is he on? How is this helping justice for our daughter? I feel so utterly powerless.”
Tim created the trust, the Lucy Blackman Trust, but the family stepped away from the trust in 2020. The organization, which is now called LBT Global aims to help families and individuals who go missing overseas and provides crisis support, per On The Wight.
Jane is now remarried. Tim also remarried a nurse named Josephine in 2008. They two had been dating since the late 1990s, after Jane and Tim's divorce.
For more information on Lucie's story, you can catch Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case streaming now on Netflix.
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