Where this was said
How Families Were Treated: The Morgue and the Coroner
At 29:50 · chapter starts 29:00
If the cover-up was the public injustice of Hillsborough, the treatment of victims' families was the private one. They were sent to a nearby gym-turned-morgue and made to wait outside in the cold. Once inside, they were handed stacks of Polaroid photographs of dead bodies — unsorted, uncategorised — and told to search through them for their loved ones. Parents of dead children were refused permission to hold or kiss them on the grounds that the bodies were 'property of the coroner.' The coroner himself ordered blood alcohol tests on every victim, including children, in an apparent attempt to shore up the drunk-fan narrative. The results backfired: they showed that alcohol was not a meaningful factor. But the cruelty of the process, and the complicity of the coroner in the wider cover-up, left scars that would fuel the families' campaign for decades.
Victims' families organised, launched a private prosecution, and kept pressure on public officials for decades. When MP Andy Burnham was publicly shamed at a 20-year memorial, he pushed for the 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel review. 450,000 pages of evidence later, the truth finally emerged.
