TV drama reveals how flaws in victim response influenced how FBI handled 9/11

Richard Monetti was aged just 20 when he was flying home to New York from London for the Christmas holidays, after studying abroad as one of 35 students from Syracuse University.

But he and everyone else on the plane never made it home.

They lost their lives in the UK’s most deadly terror atrocity, when a bomb in the hold of their flight, Pan Am 103, exploded above the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

It killed 270 people from 21 countries, including 11 people on the ground, and this devastating event has now been dramatised in an upcoming BBC drama series, The Bombing of Pan Am 103.

Kara Weipz still recalls how she and her family found out her brother Richard was among the dead – they heard it for the first time on a news report about the bombing.

As well as adding to their trauma, she says it also highlighted faults in the response system for victims’ families.

“I think it was very important to make sure those lessons were learned – like families had to be notified before names could be released,” she tells BBC News.

“We didn’t have that luxury in 1988, when names were released before we were notified. So that’s something that came out of it, and changed as a result.”

As president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group, a role she took on from her father Bob Monetti, she says it’s crucial that relatives “know what rights they have”, while stressing the group’s role in “educating those who deal with victims”.

Those lessons went on to improve how victims’ families were treated in the aftermath of 9/11, when four planes flying over the eastern US were seized simultaneously by hijackers, killing 2,977 people.

Screenwriter Gillian Roger Park, who was born just a couple of days before the Lockerbie bombing and grew up not far from the Scottish town, is a co-writer on the series.

It dramatises the Scots-US investigation into the attack, the effect it had on victims’ families and how it impacted Lockerbie’s locals.

Roger Park says the families “made history”, by speaking out about flaws in the system.

“After their lobbying and campaigning, a lot of the protocols introduced in the aftermath of 9/11 were based on what they campaigned for,” she says.

Airlines also benefited from their experiences.

“A lot of Pan Am 103 family members trained airlines on how to deal with victims,” she adds.

Kathryn Turman, played in the series by Severance actress Merritt Wever, was head of the Office for Victims of Crime, for the US Department of Justice.

Turman arranged travel for family members plus secure closed-circuit viewing in the US, for the trial of two bombing suspects in the Netherlands, in 2000. The FBI notes this was unprecedented at the time.

Weipz adds: “We have victim services in the FBI, in the Department of Justice, in the US Attorney’s office. Why? Well, because of Kathryn, but also because of the Pan Am 103 families.”

Turman’s character poignantly says in one of the episodes: “The families should have been protected and prioritised from the start… we can’t make that mistake again.”

The drama also highlights that lobbying by UK and US-based family groups resulted in “key reforms, from strengthening travel warning systems and tighter baggage screening, to people-centred responses to major disasters”.

For the series’ lead writer Jonathan Lee, creating a factual drama 37 years later was also a way of exploring the human stories behind the horror.

A co-production with Netflix, the show shines a light on “the story of these small, but heroic acts of connective humanity, in the wake of this bomb that tried to blast things apart”, he says.

For such a dark topic, it has some surprisingly uplifting moments.

We witness the strength of bonds forged between people, in the wake of the bombing.

“Collaboration between families, countries and law enforcement agencies gets us from the worst of humanity to the best of it”, former lawyer Lee tells the BBC.

“We piece things together by working together.”

The series is something of a jigsaw – we see the police and FBI painstakingly process thousands of fragments of evidence, in the build-up to Abdulbaset Al Megrahi being convicted over the bombing in 2001.

Two years later, Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi accepted his country’s responsibility for the bombing, and paid compensation to the victims’ families.

The other pieces in the TV drama’s puzzle focus on the lives of the people of Lockerbie and beyond, with volunteers stepping up to help traumatised families.

Weipz recalled one scene in the drama, where her father tries to reach a financial settlement for his son’s death with the Pan Am insurance panel.

“That was one of the worst days of my life… hearing your brother really had no value because he was 20 years old, and was an assistant manager at a swim club and mowed lawns…

“Watching it, you see how horrifying it was.”

We also see women from Lockerbie, who made endless cakes for the investigators, washed victims’ clothes before they were returned to families and showed relatives the spot where their loved ones died.

“It was important to flesh out those emotional, human stories, to bring the Scottish stories to life,” says Roger Park about the volunteers.

“They did such hard work and it wasn’t their jobs, they were just locals who felt a moral obligation to help.

“Those women are just like my gran, I know those types of women, and I just think we rarely centre on those kinds of domestic stories.

“And what strong stuff you’d have to be made of to do what they did. I just love that they used the tools of their domestic lives to do such heroic work.”

New York-based Michelle Lipkin, whose father Frank Ciulla was killed on the flight, speaks fondly about “the women who laundered the clothes”, including Ella Ramsden and Moira Shearer.

“My mother was close to Ella and Moira, and we see Moira when we go to Scotland,” she says.

“There’s no words to describe the gratitude we have for them, because our loved ones were murdered.

“It’s the most evil of evil, and so every piece of clothing they laundered, every meal they made for the searchers – that just brought back what is possible, and the human spirit and kindness.”

Weipz also speaks about the “compassion” shown by the people of Lockerbie in the hours after the bombing.

“People slept outside with the bodies too. They didn’t want them to be alone. It just overwhelms me at the times when I think about it,” she says.

Scottish actress Lauren Lyle plays June, the wife of Det Sgt Ed McCusker, one of the lead Scottish police officers.

She says although the investigation was a “male-heavy story because it was the 80s”, she also thinks “the women just stepped right up”, often behind the scenes.

Lyle spoke to the real-life Ed McCusker to research her role, and says: “About five years ago, June got cancer, and she knew she was going to die. And she said to Eddie, ‘One thing I want you to do is make sure you tell this story’.

“She sounded like a really formidable woman who held the family together, and I think she represents the people of Lockerbie.”

Weipz adds: “Maybe people watching this will take some of the compassion they see, and pay it forward – we need some more of that in the world these days.”

The Bombing of Pan Am 103 is on BBC iPlayer and BBC One from 21.00 BST on Sunday 18 May, and will be on Netflix globally at a later date