Cold Open

It’s May 20th, 1989 at Wembley Stadium in London, England.

28-year-old soccer player Ian Rush jogs up the pitch while his red-shirted Liverpool teammates pass the ball among themselves. Ian is one of the best forwards in Liverpool's history. He’s scored more than 200 goals for the club—but today, he’s late to the action. He's been brought onto the field as a substitute in the final of the FA Cup, the premier tournament in English soccer. Right now, Liverpool’s opponents, Everton, are holding the score even at 2-2, and the game has gone to extra-time.

Liverpool’s patient passing has their opponents chasing the ball and getting frustrated, and one Everton player fouls in an attempt to gain possession. Liverpool takes the free-kick and an attacking player dribbles the ball down the left-hand side of the field, but Ian notices that the Everton defenders nearby are breathing heavily. As a substitute, he has fresh legs—and takes advantage by sprinting into the free space near the Everton goal…

His teammate crosses the ball towards him. Ian stoops as he follows the ball’s flight through the air.  And then heads the ball low toward the goal, underneath the despairing dive of the Everton goalkeeper… and into the net.

With just minutes to go in the FA Cup final, Liverpool is ahead.

Ian Rush’s goal wins the match, and shortly after the final whistle, his team captain lifts up the FA Cup. Winning trophies is nothing unusual for Liverpool. For the last 15 years, they have been the dominant team in English soccer. But this victory is an emotional one—because five weeks earlier, ninety-five Liverpool fans were crushed to death while watching their team play.

Although this cathartic victory finally gives the city of Liverpool something to celebrate, winning the FA Cup will not end the grief of the bereaved families, nor the suffering of the survivors. Instead, they’ll be haunted by a tragedy for almost three decades as they fight to prove the innocence of the Liverpool fans who were wrongly blamed for the deadly disaster that occurred at Hillsborough on April 15th, 1989.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is April 15th, 1989: The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster.

Act One

It’s 3 PM, on April 15th, 1989 at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England; a month before Liverpool wins the FA Cup.

38-year-old Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish takes his dugout seat alongside the rest of his coaching staff as the referee blows his whistle to get the FA Cup semi-final underway. Liverpool is facing off against Nottingham Forest to see who will advance to the final in a few weeks’ time. And as usual, the semi-final is being played at a neutral venue, the site selected for this game is Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium.

Officially, Kenny is Liverpool’s player-manager, although he’s 38 years old now and hardly ever picks himself to play anymore. Instead, Kenny trusts younger men for the job and concentrates on running his team from the sidelines. But since this game has only just begun, it’s a little early for tactical tweaks - Kenny is still watching and analyzing Liverpool’s opponents.

But only four minutes after kick-off, Liverpool has its first chance of the game: a Liverpool forward shoots from distance, and the ball cannons off the crossbar. The crowd shouts in excitement, and the fans at Liverpool’s end of the stadium surge forward—but the wave of people causes a section of metal fencing surrounding the pitch to give way, causing fans to spill out onto the grass.

More than ten years earlier, professional soccer clubs in Britain began to install cage fences at their stadiums. These high metal barriers were introduced after a spate of pitch invasions and disorder at soccer matches. Most top-flight teams had to find a way to deal with soccer hooligans, the minority of fans who traveled to games not to just watch action on the pitch, but to get into fights with fans of the opposing team. Now, Hillsborough Stadium’s stewards hurry over to contain the fans where the fence has broken down, worrying that mischief is about to break out.

But the stewards can’t stem the flow and more fans make their way onto the pitch. With no prospect of the field being quickly cleared, the game is halted by a referee. The players return to the changing rooms while order is restored, but as Kenny leaves the pitch with his players, he’s stopped by Liverpool’s goalkeeper, Bruce Grobbelaar. Bruce reports that the problem isn’t hooligans—it’s a crush of bodies. While Bruce was tending the Liverpool goal, he could hear fans in the stand behind him shouting for help.

Kenny’s stomach lurches as he realizes that his eleven-year-old son is supposed to be watching the game from that end of the stadium. So, he rushes toward the goal. And even from where he is, Kenny can see that far too many people are packed into the stand at that end of the pitch. Fans are climbing over the fence to escape, and the stadium stewards are helping them over. The lucky fans who get out are in shock. Some sink to the ground, gasping for breath. Others stumble around disoriented and confused.

And after a few moments of terrifying panic, Kenny is reunited with his son. But as he hurries him away, Kenny sees other fans ripping up advertising boards from the side of the pitch and using them as makeshift stretchers to carry injured people to safety. It’s obvious that something terrible is happening, and soon emergency services confirm that fans have been killed in the crush.

The FA Cup semi-final is abandoned, and Kenny and his team prepare to return home. The mood among Liverpool’s players and coaching staff is somber. Radio and television reports soon reveal that ninety-four people have been killed—and the ninety-fifth will die in the hospital a few days later. Many of the dead are children.

As Liverpool’s manager, Kenny is the public face of the club, and reporters clamor to ask him questions. And the demand for his opinion intensifies four days after the disaster when the tabloid newspaper The Sun publishes a shocking front-page story, alleging that Liverpool fans picked the pockets of victims who lay dying, that drunk fans urinated on police officers trying to help them, and that one police officer was assaulted as he tried to resuscitate a fan.

Kenny and everyone else associated with Liverpool are enraged by these unfounded allegations. Kenny was there, he saw nothing of what the newspaper claims—instead, he only saw Liverpool fans helping each other and emergency services saving lives amid the chaos.

The false accusations further traumatize the people of Liverpool. In the days that follow, Kenny and his players will attend as many funerals as they can. And in their shared grief, the bond between the team and its supporters will grow stronger. When the soccer season resumes, Liverpool will win the re-arranged semi-final against Nottingham Forest, then triumph in the FA Cup final. But lifting the trophy will not mark a fairytale end to the Hillsborough Disaster. Instead, allegations, recriminations, and legal wrangling will drag on for more than two decades as survivors battle to find out exactly how and why the tragedy took place - and who was really to blame.

Act Two

It’s November 19th, 1990 at Sheffield Town Hall, seventeen months after the Hillsborough Disaster.

39-year-old Anne Williams enters a packed meeting room and finds the seat that’s been set aside for her. It’s the first day of the coroner’s inquest and Anne is here because one of the ninety-five fatalities was her 15-year-old son, Kevin.

Within only days of the Disaster, the British government commissioned Richard Taylor, a high-ranking judge, to investigate what happened. Judge Taylor examined nearly 4,000 witness statements and watched more than 70 hours of video footage. In doing so, Taylor saw through the sensationalist headlines that blamed Liverpool supporters for the disaster. And his report concluded that the crush was not the result of fan behavior, but was instead caused by poor crowd control.

According to Judge Taylor, the game’s kick-off should have been delayed when thousands of Liverpool fans were left stuck outside the turnstiles. Instead, the police opened the stadium’s gates and allowed a mass influx of fans into the stands without proper direction. Those fans unknowingly crowded into already full sections of the stadium, resulting in the deadly crush. In his report, Judge Taylor was highly critical of the police response and recommended a series of changes to make soccer stadiums all over Britain safer.

But the Judge did not comment on individual deaths. That responsibility belonged to the local coroner in Sheffield. So now, almost a year and a half after the disaster, the inquest is finally getting underway, and Anne Williams has traveled to the city where her son died to attend the hearing.

The coroner opens proceedings by defining the scope of his investigation. He announces that he won’t consider anything that occurred beyond 3:15 PM, on the day of the disaster, arguing that all the victims were already dead by then. This makes Anne furious. She knows there are eyewitness statements that show her son was still alive at 4 PM, and Anne believes more could have been done to save him. As the disaster unfolded, too little was done to help the fans to escape the crush, and police also delayed some ambulance crews from accessing the stadium.

Despite this evidence, the coroner won’t budge. By imposing this arbitrary time limit, he does not even consider the response of police or emergency services might have prevented some of the victims being saved.

So, it’s little surprise when the coroner eventually concludes that the Hillsborough fatalities were accidental deaths and that police actions were not to blame. That’s not good enough for Anne and many other families of the victims. Anne is convinced that the Hillsborough Disaster was not a tragic, unforeseeable accident, but the direct result of police negligence. And she’s determined to prove it.

Despite having no legal training and little money, Anne begins a campaign to demand her son’s case be reexamined. Other families launch their own campaigns with the same goal: to pressure the government to reopen the inquests. But initially, these campaigns have little success, and as the years pass, the tragedy only grows larger. In 1993, four years after the crush, a ninety-sixth victim dies in hospital, having never regained consciousness.

No matter how much the traumatized survivors and bereaved families demand action, the British authorities stand by the coroner’s verdict. But the more these campaigns dig into the events of the day, and more evidence they discover that the police mishandled the situation, demand for the case to be reopened grows.

The campaigning families are supported by the soccer club and other fans. A memorial service is held at Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium every April and barely a match goes by in which Liverpool fans don’t chant as one: Justice for the 96.

That support keeps the Hillsborough campaign going, even more than eighteen years after the disaster. And in 2007, Anne Williams is among the crowd of 4,000 people who march to the Prime Minister’s residence in London to hand over a petition calling for a new investigation.

Finally, as public pressure mounts, the government will order a new and independent inquiry into the Hillsborough Disaster. The nine-person Hillsborough Independent Panel will take two years to re-examine the evidence, but when it finally reports back, their findings will stun not just the city of Liverpool, but the entire country.

Act Three

It’s October 22nd, 2012 at the House of Parliament in London, 23 years after the Hillsborough Disaster.

Member of Parliament Maria Eagle rises from her seat and clears her throat. She knows the speech she has planned is highly contentious—but thanks to Parliamentary privilege, she can’t be sued for defamation or libel for anything said in the chamber, and she’s determined to have her say.

One month ago, the Hillsborough Independent Panel published its long-awaited report—and its contents caused public outrage. The report backed up earlier verdicts that Liverpool fans were not to blame for the crush of 1989, and that it was police mismanagement that led to the disaster. But the independent report went further than any previous inquiry. It concluded that almost half of the victims could have been saved had the emergency services responded properly - and that the police then deliberately covered up their failings. It was senior officers who fed the false allegations about Liverpool fans to newspapers. 164 witness statements were tampered with. Officers ran blood alcohol checks on the dead bodies of fans - even the children. And they searched police databases for criminal convictions to try to find material that could be used to smear the victims. If that wasn’t shocking enough, now, Maria wants the full truth to be known.

Silence falls over the chamber as Maria accuses a police officer involved in the Hillsborough Disaster response of boasting about his role in the cover-up. Maria’s words are shocking because the same man has risen in the years since to become one of the most senior police officers in Britain. The accusations are incendiary and denied by the officer. But he still resigns the day after Maria’s speech.

That’s far from the only impact of the Independent Panel’s report though.

With public opinion now firmly on the side of the Hillsborough victims, the British government finally orders a new coroner’s inquest—this time, there are no arbitrary time limits imposed. This second inquest concludes that the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster did not die in an accident. They were “unlawfully killed.” It’s a verdict that leaves a complicated legacy. The relatives of the victims welcome official confirmation that police inaction and not fan behavior was at the root of the tragedy. But only one person is successfully prosecuted for their part in the disaster, and that's for relatively minor health and safety violations. And for most even that small comfort comes too late for survivors and campaigners. Among them is Anne Williams who passed away from cancer before the second inquest even began. And in 2021, a ninety-seventh victim finally succumbs to the life-changing injuries he suffered in the Hillsborough Disaster.

Today, Liverpool remains one of the most successful and popular soccer teams in the world. Most of its players weren’t even born when the Hillsborough Disaster took place. But they are reminded every day of what happened and the long fight for justice that followed by the Liverpool club crest which now features two eternal flames in remembrance of the fans who went to a soccer match and never returned, on April 15th, 1989.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 16th, 73 CE. The fall of the fortress of Masada brings an end to the First Jewish-Roman War.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Scott Reeves.

Edited by Dorian Merina.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser