Tracie Andrews: Inside the New Life of Britain’s Road Rage Killer

Jenna Goldsworthy once dreamed of fame. Today, the 57-year-old grandmother lives an intensely private and largely uneventful life.

In the Cornish village she shares with her former pub-bouncer husband, neighbours say they seldom see her out.

Those who do encounter her say she is almost impossible to recognise as the convicted killer whose twisted, snarling expression became one of the most notorious criminal images of the mid-1990s.

Known then as Tracie Andrews, she became a household name after stabbing her 25-year-old fiancé, Lee Harvey, to death in a Worcestershire country lane. She initially tried to portray the killing as the result of a road-rage attack.

But the aspiring blonde model’s appearance at a televised police press conference just two days later became headline news. Her account eventually unravelled as investigators exposed a series of lies.

Two weeks ago, the 1996 murder and Andrews’ extraordinary press conference were brought back into the spotlight by a new Channel 5 drama, Under Suspicion: Tracie Andrews – Lover, Liar, Killer.

The one-off programme, which stars Hollyoaks actress Emma Rigby as the then 27-year-old Andrews, was initially due to air at the end of July. It was postponed after complaints from Lee Harvey’s now-adult daughter, who said the family had not been consulted or warned in advance.

It was eventually screened at the end of September after being quietly rescheduled. The controversy made clear that, almost three decades on, the emotions surrounding the notorious case remain raw.

A source close to the Harvey family told Our News Outlet this week: ‘They believe the continuing stream of reports and documentaries about Lee’s murder has become little more than a way for media companies to make money. They are deeply upset at being forced to endure another wave of public intrusion whenever a new programme is broadcast.

‘They want no part in revisiting the past because it remains far too painful.’

This newspaper has also spoken to Tracie Andrews’ 36-year-old daughter, Karla, who was seven when her mother began her prison sentence.

‘My pain and suffering from it are real, and it is traumatising,’ she said exclusively from her home in Birmingham this week. ‘Having to watch such a huge and tragic part of my life being broadcast never gets easier. It is upsetting.’

Karla was brought up by her father while Andrews spent 15 years in prison. She visited her mother during that time but refuses to discuss her, saying only: ‘I have my life and she has hers.’

She does, however, express deep sympathy for 34-year-old Danielle Harvey, Lee’s daughter, who was five when her father was killed. The two women, who are just over a year apart in age, became friends as children while their parents were involved in their ultimately tragic relationship. Both are now mothers.

‘Danielle and I both lost so much, and we have suffered in different ways,’ Karla told me last week.

Danielle declined to comment. However, when speaking about the Channel 5 true-crime drama in July, she said on TikTok that she had not been given advance notice that it was being made.

‘For people watching, it is just another drama. For us, it is real life,’ she said. ‘This is our reality, our nightmare and our life sentence.’

More, later, of these two now adult women and how the murder of Danielle’s father by Karla’s mother continues to haunt their families after all these years.

Their parents met in 1994 in Ritzy’s nightclub in Birmingham. Within three months they’d moved in together and were engaged within six. But right from the start, their relationship was volatile, punctuated by violent rows overheard by neighbours as well as passionate reconciliations.

Part-time barmaid Tracie and unemployed bus driver Lee broke up and made up a total of nine times during their two-year relationship.

At times Lee’s face bore bloody scratches from Tracie’s nails. She also bit his neck, punched him and once hit him over the head with a bottle in a nightclub.

Lee’s mother, Maureen Harvey, would later recall Tracie’s controlling behaviour and explosive rages and how she warned her infatuated son that if they stayed together they would ‘end up killing each other’.

A source close to the family told Our News Outlet last week that while watching the film Fatal Attraction, Tracie pretended to stab the cushion on the sofa next to Lee, saying that if he ever tried to leave her, she would be just like Glenn Close’s bunny-boiling Alex Forrest and take revenge.

On December 1, 1996, after rowing all day, the couple went for a drink at the Marlbrook pub in Bromsgrove before setting off home in Lee’s white Ford RS 2000 Turbo. They argued violently, eventually pulling over in a narrow country lane less than a mile from their maisonette in the village of Alvechurch.

Their fight ended when Tracie stabbed 25-year-old Lee more than 37 times with a penknife, fatally severing both his carotid artery and jugular vein and leaving him to die.

The alarm was only raised when a man from a nearby house heard a woman crying and found Tracie standing by the driver’s door of the car.

In the hours that followed, she told police that Lee had been killed by a mysterious assailant in a Ford Sierra. The man, she said, attacked him after a cat-and-mouse car chase which began when he overtook the other car.

It isn’t hard to see where she got the idea for this concocted story. Just seven months earlier, the shocking murder of electrician Stephen Cameron by Brinks Mat robber Kenneth Noye in a road rage attack on the M25 had thrust the phrase into the national spotlight.

But it was the cold, calculated and ultimately over-acted performance she gave at the press conference held at Redditch police station in Worcestershire on December 3 which ultimately proved her undoing and ensured her a place among the ranks of Britain’s most evil female killers.

Sporting a bruised face and black eye and gripping the hand of Lee’s devastated mother who was sitting beside her, she laid out her fictionalised story in detail, even concocting a description of the killer as ‘a fat man with stary eyes’.

In one bizarre moment, famously captured on camera – and recreated by actress Emma Rigby in Channel 5’s drama this week – she grimaced in imitation of the threatening look on this non-existent killer’s face, inadvertently giving a bone-chilling glimpse of her own deep-seated evil and the rage of which she was capable.

But it was the answer she gave to a reporter’s question which first aroused police suspicions.

Asked when she and Lee had left the Marlbrook on what should have been a 15-minute journey home, she said ‘ten to ten’ – around half an hour earlier than the time she’d previously given to police.

Journalist Rod Chaytor told Our News Outlet last week that at first he thought he’d made a mistake, even though he’d clearly made a note of the timings given by police in his notebook.

‘But I looked down at my notebook and saw what I’d written earlier. Then I looked at the police officer sitting next to her. He did a slow-motion double-take as he looked over at Tracie. It was obvious she changed her story.

‘The account she gave us didn’t correspond at all with what we’d been told by the police. The mood suddenly changed in the room.

‘For 48 hours we’d all been running around with this story of this poor woman seeing her fiancé killed in a road rage attack. It was the first time I thought, “Oh my God. She did it.”’

In the days that followed witnesses came forward. Several people had seen the couple’s car on the way home from the pub that night. All of them said it had been travelling alone. Not one recalled seeing a car chase or a Ford Sierra.

A nine-year-old girl from a cottage a few yards from the murder scene also told police she only heard two people arguing and one of them had a woman’s soft voice.

It became clear, too, that the pattern of blood stains on Tracie’s orange roll-neck jumper suggested she had been the one to deliver the fatal blows. More than 80 strands of her blonde hair were also found in Lee’s hands.

As prosecutor David Crigman QC put it at Birmingham Crown Court during Tracie’s trial in July 1996: ‘There never was another car. There was never a mystery murdering motorist. It was her.’

Chaytor, who had become close to Tracie’s parents in the run-up to the trial, was invited by her solicitor to interview her in a court side-room while the jury were still deciding their verdict.

‘I know they are going to find me guilty of murder,’ she told him, ‘but I didn’t commit this terrible crime.’

Before returning to the courtroom to hear the jury’s guilty verdict, she pulled out a poem from her pocket to show him. Called ‘Goodbye My Love’, it described Lee as ‘my soul mate, my lover, my friend’.

In 1999, in what was seen by many as a move to get her life sentence reduced, she finally admitted killing Lee, claiming she acted in self-defence during a physical fight.

She repeated that claim in the only interview she ever gave from prison, telling a Our News Outlet journalist who visited her in 2002 that: ‘Yes, I murdered Lee, but he should take some of the responsibility.

‘People just saw him as an angel. I know he isn’t here to defend himself now but there were two sides to Lee. He was Jekyll and Hyde and when he was awful to me he made my life hell.’

She claimed that she lied to the police because she was ‘terrified’.

‘I almost began to believe the that the road rage story was true’.

Refusing to say sorry for killing Lee or expressing remorse to his parents, she instead bemoaned that fact that she was spending the best years of her life behind bars. She was released on licence from Askham Grange prison in Yorkshire in July 2011 after serving just 14 years.

The Channel 5 drama did not explore what happened to Tracie after she left prison or how she has been able to rebuild her life.

Once free, she underwent £5,000 of plastic surgery paid for the NHS in an attempt to alter her appearance and soften the recognisable outline of her jaw. She also interchanges the colour of her shaggy mane of hair between blonde to black.

She moved to the South West of England to be closer to her sister and changed her name – firstly to Tia and then to Jenna – and for a time found work in a hairdressing salon before customers realised who she was and kicked up a fuss about her being allowed near them with scissors.

It wasn’t long, either, before she was making headlines again because of a man.

In 2012 she was accused of breaking up the 24-year marriage of married pub bouncer Phil Goldsworthy after meeting him while working as a part-time barmaid.

The couple, who married in 2017, live in a village which Our News Outlet has decided not to name. They are said to socialise away from the village with members of her husband’s family.

‘She caused quite a stir when she moved in,’ one neighbour said this week, ‘but since then I think they have probably slowly been accepted but they don’t get involved in village life at all. They are not very neighbourly.’

Tracie’s own parents are dead. Her father, John Andrews, who served in the Royal Navy before working in IT, died in 2009. Her mother Irene and stepfather, Alan, died within months of each other in 2022.

Back in 2010, a year before her mother’s release from prison, her daughter Karla, who now has children of her own, insisted that her mother ‘is not the psycho killer that she is made out to be’.

But clearly her relationship with her mother has been damaged for ever by the crime she committed.

She told me this week: ‘It changed my whole life and affected not just me.’

Speaking in July this year, Lee’s daughter Danielle, said: ‘From the age of five this has been my life. This is all I’ve known and we are nearly 30 years down the line since my dad was murdered. The documentary has reopened wounds that never truly healed.’

In many ways this story is as much about them as it is about Tracie who once complained that her crime had made her ‘more famous than Princess Diana’.

Life today, of course, couldn’t be more different for the woman now known as Jenna Goldsworthy, who will no doubt spend the rest of her life trying not to be recognised.