Till three weeks ago, Fiona Mackeown was just another backpacker, low-income tourist in Goa. Trailed by a brood of seven (of nine) children, most of them walking around barefoot, she represented the quintessential ageing hippy. The media blitz that has surrounded her since her daughter Scarlett Keeling’s tragic death in Anjuna on February 18, has changed her life dramatically, making her a household name not only in Goa and Britain, but across millions of homes tuned in to the media obsession with the Keeling case.

The British media, which had focused so completely on the “inefficiency and corruption” of the Goa police in their investigation of the case, sympathising with the mother, has now turned its lenses to peeling layer upon layer of Mackeown’s background, her role as a mother, her grubby caravan and gypsy way of life back in Devon, UK, and the fact that she chose to look the other way when her daughter, 16, decided to move in with a man in Goa.

Mackeown takes it all in her stride. Speaking to this newspaper, she freely admits she’s on ‘benefit’ to support her nine children. She had come down to Goa in November last year with seven of them. While she stays on to fight her case here (she hints at the possibility of coming to settle in Goa), her partner has returned to the UK with her children.

Scarlet was a “lively, bouncy teenager”, says her mother. “I know she used to have soft alcoholic beverages, like most teenagers do, but I don’t think she was taking drugs. If she was, she was a victim of drug dealers here,” she says.

There are questions being asked about Mackeown’s responsibility as a parent in the light of the fact that she allowed her daughter to stay back in Goa with her boyfriend while she went to Gokarna. “I was a bit naïve and trusting to leave her with Julio. But I thought they were a good Goan Catholic family and Scarlett would be safe.”
Mackeown insists that the Goa police’s delay in sending the viscera to the forensic lab in Mumbai will ensure all evidence of drug overdose and rape is lost. “They are trying to prove my daughter is over 16 so they can drop rape and drug charges against those responsible,” she says.

She has not been given a copy of the first information report by the police as yet, Mackeown says, affirming that she will not take her daughter's body back for burial till the investigations “are properly done”.