‘I lost one son to 9/11 – then I lost another to conspiracy theories’

Most of us have become inured to it by now, but Malcolm Campbell can never get used to seeing the murder of his middle son, Geoff, in the media every single day. “Television, newspapers… it’s never not mentioned,” he says. “And as soon as I read it or see it, it brings back the memory instantly.”

Malcolm, 79, will often be watching TV at his home in Northamptonshire, when out of nowhere, there it is – 9/11. “Geoff was just under the Windows on the World restaurant when that first plane hit, so whenever I see that footage, I always imagine that’s him being killed. That instant. It’s a constant reminder.”

Geoff Campbell was one of almost 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It was a day so devastating that anybody old enough to remember can conjure memories and images from it just by hearing the date.

And for 20 years, we’ve done just that: replayed it, dissected it, watched its ripples change the world. For those who were there in New York, Washington DC or Pennsylvania that day, or for families who lost a loved one, the most significant news event of a generation also represents a deeply private, individual grief.

The ways in which 9/11 affected those people over the last 20 years is explored by a new documentary, Surviving 9/11, by the filmmaker Arthur Cary. Shifting between 2001 and the present day, it tells the stories of 13 people whose lives were forever changed. Malcolm Campbell and his eldest son, Matt, are two of them, and prime examples of how grief can affect people so differently.

Twenty years ago, Geoff – by all accounts a formidably bright and kind man filled with potential – was 31, living in New York with his fiancée, Caroline, and working as a consultant for the news agency Reuters.

On the morning of September 11, he was rushing to a conference in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He emailed Matt, who is 18 months his senior, on the way. “It was something along the lines of, ‘Running late for the Waters Conference…’, and it’s possibly the last email he sent,” Matt says.

At the time, Matt was on holiday in Lanzarote with his wife, Melanie, their two (now three) children and his mother, Maureen. On the beach, word spread about the attacks. Matt realised “something big had happened”, but didn’t initially worry – Geoff worked in Midtown, not the World Trade Centers. He hadn’t yet seen the email.

An hour later, their younger brother, Rob, called to say he’d spoken to Caroline, who said Geoff had gone to the Twin Towers. Nobody had heard from him. “I just dropped the payphone on the spot,” Matt says. “And obviously mum then knew that… you know.”

Meanwhile, Malcolm, a retired architect and qualified mountain leader, was hiking in Snowdonia with a group when the news broke.

“We didn’t know what was going on. We got back to a youth hostel on the coast and saw the television,” Malcolm says. “They knew I was a bit stressed, so agreed to go home early. It slowly evolved over the next 24 hours.”

Reuters paid for the family – all of them, including Matt’s six-month-old daughter – to be on the first civilian flight to New York, four days after the attacks. Malcolm remembers the debris at Ground Zero still smoking; Matt recalls clinging to the rumours that a few people were alive but unresponsive in hospitals.

“We went to a couple of hospitals, but it became obvious, so we just stopped,” he says. It wouldn’t be until June 18, 2002, when the first piece of Geoff’s remains was formally identified. Maureen (from whom Malcolm was and is separated) was notified on the day before her birthday: it was a piece of Geoff’s clavicle, the same one he broke as a child on a family holiday in Scotland.

A haze of memorials and media circuses followed in New York. At one, the Campbells met Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Malcolm remembers Maureen mistakenly introducing Clinton to her “three sons”, causing the former president to break down in tears. Matt, with the good nature of any child who likes to doubt their father’s memory, isn’t entirely sure that’s what happened, but they can agree that Blair “was absolutely useless”.

They left New York that Thursday, in a state of shock. “I just remember endless tears hitting my six month-old baby’s head as we were flying in,” Matt says.

Geoff was always at the centre of the family, and the peacemaker, Malcolm says. “He’s the link that’s missing. He got on ever so well with Matthew and ever so well with Robert…” Matt simply says “there is a hole” where Geoff should be.

Yet while Malcolm has tried not to engage much with 9/11 as a historical spectacle – eschewing memorial services, avoiding it in the media, and choosing to spend every anniversary alone in Snowdonia, hiking and thinking about Geoff – Matt became gripped by it.

A former City worker turned reflexologist, he now lives near Brighton, and only this week handed a 3,000-page dossier to the acting Attorney General, calling for a new inquest into the attacks.

It is the culmination of nearly 20 years of work. Shortly after the Campbells returned from New York in 2001, friends suggested Matt look into the “mainstream narrative” of the day, and pointed out inconsistencies. He became interested, and within a couple of years had read 160 books on 9/11.

“I just remember just getting my hands on everything […] I was just incensed,” he says. His research went on and on, to the detriment of his mental health. “I suffered from depression for the best part of a decade. I was drinking a lot and the grieving was compounded.”

Many would dismiss Matt’s hypotheses and accusations about a cover-up as conspiracy theories. Naturally, he finds that term disrespectful: “What we’re doing is challenging a narrative, just like you would [at] any inquest.”

Malcolm, while a signatory on the dossier, doesn’t have the energy to pursue it with the same vigour. “I try and stop Matthew being ‘obsessed’, I think of that chap [Herbert Swire] whose daughter died in the Lockerbie bombing, it took over his life and changed him,” he says. “For me, I just don’t want to get involved in all that. It’s been too much. Twenty years of it, and I’m worn out.”

In the documentary, Malcolm and Matt are put in the same room and asked to reflect together, for the first time, on the impact 9/11 had on their family. In some ways, it paralysed them all. They are still in touch with Caroline, for instance, who has never quite moved on. “She’s made progress in the last five years,” Matt says. “Simple things, like the toilet seat Geoff was supposed to fit, she finally fitted it herself. Her loo had been broken all these years.”

Rob, who’s now 47 and has experienced depression since he was a teenager, doesn’t feature in the film. “He’s never recovered,” Malcolm says. “We always say that for the last 20 years he’s been in a black hole.”

Malcolm and Matt (and Maureen and Robert, plus five grandchildren) still see one another when they can, but 9/11 left its mark on the Campbells. At one point, they’re asked what might have happened if they’d discussed the emotional impact of it before. “I probably would have avoided a decade of depression,” Matt says, dryly.

As ever, Malcolm maintains a stoic, good-natured silence, but adds: “The sooner September is out of the way, the sooner I’ll be happier.”

Surviving 9/11 is on BBC Two, Monday 30 August at 9pm