FOR the families of the 96 Liverpool football fans who lost their lives in 1989, today was a day they thought might never come.

After hearing two years of evidence, a jury has found that their relatives were killed unlawfully and that the police were responsible for a catalogue of failings which could have prevented their deaths.

While these latest Hillsborough inquests began in March 2014, the fight for justice has been waged by the families of those who lost their lives for 27 years.

For Margaret and Stanley Godwin, of Lechlade, the process has felt even longer – they lost their son Derrick, aged just 24 at the time, on that disastrous afternoon in Sheffield.

Now in their seventies, the couple have been unable to travel to the inquest as much as they might have liked but they were able to make the journey to hear the jury’s verdicts this morning.

Speaking ahead of the announcements, Stanley Godwin, 79, said: “It’s a very poignant occasion.

“It’s taken a long time – the jury has had a hell of a job on their hands, you have to sympathise with them.

"We’re just waiting to find out what the ruling is, we’re going in with an open mind to hear what they have found.

“We haven’t been able to get up to much of the inquest because we live so far away but we will be there to hear the verdicts."

Derrick Godwin was an accounts clerk living in Gloucester in 1989, he went to school in Lechlade as a youngster before working in Swindon for PHH Insurance.

Giving evidence at the inquest in 2014, his mother Margaret said: “Derrick did not drink, he did not smoke – he was a regular young man with his whole life in front of him.

“Derrick loved to watch football and when he went to work in Swindon, he joined the Swindon Town Football Club and travelled to every away match with them.”

As well as his passion for Swindon Town, Derrick had a second footballing love – Liverpool.

He went to see them play Oxford United in a cup competition and from then on he was hooked, becoming a season ticket holder on the Kop at Anfield the following year.

On match days he would drive to Cheltenham station, change trains in Birmingham and then head on to Liverpool - it was the same journey he took on that fateful day in April 1989.

Margaret told the inquest: “I clearly remember that on the morning of the semi-final, when he left home, his Dad said to him, ‘I hope Liverpool win, Derrick’, to which he replied, ‘oh, they will win, Dad’.

“Little did we realise, they would be the last words we would ever hear him say.”

The Crown Prosecution Service will now consider whether to bring criminal charges against the senior police officers whose failings were found to have led to the disaster.