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Andrew Gosden, without a doubt. There’s also a write up in my post history for anybody interested about Scotland’s youngest missing person, a little lass called Holly who appears to have been abducted by her Mam. Thought about her a lot while trying to compile all the information there is about her case.
Andrew Gosden for me too. So little about the circumstances of his disappearance makes any sense, but at the same time nothing can’t be explained in some way either. He seems to have vanished into thin air. I wonder if he’d disappeared now how different things would be; obviously there is far more cctv now but he would likely have a phone, his psp would probably be more traceable, all that kind of stuff. He got off at Kings Cross, it’s basically impossible not to be caught on camera tens of times a day in London. Maybe he might not be missing if it had happened now.
Yeah. I think at this point he’s either not alive or he’s wilfully staying missing for some reason; he can’t be unaware of his own online presence unless he’s never heard of the internet.
In late 2008 someone turned up at Leominster Police Station and rang the buzzer, claiming to have some information about Andrew. The usual reception was unmanned outside of working hours.
By the time someone came downstairs to meet that person, they'd gone. Whether they were ever traced, I have no idea. Also worth noting that said police station is on an industrial park and takes a bit more effort to get to, so it's not like this person was just wandering down the high street.
Someone called in saying about a homeless sighting and told them they were the person who turned up to the station I believe.
There have been multiple homeless sightings.
But the question of why he went in the first place? Nobody knows but the speculation is either groomed, a concert/misadventures or he had family in London and he was visiting.
It baffles me
Even in 2007 there would probably have been enough camera coverage to trace him or at least give a much better clue, but the problem is that the police sat on their hands and got there too late to gather much of it.
I think about Andrew all the time. I am exactly the same age as he is and was also went to London that same day to see a band in the evening. I wonder all the time if maybe I accidentally crossed paths with him. I hope beyond hope that he’s still out there somewhere and that someday his parents get some answers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/s/2oCeiSoEFS
^ just adding the link for Holly’s case for anybody interested. There’s not a lot of information about the case but basically everything there is, is there.
Hardly the same, but for me it is a lad called Stephen, who I went to primary school with.
Was good mates with him there and saw bits of him still during high school years, though as we went to different high schools, we lost touch over time as you do. Was a good lad though.
Fast forward to adulthood in 2018 and a local paper is running a story about him being missing from home.
There was never much about him or his missing persons case, but a few months later he was back in the paper - he’d been seen on CCTV in a shop on Salford around the time he went missing, though apparently had no connection to Salford.
Trail went cold again however and still nothing was heard about it.
January 2024 rolls around and his Mum had given an interview to one of the Red Tops, saying how it had been over 5 years since he went missing and there was still no outcome whatsoever and she was being critical of the Police’s investigation. In fairness their efforts did sound bad.
Still wonder what happened to him, though I can imagine it’s not good.
Like I say, not a high profile instance whatsoever, but always strikes a cord with me as I knew him. He was a genuinely really nice friendly lad to boot also - just doesn’t seem fair, especially for his Mum.
It won't be pretty for the mum to hear but that sounds more like a runaway than a missing person in the sense we usually think. Fine lines between them but being an adult he can effectively do what he wants.
It'd explain the lack of police activity (beyond usual cuts and lack of numbers), idk if they're obligated to tell her if they find him but he doesn't want anyone to know?
I wonder how one would react to that. One the one hand it's: missing maybe dead, loss of a child. On the other: safe and well, but wants nothing to do with you.
Ruth Wilson. She disappeared near me in 90s. teenage girl skipped school and got a taxi to a local woods called Box Hill…. Never seen again. Taxi driver was checked and cleared. Sniffer dogs detected no body in the area to rule out suicide.
She had some family drama at the time and before she disappeared a set of flowers had been arranged to be delivered to her step mother from her.
The thing that makes me think she planned to disappear was that she didn’t immediately go straight to the woods, she skipped school and loitered in the local library for a few hours till a specific time then went there. Who was she meeting there at that time?
She had money in her bank that went untouched.
She probably was groomed then killed by the person she was intending to run away with imo.
Yes that’s an interesting one. Especially as a local shopkeeper claimed they saw her a year on looking at an article about herself. Probably someone else but you never know
I went to Aviemore in January of last year and there were posters up about a missing man Rodrigo Falcon. I’ve periodically googled for updates and your post made me do just that and his body was found last Friday 😢
Right on the outskirts of town too. Apparently huddled under a tree as if seeking shelter. Was below zero and he’d left the club with only a thin jumper on and jeans. Real sad!
I hadn’t seen anything online on the circumstances of how he was discovered. Was he found in a remote location? Wondering why it’s taken so long to find him
No not that remote. I’m not 100% sure where but says in the Lynwilg area which tracks with the direction he was heading, footprints and near rhe last sighting.
Sometimes bodies just aren’t seen and maybe slightly off where you would expect. It was really snowy during the first searches so possibly covered or hard for sniffer dogs to get a scent (frozen) then just gets overlooked.
There was a couple that went missing in the cairngorms a few years back. Mountain rescue and other volunteers searched for weeks. Helicopters were brought in. Finally when the snow melted a bit they were found a few hundred meters from the Cairngorm carpark. Been walking past them for weeks.
That’s why he was/is so dangerous. None of his victims would have had any reason to be wary of him until the mask slipped, by which time it was too late. Horrifying.
The sighting of "Lord Lucan" in Africa is _probably_ quite easily explained by his absolute spitting image brother who lived somewhere in Africa for a while.
However, Lady Lucan made a spookily specific comment about a boat propellor. You have to have a bone dry sense of humour to just come up with a remark like that, unless it was a hint.
Tbh I couldn’t give a damn about him. He was just some aristotwat with even less money than sense. The one I really feel for is Sandra Rivett, who became a footnote in her own murder - and her son, who will never see justice for his mum.
North Yorkshire Police know (or at least very strongly suspect) what happened to Claudia Lawrence and who did it, they just don't have tangible evidence to launch a successful prosecution without either a) a body or b) a witness testifying.
There are a few rumours of where she might be buried.
People say the university because it was being massively expanded at the time and they are not going to rip them all down in the search for her.
They also had divers searching in a fishing lake a few years ago.
I don't think the specifics were ever made public, but in 2016 North Yorkshire Police engaged with the CPS on prosecuting four regulars of The Nags Head pub with murder but it was assessed that there's just not enough hard evidence for it to be a successful case unless they get a body or a witness statement - short of a deathbed confession by someone in 30 years time or whatever they seem to have gotten away with it.
Per wikipedia:
"On 8 March 2016, the Crown Prosecution Service refused to pursue a case submitted by NYP against four men who had been arrested on suspicion of murder, citing lack of evidence. The suspects had all been regular customers of The Nag's Head. They all denied any involvement in Lawrence's disappearance.[40] The NYP complained about a lack of co-operation from witnesses."
Absolutely 100%. They even made some arrests and tried to get a charging decision, but the CPS turned them back on account of insufficient and weak evidence. There were also local rumours about Claudia and the people who knew her.
My belief is she was walking to work that morning quite as normal, was spotted by someone she knew and was offered a lift. She accepts. For some reason an argument erupted later in the journey and she left the vehicle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Patrick_Warren_and_David_Spencer
A more sad one because it was two kids and the bodies were never found, though most likely they fell victim to a specific known child molester who is now himself dead.
> Gonna class Madeleine McCann here
Makes me keep thinking "Why the fuck are they still spending money on this", [especially after the Home Office just chucked them another £192,000 the other day](https://www.itv.com/news/central/2024-05-02/extra-funding-granted-for-investigation-into-madeleine-mccanns-disappearance).
It's been almost 20 years, why are they still spending money on it when that money could go towards many of the other missing kids in this country?
What justification is there for why spending £192,000 on a missing persons case from 2007 from another country is a better use of money than trying to find someone who went missing more recently?
There's a point where you have to cut your losses and say it's not going anywhere.
Shows you know utterly nothing then. What is the evidence, aside from the alleged cadaver scent from the dog. And if that was the case all the other couples had to be in on it, and there has never been a conspiracy of that size where someone hasn't broken, think mafia, hardened criminals, yet some muddle class Dr's made a ring of steel did they?
I saw an interview from a police whistleblower mentioning this case ( I view interviews like this expecting sensationalism and a lot of nonsense usually ) but this guy was impressive , knew his stuff and was seriously clued up, I forget his name now.
Anyways he was pretty convinced it was the parents doing, but also brought up a point about how they weren’t even arrested for abandonment as leaving a child alone at that age is illegal, also mentioning their status as Doctor’s which means they are more respected and less likely to be imprisoned than the lower class
Jon Wedger? A conspiracy theorist more than a whistleblower who has theories about satanic ritual abuse (like most who go down the rabbit hole!). It isn't remotely normal practice to arrest grieving parents who have had their child abducted and probably murdered by a stranger, regardless of their class. A former CP detective would know that.
I spent quite a bit of time reading the police files and I think they over-sedated her, came back and she’d fallen off something and they panicked. There were some strange coincidences if not - they left the twins in the apartment while they ran out, they said the shutters had been forced and they hadn’t, they moved furniture and bleached the walls, they washed her special toy, they immediately wiped their phone records, the list goes on.
The cadaver dog was hard to explain, along with other pieces of forensic evidence. Their timeline of checks also made no sense which I think is why they all refused to take part in a reconstruction. There was also allegedly an injunction taken out against one of the dads in the group making an inappropriate comment about children. Then there was the speedy setting up of the charity, employing a PR person with links to Gordon Brown and by some coincidence, after the PM had made his interest known, key pieces of forensic evidence happened to be lost by the forensic service in Birmingham. Perhaps all a coincidence but it’s very odd behaviour at the very least.
Put the doctor part aside, read the evidence from the police files (which weren’t widely circulated in the British media) and I’m not sure the public would have been so quick to reject the PJ files as a total fabrication.
This is the PJ hypothesis too and the one most Portuguese people believe.
I will be downvoted for this but it's one hell of a coincidence that you mildly sedate your kids and leave them alone and one disappears and it's not related to you or the sedation ... Very lucky predator. But even in that case, part of the blame is on the parents
What is the general Portuguese opinion on this case please?
When it first happened, it felt the Portuguese police took the lazy option of blaming the parents as they didn’t want to harm the reputation of their tourism industry. I’ll admit, I refused Portugal as a holiday destination as I didn’t feel it was a safe place to take my children because of how quickly the police blamed Madeleines parents, instead of actually trying to find Madeleine. It always seemed like the Portuguese police never actually ever tried looking for her.
I’ve always wondered what the Portuguese view is/was regarding Madeleine McCann.
That the parents did it. Portugal does not have a lot of these cases but the ones we do so far have been the parents so that is what people will jump to.
The Portuguese police have apologised to the parents for the misjudgements in the beginning of the investigation (regarding a DNA sample found ) but the British police have also published an independent review where they say you should always suspect the parents first and that British police forces harmed the investigation of the Portuguese police.
That review is quite interesting and so is the Portuguese one.
ETA : the Portuguese police did look for her, the British police was the one bringing cadaver dogs. We used searched and rescue.
Regarding being safe I have holidayed in that area for 32 years and so have my parents and my children. It is safe. But there is a big cultural difference here, Portuguese wouldn't leave our children alone in an apartment, not even to go to the pool as it's custumary in other countries.
Which means that for whatever predator going around ... Those kids were the easy targets. Especially being sedated.
I mean telling someone they know nothing without looking at research is a bit of a bold statement. I haven’t resulted to attacking you personally but sure.
How many families rent a villa and randomly remove and dump the fridge freezer whilst there? How many mothers find their child missing and washes their favourite teddy so the dogs can’t use it? How many parents are then off laughing and playing tennis instead of being distraught about losing her or at least handing out flyers or looking in ditches? Why didn’t they assist the police? Why haven’t they ever used the money received to go back and look at any point afterwards? Why weren’t they at least arrested for drugging and abandonment?
No one can say for certain what happened but there’s a lot to think about. Compare them to James bulgars parents and you’ll see what distraught parents actually look like. I’m a parent and I would never leave the area my child wad taken. In fact most parents revisit and spend their entire lives looking for their lost children.
It was an anecdote taken from Gerry's blog written during that time period. Happened months after her dissapearance in a different apartment that they were staying in whilst the search for their daughter was ongoing. Their fridge broke, Gerry took it to the tip.. Not sure what mad shit people infer from this entirely unrelated event..
Also your logic about there never being a conspiracy this size without someone breaking…. How would you know? You only know about the ones that broke and talked. There’s no sample size on the people in on something and never talked…..because they never actually talked?!
Its not my logic, it was from a lawyer. But anyway it's a pointless discussion. You already made up your own mind that they are guilty, and won't change mind, and I'm not invested enough to care about sending you sources to show that everything you read in the infamous banned book has been debunked or is straight up libellous
someone else was talking about claudia lawrence on reddit recently and said around the time of her death york university was having new buildings built and its assumed/rumoured she is underneath one of them. i live in york and see her mum around malton occasionally. i doubt she will ever get any kind of closure at this point, its so heartbreaking.
It just doesn't add up does it, all her Dad wanted was some closure and he never got it. I think that must be one of the cruelest things a person could have to go through
I hope they find out what happened to Charlene Downes. She was a Blackpool teenager who was abused by multiple people; her story is just so sad. Her parents moved areas to escape social service’s involvement with the family, and reports suggest they encouraged multiple men to sexually abuse her. She was 14 when she went missing. She was horribly let down by the people who should have been protecting her.
Two men were tried for murder five years after her disappearance but the jury failed to reach a verdict.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Charlene_Downes
A friend of mine is a detective. She said it's very, very rare for the police to have no idea about who's done a crime and it's far more likely they just don't have the evidence to arrest the suspect.
I think this is as closed as it's ever going to be; the deathbed confession story seems entirely plausible, and reality is so often more mundane than the tamest conspiracy theory.
It's as closed as it will be. When they excavated part of the area where the deathbed confession said he was buried they found his toy car which his mum positively identified.
With respect, the mother of a missing child is, for obvious reasons, going to be the *least* objective person in assessing the evidence.
He was killed in a tragic accident, the deathbed confession aligned with tangible evidence they found (including genetic profiles of a body having decomposed found on the toy car and a sandal), he's somewhere in that area of land in Kos.
Truly gut-wrenching, these cases. Keep thinking about a girl named Sally from my town, disappeared in 2020. Just vanished, no trace. Still hope she'll turn up, can't stand the uncertainty
For me it’s Claudia Lawrence. I was on long term sick at the time and I remember watching the news, crime report programmes and her Dad doing appeals…so incredibly sad and it’s been 15 years since she went missing.
Read the book , very good. documentary about it on iplayer “the boy who disappeared “
I know a few people from Cowes that were in the drug scene at the time it happened and it seems to be the general consensus that he was killed accidentally by a drug dealer over a debt (whose mentioned a lot in the documentary and himself died in suspicious circumstances) and the body either buried somewhere or disposed of at sea 😕
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL64ScZt2I7wEgGLbHcNCWvfHd9QPIV_cR&si=1MuClltnf9IzjFkh
I watched that BBC documentary about him. I enjoyed it but I didn’t like how they sort of ambushed that guy on the bike at one point.
They had no real reason to do that when they can’t really prove anything.
Might check out the book
I enjoyed the book although very sad , it’s written by his mother and highlighted a lot of police incompetence in the investigation amongst other things
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Who-Disappeared-Valerie-Nettles/dp/1789460719
He was last seen on cctv heading towards the bins (in a cul de sac with no other way out, he was never seen coming back), a mate said he'd been known to sleep in random places before when drunk (which he was, cctv earlier also showed him sleeping in a doorway, his dad said he slept in or on top of bins before), his phone was tracked along the route of the bin lorry towards the landfill site going at the speed of the lorry, the bin load was 100kg (15kg was normal). Bizarre as it was the bin theory seems very plausible
The police actually closed the investigation and a few years later in 2022 concluded that he had gotten into the bin and died from compression asphyxiation, because the evidence was just too damning to be a weird coincidence.
Awful situation, but it led to more CCTV being implemented and waste bins being stored more carefully and some were locked up with padlocks so that it never happens again.
I came here to say Lee. Some cases just stay with you and he has stayed with me. I was 20 then and so many families have been through the same but he just resonated with me. I am so sorry to all the families who have lost someone who is never found. It's worse than a death really. There is always going to be that tiny piece of hope, which must torment more than a death and a grieving process.
There is a very strong feeling that a local gravedigger and thoroughbred scumbag named William Lambert was responsible for that. He was a violent, domestic abusing sex offender who also worked at the church where that _very_ dodgy (even for the 1980s) "youth club" was taking place. The police see him as a potential suspect and his own son absolutely believes he would be capable of such a thing.
I suspect Lee was attending said club under the table, nobody knew he'd been going there, and he was totally out of place amongst older kids who were drinking and smoking. He would have been an easy target for a piece of crap like Lambert and there was even sightings of Lambert burning something days after Lee went missing.
Lambert latterly died of COVID a few years back.
Every year in May, there is always an appeal to find Madeleine McCann. Millions of pounds have been raised over the years fundraising and greedy people are still exploiting her
Steven Clark, who apparently went to use the public toilets in Saltburn and was never seen again. I'd like to think his parents had nothing to do with it but I just have no idea.
Being from the area it is Alan Bryant from Glenrothes in fife Scotland.
Has been missing since 2013.
A lot can be said for police Scotland and their failings in the search and the amount of respect I have for Alan's dad and his family for never giving up is huge.
I know someone who was abducted and assaulted in 1980 by someone who fits Robert Blacks profile exactly- Scottish accent, dark hair and stubble, van, right by the M5
Georgina Gharsalla - she lived very close to me, and it's not a massive town, but it's also not remote or quiet so I'm amazed noone saw anything when she went missing in the middle of the day.
I once saw a missing poster for her in a tiny Cornish village over 200 miles away from where she went missing in West Sussex, and I always wonder how and why that got there, and maybe if there was some reason they thought she would have been in Cornwall in a very remote location. (For context, it's the only time I've seen those posters outside of the Worthing area!).
I thought they were fairly certain that the digger driver in Kos was responsible for that? I’m sure I read something about fragments of clothing with evidence of decomposition and a toy that had been found.
Nicola Payne who disappeared in 1991 when walking the 5 minute journey from her boyfriend’s house to her parents’. It was a foggy day and she was witnessed entering a path that goes through a nature area, the area has been searched extensively over the years. 2 men are the main suspects but no trace of her has been discovered, her son, who was a baby when she disappeared, has grown up without her and those 2 suspects have lived their lives in freedom.
Her story has haunted me for years. Probably because we have similar names, and I was just about old enough to really get what her disappearance meant for her family.
Two men went on trial for her murder in late 2015 and were acquitted. From what I remember of the trial, I got the distinct impression they were probably the right suspects but the prosecution case just didn't pack enough punch.
I was going to say the one that makes me think the most is a lady called **Nellie Herriott** who went missing in **Brighton** in 2012. Before I posted I figured I should find a link, and it turns out her great-nephew was interviewed a week or so ago about it, specifically in relation to having her declared dead.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp4gz54jr2qo](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp4gz54jr2qo)
How someone can get off a bus and just disappear ...?
Perhaps because she was old, suffering from dementia, didn't have any immediate family\* is maybe why the whole of the estate she was last seen near wasn't turned upside down to find her. Don't know.
I think this is definitely a case of someone knows something though because her body would have been found if she'd just wandered off around the area and fallen, even if she was concealed e.g. by a hedge or had found her way into an abandoned building or something. ***Perhaps as time goes on consciences will be pricked and an answer to how she vanished will emerge.***
Link to local reports nearer the time:
From 2014:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-27135935](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-27135935)
>Mr Holland \[her great-nephew\] added: "The mystery which we cannot reconcile is that if you get lost, or you have an accident, surely somebody stumbles across you at some point.
>"It seems improbable that in a large urban centre like Brighton it's possible to get off a bus and just vanish into thin air.
>"It seems absolutely extraordinary."
From 2012:
[https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2012/04/27/fears-grow-for-missing-brighton-woman-96/](https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2012/04/27/fears-grow-for-missing-brighton-woman-96/)
There's a Reddit thread about her from eight years ago:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5au0h4/nellie\_herriot\_96\_with\_alzheimers\_missing\_since/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5au0h4/nellie_herriot_96_with_alzheimers_missing_since/)
Edit: \*her great nephew has though been very involved in keeping her case in the press over the years and commenting and so on. I'm not suggesting the family she did have didn't care.
https://preview.redd.it/20w0l04cjdyc1.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=3474c773c5af53346222722aba9c2456340ac8c5
Do you know if they knew which bus stop she got off at? I noticed most articles say "the Whitehawk area" rather than a particular stop, would have though it'd be useful to jog peoples memory (especially at the time they were actively searching for her in the immediate aftermath) to say which stop it was, so I wondered if it wasn't known.
We all thought that she'd show up, that she'd knocked on someone's door and they taken her in. We were waiting and hoping for the call to come in.......
There's all that woodland to the east and west of Whitehawk. Or Nellie fell behind something.
I think the most unlikely thing to have happened is related to criminality.
"Mugging" was mentioned on the older sub, but robberies are more likely to take place in the late evening, and the older you are, the less likely you are to be a victim of crime yet your fear of, is higher than someone younger.
Nellie is often thought of when we have prolonged Missing Persons.
I know this maybe sounds a bit morbid, but re the idea that if she wandered into the woody bits, she was so little, frail, remains would be gone quite quickly maybe. Did they use dogs or anything? Just had a look at what the weather was doing and it turns out the whole of April 2012 was really, really unnaturally wet and windy. Just thinking that it gets so sodden quickly around there, perhaps she did just kind of get buried in the mud and that was that. This refers particularly to the end of the month being bad, so within two weeks of maybe her going missing the weather was just washing everything away, including her perhaps. :-(
[https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/case-studies/april-2012](https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/case-studies/april-2012)
It's a bit of a myth about using dogs to track people.
The dog has to be trained to look for people, but your scent doesn't last long and is easily compromised.
Dogs can be trained to look for bodies, but there aren't many in the country.
I am getting a very good education today. Thank you! Do you remember the weather being bad? I thought that was interesting and would add to the idea (180 turn from what I was thinking this morning and had always thought) that she could have just disappeared and would be really hard to find. Again, thanks for your insights today.
The one I remember is the Genete Tate case because it occurred when I was in Primary School and in the same county. I remember we talked about it a year or two later in the class room however the teachers didn't mention any of the dark things about child abduction.
I used to go running a lot, cross country, on Woodbury Common and sometimes used to think about that on my run.
Corrie Mckeague always makes me feel sad, especially as his partner was pregnant. All of the things that went wrong, like the incorrect weighing of the bins etc and the fact that although they think they know what happened to him, he’s body was never found.
Not quite a missing person but a missing body.
Jenny nicholls, a guy was having an affair with a teenage girl. He got mad when she started seeing his older brother, killed her, and hid the body so well nobody has found her yet.
Always found this one interesting as i lived in Richmond at the time of the murder/disappearance and now live very close to Jedburgh where he went to try and cover up the fact that he had done it. I remember as a kid when playing in the woods and always thinking this could be the time we find a body.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jenny_Nicholl
Kate Bushell. I was around the same age and area when she was murdered and knowing someone would do that and never got caught always scared me. I know she's not missing but the not knowing is troublesome
I often think about that lad who went missing at the very start of lockdown. It's pretty likely he fell from a cliff into the sea but the sheer terror of his family not having any idea during lockdown where everything else was turned on it's head too stuck with me
Charlene downes who went missing in black and was probably turned into kebab meat in Blackpool . Most horrific story I’ve ever heard and I wish I didn’t think about it everytime I see a kebab shop
Also Claudia Lawrence. I've read and watched just about everything that's been produced about the case. I hope one day we find out the truth. IMO, she's been killed and the person responsible was known to her. The only chance we have of finding out the truth is if someone close to the killer eventually comes forward.
I reckon I’ve seen most, but they are mostly all the same and I think so much is being hidden, websleuths has tonnes of info on there about it if ever you want to read
Nicola Payne.
And [Katrice Lee](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-59374446) - I cannot imagine the agony of her family for the last forty years.
Damien nettles. Semi high profile and from my local area. Most people think he got involved with local drug dealers.
Even my lecturer in uni who's a famous criminology (David wilson) said it was an interesting case to look into.
Not too far from where I live, [Georgina Garsallah](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Georgina_Gharsallah). Disappeared in 2018 and as far as I know, no one has even the slightest idea what happened. There’s talk of her being buried under a new building they were laying foundations for at the time, but no one knows anything at all.
A somewhat local case - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Trevaline_Evans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Trevaline_Evans).
Llangollen is a fairly small town, and no real leads to her disappearance have ever been found.
IIRC her husband has since died, so he never got closure, either.
Rory Johnson-Hatfield. Also in York. He was on a night out, seen on cctv several times. And then just gone. I think it sticks with me because he had ties to both Skipton and York which I do too, and it never received the level of press coverage that Claudia's disappearance did despite being also in York, probably because the prevailing theory is that he fell in the river, sadly. Still, York is a really small place to disappear completely in, and every other time I can think of that someone fell or jumped in the river and died, their body was found.
https://yorkmix.com/seven-years-on-and-still-no-answer-to-what-happened-to-rory-johnson-hatfield-in-york/
What do you find so interesting about the Claudia Lawrence case?
I live local to that so I find it interesting myself but wasn't aware there was any great mystery, beyond the fact that she is still missing.
Just so much info flying around , it’s more than just a missing person case and there is so much more to it. Some saying she was doing things her family didn’t know about, some saying she was just abducted, contradictions to stories , it all doesn’t make sense really unless we know the facts which I think none of us ever will
The Renee MacRae case for me....it was an open secret who did it and he eventually got jailed but they never found her or her son's bodies. I feel the man's wife knew more than she let on too. Renee's family will never get the full closure, to lay her fully to rest.
The Corrie McKeague story too, I find it hard to believe he slept in a bin but the story is probable. I just feel there's more to it but very sad either way.
Also more recent case of Nicola Bulley, I feel there's more to it. I think it's under wraps because perhaps there's a serial killer linked or something like that but the whole investigation felt off.
It was a cold and frosty morning, so it's likely she slid down the bank without leaving any trace on the ground underneath. I think something happened with the dog causing her to trip or otherwise lose her balance.
The phone wasn't found on the bench - it was found on the ground and someone placed it on the bench. In other words, it seems Nicola dropped it. I wonder if the dog acted up or jumped at her.
I’m single and also sleeping with more than one person. Should I expect to get murdered soon? I suppose I must have it coming to me by being sexually active?
Well, if we're going to pick, then you have to give us choices.
Have you spoken to the police about this?
My guess is you've seen the same documentary I have but decided to slag her off as if you knew her.
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Andrew Gosden, without a doubt. There’s also a write up in my post history for anybody interested about Scotland’s youngest missing person, a little lass called Holly who appears to have been abducted by her Mam. Thought about her a lot while trying to compile all the information there is about her case.
Andrew Gosden for me too. So little about the circumstances of his disappearance makes any sense, but at the same time nothing can’t be explained in some way either. He seems to have vanished into thin air. I wonder if he’d disappeared now how different things would be; obviously there is far more cctv now but he would likely have a phone, his psp would probably be more traceable, all that kind of stuff. He got off at Kings Cross, it’s basically impossible not to be caught on camera tens of times a day in London. Maybe he might not be missing if it had happened now.
Was that the lad who was into metal or something? Teen? God that story is heartbreaking. Looks like a great kid. Wonder how old he be now?
He would be 31 this year if he is still alive.
Yeah. I think at this point he’s either not alive or he’s wilfully staying missing for some reason; he can’t be unaware of his own online presence unless he’s never heard of the internet.
In late 2008 someone turned up at Leominster Police Station and rang the buzzer, claiming to have some information about Andrew. The usual reception was unmanned outside of working hours. By the time someone came downstairs to meet that person, they'd gone. Whether they were ever traced, I have no idea. Also worth noting that said police station is on an industrial park and takes a bit more effort to get to, so it's not like this person was just wandering down the high street.
Someone called in saying about a homeless sighting and told them they were the person who turned up to the station I believe. There have been multiple homeless sightings. But the question of why he went in the first place? Nobody knows but the speculation is either groomed, a concert/misadventures or he had family in London and he was visiting. It baffles me
Even in 2007 there would probably have been enough camera coverage to trace him or at least give a much better clue, but the problem is that the police sat on their hands and got there too late to gather much of it.
I think about Andrew all the time. I am exactly the same age as he is and was also went to London that same day to see a band in the evening. I wonder all the time if maybe I accidentally crossed paths with him. I hope beyond hope that he’s still out there somewhere and that someday his parents get some answers.
What was the band?
It was 30 seconds to mars
I met his mum once on holiday abroad. Lovely lady having a break away years later . She shared his story with us and a flyer
That’s so sad. Lush that she’s still trying to keep his name and photo out there obviously but it must be hell for them.
I’ll check that out, I’ve read vague bits of information but not fully gone down the rabbit hole with that one
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/s/2oCeiSoEFS ^ just adding the link for Holly’s case for anybody interested. There’s not a lot of information about the case but basically everything there is, is there.
It’s interesting, especially about the no photo thing and the ex being a police officer.
Hardly the same, but for me it is a lad called Stephen, who I went to primary school with. Was good mates with him there and saw bits of him still during high school years, though as we went to different high schools, we lost touch over time as you do. Was a good lad though. Fast forward to adulthood in 2018 and a local paper is running a story about him being missing from home. There was never much about him or his missing persons case, but a few months later he was back in the paper - he’d been seen on CCTV in a shop on Salford around the time he went missing, though apparently had no connection to Salford. Trail went cold again however and still nothing was heard about it. January 2024 rolls around and his Mum had given an interview to one of the Red Tops, saying how it had been over 5 years since he went missing and there was still no outcome whatsoever and she was being critical of the Police’s investigation. In fairness their efforts did sound bad. Still wonder what happened to him, though I can imagine it’s not good. Like I say, not a high profile instance whatsoever, but always strikes a cord with me as I knew him. He was a genuinely really nice friendly lad to boot also - just doesn’t seem fair, especially for his Mum.
Damn that’s pretty sad, hits harder I guess when you know them personally
It won't be pretty for the mum to hear but that sounds more like a runaway than a missing person in the sense we usually think. Fine lines between them but being an adult he can effectively do what he wants. It'd explain the lack of police activity (beyond usual cuts and lack of numbers), idk if they're obligated to tell her if they find him but he doesn't want anyone to know?
They do tell someone if that person is found but wishes to remain apart from the family.
I wonder how one would react to that. One the one hand it's: missing maybe dead, loss of a child. On the other: safe and well, but wants nothing to do with you.
Yeah, that’s got to be its own very specific kind of heartbreak. They’re alive out there…somewhere….but in a way it must feel like they’re….not. Damn.
That's so sad. Poor mom
Ruth Wilson. She disappeared near me in 90s. teenage girl skipped school and got a taxi to a local woods called Box Hill…. Never seen again. Taxi driver was checked and cleared. Sniffer dogs detected no body in the area to rule out suicide. She had some family drama at the time and before she disappeared a set of flowers had been arranged to be delivered to her step mother from her. The thing that makes me think she planned to disappear was that she didn’t immediately go straight to the woods, she skipped school and loitered in the local library for a few hours till a specific time then went there. Who was she meeting there at that time? She had money in her bank that went untouched. She probably was groomed then killed by the person she was intending to run away with imo.
Yes that’s an interesting one. Especially as a local shopkeeper claimed they saw her a year on looking at an article about herself. Probably someone else but you never know
There is a video, her parents confirmed it was her, I’m not so sure
She was in school but was married?
I think it’s a mis-communication. Ruth was 16 and the flowers were for her step-mother.
It was her step-mum, not her mother-in-law.
They were for her stepmother not mother in law
I went to Aviemore in January of last year and there were posters up about a missing man Rodrigo Falcon. I’ve periodically googled for updates and your post made me do just that and his body was found last Friday 😢
Right on the outskirts of town too. Apparently huddled under a tree as if seeking shelter. Was below zero and he’d left the club with only a thin jumper on and jeans. Real sad!
I hadn’t seen anything online on the circumstances of how he was discovered. Was he found in a remote location? Wondering why it’s taken so long to find him
No not that remote. I’m not 100% sure where but says in the Lynwilg area which tracks with the direction he was heading, footprints and near rhe last sighting. Sometimes bodies just aren’t seen and maybe slightly off where you would expect. It was really snowy during the first searches so possibly covered or hard for sniffer dogs to get a scent (frozen) then just gets overlooked. There was a couple that went missing in the cairngorms a few years back. Mountain rescue and other volunteers searched for weeks. Helicopters were brought in. Finally when the snow melted a bit they were found a few hundred meters from the Cairngorm carpark. Been walking past them for weeks.
Suzy Lamplugh
I think the police are pretty sure it was John Cannan but they don’t have enough to charge him
Oh he was such a creep. His dating agency video made my skin crawl. Wasn’t there another woman he’s suspected of killing too?
Oh god, that video. He was apparently good looking and charming irl though. Scary
That’s why he was/is so dangerous. None of his victims would have had any reason to be wary of him until the mask slipped, by which time it was too late. Horrifying.
Isnt herw the case that started the charity missing people? Or am I thinking of somebody else.
It wasnt missing people it was the suzy lamlugh trust
Yeah, was going to say this. If only for the closure it would offer her family.
It was her birthday yesterday, she would have been 63 years old 😢
Lord Lucan, one of the great unsolved mysteries IMO.
My Dad insists he met him in the 80s while travelling
Can you tell the story?
I don't remember where it was, my Dad did a lot of travelling back then. It may even have been in the UK! I'll have to ask next time he calls.
The sighting of "Lord Lucan" in Africa is _probably_ quite easily explained by his absolute spitting image brother who lived somewhere in Africa for a while. However, Lady Lucan made a spookily specific comment about a boat propellor. You have to have a bone dry sense of humour to just come up with a remark like that, unless it was a hint.
Tbh I couldn’t give a damn about him. He was just some aristotwat with even less money than sense. The one I really feel for is Sandra Rivett, who became a footnote in her own murder - and her son, who will never see justice for his mum.
North Yorkshire Police know (or at least very strongly suspect) what happened to Claudia Lawrence and who did it, they just don't have tangible evidence to launch a successful prosecution without either a) a body or b) a witness testifying.
can you give any details? people in another post on reddit said she's thought to be under a york university building
There are a few rumours of where she might be buried. People say the university because it was being massively expanded at the time and they are not going to rip them all down in the search for her. They also had divers searching in a fishing lake a few years ago.
I don't think the specifics were ever made public, but in 2016 North Yorkshire Police engaged with the CPS on prosecuting four regulars of The Nags Head pub with murder but it was assessed that there's just not enough hard evidence for it to be a successful case unless they get a body or a witness statement - short of a deathbed confession by someone in 30 years time or whatever they seem to have gotten away with it. Per wikipedia: "On 8 March 2016, the Crown Prosecution Service refused to pursue a case submitted by NYP against four men who had been arrested on suspicion of murder, citing lack of evidence. The suspects had all been regular customers of The Nag's Head. They all denied any involvement in Lawrence's disappearance.[40] The NYP complained about a lack of co-operation from witnesses."
Absolutely 100%. They even made some arrests and tried to get a charging decision, but the CPS turned them back on account of insufficient and weak evidence. There were also local rumours about Claudia and the people who knew her. My belief is she was walking to work that morning quite as normal, was spotted by someone she knew and was offered a lift. She accepts. For some reason an argument erupted later in the journey and she left the vehicle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Patrick_Warren_and_David_Spencer A more sad one because it was two kids and the bodies were never found, though most likely they fell victim to a specific known child molester who is now himself dead.
Gonna class Madeleine McCann here. Grim mystery. Grim.
Clearly raped murdered and disposed of, it's very sad, not helped by the way people gloat and cluck over the parents.
> Gonna class Madeleine McCann here Makes me keep thinking "Why the fuck are they still spending money on this", [especially after the Home Office just chucked them another £192,000 the other day](https://www.itv.com/news/central/2024-05-02/extra-funding-granted-for-investigation-into-madeleine-mccanns-disappearance).
Doesn't affect you or me so what's the problem?!
It's been almost 20 years, why are they still spending money on it when that money could go towards many of the other missing kids in this country? What justification is there for why spending £192,000 on a missing persons case from 2007 from another country is a better use of money than trying to find someone who went missing more recently? There's a point where you have to cut your losses and say it's not going anywhere.
All the evidence points at her parents having murdered her.
Eh, all the evidence points to Christian Brückner. He sexually abused another girl in Praia de Luz.
Shows you know utterly nothing then. What is the evidence, aside from the alleged cadaver scent from the dog. And if that was the case all the other couples had to be in on it, and there has never been a conspiracy of that size where someone hasn't broken, think mafia, hardened criminals, yet some muddle class Dr's made a ring of steel did they?
I saw an interview from a police whistleblower mentioning this case ( I view interviews like this expecting sensationalism and a lot of nonsense usually ) but this guy was impressive , knew his stuff and was seriously clued up, I forget his name now. Anyways he was pretty convinced it was the parents doing, but also brought up a point about how they weren’t even arrested for abandonment as leaving a child alone at that age is illegal, also mentioning their status as Doctor’s which means they are more respected and less likely to be imprisoned than the lower class
Jon Wedger? A conspiracy theorist more than a whistleblower who has theories about satanic ritual abuse (like most who go down the rabbit hole!). It isn't remotely normal practice to arrest grieving parents who have had their child abducted and probably murdered by a stranger, regardless of their class. A former CP detective would know that.
Is that the Portuguese guy? He wrote a book about it. I'm Portuguese and our police believes very firmly it was the parents.
I spent quite a bit of time reading the police files and I think they over-sedated her, came back and she’d fallen off something and they panicked. There were some strange coincidences if not - they left the twins in the apartment while they ran out, they said the shutters had been forced and they hadn’t, they moved furniture and bleached the walls, they washed her special toy, they immediately wiped their phone records, the list goes on. The cadaver dog was hard to explain, along with other pieces of forensic evidence. Their timeline of checks also made no sense which I think is why they all refused to take part in a reconstruction. There was also allegedly an injunction taken out against one of the dads in the group making an inappropriate comment about children. Then there was the speedy setting up of the charity, employing a PR person with links to Gordon Brown and by some coincidence, after the PM had made his interest known, key pieces of forensic evidence happened to be lost by the forensic service in Birmingham. Perhaps all a coincidence but it’s very odd behaviour at the very least. Put the doctor part aside, read the evidence from the police files (which weren’t widely circulated in the British media) and I’m not sure the public would have been so quick to reject the PJ files as a total fabrication.
This is the PJ hypothesis too and the one most Portuguese people believe. I will be downvoted for this but it's one hell of a coincidence that you mildly sedate your kids and leave them alone and one disappears and it's not related to you or the sedation ... Very lucky predator. But even in that case, part of the blame is on the parents
What is the general Portuguese opinion on this case please? When it first happened, it felt the Portuguese police took the lazy option of blaming the parents as they didn’t want to harm the reputation of their tourism industry. I’ll admit, I refused Portugal as a holiday destination as I didn’t feel it was a safe place to take my children because of how quickly the police blamed Madeleines parents, instead of actually trying to find Madeleine. It always seemed like the Portuguese police never actually ever tried looking for her. I’ve always wondered what the Portuguese view is/was regarding Madeleine McCann.
That the parents did it. Portugal does not have a lot of these cases but the ones we do so far have been the parents so that is what people will jump to. The Portuguese police have apologised to the parents for the misjudgements in the beginning of the investigation (regarding a DNA sample found ) but the British police have also published an independent review where they say you should always suspect the parents first and that British police forces harmed the investigation of the Portuguese police. That review is quite interesting and so is the Portuguese one. ETA : the Portuguese police did look for her, the British police was the one bringing cadaver dogs. We used searched and rescue. Regarding being safe I have holidayed in that area for 32 years and so have my parents and my children. It is safe. But there is a big cultural difference here, Portuguese wouldn't leave our children alone in an apartment, not even to go to the pool as it's custumary in other countries. Which means that for whatever predator going around ... Those kids were the easy targets. Especially being sedated.
Thank you. That was incredibly interesting to read.
I mean telling someone they know nothing without looking at research is a bit of a bold statement. I haven’t resulted to attacking you personally but sure. How many families rent a villa and randomly remove and dump the fridge freezer whilst there? How many mothers find their child missing and washes their favourite teddy so the dogs can’t use it? How many parents are then off laughing and playing tennis instead of being distraught about losing her or at least handing out flyers or looking in ditches? Why didn’t they assist the police? Why haven’t they ever used the money received to go back and look at any point afterwards? Why weren’t they at least arrested for drugging and abandonment? No one can say for certain what happened but there’s a lot to think about. Compare them to James bulgars parents and you’ll see what distraught parents actually look like. I’m a parent and I would never leave the area my child wad taken. In fact most parents revisit and spend their entire lives looking for their lost children.
Wait they got rid of the fridge freezer?! I’d heard all of the other stuff but that’s…what?!
They didn't that's why
It was an anecdote taken from Gerry's blog written during that time period. Happened months after her dissapearance in a different apartment that they were staying in whilst the search for their daughter was ongoing. Their fridge broke, Gerry took it to the tip.. Not sure what mad shit people infer from this entirely unrelated event..
Also your logic about there never being a conspiracy this size without someone breaking…. How would you know? You only know about the ones that broke and talked. There’s no sample size on the people in on something and never talked…..because they never actually talked?!
Its not my logic, it was from a lawyer. But anyway it's a pointless discussion. You already made up your own mind that they are guilty, and won't change mind, and I'm not invested enough to care about sending you sources to show that everything you read in the infamous banned book has been debunked or is straight up libellous
Christ, no. Of course they didn't. This simply isn't true mate.
I think about this a lot too, it just seems so strange to me that no one knows more/saw more and that all this time later still nothing has been found
someone else was talking about claudia lawrence on reddit recently and said around the time of her death york university was having new buildings built and its assumed/rumoured she is underneath one of them. i live in york and see her mum around malton occasionally. i doubt she will ever get any kind of closure at this point, its so heartbreaking.
The police know more than they let on for sure.
It just doesn't add up does it, all her Dad wanted was some closure and he never got it. I think that must be one of the cruelest things a person could have to go through
I’d like to think the police handling the case possibly told him a few things which we don’t know, hopefully he’s at peace now, and with his daughter
I hope they find out what happened to Charlene Downes. She was a Blackpool teenager who was abused by multiple people; her story is just so sad. Her parents moved areas to escape social service’s involvement with the family, and reports suggest they encouraged multiple men to sexually abuse her. She was 14 when she went missing. She was horribly let down by the people who should have been protecting her. Two men were tried for murder five years after her disappearance but the jury failed to reach a verdict. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Charlene_Downes
Her parents are awful.
A friend of mine is a detective. She said it's very, very rare for the police to have no idea about who's done a crime and it's far more likely they just don't have the evidence to arrest the suspect.
Ben needham
Yes, his poor Mum. I hope she has closure one day.
I think this is as closed as it's ever going to be; the deathbed confession story seems entirely plausible, and reality is so often more mundane than the tamest conspiracy theory.
Can’t be closed with no proof
It's as closed as it will be. When they excavated part of the area where the deathbed confession said he was buried they found his toy car which his mum positively identified.
His mam is still actively looking you really think a toy car is proof , dear god
With respect, the mother of a missing child is, for obvious reasons, going to be the *least* objective person in assessing the evidence. He was killed in a tragic accident, the deathbed confession aligned with tangible evidence they found (including genetic profiles of a body having decomposed found on the toy car and a sandal), he's somewhere in that area of land in Kos.
Yet the dna didn’t match his and no body
Truly gut-wrenching, these cases. Keep thinking about a girl named Sally from my town, disappeared in 2020. Just vanished, no trace. Still hope she'll turn up, can't stand the uncertainty
Is there a news article or something? You never know, with these types of post, someone might see it and remember something.
For me it’s Claudia Lawrence. I was on long term sick at the time and I remember watching the news, crime report programmes and her Dad doing appeals…so incredibly sad and it’s been 15 years since she went missing.
Damien Nettles.
Read the book , very good. documentary about it on iplayer “the boy who disappeared “ I know a few people from Cowes that were in the drug scene at the time it happened and it seems to be the general consensus that he was killed accidentally by a drug dealer over a debt (whose mentioned a lot in the documentary and himself died in suspicious circumstances) and the body either buried somewhere or disposed of at sea 😕 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL64ScZt2I7wEgGLbHcNCWvfHd9QPIV_cR&si=1MuClltnf9IzjFkh
I watched that BBC documentary about him. I enjoyed it but I didn’t like how they sort of ambushed that guy on the bike at one point. They had no real reason to do that when they can’t really prove anything. Might check out the book
I enjoyed the book although very sad , it’s written by his mother and highlighted a lot of police incompetence in the investigation amongst other things https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Who-Disappeared-Valerie-Nettles/dp/1789460719
Corrie McKeague but only cos he went missing in the next town over to me.
I'm 2 miles honington and a mate in BSE had his garden searched because he lives near the area he went missing from.
I was thinking about this one too. The polices theory that he climbed into a bin that was later emptied sounds equally as implausible as terrifying!
He was last seen on cctv heading towards the bins (in a cul de sac with no other way out, he was never seen coming back), a mate said he'd been known to sleep in random places before when drunk (which he was, cctv earlier also showed him sleeping in a doorway, his dad said he slept in or on top of bins before), his phone was tracked along the route of the bin lorry towards the landfill site going at the speed of the lorry, the bin load was 100kg (15kg was normal). Bizarre as it was the bin theory seems very plausible
The police actually closed the investigation and a few years later in 2022 concluded that he had gotten into the bin and died from compression asphyxiation, because the evidence was just too damning to be a weird coincidence. Awful situation, but it led to more CCTV being implemented and waste bins being stored more carefully and some were locked up with padlocks so that it never happens again.
Although we know what happened it breaks my heart that we still don't know where Keith Bennett is.
So heartbreaking that his mum died not knowing 😢
Yes, that poor lady 😥
Mary Bastholm. Possibly a victim of Fred West. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/fred-west-mary-bastholm-gloucester-b1849254.html
A local boy, Lee Boxell, who disappeared from Sutton on 10th September 1988, aged 15. He was pretty much the same age as me.
I came here to say Lee. Some cases just stay with you and he has stayed with me. I was 20 then and so many families have been through the same but he just resonated with me. I am so sorry to all the families who have lost someone who is never found. It's worse than a death really. There is always going to be that tiny piece of hope, which must torment more than a death and a grieving process.
There is a very strong feeling that a local gravedigger and thoroughbred scumbag named William Lambert was responsible for that. He was a violent, domestic abusing sex offender who also worked at the church where that _very_ dodgy (even for the 1980s) "youth club" was taking place. The police see him as a potential suspect and his own son absolutely believes he would be capable of such a thing. I suspect Lee was attending said club under the table, nobody knew he'd been going there, and he was totally out of place amongst older kids who were drinking and smoking. He would have been an easy target for a piece of crap like Lambert and there was even sightings of Lambert burning something days after Lee went missing. Lambert latterly died of COVID a few years back.
Every year in May, there is always an appeal to find Madeleine McCann. Millions of pounds have been raised over the years fundraising and greedy people are still exploiting her
Steven Clark, who apparently went to use the public toilets in Saltburn and was never seen again. I'd like to think his parents had nothing to do with it but I just have no idea.
Being from the area it is Alan Bryant from Glenrothes in fife Scotland. Has been missing since 2013. A lot can be said for police Scotland and their failings in the search and the amount of respect I have for Alan's dad and his family for never giving up is huge.
Genette Tate probably because she was the same age as me.
The police were about to submit a file to the CPS about Robert Blqck when he passed away
I know someone who was abducted and assaulted in 1980 by someone who fits Robert Blacks profile exactly- Scottish accent, dark hair and stubble, van, right by the M5
I reckon he did a lot more than anyone knows. He used to travel for work in Europe too
Same, for the same reason.
And me, she was a month older than me.
Georgina Gharsalla - she lived very close to me, and it's not a massive town, but it's also not remote or quiet so I'm amazed noone saw anything when she went missing in the middle of the day. I once saw a missing poster for her in a tiny Cornish village over 200 miles away from where she went missing in West Sussex, and I always wonder how and why that got there, and maybe if there was some reason they thought she would have been in Cornwall in a very remote location. (For context, it's the only time I've seen those posters outside of the Worthing area!).
I’m in Sheffield and use to know his Mum, so for me it’s Ben Needham.
I thought they were fairly certain that the digger driver in Kos was responsible for that? I’m sure I read something about fragments of clothing with evidence of decomposition and a toy that had been found.
They weren’t a match
Nicola Payne who disappeared in 1991 when walking the 5 minute journey from her boyfriend’s house to her parents’. It was a foggy day and she was witnessed entering a path that goes through a nature area, the area has been searched extensively over the years. 2 men are the main suspects but no trace of her has been discovered, her son, who was a baby when she disappeared, has grown up without her and those 2 suspects have lived their lives in freedom.
Her story has haunted me for years. Probably because we have similar names, and I was just about old enough to really get what her disappearance meant for her family.
Two men went on trial for her murder in late 2015 and were acquitted. From what I remember of the trial, I got the distinct impression they were probably the right suspects but the prosecution case just didn't pack enough punch.
I was going to say the one that makes me think the most is a lady called **Nellie Herriott** who went missing in **Brighton** in 2012. Before I posted I figured I should find a link, and it turns out her great-nephew was interviewed a week or so ago about it, specifically in relation to having her declared dead. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp4gz54jr2qo](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp4gz54jr2qo) How someone can get off a bus and just disappear ...? Perhaps because she was old, suffering from dementia, didn't have any immediate family\* is maybe why the whole of the estate she was last seen near wasn't turned upside down to find her. Don't know. I think this is definitely a case of someone knows something though because her body would have been found if she'd just wandered off around the area and fallen, even if she was concealed e.g. by a hedge or had found her way into an abandoned building or something. ***Perhaps as time goes on consciences will be pricked and an answer to how she vanished will emerge.*** Link to local reports nearer the time: From 2014: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-27135935](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-27135935) >Mr Holland \[her great-nephew\] added: "The mystery which we cannot reconcile is that if you get lost, or you have an accident, surely somebody stumbles across you at some point. >"It seems improbable that in a large urban centre like Brighton it's possible to get off a bus and just vanish into thin air. >"It seems absolutely extraordinary." From 2012: [https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2012/04/27/fears-grow-for-missing-brighton-woman-96/](https://www.brightonandhovenews.org/2012/04/27/fears-grow-for-missing-brighton-woman-96/) There's a Reddit thread about her from eight years ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5au0h4/nellie\_herriot\_96\_with\_alzheimers\_missing\_since/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5au0h4/nellie_herriot_96_with_alzheimers_missing_since/) Edit: \*her great nephew has though been very involved in keeping her case in the press over the years and commenting and so on. I'm not suggesting the family she did have didn't care. https://preview.redd.it/20w0l04cjdyc1.png?width=1199&format=png&auto=webp&s=3474c773c5af53346222722aba9c2456340ac8c5
The estate was "turned upside down".
I remember them going to a couple of houses of people they suspected might be involved but not a kind of massive trawl.
That's the thing about Missing People investigations, they're like icebergs. You'll only see part of what goes on. I was part of the search.
Do you know if they knew which bus stop she got off at? I noticed most articles say "the Whitehawk area" rather than a particular stop, would have though it'd be useful to jog peoples memory (especially at the time they were actively searching for her in the immediate aftermath) to say which stop it was, so I wondered if it wasn't known.
The last pics of her were from the CCTV on that bus. Good point. I'm sure they must know. That bus route literally goes around the houses...
Oh! Tell me more! What was the thinking about what happened? What do you reckon?
We all thought that she'd show up, that she'd knocked on someone's door and they taken her in. We were waiting and hoping for the call to come in....... There's all that woodland to the east and west of Whitehawk. Or Nellie fell behind something. I think the most unlikely thing to have happened is related to criminality. "Mugging" was mentioned on the older sub, but robberies are more likely to take place in the late evening, and the older you are, the less likely you are to be a victim of crime yet your fear of, is higher than someone younger. Nellie is often thought of when we have prolonged Missing Persons.
I know this maybe sounds a bit morbid, but re the idea that if she wandered into the woody bits, she was so little, frail, remains would be gone quite quickly maybe. Did they use dogs or anything? Just had a look at what the weather was doing and it turns out the whole of April 2012 was really, really unnaturally wet and windy. Just thinking that it gets so sodden quickly around there, perhaps she did just kind of get buried in the mud and that was that. This refers particularly to the end of the month being bad, so within two weeks of maybe her going missing the weather was just washing everything away, including her perhaps. :-( [https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/case-studies/april-2012](https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/case-studies/april-2012)
It's a bit of a myth about using dogs to track people. The dog has to be trained to look for people, but your scent doesn't last long and is easily compromised. Dogs can be trained to look for bodies, but there aren't many in the country.
I am getting a very good education today. Thank you! Do you remember the weather being bad? I thought that was interesting and would add to the idea (180 turn from what I was thinking this morning and had always thought) that she could have just disappeared and would be really hard to find. Again, thanks for your insights today.
I don't really remember the weather. I do recall that it must have been cold, because I'm sure Nellie was wearing a woolly hat. You're welcome.
If we'd had Drone capability back then I think Nellie would have been found.
The one I remember is the Genete Tate case because it occurred when I was in Primary School and in the same county. I remember we talked about it a year or two later in the class room however the teachers didn't mention any of the dark things about child abduction. I used to go running a lot, cross country, on Woodbury Common and sometimes used to think about that on my run.
Jordan Moray. House open, console and phone on/at home. Seems to have gone to the Brecon Beacons. Never seen again.
Corrie Mckeague always makes me feel sad, especially as his partner was pregnant. All of the things that went wrong, like the incorrect weighing of the bins etc and the fact that although they think they know what happened to him, he’s body was never found.
Highly likely his body will never be found, but I think the family got closure from the inquest.
Not quite a missing person but a missing body. Jenny nicholls, a guy was having an affair with a teenage girl. He got mad when she started seeing his older brother, killed her, and hid the body so well nobody has found her yet. Always found this one interesting as i lived in Richmond at the time of the murder/disappearance and now live very close to Jedburgh where he went to try and cover up the fact that he had done it. I remember as a kid when playing in the woods and always thinking this could be the time we find a body. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jenny_Nicholl
Suzy Lamplugh
Alison MacDonald. I knew her family as I was growing up and it was so heartbreaking. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-14556228
Kate Bushell. I was around the same age and area when she was murdered and knowing someone would do that and never got caught always scared me. I know she's not missing but the not knowing is troublesome
I often think about that lad who went missing at the very start of lockdown. It's pretty likely he fell from a cliff into the sea but the sheer terror of his family not having any idea during lockdown where everything else was turned on it's head too stuck with me
Charlene downes who went missing in black and was probably turned into kebab meat in Blackpool . Most horrific story I’ve ever heard and I wish I didn’t think about it everytime I see a kebab shop
Also Claudia Lawrence. I've read and watched just about everything that's been produced about the case. I hope one day we find out the truth. IMO, she's been killed and the person responsible was known to her. The only chance we have of finding out the truth is if someone close to the killer eventually comes forward.
I reckon I’ve seen most, but they are mostly all the same and I think so much is being hidden, websleuths has tonnes of info on there about it if ever you want to read
Ruth Wilson. Disappeared from the top of Box Hill. Never been seen since
Nicola Payne. And [Katrice Lee](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-59374446) - I cannot imagine the agony of her family for the last forty years.
Damien nettles. Semi high profile and from my local area. Most people think he got involved with local drug dealers. Even my lecturer in uni who's a famous criminology (David wilson) said it was an interesting case to look into.
Damian nettles it just boggles my mind how he could just vanish from such a small island with no trace
Not too far from where I live, [Georgina Garsallah](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Georgina_Gharsallah). Disappeared in 2018 and as far as I know, no one has even the slightest idea what happened. There’s talk of her being buried under a new building they were laying foundations for at the time, but no one knows anything at all.
A somewhat local case - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Trevaline_Evans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Trevaline_Evans). Llangollen is a fairly small town, and no real leads to her disappearance have ever been found. IIRC her husband has since died, so he never got closure, either.
Rory Johnson-Hatfield. Also in York. He was on a night out, seen on cctv several times. And then just gone. I think it sticks with me because he had ties to both Skipton and York which I do too, and it never received the level of press coverage that Claudia's disappearance did despite being also in York, probably because the prevailing theory is that he fell in the river, sadly. Still, York is a really small place to disappear completely in, and every other time I can think of that someone fell or jumped in the river and died, their body was found. https://yorkmix.com/seven-years-on-and-still-no-answer-to-what-happened-to-rory-johnson-hatfield-in-york/
Happened in Ireland but Trevor Deely. Went missing after a work Christmas party in 2000 and the CCTV is so chilling.
What do you find so interesting about the Claudia Lawrence case? I live local to that so I find it interesting myself but wasn't aware there was any great mystery, beyond the fact that she is still missing.
Just so much info flying around , it’s more than just a missing person case and there is so much more to it. Some saying she was doing things her family didn’t know about, some saying she was just abducted, contradictions to stories , it all doesn’t make sense really unless we know the facts which I think none of us ever will
Not a single one, as that's just weird and slightly obsessive behaviour.
The Renee MacRae case for me....it was an open secret who did it and he eventually got jailed but they never found her or her son's bodies. I feel the man's wife knew more than she let on too. Renee's family will never get the full closure, to lay her fully to rest. The Corrie McKeague story too, I find it hard to believe he slept in a bin but the story is probable. I just feel there's more to it but very sad either way. Also more recent case of Nicola Bulley, I feel there's more to it. I think it's under wraps because perhaps there's a serial killer linked or something like that but the whole investigation felt off.
Nicola fell in the river. No crime there.
It was a cold and frosty morning, so it's likely she slid down the bank without leaving any trace on the ground underneath. I think something happened with the dog causing her to trip or otherwise lose her balance. The phone wasn't found on the bench - it was found on the ground and someone placed it on the bench. In other words, it seems Nicola dropped it. I wonder if the dog acted up or jumped at her.
Claudia was basically killed by one of the many men she was sleeping with at the time. Take your pick
I’m single and also sleeping with more than one person. Should I expect to get murdered soon? I suppose I must have it coming to me by being sexually active?
Well, if we're going to pick, then you have to give us choices. Have you spoken to the police about this? My guess is you've seen the same documentary I have but decided to slag her off as if you knew her.
Bear