About How Many People Dissipeared and Wernt Heard From Again
I t was 7.40 on a Sunday night when xvi-yr-former Kevin Hicks popped out to the local shop. He had a cookery exam the next day, and the family had used upwards all the eggs making yorkshire pudding for supper. The shop was a short walk – you could run into it from his sleeping accommodation. Kevin left home with £1, and told his mother he'd exist dorsum in a few minutes. That was 29 years ago.
On the mantelpiece of a nighttime, winter-lit room in Croydon, south London, at that place is a photo of a handsome boy looking alee to life. "That was taken three weeks before Kevin went missing," his sis Alex says. Her abode is full of mementoes: his favourite cassettes (Madness, Survivor, Japan, Yazoo); the jumper he is wearing in the photo; his Co-op uniform; his Crystal Palace scarf.
Alex was fourteen when Kevin went missing, and for years she wanted nothing to do with the campaign to discover her brother. She left that to her parents. But now they are both gone: they died prematurely, heartbroken – her female parent aged 47, her father at 57. "My mum did an appeal a calendar week before she died. They never gave up looking. I don't feel I accept to do it – I want to do it. They didn't get answers. Hopefully I can. If he comes home, the first thing he'll get is a slap." She laughs. "All the grief he's put us through. And so he might just get a hug."
When someone goes missing, it is usually, understandably, the parents who are forced into the spotlight – the ones who do the police force press conferences, the ones who campaign, the people effectually whom public sympathy gathers. Merely how does it feel for the brothers or sisters left backside? Ofttimes young, they are relatively powerless; they don't become to decide what happens adjacent, or how the family unit is going to bargain with the trauma. A grieving parent might stifle them with love or worry or both; a grieving parent can shut them out completely. It is common for the sibling of a missing person to feel terrible survivor's guilt, and to later on projection their parents' anxieties on to their own children.
Alex remembers very clearly the nighttime Kevin went missing: her female parent looking out the upstairs window all night long; her anger at having to go to school the next morning when Kevin was away, messing about; the fact that only boys could help look for him, in case they institute something terrible; the police officer who took her aside and suggested she knew where Kevin was, and that if she told him she wouldn't get into trouble. They were not allowed to written report him missing until he'd been gone 24 hours, because he was 16 and classed as an adult. "Now, all that has changed. As soon every bit yous know someone is missing y'all can written report it."
By the end of the week, Alex was distraught. Kevin had never run away and had no history of mental illness. "I began to think somebody had taken him. He wouldn't walk off – that wasn't him." The constabulary have never found whatever trace: nobody saw Kevin that dark, there were no CCTV cameras and at that place have been no reported sightings since.
The family unit started to receive strange calls. "The first seven or eight months, the telephone would ring and at that place'd be no one on the end of information technology. Back then, you couldn't do 1471 or withhold your number. It would ring and ring, then when you picked upward, it would exist silent. We'd say, 'Kevin, if that's you, say something.' I'd say, 'Kevin, if you don't want to come home, see me at the park after school.' That was always the time I walked the dog."
The calls connected for a couple of years. Her mother got them at C&A, where she worked. "She but worked Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, and that's when they came."
Alex became more than convinced Kevin was live after her mother died. At the funeral, she and her begetter counted the bunches of flowers that had been left. The next day, there was an extra agglomeration. "I think Kevin put them there. That church was packed. He could accept been there, listening."
His disappearance most destroyed her human relationship with her parents. "They wrapped me in cotton wool. I couldn't exhale. I wanted to become out, take a life, and I started to kick off. 'I want to see my friends, this isn't off-white. You can't keep me like a prisoner.' I said some hurtful stuff." Like what? "This is all Kevin'southward fault – if he'd just come up home, I wouldn't be treated like this." At 16 she moved in with a friend. "I couldn't handle it any more. They were wrapping me up, tighter and tighter." She and her female parent didn't speak for almost a year.
By 21, she was married with two daughters, who have grown up waiting for uncle Kevin to come up home. "They know he was a lilliputian sod. He had a magic box and you'd sit downwardly and the whoopee cushion would go. They know so much about him, they want to meet him face-to-face." Alex segues between nowadays and past tenses.
Does she sympathize now why her mother became and then protective? "Oh God, yeah. If I can't go concur of my kids on the phone, I'm going ballistic."
On a skilful day, she likes to retrieve Kevin joined the military. "Ground forces or navy, on the chefs' side. I only accept that inkling." The longer you have been away from home, she points out, the harder it becomes to go far bear upon, even when you lot want to.
Does a day pass without thinking about Kevin? "No. I work in Sainsbury'south, I could serve him and non realise. I could be at a hospital date and he could be sitting next to me. I'm fighting for Kevin to be on Crimewatch, but they can't exercise a reconstruction because there's nothing to show. All they can do is movie up the route where he was heading, to the shop that is no longer in that location."
I inquire why she is then convinced Kevin left of his own accord, and her face up collapses. It's obvious the alternative doesn't carry thinking most. "Over the years I've talked to psychics and mediums," she says. "A few have said he got taken that night. He got pally with an older guy, racing his remote-control car at Ashburton Park. They say this guy said, 'I've lost the dog, Kevin. Can you lot help me?' Kevin was fauna mad, and so he'd say no trouble. Three mediums have said that. Others accept said they can taste water, which is a sign of drowning."
Through the charity Missing People, Alex has met many other families who take gone through similar experiences, and she encourages them to be positive. "When my parents went looking for Kevin, they ever looked upwards, not downwards. They got pally with the parents of another boy and they were very negative, always looking down under bushes. Mum convinced them to take this little bit of hope. 'You always have to wait up,' she'd say."
We often come across images of missing people – in the Large Issue, on law station noticeboards, on scraps of paper stuck to trees. And we oftentimes assume they are outsiders: addicts or alcoholics, people who have flunked the game of life. Merely missing people come up from all over. An estimated 216,000 people were reported missing in the UK in 2010-11, according to Missing People'due south most recent figures, and an estimated 250,000 go missing every year. Home Office statistics reveal that more half of those are nether eighteen. Most cases are quickly resolved: in 2011, 91% were closed inside 48 hours. An estimated 99% are solved within a yr. But that still leaves around 2,500 people who go missing every year and leave no trace.
It is twenty years since Richard Edwards' car was found abandoned near the Severn bridge. Richard, better known as Richey, was a member of Manic Street Preachers, the almost tortured and idolised. He was the guitarist who couldn't play guitar, the skinny boy in eyeliner who cutting himself (famously etching 4 REAL into his arm during an interview with NME).
I meet his sister Rachel Elias at her mother's bungalow in Blackwood, a sometime mining town in southward Wales. Rachel lives down the road, but spends lots of time here with her mother. In a pocket-size room off the kitchen, there is a photo of Richard (Rachel always calls him Richard) receiving his English degree – young, hopeful, not very rock'north'whorl. Next to it is a pile of old 45s, some hers, some his – the Smiths, Scott Walker.
Rachel, 45, is a small, hit woman. You don't need to wait difficult to see Richard in her. Her memories of him are random, lingering. "One of the last matches he watched on telly was Newcastle v Blackburn. I don't know why I call back him telling me that. A few weeks before he went missing, our dog died, a Welsh springer spaniel." They were both living in Cardiff, where Richard had bought a flat. "We came back home, bought a tree from B&Q and buried the dog."
Richard, 2 years older than Rachel, was a smart, creative boy, who would help her with her homework. In the years before he went missing, he suffered astute depression; he had but recently come out of the Priory later a previous stay at Whitchurch psychiatric infirmary in Cardiff. Rachel didn't remember he was troubled equally a teenager, but looking back she can run into signs. "He used to pick upward a compass and practise this." She scrapes herself with an imaginary compass. "He wouldn't do it in front of me. Merely I knew. I never said anything."
She visited him in infirmary and by now he was seriously self-harming. "I'd say, look at your wrists. He'd say, that's nothing compared to the mental pain I feel. One of the nurses gave him a book by Spike Milligan, Low And How To Survive Information technology. Milligan said he was and then sensitive to things, he felt skinless – I think Richard identified with that." Did the music business make things worse? "Who knows? Those symptoms might have manifested themselves if he'd been working in a banking concern."
She thinks the Priory fabricated him feel special, which she hated – every bit if his depression was a souvenir. "You were treated like a pop star. A psychiatrist told my mother he was the Richard Burton of the music globe. I thought, what? Because he was Welsh?" Eric Clapton was an occasional counsellor there. "I thought it was funny he and Richard exchanged CDs. He gave him From The Cradle, his blues album. Richard couldn't fifty-fifty play guitar."
Richard had told her he wanted to leave the band and merely write lyrics for them. Merely in the terminate he agreed to a United states of america bout to promote their third album, The Holy Bible. On 31 January 1995, he and band mate James Dean Bradfield checked into the Diplomatic mission hotel in London, ahead of their flying. The next morning time, when Bradfield knocked on his door, there was no answer. Staff found the room empty except for a few personal items. A fortnight later, Richard's silver Vauxhall Cavalier was found at the Severn View service station. The Severn bridge was a renowned suicide location – but a lock had been fitted to the steering wheel, which made the family call back Richard had been planning to return.
His disappearance was entirely out of character. "He took his responsibilities seriously, and he'd made the conclusion to return to the band. He used to ring my mum and dad every twenty-four hours, so only deserting them, not making the flight… "
Rachel knows how many people get missing, but says it's an isolating experience: "Other people don't know what to say to y'all or how to treat you." Over the years, she has found comfort through Missing People. On her mother'due south mantelpiece, at that place are framed pictures of families. I enquire who they are. "Other families with missing people," Rachel says. "They have become friends."
There have been numerous conspiracy theories almost Richard'southward disappearance, including the suggestion he was targeted by government agents because he wrote a song called If White America Told The Truth For One Day Its World Would Autumn Apart. But Rachel is not interested in speculation – she merely wants the facts. She has campaigned to become the families of missing people one single point of police contact (in that location were three forces involved in the search for her brother) and has fought for the Deoxyribonucleic acid of missing people to be cross-matched with Britain'southward database of more than ane,000 unidentified bodies: "Almost people simply don't know nigh the database." It took 10 years to get DNA from Richard's hairbrush tested. No lucifer was found.
For a while afterwards he went missing, Rachel would bulldoze around at dark, looking for him in their former haunts. Then she stopped, thinking it pointless. Twelve years ago, she took a job in a night shelter for homeless people. She never questioned why, so realised she was looking for Richard. "He'd shaved his head and had a bobble hat on before he went missing. And sometimes I'd walk by the living room, see the shape of someone and think…"
She has become less rose-tinted well-nigh the world, less secure. "If you go to the Missing People role, there is a wall of grainy photographs. You call back y'all live in a safe globe, then y'all run across that and recollect, no, no. Information technology makes everything seem more sinister."
7 years after someone has disappeared, they can be declared dead in absentia. The family decided against this initially, just in 2008, 13 years after Richard went missing, they agreed it would exist the best form. Their parents were getting older, and they still had Richard's bills to pay. His father, who has since died, told Rachel and her female parent he didn't want to get out them with these worries. "And then we wound up his financial affairs. Until then we were going down to await subsequently his flat."
But it was not a uncomplicated procedure. Insurance companies often claiming a case, because they believe families might be on the brand. "I had to go in front end of the judge and swear on oath that I believe he is dead. That was a very difficult experience. I wrote the affirmation. We had to build upwardly this moving picture about why we idea he may have died, show his psychiatric history, how it was out of character, what effort we fabricated to locate him. I've met families since who have had multiple applications rejected. Our commencement was. We had to add more information, then the approximate simply stamped it." Tin can she remember the twenty-four hours they got the document? "Information technology but came through. 'Richard Edwards deceased.' Yeah, that was hard to read."
There is still no sense of closure. Does it become easier every bit the years go by? "Well, recently I've come up to faith and I become to church. One of the hardest things is that my dad died not knowing. Sometimes I think, well, you have to face the possibility that y'all may have to live with this incertitude." She pauses. "But I recollect at some point, if not in this life, information technology will be revealed. And I will know."
Donna Davidson imagines the best possible scenario for her blood brother Sandy. "I'd like to think he was taken by a family unit who couldn't have children, and they've brought him up well." She stops abruptly. "Just I don't think that is the case, so I'd adopt he was dead. I'd like to think it happened quick and he didn't endure with a paedophile. I definitely think he was abducted and killed."
It is 39 years since Sandy went missing. He was four and playing in his grandma's garden in Irvine, Scotland. Donna, who was two, was with him, though she can't remember it. Despite the motion-picture show of the gorgeous little male child with the Shirley Temple locks, she has no memories of him: "That hurts."
These days she lives by the sea in Saltcoats, Ayrshire. She has three children, recently became a grandmother, and works equally a barmaid. Inquire anybody, she says, and they'll tell you she's the life and soul of the pub. "Only information technology'due south all a front. You larn to bargain with information technology. I wouldn't wish this life on everyone – just not knowing what happened."
Like so many others, her parents dealt with Sandy's disappearance by non talking well-nigh it. "Nobody mentioned his name. You weren't immune to look at pictures." Her male parent would disappear on Sandy'south altogether. When she had her own children, the memories came dorsum. "When my youngest boy was 4, he looked merely similar him. And my mum said, get his hair cutting off, because he had a mass of curls. He was his double. I said, he'due south not getting his pilus cut. You need to get over it."
Did they ever desire Sandy declared expressionless, like Richard Edwards' family? "No. Even though I think he'southward dead, I wouldn't similar that, no. Until we discover the trunk, there'southward always that fleck of hope."
Throughout her childhood, her mother worried badly for her and her younger blood brother's rubber. Now, Donna says, she's the same with her own children. "I've been overprotective to my kids. The youngest, who'southward 15 and Sandy's spitting image, is a horror. Yous never know where he is. Whenever my kids get out, my stomach's in knots."
"I miss the conversations we had. I can't accept those with anyone else. I miss his sense of humour, his music – he had an amazing phonation. I miss his confront."
Ben Moore is talking near his brother Tom, who went missing thirteen years ago, aged 31. Ben, a curator and moving-picture show-maker, is seven years younger. We run into in a club in Soho, London, one that began life as a refuge for homeless women in Victorian times. Ben has a bohemian air: well spoken, long pilus, categorical cheeks, slightly tortured demeanour.
When Ben was growing upward, Tom was his hero. "I was in awe of him. He liked to play guitar, he had cool friends." And then he started taking drugs and becoming "weird". Ben feels guilty: rather than trying to understand, in his early on 20s he pushed Tom abroad. "At that age, all you tin think of is trying to tick boxes to exist cool, right? And if the boxes aren't matching, you're not interested."
The brothers grew upwardly in a well-to-practise family unit in west London, with another brother and a sis. Their begetter had been a colonel in the Purple Marines; at present both parents teach English language. Tom studied theology at Lancaster University, then went to Republic of india to detect himself, working with the poor and spending time with Female parent Teresa ("He wasn't her right-manus human or anything"). He took mind-altering drugs, and was never the same again. "Requite him a drop of annihilation and he'd twist information technology into some terrible nightmare. He was religious and at that place is a lot of fearfulness besides as hope in religion – he got caught upwardly in a paranoid, twisted puzzle."
Back domicile, he was put on antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs. "He was on olanzapine, which basically shuts down your mind. Zombie powder. He'd be on it, then come up off it, and that's when it's dangerous. All of a sudden you're allowed to breathe, you're awake for iii days, and boom!"
Over a menstruum of years, Tom got better. He was never well, only he was calmer. Then one mean solar day Mormon evangelists knocked on the door, and he let them in. He became a Mormon, while besides embracing his Catholicism. Anile 30, he decided to become travelling once again, often to spiritual landmarks and unremarkably without alarm. Invariably, at that place would exist a mishap. He was mugged in Paris. He went for a swim in Cannes and somebody stole his clothes. He stowed away on a transport to Corsica, but was discovered and returned to France. His uncle had to rescue him from a hostel in New York.
More oftentimes, it was Ben who would fetch him. He started to brand a film about Tom. In one case he disappeared and was discovered in Medjugorje, Bosnia, a site of Christian pilgrimage after local children said they had seen the Virgin Mary. "He was there for a month. I managed to bring him abode, only I was questioning why I was. I was only doing information technology nether orders from our parents."
Ben is convinced his brother is however alive, and is the near optimistic sibling I speak to – because Tom had a history of disappearing. For Ben, it is a case of when, non if. He believes Tom was in Ancona, Italy, on 20 July 2003, because his depository financial institution menu was used to withdraw a small corporeality of cash. Since then Tom's bill of fare has not been used, but every few months Ben hears of a potential sighting. He shows me a photo of a homo in Italy. He'due south blood-red-haired, disguised, craggy, a good Tom lookalike. "What d'you think?" he asks. Well, I say, it does look similar him, but lots of people look similar Tom. "No," he says, momentarily deflated, "information technology's not him. I've got to go with my gut. And when I starting time saw information technology, my whole beingness went, 'Nah.' Seeing your blood brother, it would just exist: 'Smash!'"
Like Rachel Elias, his brother's disappearance has given him faith. He says he'd like to have his photo taken in the chapel bordering the club where we meet. "It has strengthened my faith in Catholicism, and my religion that he'south around." Ben talks about the day Tom went missing. They were in the middle of a game of chess. "I was winning, and he put it on hold. I wish I'd kept the game. I realise at present I was winning because he was distracted by the mission he was almost to get on. I realise at present he'd come round to say goodbye."
There is a pattern to Tom'southward disappearances and Ben takes hope from that. "Tom discovered all these religious cults, sects, when he was travelling. A lot of people inside them are registered missing – they get swallowed upwardly and the years get past. He could be with i of them. The only style we'll see him again is me or someone else finding him."
Volition Tom be pleased to see him? "Yes, it would be such an amazing meeting. I mean, wow! For me, that is the holy grail. It's as exciting every bit that."
He admits he'south as driven by the thought of completing his documentary. He pictures it all – the reconciliation, Tom telling his story. "This is a very selfish, vain part of me talking," he says, apologetically. "But I'd dear to cease that pic."
H ow does information technology experience for the siblings who come back, or are establish? Bill Andrews, 57, had a tough childhood. His female parent walked out when he was a little boy, leaving him with his father and an calumniating step-mother. He was made a ward of court and spent years in care, frequently running away to search for his mother. Equally a young human being, things started to look up: he worked on the docks and married a adult female he loved. But afterward xiii years she left him. He tried to kill himself, and was sectioned. On his release from hospital, he decided to walk away from everything, leaving Rochester and heading for London. He went missing for 12 years, ii of which were spent on the streets. He was eventually helped by the mental wellness charity Heed to resettle in Dartford, which is where we talk.
The moment you run across Andrews, you know he's a character – friendly, tough-looking, vulnerable. He wears his cap back to front, is known equally Pecker the Hat, has Millwall tattoos on both forearms; gold football game boots and boxing gloves dangle from his neck. His dwelling is small and crammed with family photographs, especially of his 2d wife Sharon. He says she saved him.
11 years ago, in June 2004, he received a letter from the National Missing Persons Helpline:
"Dear Mr Andrews,
We take been asked by [his mother and sister] to effort to contact you. We are able to pass on contact details to y'all, should you wish to be in impact directly. Alternatively we are prepared to pass on any messages and act as intermediaries."
How did he feel? "I was shocked. I idea, how the hell did they find me?" Information technology turned out his sis, one of fourteen siblings or half-siblings, had moved to Dartford and lived on the same road. She had never seen him, merely had heard he had been spotted locally, so got in affect with the helpline.
"For two hours I was walking upwards and down my flat, pacing and pacing," Andrews says. "So I rang them, and they got in touch with my mum. She rang me and said, 'Come over at the weekend.' I said, 'OK. Are y'all still at the aforementioned place?'"
I'm desperate to hear Andrews' experience-good story – the great emotional reconciliation, how he and his mother defenseless up on the missing years. Just life turns out to be not then obliging. "I'd been missing for 12 years, and at eleven.30am she put Sun dinner on the tabular array. Her famous apple tree pie and everything. Half 11, having dinner? I thought, what's going on? And she shoved me off to bingo. I'd been missing for 12 years and she wanted to go to bingo. Seriously! It was unbelievable." He hasn't spoken to his female parent for three years, though his relationship with his sis is better.
Sometimes he wishes he was still alone, quietly living his 2nd life. Only on the whole he is glad to be reunited, non least because it gives other missing people, and their families, hope. "At that place are and so many people crying out for that helping hand. Information technology's a shame they can't evidence photographs of missing people every day on telly, put out alerts. I do go my bad days…" He stops mid-sentence, and his face lights upwardly. "Then I've got my niece ringing up: 'Bill, when are you lot coming to see us?'"
He thinks his 12 years missing changed him for the better. Aye, at that place were terrible times – but if he'd never gone missing he would never take met Sharon. He describes how he walked into a dental surgery when he was at a low. He'd broken a crown, and Sharon was working there. He read her a poem he'd written and thirteen weeks afterwards they were married. So there are all the people he wouldn't have met if he'd not gone missing. "I started trusting people again. I used to help people if they had nowhere to stay. They called my flat Nib's Caff. They all used to turn upwardly for biscuits and coffee. I had five or six prams outside."
What made him start trusting people? "I felt people had gone a long way to help me. Now I could requite something back. If I've got money, I'll lend money. I'll give them food." This is what gives him well-nigh satisfaction. "Helping people go stronger. I learned that on the streets."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/missing-people-brothers-and-sisters-simon-hattenstone
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