Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  One final theory on Richey’s vanishing invites the reader to question beyond the standard options. There are the ‘known unknowns’ but also inevitably those ‘unknown unknowns’ that seldom occur to us.

  Nicky Wire ventured this way when he shared his personal fears that something bad might have happened to Richey at the hands of someone else. It was brave of him to broadcast what may appear to many fans to be a strange thought. Wire would know, if anyone would, the state of play at the business end of the music industry; its high stakes, the huge profits that hang in the balance. Any future investigations into the Richey case ought to strive to thoroughly probe a range of possibilities; something we have tried to kick start with this book.

  Our attempts to access official records and persons of interest inevitably went through Rachel Edwards, who we would expect to have the right to see important documents and to be able to speak with those people relevant to the case. Yet as we progressed with the writing of Withdrawn Traces, the title gradually took on a new and unintended meaning.

  Over the course of more than two years, we saw endless delays from the police. The Richey file went missing then suddenly reappeared. One minute Rachel had the right to access information from her brother’s file; the next, the police claimed she did not. Phone calls were not returned. New officers were continually put in charge of the case.

  Even more disrupting were the many Manics-related people who were initially very happy to talk to us, only to then withdraw co-operation. Frustrating as this was for us, we were nonetheless only experiencing second-hand, and in a limited way, the long years of thwarted efforts on the part of Richey’s relatives.

  The following chapter details Rachel’s search, which has been truly exhaustive, certainly compared with the apparent lack of effort that has been expended by official investigations.

  Chapter 13

  Rachel’s Search

  ‘And I said, “That last thing is what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.”’

  Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  As the official search for Richey began to lose impetus, Rachel was determined that her brother would not become a forgotten statistic. She was desperate that his very essence would not be consigned to a few dusty files, which would gradually disappear beneath a stack of other, seemingly unsolvable cases.

  In the 24 years since Richey left the Embassy Hotel, the passage of time has cast its mist over certain events and decisions taken in the immediate aftermath of his vanishing – but possible lines of investigation remain.

  As the years have passed, Rachel has witnessed many failed initiatives, inadequate responses and missed opportunities on the part of the police as she attempted to unravel the truth behind her brother’s disappearance.

  ‘Immediately after hearing about Richard going missing, I was under the impression the authorities were doing the best they could to trace him,’ she remembers. ‘I was young, and my parents came from a generation who believed the police would do everything in their power to find a highly vulnerable individual. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.’

  As the police investigation progressed, she became aware of a lack of cohesion and attention to detail, and formed the impression that her brother’s disappearance was being viewed as little more than a stunt from a publicity-hungry rock star.

  With no experience of police procedure, Rachel was uncertain as to how a missing person search should be organised, but over the years following Richey’s disappearance she has begun to question certain aspects of their investigation.

  Former Wiltshire Police Officer Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher was involved in many such investigations. Although not involved in Richey’s case, he has raised his own concerns about how the police generally instigate and carry out searches.

  In 2011, the vastly experienced Fulcher was leading an investigation into the disappearance of a young woman, Sian O’Callaghan, who vanished after leaving a Swindon nightclub. A suspect, taxi driver Christopher Halliwell, was arrested five days into the hunt. DS Fulcher believed that there was a chance that Sian might still be alive, and so, mindful that time was of the essence, he abandoned police protocol by authorising an urgent interview with Halliwell – without a legal representative present.

  Not only did Fulcher’s actions result in the discovery of Sian’s body, but also in Halliwell leading him to the remains of another victim, 20-year-old Rebecca Godden. Halliwell was given a life sentence. Fulcher, however, was suspended from his job for not following official police guidelines for questioning suspects, and was found guilty of gross misconduct. In response to this, he resigned from the force.

  Fulcher feels that an obsession with police procedure diminishes the bigger picture: ‘The public needs to know what the police won’t do if their daughter went missing. People need to be informed.’

  Drawing on his knowledge of missing person cases, Fulcher believes that investigations into Richey’s disappearance fell short of even the most basic police procedure. He explains how vital it is to account for an individual’s last known 24 hours as soon as possible: ‘That 24 to 48-hour period from when you hear about the disappearance is the time you act. That’s when you can gather the most important information before a large part of it is lost.’

  As Richey was not reported as missing until over 24 hours after he vanished, time was crucial. Yet Rachel is unaware of any interviews conducted with James and Vivian, the last two people to have seen her brother alive. Nor has the person who apparently checked Richey out of his hotel at 7am been formerly identified or interviewed.

  ‘We, as a family, never spoke to Vivian or even knew her last name,’ says Rachel. ‘Just a few people were aware of who she was, and we were never put in touch with her. Only she knows the full extent of the conversation that she and Richard had that night. Nick told my parents he was trying to give her his passport, and that could carry some weight somewhere in the investigation.’

  ‘The last person to see somebody alive, they’re going to give that detailed account of someone’s mind-set prior to them going missing. They are the key to an investigation and they should be spoken to as quickly as possible. They are always interviewed.’

  Reported Missing, BBC One, 2017

  Rachel believes that other vital opportunities to gain a fuller picture of Richey’s last known hours at the Embassy Hotel were missed, whether through a lack of police endeavour or through oversight. ‘Did the police look at incoming and outgoing calls to his hotel room? Surely the hotel would have kept a guestbook detailing who was coming in and out? Richard could have been in communication with someone other than Vivian that night.’

  Rachel soon discovered that the greater the number of police forces involved, the more complicated the process became. Becoming aware of the ineffective communication between the three forces has proved to be deeply frustrating for her.

  ‘There seemed to be no accountability, no one would take responsibility, and we were always being passed from pillar to post. It certainly wasn’t advantageous to have more forces involved – it was quite the opposite. When the car was found, the police took photos of it but two years later destroyed them. That was evidence they destroyed. Have you ever heard of that happening in an unresolved case before?’

  The discovery of an abandoned car near the bridge would normally mean the deployment of a coastguard and a Severn Area Rescue Association (SARA) search to the nearby river, yet for some reason the police failed to authorise one in Richey’s case – despite two recent searches having been undertaken the previous month when the abandoned cars of two missing people were found in the Severn area.

  ‘A search when a car is discovered near the Estuary is standard procedure,’ says Mervyn Fleming, station commander at SARA. ‘It was unusual we were never contacted, and this incident was never recorded with us.’

  The Severn Estuary has the second highest rise and fall of tide in the world,
and the movement of the water within it is very complex. If a body were washed down into the Bristol Channel, it is highly unlikely it would travel out into the Atlantic for some time, as the incoming currents are stronger and faster than those flowing outwards.

  In his 2002 book, Disasters on the Severn, Chris Witts describes how the vast amount of silt moved back and forth each day with the tides could easily submerge a body in the sediment, hiding it forever. If a search had been made of the river earlier (or at all), would there have been a chance of Richey’s body being retrieved?

  ‘Along with search boats being sent out, shallower parts of the Severn have been dredged in these cases,’ confirms Fleming. ‘So there’s always a possibility, even a remote one, of finding something in the weeks after an individual makes it into the water.’

  Rachel started contacting agencies to try to understand what might have happened to her brother’s body had he entered the water. ‘I spoke to the National Rivers Authority, the Maritime and Coastguard Agencies and the Hydrographic Office, and we discussed the details of the tides on the date Richard disappeared. They all gave conflicting answers about the arrival of the spring tide, and the strength of the current that February. There wasn’t anything conclusive I could really take from them.’

  Rachel continued writing letters to coroner’s offices throughout the UK requesting details of any bodies washed up in their region. She also wrote to the monasteries of Ireland, England and Wales enquiring whether anybody who matched her brother’s description had taken refuge there. The replies fill up an A4 file and show that her efforts drew a blank.

  ‘It was soul destroying, and no matter what I did, it never felt like enough,’ she says. ‘I spent days driving around Cardiff, looking for any clues after Richard vanished. I checked his diary and saw he went to a tattoo parlour in Cardiff the month before. When I went there, they told me they remembered him, and he’d asked for a tattoo of Jo’s name to be put on his arm. They refused because as a policy the shop didn’t ink names.

  ‘Then I saw some receipts for the Marriott Hotel, which was close to his flat. I know in the past he’d spend nights there because he hated being alone, but this time the receipts were for massages. The staff there remembered him. They told me how his legs and back were scarred from self-harming, and how disturbing it was to see. I also drove down to Swansea and spoke to some of his old lecturers. But nobody there had seen him.

  ‘When the trail ran cold, I’d go down to the riverbank in Bristol and just stare into the water, wondering if his body was beneath it, submerged in the sediment. My head was everywhere. There is no ten-step process for grief when someone you love goes missing. You are constantly flipping back and forth, between hope and hopelessness, just waiting for the next piece of news or pivotal information.’

  A short while after Richey disappeared, the officer in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Stephen Morey, set the tone for the investigation: ‘At every street corner there is potentially a Manics fan who would recognise [Richey]. He has so many out there. It is not as though he was just an ordinary unknown who has disappeared. Every fan is unwittingly looking for him. He has drawn no money since he left the hotel six months ago, nor asked his parents for any. In these circumstances, I have to move towards the theory that Richey is no longer with us.’

  Such discouraging comments seemed inappropriate for an ongoing, active search for a vulnerable adult. Richey’s original missing person report revealed that he had a previous psychiatric history. As a high-risk case, his details should have been immediately circulated to forces nationwide via the Police National Computer system. However, it was only in April 1996 that Richey’s information was finally shared nationwide. Why a delay of 14 months?

  At the time of Richey’s disappearance, the lack of a UK-wide police database for missing persons resulted in families suffering the most painful emotional trauma. There were many tragic instances where parents of missing children may have had their suffering unnecessarily prolonged due to the non-transmission of information between forces. In the same decade that Richey disappeared, another three young men who had also gone missing were featured in local news stories. Unlike Richey, their bodies were eventually found. Nevertheless, a disproportionate amount of time passed before their families were notified.

  In 1998, the Independent highlighted police failings in identifying the bodies of the three young men. Sixteen-year-old Christopher Goodall disappeared from his Stockport home in October 1997. An ardent Manic Street Preachers fan, Chris had recently broken up with his girlfriend. When she received an angry letter from him, stamped with a South Wales postmark, his parents quickly realised its significance. Recalling the news stories about Richey, his mother, Joan Battersby, immediately feared the worst. ‘Even before the letter, it came to me in the night that he might be heading there,’ she recalled. ‘He was such a fan, he thought it was so cool [Richey] getting out like that when life became too much.’

  The family contacted Derbyshire police and left for Bristol immediately. A publicity campaign was launched across the south-west to try to find Christopher. Several police forces became involved but, sadly, it was all too late. Christopher’s body had already been found, washed up out of the Severn River at Beachley, just over the Gloucestershire border. His remains lay unidentified on a mortuary slab in the county from November until the following March.

  Discovered at a location bordering three police forces – Avon and Somerset, Gwent, and Gloucestershire – the body was taken to the latter county. Unlike the other two, this police force had not been informed by Derbyshire police. It was only after an appeal made by Gloucestershire police in February’s Police Gazette, requesting information about the teenage body in their mortuary, that the connection was made.

  Appropriate inter-force communication, or contact with the National Missing Persons Helpline (NMPH), would have meant that Christopher’s body could have been identified far sooner. In fact the NMPH would later become instrumental in solving the case of a missing 21-year-old care worker, Simon Allen.

  Simon, from Keighley, Yorkshire, had suffered from depression and had recently spent three months in a psychiatric hospital before he vanished in early 1994. Due to his mental health history, his parents wasted no time in reporting him missing. Their relentless search, including a television appeal by his father, unfortunately yielded no information.

  Simon had jumped from a bridge in Leeds, just 20 miles away and within four hours of leaving his home. His body was retrieved immediately. However, it took the police three-and-a-half years to identify his body and inform his parents. This only occurred by chance when the NMPH became aware of an unidentified body in Leeds, and requested photographs from the police. Despite Simon dying so near to his home, the system still failed to identify him. His family’s grief was further compounded in the knowledge that their son had been buried in an unmarked grave with three other unidentified people.

  Most disturbing of all – and of possible significance when considering the fate that may have befallen Richey – was the case of Anthony Calveley, whose body was discovered in central London in January 1996. Suffering from longstanding drug and alcohol addictions, the 35-year-old succumbed to bronchial pneumonia. His body was found in the city on a freezing winter’s night. Originally from Birkenhead, Calveley had been sleeping rough in the capital for many years, busking with his guitar to survive. Unlike Christopher and Simon, he was immediately identified as his birth certificate was among his possessions. He also had a criminal record, with his fingerprints contained in the police database.

  This should have made it easy for the authorities to contact his family. Their name, Calveley, was an unusual one. Also, his mother still lived in the area identified on Anthony’s birth certificate. Yet still two years passed before she was notified of her son’s death.

  Again, the NMPH discovered that Anthony had died, and incredibly, despite a positive identification, four months later Lambeth Council disposed of his b
ody. His family were distraught when informed that his remains had been cremated and his ashes buried in a London cemetery.

  Anthony’s sister, Chris Hibbs, explained that her mother had great difficulty coming to terms with her son’s death, especially given the inaccuracies in the post-mortem report and because the family were never able to see his body.

  ‘The post-mortem examination said he had yellow nicotine stains on his left hand, but Tony was right-handed,’ she says. ‘It said he was under six foot. But Tony was six foot tall. If there was a body, we could have done a DNA test. She [Mum] couldn’t even have a funeral for him or have a get-together for his friends – the little things that make grieving easier.’

  The National Missing Persons Helpline charity, re-named Missing People in 2007, has expanded considerably following the Fred and Rose West case in 1995. Once reports of multiple female bodies being dug up at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester became public, the charity was inundated with calls from people who believed that their missing loved ones could have been among the couple’s victims.

  John Bennett, the Detective Superintendent who led the West inquiry and later received the Queen’s Police Medal, has since suggested that rather than unidentified bodies being buried in a shared grave, each person’s remains should be interred separately. This would enable them to be exhumed in order to extract DNA, if necessary. Graves with multiple remains cannot currently be opened to exhume a body without the permission of all the families concerned.

  With such traumatic stories coming to light, where families hold out false hope for months and even years, it is not surprising that Rachel has spent much of the past 24 years in despair, wondering what might have happened to her brother. ‘I get distraught thinking that Richard might have been one of the nameless bodies that wasn’t identified, who ended up in an anonymous grave somewhere,’ she says. ‘Or, worse, that his body was cremated, which would further limit the chances of ever finding out the truth of what happened to him.’