Withdrawn Traces

by Sara Hawys Roberts

  Rachel has also expressed her concern at having to take the initiative in providing a sample of Richey’s DNA to the police in 2005, in order for it to be cross-matched with unidentified bodies on the police database. ‘They never asked for it, or even told me that the option was available. I just happened to see something about it on a television programme and rang the police myself to plead with them to take a DNA sample from his toothbrush and comb. They had ten years to obtain it and they didn’t. It seems beyond careless.’

  Shortly after Richey’s disappearance, Anna Bowles, an undergraduate from St John’s College, Oxford, proposed an interesting theory to the Metropolitan Police. Based on Richey having written songs about the Holocaust, she suggested that he could have travelled to Germany on a visitor’s passport to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the atrocity. She also voiced concerns that the discovery of his body may have resulted in a spate of suicides similar to those that occurred following the death of Kurt Cobain.

  Bowles stated, ‘I am interested in protecting those among my friends who are vulnerable and hope that this theory would help to do so, for, providing no body is found, it permits the extension of rational hope until mid-May.’

  Her reference to the possibility of an epidemic of copy-cat suicides, should Richey’s body be found, poses a thought-provoking question: could someone have found his body and decided that for the greater good he should remained unidentified?

  ‘Emotionally it is very difficult, because from one day to the next, I have differing thoughts on what could have become of him,’ says Rachel. ‘People say the evidence obviously points one way, but when you’re at the centre of it, the film reel in your head doesn’t stop. There’s nothing left unturned in your mind when someone is missing.

  ‘On the dark days, you do think about so-called conspiracies, you do think about cover-ups, because absolutely anything could have happened, and Richard or his body, or ashes, are still out there somewhere, in whatever form they now take. I always think that someone, somewhere must know something.’

  ‘You used to watch television. Now it watches you.’

  Phil Patton, Wired magazine, January 1995

  Closed-circuit television cameras and their use to monitor our daily existence are arguably reaching a peak today, but even in 1995, CCTV cameras were already in operation from what were considered strategic viewpoints.

  Cameras put in place on the Severn Bridge to identify vehicles crossing in and out of Wales remained unchecked by police in the search for Richey. This oversight was highlighted by the 1997 radio programme Eye on Wales, in which reporter Tim Rogers sought to shed light on the way missing person cases were investigated, drawing particularly on Richey’s disappearance and the use of CCTV cameras.

  As Rachel explains, ‘Tim Rogers spoke to a member of the Metropolitan force involved in Richard’s case during the programme. Detective Inspector David Snelling informed him that there was no footage from the bridge, and if it did exist, it would have been destroyed by 1997. Yet Tim Rogers easily obtained the recordings from the operators of the bridge. It appears to be something else the police overlooked.’

  The Edwards family and the police would later view the tape salvaged by Rogers from the bridge’s control room. It contained grainy footage of what appeared to be an individual on the bridge’s footpath during daylight hours on 1 February. However, the weather conditions were dreadful with the cameras covered in rain. This made it impossible for Rachel or the police to make a positive identification.

  ‘It was hard to decipher if it was even a person because of the heavy rain, yet it was a line of enquiry that needed to be investigated and eliminated,’ states Rachel. ‘In hindsight, I wonder if another opportunity was lost by not viewing footage taken either side of 1 February to elicit how often the footpath was used by pedestrians. If it showed little usage, then there is [more] probability that what we thought was a figure could well have been Richard.’

  There were other opportunities for the police to investigate CCTV recordings in trying to establish what happened to Richey. Given the mystery surrounding his passport (in that he had reportedly tried to give it away the night before he vanished and it was later discovered in his Cardiff flat after he went missing), surely some consideration should have been given to the two separate witness statements that placed him in Newport in early February 1995, just around the corner from Wales’s main Passport Office.

  If Richey was seeking to obtain a new passport, it would have been relatively simple in 1995. One-year passports were still being issued, and they required the minimum of security checks. Should Richey have made his way to the Passport Office, surely CCTV cameras would have been present? With two statements placing him nearby, wouldn’t those in charge of the investigation have wanted to view such footage?

  ‘I know CCTV wasn’t as prevalent then as it is now,’ Rachel deliberates, ‘but because of the police overlooking something as obvious as the bridge footage, it makes me wonder if they checked if the Aust Services station had any cameras, or even the business parks next to the river’s walkway.’

  Conversely, it could be argued that Richey may have been well aware of cameras along his route and so decided to avoid them. Even so, a toll ticket in his Cardiff flat suggests otherwise, since he would still have needed to drive across the bridge from east to west to have obtained the ticket. Did the police interview the staff manning the tollbooths on 1 February? Perhaps one of them may have remembered a shaven-headed, gaunt young man, or even recognise him as a member of the Manic Street Preachers.

  The Severn Bridge toll receipt raises further questions concerning Richey’s disappearance. The timestamp reads 02:55.

  Unsure as to whether the ticketing machine on the Severn Bridge had a 24-hour clock format, we managed to track down Ian McCray. He was the owner of the company, Channel Time, which installed the ticketing systems on both of the Severn Bridges.

  ‘The tickets the old bridge produced were definitely telling the time in a 24-hour format,’ he told us. ‘There had to be a way to distinguish a.m. from p.m. for all kinds of reasons. Some people would need the receipts for expenses and VAT purposes. They could be used in crime investigations. I even installed these systems for the South Wales Police so they could clock in and out with a specific time when they brought people into their stations for questioning. I worked for 37 years with those clocks, and a receipt stating 2.55 means the early morning.’

  McCray points out that, today, anyone travelling across the bridge into Wales would have to ask specifically for a receipt, as the normal procedure is that payment is made and then the toll barrier is raised. While he is unsure whether this was the case on the bridge in 1995, he feels it quite possible that Richey – or whoever was driving the silver Cavalier – would have needed to request a receipt: ‘To be honest, the police have contacted us before about our ticketing system with regards to certain crime investigations, and I was quite surprised when we didn’t hear from them about this particular high-profile case.’

  For Richey’s vehicle to have crossed the Severn Bridge at 2.55am, he would have had to leave the Embassy Hotel at some time between midnight and 1am. For years, the official timeline had been that Richey had checked out of the hotel at 7am on 1 February and that seven hours were unaccounted for beforehand. It now transpires that this was never the case.

  Rachel is stunned at receiving this news, realising that a difference of 12 hours could change the way Richey’s disappearance had been treated from the very outset. ‘The first thing I want to know now is: who on earth said they checked him out of the hotel at 7am? Or, who drove his car over the bridge earlier at 2.55 in the morning? He can’t have done both.’

  DC Fulcher acknowledges that Rachel’s frustrations are justified, and while he admits the police aren’t miracle workers, he believes that every possible lead should have been followed. ‘The police are taught that every missing person’s case should always be treated as a potential homicide until you know
otherwise. You just never know. But the problem is, the police only want to deal with murder if there’s a body.’

  When one considers that the timestamp on the bridge receipt was totally misinterpreted and that this oversight has only recently been unearthed after over twenty years, it begs the question – can any more information be salvaged when it comes to investigating Richey’s disappearance?

  ‘Only approximately 1 in 2,000 missing persons results in suicide. The suicide theory is one of the first to suggest itself in a disappearance case. Statistically, however, it can be shown that the odds are greatly against the suicide solution. Disappearance is motivated by a desire, to escape from some personal, domestic or business conflict. Murder, the unspoken fear of the relatives, and the police, must always lie in the back of the investigator’s mind as a possible explanation.’

  Charles E. O’Hara, The Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation, 1956

  In 2004, Ian Halperin and Max Wallace published an investigation, Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain. Cobain had been registered missing for four days in 1994 before the discovery of his body in the garage of his home in Seattle. In their book, Halperin and Wallace claim that Cobain did not in fact kill himself, but that his death was a staged suicide, and should therefore have been treated as a murder enquiry by the authorities.

  During their research they interviewed Vernon Geberth, retired commanding officer of Bronx Homicide Task Force. He said: ‘I can show you a list as long as my arm of murders that were staged to look like suicide. All death investigations should be handled first and foremost as murder cases until the facts prove differently. The issue is not – could this conceivably have been a suicide? It is: could this conceivably have been a murder?’

  In an interview following Richey’s disappearance, Nicky Wire expressed the deepest fears over the fate of his missing bandmate. ‘I just hope nobody has harmed him,’ he told the music press. Usually too hard-headed to air such ideas publically, Nicky was nonetheless making it clear that even he hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Richey might have been involved in some sort of foul play.

  In January 1995, one month before Richey’s disappearance, Angela Bradley vanished from her parents’ home in Gloucester. She had been suffering from depression and anorexia. Twenty-one years later, Community Protection Inspector Andy Matheson of the Gloucestershire Police re-opened the case as a murder investigation.

  ‘Angela’s car was found parked and abandoned at Mythe Bridge, which crosses the Severn at Tewkesbury,’ he says. ‘The keys were still in the ignition and the obvious conclusion was that she went into the river. But there is no evidence to say either way. You can’t rule out foul play. She was a very vulnerable woman and you can make these connections, and believe that she came to some harm, as she seems to have vanished so completely.’

  Well placed to offer perspective from the police viewpoint, Matheson admits that officers do not have the time and resources to explore the spectrum of possibilities when someone vanishes. ‘There’s more to consider than just the two options of suicide or somebody relocating elsewhere. I’ve got outstanding missing persons’ cases and in an ideal world they would all be looked at, but unfortunately most will never get the attention they deserve.’

  With such obvious similarities between Angela and Richey’s disappearances, there remain several investigative procedures that should be addressed.

  ‘People have commented in the past how staged the discovery of Richard’s abandoned car appeared,’ says Rachel. ‘He hadn’t had a drink since he left the Priory the previous year and yet there was an empty wine bottle in the car – no receipt for it although there was lots of other rubbish. The steering lock was left on the vehicle, but if someone is in a chaotic state of mind and intending to kill themselves, it seems unlikely they would care to do such a thing. Maybe he or perhaps someone else put the lock on to ensure the vehicle was discovered. In hindsight, the steering lock should have been fingerprinted to eliminate this possibility.’

  In 2011, Rachel was contacted via a social media website by an ex-postman, David Ramus. He claimed to have spotted Richey on the Severn Bridge footpath on 1 February 1995.

  ‘I had no transport and the only way I could access the bridge was the footpath,’ he said. ‘I am convinced without a shadow of a doubt that the young lad on the Aust Tower side who looked extremely surprised at my presence was your late brother.

  ‘I was so concerned at his state that I made a detour to the bridge office and reported it. The person who spoke to me did not ask for my name, and I think he was just night security. I have no idea if it was even logged.’

  With his slight and vulnerable appearance, Richey might well have fallen into the wrong hands. Should he have been in a desperate state of mind – as Ramus’s description seems to suggest – he may have put his trust in people who took advantage of a random opportunity, as may also have been the case with Angela Bradley.

  The unexpected deaths of Jim Morrison, John Lennon and Michael Hutchence have each been fertile soil for those perferring to explore conspiracy theories about how such musical icons met an untimely end. Rather than it being a case of Richey being in the wrong place at the wrong time, might someone closer to home have been plotting Richey’s removal for their own gains?

  ‘He didn’t like the direction the music was taking – he wanted to play blues – and he didn’t want to tour America anymore.’

  Anna Wohlin, girlfriend of Brian Jones, 2013

  In a 1993 fanzine questionnaire, when Richey was asked who his favourite ever rock star was, he answered, ‘Brian Jones.’ He strongly identified with the tragic story of Jones, whose image crops up repeatedly in his private files. One inscription, in a folder of university history work, reads simply, ‘POOR BRIAN JONES’. The personal act of scribbling in the margin, perhaps during a dull lecture at Swansea University, dates Richey’s fascination with Jones to a time well before the Manics. And 1994, the year before Richey vanished, was a particularly bumper year for news about Jones.

  Two books published that year investigated Jones’s life and the mystery surrounding his 1969 death. Geoffrey Giuliano’s Paint It Black – The Murder of Brian Jones and Terry Rawlings’s Who Killed Christopher Robin? The Truth Behind the Murder of Brian Jones each laid out new information claiming that Jones had been murdered; drowned in his outdoor swimming pool at Cotchford Farm, East Sussex, by one Frank Thorogood, a builder working on the property.

  Richey would already have been abreast of the speculation surrounding Jones’s death, but now there was a new public focus – his death was being treated as a crime. The authorities had reassessed events at Cotchford Farm and a plea for further information had even been made on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme. Richey would have known all this. For him, Brian Jones’s case was evidence of the mystery, allure and intrigue surrounding rock music at the highest level: the mythic level.

  In the absence of a murder conviction, theories still swirl darkly around whoever was responsible for Jones’s death. Many could be said to have motives – financial or otherwise – for his removal. He had many enemies in the business. Had Richey, too, made enemies that were closer to home?

  Known for his provocative nature, might Richey Edwards have overstepped the mark by seeking confrontation with powerful people, or even just the wrong kind of people?

  There sill remains the possibility that, possessing a remarkable insight and perception – as well as an ingrained showmanship – he may have purposefully made an exit before he became a victim of the industry, leaving those who adored him pondering: murder, suicide or escape? Was all this a part of his own, self-creating, over-arching narrative?

  After his disappearance, James described Richey as being ‘adept at dramatic symbolism’. Intimately aware of the myth-making craft, was it in his character to layer his own story, and leave it floating in mid-air; a huge and deliberate question mark over what might have befallen him?

  Conversely, Richey may have
had an accomplice or accomplices participating in his disappearance, and, if so, what might have happened next? If this were the case, surely there would have been a meticulously thought-through plan? Perhaps he had been inspired by his Uncle Shane, who while not deliberately aiming to distance himself from his family, had fallen out of contact for five years before re-establishing links with those at home. Alternatively, Richey’s questionable mental state at the time he vanished could have led to his demise through other factors, while in the care of those who had sought to assist him.

  Richey might have been suicidal in the days, months or even years to come, driven to the brink by his use of substances, his mental illnesses or even by the frailty of his body. The implications for his fellow conspirators would have been immense had he subsequently passed away in their care – by whatever means – and it would be unlikely that anybody who had assisted him would step up and speak of such events in the fear of being incriminated themselves.

  ‘I know people could see it as clutching at straws, but I saw a documentary on Netflix called Who Took Johnny,’ says Rachel. ‘The outcome was that the missing person [Johnny] was forced into disappearing because if he went home, he’d be endangering the lives of his family. Things like that get into your head, thoughts like – did Richard have enemies? Could he have been forced to disappear? Is he maybe with somebody who’s supporting him right now?’

  Since 1995, Rachel has become an active campaigner with Missing People UK. Founded in 1986 after the disappearance of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in south-west London, the charity offers social and emotional support for those affected by the disappearance of a loved one.

  ‘They were a lifeline when Richard disappeared,’ says Rachel. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without them. It’s a unique situation to find yourself in; in terms of what to do next logistically, and how to deal with it emotionally. To have a port of call in terms of advice and support was invaluable.’