Damien Nettles: Murder, manslaughter or misadventure?

This is the second post that examines the case of 16-year-old Damien Nettles who vanished without a trace from Cowes, Isle of Wight, on 3 November 1996. If you haven't read the first post about the confirmed facts of the case, it can be found here. This post will consider the potential reasons for Damien’s disappearance in relation to personal, geographical and behavioural risk factors, statistical data, and criminological theories. The aim is to try and assess the likelihood that he disappeared of his own volition, as a result of a crime, or due to some kind of misfortune or accident. 

Although some sources claim that Damien’s disappearance remains under investigation as murder – and his case was escalated to suspected murder in 2011 when certain properties were searched and arrests were made for conspiracy to murder – it was de-escalated again, and has remained a missing person case since. The police define a missing person as ‘anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established and where the circumstances are out of character or the context suggests the person may be subject of crime or at risk of harm to themselves or another.’ Around 2000 missing people remain missing after a year, and on average 20 missing people a week are found deceased. Therefore, regardless of whether or not Damien is still alive, there is no doubt that he is a missing person.

Whilst the numbers of males and females that go missing in the UK are roughly equal, almost two-thirds of all missing person reports relate to under 18s with the most frequently reported missing age group being 15- to 17-year-olds. Whilst the drivers for children and teenagers going missing are complex, they tend to fit an ‘intentional-unintentional’ continuum, ranging from decided through drifted, and accidental to forced. Overlaying this continuum are all the possible reasons for going missing, or ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. These include social problems associated with mental health issues, alcohol use, psychological abuse, emotional abuse, neglect or rejection by a parent, and bullying, threats or intimidation from peers; a combination of social problems and criminal activity including domestic violence, sexual or physical abuse, illicit drug use, abduction by an estranged parent, and criminal and sexual exploitation; crimes such as homicide or kidnap by a stranger; and excitement, exploration, peer pressure, suicide and accident.

Alongside the reasons for children to go missing, there are certain risk factors. Some of these risk factors overlap with reasons, such as mental health issues, bullying, abuses, exploitations and substance misuse. Others stand out as being predictors of the risk of going missing, in particular, looked after children (children in care) are more likely to go missing than those who live with their parents, and 10% of looked after children are reported missing every year. 

In relation to Damien’s disappearance, there is no suggestion of his home life being anything other than stable and loving. His parents were together, he had an older sister who was studying at Portsmouth University, and a younger brother and sister living at home. He appeared to have a close group of friends, many of whom he had grown up with and gone to school with. He had split up with a girlfriend six months prior to his disappearance, but they had remained friends, and he had a new girlfriend who he’d met through his summer job at Gurnard Pines holiday camp. She lived in Suffolk. He loved music – he played the guitar and was in a band with some of his friends. He had done well in his GCSEs. He had changed schools to Carisbrooke High in the September of 1996 because Cowes High didn’t offer Psychology A Level, but a handful of people he knew had transferred there also. He had ambitions of becoming a marine biologist.

Damien was known to drink alcohol – cider and beer are mentioned – however, this was and still is true for 85% of 16-year-olds in the UK. He also used cannabis. It is difficult to find precise data on cannabis usage among 16-year-olds specifically, particularly historical data, however, it can be reasonably estimated from various sources combined that around 50% were using or had used cannabis in 1996. The use of certain illicit drugs including cannabis, amphetamines (speed), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as acid or a 'trip') and ecstasy (methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine or MDMA) rose sharply during the first half of the 1990s, peaked to significant and all-time high in 1995, and had declined to pre-1990s levels by 2000 – undoubtedly driven by ‘90s rave culture.

Speaking to Damien’s brother, James, in episode 3 of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared, Damien’s best friend, Chris Boon, said that he and Damien “used to do speed if we got hold of it”, and that there was a good chance that they “had taken some trips”. Understandably, Damien’s mother, Valerie, finds it difficult to believe or accept that her son may have been dabbling with hard drugs, but Chris’ words suggest otherwise (I will be discussing my language analysis of Chris Boon’s Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews in a future post. It makes for very revealing reading). 

So, underage drinking was normal for the large majority of 16-year-olds in the mid-1990s. Half of 16-year-olds were using cannabis. Even taking speed and acid in the mid-1990s was considerably more common among teenagers than it has been at any other time. In these respects, and in spite of his good upbringing, Damien was behaving like any normal, risk-taking-due-to-adolescence, 16-year-old boy. However, his developing, risk-taking adolescent brain will also have been particularly vulnerable to the acute effects of alcohol and drugs. If he had taken acid the night that he disappeared as Chris Boon’s interview transcript suggests, this may explain the difficulty that he was having in verbally articulating himself in the Yorkies chip shop CCTV footage. Yorkies' staff who saw Damien in the shop are reported to have said that he seemed high rather than drunk.

One well-studied effect of LSD in particular is difficulties with speech and talking due to the way that LSD affects the mind’s semantic networks (how words are stored in relation to each other). LSD doesn’t cause physical effects such as lack of coordination and slurred speech – the kind of effects that are associated with alcohol. Phenylcyclohexyl piperidine or PCP, another hallucinogenic drug commonly known as angel dust and often combined with marijuana (the parts of the Cannabis sativa plant that contain the most amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol), is also known to cause speech difficulties.

Did Damien go missing intentionally?

Highly unlikely. There is little reason for Damien to have wanted to run away. There had been an incident a few weeks prior to his disappearance where he had gone to a party with some new friends from school who he said had humiliated him – drawn on him with a marker pen, scorched his jacket and shot a pellet gun at his head – but he went to school the following Monday and the incident wasn’t mentioned again.

Did Damien go missing unintentionally?

If Damien didn’t run away, then yes, he went missing unintentionally, and unintentionally going missing applies to many of the theories that have been put forward about his disappearance, such as slipping and falling off the cliffs at Thorness, swimming to Portsmouth to see his sister who he had stayed with in the days prior to his disappearance and who had said would visit him that weekend, becoming the victim of a homicide, and being kidnapped by a paedophile. Long-term disappearances of people who are either found alive or escape are exceptionally rare. There have been a handful cases such as 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard who was kidnapped on her way to school in Lake Tahoe and was held captive until her rescue 18 years later, and Ricardas Puisys, a victim of modern-day slavery who was found alive after 5 years of being missing. However, Damien has been missing now for 28 years, and so whilst he may have been kidnapped or taken alive somewhere by someone initially, the likelihood of him still being alive is incredibly small.

Murder and manslaughter

To date, Hampshire Constabulary have arrested eight individuals for conspiracy to murder in connection with Damien’s disappearance. All were released without charge. In the UK, the crime of murder has a specific definition in law and can only be committed during peacetime by an individual who is sane and not acting in self-defence or in any other way that would make killing another living, breathing human being justifiable, and whose intention is to cause that person serious physical harm or death. Intent, which must be proven for a killing to be classed as murder, is not the same as motive, which doesn’t have to be proven. Intent is also different from outcome, which, like motive, does not have to be proven – hence why a person can be found guilty of murder in the absence of a body. Additionally, whilst a suspect's act must be a substantial cause of a victim’s death for it to be murder, it does not need to be the sole or principal cause. All of this is important when considering whether Damien could have been murdered because it means that someone had intended to harm him.

Manslaughter is more complex than murder. It can be committed voluntarily with the intent for murder, but where a partial defence applies such as loss of control or diminished responsibility, or it can be committed involuntarily, where conduct that was grossly negligent gave the risk of death and did kill (gross negligence manslaughter) or took the form of an unlawful act involving a danger of some harm that resulted in death (unlawful and dangerous act manslaughter). The latter includes what has come to be known as ‘one-punch manslaughter’.  

Homicide, which in addition to murder and manslaughter includes infanticide, and causing or allowing the death or serious injury of a child or vulnerable adult, is rare as violent crimes go. The total number of recorded homicides in England and Wales in 1996 was 482, of which 42 (8.7%) were victims aged between 15 and 19. There were an estimated 3,045,548 15- to 19-year-olds living in England and Wales in 1996, making a 1 in 72,513 chance that a 15- to 19-year-old would fall victim to homicide. The trends and drivers for homicide provide some additional perspective on whether Damien could have been a victim of homicide:

The homicide-geographical-deprivation relationship

Homicide in England and Wales shows a strong geographical relationship with deprivation that has remained true for the past 45 years. More than 50% of homicides in England occur within the 30% most deprived areas, with more than 50% of victims and suspects residing in the 30% most deprived areas. The England multiple deprivation index for 1996 is unavailable online, however, when using multiple deprivation indices to compare trends in deprivation over a period of time, it is recommended that the 2010 (covering 2001 to 2010), 2015 (covering 2011 to 2015) and 2019 (covering 2016 to 2019) versions are used. Therefore, as the image below illustrates, Cowes High Street was broadly in line with the England deprivation average in 2010, and more specifically a 6^th decile area in 2019. Given that the multiple deprivation index for Cowes is unlikely to have been different in 1996, this places the last confirmed sighting of Damien within a 50% least deprived area of England. If Damien had turned left onto Sun Hill, within a matter of minutes he would have been within a 20% (in 2010, 9^th decile in 2019) least deprived area. This is also the least deprived area of the Isle of Wight as a whole. This not to say that the least deprived areas don’t have hidden pockets of deprivation, but what Cowes wasn’t back then, and still isn’t now, is a ‘rough town’ as suggested in episode 2 of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared.

Homicide trends also indicate that the majority (on average around 70%) of homicide victims in England and Wales are male, with large swings in numbers of homicides between males aged 15 to 44 having driven the overall trend since the 1970s. Additionally, the homicide rate is higher for teenagers than for adults, and victim-suspect data show that 40% of male victims of homicide are most commonly killed by a friend or acquaintance. The link between risk for criminal victimisation and involvement in criminal or delinquent activity – the victim-offender overlap – is well-established and robust, and is stronger for violent crimes than for non-violent offending. Therefore, whilst the homicide-geographical-deprivation relationship will have reduced the risk of Damien becoming a victim of murder or manslaughter, as a 16-year-old male he fits the profile of the majority of homicide victims, and his involvement in illicit drug use will have increased his risk of violent victimisation.

Alcohol and drugs as drivers of homicide

Over the long term there has been a strong correlation between homicide and alcohol consumption. However, it is not clear to what extent this is causal and to what extent alcohol is a correlate of other drivers – probably because the association between alcohol and violence appears to be governed by differentiating factors. For example, in men, childhood aggressiveness combined with adult alcoholism is the strongest predictor of interpersonal violence, whereas the presence of trait hostility suggests that violent men are violent men – violent when drunk, and when sober.

There is good evidence that illicit drug markets can drive serious violence (and therefore homicide trends) in three ways:

1. Psychopharmacological. In a similar way to alcohol, illicit-drug takers may experience psychological effects such as increased aggression or disinhibition that make them more likely to be homicide victims or perpetrators.

2. Economic-compulsive. If illicit-drug users have to steal to fund their habit, it is possible that homicide could occur in the act of robbery or burglary.

3. Systemic. These are homicides that arise from the fact that prohibition of drugs creates an illegal market, in which grievances cannot be reconciled through normal judicial channels and therefore may be settled through violence, for example, during disputes over drug-selling territory, hierarchy enforcement, or punishment for failing to pay drug debts.

Though the mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, most studies agree that the systemic category is most important. However, individual drugs such as PCP, cocaine and amphetamines, are well-documented as being associated with hostile behaviour.

Hallucinogens and alcohol are associated with disinhibition, and therefore out-of-character, out-of-control or excessive behaviour – behaviour that could lead a person to fall victim to manslaughter, as has been the circumstance in numerous alcohol-related one-punch manslaughter cases. One of the rumours surrounding Damien’s disappearance involves Damien as the victim of a single punch thrown in anger that was not intended to kill him. 

One of the most extensively applied and cited criminological theories – routine activity theory – argues that the opportunity to commit crime happens with the combination of a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardians. The last confirmed sighting of Damien showed him walking alone and out of range of CCTV, and so the absence of capable guardians applies. Being alone and cognitively impaired from the effects of alcohol and/or drugs would have increased his risk as a suitable target, and so all that is needed to complete this crime equation is a motivated offender.

Circumstances surrounding homicide in the UK

Around half of homicides are the result of a quarrel, and this proportion is higher when the suspect is known to the victim. Homicides are more likely to occur in or around a dwelling, and though the ratio of female to male victims killed indoors is around 2:1, male victims are still more likely to be killed in or around a dwelling than in the street. Whilst most crime occurs during the day, violent crimes happen mostly at night, with homicides more likely to occur after midnight in the small hours of the morning. Additionally, Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) data show that violent crime peaked to an all-time high in the mid-1990s.  

Misadventure  

Misadventure is the most commonly concluded type of death in the UK (25%) and may be the right conclusion ‘when a death arises from some deliberate human act which unexpectedly and unintentionally goes wrong’. Death by misadventure involves a risk that was taken voluntarily and deliberately that results in an untimely and unnatural death. It is not merely an accident, such as slipping and falling off a cliff (that would be accidental death). Unlike accidental deaths where alcohol or drugs may be a factor, for example, falling over when drunk and sustaining a fatal injury, alcohol and drugs can be a cause of death by misadventure, for instance, an unintended drug overdose. However, other examples of misadventure include a nurse misreading a doctor’s order and administering the incorrect dose of a drug resulting in the death of a patient, or death from asphyxiation resulting from a police officer restraining a prisoner, or deaths unintentionally resulting from medical procedures such as elective surgery. In this respect, it’s easy to see why misadventure is the most commonly concluded type of death in the UK.

One of the police’s theories at the time was that Damien, having decided to swim across the Solent to see his older sister in Portsmouth, had drowned. Though this seems like an unlikely scenario, he was reported by several eyewitnesses to have been going from pub to pub in Cowes looking for his sister on the evening of 2 November 1996, and his sister had said that she would visit him that weekend but didn’t, and he may have taken something that evening that could have caused him to make a risky yet deliberate decision. Additionally, his sister had told their mother that Damien was interested in what it felt like to take drugs (unspecified) and that if he ever was going to do so, that she wanted to be there to make sure that he was okay. This is the approach many people take when trying LSD for the first time – in the company of a trusted friend who is able to look after them should the 'trip' turn bad, and stop them from getting themselves into trouble due to disinhibited behaviour. The conversation between Damien and his sister happened on his visit to her in Portsmouth in the days prior to his disappearance. Could this be why he was looking for his sister that night, because she said that she wanted to be with him if he took ‘drugs’? Even so, looking for his sister and deciding to swim to Portsmouth to be with her are two very different thought processes, and if he did enter the sea deliberately – or even accidentally – and drowned as a result, his body would surely have washed up by now.

Currents are strong in the Solent off Cowes, but they are cyclical and change direction from west to east and east to west with the tides. Low tide at Cowes was at around 10:45 on 2 November 1996 and high tide between 04:00 and 06:30 the following morning, and so the tide would have been on the rise when Damien was most likely to have entered the sea and the currents would have pulled his body west. It’s not impossible that he could have been swept out into the Atlantic, and if his body had been returned on the easterly currents, it would likely have washed up on the section of coast between Yarmouth and The Needles at Freshwater. The opinion of the harbour master at Cowes at the time was that if Damien had drowned, his body would have washed up within days.

Summary

Damien had very few reasons and risk factors to go missing intentionally. The only known risk factors for him going missing unintentionally were alcohol and illicit drug use, and at 16 years of age his developing adolescent brain would have been particularly susceptible to their acute effects, which may have caused him to behave in a disinhibited, out-of-character manner. He went missing within a 50% least deprived area of England. If he had turned left onto Sun Hill, he would have been within a 20% least deprived area in minutes, reducing the risk that he became a victim of homicide. However, the last confirmed sighting showed Damien walking alone, which in addition to increasing his risk of coming face-to-face with a motivated offender and therefore a victim of crime, may also have increased his risk of misadventure – he wasn’t with trusted friends who might have stopped him from having an accident (or at least been able to get help if he had) or making a bad decision. Finally, as a 16-year-old male he fits the identity of the majority of homicide victims, and his involvement in illicit drug use will have increased his risk of criminal victimisation, and potentially violent victimisation driven by the psychopharmacological effects of certain drugs and (possibly) systemic motivators. Therefore, the most likely scenario based on individual risk factors, statistical data and criminological theories, is that he went missing unintentionally, the reason for which is more likely to be homicide than accident or misadventure, and that he was more likely to have been the victim of manslaughter than of murder.

In the next post, I will be analysing the language of some of the interviews contained in the Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared documentary series, and discussing whether what has been said by certain people holds the key to Damien’s decisions and behaviour on the night that he disappeared, and ultimately, who may have killed him. 

Damien's disappearance remains an active missing person case. If you have any information that could help find Damien, please contact Hampshire Police on 101, quoting ‘Operation Ridgewood’, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous, Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

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