Damien Nettles: Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 3

In this fifth post of a series that examines the disappearance of 16-year-old Damien Nettles on 3 November 1996 from Cowes, Isle of Wight, I will be applying language analysis to the interviews with The Weatherman from the Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared documentary series that aired on BBC3 in 2016. If you have arrived here without having read the previous posts in the series, here are the links in order: 

Damien Nettles – The facts
Damien Nettles – Murder, manslaughter or misadventure?
Damien Nettles – Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 1
Damien Nettles – Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 2

The Weatherman

The Weatherman (TW) is the name that Unsolved gave to a witness that private investigator, Ivor Edwards, spoke to in 2012. To further protect the witness’ identity, his words from the original recorded interviews between himself and Ivor were spoken by an actor. It is therefore crucial to acknowledge that these original recordings have already been transcribed once for the purpose of being spoken by an actor, and so the words attributed to The Weatherman may not be the original recorded words spoken by him, nor may they be the full account. It’s also important to note that Ivor Edwards begins his interview with The Weatherman with a leading question: ‘Can you give me details of what happened in Cowes High Street the night that Damien Nettles was murdered?’. This may have influenced what The Weatherman told him.

The following excerpts are from episodes 4, 5, 6 and 8 presented in what I believe to be the chronological order of events:

TW 4:25 E4 I was coming up to the junction of Sun Hill in Cowes High Street. A group of… m-males and one female came rolling out of Sun Hill as though it was like a... a-a posse entering a cowboy town. Nicky McNamara was doing windmills, spinning around, and I said, ‘You alright, Nicky? You seem to be off-off your face on something.’ And he came out with some technical, chemical name of whatever he was on.

TW 0:47 E6 Shirley Barrett walked in between the people that I was with. I remember this so distinctively because Shirley Barrett is a tall person for a female but she had high heels on that night and she was even taller.

TW 7:47 E8 As Nicky left me, and he walked away, I witnessed Bunny Iles was also there in the street. Anyway, they all went off down the High Street towards The Fountain.

TW 1:09 E5 This was around about half past 11, twenty to 12. And erm... anyway, then this car came along and it was a police car, and-it and-it pulled up outside Yorkies. Directly outside the chip shop. Two women got out the back of the car and… some more coppers came along. There was something like in the region of about three or four coppers. This is the night that Damien disappeared.

The Weatherman's story then continues into the next day:

TW 5:43 E4 I see Nicky McNamara and he's chucking wood into this oil drum, big 45-gallon drum. Fucking great blaze. This is about half two in the afternoon. He's chucking this wood in, right? I see Nicky go back in, come out with another bit of wood, and he was scraping something along the ground, and as he picked it up and-he and-he scooped it up off the ground, he then flicked it into the fire. It was the shape of a sleeve.

Alys and Bronagh also spoke to The Weatherman themselves, but off camera. Alys states that what he told them was his first-hand account of what he says he saw the night that Damien went missing and in the couple of days afterwards. Bronagh says that they got the same account that he gave Ivor, however, we only have her word for this – it may have been a similar account, but were all the details the same?

Following this, The Weatherman, again voiced by an actor, speaks directly and in person to Damien’s mother, Valerie Nettles (VN):

TW 9:57 As I was walking down Sun Hill, I heard some footsteps, and I looked round and as I looked over my shoulder, I saw a group of people and quite jokingly I turned round to Nicky McNamara and said, ‘What's the matter? You alright?’ and he goes to me, ‘I'm a damned man. I'm a damned man.’

The audio then cuts to Bronagh saying that the morning after Damien disappeared, The Weatherman claims that he ran into Nicky McNamara in Cowes:

TW 10:29 His face, he was absolutely, he looked like a man fucked. Really fucked up in the head.

The audio cuts to Bronagh again. She says that later the same day, The Weatherman saw Nicky McNamara at the Marsh Road chalet, which was owned by a drug dealer friend of McNamara:

TW 10:51 I saw Nicky McNamara... shoving wood into this oil drum. It was a big fire.

VN 11:02 Petrol? Petrol maybe poured on it?

TW 11:06 Right, it-it was dirty engine oil... an-and I could smell it. But that was not the only other fucking smell that I smelt I could smell. After Nicky had dumped all this wood into this oil drum, he legged it back in. There was enough time for me to see him come running back out with this fucking long, black, stringy thing that looked like it could possibly have been a sleeve of something. It could have been clothing. It looked like it was heavily sodden with dirty engine oil. Basically, it looked like he had hold of an arm... and he was about to go and drop it into the oil drum. Maybe it was just a rag, I don't know to keep the fire going. Was it evidence that they were disposing of?

Analysis: The first thing to note are the many discrepancies between the account that The Weatherman gave to Ivor Edwards, and what he said to Valerie:

I was coming up to the junction of Sun Hill in Cowes High Street. A group of… m-males and one female came rolling out of Sun Hill
I was walking down Sun Hill, I heard some footsteps, and I looked round and as I looked over my shoulder, I saw a group of people

Nicky McNamara was doing windmills, spinning around, and I said, "You alright, Nicky? You seem to be off-off your face on something."
quite jokingly I turned round to Nicky McNamara and said, "What's the matter? You alright?"

And he came out with some technical, chemical name of whatever he was on.
and he goes to me, "I'm a damned man. I'm a damned man."

Two completely different accounts.

One crucial piece of information to note before proceeding further is in her book, The Boy Who Disappeared, Valerie, writes about an anonymous tip-off that was given to the police following the five arrests made on 10 May 2011. An informant had come forward saying that he had recalled something that he had seen in the days after Damien went missing 15 years previously – that he saw a man matching Nicky McNamara’s description burning clothing in an oil-drum outside of a chalet whilst shouting ‘I’m a damned man’. This resulted in the Marsh Road chalet being added to the locations already being searched by the police. The search didn’t result in any charges. According to Unsolved, The Weatherman’s memory of seeing the oil-drum fire was triggered by the news reports at the time. He also said that he told the police, but wouldn’t sign a statement.

Apart from saying that he saw Nicky McNamara and an oil-drum fire, that it was a big blaze, and there was something that may have been a sleeve, The Weatherman’s accounts of the afternoon of 3 November that he gave to Ivor and Valerie are different too:

I see Nicky McNamara and he's chucking wood into this oil-drum, big 45-gallon drum. Fucking great blaze. This is about half two in the afternoon.
I saw Nicky McNamara... shoving wood into this oil-drum. It was a big fire. Right, it-it was dirty engine oil... an-and I could smell it. But that was not the only other fucking smell that I smelt I could smell. 

I see Nicky go back in, come out with another bit of wood, and he was scraping something along the ground, and as he picked it up and-he and-he scooped it up off the ground, he then flicked it into the fire. It was the shape of a sleeve.
After Nicky had dumped all this wood into this oil drum, he legged it back in. There was enough time for me to see him come running back out with this fucking long, black, stringy thing that looked like it could possibly have been a sleeve of something. Basically, it looked like he had hold of an arm... and he was about to go and drop it into the oil drum.

As explained in thefirst language analysis post, liars tend to add or change details when they repeat a lie, and this is exactly what appears to have happened with The Weatherman’s accounts. Additionally, he slips tenses between the two accounts of the oil-drum fire at the Marsh Road chalet, which is another indication of lie-telling. In particular, untruthful accounts tend to use the present tense – ‘I see Nicky McNamara and he is chucking wood into this oil-drum’, ‘This is about half two in the afternoon’ and ‘I see Nicky go back in’, and this sentence from the episode 5 excerpt ‘This is the night that Damien disappeared’.

It is easy enough to find out what the weather was doing on any given date in any location in the UK, and on the afternoon of 3 November 1996, it was windy and raining in Gurnard. This is also confirmed in Valerie’s book, because she went out to look for Damien late morning on 3 November 1996 as ‘rain began to cascade down’. By early afternoon ‘the wind was howling and the driving rain…’, and as teatime came and went, there was no sign of Damien ‘striding up the path to get out of the rain’. Hardly the weather for outdoor fires.

The information that Damien was captured on Yorkies’ CCTV at between 23:30 and 23:45 and that there had been a police presence on Cowes High Street that night had been common knowledge for years. In her book Valerie mentions a fresh appeal for information about the men in the Yorkies' footage made by DI O'Callaghan in 2007 although the footage had been 'widely circulated in previous years'. Certainly, at least part of the footage had been in public circulation prior to Valerie Nettles uploading it to YouTube in 2016. For example, a still from the footage of Damien in Yorkies with the army men was included in a ForeverSearchingKids YouTube video in 2009 and another in 2011, and clips from the footage were included in an On The Wight article in 2010, a Daily Echo YouTube video in 2011, and two other YouTube videos that were uploaded in 2012. Additionally, in her book The Boy Who Disappeared, Valerie writes that in 2008/2009, she was provided with a CD copy of the Yorkies CCTV footage made after it had been sent away by the police for enhancement. Whilst watching it through to make sure that the copy worked properly, she noticed that parts of the footage were missing, including a segment when a police car drove past the shop. The police told her that this had been done for operation reasons so that witnesses could confirm what happened in the missing bits. Whether or not this is true, it seems odd that The Weatherman mentions seeing a police car pulling up ‘directly outside Yorkies’ given that he was supposedly at the Sun Hill junction some distance away walking in the opposite direction (walking ‘up’ the High Street), followed by ‘this is the night that Damien disappeared’. Perhaps at some point, he had been asked by the police to confirm what was in the missing footage. Or perhaps he knew others who were asked and/or had been told or knew about the police car on the High Street, or had heard that the army men who were in Yorkies at the same time as Damien could be heard to say ‘did you see that police car?’ and added this as a detail to his own story.

Filming for Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared began in October 2015, four and a half years after the May 2011 arrests. The Weatherman tells Valerie that he has ‘waited a long time’ to meet her. Is four and a half years a long time? And given that the search of the Marsh Road chalet and investigations into associates of Nicky McNamara found nothing to connect it or them with Damien, why has he been waiting to meet her? Towards the end of their conversation, The Weatherman says: ‘It wasn't ‘til... the pods searched that all the memories started coming back’ (by pods I am assuming that he meant plods). Searched what? The police arrested five unnamed men on 10 May 2011 and in the couple of days that followed, only one location that was searched was made public – an area of marshland at Dodnor Cement Kilns and Nature Reserve near Stag Lane at the Newport end of the Cowes-to-Newport cycle track. Why would this have triggered a memory of seeing Nicky McNamara having an oil-drum fire four miles away at a chalet in Gurnard? And why wasn’t this memory triggered in 1998 when the police conducted searches in Gurnard?

So, we have an anonymous informant who told the police that he recalled someone matching Nicky McNamara’s description burning clothes in an oil-drum whilst shouting ‘I’m a damned man’ outside a chalet in the days after Damien went missing. We also have The Weatherman who claims that spoke to Nicky McNamara in Cowes on the night that Damien disappeared and also the following morning shouting ‘I’m a damned man’, and saw Nicky McNamara on the afternoon of 3 November 1996 burning wood and/or something resembling a sleeve and/or what looked like an arm in an oil-drum outside the Marsh Road chalet. There are also accounts of an anonymous informant that Valerie writes about in her book. She calls him Mr X, but later identifies him as The Weatherman – named by Bronagh and Alys due to the awful weather one day when he agreed to meet Lynn Hammond (a councillor who was interviewed in episode 2 of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared) and Ivor Edwards on a deserted Isle of Wight beach.

The first piece of information Valerie writes about that came from Mr X via her friend, Carmelle, was that he saw Nicky McNamara and some others outside Moira House on Sun Hill the day after Damien vanished, and that Nicky was putting what appeared to be a bloodied carpet into a red car. Mr X says that he jokingly asked them whether what they had was a body, and that they all looked at him in horror. Carmelle is quoted to have said about Mr X that ‘he’s really afraid’. At some point after this, Mr X is documented to have spoken to Lynn Hammond and Ivor Edwards, and had theorised to Ivor that Damien went into Moira House. Valerie writes that Mr X continued to provide Lynn and Ivor with more details about the night that Damien disappeared into 2012/2013 – that he saw Nicky McNamara and his posse coming down Sun Hill between 23:30 and 23:40 on the night that Damien vanished, that he had spoken to Nicky who seemed off his face on something and was spinning round, doing ‘windmills’ with his arms, and named Shirley Barrett and Jon 'Bunny' Iles as being with him. Valerie writes that Mr X also said, noting the heavy police presence in town, that he had spoken to a policeman just as he bumped into Nicky McNamara. The police said that this wasn’t the case, that Mr X had spoken to them about everything in 2011, and had refused to sign an official statement. Mr X is said to have always told Ivor that he’d been too scared to put himself on record. Therefore, at the risk of putting two and two together and making five, the anonymous 2011 informant is the same person as Mr X/The Weatherman. Another thing to note is that in 1996, Shirley Barrett was Shirley Thomas, having married Christopher Thomas in 1993. She may have continued to have been known as Shirley Barrett, but she was married to Thomas. She was not ‘with’ Nicky McNamara in 1996, and was his landlady in 2002 when he died at her property in Prospect Road.

Summary: The anonymous informant who told police in 2011 that he recalled seeing a man matching Nicky McNamara’s description burning clothing in an oil-drum outside of a chalet whilst shouting ‘I’m a damned man’ in the days following Damien’s disappearance, and Mr X/The Weatherman, are the same person. By the time he spoke to Ivor Edwards, he had elaborated his story with common knowledge details – the time that Damien was captured on Yorkies CCTV (between 23:30 and 23:45), Damien’s last confirmed location (coming up to the junction of Sun Hill in Cowes High Street), the police presence in Cowes and the police car on the High Street outside Yorkies on the evening of 2 November 1996, that Nicky McNamara was rumoured to have killed Damien, the names of Nicky McNamara’s drug dealing associates (Jon ‘Bunny’ Iles, Shirley Barrett) and addresses connected to the group (the Marsh Road chalet, Moira House). The story of what he says he saw becomes more elaborate and more detailed the more he retells it. Details are added, details are changed, and in some instances, details shift from one part of the story to another. He retells parts of the story in the present tense to Ivor Edwards, and this changes to the past tense when he retells the story to Valerie (because his previous telling of the story is in the past).

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that I strongly believe that most, if not all of his account, is a fabrication. He wants to remain anonymous because he is lying, but he is conveniently using that he’s scared as the reason – scared of people finding out that he’s a liar. If any of what he says is true, it’s that at some point in time he saw someone that could have been Nicky McNamara burning something in an oil-drum outside a chalet. So why would he lie?

He could be a fantasist who has inserted himself into the case for attention, self-recognition or an ego boost – maybe he started with genuine intentions with the tip-off about the chalet, but got carried away when this resulted in the chalet being added to the police search. Fantasists are attracted to crime, heroism and disaster. Carl Beech was found guilty of inventing a Westminster VIP paedophile ring. ‘Military imposters’ are people who make false claims about their military service in civilian life, including claims by people who have never been in the military as well as lies or embellishments by genuine veterans, and the wearing of privately obtained uniforms or medals that were never officially issued to them. Fake stories of heroism and grief became so common in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers that they came to be known as the ‘9/11 sign’.

The alternative is that he inserted himself into the investigation in 2011 as a witness to divert police attention away from evidence relating to Damien and/or his body, and/or the people involved in Damien’s disappearance/death. There really are only two reasons why he would do this – because he killed Damien, or because someone close to him is responsible for Damien’s disappearance and/or death. There are numerous examples of killers who have inserted themselves into their own cases, either to find out how the police investigation is progressing, or to throw police off their scent – multiple murderer John Christie became a prosecution witness, giving evidence against innocent James Evans; Edmund Kemper drank with the police who were on his case; a brother of Ivan Milat gave false information to the police about witnessing two vehicles near his brother’s murder scenes; John Tanner elaborated a series of lies in an attempt to confuse the investigation and outwit the police; Darren Vickers joined the hunt for Jamie Lavis, fronted media appeals and befriended his parents; and Ian Huntley inserted himself as a witness in the disappearance of Hollie Wells and Jessica Chapman. 

However, there are many, many more fantasists in the world than there are murderers, and therefore on the balance of probabilities, The Weatherman is more likely to be a fantasist than Damien’s killer. In the next post, which will be the final language analysis post before I move on to examine the theories and rumours surrounding Damien’s disappearance and suspected death, I will be analysing Unsolved's interviews with Shirley Barrett.

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.

Sources

alisonwright (10 December 2012) South today Saturday 8th Nov 2012 Damien Nettles peaceful protest. 

Daily Echo LOCALiQ (3 October 2011) Damien Nettles Anniversary. 

ForeverSearchingKids (29 October 2009) Damien Nettles – Coldplay Trouble. 

ForeverSearchingKids (25 October 2011) Damien Nettles – 15 Years Missing. 

HelpFindBen (20 January 2012) Help Find Ben Sunday Share – Damien Nettles. 

Hurley, B. (9 September 2022) ‘It spiralled out of control’: The fantasists who pretended to be 9/11 survivors. The Independent.

Nettles, V. (2019) The Boy Who Disappeared. London: John Blake Publishing.

Perry, S. (2 November 2010) Search For Damien Nettles Still Going Strong. On The Wight.

Unsolved – The Boy Who Disappeared: 4. The Weatherman (2016) BBC3, 28 July. 

Unsolved – The Boy Who Disappeared: 5. The CCTV (2016) BBC3, 29 July.

Unsolved – The Boy Who Disappeared: 6. The House of Death (2016) BBC3, 30 July. 

Unsolved – The Boy Who Disappeared: 8. The Dig (2016) BBC3, 1 August. 

weather.sumofus.org