Damien Nettles: Investigation summary, conclusion and areas for re-investigation

When I began my examination of the case of 16-year-old Damien Nettles who disappeared on 3 November 1996 from Cowes, Isle of Wight, I hadn’t anticipated that I would still be writing about it nearly three months later. 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: Chris Boon
Damien Nettles – Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 2: Abbie Scott, Chris Boon and Davey Boon
Damien Nettles – Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 3: The Weatherman
Damien Nettles – Language analysis of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared interviews – Part 4: Shirley Barrett
Damien Nettles – Who was Nicky McNamara?
Damien Nettles – Nicky McNamara: Untangling the rumours
Damien Nettles – No body, no crime?
Damien Nettles – Water, water everywhere

Right from the start I encountered discrepancies between different accounts of the same information – the time and date that Damien was last sighted on CCTV, what was rumoured to have happened at which of the two chalets in Gurnard, the number of suspects that were arrested, and many, many more inconsistencies that I haven’t included in the blog. Having to sort the one piece of true data from all the false is always going to be a pitfall of working solely with information that it is in the public domain because mistakes get copied over and over again. When writing up my posts, I have been as careful as I can be about getting important details correct so as to not repeat the errors that have gone before. Not taking any information at face value went hand in hand with this – particularly in a case where theories and rumours abound.

I chose Damien’s disappearance as my first ‘body not found’ investigation because I was born and grew up on the Isle of Wight. I don’t remember Damien going missing – I had left the Island by 1996 – and I only learned of his disappearance when I conducted my initial search in March this year for ‘no body murder’ cases. As I began to gather publicly available information about Damien’s disappearance, it was clear that I was going to have a lot to work with including numerous newspaper and magazine articles, the Damien Nettles website, Facebook pages, groups, posts and comments, missing persons websites, blog posts, podcasts, the Yorkies CCTV footage, the eight-episode Unsolved documentary series and over 2,500 associated comments on YouTube, the book The Boy Who Disappeared by Damien’s mother, Valerie, and more.

During the course of my investigation, I discovered that I have a friend who lived directly opposite the Shore Road chalet in Gurnard in November 1996. This isn’t someone I knew when I lived on the Isle of Wight – we became friends many years later. At the time, he was a helper at Cowes Youth Club and remembers Damien going missing well – it was big news. He was able to give me information about the couple who lived at the chalet at the time, and that he had never seen Damien there. I also discovered that I have a friend who lives opposite a property connected to one of the suspects arrested in 2011. Again, not a friend I knew when I lived on the Island, and we’ve only known one another for a few years. I found out that I had other connections with the case too – a mutual friend with one of Damien’s close friends, and another with one of the suspects. These are friends who are not from the Isle of Wight, and as with the other two, I didn’t know them when I lived on the Island. This shows that even years later, anyone – anyone at all – could know someone who may hold the key to finding the one piece of information that might help solve a missing person or no body murder case, or at least help to rule out an explanation or theory. It really is never too late to keep looking and making connections.

From publicly available information I discovered the identity of Mr X/The Weatherman. This was after I had completed my language analysis of his Unsolved interviews and reached the conclusion that he was lying – a conclusion that my (unpublished) investigation into who he was in 1996 and who he is now, appears to confirm. From publicly available information I also discovered the identities of the two suspects connected to the Marsh Road chalet. I conducted a considerable amount of (unpublished) work around them and built up a reasonably detailed picture of who they were, the places they had lived, their friends and associates, and their offending histories. In addition to this, I found information about various incidents that weren’t connected to Damien’s disappearance, but that either directly involved the couple or could be linked to them – incidents that would have been prime fodder for public speculation about Damien’s potential fate.

So what did happen to Damien?

The findings of missing persons research coupled with the circumstances surrounding Damien’s life and disappearance supports the theory that he went missing unintentionally, and that he is no longer alive. However, from a criminological perspective, I couldn’t find sufficient research evidence that would support a conclusion of murder, or that Damien could have been the victim of exploitation in connection with organised crime (abducted into modern slavery for example). This really only leaves manslaughter, and misadventure/accident with a fatal outcome, as possible reasons for why Damien disappeared unintentionally and has remained unfound. In terms of probability, fatal accidents due to injury or drowning are the leading cause of death in adolescents, accounting for around a third (32%) of all deaths of 10-19-year-olds. This is followed by cancer (22%) and suicide (19%), whereas fatal assaults account for just 3% of adolescent deaths. In all cases, the risk of dying for young men is notably higher than for young women.

In terms of coming to harm at someone else’s hands, whether by fatal assault or being hit by a vehicle, the larger the victim’s body, the harder it is to dispose of, representing a literal dead weight if deceased or unconscious that is awkward to move alone. Additionally, a body is difficult to dismember without equipment, a suitable space to do it in and at least some knowledge of anatomy, and it takes an industrial furnace at 800–1000 °C to properly cremate a body. Of all the possible ways to dispose of a body, concealment by storing, (attempted) combusting and dismembering are the exceptions, representing a combined one tenth of homicide disposals, and feeding to animals and sealing in concrete are the absolute exceptions. These methods are the exceptions because they require inventiveness, planning, resources and in most cases, co-conspirators on the part of the offender, yet all five have been suggested in the rumours about what happened to Damien’s body.

Research into homicide-related body disposal sites indicates that for stranger homicides, offenders tend to leave their victims at or very near the crime scene. In friend/acquaintance homicides, victims’ bodies are moved an average of 17km from the crime scene with just 100m being the most common distance. In over two-thirds of stranger and friend/acquaintance homicides, victims’ bodies are either left uncovered, covered with leaf litter, branches and debris, or put into a shallow hollow (either man-made or natural). Less than 5% of all homicide victims (which includes those killed by a family member) are buried at any depth because digging requires a suitable location, time, physical effort and equipment. Where victims’ bodies are driven away in a vehicle, most are laid within 10m of a road/track, with the average distance being 17m. In around 10% of friend/acquaintance homicides, victims’ bodies are deposited in waterways, and this rises to 18% in cases of stranger homicide.

These findings cast considerable doubt over the likelihood that if Damien did die from a fatal assault in the flat above the butcher’s shop in the centre of Cowes town, that his body was moved to Fellows Road, stored there for two weeks in a sail bag, then moved again to Shore Road before being moved once more to be buried in the woodland behind my friend’s chalet, particularly given the amount of planning, people, resources and effort that this would have involved and the difficulty of digging a hole of any size or depth in an area where tree roots are holding the ground together, never mind the risk of being discovered with every move and how rapidly a body decomposes in air at room temperature. If Damien was the victim of a fatal assault or had been hit by a car, his body is much more likely to have either been left at or very near the crime scene, put in the sea if the water’s edge was immediately accessible, or if transported from the scene in a vehicle, driven away promptly and left either uncovered or partially covered within metres of a road.

On 8 November 1996, six days after Damien was last sighted, the police are reported to have searched all open areas in and around Cowes using a number of dogs and aerial surveillance. Ground searches of the local area including Cowes, Northwood and Gurnard by Damien’s family and members of the public were also carried out soon after he disappeared. A subsequent, intensive police search took place in 1998 in and around Gurnard, and in 2011 the marsh and surrounding land near Stag Lane plus various properties associated with the arrested suspects were searched. More recently, the scrubland that borders both Cowes and Gurnard that runs along the length of the inland side of Prince’s Esplanade and Egypt Esplanade, has been completely cleared. If Damien’s body was transported from the crime scene and left relatively exposed close to a road or track with vehicular access, the probability is high that it would have been found by now, if not by the police, by a member of the public. The privately owned woodland behind Shore Road in Gurnard has also been extensively dug over the course of several years by friends of the Nettles family, and was searched by a cadaver dog during the filming of Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared. In an Unsolved ‘clip’ interview, the dog’s handler, Mick Swindell, was asked about the accuracy rate of finding a body, to which he replied: ‘Touch wood we’ve never missed a body yet […] and there’s never been a body found in an area that we’ve declared as clear.’

All land-based searches have so far failed not only to find Damien’s body, but any of his clothing or property – the camera that he is known to have had with him for example. This leaves the very small possibility that his body has remained hidden or buried on land that is inaccessible to the public, or the much higher probability that water became his final resting place. In addition to the land searches on 8 November 1996, a marine unit scoured the banks of the Medina Estuary and the shoreline around to Gurnard, and the Harbour Master at Cowes conducted a thorough search with boats. That Damien’s body wasn’t located at the time of his disappearance or in the days, weeks and months that followed, or during the search of the marsh in 2011, can be attributed to the frequently inefficient nature of even the most committed search efforts, plus rate of decomposition, aspects of how a body can behave in water and factors that negatively affect detection, that increase the chances of it remaining undiscoverable. Missing persons data suggests that 9% (1 in 11) of people who are known to have gone missing in water remain unfound compared to 1% of all long-term missing persons.

Even when a person is suspected to have gone missing in relatively predictable water far inland from the coast, their body can remain undiscoverable for weeks despite continuous, specialist searching. The recent disappearance of Nicola Bulley is a good example. Nicola was declared a high-risk missing person by the police at 11:28 on 27 January 2023, 27 minutes after the initial missing person report was received from her partner, and as it later transpired, just two hours after she had entered the River Wyre upstream from St Michael's on Wyre. The high-risk missing person report triggered a priority police search for her whereabouts. During the second week of the search, Lancashire Constabulary stated that they believed the circumstances of Nicola’s disappearance were not suspicious, nor criminal, and did not involve a third party. Their working theory that Nicola had fallen into the river and drowned was met with criticism and scepticism by her family and friends, who stated that the hypothesis was unsupported by evidence.

23 days of intensive searching of the River Wyre all the way to Morecombe Bay 28 km north of St Michael’s on Wyre by the police using divers, helicopters, drones and underwater sonar, plus a specialist, private underwater search and rescue team and land searches by the public, failed to find Nicola’s body. 24 days after Nicola disappeared, a couple walking their dog discovered her body adjacent to a fallen tree 1.6km downstream from St Michael's on Wyre. The prediction of recovery by the expert from the Association of Lowland Search and Rescue – that Nicola was most likely to be recovered on 20 February – was highly accurate, and demonstrates that even in a relatively small search area with far fewer variables than those found in coastal waters, a body can remain submerged and therefore hidden from view for weeks. On 26 June 2023, a Coroner’s Inquest established that the cause of Nicola’s death was accidental drowning with no evidence that she had been harmed before she went into the water.

Conclusion and areas for re-investigation

Although it seems unlikely that Damien is still alive, there were several potential sightings in the days, weeks and months following his disappearance, some by people who didn’t know Damien, such as the man in Totland, Isle of Wight, who on 16 November 1996 spoke to a young man on Granville Road who fitted Damien’s description and who said that he had just moved to the area, and others by people who knew Damien well, such as the school friend who in April 1997 thought he saw Damien from the back walking along a busy main road in Wilton, Wiltshire, and prior to this, a sighting on 4 November 1996 at around 12:30 in Newport, Isle of Wight, by a man who worked with Damien at Gurnard Pines in the summer who believed he saw Damien getting out of a small dark car at Church Litten opposite Safeway. Were these sightings – particularly the Newport one – properly investigated at the time? If not, can they be re-investigated now?

If Damien had been the victim of a fatal assault in Cowes (or elsewhere) and his attacker, instead of leaving him or putting him in the sea, had had help and immediate access to a vehicle to transport him away from the crime scene, his body may have remained undiscovered because it was concealed or buried somewhere unfrequented or inaccessible to the public, for example, on private land, or in a heavily planted pond that could have prevented it from resurfacing. Statistically, this is an unlikely scenario, however, unlikely doesn’t mean impossible.

Even so, teenagers are ten times more likely to have a fatal accident than be the victim of a fatal assault, and fatal injury sustained during an accident is the most common cause of death in teenagers. This includes drowning, but given that Damien was walking when he was last seen on CCTV, could he have been hit by a car on his way home? The viability of this as a potential line of inquiry could be tested against information that has already been gathered, but that may not have been fully investigated. For example, there were two accounts of a youth walking along Baring Road near the Solent Middle School at around 00:30 on 3 November 1996 – one that was received in early 1997 from a young man who was walking home from his parents’ house, and the other after an appeal for new information in November 1998 from a motorist and his wife. If the youth was Damien, the Baring Road sightings place him well away from the coast. Was identification attempted at the time? There was a friend of Damien’s from Gurnard – Duncan Butler – who Valerie writes was the spitting image of Damien. Has Duncan been ruled in or out as being the youth walking along Baring Road at 00:30 on 3 November 1996? The motorist’s account states that the youth had been carrying a blue and white striped plastic bag – can this be linked to any of the earlier sightings of Damien in Cowes? The motorist is also claimed to have reported that the youth was walking in the middle of the road. If the youth was Damien, walking in the middle of the road coupled with wearing dark clothing may have increased his risk of being hit by a car. If the youth was Damien and he was hit by a car, he could have been transported away from the scene.

In addition to fatal injury sustained during an accident being the most common cause of death in teenagers, and teenagers being ten times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident than be the victim of a fatal assault, as an adolescent who had been consuming alcohol on a night out in an area of High Night-Time Economy in close proximity to water and who was last seen alone, Damien’s risk of meeting with a water-related, unintentional death was increased. Therefore, all things considered, the most probable, evidence-based explanation for Damien’s continued disappearance is that whether intentionally or by accident, he entered the sea, after which certain factors came together that were unconducive to life, and prevented his body from being located. Whether location or any sort of recovery might be possible after nearly three decades is a question that could be posed to experts and academics in the field of marine search and rescue, which in terms of research, knowledge, technology and equipment has progressed substantially during that time. For example, if Damien had entered the sea at Sun Slip and his body had become entangled after sinking, is it possible that traces of his body or clothing might still be found in the area?

Although this concludes my blog series on the disappearance of Damien Nettles, I will be continuing to work with Locate International as part of the team assigned to Damien's case.

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

College of Policing (2023) Independent external review of Lancashire Constabulary’s operational response to reported missing person Nicola Bulley.

Google maps.

Hill, L. (28 February 2022) Concerns raised over clearing of protected woodland in Gurnard ‘without permission’. Island Echo.

Horsburgh, L. (21 November 2023) Nicola Bulley review: Key report findings at a glance. BBC News.

Isle of Wight County Press (15 November 1996) Concern grows for missing boy, 16.

Isle of Wight County Press (29 November 1996) Possible sighting of missing Cowes boy in Totland.

Isle of Wight County Press (11 April 1997) Sighting gives fresh hope to parents of missing boy.

Isle of Wight County Press (3 December 2004) Appeal for anyone who saw Damien.

Mateus, M., Canelas, R., Pinto, L. & Vaz, N. (2020) When Tragedy Strikes: Potential Contributions From Ocean Observation to Search and Rescue Operations After Drowning Accidents. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7 (55): 1-8.

missingpeople.org.uk

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

Newiss, G. & Greatbatch, I. (2017) Men missing on a night out: Exploring the geography of fatal disappearances to inform search strategies. University of Portsmouth, National Crime Agency and UK Missing Persons Bureau.

Perkins, D. & Roberts, P. (2011) The U.K. Missing Person Behaviour Study. Northumberland National Park MRT and The Centre for Search Research.

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (2020) Adolescent mortality.

Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared: Ronny the cadaver dog (2016) BBC3, 21 July.

Whitehead, J., Franklin, R. & Mahony, T. (2024) Where are homicide victims disposed? A study of disposed homicide victims in Queensland. Forensic Science International: Synergy, 8 (100451).