Missing - Every Year, Thousands of People Vanish Without Trace. Here are the True Stories Behind Some of These Mysteries. Rose Rouse
she asks, still in a state of confusion about how and why he disappeared.
For the first week at university, Eddie seemed fine. He phoned both his parents regularly and told them all the news about fresher’s week and Leeds. They didn’t suspect anything was wrong at all. ‘He’d signed up to do sky-diving, which he loved,’ she says, ‘and joined a football team. He seemed contented and to be settling in.’
But the true picture wasn’t as clear as that. In fact, Eddie seemed to be hiding some deep confusion. At some point between 15 September and 4 October 2004, Eddie changed his mind about his course and being at university. He decided it wasn’t for him. But he kept this information to himself. He might have been afraid that his parents would feel he was letting them down, and he was never good at facing that kind of situation. He didn’t even tell his old friend Josh. ‘He wasn’t naturally secretive,’ says Jo, ‘but he didn’t like having to explain his actions or confronting things. He’d rather approach tricky situations like this sideways rather than head on. Also, once he’d decided on a course of action, he was single minded in his determination to carry it out. He’d always been like that.’
In fact, there were a couple of clues that all was not well just before 4 October, the date that Eddie took a flight to Bangkok via Dubai with £3,000 from his bank account. On Friday, 1 October, at 10.30pm, which was quite late for him to ring, he called his mother. ‘He said, “I just want to hear your voice, Mum,” which was very unusual,’ she said. ‘I was touched but I was also surprised.’
Then on Sunday, 3 October, she had another call from him. ‘He said, “Mum, I’m really unhappy about my course and I’m not sure what to do.” I told him not to panic, that it would all sort itself out. I knew he was sensible and I wasn’t really worried. I thought he’d work it out,’ she says. He rang again later that day and said that he was changing his course from International Management to Business and that he’d talked to the right professor about this. He added that his battery on his mobile was low, which meant he wouldn’t be phoning home for a few days.
At this point, Jo wasn’t concerned because she thought he’d organised his change of course and that he was OK. ‘He was always so capable,’ she says. ‘I expected him to be OK. What I didn’t realise was that he’d already made up his mind to go back to Cambodia.’ Eddie was evidently in some turmoil about this decision. Much later, Jo actually discovered that he had bought a ticket to Bangkok the day before he called and travelled down to Heathrow. At the last minute, he’d changed his mind again and gone back to Leeds. This was when he’d talked to his mother, but hadn’t told her the full extent of his worries and plans. He was probably thinking that he was creating disappointment for his family and couldn’t face that.
On the Monday, Eddie bought another ticket and this time he got on the plane. Later, his parents found out that he’d stayed in Bangkok for a couple of days before crossing the border into Cambodia on 9 October. ‘Now I wonder if he was setting up a bank account,’ says Jo. ‘He was sensible with money. I can’t imagine him walking around with £3,000 in his pocket. That’s one of the things we’re still trying to investigate – what exactly Eddie did with his money.’
Eddie had been captivated by Cambodia during his gap year. With a group of school friends, he went to Australia, then to Thailand, Laos and Burma, but it was Cambodia that captured his heart. The combination of their tragic history – 1.7 million Cambodians were killed by the terrible Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 in the infamous ‘killing fields’ – the poverty and the kindness of the people he met had a profound effect on him.
‘He met people who had no relatives because they’d all been killed by the Pol Pot regime and who had no money, yet Eddie thought they seemed much happier than people in the West,’ says Jo. ‘That made him question our value system here. He came back and threw out his Armani and Boss clothes. He didn’t see the need for them any more. He walked around in T-shirts, flip flops and shorts just like he’d worn over there. He didn’t like the greed he saw in the West.’
Finally, he seemed to have made the decision that it was more important for him to experience more of this kind of non-materialistic existence in Cambodia than to take his university degree course. He had a return flight booked for 1 November so he was planning to be away at least a month. Not that his family realised that any of this was happening. They thought that Eddie was happily ensconced in his hall of residence in Leeds. Jo did think it was a little strange that Eddie missed his brother Max’s birthday on that first Wednesday. He sent a card and a present but he didn’t phone. She tried to ring his mobile but there was no answer. She rang Josh and asked if he’d seen Eddie and he said he thought he’d seen him somewhere but Jo wasn’t reassured.
By the end of the week, Jo was in a terrible state. ‘I rang the university and asked them to break into his room,’ she says. ‘I was imagining that Eddie was lying dead in a pool of blood. Finally, they did get in and Josh reported that everything was still there except for a little satchel, a black holdall, his passport and money. Then, I knew that he’d probably gone abroad. I was incredibly shocked and worried.’
She rang the police, who were reluctant to do anything because Eddie was 18 and therefore free to make his own decisions. Then she phoned Missing People, who advised her to phone the Foreign Office to check if he’d left the country. It turned out that Eddie had mentioned to a couple of friends in Hove that he wanted to go back to the Far East, but none of them had taken him seriously.
Jo also phoned around the hospitals in Leeds, checking to see if Eddie was lying there injured. By 15 October, the family knew that Eddie had crossed the border into Cambodia. She turned all her attention back to the police, trying to get them to find out more information. But they weren’t prepared to do anything. Eddie had made the decision to go and that was that as far as they were concerned. ‘Mike wasn’t as worried as me at this stage,’ she says. ‘He thought it was just Eddie doing his own thing.’
Finally, on 20 October, Jo got an email from Eddie in Phnom Penh. ‘I felt the happiest I’ve ever been,’ she says. ‘I was so excited, so relieved and so incredulous all at once. I’d been emailing him three or four times a day, and the rest of the family and friends had been too, so he must have had at least a hundred emails. He apologised for going off without telling us and explained that university just wasn’t for him. He said he was coming back on 1 November and told me not to worry. He also said I was the best mum in the world and he was looking forward to seeing us all again. Then he made it clear that he wasn’t going to open his emails again because he wanted “to clear my head and decide what to do with the next three years of my life”.’
Eddie gave her the impression that this was something he had to go through on his own. Of course, Jo was overjoyed to hear from her son, but she also wanted to let him know what she’d been going through. She emailed him back. ‘Oh my God, promise you will never do that again. You have no idea how worried I’ve been and what thoughts have been going through my mind. I can’t wait to see you. I’m not angry with you and it doesn’t matter about university. You are bright and everything will be fine.’ Jo is not sure whether Eddie ever read it.
She received one more email four days later. ‘He said he was definitely coming home on 1 November,’ she says, ‘and he was ready to come because he’d seen enough of the poverty and deprivation over there.’ It was enough to reassure her and convince her. Jo was looking forward to having her son home in her arms again. Both parents were determined to be there at Heathrow when Eddie got off that flight.
They drove up together from Sussex. Jo was so excited about seeing and holding her son after so much anxiety over his safety. At 7.15pm, travellers started to come through from the flight from Bangkok. Jo and Mike were right in the front of the exit doors ready to give him a huge welcome. But ten minutes later there were only a few stragglers with backpacks left. And none of them was their son. The doors shut and these two parents had to face the nightmare reality that Eddie was not there. He had not come back.
‘I felt torn apart,’ says Jo. ‘My emotions just went into overdrive. Waves of shock and terror ripped through me.’ She ran over to the British Airways desk and asked them