Missing - Every Year, Thousands of People Vanish Without Trace. Here are the True Stories Behind Some of These Mysteries. Rose Rouse
to show them her security pass. They confirmed that Eddie hadn’t got on the plane. Jo had thought her living hell was about to end – tragically, it was just about to start.
Jo later confessed that, on the way to the airport, she’d had a faint suspicion that Eddie wouldn’t arrive, while Mike was still convinced that Eddie would be back in his own time. At home, Jo couldn’t hold back the pain and anger any longer. She wrote Eddie an email that was incandescent with rage. It read, ‘I can’t believe the pain you are putting us through. We were so looking forward to seeing you. I can’t believe you would be so selfish. You don’t know what it is like to be a parent and go through this. Make contact with us. Let me know you’re OK.’
Naturally, Jo was absolutely desperate to hear from her missing son. She wanted to tell him everything she was feeling and how hurt she was. She wanted to communicate with him and hear what was happening to her boy. But in fact, she never heard another word from Eddie. The next day, feeling terribly guilty, she sent him another email apologising. Meanwhile, Mike was still confident that Eddie would come home when he was ready. ‘Remember,’ he would say, ‘Ed hates fuss and confrontation, and having to explain his actions. He’ll be home in his own time.’
To keep her mind occupied, Jo busied herself with activities connected to finding Eddie. She phoned prisons in Thailand to see if he could be there – although she is quick to point out that she always warned Eddie about people planting drugs on him and that he was never interested in drugs. She also phoned the Buddhist centres in Cambodia. ‘I thought Eddie might have decided to clear his head there,’ she explains. ‘I even found a professor who specialised in Buddhism who was going there. He said he’d check them out for me but on his return he told me that it was very unlikely that Eddie was in that sort of centre. Not many Westerners can take that sort of regime, which includes cleaning rotas and being up at 4am, plus they also only speak Cambodian.
Jo also sent out a chain global email saying she was looking for her son and asking if anyone had seen him. She got emails back but no real news. Eddie had kept detailed dairies of his gap year, so Jo read them now, looking for names of hotels in Cambodia and then emailing them to see if Eddie had stayed there recently. She was incredibly industrious. But she didn’t have any luck.
Christmas 2004 was approaching and they were all convinced that Eddie wouldn’t miss it. But, horribly, there was no word from him. Now his father and eldest brother Elliott decided to take action and flew out to Cambodia to try to find him. ‘It was a dreadful Christmas,’ says Jo. ‘We had my mother over and she’s eighty-seven. We hadn’t told her about Eddie because we didn’t want to worry her. But now I had to tell her. She took it better than I thought she was going to, but I suppose she lived through two wars when people went missing regularly. Telling her somehow made it official. It made me feel in total despair.’
Unbelievably, Mike and Elliott arrived in Phnom Penh and the tsunami happened on the same day. All the police officials with whom they had wanted to find and discuss Eddie’s disappearance had been diverted to Vietnam and Thailand. However, they did manage to put ‘missing’ posters up everywhere.
‘From the diaries, I could see Eddie had had a relationship with a girl in Bangkok. Mike and Elliott managed to find her but they discovered he hadn’t gone back to visit her this time,’ she says. ‘But she started to help us too.’ They talked to bar owners and went down to beaches where travellers hang out. Cambodian girls would say they’d seen him, but these sightings all proved to be untrue. Yet Mike and Elliott came back still positive, still thinking he was there somewhere, they just hadn’t found him yet.
Unable to stay at home when the others had been in the country where Eddie had gone missing, three weeks later, Jo and Tony flew to Phnom Penh. They met up with the British embassy’s vice consul who explained that Westerners would often get picked up by ‘taxi’ girls, who would totally look after them in return for being financially supported. ‘He said Westerners often occupied this unreal, bubble world, which was lovely, very peaceful and cheap. Then there were the local drugs like yabba, an opium derivative, which would keep them permanently high. Lots of Westerners apparently end up living out here for ten years just to escape life at home,’ says Jo. Presumably, the embassy official was suggesting that Eddie could have made that choice too.
However, Jo couldn’t see Eddie getting into drugs. He liked being in control too much, plus he was really into his health. ‘Unlike my other boys, he was always shopping for fruit and vegetables,’ she said. ‘He really cared what he put in his mouth.’ Jo had an aim on her trip and it was to get on TV and in the newspapers over there. ‘I wanted as many people as possible to be aware that Eddie was missing,’ she says.
Unlike her son, Jo hated Cambodia. ‘It is the worst place I’ve ever been to,’ she says. ‘I saw all the pretty girls there and the beaches, but underneath there is such a basic need to survive that people will do anything for money. There is also a feeling of immorality that maybe came from the Pol Pot era. It feels as though people will do anything, however ruthless, to survive. We went to one of the backpacker’s hangouts and it was horrific, filthy and full of drug addicts – it was vile. We looked to see if Eddie’s name was on the register, but it wasn’t. I was so shocked by these places. Parents would never let their children go there if they knew what they were like.’
Jo managed to get a lot of coverage on TV, radio and in the newspapers. Expats offered help, Cambodians also came forth and offered information, but Jo was only too aware that the latter were often just interested in the cash being offered. One Cambodian man said to her, disturbingly, ‘You realise that people get killed here for fifty dollars and the killers simply bury the bodies.’ The horror of the possibilities in a country with such a corrupt underbelly hit her, but Jo refused to give up. ‘I was crying, I felt so sick,’ she says. ‘We also tried police stations, which was another horrible experience. The police there have gold teeth and crisp, green uniforms, but they don’t inspire any confidence. Basically, they won’t do anything without being paid. Everyone wants to be paid. It’s very demoralising.’
She did find a man called George who did sincerely offer to help. He was an American lawyer who put posters up and contacted hotels to see if Eddie had been there. There was also Gareth, a lovely Welsh man who Jo happened to ask for directions when she was walking along the beach. He recognised her voice because he’d heard her do a radio interview there about Eddie. ‘Are you Eddie Gibson’s mum?’ he said immediately.
‘I was so excited that he knew who I was, it made me feel hopeful. He has turned into a friend and helped out a lot,’ she says.
But mostly she was approached by shifty characters who were obviously after money. Which made her search even more distressing. There was one man who was Israeli and, she says, looked like Colonel Gaddafi. He promised he’d find Eddie, but she didn’t even consider taking him on. ‘I was still going to bars and half expecting Eddie to be sitting there,’ she says.
Leaving Cambodia without any concrete news about Eddie was extremely tough for Jo. ‘I was so sad,’ she says, fighting back the tears. ‘I felt as though I was leaving my Eddie there. That was so difficult emotionally.’
Back home, she kept getting emails. Most were from Cambodians claiming to have news of her son, but they were obviously lying. They were all insisting, of course, that they needed money to help. Then Jo received an email from a Korean girl called Constance who was living in Phnom Penh. She was a friend of a Cambodian girl called Ami, who had apparently been having a relationship in October with Eddie. At last, this was the possibility of a real breakthrough. Jo allowed herself to become a little hopeful of finding out the truth.
And this piece of information turned out to be real. It transpired that Eddie had been staying with Ami from 9–24 October. The lovely Welshman, George, was duly dispatched to find Constance and to try to locate Ami through her. He did. Eddie had, it turned out, met Ami during his gap year at a club in Phnom Penh called the Heart of Darkness (ominously named after the Joseph Conrad novel that inspired the film Apocalypse Now). Eddie was obviously keen on her because he went back to see her on his second visit. Ami and Eddie hung out together, she stayed in his room at different hotels, he visited the small wooden