Awful int it.
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Jerome Thomas is the one that baffles me the most. His clothes were found in the washing basket so he's either come back again to change or his family have killed him.
Bristol's the same unfortunately
. The area where his phone pinged isn't that far away from where he was last seen (pretty much the other side of the water). I suspect the phone location is slightly imprecise and the phone was in or near Cumberland Basin.I wish I could see a more positive outcome in this case.
Same in Glasgow, quite a few young men found in the same canal.Bristol's the same unfortunately
I wish I could see a more positive outcome in this case.
Honestly, would be perfect cover. However, there would be unsuccessful pushes too, and there's no evidence of that.
There's a woman missing from Salisbury for about a week, Lynne Morrall. Salisbury Journal have had articles about her quite prominently placed on the website all week but I just went and checked and couldn't see any trace of articles today (although they come up when you Google her name).
She's 69 and last seen getting off a bus in Salisbury, from what I can find I think she lives in Downton which is about 15-20mins away. Police have been searching rivers etc.
She's 69 and last seen getting off a bus in Salisbury, from what I can find I think she lives in Downton which is about 15-20mins away. Police have been searching rivers etc.
Has anyone seen this case in America. Very strange update today about the navy being called off due to death threats.
Strange case overall.
www.independent.co.uk
edit - its not the Navy, its the name an organisation have given themselves
Strange case overall.
Sebastian Rogers search by United Cajun Navy called off after parents meet police
The 15-year-old disappeared from his Sumner County, Tennessee, home on 26 February
edit - its not the Navy, its the name an organisation have given themselves
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It seems the mum and step dad are raising a few suspicionsHas anyone seen this case in America. Very strange update today about the navy being called off due to death threats.
Strange case overall.
Sebastian Rogers search by United Cajun Navy called off after parents meet police
The 15-year-old disappeared from his Sumner County, Tennessee, home on 26 February
edit - its not the Navy, its the name an organisation have given themselves
Yes I am following closely too as also friends of friends. It was Jack’s birthday yesterday. A friend’s family member went missing in similar circumstances and it took 3 weeks for them to be found in the water. I really don’t believe the same has happened to Jack but don’t want to share my thoughts here in case the family read.
I know. Very strange isn't it.
Just 2 miles from his grandfather’s house so it sounds like he probably just wandered off and got lost and not found in time.They’ve found the remains of Émile, the 2 year old who went missing last summer in France.
Poor little boy. How awful
I was listening to The Missing podcast yesterday, was about Charlene Downes.
I did not know about this case and it’s another really terrible one.
But towards the end, it touched on some stuff about her background that made me do a real double take, and see things from a completely different perspective.
I wondered if anyone else had listened to it, or knew of the case, and what your thoughts are?
It’s left me feeling so uncomfortable and so sad for the poor kid. The podcast seemed to gloss over a lot of stuff, but it seemed as though she never stood a chance in life
I was listening to The Missing podcast yesterday, was about Charlene Downes.
I did not know about this case and it’s another really terrible one.
But towards the end, it touched on some stuff about her background that made me do a real double take, and see things from a completely different perspective.
I wondered if anyone else had listened to it, or knew of the case, and what your thoughts are?
It’s left me feeling so uncomfortable and so sad for the poor kid. The podcast seemed to gloss over a lot of stuff, but it seemed as though she never stood a chance in life
Charlene Downes case is so sad. What did they say about her background?
I know of the case and have read about it online quite a lot. It’s also been discussed on the real life crime and murder threads (if you fancies a read) I’ll copy and paste an article another user posted at the time…Poor little boy. How awful
I was listening to The Missing podcast yesterday, was about Charlene Downes.
I did not know about this case and it’s another really terrible one.
But towards the end, it touched on some stuff about her background that made me do a real double take, and see things from a completely different perspective.
I wondered if anyone else had listened to it, or knew of the case, and what your thoughts are?
It’s left me feeling so uncomfortable and so sad for the poor kid. The podcast seemed to gloss over a lot of stuff, but it seemed as though she never stood a chance in life
I've done this before but will do it every time I have to. All you need to know about Charlene Downes is contained in this article from the times written in 2013 - it's now paywalled so I've transcribed it. I would also go as far as to say that I am 99% certain that she will never be found and her case will never be solved.
Too little cared for and too little mourned
"There goes Charlene Downes, ten years ago today, skipping towards the bright lights of Blackpool. Never to be seen again.
It was late autumn, the final night of the season. During the evening, the 14-year-old was spotted in a bar at the seaside resort’s North Pier. Someone bought her a vodka and Coke. She left with a young friend. They headed for a dark, waste-strewn passageway lined on each side by the rear entrances to several takeaway food premises.
This was “Paki Alley”, where chips and alcohol were in plentiful supply for children smart enough to know that one good turn deserved another. Arcades and kebab shops were a cheap escape from teenage boredom but on that particular night, November 1, 2003, a crime took place which meant that Charlene never came home.
A decade on and the unsolved murder has barely registered with the mainstream public. By contrast, Britain’s far-right parties have taken such an interest in the Downes case that banners demanding “Justice for Charlene” were raised on football terraces by sections of hardcore fans.
Their focus was triggered by a 2007 criminal trial at which it was alleged that the child was killed by a Jordanian kebab-shop owner who later disposed of her body with the help of his Iranian business partner. No remains were discovered.
Lacking concrete proof of murder, the prosecution was built on hearsay evidence from an unreliable witness and on a police officer’s transcription of low-quality recordings from bugs placed in the flat and car of one of the suspects. Its accuracy was repeatedly challenged by the defence.
On the eve of a scheduled 2008 retrial, after the first hearing led to a hung jury, the case collapsed. Both defendants were acquitted. The far-right’s conspiracy theory — dark-skinned men getting away with the rape and murder of a white girl — gained strength in 2011 when it emerged that an unpublished police report identified more than 60 girls who were groomed for sex by Asian workers at a cluster of takeaways.
Today, Charlene’s disappearance will be marked by a memorial service in the town, organised by the British National Party. Tomorrow, its supporters will stage a demonstration against “Muslim grooming gangs”. Leading the tributes will be her parents, Robert and Karen Downes. They are cherished icons of the nationalist movement. But they sit on a hollow throne.
The truth, hidden until now, is that so many men of all creeds and colours were suspected of sexual offences against Charlene that when she first went missing the police did not know which way to turn. One of the trails led directly inside the Downes family home. Confidential witness statements, social services records and internal police reports reveal that the child protection authorities first became concerned about Charlene’s home environment in 1989, the year she was born.
Then, the family were living in the West Midlands. Police and social services launched a joint investigation because a convicted rapist, jailed three times for buggery and indecent assaults on two young girls, was a regular visitor to the house and was allowed unsupervised access to a child.
Mr Downes, now 52, was “strongly advised” by social services not to allow the man inside his home but the visits were suspected to have continued. A witness told the authorities she saw the rapist “fondling [a child] in the house and that the parents were present”. They deny that any such incident happened.
In 1998, when Charlene was 9, she and another girl alleged that they were being sexually abused by a man “trusted by Mr and Mrs Downes to take them to school”. He was charged with rape but the case collapsed when the other girl failed to give evidence.
Charlene’s parents told The Times that the man seemed trustworthy because “he had a girlfriend”. They rejected a police officer’s report that they “had some knowledge of the abuse but failed to act”.
The family moved to Blackpool in 1999 after Walsall social services threatened to prosecute the parents for wilful neglect and to have the children taken into care. In the North West, a succession of men were introduced to the family after meeting Mr Downes in local pubs. Some stayed overnight or even longer.
They included a man in his 50s who described Charlene, then 13, as his girlfriend, and a 40-year-old who later admitted to police that he paid her to carry out a sex act. Three days after Charlene vanished, a 34-year-old man, staying with the Downes family while on bail, was jailed for crimes that included indecent assaults on three young girls. He admitted indecently touching the missing child.
An account of life inside the Downes home came from an environmental health officer, visiting one morning on council business, who walked into a downstairs room to find Charlene, then 12, lying on a bed in a “skimpy” nightgown. Lying alongside her was a man in his 60s. The girl jumped up and “started to scoop a number of pound coins off the bed”. The man, “shaken and trembling”, began “pulling his trouser zip up and fastening his belt”.
In a witness statement, the council employee described his shock at “the situation I had stumbled into”. He said Charlene was quick to tell him that “it’s OK — he’s my uncle”. Mr Downes then entered the room, apparently unconcerned, and explained that the man was “a family friend”. The incident was reported to social services but “it was decided not to pursue the matter further due to lack of evidence, lack of co-operation from the family and no complaint from Charlene”.
Her parents described it as a misunderstanding. Mrs Downes blamed the council worker for being too “nosey”. They said that the man on the bed with Charlene was “a lovely, nice old man” who had merely been adjusting his trousers. Mr Downes said he did not know, at the time, that any of the men he brought home had a sexual interest in children.
The couple did not comment on a hospital doctor’s report from June 2000, when Charlene was 11, warning of suspected sexual abuse, nor on the 13 visits she made to an NHS walk-in centre over a 12-month period in 2002-03, when she regularly sought help for sexual health problems.
Her mother insisted this week that her husband always sought to protect their daughter. She described the documents seen by this newspaper as “widely exaggerated and untrue”.
This is the mother of a child who apparently made regular visits, aged 11, to a Salvation Army soup kitchen and was seen dancing for men outside a pub, aged 12. Her parents explained that she enjoyed going “to church” and often danced to “music that she liked”. It was against this background that Charlene began swapping sexual favours, during the final months of her life, with Asian and Arab takeaway workers.
The Times understands that, three months before she vanished, she was one of two girls driven by Asian men from Blackpool to a lay-by in Blackburn. There, at midnight, she walked down an alley with one of the men, returning an hour later. Back in Blackpool, she was handed an envelope. Her friend asked what was inside and was told it was “what I got for what I did in Blackburn”.
Another Asian man is known to have taken her to Manchester in an old BMW less than a week before she disappeared. Neither incident was connected to the two men who stood trial over her murder.
It can also be revealed that a week before she went missing, a white man with the “motive and opportunity to murder Charlene” gave her £40. He met her again on her final night. A police report described him as a “compulsive, perverted paedophile” living in “a squalid flat knee-deep in pornographic material of all types including those featuring young children”.
Lancashire Constabulary today announces a new investigation, pledging “an open mind” about the murder. Its inquiry will not be short of suspects. Some are white; some are not.
Evidence shows that Charlene Downes was failed throughout her life. Until now, she has also been failed in death. The reports suggest that she was let down by her parents, by care professionals, by dozens of sex abusers, by her killers and by a police force that mismanaged a murder inquiry.
Today, the BNP distorts her story to sow seeds of divisive malevolence. Too little cared for, too little mourned. She deserves better."
That is heartbreaking to read. What an awful short life she had. She was failed so many times, she could have been saved. Her parents are disgusting people. I can't imagine how miserable she must have felt, trapped in a life of being abused for food and money.
That poor girl
@Koalalalala thank you for posting that. I’ve been trying to read up on the case today but could find no report that hasn’t completely whitewashed over her parents atrocious behaviour.
The podcast glossed out the reason the family moved to Blackpool - the mum simply kept stating the kids loved Blackpool.
Charlene’s sister had apparently left the family home to live with “a family friend” at the age of 16. She later describes telling Charlene “you know I have to be home by 6.45” which is by the way, but made me think she’d been made to leave the family home and had a curfew.
The rest of the podcast slants heavily towards the men who were arrested being freed and later paid compensation, with Charlene’s mum outraged that they’d “got away with it” and been paid such a large sum. At this point I was actually agreeing with her.
But then it was almost casually mentioned that Charlene’s Dad kept bringing sex offenders home from the pub.
According to mum, it’s just because he’s a friendly guy, and he didn’t know what these men were like.
He’d take them home and sit boozing with them all afternoon.
What an awful coincidence that a these men he took home happened to turn out to be perverts and paedos
This last part of the picture was so soft focus in the way it was revealed, and the Mum proclaiming ignorance just made me feel sick.
Poor kids, and her siblings, just seemed to have a crap life and it could have been any seedy, POS who ended it
The podcast glossed out the reason the family moved to Blackpool - the mum simply kept stating the kids loved Blackpool.
Charlene’s sister had apparently left the family home to live with “a family friend” at the age of 16. She later describes telling Charlene “you know I have to be home by 6.45” which is by the way, but made me think she’d been made to leave the family home and had a curfew.
The rest of the podcast slants heavily towards the men who were arrested being freed and later paid compensation, with Charlene’s mum outraged that they’d “got away with it” and been paid such a large sum. At this point I was actually agreeing with her.
But then it was almost casually mentioned that Charlene’s Dad kept bringing sex offenders home from the pub.
According to mum, it’s just because he’s a friendly guy, and he didn’t know what these men were like.
He’d take them home and sit boozing with them all afternoon.
What an awful coincidence that a these men he took home happened to turn out to be perverts and paedos
This last part of the picture was so soft focus in the way it was revealed, and the Mum proclaiming ignorance just made me feel sick.
Poor kids, and her siblings, just seemed to have a crap life and it could have been any seedy, POS who ended it