What it’s really like for people who’s lives are torn apart by their loved ones going
Why did the man found dead in a Kensington mews in January 1994 have a scrap of torn-off paper in his pocket with the name ‘Vincent Akpprofoft’ scribbled on it? Was that his name? If so, why would he be walking around with his own handwritten name in his pocket?
And who was the barefoot woman killed on the A1(M) near Baldock in 1975, dressed in black cords beneath a denim skirt and a leather waistcoat? A milkman said she’d asked him for a yoghurt from his milk float a few hours before her body was found, and she’d spoken in a foreign accent. No one ever came forward to report her missing.
Debbie Griggs on her wedding day
Those are lost identities. Alongside them, running in parallel, are the missing: people with full identities who vanished without trace, and whose grieving families, decades on, can’t find rest or closure. A person is reported missing in the UK every 90 seconds, on average. Most of them return, but 13,000 have not.
George Johnston was one such. A young husband and father, he was swimming back towards the shore in Norfolk in 1984, having rescued another father and son in trouble in their dinghy, when he was swept away by a wave. No trace of him was ever found. Another was a pregnant mother, Debbie Griggs, who vanished from Deal in Kent in 1999. Parents at the school gate were concerned when her husband Andrew did the school run the next morning, which was out of character. He’d been having an affair with a 15-year-old girl. He was definitely a suspect, but there was not a strong enough case to bring him to court.
In the first weeks after those cases were reported, they received full police attention. But, as retired detective inspector Dave Grimstead knows all too well and explains in this moving and unsettling book, unsolved cases like those ‘fall down the slippery slope of resource constraints and short attention spans’. Grimstead saw ‘how the lighthouse turning its beam onto something new meant that another family’s tragedy was largely cast into darkness’.
Driven by a belief that neither the grieving nor the unidentified should ever be abandoned, he and a former colleague, cold-case investigator Kevin Pittman, decided to do something to counteract the withdrawal of police attention. In 2020, they founded an organisation called Locate International, powered by volunteers willing give up their time to help search for the missing, and identify the nameless dead.
A person is reported missing in the UK every 90 seconds, on average. Most of them return, but 13,000 have not.
The project took off. Locate International now has thousands of people across the country working on cases the police have long since given up on. With the backing of those retired officers, they have access to files, and receive all necessary training and resources.
Sounds attractive? A nice little sideline in Miss Marple-ing for anyone interested in true crime? Well, yes; but think twice before taking it on, because the work is repetitive and thankless, all too often ending in banging your head against a wall when yet another lead comes to nothing. You might search in vain for years for a single person who noticed a woman wandering into an office building to commit suicide.
In 2004, a smartly dressed woman did exactly that. She wandered into Wembley Point in north-west London, went to the cafe on the 21st floor, had a cup of coffee, read the Guardian and smoked a cigarette. Then she walked to the window and threw herself to her death. No one came forward to report her missing.
Grimstead salutes Locate International’s steadfast volunteers, such as Andrea, Yvonne, Chung and Angela (a retired church minister and anti-money-laundering investigator ‘with a mind like a filing cabinet’). They get totally absorbed in baffling cases, refusing to give up, plugging away for years on end. Often, at weekly virtual meetings with the team, they admit they’ve been dreaming about the missing or unidentified person, so deeply do the cases get under their skin. Sligo Man, Waltham Forest Man, Port Logan Woman, Kensington Man, Baldock Woman… the volunteers are fired by the certainty that someone, somewhere, must be grieving for these people, even if the body was found half a century ago.
Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple stories always have satisfying resolutions. Sadly, in real life, mysteries are not always solved. Of the ten or so cases Grimstead tells us about, roughly half are solved and half not. So, as the reader, you’re sometimes left in limbo, echoing the limbo of the grieving relatives or of the dead person who has never been reunited with his or her family.
Wembley Point Woman: unsolved. When the Guardian ran a piece on the case in 2023 (inspired to do so by the fact that the woman had been reading the Guardian) a woman got in touch who believed the woman was one of her Congolese clients, Fatima, who’d been trafficked to the UK. But Locate traced Fatima and found her to be alive and well.George Johnston: unsolved. A dead body washed up on the coast of France ten days after his disappearance, dressed in blue shorts, just as George had been, and was buried in the town of Ambleteuse. Was it George’s body? It was exhumed for DNA testing, and found not to be. Locate’s oceanographer worked out that George’s body probably washed up somewhere in Holland.
With Kensington Man, Baldock Woman and Debbie from Deal, there were breakthroughs, making the years of toil worthwhile. On close digital inspection, the name on Vincent’s scrap of paper turned out to be the Nigerian surname ‘Akpiroroh’. The team managed to find his birth certificate and to find someone in Battersea who remembered him from childhood in 1961. Vincent was a deaf-mute, hence his name on the scrap of paper.
With Baldock woman, a couple came forward who’d given free lodging to a girl called Odile in 1972. The team located someone who’d known Odile in Cambridge and said she’d come from Saint-Lo in Normandy. And, thanks to volunteer Andrea urging for the case to be brought back to court, Debbie’s body was found buried under Andrew’s garden in Dorset, and he was convicted of her murder.
One plea of families grieving for missing relatives is ‘Please don’t let other families endure years of silence and uncertainty, as we have.’ Thanks to Locate International, their plea has more chance of being answered.