The Missing

Rachel Pickthall has been birdwatching for as long as she can remember. It's a passion she shared with her older brother Simon and as children, the pair spent many an evening together camped out in their back garden, bird guide in one hand and binoculars in the other.

In late December 2013, Simon, then aged 48, travelled to Bempton Cliffs on the Yorkshire coast, the UK's largest mainland seabird colony. The last few years hadn't been kind to him...

Sandra Gant of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex has three daughters, Carrie, Michaela and Lauren. Their relationship with their mother has always been fraught, complicated as it was by her struggles with alcoholism. Sandra lost a lot of battles with her demons over the years but as we all know, addiction is a war…one Sandra was very much still fighting when she disappeared on the 14th of November, 2003. The Gant siblings knew the police could only be so helpful.....

Consider what the average person goes through when they’re trying to locate a missing loved one. For starters there’s the ongoing dialogue with the authorities, where you’re doing your utmost to provide the investigation with the information it needs to progress. Then you have the media, as well as poster and online campaigns to manage, in an effort to get the word out as quickly as possible...

It doesn’t matter how old your children get, whenever they go on a trip you’re always dreading that phone call…The one that often comes in the early hours of the morning…The one with the solemn voice at the end of the line. 

The Nutley family of the Welsh village of Caerwent, received one such call in October 2004. James, who at 25 was the eldest son, had failed to return to his hotel after the first night of a golfing trip...

When Carmel Fenech went missing in London in the summer of 1998, her mother Deirdre, of Broadfield, Crawley, didn’t panic. She was well practised at bringing her daughter home.This wasn't the first, second or even tenth time her child had gone AWOL. Carmel had a well documented drug problem, one that had pulled her into the orbit of people and places that no-one, let alone a sixteen year old girl, should find themselves...

What would you do if the police knocked on your door one day and told you they had just arrested your parents for your brother’s murder? That was the nightmare scenario facing Victoria Orr, whose beloved mother and father were taken into custody in September 2020, suspected of killing their own son. Steven Clark had vanished during a walk in the seaside village of Saltburn almost two decades earlier, when he was twenty-three years old...

The Missing is BACK - Launching on June 12th - a brand new series with TEN more stories of long-term missing people.

Once again brought to you with the support of the charities Locate International and Missing People, and hosted by Pandora Sykes.

A What's The Story Sounds Production

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Take a look on the list of missing people on the missingpeople website, and you’ll see a large number of them are Vietnamese nationals. For years, traffickers have been bringing young people into the country from Vietnam – often illegally – and these people have then gone missing. This episode explores this issue – asking how they arrive in the country, why they vanish, and why it’s often the case that they’ll escape the relative safety of local authority care to once again disappear...

Anthony was 27 years old when he vanished in 2012, near his home in Colchester, Essex. He withdrew cash at an ATM a few minutes walk from the house he shared with his parents. But from there… he seemingly vanished. Police investigators used data from his phone to reveal he’d last been around 2-3 miles from home, but they had no clue exactly where he had gone, or why. And for ten years there has been no further sightings...

Lorraine was 35-years-old and lived in Essex. She was last seen by her partner, in 1998, waving him off in a taxi as he took a trip abroad. When he returned, there was no sign of Lorraine, and there have been no sightings since. This episode tells Lorraine’s story and asks listeners if they might hold the vital clue which could finally resolve this mystery.

For more information on every episode from every series visit https://themissingpodcast...