At 10pm on Friday 29 January 2016, Esther Beadle closed the front door and walked out of her life. A journalist at the Oxford Mail, she was seen leaving her shared house in Cowley, about an hour’s walk from the centre of Oxford. Then she was gone.
When she didn’t turn up to meet a friend in London the next day, alarm bells started ringing. Within hours there were hundreds of tweets about her, describing her, detailing her last known movements, and asking for information.
But Esther hadn’t planned to become a missing person. She just wanted a break, and had taken herself somewhere else to get some space. “In my eyes, people were missing from me,” she told me last summer. “I’d removed myself from everything, to try to push the world away.”
About 180,000 people are reported missing in the UK every year, a number that is believed to be a significant underestimate. Among them are the individual stories that capture our collective, horrified attention: the people taken and harmed, or whose vanishing seems immediately to speak to something wider than the facts of the case alone, like the disappearance and death of Sarah Everard in March.
But there are innumerable reasons why a person might go missing. It is often, consciously or not, an attempt to exercise control in a life where things have started to slip. This control, however, is often illusory; when an online appeal springs up, a missing person’s image is circulated far and wide across social media, with any context and complexity to their story often stripped away.
I became fascinated by these stories as a way of understanding a disappearance in my own life. In my early childhood in the late 1990s, my father, Christobal, returned to his Spanish homeland from London, not long before my mother’s death. He was a young man, beset by a patchwork of vulnerabilities. After a brief visit to his home city a few months later, we lost touch – a silence that gradually became an estrangement. In the decades since, he became a missing person to me, if not to the world he knew back home. It set me on a path to discover: can you ever close one chapter of your life? If someone is missing you, do you have the right to be gone?
I meet Esther on an overcast afternoon in Newcastle city centre. We compare our recent attempts to quit smoking as I rustle for a filter tip and Esther pops a piece of nicotine gum. Her life now, she says, is very different from those frenzied days. She is healthy, happy and teaching journalism master’s students at Newcastle University.
On the day she disappeared, Esther had taken £150 out of a cashpoint and made her way to London, which she knew well from her student days, and where she had already made a reservation at a hotel.
By the Saturday afternoon, a friend she was due to meet sensed something was wrong and tweeted that Esther, then 27, hadn’t shown up to meet her and a former housemate. It was, the tweet ran, “very out of character”.
The next day, holed up in a nondescript Travelodge, Esther started to realise what was happening online. Her name was everywhere she looked, amplified across Facebook and Twitter. People speculated about where she was and why she had left. Her face, her personal details plastered everywhere. “Have you seen this woman? Red hair, glasses and a strong geordie accent”: an entire life stripped down to bullet points. One tweet even speculated about which tabloid would be the one to “pay the most” for the story of her disappearance.
“I’d planned to hole up in the hotel, which made total sense at the time. Then I could see [the social media] stuff blowing up. My face and people’s thoughts about me were being shared across the UK and beyond.” Esther says. She had just wanted to be alone, but this wasn’t what solitude was supposed to feel like. Her phone was deluged with increasingly panicked messages and phone calls, from family and relative strangers, including her year 9 geography teacher. Esther couldn’t bring herself to answer them. Then there were the actual strangers; people inserting themselves into her private messages, asking where she’d gone and when she was coming back. On the late afternoon of Sunday 31 January, Esther walked into St Thomas’ hospital, a few yards from the crowds of tourists on Westminster Bridge, and asked to see the mental health crisis team. Her missing episode, as the rest of the world seemed to be calling it, was over. She had been found safe and well, to use the standard policing jargon.
When someone goes missing, it is usually because a serious vulnerability has opened up in their lives. Though it is never reducible to a single cause, eight in 10 missing adults have a mental health condition. After Esther’s return, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), a condition that carries with it stigma and misunderstanding .
On the day of her disappearance, there were signs of what Esther now considers to be hypomania, a common hallmark of BPD. “I knew that I didn’t want anybody to know where I was going. I just knew I wanted to be away. Away from existence, I suppose. I booked the hotel on Expedia while I sat in my living room, chatting to my housemate telling me everything was fine, that I was going to be fine.”
Eighty-five per cent of missing adults return, as Esther did, within two days (that figure stands at 90% for children). In contrast to the volume of speculation expended on the missing, the act of returning is rarely discussed. Esther now advocates for mandatory “return interviews” for the people who do come home, to help understand the pressures that led to the disappearance and treat them before they build up to another flight.
Emphasis, Esther says, is usually placed on everyone but the missing person, “who is in this vacuum of support and, potentially, reality. I’ve never spoken about my missing episode in any kind of therapeutic environment.”
Almost everyone I’ve spoken to in the professional world of the missing – from academics and police to frontline mental health workers and the charity Missing People – has said something similar: that the person at the heart of the “missing episode” is often forgotten once they are found. There is often little support to help them access the services they need, or to soften the impact of their return – particularly, in helping them deal with worried loved ones who searched for them; worry that can sometimes slip into anger or resentment. And there is no programme to help vulnerable people deal with the shock of their image amplified, seemingly endlessly, across social media without their consent.
During the summer of 2019, I spoke to Joe Apps, the head of the National Crime Agency’s Missing Persons Unit, about whether the internet has made it harder for people to go missing. He felt the opposite may be true. Yes, you may have social media networks, he told me, but how robust are the relationships they engender? And if things start to unravel to the point of disappearance, how long would it take for these online connections to notice?
The impulse to want to find a missing person is understandable. It feels like the best (maybe the only) thing you can do in the face of that specific form of helplessness and grief. One can feel like an actor in a noble cause, to help locate someone who has slipped out of sight. The lost teenager or wandering dementia patient, whose face is staring back at you on Facebook or Twitter from a grainy picture, screenshotted from their social media profiles along with the police or family appeal itself.
I’ve spent more time than is healthy scrolling down the many amateur sleuth-run Facebook pages devoted to the hunt for the missing, of the kind where Esther’s appeal was circulated. Some focus on an individual case (often at the initiative of family and friends), while others are general sounding boards where dozens of appeals are posted a day, to varying degrees of interest or success.
Paula Adby, 45, is the founder of Help Find Missing People in the UK, one of the largest such groups with almost 3,000 members. Her interest in the missing stems from a case she’d seen circulating a number of years ago, near her Surrey home. Apart from the occasional story on the news, she had no idea how many people seemed to be vanishing every day, across the country. “It shocked the hell out of me. When someone goes missing you want to find them. The last two or three years, the group’s grown like crazy.” she says.
There have been a number of cases where the group’s strategy of trawling the internet has resulted in successful reconnections: mostly people who have lost contact with a loved one and had no idea where else to turn. But Adby says she hadn’t thought about the potential long-term impact of social media appeals on those that later returned. What motivated her, she says, was the feeling of “lying awake at night thinking, ‘Where are you? Please just go home,’ especially if they’re really young or have mental health problems.”
Though Adby and her fellow admins have a sincere desire to find the missing (voluntarily giving up much free time in the process), not everyone who wants to use the group is so scrupulous. They have to be wary. Recently, they received a panicked message from a woman who had run away from an abusive marriage with her child. “He was posting on our site trying to find her. We’ve had other people message us saying, ‘Please take that post down, we don’t want to be found by that person.’” Fleeing violence is not an exercise in the right to be forgotten, but an essential need, an instance when coming back holds more danger than going missing.
Physical appeals fade over time. The poster at the bus stop will be torn down or taped over in the days, weeks and months after a disappearance. But a viral tweet doesn’t decompose.
You are what Google says you are, runs a digital age truism. If the search engine or the long-dormant social media appeal says you’re a missing person, then that’s what you remain, returned or not. The effects on everything from employment prospects to fundamental questions of self-perception are likely to vary depending on a person’s individual vulnerability.
In one 2017 report, on the impact of publicity appeals in missing children cases, the mother of a teenager who had gone missing and attempted suicide at 16 expressed concern, two and a half years later, about her daughter still coming across news articles about it. Dr Karen Shalev Greene is director of the Centre for the Study of Missing Persons at the University of Portsmouth, as well as one of the report’s co-authors. She tells me that social media appeals are a double-edged sword.
“The instinct, as a family member, is to shout out as loud as you can. You want to do everything, and press every button.” It’s not that it’s the wrong thing to do, she adds. How, say, to second-guess the anguish of a parent living in the shadow of a missing child? “You’d take that one in a million chance. Families will take it because they’re desperate, and there is a chance that it will help.”
It’s almost impossible to accurately document the effectiveness of social media campaigns, though, as Greene explains, that isn’t their entire purpose. Several returned children, interviewed by Missing People, said that social media appeals convinced them that coming back would be safe; that there was someone who cared. Their amplification can make you feel less alone, on both sides of the missing divide: the searchers as well as the searched-for.
A few weeks after her return, Esther moved back to the north-east, determined to find some mental health support. “I’d gone from very intensive support to nothing. I’d spend until 4pm in bed and struggle to put my shoes on.” By the time we speak, after months of pinballing between services, she finally has the “bits and pieces” that have helped her life settle into its new, more stable rhythms.
Esther tells me that she still isn’t quite sure how to explain the precise nature of what happened that day in January 2016, when she walked away, and opened up her entire existence to unwanted speculation. “Is it what I did, or what happened to me? I can’t quite place myself in that. It might be that it’s a mixture of both.”
After spending so much time in the world of the missing, I’ve realised that those searching can end up just as lost as those that disappeared. The fear and frenzy that consumes friends and family when someone goes missing can cloud their actions once they return.
It would be fantasy to suggest that there haven’t been times when I have typed variations of my father’s name into Facebook or Google, on the random occasions when curiosity took over, against my better judgment. But these cursory searches reveal nothing, other than how much more effort it would take me to use these means to track him down.
Talking to Esther underlined to me that not everyone wants to be found. Or perhaps, after so many years, Christobal considers me just as missing from his life as I do him from mine.
