I found the last image of my missing son myself and had to search for him with my bare hands alone after police constantly fobbed me off. One mother's heartbreaking story...
Call it a mother’s instinct, but when Catherine O’Sullivan woke in the darkness of a winter morning in early March this year, she was seized by an immediate sense that something was terribly wrong.
‘I jumped out of bed and went straight to Jack’s room — and it was exactly as we’d left it,’ she recalls. ‘His light was on next to his bed and the bed wasn’t slept in. I ran downstairs and when the door was still locked, I immediately went into a deep panic.’
That gut reaction proved to be chillingly accurate: Jack is Catherine’s 23-year-old son, and that moment of visceral fear as the clock approached 5.30am on March 2 would prove to be the start of a spiralling nightmare that endures to this day.
Jack O'Sullivan, 23, who has been missing since March
Nearly five months on, Jack has still not returned home, and the enduring agony of his absence is compounded by anger about what the family sees as a catalogue of police failings in the search for their son.
Convinced the police have consigned Jack’s disappearance to the archives, they have turned into detectives themselves, meticulously piecing together his last movements by analysing hours of CCTV footage.
A desperate Catherine has combed areas that she believes her son may have visited in the final hours before he vanished, even searching them with her bare hands.
‘It’s hard to get up some days, but the alternative is to have to accept that Jack’s not with us and that we’re just going to have to find a way to live with that and I can’t,’ Catherine tells the Mail.
‘I simply can’t accept that nobody knows what happened — not when there are so many unanswered questions. I don’t know of any mother who would.’
Questions such as: Why did police restrict their examination of CCTV footage to the very early moments of Jack’s disappearance, when they knew that his phone remained active until much later?
Why have they not interviewed potential key witnesses in the areas where he was last seen or analysed phone records which show data usage equivalent to a nine-minute video in the hours after his last confirmed sighting?
And perhaps most bafflingly of all, why have they not even bothered to visit the location where the phone last gave off a signal, more than two hours after the last sighting of Jack, in the small hours of that wintry Saturday morning?
These are the questions that, along with husband Alan and her other son, Ben, 28, Catherine is determined to answer.
But the family are aware that every day that passes makes those questions harder to address. When Jack went missing, there was a fine dusting of snow on the ground at the family home in the village of Flax Bourton, five miles from Bristol. Today it is high summer, and the flowers are in full bloom.
A missing poster put up following Jack's disappearance nearly five months ago
Since March they have navigated assorted horrors, including the discovery of human remains left in suitcases earlier this month at the nearby Clifton Suspension bridge, not far from where their son was last seen. They were left in agony for two days until they were told it wasn’t Jack.
‘You just live from hour to hour really,’ Catherine, 52, confides. ‘Every time the phone rings or you hear a helicopter overhead you freeze. It has affected every part of us.’
How can it not? It is a bewildering turn of events to happen to a loving and close-knit family.
Together with his older brother Ben — the more outgoing of the two — Jack was raised within the protected confines of the private Clifton College school in Bristol, where Alan is a housemaster and Catherine a matron, although both are currently on compassionate leave.
Academically bright, both sons went on to university to study history — Ben at Cardiff, Jack at Exeter — and Jack decided to pursue a career in law. He enrolled on a law conversion course in Bristol, moving home to save money, and had secured himself three ‘vacation schemes’ for the summer.
‘He put in 38 applications when he was advised to do maybe five or six; that just gives you a tiny taste of the level of determination he had,’ says Catherine.
With many of Jack’s closest friends pursuing careers outside of Bristol, Catherine says her son had not been enormously social, but on Friday, March 1, he was invited to a birthday party by someone on his law conversion course.
‘He didn’t know those people particularly well and he wasn’t really that bothered about going,’ she says. ‘It makes what happens even worse because it was me that was telling him to go, if only for a few hours.’
Prior to going to the party, Jack — clad in navy chinos, a beige lambswool sweater and an olive-green quilted Barbour jacket — gave his mum a lift to a gathering of her own with friends to mark St David’s Day, before returning home to have something to eat.
Jack O'Sullivan, second from right, pictured with his brother Ben, mother Catherine and father Alan
He then took the bus into town at around half-past eight. ‘When I got back I could see that he’d had a glass of Coke, not even a beer, so I really felt he didn’t go out thinking he was going to have a big night out,’ Catherine says.
Jack met friends at a harbourside pub in Bristol city centre, arriving at the party venue in Hotwell Road at around 11pm.
Catherine later learned from one of the attendees that Jack had been involved in a minor altercation with other partygoers after reprimanding them when they laughed at him for tripping over, and that he had seemed drunker than usual.
‘I find that odd, as he didn’t strike me as intoxicated in any of his messages to me — you can sense when someone’s had a drink, but Jack was making full sentences with full stops,’ she says.
In their last text interaction, at 1.52am on March 2, Jack said he planned to stay out later than anticipated and was going to get a cab home. ‘I asked him if he had keys, and whether he had drunk too much, accompanied by a smiley face, and he replied saying he was fine and not to worry.’
Jack stayed at the party another hour, with CCTV footage showing him emerging on to the main road by the house at 2.57am, heading towards Hotwells, an area known as a good place to get a taxi.
She pauses. ‘And that was my last correspondence with him.’
Subsequent CCTV cameras captured him at various points walking around the harbour area. ‘It almost looks like he’s done an entire loop of what we call the Basin, a body of water in the middle of the harbour,’ Catherine says.
The last confirmed sighting at 3.38am — discovered by Catherine, not the police — shows him walking up a slip road towards a bridge on the northern side of the River Avon until he goes out of sight.
Ten minutes earlier he had made a call to a friend at a party which went unanswered. She called back five minutes later, and says the phone was answered by Jack with a ‘hello’ before the line went dead.
Volunteers gather at Cumberland Basin in Bristol in April to search for Jack
Less than two hours after that call was disconnected, Catherine woke at 5.25am to that profound sense of dread.
‘The only one other occasion where Jack didn’t come home he’d just rung me,’ she says. ‘He had no qualms about phoning me up in the middle of the night if he was in a spot of bother, so I just knew instantly that something terrible had happened.’
What she calls ‘blind panic’ followed as Catherine phoned her son’s mobile, to find it ringing out and going to voicemail, suggesting it was still active.
The locator app shared by the family, meanwhile, placed him at a residential address in the Hotwells area a few minutes’ walk away from the party venue. ‘Given that the last time I had looked before going to sleep the phone had accurately placed him at the party venue I had no reason to believe this wasn’t correct,’ she says. ‘I woke Alan and said we needed to go to this address now.’
The O’Sullivans made the four-mile journey to the location shown on the phone, only to find it led to an area of housing rather than an exact address. ‘We spent an hour there, going up and down. I didn’t really want to knock on everyone’s door because it was 6am but we approached anyone we saw.’
Returning home at 7am, the O’Sullivans felt they had to call the police, only to be told it was ‘too soon’ to report Jack missing. But by 11am, Catherine could wait no more. A policeman arrived later that day to take a statement, and a few hours later the family received a devastating phone call to say that the police had CCTV of what they believed to be Jack in close proximity to water.
‘The officer said that given that he was a young male who had been to a party they felt it was most likely that he’d fallen in the river,’ she says. ‘It was almost beyond words. Very early on they quoted national statistics that for males reported missing on a night out, 85 per cent of those in the vicinity of water end up drowning, and I think the police’s mindset was that from the start.’
The family did not know at that point that CCTV footage captured Jack alive later that night. And within 24 hours, another officer — sent to the O’Sullivans’ home to test a set of keys they mistakenly believed might have been Jack’s — cast doubt on the evidence that Jack had been near the water.
‘He told us they couldn’t even confirm that the footage police had seen was Jack, but might instead have just been a shadow on the railings. So at this point we just started to think: “Hang on, what’s happening?”
‘But equally we’re in such shock that we’re not functioning very well at all,’ says Catherine. ‘We had no experience and didn’t know what we were facing.’
Even so, ‘alarm bells were ringing’ early enough for Catherine to ask for access to CCTV footage of her son going missing — especially after learning that the initial trawl of CCTV did not extend to the time police knew that Jack’s phone was still active.
CCTV obtained by police shows Jack in the area of Brunel Lock Road and Brunel Way in Bristol in the early hours of March 2
She says that while she was not actively refused, she was consistently fobbed off.
‘I was just told, “Oh, it’s not necessary, it has been done thoroughly”,’ she recalls. The police relented only after the family made an appeal via the BBC ten days after Jack had gone missing.
‘They came with a memory stick, installed it on my laptop, and left me with it,’ she says. Along with Alan, she spent two weeks watching the footage frame by frame, even visiting the areas depicted in person to check that the angles shown made sense.
Following one of those visits, she found CCTV footage showing what would be the final sighting of Jack, walking along the top of Plimsoll Bridge on the north side of the River Avon — away from where police had last placed him on CCTV nearly half an hour earlier.
Moreover, while police had said ‘phone triangulation’ placed Jack in the area of the bridge, they said this suggested he was in the water.
‘Immediately I just watched this dot travelling along and I knew it was Jack. So I called my husband to look at it and we watched it 20 times, and then I picked up the phone and said: “I think I’ve found Jack on CCTV heading a different way.”
'And the officer sounded quite shocked and said he’d get back to me,’ Catherine says now. ‘They were shocked that this had been missed. So the phone was quite accurate with its crossing for that phone call, but he was just on the bridge, and not under it.’
It is one of many moments during the investigation that has left the family baffled, not in the least the police’s decision not to thoroughly search the area where Jack’s phone last gave off a signal — an overgrown area with an electricity substation.
The O’Sullivans called the electricity board, who came out to clear it so the family could scrutinise it for evidence, digging with their bare hands. ‘They said no one from the police had contacted them,’ says Catherine.
Catherine O'Sullivan wears a T-shirt featuring her son's face in a bid to find someone who can give her more information about her son's disappearance
Many local residents in Hotwells have told the family they have never been approached about the case. It has been left to friends to set up a website appealing for information and to leaflet the areas where Jack was last seen.
‘We are so grateful to people, some of whom don’t even know us, for all their efforts,’ says Catherine.
In a statement, Avon and Somerset Police said they have carried out an extensive investigation, reviewing more than 100 hours of CCTV footage, as well as ‘carrying out expert-led searches’ and ‘issuing multiple appeals to the public and media for information’.
Yet for the family, the horror goes on: a fortnight ago, they were contacted by an officer who told them that a ‘skull and bones’ had washed up on a beach in Weston-super-Mare, but it would take weeks to identify them as the family had not agreed to give out Jack’s dental records.
‘We had never not agreed to that,’ says Catherine. A five-hour wait followed before the family were told that the bones were historic. ‘It was so abrupt, no compassion at all about what we might be going through,’ she says.
Today Catherine, together with Alan and Ben, feel the police have all but ‘given up’, with their once regular correspondence reduced to a weekly email.
But she insists this family’s desperate search will never end until they get to the truth. ‘Someone out there knows what happened,’ Catherine says. ‘And until we know otherwise, anything is possible.’
- If you have any information please call 101 quoting REF: 5224055172 or visit findjackosullivan.co.uk
