Expert who hopes he can find student Jack O'Sullivan

Twenty-seven years ago, Sergeant Charlie Hedges found a note on his desk from one of his superior officers at Thames Valley Police.

‘Can you sort this out please, Charlie?’ it read.

The note was attached to a case file relating to the disappearance of a 19-year-old man, who had travelled to a dance festival in Milton Keynes but never made it back to his B&B that night.

Sgt Hedges was dismayed to find, in his words, a ‘bloody mess’: there was little to no paperwork, and the police response was largely confined to a dispute over whether Thames Valley or the force in the man’s home town many miles away should take responsibility for the case.

The fallout from this would ultimately lead Hedges on a mission to transform the way constabularies all over the country respond to the annual 350,000 missing person reports in the UK. In the process, he’s become one of the foremost experts in the field.

His advice has been sought in some of the UK’s most high-profile disappearances, including those of weapons expert David Kelly, who killed himself in 2003, and five-year-old April Jones, who was abducted and murdered in her home village of Machynlleth, Wales, in 2012.

He also helped overhaul police procedure, as well as becoming an authority in some of the more obtuse elements of missing person searches, from tide patterns to smuggling compartments in boats, planes and vans.

When Hedges, by now a DCI, eventually retired in 2015 to work in a private capacity – he’s also chair of trustees of the charity Locate International – he was confident that the police response to missing persons had vastly improved.

Yet nearly three decades on from that first jolt of dismay, the 71-year-old has found himself involved in another case which could also be described as a ‘bloody mess’.

Once again, it involves a young man, but this one is Jack O’Sullivan, the 23-year-old law student who went missing in Bristol in the small hours of a freezing March night after attending a party.

More than six months on, Jack’s mother Catherine, father Alan and brother Ben are no closer to knowing what happened to him – and in their desperation it is to Charlie Hedges that they have turned for help.

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As he reveals today, he was contacted by the family in May, after Ben came across an article in which Hedges recalled the story of the man in Milton Keynes – whom he calls ‘Rob’ – and spoke candidly about the sorry state of missing persons investigations back in the day.

‘From the headline about what a mess it had been Ben initially thought the article was about Jack,’ Hedges says wryly. ‘And when I spoke to the family I could see why.

‘A lot of the same errors from back then were being carried forwards. On the whole things have been a lot better in terms of the way cases are investigated and managed but it’s not universally changed. And it all falls down when attitudes are not right.’

Genial and thoughtful – and categorically not a finger pointer – Hedges is certainly in a position to know.

Largely down to his determination, the guidance for ‘mispers’ – as missing persons are known in police parlance – was transformed from a ‘tick box’ exercise to a more rounded, hands-on and, perhaps equally pertinently, compassionate response.

He developed a risk ‘triage’ in terms of questions that should be asked in the wake of someone’s disappearance and the information that needs to be gathered. It remains in use to this day.

Given his measured outlook it is nothing less than damning when he describes the response he got when he approached Avon and Somerset police on the O’Sullivans’ behalf.

‘I thought that because of my reputation I could be a kind of honest broker between the police and the family,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, they [the police] weren’t having that at all.

‘It was quite a shock to me, because having been around the police service for most of my life, I know how it works. But I was completely stonewalled by what felt like this amorphous, black blob that wouldn’t let me anywhere close.’

One senior police officer he reached out to directly told him: ‘We know what we’re doing.’

Yet Jack’s family don’t feel reassured the force know what they’re doing, and argue that because police quickly became fixated with the theory that he fell into water they ignored other lines of enquiry.

It was Jack’s mother, for example, who uncovered CCTV evidence that he was alive later than had been thought.

Through his work, Hedges knows the agony of families who never find out what happened to their loved ones.

He says: ‘And in Jack’s case, what makes it worse is that they haven’t got the confidence to know that everything that could have been done has been done, that the effective response was efficient. Catherine and Alan and Ben feel they haven’t got that confidence.’

Certainly, if anyone has the right expertise it’s Hedges, who has also worked at the UK Missing Persons Bureau as the Liaison and Support Officer and at the renowned Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre as manager for Missing and Abducted Children.

He explains statistics around missing people are usually reassuring: 90 per cent return within 48 hours, and fewer than one per cent are unresolved within a month.

‘But however long they are gone for, the starting point is to remember that going missing is an indicator of telling us something in their life,’ says Hedges. ‘Missing people don’t go missing without a reason. It might be a fairly innocuous reason, which we can resolve fairly quickly, but there is a reason, because most of us really want to go back home – and that they haven’t can sometimes be an indicator in itself.’

By that he means the ways missing persons cases can be connected to other crimes, such as sexual exploitation.

Hedges was closely involved in securing convictions for the horrific 2010 sex abuse ring uncovered by police in Derby, in which a gang of men groomed and sexually abused up to 100 teenage girls.

‘For the first time such exploitation was recognised and this led to many more cases being uncovered in towns and cities throughout the UK,’ says Hedges.

Meanwhile, tracing other missing teenagers has led to the blowing open of county lines networks.

Sadly, not everyone is found alive – including Rob, whose body was subsequently uncovered in the reed beds of a large body of water by which he had last been seen. The police had not previously properly searched it.

Yet mystery remained as to what, exactly, had happened to him: contrary to police assumptions at the time, he had no alcohol or drugs in his system, and while there had been sightings of another male at the lake at the same time, investigating officers had made little effort to track him down.

‘This case changed my life, leading me to drive change in the response to missing persons,’ he says. ‘It still sits with me today.’

Just six years later, in July 2003, Hedges received a call asking him to look into the disappearance of David Kelly, the Welsh scientist and weapons expert who had just appeared before a parliamentary committee relating to the previous year’s publication of the dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to which he had contributed.

Hedges was called in personally by Thames Valley’s then Assistant Chief Constable Mick Page.

‘I felt there was a good chance this isn’t going to end well,’ he recalls.

Believing suicide was the most likely answer, because of the scientist’s fragile state of mind, Hedges thought of places he visited regularly. Kelly’s body was found exactly where Hedges directed the search team, at a spot on a walk he frequently took near his Oxfordshire home.

‘We always had hope,’ he says now. ‘It could have been a search and rescue operation, and that was the thing you have to keep in mind, to keep the urgency going. You cannot make assumptions.’

Then in October 2012, within 30 minutes of the disappearance of missing five-year-old April Jones, who had vanished after last being seen getting into a vehicle not far from her home, Hedges was called in by Dyfed-Powys Police.

‘We discussed plans for the immediate response and remained in contact throughout the investigation,’ he says.

From the start, the report of the last child witness to see her had stood out to Hedges.

‘She said that April had got into the wrong side of the car. That suggested she had gone in willingly – meaning with someone she knew – but we couldn’t really work out what “the wrong side” meant, if anything at all. But in an investigation, you cannot let things wash away.’

When Mark Bridger – who was later convicted of murdering the little girl – was arrested, he was found to have a left-hand drive Land Rover.

April’s body was never found – although 17 fragments of bone were recovered from the fireplace in Bridger’s cottage – and Hedges has a special reserve of compassion for those whose loved ones never come home and whose bodies are never found.

‘There are plenty of families who have been through that situation where someone’s walked out the door and they haven’t turned up again, and they still live with that agony for years, and it never goes away,’ he says.

As the father of a 35-year-old son, Tom, he also cannot help put himself in their place.

‘It’s called ambiguous loss and it’s horrendous for families,’ says Hedges.

He admits that when he first looked at the specifics of Jack O’Sullivan’s case, like Somerset and Avon police he too initially thought that Jack – who had been drinking, and was said to have fallen down stairs at the party – may have tumbled into one of the many waterways on his final known route after he left the party in the Hotwells area of Bristol.

National statistics show that for males reported missing on a night out, 85 per cent of those in the vicinity of water end up drowning.

‘That was my first hypothesis – it fits men missing on a night out. I know the man who wrote that research, and I’ve been closely involved with it and used it on many, many occasions,’ Hedges says. ‘And it does fit, so the police are not wrong about that, but it doesn’t account for 100 per cent of cases, and you should never focus on a single scenario.’

He was particularly struck by Catherine’s passionate sense that something was desperately wrong from the moment she woke up at 5.30am and found her son’s bed empty at the family home in Flax Bourton, around five miles from Bristol town centre.

‘There is a strong case for “Listen to mum”. We all know that some mothers can be very overprotective. But any investigator’s job is to listen and discern the message behind the words. And if you look at everything that Catherine said about this case, she knew instinctively that something was wrong,’ he says.

He points out the fact that the mother and son were so close that Jack would never hesitate to call her if he needed help, no matter how late or inconvenient.

‘And that is part of the puzzle,’ he says. ‘If he still had his phone, and was struggling to get home, then why didn’t he call her?’

After the call from Ben in May appealing to him to help, Hedges met the family over Zoom before travelling to Bristol from his home in Buckingham.

Since then, he has worked seven days a week – unpaid – trying to sift through the mountain of information that has flooded in and overseeing areas of investigation he felt might be useful.

It was Hedges who suggested searching underneath the two bridges over which Jack is known to have walked with metal detectors to see if he had dropped his phone – which has never been found – onto the banks of the water below, as well as searching the areas around where Jack’s phone gave off its last GPS location signal at 5.40am.

Hedges recognises this is a singularly difficult case, not in the least because of the geography of the area where Jack went missing. When he undertook a tour with Catherine, he was struck immediately by the ‘challenging’ nature of the search area.

‘The water and the roads network there is incredibly complex,’ he says. ‘And the other thing that struck me was that walking around some of those areas is that I’m not sure I want to be there at two o’clock in the morning. It’s quite dark and not very nice.

‘At that time of the morning, a young man could be vulnerable to walking into something going on around there, be it drug dealing or similar. You also have to have your wits about you if you’re crossing over those roads, so that adds to the potential for all sorts of things happening.

‘The police will say that they did lots of searches, but it’s been quite difficult to discern exactly what they have and haven’t done, and that’s what I would have liked to have been able to understand.’

It is not knowing exactly what has been thoroughly searched – and what hasn’t – as well as ongoing issues with accessing data from Jack’s mobile phone and Apple AirTag, that continue to haunt the family.

‘These are the two things really troubling them,’ he says. ‘If you have any humanity at all, you can understand the personal story there.

‘In today’s digital and connected world, it is hard to imagine that someone can simply vanish without trace, but this is what has happened to Jack. Is there something that we do not know about?’

He pauses. ‘Maybe something that someone has seen will help us to unlock this mystery.’