‘People have told me he was cut up and fed to the pigs, that he was chopped up and put in a lobster pot, that he was thrown overboard in the middle of the Channel, that his head was kicked like it was a soccer ball, that he was stuck with a pitchfork…’ says Val Nettles, reeling off just some of the horrifying rumours she has heard in the 28 years since her son Damien vanished.
‘All of these things can’t be true,’ she continues. ‘But they stay in my mind, like visualisations. Even if I dismiss a rumour, those thoughts are still here.’
The 72-year-old is speaking to Metro over Zoom from her home in Texas, thousands of miles from the windswept Isle of Wight where Damien was brought up. Val and her husband Ed, who met at university in 1973, moved to the island in 1990.
Val had been brought up on the Isle of Wight and it seemed a tight-knit, safe area to raise their four children. Gurnard, the village where they lived, was the type of place where you’d leave your windows open if you popped out to the shops and where teenagers roamed freely between each other’s homes.
On Saturday, November 2 1996, Val waved goodbye to Damien, 16, as he headed out the door around 7.30pm. The teenager braved the grey and gusty evening to meet with his friend Chris Boon and his brother Davey, as well as two 14-year-old girls they knew.
When Damien and Chris grew bored of the small gathering, they went in search of a more exciting Saturday night.
The friends popped into an Alldays newsagent and picked up a few cans of the – now discontinued – White Lightning cider. The strong drink (7.5%) made the pair merry as they jumped on a ferry from East Cowes to Cowes, a journey took just a few minutes.
After wandering around the town centre, at 10.30pm the boys parted ways. But instead of heading home to dry off from the rain like Chris had, Damien nipped into local chip shop Yorkies where some Army personnel were ordering food. In an interaction caught on the shop’s CCTV, he ordered some chips.
When the manager of Yorkies closed up shop, she spotted Damien, dressed in blue jeans and a dark fleece, stride past at 11.45pm.
Witnesses saw the teenager walking along the High Street and he was last seen around 12:02am on November 3 on street CCTV. Police have since lost this footage.
The following morning, on November 3, Damien’s family woke and realised he hadn’t come home. Val and Ed called his friends then jumped into their car and drove all across the island looking for their lost son.
While the Coastguard scanned the waters for Damien that day, police refused to send out search teams or sniffer dogs immediately.
‘I was panic stricken that my child was gone,’ Val, who was a medical receptionist at the time, recalls. ‘He might be 6ft 3, but he’s still a little boy to me.
‘I think a lot of apathy about his disappearance came from tired policemen with very little professional curiosity. They thought “oh, another missing kid, they’re a pain in the arse.” They said he’d be back by tea-time. But Damien had never gone missing before, which is why it was totally out of character.’
To begin with, police assumed the 16-year-old had run away or fallen into the sea. Val disagrees. She thinks Damien came to harm in ‘an accident gone wrong’ and that someone on the island knows what happened to her son.
‘I feel strongly that something has happened to Damien that stopped him coming home,’ she says tearfully. ‘I’d love to think he’d gone off because he wanted to but I honestly, hand on heart, do not believe that. Something bad happened to Damien, I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time around the wrong people.
‘There is the suggestion he fell into the sea, but Damien was a strong swimmer and he knew better than to go anywhere near the water in bad weather. It was rough that night, it was blowing a gale with driving rain coming over the seafront. He would have stayed on the streets that were lit, not gone towards a very dark unlit seafront that was being pounded by sea and rain.
‘My husband spoke to the harbour master in Cowes, who was fairly adamant that, given the way the tides were in the early hours of November 3, that if Damien had gone into the water then his body would have been “pushed” back into shore and he would have been found.
‘A lot of people assume he went to America, where my husband is from, or Singapore where we lived before the Isle of Wight. But he didn’t take his passport and I don’t think he would ever do that. He always kept in contact with us.’
As days turned into weeks, Val kept pushing the police to carry out more searches and pleaded with local businesses to put up missing posters. She thumbed through the Yellow Pages business directory and found the charity Missing People who she reached out to for support.
Val ended up having 20 weeks of counselling in the aftermath of Damien’s disappearance. Heartbreakingly, five years after the 16-year-old vanished, the Nettles family was forced to leave the Isle of Wight and move to America when Ed lost his job. Val kept all of Damien’s belongings; from drawings he’d done as a child to Christmas ornaments he’d made and treasures all her memories of her son.
Val remembers how he weighed 7lbs 10oz and had ‘big brown eyes’ when he was born on June 21, 1980. She writes online about his love of music and how, aged just 11, he started a band called Distorted Justice with his friend Alex Roberts. She remembers conversations with Damien where he revealed he hoped to become a marine biologist.
‘I have kept his school work, his clothes, his guitars, the love notes he wrote to his girlfriend Gemma, everything,’ Val, a former administrative assistant, explains.
‘It’s surprising how important every single tiny crumpled thing he might have touched, made or written on has become to me. When we left the Isle of Wight the strangest thing happened when I carried a final box out his bedroom. His passport fell out the box and onto the floor, I felt strongly like this was him saying “please don’t leave me behind.”’
Despite the distance between her new home of Texas and her old home of the Isle of Wight, Val diligently kept posting on social media and reaching out for help in her mission to find Damien. She gave endless interviews, in the hopes that someone reading a magazine in a dentist office or doctor’s surgery might just look up and see her son in front of them.
Someone is reported missing every 90 seconds in the UK. That means life is lonely, scary and uncertain for 170,000 families every year.
Missing People is the only UK charity dedicated to reconnecting them and their loved ones and that's why this year Metro is proudly supporting them for our 2025 Lifeline campaign.
To help raise vital funds for the charity we would love you to join us on on 3 May for a 25km, 53km or 106km hike on the beautiful Isle of Wight.
Registration starts at just £15 with a fundraising minimum of £240 (25km) / £360 (58km). Alternatively, you can pay for your place and set your own fundraising target.
Whether you want to do it as a group or are signing up solo, as part of Team Lifeline, you’ll receive tons of support and advice, so that every step you take can make a massive difference helping those whose loved ones have disappeared.
Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary have made a total of eight arrests in relation to Damien’s disappearance with each individual later let go. In 2011, a house on Marsh Road in Gurnard on the Isle of Wight was searched after a 44-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman were investigated. Previous arrests in connection to Damien’s disappearance included four men from the Isle of Wight and a ‘person’ from Kent.
When contacted for latest updates into the case, Detective Inspector Julia Nicol from Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary told Metro: ‘Our shared objective with the Nettles family remains finding out what happened to Damien after he was last seen in Cowes in November 1996 by following all viable lines of enquiry.
‘It’s important to stress that this is still an open case and any new credible information will be explored for any viable lines of enquiry. Despite the length of the investigation we all hope that a line of enquiry will be identified to us at some stage that will allow us to provide answers to the Nettles family about Damien’s disappearance.’
In 2016, the BBC released an eight-part documentary called ‘Unsolved – The Boy Who Disappeared.’ Investigative journalists found that a ‘key suspect’ in Damien’s case was known to ‘intimidate’ potential witnesses on the Isle of Wight but, still, the mystery of his disappearance has never been solved.
Despite everything, the teenager’s family and friends have never given up hope of finding out what happened to him. There have been events like ‘Dig for Damien’ which saw his friends search Parkhurst forest and Spencers Copse on the Isle of Wight for a body after a tip-off from an ex-police informant who has since been deemed unreliable.
Hampshire Police turned down the opportunity for Damien’s case to be covered on Crimewatch, much to his family’s disappointment as they hoped it could lead to new leads.
Whenever Val gets new information, she feeds it back to the police. There are still unanswered questions which keep her up at night. Damien had a camera when he went out with Chris, why has it never been found? How was important CCTV tape of her son on the High Street mysteriously lost by police? Was her son really involved with drugs?
‘The only hope I have is that someone will come up with the information we need to find answers, or that Damien’s remains will be found,’ says Val.
‘At this point, I don’t even want retribution. If someone is arrested, I want them to tell me where my child is. Then we can lay him to rest and get out of this cycle we’ve been in for 28 years, of not really having a life outside of this dilemma. It’s very debilitating to live like this.’
Val wrote a book about her experience called ‘The Boy Who Disappeared’ and also writes on Substack. She finds writing therapeutic.
Through the charity Missing People, which she describes as a ‘lifeline’, the 72-year-old has been able to reach out to other parents whose children have gone missing and understand what it’s like to spend agonising years without closure. Val has become a member of the Advisory group for Missing People and attends creative writing sessions for other families of the missing.
One friend made through the charity is Nicki Durbin from Suffolk whose son Luke, 19, vanished in 2006. She and Val walked together in the 2008 ‘March for the Missing’ with several other families through London which called on greater support for families like theirs. When the mums feel particularly low, they imagine Damien and Luke together.
Val adds: ‘Nicki and I like to think that, if the boys are really gone, then they’re both sitting out there somewhere, having a beer together. A lot of families I’ve met through Missing People share this kind of loss that other people don’t always understand.
‘It’s an ambiguous loss. We have no conclusion, no ideas, no new information. Even after all these years, these rumours, a documentary, we still don’t know what happened to Damien. All we have is the facts. But I’ll never stop looking for answers.’
Anyone with new information about Damien or his disappearance can contact Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary by phoning 101 or emailing operation.ridgewood@hampshire.police.uk. You can also contact Missing People via the details on the poster below.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Kirsten.Robertson@metro.co.uk
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