Spanish police searching for missing holidaymaker Jay Slater are investigating his background to determine whether it is ‘relevant’ to his disappearance.
The 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, vanished last Monday morning after attending a three-day rave in Tenerife.
Amateur sleuths and psychics have sparked a carnival of hysteria and chaos surrounding the investigation by spreading wild, false, and even malicious theories about his disappearance on social media, including the sick idea that he has faked his disappearance to pocket the GoFundMe cash.
Some cruel trolls have even made the unfounded claim that he has been kidnapped after a drugs deal went wrong with criminal enforcers holding him to pay back the debt. Others have alleged that he lost the drugs or pocketed the money himself and is lying low until the heat dies down.
The speculation was fueled when, shortly after he vanished, Jay’s mother, school finance officer Debbie Duncan, 55, was sent a menacing Snapchat message that read: ‘Kiss goodbye to your boy, you’re never going to see him again, he owes me a lot of money.’
Spanish police have said they are not ‘ruling anything out’ ‘In cases of missing people it’s natural to investigate their background in case it’s relevant to the hunt. This case is unusual as it’s been a week and there has been no sighting or leads on him at all and searches have thrown up no clues. We have to consider the possibility of something else happening.’
Jay was previously involved in a machete attack that left a man fighting for his life. Jay was part of an eight-strong gang who split the skull of Tom Hilton after he was attacked with a machete, golf clubs, and an axe.
Mr. Hilton was left with injuries to his head which left his skull exposed as well as wounds to his shoulders and legs in the 2021 attack when he was 17 in Rishton, Lancashire. In court, he described the gang as a ‘pack of wolves’ and he was forced to run for his life through nearby woods before being set upon.
Details of the attack have been posted on social media sites appealing for help in tracking Jay down and many have described his disappearance as ‘karma.’
But in a Facebook message, the gang’s magnanimous victim, Mr. Hilton, said: ‘Whoever is writing on these TikToks, give it a rest. This young lad is missing and his family’s heartbroken. Put yourself in their shoes. Stop talking nonsense on social and get this lad found, mentioning my name all this and that. Have some respect and help find this boy and get him back to his family.’
A report of the attack in the Manchester Evening News from last August describes how throughout the case all eight laughed and joked with Judge Philip Parry telling Preston Crown Court they had found the trial ‘amusing.’
Passing sentence, Judge Parry said: ‘Many of you have found these proceedings amusing throughout the trial and yesterday and today, showing disrespect to the court. I hope for the sake of all your families, the public, and the people who have offered you jobs and apprenticeships and the sort that you all grow up. Everyone of you deserves to be sent to youth detention. Some of you played a more active role in the violent disorder than others, some of you carried weapons, some wore balaclavas but the seriousness of this is the group nature of it. As a group you were all more threatening than you would have been as individuals.’
He added that if they had been convicted of the more serious charge of section 18 wounding, they would all have gone to youth custody. However, he said he took the rehabilitative approach when sentencing them for violent disorder and further offenses including witness intimidation, attempted robbery, and conspiracy to supply class A drugs.
Jay was given an 18-month community order with 25 days of rehabilitation activities and 150 hours of unpaid work for violent disorder – and he went on holiday to Tenerife last week after completing most of his sentence. His mother Debbie is convinced he has been ‘taken’ and appealed to anyone who was holding him to let him go.
She said: ‘What happened in court is irrelevant, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What matters more than anything is that my son is missing and we need to find him.’