School of Humans. On Sunday, June seventeenth, twenty twenty four, Jay Slater, a nineteen year old bricklayers apprentice who lived in Lancashire, England, was on his first ever foreign holiday and he seemed to be having a blast. He had gone to the island of Tenerife in Spain with a female friend named Lucy and another guy named Brad. That night, he and Lucy went out to a music festival called NRG New Rave Generation. It was held at Papagayo Beach
Club in an area called Veronica's Strip. It's an area that has a ton of nightclubs and neon signs. It's very popular with British tourists. According to the information that Lucy posted later on a go fund meet, they had a great time that night. Jay had just finished his course at technical school back in the UK. He was getting ready to take his exams when he got home, so they were blowing off some steam. But Lucy said she was tired from the weekend, so she went home early.
That night. Jay stayed on at the club. He posted photos and snapchats from there. He appeared to be having a great time. At eight thirty five, PM, he posted a snap of himself hanging out with friends, looking happy and chilled and dancing. More camera footage has come out from inside the club. You can see him laughing and having a great time. Eventually he made his way outside the club, which closed at three am. After that, he was sitting on a wall. At around four am he
started chatting to two other British men. Somehow they made a plan to go on to those two guys Airbnb. They left that club sometime after four am. He got into a car with these two strangers and went back to their airbnb, which was in a remote area about an hour away from where Jay was staying in the touristy resort area. The airbnb was near a small town
called Mascot. The next morning, Lucy got one last frantic call from Jay a little after eight am, saying he was lost, didn't know where he was, and that he was panicked. That was the last time that anyone ever heard from Jay Slater, because after that he disappeared. J Slater, this healthy young man who had his entire life ahead of him, was just gone, and what happened to him has become a huge story in the UK and now throughout the world. What did happen to him? Was he
kidnapped and murdered like a lot of people believe. Did he wander off into the wilderness or did someone else pull up alongside him on that narrow strip of road, coax him into their car and drive off somewhere. This case is wild. It is exposed the seedy underside of this beautiful island and the criminal underworld that are operating there. This case has taken over British news. Everyone from police detectives to psychics and TikTok stars have descended on this
Spanish island in the Canaries. They're all trying to find a young man who is partying and vanished about a trace right in the middle of an island full of tourists. I'm Catherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. If you listen to this podcast, you know I don't normally cover cases that are ongoing unless there's a good reason, like a missing person's case that isn't getting attention, not like this case, which actually is all over the news.
I prefer cold cases for several reasons. First of all, I don't want to be one of those reporters that stands on people's lawns right after tragedy and ask for sound bites from grieving families. And even though we are sometimes critical of the police when they are investigating a case, I really don't want to get in the police's way. But this case, the Jay Slater case, is fascinating. It's
fascinating for a couple of reasons. In my opinion, it's a good lesson in what to do when a loved one goes missing and what not to do because this case has brought out some of the darkest, worse sides of true crime journalism and of what they call black tourism or murder tourism. A little background here. I used
to live in London. I work for a British newspaper for several years for people who don't know that, and I am an American citizen, but I also have a British passport, so really London is like my second home. I come here every summer. And when I came to London this week, literally the entire country was talking about this Jay Slater case. It reminded me a little bit of the Natalie Halloway case in the US back in
two thousand and five. The difference is that since the Natalie Hallway case, we have social media, so in addition to this nationwide press coverage, we have all these amateur detectives that have gone into a frenzy over this case. As we said before, Jay's friend Lucy started to worry the next morning when he didn't come back to the resort where they were staying. This was a big resort called Plia dea LA's America. It was about a forty minute drive from their resort to the area where Jay
went with the two strangers. That was in a more rural area in the north of the island, near a park called Rural de Teno Park. This is a long way from the Lively Beach resort area where they'd been hanging around the night before. This park is in an area that is remote popular with hikers. At around seven thirty am the next morning, Jay had posted a snap of a hand. We haven't seen this snap, but presumably it was his hand holding a cigarette on the front
steps of that airbnb. We know it's that airbnb because Lucy said you could see the tile pattern on the steps. He called Lucy shortly after eight am. Now, some reports at eight fifteen, but later it seemed like the correct time was eight fifty am. He called her and sounded panics. She said. He told her his phone was dying, he only had one percent battery, he was thirsty, and he
did not know where he was. She wrote on the go fundme page, quote, I woke up to a phone call off Jay at eight thirty am, saying he was lost in the mountains. He wasn't aware of his surroundings, he desperately needed a drink, and his phone was on one percent. He had met two people on Sunday night and left with them to go to their apartment. Their apartment was miles away from civilization and in a very
secluded location. End quote. Now, after this went down, a lot of people asked did Lucy or Jay know these guys before the night he vanished? The post on GoFundMe that was made by Lucy, in my opinion, made it sound like the two guys from the airbnb were complete strangers. Later someone else would come forward to question that, but we'll get back to that later. So, after Jay said he was in trouble and lost, Lucy immediately went out looking for him. Apparently that snap that Jay sent had
his location. That's how Lucy was able to find that house so quickly. It's also the only house in that area in the mountains. It's along a winding strip of roads, surrounded by rural cliffs and very difficult terrain. She said that she knocked on the door and that there were two people there, presumably the two men whose airbnb it was. According to Lucy, that morning, Jay had gone out for a smoke, come back for a short time, and then said he wanted to go home. After that, they said
he left now. According to media reports, Lucy said that she believed that Jay may have been kidnapped, but after he left the residence, he did talk to Lucy at eight fifty and there was someone else in that remote wilderness who saw Jay after he left the airbnb, so someone did see him after he left the airbnb. The last person to see Jay alive that we know about was a woman, Ophelia Medina Hernandez. This was a neighbor the person who owned the airbnb. She was interviewed by
British media and by the police. She said that when she saw Jay that morning, right after he left the airbnb, he was asking her about the bus. What time the bus came, because there was a bus stop right in front of the house. Apparently he was trying to get a bus back down the hill, back in the direction of Los Cristianos, which would have been the direction of the resort where he was staying. You can see that bus stop from the house. The woman said she told
him the bus was at ten am. She didn't really speak English, so she held up ten fingers to signal that she meant ten. So if that bus came at ten o'clock, he would have had over an hour to wait at that bus stop. The woman said later that she saw Jay one more time. She said she passed by him in her car about fifteen minutes later after they had that conversation, But she said something strange. She said, he was walked looking uphill, so in the opposite direction
from town. She said, quote, he was alone, he was walking normally, though he was walking fast end quote. So what made him lead the bus stop and why was he walking uphill toward the middle of nowhere instead of downhill toward town. Jay's phone died just after eight p fifty am. The last ping was from an area near a hiking trail uphill from the airbnb. Lucy reported Jay missing to police and started looking for him. She met someone who gave her a ride. They drove around the
mountains all day. She said she thought she would see Jay walking along the road, but he was just gone. Authorities in Spain contacted Jay's mother, fifty five year old Debbie Duncan, and his father Warren back in the UK. Debbie and Warren and Jay's brother immediately flew over to Spain. Pretty soon there was a massive search being done the police, firefighters, volunteers, people with canine dogs, drones and helicopters. Tenerief is the largest of the Canary Islands. There are seven of them
and they are geographically located near North Africa. Because they are just a short flight from the UK a little over four hours. The Canary Islands are very popular tourist destinations for British people. A lot of people come to these islands to party and soak up the sun. There is a huge bar culture, drinking, dancing and of course some drug use that comes along with going out and partying, and a lot of young people being in a rave.
Early in the investigation, Lucy was kind of criticizing the Spanish police she seemed to be a mysterious figure herself when she did interviews, she had her identity hidden. She was just kind of this dark silhouette. Basically, she said the local authorities in Spain had fobbed her off. She said she believed they were not taking Jay's disapp hearent seriously.
She also asked, by the way, why the Spanish police did not have a translator after three days, which is reasonable because it's not like English to Spanish translators are hard to find. But also, unfortunately, the Spanish media seemed to kind of have an issue with this and seemed to, at least at first, kind of in my opinion, paint her as this demanding foreigner. Unfortunately, that happens in a lot of these cases. Pretty soon a lot of online
commenters were speculating about Lucy. A lot of people were asking, how was this young woman able to take so many foreign holidays? How did she pay for them? Was she some kind of drug mule? By the way, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of this, and I can totally understand why Lucy would have wanted to hide her identity exactly for this reason. Because people started to get very involved in this investigation, they were following it on social media.
Lucy did something else. She set up a GoFundMe campaign, and, as we know from listening to True Crime podcast, since every decision that family members or friends make early an investigation, unfortunately can be criticized, this is one of the biggest areas for criticism. What happens with these gofundmes? Where did the money go? Why did the friends started and not the mom. This prompted Jay's mother, Debbie, to post an update. She said they would be using the funds for travel
and lodging and to support the Spanish authorities. As of June twenty seventh, by the way, the go fundme had received around forty thousand pounds a little over fifty thousand dollars. So the police were wondering how in the world did this young man just disappear. They talked to the two men whom Jay had gone home with, and it seemed like they were mystified too. Police said the two men answered their questions, they cooperated, and they voluntarily stayed on
the island for extra day. They said that the Spanish police had their names, addresses and all their personal dey tales before those two men flew back to the UK. Now, a lot of online commenters made statements like how could Jay's friends leave him alone? But honestly, I find that probably the easiest part of the story to believe, because we see this over and over. We see that there's a lot of press about young women being preyed on whether they're at home or when they're on vacation, but
young men are generally less careful about these things. There's much less awareness about the danger that a young man can feel when he's on his own. And people do disappear in Tenerief, even though the crime rate on the island is pretty low. Sometimes they wander off into the rough terrain and fall through ravines or get trapped there. But then a lot of people speculated maybe Jay got involved in some kind of drug trade. There is a
drug trade, an underground criminal element on Tenerief. It's been described as an island where the Italian mob is very active. It's all been described as one of the islands of what they call geostrategic importance when it comes to international drug trafficking. Because the case made national and then international news, there were sightings of Jay everywhere, all of them to this date have been unbeverified. The rumors continued to fly.
Some people said Jay lost a bag full of drugs and he was being held hostage until the money was paid. There were a lot of crazy conspiracy theories flying around, each one a little more unbelievable than the next, and a lot of them entered around this go fundme money that somehow Jay's family or friends had set up this
GoFundMe to repay a drug debt. This was all some elaborate scheme, which really should have seemed totally ridiculous from the beginning, but people were continuing to repeat stuff like this. Then on Saturday, Jane twenty second, there was a break in the case. There was a reported sighting of Jay in Santiago del tier Day, a town that's about five miles away from Masca, the nearest small town to that airbnb. Someone said they saw Jay there with two men outside
of church. That would have been on the day he disappeared at around six pm in the evening. There was blurry footage outside that church, but no confirmed sighting of Jay. There was another rumor he had been spotted watching a football match. Now this is all going on in the middle of the Euro twenty four matches. It was reported in the press that the mayor of that town, Santiago d'ltierede, said that the Spanish police had spoken to several people
who may have seen j Now. I mention this because it's a really good example of how in these situations, when there's fast breaking news, rumors start flying and things do not get corrected. So the rumors started because the mayor mentioned he heard someone saw j Now somehow in some of the news reporting that became, it was definitely Jay and he was watching football. But by the time police went there to question people and other news organizations
showed up, they got the real story. The mayor had heard people saying that they saw a young man who may have matched Jay's description. Now, of course Jay had a very general look. He's a young tan guy on vacation and with his darker skin and hair and kind of alive complexion. Honestly, he could have been a local or a tourist. Clearly, they just saw someone who looked vaguely like Jay. It was not Jay. So it's natural to ask a question in a case like this, how
common is it to go missing in a place like this? Well. The Independent newspaper did a super interesting synopsis of other men who were from the UK and went missing in Tenerief and have never been found. There was Billy Bennett, who was eighteen when he disappeared. He was on vacation in Tenerief in December of nineteen eighty five. He was supposed to go to the island with a friend of his,
but the friend couldn't go, so Billy went alone. He stayed at the Los America's Resort, the same resort where Jay stayed. He went to a nightclub often called the Sergeant Pepper's Nightclub. The friend who was supposed to go on the trip talked to the press later. He said that later he did go to Tenerief, he met up with Billy. He said Billy was, in his words, worse for wear. He said Billy told him that he lost all of his money and was worried about having somewhere
to go. Billy was never heard from again. In nineteen eighty seven, there was a similar story another young guy, a twenty three year old named Ricky Deacatta. He went to Tenerif in March of nineteen eighty seven to party and never came home. He was working a season out in Tenerief, which a lot of young people in the UK do to earn money. Interestingly, he worked in the same club that Billy frequented, the Sergeant Pepper's Disco pub
in the Plia Delas America's resort. His sister was interviewed by the Independent newspaper back in two thousand and one. She said that Ricky was a loving, caring brother. She said he was super excited about going to work in Spain. She said she talked to him and he said he was planning to come home. He called in October to ask for forty pounds for a ticket home for Christmas. Then she said she called him and confirmed that he did get that ticket money. But Ricky never showed up
for Christmas and his family never saw him again. His passport was handed in to Spanish authorities, his bag was given to the police, so eventually his parents got his passport and his stuff back, but had no idea what happened to Ricky. There's actually a lot more to this story. There was a documentary made about the case called Looking for Ricky. They did testing on five bodies that were
founded Tenery that the tests were inconclusive. The documentary put forward the theory that Ricky may be indirectly involved in the drug trade and tenery basically that he may have annoyed the wrong person, but no one has ever been arrested or charged in this case. In two thousand and four, another brit named Kevin Ainley disappeared. He also had moved to the same area. Just three months after moving there
in June of two thousand and four, he vanished. So young men who go to Tenerif to have a good time have disappeared over the years, some under mysterious circumstances. But going back to Jay's case, a lot of people were trying to figure out where the last place that he was actually seen was. Could something have happened to him in that airbnb? And then things started to get even more crazy in the case because a lot of people started flying out to Tenerif from the UK to
insert themselves into the investigation. I don't want to sound like the pot calling the kettle black here because I in the past have been accused of doing the same thing when a case is not getting attention after a long time. Yes, I have inserted myself into it, but I do feel strongly that in the beginning of a case, when the police are actively investigating, we have to let them do their jobs, and I think it's important to
follow journalistic standards. It's fine to ask the police questions, even aggressively, and to demand the truth, but we have to maintain ethics in true crime reporting. One of the most important rules to follow is not to waste police time or distract from the investigation, and people do not seem to be following that rule here. TikTokers have shown up in Tenery by the dozens and so of journalists.
There's one female journalist from an ITV morning show by the way, that's one of the main channels in the UK. She literally has teamed up with one of the British TikTok stars and they're taking selfies together now. To be fair, at least the TikToker, whose name is Paul arn't at least he's a seasoned hiker. He says he did contact the authorities and that he got the go ahead to
go out and search on his own. He's been posting lots of videos of himself with a camera, walking through cactus and shooting the airbnb with what looks like a long telephoto lens. It is surreal these bloggers are showing up with drones and cameras, and there's been a lot of criticism that not only are they not helping, they may be making things worse. A lot of people wondered
about the two men who Jay was partying with. Who were they, why were they staying in an airbnb on an isolated part of the island, what were they doing there and did they know Jay beforehand? But just like in America, in an open investigation, police do not reveal a lot of information, the Spanish police were no different. Police did question the two men. According to media reports, one of them is known by the nickname Johnny Vegas.
They're both British. Spanish police questioned the two men. They said that they were cooperative. Police did get their passports and their information, and then the two men flew home back to Luton in the UK. In addition, a lot of tourists have started flying over to Tenerief, which I find absolutely fascinating. Groups of tourists in jeeps driving around and taking selfies from the crime scene. They call it dark tourism, and I noticed that in a vacuum of information,
commenters do make certain criticisms. Side note, laws in European countries are very different to laws in the US, and police do things differently. For example, they aren't allowed to light to suspects in Europe, so they can't, for example, throw two guys in an interrogation room and tell each one that the other one said they did it. They're not allowed to do stuff like that. They have to go about their evidence gathering in a very different and
much more low key way. Another reason why I like to cover cold cases is that I find if you have a case that's actually grabbing headlines, you always have people and I call them the obligatory expert. These people who kind of rushed to the scene, they start trying to solve things, and I'm putting solved in air quotes. Really, in my opinion, they're trying to grab headlines for themselves and inevitably they get in the way the police. Well, there's one of those experts in the United Kingdom. He's
a former police detective named Mark Williams Thomas. Now he's a TV expert. So early in the case he said he made contact with the family and he made this big public statement and said he could get answers for the family in three days, so he flew to Tenerif and held a press conference. This part was interesting because Mark said he was working with the family. The family wasn't there. He said this was because the Spanish police
had not officially sanctioned this press conference. He said he wanted to be able to get information without alienating the authorities. But he said very publicly he was looking for these two witnesses, the guys who Jay had partied with back at the airbnb. He said that he was appealing for these mystery men to come forward, but honestly, the police had already said they talked to these men. The Spanish
police said they had their details. The two men had stayed for an extra day in Tenerif, and then they'd flown back to the UK. So the Spanish police know who these people are. There's no need for these men to come forward and talk to a TV detective. But Mark did pose an interesting question in the flurry of all this publicity. He said, quote, what we don't know is why, if they were partying here, they went to a holiday rental around an hour away in a really
remote location. I don't know the answer to that. But my focus is to find those people. I am giving them the opportunity to come forward. They are crucial witnesses and ask questions that could get answers. End quote. Again, I don't really understand why these men would need to come forward and talk to him, but I do think that it's a good idea to appeal for anyone who may have been on those roads, on those skinny roads
around Mascot the time Jay disappeared to come forward. Jay might have wandered off the road, but we can't rule out the theory that someone could have picked him up there. Mark Williams Thomas had another update on July third. According to the Lancashire Telegraph, Mark said that while Jay was riding with those two guys in the car on the way back to their airbnb, that Jay had allegedly posted a snapchat saying that he had stolen a twelve thousand
pound Rolex watch off someone back at the club. Mark told the newspaper quote, We've been unable to validate this in terms of reported thefts. Friends of Jay said he would not make this up and the watch was subject to later conversation between the friends end quote. So people are talking about this stolen rolex online. It's also been reported that after the club where Jay was partying closed that a fight broke out after a man said that his watch was stolen, but again there's no proof of
this yet. Mark also said, quote, We've received information that would suggests Jay left the rental property feeling scared. He would not return to the rental, even though that would have been the most sensible course of action. We continue to investigate this aspect end quote. But again there's no proof of this. The Spanish police have said the two British men, who again have cooperated completely and flown home, are irrelevant to the investigation. They actually use the word irrelevant.
Then another friend came forward. It turned out that Lucy may not have been the last person to talk to Jay, because Brad, the third friend who was with Lucy and Jay in Tenerife, made his own video. He said that he talked to Jay on the morning he went missing. He said they had a video chat and that in that call, Jay was walking out there in the wilderness, and he said Jay told him he had been walking
for thirty minutes, that he was taking a shortcut. Brad said it sounded like Jay may have been slipping out there, maybe on loose stones. Brad also cleared something else up. He said that he, Jay and Lucy did know the two men from the airbnb. He said they had been talking to those guys and hanging out for a couple of days before Jay disappeared. So I do wonder why Jay didn't want to go back to the Airbnb. Did something unpleasant go down between him and those two men
late night? But even if that was true, the facts right now or that someone did see Jay and talk to him after he left the Airbnb. And this is where you see the dark side of social media, because yes, you get a lot of tips with publicity, but you also get a lot of weird people and internet trolls. And this is where the dark tourism and these message boards cross over from kind of a curiosity to something that is, in my opinion, much more sinister. Someone hacked
Jay's Instagram. It's been reported that it was hacked by someone who was trying to get in it to find clues. I have no idea if that's true, and if so, if it's someone who knew him or someone who was trying to get information after reading about the case, but either way, this is shocking. Jay's sister addressed the message boards. She wrote on social media, quote, all of the groups are full of trolls and sickos. I can't believe some
people are actually this sick in the head. There are people hacking my accounts and Jay's family, making it pure lies and pretending we are all in on it. End quote. And at some point the internet turned on Jay himself. We talk a lot in true crime about the perfect victim, the idea that to get headlines, to get public sympathy, a victim has to seem pure, which I think is ridiculous, but it's kind of a true crime trope that refuses to die. It turned out that Jay, the fun loving
teen in the pictures, had had a dark past. Twenty one, Jay and seven other teens were part of a vicious machete attack on a seventeen year old named Tom. The attack apparently started after a night out. Tom was having issues with one of Jay's friend group and it turned violent. The guys attacked Tom and chased him outside the club. In court later, Tom said that Jay and his friends were like a pack of gorillas. They attacked Tom with a machete and a golf club, hitting him so viciously
that his skull was exposed. Later in court, the judge said he was disgusted by Jay and his friends. He said he was disgusted by the fact the teens continued to laugh and joke throughout the trial and the sentencing process. The judge said that some of the group, though reportedly not Jay, were guilty of intimidation of witnesses, drug charges,
and robbery. Now it has been reported that Jay was not one of the main instigators in this group, that he was just kind of on the periphery, But either way, this attack was Horrifyingly, the sentences were shockingly light. In my opinion, Jay was given an eighteen month community order, like probation in the United States. He was required to do community service and unpaid work. That is it. Some
people described his disappearance as karma. I must say that, in my opinion, the victim of this attack showed some class here. He wrote on Facebook quote, whoever is writing on these tiktoks, give it a rest. The young lad's missing and his family's heartbroken. Put yourself in their shoes, Stop talking nonsense on social media and get this lad found mentioning my name, this and that. Have some respect and help find this boy and get him back to
his family. End quote. The case just kept getting crazier every day. The British news would open with day ten, day eleven of the Jay Slater search. Then more and more people started showing up. This tourist ustin it. You had psychics and other TikTok people with drones, more TV journalists,
people retracing the last steps from the airbnb. Then, in another stranger than fiction twist, one hiker who was reported to be someone who was looking for Jay, though that was never confirmed, police had to come in and rescue him. The press release read quote tired and disoriented, he was located by the agents and the rescue team who helped get him out of the ravine end quote. At first
a lot of people got excited. They thought maybe that Jay had been found, but no, this was some random person who had turned up, presumably for the search, and gotten lost himself, wasting more police time and taking effort away from the attempt to find Jay. Every area, every single small town, even the ones where you say we can leave our doors unlocked at such a safe place, they all have this side. So this is not unique to this island, but Pliadella's America's, where Jay was staying,
in particular, is known for drugs. There have been a lot of high profile drug trafficking cases there in recent years, including murders committed by gangs called the Timeshare murders who were kind of fighting over property. In addition to that, a local news outlet called Canarian Weekly reported that crime in the Canary Islands has spiked post COVID. In twenty twenty two, rape was up by twenty seven percent, violent robberies thirty two percent, and drug trafficking forty one percent.
So it is possible that Jay was partying with these guys and that he got into a confrontation with them or with someone else. We do have to be open minded and consider that. But I keep coming back to the fact Jay was seen by this woman after leaving the airbnb. Whatever happened that night, he was out of that property. It was more he was headed toward home. He walked uphill, not downhill, toward the town. Why did
he do that? And while thinking about that, I also want to think about what we can learn from this case going forward. One of the reasons that I wanted to do this story was because I have so many of these cases where someone's out and they get into trouble, they get into a fight with someone, or they're lost
or potentially intoxicated, and their phone battery dies. So I did some research and I found out that there is a way if you have an iPhone or an Android, there are ways to find someone's location even if the battery is dead. But and this is the crucial part, you have to enable it before you lose the phone, not afterwards. To do this on an iPhone, you go to settings, your name and then find my Then you
took the option that says my network. This apparently enables to find my feature to work even if the battery is dead or the phone is offline. There's also an option there called c Last Location. You can opt in and that will allow your phone to automatically send its last location to Apple even if the battery is dying. I also wonder if there were other apps on Jay's
phone that could have helped. We saw in a previous case that, for example, the Health app was very helpful in measuring exactly where this young man was walking and how long his strides were Secondly, and this will be controversial, I know, but I really advise people not to give to go fundmes unless you know the families personally. This is no reflection on Jay or his family. This is just a general rule that I follow because we have no idea who is using the money or what it's
being used for. There's really no transparency. I would add, if you do give go fund me money to anyone, you just have to accept the fact that you're gonna have no control over where it goes, and give it as a gift with no strings attached and never think about it again. Treat it like you would a gift to a friend, because in my opinion, it is pointless to give to a GoFundMe and later complain about how the funds are used. When you give to go fund me,
you relinquish that control. And third, I think we all have to take a long, hard look at what we're doing on social media. If we post on social media in groups for a case, we really have to remember this is a living person, this is a real family. In this case, people have been making memes about Jay Slater's case, treating it like a joke, sending messages to the family. Trying to get into someone's Instagram and then even clogging up the search trails. It's not only immoral
and unhelpful, it's potentially illegal. It's easy to forget. These are not just news stories. These are real people. So why did Jay randomly walk uphill? I do have a theory, it's just an idea at this point. Again, I'm not actively investigating this case, letting the police do that. I did a Google Map search. I asked for walking directions from the Airbnb down to the town of Masca below. I noticed that when I did this for driving directions,
it guided me down the hill from the Airbnb. It said it would be a twenty minute drive, and this was about a thirty kilometer distance, about eighteen miles. But if you put in walking directions, for some reason, the walking direction takes you back up the hill and it says it takes six hours and sixteen minutes. So and again this is just a guess. Maybe Jay did start walking in that direction, not realizing it was eighteen miles away and that it would have taken him at least
eleven hours to do that walk. Maybe he was out of it. It was early in the morning, he'd been out all night. Given what we know now, and again we do not have all the info that police do for good reasons, I do think it's more likely that Jay got off the road oad somehow or tried to take a shortcut. Jay's phone was dying and he was tired and dehydrated. Temperatures in that area are brutal, approaching one hundred degrees during the day and down to the
thirties a night. In fact, the UK Foreign Office has a travel advice warning for that area. They tell visitors to be very careful when hiking or walking in that area. There's also, by the way, a risk of altitude sickness up there, which would have been a lot worse with a hangover and dehydration. So this was Jay's first trip abroad, first time in a foreign country. The terrain there can be deadly, but that's easy to forget. It reminds me
a lot of people who go missing in Malibu. It's such a temperate, nice area with the beach during the day and lots of people around, it is easy to forget that if you get lost out there, you're basically crossing a desert in your beach clothes. Once reporters stopped walking in the hills in their tennis shoes and they actually took the time to interview local residents, which is
such an important part of these stories. They interviewed a woman who lived in that area, and I think that her comment was one of the most sensible of the entire investigation. She said that people go missing in those hills all the time. It takes police months or years to find some of them, and some of them are never found. I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me
Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. Music contributed by Ben Sale. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Noah Camer Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Els Crowley. Listen to Helen Gone ad free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel on Apple podcas. You can
follow the show on Instagram at Helen gon Pod. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into You can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four, six one four or five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five. School of Humans