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Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers and I'm Britt.
And the story I have for you today is a real head scratcher.
One of those cases where a person just seems to vanish into thin air.
They're almost impossible circumstances.
This is the story of Stephen Clark.
December 28, 1992 is a nice and a day in mask by the sea that Doris Clark decides to head out for a walk on the beach.
Her son Stephen makes the last minute plan to join.
He was supposed to go to a football match with his dad Charles, but dad's trying to teach him a financial lesson at the moment and told him that if he wanted to go to the game, then he'd have to pay for himself.
And even though 23 year old Stephen has some money, he's only in a print list, which is basically like an intern here in the US.
So he's like, you know what, a walk with mom's going to be just fine.
Walk with mom's free. Free.
Yeah, it's better than staying at home alone doing nothing.
Doris and Stephen set out on this two miles path along the beach that takes them from mass to this next door town of Saltburn.
She walk this path often, the seas on one side, there's cliffs above them on the other, so it's, I mean, honestly, picturesque.
Now once they get to Saltburn Pier, Stephen says that he needs to use the restroom, so he pops in real quick to the closest bathroom nearby, and Doris figures she might as well go to the ladies' room while they're there.
She's not in there too long, and when she walks out she expects to see Stephen waiting for her, but he isn't, so she waits on him instead.
And she watches as other people kind of come and go, there are these two guys that show up with a little girl and they take turns going in while the other waits with the girl, but they all end up leaving, and Stephen still hasn't come out.
So now she's thinking, you know, maybe he just finished up before her, like, and didn't see her waiting and decided to just turn back and walk home.
Did you ask the men if Stephen was in there?
No, I don't think she talks to them at all, so like, again, like, at the time she's not even like worried, they're just coming and going in and she's just waiting.
So like I said, she decides to walk back home, see if she can find Stephen along the way or see if he's waiting for her at home.
What about just going in and seeing if he's still in the bathroom?
So Doris actually addressed this question in a documentary about Stephen's case, and she said it would never cross her mind to go check on her 23 year old son.
And Stephen's sister, Victoria, says the same in a podcast episode for the missing, like she is certain he would be straight up mortified if his mom walked into the men's room calling out his name.
I mean, to be fair, I would be mortified if my mom did that to be in the general.
Yeah. I'm not going to be in the family fair and listen, even though Stephen does have limited mobility from a childhood accident, he is fiercely independent.
So no, she's not going in like calling his name like he's eight.
She walks home, but Stephen's not anywhere along the path ahead of her.
He's not there waiting for her at the house when she gets back and now she kind of starts working, but she doesn't want to get ahead of herself.
So she waits for Charles to get home from the match before conducting an all out search.
And you see, her and Charles were both part of the police force at one point.
So presumably they'd be able to do that good search, like they know where to look.
But when he does get back and she explains the situation to him, Charles immediately goes into not police mode, but just like dad mode.
He goes back to the pier looking for Stephen, like calling out his name, but he does not find any sign of him.
And does he walk into the bathroom?
Well, nothing explicitly says that, but I mean, I got it as soon.
That's the first thing he checked, right?
Even though, I mean, him still being in the bathroom doesn't make much sense unless he collapsed in there.
But I mean, I would check.
So I assume he checked. When he gets back without Stephen, Doris and Charles call their daughter Victoria, just kind of let her know what's going on.
Just in case her brother was like reach out to her, I assume.
But they tell her, listen, there's no reason to panic.
Just in case though, we're going to call the police and report Stephen missing.
I know they're saying not to panic, but I think I'd be full on panicking.
Oh, 100%. If I got a call from my parents saying that like, hey, baby David is missing, we're going to call the police.
Don't worry, but we're calling the police.
Yeah, I would be like fully on like, let's rally, let's search, like, let's go.
And Victoria is no different.
It's not there exactly when, but she hops on a train back to mask from where she's living in Gilford.
And six hours later, she's home and ready to help search for Stephen.
A search that they're going to have to do so low.
As when Doris calls the police to report her son missing, the police make them wait a full day before taking the missing person's report since he's 23.
Oh, Taylor's all this time, apparently, even in the UK.
I guess so. So do the police officially file the report once those 24 hours are up?
I think so, but there's no official documents I could find saying that a report was filed or exactly when a report was filed even.
According to a documentary broadcast by ITV in 2021, and this is jumping ahead just a little bit, but apparently there aren't any records of Stephen's case from that time that still exists today.
Nothing. What do you mean?
I mean, this isn't the fifties or the sixties when record keeping was like, shawty at best.
This is the nineties. I mean, how do you not have any record?
I truly have no idea. That's just what I'm getting from the source material.
And even if police actually do file report, it doesn't look like they sent anyone to search for Stephen when they do.
So the clerks are on their own.
Now they obviously start at the bathroom where he was last seen and kind of worked their way out, but as the days go by, their search radius is just getting wider and wider, even out into the sand dunes and the cliff sides surrounding the trail just in case.
I mean, it would have been much more difficult for Stephen to get around in those areas, but I mean, they're starting to wonder if maybe he fell somewhere or if he stuck somewhere.
I mean, is it possible he took the cliff lift nearby?
It's at the pier and takes people up like 120 feet to the top.
So maybe he went up there and there was some kind of accident like up there, but even that doesn't really make much sense because you would think someone would have seen him.
And there's no way that his body could have just like washed out to see or something because the cliffs don't even drop into the water like near the pier.
It drops on to either a grassy section leading to the long sandy beach or to shops along the shore.
So they're looking and looking more days go by and during this whole time, Victoria's mind is spinning.
She's replaying the Christmas.
She literally just spent with her brother and wondering where the heck he could be.
Now she's 14 months younger than him, but the two are super close and she's always felt really protective of him.
She was actually interviewed for an episode of the missing podcast about Stephen and in it, she talks about how growing up wasn't easy for her brother.
That childhood accident he had left him with limited mobility in his left arm.
He also had a distinctive limp when he walked and even some difficulty in school.
But more than anything, it was really like the way people treated him that made her stick up for him when she could, which is partly why they're super close.
She can't even begin to imagine a world where he's not there.
So with each day that passes, she's hoping that someone will say that this is all just a big misunderstanding.
Stephen's back, safe and sound, they'll all look back on the situation and laugh.
But that's not happening.
And unfortunately, Victoria has to go back to work, go back to life, even though she wants to stay just in case her brother shows up.
But even though she has to go back, she remains in constant contact with her parents.
Now while police still don't seem to be helping in the search at all, word is spreading throughout the community that Stephen's missing.
Actually after his disappearance, Doris and Charles start hearing about sightings of Stephen in the Saltburn Mask area, as well as this area called Red Car, which is just a town over.
Basically these three towns are all like in a line on the coast and masks is in the middle.
But what's significant is that these sightings aren't happening or they're not like from the day that Stephen went missing.
People are contacting them saying that they saw Stephen days after he disappeared.
How quick did anyone ever track down the two guys Doris saw near the restrooms that Stephen went missing from?
No, I mean, again, like she noticed them, but she didn't even take like detailed notes of their features or anything specific about them.
She wasn't expecting that day to turn out like it did, which I totally understand.
So they have not even the first clue how to track them down.
Anyway, out of all of these sightings, two of them seem promising to the Clark family because they're from people who actually knew Stephen.
So on January 3rd, this would have been almost a week after Stephen went missing.
A family friend comes forward and says that he saw Stephen two days after he vanished, which would have been on December 30th in Red Car.
This friend says that he's pretty positive it was Stephen.
He just didn't even know he was considered missing at the time, so he says he didn't actually approach him or anything.
Oh, what was he doing? Did he seem fine and normal?
Yeah, I mean, it was like the quickest interaction, at least I think the story.
It varies a little bit depending on who tells it, but the gist of it is that Stephen just kind of walk past this family friend.
I mean, this guy's wife later says that the husband actually stopped and talked to Stephen, but he never says that himself.
So I'm not really sure. Again, he didn't know his missing.
It's kind of like doors with the two guys.
You didn't know this was going to be important.
But the significant part is that this man is positive that it was Stephen.
And Stephen was alone? Just him.
So this sighting gives the Clark's hope that he's still out there somewhere.
They don't know why he just walked away without a word.
They don't know where he would be staying or what he would be doing.
Honestly, they don't really care.
They just want to find him and bring him home.
And this is the first time in six days that they feel like they're within reach.
And their hope is bolstered with the second sighting later that same month, one that might even offer a better clue as to where Stephen has been.
David Hauntley reports for T.Side Live that someone who knew Stephen through mutual friends saw him on January 14th, an entire 16 days after he disappeared.
And this time, Stephen wasn't alone.
This friend says she saw Stephen insult her with a 50 to 60 year old man who was a medium build, balding with gray hair around the sides and wearing glasses.
Now, when the family hears this, they have no idea who this man could be.
Stephen wasn't friends with anyone who fit this description as far as they know.
It doesn't really fit the bill for anyone, his parents or sister knows either.
And it seems like Stephen was with him willingly.
Well, the woman who saw him claims that Stephen and the man weren't talking at all and she couldn't tell if either person looked upset or not.
They were just kind of walking together.
But even kind of in a weird way, the man was ahead of him and it looked like Stephen was trying to keep up.
You know, with his limp and all, I feel like he would have had to have left with someone, right?
Otherwise, his mom would have spotted him and he's not likely walking to these other towns.
Yeah, I totally agree. So I guess the question really is just like, did he go willingly?
I mean, it's possible, but I will say that even if it was willingly, it didn't seem planned.
Like, his wallet, his passport, everything was still at home, which you would obviously need those things if you had planned to run away or start a new life.
And like, again, this, even this walk was like very last minute.
Mm-hmm. And if you're kind of like, leave and start over, you would think that you'd go further than one town over.
Right. And do we know if he has any reason to want a fresh start?
No, I mean, not that Victoria knows about anyways.
Like when she last saw him during the Christmas holiday, everything appeared to be fine.
That being said though, he did ask her a pretty morbid question when she was there.
Not about like, starting over, running away or anything, but about ending things.
He asked her if she were to die by suicide, which method would she choose?
And this is really dark.
And without more context about when and how this is asked, like, I mean, it might send up some red flags for others, but whatever the situation was, it didn't really alarm Victoria at the time.
She had kind of laughed it off because they both had a quote like dark sense of humor.
She's only thinking of it now in hindsight because I mean, when nothing else makes sense, you kind of go back and catalog every interaction you less had with somebody who's now missing, looking for any clues into things they said or did.
But even though she flags this conversation for her parents, for I assume police, like she's still pretty sure that there's something else going on.
Like that's not what happened here.
And she was super close with him.
She believes that if something was going on, that he would have told her.
According to a BBC article, the whole family was close and things felt wrong without Stephen.
But also things weren't easy for Stephen.
And we know some people do suffer in silence.
So despite having what seems like a really loving and supportive family, I mean, there had been some unsteadiness here and there.
Like his family had moved to South Africa when he was little, like a little after his accident.
And while he loved growing up there, his accident left him with learning differences.
And after he finished school, he was having a really hard time getting a job there, which is why the family had moved back to England.
They had first gone to Gilford where Victoria lives now and then came to mask where the family was.
And just like the move to South Africa had been an adjustment moving back to the UK was an even bigger one.
But I mean, everyone was doing their best.
Stephen joined an inclusive organization that helped him kind of acclimate to this completely different culture.
He began making some friends.
So to Victoria, he seemed to actually be starting to finally thrive there.
But that did change in 1991 after Charles lost his job and the family had to move again.
So this is when they moved to mask.
And it was that move that really shifted the family dynamic the most because Victoria decided to stay behind in Gilford instead of moving with Stephen and his parents.
And so even though he was like finally getting his footing like this time around, Stephen was again like having some trouble adjusting.
So even though he was doing well in school and kind of in his social life, his grandma who he was super close with had just died.
So he was presumably dealing with that grief on top of being away from his sister who had done all these moves with him on top of being away from everything else he kind of was connected to.
Right. Being in this new environment without without your sibling, which yeah, based on their age, like if they were close, like that's which they were built in best friend.
Yeah. And so here's a thing that while all of that might feel like a lot, Stephen did have some good things going for him.
So he had actually joined this new organization called the Rathbone Society, which was design specifically to help people with learning disabilities find jobs and help them thrive independently.
And through that, he was starting to find a place in the community and he'd even recently won the Apprentice of the Year Award at Rathbone and things were starting to finally look up.
He even seemed to have met a girl through Rathbone not super long ago.
I mean, this was like a week and a half or so before he went missing.
And it was like not, I don't know, like again, actually kind of various.
So like what I heard is that like they would meet up at this local pub.
His parents say it's not anything serious or long term.
But then in later reporting, detective suggests that it might have been a little more serious or getting serious, even though like his parents didn't realize because they heard that he went and met her parents.
But either way, even if they didn't think it was serious yet, it was just another sign to his family that he was putting down roots.
He was getting settled there.
He was making connections, yeah.
So has anyone talked to this woman to see if she knows where Stephen might be?
Maybe it was heard from him or something?
I don't actually know, so based on the way detectives talk about her in later years, it makes it seem like they might have, but no one ever says explicitly one way or another.
And at the time, Doris and Charles are pretty adamant that they don't think she has anything to do with his disappearance.
But also, it seems like there's no one else who had anything to do with his disappearance either.
It's almost just this information void.
And eventually, news about Stephen starts dwindling, leaving the clerks to cope with this massive loss.
Weeks start to pass, and then months, and eventually years go by with no signs of Stephen.
His bank accounts, they're checking, insurance, I mean, nothing is being used.
Throughout the early 2000s, there are some mentions of Stephen in the local papers, mostly about charitable efforts to bring attention to his case.
For instance, the Northern Echo reports in 2004 that an organization spotlighting missing persons, features Stephen's case.
There's another article in 2007 that talks about how a charity is trying to help track him down, I mean, at about 15 years later.
But there was one part that actually stood out to me, they include a message in their broadcast appealing to Stephen directly.
They say, quote, Stephen can also call our confidential service where he can leave a message reassuring his loved ones of his well-being that we can forward on his behalf.
He does not have to say where he is.
So even after 15 years, there's still some assumption that he just up and left on his own.
Maybe not assumption, I mean, I think it's at that point hope.
I mean, I think in our crime-junkie brains, we automatically assume the worst, but while it's rare for someone to go off the grid and then just show back up decades later, it's not entirely unheard of.
If that is what happened though, Stephen never reaches out.
The only other update comes a few years later, when Doris and Charles speak out about needing a DNA database for missing people, like they have for murder cases.
And I'm not 100% sure what exactly they wanted, because I was able to find an annual report from the National DNA Database that says they've been collecting DNA to support the missing person's bureau since 2010.
So maybe they're talking about needing a completely different directory, like separate from the National one.
I'm not 100% sure. They could also be trying to just draw some attention to Stephen's case.
Now after this article comes out, things go quiet again, and his family has to live their whole lives without Stephen there.
Victoria in particular gets to the point where she has lived longer without Stephen than with him.
She gets married, she has kids of her own.
I'm sure in the years after he went missing, she thought of every scenario under the sun, regarding what could have happened to her brother.
Because again, when you have this information void, when you don't have answers, anything is possible.
But then, out of nowhere in September 2020, Victoria gets a knock on her door, and she is confronted with the one scenario that never crossed her mind.
In the Missing's episode, Victoria says that she opens the door and finds two officers standing in front of her.
And they ask her, you know, is Charles and Doris Clark are those your parents?
And when she nods, they tell her something that turns her world upside down.
Her parents have been arrested on suspicion of murdering her brother.
Victoria is completely taken aback.
Out of everything she thought might have happened, she never suspected that Stephen could have been murdered by their own parents.
After a moment to process it, she asks where her parents are.
Her parents, who according to that same Missing podcast, are in their 80s now, by the way.
And they tell her that they're being interviewed.
And then they inquire if they can ask her a few questions.
Because, you know, by the way, they never talked to her back when Stephen first went missing.
What? I mean, I know she was like a town over, but...
Yeah, zero investigation.
So they're basically making up for lost time.
Obviously, she agrees.
And for the next like four plus hours, they sit at her kitchen table just grilling her.
They ask her about her and Stephen's home life.
And what it was like growing up in the Clark household.
Specifically, if her parents were ever violent toward her or Stephen, to which she tells them, no, never.
I mean, they were so close, they're moved to a different country, and then back only brought them closer and solidified their tight-knit family unit.
That doesn't seem to deter detectives, and they just keep pressing.
But she is adamant. Her parents were never violent, never abusive.
She doesn't think that they have any reason to have arrested them in the first place.
And the more they speak, the more she can feel her faith in the justice system, just crumbling.
I mean, remember, both Doris and Charles were police officers.
They raised their kids with the belief that if you were ever in trouble, go to the police.
And you know what to do, you'll be safe with them.
So to hear officers in front of her, accuse her parents of murder, with seemingly no proof, like her blood is boiling.
Okay, why is this happening at all, but why now?
Like, how did we get here?
So here's the thing. So unbeknownst to any of the Clark family.
The Cleveland and North Yorkshire Police Cold Case Unit had been actively investigating Stephen's disappearance since at least a year before they came knocking on Victoria's door.
I don't know what made them reopen this case then, but as part of their investigation, they focused on an anonymous letter sent to police back in September 1999 that has some seriously concerning information regarding Stephen and his parents.
They had this letter for 20 years and they were just sitting on it.
What have they been doing this whole time?
Nothing, I guess. And the clerks had no idea about this letter.
Well, here's the thing.
So it depends on who you ask.
According to the ITV documentary, Charles in that says that he vaguely remembers hearing about it, but claims that he never saw it.
He says police never showed it to him or even really talked about it with him at the time.
But reporting for T.S.I.
Live says that police did talk to Doris and Charles about the letter.
In fact, they say, quote, historic records show at the time the letter was assessed by officers and the information was recorded.
These records also show that in November 1999, detectives visited Stephen's home address and had a conversation about the letter and its contents.
I'm sorry, it was recorded in historic records.
What? Records? You said there were no records.
Ah, yeah, I don't know what is going on with the records.
Police say they don't have them, but then all of a sudden, like, again, they need to like back something up and then there are records.
I don't know. So all in all, it seems like it's this letter that is the main reason Charles and Doris have been arrested.
And Victoria's obviously got so many questions about it.
I mean, first of all, what does it say?
Who sent it? But the police won't let her read the letter.
And they actually still have no idea who sent it.
And what's really strange to me is that just based on how Victoria says they're talking to her, it doesn't seem like they would have had a motive.
Like that's not something that's presented.
It seems as though police are almost trying to figure out what the motive would be from her.
Or maybe they're just trying to get her to confirm what's in the letter without them telling her first.
I don't know. It's all pretty strange.
And I can imagine if this is how they approached Charles about the letter way back when, maybe that's part of the confusion.
Like the record show we talked to him about it the same way they talked to Victoria about it.
Right. Right. And he said, and if it was about him, maybe he didn't even know the significance of it then.
I, again, I don't know. Well, I mean, surely they'll tell him what's in it now that they're grilling him, right?
I mean, where are the lawyers?
Someone get these people a lawyer.
Well, they don't get a lawyer.
This first go around. They are willing to cooperate and talk to police on their own.
And later that night, they actually get bailed from police custody.
Okay, but what did they talk about?
So Doris explains in the documentary that they first split her and Charles up and interrogated them separately.
And I mean, we know that's pretty normal when there's more than one person like being looked at or whatever.
But Victoria thinks that they did this to pit them against one another.
Now, I can't find many of the questions that they were asked specifically or even what investigators told them, which is all I want to know.
I know. Delsen the details, right?
Doris does say that her interrogator was aggressive.
If Charles would ever like keep something from her to protect her and she's like, I don't know, maybe he might.
But if the insinuation was that Charles was somehow responsible for the death of their son, like, I mean, she wasn't pying that.
And then if that with what they're trying to do is get her to say something about Charles, then it gets kind of flipped because of by the end of the interview, all we know is that the officer interviewing Doris told her that she was violent.
She's controlling and she's a murderer.
And they basically like tell her just like, just tell us where Steven's body is.
Again, I met a total loss here.
How is she violent? Why do they think she's a murderer?
This is all just coming so out of left field.
I know. Victoria has to be feeling the exact same way.
Confused, lost, I mean, terrified for her parents.
But they don't get any real answers.
Now, it doesn't seem like Charles told Victoria or anyone else any specifics of what was in his interview.
But the outcome for both was the same.
Detectives don't have anything concrete to keep them in custody, so it seems like they have nothing left to do besides putting all of their efforts into finding Steven's remains.
Which the first place they do this at is the Clark's back yard.
So they're doing this search of their yard and they find what they call an area of significance.
I'm not exactly sure what that means or how they find it.
They didn't define it for us.
But they jump on it. They start digging up the yard.
They dig up almost every single inch of it, even emptying and moving a shed that they have in the back.
But after all of that searching, they find nothing.
Though they're not done.
They do finally what should have been done almost 30 years ago and they start an all-out plan search for Steven in the area where he went missing.
They're looking along the cliff sides on the beach in the sand dunes all over.
Now as all of this is going on, public interest in Steven's case has skyrocketed.
Soon the case gets a second wind and the Clark family becomes as spectacle at the center of it.
In the court, a public opinion, Doris and Charles are already guilty and they can't go anywhere or do anything without being hounded by reporters.
And it leaves Victoria in this really difficult position because on the one hand, she wants to publicly defend her parents and make her voice heard.
But she also has her own family, specifically kids that she has to protect.
And in the missing podcast episode, she says that she's horrified that her kids aren't off limits seemingly to the media.
Like one reporter even reached out to Victoria's 13 year old son, Oh hell no.
I know. So she draws the line.
She has to make the difficult decision to just stay out of the limelight while trying to support her parents like in the background.
And at the same time, like keeping an eye on this new investigation without putting her own family like in the public eye even more.
And the fact that she's like not front in center makes the speculation just even more rampant with reporters seemingly taking Victoria's silent as some sort of confirmation that she thinks her parents are guilty.
When all she's trying to do is protect her kids.
Yeah, and again, behind the scenes, totally not the case.
She is fully teen parents.
Right. So I mean, they're like, I imagine like hunker down.
All they can do is wait and wait for some kind of news from the searches, hoping that if they find Stephen, maybe all of this will get cleared up.
But days go by. No remains turn up.
There's essentially no sign at least that detective share of Stephen anywhere along this seafront.
All along the way, detectives are continuously putting out appeals through this new investigation for anyone with information to come forward.
Now they don't outright say that they have reason to believe that at the time Stephen's potential girlfriend could have helpful information, but they do address her enough times in their conversations with the press that it seems like they want to hear from her about how Stephen was.
Like how was he acting? What was he doing leading up to his disappearance?
But I don't know if they can't find her now or if they're just covering all their bases like I don't know why they're like saying this to the public as opposed to just going to her makes me think they can't find her.
And as far as I know, she never reaches out to them.
But a new witness does. And the anonymous letter writer finally reveals themselves.
There's a woman who comes forward saying that she saw Stephen on the day that he went missing.
She says that she saw him later that same afternoon and he was walking away from the saltburn pier, which means that Stephen did come out of the bathroom and walked into town from the path that he and his mom were on.
And she just kept us to herself for nearly 30 years.
Pretty much. I mean, she said that she realized the significance of her sighting when she saw a report about Stephen being missing.
Like, honestly, right, like when he first vanished, but she wasn't sure if what she saw was relevant or not.
So she just didn't report it.
She only came forward now because she thought, well, you know, like it's been all this time, maybe the thing that I saw actually is helpful, which I don't totally like get the reasoning, but whatever.
Like, okay, we're here now.
They have this and this kind of forces them to go back and look at those two other sightings of Stephen from way back in the day, the ones from like the people who who said they like knew him or knew him through mutual friends.
And this time around, they have some new insights on the credibility of those sightings.
So that first sighting by the family friend that happened in December in red car ended up not being verifiably Stephen.
I guess later on the friend said that it was actually raining super heavy on the day that he thought he saw Stephen.
He couldn't actually see the face of the person that he believed to be Stephen.
He thought it was Stephen, basically, just because this person walked in a similar manner.
So he assumed it was Stephen, which for what it's worth, he did have that limp.
So he had a more distinctive walk than most, but certainly not the only one in the world who walked like that, I'm sure, right?
And then police say that the person who reported the sighting that happened in January was actually too far away to confirm that the person they saw was actually Stephen.
And it would have been dark at the time of the sighting.
So detectives just don't think that that's super reputable either.
So we don't actually know if anyone saw Stephen after the day he went missing.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, like this lady's coming forward all these years later, like I don't know if we have a sighting of Stephen after his mom sees him go into the bathroom.
Right. Are you ready for like everything else to fall apart, too?
So like I teased, not long after all of the sightings fall apart, the mysterious letter writer comes forward.
And again, you know, this, this letter was the whole catalyst for Doris and Charles arrest.
Well, it turned out to be written by a woman who had no direct contact with the Clarks and only wrote the letter because she had a feeling that this family she doesn't know murdered Stephen.
Not because she had any substantial evidence or information that could actually back up this claim that would go on to destroy their lives.
So because this lady had a feeling, these parents of a missing person got arrested, got interrogated by the police.
Their yard was dug up. Their lives were turned even more upside down than having a missing child.
Check, check, check. Because she had a hunch.
Yeah. I'm sure it's like embarrassing when they, when everyone like finds out and like they can't undo the damage.
Yeah. So in another Northern Echo report, investigators do eventually clear the Clarks as suspects.
And that happens in February of 2021.
I mean, this is all like unfolding like recently.
And it was in that April that ITV releases that documentary, which was following Doris and Charles over the prior year during the investigation into Stephen's murder.
And I mean, that honestly that documentary was a huge source for this episode.
And in it, they maintain their innocence and they describe how that accusation impacted them.
Now, if you go watch the documentary, I feel like I have to at least like address this because a lot of people talk about Charles and Doris's tone and demeanor.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
If you go look it up, you'll see comments about how both parents seem, what people say they're like, oh, they're unconcerned with their son's disappearance.
But I think like again, if you go in, if someone's like going and already convinced of their guilt and looking for proof where there hasn't been any, it might look like evidence that they don't care about Stephen, like people are saying.
Without literally any evidence of their guilt, I would like to remind everyone listening that you never know how you're going to react when something like that happens to you.
I've watched it. I don't really see what other people see.
Well, and not just when something like this happens to you, but when you've lived with this for almost 30 years as your reality, not knowing what happened to your child, where your child is.
And then on top of it, going through the hell that they just went through with the police investigation.
And that's what I'm saying.
Like, I, the way that this like rips you open, a cheer point you would live with that for years.
And then for after all those years, not only did police like not give a crap then and do nothing, but now you're paying the price because they didn't do a proper investigation and they're trying to arrest you and blame you for the son that you've lost and been grieving.
Like again, that's like the mentality I went in watching it and people would have like definitely thought I was guilty because I would have been pissed.
Like the fact that they're talking at all is a grace to them.
They don't have to do this.
Yeah. And by the way, most people are just straight up uncomfortable in front of cameras.
So like add that to the mix too.
Totally. Just for another reference does Victoria do the documentary as well?
No, but like I said, she later did that missing podcast and she says the only reason she didn't was again for the safety and privacy of her children because they didn't go in after they were cleared.
Like I said, they were filming that whole year where like the media was just coming after them.
And she reinforces in the podcast that like she didn't step out of it because she got her parents were somehow responsible for her brother's death.
She fully believes them and she still wants answers about her brother's disappearance.
But the whole time she's had to balance that desire for answers with being there for her family, which has had to take top priority.
Now after the documentary and the podcast episode comes out media attention surrounding Stephen's disappearance, like you know, there's that hot moment and then it kind of just dwindles.
The cold case unit is still working on his case, but since 2021 there hasn't been much of an upding.
That being said, investigators are very much interested in speaking to anyone who can provide insight into Stephen's disappearance.
Maybe you were Stephen's alleged girlfriend or you know who the girlfriend is.
Maybe you're one of the two men with the little girls seen by the saltburned peer restrooms.
Like, or you know who these men are.
So if you're listening to this and any of that applies to you or you know anything, the Cleveland and North Yorkshire police cold case unit would love to talk to you.
Again, Stephen disappeared on December 28th, 1992 at the saltburned peer.
And before we go, Brick, can you share what Stephen looked like and what he was wearing when he disappeared?
Yeah, Stephen is a white male.
At the time of his disappearance, he was six foot three with a medium build.
He has blue eyes, dark brown hair.
And like you mentioned before, he walked with a limp and had limited use of his left arm.
And today, Stephen would be 54 years old.
He was wearing a navy blue parka and had on blue denim jeans and gray shoes on the day he disappeared.
So if you saw Stephen that day or remember any tiny detail, let detectives know.
You never know what might crack this case.
Missing people has a website set up where you can submit your tips.
We'll link to that in our show notes.
You can also call the missing people's helpline at 116-00.
That number's for the UK.
So if you're in the US and you know something again, go to the link in our show notes.
And like that broadcast did so many years ago, Stephen, if you're out there and listening to this podcast, you can use the same tip lines to let your family know you're okay.
I'll link out directly to the UK like cold case team that stuff in the show notes as well.
But before we close out this episode, it's important for you or anyone you know who is thinking about suicide to be aware that emotional support can be reached by calling some meritons in the UK at 116-123.
If you're in the US, you can call or text the suicide crisis lifeline at 988 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.
We'll post even more resources in our show notes.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com.
And you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkiepodcast.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
And that's Donald Ray Cough, one of Ocimates 3 attorneys.
He'd been in the Air Force himself for 28 years, but by the time he joined Ocimates' case, he was a civilian, freer than the uniformed attorneys to deploy spirited language.
This was probably the worst of any US military court martial I've ever been involved in.
And I've tried 200 courts martial.
It was just the cascade of errors.
I know litigators tend to be fast and loose with the superlative insults, but it's true.
Then abounded in Ocimates' case.
The government tried again and again to find indications that the way Ocimates had done his job in Guantanamo, the way he translated, simplifying the prayers, the way he'd used his computer, weren't simply shortcuts.
There were deceptions.
Investigators needle deep into his hard drive, looking for evidence he'd uploaded secret information, or embedded it in his personal website or email detainee information to someone.
But there was nothing. FBI agents secretly raided his sister's house in Anaheim, breaking a window and rifling through their home office, traumatizing her in the process.
No evidence there either.
Also getting to the government's case, they did not know what was classified and what was not.
Brian Wheeler, the prosecutor, told me that early on in the case, he'd gone to a meeting at the Pentagon, where he'd been informed in serious tones that the list of detainees and their ISN numbers was classified.
Not just secret, but possibly top secret.
Once later, after a formal classification review, they told him, Well, maybe not so much.
That's not secret at all.
Well, that really affected things.
The 186 letters on Ahmed's computer weren't classified either.
In fact, the only classified papers Ahmed had were the ones from the Airbridge mission.
Meanwhile, the government's case against James Yee was falling apart, too.
That accused him of mishandling classified information, but never produced any evidence to back it up.
After two and a half months in a Navy break, they let him out and eventually dismiss the charges.
In Ahmed Mahalba, the linguist arrested in Boston, would end up pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized possession of classified materials.
A crime he insisted was unintentional on his part.
He'd spend a year and a half in jail.
It had been only two years since 9-11.
We'd just had the biggest scare of our lives.
So when you think about the weaknesses in the government's case against Ahmed, it's only fair to keep that in mind.
If Al Qaeda could take control of commercial airplanes and steer them into skyscrapers, into the Pentagon, was it irrational to think that they could be operating inside Guan Panamo, one of the most secure facilities on Earth?
On the other hand, the number of times that simple, logical explanations for what investigators and prosecutors were seeing were brushed aside.
The sheer sloppiness of some of their work, that too is remarkable.
Mistakes are one thing, but this started to feel like something else was at play.
It's worth pointing out the investigators looking into Ahmed were young in their 20s and inexperienced.
The lead investigator, Special Agent Lance Wega, was so knew at his job he was still on probation with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
Another agent on the team, he'd just turned 23.
Their supervisors were a little older, but one of the investigators told me, as far as he knew, none of them had ever worked on account intelligence investigation before.
And within a couple of months of Ahmed's arrest, one supervisor was pulled off the case.
He'd later plead guilty to mishandling classified documents and a slew of sex crimes against two young girls.
None of the investigators would talk to me on the record, but let's just say, the people trying to prove Ahmed was a spy, this wasn't exactly the A team.
Some of the accusations they made against Ahmed were eminently checkable, but simply hadn't been before ending up on a charge sheet.
The bank fraud allegations, for instance, complete nonsense.
Military judge noted the prosecution's quote, appalling lack of evidence for that one.
Or the document had lied about being a US citizen, when in fact he was a US citizen.
He'd been naturalized just a week before he arrived at Guantanamo.
Military allegations were so thin, yet so casually and confidently weaponized, the only explanation seemed to be not just incompetence, but bad faith.
After a court hearing, for instance, a government translator realized she'd made a mistake, translating a piece of evidence the government was relying on to show Ahmed was trying to peddle secret information abroad.
But when she notified a prosecutor, she'd misinterpreted a crucial word.
He told her not to mention it to anyone.
Chapter two was thrown off the case.
To demonstrate that Ahmed was a sympathizer and possibly an extremist, the government assembled a patchwork of statements from far-flung sources, a couple of which turned into criminal charges, who's accused of making anti-American comments and then lying to investigators about that.
The lead investigator, Lance Wage, testified that one such statement had been relayed by Ed Brooks, the Arabic linguist and formerly annoying evangelical Christian.
Quote, Sergeant Brooks allegedly told FBI agents that senior Airman Al-Halabi said, quote, that camp Dalta's detainees were treated unfairly and the guards deserve to be spat upon, or words to that effect, unquote.
But when I asked Ed Brooks about this 20 years later, he didn't know what I was talking about.
It was the first time he was hearing he'd been part of Ahmed's case in any way.
To prove it, I read to him from the court record.
Especially as you know, Wage said, Oh my God.
Okay, yes. I just triggered it.
I did say that in an interview, but it wasn't to slam him like they were saying like Ed said some investigator had come to him asking whether Ahmed had said those things and Ed said, yeah, he did.
But here's what happened.
There'd been an earthing that had gone south.
The interpreters had suspected this one guard of denying a detainee food on multiple occasions and harassing him by keeping him awake.
And so the detainee had finally spat at the guy.
The guards decided to urf him called for an interpreter.
How will be responded to this earthing?
They started without him, which was completely against fucking SLP.
Like they were dead wrong to do it, but they wanted to.
So they tuned this, you know, they, they urf the detainee, they hog time and then how it would be there for like the end of it and how he had come back angry about it.
It was like they deserved to be spin on ball blah, like not the guards as in all like this one urf that had gone down badly.
So that is super out of fucking context.
The fact that someone would then take me and quote that as an anti-American, that's fucking ridiculous.
A bunch of statements in Ahmed's case were like that, ridiculous even in context.
It really is striking. How so much of this, the inexperience, the tenuous connections, the lack of rigor and professional restraint, all echoes inside the case files of Guantanamo detainees.
I've spoken to a handful of people who've seen inside the classified intelligence files we kept on the detainees.
And most of them told me quote, yeah, we had some good information.
But overall, we should be skeptical.
A former CIA analyst named Gail Heldt who reviewed the detainee intelligence told me quote, the associations, the linkages that they made, like I don't want to be unduly harsh to people who were working under very intense and immense pressure after 9-11, but the associations they made were stupid.
Another analyst, Jake Meyer, an army intel guy who worked at Guantanamo for about five years on and off said, especially in the earlier years they were working at break next speed to get information and everybody's caught up in it and you're producing, you're producing and compiling this massive swirling pile of bullshit is what he called it.
And some of what's in that swirling pile is good and important quote, but as an analyst we're supposed to be able to filter through all the other bullshit to find the good stuff.
We found that we probably should have been filtering through our own bullshit unquote.
Talkin' it doesn't blame the government for investigating him.
He just wishes they'd done it with an even hand.
He said, I was able to give them the benefit of the doubt.
They didn't give it to me.
Okay, I asked him, so why did you take those papers home?
Everybody else seemed to know that wasn't allowed.
What were you thinking when you packed up that box for instance with the classified air bridge papers?
He was about to ship out, he said, and those documents he thought they were cool.
He wanted to keep them. And then I'm not going to keep it with me, let me just send it in the box.
In case they search and they find it on me, right?
So I'm like, I'm just sending it.
So you totally know you're not supposed to happen?
Yeah, like I said, you know what I had?
The inner self telling me, maybe I shouldn't do this, but like what's the worst that can happen?
Of course, the worst can happen to get arrested, right?
The word naïve tends to come up when people describe Ahmed back then.
He used that word to describe himself.
Maybe that was true. But also true, Ahmed was the iguana feeder.
He didn't plan to do anything with those papers, he said.
So he didn't see the harm in taking them.
And these documents, he told me, he felt entitled to them.
He just spent eight rough months working in a detention facility.
I'm like, yeah, I deserve to keep something from that time because I literally had nothing to take leaving.
I was supposed to get a medal and I didn't.
And I was very pissed off, you know, because everybody gets a medal, but for some reason or another, they didn't have medals at that time and they didn't have the time to do a ceremony for us leaving.
And I didn't get that. So you know, like, well, let me get something.
Let me take something. So I took these documents or papers.
The most logical explanation for what Ahmed did is this one, the one he admits to that despite the government's year-long effort to prove otherwise, his intention wasn't nefarious.
It was just dumb, petty.
What shocked Ahmed about his case, he told me, was how sudden it all was.
It was shocking, he said, to know that you can turn on one of your own this quickly and this heavily.
I was taken aback for a second by this idea that they'd turned on one of their own.
This did the military consider Ahmed one of their own?
Maybe they didn't, not really.
And maybe that's why they didn't entertain the logical explanation for what Ahmed did, or for what other Muslim personnel did.
Consider around the same time Ahmed and Captain James Yee and that other linguist Ahmed Mahalba were all arrested and imprisoned and charged with crimes, a fourth person was also stopped on his way out of Guantanamo with a number of classified documents in his briefcase, his computer, his foot locker, he was an intelligence officer, older, a decorated colonel, he was not Muslim.
He looked and spoke like one of their own.
His case ended with no detention, no criminal proceedings.
Instead, he got an administrative ding and the benefit of the doubt.
The investigators I spoke to all denied that Ahmed's foreignness, as Ahmed put it, my accent, my funny name, my religion, played any part in his prosecution.
They were following the facts, they said, full stop.
But in the end, it's not just the wrongness of some of their facts that makes me disagree.
It's the origin of some of those facts.
The case against Ahmed was spun up in part because of a guy named Jason Orlich, an Army Reserve captain who worked as the camp security officer.
Captain Orlich's office shared space with the Doc X office for a while and his swirling suspicions about religious Muslim personnel at Guantanamo were at the root of the government's investigations.
As one of Ahmed's lawyers said in court, Captain Jason Orlich, frankly your honor, was the one that started this whole mess to begin with.
Captain Orlich didn't want to talk to me, but back when all this happened, the Seattle Times newspaper did a nine-part investigation, mostly about the ye case.
And Orlich did speak to that reporter Ray Rivera at length.
Orlich told Rivera he became suspicious of Chaplain Ye almost as soon as he got to Guantanamo.
When he sat through Ye's cultural awareness briefing for incoming personnel, basic information about the detainees and about Islam.
The presentation made Orlich uncomfortable, as if Ye was justifying extremist actions.
You could ask anyone who went through that initial briefing Orlich is quoted as saying, everybody who walked out after it was oversat there going, is he on our side or is he on the enemy side?
After that Orlich began keeping tabs on Ye and on Ye's group of friends, including Captain Hashem and the Navy Petty Officer, an Ahmed, the way they prayed in particular rubbed him the wrong way.
Orlich himself was a devout Catholic and described himself in Ray Rivera's series as accepting of other religions, but he said the way Ye and his quote-unquote Muslim click behaved was strange to him.
In statements he made to investigators, Orlich said, many times our section could hear the Muslim linguists, including Al-Halabi, praying at the end of the hallway.
Al-Halabi and Captain Hashem would try to get others to come to prayer.
The room at the end of the hallway became crowded with their recruits, unquote.
And they were fervent in their beliefs.
A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those of the detainees, unquote.
Orlich told the Seattle paper that some of the non-Muslim linguists, some of the same ones who'd complained about Captain Hashem favoring Ahmed, began coming to him with information about sympathizary things Ahmed had supposedly said or done.
Orlich himself couldn't open an investigation, but he could and did pass along his concerns, especially about Chaplain Yee, to the camp's counterintelligence officer, who took them seriously and who in turn pushed them up the chain until finally, in May of 2003, the military officially opened an investigation on Chaplain Yee, and also on Ahmed.
Look, nobody wants to be accused of being a racist, prejudiced, bigoted, Orlich told Ray Rivera after the case isn't fallen apart.
But if we hadn't done anything, some of us would have lost our jobs.
But Orlich did think Orlich was prejudiced.
At the time, Captain Orlich and his pals were passing around homemade CDs loaded with offensive content.
Ahmed's defense tried to introduce this stuff in court, but the judge wouldn't have it.
I've seen it though. Sexist, racist, jingoistic, juvenile, Islamophobic images, cartoons, and little films.
Even worse, some years after Captain Orlich left Guantanamo and was promoted to Major Orlich, he made a PowerPoint about Islam, based in part on, quote, Lessons Learned at Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay.
If you Google it, you'll see Orlich's dangerous argument that there's no such thing as a moderate or peaceful form of Islam, accompanied by images of burning towers, severed heads, bloody children, quotes calling for death to all Christians and Jews, and many exclamation points.
According to court records, Jason Orlich is the guy who ended up with Ahmed's disposable camera, not entirely clear how, and had the film developed and identified those two verboten photos, the incident that kicked off Ahmed's case.
Lance Wage, the lead investigator, testified that he took extensive guidance from Captain Orlich when he was gathering evidence, including about what documents and Ahmed's possession were classified, what documents included, quote, unquote, extremist content, even though it turned out Captain Orlich didn't definitively know what was classified and didn't know Arabic.
Lance Wage was praised for this investigation, by the way, a performance report noted that he, quote, developed one of the most prolific espionage aiding the enemy investigations in recent memory, unquote, and that his actions led to 18 other investigations, none of which turned up any serious violations, much less aspiring, but he got an extra 2,000 bucks as a thank you.
By September of 2004, a little more than a year after it started, Ahmed's case was a shadow of its most threatening self.
The espionage aiding the enemy, most of the false statements, the bank fraud, had all dropped away, until about half the original charges remained, and half of those, as Laura said, were rinky dink.
Meanwhile, the mood of the press had soured on the prosecution, spiring at Gitmo became three counts dropped against Gitmo translator.
Finally, the government was grudgingly ready to let go.
A year earlier, prosecutors had offered Ahmed a deal of 50 years in prison if he pleaded guilty to espionage.
Now they were agreeing to zero, no more time at all.
Ahmed admitted to mishandling classified documents, violating a general order, making false statements, all to do with those two pictures and the air bridge papers.
He was sentenced to time served, and a bad behavior discharge from the Air Force.
After the evidence in Ahmed's case was aired out, the world learned, Ahmed wasn't an Islamic extremist or spy.
He was just a young airman with sticky fingers, who'd learned the harshest shoplifting lesson of all time.
However, that's what the world should have learned.
Instead, and this too is true for the detainees, even after the investigation was finished, the suspicion wasn't.
Even after sentencing, Ahmed's case wasn't over.
As part of his plea, he agreed to be debriefed by the government.
I assumed this debrief was a lessons learned sort of thing.
The government trying to understand how its big splashy case ended up more than a year and God knows how many dollars later, as dude gets caught with two boring photos and still air bridge instructions.
I'm minimizing, I know.
But surely somewhere, someone with stars on his or her lapels was asking, what went wrong here?
The debrief was not that.
Ahmed's case was about to get a lot weirder.
It's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas and me, our editor is Julie Snyder, additional reporting by Kora Courier and Amir Kafaji, fact checking by Ben Falen and Jessica Seriano.
Public supervision, sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang, original score by Sophia Dele-Ellisandre.
Editing help from Alvin Melath, Jen Guera and Ira Glass, our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Rosina Ali.
Additional production from Daniel Gimett and Emma Grillo, our standards editor is Susan Wessling, legal review from Elimine Sumar.
The art for our show comes from Pablo del Con and Max Guter.
Supervising producer for serial productions is Ande Chubu.
Our executive assistant is Mack Miller.
