Jay Slater and the horror of true-crime ghouls Armchair detectives have turned a tragedy into a ghost story

The content of these groups is, to say the least, batshit. Internet sleuths and true crime ghouls trace Jay’s hiking routes; they watch livestream footage of the mountains and pick out shadowy figures — often palm trees — who might be “involved”. Several people have actually travelled to the search location; “I am filming a small informative video to go up tonight if appropriate,” says one. “PLEASE READ A WHITE CAR IS PARKED AGAIN ON THE CCTV LOOK,” says Amber. David soberly replies: “95% of cars in Spain are white apparently.” “It looked like too [sic] men dressed in black hiding something,” says Ava. Paul chips in: “A lot of people don’t believe mediums but they’ve helped solve crimes before. There has been a couple mediums from other groups … saying something along the lines of Jay is surrounded by mountains, injured and needs help.” If only I had that oracular power.

I first heard of the hysteria when it was ruthlessly mocked on Twitter/X, with hard-nosed realists sneering at the “crushed velvet sofa” brigade, parodying brainless conversations about “this lad in Tenerife”. For the post-ironic edgelords of one platform, the story is not about the teenager but the uncool and manic gullibility of another. The discourse is now snagged on the barbed wire fence between Boomers and snarky Millennials — there is a cold detachment to the Twitter mockery which is even more chilling than the bizarro spitballing on Facebook; a further turning away from the simple human misfortune at the story’s centre.

The reason for the story’s virality is its factually flexible juiciness. In a vacuum of information, much suspicion has been targeted at Law, the 18-year-old holiday companion who set up the fundraising page. Blissfully dismissive of libel laws, people have been enthusiastically calling her a “drugs mule for them over there”, saying she is “known in the clubs” of Tenerife for peddling substances. “She gets paid to go to raves/festivals and takes drugs over to sell” reads a screenshot of a private text exchange. The evidence for these claims is non-existent.

Many accounts claim “I know someone out there”. “I have friends over in Tenerife and what’s been said to me by them don’t sound good at all,” says one ominous and helpfully vague post. A popular theory goes that Jay, who was handed a community order for splitting a 17-year-old boy’s head open with a machete along with seven accomplices in August 2021, was on a mission to “steal a Rolex” — a codename, sleuths speculate, for ecstasy.

Then, there are the straight-up fakes. A text exchange supposedly with Lucy contains the spiritually concerning vow: “Once I die I’ll take the secret to my death”. Several posts compare the mystery to the Shannon Matthews case — when a nine-year-old girl was reported missing in Dewsbury in 2008, only to be found hiding under a family friend’s bed in a plot to profit from reward money. “She’s almost smiling and laughing at times,” says a comment under a video interview with Jay’s mother Debbie Duncan. “The mum is 100% involved,” says a post. “Rumours going round he’s been found tied up in a shed, to be confirmed,” says another.

From the nastily accusatory to the downright ridiculous: a woman called Kirsty kindly offers, “I have a Labrador who has a very sensitive nose. Maybe he could pick up a scent if you have an item with his smell on it?” One can only imagine the poor dog trudging around the mountains and barren valleys of Tenerife after having had a teenager’s sweaty Hugo Boss t-shirt shoved into its snout. “What if it’s the same person that took Madeline [sic] McCann,” asks one TikTok investigator.

What may seem like obvious trolling becomes grimly more credible in the context of the general hysteria of these groups, in which users satisfy morbid fascinations with hours of unsolicited research. In one forum, “top contributor” Steve admits he has spent six hours on Google Maps “zooming in on the satellite view to see if I can find him”, only to realise he was looking at Lanzarote. Little does he know the map function is not even live (he was probably looking at a three-year-old static image of the wrong part of Spain). Better not to waste valuable time doing the research, Steve: show the chutzpah of the anonymous poster who posited that Jay is “still on the mountain” but is simply “attached to a cactus”.

This is not the first time a missing person has sparked a flurry of speculation. Nicola Bulley, 45, disappeared in Lancashire last year, having fallen into a river and drowned. At the time, social media lit up with theories about the supposed involvement of her devastated husband (who, it emerged, had nothing to do with it). In a bizarre twist, a detective who worked on the Bulley case has said he can have Jay Slater’s disappearance sewn up “in three days” if he can join the search.

People go missing all the time, gaining woefully scant attention. But from Madeleine McCann to Lord Lucan, certain cases have a specific appeal for armchair investigators. In Lucan’s case, his aristocratic background and intriguing family life was central; McCann’s abduction was made sensational by cruel suspicions around her parent’s involvement. The abuse they received, like Bulley’s husband, was shameful at what could only have been the worst time of their lives.

The same vicious speculation was directed at the Princess of Wales during her absence — now understood to have been linked to her cancer diagnosis — after the posting of a bodged photoshop in March. Even now, Kate’s re-emergence at Trooping the Colour was met with cruel videos on TikTok in which assorted “creators” compared images of the royal’s face before and after her chemotherapy treatment, claiming that her cancer announcement was simply a cover-up for having a facelift. Now, Slater’s family and friends are feeling the brunt of the same misinformed, vicious curiosity — turbo-powered by late-stage internet culture.

There will always be an appetite for mystery and problem-solving — particularly among the Miss Marples of middle-aged Facebook — but we must acknowledge that social media has lit the touchpaper of the most base instincts around tragedy. In Jay Slater’s case, all the ingredients for prurient fascination are there: he is a “sweet lad” from a relatable background, on a holiday to a popular British tourist destination. We have a dash of exotic glamour, a touch of Death in Paradise, coupled with the homely sensibilities of concerned parents. We have a suspicion of blundering foreign policemen and murky goings-on in tourist hotspots. And, in an innovation which sets modern murder mysteries apart from those in the golden age of print, we have an absolute abundance of data — forums, webcams, social media profiles, tranches of images — coupled with a lack of detail apposite to what will undoubtedly turn out to be a depressingly banal case of an intoxicated youngster making a mistake. The fervour to compile information, the eagerness to thrill one another with exclusive tidbits and wild theories, can only thrive in the dank chasm created by too much power and too few facts, like noxious fungi spreading in the dark.

The human tragedy at the centre of this story has been shoved to the side, while compelling narratives are warped and milked and passed around like ghost stories. And, critically, few upstanding publications care to engage with the lunatics on social media — the traditional Press understands that it is unfair and undignified, let alone legally sticky, to baselessly speculate. As a result, online communities are left to fester and flourish, and are afforded the most intoxicating feeling of all: a sense that “no-one is talking about this”; that we are “not being told” something.

That a boom in true crime coincided with a global pandemic, and has only metastasised since then, is not a coincidence. The banal confines of life under lockdown saw social spheres turned inwards, with the isolated, bored and unfulfilled hooking themselves up to a steady drip of intoxicating Netflix thrills — a trend which Baby Reindeer, whose obsessive fans identified and harassed its real-life “stalker” character, has indefinitely prolonged. At a time of uncertainty, unpicking the tragedies of others must have seemed soothing, a gruesome schadenfreude.

True-crime mysteries are deceptive in their complexity, for at bottom what we like about them is their comforting simplicity. If we solve this, if we find the one answer, it is done. How heady, in a world of such harrowing unpredictability, must it be to cast aside all the bother of other news stories (a tangle of election stories, the depressing cost of living, the ever-looming prospect of international conflict) and become the saviour detective in your own. But this is not victimless; immersing ourselves in pet conspiracy theories, whether that be Kate Middleton’s health or the shadowy elite shoving us into 15-minute cities, is not just about freedom of speech or thought. In this case, it will probably mean that a 19-year-old boy staggering home from a rave died, parched, on a slope in the Canary Islands, only to become a martyr to Netflix-addled nosiness.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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