‘It was a bloody mess’: why are the police still so bad at finding missing people in the UK?

Two cases, months apart, brought home to Charlie Hedges just how much police were failing when a person was reported missing. The first landed on his desk in October 1997 with a note from his inspector: “Can you sort this out please, Charlie?”

At the time, Hedges was a sergeant with Thames Valley police in Bletchley. The case involved a 19-year-old man – Hedges calls him Rob, which is not his real name – who had attended a rave in Milton Keynes and failed to return to the guesthouse where he was staying. As Hedges sorted through the scant paperwork, he could see that the police response had been “a bloody mess”.

“One of the key things was that there was no ownership – there was a dispute between my force, which covered Milton Keynes, and the force where Rob came from, 200 miles away, over who was responsible,” he says. “It had just been recorded on a piece of paper and batted around. Every step of the way, things weren’t happening the way they should. There was no support for the family, no point of contact, no updates. The assumption was: ‘He’s a young man out having a good time, he’ll turn up, he’ll be OK.’”

A closer look at Rob’s disappearance quickly sounded alarm bells. Building a relationship with Rob’s mother convinced Hedges that this was not a young man caught up in partying, but something completely out of character. Rob had been born when his parents were teenagers and Rob’s father had left the house one day and never returned: he was killed in an accident at 19. Her son, then 19 himself, would never inflict this on her again through choice, she said.

Enquiries around the venue quickly produced witness accounts of someone fitting Rob’s description close to a lake in the early hours of the rave. CCTV footage confirmed it was Rob and some of his clothing was found nearby, but the subsequent underwater search was inadequate. Hedges’ primary search area was a reed bank, but he was informed it yielded nothing. More days passed. It was only when he ordered another search and oversaw it himself that he saw the diver was purposely avoiding the reeded areas, later explaining that reeds were too difficult to search. When Hedges insisted on it, Rob’s body was quickly located.

Still, many questions remain unanswered. Toxicology tests on Rob’s body were negative. There had been sightings of another male at the lake at the same time, but what happened to Rob that night was never established. The investigation had been too slow, too slapdash. It wasn’t surprising that Rob’s family raised a complaint and Hedges found himself under investigation.

“That case changed my life completely,” he says. The fallout led to Hedges having a breakdown and taking time off work. On returning to duty, he set out to transform the police response to a missing persons case. He has spent decades developing national police guidance, decision-making tools and expertise; he has worked on some of the UK’s most high-profile disappearances, including those of David Kelly, the weapons expert who killed himself in 2003, and April Jones, the five-year-old who was abducted and murdered in 2012. His book, Missing, which charts his career, is dedicated to Rob.

Hedges says every missing persons case is an “indicator”. In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds. Although 90% return within 48 hours – and fewer than 1% are unresolved within a month – Hedges believes each will have suffered harm, either before they went missing or while they were gone.

One chilling example dates back to his earliest days on the job, when he was attending training courses with officers from Liverpool. He remembers them complaining about the constant stream of teenagers running away from care homes in north Wales and turning up in the city. The police routinely delivered them all back. Decades later, a three-year, £13m investigation would reveal those care homes were rife with physical and sexual abuse.

“Everyone in authority was complicit in enabling those offenders to continue,” says Hedges. “Those teenagers going missing were seen as a nuisance, a waste of police time. That was the attitude that prevailed. Actually, a missing persons case can be the door that leads to a major crime. Child sexual exploitation, county lines, forced marriage, people trafficking: most of these have been identified through a missing person. It just requires you to look closer and join the dots.”

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A few months after Rob’s disappearance, an 80-year-old man with dementia was reported missing in a rural area near Bletchley, yet for days nothing was done to locate him. “It was pretty horrifying – it was as if they were just waiting for him to turn up again,” says Hedges. Taking charge, he quickly found witness accounts of an elderly man wandering the footpaths. One person, concerned for the man’s welfare, had reported the sighting immediately, but police hadn’t acted on it or made the connection.

Hedges drew up a search area and enlisted a voluntary search-and-rescue team, who found the man’s body tangled in brambles. A faster response could have saved his life. “Having already highlighted the problems with Rob’s case, I naively thought that someone would have sorted it, but the same mistakes were being made,” says Hedges. “I was angry, frustrated – and I realised that if you want to make a difference, you’ve got to do it yourself.”

Before Hedges was able to work out how, he had to step out of policing for several months. “It was partly Rob’s case – the complaint, the investigation into me, the whole trauma around it,” says Hedges. He would arrive at work with anger churning in his stomach, feeling constantly on edge and “ready to explode”. He was soon signed off sick. Counselling helped; he developed coping mechanisms that he relies on today. Being in nature is one of them.

When he returned to work, he applied to the Police Research Award Scheme (PRAS) for funding to create a police guide to the investigation of missing persons – and was astounded to get it: “I was an underachiever at school: I was never academic, I struggled to get O-levels.” Hedges had only joined the police when a career adviser mentioned that her dad was in the police and “it seemed like an interesting job”. “With the PRAS project, I was doing things I’d never have believed I had the capacity to do. It led to more research, secondments, international collaboration, policy development. The journey has been absolutely unbelievable.”

Hedges’s aim was to transform the handling of a missing persons case from what he believed was “a tick-box exercise” – low-status, non-urgent and passive – into an active investigation. He developed a “risk triage” – the questions to ask and the information to gather in order to assess risk – and emphasised the need to build a relationship with the missing person’s family. “If you’re a victim of a major crime, you’ll get a family liaison officer to help you. In most missing persons cases, it’s hard for the family to have any point of contact when it’s dealt with by a rotation of officers.”

At the same time, police can’t take a family’s account at face value. “A woman might be fleeing abuse and in a refuge and the husband will use the police to try to locate her,” says Hedges. “An adult has the right to go missing. It’s not a criminal offence.” Understanding a missing person’s environment and history is fundamental to making connections with other crimes and cases. The “return interview” is crucial for gaining intelligence, too, as Hedges keeps reiterating.

“The return interview is still a mission now,” he says. He is about to deliver a webinar on this topic to police in Europe. “When a person comes back or is located, the police officer is supposed to see them, build trust and establish what is going on in their life.” Instead, a return interview is too often recorded in a cursory few words: “Stayed out late.” “No harm disclosed.” Case closed, nothing learned.

Hedges now believes his first case of child sexual exploitation came to him through missing persons cases – although he didn’t realise it at the time. Large numbers of teenage girls were regularly going missing from an estate in Bletchley: disappearing, reappearing, taking up police time. The return interviews were unenlightening: “Nothing happened; I just stayed out longer than I should have.”

It was only when Hedges joined with social services to map names, locations and timings that they identified patterns. One car registration kept cropping up. It belonged to a man in his 30s whom police in another district already suspected of abusing teenage girls. Although the police were unable to build a case, when he was jailed for repeatedly driving while disqualified, the disappearances stopped. “I look back at that now and think: ‘Crikey, that was child sexual exploitation,’” says Hedges. “We just didn’t understand it.”

Hedges was closely involved in a securing a conviction for a similar crime: the 2010 child sexual abuse ring in Derby, where a gang of men groomed and sexually abused up to 100 girls. Again, it started with girls going missing on a regular basis. Hedges was an important sounding board for Sheila Taylor, the founder of the local charity Safe and Sound, who had struggled to gain the support of local police in investigating what she believed was a grooming gang.

A more recent breakthrough was last year’s conviction of four men after a county lines investigation. In November 2022, Hedges had been called to review a case of a missing 16-year-old from Croydon. Although she was located, it alerted police to the fact that an unusually high number of Croydon teenagers were going missing, while a significant number of teenagers missing from other parts of the country were being found in Croydon. Identifying the links between the teenagers – the people they knew, the places they visited, the transport they used – established that they were drug couriers and uncovered a county line stretching from Croydon to Dundee.

Hedges’ book covers the vast array of specialist knowledge required for missing cases: identifying the spaces in a boat, a plane or a car where a body might be hidden in cases of human trafficking; understanding the patterns of where bodies wash up if they enter the sea from southern England (Sweden) or the north (the Netherlands).

In cases of suicide, if someone has gone missing on foot, they are unlikely to have gone far. If they drove to a spot, the body is likely to be close to the car. When Hedges was called to investigate the disappearance of Kelly in July 2003, he believed suicide was the most likely answer. Kelly’s body was found exactly where Hedges directed the search team.

Hedges believes that the police response to missing cases is significantly better today. “We’re getting a lot right, but I still come across cases where the same mistakes are made,” he says. “They make my heart sink.” Last year, police data revealed that black and Asian people go missing for longer, are less likely to be found by police and less likely to be recorded as “at risk”. Hedges wants this to be investigated further.

Although he is retired, Hedges is still involved in missing persons cases through his work for Locate International, a charity that investigates cold cases, and Safe and Found Online, a digital information bank that stores information about vulnerable people (those with dementia, for example, or complex mental health needs). It lists who they are, their history and their favourite places; it can be accessed by police if they go missing. Hedges is also a volunteer gardener at a woodland close to his home in Buckingham.

Despite Hedges’ successes, Missing dwells heavily on his professional mistakes: questions that remained unanswered, people who are still missing, families still waiting. The human suffering is unimaginable. How has he coped?

“When I had that breakdown at Bletchley, I remember watching my counsellor and the way she processed each session. It just flowed away from her at the end of the hour,” he says. “That was huge for me. When the pressure is too much, I go outside and remind myself that whatever happens with a case, whatever I do, the wind will be blowing, the grass will be growing, waves are breaking. A missing case never leaves you and should never be forgotten, but you can’t let them possess you. All you can do is your best.”

Missing is published on 9 May (Seven Dials, £9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org