HELP SOLVING AN ALMOST 25 YEAR OLD CASE!

Isle of Wight, November 2nd 1996

On a wet, cold wintry night on 2 November 1996, 16yr old Damien Nettles went missing in Cowes, Isle of Wight. His movements were well documented up to 12:02hrs on 3 November when he was last seen on CCTV in the High Street.

Damien went to a party at a friend’s house on the Saturday night in East Cowes and had permission to stay out until midnight. Damien and his friend left the party early and headed over to West Cowes, having bought some cider. They wandered around the high street for a couple of hours before parting company at 10.30pm. The rest is only known in hindsight from witness statements and his family joining pieces of the story together.

He was reported missing the afternoon of 3 November when all avenues had been exhausted to locate him. Hampshire Police did not take his disappearance seriously and mistakenly listed him as 19yrs of age. They refused the family’s desperate requests for land & air searches and the deployment of search dogs. The family implemented their own searches with the help of friends and visited local businesses to acquire CCTV. When Mrs Nettles phoned the station a few days later for an updated, she was deemed a hysterical mother. She was told she was hampering the investigation by keep calling them.

Initial Misper procedures were not implemented, so the case got off to a bad start, where critical evidence was lost. Unfortunately, Hampshire Police lost the last CCTV footage of Damien walking along the High Street. They took another CCTV of Damien surrounded by strangers, later identified as Army men, in a chip shop. The police edited that tape, splicing the beginning and end off, and the middle of the tape which showed a police car passing the plate glass window.

The case rumbled on for many years with many change of officers and atrocious mishandling of the case by police. Despite the passage of time, his mother Valerie Nettles vows never to give up in the search for her eldest son.

Source: https://www.damiennettles.uk

Additional YouTube sources:

https://youtu.be/88-foX1zjfk

https://youtu.be/mS_bvd9ReNs

https://youtu.be/XlbWz7S0D3

https://youtu.be/TvxwygrMq3w

https://youtu.be/jYSv4O89pdc