Teen vanished after studying horror reality about lacking mum’s ‘loss of life’

Ruth Wilson, then 16, vanished without a trace after discovering a heartbreaking secret about her mum – and police are still no closer to finding out what happened to her

Police are still baffled about the vanishing of a teen who stumbled upon a devastating family secret. This November will mark 30 years since the “shy” yet bright girl, who seemingly had it all, vanished without a trace.

Ruth Wilson, just 16 at the time, disappeared in November 1995 after hailing a cab from Dorking station in Surrey, directing the driver to drop her in an isolated woodland area. Unnamed, the taxi driver left her at Box Hill, a North Downs peak and beauty spot, and that was the last anyone saw of her.

Chillingly, he recalled her wearing clothes unsuitable for the winter chill, standing motionless in the rain with no coat over her red jumper and black trousers, as he drove off – a sight he found peculiar. When night fell and Ruth didn’t come home, her dad Ian—a local school teacher and parish councillor—and his deputy head wife Karen Bowerman, raised the alarm.

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On the day she disappeared, Ruth should’ve been at The Ashcombe School in Dorking attending A-level biology and chemistry classes. She normally took a bus with her sister Jenny but claimed she’d go in later. Even an offer of a lift from her ex, Will Kennedy—with whom she remained close—was turned down, reports the Mirror.

Instead of heading straight home, she got a cab to Dorking library where she spent a few hours before popping into Thistles, a florist, to get a bunch of flowers for her stepmum. She specified they should be delivered in a couple of days, no sooner, and didn’t attach a card.

Ruth then got another taxi to Box Hill. Come 4.30pm, she was dropped off at a bridleway entrance near the cosy Hand in Hand pub – and that’s the last time anyone saw her.

Surrey Police went all out with a huge search across parkland that stretched a whopping 1,000 acres; bringing in sniffer dogs, heat-sensors and even used a helicopter. One of Ruth’s mates, Catherine Mair, found the quickfire response a touch bizarre. Chatting to The Daily Mail, she said: “I always thought it was odd that they launched such a huge search so quickly,” musing, “Teenagers fail to come home all the time. It made me wonder what they thought they knew.”

To the outside world, Ruth’s life seemed like a fairy tale, nestled in a quaint 17th-century cottage with her esteemed family. Excelling at school, she was a local choir singer, an electric guitar player, and even rang bells at the church. With dreams of studying archaeology at uni, her future appeared golden. But a dark cloud loomed over her idyllic upbringing—the mysterious death of her mother Nesta at 33, when Ruth was just three and her sister Jenny barely a year old.

Her father Ian had always said that she tripped at the top of the stairs and broke her neck. Ruth, it seems, always blamed herself for her mum’s tragic passing.

“Sadly, Ruth seemed convinced she was responsible,” Catherine revealed. “She believed it was one of her toys that her mum had tripped over.” Another of her friends, who asked not to be identified, also told the publication that she believed it was one of her toys that caused the accident.

Before she went missing, Ruth reportedly decided to try and find out more about the circumstances of her mum’s death. In early October 1995, it is said that she went to the public records office in London where details of births, marriages and deaths were stored to obtain a copy of the death certificate. Will, who was still her boyfriend at the time, reportedly went with her and they uncovered the horrifying truth that her mother had actually took her own life and didn’t have an accident at all. She had killed herself just weeks before Christmas, according to her death certificate shown in a documentary about the case.

Catherine said Ruth was overwhelmed by the awful discovery. “Obviously it’s crazy to find out that something you’ve been told your entire life isn’t true, whatever the reasons. Understandably it left a lot of questions for her – why her mother, with two young babies, would take her life just weeks before Christmas. Ruth was distressed and confused and started asking some dark questions. She became fixated on getting to the heart of exactly what had happened.”

After this, Catherine said Ruth would often ask to stay at her house rather than return home and another school pal of Ruth’s, Ben Anderton, claimed that a month before her disappearance, Ruth ran away from home. He told local journalist Martin Bright in a 2018 Real Stories You Tube documentary, Vanished: The Surrey Schoolgirl that she “hid out” at his house because she “wanted to escape”.

The weekend before she went missing, Ruth worked at the music shop where she had a Saturday job as usual and then went out for a meal with Will and another friend Neil Phillipson. Both claimed she paid for the dinner because she said it was “something to remember her by”. On the Sunday Ruth went to bellringing practice and then a youth club in Dorking before going to Will’s home for dinner ad then heading home.

On that fateful Monday, Ruth’s dad had to rush out the house early for a school Ofsted visit, as did Karen, who married her father a year after Nesta’s death, so they didn’t realise she hadn’t left as usual. Two days later and when the search was underway for Ruth, the flowers she had ordered arrived for her stepmother. Catherine believes Ruth sent them to “make a point” and not as a nice gesture.

At the beginning of December The Times reported that officers had found three notes hidden in a bush on Box Hill – one each to her father and stepmother, and one to a friend. The contents have never been revealed. It was also reported that the only other belongings found nearby were an empty packet of paracetamol tablets and a bottle of vermouth. Surrey Police have never confirmed these discoveries.

A few days after Ruth disappeared, the Wilsons appeared on ITV‘s This Morning and made an appeal for her return. Exactly a year after she vanished, a grainy CCTV sighting of a distressed girl who looked like Ruth at a Dorking newsagent asking for local newspapers surfaced. No body had or has ever been found and the Wilsons believed it was their daughter, with Karen saying at the time: “We want to tell her, ‘We love you so much. Just get in contact Ruthie, let us know where you are’.” In 2006, Ian wrote an open letter to his daughter and revealed they still had her Christmas presents from the year she vanished waiting for her at home. Since then the family has avoided publicity.

Catherine said she was distraught at the disappearance of her friend and thought it “odd” that Ruth’s family never contacted her considering they were close and she stayed at her house regularly. She doesn’t believe the CCTV was Ruth, who would be 46 by now, because it “doesn’t make sense” she would try to get away from Dorking only to return on the anniversary of her disappearance. But she is still haunted and mystified by it all, especially since her own daughter is the same age Ruth was when she went missing. “I find it hard to believe she took her own life but also that she managed to start a new life,” she said. “What I do know is that I would love nothing more than for Ruth to just suddenly walk back into our lives.”

Many of her other school friends regularly take to a Facebook page dedicated to her memory to talk about her, mulling over the unsolved questions such as why has her body never been found if she took her own life in such a popular location and why did she send the flowers to her step mum.

Surrey Police says her case remains a missing person inquiry and it “continues to keep an open mind about what is behind Ruth’s disappearance” but “at this time there is no further evidence to support any one particular line of inquiry about what has happened to Ruth”.

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