Furious boss of lacking particular person charity vows to catch Jay Slater trolls

The boss of the missing persons charity supporting Jay Slater’s family has vowed to wage war on cruel trolls who sent him misleading and untrue tip-offs about the youngster before he was found dead on Tenerife earlier this week.

Matthew Searle, chief executive of LBT Global, says he received hundreds of malicious emails, phone calls and messages with false information about the 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer after he disappeared on June 17.

He has passed messages sent to him and Jay’s mother, Debbie Duncan, to police to investigate under telecommunications laws. The malignant messages included false ransom demands from people claiming to have Jay in their custody.

Others included claims that Jay had been seen in a Sainsbury’s in Basingstoke, watching a football match in Germany and on a Eurostar train.

Mr Searle said the bad actors had delayed genuine investigations into Jay’s disappearance because he had to ‘follow up every single lead’.

He told The Sunday Times: ‘It’s been very, very difficult. We’re going to get a case where the police will be dealing with the malicious side of it, and they miss an opportunity to actually rescue someone and someone’s life will be lost.’

It is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 to send a false message that causes ‘annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety to another’. Those found guilty of the offence can face up to six months in prison.

Many of those sending the cruel false tips did so using ‘burner’ SIM cards and single-use email addresses, making it harder for him to identify those who might be responsible.

And it has only added to the pain felt by Jay Slater’s family after the teenager’s body was found on July 15 at the bottom of a ravine in the Barranco Juan Lopez valley on Tenerife’s west coast.

Mr Searle, speaking to Sky News earlier this week, says he intends to speak to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper about the damage and hurt caused by online trolls who turned Jay’s tragic disappearance into a true-crime free-for-all.

‘Ultimately it hinders the search and it’s terrifyingly horrible for a family that are going through this,’ he said.

‘Wherever there’s a real-life crime drama acting out in front of our eyes on television, half the population need to jump on Facebook, set up a Facebook group… to tell the world “what really happened”.

‘It’s really worrying to the point where our charity thinks it’s time that it has to stop.’

Police believe Jay died after falling from a height as he scaled tricky terrain in the ravine as he tried to walk home to his hotel 25 miles from where he had been partying with friends.

He had left the NRG music festival to travel to an Airbnb in the village of Masca, close to where he died, with two men he had met while out partying. Police later ruled the men irrelevant to their enquiries.

Jay then phoned friend Lucy Law early on June 17 to say he had hurt himself and that his phone was low on battery. He was not heard from again. 

LBT Global – formerly known as the Lucie Blackman Trust after it was set up in the name of a 21-year-old British woman murdered in Tokyo in 2000 – has been supporting Jay’s family since the end of June when the search remained active.

Mr Searle took to social media earlier this week to defend the family from other trolls who attacked their request for additional donations to a GoFundMe page in order to cover the costs of Jay’s repatriation.

The fundraiser, initially established to cover the costs of private search and rescue operations, has garnered £70,900 of donations against a £30,000 target at the time of publication.

The family intends to fly back with Jay together before holding his funeral in Britain. But the plea for further funds – when the GoFundMe had already reached £60,000 – was met with some derision and scepticism from online trolls.

This prompted a heartfelt defence of the family from Mr Searle, who wrote on the LBT Global Facebook page: ‘This hate comes from people who, I assume, have never had to repatriate a deceased loved one. Those costs can top £20k easily. 

‘These people probably haven’t had to arrange their own child’s funeral, nor felt the need to make it the biggest and best they can as it’s the last thing they’ll ever do for their child.’

Mr Searle later removed the post after it too attracted significant backlash, writing in a later entry: ‘I was not trying to downplay the feelings of anyone who has lost a child. It was not aimed at those asking legitimate questions.’

Estimates of the true cost of repatriating a body can vary. Homeland International, a specialist in body repatriation, says the cost ‘usually tends to be somewhere around £3,000 to £6,000’.  

Along with the cost of freight, this fee includes the embalming process, a fit-to-fly coffin and a certificate to confirm the corpse is free from infection. 

Some of the money from the GoFundMe – whose representatives say they are in constant contact with the family about the use of funds – have been used to pay Dutch search and rescue team Signi Zoekhondon.

It does not charge for its services, but asks for a contribution to be made to cover transport and accomodation costs. It has confirmed to the Mail it expects a payment to be made by the family next week. 

The Mail understands Jay’s family intends to make a donation to LBT Global in recognition of the support it has given. 

Police have, however, remained silent on whether Jay was found with a £12,000 Rolex luxury watch he is alleged to have stolen from a reveller the night before he disappeared. 

The family have taken a ‘very small’ degree of comfort from the knowledge that Jay’s death was likely instantaneous, Mr Searle said.

‘Chances are if he did fall from a height where we saw the recovery teams searching, then it’s very unlikely he would have known much about it,’ he told the Independent.

Jay Slater’s disappearance captured the attention of people across the world, who became heavily invested in the search for the young man – with echoes of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley, who vanished in January 2023.

TikTok conspiracy theory rabbit holes and ‘find Jay Slater’ groups on Facebook became sources of speculation and harmful, unproven rumours about where Jay had gone on the day he vanished.

This continued despite pleas from the family to stop sharing ‘awful comments and conspiracy theories’ online – as attention-seeking TikTokers flew out to Tenerife and filmed themselves in the valley where Jay had disappeared.

And TV detective Mark Williams-Thomas flew out to Tenerife to chip in with the investigation – much as he had done in the case of Ms Bulley when she vanished beside a river at St Michael’s on Wyre.

But, as in the case of Ms Bulley, whose body was eventually found a mile downstream from where she vanished, the truth of Jay Slater’s disappearance was much simpler than social media may have liked. 

Questions still remain as to why Jay travelled so far with two men he had just met, and why he set off in what ultimately proved to be the wrong direction as he tried to walk back to his hotel after missing a bus. 

But Mr Searle’s priority is ensuring Jay’s family can travel with him on his final flight back to the UK.

‘If we can, we always try to make sure the family is on the repatriation flight. For mum, she’s bringing her boy home,’ he said.