Angela Watts arrived in the small Welsh village of Resolven, in the Vale of Neath, on a warm day in July 2021. Aside from the walking trails and waterfalls there was not much in the way of visitor attractions. That month, the district website advertised a Women’s Institute bake sale and a small outdoor musical performance. No matter. Watts hadn’t made the two-hour journey for fun. She was there to get a feel for the scene where a man’s skeletal remains had been discovered on a nearby hillside, back in 1979.
Watts was the embodiment of pragmatism, in her early sixties, sensibly dressed, with gold-framed glasses and greying black hair, cut short in a no-fuss style. She had come to Resolven with her friend Margaret Vale to seek new leads on the case of the dead man and distribute flyers calling for information. She had all sorts of questions. The hills around Resolven were steep — she couldn’t imagine scrambling up them herself. And the man had walked with a limp. So how had he got up carrying a holdall and a briefcase? Was he driven to the top and rolled down?
She went to the post office, the kind typically found in a small village, where the woman behind the counter seemed to know everyone but couldn’t remember anything about a skeleton being found in the area 40 years before. Watts approached the vicar with a possible name for the deceased. He walked up and down the cemetery looking at gravestones, and trawled records going back more than 100 years, hoping to discover family connections. But everyone she spoke to drew a blank. It seemed that the death had simply never been talked about.
It is easy to forget that “whodunnit” is not always death’s greatest mystery. In the case of the man found in Resolven, the question was more basic: who was he? Watts has been intermittently investigating the case of “Glamorgan Man”, named for the Welsh county where his remains were found, for the past three years, setting about the task methodically as she would with her favourite pastimes, puzzle solving and cryptic crosswords.
Watts is not a police detective, or a “true-crime influencer”, but a volunteer investigator at Locate International, a charity founded in 2019 by two former policemen to trace missing people and unidentified bodies. She manages a team of workers and pensioners whose aim is to discover the names of people who died anonymously, generally of natural causes, and trace the relatives who might be missing them. These are the kind of cases that fall between the cracks, thanks to depleted police budgets and resources.
Each case starts from a publicly available database — there are about 1,000 unidentified people in the UK. Some are represented by photos (“Dave the Busker”, nicknamed “Tang”, found near a former squat, believed to be originally from Kent in England). Others by artists’ sketches (“Daventry Woman” found in a floral designer top and likely to be from Jamaica). Or computer assisted depictions (bearded “Kingsthorpe Man”, who died in a shopping centre in Northampton in 2010).
Others are simply denoted by a photograph of the land where they were found, a beach, or forest, or, as with “Cirencester Man”, a stretch of the A419. How could these people have gone unmissed, Watts wondered, and what difference might uncovering their identity make? Glamorgan Man was one puzzle in her efforts to answer that question.
We are living through a boom era for true crime. Dark fascination about unsolved mysteries is nothing new, but the platforms to pick over them have proliferated. Many of us are addicted to podcasts, streaming documentaries, TV dramas and social media accounts that painstakingly recreate cold cases, whether of violent murders, disappearances or heists, in an effort to understand the psyche of a criminal or a missing person, and the investigation skills that go into unearthing a crime.
And increasingly, there are real-life opportunities to apply this fascination. Anyone with a smartphone can post theories. Armchair detectives took to social media in June to speculate on the disappearance of Jay Slater, a teenager who went missing in Tenerife. Paul Arnott was one. He left the UK to help with the search and rescue. “Let’s get this lad found,” he told his 320,000 TikTok followers before recording the investigation over several days in the Canary Islands, before Slater’s body was found in rocky terrain, having seemingly fallen to his death.
The speculation around Slater’s death didn’t lead anywhere, but members of the public can be key to solving crimes, most obviously as witnesses. Andrew Trotter, former deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, points out that citizens increasingly collect their own evidence, with the help of consumer tech like Ring doorbells and smartphones. “You see it with traffic offences, people are sending in dashboard and camera [footage],” he said. “The police can’t have an exclusive role, particularly not at the moment, when the detection rate is so low. I’m not knocking the police — [there have been] huge cuts.”
Dave Grimstead, the co-founder of Locate International, understands the value of public support. One stormy day more than five years ago, walking on the beach in Cornwall, he was moved by the sight of a lifeboat plunging into the waves. That volunteers could perform a service as vital as saving someone from drowning made him wonder whether a similar kind of skilled and structured work could be applied to policing. Grimstead is a retired senior investigating officer who joined the force in 1980, at 16 years old. His years spent looking into grisly cases of domestic abuse and murder gave him the unsettling realisation that there were many loose ends in less dramatic cases of missing persons and unidentified bodies.
When we met in an empty café in Bristol, the softly spoken, watchful 60-year-old described the sense of “ambiguous loss” felt by families whose loved ones go missing. “You don’t always get the time to apply to those cases,” he said, “because there’s always another major investigation coming in. Detectives I worked with really wanted to do more.” He saw the founding of Locate as a personal opportunity to salve the trauma of delivering the worst news to families. “That moment of being there where everyone is in tears, it’s hard. Years later, it impacts you. It’s always in my mind.” Starting a network of volunteers who could bring families answers could be a way to heal those wounds.
Grimstead also knew that, unlike in TV dramas that revolve around one or two charismatic detectives making brilliant breakthroughs, much of policing is a slow, steady slog by a large team. He wanted to find people who were prepared to apply their time in a structured way, following protocols. This was no role for flashy mavericks. “Every major investigation is just as good as the 20 to 30 people who are there every day, day in, day out . . . lots of mundane actions [that] suddenly produce a result.” Someone who has done 30 years working as an accountant, matching up patterns and data, is used to that kind of work, he said. “You can apply those skills in a different way.”
There are precedents to Locate in the US, such as the Doe Network, established in 1999, which says it has solved or assisted successfully in 128 cases. There is also NamUs, an initiative by the National Institute of Justice, a government research and evaluation agency.
Grimstead’s former colleague, Neil Smith, joined him. Smith had retired from the police force early and knew the power of open-source intelligence through his work conducting private investigations on behalf of companies. He also believed that volunteers from different walks of life could bring new perspectives to police work. “How you access the internet is just the same — but once you’re in, it’s how you interpret the information. Having that detachment and freshness is the difference,” he said. “A lot of investigations in policing are not rocket science. But you tend to become slightly worn down and jaundiced.”
The greatest problem for the police today is a lack of resources, said Smith. “The ability to progress an investigation or inquiry has been seriously hampered. If you were found in the street with your throat cut, because it’s a murder there’ll be a budget. But if you drop dead and it’s a heart attack, and the hospital says they don’t know who it is, there’s no budget.”
I met Watts at her home in a modern cul-de-sac in Wiltshire. The front room was a calm vision of cream and beige, with two small pictures on the wall — of a world map and an orange sky. In the background was Vale, in matching glasses, who pottered about dealing with admin and attending to lunch — Marks and Spencer quiche, salad and soft rolls. Sometimes Vale helps Watts on her cases, accompanying her in the car to look up an electoral roll or archives in a library.
A lot of the work is this kind of slow, piecemeal information gathering. In the Glamorgan Man’s case, there was more than usual. The first step was to scrutinise the evidence. On the day he died he was wearing a brown jumper and trousers, and carrying a bag containing clothes, including a pair of green socks. Fused bones in his right leg indicated the limp. In his briefcase was a “Salvation Testament” Bible inscribed with a name in capital letters, D MALAN, and a PO box without a number ascribed to Randburg, Johannesburg. There was also a timetable showing flights for South African Airways and headed notepaper from the Sheraton Heathrow Hotel.
Watts and her team came up with hypotheses to answer the question itching in her brain: what brought this man to Wales from South Africa? One theory held he could be part of the anti-apartheid movement visiting sympathisers. Another, that he was descended from a family who had swapped the Welsh coal mines for the South African gold rush at the end of the 19th century, and was returning to visit relatives. “We’ve had several fools’ trials,” she said.
But she was determined to continue investigating. For Watts, the cases “become so vivid. My mind is like a web browser. I can open so many tabs at once.” Focused and tenacious, she can also be blunt. If she has done a good job, she’ll say so, because it’s true. In this kind of work, she said, “nerds” were secret weapons. “Find your person who is obsessed about tie labels . . . specialises in tattoos or jewellery, or bus tickets.” There are working solicitors who volunteer with Locate and those with an interest in genealogy. One forensic oceanographer helps identify tidal movements that indicate where a washed-up body might have entered the sea, drawing on his life-long interest in shipwrecks and reports of bodies overboard.
Watts is also a practising Christian. She first encountered Christianity in a meaningful way while studying French and German at university. Later, she opened a Bible at Isaiah, 43:1, “I have called you by name, you are mine.” Never before or since had she felt “such a sense of belonging to someone . . . That was to God. It changed me.”
After graduation, she joined the Salvation Army, attracted to its “directness” and focus on practical solutions. The uniform was a bonus, getting her “safely into places I wouldn’t go in cities”.
She left in 1992, when health problems took their toll, and found a desk job in computing, eventually looking into suspicious financial transactions. After an early retirement, she devoted herself to volunteering, including to charities connected with the church.
She first came across Locate when she read an interview with Grimstead in a copy of Saga magazine, a publication devoted to the over-fifties. She “loved the ambition of releasing” all these “life skills” on to cold cases. “I’ve got a lot,” she said matter of factly. When she joined in 2021, there were approximately 20 volunteers. Now there are 300, including academics, forensic artists, lawyers and mental-health nurses. More potential recruits are on a waiting list.
Her faith makes her a natural match for Glamorgan Man. His possessions included not only the Bible but a bookmark from an Easter mission in 1960. “If he’s carrying it with him from South Africa to Wales, that shows he was serious about his Christian faith,” she mused. Such items are a reminder of a “time when you felt close to God”.
To date, Locate has identified four people. Is that a good result, I asked Grimstead in the Bristol café. “Yeah,” he replied, his voice rising in quiet determination. “These are cases that have been unresolved for decades. So yeah, that’s good.”
In one case, after making an appeal, Locate made contact with the family of a man who was found on an A-road in July 1975, having been hit by vehicles after leaving the Knebworth festival. A relative got in touch. The family was large and spread out, and had assumed he had gone off to fulfil some music ambition. Now they could organise a headstone to honour him.
A new generation of have-a-go detectives has had mixed results. After the January 6 2021 attacks on Capitol Hill, various groups, including one calling themselves “Deep State Dogs”, tracked down people involved. In the US, after the Boston marathon bombing, a Reddit forum wrongly identified one of the suspects as a missing student, who it later transpired had already died by suicide.
Simon Harding, a crime consultant who was previously a detective chief inspector at the Metropolitan Police, described how in investigating the 2023 Nicola Bulley case, police failed to protect the crime scene and get on top of social media reports and conspiracy theories. “They lost to armchair detectives. Then people came out with all sorts of theories . . . interview[ed] each other and guess[ed] what happened,” he said. “They do it for their own followers [and] profile . . . The police are playing catch-up with social media.” After Bulley was found dead, a police report into the handling of the case found that the conspiracy theories had “a significant impact on levels of confidence in Lancashire Constabulary”.
Eleanor Neale is a true-crime YouTuber with 2.8 million subscribers. On her channel, she talks through cases such as “Murdered Minutes from Her Front Door”, “The Man Who Survived Being Married to the Black Widow” and “Murdered on Instagram Live by her Influencer Boyfriend”. Speaking over a video call from a hotel room in Los Angeles, Neale was immaculately made-up, with perfect black eyeliner flicks. Originally from Yorkshire, she started out doing online make-up tutorials before switching to true crime, an interest she developed as a teen watching documentaries with her mother.
When she began in 2018, such content on YouTube was in its infancy and Neale’s early videos were about missing people and unsolved murders. In response to audience requests, she started to create films on serial murderers. What fuels such grim interest? “People want to try to understand what’s incomprehensible . . . That’s a huge part of it for me, to understand the thought patterns.”
Viewers will make connections in the comments about a criminal’s behaviour, trying to piece together clues. Mainly, Neale said, people want to “be helpful”. There’s a minority who are “into conspiracy theories. It’s disrespectful. I don’t want people speculating. We avoid Reddit when researching cases. When people get too involved, it can cloud things. It could harm a potential conviction if false [theories] are spread.”
Still, the speed of TikTok content creation is alarming. “People will hear a case on the news, and within 30 seconds someone can have a TikTok up, spreading something false, and within half an hour a million people will see it. Social media can be really effective, especially with unsolved crimes.” But creators have to ask whether it is useful, she said. “If [not] it should just be a conversation with friends.”
Watts has seen the effects of online disinformation up close. Investigating the case of “Sligo Man”, who was found on the beach and had checked into a hotel in the Irish town using an alias, she joined a Reddit forum and found that its participants were obsessed with the idea of the corpse having only one kidney. “I just wrote, ‘Where is your evidence?’ I was totally slammed.”
For Locate volunteers, who organise themselves into teams with a reporting structure, collaboration with police is mostly down to gentle persuasion, said Smith. “The message is slowly getting through . . . ‘Aren’t we better working as a team? You can take the glory. We’re going to provide you with the information. We’re volunteers trying to help. Why not accept that these cold cases are an area of expertise you don’t possess any more?’ We’re not going after cases that grab the headlines. We tend to be in the background . . . Our successes are a family’s grief.”
The name Malan is common in South Africa. With her team, Watts traced the family’s lineage to Switzerland. “We have been working on the most humongous tree, descending all the male stems, and we descend that stem until we find either proof of life past this date, or a date of death.”
They discovered a promising lead: a man who had been to the right university, at the right time, whose sister was on social media and living in Australia. Watts arranged a video call with the sister’s son, only to discover that his uncle had died recently, too late to make him Glamorgan Man.
The trail has taken her to the identity of the forest worker who discovered the body (but also, unfortunately, to the news that the person in question had died two months earlier), to churches in South Africa listed on the bookmark, to the daughter of an academic who had mentioned a relevant term in a book but then could not provide any further details, to a friendly librarian who looked up local South African newspapers. All this cajoling and asking of favours takes patience. No one is compelled to respond. Watts remains hopeful for a response to her letters to Lord Peter Hain, the South African anti-apartheid campaigner who became MP for the region where Glamorgan Man was discovered.
The work is frustrating but consuming. Watts knows, of course, that D Malan might be a red herring. The Bible could have been a gift. They might be barking up the wrong tree entirely. Perhaps that’s why she enjoys detective fiction.
It allows her to switch off. “I don’t have to think about who’s done it. I just turn the pages until I find out. I don’t try and solve them . . . I’m not thinking, is there a pattern I’ve missed?”
So much is simply baffling. This summer, Locate made an appeal focused on a possible Australian connection to the case of the “North Sea Man”, found in Heligoland, an island off the coast of Germany, in the build-up to the 30th anniversary of his body’s discovery. What made this different from their usual cases was that it was a murder investigation because the man had a catastrophic blow to the back of his head and was found with weights in his pockets.
One of his defining features was his height. As Grimstead put it, “He’s 6ft 5in tall. He’s smartly dressed, he’s got a tie, a shirt . . . and his body is left in the middle of the North Sea. Somebody should know who that is. That’s a 6ft 5in gap in somebody’s life and nobody knows who he is. Somebody is not coming back.”
Estrangement is a common theme among the cases. I spoke to Stefan Timmermans, co-author of the book Unclaimed, which explores why so many dead bodies in Los Angeles are abandoned, even when their identities are known. Families can easily lose touch, he said. “It’s not always a big fight, it’s a gradual process that takes place over years. At some point you realise you haven’t spoken to your relative.”
Whenever he talks about this, someone will say, “I had a classmate in high school, I wondered what happened to them . . . Even if we think nobody cares, someone might . . . It matters because there might be somebody looking for them for whom this makes the world of difference. This interrupted grief can be life changing.”
This was the case for Vincent, a homeless man found dead in Kensington. His name was written in a notebook, but in his records the letters were muddled up. After some tracing, using the new spelling, they found his identity. By honouring him in death, perhaps we came a little closer to making sure people like Vincent counted in life, Watts told me. Her guiding principle, borrowed from the fictional detective Harry Bosch, is simple: “Everyone counts or nobody counts.”
In the case of the “Wembley Point Woman”, who died after jumping from a window on the 21st floor of an office block on October 29 2004, the team built up a database of businesses in the building. Through Reddit and LinkedIn, they contacted people who worked for them and spoke to two who travelled part of the way in the lift with her.
“One of them really kicks himself,” Watts said, for “not realising her intention was to die by suicide”. Police thought that a plastic bag she was carrying with letters, C, P, N, Y on it, indicated that it was from Central Park, New York. Watts and her team found a woman who collected plastic bags who identified it as being from a small chain of London women’s fashion shops. New lines of inquiry are being pursued.
Watts had always been haunted by the idea that someone could slip from life without leaving a trace. At the “bleakest funeral” she ever attended, at the age of 24, she was accompanying a Salvation Army major leading the service for an elderly housebound woman at a crematorium. “No one came from her community except her home help. Most of the people in that room were there because they had to be . . . I still remember not the desolation of death, but the desolation of a life that it seemed to me had not impacted anyone.”
Before spending time with Watts, I’d wondered if volunteers’ interest was solely to satisfy a puzzle, or make them feel good about themselves, memorialising a person who perhaps had not mattered to others. It could feel that even if there was a discovery, there was no resolution. But the ambition to make a difference to just one family missing a loved one was clear.
“There’s a bit of me that always wants justice,” she said. “I don’t mean justice in the legal sense. But whatever got [them] into that situation, they’ve been let down, and we’re not going to forget them, that they have a real identity.”
Emma Jacobs is a work and careers writer at the FT
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