The Mystery of Ben Needham

Snipped from the Mirror:

The toy car was discovered at "Site 2" - a landfill site - and detectives are working on the theory it was taken there from "Site 1" - the farmhouse - by someone trying to dispose of evidence.

Andrew wrote:Snipped from the Mirror:

The toy car was discovered at "Site 2" - a landfill site - and detectives are working on the theory it was taken there from "Site 1" - the farmhouse - by someone trying to dispose of evidence.

Slip it the pocket and dispose of it miles away would be more likely imo.

Anyone know where `Site 2` was/is? Was it in the same road?

If the workers had stopped work for the day before Ben went missing, how did it get there and who knew of that site to bring it there?

Mimi wrote:Anyone know where `Site 2` was/is?  Was it in the same road?

Down the bottom of the farmhouse lane, turn left and walk ~300m to a three way fork in the road and it is ~30m off the roads. Clearly visible and accessible to anyone and everyone and surrounded by houses.

It was the road Christine/Ben/Danny walked and the road Eddie and Stephen drove/rode between the caravan and farmhouse.

TheTruthWillOut wrote:

Mimi wrote:Anyone know where `Site 2` was/is?  Was it in the same road?

Down the bottom of the farmhouse lane, turn left and walk ~300m to a three way fork in the road and it is ~30m off the roads. Clearly visible and accessible to anyone and everyone and surrounded by houses.

It was the road Christine/Ben/Danny walked and the road Eddie and Stephen drove/rode between the caravan and farmhouse.

Thanks TTWO - I`ll have a look on google maps.

@Mimi

I just read the Mirror article again. Been updated since this morn when I posted.

Snipped:

The discovery now confirms cops' firm belief that little Ben died on the day he went missing while playing - in what is being described as a "farming accident".

Yes, I would say a 'farming accident' is exactly what happened.

But it didn't involve Dino.

Andrew wrote:I just read the Mirror article again. Been updated since this morn when I posted.

Snipped:

The discovery now confirms cops' firm belief that little Ben died on the day he went missing while playing - in what is being described as a "farming accident".

Yes, I would say a 'farming accident' is exactly what happened.

But it didn't involve Dino.

I wonder who stated that? Is it a direct quote from SYP?

Both areas (farmhouse and Dino site) were building sites so don't get the use where the word farming comes into it?

Not sure to be fair, TTWO, whether it is a direct quote from SYP or speculation from the Mirror. First time I've heard 'farming' anyway.

But remember this bit of the original SYP statement:

“My team and I know that machinery, including a large digger, was used to clear an area of land on 24 July 1991

I suppose clearing land could be classed as farming as well. It was quite overgrown in some areas by the place.

Perhaps the men weren't working on the roof at all?

Just a thought.....

Just seems there is now a drip feeding of info that is subtlety changing article by article to me. Are SYP due to give some kind of final report after the forensic tests are complete?

From tex post yesterday ....she thinks the explanation of this case will affect Maddie out come. If there has been a tragic accident involving farmers diggers or family ....how will they resolve it and can they do they same with Maddie....and that as TTWO says is what appears to be going.. . Subtle inflections till we turn the story to where they want it.

TheTruthWillOut wrote:Just seems there is now a drip feeding of info that is subtlety changing article by article to me. Are SYP due to give some kind of final report after the forensic tests are complete?

I'm not sure how long it would take to do all these forensic tests from all the '70 items of interest' (or however many there were).

Although I gather that the sandal that they had remade are to compare with a piece of sandal found in the 2012 search. Quite why they didn't get the sandal made then I've no idea? Clearly not in an immediate rush.

But maybe more subtle changes in the direction of the narrative until the 'time is right'. Whenever that will be.

On way to swinming and seen this on....youve guessed it..  as a comment..  thought id bring it over...  delete if already here!

extusa29 Oct 2016, 12:04:00
Anonymous 29 Oct 2016, 11:43:00

Thank you for the heads up.

Having read both the reply and article, we thought best to bring both over to the blog.

We found the original article by Carol Sarler, in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/30/comment.uk1

This limbo that lasts a lifetime

Carol Sarler
Sunday 30 September 2007 00.14 BST Last modified on Sunday 30 September 2007 01.02 BST

After another 'sighting 'last week, the McCanns face a future of accusation and uncertainty, just like Ben Needham's family

Rudimentary common sense, you might have thought, would have told us it was not Madeleine McCann. Smudgy tourist snaps notwithstanding, it is inconceivable that a blonde, four-year-old, English-speaking chatterbox is living openly in a far-flung corner of Morocco, hefted around by a brown woman who has enough trouble feeding four children of her own. Nevertheless, it took a posse of bounty-hunting journalists to swoop upon an alarmed family before reason kicked in to the most recent of four 'sightings' of Madeleine in Morocco - curiously, always in the grip of a 'swarthy foreigner'.

The McCanns are said to be devastated by dashed hopes; if so, they must get used to it, for there will be more sightings, more dashing and, to add to their misery, more harassment of more innocent families. I know this because, having investigated the disappearance of Ben Needham on Kos in 1991, the unfolding of the McCann case has felt like one long, wretched, groundhog summer.

Ben, recapped in a nutshell: his grandparents, Eddie and Chris Needham, moved from Sheffield to Kos with their teenage son Stephen, daughter Kerry and her boyfriend and their son, Ben. Eddie was rebuilding a local farmer's hillside shack, Kerry worked in a hotel, Chris cared for Ben. On impulse, Chris took Ben to have lunch at the shack, joined by Stephen on his scooter. Ben played outside; Chris and Eddie checked on him 'every few minutes'. (Hold that thought.) Even when they noticed him missing, they assumed he had left with Stephen and it was five hours before they discovered otherwise. Nobody, therefore, knows exactly when Ben disappeared; familiar, you will be thinking.

The singular difference between the Needhams and the McCanns is, crudely, class. Eddie has homemade tattoos on his knuckles, Chris was a grandmother at 38, Kerry and her boyfriend - a man known, as they say, to the police - lived in a council block. Perhaps this explains why, throughout their ordeal, nobody from the British consulate in Athens once got off their butt or went to Kos to help or support; surgeon Gerry McCann, by contrast, mobilised the world.

Much else, however, is disturbingly similar. The press interest, for instance - it helped that the missing children were both yummy bundles of photogenic, fair-skinned beauty - was, at least initially, sympathetic. In both cases, early investigation was hampered by scant co-operation between local and British police. (The recalcitrance is not necessarily always foreign: the Sheffield officer on Ben's case told me proudly that he'd never had a passport and didn't want one now; what good, he demanded, could he do in bloody Greece?)

There is consistency, too, in the eagerness of local police to blame the families. As with the mayor in Jaws, serving a district that survives on tourism involves ignoring home-grown sharks; if the family is guilty, at least the sin is not indigenous. Every time leaks spill from Portuguese police, I remember the Kos officers who fancied young Stephen for an imagined murder, but who also saw fit to tell me that Eddie and Chris took a drink too many and that unmarried Kerry was a slut, in a tone that suggested losing a child was too lenient a punishment for her.

(cont)

Textusa29 Oct 2016, 12:05:00
(cont)

Back in Blighty, armchair sleuths were then, as now, having a blast, albeit by parking accusation in the space reserved for whichever bogeyman was in vogue. In 1991, we were not yet in thrall to paedophilia, so favourites were body snatchers: hundreds of people, I was assured (here and in Greece) were taking children to harvest their organs. Ben may return alive, I was told ominously. But with bits missing. Now we're riddled with perverts, so rumours run easier still.

Back then, bad guys were traditionally gypsies, so everybody grabbed the chance to be extra horrid about them; now, it's Muslims.It is unlikely a coincidence that four 'sightings' happen in the nearest Muslim country to Portugal, while the Moroccan woman seen with the might-be Madeleine last week was not wearing religious clothing, nor was her name known, but she was widely described none the less as Muslim.

The biggest problem with amateur detection is the systematic evolution of preferred theories, which, by dint of popularity, come to override plausibility - and none tips the scales of sense more surely than this: crime is always preferred over accident, by all involved. That a child might wander off and come to a lonely end does not suit those who live nearby: whether in Kos or Praia de Luz, they are no happier to admit to risk by drain or quagmire than by the hand of a native nutter.

It does not suit the media: note how quickly an accident leaves front pages; note how long a murder stays. It does not suit the armchair sleuths: how can you enjoy your xenophobic prejudices without central casting's baddies to blame?

Most of all, it does not suit the families. Accident points not only to probable death but to more negligence than they have already admitted to themselves: what if checking on Ben 'every few minutes' wasn't entirely accurate; what if checking on Madeleine 'every half hour' meant listening but never actually seeing her; how far, really, could a 21-month-old propel himself in five hours? Or a three-year-old in two and a half?

I shall not presume to deduce Madeleine's fate; like you, I'm still in the armchair. But with Ben, I'm entitled. I have stood, three times, on the spot where he vanished, a lethal stretch of terrain, strewn with waist-high scrub, crevasses and old wells and I have crossed off every theory.

There wasn't a shred of evidence against the likable Stephen. No, Chris and Ben were not followed; the path was too exposed for cover. No, nobody drove there; a car would have been heard. No, Ben was not smuggled off the island; the first ferry was five hours after he was last seen and a kidnapper would have assumed the alarm was raised.

The only search for Ben was by the family in the dark with, next day, desultory help from local police (familiar, again?). Crucially, they only searched down the hill from the shack, based solely on the family 'knowing' Ben would head down towards home, just as the McCanns 'know' Madeleine wouldn't wander, especially without Cuddle Cat, and just as I 'know' this: that the only conclusion to hold a drop of sane water is that Ben did go up the hill, did fall, died or was concussed and heat and animals did the rest. Faster than you could possibly believe.

I just read that, Bampots over on the Textusa blog. There is also a reply from the Needham family that's been put up (from back in 2007 I presume). Worth a read anyway.

As I say, accident is an unpopular conclusion, so much so that no infrared body-tracking device was flown over Ben's bleak hillside and nor was it in Portugal. It might have been useless; it might, at best, have ruled out mishap. Nevertheless, if disproportionate time is always to be invested in theories popular with interested parties, other families will be where the Needhams are and where the McCanns are heading: towards more and madder 'sightings', almost all by tourists who get hyper after a few sherries. Nothing will come of any of them and the crazed limbo of family uncertainty, coupled with spiteful stranger speculation, will drag on for a lifetime.

And all the while, in remote foreign fields, frightened families with good reason to fear their police will be forced to prove their own children's existence. For that, as for much else, many of us have a lot to answer.


Missed a bit... bring it over Andrew....on phone really awkward ..did not realise how important the answer was!!!!

The reply from the Needham family in response to the Observer article published in 2007:

Reply to article by Carol Sarler "The Observer" September 30, 2007

We understand that journalists have a job to do, but in our experience of 16 years working along side every British TV, Newspaper and Magazine there is, we do believe we have the right to reply to this article, because it misinforms the public.

Ms. Sarler

Firstly let us say that Ben was abducted he didn't just disappear, and if as you have stated in your column you have investigated Ben's case, you should have known the difference.

Yes! Ben played outside the doorway of the shack as you call it.

As a matter of fact, it was an old farmhouse that needed rebuilding.

There was no door or shutters or even windows.

Therefore, Ben had not been shut out of the house to play on his own.

Ben was in and out collecting water and food every few seconds.

Stephen was already at the farmhouse working with Eddie.

It was only when Eddie told Stephen, there was nothing more they could do that day without building materials, that Stephen left.

Yes!!! Ben was still outside at this time playing in the dirt with his toy cars like any normal little boy.

He did look up to see Stephen leaving and Stephen did tell him to stay there with Granddad.

Please Ms. Sarler, hold on to your own thought!

With hind sight yes Stephen could have picked him up and taken Ben inside, but why would anyone think like that.

If Ben wanted to wonder off on his own he could have done so already!

When Christine realised Ben was quiet (only a few moments after Stephen had gone) not 10 or even 5 minutes for that matter, she did NOT assume straight away that Stephen had taken Ben with him.

It was only after Christine, Eddie and the owner of the farmhouse searched the surrounding areas, shouted his name for half an hour or so that they came to this conclusion.

The time that Ben vanished was just after Stephen had left at around 2.30pm.

This is known to the authorities.

And even then Christine & Eddie, did not think "oh well let's go back inside to eat and chat". NO!!!

Christine was mad with Stephen for not telling them, so she went straight home walking with an empty pram just incase she passed them coming back.

It was not 5 hours before police were informed either, this is what the police and the abductors would like everyone to think.

True Ms. Sarler, as you must compared us with the McCanns, we do believe you are right.

We do not have friends in... high places.

We do not employ media managers and others to manage our affairs.

We do not have a multimillion pound Ltd. Company, in Ben's name to use as we please.

You are right Ms. Sarler, the British Embasy, "did not get off their butt, to support or help us" in any way, shape or form.

Dear Ms. Sarler you forgot to add that we did not even get a mention from any PM either.

We agree that everyone is entitled to an opinion, but only if one knows the facts and admitts to them.

We are totally familiar with the Kos police officers slunder.

Christine had a drink too many? That's really laughable.

Anyone who knows Christine, does know, there are two things she completely despises and that's drinking & offensive language.

We admit Ms. Sarler, Eddie has been drunk on occasions, after Ben was abducted and usually around the date of the abduction and on Ben's birthday.

Now the real beef, Ms. Sarler. Young Kerry was an unmarried slut.

For your information, Kerry loved her little son more than life and she was working to support him.

It is also a well known fact to those who really investigate reality, that the illegal adoptions of children is very much alive and well around the world and not the figment of someone's imagination.

As far as Greece is concerned, it has a long and dirty history.

Ben's abduction was no accident I assure you, nor did he have an accident.

Eddie & Christine were not negligent in anyway whilst looking after Ben.

Yes they do feel the guilt like any normal person would, but they have nothing to be ashamed of.

They checked on Ben continuously!

How far could a 21 month old go by himself? Not very far considering the ground there is too rough and has remained the same after all those years.

Eddie & Christine did not leave it 5 hours before looking for him as you state in your article.

Ms. Sarler you state you are entitled to make a judgement on Ben's fate.

We are really glad you just stood there, three times.

That is all you have done Ms. Sarler and along with the police slunder does not entitle you to any kind of judgement.

Where on earth did you see the lethal stretch of terrain with waist high scrub and crevasses?

Dear Ms. Sarler, have you confused Kos island with some other place?

Apart from the scenery, the corrupt Kos police, "forgot" to inform you that there have been witnesses statements, there was a white car parked near by, with one woman in the back and two men in the front.

The police themselves, have given us the name of the white car owner.

The owner of the car is a woman who had a close relationship with a certain police officer and was brought in to translate for us, thus controling the investigation itself.

When we ourselves confronted the woman with this fact, she denied her car was roadworthy at the time of Ben's abduction, namely July 24, 1991.

She lied and told us she had returned her car to the government in order to claim a subsidy.

True, but she had applied for it in October and it was approved in November.

Have you seen the documents Ms. Sarler?

Have you seen any witnesses statements at all?

We do not plan to show you any!!!

There has never been an investigation as to her whereabouts that fateful day.

It was all too easy for her to abduct Ben.

This woman knew how the police would react, especially when she told them about Kerry's unmarried mother status.

Another thing Ms. Sarler, how do you know when searches took place to find Ben?

Were you on Kos and somehow we did not see you, or this is what you have been told by the Kos police, the same police who botched and covered up the investigation in order to save their criminal friend and their island?

If Ben had wondered off during the afternoon and fell down he would have been heard crying.

If he had got stuck somewhere he would have been heard and what's more Ben would have heard his Nanny and granddad shouting his name.

A very scared little boy who have hurt himself, the whole village would have heard his screams.

There is an echo right there, Ms. Sarler, or you didn't notice that either?

But... you have investigated and you are entitled to tell the world!!!

Ben did not vanish on his own.

He was ABDUCTED Ms. Sarler.

Last but not least Ms. Slarer, apart from the police slunder to cover their own corruption, no member of the Needham family ever became a criminal suspect. This is not a class matter.

But it... becomes one, whenever climinal suspects are treated like celebrities.

May we suggest that in the future, you stick with reality and if you don't know the whole story, be really careful.

Next time around we will answer you with a lawsuit.

The Needham Family

Thanks for the map Andrew - I was going up and down the roads on google maps and not finding it.

PS Found it.  My goodness what a tatty place Kos is.  Everywhere you look is like a gypsy settlement - everything in a shambles, broken, rusty, bodged etc, dumped cars and trucks.

Why they went there I do not know - all that plus it`s baking bl**dy hot.  Hell on earth IMO.

PPS - Just remembered that Eddie felt at home with gypsies when he worked on the fairground (Kerry`s book).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32xqT0mlXdo

Take a watch of this if you can - listening to Ben's uncle whilst under hypnosis is very thought provoking

From the Needham reply.

Needham family. wrote:He was ABDUCTED Ms. Sarler.

Hmmm.

@ Andrew - Thanks for posting that 'Needham's reply', never seen it before.
The anger and frustration from his family are clear, as is the absolute despair.

What entitles journalists to put forth such stories. Here I'd also include 'bloggers'.
It may provide the sort of reading and opinions many want, but that's all it is, opinion, personal translation of what little is known written in a form of tantalising journalism to get readers hooked.

I don't know what happened to Ben, does anyone really know. Must say I'm disappointed by SYP as that all feels like some "production" they held in Kos - similar to those digs in PdL but fewer updates.

I am just losing faith in these police investigations. Only IMO and a rant, sorry.

bluebell wrote:I am just losing faith in these police investigations.  Only IMO and a rant, sorry.

When you have the police saying that the Needhams should be prepared for the worst with out any evidence to back that up its understandable.Then we have the likes of the Mail with it's headline.

Police release picture of Ben Needham's yellow Matchbox car that they say proves he died on holiday in Greece

They found a toy car now unless I'm missing some thing important how does this prove any thing?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3883926/Police-release-picture-Ben-Needham-s-yellow-Matchbox-car-say-proves-died-holiday-Greece.html

@ Heisenburg  -  Well they found a toy car from 25 years ago?   Maybe they could continue their digging investigations and find the remains of the child it belonged to, or is that too much to ask ?

A toy car - what sort of an answer is that.         Oh and where is the second toy car he had, any sign of that ?

bluebell wrote:@ Heisenburg  -  Well they found a toy car from 25 years ago?   Maybe they could continue their digging investigations and find the remains of the child it belonged to, or is that too much to ask ?

A toy car - what sort of an answer is that.              Oh and where is the second toy car he had, any sign of that ?

They found some toy cars back in 2012. (or parts of them). They were shown to the family back then but I can't actually recall or find what their response was.

http://news.sky.com/story/ben-needham-search-childrens-toy-cars-found-10466297

A bizarre one and I'm not sure why but I was thinking earlier on whether they actually found Ben's remains back in 2012 when they had the sniffer dogs there etc. But for whatever reason they didn't disclose this at the time as they needed something else to corroborate their theory / evidence on which they were building a case around.

This toy car which was recently found might have been the missing piece in the jigsaw they were looking for to build said case. And they've treated it like the icing on the cake that they literally have done.

Told you it was a bizarre thought....