New development on missing Andrew Gosden case.

[ClaraThePigeon]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-59952786

I hope that this latest development gives that poor boy's family answers, terrible as they may be. I can't imagine the hell they've had to live with every day since his disappearance.

Maybe he took the money out in case he decided to stay in London for a couple of days or return home, but really had the intent of ending his life, which he did if that makes sense.

Did he pay for his train ticket using the withdrawn money?

Why end his life in a way that his parents never recover the body? It doesn't make sense to go to London just to commit suicide, which he could have done at home or on the way to/from school

I was 14 at the time Andrew Gosden went missing and I also live in kings cross.

St Pancras had already been built and its seedy rep had been left behind everyone had phones by the time they started secondary school.

It was really relatively safe place to be particularly during the day with lots of people around I just can’t see how a stranger abduction could happen that quickly.

I believe he went to meet someone. Even if he didn’t have a phone I regularly used phone boxes still then when I’d run out of credit.

Whatever happened to Andrew I truly hope his parents get closure.

Another rookie guess is that he got into a car or taxi at the train station, which is why he wasn’t picked up on CCTV walking anywhere. Could the cash have been to pay for a long taxi ride?!

I think that's quite a good thought cheeky peach. An innocent cabbie would have later reported I think, but theres always the possibility that he was totally unobservant or even died before any there was any publicity about andrew.

@dayswithaY

There's something about that photo of Andrew leaving Kings Cross where he seems like he's looking out for someone, the way you do when you've arranged to meet someone at a certain place. He doesn't look like he's striding out of the station with purpose, more like slowing down to find someone.

Given the latest developments this might be what happened. Still can't work out how they initially made contact with him though.

Yes. I went to find the video and I agree. Poor naive young chap.

@ConnectFortyFour

I think that's quite a good thought cheeky peach. An innocent cabbie would have later reported I think, but theres always the possibility that he was totally unobservant or even died before any there was any publicity about andrew.

An awful lots of people simply don’t pay attention to the news even now - and back in 2007 we didn’t really have the news on mobiles like we do now. It’s entirely plausible the whole story was missed by, say, a 60-something taxi driver who wasn’t great with the internet and didn’t watch the teatime news.

I think he was groomed and it was at the uni course he attended in the summer. Either another student or someone older. He met up with them - I don’t think he knew he would be away forever but I definitely think he knew exactly where he was going and he had a lift back - eg another maths student had said meet in London x cross at 12 noon on that day etc … he could have phoned them from a public phone box - the not walking home from you in the previous days Is odd. I don’t see any evidence he was being abused - but he might of been and actually thinking this was an escape …. I hope he is alive well and happy

I don't think he committed suicide, why go to London to do it, and a body would have likely been found.

I think he was meeting someone, and might have had access to the internet somewhere, or access to talking to someone somehow.

I'd hope he is alive somewhere and hasn't contacted his family out of fear and/or embarrassment, or perhaps joined a cult and has been brainwashed (a bit of a lomg shot but anything is possible, and is better than alternative possibilities)

@Havilland

‘Gosden's family have kept his room as he left it and have not changed the locks on the house as Gosden was known to have taken his key.‘

The enduring heartache of his family not knowing ....

That breaks my heart. Every time the key goes in the door they must hope for a moment.

To those saying he went to London to commit suicide, I think that's pretty unlikely, especially as two men have been arrested on suspicion of kidnap and human trafficking in relation to his disappearance.

@BruceBogtrottersWife

He didn't have access to the Internet as far as his family knew Such a confusing case :( I'm not from so far away from where he lived

At least the family will have some answers I guess.

I find that hard to believe a 14yr old in 2007 would have been very unusual if they weren’t online. I was 14 ten years before this and internet was in common use then with chat rooms etc.

The police fumbled the case so badly and spent so many weeks convinced it was the family who were responsible before widening the investigation.

Andrew probably was accessing something relevant on the school internet and/or meeting someone on his walks home.

If the police had requested a range of London CCTV weeks earlier, they could have solved this, but everything was wiped. Ditto if they’d publicised it better in London soon after the event, when memories were fresh.

If the police had requested a range of London CCTV weeks earlier, they could have solved this, but everything was wiped. Ditto if they’d publicised it better in London soon after the event, when memories were fresh

This is true and so heartbreaking. I've heard of this happening in cases involving adults, but Andrew was a vulnerable child and they still dithered about getting CCTV footage? Absolutely outrageous.

The renovations around King's Cross started in June 2007 I thought?

If the police had requested a range of London CCTV weeks earlier, they could have solved this, but everything was wiped. Ditto if they’d publicised it better in London soon after the event, when memories were fresh

I agree. At least there may have been more clues to go on.

I find that hard to believe a 14yr old in 2007 would have been very unusual if they weren’t online. I was 14 ten years before this and internet was in common use then with chat rooms etc.
I agree. A PP said before that they were 17 in 2007 and didn’t have the internet on their phone..
I remember in 2001 or so as an early teen using the internet / chat room function on my cheap phone. Internet was slow and in black and white, no photos, I think we used WAP which then became GPRS and years later 2/3/4G but you could go online and talk to strangers. Obviously it drained your credit very fast so you wouldn’t have been online every day.
I remember within about 10 mins of using the chatroom someone had asked if I wanted to go on holiday with them. It freaked me out and I didn’t use the chat room function again.
I guess online grooming looked different then. There was no way to take a photo for one.

It’s not inconceivable that he had a cheap phone unknown to his parents and used it to email someone he’d met at camp or someone he’d got in contact with another way.

*I was 18 in 2007 and everyone did have phones (although just turned 14 year old is very different to 18 year olds). However, the phones people had did not have the internet or data, or, if you did have a phone which claimed to have the internet, they were glacially slow and would only connect to specific things - ie. you could text in your Facebook status but not actually access Facebook.

My point being that Andrew having a secret phone would unlikely give him internet access back in 2007.*

Yes this is what I disagree with. Your phone in 2007 almost certainly did have the internet because my cheap phone in 2001 did and it allowed me to go into chat rooms. You may have not used it because it was a different era and social media wasn’t a big thing - you’d have had a MySpace etc that you updated from your home computer and you’d have chatted on MSN on your home computer too, not your phone, but I’m sure it would have had the capability to check email.
I had Facebook in 2005 even.. it certainly was a different time technology wise but I’d have found it surprising if a teenager hadn’t ever used the internet in 2007 and I think if you’d wanted to keep in contact with someone online you’d have managed to use your phone to access your emails. I don’t think it was necessarily even pre-loaded as an app back then (email) but you’d have been able to navigate to the log in page via a browser. Or you could simply have used an Internet cafe I guess.
I don’t think I used my phone for email back then because it seemed easier to use a computer but if I’d wanted to, I could have.

Could phone connect to WiFi back then?

@Cheekypeach

Could phone connect to WiFi back then?

I can’t remember that. They’d definitely had blue tooth for a long time - I remember discussing Bluetooth in sixth form which was a few years prior to 2007 so they may well have. And actually at that point (2003 ish?) I had a colour phone you could take pictures from but I don’t think that was ubiquitous then at all, I think most phones were black and white. I didn’t really have a way of then transferring the photos to my computer though and when I was at university most people still took photos on digital cameras and then uploaded the photos to Facebook via their computer. Even if our phones could connect to WiFi i don’t think most people would have done it as a matter of course.. if you wanted to go online you went on your laptop, not your phone. Still - this is when I was at university so I had a lot of freedom and privacy. If I’d been living at home at this time and didn’t have my own laptop and my use of the internet was monitored I might have used my phone more. I think you would have had to actually type the email provider into the browser… It wouldn’t have been as user friendly as on smart phones (2009ish +?) but definitely possible to access and send email even for a teenager spending the odd £10 on phone credit.

@MimiBaker

The renovations around King's Cross started in June 2007 I thought?

If the police had requested a range of London CCTV weeks earlier, they could have solved this, but everything was wiped. Ditto if they’d publicised it better in London soon after the event, when memories were fresh

I agree. At least there may have been more clues to go on.

No, demolition and building started a long time before that. I had to walk through the building site most days . The water tower had been moved by 2007, Gasholders taken down etc, a huge amount had already been done. I had lived through years of building and chaos by 2007.

And thinking more about it…

Andrew was obviously a boy with secrets that his parents had no inkling of. He bunked off school to go down to London - at a minimum he had a plan to see a concert or do who knows what.. or alternatively he had plans to commit suicide away from home and with no chance of being discovered, to start a new life or to meet up with someone who had potentially been grooming him (either online or at the summer programme).

The not booking a return ticket strikes me as kind of ominous frankly and not wholly consistent with the idea that he just wanted to go to a concert (as much as, if I were the parent, this is theory I’d very much want to believe).
The chance that he had a burner phone that cost about £20 and his parents didn’t know about and that he took to London with him is surely very, very high.

I didn’t have that rebellious or interesting a childhood but honestly my parents had very little idea what was going on with me. I think particularly back then - parents were often oblivious to the kind of things teenagers could do online as they hadn’t grown up with technology and probably didn’t use it much themselves. As I’ve said, some random man I’d been speaking to for a few minutes tried to meet up with me from a phone chat room years before Andrew went missing and actually it would have been about 2003 that I actually met up with people I’d befriended online on some kind of music fan site .. it was thankfully completely harmless, but it involved travelling by train and finding a pub (underage) by myself. I’d actually forgotten about it until now. I’m sure my parents had no idea about that. Most of my friends had relationships whilst underage that their parents never had an inkling of.

As a parent myself now the idea that I could have very little idea about what my teenager is doing is terrifying.

I wonder if he could have been meeting up with someone he went to that camp with. The fact that photos have been found seems like he was maybe taken. So horrible for his family, the not knowing.

The camp wasn't in 2007 though, it was actually in 2006.

He was failed, there were several plausible sightings in the weeks following his disappearance, including a woman who thought she spoke to him, yet it took the police 6 weeks to get back to her!