More than 170,000 people go missing in Britain every year. What drives them to leave their friends and families – and what awaits them if they do come back?
Sitting at her dining room table in Hampshire, 60-year-old Karen Bone tells the story of her son’s disappearance. It was early March 2018 when Matt Bone, 26, left the family home after telling his parents he was going for a walk. “He came downstairs, took his front door key and walked out. We thought he’d gone to clear his head. Later that day we were due at my mum’s for her birthday celebration. He never came back.”
Matt had been an academically gifted child. He had sailed through school, before completing a degree in environmental sciences at the University of East Anglia, where he swiftly moved on to his doctorate. His research was going well, taking him around Britain and beyond, even as far as Antarctica. “He seemed on top of things to begin with,” his mother explains. But there were faint warning signs too, “things you go back on retrospectively – though, at the time, you’d think, ‘Oh that’s just Matt.’”
