The first bill is €2,000. That is what a Greek investigative firm wants up front to start work on the disappearance of Ben Needham, and his mother says the full job could cost around €20,000, money she does not have.
Kerry Needham, 53, lives in Turkey. She plans to hire a private investigator in Greece after a phone call last month. A family liaison officer, she told the Daily Mail, said South Yorkshire Police’s Major Crime Unit would no longer be responsible for the case it had run for 14 years. She called the news “devastating.”
The force says that is not what happened. A spokesperson told the Mail it was not stepping back fully and that its role is to act as a “conduit for information sharing” between UK authorities, Interpol and the Greek authorities. “The investigation itself is led by the Greek authorities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the force still has a designated family liaison officer and a detective inspector on the case. The force said it was “deeply sorry for any confusion this review may have caused.”
Needham told The Sun that two senior officers later described the whole thing to her as a “misunderstanding.”
Two digs, no answer
Ben was 21 months old in July 1991 when he vanished from a farmhouse near Iraklis on Kos. His grandparents, Eddie and Christine Needham, were renovating the property. His mother was working at a nearby hotel.
South Yorkshire officers took over in 2012, when the Home Office gave the force £700,000 to reopen the case after the family argued it had not been examined thoroughly enough. That year they excavated the land around the farmhouse and found no traces of DNA. A second dig came in 2016, after a witness alleged that a digger driver from Kos had run Ben over by accident and buried his body under building waste. Officers recovered an item believed to have been Ben’s. They concluded an accident was the most likely explanation, and the search formally ended that October.
Needham rejects that. “There is no physical or forensic evidence to prove that that happened,” she said.
Why she wants a private investigator
She has asked for the case files held by police on Kos since 2016 and says she has never received a specific answer. The Greek firm contacted her, she told The Sun, and said it could get at those files and start from the beginning. She also wants witnesses re-interviewed, and former officers from the 1990s found while they are still alive. “These people are aging, they’re now in their 70s,” she said.
Her case to the Mail was blunter. “I think if a private investigator got involved and was allowed to take the case files and review them from the very beginning, they will see that there were lots of mistakes made, and potential cover-ups,” she said.
She believes Ben may have been abducted. She is also waiting on DNA results from a man adopted in the US who thinks he could be her son.
The money is the obstacle. Needham started a GoFundMe in March. She declined to name the firm. “I don’t want to be in debt to somebody, and not be able to pay him for the job,” she said. The investigator, she added, has been sympathetic and told her they can try to work together, but she will not hire him until she has a substantial sum raised.
Sources
- Ben Needham's mum to hire detective to solve son's disappearance
- New investigation into missing Ben Needham case: Greek private detective joins search
