https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12152685/Mothers-heart-breaking-belief-20-years-searching-missing-son-went-bike.htmlThe little boy who vanished exactly four years before Maddie: Mother's heart-breaking belief after 20 years of searching for missing son who went out on his bike but never came home
Daniel Entwistle has not been seen since he was aged seven on May 3, 2003
His mother Paula Taylor, 50, believes he drowned after falling into a river
By Andrew Young
Published: 09:14, 3 June 2023 | Updated: 11:47, 3 June 2023
The mother of a boy who disappeared 20-years-ago on the same date as Madeleine McCann went missing has told for the first time how she believes he drowned after falling into a river. Daniel Entwistle has not been seen since he failed to return home after going out to play when he was aged seven on May 3, 2003. His mother Paula Taylor, 50, dismissed rumours that her former husband David Entwistle had harmed their son, despite him having once been jailed for six months for a child sex offence. Ms Taylor said that she knew nothing about his conviction in 1987 for having sex with a 12-year-old girl until police told her about it after Daniel went missing. She admitted it was one of the reasons they split up in the weeks after Daniel seemingly vanished. But in an exclusive interview with MailOnline, she said: ‘The last time Daniel was seen he was on his bike and he was on his own. If the police thought David was anything to do with it, he would have been locked up.’
She is convinced that her much-loved son drowned close to where his red BMX bike was found at Trinity Quay next to the River Yare in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Ms Taylor believes that he fell into the fast-flowing water and was swept away after scaling the 3ft high river wall to stand on top of the wide ledge. She said: ‘There have been all sorts of rumours and theories but I am sure that he went into the river. It’s not a big mystery. The police showed me CCTV of him riding his bike across a garage forecourt towards the quay and he didn’t come out again. Nobody else was shown going towards the quay so it looks like he was on his own. I think he had gone to the garage because he wanted to buy a Kinder egg and they didn’t have any in the shop where he had been earlier.’
Speaking of her agony about his body never being found, she added: ‘You never get closure. You just have to learn to live with it. The police have to keep an open mind because they have to keep a missing person’s case open. I could go to court to say that he’s passed away, but I would have to dig everything up again and it is too much hassle. You have to move on and carry on, but maybe one day they might find something.’
The search for Daniel quickly faded from headlines in 2003, even though police could not rule out fears that he had been abducted. The limited coverage was in stark contrast to the continuing attention given to the hunt for three-year-old Madeleine who disappeared in Portugal on May 3, 2007. The enduring mystery of how Madeleine, the daughter of two doctors, disappeared from her holiday apartment in Praia Da Luz has kept her case firmly in the public eye for 16 years. But Daniel who was said to have had Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and was allegedly bullied at school, came from a working class family, lived on a council estate and was used to roaming the streets by himself. Ms Taylor told MailOnline: ‘Everybody is still reporting about Madelene McCann, but people should focus on all the other children who go missing with nobody talking about them. Madeleine’s parents have lost a child and I understand their pain, but it is the circumstances. People ridiculed me because I lived on a council estate. I got accused of being manic depressive when I wasn’t. Madeleine was the daughter of two doctors in a certain income bracket. They also had all the PR and politicians behind them. But there are other parents going through the same thing.’
Mr Entwistle’s conviction at Preston Crown Court was only made public after he was found dead aged 53 in January 2015 at his bedsit where he lived alone in Lowestoft. MailOnline can reveal that he also spoke before his death of his belief that Daniel had died accidentally after falling into the river. In previously unpublished comments made to a news agency reporter in 2008, he said that Daniel’s ADHD had made him behave recklessly. He said: ‘Daniel had no fear of anything. When he was just two-years-old, he poured a kettle of hot water over himself and was in hospital in Manchester for three months with 50 per cent burns to his chest and neck. After he went missing we found out he had been climbing up on to our neighbour’s sunroof and sunbathing for a laugh. We also discovered he had been going down to the Pleasure Beach in Great Yarmouth with his brother and trying out all the rides which the local kids were allowed to do so before the summer season started. But what made it really bad is that his body was never found. It has meant that we have never been able to bury him and have any sort of closure. I turned to drinking because I could not face reality. Paula and I split up in September 2003 because I was not there to give her the support she needed.’
Daniel went missing three years after moving to the seaside town with his parents from their former home in Burnley, Lancashire. The family spent the afternoon of Saturday May 3, 2003, shopping in Gorleston for clothes to take on a holiday to Tenerife which they had booked. Ms Taylor who suffers from epilepsy went to bed because she felt unwell when they returned to their end terraced home overlooked by a derelict Victorian gas holder in Copperfield Avenue on the Barrack estate in Great Yarmouth. Rail maintenance worker Mr Entwistle was left looking after their three sons Antony, ten, Daniel, seven, and two-year-old John. He sent Daniel out to buy a bottle of milk for John from Blencowe’s corner shop around 50 yards from their home on a nearby road. He also gave him 50p to buy sweets. CCTV images from the store taken at 5.02pm show 3ft 2ins tall Daniel walking down an aisle in the store in his blue Adidas T shirt, blue tracksuit bottoms and grey coloured training shoes. After returning home to drop off the bottle, he headed out again on his bike and was last seen around 300 yards away on the CCTV at the garage next to Trinity Quay at 5.14pm. Mr Entwistle recalled in his interview in 2008 that he asked his stepson Antony to go out and look for Daniel. He said: ‘He came back a short while later because he could not find him. I went out for a general look but there was no sign of him. Then I started to panic. Paula rang her sister who came round with her boyfriend. By then it was about 7.30 pm. Her partner and I drove around in different directions and agreed to meet at the house again in half an hour. When we got back, we rang the police. A single officer came round in a car, and I went out with him for a look. The officer realised it was serious and radioed his guvnors to say that this little lad had been missing since 5pm. A full scale search was then launched. Word got out that Daniel was missing, and half the street turned out to join the search. The police were out all night and assigned us a family liaison officer. ‘One of our neighbours was looking around when he saw Daniel’s little red bike on some spare land about ten or 15 yards from the river. The front tyre was flat from a puncture. I had tried to repair it earlier on, but obviously had not done it properly. The police then took me to see the bike. When I saw it, I just started crying and ran towards the river wall. I just knew he had gone in the river. I had to go back and tell Paula that the bike had been found next to the river about two or three minutes from our house. She just broke down.’
Norfolk Police announced Daniel’s disappearance the following day, and his parents appeared at a press conference in a local community centre to appeal for information from anyone who had seen him. Ms Taylor told reporters: ‘He's outgoing, he's pleasant, he can be mischievous like a lot of children and he's a bit of a loner. But he says 'Hi' to anybody. He has friends that live locally and we just thought he was there.’
It was revealed that Daniel had been seen in the Trinity Quay area earlier on the day he disappeared when he was watching a group of boys throw stones in the water. Police also disclosed that he had once previously disappeared, but only for about two hours. Police divers searched the river while teams of officers scoured land all over the town and questioned known local sex offenders. Mr Entwistle said: ‘I suffer from blackouts and just before I went in to see the press, I nearly fainted. The next day Paula and I got questioned at separate police stations for nine hours each. The police started making inquiries in Lancashire in case Daniel was up there. The police were 100 per cent helpful and sympathetic. There was no way they were pointing the finger at us – but some people in the community wrongly assumed that we had something to do with Daniel going missing.’
In the following days, Daniel’s parents were pictured helping to put up posters about his disappearance around as police searched the riverbed with sonar equipment. Mr Entwistle added in his interview that he and his wife were the subject of cruel gossip. He said: ‘Someone told one of the papers that Paula and I were always in the pub. It was just rubbish. Paula is not a drinker and although we did go out, it was not that much. I had not been drinking on the day he went missing because I was due to work that night. I would have been sacked if I had gone to work drunk. One report said that he had been turning up to school with bruising. That was rubbish as well. Paula and I never laid a finger on any of our kids. Over the following weeks I tried to keep a glimmer of hope alive. We both just hoped that he would somehow turn up but the police told us to be prepared for the worst.’
Daniel’s family were told that a child’s training shoe had been found washed up on a local beach, but it turned out to be a different size to the ones worn by Daniel. In recent years, local gossips and web sleuths have also speculated that two notorious local paedophiles may have killed Daniel. Jim Hall, 60, and Andrew Ventham, 49, killed themselves in November 2009 in their car repair garage, just 300 yards from where Daniel’s bike was found. An inquest heard how the pair died in a fume filled car after murdering Derick Tempest, 30, who had been demanding cash from them in return for keeping quiet about how they had abused him as a 13-year-old boy. The two mechanics made payments of (pounds) 1,000 and (pounds) 800 after he allegedly saw them with other young boys. They are believed to have killed him when he demanded more money on a third visit to their business Hall's Garage in Camden Place, Great Yarmouth. A note in Mr Hall's handwriting, made it clear that the pair who lived together intended to kill themselves, saying: ‘Sorry about this, but events have conspired against us.’
The body of Mr Tempest with a 15kg vehicle brake drum tied around his waist was found in April, 2010, in the River Yare near the Berney Arms pub, near Great Yarmouth. A post mortem failed to establish how he had died because his body was so decomposed. Norfolk Police revealed at the inquest that there was ‘strong evidence’ that Hall and Ventham had killed Mr Tempest and would have been charged with murder if they had lived. Norfolk coroner William Armstrong recorded verdicts that Mr Tempest had been unlawfully killed, and that Hall and Ventham had died by suicide. He added: ‘There is a substantial and impressive body of evidence which leads irresistibly to the conclusion that Mr Hall and Mr Ventham had for many years been behaving in an inappropriate way with young males. There is equally clear evidence that Derick Tempest was effectively blackmailing them.’
Ms Taylor told MailOnline how Norfolk Police knew nothing about Hall and Ventham when Daniel disappeared. She added that a police family liaison officer had told her after the pair died that they may have murdered a former victim who was trying to blackmail them. But she said: ‘They searched their garage and house, and found nothing at all to link them to Daniel. I know there have been people on Facebook saying they killed Daniel, but it was nothing to do with them blokes.’
Mother-of-four Debbie Munday, 40, who used to live on the Barrack estate told MailOnline how she remembered Daniel often being out alone in the months before he disappeared. She said: ‘He was dinky and not very tall. I used to try and engage with him, but he wouldn’t speak. On the day he disappeared, it was overcast and I remember seeing him come away on his little scooter. He was going in and out of the road, and I remarked to my ex-husband about him being on his own. I waved at him and told him to get back on the pavement. I would often see him trying to carry shopping by himself, and lugging around big bottles of milk. I think he may have been playing on the wall at the edge of the water and fallen in.’
Debbie’s mother Susan Hutchison who lives in Copperfield Avenue, added: ‘Daniel used to come in the fish and chip show where I worked. His parents would send him out with an order written down on a bit of paper. It was as if he couldn’t speak properly. I used to see him out alone, sometimes down by the quay or along the seafront. My partner who worked down at the Pleasure Beach used to see his bike down there.’
But another woman living near Daniel’s old home said: ‘I don’t think he had any problem talking. It was just that his parents would give him notes for the shop, so he got an order right. I was always chatting to him because I knew his parents. Once, my husband found him on our fence. My husband told him to get off, and he said ‘No’. I had to get him to move. He was cheeky in a funny way. Two police officers came round to check our shed on the day after he disappeared. One of them told me it was almost certain that he had gone in the river.’
Eleanor Levi Killett, 27, who was a pupil with Daniel at the Greenacre First and Middle School, said she remembered him as a friend who chased her around while ‘pretending to be a dinosaur’. She told MailOnline: ‘He was a lovely lad with a cheeky smile. He was very bright and funny.’
Andy Guy, the Unsolved Case Review Manager for Norfolk Police, said: ‘We recognise the enormity of two decades passing since Daniel went missing, and the impact this has had on his family in that time. As a force we remain committed to finding answers for them, and we have continued to explore new lines of enquiry in this case in response to new and credible information. In the last five years we have pursued 12 pieces of information passed to us. However, despite the original investigation carried out in 2003, our continued efforts and the subsequent appeals in the intervening years, no information or evidence has yet established what happened to Daniel since the last confirmed sighting of him on 3 May 2003. Daniel's case remains active and anyone who has credible information that has not been previously passed to the police can contact us on 01953 423819 or email unsolvedcasereviews@norfolk.police.uk or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.’
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