Author Topic: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.  (Read 7956 times)

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Offline John

Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« on: July 27, 2014, 09:00:19 PM »
Ben Needham's sister speaks of the reconstruction she took part in as part of an ITV documentary.

One of Leighanna's first memories is taking part in a TV reconstruction of Ben's last moments when she was 22 months old - the same age Ben was when he went missing. With her hair especially cut in the same crop as her brother, and wearing boys clothes, she was the living image of Ben.

"I was very young, but I can remember that day,"  Leighanna says, "There was a man walking in front of me holding a yellow toy duck so that I'd follow him.  In a strange way it has made me feel like I was there the day Ben went missing."

Although there have been more than 300 claimed sightings of Ben, newspaper appeals offering rewards of up to £250,000, and photographic reconstructions of how he would look today, Ben's fate remains a mystery.


« Last Edit: July 27, 2014, 09:06:59 PM by John »
A malicious prosecution for a crime which never existed. An exposé of egregious malfeasance by public officials.
Indeed, the truth never changes with the passage of time.

Offline John

Re: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« Reply #1 on: July 27, 2014, 09:53:51 PM »
My brother Ben vanished 22 years ago on a Greek holiday island. My mother left me to drink her pain away. At 11, I found her suicide note. Now we need a miracle.

  • Leighanna Needham wasn't born when brother Ben went missing in Kos
  • But she speaks out about how his disappearance still affects her family

MailOnline
20 April 2013

It was, until the abduction of Madeleine McCann, the most notorious missing child case in British history: the unexplained disappearance of toddler Ben Needham on the Greek island of Kos in 1991.

The mystery surrounding Ben’s fate made headlines for almost a decade, with scores of false sightings, ill-fated DNA tests and stalled re-investigations, with his mother Kerry fighting against the odds as the years passed by.

Yet the consequences of Ben’s disappearance to his immediate family have never been fully detailed until now – in particular the devastating effect it had on his younger sister Leighanna – and on Kerry, who numbed the pain with alcohol.



Leighanna Needham wasn’t even born when Ben vanished while playing in the garden of his grandparent’s retirement house on the island while Ben’s mother Kerry worked in a local hotel.

But in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Leighanna, now 20, explains that his loss has cast a long shadow over her life.

Ben’s disappearance sparked an international missing person’s hunt that dominated the world’s headlines in a way that was strikingly similar to the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in May 2007.

Madeleine was just days short of her fourth birthday when she vanished. Ben was a 21-month-old.

But while the ‘Maddie’ campaign to find her, launched by her parents Gerry and Kate McCann, attracted millions of pounds in donations and worldwide publicity, the Needhams struggled on alone.

‘Unlike the McCanns, we haven’t had the money to pay for publicists and private detectives, we’ve just had each other and a lot of faith and determination,’ Leighanna says.

‘I think people have always seen us differently. The McCanns are GPs with money, my mum is a single mother who lived in a council house.

'I don’t want to sound bitter because we know what they’re going through and they just want Madeleine back, like we do Ben.

'Kate McCann said in the papers last week that she’s reached the stage that she would be able to forgive whoever abducted Madeleine – but we could never forgive the person who took Ben.’


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« Last Edit: July 27, 2014, 10:07:01 PM by John »
A malicious prosecution for a crime which never existed. An exposé of egregious malfeasance by public officials.
Indeed, the truth never changes with the passage of time.

Alfred R Jones

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Offline Anna

Re: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2015, 08:52:49 PM »
ITV reporting a new lead - dare we hope...?

http://www.itv.com/news/calendar/2015-01-26/new-lead-in-ben-needham-case-after-calendar-helps-greeces-biggest-tv-show/

Thank you, for posting this.
Some new hope, that is hopefully not disappointing.
“You should not honour men more than truth.”
― Plato

Offline DCI

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Re: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« Reply #4 on: January 27, 2015, 12:47:29 AM »
Thank you, for posting this.
Some new hope, that is hopefully not disappointing.

Yes hopefully and on his 25th birthday!
Kate's 500 Mile Cycle Challenge

https://www.justgiving.com/KateMcCann/

Offline valeria

Re: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« Reply #5 on: January 31, 2015, 12:00:38 AM »
tonight in the live tv show "light at the end of the tunel" a man of  gipsy origin contacted the phone center of the show and asked for a dna test believing that he could be ben.
the presenter said that she was given important clues but for the moment she prefered not to make them available to the public.


Offline steve_trousers

Re: Ben Needham - The ITV reconstruction.
« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2015, 11:03:15 PM »
Hi All, I remember this case well and there's something about the disappearance of Ben Needham, that never quite made sense with me.

His loving and devoted family have been through and continue to go through hell and im not suggesting they were involved in any way, but i've never bought the kidnapped by gipsies seen in the area theory, and you do a search in the internet and it is all you can find, people have just accepted it as the truth.
Here you had a missing child, nothing whatsoever to go on, except that there were gypsies staying nearby. It can't be ruled out, but it smells of red herring to me.

The surrounding countryside is thick scrub, often up to your waste in sharp thorns. The family did their own search then the police bungled it, I recall that the general consensus was "how far could a 2 year old go by himself" well my experience with 2 year olds is they are full of energy and can wander off a long way. This investigation was bungled by the police back in 1991, they could have saved a lot of grief all round by conducting a more thorough search.