At first glance, it could be the footage from a cyclist’s helmet camera showing an apparently unremarkable journey through urban streets.
In fact, the two-and-a-half minute long video, made by the Daily Mail and released last week, is a detailed reconstruction of the last known movements of missing student Jack O’Sullivan, who vanished after attending a student party in the Hotwells area of Bristol in the small hours of March 2. He has not been seen since.
The video has since received thousands of views, amid hopes that it may jog the memory of hitherto undiscovered witnesses.
It is a reminder, too, that more than six months after Jack’s disappearance, many puzzling questions remain unanswered about his final movements that night.
Jack’s family – his mother Catherine, husband Alan and his 28-year-old brother, Ben – all believe the key to what happened lies in the five hours before Jack’s mobile phone, which has never been recovered, gave off its last signal.
Here, Femail looks at the key timeline and raises some troubling questions.
Jack O’Sullivan (centre) is pictured graduating with his parents Catherine (front) and Alan (right) and brother Ben (left)
WHAT HAPPENED AT THE PARTY?
At 1.52am, Jack texts his mum Catherine from the student party he’s attending in the Hotwells area of Bristol to say he is safe and plans to get a taxi home. The 23-year-old, an Exeter University graduate, was living back at the family home in Flax Bourton, a village around five miles away, while studying a law conversion course in Bristol. He arrived at the house party around 11pm after meeting friends for drinks in a Wetherspoons pub in the city centre.
When Catherine replies checking he has his house keys, he replies in turn with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji, confirming he did. ‘That was my last correspondence with him, and he didn’t seem drunk,’ Catherine recalls to the Mail. ‘You can just sense when someone’s had a drink, but Jack was making full sentences with full stops.’
Catherine also believes there were a couple of what she calls ‘odd’ moments at the party which she only learned about in the days after Jack disappeared. At one point he had exchanged words with a couple of fellow guests who had laughed at him when he tripped as he came down the stairs. ‘He was a bit miffed by that,’ says Catherine. ‘But the police said there was no sort of physical fight or anything like that, it was just a few words were spoken.’
Jack also left without saying goodbye to a good female friend who had invited him to the party in the first place. ‘She had gone outside with some others to smoke, and when she came back, Jack was gone. It’s very unlike Jack not to say goodbye, so that was odd,’ Catherine says. While these details may be minor, in the light of Jack’s subsequent disappearance she has wondered whether they played any part in what subsequently happened.
WHY DIDN’T JACK GET A TAXI?
Jack is captured om CCTV at 2.57am emerging from the party alone, more than an hour after texting his mother to say he was going to leave. It’s unclear what made him decide to stay. There is a taxi office nearby called V Cars, but Jack instead walked south from the house along a road called Christina Terrace and was caught on CCTV crossing one end of the Cumberland Basin – the main entrance to Bristol Docks, which is not tidal – using Junction Swing Bridge.
‘Hotwells is always a spot where he’s never failed to get a taxi, so my thoughts are that he felt confident that he would pick up a cab there,’ says his mother. There is, however, no record of him getting into any cab. As a student with good knowledge of the city, he could also have booked a cab via an app on his phone. Did he do this and one failed to show, leading him to take another route?
CCTV shows Jack at one end of the Cumberland Basin – the main entrance to Bristol Docks, which is not tidal – using Junction Swing Bridge
WAS THERE A RISK OF HYPOTHERMIA?
It would have been very cold on the night in question, with weather records showing that it was around 4 degrees in the small hours. By dawn, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. But Jack was dressed for the cold in a quilted Barbour jacket and a woollen sweater.
At 3.13am, CCTV footage shows Jack walking under the Brunel Way flyover, having apparently walked there along Brunel Lock Road. This is a short walk along the northern edge of the Cumberland Basin and suggests he is starting to double back on himself towards Hotwells Road but, as further CCTV captures Jack – identified by his mother from his gait – less than 20 minutes later, he appears to keep moving, dispelling suggestions that he could have succumbed to hypothermia and collapsed somewhere on such a freezing cold night.
At 3.13am, CCTV footage shows Jack walking under the Brunel Way flyover, having apparently walked there along Brunel Lock Road
Security cameras captured various snippets of Jack’s journey after leaving the house party
WHY WAS HIS LAST PHONE CALL CUT SHORT?
At 3:30am, in footage missed by police – Catherine spots Jack crossing the Cumberland Basin again using Plimsoll Swing Bridge. Four minutes later, at around the time he is crossing the river, Jack attempts to call the friend he had missed saying goodbye to and who was still at the party. The call went to voicemail, but when the friend calls back ten minutes later at 3.35 am Jack answers but only says ‘hello’ before the call is abruptly cut off.
‘The police told us that phone records show that call lasted 58 seconds but his friend could not hear anything,’ says Catherine.
IS THERE MORE TO BE GLEANED FROM THE CCTV FOOTAGE?
In another piece of CCTV footage, a shadowy figure, identified by Catherine as Jack, is spotted walking up Bennett Way, back towards the Plimsoll Swing Bridge. The time recorded is 3.39am. ‘It was his walk, his gait, and he was walking with purpose,’ she says. Catherine also emphasises that while police have said there was ‘nobody in the area where Jack was seen wandering around’ her own viewing of the CCTV footage – which she received after begging police to watch it – suggests this was not the case.
‘I’ve seen the CCTV, and there are people in the area,’ she says. ‘You wouldn’t be able to recognise them. But they’re people. They’ve got arms and legs, and they’re moving around. Some of it is quite a seedy, unpleasant area. So it is really difficult to know what to think.’
A shadowy figure with Jack’s ‘walk and gait’ is seen crossing the Plimsoll Swing Bridge
It is unknown if Jack interacted with anyone on the bridge, though police have appealed for witnesses
Catherine previously told MailOnline that she uncovered this footage while trawling through CCTV herself. Although police have not confirmed this is Jack, the family say it his ‘walk and gait’
WAS SOMEONE ELSE INVOLVED?
The family refuse to rule out third party involvement in Jack’s disappearance.
‘The police are categorical that they feel it’s impossible for there to be a third party involvement. Well I don’t know how you can be so certain,’ Catherine says. Either way, if this is Jack, then he is only about 100 yards from the bottom of Granby Hill, the area from where his phone sends its final GPS signal at 5:40am. His phone then remained on the network – although not giving off a GPS locator – until 6:44am.
If he has his phone with him, what is he doing in these intervening three hours, given there are no further sightings on CCTV? Was his phone stolen?
WHY WAS THERE A CURIOUS DATA SPIKE ON JACK’S PHONE?
Records show that at around 4.39am, Jack’s phone uses the equivalent data of a nine-minute video, significantly more than would be used by apps on the phone running in the background. If Jack was using his phone, what was he doing with it? Downloading music, or another app?
Or was someone else using Jack’s phone at this point, and if so who? ‘There’s every chance Jack’s not with his phone at this point, and somebody else is using it,’ Catherine acknowledges. ‘But then it again asks the question of could there be someone else involved here?’
She points out the police have not been given full access to Jack’s phone records, but she has been told by them that the phone shows other chunks of data usage until 5.40am – the last time the GPS location finder on the family’s family location sharing app – gives a signal. She points out that police had previously told her they had learned everything they needed to know from CCTV, only for her to find another image through her own search.
‘We’re desperately trying to get hold of the phone data that they [the police] tell us they’ve analysed,’ she told the Mail. ‘And they tell us “we have already told you the findings”. Well we would like to be certain of that, because they did the same with the CCTV.’ The iPhone would not give off a signal if it was in water.
WHY IS JACK’S PHONE TRACED TO A DIFFERENT SET OF HOUSES?
At 5.25am Catherine wakes at the family home and on discovering that Jack’s bed has not been slept in and his light is still on she checks his location on family sharing app ‘Find My Friends’. It shows him in a different location to the party, placing him at a residential address in the Granby Hills area of Hotwells, a few minutes walk away from the party venue.
‘Given that the last time I had looked before going to sleep the phone had accurately placed him at the party venue I had no reason to believe this wasn’t correct,’ she recalled. Catherine sends her son a WhatsApp message asking him where he is, and knows the message was delivered because it is marked with two ticks – although it doesn’t appear to have been read.
When she calls the number over the next hour it rings out before going to voicemail, showing it is on and functioning. Together Catherine and Alan visit the location where Jack’s phone is transmitting from, but find it is not a specific address but a group of houses backing on to an old electricity substation. Too early to knock on doors, they questioned passers-by.
‘We understand that the police did go back to these addresses at a later stage, but we don’t have information about what happened,’ says Catherine. ‘I do know that the police said there was not enough evidence to justify a search warrant.’. The electricity substation is also not searched by police.
While the location finder does not move after 5.40am, the phone remains on the network until 6.44 am, when it ‘dies.’ The phone has never been found. ‘We have gone back repeatedly as a family with our phones to that area and the location finder on our own phones shows the exact same spot. So Jack’s phone was surely there,’ says Catherine.
AND WHAT HAPPENED TO JACK’S AIRTAG?
Jack’s phone has never been recovered and the family’s attempts to access Jack’s Apple AirTag device, a tracker attached to his key fob, which is also still missing, have also proved fruitless. Initially, Jack’s family were told by police that Apple privacy laws would not allow them to pursue any of the data, before being subsequently told they had accessed the data, but it wasn’t providing information because the battery was flat.
‘We said, well it wasn’t flat when he’d left the house, because he demonstrated how it worked to me at 6pm that night,’ recalls Catherine. ‘He showed me how he used it, basically by pretending to hide his keys and then using his phone to contact the AirTag so that he could locate them.
‘I’m certain that it was not out of battery, and then again looking into it with the Apple technical people, they said that even if it was running low it would show on your phone.
‘It would tell you that your AirTag needed replacing so that wasn’t the case. The police then changed the story again and said, “Well actually we don’t think it was set up correctly, it was never registered’’. We were going around on this ridiculous circle of not getting anywhere.’
In the last fortnight, Catherine says the police have told her the AirTag has not been located because it had been registered to the account of Jack’s ex-girlfriend – a statement the ex-girlfriend refutes.
‘We just can’t get a straight answer,’ says Catherine.
- Additional reporting by Simon Trump
Jack O’Sullivan, shadowy strangers, a ‘seedy’ area and a mystery data spike: The clues his mother believes can explain what happened to him after he vanished into thin air six months ago
