MISSING without a trace

A shocking 75,000 children are reported missing every year in the UK. Thankfully, most turn up alive but what of the others? KAREN ROCKETT investigates.

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IT'S HARD to imagine a more desperate situation than a child vanishing without a trace. First comes shock, then disbelief, then the tortuous retracing of steps in the hope of finding any clue to locate the absent youngster. And with 75,000 children reported missing every year in the UK, the mystery of what becomes of the young faces portrayed in posters and news reports is an enduring one.

Thankfully, eight in 10 of these youngsters are found within a couple of days.

But more than 1,700 remain missing a year on, and some never turn up at all.

Nearly 30 years after Surrey schoolgirl Ruth Wilson disappeared at a local beauty spot, her best friend Catherine Mair has revealed how the 16-year-old's unravelling of a haunting family secret might be linked with her vanishing.

Speaking last week, Mair, now 46 and a mother and carer, said that Wilson was disturbed after learning her mother had died by suicide instead of falling down the stairs as her father had told her.

"Obviously it's crazy to find out that something you've been told your entire life isn't true, whatever the reasons," said Mair.

"Understandably it left a lot of questions for her why her mother, with two young babies, would take her life just weeks before Christmas.

"Ruth was distressed and confused and started asking some dark questions.

"She became fixated on getting to the heart of exactly what had happened."

Wilson, who would have turned 46 at the end of last month, repeatedly told her friend she wanted "to escape" from her home.

On November 27, 1995, she took a taxi to Box Hill, part of the North Downs.

She was never seen again, despite a huge police search.

Just as baffling is the case of Hayden Manis, nine, in Muncie, Indiana, whose grandfather has launched an urgent appeal to find him after discovering he had been missing for five years.

Gary Manis last saw Hayden, then aged four, in 2019 at a Christmas gathering.