The Disappearance of Jay Slater review – his parents deserve better than this

The teenager’s family are grieving while having to contend with wild conspiracy theories and trolling. Surely this documentary should have done more to tackle such horrendous online abuse

There is always a line in any documentary about a death, and especially that of a child, that suddenly distils the bereaved’s pain so effectively you can only bow before it and wonder at the strength of the human spirit surviving amid such suffering. In The Disappearance of Jay Slater, it comes from Jay’s father, Warren, as he remembers the brutal hope the family had that their son had been taken by kidnappers, and the online rumours swirling about his torture for a supposed drug debt. “At least if we’d got him back,” says Warren, “I could have mended him.”

Nineteen-year-old Jay Slater went missing on 17 June last year. He was partying until the early hours with his pals at a music festival in Tenerife – the first time he had gone on holiday without his parents – then left a nightclub with two people he had met there and went back to their Airbnb 30 miles from his own digs. After a few hours’ sleep, he started to make his way back. Then he disappeared. His friends couldn’t get hold of him. His family flew from their home in Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire to Tenerife and watched and waited as the search of the mountainous terrain he was thought to have tried to pass through was started by the Guardia Civil. This was expanded via volunteers and eventually concluded on 15 July when human remains were discovered at the bottom of a ravine, close to the last known location of Jay’s phone. DNA fingerprinting confirmed that this was Jay. A preliminary autopsy by the Spanish authorities said he had died as a result of head injuries sustained in a fall from a great height. Back in England, once the body had been repatriated, another autopsy agreed, and noted that toxicology results suggested he had ingested drugs and alcohol not very long before.

The Disappearance of Jay Slater is on Channel 4 now.