The Body Detectives (Channel 4, Tuesday, 9pm) combines two popular genres. The first is the Davina McCall, Long Lost Families school of midweek weepie, where people are introduced to relatives they never knew they had. The second is the beloved British milieu that involves pottering around searching for interesting fragments from the distant past – as popularised by the like of Time Team, Digging For Britain and Royal Autopsy.
Blend the two, add a sombre voiceover, and you have The Body Detectives – which revisits cold cases involving the death or disappearance of people whose remains have never been recovered.
The dewy-eyed Davina in this scenario is former detective Dave Grimstead from Locate International – an organisation “dedicated to revisiting forgotten cases and giving a name and a story to each unidentified person”. In a fascinating first of three episodes, he’s heading to the coast of Norfolk in the east of England, where 26-year-old George Johnston went missing on holiday in 1984.
Johnston had swum out to help a family in distress, only to be pulled under by a riptide. His daughter, Lucy, was two at the time, and grew up never knowing her father. “It did tear the family part,” she says. “As a child, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know my dad. Not knowing who he was – that was the hardest thing as a kid.”
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In Norfolk, Grimstead meets Lucy and her uncle Barry (George’s brother-in-law). Barry was there the day Johnston vanished and is haunted by the memory. “George was swimming back. The wave went over him. He went under. That was the last we saw of him,” he says. Sighing, he says, “There’s nothing good about the sea. It’s a cruel place.”
Grimstead gets to work with the help of missing persons expert Emma Tilley. Scanning databases of unidentified bodies from 1984, they get a potential hit across the Channel in France, where the remains of a man washed ashore at Ambleteuse in Pas-de-Calais.
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The body is exhumed, and we discover the individual died and was buried in his swimming trunks – blue with three white stripes. Removing a body from a grave is not done lightly, says Grimstead – but if it can bring closure to Lucy and her family, it is a step worth taking. “That’s a really big deal,” he says. “That is someone’s final resting place. Imagine being disturbed without good reason.”
Sadly, a DNA test reveals the man found in the lonely dunes at Ambleteuse is not George. The search must go on – a downbeat twist that underscores the challenges posed by investigations of this nature.
But while there is no happy outcome for Grimstead and his crew, the work continues. “These cases are cold for a reason,” says Emma Tilley. “They are difficult cases to solve. The focus is on ensuring no stone has been left unturned.” All stones are turned, and still no trace of George Johnston is uncovered. It is, as Barry says, proof of the cruelty and implacability of the sea – and a stark reminder of the open wounds left when a loved one disappears without a trace.
