The Mysterious Dissaperance of Richey Edwards | 9
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Hi, it's Alan. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode discusses suicide and suicidal ideation, and some people might find it disturbing. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988. Support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you're in immediate danger or need urgent medical support, call 911. It is hard to disappear completely.

With all the surveillance tools out there and the digital smog we leave behind, it's almost impossible to vanish without a trace. Yet it happens. We still haven't found Amelia Earhart, who has been missing since 1937 when she tried to fly around the world. We don't know what became of D.B. Cooper, the hijacker, who in 1971 bailed out of a plane somewhere in the Pacific Northwest with $200,000 in ransom money.

No one has ever found Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa after that last lunch in 1975. And you've probably heard about Maddy McCann, the English child who is still missing since 2007 after disappearing from the bedroom of an apartment at a resort in Portugal. Those are the most notorious cases. But have you heard of these? Edwin and Stefania Andrews left a cocktail party in May 1970. They were last seen turning the wrong way on a one-way street and were never heard from again.

That case is still open. Then we have the case of Peter Winston, a chess prodigy, who went missing after bombing out of a tournament in 1977. His body has never been found. Anyone remember the story of Bison Deli? He was a retired NBA player who went sailing in the South Pacific and was never seen again. Cops think his brother, who was on the boat with him, killed everybody on board and then dumped the bodies at sea and then committed suicide. But we'll never know.

There are mysterious disappearances throughout the history of music, too. One of the most baffling is the case of Richie Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers. One day, he was in a hotel in London getting ready for a trip to North America. And the next, who knows, he was just gone, vanished without a trace. So many questions. What happened? What do we know? With all the CCTV coverage in the UK, is there no record of his movements?

What's been done to find him? Where's the body? Or could he still be alive? Did he just figure out how to disappear completely? Or did something else happen? Well, I got a story for you. This is the mysterious disappearance of Richie Edwards from Uncharted, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. Why don't you just...

There's a taste of the Manic Street Preachers with Stay Beautiful, a song from the band's 1992 debut album, Generation Terrorists. The band featured Richie James Edwards, or Richie Manic, as he liked to be called, and we don't know where he is. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and on this edition of Uncharted, we're going to explore the complete disappearance of a rock star, and I mean gone, vanished, absolutely nowhere to be found. Musicians have gone missing before.

No one has ever heard from big band leader Glenn Miller after his military plane evidently went down somewhere over the English Channel while on a mission during World War II. That was December 1942. The wreckage was never found, but it was wartime and the weather was bad, so anything could have happened.

Connie Converse was a singer on the ascent in the 1950s, making her name with the beatnik crowd in Greenwich Village. When things didn't work out, she moved to Michigan and fell into a deep depression. On her 50th birthday, she wrote a series of farewell letters saying that she was going to search for a new life. She walked away from that home in Michigan and was never seen again. Jim Sullivan was an interesting dude, playing the L.A. club scene in the 1960s.

In 1975, he moved to Nashville to restart his career, but that didn't work out. He was last seen at a ranch near Santa Rosa, New Mexico. His car was found abandoned with all his possessions. There was no sign of Jim. But because his debut album was called UFO, some conspiracy theorists believe that he was abducted by aliens. There's also the story of Christine McKechnie of the Incredible String Band. She moved from Scotland to California, where she fell off the grid.

The last time anybody saw her, she was hitchhiking in Arizona in 1990. And the case of Richie Edwards. This is a fascinating and disturbing story that is yet to be resolved. The man disappeared from the face of the earth on February 1st, 1995 and has not been seen since. But if we look at the years leading up to that day, we can see that all the signs of something going wrong were there. Richie's fate was almost predetermined.

So his disappearance probably should not have been much of a surprise. Like all members of the Manic Street Preachers, Ritchie was from South Wales, a south and bleak coal town called Blackwood, abandoned by industry and leaving nothing but betting shops and pubs. Ritchie would later describe it this way. Unemployment, violence, and defeatism were all around us. Yet he grew up quite happy. It was a well-adjusted family. He had a younger sister named Rachel, and he was very close to her. Ritchie had this to say.

Up to the age of 13, I was ecstatically happy. People treated me very well. My dog was beautiful. I lived with my nan and she was beautiful. School's nothing. You go there, you come back and just play football on the fields. Then I moved from my nan's and started at a comprehensive school and everything started to go wrong.

In high school, he met Nicky Wire, Sean Moore, and James Dean Bradfield, all future members of the Manic Street Preachers. He was into the Smiths and David Bowie. He liked Joy Division, The Clash, The Police, The Boomtown Rats, and Blondie. He went through a goth phase for a while. One of his favorite things to do was read the Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a very curious kid. He kept a dream diary and was devoted to his cocker spaniel named Snoopy.

Upon graduation, Ritchie went to university, where he excelled and ended up with a degree in political history. He stayed close with the future Mannix guys, working as a driver, roadie, promoter, PR flack, record company liaison, photographer, and designer for the band. But he'd always wanted to be a rock star. And not just any rock star. He wanted his existence as a rock star to mean something.

In the spring of 1989, the Manic Street Preachers adopted Ritchie as a fourth member of the band and spokesman. He was referred to as their minister of propaganda. He had zero musical ability. Oh, sure, he had a guitar on stage, but he was mostly just miming with his amp turned down. He was fine with that. His job was to attract attention. In his time with the band, he actually played on maybe two songs through three albums, and

But Ritchie was an excellent lyricist. He became the band's intellectual, their political consultant, their literary expert. Ritchie knew about Karl Marx, Albert Camus, Sylvia Plath, Dostoevsky, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Conrad, and all the beat poets. He rehearsed quips for interviews, often dropping in quotes from philosophers and literary figures. And he knew about the power of notoriety.

It was with Richie that the Mannix came up with their slogan, Culture, Alienation, Boredom, and Despair. Richie began to contribute more and more, working side by side with Nicky Wire, eventually falling into a 50-50 co-writing arrangement when it came to lyrics. He also had vision, helping the Mannix shape their sound and image. Guess we could call him a muse of sorts. When the press needed a quote, they went to Richie. And this man did have a look. The hair, the cheekbones...

Richie had a glamorous look compared to a lot of his peers playing the club circuit. This man had charisma to burn, and audiences loved it. Even though he rarely played a note, there were many who just assumed that he was the leader of the band. The Mannix were different for the early 1990s. They professed to have more in common with Guns N' Roses and Motley Crue than anything from Manchester or early Britpop, saying that real rock and roll came from America.

They bragged about wanting to sell millions of records, something that indie bands of the era just didn't do. And when a major label came calling, they happily signed a deal. And the result was a new type of, I guess, punk rock. Richie, however, had his demons. He was an introvert in an extrovert's business. He wanted fame, but was also tremendously introspective.

Alcoholism became a problem. So did anorexia, which appeared to be related to a need to exhibit self-control, perhaps as an alternative to his need to self-harm. He began cutting himself at university. When he wrote his final exams, he weighed just 84 pounds, alarmingly skinny for someone who is just 5'8".

Interestingly, one of Richie's heroes as a kid was Bobby Sands, the IRA member who killed himself in prison by going on a hunger strike. He died 65 days in at the age of 27. But depression was Richie's biggest issue, and he had no trouble talking about it or his repeated self-harm. He was prescribed Prozac. He started cutting himself in high school, something that began around the same time his grandmother died. Stubbing out cigarettes under his arms became a habit.

He also had a t-shirt that read "Kill Yourself". "When I cut myself," he said, "I feel so much better. All the little things that might have been annoying me suddenly seem so trivial because I'm concentrating on the pain. I'm not a person who can scream and shout, so this is my only outlet. It's all done very logically." Cutting himself wasn't always done in private either. On May 15, 1991, the man explained a show at the Norwich Art Center. The NME had dispatched a reviewer, in this case Steve Lemack.

This was an interesting choice by the paper because there had been some friction between the Mannix and Lemak. He'd been an early supporter of the group, but things kind of went south after he gave one of their early gigs a poor review, saying that "I just don't think a lot of people think you're for real." After the gig in Norwich, Lemak conducted an interview with the band. Lemak probed the members.

Are you serious about what you're doing? Do you think you can make a difference with the way you're doing things? Are you the real deal? When the main interview was over, Richie asked for a word with Steve. While stating his position and that of the band, Richie pulled out a razor blade. I mean, who carries a razor blade with them? And he carved the words for real into his forearm. Blood gushed everywhere, but Richie insisted on talking.

Here's a quote from LeMac's biography. In the end, the conversation was going around in circles, and Richie's arm was beginning to look uncomfortably gory. The blood from the first cut had started to trickle down his arm the moment he'd finished it. Until I saw the photos the next day, I didn't know what he'd written because it was obscured by the blood. We'd better do something about that. You're going to mess the carpet up, I said. It took 17 stitches to repair Richie's arm. A photographer from the NME was there, and he said,

and he captured all the gore. Back at the paper's offices, there was a big argument as to whether they should publish that photograph. That discussion was recorded and later released on the B-side of a manic single. It was called Sleeping with the Enemy. Let me give you an excerpt.

Oh there we are Thursday morning just walked into the NME immediately big buzz guy around Andrew Coddins sitting here saying oh something's happened and what is it? The thing that's happened right is that last night Steve Lemac went up where did you go? Norwich. He went to Norwich to do a planned live review stroke feature on the Manic Street Preachers right?

It certainly wasn't what I was expecting was going to happen. And anyway, Steve's a bit suspicious of them, so it was going to be this sort of, not a backlash, but he was going to suggest that maybe they're not all they're cracked up to be. And anyway, went up there, saw the gig. You won't get much coherent sense out of me on my front. And, um...

You know what they're like, these young punks, basically. It's a return of punk. And a lot of people are very suspicious of them, think they're all sort of just faking it in slogans and trying to get rich and famous. And they're not really being serious. So Steve did half an hour of chat with... Which one was it?

Richie? Yeah. Richie. You know, we were supposed to sort of hate each other and everything. I was a bit nervous, I suppose. And after this half-hour of chat, after which they agreed to disagree, you know, Steve says, I'm not convinced by you, but, you know, fair enough. We'll leave it at that. He said... Do you want to tell him? No. No, I'll tell him. Richie said, you know, you've got a minute, come back, come back stage. Just one thing, one last thing I'd like to say. And so we went back stage and...

you know, I said, you know, I just don't think a lot of people think you're for real and he got, I don't know where he got it from, he got a razor blade and wrote for real on his arm, down the side of his arm while I was standing there watching him and that's about it really.

This is quite interesting already. This is good. This is a good story. We actually said at the time, believe me, we are for real and we're not the next Birdland. And we sort of carried on talking for about another three or four minutes. But by that time, he was dripping blood all over the floor. He was beginning to stain the carpet a bit. And Millie and everybody will have a reaction to this story. He said, unfortunately, Ed says, didn't get any pictures of him. I had to wind it up.

went out and found the manager, told him to get back, started his pretty day and quit. So we're thinking, never mind, tell the story, Steve. So the page that he was going to go on will be taken up with the story. Then Ed Serres arrives with colour pictures of this awful event. So Rodi's rushed round and lashed some bandages around him and I whipped the camera and he took the bandages off for me very quickly so that it could happen. So he actually said, oh, I'm going to take the...

Oh, yeah, I didn't have to suggest it. Close-up, nasty, gory pictures of this blood. And it's an appalling picture and everybody's running around, getting upset and appalled and excited. He actually said, "Do you want a photograph of this?" "Oh, yeah, I'd better take the bandages off." And it had just been put on, so it was mint. So you've got a mint wound. Oh, yes. And, er... Question is, can we print this picture?

Because it is really horrible. I find it extremely horrible. He's upset, people down there are upset, grown people are upset by this picture. It is an horrible picture. Danny, as I say, Danny's in a meeting he hasn't seen yet. He's going to be jumping around, you know. It's a bit of news, even if you could say it's trivial. Like I say, within our little world, it is not trivial. It's quite a thing. How do you feel about all this? I don't really think I've quite got over the shock of it, really.

Do you in any way regard it that you may be responsible for that in any way because he did it for you? No, not really He chose he chose to do it. He chose to make his point in that way. I don't think No, I don't I don't find it kind of feel guilty about the fact that he's done it So now

It's been one hell of a week now. Richie was reportedly pleased with the coverage, although he was disappointed that it wasn't enough to get the band on the cover of The Enemy. After the for-real incident, things began to spiral quickly. Richie was back to having an eating disorder, something that inspired the song Four Stone Seven Pounds on the band's Holy Bible album. The for-real self-mutilation incident did not help with the Manix reputation either.

Weirdly, though, this is when record labels really started paying attention. Six days after he carved himself up in Norwich, Columbia Records signed the band and allowed them to create an 18-track, 73-minute album entitled Generation Terrorists. It was released on February 10, 1992. And Richie didn't play a single note on the record. But that was okay, because he had other roles to perform. Let's see him on the front cover. That's how you need

Even as the Mannix career started to take off, things were not good for Richie. He had always suffered from insomnia and used alcohol to get to sleep. That resulted in a trip to rehab. He spent time in two different facilities. When he was discharged, he seemed distant, isolated, even from his bandmates. A close friend of the band then died of lung cancer. Interviews grew darker.

In one, he spoke of feeling unloved and doomed to a life of loneliness. Here's a quote. I've never had any long relationships. Longest, when I was young, was about four days. Since the band started, I've only really been involved with one girl. I can speak to her more naturally than to anyone else. It means something. But I've never told her I love her. I've known her for years, but only kissed her once. Twice. That's all. How can I explain? When I love somebody, I feel...

Sort of trapped. Still, Richie and the band moved forward. A second album entitled Gold Against the Soul came out in the summer of 1993. The artwork for that one was based on a painting by Yukio Mishima, the leader of a radical Japanese political group. On November 25, 1970, Yukio ordered his followers to ritually behead him, which they did. The album itself features themes of loneliness and despair.

Gold Against the Soul was followed by a third record called The Holy Bible in August 1994, which covered topics like the death penalty, prostitution, political revolution, and suicide. By this time, Ritchie was even in rougher shape. Hints about his depression, drug use, alcoholism, more self-harm, and his anorexia can be found all through that album. People around him and the band were quite frightened for his well-being.

Like I said earlier, there's a song on the album entitled Four Stone Seven Pounds. That's the equivalent of 63 pounds or 29 kilos, the weight below which death is considered to be medically unavoidable for someone suffering from anorexia. Richie was the lyricist for that one. Later, when the band went on tour, the cutting continued.

Bandmate Nicky Wire tried to intervene, checking Richie every day for signs of cutting. And Richie was fine, until the band reached Amsterdam, when Nicky saw that Richie had slashed his chest. He also slipped off to a store to buy a meat cleaver, and the suspicion was that he wanted to chop off a few fingers so he didn't have to go on stage.

When the Mannix played Bangkok on April 23, 1994, a fan sent some miniature ceremonial swords backstage with a note asking Ritchie to slash himself on stage, which he did. The self-inflicted wounds across his chest were there for everybody to see. And when asked why, Ritchie replied, the fan asked me to. I didn't want to let him down.

The trip to Thailand also seemed to mark the beginning of a rift with the rest of the band. Flying to and from Bangkok, Richie insisted on sitting at the back of the plane by himself. He was growing increasingly paranoid. He began to identify with the character of Pink, the burned-out rock star subject of Pink Floyd's The Wall, and then a close friend from his university days. One of the few true friends he had hanged himself.

Richie's mental and physical condition continued to slip. He isolated himself more and more from everyone around him. He was having a mental collapse. This culminated with an apparent suicide attempt on July 18, 1994. He phoned his parents, who raced over to his apartment to find him lying in the bathtub with blood seeping out of his arms. He was stoned and he was drunk. They got Richie to the hospital on time.

After his wounds were treated, a psychiatrist was called in to consult. The family was told he was suffering from severe depression. They convinced him to voluntarily check himself into a psychiatric hospital. They did. On July 19, 1994, Richie was admitted in a general ward with 25 other beds with little privacy. Doctors were alarmed at the self-harm injuries. Richie admitted he no longer had any control. He offered to leave the bed but then changed his mind.

On July 28, 1994, he was moved to Priory Hospital, a renowned rehab facility in London popular with the celebrity set. Ritchie was deemed one of the more complex cases and was prescribed a six-week stay. He was enrolled in a 12-step program. He was put on the maximum allowable dose of Prozac. He was given a strict schedule that ran from 8.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night and involved everything from private counseling to yoga to flower arranging.

Meanwhile, the band continued to play gigs throughout the summer of 1994, largely to help with Ritchie's mounting medical bills. When asked about Ritchie's whereabouts, James Dean Bradfield told a reporter that "Nicky went bonkers. Something just flipped in his head. It was dramatic." Two weeks into his stay at the Priory, Ritchie was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a newly named condition at the time. It summed up so many of Ritchie's problems.

Issues with personal identity, difficulty with friendships, career choices, sexuality, and other things central to a person's being. It can result in that person detaching from reality, slipping into disassociative states. Richie seemed unimpressed with the diagnosis, calling it "lazy."

Another diagnosis that came later was Asperger's, which we now know as a form of autism, which would explain a few things, including Richie's laser focus and his insistence on strict routines. His weight dropped further, and he kept cutting himself, saying that the only way out of his emotional pain was to distract himself with physical pain.

And this is interesting. Ritchie would often talk to visitors of an old 1970s TV show called The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. Reginald Perrin was a successful executive who faked his own death during a midlife crisis. Ritchie also became obsessed with Apocalypse Now, especially how Marlon Brando disappeared after the picture wrapped, moving to an island in the South Pacific for the next 10 years.

Richie was discharged from the Priory on September 8, 1994. Two weeks later, he was back on the road with the Mannix. He was better, but still very emotionally fragile, veering from hopefulness to hopelessness. He was smoking 65 cigarettes a day and powering himself with 30 cups of coffee to counteract the half-bottle of vodka he habitually drank. On December 2, 1994, after a show in Hamburg,

Richie was found outside the band's hotel in his pajamas, bashing his head against a brick wall until he was bloodied. He was moaning, "I want to go home. I want to go home." The tension within the band was intense, and it was decided to end the European part of the tour. Richie's last appearance with the Mannix was three weeks later at a gig at the Astoria in London, December 21, 1994. That was at the end of a three-night stand that included him smashing up his guitar at the end of the set

and then beating himself above the head with what was left. He made it through the holiday season, but then abandoned writing his diary on January 17, 1995, three days after Snoopy, his beloved Cocker Spaniel, died at the age of 17. Richie was inconsolable, and with the band tensions and a relationship breakdown, he must have felt that the universe was crashing down around him. By the end of January, Richie was teetering on the edge of something really, really bad.

He also seemed to be up to something. He paid four trips to a bank machine in Cardiff on January 20, 21, 23, and 25, withdrawing exactly £200 each time. Some of that money was spent on breakfast, comic books, books, and movies on VHS. He bought flowers for his mom and visited her one last time. There were two days' rehearsal with the band, and then he and James were to leave for a promo tour of America.

Richie seemed excited about the idea and the 36-day tour that was scheduled to start in Tucson, Arizona on February 22. At the end of a rehearsal on January 31, Richie gave everyone in the band small presents, perhaps as a way of saying sorry for all the trouble he'd caused. James and Richie then checked into the Embassy Hotel in the Bayswater area of London.

They drove there in a three-month-old Vauxhall Cavalier, which the group had bought as a band car, but as a vehicle that only Richie seemed to drive. They pulled into the underground car park of the hotel and listened to a few demos. From there, they went up to their rooms. Richie's room was number 516. Both agreed to meet up a little later to go out to eat, but when James knocked on Richie's door half an hour later, he found him taking a bath. He said he'd changed his mind and was going to spend a quiet night alone.

That was about 8:30 p.m., January 31, 1995. James Dean Bradfield may have been the last person to see Ritchie alive. This brings us to February 1, 1995. What happened? Well, we'll explore that next. Although Ritchie Edwards claimed to some people that he was really looking forward to the North American promo tour with James Dean Bradfield, the truth was that he was dreading the trip.

After he and James parted at the Embassy Hotel on the evening of January 31st, 1995, Ritchie spoke to his parents on the phone, and there was nothing unusual about the conversation. It then appears a guest dropped by his room, a mysterious woman named Vivian. She may have been a former fan-turned-friend. This is according to Ritchie's sister, Rachel, who has doggedly been trying to piece together the last hours of her brother. In any subsequent investigations into Ritchie's appearance,

No one has been able to track this Vivian woman down. Did she stay and leave? Or did she and Richie leave the hotel together? And what's this rumor that Richie asked her to take his passport because he wasn't going to need it anymore? Well, that thought for a second, because we'll come back to it. On the morning of Wednesday, February 1st, 1995, James Dean Bradfield got up as usual and went down to the lobby to wait for his bandmates sometime after 9 a.m. When Richie failed to show up,

unusual given that Richie was almost always punctual, James went up to room 516 and knocked on the door. No answer. Fearing something that was wrong, he went back to the front desk and convinced a member of the staff to unlock the door with a master key. When they got inside, no sign of Richie. There was a packed suitcase. The bathtub was full of water. There was a gift box, carefully wrapped and decorated with literary quotes and a collage of pictures.

It was addressed to a former girlfriend, containing videos, books by Tennessee Williams and Friedrich Nietzsche, among other things. There was a selection of photographs and a note that said, I love you. Some close to him suggest that the existence of this present meant that he had been planning to disappear for some time. There was another book involved. The previous day, January 31st, 1995,

He gave a friend named Emma Forwar the English translation of a book called Novel with Cocaine. It was written in 1934 by Mark Levy and published under the pseudonym M. Agiev. The book tells the story of an alienated and insecure young man named Vadim Malesenikov. Levy submitted the manuscript to his publisher, gave his passport to a friend, and then disappeared forever. No one ever saw him again.

That friend was told to focus on the introduction of the book, which told of Levy's time in a mental asylum before he vanished. After 24 hours of waiting for Ritchie to turn up, Martin Hall, the band's manager, filed a missing persons report. Members of the Mannix PR firm started calling everyone in Ritchie's address book, but no one had heard anything from him. Meanwhile, James left for the U.S. on his own.

Bandmate Nicky Wire started calling various hotels, hoping that maybe Richie was hiding out somewhere. Richie's father put an ad in the local paper that read, Please make contact, Richard. The story was picked up by the Daily Mail and amplified across the country. About 30 newspapers and magazines jumped on the story. But nothing. Another appeal was made on local radio and on the BBC. Again, nothing.

On February 15th, two weeks after Ritchie vanished, Cardiff police issued a statement looking for information on his whereabouts. Hotel staff reported that he had left the building at 7 a.m. on February 1st, driving away in the band's silver Vauxhall Cavalier. A toll receipt for crossing the Severn River Bridge was found in his flat in Cardiff. It was time-stamped at 2.55 a.m.

That receipt would have had to have been requested and handed out by someone working in the booth at the toll bridge, which didn't make sense. If Ritchie left the embassy at 7 a.m., as hotel staff claimed, to have a receipt time-stamped at 2.55 a.m., he would have had to leave the hotel between midnight and 1 a.m.

In addition to the toll receipt, his passport, his bank card, some spare change, a bottle of Prozac, and a few other things were recovered at his flat in Cardiff. It appeared that someone, presumably Richie, had visited the apartment after he left the hotel in London. The question is, exactly when? This may mean seven hours of Richie's whereabouts from midnight to 7 a.m. on February 1st have never been accounted for.

But then, a break. On February 17th, the car, the silver Vauxhall, was recovered. It was found parked and locked, with a lock over the steering wheel, at a service station on the M48 highway on the English side of a bridge that led over the Severn River into Wales. It had been parked there for at least three days and had received a parking ticket. There were signs that someone had been perhaps sleeping in the car.

Inside were pictures of Richie's family that dated back to the previous Christmas, some of Richie's medication, and a Sex Pistols cassette in the tape deck. The car's battery was dead. An empty wine bottle was found, which was odd given that Richie hadn't had a drop to drink since leaving rehab the previous year. And there was no receipt among all the rubbish in the car showing that anyone had bought that bottle of wine. Strangely, the state and the contents of the car were never investigated by police.

The cops did investigate his bank statement for clues. They found those previous 200-pound withdrawals from a bank machine and two subsequent withdrawals. The total amount from the last two weeks was 2,800 pounds. So why was Ritchie stockpiling cash? They saw some purchases, but nothing out of the ordinary. So that was more or less another dead end. On February 25th, a little more than three weeks after Ritchie failed to show up in the lobby for the trip to America,

Police searched the home and back garden of his mother and father. It was a surprise visit at three o'clock in the morning, which was strange. And of course, they found nothing. Meanwhile, tips from the public were pouring in from people who claimed to have seen Richie. There was a report of a fan with Richie outside the bus station in Newport, Wales. After a quick conversation, Richie got into what looked like a silver box hall and drove off.

Another report came from a Newport taxi driver who says that he picked up someone who might have been Ritchie at the King's Hotel in Newport on February the 7th. Ritchie asked to be taken to several places before he was dropped off at the same service station where the Vauxhall was later found. There was another report that someone may have seen Ritchie hitchhiking. That sighting was investigated, but was dismissed as a case of mistaken identity. And then on March 4th,

A tip faxed to the offices of the NME said that Ritchie was staying in an apartment in Irving, Scotland, which is southwest of Glasgow. A tattoo artist in Cardiff claimed that Ritchie had gone to Israel to live in a kibbutz. Heading off to the Holy Land was something that Ritchie had talked about quite a lot. Sinead O'Connor got involved, telling police that she believed that Ritchie had gone to visit a schizophrenic fan in Hereford, which is south of Birmingham.

A German fan claimed to have received a postcard from Ritchie. She says it was mailed from London on February 3rd, but she refused to give it to the police for examination. The NME received a theory in the form of a three-page letter from an Oxford student who ardently believed that Ritchie had left for Germany to mark the 50th anniversary of the Holocaust, something that he'd studied in university. A few days after that, a 16-year-old girl claimed to have seen Ritchie on a street in Yorkshire.

Even though they officially brought the search to an end in May 1995, standard procedure, police thought that they might have cracked the case on July 21st when the body of a man with a lot of tattoos washed up at Beachy Head, which is on the English Channel in the south of England. That body was ultimately identified, but it was definitely not Ritchie. After that, the trail just kept getting colder. Oh, there were some other sightings among the many hoaxes.

For example, in late 1996, there was a report of someone looking a lot like Richie hanging out with some hippie traveler types in Goa, India. Getting there without his passport would have been difficult. In November 1998, a waitress working in a bar in the Canary Islands says she was on duty when a customer shouted to another, "You're Richie from the Manic Street Preachers!" The person being shouted at immediately ran for the door. About a month later, Richie's family received a letter from a woman on another of the Canaries

describing a man playing a guitar on the street who really could have been Ritchie. Four years later, in 2004, there was another Ritchie setting on that same island. Nothing came of that either. So we come back to our original question. What happened to Ritchie Edwards? Some theories in a moment. Where is Ritchie Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers? How could he disappear completely and leave no trace of what happened to him?

The most common theory is suicide, which makes sense given he'd tried to take his own life once before and his continuing mental health struggles. This theory says that he parked his car at the Severn Bridge and jumped into the Severn River, drowned, and his body swept away by the powerful outflow and tides, the heaviest in the UK, out to sea, never to be found again. We also have to consider Ritchie's sense of self.

For years, he had been striving to build this image of a mythical figure. Disappearing in such a dramatic, mysterious, and literary way certainly would have played into that. He did leave enough clues to make everybody think that his disappearance was carefully staged and thought out. Remember the book Romance with Cocaine that he left behind, written by an author who vanished. The Nietzsche book contained Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is about a prophet who quits life and goes to live in the wilderness.

Speaking of Ritchie's voracious reading, one of the things he loved to do was memorize famous suicide notes left by people such as Vincent Van Gogh, writer Virginia Woolf, comedian Tony Hancock, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, and writer Sylvia Plath. One of the photographs left behind in that gift box on the bed was a shot of the house where Plath committed suicide on February 11th, 1963.

It's possible that Ritchie knew of Weldon Keyes, a suicidal American poet who was getting ready for an overseas trip that he dreaded. On July 18th, 1955, his car was found abandoned at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Weldon Keyes was never seen again. People have dug through all the lyrics Ritchie wrote for the preachers, pointing to themes that provide clues that he took his own life. Oh, the Severn Bridge where the band's car was found?

That's the longest bridge in the UK, and it is a well-known suicide spot. Many people have jumped to their deaths from its span. And remember that 12-inch single I mentioned with the NME discussion on the B side? You know, the one where the staff is talking about whether or not they should publish the Richie Edwards for real photo? The A side of that record was the Mannix cover of the theme for MASH, which, by the way, is

has a proper title: "Suicide is Painless." Richie's fans, friends, and bandmates held out hope for years that he might turn up. He never did, of course. He was declared dead by his family on November 24, 2008. The age of his death was listed as, you guessed it, 27. But that hasn't stopped his sister, Rachel, from looking for answers.

Why did the police not interview James Dean Bradfield about Ritchie's state of mind in the hours after his disappearance? Why was there no follow-up to the mysterious woman named Vivian who apparently visited Ritchie in his London hotel room? When the car was found by the Severan Bridge, why wasn't the Coast Guard immediately dispatched to search for a body? The incoming tides of the Severan are much stronger than those flowing out. So, was an opportunity missed to find Ritchie's body? There was another strange gap.

When Ritchie was reported missing, there was a note saying that he had a history of psychiatric problems. That should have been put in a UK-wide police system and would have amped up the search. Yet for some reason, that nationwide police alert wasn't shared until April 1996, 14 months after Ritchie disappeared. Let's talk about closed-circuit TV security cameras. They're all over the UK, including at strategic points on and around the Severn Bridge.

No one thought to check them for signs of Ritchie after February 1st, 1995. A media investigation did manage to somehow acquire surveillance tapes that did show someone in the area, but the cameras were covered in rain, so nothing conclusive. However, in 2011, Rachel Edwards received a note on social media from a man who claimed to have seen Ritchie walking on the bridge on February 1st.

He was so concerned about the way the man looked that he reported the encounter to the night security guard on the English side of the bridge. Nothing ever came of that tip. Why? Ritchie left his passport behind. Two witnesses claimed to have seen him in Newport Wells, literally around the corner from the local passport office.

Did anyone follow up with anyone at the office? No. And at the time, it would have been relatively easy for Richie to get a temporary one-year passport with a minimum of documentation. Okay, so what about a DNA sample? No one asked for one. It wasn't until Rachel Edwards took it upon herself to give a sample to the cops in 2005, 10 years after Richie went missing. That's when his DNA was entered into a database.

There's the possibility, however remote, that Ritchie somehow ended up the victim of foul play. Maybe he was mugged and then murdered. We can only speculate about that. Or perhaps he suffered some sort of accident. Or maybe he is still alive, having escaped somehow to somewhere. Rachel Edwards went on to become an advocate for the families of missing persons. Graham Edwards, Ritchie and Rachel's father, died of cancer in 2012, never knowing what became of his son.

Meanwhile, the Manic Street Preachers have soldiered on, selling millions of records, and they also have used some of the lyrics Richie left behind. I wish there was some kind of resolution to this story, but there just isn't. We will never know what happened to Richie Edwards, unless he turns up one day. You can catch all episodes of Uncharted by downloading them from your favorite podcast platform. Please rate and review if you get a chance.

If you have any questions or comments, shoot me an email, alan at alancross.ca. We can also meet up on all the social media sites, along with my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com. It's updated with music news and recommendations every day. And don't forget about my other podcast, The Ongoing History of New Music. There are hundreds and hundreds of those that you can listen to whenever you'd like. Join me for more stories of crime and mayhem from the world of music on Uncharted. Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross.