Owen wanted to spend the lockdown with Meg, and had joked with her and his friends that he might make the journey north. But his mum was adamant that this was not going to happen.
“It was like this ongoing discussion all week. That was really, really tricky between us,” she says.
On Thursday 26 March, the argument flared again, and as the evening sun illuminated the South Downs, Owen left the house without saying a word to his mother. CCTV pictures show the teenager walking south, down Bannings Vale in Saltdean, towards the cliff top at 18:13.
The distance to the cliffs is less than half a mile. The eastern edge of Saltdean sits next to Telscombe Tye, a scrubby expanse of grass popular with walkers that marks the meeting of Brighton’s eastern suburbs and the South Downs. There are only a few hundred yards of grass beyond the coast road before the Tye stops at the Sussex chalk.
He made a phone call to Meg after he left the house. “He said that he’d just had a big argument with his mum,” she says. “And I was upset as well because I had just had an argument with my mum about the same thing. And then we just sort of cheered up and and he said he was just going to watch the sunset.”
It was the last time anyone has reported having spoken to Owen.
Cell site records show that Owen’s phone was connected to the mast at the top of Longridge Avenue, which runs from the downland behind Saltdean to the coast road and the cliff top. At 18:23 it was disconnected.
Meg made a further call to her boyfriend at 18:32, but it went straight to voicemail. Unaware of this, Stella was not concerned. “We live by the sea, we live next to the Downs. We go walking a lot. He just went out, off he went and I just thought: ‘Well, good, go and get your allocated daily exercise.
