I'm one of the people who thinks foul play.
When the story broke, his mother was mainly talking in terms of struggling with remote learning and having had to shield for so long, and I was thinking in terms of suicide too, although obviously I hoped he'd be found alive. But then the detail about Loughton broke, which makes no sense in the context of suicide, particularly since there was no connection - not a favourite place to visit as a child, for instance. I get that it shows up as a popular suicide spot if you google it, but why would he google it? If he were to google, say, 'private suicide site london', it doesn't come up at all. He lives literally next to a major canal with plenty of secluded stretches in walking distance of home. If he'd googled 'grand union canal suicide', he'd have found plenty of hits for that. If he wanted to be sure that his mother wouldn't be the one to find him, he had no need to go to Epping Forest.
But what really made me recalibrate my thinking was the CCTV from the Victoria Tavern. It was the first moving image we'd seen and his body language is confident and purposeful imo. I was still assuming suicide at that point, but the footage made me realise I was thinking on those lines for no better reason than that it was an argument I'd already made. It was around that time that the narrative from home changed to one of online grooming, a new set of friends, a prearranged meeting etc and the narrative from the police became 'you're not in trouble'. I presume this also coincided with the police having done a preliminary investigation of his computer/s,
There have been some compelling posts on this thread about the possibility of an organised crime connection, probably county lines. If this sounds far fetched, well, it's not. Kids and young people are sucked every day of the week into couriering and selling drugs, thinking it will be easy money and then finding they've got no choice but to go places they don't want to go and do things they don't want to do. The bait is money but that quickly becomes threats, abductions and violence. Richard could well have been recruited online during lockdown - many have been. It's been speculated he might have gone out at night before, but this trip to Loughton might have been a step up that he wasn't expecting (hence no coat, no medication, whisked out of London in an Uber, his phone perhaps swapped for a burner phone for the duration). From Loughton, he may well have been transported (perhaps unexpectedly, perhaps unwillingly) out to an Eastern counties area.
@ApparentlyInDenial posted a link to a PDF that shows very clearly how outer London boroughs map onto out-of-London destinations via fairly obvious transport routes.
If any of this is half way true, Richard will have turned out to be a bad recruitment decision. He may have been a 19yo student but he was still living with his mum. He may have been free to wander London at night because of her shifts, but he was loved, and missed in fairly short order. He may have been vulnerable in some senses but mainly because of a medical condition that would have been a practical problem fairly quickly. While he was (hypothetically) out of London for a couple of days, the search for him blew up into a huge media circus that will have totally compromised the line he was being coerced into working for. If he had resurfaced alive, the first thing that would have happened would have been an extremely extensive debrief with the police. As it is, his computers may well have revealed plenty. The area on the northeastern side of Epping Forest where this body has been found is a notorious site for murders and body dumps, many of them gang or organised crime related. It's a short hop from the M25/M11 interchange to the Wake Arms roundabout.
To me, this makes sense. It makes as much sense as suicide, and more sense than travelling for miles to die in a forest you've never been to and your body not being found for two weeks even though it's in a place that's well used by hikers, fishermen and dog walkers. If you think it's far-fetched, do some reading about county lines, which won't be time wasted even if it turns out to have no bearing on what happened to Richard in the end (especially if you have children of your own).
It goes without saying this is pure speculation, hypothetical and JMO etc. Also, to be clear, I see Richard as exploited in this picture, not in any sense a bad actor. But hopefully it goes some way to explaining the thinking of those of us who are favouring foul play over suicide.
Hopefully we'll know more facts soon, or at least eventually.
JMO, MOO
