WarmingUpColdCases
Certified overthinker
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Here's a good summary of the times and places he was last caught on CCTV.
UK UK - Jack O'Sullivan, 22, left friends after night out, last seen Brunel Lock Road/Brunel Way, Bristol at 3.15am, 2 Mar 2024
- Thread starter MsMiniSleuth
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It is my opinion that his "friends" who were at the party that night know more than they are saying.
I agree and probably why the police haven't moved on this
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08 Jun 2025
www.bristolpost.co.uk
"The family of Jack O'Sullivan continue their tireless search to find him after he vanished in Bristol.
Over 15 months after Jack, who would now be 24, went missing, his family continue to appeal for information that can help them find him.''
'Jack's family are offering a £20,000 reward for any key information which leads to finding and bringing him home safely.
Posting to the Find Jack Facebook page, Jack's mum, Catherine said: "I would just like to say how much my family and I appreciate all the support that has come from sharing our information and supporting our search for Jack.''
''Though Jack's phone disconnected, police believe it did not leave the Hotwells and Cumberland Basin area, and it remained active until 6.44am.''
Apr 4, 2024
These are the last known moments of a 23-year-old man who disappeared after a night out with friends in Bristol.Jack O’Sullivan was last seen at around 3.15am on 2 March in the area of Brunel Lock Road/Brunel Way of Bristol.Police have described his disappearance as “very out of character”.Mr O’Sullivan is described as white, around 5ft 10ins tall, of slim build, with short, brown hair.He was wearing a quilted green/brown Barbour jacket, a beige woollen jumper, navy chinos and brown leather trainers with white soles
Missing Jack's family's 15 months of 'unimaginable hell'
He was last seen in Bristol in March, 2024
"The family of Jack O'Sullivan continue their tireless search to find him after he vanished in Bristol.
Over 15 months after Jack, who would now be 24, went missing, his family continue to appeal for information that can help them find him.''
'Jack's family are offering a £20,000 reward for any key information which leads to finding and bringing him home safely.
Posting to the Find Jack Facebook page, Jack's mum, Catherine said: "I would just like to say how much my family and I appreciate all the support that has come from sharing our information and supporting our search for Jack.''
''Though Jack's phone disconnected, police believe it did not leave the Hotwells and Cumberland Basin area, and it remained active until 6.44am.''
These are the last known moments of a 23-year-old man who disappeared after a night out with friends in Bristol.Jack O’Sullivan was last seen at around 3.15am on 2 March in the area of Brunel Lock Road/Brunel Way of Bristol.Police have described his disappearance as “very out of character”.Mr O’Sullivan is described as white, around 5ft 10ins tall, of slim build, with short, brown hair.He was wearing a quilted green/brown Barbour jacket, a beige woollen jumper, navy chinos and brown leather trainers with white soles
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Mother of Jack O’Sullivan reveals last message she received from missing son
Bristol student was last seen four months ago after leaving a house party
www.independent.co.uk
D
Deleted member 339775
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I was hoping they’d of found him by now but I’m sending good thoughts and kind wishes (as always) to jacks family and I hope this nightmare is over for them soon
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Thing is though Jack had left the party and the subsequent CCTV pictures shown above seems to show Jack walking alone. I don't know Bristol at all, but for those who do, do any of those areas have any kind of problem? Would you walk there at that time of the morning?
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Earlier in this discussion, I posted details of crimes committed in that part of Bristol, including around the various river branches and wharves, which showed that violent crime was very rare in the area, and that it was much safer than posters expected. The chance of Jack being assaulted and thrown in the river was very small indeed.
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Hmm it's not impossible though. Is it?
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Nothing is impossible - except (possibly) the White House being flattened by herds of marauding dinosaurs. However, you might find it worthwhile looking at the information about crime in that part of Bristol that I mentioned earlier, which is contained in post #245.
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As a woman, I wouldn't be any more concerned about walking in that area at night than anywhere else. It's not rough.
My money is on Jack tripping or losing his balance, and falling into the water; tragic but not criminal.
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That has always puzzled me, as it looks a circuitous route and backtracking on himself. Was it because he was drunk? Lost his bearings? Trying to find a taxi?
I think he was out of it....his stride seems really big in them pictures like he's drunk or drugged
SteveH
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Another Bristolian here. Although I haven't been down to the Hotwells/Cumberland Basin area in a few years I used to know it very well. I worked at the Council's B Bond building on Cumberland Basin for a while in the mid '90s and long before that my uncle and aunt lived in Hotwells In fact the house they lived in was subject to a compulsory purchase order in 1961 when the new bridge/road system was built, and would have been in almost the precise spot where Jack was last seen on CCTV on Bennett Way. I was very young at the time and have only vague memories of the street, which has completely disappeared (Brunswick Place)!
The area isn't really a crime hotspot, but wouldn't be a pleasant place to walk around on a cold March night when it was snowing. It's a liminal space, not far from the city centre but on the edge of the built up area as there is little development west of the River Avon. It is what you might call an "edgelands" area.
As Robert Macfarlane writes in the Guardian:
"The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies."
The road system also makes it a rather Ballardian space - think of Concrete Island, in which after a car crash an architect finds himself stranded in a large area of derelict land created by several intersecting motorways.
Whilst working at B Bond I used to cross the New Cut of the River Avon on the old two level bridge, the top level of which used to contain a road which had long been demolished by then. This road was the only way to get across the river before the Plimsoll Swing Bridge was opened in 1965, and the lower level which used to carry a railway is now used as a metrobus route (Ashton Avenue Bridge).
Photo of the old two level swing bridge: https://bristolcitydocks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ashton-avenue-swing-bridge1.jpg
The New Cut - which was dug in the early 19th century to divert the Avon away from the Floating Harbour, which had been the old route of the river, but subsequently became a large dock for which the Cumberland Basin was an entrance dock where ships might have to wait to enter the main harbour - is a tidal part of the Avon.
I was crossing the New Cut one day when a body emerged from under the bridge and sped downstream only to move towards the south bank of the river twenty or thirty yards further on, where a few police officers were already gathered with some gear to drag it onto the grass. I found out a couple of days later that some poor bloke had jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge the night before, and the tide had swept the body way upriver until it turned and brought it back down to within a couple of hundred yards or so of where he had jumped from. It was face down when I saw it.
The obvious answer in the Jack O' Sullivan case is that he ended up in the water. But why hasn't his body been found? My question would be: would a body float all the way from Hotwells to the Severn Estuary given all the twists and turns of the River Avon before it reaches Avonmouth? There was a body found on the Welsh coast (at Stout Bay near Llantwit Major) a few months ago which the police thought might be Jack's, but wasn't in the end, so maybe it is possible. I also remember seeing quite a few shopping trolleys in the river at Hotwells at low tide and God knows what else has been dumped in there, so I suppose a body could be snagged on something, but the police did search the river from Avonmouth all the way up to Conham in the east of the city. Some have speculated that Jack's body could have sunk in the mud, but is that possible?
This video gives a walkthrough of the route Jack took after he left the party on Hotwell Road:
There is no way that Jack is looking for a taxi in a lot of those locations unless he thought there might be a taxi office somewhere in the vicinity At around the two minute mark he veers to the left through the Council car park and at 2.20 he passes the entrance to the Record Office. He goes a little way around toward the Create Centre entrance on the New Cut, but doubles back and then turns left to reach a small grassy area in the middle of the road system, then crosses the road and goes round a very circuitous route to cross back to the north of the river on the Plimsoll Bridge. At 6.10 you can see the bottom of Granby Hill.
Jack's route: https://media.aspolice.net/uploads/production/20240829182700/Map-2.jpg
From Bennett Way you can get onto the footbridge to the bottom of Granby Hill:
You could also turn left at the top of Bennett Way to get back to Hotwell Road, or right to go back over the river in the direction of Jack's home at Flax Bourton.
This is the substation on Granby Hill:
Slightly down the hill on the same side is a small car park and just uphill is the entrance to Hinton Lane. If you turn left down Hinton Lane you could eventually come back down to the Portway by the River Avon:
A little further up Granby Hill you could turn right and go down Hope Chapel Hill to rejoin Hotwell Road, and near the top of Granby Hill is where Jack's brother Ben lived.
Surely if Jack was in a poor state his brother's residence would have been his best bet supposing he was at home at the time. As Jack had been a pupil at Clifton College I would suppose he would know the area pretty well, but maybe not.
According to Bristol Live:
"At 5.40am, his parents realised Jack hadn't made it home yet and the 'Find my Phone' function showed him still in the Hotwells area. While his family say this places Jack at an address in the Granby Hill area, investigating police are less certain, saying 'Find my Phone' is a computer algorithm’s ‘best guess’, rather than an exact location.
However, police do know that Jack's phone didn't leave the Hotwells/Cumberland Basin area from the moment he left the party to it switching off from the network at 6.44am. So if Jack never left his phone unattended, neither did he."
The article also says the police spent 200 hours searching the river and the riverbanks and that "Our dive team has searched the river from Avonmouth through to Conham River Park. Officers, including those with our mounted team, dog unit and drone unit, have searched in water and on land, especially in the wider area where Jack was last seen, including the Hotwells, Ashton and North Somerset areas."
www.bristolpost.co.uk
I don't know what to make of the "altercation" at the party - seems like handbags to me. One thing I can't relate to is the fact that Jack's mother seemed to be in regular contact with him during the night (and that he had devices on him so that there was the potential for him to have been tracked). When I "were a lad" - in the '70s and '80s - I used to stagger out of pubs, clubs and parties at all hours of the night/morning, walk miles home, get lost etc in both Bristol and in Manchester (eg from the Haçienda) and would have died sooner than phone (from a phonebox!) my parents or anyone else. I also spent a couple of years in Australia, hitchhiking, walking down dirt tracks in the Outback (NT and WA) at night to get back to some remote campsite. standing in dives downing more than a few tinnies/stubbies and generally placing myself in great danger. I also had a couple of close encounters with crocs. How did I survive?
The area isn't really a crime hotspot, but wouldn't be a pleasant place to walk around on a cold March night when it was snowing. It's a liminal space, not far from the city centre but on the edge of the built up area as there is little development west of the River Avon. It is what you might call an "edgelands" area.
As Robert Macfarlane writes in the Guardian:
"The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies."
The road system also makes it a rather Ballardian space - think of Concrete Island, in which after a car crash an architect finds himself stranded in a large area of derelict land created by several intersecting motorways.
Whilst working at B Bond I used to cross the New Cut of the River Avon on the old two level bridge, the top level of which used to contain a road which had long been demolished by then. This road was the only way to get across the river before the Plimsoll Swing Bridge was opened in 1965, and the lower level which used to carry a railway is now used as a metrobus route (Ashton Avenue Bridge).
Photo of the old two level swing bridge: https://bristolcitydocks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ashton-avenue-swing-bridge1.jpg
The New Cut - which was dug in the early 19th century to divert the Avon away from the Floating Harbour, which had been the old route of the river, but subsequently became a large dock for which the Cumberland Basin was an entrance dock where ships might have to wait to enter the main harbour - is a tidal part of the Avon.
I was crossing the New Cut one day when a body emerged from under the bridge and sped downstream only to move towards the south bank of the river twenty or thirty yards further on, where a few police officers were already gathered with some gear to drag it onto the grass. I found out a couple of days later that some poor bloke had jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge the night before, and the tide had swept the body way upriver until it turned and brought it back down to within a couple of hundred yards or so of where he had jumped from. It was face down when I saw it.
The obvious answer in the Jack O' Sullivan case is that he ended up in the water. But why hasn't his body been found? My question would be: would a body float all the way from Hotwells to the Severn Estuary given all the twists and turns of the River Avon before it reaches Avonmouth? There was a body found on the Welsh coast (at Stout Bay near Llantwit Major) a few months ago which the police thought might be Jack's, but wasn't in the end, so maybe it is possible. I also remember seeing quite a few shopping trolleys in the river at Hotwells at low tide and God knows what else has been dumped in there, so I suppose a body could be snagged on something, but the police did search the river from Avonmouth all the way up to Conham in the east of the city. Some have speculated that Jack's body could have sunk in the mud, but is that possible?
This video gives a walkthrough of the route Jack took after he left the party on Hotwell Road:
There is no way that Jack is looking for a taxi in a lot of those locations unless he thought there might be a taxi office somewhere in the vicinity At around the two minute mark he veers to the left through the Council car park and at 2.20 he passes the entrance to the Record Office. He goes a little way around toward the Create Centre entrance on the New Cut, but doubles back and then turns left to reach a small grassy area in the middle of the road system, then crosses the road and goes round a very circuitous route to cross back to the north of the river on the Plimsoll Bridge. At 6.10 you can see the bottom of Granby Hill.
Jack's route: https://media.aspolice.net/uploads/production/20240829182700/Map-2.jpg
From Bennett Way you can get onto the footbridge to the bottom of Granby Hill:
You could also turn left at the top of Bennett Way to get back to Hotwell Road, or right to go back over the river in the direction of Jack's home at Flax Bourton.
This is the substation on Granby Hill:
Slightly down the hill on the same side is a small car park and just uphill is the entrance to Hinton Lane. If you turn left down Hinton Lane you could eventually come back down to the Portway by the River Avon:
A little further up Granby Hill you could turn right and go down Hope Chapel Hill to rejoin Hotwell Road, and near the top of Granby Hill is where Jack's brother Ben lived.
Surely if Jack was in a poor state his brother's residence would have been his best bet supposing he was at home at the time. As Jack had been a pupil at Clifton College I would suppose he would know the area pretty well, but maybe not.
According to Bristol Live:
"At 5.40am, his parents realised Jack hadn't made it home yet and the 'Find my Phone' function showed him still in the Hotwells area. While his family say this places Jack at an address in the Granby Hill area, investigating police are less certain, saying 'Find my Phone' is a computer algorithm’s ‘best guess’, rather than an exact location.
However, police do know that Jack's phone didn't leave the Hotwells/Cumberland Basin area from the moment he left the party to it switching off from the network at 6.44am. So if Jack never left his phone unattended, neither did he."
The article also says the police spent 200 hours searching the river and the riverbanks and that "Our dive team has searched the river from Avonmouth through to Conham River Park. Officers, including those with our mounted team, dog unit and drone unit, have searched in water and on land, especially in the wider area where Jack was last seen, including the Hotwells, Ashton and North Somerset areas."
Jack O'Sullivan's fate is still a mystery one year on
A year on and his mum says every day is 'hell'
I don't know what to make of the "altercation" at the party - seems like handbags to me. One thing I can't relate to is the fact that Jack's mother seemed to be in regular contact with him during the night (and that he had devices on him so that there was the potential for him to have been tracked). When I "were a lad" - in the '70s and '80s - I used to stagger out of pubs, clubs and parties at all hours of the night/morning, walk miles home, get lost etc in both Bristol and in Manchester (eg from the Haçienda) and would have died sooner than phone (from a phonebox!) my parents or anyone else. I also spent a couple of years in Australia, hitchhiking, walking down dirt tracks in the Outback (NT and WA) at night to get back to some remote campsite. standing in dives downing more than a few tinnies/stubbies and generally placing myself in great danger. I also had a couple of close encounters with crocs. How did I survive?
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If Jack had intended to flee Bristol and friends/family, he would surely have gone home and slept and then arrived at the railway station/airport when services were operating. If he'd been drinking, possibly had a head injury according to some psychics' predictions, then I can't see any airline letting him fly or any train operator taking him as a passenger.
I don't believe he have ended up in the water, in my opinion, with the geographical nature and how infiltrated the waterways around there are with buildings/bridges, possible pipes etc, I think at least some of his belongings would have been recovered.
<modsnip;: Websleuths does not allow discussion of the paranormal / metaphysical>
I would hope that the police have searched CCTV of any vehicles driving around Bristol at the time of disappearance, there can't have been that many, were any cars stolen that night? Was any concerning behaviour reported in incidents that may seem separate but within the vicinity? I hope these avenues have all been explored, but sadly, I doubt it.
I don't believe he have ended up in the water, in my opinion, with the geographical nature and how infiltrated the waterways around there are with buildings/bridges, possible pipes etc, I think at least some of his belongings would have been recovered.
<modsnip;: Websleuths does not allow discussion of the paranormal / metaphysical>
I would hope that the police have searched CCTV of any vehicles driving around Bristol at the time of disappearance, there can't have been that many, were any cars stolen that night? Was any concerning behaviour reported in incidents that may seem separate but within the vicinity? I hope these avenues have all been explored, but sadly, I doubt it.
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Reward is now £100,000 for information about Jacks physical whereabouts. This is from mum Catherine. Hopefully a news article will follow.
Donor offers £100k reward to find missing student Jack O'Sullivan
Mother of Jack O’Sullivan, who disappeared in Bristol in March 2024, says she is "overcome" by the offer.
www.bbc.co.uk
Praying for Jack's family that this helps!Donor offers £100k reward to find missing student Jack O'Sullivan
Mother of Jack O’Sullivan, who disappeared in Bristol in March 2024, says she is "overcome" by the offer.
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