2nd March is a really horrible day for unsolved cases of missing young men. Apart from Kevin, there is the case of Mark Garvey in Liverpool in 1987 and more recently Jack O'Sullivan in 2024. All missing on 2nd March.
The thing with the stereo is really interesting isn't. It really does make you wonder what evidence the police have that it formed part of the grooming. As I recall, it was said at the time that Kevin bought it with a bonus from his job at the Co-op. Perhaps they checked with the Co-op and there was no such bonus.
So, it seems that Kevin used money to pay for it rather than being given the stereo outright. That made me think of something that my friend who grew up in Croydon told me. He said that it was not unknown for some teenagers in Croydon to "pose for photos" *ahem* for a bit of money. Thinking about it, I actually knew a couple of lads I was at university with who'd done something similar, although they were 18 / 19 when they did it. I wonder if Kevin had been given money for something similar. He's also told his dad the night before that he was broke, and borrowed money from him to go ice skating. I wonder perhaps if on the night he disappeared, he'd been hoping to get some extra money from someone who had been giving him money before. As I recall, it would not have been illegal at the time for a 16 year old back then to appear in photos, although worth remembering that Kevin had only just turned 16 a couple of weeks earlier.
I had another look through the newspaper archives and it was shocking just how violent the local area was back then, including in Lower Addiscombe Road where Kevin was supposed to be going to the shop. Rapes, assaults, burglaries, hold ups, all just on that one street alone.
There were a couple of interesting articles about Shirley Hills. One was from just a few weeks before Kevin disappeared, saying that a man in his 50s who was walking his dog was violently attacked by a 25 year old man in Shirley Hills, and the description of the man matched another attack also in Shirley Hills. Interestingly, the policeman the newspaper quoted in the article was one of the policemen who later got caught up in the Daniel Morgan murder scandal, Derek Haslam. Another reminder of just how much was going on in the local area at that time.
The second article was in the Daily Mirror in 1985. It said that Shirley Hills was not only a well known gay cruising area, it was also very popular with straight people, engaging in what the tabloids used to love to call in their awful sexist language "wife swapping", but what we'd probably call dogging now. They said that it was quite a sophisticated set up, and the straight people involved often arranged meet ups through what would have been coded "adverts" in newspapers. It's a good insight into how a lot of covert sexual encounters used to be arranged back then before the internet, through personal columns etc in newspapers. I'm sure somebody could do quite a detailed academic study of it.
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