Every morning, as soon as she gets downstairs, Catherine O’Sullivan unfolds a well-worn ordnance survey map of the local area and spreads it out on her kitchen table.
For the past six months, she has been poring over this map daily, diligently crossing off squares as she visits them.
Once she’s pinpointed a location, she packs a bag with a bottle of water and some supplies, and sets off from the family home in Flax Bourton, five miles outside Bristol.
Sometimes she brings a walking stick or, depending on the terrain, a few golf clubs to hack away shrubs. On one occasion, to get through dense undergrowth, she even brought a strimmer.
It might seem extreme for a bit of daily exercise. But Catherine, 52, is not simply going for a walk.
Every day, from the moment she wakes, she is desperately searching for her son.
Jack O’Sullivan, 23, went missing in the early hours of March 2 this year, after attending a house party with friends in a riverside area of Bristol.
Jack O’Sullivan and his mother and father, Catherine and Alan, and brother, Ben, at Jack’s graduation
Catherine’s last contact with her son was at 1.52am that night, when she texted to see if he was all right and ask if he wanted a lift home.
‘He replied saying, “All good. I’m going to stay a bit later but I’ll get a cab home. Go to bed, Mum,” ’ she recalls.
But Catherine woke with a start at 5.25am, filled with a sense of dread – a mother’s chilling intuition. She checked Jack’s room: his light was still on; his bed untouched.
Catherine, her husband Alan and older son Ben, 28, haven’t seen or heard from Jack since.
Nobody – not the police, nor the hundreds of kind-hearted volunteers who have helped look for him, nor the family themselves – have found a single trace of him or his belongings. And nobody who was with Jack or saw him that fateful night seems to know what happened either.
‘Everything stopped,’ says Catherine. ‘We’re stuck on March 2.
‘I can’t let go of the fact that I don’t know where he is. How can my son have just disappeared?
‘I have to put myself out there and try to find him. I don’t know what else to do’.
Compounding the pain the family has already endured is the fact they have become targets of vicious online trolls, some of whom claim to have seen Jack, know where his body is – and even say they are holding him hostage, demanding vast amounts of ransom money for his return.
Doing such a thing to a family in the depths of despair truly defies comprehension, but Catherine tries to rise above it, focusing instead on finding her son.
Jack was spotted on CCTV walking close to a body of water – in an area known as the ‘Basin’, in the middle of Bristol Harbour – shortly after leaving the house party at 2.57am
If Jack were here, he would be starting the second year of his law conversion course this week.
A history graduate from Exeter University, he’d moved back home with his parents to save money while he pursued his dream of becoming a lawyer.
‘He’s really bright, and he can come across as quite shy but at home he’s a very lively, cheeky character,’ says Catherine.
‘He was interested in doing commercial law. When I asked why, he’d laugh and tell me he wanted to do the type that paid the most.’
But as millions of young people head back to school, college and university, there are no such milestones in the O’Sullivan household.
Jack’s bedroom sits empty, his things as they were when he left the house.
His father, a housemaster at Clifton College, a co-ed private boarding and day school in Bristol, has steeled himself to return to work this week for the first time since his son went missing.
‘His aim is to slowly but surely do what he can,’ says Catherine, her voice thick with emotion. ‘He really wants to push forward, to find a way through this, but the reality of it might be too much.
‘He wants to try, and the most important thing is that Jack would have wanted him to try.’
As a pupil at Clifton College, Jack was taught by his father – so the moment is especially poignant for all of them.
And while life goes on around her, Catherine – who’s on compassionate leave from her job as a matron at the same school – continues her shattering quest to find her son.
‘I search every day,’ she admits. ‘My day is planned around which direction I’m going to look next, until I run out of areas I can feasibly check.
‘We’ve come across some incredibly remote spots that are on our doorstep, and we had to explore them, just in case.’
The ‘we’ she refers to is herself, Alan, son Ben and his girlfriend, who live in the same village, plus a family friend, David, who’s experienced in reading maps.
Catherine’s lost count of the number of doors they’ve knocked on, the shops and businesses they’ve asked for CCTV, the flyers – bearing Jack’s handsome face – they’ve stuck to lampposts and noticeboards, many now faded and peeling.
The physical process of searching for her son is arduous, with Catherine and her family combing rural areas, industrial sites and scrubland around Bristol in the hope of turning up something, anything, that might explain what happened.
‘We climb fences, jump into ditches, anything it takes,’ she says.
‘We’ve tried to cover every nook, cranny, alleyway and area of disused land. I don’t think I’d ever climbed a six-bar gate before this.
‘I’ve been back to the area where he was last seen and I’ve paced up and down, trying to put myself in Jack’s shoes: where would he have gone?
‘We’ve also spent a lot of time looking for his phone; we had people come out with equipment to detect it, trying to get into drains for us.
‘It gives me peace of mind to say we’ve been here, we’ve looked and there was nothing.’
The image of a mother scouring the earth for her missing child is truly unbearable.
She does so, she says, because she hasn’t lost hope – still referring to Jack in the present tense – and because there is no other way to quell the searing pain in her heart.
But she also searches because she has to; because Avon and Somerset Police, against whom she launched a complaint in June, have cut their contact with her down to a weekly email, and because she believes they aren’t doing enough to find her son.
Since the day they reported Jack missing, she believes the police have had one theory, which has shaped their investigation ever since.
Jack was spotted on CCTV walking close to a body of water – in an area known as the ‘Basin’, in the middle of Bristol Harbour – shortly after leaving the house party at 2.57am. As a result of this, the police told Catherine it was most likely that he’d fallen in.
Subsequent statements from people who were at the party suggested he had had quite a lot to drink, with one claiming he’d fallen and hit his head – facts Catherine can’t prove but which she thinks led police to their conclusion.
‘Very early on, they quoted national statistics that for males reported missing on a night out, 85 per cent of those in the vicinity of water end up drowning,’ she says.
‘The way they explained it to us is that, because it’s a complex and fast-flowing river system around there, there’s a chance Jack could have been immediately washed out to sea.’
She accepts the police have put ‘a lot of effort’ into trawling the harbour area, using sonar, specially-trained dogs and even bringing in an oceanographer to assist.
To date, the police dive team have carried out more than 200 searches on the water and riverbanks. They’ve also done 40 land searches, reviewed more than 100 hours of CCTV and deployed a drone for 16 aerial searches.
This week, they renewed their appeal for witnesses, calling for doorbell cameras, dash-cam footage and mobile phone recordings that may have captured him. A dog walker seen on CCTV is of particular interest, as are the 1,000 taxi drivers working in the area that night.
Avon and Somerset Assistant Chief Constable Joanne Hall insists they ‘remain committed to doing everything we can’, adding: ‘Throughout our investigation, we’ve been open-minded about what happened to Jack, considering different possible outcomes and scenarios following his last sighting.’
But Catherine does not agree, and feels let down by their handling of Jack’s case.
For it was she, not the police, who found footage of Jack on CCTV much later on the night he disappeared, at 3.38am, walking up a slip road towards a bridge on the north side of the River Avon – in the opposite direction to before.
And it is she, not the police, who has repeatedly nudged Jack’s name back into the headlines, frustrated that his disappearance is not receiving the same attention as other missing people cases, such as those of dog walker Nicola Bulley in Lancashire last year and teenager Jay Slater on Tenerife this summer.
She continues to push for the release of Jack’s phone usage and location data, which might help them trace his final movements, but which – staggeringly – police say would be against the law to share during an ongoing investigation.
Today, Catherine relies on a more unlikely source of help and solace – a Facebook group called Find Jack, set up by a family friend, which boasts 62,000 members.
The page is a mixture of news articles, comments by well-wishers and friends, and suggestions from amateur sleuths, all united in their mission to share information, theories and offers of assistance to help find her son.
She checks it daily, often hourly, and says it’s been ‘amazing’. ‘The people on there are so determined, and I’m so grateful to them.’
The group connected her to a local charity, which supplied sniffer dogs to search overgrown farmland. They’ve asked the local climbing club to keep an eye out for Jack’s possessions in nearby Avon Gorge in Clifton: a shoe maybe, or his house keys, or the quilted Barbour jacket he was wearing.
But with the good comes the bad, and Catherine has also received much darker messages, from vile internet trolls who claim they know where he is.
‘Someone made contact saying they had Jack, and if we paid a certain amount they would tell us where he was,’ she says.
‘The message came across with such certainty, I couldn’t help but think: “What do these people know?” But the police said it was just one of those things.
‘Some people don’t hold back on their thoughts and opinions. They tell me it’s “obvious” what happened to him, that I should just give up.
‘In the last few days, somebody posted [on Facebook] saying he’d clearly been killed and was in an area of land in Bristol.
‘The police did warn me that if I chose to go down this public route then I should expect really unpleasant things, but it’s a choice we’ve had to make.’
Today marks 189 days since Jack went missing. For the O’Sullivan family, some have been harder than others. There was Jack’s birthday, just four weeks after he disappeared, which felt ‘surreal’, says Catherine. ‘It was a blur. Nothing had sunk in.’
Then there were exam results, delivered through the door in April, which Jack had passed – as predicted – with flying colours. Over the summer, the start and end dates of the work placements he’d so conscientiously lined up came and went.
For his brother Ben, to whom he’s extremely close, it’s the football fixtures that hit home: watching his beloved Arsenal play Jack’s team, Manchester United, without his brother.
‘It’s been really, really hard for Ben,’ says Catherine. ‘People don’t know what to say to him.’
The worst, she admits, is the not knowing.
For weeks after Jack disappeared, Catherine left the porch light on, just in case he came home.
She doesn’t sleep at night, relieved if she gets four or five hours, and jumps every time her phone rings, fearful and hopeful at the same time.
‘God forbid, if someone had come to our door that morning and said Jack had had a tragic accident, it would have been the worst thing any parent could hear,’ she says.
‘But we would know. We would have a reason to be feeling as we are. Instead, we’re in total limbo.’
She doesn’t allow herself to dwell on theories about that night, instead taking each day at a time, throwing herself into her search – by now a familiar ritual that stops her from imagining the worst.
‘What gets me going is asking myself, “What would Jack do?” Anybody who has met him will know he’s one of the most determined people on this earth, so I’ve got to keep going.
‘But I don’t want to be doing some of the things I’ve had to do.
‘I’m having to become a detective, an investigator, when really I just want to be Jack’s mum.’
