Jay Slater's mother says retracing his final steps brought 'more closure' ahead of Channel 5 documentary

The mother of Jay Slater has said that walking the route her son took in the days before his death was "very tough and emotional", but has given her and her family "more closure". Debbie Duncan spoke to BBC Radio Lancashire about retracing her 19-year-old son's steps in Tenerife, where he disappeared on 17 June 2024 after travelling to the island for a music festival in Playa de las Americas. Jay, who was from Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire, was found dead following a search lasting 29 days.

The trip back to the Spanish island forms the basis of a new Channel 5 documentary, "Cause of Death", whose first episode airs at 21:00 BST on Wednesday. The series is set to explore both the manhunt for Jay and the enormous social media interest the case attracted. Duncan said she hopes that by watching the programme, people "may well believe the facts" — a pointed reference to the wave of speculation and conspiracy theories that spread online in the days and weeks after Jay went missing.

Those questions were formally settled by an inquest into Jay's death, which concluded that he died in a "tragic accident" and that his death was entirely without third-party influence. The inquest heard that he had fallen in what was described as a "particularly dangerous area", suffering skull fractures and brain trauma that killed him instantly. That finding ended months of speculation, though Duncan said the response to it on social media has continued to divide opinion in her view.

For Duncan, the value of retracing Jay's route was partly practical. She explained that the return allowed the family to look at the terrain in far more detail than was possible from news footage, maps or online updates at the time. Being able to see the landscape for herself, she said, helped her understand the environment in which her son had become disoriented and ultimately came to harm.

A second reason, she said, was about time. Duncan said the trip was important to her because it allowed her to reconstruct a timeline — from the point at which Jay's phone location was last known through to the moment he messaged saying "I don't know where I am, I am lost". Revisiting the sequence of those final hours, she said, was important to her personally, and she has stressed throughout that she never doubted for a moment that what happened to her son was an accident.

Joining the retracing was forensic pathologist Richard Shepherd, who carried out Jay's postmortem after his body was returned to the UK. Duncan said having the doctor there to talk through her son's injuries "was just really good", adding that he was able to explain what had happened "in more simple terms". That plain-language explanation, she suggested, was more helpful to her than the technical detail she had encountered during the earlier legal proceedings.

Her comments come as the family marks the second anniversary of Jay's death and continues to adjust to life without him. Duncan said the family are "all coping in different ways" and that she is trying to keep busy. Part of that effort involves staying in contact with other bereaved families, and she said she cannot say it makes a difference, but speaking to other parents who have lost their children means "you are not on your own".

That experience has shaped her campaigning. Last year, Duncan called for a "Jay's Law" to prevent the online trolling of grieving families. She said such a law would be "aimed at tech companies" and would oblige them "to take down misinformation" about cases such as her son's. She described the conspiracies that circulated after Jay's disappearance as "wild", and rejected the argument that regulating such content is an attack on free speech.

"It's not about freedom of speech. It's downright bullying," she said. "They know the facts but they don't want to believe them, they just go along with their own narrative." Critics of the proposed law, she noted, had framed it as a restriction on people's ability to say what they want — a characterisation she dismissed.

Duncan said she was encouraged by the response to the campaign, adding that "the right people were listening" to her appeal. But she was candid that the passage of time has not made the loss any easier to bear. Living without Jay, she said, has not become simpler, and added: "It seems to get harder to be honest."

The debate she has joined is one that has run alongside the Jay Slater case since 2024, spanning bereaved families' encounters with misinformation, the responsibilities of social media platforms, and the wider question of how the public engages with online speculation following a much-publicised death. BBC reporting has previously documented the harassment faced by Duncan, including an article on claims that she had been accused of her son's murder by trolls, as well as her appeal for witnesses to attend the inquest and an examination of why it took 29 days for Jay's body to be found.

With the inquest having recorded a tragic accident and a documentary due to air on Wednesday, the focus now shifts to whether the detail assembled by "Cause of Death" can finally shift public opinion — and, in Duncan's words, persuade people that the facts, rather than conjecture, are what matter.