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It’s 17:40 on 19 April, 2024. A strong southerly wind is whipping off the Balearic sea. Julie Davis is leaning into it, shading her eyes, studying vessels dotting the bay of Barcelona Old Port.
The breakwater on which she stands – a functional 4.8km finger of concrete – is hardly a tourist attraction but it’s not her first visit. She is retracing what the police think were the last movements of her son Levi.
Four thousand metres further into the distance, beyond the reach of the naked eye, is the ‘Sierra Buoy’; the anchored nautical marker near which it is quite possible Levi was last seen on 30 October, 2022, alone in the open sea, caught in a cruise ship’s docking lights.
Maritime rescuers, despite rapid dispatch and aerial support, returned 12 hours later with only a life ring thrown from the ship – the MSC Bellissima – from which four witnesses reported seeing or hearing a man in distress.
No identity – in fact no further trace whatsoever – was established. But Levi’s last phone signal was opposite the port’s cruise ship terminus. And then his passport turned up three weeks later in a security booth five kilometres away – under hotly disputed circumstances.
Unfinished Business
Levi’s disappearance is painful unfinished business, not just for his nearest and dearest but also those who admired his rugby and singing and for whom he made history as a bisexual sporting role model.
The Davis family – Julie, Levi’s brothers Nathan and Luke and two younger siblings – have been carrying his loss for 24 months. This summer, they looked on with grim recognition as another young Briton, the 19-year-old apprentice bricklayer Jay Slater, went missing on holiday in Tenerife.
The Slater case went viral, transfixing the UK. Rolling news dissected every emerging detail as crowdfunds swelled with wellwishers’ donations and armies of volunteers joined the search.
Specialist sniffer dog teams rushed over from Madrid. Helicopters, drones, and Tik Tokkers scouring the remote interior of the Canary island. Celebrity gumshoes EasyJetted-in to sleuth around Tenerife’s night-time economy – and feed the media.
After 29 days of “constant” looking, the Guardia Civil made a discovery in a rocky ravine and at last – at least – the Slaters could begin to grieve.
It raised ghosts for Julie. “So many difficult feelings,” she said. “Obviously empathy and heartbreak, but also injustice. When I look at the support for Jay I wonder why
Levi didn’t get the same? It keeps running in my head. I feel bad for even thinking
it; because of poor Jay – but the thought is there.
“With Jay they kept searching till he was found. I keep asking myself ‘what did I do wrong?’. What is it I didn’t do for Levi? I went to the authorities. Did I not shout loud enough? I really don’t know. They are such similar cases except that one is in Tenerife and one is in Barcelona.”
You can see the burden in Julie’s knotted brow as she walks her boy’s last known route down La Rambla, the busy tourist boulevard where he drank a couple of beers and posted videos over Instagram for his friends in the hours before he vanished.
Even now, two years on, as she retreads Levi’s steps with Byline Times, she’s scanning faces around the flower and tapas stands with a sort of forlorn anticipation as low voices hiss illicit offers from side-alley shadows and beggars jangle coins in paper cups.
It’s the street dwellers, of course, who see a city’s underbelly clearest. Julie spoke to many La Rambla regulars on previous visits to Barcelona in the weeks and months after Levi went missing. Sifting truth from fiction – however well-meaning the offers of information – is a treacherous job no grieving parent should face.
‘My Name Is Levi Davis and My Life Is in Danger’ – Reopening the Case of the Rugby Star Who Disappeared
Part One of a five part special investigation by Dan Evans and Tom Latchem
“We’ve felt let down by the police,” Julie told Byline Times. “We’ve been abandoned. It’s really distressing. Words can’t describe it.”
The false hopes land hardest. One leather-jacketed rough sleeper Julie tracked down – a woman, maybe late 30s, with a white streak in her hair – insisted she’d spoken to Levi, alive and well, in the city in the week after his disappearance.
“She said it was definitely him. I wanted to believe her, but it came to nothing. There were all these other supposed sightings. And because there is no body or other actual proof of what happened to Levi it’s impossible not to keep hoping. Even now, I keep thinking I’m going to walk around a corner and see him. It’s terrible.”
‘Full’ Report
The need for reliable information brought Julie back for a fourth time to Spain’s second-largest city in April 2024. She flew in from Birmingham on a Thursday morning with Levi’s little sister, taking a taxi to the ‘Ciutat de la Justícia’ courts and police complex in the l’Hospitalet de Llobregat area of the city.
She emerged after 20 minutes with a Foreign Office translator into the late Spring sunshine holding a pen drive on which the processes and conclusions of a near-12 month official investigation are recorded in four digital ‘folios’.
The 243-pages include court instructions, witness statements, maritime search reports, cruise ship operator comments and mobile phone and tech company submissions in a mixture of Catalan and Spanish.
On translation, it seems clear that the Spanish state gave resources to searching for Levi and that also, with the trail becoming increasingly difficult to follow – and the circumstances complex – those resources dried up.
Throughout, officers of the Mossos d’Esquadra have liaised with the UK’s West Midlands Police, using Interpol as go-between, under the direction of a magistrate who – in the Spanish system – oversees the investigation.
British involvement has so far been peripheral, Byline Times has learnt, with one source describing its current function as to be “essentially a postbox” for information from Spain. There have been “low key inquiries in the past” in support of the Catalan authorities’ efforts, “but nothing for well over a year”.
Now pressure is building for that to change. Julie, and allies including the British Government Minister for Safeguarding Jess Phillips, who has campaigned against male sextortion, and Janet Hills MBE, the former Chair of the Metropolitan Black Police Association and a retired detective with experience in high-level “misper” cases are calling for a review taking in emerging evidence.
Among many new lines of inquiry are the identification by this newspaper of a British person of interest allegedly connected to Levi’s claims of blackmail, and the discovery that Levi ended up 1.1miles out to sea at night in a busy shipping lane – as Catalan police believe – probably as a victim of crime.
For Julie Davis it’s simple. She said: “I believe my son was either murdered or sex-trafficked. Those are the most likely possibilities as far as I am concerned. But for some reason, the police don’t seem to care.”