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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.
“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.”
Absence of Evidence
The judge-led probe in Barcelona can be summarised neatly with one word that appears in its texts 17 times – ‘negative’. While it seems to have been extraordinarily unlucky to have drawn blank after blank, closer analysis shows glaring voids in its methodologies.
For example, in a city bristling with CCTV – with an estimated 13,300 separate surveillance cameras, including 165 under municipal control, and a further 200 covering more than 90% of the port area – it is striking that just two sets of images were ever recovered, and both were signposted by Levi himself through his social media activity.
This contributed to an “unacceptable” six hour gap in official knowledge between his phone losing signal at 00:12 and the sighting of a man in the water at around 06:30.
Further, the official report notes that Levi was communicating over WhatsApp, Instagram and OnlyFans, yet Byline Times has found the authorities made no applications for disclosure or assistance from these companies, creating a second black hole in official knowledge.
The report gives no explanation for the dearth of visual or digital evidence. It is true that Spain has a 30-day retention rule for CCTV images, leaving open the possibility the police simply acted too slowly – an accusation Julie and others have directed at them in the past.
Given Levi was logged as missing in Barcelona on 9 November – 10 days after the sea sighting, and five days after international reporting of his case started – the authorities had almost three full weeks to seek and preserve evidence.
On the question of disclosure of his communications, however, it seems that the authorities in Spain simply didn’t look. When we asked for comment, WhatsApp and Instagram owner Meta didn’t reply, but an OnlyFans spokesperson said they always cooperate with police requests.
Julie Davis said: “Someone needs to explain to me why there are all these gaps so we can try again and do better for Levi this time.”
Apple and Orange, but Vital Pair Missing
The official report raises further important questions – principal among them: how thorough was this original investigation?
Though it obtained court orders for disclosure from Apple, Google, Vodafone and Orange to establish that Levi’s emails were not accessed nor his bank account used since the night his phone lost contact, the investigation made no such approach to OnlyFans or Meta (owner of WhatsApp and Instagram), despite its own findings that he was using the platforms the night he disappeared.
Inquiries by Byline Times have identified at least one new relevant WhatsApp conversation previously unknown to the Mossos police investigation. While on the ferry from Ibiza, Levi called photographer friend Ade Adetona and confirmed that he was travelling to meet a mystery person. This is highly significant because the identity of the person has never been established.
Mr Adetona told a friend: “He said he was going to Barcelona to meet someone, that it wasn’t a big thing. I was a bit annoyed with him because we had a [new music release] single to promote. I was fully expecting him to come back.
“He was 24 and it’s the sort of thing people that age do [act on the spur of the moment] so I wasn’t worried at first. I thought he’d turn up. I didn’t speak to the police.”
The Grindr Conundrum
Another apparently obvious stone left unturned is the question around Levi’s Grindr activity. The witness statement of his Ibiza host Richard Squire says that Levi was going to Barcelona to meet someone from the app.
However, Byline Times has established that Squire’s actual account is more equivocal and he is unsure whether Levi was communicating with unidentified parties over the gay hookup app, or through his recently-launched OnlyFans account, or indeed another app.
Either way, the official report initially seemed to treat the alleged Grindr contact as a priority line of inquiry, only to then abandon mid-process – and without explanation – attempts to access Levi’s messaging using the well-established Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) international information-sharing protocol.
Byline Times has however found primary sources with knowledge of Levi’s social media activity who suggest he was not using his Grindr account at all in the weeks prior to his disappearance – nor arranging meetings on OnlyFans.
One source said: “He had been talking about Barcelona for a few months. He wasn’t active on his Grindr account for a couple of weeks before he went missing and though he was getting a lot of attention on his OnlyFans that wasn’t it either.
“Whoever he was going to meet out there he had been speaking to them for a while, and it would have probably been on one of his two Instagram accounts or on WhatsApp. There were a few other apps he used sometimes for meeting people, but they were the main ones.”
A second source, the photographer friend who shot some of Levi’s OnlyFans pictures in Ibiza, Ade Adetona, is understood to be clear that he did not witness Levi using or discussing Grindr between 22 and 28 October 2022.
Whatever the platform, Levi’s potentially critical communications – and the secrets they may contain – have yet to be recovered.
A family source said: “It’s hard to believe that no one has managed to access Levi’s digital footprint when it is so obviously relevant and probably the first place most people would want to look for clues.”

The Passport Mystery
Burning near the front of a queue of questions is the confusion around Levi’s passport – a matter of great importance given the Catalan authorities’ position on whether Levi was, in their opinion, a victim of crime in their territory.
As Magistrate Francisco Miralles Carrio put it on 23 March 2023, at the Court of Instruction No. 7 in a view that remains the status quo today: “In the present case, although there is no evidence that any crime has been committed, the truth is that Mr Levi Davis disappeared in the city of Barcelona on October 29, 2022, and since then no one around him has had any news of his whereabouts.”
The Davis family, however, believe there are more grounds to suspect foul play than not, and say clear avenues of inquiry have been passively overlooked by an investigation that, they say, markedly lacked urgency.
“There are many decisions the police made that I don’t understand,” said Julie.
“Their investigation started slowly, progressed slowly, and then stopped before it was finished. They also dismissed Levi’s Instagram video as irrelevant straight away. I find that very strange given that four days before he disappeared he’d said his life was in danger.”
While Levi’s case was referred to a criminal ‘homicide unit’ for a review, no further action, or detail of inquiries allegedly undertaken, is recorded. And there are many areas of continuing confusion – including the passport – which underpin calls for a “joined-up” review of the case to be led by British police, in the style of the Madeleine McCann investigation, which has been going on now since she went missing in Portugal in 2007 at a cost to the Metropolitan Police of £13.2m.
Zone of Interest
According to the Catalan authorities, Levi’s travel document “was located” almost three weeks after he disappeared, having been sitting for an unknown period of time in a booth at a port security checkpoint, where it had been apparently handed in as a “lost object”.
“Therefore, the exact location or the date it was found is unknown,” the report concludes, uncritically.
But Byline Times has since identified the location of the security booth as a zone of interest to the case in light of an independent analysis of vessel movements in the six missing hours – an exercise never apparently undertaken by the Catalan authorities, according to a Mossos source.
The booth is the control point for the port’s secure ‘Energy Dock’; an area of industrial infrastructure where hundreds of millions of euros’ worth of chemicals and fuel come and go weekly on tankers from across the world – and where no tourist would have reason to go nor access.
It is also, Byline Times has established by using open source marine traffic records, where at least one vessel was moored at midnight when Levi’s phone lost signal, and which left the port a few hours later, passing the point at which he was allegedly seen in the sea approximately an hour before that sighting.
The ship – a tanker bound for Turkey – is one of a number of commercial, personal, and port authority vessels in the area of which no active inquiries are recorded, but whose location and movements mean they are relevant to the leading hypothesis that Levi was lost at sea.
Byline Times has asked the owners of 12 vessels for comment. We had yet to receive any responses at the time of publication but will update this article if we do.
Julie said: “None of this has figured in the thinking of the investigation in Spain. I spoke to an officer who said they just relied on passing ships to self-report if they had seen something untoward. But there is logically only one way Levi was in the sea as they say and that was from a boat. I’m shocked the investigation showed so little curiosity.”
A Further Twist
And then there is a further twist in the passport story. Byline Times has established that a much more detailed and seemingly contradictory account of its discovery was allegedly given by a Mossos officer to the Davis family on the afternoon of 18 November 2022.
During a pre-arranged 30-minute briefing at the Ciutat Vella station in the city, where the case was originally reported, Richard Squire – acting as a liaison for Julie – reported being told the passport had been found “randomly” at a “crime scene” in the city centre – in a narcopiso; an apartment where drugs, and in some cases sexual services, were bought and sold. No explanation reconciling its subsequent alleged recovery from the Energy Dock has ever been offered.
Julie said: “Richard has been very clear in what he was told and it means we have two different versions of events. This is one area we want the police to reinvestigate and as a family we need clarity on.
“If it is the case as suggested that Levi may have been in or near one or both of these places in the six lost hours then it’s vital to the case. We know the location and time of the briefing the policeman gave Richard and so we’d like a statement from the officer as there is none in the official report.”
Bog Standard Questions
In addition, Levi’s passport was located at least as early as 20 November, which allowed 10 full days to check CCTV in and around the ‘Energy Dock’ secure port zone where it was handed in.
Julie said: “Levi was walking through the busiest streets of Barcelona and the investigation produced no CCTV and hasn’t said why. Then his passport turns up in a high security area and still there is no CCTV. And then they say he was probably in the water, kilometres out to sea, still in his clothes, but they don’t ask how he got there. It is so, so frustrating.”
Julie’s not alone in her frustration. Janet Hills is the former Chair of the Metropolitan Black Police Association and a retired detective.
She said: “In terms of professionalism, it leaves a lot to be desired. I know they have got a different system and the judge does a lot of the directing, but some of these lines of inquiry are bog standard and could have been looked at and put to bed.”
In response to direct questions from Julie and Byline Times, the Mossos said it had nothing to add to its published findings. Julie was told to make a formal application to the judge through lawyers if she wants further answers. The court would only comment to say the case remains closed.
“I’m a single working mum with two dependent children still at home,” Julie said. “Like most of us, I’m working all hours just to meet the cost of living, let alone employ a legal team in Spain. Along with everything else, it’s just another obstacle.”
Sex Trafficked?
It’s tempting to imagine reasons for the lack of engagement by the Catalan authorities. After all, Levi’s case strays into allegations of organised crime, sex trafficking, modern slavery and potentially murder.
“Some stones aren’t worth lifting. You might not like what you find,” said a source with knowledge of organised crime in Catalonia and Ibiza.
Whatever the reasons behind the apparent gaps in the official investigation, the Davises remain in the dark as to how and why Levi could have ended up in the sea.
But when a foreign national disappears and it attracts international attention, it becomes a local conversation among the powers who know; the criminal underworld.
Byline Times has made journalistic enquiries in Barcelona, a city of gangs such as the cocaine-trafficking Clan Farruku, the narco Moccro Mafia, their rivals; the Balkan Cartel, the Latin Kings, and the machete-loving ‘Los Demons de Ciudad Meridiana’ which ran drugs and robberies with sidelines in phishing and smishing (infecting devices with spyware) until it was dismantled last May in a targeted Mossos operation.
We have spoken to sources who suggest that a single trafficked sex worker in Barcelona, for example, can generate around €300,000 a year for organised crime. And it applies to men just as much as women, with premiums attached to victims with certain personal characteristics.
This newspaper has heard testimony from sources who speak of large networks of men set to work in cities the world over, drawn in and then controlled through the mechanisms of false debt, rape-enabled blackmail, and controlled drugs dependency, reinforced with threats of physical harm to self and family and ruination through public doxxing.
We’ve heard about the use of OnlyFans as an ‘advertising tool’ for real-life meetings, as well as being an online brothel for the sex traffickers; of grooming gangs who do not look like criminals – people with respectable lives in public-facing institutions, often young gay men – yet who inhabit two worlds.
A source said: “No one gets into it on purpose. It happens bit by bit. There are ruthless people who think nothing of blackmail. It’s surprisingly common. Once you’re being blackmailed, you’re on the hook to do the same to other people. Hence the people involved never look sinister. It’s a horrible horrible world.”
Exploitation Gateways
There are two sometimes interconnected gateways the criminals exploit. One is online sextortion, in which people – overwhelmingly men – are compromised by sexual material they’ve shared voluntarily but ill-advisedly online.
And there are physical exploitation spaces in the shape of chemsex parties.
“In the gay community there is a distinct but small subsection into the chemsex party lifestyle,” said another source.
“The parties are very common; essentially orgies, mostly set up on Grindr or other specialist sites. Sometimes they go on for days with men arriving and leaving all day and night.
“Sometimes there are fees, sometimes it’s just an open door policy. Sometimes it is very niche and for closed groups only. There are always drugs – crystal meth, GHB, cocaine, MDMA, and ketamine are common, but also 2cb, fentanyl, booze and weed; you name it.
“These are communities built on mutual trust – which means they are open to abuse. There’s a saying: ‘it’s not who you know that counts, it’s what you know about who you know’.
“Blackmail is much more common than you’d think. But it’s happening in such a way, with the dark web and disappearing encrypted message services, that the police never get near it.”
Did Levi Hide Himself?
Byline Times has looked into the possibility that Levi was seeking to disappear of his own accord, and somehow tried to stow aboard a ship bound for somewhere far flung.
Is it possible he intentionally lost his passport so that he could disappear and acquire a new identity, thus hoping to rid himself of his problems?
It seems unlikely, for a number of reasons; an abject lack of funds (or even clothes), his positive demeanour in his last communications, and his widely stated intention to return to collect various belongings from friends in Ibiza and England.
In addition, the chances of Levi successfully gaining access to a vessel through the Energy dock without help are very small. Security clearance and documents are required and an average 90% of the area is covered by CCTV cameras.
Further, according to an underworld source, for these reasons the port is not a favoured people-trafficking route; certainly not at any kind of scale.
One former people smuggler Byline Times spoke to said: “In the port, I didn’t find people trafficking because it is a place very closely guarded. Instead of that, theft of goods and drugs has always existed.
“People smuggling is accessed through other networks, especially taxi drivers.
“People stay temporarily in pensions (apartments) in the city and then are moved through routes into France and then beyond.
“We were paid depending on the nationality. For Pakistanis, we were paid in dollars and got double the charge we’d get for negritos (black people) and Arabs.”
Justice Delayed, or Outright Denied?
Byline Times has heard powerful evidence from inside Levi’s tightest groups of friends that he had been in fear of a sex trafficking gang for at least a year.
On 25 October 2022, Levi talked about it publicly in a moment of crisis in a post to 19,000+ Instagram followers. He simultaneously launched an OnlyFans account with the defiant hashtag #takeitback.
Then a few days later he left Ibiza suddenly on a “business journey” arranged on an unknown app and then disappeared hours after arriving in Barcelona to meet a mystery man.
Whether these events are causal or interconnected is not certain, however Julie and others believe they ought to be investigated by the proper authorities in a way equal to other British citizens.
Retired detective Peter Bleksley said: “Firstly, there are unfortunate levels of racism and homophobia across the globe – including in the police force. There are opportunities here for law enforcement in different jurisdictions – Ibiza, Barcelona, London, and elsewhere in England – to say ‘It’s nothing to do with me, guv’.
“What it really needs is somebody to have the will, determination and public spiritedness, to grasp it, say we are in charge, we will coordinate, we will travel anywhere and we will find the answers.
“Because at the moment, Mr Davis is being failed, his family are being failed, his friends are being failed – and in a broader sense the public is being failed by the police inaction here and in Spain.”
Black Male: Two Tiers for the Missing?
Birmingham Yardley MP Jess Philips has taken on the case as Julie is a local constituent in the West Midlands. Speaking in July before being made Minister for Safeguarding – with a remit including sexual violence, gangmasters and prostitution – Ms Phillips told Byline Times: “It’s clear that some lines of inquiry connected to the disappearance of Mr Davis have yet to be properly explored.
“All avenues and enquiries should be exhausted both in the United Kingdom and Catalonia. Too many questions remain for the family and friends of Mr Davis, and I would urge the police in both jurisdictions to work together to act on any new information.”
Janet Hills MBE points to a gap in positive outcomes for vulnerable missing people of colour compared to white people. It follows a 2023 report from the charity Missing People which suggested police find white missing adults 39% of the time, compared to 35% for Asian adults and just 31% for Black adults.
Ms Hill said: “Data shows there is very little done by the police here in the UK, and in particular The Met when it comes to investigating missing people who are Black.
“This is unacceptable and the fact Mr Davis has gone missing abroad shouldn’t stop The Met from working with Interpol and the Spanish Police to try to give closure to this matter, particularly for the family.
“Even though he went missing in Spain, Mr Davis is a British citizen. If you compare the resources that have been applied to this case with, for instance, that of Madeleine McCann, there is a huge disparity.”
Julie added: “As a family we’ve felt powerless. Levi’s case has been abandoned. It’s really distressing. When I look at the support for the family of Jay Slater [a 19-year-old British apprentice bricklayer who disappeared in Tenerife in June] I wonder why Levi didn’t get the same. I can’t help wonder if it is because Levi’s a black man and there is bias or because he came out as bisexual and there is less sympathy for that with the mainstream media. I just think everybody deserves the same treatment.”
An analysis by this newspaper of UK media coverage shows a striking disparity in the cases of the two men. In the 29 days between Mr Slater’s disappearance and the discovery of his body, after exhaustive and often televised searches by Spanish police and volunteers, 294 articles were published in the British tabloid and mid-market press, while a crowdfund to support the Slater family’s search efforts saw donations of £72,591 made – more than double the £30,000 target.
In the 29 days after Levi – a professional sportsman and reality star of some public profile and social-media reach – was reported missing in the press, 22 articles were published by the same news outlets, while a support crowdfund foundered at £2,205, well shy of its £3,000 target.
Julie Davis said: “We have felt abandoned. I believe Levi was a victim of crime in the UK and in Spain. So many things do not add up. I’m determined to fight for the truth. They pulled out the stops to find Jay Slater and search and pursue justice for Madeleine McCann. They need to do the same now for Levi.”
And yet, as this article was being published, the Davises learnt they face yet another hurdle. They have been told they cannot raise any questions challenging the Catalan investigation without hiring a lawyer to fight Levi’s corner.
Julie said: “I’m just a working mum trying to make ends meet. We have so many questions about the Catalan inquiry in particular but we’ve been told now that we cannot even ask them without spending thousands on legal fees. I’m told it is the system in Spain but it’s really unhelpful.”
For more information on the issues raised in this article including steps on getting support and reporting crime visit:
https://www.victimsupport.org.uk/crime-info/types-crime/sextortion/
https://www.iwf.org.uk/resources/sextortion/adults/