How to Disappear Completely: The Unsolved Missing Persons Case of Damien Nettles

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It should have been a standard Saturday night. On November 2, 1996, gangly teenager Damien Nettles headed out in Cowes on the Isle of Wight with his good friend Chris Boon. They'd been out at a party earlier in the evening. Nothing special. Bored, they'd bought ciders, taken the ferry to west Cowes, and then tried to get served at a couple of pubs, underage, before giving up and going their separate ways on the high street. Chris would be the last person close to Damien to see him alive. Damien was 16.

But this isn't the story of a horrifying murder on an island that most Brits barely think about beyond planning their Bestival fancy dress. It's the bizarre tale of a boy who just disappeared. About 25 minutes before midnight, Damien walked into a chippy and stumbled his way through an order. From what we can piece together courtesy of the chip shop's CCTV footage, he bought his food, briefly chatted to a few men at the counter, and walked outside into the darkness.

His story has crept back into the news now, almost 20 years later, as the subject of BBC Three serialized documentary Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared. It's an attempt at a British take on Making a Murderer or Serial—where a quick Google search could tell all about how the story's unfolded so far—and fronted by Panorama investigative journalists Bronagh Munro and Alys Harte.

"Quite quickly we came to Damien's story as this remarkable case that had thousands of people involved in the police investigation, hundreds of witness statements taken, and then... nothing," Harte says, speaking over the phone on the day Unsolved debuted online. "They made eight arrests, there was a massive effort over 20 years, and yet still nothing. Other people had tried before so we thought, we should give this a go." The results of she and Munro's yearlong investigation is an eight-part show, split into bite-sized episodes that each run to about 15 minutes long. You're taken onto the island, introduced to a score of characters believed to be linked to Damien, and left fumbling in the dark after quiet whispers of leads, bumping into one dead end after the next.

Damien's mother, Valerie Nettles, shows up early as a key resource. She flies back to the Isle of Wight from her Dallas home to meet Munro and Harte, sending them all the information she's gathered on the case to date. Watching her walk along the streets that somehow snatched her son away, it's hard not to feel moved by how calm she seems. How composed.

I ask Harte what it felt like to work with Valerie, no doubt opening up old wounds about the night that changed her life for good. "The kind of grief that Valerie's dealing with is a really complicated, heartbreaking one," Harte says. "She's ... pretty sure that her son is dead but she's not 100 percent sure. And she doesn't have anywhere to grieve him—she doesn't have a grave—so it's really difficult." You see that written on Valerie's face, first when she video chats with the two reporters and later when they meet in person.

Surely, after years of speaking to the press about a story that's barely progressed, Valerie would feel drained at the prospect of dredging everything up again, this time for the BBC. How did it feel to be back on the island during filming? "Going back after Damien went missing is bittersweet," she says, speaking from her home in Texas, "because I love it, but something terrible happened to us there. Something ripped our family apart and caused us to spiral off in a direction we would have never had to go in our lives."

Valerie, with Damien as a baby. Photo courtesy of Valerie Nettles

She goes on: "I knew it wasn't going to be easy, going into this program, and that we may not get all the answers we would hope for. But I think it's highlighted more questions surrounding the case—it's been a hard slog for nearly 20 years to make some sense out of all of this."

She's right. You can go through all eight episodes of Unsolved and walk away as confused as you started. Harte and Munro present plenty of leads, and most of the evidence they uncover seems to point in the direction of a couple of drug houses run by some of the town's dealers. One in particular, Nicky McNamara, stands out as a prime source of potential knowledge. That sounds promising, you might think, until you learn that he's dead. He was found in 2003, reportedly after taking an overdose at a friend's house—and obviously "dead men can't talk," as Valerie tells me.

By the time you meet Shirley Barrett—who used to live in the house where McNamara died and is doorstepped extraordinarily by Munro and Harte in episode six—then encounter Dan Spencer, another former drug sidekick, you can't tell who is or isn't telling the truth when questioned. "With hindsight I've found out so much," Valerie says, "not just about Shirley Barrett, in the film, but about young people—the age of my kids then—who've come forward now." From them she's learned that drugs featured more heavily in local teenagers' lives than she was aware at the time.

The people who served Damien on that November night—known only as Rob and Sharon—remember him acting strangely, in an account shared second-hand by the former chip shop owner. "It wasn't drink, was Rob's opinion, and Sharon agreed with that," says Denis Welsh in the show. "She said we can recognize drink—it was a 'drugs effect,' if you like."

The Nettles family: father Ed, Damien holding Valerie, and siblings James and Melissa

According to the show, the Hampshire constabulary police lost a few crucial surveillance tapes that could have shown where else Damien walked after midnight; that's just one of a few reasons Valerie has for deeming their handling of the ongoing and open case "lackluster, shoddy, and pitiful." From the police force's perspective, they've spent 20 years involving 1,134 people in the investigation—"either as investigators, witnesses, or people of interest," they say—taking 357 witness statements and reviewing more than 2,500 documents.

But really, it's the banality of Damien's last known whereabouts that make this story so frustrating. Everyone's been on those nights, where you wander from one place to the next in the vague hopes of landing on something entertaining for a few hours. But most of us make it home. Damien never again saw his parents and three siblings—Sarah, now 38, James, 32, and 28-year-old Melissa. To be clear, Unsolved doesn't quite match Making a Murderer or season one of Serial in terms of production value and intrigue, but puts in a valiant effort at digging around for reasons why things turned out the way they did.

"Up until a few minutes after midnight," Harte says, "it's almost minute-by-minute, the eye-witness accounts of where Damien was and who he was speaking to. And then"—she pauses—"it stops. How did a 16-year-old boy disappear? Even if there are great leaps forward in the coming months, I feel there will always be unanswered questions about this case." For Valerie, those questions give her a sense of purpose. "I'm not the only mother of a missing child to feel desperate, but we go out there rattling cages," she says. "That's what we do."

Unsolved: the Boy Who Disappeared is on now available for UK-based viewers to stream on BBC iPlayer

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Beautiful Shots of Berliners Sunbathing Nude on Their Lunch Break

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

If you're in Europe and you're reading this, there's a big chance that you are sweating your shirt off in a heatwave. For a lot of countries this is pretty bad news, because even though you have lakes and rivers going through most major cities, you're not really allowed to go swim in them, for safety reasons or simply because the authorities are too lazy to supervise that area. In some countries you aren't even allowed to relax on the grass in the parks, which only leaves you with air-conditioned apartments and expensive swimming pool memberships.

In Berlin, however, things are a little different. Coyness is not held in high esteem in the birthplace of Free Body Culture—to the point that in many parks it's generally allowed to sunbathe naked. Photographer Ana Topoleanu took a stroll around the city's parks and took some beautiful analog shots of naked Berliners on their lunch breaks.

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An Exhibition of Seats Taken From Deadly Car Crashes

"The Survivors" expo in central Bucharest

This article originally appeared on VICE Romania

Earlier this month, the Romanian police launched an eerie awareness campaign about the life-saving qualities of the seat belt. 15 car seats were placed in central Bucharest, all taken from wrecks of cars in which people lost their lives because they weren't wearing a seat belt. The seats are still stained, but the passengers sitting in them at the time of the accident survived because they did remember to wear their seat belts.

The aim of the exhibition is to reduce the number of traffic-related deaths—Romania has the second highest number of deadly traffic accidents in the European Union. According to the police, about eight lives are lost on the Romanian roads every day because people can't be bothered to wear a belt, forget about it, or actually tie it behind the seat to fool the car's sensors.

Each seat in the exhibition comes with a corny title celebrating the virtues of the seat belt, and a heartbreaking story from the survivor of the crash. Like this one:

"I wish it had been me instead of Cristi and his brother Vali. They were young and full of life. Cristi had just moved to Bucharest and his brother was living with their parents in another city. They had hung out together over the weekend at Christi's, and then we drove Vali back to their parents. They were both tired. Traffic was pretty slow, so Cristi told Vali to relax and leave his seat belt. Suddenly we went off-road, I still don't know why. I yelled at them, but there was no one left to hear me—we hit a concrete wall."

Depending on how decent your Romanian is, you can read more stories here.

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First-Person Shooter: The Definitely-Not-Sober Faces of Guests in a Colorado Hostel

For this week's First-Person Shooter, we handed off two disposable cameras to Nigel Peligree, a desk clerk at the 11th Avenue Hostel located in the middle of Denver's downtown. As a longtime hostel employee, Nigel has seen a variety of unique characters crash at the space—from 20-somethings passing through town on holiday to Vietnam veterans looking for a comfortable bed for a reasonable price.

On top of snapping a few pics of some regular guests, Nigel also burned through a few exposures during the hostel's Fourth of July party—during which he passed out blue and red jello shots that were "gross as hell." Here's what else happened during the weekend he shot the following photos.

VICE: What'd you get up to during the day you took photos?
Nigel Peligree: I woke up, drank two giant cups of coffee, and drove to work. There isn't a specific order of tasks that I follow every day. I'm responsible for making reservations, doing laundry, helping guests with any advice or recommendations they need, security (when needed), and keeping a nice environment for our guests.

What's your usual hotel patron like? In the photos there seem to be lots of old men.
Our patrons range quite a bit from person to person. We often have retired military guys who come to Denver to see family and friends, but aren't in town long enough to get an apartment lease. We have international travelers looking to save a couple dollars on lodging while they road trip across the country with their friends. We have extreme stoners who come to Denver to get as high as possible on our legal marijuana and marijuana products for a few days. We have guests from Denver who are in between housing and need somewhere to stay while they wait on their apartment or house to be ready. We have bands playing local venues who need a room that can fit at least four people and doesn't cost an outrageous amount of money. We bring in a diverse crowd.

What's the worst thing you've ever had to clean up?
Overflowing sewer and rain water in the basement during an extremely bad storm.

Can you tell me about your regulars?
They're generally a little older and have interesting life stories. There's a girl in her late 20s who just got a job in Denver's financial district but hasn't found an apartment because of the extremely competitive housing market. We have another guy who lives in the mountains, rents his house out on Airbnb, and comes down to the city every few weekends to hang out with his friends in the city. We have a bluegrass musician who's been coming to the 11th Ave Hotel once a summer for over ten years to play shows. We also have regular partiers who come to the hostel every few weeks from the suburbs or neighboring cities such as Fort Collins, Boulder, and Colorado Springs. They usually stay because they don't want to make the drive home after going out clubbing for a night or two. I like our regulars.

How can people book some time to stay there?
People can book with us online or by calling us. See our website for more details.

Follow Julian on Instagram and visit his website to see his own photo work.

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What UGK’s ‘Ridin Dirty’ Means to Houston's Souped-Up Car Culture

"Everything I ride original, no kits on them chops," Pimp C proudly declares on "Pinky Ring," a thick slice of Curtis Mayfield-sampling funk from UGK's 1996 opus, Ridin Dirty. The Port Arthur, Texas duo managed to make waves 90 miles down the road in Houston by applying to their music the same virtue that was paramount to the city's auto aficionados: originality. For decades, H-Town's car culture has revolved around "slabs"—slow, low, and bangin' riders outfitted with candy paint, a fifth wheel mounted on the trunk, and rare rims outfitted with protruding spears called "pokes," "swangas," or "elbows." These aftermarket details required imaginative customization from any number of the city's experts. In 1996, Houston already had a well-established hip-hop scene. Geto Boys put the city on the map with their unadulterated realness, and by the mid-90s, the Screwed Up Click's pitched-down, glacially-paced sound came to define the region. But by the time Pimp C and Bun B hit their stride on Ridin Dirty, they, like H-Town's custom car artists, injected even more vibrant originality into the city's culture.

Similarly to Atlanta's Organized Noize, who Pimp actually shouts out in the outro of "Pinky Ring," Ridin Dirty's production team (primarily comprised of Pimp and Scarface confidant N.O. Joe) breathed life into their beats with a heavy use of live instrumentation, hiring a number of keyboard, bass, and guitar players to bolster samples of golden-era funk. The result was a vivid document of both the good and bad—from the crystalline laments of mortality on "One Day" to the sun-kissed glory of "Hi Life"—that was to the increasingly stagnant Houston sound as slabs are to factory-made car models.

Of course, Ridin Dirty was tied to slab culture in much more than a metaphorical sense, too. References to Fleetwood 'Lacs, Mercedes Benz 600 Ss, AMG and Lorenzo rims, Yokohama tires, candy paint, and trunk-popping jump off the page as colorful scene-setting devices, as well as aspirational luxuries for the listener. Cars are so central to the album that Bun and Pimp actually appear in one on the cover, looking over their shoulders in a perfect distillation of Ridin Dirty's intoxicating blend of paranoia and pursuit of wealth.

As Bun B tells it today, he and Pimp were just like any other auto-obsessed Houstonites in '96. "Comparing, showcasing, and talking about the newest car innovations is a way to bond between Southern men and I think car men in general," he told VICE over email, going on to explain the importance of the city's car washes that offered detailing services. "The car wash is the common communal area for car people in the South. Meet up, get clean, and show your sound. The detailing took an hour tops, but guys hung out for two or three times that."

Unlike, say, the stretch Hummer in Juvenile and Lil Wayne's "Bling Bling" video, or the prohibitively expensive (starting at only $189,350!) Maybachs immortalized in the name of Rick Ross's record label, the cars UGK touted were more competitive on the street level. They actually required some work on the owner's part. Constructing slabs has become a much more attainable pursuit in the years since the album's release, thanks to specialized auto parts businesses popping up in response to fierce demand that sometimes proved violent in Houston. UGK's impact on this culture still reverberates through South Texas's custom shops today. So in celebration of Ridin Dirty's 20th anniversary, we hopped on the phone with some of the region's longtime slab artists to get their thoughts on the landmark album.

EDDIE KENNEDY, OWNER OF 3RD COAST CUSTOMS

Bun, Pimp, and I, we're all from the same area. I'm originally from Beaumont, they're from Port Arthur and put it in everybody's face. And a lot of people for a long time never knew what a slab was, but it started to get major exposure and people actually started to accept the slab scene. People in Canada, New Zealand, Tokyo— we ship swangas everywhere. There's people everywhere that want to be down with it now, it's crazy.

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Comics: 'Smut Philosopher,' Today's Comic by American Nature Comics

Check out American Nature Comics on their website, online shop, and blog.

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If You Only Play One ‘Aliens’ Game Today, Make It ‘Infestation’

Don't get too attached to these marines—there's a good chance they won't be seeing the credits.

Aliens is 30 years old. I know this, because I can use calendars. James Cameron's all-guns-blazing sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror masterpiece of 1979 came out in July 1986, pulling in a box office of well over 100 million dollars on a budget of around 18 million. It won two Oscars, seven Saturn Awards, and was undoubtedly my favorite movie of all time until I reached an age where I could better appreciate the pacing and tension of its predecessor (and had seen more films). Its director's cut was a regular watch when underage parties finally cooled down, and we all slumped in front of the TV set. So far as action movies of the 1980s go, though, few come better—IMDb has it placed eighth in terms of popularity for the decade, encompassing films of all genres.

Aliens developed a rabid fanbase, eager for more stories of heavily armed marines battling acid-for-blood xenomorphs across the stars. So when Alien 3 came along in 1992, scarred by scripting problems, director's chair changes and featuring no guns whatsoever in opposition to just a single alien, people got pissed. Cameron himself was a critic of the film, calling its killing off of the survivors of Aliens a "slap in the face." The all-action follow-up to Aliens, sold as a "true sequel" and effectively rewriting the series' story as steered by Alien 3, would ultimately come out as a video game in 2013. Sadly, Aliens: Colonial Marines by Gearbox Software was a disaster of a shooter, riddled with bugs and awful enemy AI, set in boring environments and featuring forgettable characters. "You have to ask, if this didn't have the Alien branding, would it even have seen the light of day?" asked Eurogamer in its review. If only it'd remained in the dark.

For anyone wanting to celebrate Aliens' thirtieth by getting stuck into a video gaming experience of comparable drama and adrenaline, featuring familiar iconography, weaponry, and worlds, it might seem that Colonial Marines is the only option. Suck it up, stick it in—the disc, that is—and just go with it. Yeah, yeah, that is Hicks, and I know, the whole thing's an absolute state; but what else are you going to play these days, on still-active systems? Alien: Isolation is a phenomenal game, of course, but it's a tonal cousin of the first movie, a far cry from the pulse rifle-lugging grunts of bug hunts past.

Well, you could play the WayForward-made Aliens: Infestation. Scratch that: you should play Aliens: Infestation (let's stick with the colon), especially if you're the sort of person who a) loved Cameron's movie more than you should have given you were something like 11 the first time you saw it, and b) know your way around the metroidvania genre, as this is very much an experience that mirrors the 2D open-world design of Nintendo's 1986 explore 'em up. Which is absolutely fair enough, as Metroid certainly borrowed its share of aesthetic cues from Scott's Alien, the game's character designer Yoshio Sakamoto declaring the movie a "huge influence," and its art team looking to H.R. Giger's work for creature inspiration. Infestation is merely cashing in what the Alien franchise was inarguably owed.

Infestation is a Nintendo DS game, meaning that it's also playable on the 3DS range—meaning that there are somewhere in the region of 210 million people out there who can pick this up and immediately play it on their handheld console. But it came out right at the back end of the DS's lifespan, in the autumn of 2011, which hardly aided its commercial visibility. This wasn't the first time a more than decent Alien franchise tie-in emerged when gaming technology had all but moved on.

In late 2000, with the PS2 already selling in big numbers, Alien: Resurrection came out for the original PlayStation, a full three years after the movie it shared its title and plot with. Although it doesn't look too similar at a first glance, Resurrection being a grimy first-person shooter, the game shares a few qualities with Infestation: both are heavy on atmosphere, in place of genuinely transportive graphics, and use multiple player-controlled protagonists. Both are incredibly tough, too, the difference being that once a soldier is dead in Infestation, they stay dead, XCOM style.

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Love aliens? Watch our documentary, The Real 'X-Files'?

Which is why you can never rush anywhere in Infestation. It does put you in the boots of a number of marines, each one packing some serious firepower; but race into a new area of the game—be that during one of its USS Sulaco-set stages, or on the surface of the infamous LV-426—paying little mind to the bleeping of your motion tracker, and you'll swiftly be overwhelmed by aliens, enemy soldiers (alas, this isn't strictly a men (and women) versus monsters affair), aggressive robots or any combination of Bad Things. On opening each and every door, via keycards or blowtorch, you creep into the newly discovered space, just in case. Because underneath all that armor, behind all those guns and bombs, and beneath those layers of attitude, you're just a puny human. And puny humans die real easily.

I've had my crew—four at a time, and no more, with new recruits available to fill vacant roles, assuming you can find stray soldiers willing to step in—obliterated inside 20 minutes of play before. Lose all four of your squad without an opportunity to recruit replacements, like in a tough boss battle encounter, and it's game over, man, game over. Every character plays the same way, at the same speed and with the same abilities, but Infestation's vibrant character designs, by X-Men artist Chris Bachalo, means that each has a distinct personality when exchanging messages with the operation's commanding officer, one Patrick "Stainless" Steel.

'Aliens: Infestation,' launch trailer

And the mission at the game's narrative core is unashamedly indebted to Cameron's 1986 story—"the company," Weyland-Yutani, is again trying to get aliens into its research facilities with the objective of using them as biological weapons. Your team isn't about to let this happen, even with a "generic company man" (the game's words, not mine) interfering. Plenty of callbacks to Aliens are inserted into the gameplay, including a loader fight, flambéing eggs, and a frantic APC escape; and the music's bombastic blasts and eerie turns are deliberately evocative of James Horner's original score.

Infestation looks simple, primitive, as a great many 2D games do nowadays. It's not going to blow anyone away with its looks, however nice some of the idle animations are. And it's not going to take up days of your time—if you're good enough, and that'll take practice, you can finish the whole thing within three hours, barely longer than the film that inspired it. But this is a deep and memorable Aliens-affiliated experience that does a terrific job of continuing the action that Cameron's movie delivered. It's not considered canon, as Colonial Marines so depressingly is, but by leaving the events of Alien 3 untouched but still returning to so many memorable locations—you even see inside the Derelict—it assuredly earns its unofficial place within the series in fan-pleasing style.

This is not the perfect Alien/s game—its respawning enemies can absolutely dick off, and there are times when the environment is almost conspiring against you, trapping your marine between a crate and an enemy with a gun, with no wiggle room to get your own shots away. To be honest, I don't think any game tied to 20th Century Fox's continuing franchise has quite nailed its interactive potential. But Infestation is absolutely the best game, the only game, to celebrate Aliens' thirtieth anniversary with, that you can easily play today without having to source a defunct console, or Konami's thoroughly bananas arcade game of 1990. Because zombies were a thing in Aliens, right?

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