20/20 Britain's Most Notorious Crime Investigations (2026) s01e01 Episode Script
Ben Needham: Lost in Paradise
1
[Kerry] I hate coming back here.
It makes me shake.
It makes me feel physically sick.
Coming back here makes me relive that day.
A two-year-old boy from Sheffield
has disappeared while on
a Greek holiday island.
[Christine] I thought,
"Ben's really quiet".
And I went out, and he wasn't there.
"Where's Ben?"
How can a child just vanish?
A full-scale search is continuing
for the missing Sheffield toddler
who disappeared while staying
with his mother.
I appealed for anyone
with any information, please come forward.
[newsreader] Police say the boy
could have been kidnapped.
Why would someone steal my child?
[speaking in Greek]
Little Ben is in my hands.
[Christine in English]
We thought, "Oh my God,
this is really important.
This could be it."
[speaking in Greek]
If the boy were here, we'd give him back.
[in English]
"If you don't go, he's gonna shoot you."
[speaking in Greek] Go away or we'll take
our guns and kill you.
[Mark in English] It is one of the world's
greatest mysteries.
What happened to Ben Needham?
It's like being private investigators
with no experience whatsoever.
The witness coming forward,
this was the breakthrough.
What the bloody hell is going on?
Something's happening.
You're left with the one
plausible explanation.
[Kerry] They were not looking
for a full little body.
They were looking for fragments of him.
If he's dead, where's the evidence?
But if he's alive, where is he?
[Kerry] It's like living
my worst nightmare.
Someone on that island
knows what happened to Ben.
I will find the answers.
That one is the last-ever photograph
taken of Ben.
The last-ever picture taken of him.
Absolutely beautiful, inside and out.
Ben was born in 1989. I was still 17.
Everybody wanted to spend time with him
because he was such a happy little baby.
He had a cute little giggle,
he would make everybody laugh.
My family were a very, very
normal working-class family.
We lived in a very poor area
of Sheffield, in England.
I didn't want Ben to grow up
living in a place like that.
My parents decided they were gonna go
and move to the Greek island of Kos
to have a better way of life for us.
Kos was freedom to me
and hopefully to my family.
Me and Kerry's dad, Eddie,
and the kids, Stephen and Danny.
I have two brothers, Stephen,
who is two years younger than me,
and Danny,
who is six years younger than me.
[Danny]
Ben's like a little brother, really.
Even though we're a 10-year age gap,
we'd play.
He just had a good sense of humour.
Always playing and messing around.
A lot of people thought, "You can't
just go and live on a Greek island".
Well, yes, we can.
It's still the same.
It's still a beautiful island.
And that's the reason why we all came
[Danny] Why we'd come here
in the first place.
[Kerry] Yeah.
It's not the island itself's fault, is it?
[serene music playing]
My first impression of Kos was
"Wow". Never seen
anything like it in my life.
You've got the sunshine,
the colour of the sea. So blue, so clean.
It was like living in a dream world.
The Needhams would've been an unusual
addition for the Kos society at the time.
This was a closed-off society
where everybody knew everyone.
This is a conservative part
of Greek society.
Kerry had Ben when she was very young.
All this would've been talked about.
Many people would've disapproved.
Teenage pregnancy was considered,
you know, not the acceptable thing to do.
Everybody seemed so smiley, so happy,
so friendly, wanting to help.
Now we look back and go,
"Well, were we that stupid to believe
that everybody on the island was nice?"
But we did.
[Christine] We rented some land,
an olive grove, off a farmer.
Absolutely idyllic.
Eddie and Stephen got a job
to renovate an old farmhouse,
and they went off to work there
every single day.
[Kerry] I managed to get a waitress job
at a hotel very, very close by.
I would drop Ben off with my mum.
You know, "I will take care of Ben
while you go to work".
I was like the second mother.
You didn't think that anything bad
would ever, ever happen on that island.
We had no idea that it held dark secrets.
I gave him a kiss on his lips,
and said goodbye and set off to work.
I thought me and Ben
could have a little stroll
and surprise Eddie and Stephen at work.
Ben was in a pushchair,
and he'd got two Dinky cars.
He was banging them together
to make sounds.
When we arrived at the farmhouse,
Eddie was mixing concrete.
They were waiting for Dino,
the digger driver,
who was helping to build another property.
-The tree's still there. No.
-Yeah. Not much of it, though, is there?
[Christine]
Ben was playing under the tree.
We sat inside, and Ben was coming
in and out of the door, playing.
You feel all right?
-Mmm.
-You'll be okay.
Stephen decided there's no more work
for him to do that day.
He said he was going home on his motorbike
to get a shower.
Ben was still playing
outside the farmhouse door,
and Stephen just
drove off on his motorbike.
Stephen was the last person to see Ben.
A bit later, I thought,
"Ben's really quiet".
And I went out, and he wasn't there.
I was like,
"Where's Ben? Where is he?"
I came out of this doorway,
and I went down that way.
And then I came back and thought,
"He can't have got this far".
Eddie went across the field,
shouting his name,
and he came back saying,
"He's not there. There's no one there".
[Kerry] My dad went to the other property
where Dino was working.
Dino wasn't around. Nobody was around.
That's when we thought Stephen
must have took him on the motorbike,
because Ben was
always getting on the motorbike.
That was the logical explanation.
At that point, we stopped looking.
I wasn't alarmed at all.
I decided, "I am not going to tell Kerry,
because she's at work,"
and I didn't want to panic her,
because in my brain, I was still thinking,
"Stephen's gonna
bring him back in a minute".
Later on that evening,
I distinctly remember being with my dad,
going to Steve's apartment and saying,
"Steve, it's only us. Where's Ben?"
And I remember Steve saying,
"Ben? I ain't got Ben".
"Oh, my God. Where is he, then?"
That's panic.
So that's when me and Stephen
went to the police station.
They decided to send some officers up
to the farmhouse, and they all searched.
My dad searched into places
that there would be no way
a 21-month-old child could've gone to.
He went into grass up to here,
and there is no way Ben would've gone
in there, but he searched them anyway.
The police were questioning my mum about
"Where is the mother?"
So then the police brought my mum
to the hotel where I was working.
She's crying, and I said,
you know, "What's happened?"
She said, "I can't find Ben".
"What do you mean, you can't find Ben?"
She went, "I've lost him.
I can't find him".
[Christine] I was proper crying by then.
I was like, "I've lost him and it's dark
and he'll be frightened, and"
And she calmed me down.
She said, "Mum, Mum, it'll be OK.
We'll find him".
We went up to the farmhouse,
and we searched,
shouting his name,
and you're just shouting,
waiting to hear a cry
or somebody say, "I've got him".
And it didn't come. It just didn't come.
So I'm panicking.
"My son's going to be scared.
He wants his mummy".
Which was soul-destroying.
And it was then the police said,
"You need to come
to the police station now and give
"your official statements".
We were taken one by one into a room.
It felt like an interrogation,
and that was when the Greek police
said to Stephen,
"You took the child. You killed the child.
You buried the child".
Because Ben's nowhere to be seen,
they've checked everything,
the Greek police were all thinking,
"The family have got
something to do with it".
I was an unfit mother for going to work
and leaving my child
with his grandparents.
You're begging them for help, [sniffling]
and they're accusing you
of doing something.
And then it was,
"Well, it must be Stephen, then".
Stephen had a broken
indicator cap on his motorbike,
and one of the Greek officers
asked Stephen,
"Did you have an accident?"
Stephen said, "Well, yeah, I did,
but it was three weeks ago".
Stephen said, "They think that I have had
an accident with him and buried his body".
Stephen was horrified, and he walked
out of that interrogation room.
He was absolutely beside himself.
There was just
a little farmhouse opposite,
where an old Greek couple lived.
The old lady actually saw Stephen
leave that day on his motorbike.
Alone.
So then they had to stop accusing Stephen.
We're in a foreign country,
and the police were all we had.
I didn't want to lose my temper,
because I didn't want to upset them.
I would've thought everybody on
the plot of land would've been a suspect,
irrespective of who they were and
their relationship to Ben and his family.
There was very little evidence
about what had happened to Ben
and every lead
needed to be followed up on.
So the Kos police had to interview
the Needham family,
even if it was just to confirm
that they were not involved.
This is something
that everybody on the island
would've found out about very quickly.
They would be talking about it
and probably gossiping as well.
We were horrified
at the rubbish they were talking.
"The grandfather, he's an alcoholic".
"The grandmother, she was having
an affair with the local shepherd".
It was like, "What?"
"Ben, he was dirty and starving.
The mother didn't care.
"She went to the discos. She was drunk".
It was the island rumours
that were spreading like wildfire.
[sniffling] We were a family needing help.
They wasn't interested in helping.
They wanted a solution,
which was to blame the family.
There was just a knock at the door.
Opened the door and he said, "Hello.
I'm looking for the Needham family".
I'm like, "Yes".
"I'm here from The Sun newspaper".
That's when the news broke in the UK.
I think the whole of the British media
turned up.
A two-year-old boy from Sheffield
has disappeared while on
a Greek holiday island.
Police say he may have been kidnapped.
That was the first report
that was broadcast anywhere
about Ben's disappearance.
When the call came in
to report that a child had gone missing
on a Greek island,
everybody's ears pricked up.
We hadn't heard of anything quite like it.
[interviewer] What have the police
been doing to try to find Benny?
[Kerry] Just searching everywhere.
And within days, it had gone
from a regional news programme
to be covered by
all the national newspapers.
The thought was "Child's gone,
disappeared, on a Greek island.
"Must have been abducted".
[interviewer] And what would you say
to anybody listening to this
who might actually have
some information about Benny?
[Kerry] Bring him back to me.
So, the next question would be
"Who's done it?
"Why have they done it?"
It was a complete mystery.
In Greece,
a scandal has come into the open
of the theft of thousands of babies
from poor and illiterate parents.
[newsreader 2] In Greece today,
there is an active illegal trade
in children being sold for adoption.
[Kerry] We actually learned that
child trafficking in Greece had been rife.
We already had our suspicions
that Ben had been abducted.
But the more times we spoke to people,
the more apparent it became.
The Needham family uncovered
a very, very murky world.
[speaking in Greek] The price for a boy is
higher than for a girl.
For a blond with blue eyes
it's definitely higher.
For a boy the price can be
anything up to £12,000.
[in English] No wonder the Needhams
thought that
that could have happened to Ben.
[Kerry] Because Ben had blond hair
and blue eyes,
he would fetch the most amount of money.
It opened our eyes to
someone had taken him.
We wholeheartedly believed
that Ben had been abducted.
It's the only thing
that could have happened,
cos there was no cars,
there was no danger,
he hasn't fallen in the sea and drowned.
The only theory that was possible
was someone had taken him.
But there was no developments,
absolutely nothing.
[Mark] Weeks and weeks went past
without anything happening on the island.
The Greek police said the search for Ben
was being wound down,
because there was
nothing to investigate any more.
[Kerry] So much time lost. [sniffles]
That's when the distrust
really, really started to set in.
[Mark] At the time, the family were
getting no help from the UK embassy.
They were banging their heads
against a brick wall.
[Christine] About six weeks
after Ben disappeared,
we thought it necessary
to get our family back to England.
We needed to talk to the English police,
cos nothing was happening.
Day after day of nothingness.
We had no money, so my dad literally sold
everything just to get back to the UK.
Even down to my mum and dad's
wedding rings.
Sad. Very, very sad.
As the ferry started to leave,
I thought, "It's a mistake.
I am leaving my son behind".
I thought I was abandoning him.
And Stephen said, "We've got to do this.
We've got to. We haven't got any help.
"We're doing this for Ben. If we go back,
"we will be able to find him
because we'll get the help that we need".
And we just sobbed and sobbed
and sobbed for hours.
When we arrived back in the UK,
we were appointed
a liaison officer
from South Yorkshire Police,
and they organised
a press conference for us.
[reporter] Ben's mother made this appeal
to holidaymakers in Greece.
Just to keep looking for him.
If they think that they see him, take
a photograph, please, and bring it home.
They did what they could do,
but we were told the British police
cannot go and investigate
in a missing persons case abroad.
[Mark] South Yorkshire Police had
absolutely no jurisdiction in Greece.
They have no jurisdiction to arrest.
They have no jurisdiction to question.
No investigating officers,
no one to do it for us.
We'll do this on our own,
cos we're not getting any help anyway.
I appealed for anyone
with any information.
"If you've been on holiday in Greece, and
you've seen a child that resembled Ben,
"please come forward.
Send photographs if you can".
And that's when alleged sightings of Ben
started to come in.
[indistinct chatter]
We got 17 sightings of a blond-haired,
blue-eyed child living on Corfu.
He was living amongst Greek people
who were very dark-skinned.
This sounds promising.
[Christine] We didn't have the funds,
so the media took us out there,
just me and Kerry,
and we found the place where the boy was.
Myself and my mum just waited
for this little boy to appear.
I was anxious.
He appeared, and he was beautiful.
He was definitely English.
But he wasn't Ben.
[Christine] She completely lost it.
She held her head
and ran into the street, screaming.
It actually felt like
losing him all over again.
That experience was one of hundreds.
Hundreds of sightings
coming from the newspapers,
from people just sending us letters.
It's now three years
since the toddler Ben Needham
went missing on the Greek island of Kos.
Police have failed to trace the boy
or uncover any information.
Every single time you get another lead,
you think, "This is it. It has to be".
It's like being private investigators
with no experience whatsoever.
If one slipped through the net,
how could you not know it was that one?
A private investigator had claimed that
the boy, whom he traced to a gypsy camp
in northern Greece, was Ben.
And that was our life.
That's what we had to do by ourselves.
[newsreader] A computer-generated picture
of Ben Needham as he may look now.
[Kerry] As he was aging,
it was becoming more difficult
because we didn't exactly know
what Ben looked like any more.
So you were guessing
from age progression pictures.
And the years kept going on and on and on.
[Mark] Kerry had a really difficult time.
How can anybody cope
with what she's gone through?
Years and years of chasing shadows,
and that takes it out of you.
How many more times
can I put myself through that pain
of losing my boy over and over
and over again?
Because that's what it felt like,
year after year after year.
But we didn't give up.
It was the fifth anniversary
of Ben going missing,
and my parents travelled to Athens.
They took part in a Greek TV show.
'Reporting In The Fog'
We was told that 99% of Greeks
watch that programme.
[speaking in Greek]
We are searching for Ben Needham.
[Mark in English] This was the first time
in a couple of years
that the case had been featured on Greek
television, so it was really important.
-Good evening. I'm fine. Thank you.
-How are you?
-Good evening. How are you?
-Good evening.
[Christine] Sitting in that TV studio
just seemed a bit unreal,
but being on that
was the most important part to us.
We're speaking directly
to the Greek people.
Is it guilt or perhaps love
that you're trying to keep going?
Love, mostly. And guilt because he was
in our care, and it's our fault.
We have to find him. We have to.
Whilst they were live on that show,
a man called in who was in prison,
and the whole tone of the show changed.
[man speaking in Greek] I want to tell
the whole truth about little Ben.
Little Ben is in my hands.
[in English] What the bloody hell
is going on? Cos something's happening.
[Christine] We thought, "Oh, my God.
This is really important".
Somebody's telling you something
you've waited to hear for a long time.
This could be it.
[man speaking in Greek]
He's with a cousin of mine.
Right now he's in Greece.
Ben is in Patras.
[in English] The prisoner said
that he had seen Ben in 1992,
and he was in the company
of the Kerimi family.
They are self-proclaimed to be the king
of the travellers in northern Greece.
This was the breakthrough.
[Kerry] My parents took the lead
very, very seriously.
They'd seen how the people
who were live on air were reacting.
My parents decided to investigate
that claim even further.
The Greek police didn't think
it was a credible lead,
so we were on our own again.
The next step was to go to Larissa prison
and speak to the prisoner
directly himself.
[Christine] The media took us out there,
just me and Eddie,
a cameraman and an interpreter.
We never thought, when Ben disappeared,
that we would end up talking to criminals.
I'd lost everything,
so there was nothing else to lose.
It was very scary.
[Christine] Did his cousin take Ben?
-[man speaking in Greek]
-[translator] He says, yes, of course.
[Christine] Where is Ben now?
-He's in Patras. He says he's in Patras.
-[Christine] Yeah?
-[Christine] Wow.
-[Eddie] I believe her.
[Christine] I do.
I think we'll just die of disappointment
if it's not Ben this time.
And then they decided
there was only one thing to do,
and that was go to visit the Kerimi family
and ask them questions face-to-face.
[Christine] Travelling through
northern Greece to search for Ben,
we had to go in a lot of
travelling community camps.
We felt we didn't belong there,
but we needed to be there.
[speaking in Greek] Hello, hello.
[Christine in English] We thought that
if we gave someone enough money,
then they would tell us.
We would've paid anybody anything
for the right information.
[speaking in Greek] Why would anyone want
to take a foreign child?
If the boy were here, we'd give him back.
[Christine in English]
The family that I was looking for,
we'd been told to be very careful,
and we were quite apprehensive.
We went in with an interpreter, who asked
if we could speak to the main man,
and he did come out.
Really mad, he was.
His face was really angry,
and it was quite intimidating.
[speaking in Greek] You have ridiculed us.
Do you want to get beaten up?
[in English] And the interpreter
was very, very scared.
[speaking in Greek] Go away or we'll take
our guns and kill you.
[in English] She went,
"He's gonna get a gun.
If you don't go, he's gonna shoot you".
He went into the house and came out
with a tea towel over his hand,
and she said, "He's got a gun.
We have to go".
[speaking in Greek] Why are you asking us
if we have a foreign child here?
Go and find him yourself.
[Kerry in English] It was a dead end.
You couldn't take the investigation
anywhere else.
There was nowhere else to go.
The Kerimi family denied it.
We couldn't prove. We couldn't disprove.
Sixteen years after Ben went missing,
the trail had gone well and truly cold.
And then another British child
disappeared abroad.
A family holiday in Portugal
has turned into a nightmare.
A three-year-old girl, Madeleine McCann,
has disappeared from the apartment
where she was sleeping.
There are fears she's been abducted.
Another child. And it was like,
"Oh, my God. Here we go again".
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home to her mummy,
daddy, brother and sister.
I slowly watched the story unfold
about Madeleine.
With the Portuguese now conducting
one of the largest search operations
ever seen in the Algarve,
several senior British detectives
are assisting behind the scenes.
There's nothing against the McCanns,
there's nothing against what they had,
but I was seeing massive differences
in how this case was being handled
and how Ben's case was handled.
[newsreader] Now about 130 officers
working on the case,
including scores of detectives
brought in from the capital, Lisbon.
[Mark] The disappearance
of Madeleine McCann
was like lighting a blue touchpaper
on the Ben Needham case.
[Kerry] Then the press descended
on my doorstep,
and I did 27 interviews in one day.
It's something that no parent
should ever have to go through.
Ben's name was brought out there again,
and then they had to do something.
That's when the funding was given
to South Yorkshire Police
and Operation Ben was launched.
[newsreader] The Home Office has given
South Yorkshire Police
over a million pounds
to spend on this new inquiry,
so this may well be the last official
attempt to find out what happened to Ben.
I'm Matt Fenwick,
Detective Superintendent,
and I was the lead investigator
on Operation Ben.
I was the first UK police officer
to go to Greece
and actually work in conjunction
with Greek authorities,
actually doing an investigation
on foreign soil.
It was quite groundbreaking at that time.
South Yorkshire Police would follow up
every line of inquiry
with a fine-tooth comb.
[Christine] They were our heroes.
At last, we've got police
who know about investigation,
who are gonna strip it
right back to the beginning.
We believed that
they would find the answers.
One of the pivotal lines of inquiry,
was Ben being abducted
by a Roma traveller family,
the Kerimi family?
There were a number of sightings
of blond-haired children
of the right age with that family.
So we've interviewed all of
the Roma traveller family themselves,
and we've taken DNA
of the children themselves,
who were obviously older by now,
and we've been able to completely negate
that these children were Ben Needham.
The police wanted to discount the Kerimis.
So the team went to visit the prisoner
who had phoned the Greek TV show
to say that he knew where Ben was.
And he admitted that
what he had said was not true.
There'd been a feud between
the prisoner and the Kerimi family,
and he wanted to get back at them.
[Matt] It was always gonna be a difficult
case, but I really wanted to help Kerry
and find out what happened to Ben.
But it was a dead end.
We've negated all the lines of inquiry
that were presented to us.
[Christine] After four years of
South Yorkshire Police's intensive work,
there was no significant lead.
In 2016, we got a breakthrough.
There was a guy
called Konstantinos Varkas,
known as Dino, and he was a digger driver,
and he was working next door
to where Ben went missing.
[Kerry] My dad had worked with him
on a couple of other jobs.
They weren't friends,
but they knew each other.
[Matt] He is the owner
of quite a large Caterpillar.
And when he sits in it,
he can't see anything
for 10 meters around him
because of where
It's the position of the equipment itself.
Dino was often seen around
the area of the farmhouse
where Eddie was helping to renovate.
[Matt] So, in 2016,
we got approached by a witness
that said that he was a friend of Dino,
and that he'd seen Dino at the property
where Ben went missing from
on the day that Ben went missing.
And he recalls that he'd seen Ben
playing in the area between the two houses
and really close
to where the machinery was.
I think you've got to bear in mind
that were Ben to come into contact
with that machinery,
then the likelihood is that
it would be catastrophic.
The witness said that he saw Dino
over the following days,
and he said that Dino had been red-faced,
upset, sweating, was in quite a state.
The witness recalls Dino saying that
he may have run something over
that made a noise.
Dino says, "I ran over something
that yelped, and I thought it was a dog".
Dino confessed to the witness
that he believed it was a possibility
that he had killed Ben.
The witness coming forward
was the biggest breakthrough
that this case had ever had.
[Matt] This witness
also showed us a location
that Dino, when he was excavating soil
or rocks,
he had a location where he would dump it,
and he showed us where that location was.
This was the most conclusive piece
of information that we'd ever come across.
A new witness has come forward to say that
Ben, who went missing on July 24th, 1991,
when he was just 21 months old,
was actually killed that same day.
It's thought he was hit by a digger
working near the farmhouse
where he was playing.
The driver then buried his body.
[Matt] Dino passed away in 2015.
I think the witness only came forward,
you know, 21 years later,
because Dino had died.
I think that there could have been
a level of guilt
whereby he wanted to let Kerry know
what he believed had actually happened.
As a result of the information
we got from the witness,
we were able to identify a site
and we were able to do an excavation.
[man] Ben's body may have been buried
somewhere in this small dusty olive grove.
After a search that spanned
a quarter of a century,
and much of the planet,
the toddler could've been lying here,
just yards from where he went missing,
all along.
This is where we did the excavation,
and this is where
we were looking for Ben's remains.
We had ground-penetrating radar equipment.
We took cadaver dogs over there with us,
and we undertook quite a large-scale dig.
[Kerry] They were not looking
for a full little body.
They were looking for
fragments of him,
because he'd been basically
crushed to death.
Watching the excavation day by day,
there was no human bones,
there was no decomposed body,
there was no Ben's clothes.
And every day that went by,
expectations of finding Ben's remains
drifted further and further and further.
And then they found the car.
[newsreader] Twenty-one days
of excavations on the island
culminated in a find police say
is of great significance,
an item Ben had with him
on the day he disappeared.
[Mark] It was in October, 2016.
On the very last day of the excavation,
one of the Greek volunteers
found a toy car.
[Kerry]
We were ready for leaving the island.
And then I got a phone call
that an item of interest had been found,
and would we be up
for having a look at it.
South Yorkshire Police turned up
with evidence bags.
Inside was a yellow Dinky car.
[Christine] I remember it exactly.
We burst into tears.
Me and Kerry just cried
and cried and cried.
We said, "Yes, it is. It is the car".
Cos we actually bought the toys
from the toy store in Kos town for Ben.
He didn't have many toys.
[Kerry] "Well, if they found that,
have they found Ben?"
[sniffles]
It's like living my worst nightmare.
When we found the toy car,
when we found the other bits,
the bits of leather, the bits of rubber,
we sent them to be forensically tested.
And following that forensic examination,
they found that there was support
for an assumption
that the toy car had been in contact
with blood or tissue
that had now decomposed.
[Kerry] It was the worst news
any family can receive,
but at least we know what had happened.
It was heart-wrenching.
Absolutely heart-wrenching.
You're left with
the one plausible explanation.
I think that Dino went into the area
where Eddie was during the renovations,
and then I think Ben
was playing between the two properties.
I think that it's likely that Ben
came into contact with
that huge piece of machinery.
I think Ben died as a result of that.
I think it would've been an accident.
I believe that Ben's body was moved
as a result of a criminal conspiracy,
to hide the fact of what had taken place.
I believe it's the final answer
in what happened to Ben.
The feeling of losing Ben
will never leave me. Never.
[sighs] I'm OK.
It hurts.
[Mark] South Yorkshire Police's belief
was that Ben had died on the day
he went missing.
The family going abroad
and chasing shadows for 25 years
had been a complete waste of time.
Who knows?
Because Dino can't answer for himself.
Dino's family vehemently deny
South Yorkshire Police's accusations.
Didn't know what to say.
If that's what's happened,
then at least I can grieve.
It's better than the not knowing,
cos the not knowing is the hardest.
It's hard to accept that Ben's died.
But I believe them,
because they're the police.
[Mark] The whole place had just seemed
to be swarming with cameras.
The headline was "Ben Needham is Dead".
[newsreader] Tonight, devastating news.
Police have told Kerry they believe
Ben was knocked down
and killed on the very day
that he went missing.
[Mark] At the time, in 2016,
techniques weren't advanced enough
to extract the DNA from the toy car.
But two years later, there were advances,
and they were able to test it for DNA.
[Kerry] Two years after the dig,
I got a phone call.
"Kerry, I'm sorry to tell you that
the human decomposition inside the car
"is not a match to Ben's".
And I was, like, thinking,
"Why are you sorry?" [sniffles]
Because that means he's alive, then.
That means the accident didn't happen.
You didn't find his body.
You didn't find anything else.
All you found is a toy car.
So he's not dead, then.
Two years of believing that he was dead,
that they couldn't find him,
and it was hard.
[Matt] I do accept that
we may not have found the answers
that they were looking for,
but I think that the chances of him
being alive are extremely low.
I think it's highly likely that he's dead.
And that we haven't found his remains,
and we don't know where to look now.
[Mark] There was one major problem for me.
No body was found.
If somebody can prove
that your son is dead,
then OK. They can somehow move on.
But they need physical evidence
that he's gone.
So they can never They can't mourn.
[Kerry] So then my campaign started again.
Ben is still a missing person in my mind.
I decided to create a new website.
We get messages of support every day.
You know, people just send in
a quick message saying,
"I've never forgotten about Ben's case".
I'm always checking the emails,
I'm always checking the messages,
just in case
it's that one important thing.
It's a case of pushing Ben's name
back into the public eye.
It is still an ongoing investigation.
Thirty-five years on, and we're still
no closer than we were in 1991.
Having covered this case for 35 years,
I am no closer to knowing the truth.
I don't know if Ben's alive,
and I don't know if he's dead.
[Kerry] We, as a family,
will never let this lie.
I appealed to them people on Kos,
tell me the truth, tell me what happened,
tell me where he is if you can,
and I will go away.
But until then, I'm not going anywhere.
[melancholy music playing]
[Kerry] I hate coming back here.
It makes me shake.
It makes me feel physically sick.
Coming back here makes me relive that day.
A two-year-old boy from Sheffield
has disappeared while on
a Greek holiday island.
[Christine] I thought,
"Ben's really quiet".
And I went out, and he wasn't there.
"Where's Ben?"
How can a child just vanish?
A full-scale search is continuing
for the missing Sheffield toddler
who disappeared while staying
with his mother.
I appealed for anyone
with any information, please come forward.
[newsreader] Police say the boy
could have been kidnapped.
Why would someone steal my child?
[speaking in Greek]
Little Ben is in my hands.
[Christine in English]
We thought, "Oh my God,
this is really important.
This could be it."
[speaking in Greek]
If the boy were here, we'd give him back.
[in English]
"If you don't go, he's gonna shoot you."
[speaking in Greek] Go away or we'll take
our guns and kill you.
[Mark in English] It is one of the world's
greatest mysteries.
What happened to Ben Needham?
It's like being private investigators
with no experience whatsoever.
The witness coming forward,
this was the breakthrough.
What the bloody hell is going on?
Something's happening.
You're left with the one
plausible explanation.
[Kerry] They were not looking
for a full little body.
They were looking for fragments of him.
If he's dead, where's the evidence?
But if he's alive, where is he?
[Kerry] It's like living
my worst nightmare.
Someone on that island
knows what happened to Ben.
I will find the answers.
That one is the last-ever photograph
taken of Ben.
The last-ever picture taken of him.
Absolutely beautiful, inside and out.
Ben was born in 1989. I was still 17.
Everybody wanted to spend time with him
because he was such a happy little baby.
He had a cute little giggle,
he would make everybody laugh.
My family were a very, very
normal working-class family.
We lived in a very poor area
of Sheffield, in England.
I didn't want Ben to grow up
living in a place like that.
My parents decided they were gonna go
and move to the Greek island of Kos
to have a better way of life for us.
Kos was freedom to me
and hopefully to my family.
Me and Kerry's dad, Eddie,
and the kids, Stephen and Danny.
I have two brothers, Stephen,
who is two years younger than me,
and Danny,
who is six years younger than me.
[Danny]
Ben's like a little brother, really.
Even though we're a 10-year age gap,
we'd play.
He just had a good sense of humour.
Always playing and messing around.
A lot of people thought, "You can't
just go and live on a Greek island".
Well, yes, we can.
It's still the same.
It's still a beautiful island.
And that's the reason why we all came
[Danny] Why we'd come here
in the first place.
[Kerry] Yeah.
It's not the island itself's fault, is it?
[serene music playing]
My first impression of Kos was
"Wow". Never seen
anything like it in my life.
You've got the sunshine,
the colour of the sea. So blue, so clean.
It was like living in a dream world.
The Needhams would've been an unusual
addition for the Kos society at the time.
This was a closed-off society
where everybody knew everyone.
This is a conservative part
of Greek society.
Kerry had Ben when she was very young.
All this would've been talked about.
Many people would've disapproved.
Teenage pregnancy was considered,
you know, not the acceptable thing to do.
Everybody seemed so smiley, so happy,
so friendly, wanting to help.
Now we look back and go,
"Well, were we that stupid to believe
that everybody on the island was nice?"
But we did.
[Christine] We rented some land,
an olive grove, off a farmer.
Absolutely idyllic.
Eddie and Stephen got a job
to renovate an old farmhouse,
and they went off to work there
every single day.
[Kerry] I managed to get a waitress job
at a hotel very, very close by.
I would drop Ben off with my mum.
You know, "I will take care of Ben
while you go to work".
I was like the second mother.
You didn't think that anything bad
would ever, ever happen on that island.
We had no idea that it held dark secrets.
I gave him a kiss on his lips,
and said goodbye and set off to work.
I thought me and Ben
could have a little stroll
and surprise Eddie and Stephen at work.
Ben was in a pushchair,
and he'd got two Dinky cars.
He was banging them together
to make sounds.
When we arrived at the farmhouse,
Eddie was mixing concrete.
They were waiting for Dino,
the digger driver,
who was helping to build another property.
-The tree's still there. No.
-Yeah. Not much of it, though, is there?
[Christine]
Ben was playing under the tree.
We sat inside, and Ben was coming
in and out of the door, playing.
You feel all right?
-Mmm.
-You'll be okay.
Stephen decided there's no more work
for him to do that day.
He said he was going home on his motorbike
to get a shower.
Ben was still playing
outside the farmhouse door,
and Stephen just
drove off on his motorbike.
Stephen was the last person to see Ben.
A bit later, I thought,
"Ben's really quiet".
And I went out, and he wasn't there.
I was like,
"Where's Ben? Where is he?"
I came out of this doorway,
and I went down that way.
And then I came back and thought,
"He can't have got this far".
Eddie went across the field,
shouting his name,
and he came back saying,
"He's not there. There's no one there".
[Kerry] My dad went to the other property
where Dino was working.
Dino wasn't around. Nobody was around.
That's when we thought Stephen
must have took him on the motorbike,
because Ben was
always getting on the motorbike.
That was the logical explanation.
At that point, we stopped looking.
I wasn't alarmed at all.
I decided, "I am not going to tell Kerry,
because she's at work,"
and I didn't want to panic her,
because in my brain, I was still thinking,
"Stephen's gonna
bring him back in a minute".
Later on that evening,
I distinctly remember being with my dad,
going to Steve's apartment and saying,
"Steve, it's only us. Where's Ben?"
And I remember Steve saying,
"Ben? I ain't got Ben".
"Oh, my God. Where is he, then?"
That's panic.
So that's when me and Stephen
went to the police station.
They decided to send some officers up
to the farmhouse, and they all searched.
My dad searched into places
that there would be no way
a 21-month-old child could've gone to.
He went into grass up to here,
and there is no way Ben would've gone
in there, but he searched them anyway.
The police were questioning my mum about
"Where is the mother?"
So then the police brought my mum
to the hotel where I was working.
She's crying, and I said,
you know, "What's happened?"
She said, "I can't find Ben".
"What do you mean, you can't find Ben?"
She went, "I've lost him.
I can't find him".
[Christine] I was proper crying by then.
I was like, "I've lost him and it's dark
and he'll be frightened, and"
And she calmed me down.
She said, "Mum, Mum, it'll be OK.
We'll find him".
We went up to the farmhouse,
and we searched,
shouting his name,
and you're just shouting,
waiting to hear a cry
or somebody say, "I've got him".
And it didn't come. It just didn't come.
So I'm panicking.
"My son's going to be scared.
He wants his mummy".
Which was soul-destroying.
And it was then the police said,
"You need to come
to the police station now and give
"your official statements".
We were taken one by one into a room.
It felt like an interrogation,
and that was when the Greek police
said to Stephen,
"You took the child. You killed the child.
You buried the child".
Because Ben's nowhere to be seen,
they've checked everything,
the Greek police were all thinking,
"The family have got
something to do with it".
I was an unfit mother for going to work
and leaving my child
with his grandparents.
You're begging them for help, [sniffling]
and they're accusing you
of doing something.
And then it was,
"Well, it must be Stephen, then".
Stephen had a broken
indicator cap on his motorbike,
and one of the Greek officers
asked Stephen,
"Did you have an accident?"
Stephen said, "Well, yeah, I did,
but it was three weeks ago".
Stephen said, "They think that I have had
an accident with him and buried his body".
Stephen was horrified, and he walked
out of that interrogation room.
He was absolutely beside himself.
There was just
a little farmhouse opposite,
where an old Greek couple lived.
The old lady actually saw Stephen
leave that day on his motorbike.
Alone.
So then they had to stop accusing Stephen.
We're in a foreign country,
and the police were all we had.
I didn't want to lose my temper,
because I didn't want to upset them.
I would've thought everybody on
the plot of land would've been a suspect,
irrespective of who they were and
their relationship to Ben and his family.
There was very little evidence
about what had happened to Ben
and every lead
needed to be followed up on.
So the Kos police had to interview
the Needham family,
even if it was just to confirm
that they were not involved.
This is something
that everybody on the island
would've found out about very quickly.
They would be talking about it
and probably gossiping as well.
We were horrified
at the rubbish they were talking.
"The grandfather, he's an alcoholic".
"The grandmother, she was having
an affair with the local shepherd".
It was like, "What?"
"Ben, he was dirty and starving.
The mother didn't care.
"She went to the discos. She was drunk".
It was the island rumours
that were spreading like wildfire.
[sniffling] We were a family needing help.
They wasn't interested in helping.
They wanted a solution,
which was to blame the family.
There was just a knock at the door.
Opened the door and he said, "Hello.
I'm looking for the Needham family".
I'm like, "Yes".
"I'm here from The Sun newspaper".
That's when the news broke in the UK.
I think the whole of the British media
turned up.
A two-year-old boy from Sheffield
has disappeared while on
a Greek holiday island.
Police say he may have been kidnapped.
That was the first report
that was broadcast anywhere
about Ben's disappearance.
When the call came in
to report that a child had gone missing
on a Greek island,
everybody's ears pricked up.
We hadn't heard of anything quite like it.
[interviewer] What have the police
been doing to try to find Benny?
[Kerry] Just searching everywhere.
And within days, it had gone
from a regional news programme
to be covered by
all the national newspapers.
The thought was "Child's gone,
disappeared, on a Greek island.
"Must have been abducted".
[interviewer] And what would you say
to anybody listening to this
who might actually have
some information about Benny?
[Kerry] Bring him back to me.
So, the next question would be
"Who's done it?
"Why have they done it?"
It was a complete mystery.
In Greece,
a scandal has come into the open
of the theft of thousands of babies
from poor and illiterate parents.
[newsreader 2] In Greece today,
there is an active illegal trade
in children being sold for adoption.
[Kerry] We actually learned that
child trafficking in Greece had been rife.
We already had our suspicions
that Ben had been abducted.
But the more times we spoke to people,
the more apparent it became.
The Needham family uncovered
a very, very murky world.
[speaking in Greek] The price for a boy is
higher than for a girl.
For a blond with blue eyes
it's definitely higher.
For a boy the price can be
anything up to £12,000.
[in English] No wonder the Needhams
thought that
that could have happened to Ben.
[Kerry] Because Ben had blond hair
and blue eyes,
he would fetch the most amount of money.
It opened our eyes to
someone had taken him.
We wholeheartedly believed
that Ben had been abducted.
It's the only thing
that could have happened,
cos there was no cars,
there was no danger,
he hasn't fallen in the sea and drowned.
The only theory that was possible
was someone had taken him.
But there was no developments,
absolutely nothing.
[Mark] Weeks and weeks went past
without anything happening on the island.
The Greek police said the search for Ben
was being wound down,
because there was
nothing to investigate any more.
[Kerry] So much time lost. [sniffles]
That's when the distrust
really, really started to set in.
[Mark] At the time, the family were
getting no help from the UK embassy.
They were banging their heads
against a brick wall.
[Christine] About six weeks
after Ben disappeared,
we thought it necessary
to get our family back to England.
We needed to talk to the English police,
cos nothing was happening.
Day after day of nothingness.
We had no money, so my dad literally sold
everything just to get back to the UK.
Even down to my mum and dad's
wedding rings.
Sad. Very, very sad.
As the ferry started to leave,
I thought, "It's a mistake.
I am leaving my son behind".
I thought I was abandoning him.
And Stephen said, "We've got to do this.
We've got to. We haven't got any help.
"We're doing this for Ben. If we go back,
"we will be able to find him
because we'll get the help that we need".
And we just sobbed and sobbed
and sobbed for hours.
When we arrived back in the UK,
we were appointed
a liaison officer
from South Yorkshire Police,
and they organised
a press conference for us.
[reporter] Ben's mother made this appeal
to holidaymakers in Greece.
Just to keep looking for him.
If they think that they see him, take
a photograph, please, and bring it home.
They did what they could do,
but we were told the British police
cannot go and investigate
in a missing persons case abroad.
[Mark] South Yorkshire Police had
absolutely no jurisdiction in Greece.
They have no jurisdiction to arrest.
They have no jurisdiction to question.
No investigating officers,
no one to do it for us.
We'll do this on our own,
cos we're not getting any help anyway.
I appealed for anyone
with any information.
"If you've been on holiday in Greece, and
you've seen a child that resembled Ben,
"please come forward.
Send photographs if you can".
And that's when alleged sightings of Ben
started to come in.
[indistinct chatter]
We got 17 sightings of a blond-haired,
blue-eyed child living on Corfu.
He was living amongst Greek people
who were very dark-skinned.
This sounds promising.
[Christine] We didn't have the funds,
so the media took us out there,
just me and Kerry,
and we found the place where the boy was.
Myself and my mum just waited
for this little boy to appear.
I was anxious.
He appeared, and he was beautiful.
He was definitely English.
But he wasn't Ben.
[Christine] She completely lost it.
She held her head
and ran into the street, screaming.
It actually felt like
losing him all over again.
That experience was one of hundreds.
Hundreds of sightings
coming from the newspapers,
from people just sending us letters.
It's now three years
since the toddler Ben Needham
went missing on the Greek island of Kos.
Police have failed to trace the boy
or uncover any information.
Every single time you get another lead,
you think, "This is it. It has to be".
It's like being private investigators
with no experience whatsoever.
If one slipped through the net,
how could you not know it was that one?
A private investigator had claimed that
the boy, whom he traced to a gypsy camp
in northern Greece, was Ben.
And that was our life.
That's what we had to do by ourselves.
[newsreader] A computer-generated picture
of Ben Needham as he may look now.
[Kerry] As he was aging,
it was becoming more difficult
because we didn't exactly know
what Ben looked like any more.
So you were guessing
from age progression pictures.
And the years kept going on and on and on.
[Mark] Kerry had a really difficult time.
How can anybody cope
with what she's gone through?
Years and years of chasing shadows,
and that takes it out of you.
How many more times
can I put myself through that pain
of losing my boy over and over
and over again?
Because that's what it felt like,
year after year after year.
But we didn't give up.
It was the fifth anniversary
of Ben going missing,
and my parents travelled to Athens.
They took part in a Greek TV show.
'Reporting In The Fog'
We was told that 99% of Greeks
watch that programme.
[speaking in Greek]
We are searching for Ben Needham.
[Mark in English] This was the first time
in a couple of years
that the case had been featured on Greek
television, so it was really important.
-Good evening. I'm fine. Thank you.
-How are you?
-Good evening. How are you?
-Good evening.
[Christine] Sitting in that TV studio
just seemed a bit unreal,
but being on that
was the most important part to us.
We're speaking directly
to the Greek people.
Is it guilt or perhaps love
that you're trying to keep going?
Love, mostly. And guilt because he was
in our care, and it's our fault.
We have to find him. We have to.
Whilst they were live on that show,
a man called in who was in prison,
and the whole tone of the show changed.
[man speaking in Greek] I want to tell
the whole truth about little Ben.
Little Ben is in my hands.
[in English] What the bloody hell
is going on? Cos something's happening.
[Christine] We thought, "Oh, my God.
This is really important".
Somebody's telling you something
you've waited to hear for a long time.
This could be it.
[man speaking in Greek]
He's with a cousin of mine.
Right now he's in Greece.
Ben is in Patras.
[in English] The prisoner said
that he had seen Ben in 1992,
and he was in the company
of the Kerimi family.
They are self-proclaimed to be the king
of the travellers in northern Greece.
This was the breakthrough.
[Kerry] My parents took the lead
very, very seriously.
They'd seen how the people
who were live on air were reacting.
My parents decided to investigate
that claim even further.
The Greek police didn't think
it was a credible lead,
so we were on our own again.
The next step was to go to Larissa prison
and speak to the prisoner
directly himself.
[Christine] The media took us out there,
just me and Eddie,
a cameraman and an interpreter.
We never thought, when Ben disappeared,
that we would end up talking to criminals.
I'd lost everything,
so there was nothing else to lose.
It was very scary.
[Christine] Did his cousin take Ben?
-[man speaking in Greek]
-[translator] He says, yes, of course.
[Christine] Where is Ben now?
-He's in Patras. He says he's in Patras.
-[Christine] Yeah?
-[Christine] Wow.
-[Eddie] I believe her.
[Christine] I do.
I think we'll just die of disappointment
if it's not Ben this time.
And then they decided
there was only one thing to do,
and that was go to visit the Kerimi family
and ask them questions face-to-face.
[Christine] Travelling through
northern Greece to search for Ben,
we had to go in a lot of
travelling community camps.
We felt we didn't belong there,
but we needed to be there.
[speaking in Greek] Hello, hello.
[Christine in English] We thought that
if we gave someone enough money,
then they would tell us.
We would've paid anybody anything
for the right information.
[speaking in Greek] Why would anyone want
to take a foreign child?
If the boy were here, we'd give him back.
[Christine in English]
The family that I was looking for,
we'd been told to be very careful,
and we were quite apprehensive.
We went in with an interpreter, who asked
if we could speak to the main man,
and he did come out.
Really mad, he was.
His face was really angry,
and it was quite intimidating.
[speaking in Greek] You have ridiculed us.
Do you want to get beaten up?
[in English] And the interpreter
was very, very scared.
[speaking in Greek] Go away or we'll take
our guns and kill you.
[in English] She went,
"He's gonna get a gun.
If you don't go, he's gonna shoot you".
He went into the house and came out
with a tea towel over his hand,
and she said, "He's got a gun.
We have to go".
[speaking in Greek] Why are you asking us
if we have a foreign child here?
Go and find him yourself.
[Kerry in English] It was a dead end.
You couldn't take the investigation
anywhere else.
There was nowhere else to go.
The Kerimi family denied it.
We couldn't prove. We couldn't disprove.
Sixteen years after Ben went missing,
the trail had gone well and truly cold.
And then another British child
disappeared abroad.
A family holiday in Portugal
has turned into a nightmare.
A three-year-old girl, Madeleine McCann,
has disappeared from the apartment
where she was sleeping.
There are fears she's been abducted.
Another child. And it was like,
"Oh, my God. Here we go again".
Please, if you have Madeleine,
let her come home to her mummy,
daddy, brother and sister.
I slowly watched the story unfold
about Madeleine.
With the Portuguese now conducting
one of the largest search operations
ever seen in the Algarve,
several senior British detectives
are assisting behind the scenes.
There's nothing against the McCanns,
there's nothing against what they had,
but I was seeing massive differences
in how this case was being handled
and how Ben's case was handled.
[newsreader] Now about 130 officers
working on the case,
including scores of detectives
brought in from the capital, Lisbon.
[Mark] The disappearance
of Madeleine McCann
was like lighting a blue touchpaper
on the Ben Needham case.
[Kerry] Then the press descended
on my doorstep,
and I did 27 interviews in one day.
It's something that no parent
should ever have to go through.
Ben's name was brought out there again,
and then they had to do something.
That's when the funding was given
to South Yorkshire Police
and Operation Ben was launched.
[newsreader] The Home Office has given
South Yorkshire Police
over a million pounds
to spend on this new inquiry,
so this may well be the last official
attempt to find out what happened to Ben.
I'm Matt Fenwick,
Detective Superintendent,
and I was the lead investigator
on Operation Ben.
I was the first UK police officer
to go to Greece
and actually work in conjunction
with Greek authorities,
actually doing an investigation
on foreign soil.
It was quite groundbreaking at that time.
South Yorkshire Police would follow up
every line of inquiry
with a fine-tooth comb.
[Christine] They were our heroes.
At last, we've got police
who know about investigation,
who are gonna strip it
right back to the beginning.
We believed that
they would find the answers.
One of the pivotal lines of inquiry,
was Ben being abducted
by a Roma traveller family,
the Kerimi family?
There were a number of sightings
of blond-haired children
of the right age with that family.
So we've interviewed all of
the Roma traveller family themselves,
and we've taken DNA
of the children themselves,
who were obviously older by now,
and we've been able to completely negate
that these children were Ben Needham.
The police wanted to discount the Kerimis.
So the team went to visit the prisoner
who had phoned the Greek TV show
to say that he knew where Ben was.
And he admitted that
what he had said was not true.
There'd been a feud between
the prisoner and the Kerimi family,
and he wanted to get back at them.
[Matt] It was always gonna be a difficult
case, but I really wanted to help Kerry
and find out what happened to Ben.
But it was a dead end.
We've negated all the lines of inquiry
that were presented to us.
[Christine] After four years of
South Yorkshire Police's intensive work,
there was no significant lead.
In 2016, we got a breakthrough.
There was a guy
called Konstantinos Varkas,
known as Dino, and he was a digger driver,
and he was working next door
to where Ben went missing.
[Kerry] My dad had worked with him
on a couple of other jobs.
They weren't friends,
but they knew each other.
[Matt] He is the owner
of quite a large Caterpillar.
And when he sits in it,
he can't see anything
for 10 meters around him
because of where
It's the position of the equipment itself.
Dino was often seen around
the area of the farmhouse
where Eddie was helping to renovate.
[Matt] So, in 2016,
we got approached by a witness
that said that he was a friend of Dino,
and that he'd seen Dino at the property
where Ben went missing from
on the day that Ben went missing.
And he recalls that he'd seen Ben
playing in the area between the two houses
and really close
to where the machinery was.
I think you've got to bear in mind
that were Ben to come into contact
with that machinery,
then the likelihood is that
it would be catastrophic.
The witness said that he saw Dino
over the following days,
and he said that Dino had been red-faced,
upset, sweating, was in quite a state.
The witness recalls Dino saying that
he may have run something over
that made a noise.
Dino says, "I ran over something
that yelped, and I thought it was a dog".
Dino confessed to the witness
that he believed it was a possibility
that he had killed Ben.
The witness coming forward
was the biggest breakthrough
that this case had ever had.
[Matt] This witness
also showed us a location
that Dino, when he was excavating soil
or rocks,
he had a location where he would dump it,
and he showed us where that location was.
This was the most conclusive piece
of information that we'd ever come across.
A new witness has come forward to say that
Ben, who went missing on July 24th, 1991,
when he was just 21 months old,
was actually killed that same day.
It's thought he was hit by a digger
working near the farmhouse
where he was playing.
The driver then buried his body.
[Matt] Dino passed away in 2015.
I think the witness only came forward,
you know, 21 years later,
because Dino had died.
I think that there could have been
a level of guilt
whereby he wanted to let Kerry know
what he believed had actually happened.
As a result of the information
we got from the witness,
we were able to identify a site
and we were able to do an excavation.
[man] Ben's body may have been buried
somewhere in this small dusty olive grove.
After a search that spanned
a quarter of a century,
and much of the planet,
the toddler could've been lying here,
just yards from where he went missing,
all along.
This is where we did the excavation,
and this is where
we were looking for Ben's remains.
We had ground-penetrating radar equipment.
We took cadaver dogs over there with us,
and we undertook quite a large-scale dig.
[Kerry] They were not looking
for a full little body.
They were looking for
fragments of him,
because he'd been basically
crushed to death.
Watching the excavation day by day,
there was no human bones,
there was no decomposed body,
there was no Ben's clothes.
And every day that went by,
expectations of finding Ben's remains
drifted further and further and further.
And then they found the car.
[newsreader] Twenty-one days
of excavations on the island
culminated in a find police say
is of great significance,
an item Ben had with him
on the day he disappeared.
[Mark] It was in October, 2016.
On the very last day of the excavation,
one of the Greek volunteers
found a toy car.
[Kerry]
We were ready for leaving the island.
And then I got a phone call
that an item of interest had been found,
and would we be up
for having a look at it.
South Yorkshire Police turned up
with evidence bags.
Inside was a yellow Dinky car.
[Christine] I remember it exactly.
We burst into tears.
Me and Kerry just cried
and cried and cried.
We said, "Yes, it is. It is the car".
Cos we actually bought the toys
from the toy store in Kos town for Ben.
He didn't have many toys.
[Kerry] "Well, if they found that,
have they found Ben?"
[sniffles]
It's like living my worst nightmare.
When we found the toy car,
when we found the other bits,
the bits of leather, the bits of rubber,
we sent them to be forensically tested.
And following that forensic examination,
they found that there was support
for an assumption
that the toy car had been in contact
with blood or tissue
that had now decomposed.
[Kerry] It was the worst news
any family can receive,
but at least we know what had happened.
It was heart-wrenching.
Absolutely heart-wrenching.
You're left with
the one plausible explanation.
I think that Dino went into the area
where Eddie was during the renovations,
and then I think Ben
was playing between the two properties.
I think that it's likely that Ben
came into contact with
that huge piece of machinery.
I think Ben died as a result of that.
I think it would've been an accident.
I believe that Ben's body was moved
as a result of a criminal conspiracy,
to hide the fact of what had taken place.
I believe it's the final answer
in what happened to Ben.
The feeling of losing Ben
will never leave me. Never.
[sighs] I'm OK.
It hurts.
[Mark] South Yorkshire Police's belief
was that Ben had died on the day
he went missing.
The family going abroad
and chasing shadows for 25 years
had been a complete waste of time.
Who knows?
Because Dino can't answer for himself.
Dino's family vehemently deny
South Yorkshire Police's accusations.
Didn't know what to say.
If that's what's happened,
then at least I can grieve.
It's better than the not knowing,
cos the not knowing is the hardest.
It's hard to accept that Ben's died.
But I believe them,
because they're the police.
[Mark] The whole place had just seemed
to be swarming with cameras.
The headline was "Ben Needham is Dead".
[newsreader] Tonight, devastating news.
Police have told Kerry they believe
Ben was knocked down
and killed on the very day
that he went missing.
[Mark] At the time, in 2016,
techniques weren't advanced enough
to extract the DNA from the toy car.
But two years later, there were advances,
and they were able to test it for DNA.
[Kerry] Two years after the dig,
I got a phone call.
"Kerry, I'm sorry to tell you that
the human decomposition inside the car
"is not a match to Ben's".
And I was, like, thinking,
"Why are you sorry?" [sniffles]
Because that means he's alive, then.
That means the accident didn't happen.
You didn't find his body.
You didn't find anything else.
All you found is a toy car.
So he's not dead, then.
Two years of believing that he was dead,
that they couldn't find him,
and it was hard.
[Matt] I do accept that
we may not have found the answers
that they were looking for,
but I think that the chances of him
being alive are extremely low.
I think it's highly likely that he's dead.
And that we haven't found his remains,
and we don't know where to look now.
[Mark] There was one major problem for me.
No body was found.
If somebody can prove
that your son is dead,
then OK. They can somehow move on.
But they need physical evidence
that he's gone.
So they can never They can't mourn.
[Kerry] So then my campaign started again.
Ben is still a missing person in my mind.
I decided to create a new website.
We get messages of support every day.
You know, people just send in
a quick message saying,
"I've never forgotten about Ben's case".
I'm always checking the emails,
I'm always checking the messages,
just in case
it's that one important thing.
It's a case of pushing Ben's name
back into the public eye.
It is still an ongoing investigation.
Thirty-five years on, and we're still
no closer than we were in 1991.
Having covered this case for 35 years,
I am no closer to knowing the truth.
I don't know if Ben's alive,
and I don't know if he's dead.
[Kerry] We, as a family,
will never let this lie.
I appealed to them people on Kos,
tell me the truth, tell me what happened,
tell me where he is if you can,
and I will go away.
But until then, I'm not going anywhere.
[melancholy music playing]