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The last photo taken of Durrell Cooper, when 25 |
Will wandering son fulfil his promise and come home after four years?
‘I just want to know he’s still on the planet’ pledge as search is launched for high-flyer
ON a summer afternoon in 2003, with nothing more than £430 in savings and a passport in his back pocket, Durrell Cooper lived up to his word and walked out of his home. He has not been seen since.
Just a few weeks earlier he had told his mother he planned to disappear on his 26th birthday with the chilling warning that for “three, maybe four years they wouldn’t see or hear from him”.
For four long years his mother, Léonie Scott-Matthews, founder and owner of Pentameters Theatre in Hampstead, has waited for his return.
“Having a missing son I am out there on my own – I didn’t know anyone else,” she said. “You have to learn to love enough to accept the not-knowing – that is the hardest part.”
Durrell was 25 when he made his bold prediction. He was renowned for his adventurous spirit, a champion “snakeboarder” who was known as “D” in breakdancing circles.
Ms Scott-Matthews said: “To disappear so completely with no trace – you’d think somebody would have seen him. He had a lot of friends. He was a bit of a face on television. It’s so odd that no one has seen him.
“This is the first interview I’ve done, although I’ve been asked endless times. I respect the fact Durrell may not want to be found. And I feel I owe it to him to respect his need to disappear and his need for privacy, but I feel now, after four years, that I must do everything I can to find him.”
Durrell spent much of his early childhood at Pentameters Theatre in Heath Street.
When he started school at William Ellis in Parliament Hill, he moved to the Gospel Oak home of his father, John Cooper.
Ms Scott-Matthews said: “When he left school he travelled a lot. He lived in Sydney and South Africa and be-came the UK snakeboard champion and third in the world when he was about 19.
“It was very much a freelance life. He did a lot of modelling and ‘tombstoning’ [diving off cliffs into the sea] in the Channel Islands. He used to practise breakdancing on the stage at Pentameters with his friends. He was a high-flyer – very outward, very good-looking.”
Things “started to get a little unstuck” at the beginning of 2002, according to Ms Scott-Matthews. “He suddenly started hallucinating,” she said. “He had boundless energy and he could not sleep. One night Durrell ran for miles looking for me. He was in a manic state and he’d got it into his head that I’d been harmed.
“He was hospitalised at the Royal Free. In retrospect, we think his lifestyle had suddenly led to a condition known as bipolar disorder.”
When Durrell came out of hospital he took out his savings and disappeared to Hawaii. Two weeks later he called his mother from San Francisco, penniless but all right, and was brought home.
Then, that Christmas, he vanished again. Three weeks later his mother got a phone call from a doctor in Paris. He had been found on a bridge, dangerously close to falling – or jumping – into the Seine.
French doctors were concerned for his welfare but Durrell was adamant he had just been performing a stunt.
Ms Scott-Matthews is cautious about blaming drugs for his condition, but admits they may have played a part.
“Because you have to be so physically fit with his sport he was very clean living but, having said that, I think it could have been brought on by smoking something,” she said. “He was never particularly interested in drugs. It [his bipolar condition] might have happened anyway, but it might have been triggered by that.”
Certainly Durrell was reluctant to take medication he was prescribed following what doctors described as his “psychotic episodes”.
Ms Scott-Matthews said: “There was no way he would take his medication unless he was in hospital. It would build up over a period of time and he would start to behave in a manic way.”
Eight months later, on August 6, 2003, the day of his step-sister’s 15th birthday, Durrell staged his last and boldest disappearance, leaving reams of poetry, drawings and stories behind.
“It’s absolutely fascinating where his head was at,” Ms Scott-Matthews said. “Durrell was on a spiritual quest. He used to say: ‘The search for God is everything.’ What he did is very biblical in a way – you take your rod and your staff and you go out there.
“If you read about manic depression the highs are fantastic. You have Blakean visions. Durrell wanted space – he found built-up areas very claustrophobic. He just wanted to get out of the country.”
Ms Scott-Matthews has her own ideas about where her son might be. “He could be in Maui [one of the Hawaiian Islands],” she said. “He often talked about it. Or he could be in a religious cult being very well looked after. India is the most likely place. Nobody would question him or expect anything of him, and he wouldn’t have to take those damn pills.
“Durrell was a wonderful teacher too. In an ideal world he’d be in a caring community teaching children. Suicide was not on his agenda. He really wanted to live. In fact, live too much in a way. He’s always been larger than life.”
His sister Alice has travelled to Paris and India to look for him – and now Ms Scott-Matthews intends to join the search.
“The four years is well and truly over,” she said. “I feel he has to be found now or it goes into a death situation. I’d just like to know he’s alive – that’s all I want to do.”
She hopes to start her search by raising Durrell’s profile on the internet before travelling to the Hawaiian Islands, and would like to put a support group together to help anyone who has had a similar experience.
“The police said there’s nothing they can do – he’s an adult, he’s free to come and go, thousands of people go missing every day,” she said. “It’s a very difficult one because it is a needle in a haystack, but most places in the world are contactable. I just want to know he’s still on this planet.”
Durrell is 5ft 10in tall, of stocky build, with short blond hair and blue eyes. He was born on October 11, 1977, so he would now be 30.
Anyone with information about him can call the National Missing Persons Helpline on 0500 700 700. |
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