Bristol, England — February 2015
Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Marie Watts, known to her family as Becky, was supposed to be safe inside her own home.
On the morning of February 19, 2015, Becky was at the family house on Crown Hill in St George, Bristol. Her stepmother, Anjie Galsworthy, was the last person in the household known to have seen her.
Anjie, who was living with multiple sclerosis, left the house at around 11:15 a.m. for a hospital appointment.
By the following afternoon, Becky was reported missing.
At first, there was no obvious explanation for where she could have gone.
She had left behind her money and spare clothes. She had not told anyone that she was planning to leave. Yet her phone, laptop and tablet were gone.
The disappearance quickly became a desperate search for a teenage girl who seemed to have vanished without warning.
And then the investigation took a devastating turn.
A CITY SEARCHES FOR BECKY
On February 22, Avon and Somerset Police publicly appealed for information about Becky.
The following day, her father and grandmother appeared at a press conference, asking for help in bringing her home.
Online, the hashtag #FindBecky spread rapidly, reaching millions of people around the world.
Police officers searched residential areas, open spaces and parks across Bristol. Investigators carried out house-to-house inquiries, while members of the public organized their own searches in places including Wharf Road, Trym Valley and Badock’s Wood.
Troopers Hill nature reserve and other locations were also searched.
Investigators additionally appealed for information about a black Vauxhall Zafira that had been seen in the area between February 19 and February 23.
At this stage, the working assumption was that Becky had left the family home.
That belief was largely based on information given by two people who had been there around the time she disappeared: her stepbrother, Nathan Matthews, and his girlfriend, Shauna Hoare.
They told investigators they had not actually seen Becky leave. They said they heard a door slam and assumed she had gone outside.
But police were beginning to look much closer at the people closest to the disappearance.
THE INVESTIGATION TAKES A DARK TURN
On February 28, Matthews and Hoare were arrested in connection with Becky’s disappearance.
Two days later, they were arrested again — this time on suspicion of murder.
Then, on March 3, investigators made the discovery that ended the search for Becky.
Her dismembered remains were found at a property in Barton Court, Barton Hill.
The sixteen-year-old who had disappeared from her family home was dead.
Nathan Matthews was charged with murder the following day.
Several other people were subsequently charged with assisting an offender after investigators alleged they had helped conceal or dispose of Becky’s remains.
The case was no longer about finding a missing teenager.
It had become a murder investigation.
WHAT HAPPENED INSIDE THE HOUSE?
The prosecution later presented a disturbing account of what had happened on February 19.
According to the prosecution’s case, Becky had been targeted as part of a planned kidnapping involving Matthews and Hoare.
Prosecutors said the plan had a sexual motivation and that Becky was suffocated before being stabbed fifteen times.
After her death, they said, her body was placed inside the boot of a car.
Matthews and Hoare allegedly remained at the family home for several hours, even as other relatives returned.
The body was later taken to their own property.
Over the following days, investigators said, Becky was dismembered using a knife and a circular saw. Her remains were placed into bags and boxes before being hidden inside a neighbour’s shed.
The prosecution’s evidence painted a picture of a crime that continued long after Becky had been killed.
MATTHEWS’ VERSION OF EVENTS
Matthews admitted that he had killed Becky.
But he rejected the accusation that he was guilty of murder.
His explanation was that he had intended to frighten his step-sister by kidnapping her because he believed she was behaving badly.
According to his account, the plan went wrong and he accidentally killed her.
Matthews also maintained that Hoare was not involved in the killing. He said she had been in the garden at the time.
Hoare herself denied knowing about the murder.
She told the court that she had played no role in Becky’s killing or the disposal of her body.
One of the issues prosecutors relied upon was a series of messages exchanged between Matthews and Hoare before the murder. Those messages discussed kidnapping schoolgirls.
Hoare characterized some of those conversations as sarcastic and unfortunate.
The prosecution, however, argued that the messages and other material recovered from the couple’s home pointed to a shared interest in teenage girls and supported the allegation that the kidnapping had been planned.
THE CCTV TRAIL
Investigators were also able to reconstruct parts of Matthews and Hoare’s movements through CCTV footage.
On February 19, before going to Crown Hill, the couple were recorded at a Tesco supermarket purchasing batteries.
Prosecutors alleged the batteries were intended for stun guns that were to be used during the planned kidnapping.
CCTV footage also showed Matthews purchasing a circular saw the day after Becky was killed.
Between February 20 and February 22, Matthews and Hoare were recorded purchasing cleaning products.
Prosecutors said those products were used to clean the bathroom where Becky’s body had been dismembered.
DNA evidence also connected both Matthews and Hoare to items recovered from the shed where packages containing Becky’s remains were discovered.
An expert told the court that carrying out the dismemberment would have been easier with more than one person involved.
Piece by piece, the prosecution attempted to establish that the crime was not the work of a single person acting alone.
THE TRIAL
The murder trial opened at Bristol Crown Court on October 6, 2015.
The proceedings examined not only Becky’s death, but also what investigators believed had happened before and after it.
Matthews continued to deny murder, maintaining that Becky’s death had been accidental.
Hoare continued to deny involvement in the killing.
But after hearing the evidence, the jury reached its verdict on November 11.
After deliberating for 3 hours and 27 minutes, the jury found Nathan Matthews guilty of murder.
Shauna Hoare was found guilty of manslaughter.
Both were also convicted of:
- conspiracy to kidnap
- perverting the course of justice
- preventing the lawful burial of a body
- possession of two stun guns
Two men, James Ireland and Donovan Demetrius, were cleared of assisting an offender.
Karl Demetrius and Jaydene Parsons, who owned the shed where Becky’s remains had been stored, had previously admitted assisting an offender while maintaining that they did not know what the packages contained.
THE SENTENCES
On November 13, 2015, Justice Dingemans sentenced Nathan Matthews to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 33 years.
Shauna Hoare received a 17-year prison sentence.
In sentencing Matthews, the judge accepted the prosecution’s position that the planned kidnapping had a sexual purpose.
The judge also paid tribute to Becky’s family for the dignity they had shown throughout the proceedings, despite the extraordinary burden placed upon them.
For Becky’s loved ones, the verdict finally answered the question of what had happened to her.
But no sentence could undo the loss of a sixteen-year-old girl whose life had been taken inside the place where she should have been safest.
SAYING GOODBYE TO BECKY
Becky’s funeral was held on April 17, 2015, at St Ambrose Church in Whitehall, Bristol.
Her family described the service as an opportunity to celebrate Becky’s life.
After the service, she was privately laid to rest at Avon View Cemetery with family and friends present.
Months later, the city would create permanent reminders of the teenager whose disappearance had shaken Bristol.
A memorial bench was unveiled in February 2016 at Goat’s Field, near Becky’s home.
A painted mural was also created in a nearby park in her memory.
THE APPEALS
Matthews and Hoare later challenged their convictions and sentences.
On June 23, 2016, the Court of Appeal rejected their applications, finding no reasonable argument that their convictions were unsafe or that the sentences were wrong in principle or clearly excessive.
Hoare was eventually released from prison on September 1, 2023, after serving half of her sentence.
REMEMBERING BECKY WATTS
The details of Becky’s final days became the focus of a major criminal investigation and a widely followed court case.
But beyond the investigation, the evidence and the courtroom proceedings was a sixteen-year-old girl whose family lost her in circumstances they could never have imagined.
Becky Watts disappeared from her own home on February 19, 2015.
Within weeks, the search had become a murder investigation.
And the people ultimately convicted were not strangers who had appeared from nowhere — they were people connected to Becky and to the place where she had last been seen.
Her story remains one of the most devastating murder cases in Bristol’s recent history, remembered not only for the horrific circumstances of her death, but also for the campaign that brought thousands of people together in the hope of finding her.