Yoga at a retreat on the side of a volcano; beaches in India, the glitz of Miami: Debbie Cooper was on the trip of a lifetime with her new husband Jamie Starbuck and her sporadic emails back to her family in the UK laid out their adventures.
It had all been decidedly whirlwind. Within three months of Debbie and Jamie meeting in July 2009 via a Nottingham MeetUp group they had moved in together, and within 10 months had wed in a tiny registry office wedding.
Only weeks after that came more good news: Jamie, a cleaner who dreamed of being a photographer, had won a competition to take photos around Europe; he and Debbie, a free spirit and passionate traveler, were off on an open-ended worldwide adventure, starting in Amsterdam.
For the next two years, her sisters and friends back in Britain would get email updates about their travels.
“We’re in Nicaragua on a sustainable ecovillage living the hippie life,” read one message, according to The Telegraph’s Missing Debbie podcast. “Mud houses, solar power, and growing vegetables. Every day we go into the garden and pick a salad for dinner. I got up at 5:15 for meditation today, but it’s a very non-quiet meditation and involves strange breathing, which I don’t like. Pictures will follow.”
There could be months between her emails but still, Debbie reassured her family, per Missing Debbie, “I’m feeling great. This journey we’re on, by which I mean the whole life thing, is being very cathartic for us both. I’m sorry to make you worry by my silences. Checking emails and things just doesn’t seem a priority.”
“We’re literally only planning a few days in advance.”
Her sisters asked her to send them photos; they never got any. Suggestions of phone calls were ignored.
Jamie, meanwhile, had been working on a travel blog called Diary of a Misanthrope and many of his accounts were not exactly glowing. “Greece is sh-t,” he posted. The food in Colombia “is pretty s–t.” In India, he detailed getting food poisoning.
Diary of a Misanthrope would cover his experiences in 32 countries, including Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Columbia, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Mexico, America, Canada, and finally Peru.
However, back in Nottingham, friends of Debbie had started to notice strange things.
Matthew, who knew Debbie via Meetup, had been following Jamie on social media but, as he told Missing Debbie, Jamie “wasn’t talking about her, he wasn’t including her in plans. He would have pictures of himself with other people and there was no Debbie.”
Debbie’s sisters Beth and Nicole had also noticed discrepancies, like that while emails from Debbie said she was in Asia, Jamie was tweeting from the United States. They wondered if maybe the new marriage had already fallen apart.
“I was convinced,” Beth told Missing Debbie. “I just said they’ve split up and she’s hiding out somewhere … he just doesn’t want to tell us because she’s just really embarrassed.”
Another Meetup friend, Andy, had also noticed that Jamie had stopped using “we” in his blog posts, which read like those of a solo traveler.
Nicole told Missing Debbie: “There was no mention of her name. And it was like there was somebody living a completely different life to the one that we thought was being lived.”
Requests for photos and phone calls
About “seven or eight months” into Debbie and Jamie’s trip, Matthew began to get suspicious about the absence of Debbie in Jamie’s posts and, after getting a strange premonition in the shower, realized he needed “to raise the alarm.”
He joined forces with Andy and another friend and they began to share the different clues and strange discordant details they had spotted. They remembered that Jamie had once made brief mention of having a first wife named Helen, who was disabled, so they tracked her down and were shocked by what she told them. Should they be concerned about Debbie, they asked Helen. “Very worried” was what they were told.
Helen told Debbie’s friends that Jamie had “hacked into my accounts, my emails, changed my benefits address to his. You name it, he tried it.” One of Helen’s carers, per Missing Debbie, had discovered in a computer’s history that Jamie had searched, “I want to kill my wife.”
On March 1, 2012, Debbie’s friends reported her missing.
After police contacted sister Beth, she in turn emailed Debbie to ask her a question about their childhood that only Debbie could know the answer to. She never heard from ‘her sister’ again.
The police emailed Jamie and Debbie, who both assured detectives they were fine, but had gone their separate ways.
However, then police discovered that Debbie’s passport had not left the UK and had in fact expired. Financial investigators threw up more clues: Debbie had inherited $283,000, but after marrying Jamie, that had been transferred into a joint account; Debbie’s account was dormant.
By now the police were concerned that Jamie was authoring ‘Debbie’s’ messages and provided hundreds of their texts to forensic linguists.
Soon their inquiries escalated into a ‘no body’ murder investigation.
By watching Jamie’s bank account, police knew when he would land back in the UK and when he touched down at Heathrow in January 2013, they were at the airport to arrest him.
In his final Diary blog post, sent two days before his return, he posted: “I am literally leaving paradise to face my destiny in England. I left the UK a long time ago in search of … well, in all honesty I was running away. From life and responsibility; justice and my past.”
When police searched his laptop they found a “confession” in an unsent email in which he wrote, “I had planned for it to be quick … I never expected you to be so durable.”
Finally, Jamie confessed. Only eight days after marrying Debbie, he had murdered her, dismembered her, and burnt her body. Days after this heinous crime, he had left the country, spending $123,000 of her money to travel the world.
Judge Michael Stokes QC sentenced him to 30 years in prison and said that of more than “75 homicides, I’m trying hard to think of one as horrific as this … This case shows the categories of wickedness are never closed … Even in death you stripped her of all dignity. It is difficult to imagine a more grotesque and inhumane act.”
Sister Beth, speaking on behalf of the family, said at the time that the pain was “almost impossible to bear.”
“For nearly three years we thought we were communicating with her, living with the illusion that she was alive and happy and traveling around the world with Jamie.
“We are haunted and tormented by the suffering that she must have endured in the violent act that caused her death.”
