Police to view video in hunt for family

Evening Press posters help in the hunt

Officers are to study a home video taken at Pickering Railway Station, which may contain footage of Jeff and Jennifer Bramley and their foster daughters Jade and Hannah Bennett.

And they are checking out a possible sighting of Mrs Bramley at a Tesco store in Scarborough, where it is thought she may have tried to use a Link machine to withdraw cash.

Police have also spoken to security staff at the National Railway Museum in York, which they believe Mr Bramley, understood to be a train enthusiast, may have visited.

The couple vanished from their Cambridgeshire home almost four months ago when they feared their children were about to be taken off them.

Following media appeals for help, members of the public from across a wide swathe of North Yorkshire have continued to contact police to say they think they have seen the family. Possible sightings are reported to include one at Helmsley on New Year's Day and another on a country road between Allerston and Yedingham.

A ticket collector reported earlier this week that he had seen the family on the North York Moors Railway, between Grosmont and Pickering.

Now a railway enthusiast who used a video camera at Pickering station has handed the footage over to police, to see if the family appear on the tape.

A woman from Seamer, near Scarborough, rang police to say she thought she had spoken to Mrs Bramley at Tesco's superstore in Westwood, Scarborough, on Sunday afternoon.

She said Mrs Bramley asked if she could use her Link card in the store's cash machine and she directed her to a machine at the Post Office in Aberdeen Walk.

PC Tim Gargan of Scarborough police said Mrs Bramley seemed to have spent quite a bit of time in Bridlington as a child, so it was possible she had come back to places she knew well. Police thought the family were still in the area.

In York, officers have sought the help of staff at the Castle Museum, National Railway Museum, Grand Opera House and Theatre Royal, and the Odeon Cinema, which the family may have visited while in York. The tourist attractions have been asked to put up posters requesting help from the public in finding the family.

We offer the Bramleys a chance to tell their story

The Evening Press today offers Jeffrey and Jennifer Bramley a chance to tell their story.

The Cambridgeshire couple have been missing with their two foster daughters Jade and Hannah Bennett for almost four months now.

Police are convinced they are hiding out somewhere in North Yorkshire, following the discovery of their abandoned car in York and a sighting of the family on the North York Moors Railway. Despite this, the couple continue to elude the authorities.

But what has driven the Bramleys to take such desperate action? What has made this couple give up everything to hang on to their children, when the authorities have decided they should not adopt them?

If the Bramleys happen to read this, we want you to consider ringing us to explain what you are doing - and what might persuade you to give yourselves up to the police.

Please call Chief Reporter Mike Laycock on either 01904 653051 ext 345, or on mobile 0402 899243. We will need information about the children that has not previously been made public, to verify that you genuinely are the Bramleys.

Ron Godfrey speculates on the ease and problems of simply disappearing without trace

Missing

It's difficult to vanish, but many people do manage successfully to disappear

How is it possible for a whole family simply to... vanish? The disappearance of Jeff and Jennifer Bramley with their two foster children Jade and Hannah Bennett begs the question.

However, while the Cambridgeshire runaways vanished for a good four months it wasn't without trace. First their abandoned blue Honda was found in Scarcroft Hill, York; then came a reported sighting of them on the North Yorkshire Moors railway.

The police investigation began with a dozen officers, scaled down as clues to the foursome's whereabouts ran out, and now has sprung back to life with seven Cambridgeshire detectives working in York - but whatever the outcome one thing is for sure.

If you and your family want to vanish and go on the run you can do so quite easily by carefully staying outside the social system but it is likely to be at a terrible price, particularly if you are targeted in a nationwide police hunt and your faces are on posters, in the newspapers and on television.

You dare not fall ill, have an accident or go to a dentist because you and yours would need to confirm where you are registered before you get treatment.

You could register your children at a school but they would need a permanent address and to obtain that you would need identification.So unless you had help from a sympathiser, you would be doomed to live in B&Bs, bedsits or possibly illegal squats in unoccupied homes.

You would be unable to claim unemployment or other benefits from social security because your national insurance details would identify you.

Nor would you be likely to find a permanent job because of the danger of being traced by declaring your names in order to gain necessary references and by revealing that dreaded national insurance number.

Wages are often paid by direct debit into employees' banks, therefore you may have to start up a new bank account. That, as Phil Gees, of Barclays, York, confirms, can be done, but only with identification such as a passport or driving licence. However, once established, banks do have a duty of confidentiality.

There is still the problem, though, of matching your bank details passed on to your new employers with your national insurance details. Any disparity would be spotted.

So you will be forced to seek work in the "black market", working for under-the-counter wages.

You and your runaways would not be able to leave the country because passport control would nab you. Of course you could falsify your name but if it doesn't check out with official records someone will smell a rat.

It is a different matter, though, if your motive is not to avoid judgement, legal retribution or penalty, but simply a desire to uproot and start again in another guise, another life. Indeed, in some instances you could be protected from identification by the authorities.

As Sarah Miller, spokesperson for the Salvation Army's Family Tracing Service, says: "It's easy to vanish with a clear conscience."

Her organisation, which is capable of tapping into a database of 44 million names and addresses in Britain, receives 5,000 pleas for help each year to find missing people and has an 83 per cent success rate - tracing ten people every working day.

Not all of those traced consent to being identified and Salvation Army investigators themselves often do not know the address of those they have found - communicating with them through employers or social security which pass on messages but fiercely protect confidentiality.

But people being sought by the police have a tougher time. Most agencies co-operate with the legal authorities.

Still, Lord Lucan, proved that it could be done. He disappeared from his home in London's Belgravia after his children's nanny was found murdered there on November 7, 1974.

Ironically the first major evidence linking him to his whereabouts was also a car - a borrowed Ford Corsair found abandoned at Newhaven on the south coast. It was also the last real evidence because he has never been traced.

But "Lucky" Lord Lucan had the lucre, and unless like the former Coldstream Guard, you're loaded with enough to sustain you then it is unlikely that you would be able to stay in obscurity indefinitely.

Police have recorded that the Bramleys withdrew £4,900 using credit cards before leaving their home in Ramsey with Jade, aged five and Hannah, three, and failing to turn up at a meeting to formally hand over the children to Cambridgeshire County Council for adoption.

That would have been likely to keep them relatively well... for a time. For instance, by staying in bed and breakfast accommodation they could avoid other overheads such as heating and lighting, but by now the money could be running out. After all, the Bramleys left with few clothes for the children in September and by now they would need to obtain warmer garb.

Catherine Feast of Cambridgeshire police says that money running out for the Bramleys could be one reason why they abandoned their car in York with its new tyres. "We don't think they would have got someone else to abandon it for them. It doesn't fit in with what we know."

On the other hand, if they are low in resources, where did they find the money to take a train ride on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway? Staff there believe that the four bought a family all-line return ticket between Pickering and Grosmont for £22.90.

So it seems that even if you and your family do go on the run there are occasions when you simply must get away to relax - at any price.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.