unsolved-murders.co.uk
Unsolved Murders
Tags

Richard Edwards

Age: 27

Sex: male

Date: 1 Feb 1995

Place: Bayswater Road, London

Richard Edwards vanished on 1 February 1995.

It is thought he might have jumped from the Severn Bridge.

He had secretly left the Embassy hotel in Bayswater Road, London where he was with his band, for his flat Cardiff at 7am, 1 February 1995 in his silver Vauxhall Cavalier car which was later found at the Severn Bridge service station at Aust, on the English side of the bridge a few weeks later on 17 February 1995.

It was thought that he had made it to his flat in Cardiff as his keys and credit cards were there, but it is not known what he had done after that.

However, the police said they did not know how long his car had been where it was found.

It was initially thought that Richard Edwards had crossed the Severn Bridge at 2.55pm but his family said in February 2018 that they had recently found out that it was 2.55am that he had crossed the bridge.

They found out after contacting the people that made the time recording machines on the bridge who told them that the machine had used a 24-hour clock and always had.

They said that the initial times had meant that there was an 8 hour gap between him leaving the hotel and him reaching the bridge. However, they said that the new times opened up a whole new line of inquiry.

Richard Edwards had been in the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers and was known for writing bleak songs. The last album that he had worked on was called The Holy Bible but it was originally going to be called The Poetry of Death. It had been inspired in part by the bands trip to the Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Belsen shortly before. It was noted that many of the songs dealt with issues that Richard Edwards dealt with such as self-harm, anorexia, prostitution and the Holocaust but his band members said that they thought that he was imagining other people’s pain, and not his own.

He had been due to fly out to America on tour with the rest of his band shortly after he disappeared.

It was noted that as the bands fame grew, he had started to behave more and more erratically, and it was also stated that he had admitted that he had problems with life in the spotlight.

A photograph had been taken of him at about that time for his passport and as it was the most recent, it was used in an article in The Big Issue magazine which had a circulation of over 250,000 copies across Great Britain and often carried articles on missing people, many of whom were often sleeping rough. The edition went out on 4 February 2002.

Although his family were able to declare him legally dead after seven years they chose not to and it was heard that the other members of the band continued to pay Richard Edwards's royalties, a quarter of their earnings, into a trust for him in case he returned.

Over the years there were many alleged sightings of him in places such as Whitby, New York, Goa and the Canary Islands.

He was described as 5ft 8ins tall and very thin with very short brown hair when he disappeared and with dark brown eyes and a pale complexion. He had four tattoos, one of which had the words, 'I'll surf this beach'.


*map pointers are rough estimates based on known location details as per Place field above.