Lee Sheppard

Lee Sheppard vanished on 31 January 2003 whilst on the night shift at European Metal Recycling in Harlesden.

It was intally thought that he might have run away or ben the victim of fould play. It was also suspect that he might have left the facilities early in order to find sex or that he had fallen off a railway bridge. 

However, fice years after his dissapearance, his family hired a private detective who found that it was possible that he might have been crushed in a large 40 ton fridge recycling machine that they had had at the site. It was heard that the machine, which had the capacity to crush ten fridges at a time contained nitrogen and that he might have gone in and been overcome by the gas and later crushed. 

Lee Sheppard had been a supervisor at the facility. He never clocked out and had left all his possessions there and never touched his bank account.

However, at the time the police didn't realise how dangerous the machine was and no DNA or evidence was taken from it. 

However, at his inquest eight years later the jury found that he had been crushed by the machine. However, it was noted that that conclusion was based wholly on circumstantial evidence. 

Lee Sheppard had been a father of two and had just found out a few weeks earlier that his wife was pregnant with their first child.

The inquest heard that the last person to see Lee Sheppard alive had been a work colleague from Ukraine at about 2am on 31 January 2003. when he was later questioned bhe said that the crushing machine had malfunctioned on the night Lee Sheppard vanished, however, because of his immigration status and the fact that he was not legally allowed to work at the plant, he had not wanted to speak to the police in 2003. 

He said that at about 10.10pm the machine's de-gasser stopped working and that work stopped as a result, and noted that anyone that went into the machine to fix it could have been knocked unconscious and then crushed.

he added that a blockage later occurred in the machine after Lee Sheppard went missing and that he and others afterwards thought that it might have been in part due to Lee Sheppard being in the machine. 

When a barrister asked him:

xxxqxxx The reason you were scared is, in the back of your mind, you thought the blockage might have been Lee's body?