Rachel became a representative for the charity in 2010. The same year, she helped launch the Missing Rights campaign, alongside Peter Lawrence (father of missing chef Claudia) and Gerry and Kate McCann (parents of missing toddler Madeleine), urging the government to implement laws to improve the support for the families of those who are missing. The campaign had certain aims:
Aim 1 – Families of missing people should know everything possible is being done to find their missing loved one: Every region should have a local missing persons’ coordinator who will hold local services to account. Every family should have a named single point of contact in the police force dealing with their missing loved one. All unidentified bodies should be cross-matched with missing person reports.
Aim 2 – Families affected by a disappearance should have access to support: Every family of a missing person should be signposted to Missing People’s free emotional, practical and legal support services by the police. A network of specially trained counsellors should be developed to support the unique needs of families of missing people.
Aim 3 – Families left behind should be spared the pain of unnecessary financial and legal bureaucracy: A Presumption of Death Act for England and Wales (already in place in Scotland and Northern Ireland) – this has been achieved. A legal guardianship mechanism that would enable families to become trustees of a missing relative’s affairs.
Rachel’s involvement in the implementation of Aim 3 was very close to her heart, as the Edwards family found declaring Richey legally deceased a difficult and heartbreaking process.
‘We had the opportunity to begin the procedure of declaring Richard dead in 2002, seven years after his disappearance, but we held out,’ says Rachel. ‘My dad was always sure Richard was going to come back after five years just like Uncle Shane did, but as those years passed … you could see it in Mam and Dad’s faces, they had nothing left to say.
‘Then my dad became ill with cancer, and he knew the latter part of his life was approaching. He didn’t want to leave Richard’s unresolved affairs for my mam and I to deal with alone, so we started the proceedings to obtain a death certificate towards the end of 2005.’
At the time, when families are coping with unresolved grief, the law regarding death in absentia did little to ease the burden for relatives, either financially or logistically.
‘As well as dealing with what I call “suspended loss” there are the logistics of handling the missing person’s everyday affairs,’ says Rachel. ’It’s the small things you wouldn’t even think about, like sorting their finances, insurance policies, mortgages and, when it came to Richard and his line of work, his publishing rights. After he went missing his direct debits were still going out, his flat was sat there rotting, and we couldn’t let it or sell it. When someone disappears, you realise that banks and other institutions have no system to address the affairs of clients who go missing and are now presumed dead.’
During this time, Rachel and her father sought advice from several legal experts who found it hard to counsel them adequately on their predicament. With no legal framework in place, it took the Edwards family three years, and significant financial outlay, in order to obtain a death certificate for Richey.
On 24 November 2008, Richey Edwards was legally declared dead.
‘I went into the solicitor’s office with my dad and we had to swear on the bible that we thought Richard was deceased,’ she says. ‘It was a horrible situation for us as a family because it felt that in doing this we were giving up on him. But it wasn’t about that: it was about the practicalities. Mam and I will never give up the search for Richard, or the hope of finding out what happened to him.’
In September 2011, Rachel gave evidence to Parliament’s Justice Select Committee about her family’s ordeal. The Presumption of Death Act 2013 was passed and became law in October 2014.
As a result, families are now able to approach the courts for the right to declare their missing loved one deceased. The legal power of the certificate enables those left behind to resolve the affairs of the departed in a speedier and more succinct manner. The achievement of Rachel and the charity allows further legal clarity for professionals who work with the families of missing persons, and also for other agencies involved in administering assets.
‘It’s such a harrowing procedure, not just emotionally but bureaucratically,’ she explains. ’With the Missing Rights campaign, I thought if I could help spare other families the same long-drawn-out process, then some good could come from the situation.’
A year before the Bill was passed, in the autumn of 2012, Graham Edwards sadly succumbed to cancer at the age of 77.
‘There aren’t really any words that do justice for the heartbreak my dad carried before he died,’ says Rachel. ‘He passed away with the biggest uncertainty hanging over him. Not knowing makes it so much worse. It’s more painful than grief: it was a prolonged bereavement that ate away at him for years. There was never any closure for him. I don’t think any parent could imagine a worse torture than never finding out what became of their child. I don’t think he ever reconciled himself with that.’
‘Doubts are crueller than the worst of truths.’
Molière, Le Misanthrope
While Rachel desperately sought to discover what had become of her brother, the band would re-invent themselves and find fame and fortune following the loss of their chief lyricist.
‘The band have never given you or me the opportunity to hear what they had to say off camera, in person, to people that mattered to him, at least. Only to those who contributed to his unhappiness.’
Jo, letter to Rachel Edwards, 1997
In the years since Richey’s disappearance, the Manic Street Preachers have gone on to sell millions of albums, pick up numerous awards, and become firm favourites of the British musical establishment. A year after Richey vanished, their comeback single, ‘A Design for Life’ reached number 2 on the singles chart and their accompanying album, Everything Must Go, has since gone triple platinum.
Having achieved great mainstream success in Richey’s absence, the band’s mentions of him throughout the past two decades have primarily taken the form of public praise for him as a rock star, with Nicky Wire admitting that he misses Richey’s input as a co-writer, or repeated references to how ‘cool’ Richey had always been. For the Manic Street Preachers, the band’s own narrative appears paramount, and the Richey story seems to find its place within this larger one.
‘There’s definitely a public and a private side when it comes to the band and my brother and his disappearance,’ says Rachel.
‘Formed in the Valleys, ner ner ner … Inspired by Guns N’ Roses and Public Enemy, ner ner ner … Bloke went missing, ner ner ner … Have I really got to read that shit again?’
James Dean Bradfield, Independent, 2004
Since 1995, it’s fair to say that the Manic Street Preachers appear to have carefully policed the boundaries of received wisdom on the topic of their former bandmate. A central tenet of this effort to retain control of the narrative has been their guarding against prurient interest or speculation for fear of hurting the feelings of those most immediately impacted by Richey’s disappearance – the Edwards family themselves.
This is a noble stance to take, and one aimed at steering away from exploiting deep personal hurt and family tragedy. Rather than inviting fans and commentators to engage in wild speculation on Richey’s whereabouts, and instead of actively encouraging their hundreds of thousands of fans around the world to look for Richey, the Manics have drawn a boundary around the matter in the name of good taste.
‘When I speak to journalists to highlight Richard’s anniversary, some ask me about the band, if they’re in touch or what they’ve done for the Missing Persons charity,’ says Rachel. ‘When I tell them, nothing that I’m aware of, they’re aghast and tell me they’re really surprised.’
However, there is a sizeable gap between the band’s narrative on Richey’s disappearance
and Rachel’s interpretation of events. Rachel feels that the lion’s share of the attempt to find him has been left to herself.
As Rachel sees it, the band and those surrounding them could have helped her more with the search.
Richey’s old friend Adrian Wyatt also remains unhappy about what happened after his disappearance. He feels more could have been done to help find Richey.
‘There were interviews when James was saying he wouldn’t talk to Richard if he came back and hinting it was best that he stay away as it was “obviously working for him” being wherever he was,’ says Adrian. ‘I remember thinking it was such an odd thing to say about a friend. You’d do anything for someone to come back, you’d grit your teeth and lie because you’d be worried about the safety of that person.
‘To be honest, it seems as if they did and said as little as possible. They ticked certain boxes, but I felt they showed little emotion or passion. It didn’t feel right. I liked to think at the time they were unable to talk about it, but now I wonder whether there was something more to it.
‘My feeling is what propelled them into the spotlight was Richard going missing. They may have had massive success since without input from him, but in my view they wouldn’t have even got the attention of a mainstream record label in the first place without him.’
In the weeks following Richard’s disappearance, the band got in touch with Rachel and asked her to go down to his flat to retrieve a folder with a Bugs Bunny cover from his shelves for them. She asked them why and was told it was because they wanted to look for clues, and that it was the property of Sony Records, and they had to have it back.
‘I wasn’t able to think straight at the time and just handed it over,’ remembers Rachel. ‘I know there were some sheets with lyrics on them inside, but I hadn’t got a clue whether Richard had said it was OK for the band to take them. The stuff in there could have had his private musings on them: stuff he wouldn’t have wanted published.’
With the permission of Graham Edwards, the band would go on to use the lyrics that Richey left in that folder in early 1995 on 2009’s Journal for Plague Lovers album.
‘Not only that, but the pictures on the folder itself were used for the inner sleeve for the Journal for Plague Lovers album, and that was his personal file,’ says Rachel. ‘I think he never left the Bugs Bunny file for them as they claimed. I think it was about how they could market it as Richard’s lyrics. They’d already used some of his lyrics on a 2005 track called “Picturesque” without notifying us, or asking for permission.
‘I’ve seen people on internet forums commenting about how different what Nick sings on “William’s Last Words” is to the actual words Richard wrote on the accompanying paper. Again, it’s the band’s structured narrative of four best friends until the end.’
The Manics’ missing bandmate now tends to appear as a footnote or an afterthought in any post-1996 documentaries or interviews.
‘It was odd that the band never responded to a letter which Jo sent them about the poem she had written called “Edit the Sky”, which formed part of the song, “The Girl who Wanted to be God”.’
Surprisingly, the Edwards family were never contacted by the band’s record company after Richey’s disappearance, and Rachel and her parents were sad not to have been able to speak to anyone personally.
Rob Stringer – the CEO of Sony Records at the time of Richey’s disappearance – is quoted to have said that his relationship with the band has been at the core of his career and that he is close friends with the remaining members. ‘They changed record labels with me. As much as anything they’ve been the reason why I do this job, and I speak to all of them at least once a week and have done for 15 years. We’ve had lots of ups and downs.’
In an interview with the NME in the same month that Richey disappeared, Stringer had talked about how well-informed Richey was about suicides. ‘Richey is a very ritualistic person. He doesn’t act arbitrarily. And the scary thing is, he’s the most well-read person I’ve ever known – he would be able to tell you the last words of all the world’s famous suicides, he would know the content of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note off by heart, and he would know twenty different ways to disappear completely. He will have planned it. He may be in Tibet for all I know …’
Rachel says, ‘I even wrote to [Stringer] recently, asking for more information about him saying that Richey was obsessed with the perfect disappearance. I received nothing back.’
Both Rachel and Jo have over the years felt excluded from the Manics’ inner circle. In a letter sent by Jo in 1997, she wrote, ‘Nobody ever said a word to us. That was the biggest insult. What a betrayal. What would Rich have said?’
Only last year Rachel tried to contact the Manic Street Preachers’ management to view the findings of a private investigator that the band hired immediately after Richey’s disappearance.
‘I was told by the management that they couldn’t remember the name of the person who did it, or where they’d placed his written findings. Also, if the PI didn’t speak to me, my family or Jo, some of the last people to be in contact with Richard – who did he speak to?’
‘The Band should know that if you love someone and lose them, all you want to do is find them again. It’s so simple, and it’s more important than the band, the press, fame or anything. Love and death is more important than any of that.’
Jo, letter to Rachel Edwards, 1996
Ultimately, only the remaining Manic Street Preachers know exactly how they feel about Richey Edwards and his disappearance. His loss must have hit them incredibly hard, and to their credit they have continued to play all their shows with an empty symbolic mic on Richey’s side of the stage. However, how Richey felt about the band towards the end is, in truth, open to interpretation.
In a 1994 interview with the NME, Richey described himself as having a ‘very childlike rage, and a very childlike loneliness’. Having bequeathed the song ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’ to the band shortly before his disappearance, could its lyrics be considered a pre-emptive strike at any future incarnation of the Manic Street Preachers, hell-bent on pursuing a decades-long career without him?
Richey was notorious for his arcane lyrics, some of which were indecipherable even to his bandmates. Do such lines in ‘Elvis Impersonator’ contain some of the venom and ‘childlike rage’ attributed to Richey by those familiar with his more spiteful side?
The song is purportedly a thinly veiled attack on the ongoing Americanisation of the entertainment industry. Yet some lines certainly leave room for interpretation. Who was Richey calling out as so ‘fucking funny’ in his pointed refrain?
Occasionally referenced by Richey, the writer Michel Foucault, was frequently described by friends as being possessed of a similar sardonic nature to the missing Manic. In a documentary, Michel Foucault Beyond Good and Evil, author James Miller stated: ‘As always with Foucault, you never know if he’s being ironic or serious, it’s always a thin line, and I tend to think he’s usually smiling … so you have to keep the irony, and take seriously what’s being told to you with the smile.’
Rachel Edwards is the first to admit that, in the same way, there were always many multi-faceted, sometimes undecipherable layers to her brother.
‘When I think about what might have become of him, and the not knowing, I sometimes believe this was his intention all along,’ she reflects. ‘To never be found. Because there are ways of doing that. He’s not living as an ex-member of a band like Syd Barrett was, or he’s not dead like Ian Curtis. In a way, it cheats people of an opinion of him.
‘The only certainty in life is death, and with Richard we don’t even have that. He was such a complex person, and from speaking to others who knew him and trying to piece together who he was from their memories, it seems obvious that nobody ever really knew him as well as they thought they did.’
Whether he opted for suicide or survival, the likelihood is that the mystery of the disappearance of Richey Edwar
ds will only ever be definitively solved in the event of his sudden reappearance, or in the discovery of a body. For now all that remains is an enigma – a shadow of a man and of an artist who touched the lives of those who loved him deeply.
‘He gave so much as an artist, a poet and most of all as a person,’ says Rachel. ‘He was my brother and I will never give up searching for him. I think of him first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Until we find out what happened, I’ll never be able to live my life properly. Until Richard’s body is found, I will not be convinced that he is dead. Without that finality, I can’t give up and I will continue to search until I discover what has become of him.’
‘I think of him every day. Even after all these years. Every new place I go to, I wonder what he would think of it. I think about the way he thought and his opinions, which I can see in a different light now I’m older. I think of him that winter, when he was in such a mess, trying to find something to make me laugh, saying, “I just want to see you smile, Jo.” It just makes me cry. I’m not being silly or romantic, I haven’t, and I don’t think I will ever meet or feel that way about someone again. I really don’t. You just don’t meet people like him. Not remotely like him. Despite his faults – and bloody hell, everyone has millions of faults – you knew he was gentle, he was quiet and emotional with me on good days. He just talked quietly and sensitively. He listened. Just things like laughing at things like dumb cartoons or something was so nice. Everything was going wrong, yes. But he was gentle and loving and incredible. He was warm, just so soft. That just never seems to come across.’
Jo, letter to Rachel Edwards, 1998
Graham Edwards and his Mother Kezia. Richey was deeply influenced by his grandmother, having spent his formative years living with her.
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