Girl missing with teacher sent
text from France

Megan Stammers, 15, who sailed from Dover to Calais with 30-year-old Jeremy Forrest last Thursday, later sent a text message to a friend saying she was in France.

Speaking at a news conference in West Sussex yesterday, Megan’s mother Danielle Wilson and stepfather Martin Stammers said Megan, a pupil at Bishop Bell C of E High School in Eastbourne, had been having extra maths tuition.

However, they did not suspect a relationship between her and Mr Forrest, a married amateur musician who lives near Lewes.

The text message was sent to one of Megan’s good friends saying she was in France but did not come from her own phone, a senior police officer revealed.

Chief Inspector Jason Tingley, of Sussex Police, said: “I can’t give a specific time or date but we know there was a message passed to one of her good friends to say she had arrived safely in France.

“I can’t say that message was from her but we believe it was. That gives us some comfort that she has arrived safely and she is in France. That’s our last contact.”

At the news conference at Sussex Police headquarters in Lewes, it emerged the pair travelled out on a ferry on Thursday and were due to return to the UK on Monday but did not use their tickets.

Police believe the plan to come home may have been devised as a “smokescreen” to enable them to spend longer together.

Megan had telephoned her mother from school on Thursday afternoon asking if she could stay at a close friend’s house that night and she agreed.

She came home from school as normal, accompanied by her friend, and picked up her dinner money before leaving the house at around 4.30pm.

Ms Wilson said: “She was really happy, jumping around. She grabbed my shoulders and she said to me, ‘Mum can you look me in the eye?’ And I said to her, because she was fussing, ‘please stop, get off me now’.

“She said, ‘no mum, look me in the eye’, and I looked her in the eye and... she said, ‘I love you’.”

Alarm bells started ringing when Megan failed to arrive at school the next day and her mother 
discovered her passport was missing.

With her voice breaking, Megan’s mother told reporters at the news conference: “Please darling, just do anything – text me, ring me, send me a message.”

Describing Megan as “everything you would want in a daughter”, Mr Stammers added: “We are a family unit working together. Strength is coming from within all of us, as a family, our close friends (are) striving so hard.

On a blog apparently written by Mr Forrest under his music stage name Jeremy Ayre, he writes about a “moral dilemma” in a posting on May 19 headed “You hit me just like heroin”.

It says: “The over-riding question it left me with was this: ‘How do we, and how should we, define what is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable???’

“I came to a few different conclusions, mainly that actually we get a lot of things wrong, but at the end of the day I was satisfied that if you can look at yourself in the mirror and know that, under all the front, that you are a good person, then should have faith in your own judgment.”

Interpol, the UK Border Agency, the British Embassy in France and the French authorities are all working to help trace Megan.

Chief Insp Tingley appealed to Mr Forrest, saying: “Do the right thing and make contact with us.”