Jay Slater’s mother has returned to Tenerife to retrace the final known steps of her 19-year-old son for a new documentary. In the programme, she also reveals the horror of being shown photographs of Jay’s dead body.
Jay disappeared in June 2024, triggering a huge search operation across Tenerife. His case also prompted a wave of conspiracy theories and online abuse, with trolls making unsubstantiated claims about what had happened and targeting his family and friends.
Two years on, his mother Debbie Duncan remains haunted by the question of whether her son suffered during his final moments before he was found dead in the hills of northern Tenerife.
For Channel 5’s Cause Of Death, the 57-year-old returned to Tenerife’s Rural de Teno national park alongside Jay’s uncle, Glen Duncan. Together, they revisited the route he took before falling to his death.
Ms Duncan also described how Spanish police showed her images of Jay’s body when she returned to the island to collect his phone.
Ms Duncan, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, said: ‘I did think about it (viewing his body) and thought, I don’t think I can. But then, when we had to go back to Tenerife to get paperwork from the courts and to collect his phone, to my horror there were images of Jay. I thought my heart was going to stop beating.
‘Whenever people say, “How did you know it was Jay?” Well, it was Jay. My beautiful boy.’
She later visited the place where Jay left the road and broke down as she laid flowers for her son. Ms Duncan said Jay would have been ‘so sorry for the mistakes he made’.
Jay Slater (pictured with his mother) died on June 17, 2024, after getting lost and falling from a height while trying to return home from a night out in Tenerife
Jay was found dead after disappearing while on holiday in Tenerife with friends
In Channel 5’s Cause Of Death, Ms Duncan returns to Tenerife’s Rural de Teno national park with Jay’s uncle Glen Duncan to retrace the final steps he took before falling to his death
The documentary was filmed only weeks after Ms Duncan received the delayed Spanish post-mortem report. It confirmed that Jay died after falling into a ravine measuring 82ft in depth.
In another section of the programme, she discusses the findings from both the Spanish and Home Office post-mortems with pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd.
Dr Shepherd, who carried out the Home Office post-mortem, told The Sun that, given the trolling Ms Duncan had endured, it was ‘really important she knew the truth’.
He said: ‘She wanted to know how his injuries would have affected him. I was able to tell her that yes, it was an awful injury, and yes, it killed him. But the head injury was so severe that it probably would have killed him immediately. It was the end — there was no pain and suffering.’
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Despite the evidence, conspiracy theorists circulated false claims, including suggestions that Jay’s disappearance had been a ‘revenge attack’ linked to his past behaviour. Some even questioned Ms Duncan’s conduct and asked why she had not appeared visibly more distressed.
Jay’s body was found four weeks after his disappearance in a remote area near Masca. An inquest in 2025 concluded that he died on June 17, 2024, from injuries consistent with a ‘heavy fall from height’. Nevertheless, online sleuths continued to spread fabricated claims about the case.
Dr Shepherd said his examination established the cause of death as head injuries. Jay’s body showed no evidence that he had been restrained or assaulted, but the findings did not stop further abusive messages.
Speaking on This Morning earlier this year, Ms Duncan said: ‘It’s just never ended, two years on almost, and they just keep coming – it’s going round in circles, the comments about, “He was involved in the mafia and drug dealing”, and then it gets really personal.
‘[Trolls have been] calling his family, calling me [saying] “they’re drug dealers… he had a bad upbringing”, it just got really personal.’
‘They don’t know us, they don’t know our family, they don’t know Jay but yet they just judge… and the conspiracies started almost immediately.’
Last year, Debbie hit back at ‘disgusting’ online trolls after the family were bombarded with more than 30 million videos speculating about the case.
She first revealed she was calling for a law change to tackle the spread of misinformation and online abuse during the investigation into a missing persons case back in October 2025 and has been campaigning for Jay’s Law over the past 12 months.
Jay went missing during his first holiday without his parents, after partying at the NRG music festival and Papagayo nightclub in Playa de Las Americas.
After the event died down, he got into a car with two men he’d met on the holiday and drove to their Airbnb in the village of Masca, about 20 miles away.
After leaving the property, he phoned his friend Lucy Law saying he was lost in the mountains and his other friend Bradley Geoghegan to tell them he was trekking home after missing a bus.
When he failed to return to his accommodation he was reported missing.
Before long, dozens of conspiracy theories about Jay’s whereabouts were posted online.
Some of the theories claimed that he had been kidnapped by drug dealers and murdered in the mountains after losing a bag of drugs, while others claimed he had staged his own death or been killed by relatives.
- Cause Of Death is on Channel 5 on Wednesday at 9pm