Naman Shrestha
In 1999, a pregnant woman named Debbie Griggs vanished from her family house in Kent out of the blue, after which the authorities launched a search for her but to no avail. Fast forward to more than two decades, her remains were found in Dorset. In the ninth episode of Netflix’s ‘When Missing Turns to Murder’ season 2, we get intricate details surrounding the Debbie Griggs case and how it took two decades to bring the perpetrator to justice and uncover key evidence related to the case.
How Did Debbie Griggs Die?
Patricia Cameron and Brian Cameron welcomed Debbie Elizabeth Cameron Griggs into the world on December 10, 1964, She seemingly grew up in a loving household in Dover District in Kent, England, with her parents and a brother and sister named Derek Cameron and Wendie Rowlinson. After being trained as a nurse, Debbie worked in care homes for some time. In the meanwhile, in the year 1990, she got married to a man named Andrew Griggs, who was a fisherman.
After welcoming their first son Jeremy, Debbie stopped working and supposedly focused on the upbringing of her sons. Within the course of the next four years, the couple gave birth to two more sons — Jake and Luke. Debbie was a kind-hearted woman whose world revolved around her loved ones, which is why her sudden disappearance from her home on May 5, 1999, sent shockwaves across the town. As per reports, she was four months pregnant at the time. It was 24 hours later that her husband, Andrew Griggs, reported her missing to the Kent police.
Even after years and years of investigation into the disappearance of Debbie, the authorities could not seem to find her anywhere. However, about 23 years later, in October 2022, her remains were found buried in a garden in Dorset and her family members finally found some closure. Unfortunately, the cause of her demise could not be determined by the authorities.
Who Killed Debbie Griggs?
Shortly after Debbie’s disappearance, the police launched a huge search and started interrogating her loved ones and acquaintances in an attempt to find some leads. However, it didn’t yield any significant results as all the possible leads led to a dead end. In the initial stages of the investigation, the authorities reached out to the missing woman’s husband, Andrew, to get a detailed account of their relationship and the circumstances under which she vanished from their residence in Cross Road.
According to Andrew, the 34-year-old was living with depression and had taken £250 and her white Peugeot along with her. The authorities prompted him to produce paperwork for the car and a recent photograph of hers, which he claimed he didn’t have on him. Since he had taken a day to file the missing persons report, the police inquired as to why he took so much time to do so. In his defense, Andrew told them that she had gone missing on previous occasions as well but always returned unharmed.
Andrew claimed that on the night that Debbie went missing, he came home at around 7 pm and fell asleep while she was working in the kitchen. The next thing he knew was that she was shouting at him for always dozing off and that she had to take care of the house and the children all day all week. He said that she stormed off the house with her coat on and her bag over her shoulder and drove off in her car.
Just a few days after Debbie went missing, a white Peugeot was found abandoned near her house, from where she went missing. Although the blood found in the vehicle matched her, it didn’t help much in the case because no other concrete piece of evidence was found related to her. But when the authorities found out about the couple’s strained marriage in recent years leading up to her disappearance, it didn’t take long for them to make Andrew a prime suspect. More than the strained marriage, the police’s suspicion of Andrew was raised when they discovered a clear motive for him to want Debbie out of the picture.
As per reports, Debbie had found out about Andrew’s affair with a 15-year-old and was unwilling to cover up for him. At the time of her disappearance, the married couple worked at Griggs Freezer Centre in South Street, Deal, and it is believed that he was afraid he could lose half if she decided to divorce him over his affair. After about two decades of Debbie’s disappearance, with some new evidence coming to light, the remarried Andrew was charged with his wife’s murder in 2019. What put the final nail in the case was the discovery of her remains in the garden of the property where Andrew and his sons moved in 2001.
Andrew Griggs is Serving His Time in Prison
Evading justice for nearly two decades, Andrew Griggs was finally charged and found guilty of Debbie’s murder during a trial on May 12, 2019, at Canterbury Crown Court. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 20 years. Still maintaining his innocence after all these years, in 2022, he appealed his conviction to be overturned. But due to a lack of convincing and reasonable arguments, he lost the bid to get his sentence overturned. Currently, he is serving his time in prison in England while still maintaining his innocence to this day.
