Disappearance of Lee Boxell

On the morning of Saturday 10 September 1988, Lee Darren Boxell, a 15-year-old from Cheam in the London Borough of Sutton, left home to meet a friend in nearby Sutton. The pair spent roughly two hours window shopping before parting at around 1 pm. As he left, Boxell mentioned he might go to Selhurst Park to watch a football match between Charlton Athletic F.C. and Millwall F.C.

Despite extensive appeals, including on BBC's Crimewatch and at Selhurst Park and other football grounds, no confirmed sighting of Boxell at any football stadium has ever emerged. A witness did report seeing him outside a Tesco on Sutton High Street (later an Asda) at 2:20 pm, a time that would have made it unlikely he could reach any ground in the area before a 3 pm kick-off. He has not been seen since, and his whereabouts remain unknown.

From 2012, investigators developed a new theory: that Boxell may have attended an unofficial youth club known as "The Shed," run in the annexe of St Dunstan's Church in Cheam by the church's graveyard digger, William Lambert. Lambert was jailed for eleven years in 2011, at age 75, after sexually abusing four girls who attended the club. Police inquiries found that other individuals suspected of sexual abuse had also been operating in the area at the time of Boxell's disappearance. Between June and September 2012, and again from April 2013, police excavated parts of the St Dunstan's graveyard in an effort to locate possible remains.

In 2013, coinciding with what would have been Boxell's 40th birthday, Crimewatch broadcast a further appeal built around the theory that he had visited The Shed on the day he vanished. This prompted a previously unreported allegation of sexual abuse, and police began investigating the possibility that "Lee may have died after intervening to try to stop sexual abuse at a youth club in Cheam." In 2018, a Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed that cold case detectives had interviewed a potential witness and were investigating new information that could lead to the recovery of Boxell's remains. In 2019, his case was featured in a missing-person campaign promoted by Italian football club AS Roma.

Separately, in 2001, a possible link was suggested between Boxell's disappearance and Brian Lunn Field, a paedophile and serial sex offender arrested that year for the 1968 murder of Roy Tutill, who had been abducted from a street in Chessington, less than four miles from where Boxell was last seen. Boxell's mother disputed any connection, correctly noting that Field was in prison from 1987 to 1990, spanning Boxell's disappearance. Field has also been suspected by police in the unresolved 1996 disappearance of Patrick Warren and David Spencer from Solihull. The case of Lee Boxell remains open and unsolved.