Mostly blond, all beautiful, the family of Gaia Pope look like a host of broken angels. It has been five years since their 19-year-old daughter/sister/cousin’s body was found huddled in undergrowth on a Dorset clifftop two miles from home after 11 days missing – and the grief and anger still pours out of them. The cause of death was determined by the coroner to be hypothermia. The three-part documentary Gaia: A Death on Dancing Ledge (the name refers to the clifftop where she was found) takes a broader, deeper, and perhaps more humane and meaningful view than a coroner’s job allows. It unpacks all that might have led to that lonely death so close to home.
The documentary opens with Kim, Gaia’s mother, first contacting the police, followed by more calls asking for further help, reminding them that Gaia had epilepsy but no medication with her and saying how out of character her disappearance was. Text messages among family and friends checking in with each other, racking their brains for more places she might have gone appear and disappear on screen in silent testimony to the love and affection in which she was held. Over 11 days, the police investigation changes from a search for a missing teen to a suspected murder inquiry, before she was eventually found to have died from exposure.
Delicately interwoven interviews with her friends, Dom, Megan, Connie and Mara – still looking like children five years on – recreate the happy, gregarious teenager and college student they knew. “She would light the place up,” says one. “We were in the full swing of it!” Dom remembers her being popular with boys but only attracting “genuine sort of people”. Until, one day, she didn’t.
Presenter Zara McDermott traces Gaia’s involvement with a man called Connor Hayes. Gaia was 16 when the 21-year-old first made Facebook contact with her and despite warnings from her friends that he had an established reputation “for messing around with young girls”, she thought she could see a good side to him. In her last few social media posts before she died, McDermott notes that they became increasingly distraught and upsetting – they read as if she has been deeply traumatised and is trying to express something inexpressible, unbelievable.
In the next episode, her family and friends describe Gaia’s growing distress and paranoia after a second date with Hayes in 2014. The film delves deeper into the last three years of Gaia’s life, which were dominated by the mental suffering caused, she eventually tells her mother and twin sister Maya, by being drugged and raped by Hayes. Hayes denies these allegations, and after investigating Gaia’s allegations police told her they were not going to prosecute him.
The recurring question in the first episode – “what was she running from?” – takes on an almost more terrible aspect than before. If you are in crisis, you are trying to flee something that cannot be outrun. You will run, perhaps, until you can run no more and the elements have you in their grip. Who caused that crisis? Who causes that death?
Only the first two episodes were made available for review, but I hope that the third continues to ask that question. It’s an essential topic that has to be addressed, even as this documentary – presumably – covers the rest of the facts of the police search and Gaia’s family’s attempts to get changes made to the various systems that were supposedly in place to help her, so that others might be saved these agonies.
That second episode, however, contains some extraordinary footage. Hayes and a friend of his took part in a 2016 BBC documentary by Mobeen Azhar called Webcam Boys because they were making good money working in that nascent industry. They were recruiting young women, too. But Azhar says he found the whole thing “silly … ultimately harmless”, albeit sometimes “gross”. But no alarm bells seem to have been set off by their behaviour. Of course, we have the benefit of hindsight now, including the knowledge that Hayes was convicted of child sexual abuse offences that year and again in 2018. But the unaired footage Azhar plays of Hayes’s friend, almost fibrillating with excitement as he tells the presenter how much he loves “treating [women] nasty” and the more webcam work he did “the more you want to just fuck them up, basically” causes McDermott to cover her mouth as she watches, while Azhar explains that he was “dismissive of it, being within the world of role play” and explaining that “the energy around this project was non-judgmental”. Around that line alone could be made an entire series of documentaries. In the meantime, it is fodder enough to wonder how different that 2016 film might have been if a woman had made it.
Gaia: a Death on Dancing Ledge aired on BBC Three and is available on BBC iPlayer.
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