The 999 call came in at just after eleven in the morning. The voice on the other end was calm, measured, almost rehearsed. The man told the operator that his friend had come to stay the night, that the friend had been feeling down, that there had been an altercation. And then he said the words that would shatter everything: he was the only one who came out alive.
At the address in Essex, police found a scene that did not match that story at all. There was a bed covered in blood. There was a laptop covered in blood. There was a boy, just fourteen years old, lying dead.
And in the bathroom sink, three mobile phones and a couple of hard drives and some USB sticks soaking in water, someone’s frantic attempt to destroy the evidence of what had really been happening. That boy was Breck Bednar. And the man who made that call, Lewis Daynes, had been grooming him for months. But his mother, Lorin, did not find out about any of that until it was far too late.
She had known something was wrong. She had felt it in her gut. She had even called the police. But by the time anyone truly understood what Breck was caught up in, he was already gone.
Breck was born on St. Patrick’s Day, and it felt special because you could hear everyone outside celebrating. His mother dressed him in little old-fashioned English outfits, and people always thought he was a girl because he was so pretty. She was so proud of him.
It was the happiest time of her life. At home, he was super nice. She would sit next to him at restaurants, and people would not believe that an older brother could be that way. They expected him to be annoying, but he was helpful in any way she needed.
She could not have asked for a better older brother. He was a guiding figure for the younger kids. He would teach them things. He always came up with games.
His younger sister would be at his shoulder, tapping him and annoying him, desperate to get his attention. He was such a cool older brother. When the triplets were born, Breck was only two years old. The only time his mother remembered him being sad was the day she went to the hospital to have them.
It was confusing for him, and he was crying as she left, which tugged at her heartstrings. But after that, he just took on the role of big brother. He was not jealous like other children could be. If she asked him to get nappies from the changing table, he would toddle over and bring them back.
He actually liked taking on responsibility. He was quite grown up even from the start. At school, he pretended he did not know his sister, because he wanted to be cool and tough with his friends. But at home, he was so sweet and so smart, and he really did love his family.
He looked out for them. He easily got good grades. He tried, but he was also naturally clever. He would come home excited, telling his mother about the merits he earned for a history project.
She would tell him well done, and his face would light up. He wanted to be a pilot, which his mother thought was amazing. She would drive him to air cadets, and those were some of her favorite memories, just the two of them in the car, no distractions, chatting the whole way and listening to music together. She barely ever had problems with that child.
He was laid-back, chilled, clever, easy, fun, funny. He was special. As Breck got older, his passions were anything to do with technology. He loved spending time on his devices, gaming, computing.
His sister enjoyed watching Breck play games more than she enjoyed playing them herself. He would be in the middle, all the trip lads gathered around at his shoulder, peering in and watching what he was doing. They idolized him in everything he did. She was always so impressed, always in awe.
Breck’s parents had separated when the children were still in primary school. It was hard for the family. But they always wanted to make sure things were best for the children. Things were a little bit difficult because they went back and forth between houses, but they were still very close as a family.
Because of the divorce, Breck had to switch schools, and the school his mother found for him reconnected him with friends he knew from primary. Breck was invited into a gaming group, and his mother was pleased that he had rekindled those relationships. All the boys would hang out at school during the day, and then they would all race home, get on their computers, and enter their second life, their virtual life. She knew where these friends lived.
She knew their parents. They had a history together, and it felt safe. She was pleased for him. He seemed to love it, and he put a lot of money and effort into his perfect gaming setup.
As Breck grew older, he started to expand his games, playing more war games and fighting games, which was ironic because he was such a chill guy himself. When the children were young, they only had a family computer in the kitchen, which was easier to hear and see what was happening. As Breck got older, he earned the responsibility and had his own computer in his room. The door was always open, and his mother could hear and see what was happening.
Breck had three screens. One would show all the players and their names, then there would be the action screen, and on the other side, messages would pop up. It was so cool. His mother could understand why Breck liked to game that way.
But she did not realize the danger he was up against. Lorin had worked with Essex Police for years. She joined as a standard police constable, then got involved viewing images shared online. As her knowledge and skills grew, she joined the Digital Forensics Unit in 2008.
She had seen the full range of how people behave, how they disassociate themselves from what they are doing online compared to how they work in real life. There was no accounting for what people look at, what people are interested in, what groups they take part in. One day, she could hear what everyone was saying in the gaming room, and she recognized all of the voices. But she remembered the exact day she heard a deeper-sounding voice.
It did not sound like someone who was thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, the age of his friends. It sounded like someone older, an adult. Immediately, she was concerned. She pictured some creepy forty-year-old guy behind a screen hoping to entice some boy into doing something sexual.
That was the exact image she got from this voice. Breck told her that this stranger was the one who ran the server, the best he had ever gamed on, the fastest and most efficient. She asked who this stranger was. Breck told her all about this new friend.
He was seventeen, he had an amazing job in New York City, he was working for the US government on contract, and he worked his own hours. He told her his name. She had never heard the name Lewis Staines. She had no idea who that was.
He was talked of as a computer engineer, as having a very successful business, saying that he was like a covert operative, trained himself as this very important person living a fantastic lifestyle. He had very similar interests, a huge knowledge of technology, successful, fun, and funny. Sometimes Lorin would go into the room, and funny things would pop up on the screen. They would laugh together, and it would be entertaining.
If you talked about a news story, it would flash up. If you talked about a movie, it would flash up. But with Breck being just thirteen or fourteen, Lorin did not necessarily want him gaming with seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds anyway. She would rather have him hanging out with kids his own age.
Little things started to add up for mother and father, getting these little clues that something just did not seem right. Whenever she tried to talk to Breck about her concerns, Breck would just defend him. She would ask how he had time to game with the boys if he had his amazing career. Breck would say he could work his own hours.
She would ask Breck if he had seen this stranger, this new friend. Breck would say no, he could not show his face because of the work he did. There was an answer for everything. When she tried to speak to the gaming group, Breck’s friends that she knew would get kind of quiet.
They did not want to talk to a mom. But the person she did not know would speak to her openly. Hey, Mom, how you doing? What’s going on?
He would say he was in New York City, it was great. She would ask what the weather was like, and he would say it was about the same. He never really had any New York stories even though he claimed to live there. She could not gather any information that would lead her to believe he lived there or that he was who he said he was.
As time went on, Lorin had rules in the house. Breck had to come to dinner. She cooked dinner because she wanted to chat with her children. She would say, Breck, you do have to come down for dinner.
Well, this predator used it against her. Oh, well, why is your mom making you eat if you’re not hungry? Why does your mom insist that you eat when she wants to eat? Lorin felt like she was constantly fighting against this person that she did not know who he was.
It was almost as if he was another parent. She noticed Breck’s personality changing in the summer. He stopped being easy about doing the things she asked. He would question them.
In a way, she could not tell if this was normal teenage behavior or something different. Breck had always wanted to go into the air corps training. But now he was saying he wanted to drop out and continue gaming. His parents said, what, but you’ve always wanted to be a pilot.
You’ve always wanted to pursue that. And he said he did not want to anymore. Breck would be really sullen. He just did not want to hang out with the family.
He would much rather be back in his room on his computer. Lorin felt quite far away from him. She started to pop in more often to see what she could see. Instead of funny things popping up on the screen, it would be the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz flying across on her broomstick.
The next time she popped into the room to call him for dinner, Hitler would goose step across the screen. He was turning her into the bad guy when all she was trying to do was be a good parent. Lewis Daynes used multiple methods of grooming on Breck. He worked out what Breck needed, what he liked, and found something in common with him.
He contacted him on a daily basis. He created a fantasy of an individual that Breck and the rest of the boys would have believed. None of them knew any facts about this individual because he did not let them see even his face online. Just like a face-to-face abuser would take somebody off to a different room or a different place, that is what happens online.
Breck was being taken to other better places to game, taken to other sites and up other channels of communication because he was special. Breck saw in Lewis what he wanted to see over and above all these other friends. Lewis actually meant something. Lewis was what he aspired to.
On the day Lorin decided to phone the police, she was scared, but she had a gut feeling that things were quite wrong. She told the officer on the line that she had a fourteen-year-old son and there was an eighteen-year-old person that said he was eighteen, and she felt like her son was being turned against his family. She was really concerned that this person was not actually who he said he was. She gave the predator’s real name.
She gave his alias. She gave where he lived, lies he was telling to the boys. She said he was grooming her son for something because he was trying to change his thinking set on everything. The officer asked what happened when she spoke to her son about it.
Lorin said that her son and the rest of the guys in the group completely looked up to this older boy. She felt a great sense of relief that she had made the report. She got off the phone and took away all of Breck’s technology as a stance, to say I’m worried and I need you to take this seriously. But what she missed was a little MP3 player.
That was how Breck was able to record the intervention meeting when instructed by this predator. At the meeting, they told Breck that what they were hearing scared them to death. It might sound like paranoia, but it felt like grooming behavior. Breck was defending him.
He said he was a good guy. So they said, okay, fine, let’s meet him. They said they wanted to meet him for coffee. Breck said he did not want to meet them.
He said the man thought parents were too judgmental. So they said, well, if you will not meet up with us, what about just the dads? Breck said no, he won’t. Well then that’s it.
They were going to have to forbid Breck from gaming, speaking, or socializing with this guy because they did not know who he was. The predator now knew that they were onto him. So it became that much more dangerous because everything then went underground and became more secretive. That was the point at which the predator sent Breck a brand new smartphone so they could communicate secretly.
Lorin realized later that as much as she was trying to do the right thing by forbidding, it was actually a tool that predators use to make the parents seem as if they are the bad guys. When parents try to go to the police and say their boy has been groomed, it is very much a case of, well, where is the evidence for that? You have a child chatting with an older male, but there is no grooming offense going on in terms of the legal framework required to try and progress something. Unfortunately, Lorin found out too late that they had closed the investigation that very evening because they did not recognize the signs of grooming that she was telling them about.
There were flags earlier on because Lewis was separating Breck from the rest of the group. Breck was enamored. Lewis was all that Breck wanted to be in terms of this computer engineer. He was out in America.
That was great, but Breck had no way of checking that. Breck was not normally devious or secretive, but he was being brainwashed. It was Christmas when he had his computers taken away, and it was like the perfect Christmas because he was not on his computer. It was only a week off of technology, and Lorin got to see more of him.
That was what she wanted. She wanted to spend more time with her children. She did not want them each separated in their own little world. He was actually enjoying time with the family, and it felt like normal again.
After Breck got his technology back, he started with the new gaming group with his old friends, and he seemed normal. He was happy-go-lucky. He was chilled again. He did his chores again.
He came to meals when she asked. She felt that everything was back to normal. She never heard that deep and distinctive voice again. Early 2014, Lorin was so pleased and proud of him because he was doing a Spanish exchange trip, something she never got an opportunity to do when she was young.
She took a couple of pictures of him, and as he walked away, she remembered being so proud. She guessed because he was becoming a young man. She never expected that to be the last time she would see him alive. When Breck returned from his trip, Lorin was away, so his dad picked him up from the airport.
Everyone noticed how confident he seemed. He had met a girl there. Lorin messaged him and said she could not wait to hear about his trip. He said he could not wait to tell her about it.
A few days later, Breck asked his dad to go visit a friend from school. There was something about Breck going on a sleepover, and he did not often do that kind of thing. So Lorin was excited for him that he had something different going on. Breck had not lied before.
He had not snuck off before. He had not been bad. So Breck went with his devices to game, to compute, to learn, to laugh, to enjoy his passion. Poor Breck would have never expected how that evening was going to go.
Lorin woke up with an impending sense of doom. Then she got a message from their dad saying Breck did not come home last night. He stayed at his friend’s house and he could not get a hold of him. She immediately started to panic.
His dad called her back, and it was literally the worst phone call any parent could ever get. He said, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Lewis has killed Breck. Honestly, you might as well just die at the same time. A huge part of her did.
She could not stop screaming. She had to be sedated. She could not believe it because she always knew from the start in her heart that this guy was a baddie. But she had no idea he was a killer.
The 999 call, when she first heard it, she very much felt that Lewis wanted to be in control. He was measured. There was no real emotion. He said his friend came to stay the night with him yesterday, feeling very down, feeling suicidal.
He woke up this morning and the friend was in a mess. He tried to calm him down. He hugged him. Then said that he was there for him.
He shrugged him off. He said the friend was going on about how he did not want to go home, fed up with his life. He said he had a pen knife folded. The friend picked it up, opened it, and then lost control.
His account of what happened was that there was a struggle, an altercation, because Breck was apparently uncontrollable with emotion in the way that he described it. He said he put his left arm up to block him from stabbing him. They struggled. He got him to the ground.
He got up. He got the knife. He said he did not remember exactly what happened, but the fight ended with him cutting Breck’s throat. He admitted that he had caused Breck to die, but he was trying to say it was self-defense.
The call handler was trying to establish what had taken place. She was trying to understand, but Lewis wanted to get over his side of it. It sounded rehearsed. He kept saying, can you not interrupt me with this part?
He was very compliant, almost separating himself from the actual act. The very fact that he went and sat in the shower for a while, then decided to ring the police, made you start to think he was trying to get his head together before he called to say he had killed somebody. When the police turned up, Lewis Daynes was arrested at the scene. He was just trying to play it down.
Yes, I’ve killed somebody, but it wasn’t my fault. Lorin got home and there were two police cars outside the house. The two police ladies got out of their car, came up to her, and asked where her brother was. Was he home?
All of a sudden, her dad came home, and that is when the shouting started. It was loud, and they had no idea what was going on. Her dad was in pain. Eventually, he came into the living room, sat on the couch next to them, bloodshot eyes, and told them that Breck was dead.
They just let it sink in, the horrible truth of it. That was the first time they heard it. That was the first time they felt that blow. From that moment, everything changed forever.
When the investigator got to the address, it was very tidy. In the lounge, there was a laptop on the sofa, which was Lewis Daynes’s laptop. She was asked if she could seize the laptop from the bedroom. She had not realized that when she walked into the bedroom, Breck was still on the floor.
He was covered in blood. The bed was covered in blood, and the laptop was covered in blood. In the bathroom sink, there were three mobile phones and a couple of hard drives and some USB sticks which had been put into the water. They were a priority because they needed to be dried out to a state where they could start getting data from them.
Detectives and forensic experts would be looking for a variety of different evidence at a crime scene. First of all, hair, anything that could contain DNA, skin, signs of a struggle, any breakages in the house. There was duct tape in the bin in the bedroom, but there was also duct tape in the bin outside. Forensic material suggested there had been some sort of sexual activity between Breck and Lewis at some point.
They found DNA on the tape which matched the hairs on Breck’s legs. They found blood-stained clothes. They found a tube of lubricant with blood on it as well. This certainly would suggest that Breck was tied up and assaulted.
Daynes’s account of Breck being uncontrollable with emotion did not support that at all. The evidence found suggested that he would have been incapacitated because he was tied up. The last activity from the laptop that Breck had was at quarter past nine the morning of his murder. The 999 call went into the police at about eleven.
So two hours before he was killed, Breck was still doing something with his laptop. He would have been completely unaware. He would have been there doing what he enjoyed doing, playing with his computers. Police found loads of evidence at the killer’s flat.
Breck had been lured there. It was premeditated. There was evidence that they had pizza, which Breck loved. They found a bag of Breck’s belongings, and all of his devices were destroyed.
But for some reason, one of Breck’s devices was in his bag undestroyed. That helped police get more evidence because they were really struggling to get the evidence out of the other devices. They found a hard drive that had been opened up and the chip had been scored across the back, which stopped that working. But the important one was Breck’s tablet, which they were able to get into.
That is where most of the communication data in relation to Breck and Lewis came from. In January, all the communications showed that Breck was going out to Spain for a week. Lewis was quite nervous about this because Breck was going to be with another group of friends, out somewhere else, which Lewis did not like. He could lose Breck because Breck was going to become involved with another group of people.
So he panicked. Part of the communication that was taking place was that Lewis was dying or he was ill, and Breck was to take over his company. The words were, you are in a man’s world now, so you need to step up. In February, Lewis was trying to formulate how he was going to get Breck from his home address to Lewis’s address in Essex.
They had to speak in person for him to be able to properly hand it over. Breck would have probably been looking forward to seeing his friend in person. But as a fourteen-year-old, you would not necessarily recognize some of the language as being coercive control, which is what they were at this point. You would say that is the ultimate dream for a fourteen-year-old, to be handed a company that is worth millions that he is going to run.
It was arranged in the beginning of February that Breck would be visiting Lewis. But the parents did not know this, of course. Lewis had given Breck an idea as to how to couch this trip. He said on the day to tell his dad that he was going to go to a friend’s address which was two roads away, but not to say anything until he was actually in Lewis’s address.
So dad was thinking Breck was just around the corner, but he was thirty odd miles away. It was a month from when he was killed on Lorin’s birthday to when he was buried on his birthday, on St. Patrick’s Day. She did her best to try to have his funeral on his birthday because it made it feel like it might be more special.
His birthday was always going to be a hard day anyway. It was the most beautiful funeral. The whole town came out, and they had a procession, and it was gorgeous. And then everybody goes home, and then you are just left to your own devices.
It was only after the family had left and all that chaos was gone that Lorin started having to figure out how to live with her grief and how to learn to live with that gap in her life that Breck had left. She was in bed for a year. She only got up for meetings or anything to do with Breck. She did get up for the triplets’ school events, but she was a zombie.
She had died inside, and the family could not do anything to help her. The way that grief hits a mother when she loses a child, her grief was rough. The triplets not only lost their brother, they lost a normal-acting mother. Luckily, they had each other.
They were all twelve. They carried themselves through that. They really could not have done it without each other. When the triplets saw Lewis in court, he looked very young.
He did not look his age. He was very quiet, did not show any emotion. They were shocked because he looked like a teenager. He was wearing a long-sleeved black t-shirt like Breck might have worn.
They remembered just glaring at him thinking, how could you have done this? And thinking, you could have been friends. You could have come over for pizza. You could have been part of our family.
Daynes all the way through investigation had maintained his story that this was self-defense. And then he changed his plea. Lorin noticed her barrister looking at her funny. Then in came the killer, and they asked him again what his plea was.
And he said, guilty. You could have heard a pin drop because nobody expected a psychopathic liar to change his plea. The only way of him taking back control over this situation was to be honest and plead that he was guilty. It saved them from sitting through weeks and weeks of hell.
But then in the sentencing, they did still have to sit through a lot of the horrific things that Breck endured. When Lorin thinks about that last moment, she thinks he must have said, oh my god, my mom was right. My mom was right. But it was too late.
On January the twelfth, 2015, Lewis Daynes was sentenced to life for the murder of Breck Bednar with a minimum term of twenty-five years. Lorin did not think justice had truly been served. Twenty-five years was not enough for the way it was planned and the torture that he gave to her brother and the whole family. He was truly the most disgusting human being.
She could not imagine that someone so young would be so cunning and manipulative to be able to do that to a young child. He had a record. He had groomed a boy in the States as well as boys in the UK. He had sexually assaulted a boy his own age.
And he was known to have indecent images of boys in his computer. Although Daynes looked very young, he was an eighteen-year-old man who was grooming fourteen-year-olds. The fact that they found child pornography on his computer was not surprising. Daynes is a paedophile at the end of the day.
Lorin’s mother is the most powerful woman she knows. She is so strong. She really had to fight to live through that pain and to get up and get out of bed and choose to live. And then she got up and started a charity and managed to find some light in Breck’s death.
She goes and makes sure that what happened to Breck does not happen to anyone else. Lorin thinks if Breck had seen another boy’s story, he would have been the typical teenager that said that could never happen to me. So she decided she needed to set up the charity with the help of the local community because there was so much to learn. When she teaches about Breck’s story, she tries to make sure that young people look after each other because the parents will not see what is happening or will not recognize it.
But the friends or your siblings are the ones that see the change in the personality. They will see what is happening on the platforms. They will see what is being said behind the scenes. The person that is being groomed, it is very difficult for them to see.
And that is why she wants to speak about Breck’s story, so that other parents can be better able to help their children when they meet people online to keep safe. She feels bad that Breck did not get to reach his full potential. He was so clever. He was just good, innately good and kind.
He was a great older brother because he was so driven by his passions. He was truly someone to look up to. Whenever she does something cool, she likes to think that he can see it too. Wherever he is, if he is looking down on her, she likes to think that he would be proud of her.
Because she is so far away from the twelve-year-old that he knew. She wishes he could get to know her now.
