JAY Slater was just 19 when he was mysteriously found dead in the remote hills of northern Tenerife.
His 29-day disappearance, hours after he called friends to say he was lost and had no water, sparked TikTok sleuths to post a “blizzard of misinformation” which intensified the pain for his devastated family.
And two years after Jay’s death, mum Debbie Duncan was still asking one vital question about his final hours: “Did he suffer?”
Debbie, 57, was tormented by images of her “beautiful boy” injured on a hillside, dying slowly and alone.
And she reveals in a new TV documentary that her agony was compounded by photos of her son’s body that Spanish police accidentally showed her when she returned to Tenerife to collect his phone.
Debbie, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancs, told the cameras tearfully: “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.”
In Channel 5’s Cause Of Death, Debbie returns to Tenerife’s Rural de Teno national park with Jay’s uncle Glen Duncan to retrace the tragic teen’s last steps before he plunged to his death.
The filming took place just weeks after Debbie finally received the delayed Spanish post-mortem report on her son’s passing — which confirmed he was killed by his fall into the 82ft-deep ravine.
And in the documentary she examines the findings of both the Spanish and the Home Office post-mortems with pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd.
Dr Shepherd — who conducted the Home Office post-mortem — told The Sun exclusively: “Because of the trolling Debbie has endured, and all of the hurtful speculation about Jay’s death, it was really important she knew the truth.
“Two years after he died, she still had questions about his final hours.
“The main question Debbie had was, ‘Did he feel anything?’
“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.
“He wasn’t injured on the hillside dying slowly, and that was important for her to understand.”
The Spanish post-mortem report, which Debbie accessed only this summer, revealed that local police were so convinced Jay had been strangled by a killer that they sent his voice box for further testing.
Their theory emerged during a whirlwind of feverish conspiracy theories around the apprentice bricklayer’s death — with online sleuths concocting theories that he had been murdered and doctoring clips of him being tortured.
But despite the Spanish police’s fears, the second post-mortem found no evidence of damage caused by strangulation or any other deliberate harm.
Dr Shepherd added: “The authorities moved slowly, because the authorities in this country and the local authorities were going back and forth. That left gaps for people to jump in and say, ‘I know what happened.’
“But neither post-mortem showed anything to suggest he was anything other than a fit and healthy young lad who became confused and disorientated and had a really tragic fall. Debbie was worried about how dehydrated he was, how confused he was, and why.
“He had taken a couple of drugs and drunk alcohol, but his alcohol level was not high.
“As the sun came up, it would have got hot very quickly, and you can understand how confusion would have set in.
“When I started speaking to Debbie, I tried to judge how much to tell her, but she wanted to know everything. She wanted to be absolutely certain about what had happened, and to understand fully.
“The fact that Jay’s death had been raked over by TikTok had added to her sense of confusion over what was real and what wasn’t.
“She wanted someone to sit down and tell her the truth, and I was able to give her that peace of mind that the theories these so-called sleuths had been spreading on social media were incorrect.”
After the emotional meeting, Dr Shepherd joined Debbie and her brother Glen as they travelled to the village of Masca — where Jay left his Airbnb, the Casa Abuela Tina, at 8am after partying with friends he had met at the NRG music festival.
When pal Lucy Law called him at 8.32am, he told her he was thirsty and “frightened.”
His final communication came at 8.50am, when he made a call to Lucy, telling her he was in the “middle of nowhere” and “all I can see are mountains” before his phone battery ran out at 8.52am.
But because he shared his last known location with pals on WhatsApp at 8.13am, forensic scientists were able to pinpoint where he was before he tried to walk back to Los Cristianos through the rugged Rural de Teno park.
Debbie, who had seen a Snapchat her son posted from the apartment less than two hours earlier, said: “I think, ‘Why did you not ring me?’
“But then I also think, ‘Why did I not ring him when I saw his Snapchat that morning?’
“Nobody knew what was going to happen. I need to stop feeling guilty about that. It’s really hard.”
In the documentary, Debbie reveals she is desperate to understand why Jay couldn’t turn back on to the road after telling pal Lucy in their first call that he felt “frightened”.
But after returning to Masca and seeing the valley he attempted to cross, she says she now understands how helpless he must have felt as he surveyed the rocky wilderness all around him while dehydrated and alone.
She said: “We thought, how was it possible to get to a place where he said to Lucy, ‘I’m lost, all I can see is mountains’? He must have been so scared, thinking, I can’t turn back.
“And when you look at it, you just know why. The closure I’ve got is from the walk, knowing where he set off from, how he has seen the ocean and gone down, and where he got to before he died.
“Seeing all that now, I understand it better. That’s what closure has given me.”
Heartbreakingly, Debbie told how she knows Jay would be sorry for taking that final fatal path.
After laying flowers on the spot where he left the road, she broke down as she said: “I know he’d be so sorry for the mistakes he made.
“He’d be saying, ‘I’m so sorry, Mum.’ ”
- Cause Of Death is on Channel 5 on Wednesday at 9pm.