I want to report a missing person.
Ben Lacomba phoned us to report Sarah was missing.
We all went to bed and then when me and the kids
woke up in the morning, she wasn't there.
I tried to call her, got no answers.
I was trying as much as I could,
phoning her, messaging her, like nothing.
No sign of her, no idea where she's gone.
I put a shout-out saying, "Is anybody free?"
"There's a missing lady."
"Fancy going and having a look for her?"
Did she go missing before?
She hasn't gone missing before
but got a bit of a weird life, let's put it that way.
He was saying that Sarah was depressed
and he was worried that she may harm herself.
That appeared to be very untrue information.
We all had our suspicions beforehand.
There was no financial footprint,
there was no digital footprint.
There was no sign of Sarah at all.
At one stage,
we had over 1,000 people out looking for Sarah.
Where is she? How could she be missing?
And we had a real breakthrough.
We found that just after 2:00 a.m.,
Ben Lacomba's car was on the move.
And he didn't return until 4:30 in the morning.
When the car was first parked there, it was pristine.
When it returned from wherever it had gone,
it was covered in mud.
I'm not clear at the moment, Ben,
whether you're just trying to think of an answer
or whether you've decided not to answer the question.
Why wasn't he helping us?
Was he responsible for Sarah's disappearance?
There's no end to it
until one day she's actually found.
Morning, Kent Police switchboard.
Hello, I want to report a missing person.
Kent Police first got a phone call from Ben Lacomba
on the morning of the 11th of October, 2018.
He phoned us to report Sarah was missing,
but actually had gone missing
a couple of days prior to that.
Ben Lacomba, one-time lover of Sarah Wellgreen
and father of their two children.
How old is this person?
I know her date of birth, 14/12/71.
I see, and did she go missing before
or is this out of character?
Sarah, he told us, had come home from work
on the evening of the 9th of October.
She'd come into the house, and she'd seen her children to bed,
and then she'd gone to bed herself.
When Ben Lacomba said he woke the following morning
around 7:00 a.m., he'd gone to Sarah's room
and found that she was missing.
She hasn't gone missing before,
but got a bit of a weird life, let's put it that way.
All right, okay,
so what concerns do you have at the minute?
- She lives with me. - Yeah.
- She's my children's mum. - Okay.
And she's not like, we're not together,
we just live together sort of thing.
Ben Lacomba did live with Sarah Wellgreen.
The former lovers had had the ups and downs,
as one of Sarah's children discovered all too abruptly
one day when at school.
My mum was kicked out of the house.
Shortly, so was I.
I remember the day well.
I was in a class or doing something
and Ben turned up to my school
with a suitcase filled with my belongings
and told the teachers at the time
that I am not allowed to return to the home.
The call from Ben Lacomba to Kent Police
was escalated as high priority.
Ben speculated Sarah was with a new boyfriend.
Do you know Sarah's boyfriend's
number and address?
I do know his number
'cause he texted me last night.
But I didn't know whether to really contact him
because Sarah's got a couple of phones that she left,
that were in her room and I found out
that she's sort of like, seeing a few blokes sort of thing.
- Okay. - So it looks like
she's cheating on him sort of thing.
So I didn't, although he contacted me,
I haven't replied to him.
- Okay. - I just spoke to Lewis
and obviously I said to him like,
"I'm going to be ringing the police today."
Lewis, Lewis Burdett, Jack's brother,
the boys from Sarah's relationship some years before.
He was in touch with the new man in Sarah's life.
He couldn't get in contact with my mum.
He'd been trying for like all day, heard nothing.
Last time he spoke to her was like the night before.
So I thought "Oh, that's all right,
"she's probably just ignoring ya," to be honest.
So I tried, couldn't get nothing
and then contacted my nan, brother.
Nobody else could. And then I contacted Ben myself.
Ben was getting the police exercised.
Is there a reason that she may gone missing?
Anything going on that might be upsetting her
or any reason you know, that she might go missing at all?
Like I said, like, nothing.
Obviously I found out about like,
her sort of seeing quite a few blokes and things.
I can only guess really, like,
I know shew as assaulted at the weekend.
- Who was she assaulted by? - An employee at her work.
I'm sorry, it's just quite.
No, that's all right, that's all right. I just want--
I'm just trying to think, she's got a complicated life, like,
and it's just a bit messy really.
Ben Lacomba had now given police
a potential person of interest if Sarah had come to harm.
So that initial report came in on the 11th of October.
And from there, we then started our investigation
as to where Sarah might be.
I was trying as much as I could, phoning her,
messaging her, trying to think of any different way
to get hold of her whatsoever.
Phoning people she might've been with, seen, but nothing.
I believe it was a couple of hours almost of that day.
I firstly put it down to that she was just having a bad day
and didn't want to talk to anyone.
Later on the day of the 11th,
with Sarah Wellgreen having not been seen
or spoken to for over 48 hours,
the brothers had become very concerned.
I phoned Ben, to begin with, from his mobile number,
got nothing through, it's about seven o'clock in the afternoon,
and then managed to get the house phone number.
One of the children answered the phone
and I got them to go wake him up.
He didn't really seem bothered by it at all, like, nothing.
The Burdett boys were living in Hampshire.
Their mother's home in New Ash Green, Kent
was an hour away.
Amongst their worries, their half brothers and sister
who were living with Mum and Ben Lacomba.
We just wanted to make sure
that the younger children were all okay.
And we all drove up to Kent in order
to get a better understanding of what was going on.
Because at the time, it was all hearsay.
And it's not until you get to the village,
see and understand what's going on,
that it all sinks in an awful lot more.
This was a very modern family.
Sarah's grown up boys
and her three children with her ex-lover.
Ben Lacomba no longer in a relationship with Sarah,
but living in the attic bedroom of the same house.
And Sarah missing.
The chapter of her life with Ben Lacomba
had begun 14 years earlier.
She was single then, having divorced.
Sarah and Ben Lacomba actually met online in 2004.
She had two sons.
She met Ben when I was about eight years old,
nine years old maybe.
And I believe they met through a online dating website.
And to begin with, it was nice,
just seemed like a nice bloke.
In the beginning it was fairly normal.
You know, nothing other than the fact, you know,
my mum is introducing someone.
So it's a big step.
You know, it meant a lot to her.
And in the beginning it was just nice.
Sarah moved out to Spain where Ben Lacomba was living
and they spent some time there together.
Ben had proposed the move to Spain.
He recommended that she quit her job
and join him as he trained as a pilot.
So determined was she to make this work,
that not only is she gone to those, back then,
unusual lengths to meet this person,
she was then willing to leave the country
to build the relationship.
It was pitched to my mom as a new life,
somewhere fresh to go and start,
a place where they can have their own home together,
different country, everything will go well,
he'd provide for her, all things like that.
It meant giving up her career.
She was a branch manager at Lloyds.
She really loved that job.
She was very independent before she met Ben
and I think anyone who would be,
meet someone and then told that they'll take care of you,
we can go move to another country
and you can spend more time with your children, appeals to anyone.
From the start, the move suited Ben more than Sarah.
He was full of promises,
but Ben's aspirations were seldom met.
I believe he was training to be a pilot
for a commercial airlines, things like that.
Done all the training for it and it never took off.
All he did was just work at the airport.
He was going to be a pilot and earn this amount of money.
"We'll be fine financially."
But my mum being a banker, I don't think it took her long
to realize that was never gonna happen.
So as time went on, things were obviously rocky.
Then her and Ben had their first child,
and it was a couple of months after
is when we returned back to the UK.
The lovers were now parents of their own child.
Their twins followed soon after they returned to England.
It made a massive impact
because where he had his own children,
me and Jack would be sort of in a way pushed to one side,
because he's got his own little family now.
He doesn't really need us anymore.
The man Sarah thought was headed
for a career as a pilot with a home in the sun
while she spent time with the children
now offered a different proposition.
After we came back from Spain, we lived in a caravan
for a little bit, for a couple of months.
Sarah first returned to her old job in the bank
and then retrained as a beautician
with a plan to open her own business.
None of that had been part of her plan
when she began her relationship with Ben,
and that relationship became fractured.
It was after we came back to England
and we started moving around,
things were not all that they seemed.
You know, you can always tell when something's wrong
in a relationship when you're a child.
Despite having had three of their own children,
Ben and Sarah were far from content in the relationship.
There were daily arguments.
Nobody wants to see their mom argue
and be in a relationship like that.
And I think that did go on for a while.
The arguments became more frequent.
The situation was deteriorating.
The way they'd speak to each other, it just all changes.
Whatever life they tried to build for themselves,
whatever life they've been striving for
hasn't really worked out.
As things got on through the years, things change.
You notice things a little bit more.
You notice all the arguments and things like that
that keep happening.
In a way, you just wanna get away from it.
So yeah, you'd like to get out as soon as possible.
And that's what Lewis did.
Ben encouraged him to leave.
Not long after, things came to a head between Sarah and Ben.
So that was the day when everything
probably hit its worst point.
He then decided to throw her out the house one day,
changed all the locks.
A relationship began with hopes
of the high life in Spain had fallen apart
and would soon spiral further towards murder.
The information that we were getting from Ben Lacomba
was that Sarah was depressed,
that she would take herself away,
and he was worried that she may harm herself.
And as we later found out that appeared
to be very untrue information.
Things that not worked out
between Sarah Wellgreen and Ben Lacomba.
But for legal and financial reasons,
Ben Lacomba had to allow her back in
to what had been the family home.
She had nowhere else to go,
nowhere to turn to apart from Ben.
That was the only place she could really go back to.
In 2013, although they were living in the same house,
over the next few years we learned that their relationship
was starting to deteriorate.
You have to focus on just getting through the week
and doing what you can to help.
That seems to be a very, very toxic four year period.
Throughout this toxic time,
Sarah with nowhere else to live,
faced a Ben Lacomba who was refusing to move out.
There were short periods where Sarah did move out
and stayed with other people,
but she needed and wanted to be with her children.
So actually she moved back into the home address.
Not a popular decision with her sons.
I didn't agree with it whatsoever.
I don't believe anybody my side of the family
agreed with her moving back in there.
Everyone told her it was a bad idea.
But the more I spoke to her about it,
it was just simply so she could see her children.
But then obviously come round,
it was her decision she made.
And that came at a very personal cost for her.
She didn't like Ben at the time.
Back as primary carer of her children
but stuck living with the man she no longer wanted.
During that four year period when this dispute is ongoing,
they are still living together.
They're not sleeping together, they're in separate parts of the house.
They're not in a financial position to move on from that.
I mean there's only one reason that you stay in a house
with somebody you don't want to be with anymore,
and that's because you don't have any choice.
She was willing to make that sacrifice for her children.
But that four years that's forced upon them,
four years in which whilst effectively,
legally at each other's throats,
they are also co-habiting.
And that cannot have been a happy time or a healthy time.
Inside this house,
tensions were constantly running high.
Ben Lacomba became an all seeing ex-lover
living in the attic, watching his former lover come and go.
He has CCTV fitted all around the house.
But why does he need to know exactly what's going on
in every room of the house?
Why does he need to have this sort of omniscient overlord
looking down approach to his domestic life?
And when you look at that combined with repeated failures,
you think that maybe this is a ticking time bomb.
By 2018, Sarah's professional life had progressed.
She now had her own clients working as a beautician
and she had been offered further work in that line
to give her a permanent salary.
Lacomba, meanwhile, had few friends, no female partners,
and he was running a taxi,
having abandoned his ambition of becoming a pilot.
To fill the time, he could watch Sarah come and go
via the security cameras, and that's what he did.
It was quite an elaborate setup. He had cameras at the front,
the side, and the rear of his house,
all controlled by a system
which was actually kept in his bedroom,
which was in the attic conversion of their house.
She knows she's being watched.
She knows that her every action is being recorded.
She's well aware, because it's impossible not to be,
that there's CCTV all around this house.
Surely Ben Lacomba could have seen Sarah
leave the house one particular evening.
But he would claim he did not.
In October 2018, three days
before the birthday of her son, Sarah disappeared.
No sign of her, no idea where she's gone.
Remember they're still living in the same house.
So he is aware of this immediately.
He knows on that very, very first morning
of her being missing that she is not around.
He knows the following morning she's still not home.
Sarah's mother and boyfriend were concerned
and alerted Jack and Lewis.
Sarah's boys were already getting worried
on not hearing from their mum.
They called Ben.
He didn't really seem bothered by it at all, nothing.
I got a call from Lewis saying
that no one's heard from my mum
in I believe it was a couple of hours or most of that day.
There's lots of thoughts in the beginning of it.
There's lots of things that go through your mind
when it's all happening.
The boys urge Lacomba, "Call the police."
Then he finally calls the police, and he only does so
at the instigation of other family members.
Morning, Kent Police switchboard.
Hello, I want to report a missing person.
After Ben Lacomba called us, we went straight to the house
and we started our investigation into trying to find Sarah.
Ben Lacomba didn't seem to be that concerned.
The way he was presenting to us
was described to me by my officers as quite odd.
He didn't really want to engage with us,
he didn't really want us at the house.
Which for somebody that had reported Sarah missing,
he didn't seem to act in that way.
In fact we learned later on that it was Sarah's family
had put pressure on Ben Lacomba to phone us
to report her missing.
From the very start, officers were worried.
We searched the home address.
We found that Sarah's car was still there.
We found that her handbag was still there
with her purse, and her cash, and her cards.
In fact, on speaking to Sarah's family and to Ben Lacomba,
apart from her personal mobile phone,
everything else was still at the house.
So that raised some alarm bells straight away,
that Sarah may not have just gone out.
Actually, what had happened to Sarah?
On the first day that I was called,
I didn't think much of it.
I mean, I tried to call her, got no answers.
Sarah doted on her children
and she would never have been missing
on one of her son's birthdays.
She actually had plans for his birthday,
and she wasn't there.
So our worry about Sarah was very high.
It was a difficult night that night because obviously
you have everything going through your brain.
When we got to Kent, there was nothing else
to think about other than, where is she?
How could she be missing?
Why would she be missing?
We began searches in the wider area of New Ash Green as well.
It's quite a rural area where that estate is built.
So we were looking in that area to see whether Sarah
might've been located nearby.
The authorities alerted the public.
There was a sense of purpose quickly
about the search for Sarah.
I checked Facebook before I went to bed,
like I generally do.
And there was, on the village account,
there was a shout-out from a young man called Lewis
saying that his mum had gone missing
and had anybody seen her.
That played on my mind through the night.
I woke up about five in the morning
and she was still missing.
So I put a shout-out in the morning saying,
"Is anybody free?
"There's a missing lady.
"Fancy going and having a look for her?"
I arranged with the local pavilion that
and I was absolutely shocked how many people turned up.
The village is a little bit like that,
kind of comes out if anything goes wrong.
So we started to send people out in different directions.
And then more people came and more people came.
For me, it became more serious
when I'd see all the effort
the whole community was putting in
towards the searching and things like that.
We kind of thought we were just going
looking for somebody down and injured.
That's what the police had said to me that morning.
So we were looking at the roads,
looking to anywhere somebody
could have got themselves off of the road if they were injured.
The boys meanwhile,
were getting very concerned about Ben Lacomba's behavior.
A couple of days after she went missing,
we wanted to try and see the children,
and we were blocked from it.
And I always thought that was a bit strange.
Then I found out that he had taken the children
to his mother's sister's house
and that we weren't allowed to see them.
So it was from that point
where my suspicions grew a lot more.
You can tell he's obviously hiding something.
It only points you to one answer.
An answer they did not want to hear.
Every day, you believe something will turn up,
some sort of new evidence, anything at all,
some sort of sighting or anything.
The police looked into absolutely everything
and still nothing was being turned up.
Was Sarah Wellgreen dead?
Had Ben Lacomba killed her?
If so, where had he put the body?
Kent police were alarmed from the moment
that they had received the call
about Sarah Wellgreen's disappearance.
It was quite suspicious that Sarah had left
all of her property behind.
Her family were telling us
that she would never walk anywhere.
She always used her car.
And that was still at the home.
So we were very worried right at the beginning.
And we classed Sarah a high-risk missing person.
Had she come to some harm?
Had she harmed herself?
Had she had an accident nearby?
Had she left and couldn't return
because she was being held somewhere?
In very few days, we were told that, you know,
it was not a missing person.
It was being treated as a potential murder.
So we carried out quite extensive searches
in the local New Ash Green area.
It's quite a rural area and a lot of woodland,
and we did a lot of what we describe as fingertip search,
in trying to find any evidence
of where Sarah might have gone.
We did quite a lot of work around the local CCTV
to see if we could find Sarah going out
or anybody coming to the address.
We did some work on Sarah's phone, her missing phone,
and we were able to establish that that phone went offline
at four minutes past four in the morning.
And we did some financial work to see
whether there was any transactions,
and we did a lot of work around her digital
and social media footprint.
There was no financial footprint,
there was no digital footprint.
Despite that, Ben Lacomba carried on his life as normal.
His former lover, the mother of his children, missing,
yet he ran an event business as a sideline
and he planned a party.
He ran kids war games with these foam guns.
And we were really baffled with Ben
when about day three or four of our searching,
he went into the village office to book the village hall.
And we thought that was completely bizarre.
There's half the village looking for the mother of his children,
and he's trying to arrange a kid's game in the village.
We did realize that we were dealing with somebody
that didn't kind of think like the rest of us did.
So we applied that really to our searches of,
okay, what do we think he thinks?
How do we think his thought pattern is?
We're still pretty sure she's here right under our nose.
The search parties combed every inch
of the woodlands and country lanes around the area.
Most feared the worst had happened.
They were probably looking for a body.
As searches for Sarah continued and turned up nothing,
Ben Lacomba planned his children's party
in the village hall.
But with no body, there could be no arrest.
Three days into the hunt for Sarah,
police asked Ben Lacomba for his phone.
Could they check to see if information on it
might reveal digital signals
to show where Sarah's still missing phone was?
Usually, we get a lot of cooperation from people,
especially when there's concern for a loved one.
Actually Ben Lacomba was more interested
in what we could retrieve from his phone
and refused to give us his phone that evening.
He told us that he would see us the next day.
He told us he'd come to the police station and we could do it then,
but he needed to do some things on his phone first.
As we later found out, that evening
after my officers have left, Ben Lacomba drove
from his home address to Greenhithe, which is a town nearby.
He went to the River Thames there
and he threw his phone in the river.
The following day, we couldn't get hold of him
until he'd been and bought another handset,
an identical handset to the one he'd just disposed of.
And he put his original SIM card in there.
Ben Lacomba seemed very keen
to get rid of any evidence which might incriminate him.
It was hoped that the cameras which proliferated
on the property would yield evidence.
Oddly, no luck there either.
We found that his CCTV system was corrupted.
And he told us that that system
hadn't been working for over a year.
So there wasn't anything on his footage
that we could find to help us find Sarah.
As detectives tried to overcome
the strange series of evidence gaps
linked to Ben Lacomba, the search went on.
No body meant there was still hope.
It does hurt, it's a strange feeling
because you've got so many different emotions
going through you at the time.
Like even, oh, they haven't found anything.
Could she still possibly be alive?
Was the answer to that question to be found
somewhere in the fields, and the ditches,
and the country lanes around New Ash Green?
The community and the boys were not about to give up.
One particular search will always stay in my mind
of a potential area in the woods.
And Jack had come out on the search,
which I don't actually think is necessarily the best thing.
But we were digging and we realized that no,
this wasn't going anywhere, it wasn't.
But we couldn't stop Jack digging.
And it was the most heartbreaking thing
to stand there and watch a young boy digging for his mother.
By October 16th, a week
since she was last sighted on security cameras,
and five days since Ben Lacomba had reported her missing,
detectives pounce.
And on the 16th of October,
I had Ben Lacomba arrested on suspicion of Sarah's murder.
Ben, it's the police.
You are under the arrest
for suspicion of murder of Sarah Wellgreen.
Over the next two days whilst he was in custody,
we interviewed him a number of times.
In fact, we had seven hours worth of interviews with Ben.
Throughout all interviews, he remained silent.
He refused to answer any questions.
You're here on suspicion of murdering her.
We believe she may be dead,
and that may be at your hand.
So did you kill her?
And for somebody that was innocent,
somebody that had nothing to do with Sarah's disappearance,
somebody that had phoned us with concern
that she'd gone missing,
for him not to help us was really strange.
So I'm not clear at the moment, Ben,
whether you're just trying to think of an answer
or whether you've decided not to answer the question.
And it was at very early stages,
we were a week after Sarah had gone missing.
There was still a lot of investigation
that we needed to do.
I had strong suspicions that Ben Lacomba was responsible.
But at that stage, Ben Lacomba was released on bail
and we continued our investigations.
You can only assume that Ben
is relying upon the lack of a body here
to guarantee that he doesn't get arrested or charged.
The first time he was arrested
essentially told us all what we were all thinking.
Then he was released, we weren't necessarily too sure why.
A series of mysteries was now to be examined.
Lacomba had said, inexplicably,
his own CCTV not been working.
But his home was not the only one with cameras.
What we did find is one
of Ben Lacomba's neighbors had CCTV,
and that overlooked the front of their house
into the main car park,
and behind that neighbor's house as well.
It was to be a huge undertaking
as they searched frame by frame through CCTV images
capturing the comings and goings of cars
around the home where Ben and Sarah lived.
And there were revelations.
From viewing the neighbors CCTV,
we found that pretty much every day
Ben Lacomba would come home and he'd park his car
in the car park right next to his house.
I call that car park one.
Actually the day that Ben Lacomba
came home from work on the 9th of October,
he parked his car in what I call car park two,
and that's behind the neighbor's home address
in an area that's not covered by CCTV.
It's quite dark there and an area where Ben Lacomba
could still get to his house, but without being seen.
And I wondered why did he not park
where he would normally park right by his house?
It was lit, it was covered by CCTV.
In fact, CCTV that he knew about,
because he'd asked his neighbor
what the coverage was before.
Why did he park somewhere else?
On the 9th of October,
they see Sarah Wellgreen leaving the shared home.
Later on the 9th, Sarah returns.
We know from CCTV that Sarah came home
just before 8:00 p.m. on the 9th of October.
We can see Sarah parking her car next to her house
and we see her going into her home address.
That's the last time anyone saw Sarah,
apart from her children and Ben Lacomba.
And at that stage, we could only go on
what Ben was telling us.
He said that Sarah had come into the house,
she had gone to see her children
and then she'd gone into her bedroom,
which was on the second floor.
Ben Lacomba slept in the attic room
on the third floor of the house.
Minute analysis of the neighbor's CCTV footage
exposed Ben's claims that his cameras
had not been working as untrue.
One of the things that that CCTV shows
is Ben's CCTV cameras and their flickering light
that says they're active.
And what it shows is that the night
of Sarah's disappearance, someone turned them off.
The CTTV system itself
was located in Ben Lacomba's bedroom.
So who else could have turned that camera off?
In the extensive search for Sarah,
Ivan Beasley's team undertook the largest search operation
Kent police have ever seen.
They trawled through private CCTV footage
in a 10 mile radius.
And we had a real breakthrough.
We found that just after 2:00 a.m. that night,
Ben Lacomba's car was on the move.
And we captured it on a number of cameras
at private addresses, traveling around two miles
away from the home address.
So we knew Ben Lacomba had gone out, and he didn't return
until about half past four in the morning.
So Ben Lacomba had told us that he'd been in bed all night
and that when he woke in the morning, Sarah was missing.
But we've now found his car on the move
and it had been away from the home address
for over two hours.
Learning all the information and the CCTV footage
of him leaving, being gone for a few hours,
I've reminisced about that an awful lot.
I know the route that he's taken.
I know the last point of camera that he was on.
I know he was gone for approximately two hours
before he returned back to the point
and took the same route home.
What had Ben Lacomba been doing
in the two hours in which he had found a place
where there were no cameras,
no passersby, at three in the morning
when he had told police he'd been asleep in bed?
He was liar, but was he a killer?
October 10th dawned brightly in Kent.
Already on the road, Ben Lacomba.
The following morning after Sarah had disappeared,
his car had mud all around his wheels
and all up the sides of both sides of his car.
So that car had been out overnight
and it had been off the road.
So where had that car been?
Within two hours of us seeing that car
the following morning, he'd got the car cleaned again
and it was spotlessly clean as per usual.
So where had the car gone?
Why was it dirty?
And why was he cleaning it straight away afterwards?
Although our evidence was building to show that,
in my opinion, Ben Lacomba was responsible,
the real frustration was we couldn't find Sarah.
The entire community was asked for help.
Could they find anything of Sarah's, like her phone?
On one occasion, we found a mobile phone
that fitted that description.
And we were... I cannot describe the feeling.
We all sat in silence waiting for the police
to say yes or no, and it was a no.
The area around New Ash Green,
and the community believes the body
of Sarah Wellgreen was out there.
Finding it might lead to the prosecution of her killer.
Most presumed that to be Ben Lacomba.
One of the searchers knew Ben
and of the difficulty facing Sarah's neighbors.
Ben was a taxi driver.
You know, he's used to all the country lanes,
all these routes all times of day.
He knows when it's quiet.
He knows where there's cameras.
He knows, you know, landmarks, what he's looking for maybe.
Unfortunately what worked to his advantage
was that the area has got so much
vast and desolate woodland.
Some of it isn't accessible to dog walkers
or isn't a public walking spot.
So they're quite remote and he would have been able to find
a suitable burial site in those locations.
We looked for access points, maybe a gate,
maybe a footpath, anywhere Ben could stop,
maybe not get disturbed in the middle of the night.
He's then got easy access,
whether it'd be a field, trees, cover, he's got everything.
We then were so far in, we couldn't stop.
We couldn't just say, "Oh well, we've looked,
"we've not found her."
We were invested with the family,
we'd got to know them, we'd got to know the police.
Search come up that way.
So we kept going, we got teams of cadaver dogs.
They came down from Yorkshire
and as far as the West Country.
And we went out with them in the woodland
and everything surrounding the village, nothing.
But we had a few positives.
The police came out and it wasn't.
As villagers, police, and dog handlers
searched the countryside for signs of Sarah Wellgreen,
Ben Lacomba was still
going about his business as a taxi driver.
He also went to the family court.
Within a few days of her disappearance,
Ben Lacomba had gone to the family court
and was trying to convene an urgent hearing
so that he could have prime custody of the children.
Now I wonder what the urgency was.
Why did he need to do that so quickly?
And the only answer I came up with was that he knew
Sarah would never be coming home.
Kent police and the Crown Prosecution Service
decided to charge Lacomba with murder.
The time is 06:45.
You are further under the arrest
on suspicion of murder of Sarah Wellgreen.
This is a further arrest on the discovery of fresh evidence.
It was the only answer to what had happened.
But would a jury agree?
Do you understand that?
Okay, you don't have to say anything. But it may harm your defense
if you do not mention when questioned
something which you later rely on in court.
Anything you do say may be given in evidence.
It is unusual for somebody to be charged with murder
and tried for murder when there's no body.
It's certainly not unheard of.
I've been involved in one of those cases myself.
It is not usual.
To get their man,
detectives needed an unusual investigative approach.
We had to carry out what are negative proof of life inquiries
and that was really hard to do.
A jury was about to be asked
to believe a negative.
If someone cannot be seen to be alive, they must be dead.
The inquires that were carried out to try and prove
that Sarah was no longer alive
were very complex and ongoing
throughout all of our investigation
up to the point of our trial.
I needed to show that there was no physical sightings of Sarah.
I also needed to show there was no financial
or digital footprint of Sarah.
We did ongoing work with her phones,
we did ongoing work with her social media
and I would say it's very difficult in this day and age
to be able to leave no footprint at all.
If the jury at Woolwich Crown Court
accepted the prosecution argument,
then the next thing to be shown was that Ben Lacomba
had been responsible for her death.
Amongst the videos the jury was shown
was the one revealing that Lacomba
had driven seven miles from home three nights
after Sarah disappeared to throw away his phone.
So when a question was put to Ben Lacomba
about why he threw his mobile phone into the river,
he said that in the past he'd written some messages
on his phone that he hadn't sent,
but it was a cathartic way of him expressing his views.
And he decided that if those messages
had ever been seen by the police,
they might be construed in a way
that might raise suspicion about him being involved.
So that was his answer for why he decided
to throw his phone in the river.
So the Crown had to prove
that Ben had carried out a murder,
and they had to do that with the absence of a body.
So ordinarily, that's not easy.
He made it very easy for them.
Lacomba was found guilty of murder on November 2019.
He will serve a minimum of 27 years
before he is eligible for parole.
He has still to reveal the whereabouts
of the body of Sarah Wellgreen.
The investigation into who killed Sarah is closed.
Ben Lacomba has been found guilty of murdering Sarah,
and he's been sentenced.
The proactive search for Sarah
has sadly had to come to an end.
But any further information that comes out
that might help us find where Sarah is,
we are reviewing and reacting appropriately to.
Lacomba has left behind his own three children
and two of his ex-lover's boys,
who will be forever haunted by not knowing
where their mom is buried.
Lacomba is still keeping quiet.
The hardest part is that she's still,
to this day, not been found.
That's probably the hardest thing to actually deal with.
As to why he's not done it,
I don't think anyone can know that other than him.
There's still that missing piece
and it'll always be like that.
We'll always have that missing big piece
because of what he's done.
It'd be a lot easier if he was to say where she was,
but I believe he will keep on denying it
so he has a hope that he can have a relationship
with his children.
I believe he's withholding that
because that's the only sort of power that he has left.
Like as soon as he tells us that,
that's him admitting to doing it, which he has never done.
But all the evidence pointed towards him.
Whether he will admit that or not, we can only hope.
Whilst the police have had to stop the search
for the body of Sarah Wellgreen,
those who first volunteered to look for her
when she was officially missing continue.
The boys and they feel that the area of Kent
Lacomba traveled to that night
is not so big that they cannot find her.
The involvement in the searches,
I feel as though if I wasn't involved,
I wouldn't be doing anything else that would be useful.
The whole reason I came back to Kent was to find her.
I've been here ever since.
We definitely think she's still right under our nose somewhere.
We still got lots, lots more work to do,
but they are a great support network.
If that's the farm, there's the access roads from here.
Without them, I don't think,
I don't think I would be as capable
and as strong as I am today to carry on with what we do.
So around there, down, down, down, down, down,
around, and then we got whole of his park view here.
I don't think it's difficult to remain hopeful.
This is something that I've always talked about
with the others and with Jack about.
We've always got to have hope,
and the more and more we search,
the closer we to are finding Sarah.
All I've been doing for the past year
is working with some others who are involved.
Going to points of interest,
marking out on maps, and waiting for everyone
to be able to get together
so we can then kickstart it all up again.
Ground level, we'll be looking for any kind of area
that looks like it's been disturbed, possibly dug over.
We're three years into this now.
So we're going to be looking for really
a mound of stones where the soil was sunk,
but the stones will not sink.
It's nonstop, I never switch off from this.
Even if I've got a spare hour,
I will be looking at maps trying to find some more points
that we need to go and look at.
We press on, we wouldn't let the boys down at this stage.
So we are now at the stage where we're looking at areas
that we need to bring specialists in.
We know that we're not looking for a person anymore.
You know, we are gonna find bones.
That's quite hard to get into your head.
So it's tough, it's a tough one.
Tough or not to find Sarah out here
in the Kent countryside, those living in the villages
which experienced the sudden disappearance
and murder of Sarah Wellgreen
are determined to find her, and they believe they will.
I can see those boys getting closure.
I can see them all getting closure,
and I just hope that we can be part of that.
It'd mean everything just to have a place
where you can bury her and there's a place
that you can actually go to.
If you ever feel down about anything,
you've got that place you can go.
Without it, you've got nothing.