The mother of Ben Needham, who went missing as a toddler, has said confirmation that her son was dead would mean “closure” after 25 years of searching for him.
Kerry Needham said her family was preparing to accept that Ben was dead and could no longer bear to live without knowing what had happened to him on the Greek island of Kos in July 1991.
In a tearful television interview on Monday, Needham said she and her family were “tired and distressed”. She spoke as police entered their third week of searches on Kos after new information that Ben, who was 21 months old when he disappeared, may have been accidentally killed by a digger driver.
She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “I think it really now is a case of finding him not alive. We can’t live another 25 years like this, my parents can’t and I can’t. It’s not the best solution but it will eventually lay it to rest for us, we’re all extremely tired and distressed.
“Twenty-five years living and not knowing where your child is, is torment. I don’t like to say it but then at least we would know and it would be closure and he can be laid to rest and we can remember him as he was.”
Needham said her family was trying to remain calm but every day was an “agonising wait” for news from the police. “They are in constant contact with us and updating us on everything, but every time the phone rings you think: is this going to be the one with the bad news?’’ she said.
“It’s stressful, it’s frustrating, it’s painful, but we’re trying to stay as strong as we possibly can.”
Officers from South Yorkshire police and Greek volunteers have been working for a fortnight near the farmhouse where Ben was last seen.
Last weekend, officers said they would extend their stay after discovering a layer of spoil material that had been deposited at the site within the past 30 years.
The current operation was prompted by information that a digger driver, Konstantinos Barkas, also known as Dino, may have been responsible for the toddler’s death.
Barkas, who died of stomach cancer last year, was clearing land with an excavator near where the boy, from Sheffield, was playing on the day he vanished.
Needham, who has been warned to “prepare for the worst”, thanked the public, the police and the British media for their support.
“We wouldn’t have got this far without South Yorkshire police – they’ve been fantastic and they’ve tried to do this as painlessly as possible,” she said. “They have tried to find those answers for us and we need those answers good or bad. Unfortunately it looks like it’s going to be a bad outcome, but we’ll just try to get on with everything.”
