Gary Baxter

DI Gary Baxter is a Sunderland detective whose work on the abduction cases leads him into the search for the Briggs twins, the discovery of their bodies and the investigation of Jason Dodds and Frank McQuillan. He is presented less through private history than through the decisions he makes under pressure: reconstructing how women disappeared, pursuing a breakthrough in the twins’ case and insisting that police procedure be followed even when colleagues are eager to act. The investigation tests both his discipline and his capacity to face what the evidence reveals.

Role and investigative approach

Gary joins Eve Strong and Bill Nicol at the murder board and asks for news, placing him within the team’s ongoing inquiry. When he later examines what the victims had been doing before they disappeared, he lays out markedly different routines rather than treating the women’s cases as identical. Becky Allsopp had travelled back from a business meeting: investigators tracked her from Newcastle Central Station onto the Metro and as far as the Stadium of Light, where she walked beyond CCTV coverage. Cath Caslaw had left a cinema and a drink with her boyfriend after a row. Louise Usher had been to the gym and might walk the mile home, take a bus or, more rarely, use a taxi. Felicity Wanless had left a pub before her friends and never arrived home.

From those distinct journeys Gary draws a practical investigative question: how could someone seize women in different circumstances without attracting reports of shouting or screeching tyres? The team considers whether an apparent request for help could have brought a victim close enough to overpower. His account of Becky’s last known route also makes the limits of surveillance concrete: the cameras record her only until she walks beyond their range. The inquiry has to work from incomplete traces, comparing ordinary journeys and possible means of transport rather than relying on a single obvious scene of abduction.

CCTV later provides a suggestive account of Jill Richards’s movements. She is seen leaving a supermarket, walking past McDonald’s towards Roker Avenue, disappearing briefly from view, then appearing at a bus stop outside the Salvation Army. Across the road, a car showroom’s camera records her checking the timetable and flagging down a vehicle shaped like a black cab, but with no sign on its roof. Eve Strong points out that this conflicts with the police warning to hail only white cars bearing a taxi sign. The footage does not by itself identify the driver, but it sharpens the concern that a vehicle resembling a cab could be used to approach women under a false appearance of safety.

The twins’ disappearance and the phone breakthrough

When DCI Kirsty Summers tells Gary that two fourteen-year-old twin girls are missing, she assigns him the lead. He immediately sets off with Jane Bowman to speak to their mother. In a meeting with the family, he asks what the twins are like and whether they are popular, seeking the social context that might explain where they went and whom they might have trusted. Their best friend, Billy-Jo Mason, becomes another person for the detectives to question. On the way to see her, Jane says the investigation has drawn a blank on all three missing women; Gary shares her frustration at how little the town’s many people and cameras have yielded.

The twins’ smartphone changes the direction of the case. When it is found in a bin in Grangetown, Gary calls Jane to join him and tells the officers at the station that the phone has been recovered. The news creates an immediate stir because it is the first real break after days without one. Frank McQuillan and Joe explain how it came to be found; back at headquarters, Jane books it in as evidence and Gary arranges for officers to watch Jason Dodds’s house so they can arrest him when he appears. He also asks Maddie to examine the phone urgently.

The messages give the detectives a concrete line to pursue. Maddie identifies the person the twins had been messaging as Jason Dodds, whose number was registered under that name even though the girls called him Mario. The exchanges show that he had pretended to be someone else, persistently asked the girls for pictures and persuaded them to skip school and meet him in Newcastle. They had sent topless photographs, but Maddie’s account stresses that they had resisted his further pressure and stuck together. Gary checks that the plan to meet is definite. Once Dodds is picked up, he decides on a first interview that evening, followed by further questioning the next day, while the police seek warrants to search his home, car and other relevant places.

Searches, discovery and family contact

The inquiry expands from the phone to a riverside lock-up where Gary and a mixed police team wait to search. Detectives, uniformed officers and crime-scene technicians are assembled, while Nick Hart and Jess Thomas continue following Dodds. Some members of the team suggest beginning before the warrant paperwork arrives. Gary stops them: he wants the search conducted by the book. When the permission finally reaches his phone, he authorizes entry. The delay is brief in the larger investigation, but it shows that urgency does not erase his insistence on lawful process.

The lock-up’s contents are concealed behind shelving, and reaching them requires the investigators to work through the cramped space. When a hammer is passed through a gap, Gary follows Jane through it, takes the tool and levers open a padlock. Inside a freezer, two bodies have been wrapped in heavy-duty plastic and folded to fit. Frost covers the wrappings; through one, Gary sees a pale face framed by dark curls, with ice crystals on the eyelashes. The search has ended the uncertainty over the twins’ whereabouts, but it confirms the worst outcome. Gary’s response is an expression of sorrow for the girls, while Jane immediately recognizes the devastating news for their mother, Linda Briggs.

Gary and Jane go to the Briggs home, where Wendy Sawyer opens the door. Gary tells her that the girls have been found; Wendy’s immediate question is whether they are alive. The encounter places the investigation’s result in the presence of the family who had been waiting for news. Gary does not let the discovery remain an operational fact confined to the lock-up: he and Jane carry it directly to the household, where the meaning of the search is unmistakable.

Interviews and the investigation’s significance

Back at the station, Gary watches the interviews through one-way glass. Jason Dodds is questioned by Colin Flynn and Jane, with his appointed lawyer, Gareth Snell, present. Frank McQuillan is also in custody and is due to be questioned. Gary observes as the interviewers put the discovery to Dodds: two teenagers were found dead in a deep freeze, hidden behind a shelving rack at the back of his lock-up. The evidence has transformed the earlier missing-person inquiry into an investigation confronting the deaths directly.

Eve Strong joins Gary in the observation room while Colin and Jane interview McQuillan. McQuillan describes how he and another man posed as young men, created a Facebook page and used pictures found on the internet. His account begins to disclose the deception behind the twins’ online contact and supplies a human explanation for the messages recovered from the phone. Across these stages, Gary’s role links digital evidence, surveillance, warrants, physical searches and interviews. His persistence does not make every disappearance immediately legible; instead, he keeps the inquiry moving from fragmentary movements to a phone, from the phone to suspects, and from a legally authorized search to the truth concealed in the freezer.