Olly Stephens' parents talk about their loss and the campaign to protect other children

STUART and Amanda Stephens have not celebrated Christmas since the murder of their 13-year-old son Olly two years ago.

The spot in their lounge once filled by a Christmas tree was empty again this year and they did not eat Christmas dinner or unwrap presents.

Instead, the couple and their daughter watched old video footage of past Christmases as they endured the second one without their son.

Mrs Stephens, 53, said: “On that last Christmas, I have a video looking into our lounge just before the kids come down. It was beautiful.

“I just can’t see how we’ll ever get back to that. That innocence and that joy is gone. There’s no feeling of wanting to do it again.”

On January 3, 2021, Olly told his parents he was meeting a friend and set off from their home in Emmer Green to walk just a few hundred yards to Bugs Bottom.

Just 10 minutes later, he was ambushed by two boys, aged 13 and 14, who had recruited a 14-year-old girl to lure Olly to the fields following an online feud.

A brief fistfight broke out before Olly was fatally stabbed.

Speaking on the eve of the second anniversary of his death, Mr Stephens, also 53, described life without Olly as “empty”.

He said: “I can’t believe how quickly 24 months goes by. It feels both an incredibly long and short time. He was my entertainment and I was looking forward to all the things we were going to do together.

“You’re not only grieving the loss of your child, you’re grieving the loss of their future.”

Mrs Stephens said not a moment went by when she was not thinking of her son.

She said: “With the loss of a child that’s been murdered, you can’t have peace of mind. You’ve lost them in the most traumatic of ways.

“You have to try to get past the trauma of it and keep going and do what you can. It’s a horrific path to live.

“I’m always thinking of him. I wake up in the night and I remember again. I wake in the morning and I remember again. It doesn’t ever go away.

“I can’t bear the thought I haven’t got him in my life anymore.”

Olly’s bedroom has been left almost untouched since the day he died and is filled with his toy cars and action figures.

Mr Stephens said he still peeks in expecting to see his son’s feet poking out from under the bed covers.

He remembers spending hours playing with Olly in the fields which back on to their house, “doing silly stuff and climbing trees”.

As Olly grew older, he would take him for “burger runs” or to watch London Irish Rugby Club play at the then Madejski Stadium in Reading.

Mr Stephens said: “He touched so many people in such a short space of time. We get messages every day from people saying how much they miss Olly.

“He was a good kid from day one and he had a good soul. He always made me laugh.”

Mr Stephens would always visit Olly’s room and give him a hug and a kiss before he went to bed.

He said: “It didn’t matter how bad a day you had, just walking into his room made you feel better. He was still a baby. The joke was because he was the youngest, he would always be the baby no matter how old he got.

“Unfortunately, life gets in the way. When I look back at the times I was working when I should have been with the kids, I just kick myself.”

Mr Stephens, a carpenter and builder, said he was stressed with work during Olly’s last Christmas in 2020 and described it as “not one of our best”.

He said: “We had a bad feeling going into Christmas. I don’t know if you believe in omens, but I dropped a wedding photo and it cracked straight through.

“I was stressed because of work but also because I knew something was going on with Olly and he wasn’t telling us.”

Mr and Mrs Stephens noticed differences in Olly’s sleep patterns as he was unable to sleep at night and instead rested during the day.

Mrs Stephens said: “He would arrange to meet a friend in the day who would knock for him but he’d still be asleep.

“He didn’t say anything, but you could tell in his manner he was worried about something.”

In the weeks before he was killed, Olly had seen a video posted on Snapchat of a young boy being “patterned” — the filmed humiliation of a young person — and had alerted the boy’s older brother.

When two boys in the same Snapchat group realised what Olly had done, they accused him of “snitching” and began to plot the attack.

Mr Stephens said Olly would always “stand up for the underdog” and he had previously been suspended from school after sticking up for a younger boy being bullied.

Nevertheless, he noticed his son was detached that Christmas and recalled that when he asked what was wrong, Olly replied, “snitches get stitches”.

Mr Stephens said it was unusual for Olly to act this way as Christmas had usually been one of his favourite times of the year.

The family would decorate the tree together and watch the same films, including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Christmas Carol (1999).

Mr Stephens said: “There’s a line at the end of A Christmas Carol that goes, ‘He knew how to do Christmas well’. I always tried to do Christmas well for the kids.

“We had loads of great food, loads of presents, lots of colour and lots of lights.

“Olly loved receiving presents. He was never really bothered what he got, as long as it was wrapped. One year, when he was really small, we just wrapped a lot of empty boxes. He loved it.”

Mrs Stephens noticed that Olly, who had recently been diagnosed with autism, was different from his usual “larger than life” personality.

She said: “He said to us he felt he didn’t have any friends. He felt he wasn’t liked.

“We told him he did have friends but now we realise he was having these interactions online that were upsetting him.

“It’s hard as a parent because your job is to protect your child. You look back and think, ‘If only he could have been honest then we could have done something’.

“It just wasn’t his way. He would have kept that away from us, thinking he almost had to protect us.”

Mr and Mrs Stephens’ final Christmas present to Olly was a technical Lego set of a car from the Fast and Furious movies.

Mr Stephens said: “When he unwrapped it, I told him he could tell his friends he had a car. He told me to stop telling dad jokes.

“We only found out later that he would text all his friends whenever he completed a section of it.”

Olly did not have the chance to complete the car before he was murdered on the afternoon of January 3. He had spent the morning helping his father move books from a bookcase due to be painted before telling his parents he was going out.

Mrs Stephens said: “He did seem happier in himself. He started to say he was going to meet someone we knew.

“The time seemed to change. One minute he said he was going and the next he said they hadn’t replied. I kept thinking, ‘Is he going or not?’

“But he was showering and getting ready to go and was in really good spirits to meet that person.

“The last thing he said was ‘Love you, mum’ because I said that to him as he left. Then he told me not to worry as he had his location app turned on.”

Mr Stephens said: “Because he was happy, we were relaxed. Next thing I know, he had gone out the door.

“Something told me to stop him. I reached for the door but at the time, I needed a new hip as I have bad arthritis and my knee gave way.

“I tried to open the window but it was locked. I banged on the glass but he couldn’t hear because it is double glazed. I didn’t even think of ringing and that drives me insane. I should have rung him.

“You wouldn’t expect your son to walk 200 yards from your house and not see him again.”

A neighbour’s doorbell camera captured the last known footage of Olly at 3.34pm walking in sliders and without a coat to the fields where he had played as a child.

On the way, he met friends of his parents and chatted for a short time before proceeding to where he expected to meet the girl alone. Instead, he was ambushed by the two boys and the fistfight broke out. Olly is said to have gained the upper hand, knocking one of the boys to the ground, before the younger boy pulled out a blade and stabbed him twice.

The killers and the girl fled the scene while Olly lay bleeding on the ground.

It was 15 minutes after her son had left the house that Mrs Stephens answered a knock at the door.

She said: “It was a sharp rap. I recognised the young adult and he said what had happened.

“It was just as if time stopped. You instantly have that out of body feeling as if ‘Did he really say that — Olly’s been stabbed?’”

Mr Stephens, who had been watching rugby on TV, heard his wife scream and ran down the stairs, not pausing to put on shoes before running to where Olly lay.

He said: “There were all these people who turned to look at me and their faces were white.”

He arrived before the paramedics while members of the public were performing CPR on Olly.

An off-duty nurse walking her dog had witnessed the stabbing and given him first aid.

Mr Stephens, who had helped deliver Olly at his birth, knelt to cradle his son.

He said: “I helped give birth to him, so I wanted to be with him. I knew just by looking at him he was gone. His hand was completely lifeless and cold.”

Mrs Stephens arrived soon afterwards and the first thing she saw was Olly lying on the ground with his feet to one side. She said: “He was wearing sliders. I had told him to put trainers on as it was cold and wet but he wouldn’t. He just had socks and sliders on and one slider had fallen off. His face looked so unhealthy.

“There were people surrounding him, and Stuart was near him, crouched down, trying to get across to him.

“He had fallen to his knees and he screamed, ‘My boy, my boy, no.’ I just had this horrible feeling that this wasn’t good.

“I didn’t have hope in my heart that anything good was going to come. When we got there, he’d probably already been dead a couple of minutes.”

Olly was carried into an ambulance but died before he could be taken to hospital. He was officially pronounced dead at 5pm.

His family were allowed to say a final goodbye in the back of the ambulance.

“We went in and he was wrapped in a big foil blanket,” said Mrs Stephens. “They had tried to cover him all over so all we could see was his face and the tube coming out. His eyes were closed and he was ever so pale.

“I said something like, ‘I just can’t believe this has happened to you, Olly. It’s so awful. I love you.’

“It was that feeling of leaving him there that was horrific. I just wanted to take him home.”

Mr Stephens said: “An hour and a half earlier, we’d been messing around in the house.

“I had a few words with him, saying something along the lines of, he was our joy. We always felt we said what we had to say to him anyway. We were always saying, ‘We love you.’

Olly was murdered on the same day the family were due to take down their Christmas decorations but the subsequent police investigation meant they stayed up for most of January.

His killers were caught and charged within days.

In July last year both boys were found guilty of murder following a five-week trial at Reading Crown Court and sentenced to life in custody with a minimum of 13 and 12 years respectively.

The girl admitted manslaughter and was sentenced to five years.

In the months following Olly’s murder, between assisting the police investigations and organising Olly’s funeral, Mr Stephens finished Olly’s Lego car. It now sits in his room.

Mr Stephens also keeps a box of all their Christmas presents from Olly upstairs.

He said Christmas was a particularly difficult time of year, with Olly’s absence most noticeable at family gatherings when “a seat at the table is missing”.

He said: “We’re not really Christmassy anymore. My heart’s not in it. The joy has gone.”

While the Stephens family no longer celebrate Christmas, a tree that stands just metres from the spot where Olly was killed is adorned with baubles and decorations.

The tree was planted by Mr Stephens as a tribute to his son a couple of months after his death and is decorated throughout the year by passers-by. It is where his family and friends have gathered for Olly’s birthday — November 1 — for the last two years and is where they will meet for the anniversary of his death on Tuesday.

Near the tree stands a large wooden memorial bench carved in the shape of a sofa.

Mr Stephens said these tributes provide a “focal point” for people to remember Olly.

He said: “We put the tree and bench there because something so horrible happened in that field that his friends had stopped using it. A lot of them find a bit of solace there and can talk to him.”

Mr and Mrs Stephens, who grew up streets apart in Caversham Park Village and met while waiting for the school bus, have no desire to leave their home.

Mr Stephens said: “We don’t want to move because this is where Olly grew up. This is his home and where all our memories are of him.

“I can see him lying on the sofa. I can see him going into cupboards. If you move somewhere else, that’s all gone.”

Olly’s murder was plotted on 11 different social networking sites and his parents have been campaigning for stricter laws to deal with the issues of online abuse and dangers.

Mr Stephens said: “Without that platform, they wouldn’t have been able to plot to kill him. He was groomed, abused and murdered by social media.

“Kids are becoming desensitised. They are lacking morals. It is a danger. Any kid can be manipulated without their parents knowing it.” Earlier this month, Mrs and Mrs Stephens visited Parliament with Reading East MP Matt Rodda to watch from the public gallery as the Online Safety Bill was debated.

The Bill aims to keep websites and social media free of illegal and harmful content while defending freedom of speech.

Mr and Mrs Stephens are part of a group of five bereaved families who all claim social media played a part in their children’s deaths.

They recently met Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful content online.

Together, the parents have formed the Bereaved Families for Online Safety initiative, supported by the NSPCC, to campaign for a safer internet for children.

Mrs Stephens said: “We are highlighting the cases of our children, what happened, and pushing for the Online Safety Bill to go through as soon as possible.

All the families use the term “taken” to describe what happened to their children.

Mr Stephens said: “We didn’t lose Olly. Any child that dies prematurely is a tragedy but Olly was taken in such a brutal manner by other children.

“We are working with other parents in our situation and ‘taken’ is the word that is always used because you feel like you’ve been robbed.

“They’ve stolen your future. They’ve stolen your happiness. They’ve stolen your joy.”