‘Mate, I’ve f****ed up good and proper.’
That was the chilling final message received from 33-year-old Josh Rogers shortly before he went missing in the Spanish resort of Lloret de Mar last September.
Sent to his mother’s partner Stu, it was deeply alarming coming from a normally cheerful football fanatic, described by his younger sister Ashley as a ‘very cheeky personality.’
‘Josh was very bubbly,’ she says. ‘He was friends with everybody.’
That happy disposition can be seen in a treasured photograph of Josh as a baby. Dressed in a little Santa suit and chuckling away at the camera, he remained as playful as an adult, despite being born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, a hereditary neurological condition that made walking difficult for him.
He also had problems concentrating. So he liked to plan ahead and allow plenty of time to find places, especially when it came to watching his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers, the team he had supported since his childhood in the neighbouring West Midlands town of Walsall.
On September 20, Wolves played a Premier League match against Leeds United and, although Josh had arrived in Lloret the previous night, he was determined not to miss a second of this important game. He had booked himself a table to watch it at Dave’s Bar, one of the many British pubs in this lively town on the Costa Brava.
On that fateful Saturday, the match kicked off at 4pm Spanish time but Josh never saw it. His final message was sent that lunchtime and three days later his body was found in a hillside woodland surrounded by sprawling Mediterranean villas, about a 25-minute walk from his hotel.
Nothing about that location made sense. This was a young man seeking the cut-price hedonism for which the Costa Brava is renowned, not a neighbourhood of upmarket homes with only the occasional barking dog to break the silence.
‘He had no reason at all to go there,’ says his mother Dionne, a 55-year-old teaching assistant. ‘There’s nothing up there for tourists. He must have been taken there.’
Josh’s phone, bank card and €600 in cash were missing and a local witness reported that the body appeared to have been moved before the police arrived. It seemed it could only be foul play.
Yet within days, the Mossos—the regional police force—shut down the investigation, blaming Josh’s death on cocaine and alcohol exacerbating an underlying heart weakness.
Josh’s family have spent the months since fighting to reopen the case and with good reason, the Mail’s forensic piecing together of his final hours revealing important evidence overlooked by the police. Just as in some other recent tragedies involving Britons in Spain.
Josh (pictured with his dog) was an avid supporter of Wolves. His love for the game came from his dad
Josh sent a video of him beaming in a tour of his hotel room after checking in at around 2am
This is the neighbourhood Josh was found in. There were sprawling Mediterranean villas, but it is the complete opposite direction to the beach and town centre
In July 2024, 35-year-old Brett Dryden was found dead in Almeria with a four-inch head wound. A British pathologist deemed his injuries consistent with murder; Spanish authorities blamed drugs.
Two months later, the body of 30-year-old Nathan Osman was discovered at the foot of a cliff in Benidorm. Local police ruled it an accident, despite someone trying to use his bank cards the day after he died.
In both cases, the mourning families say Spanish police dropped the ball, forcing them to investigate on their own.
Now new information obtained by the Mail in Lloret has highlighted the missed opportunities in Josh’s case — starting with a bombshell admission from the taxi driver who is one of the last people known to have had direct contact with him.
Two months before the trip, Josh contacted this driver via his Facebook travel business page and booked a 90-minute ride from Barcelona’s El Prat airport to his hotel.
The cabbie claimed that, after collecting him from the airport at around 10.30pm, they drove straight to Lloret de Mar. They then stopped for Josh to get a kebab at a local takeaway called the Himalaya before he dropped him off at his hotel, the three-star Bluesea Montevista Hawai, shortly before 1am.
All that appears to be true but he omitted to tell them about another stop they made on the way to the hotel.
As the Mail can now reveal, Josh had exchanged a number of messages with the driver in the run-up to his trip, mainly asking for recommendations for local bars but also to ask if he could get hold of two grams of cocaine for him.
‘I can do … but I don’t know if before or after pick you up,’ the driver replied.
Josh, who enjoyed solo travelling to meet new people and explore new countries, then sent a picture of himself so that the cabbie could recognise him in the arrivals area, saying he would also be distinguishable because ‘I do walk a bit different got a disability’.
‘No problem bro,’ came the reply. ‘I will try to buy the cocaine and you will walk more faster.’
Even after the Spanish police had been shown this seemingly incontrovertible evidence by Dionne, they accepted the taxi driver’s denials that he had offered to source drugs for Josh. But that story changed when we confronted him in the courtyard beneath his apartment in Lloret.
A short, stocky Venezuelan wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, he would talk only on condition of anonymity.
‘I want to tell you the truth,’ he said, admitting that he had promised to get cocaine for Josh but claiming that he had overslept and didn’t have time to pick any up on the way to the airport.
He’d called an old drug-dealing contact but he was unavailable. By then it was past midnight so, after they’d got Josh the kebab, he took him to Lloret’s notorious ‘strip’.
This grainy image is the last CCTV of Josh, leaving his room at 12.21pm on September 20
Josh is pictured as a playful child in a sweet Santa suit as a baby. He tragically died aged 33
Josh walked out of the Bluesea Hotel Montevista Hawai at around 12.23pm and was never seen alive again
His taxi driver admitted to the Mail that he took Josh to pick up drugs outside the Londoner nightclub, a notorious area of Lloret de Mar where dealers prowl for tourists
This is the entrance to the woodland where Josh was found, around a 25 minute walk uphill from his hotel
A tacky neon-lit drag filled with clubs and bars offering happy hours alongside souvenir and sex shops, this hub of Lloret’s nightlife is also known for aggressive drug-dealers prowling for drunk tourists.
Pointing him in their direction outside The Londoner nightclub, the driver says he stayed in the car and waited for Josh to come back.
‘I said my friend if you want to go there, I’m not going to do it. You want it, you go and you buy.’
Once Josh was back in the car, he says, he drove him straight to the hotel.
‘I never went in the room or the hotel. That was the last time I saw him. I promise you I have no idea what happened with him.’
Although the hotel’s CCTV is still being held by the police, a manager there talked us through what he remembered of it. It showed that Josh, who’d been drinking both before and during his Ryanair flight from Birmingham Airport, seemed relaxed and happy as he checked in and made his way to his room.
At 12.57am, he sent Stu a photo of a beer bottle on his bedside table. Three minutes later, he followed it with a video of himself grinning into the mirror while giving a virtual tour of his room and joking about the dodgy pipework.
It seemed to the family that he was already high by then but they weren’t unduly worried. Meanwhile, Josh stayed up late and, according to the cab driver, messaged him at 3.38am, asking for his help in finding a prostitute.
The driver claims he told Josh that he was already in bed and couldn’t help him, sending him links to websites for escort services and the number of another taxi firm instead.
Nine minutes later, Josh dialled the number of the alternative cab company the Venezuelan had given him and then again at 6.49am and 6.54am.
For some reason, the first two calls didn’t go through. But when the Mail visited the taxi firm’s offices, we discovered that the third — which lasted 26 seconds — was recorded and Josh can be heard saying: ‘Can I get a taxi please… Bluesea Montevista.’ The line then goes dead.
If we are to believe the taxi driver, then it’s possible Josh had found an escort online and was trying get to wherever she was. But his mother Dionne is sceptical about this.
Although fully aware that Josh took cocaine, she’d never heard of him paying for sex before.
‘I can’t get my head around that, it seems totally unlike him,’ she says.
A poster of Josh was put up by his family in the area he was found dead. They are desperate for answers
Josh’s family say he lived and breathed Wolves and was going to watch them in a local bar
Wherever Josh was trying to go, the security footage shows that he didn’t leave his room that night. And by morning, he seemed paranoid and anxious to get hold of his family.
Five minutes after that last call to the taxi company, Josh tried to call his mother’s partner Stu, a vehicle recovery driver, but he’d been working late the night before and was still asleep. At 8.26am, Josh sent a follow-up message saying ‘Mate, can you answer please?’
But Stu didn’t see that until 10.37am and Josh didn’t respond to the reply Stu then sent, asking ‘What’s happening kid?’
According to the Venezuelan’s witness statement, Josh messaged him on WhatsApp again at 12.15pm with a request for another ride but he replied that he was unavailable and gave him the number of yet another cab company — and that was the last time they were in touch.
Almost immediately afterwards, Josh twice texted a Spanish number which still hasn’t been identified.
‘You’d think that finding out whose phone number it was would be crucial information but the Spanish police just brushed it off when we gave them it and said they wouldn’t be looking into it,’ says his sister Ashley.
One possibility is that Josh was contacting someone he met while buying his cocaine on the strip. In those furtive exchanges, amidst the chaos of the thumping bass and crowded pavements, phone numbers are routinely swapped as promises of better product, cheaper prices, or afterparties are made.
Perhaps someone he met in that shady environment convinced him to step outside his hotel that lunchtime into a trap from which he would never return.
That theory would certainly be consistent with the hotel’s CCTV. It captured Josh walking through the lobby at 12.23pm—three and a half hours before the Wolves-Leeds game kicked off.
Pictured is Dave’s Bar in Lloret de Mar, where Josh had booked to go and watch the Wolves match. However, he never made it there
He then goes straight outside, not turning right towards the beach, as guests invariably do, but heading left — in the direction in which his body was later found.
According to the hotel manager, he did so very purposefully.
‘It’s like he knew he had to go there for some reason. Why?’
How far he got on foot is unclear as the police say there was no CCTV footage available from further up the road, despite the family counting at least 20 cameras in the vicinity.
When the Mail retraced the walk from the hotel to where his body was found, it seemed very unlikely that he could have made it under his own steam.
Steep, exhausting and eerily quiet, it would be a gruelling 1.3km climb for someone with Josh’s limited mobility, especially in the Spanish sun, with temperatures hovering around 80F (27C) on the day he disappeared.
The family speculate that somebody he’d talked to on the strip might have picked him up and that as soon as he got in their car he realised that it was a very bad idea, hence that desperate final message about having ‘f***ed up good and proper’, sent to Stu at 12.30pm.
‘It was almost as though he left that hotel and immediately knew he was in danger,’ Ashley says. ‘He knew something was very wrong.’
Had the Spanish police pressed the taxi driver and learned about Josh’s visit to the strip when they first interviewed him, they might have found vital CCTV evidence showing who he spoke to there.
Now, nine months on, it has probably been wiped — like the footage from the Himalaya kebab shop. The owner told the Mail that the police had not visited him or asked for CCTV footage and it is automatically deleted after 15 days so any potential leads are long gone.
Such oversights have been compounded by an astonishing lack of compassion for Josh’s family.
On the Sunday evening, when Josh had failed to respond to any of his family’s messages or phone calls, Dionne remembered her son telling her about befriending the taxi driver on Facebook so she messaged to see if he knew where he was.
‘By this stage we were thinking maybe he got drunk and lost his phone.’
The driver made enquiries at the hotel and when they said they hadn’t seen him since the day before, the family registered him with police as a missing person.
That Tuesday his body was spotted by Manuel Serra Mayordomo, a 79-year-old carpenter who lives in a clifftop home above the woods.
Speaking publicly for the first time about the horrifying discovery, he told the Mail that he was in his garden when he noticed a man lying near the bushes below him.
‘I got the feeling he was asleep because he had one arm behind his head and he looked very peaceful. I went into my house but I came back because something didn’t feel quite right.
‘I went closer the second time. I could see that he was not alive so I called the police.’
In his police statement, Señor Mayordomo said that there were six hours between him first seeing the body and then reporting it but he told us that it was only 20 minutes. In both accounts, however, he insisted that the body had been moved some 10 metres further into the woods the second time he saw it.
As he admitted to the Mail, his memory is failing, which is perhaps why the police discounted his claim that the body had somehow moved.
But, as our enquiries have shown, they seemed to have been all too willing to ignore any hint of suspicious circumstances — including the pathology report describing scratches and bruises on Josh’s body.
‘His injuries are consistent with being dragged,’ says Ashley. ‘He’s got marks around his ankles and scratches all up his legs.
‘The entry to the woods is by the only lay-by in the area so we think he’s been taken in a car and dumped there, either dead or unwell. But according to the police, he walked into the woods and died a natural death. It’s crazy.’
Instead of finding out about her son’s death from Mossos, or the British authorities, Dionne received a haunting text from the taxi driver who had apparently seen reports circulating on Spanish media.
‘I’m really sorry, but I believe they found Josh dead in the woods and he died of natural causes,’ she read on her phone as she was about to fly out to Spain.
‘Nobody had confirmed it was Josh,’ Dionne said. ‘I hadn’t even heard from the Spanish or British police. He texted me that rather than calling me. I felt absolutely awful.’
The family wanted the body brought home for a post-mortem by a Home Office pathologist.
But since Josh had no identification on him, the police insisted that the only way to confirm who he was would be for a family member to give a DNA sample. Until then, they would not be allowed to view the body.
It took 13 weeks to process the swab given by Dionne and when the family finally went to see the body at the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Catalonia in Girona, about 25 miles from Lloret de Mar, they were informed that it hadn’t been embalmed or stored properly.
‘I asked the man there if he could take a photo to show us instead,’ says Ashley.
‘When he did, I said “That isn’t Josh” because he was covered in maggots and there was nothing left of him. It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.’
This week, the Institute told the Mail that the body was already decomposed when they received it but the family insist they were told that it hadn’t been properly handled.
Either way, it was in such a state that the repatriation company employed by Josh’s insurers were told they could not fly it back to the UK, and the Spanish authorities would not release it until the family agreed to a cremation or burial in Spain.
‘We were basically bullied into having Josh cremated there,’ says Ashley.
Under Spanish health laws, repatriating a body – especially one in a state of decomposition – can be blocked over contamination fears.
The funeral service in Lloret de Mar that December was attended only by Josh’s immediate family. They did what they could to honour his memory, draping a Wolves flag and scarf over the coffin.
The following month, sister Ashley organised a memorial service at a church in Walsall, with the urn containing Josh’s ashes flanked by floral tributes saying ‘Son’ and ‘Bro’.
The order of service now sits on the mantelpiece at Ashley’s home in a quiet residential part of Walsall, alongside a picture of him with her six-year-old daughter, the niece he doted on.
‘Before he died, he gave her a Wolves mascot which is like a little teddy so I put that in his coffin with him,’ says Ashley.
‘His death has really affected her and what’s happened has destroyed us as a family.’
‘Why should we have to try and solve his death ourselves? It shouldn’t be like this.’
The Mail approached Mossos for a comment about its alleged shortcomings but they had still not replied when we went to press. The Catalan health authorities – who determine whether a body can be repatriated – declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Josh’s family are determined not to give up their search for answers — not least because his missing mobile has been on twice since he died. Dionne phoned it once, and it rang, and a WhatsApp message sent by a friend showed the two double-blue ticks, showing it had been read.
His bank card was last used at Birmingham Airport and has not been used since. Where his €600 and £200 ended up remains a mystery.
The family have now hired a private detective in Lloret de Mar — paid for with the help of a GoFundMe page which has raised £5,596 to date.
So far no new information about what happened to Josh has been unearthed but they are battling on, hoping to prove one day that the much-loved son, brother and uncle who meant so much to them all did not simply walk up a Spanish hillside and die.
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