‘When we were growing up we had bedrooms next to each other and at bedtime we would communicate by how many knocks we did on the wall. It was like our secret language. I think Gabriel liked inventing new languages and that was the first and most basic one. When he died he was working on his own language, made up of other languages, a bit like Esperanto.’

The police knew none of this, because the investigating officers didn’t bother to contact the family.

Three weeks after Gabriel’s death, Daniel Whitworth’s body was found just feet away from where Gabriel was found, posed in the same position. The two were even discovered by the same dog walker. Police found an apparent suicide note – unusually, contained in a plastic sleeve – on his person. Even more curious was the fact that he was found on a bed sheet.

The ‘suicide note’ said Daniel had accidentally killed Gabriel with GHB and had taken his own life out of guilt. In truth, the two had never met, and a simple check of their mobile-phone records would have shown they were not in the same place when Gabriel died, but police failed to look. Nor did they carry out DNA tests on the unexplained bed sheet found with Daniel, which would have led them to Port.

Instead they sent a poorly copied section of a small part of the note to Daniel’s parents, but neither the Whitworths nor Daniel’s boyfriend, Ricky Waumsley, could verify it was his writing. 

It later transpired that a detective constable had recorded that the family had positively identified the handwriting as Daniel’s. Case closed.

When the family was shown the full note two weeks later, ‘there was nothing about it that spoke of Daniel’, his stepmother Amanda Whitworth says. ‘He didn’t mention us, or his grandma, or Ricky. We are a small family but he hadn’t mentioned anyone.’ 

It struck Amanda as deeply odd, but ‘as parents we were more worried about the contents; we were trying to work out if he had done this, why he had done this, our heads were a mess’.

The note, of course, had been written by Port, who had contacted Daniel through the gay dating app Grindr. Overwhelmed by grief and confusion, Daniel’s parents ‘became very insular, we were hermits, we steered well clear of the internet’, Amanda says. It meant they knew nothing of the growing disquiet among Daniel and Gabriel’s friends as they carried out their own research into the deaths.

‘We just lived with our doubts for a whole year,’ says Amanda. ‘We tried to heal ourselves, we sought out suicide groups, just trying to make sense of it all, but none of it made sense.’

Others reacted differently. Sarah Sak says, ‘When I found out about Daniel and Gabriel I rang the family liaison officer and said, “They’re literally next to each other,” and his exact words were, “They’re not connected. They’re nothing to do with each other. One was homeless and the other didn’t even live in the area.” He got quite annoyed actually.’

After Daniel was murdered, the bodies stopped turning up for a whole year. For part of that time, Port had been sent to prison for perverting the course of justice over Anthony’s death. 

Then, on 13 September, 2015, Jack Taylor communicated with Port on Grindr and went to his flat. He was found dead by the wall of St Margaret’s graveyard the next day, but his death was classed as non-suspicious.