Royal Marine and missing person, was born on 14 July 1961 in Croydon. In c.1975, after one or two moves in the southeast of England, his family moved to Hull to be close to his mother’s wider family. He was a happy, confident lad who seems to have got on well with people generally. He enjoyed his early school years, particularly sport, but he was not especially academic and left school at the age of sixteen. He found employment initially as a farm worker but later decided to join the Royal Marines.  

Having completed basic, commando, and arctic warfare training, he was posted to 45 Commando and in 1980 he was drafted to Naval Party 8901, the small Royal Marines garrison of the Falkland Islands. 

One of the tasks of NP 8901 was to train the so-called Settlement Volunteers to assist inthe defence of the islands in the event of hostilities with Argentina.  During the first week of August in 1980, a small team of Royal Marines had been conducting such training at North Arm.  Addis was a member of a second team tasked to carry out similar training at Fitzroy,and in the late afternoon of 7 August, he arrived at North Arm with the rest of his team on board the small government ship, MV Forrest. The intention was to pick up the first team along with the training stores and equipment, returning to Stanley via Fitzroy where Addis’s team would disembark to train the Fitzroy volunteers.

On the evening of 7 August, the residents of North Arm invited all the Marines to a party in the settlement social club. Early the following morning, MV Forrest, under the command of the  redoubtable local skipper, Jack SOLLIS, left North Arm and set a course for Fitzroy.  Only then was it discovered that Addis was not on board  The view of all on board, including Captain Sollis, was that Addis had missed his ship, something that marines have been doing for as long as there have been marines. 

Captain Sollis declined to return to the settlement but, despite being unable to contact North Arm by radio, was able to speak to another settlement, requesting the people there to call North Arm by telephone to advise them that Addis was not on board. The telephone call was taken at North Arm by Lynn Blake, the wife of the manager, Tony Blake, who gave instructions to his farm hands to search the settlement for Addis, including, particularly, the area of the jetty, When this search failed to find him, Blake gave further instructions to widen the search to cover tracks and other routes that might have been taken by Addis if, for some reason, he had decided to walk away from the settlement. None of these searches found any trace of Addis and the following day, the officer commanding NP 8901 organised a more formal and structured search to be carried out by Royal Marines sent to the settlement from Stanley, assisted by the residents of the settlement.  

This search, which included the coastline and islands off North Arm, was no more successful than the first. In due course, a Royal Marines Board of Enquiry was convened at North Arm to look into the disappearance. Evidence was heard of Addis’s attendance at the party, of events at the party, which included a disagreement with one of the farm hands, and of his departure from the social club, alone and sober.   There was no evidence at all of events that might have taken place after he left the club. Unable to reach a positive explanation as to what had happened to him, the Board concluded that Addis was missing, presumed dead, and had probably died as a result of falling from the jetty while attempting to board his ship, of falling overboard after the ship had left North Arm, or of wandering off into the hinterland where he had succumbed to hypothermia. At no time did anyone, not the farm manager, the Royal Marines themselves, Rex HUNT, the Governor or any government official, the local police, nor even the coroner, appear to have ever considered the possibility of foul play.

Addis’s mother, Mrs Ann Addis, was not convinced that a sufficiently thorough investigation had been carried out, and having sought the support of her local MP (James Johnson), was able, with help from the Ministry of Defence, to visit the Falkland Islands herself in March 1981. Here, despite being unable to visit North Arm because of bad weather, she was able to meet some of those who had attended the party on 7 August. She also met the officer commanding NP 8901, who had arranged for a memorial service to be held in Christchurch Cathedral where a memorial plaque was unveiled. It was through contacts made during this visit that Mrs Addis was later made aware of rumours that her son had indeed died as a result of foul play.  

Spurred on by this information and assisted once again by her MP, Mrs Addis managed to convince the MOD that further investigation was necessary and a very experienced Royal Military Police investigator, Captain Jim Gallacher of the Special Investigation Branch, was sent to the Islands to conduct a criminal investigation. His enquiries failed to establish that any crime had been committed. He left a copy of his case file with the newly arrived Falkland Islands Police chief, Superintendent Ronnie Lamb, who, at the request of the Governor, reviewed the evidence and conducted his own enquiries in relation to new suspicions.These enquiries also failed to disclose any crime. 

During their occupation in April 1982, the Argentines took over Stanley police station and destroyed or removed all the papers relating to  Addis.   Superintendent Lamb was deported by the Argentines and only returned briefly after the liberation to sort out his personal affairs. He was replaced by Chief Superintendent Bill Richards, who was a Falkland Islander and a serving Metropolitan Police officer. In the aftermath of war and with the population more than doubled by the new garrison, the police were extremely busy with immediate matters, including the loss of eight lives in a devastating fire at the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in April 1984.   

In 1985, Superintendent Richards was replaced by Superintendent Ken Greenland, a former Royal Military Police officer, who had served in the islands as Force Provost Marshal in 1983. In due course Greenland conducted a review of inconclusive sudden death investigations and identified three unresolved cases which he thought should be re-opened. The last of these was that of Marine Addis. Starting in 1991, a great deal of preliminary work had to be done to reassemble all that had been discovered by the earlier investigations and during this process several new lines of enquiry were identified which included, for the first time, the possibility of homicide. Many searches were carried out, including some by divers and some by climbers, many sites of interest were excavated and septic tanks drained, a hydrographic survey was conducted at North Arm and many new interviews were conducted and statements recorded. No physical evidence was ever recovered.  

By 1995, enquiries had identified one person suspected of homicide and three others suspected of conspiracy to conceal the death of Addis. Before proceeding to make arrests, the case file was sent to the head of CID at Devon & Cornwall Constabulary for his assessment and advice. As a result, a team of four detectives from D&C led by Detective Chief Inspector Bob Pennington went to the Falkland Islands in 1995 and carried out their own investigation.   It was entirely independent, but it led to the same four suspects, who were arrested in due course and interviewed after caution. All four suspects stuck to their original accounts and in the absence of any forensic evidence, it was concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support any charge against any of them.

In 1996, Lion TV approached Mrs Addis with a proposal to fund further searches for the remains of her son to be filmed as part of their “Equinox” series.   The searches were to be carried out by an organisation called the Forensic Search Advisory Group and in particular by Professor John Hunter, a forensic archaeologist, Mr Steve Taylor, a ground penetrating radar operator, and by Lee, a cadaver search dog, and his handler, Sergeant Mick Swindells of Lancashire Constabulary. It took a full year for this operation, codenamed Lioness, to be set up and carried out, but ultimately it failed to find any new evidence. It did, however, result in a documentary film called “The Body Hunters” which was eventually broadcast by Channel 4. 

The case of Marine Addis remains a mystery. Despite separate and totally independent investigations by the Royal Marines, the Royal Military Police, the Falkland Islands Police, Devon & Cornwall Constabulary and the Forensic Search Advisory Group, no trace has ever been found of him, his remains or any of his clothing or possessions, and no crime has ever been  established to the standard required to support a charge. In the vacuum that remains, rumours about his fate and conspiracy theories about the failure of the various investigations to solve the mystery continue to circulate. All of the suspects are now dead, as are Mrs Addis and many of the original witnesses. It seems unlikely that the truth will ever be established.