© Missing Darrell Simester/via FacebookDarrell Simester, who mysteriously disappeared on holiday in 2000, was recently reunited with his family after vanishing for more than a decade.
Darrell Simester, who mysteriously disappeared on holiday in 2000, was recently reunited with his family after vanishing for more than a decade.
An Englishman who mysteriously vanished on holiday more than a decade ago has been reunited with his family after he was discovered allegedly working as a slave on a Welsh farm for the last 13 years.
Darrell Simester, missing since he was 30, has been found in Peterstone, South Wales, where he toiled 365 days of the year while consequently suffering a deformed spine, a hernia the "size of a football," infected feet, missing teeth and starvation.
"I never had one day off in 13 years," the now 43-year-old told British newspaper The Sun on Sunday night. "I was scared what they'd do to me if I didn't stay there."
After his abrupt disappearance in 2000, his tormented parents never once stopped looking for him while plagued by his occasional phone calls from an undisclosed number.
Some of the calls let them know he was all right, but they all sounded scripted or at least monitored. When they stopped receiving them entirely in 2008, his parents contacted local authorities for help.
Their prayers were finally answered when a woman reported seeing a man resembling him working the remote horse farm owned by Irishmen.
It was Darrell, however a version dramatically different from the man his family once knew.
"What happened to him is horrendous, inhuman," his enraged father Tony Simester told The Sun. "These types of people roam the streets picking up the vulnerable and offering them a new life. Then they are treated like dogs."
© Missing Darrell Simester/via Facebook
It wasn't until two years ago he was permitted to move into a caravan, a shelter however still not entirely protected from the elements.
Throughout his 13 years he washed himself and his clothes in an outdoor trough, worked 12-hour days without a single day off and was never permitted to see a doctor.
He was never locked up, he said, but was fearful of the repercussions if he tried to leave.
It was in August, 2000 the family's agony began after Darrell announced his plans to go on holiday with a married couple and his then girlfriend.
He'd be back to see his parents the weekend after his trip, he told them, but instead of his face at their Worcestershire home it was his girlfriend's.
"This girl came and knocked on the door and said, 'Just to let you know, we have come back without him and we can't find him,'" his mother, Jean Simester, recalled to Wales Online last February.
One week later they received a phone call from a pair of Irishmen who said they found their son in need of a place to stay and have given him a job.
Darrell had gone through a bout of homelessness before, his parents revealed, but this absence that would spread into months without a single phone call, wasn't like him.
At first he called maybe twice a year, they said, but those calls sounded like they were being monitored through speaker phone with him directed on what he could and could not say.
"If we asked for an address he would say, 'I can't give you an address, mum,'" Jean Simester recalled.
That bizarre behavior and infrequency went on for the next eight years. Christmas Eve 2008 was the last time they heard from him.
"We just want to know he is okay," his heartbroken mother said in a public cry for help last February.
Today, Darrell is expected to undergo several years of therapy to recover from his experience.
The Sun reports no sign of the farm's owners at the property on Sunday. Authorities say the property and the owners are still under investigation.
ngolgowski@nydailynews.com
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