Debbie Duncan has described the moment she was shown images of her dead son Jay Slater's body during a return trip to Tenerife. The 57-year-old was in the Spanish island to collect paperwork from the courts and retrieve Jay's phone when she saw the photos, which she said made her feel like her heart was going to stop beating.
Return to Tenerife
Speaking in Channel 5's Cause of Death, Debbie said she had thought about viewing her son's body but felt she could not. However, when she went back to Tenerife for official matters, the images were shown to her. She said: "I did think about it (viewing his body) and thought, I don't think I can. But then, when we had to go back to Tenerife to get paperwork from the courts and to collect his phone, to my horror there were images of Jay. I thought my heart was going to stop beating."
Debbie added: "Whenever people say, 'How did you know it was Jay?' Well, it was Jay. My beautiful boy." She was accompanied by Jay's uncle Glen Duncan when she retraced his final steps at Tenerife's Rural de Teno national park. The documentary was filmed weeks after Debbie received the delayed Spanish post-mortem report confirming Jay died after falling into a ravine.
Cause of death
Dr Richard Shepherd, who carried out the Home Office post-mortem, said he believed it was important Debbie "knew the truth" due to the "trolling" and memes she received following Jay's death. Speaking to The Sun, he said: "She wanted to know how his injuries would have affected him. I was able to tell her that yes, it was an awful injury, and yes, it killed him. But the head injury was so severe that it probably would have killed him immediately. It was the end — there was no pain and suffering."
Fabricated claims spread online about the case and persisted after an inquest in 2025 found he died on June 17, 2024, following a "heavy fall from height." Earlier this year, Debbie told This Morning that she still deals with personal attacks about her son. She said: "[Trolls have been] calling his family, calling me [saying] 'they're drug dealers... he had a bad upbringing', it just got really personal. They don't know us, they don't know our family, they don't know Jay but yet they just judge... and the conspiracies started almost immediately."
Final steps
Jay vanished during his first holiday without his parents, after he got into a car with two men he met on holiday. They drove to the village of Masca, about 20 miles away from the NRG music festival and Papagayo nightclub in Playa de Las Americas. Jay called his friend Lucy Law after he left an AirBnB to say he was lost in the mountains. He was reported missing after he did not return to his accommodation and his body was found weeks later.
