The strange case of the British rugby player who disappeared without a trace

At 10.05pm on the night of 29 October last year, a CCTV camera in The Old Irish Pub on Barcelona’s La Rambla caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure walking out of the pub at a measured clip and on to the crowded pavement of the city’s nightlife thoroughfare.

Dressed in a white T-shirt, black trousers and trainers, and carrying a small black rucksack, Levi Davis, then 24, a professional rugby player and sometime reality TV contestant, had arrived in the city that day, having taken the ferry from Ibiza. He had spent the evening at the Irish pub, watching a football match on television and drinking a pint of Heineken lager.

Stopping outside, Davis was seen tapping into his phone before striding off. Some 10 minutes later he was glimpsed outside the Hard Rock Cafe, at the other end of La Rambla.

And then he vanished.

Davis had gone to Ibiza, as he told friends, ‘to chill’, following a series of setbacks in his rugby career. He had been on the island for eight days, staying with a friend, when on 25 October he posted a strange message on Instagram. Staring into the camera, looking nervous, he began, ‘Hello, my name is Levi Davis and my life is in danger… I ask, no I beg, that you listen and try to understand what I am telling you.’

Over the next 15 minutes he unfolded a rambling story about how, following his appearance on The X Factor: Celebrity in 2019 as part of the group Try Star, with fellow rugby players Ben Foden and Thom Evans, he had met ‘many new people, one of which… we began a friendship formed through music’.

This, he went on, had led to him being drugged and filmed doing sexual acts – ‘which many would call rape and by law we would call rape’ – and to being blackmailed. He and members of his family had, he claimed, had their lives  threatened.

‘This is a story about police corruption and government corruption, and also organised crime,’ he continued. The video was ‘me taking my power back’. Within a day of being posted, it was deleted from his Instagram account.

Four days later, he took a ferry from the island to Barcelona, and walked up La Rambla to The Old Irish Pub, after which he was never seen again.

There has been no word from him – no clue about what might have happened or whether he is alive or dead. Spanish police have said next to nothing about their investigation.

The real Levi

Davis’s disappearance is a tangled story in which sport, celebrity, social media, drugs and crime interconnect. Few who know Davis want to discuss it. Emails and messages go unacknowledged, aside from a few apologetic ‘no comments’.

Levi is a ‘wonderful, generous and kind individual’, one person who has known him for many years wrote, saying they preferred not to discuss the case. Another friend describes him as ‘the most charming, positive, gregarious person. Levi never saw himself as better than anyone else. He had a real magnetism. When he walked into a room people would gravitate to him because of his kindness and positivity.’

In videos and pictures of Davis, there is hardly one where he’s not smiling. But that wasn’t always the case.

Davis’s early years were scarred by trauma. Born in Birmingham, and raised at first by his mother, Julie Davis, he was taken into foster care when he was six. The circumstances around this are unclear.

In an interview broadcast in 2020, Davis talked about how he had been ‘in and around bad things at a very young age’ and ‘bounced around a few foster homes’ until finding a settled family who became his carers. ‘I was an upset, angry kid for a long time, and then I found my foster parents and they were amazing, and they facilitated me to do all the things I’ve done.’

Sport was to be his redemption. At The Friary School in Lichfield, where footballer Daniel Sturridge had once been a pupil, he was scouted by the Wolverhampton Wanderers academy. But it was rugby that became his focus, supposedly after he was seen sprinting after somebody who had stolen his cap, and at 14 he won a sports scholarship to Denstone College, an independent school in Uttoxeter.

He went on to move to Bath, studying for a foundation degree in Sports Performance, and later signing with Bath Rugby. He played his first game for the club in 2017, going on to represent England at under 18 and under 19 level, and in 2019 he made his first appearance in Premiership rugby, going on to play eight times for the first team.

‘He was a great player,’ Tom Varndell remembers. Varndell is a former England international, who played against Levi, and would later become Levi’s agent representing his rugby affairs. ‘He was a powerful player, very fast. An exciting young prospect.’

Davis, he says, ‘was very proud of what he’d done. He had a tough upbringing, and for a kid who’s had that there’s always going to be stuff in the back of your head. You need support, but you also need to get out of the environment you’re in and he wanted to use rugby to do that.’

From the rugby pitch to Celebrity X Factor

Music was his other passion. While playing for Bath he spent a period studying at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute in Bristol, and sang with a band, Majesti. In 2018 he sang on the soundtrack for the Premiership Rugby Cup Final, which led to him being spotted by a casting agent for The X Factor: Celebrity and being put in the band Try Star, with Foden and Evans. Davis had just made his first appearance for Bath’s first team, and friends from the rugby world tried to discourage him from doing X Factor.

Varndell for one was surprised. ‘I could understand the reason for Ben Foden and Thom Evans doing it because they’d effectively come to the end of their rugby careers. But Levi was still only 22. For me, as a player, you’d think your focus would be on playing, but Levi obviously wanted something different. He’s a brilliant singer and music is a huge passion for him, but you go on to a massive show and of course it’s going to be a distraction.’

With Simon Cowell as their mentor, Try Star finished in fifth place, singing Sweet Low Sweet Chariot. Whether a distraction or not, one friend says after his appearance on The X Factor: Celebrity ‘there was something not quite right. But Levi was the kind of person who would never throw his issues at you, but try to work them out by himself.’

In January 2020 he was sent out on a short loan to Ealing Trailfinders, in the lower Greene King IPA Championship division. Returning to Bath he sent a text to his fellow players, telling them something that had been ‘eating away at me’ for four years. ‘I’m bisexual. It’s something I’ve known since I was 18’, he wrote, ending the message on a playful note: ‘None of you lot are on my radar.’

Davis would later say that the response was universally supportive. But his days at the club were numbered anyway, and in June he was transferred permanently to Ealing on a two-year contract. (A spokesman for Bath Rugby told The Telegraph that his departure was a ‘purely rugby-based decision. The club were very supportive of Levi whilst he was on The X Factor and when he publicly came out.’) But his time at Ealing was to be short-lived. Early in 2021 he left the club.

With the pandemic disrupting normal life, and at the urging of his showbusiness agent, in April 2020, before publicly coming out as bisexual, Davis had appeared in E4 reality series Celebs Go Virtual Dating. Billed as ‘rugby star and soul scene sex mountain’ and obligingly quipping the scripted line ‘the only person I’ve got hold of recently is a hooker’, among the inflated lips and egos of his fellow contestants he looked awkward and out of place.

It would be his last TV appearance. And other troubles were crowding in.

Depressed and drinking heavily, there is a suggestion that by now he had started taking drugs. ‘He got into a bit of a crowd,’ according to one friend. By some accounts, his flat in Ealing was taken over by people, some of whom were possibly drug dealers.

Davis left to return to the Midlands, and to the home of his birth family. In April 2021 he posted a video on TikTok, showing clips of himself on The X Factor: Celebrity and in Los Angeles with Evans and Foden. It was a reminder of happier times – but the song he had chosen to accompany the images, In The End by Tommee Profitt, suggested a mood of dark foreboding. ‘I tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter/I had to fall to lose it all, but in the end it doesn’t even matter.’

‘The thing with Levi is that he never looks unhappy,’ Varndell says. ‘That’s the problem. When we’d talk on the phone he could be a bit frustrated, but in person he’d always put on a smile, but you just don’t know what’s going on behind that. He’s a very intelligent and eloquent bloke; he’s very good at saying what you want to hear, and his outlook is always very positive, even when it’s not.’

Drugs, money struggles and new friends

Davis’s birth mother, Julie, says that in the years he was in foster care she would watch him playing rugby and see him during the holidays. Levi, she told The Telegraph, was ‘a go-getter. He would set his goals and always aim to achieve them, no matter what. And he was a popular boy, very likeable, caring’

Julie is a Pentecostal Christian, and Davis had also attended church when in foster care, singing in the choir. When he first confided to his mother that he was bisexual, she says she was shocked. ‘I was like OK, you know my feelings towards that, being a Christian. We said, are you sure that this isn’t related to trauma, things that have happened in your lifetime? I didn’t want to say it was wrong, but I needed to question it.  But I said, you’re still my son, I’ll always love you, and I’m there for you if you need me. It was difficult.’

Davis, she says, ‘was a worrier, but not to the extent that you would say he had depression’. But as his career spiralled downwards he had lost all motivation. ‘I’d be there trying to help him get up, get into a routine and he found that very difficult.’

It was only as time passed, she says, that he started telling her things, bit by bit. ‘It was very sketchy. I think he was afraid to talk about it. He said, “Mum, I think I’m being followed.” And then it was, “I’ve been drugged,” and, “I believe I’ve been raped.” He said, “Because I was drugged I can’t exactly remember specific things, but there are some things I can remember,” and that would make sense as to why he was so depressed.’

Julie says she encouraged him to report it, and he was interviewed by West Midlands Police. ‘They wanted names, they wanted so much detail, but it’s a very sensitive subject and Levi wasn’t quite ready to go through it all.’

In a statement to The Telegraph, West Midlands Police said they were ‘not carrying out any criminal investigations in relation to the disappearance of Levi Davis. We remain in touch with the Spanish authorities and Levi’s family’ – but they added that files concerning Davis had been passed to The Met.

In statement to The Telegraph, the Met said: ‘On 19 January 2022 the Met Police received a report from a third party of an alleged rape of a man in his 20s. It was reported the rape happened in Ealing on an unknown date. An investigation was carried out and detectives spoke to the victim. The investigation could not be progressed further and was closed on 29 January 2022.’

Was Davis being blackmailed – as he would later claim? He often had money problems, and according to his mother, before leaving Ealing he had asked to borrow £1,600 ‘to pay the rent. I couldn’t understand what was going on.’ Could it have been for drugs? ‘If it was,’ she says, ‘Levi kept it very quiet’.

It was only later that Davis told her that following the rape he had developed a drug problem. He sought professional help and was prescribed antidepressants. But Julie says he had trouble keeping his medical appointments.

A clean break in Australia

In an attempt to rebuild his rugby career, he dropped further down the league, joining Worthing Raiders in National Division Two South. He spent half a season at Worthing in the autumn of 2021 before briefly playing at a higher level for London Scottish in January 2022, but after a few games he told Varndell he wanted to leave. His problems were taking their toll. ‘He said he wanted to get a clear head,’ Varndell says, ‘and he didn’t want to be around the friends he was associating with.’

Varndell arranged for Davis to play for Queanbeyan, in the Canberra Region Rugby League. ‘It’s possibly the quietest part of Australia. I said you can have a completely clean break; have a fresh start, focus on your rugby and get out of the cycle you’re in.’

Davis lived with the family of one of his fellow players, and was was playing well. He posted a film of himself on TikTok, pumping iron in a gym, looking strong and healthy. But in his lengthy Instagram message he talks of having sought help from Samaritans and Menslink, a counselling service, and after three months he told Varndell he wanted to come home.

Varndell got him a place with Rotherham Titans, but in his first pre-season game he ruptured a knee ligament, ‘And that was the end of that.’

With his rugby career having petered out, Davis told his mother that he was going to Ibiza to see a friend. When she asked for a name and telephone number of where he would be staying, he wouldn’t give it to her. ‘He said, “Mum, I’m only going to be there for a few days, then I’ll be travelling around Europe.” That was the plan.’

‘I didn’t want him to go, not at all,’ Julie says, ‘because at that point he wasn’t 100 per cent right yet. He’d only just started seeing the doctor and being medicated, and they were still reviewing him but he was adamant.’

When he told Varndell he was going to Ibiza, ‘to chill,’ Varndell too cautioned against it. ‘I said, “Don’t do that, no one goes to Ibiza to chill.” He said, “No, I’ve got a friend there. I want to work on my music.”’

The friend was Richard Squire. Squire’s social media suggests he has connections to the world of reality TV, and it seems that Davis likely met him around the time of his X Factor appearance.

Squire, who is in his 40s, describes himself as an ‘international marketing/brand.ecom consultant, working with the biggest and best… lover of a good time and good friends’. He is listed on Companies House as the sole director of Retina Marketing Consultants that last filed accounts in 2017.

In the wake of Davis’s disappearance, Squire put up some missing person posters around Barcelona and posted an appeal on his social media, establishing a gmail address for people to send information to. He also set up a GoFundMe page ‘to get friends and family on the ground in Spain to walk the streets looking for him and follow up on any leads’.

Once Davis was found, it said, any remaining funds would be used to ‘get him the professional help he needs. Any money left over will be donated to a charity that can help other venerable [sic] people.’ The fund helped to pay Julie Davis’s fare to Barcelona following Levi’s disappearance. At the time of writing, the fund stands at £2,205, with the last donation made a month ago.

Davis, it seemed, led a compartmentalised life. Close friends of Davis’s, including several who have known him since university, exchanged puzzled messages when Squire was named as his friend. None had heard of him.

Davis would stay with Squire for 12 days. He was waiting for some money he was owed from Rotherham. ‘He was having to borrow money from people, myself included,’ Julie says. At one point, she adds, she and Davis had travelled to Rotherham to meet the team coach and inquire about the money, but the coach was not at the ground. Varndell had been working to sort out the problem, and messaged Davis to say the money was on its way.

By now Davis had been in Ibiza for 10 days. He messaged Varndell back, ‘Thanks.’ ‘That was literally the message,’ Varndell says, ‘one word.’

In Ibiza, Davis was joined by a fashion photographer, Ade Adetona, who took a series of pictures of him, looking buff, on the beach and in the sea, which Adetona published on his Instagram page. Richard Squire was credited as ‘art director’.

The pictures were intended to promote a forthcoming single, Los Angeles, scheduled for release in November. A first single, With Me, had been released in September under the name LEDA. ‘Everything seemed normal,’ Adetona later told the BBC. Davis was ‘busy scribbling lyrics into a notebook and learning Spanish on his phone. [Levi] was quite fit, getting up and doing his circuit training… There were no alarm bells.’

Levi’s 15-minute Instagram video

On 22 October, Davis posted one of Adetona’s photographs on his Twitter feed. His last posting on the site was on 24 October, retweeting a saying from the Dalai Lama, ‘I resolve to use my life to ensure that other beings are happy.’

At midday the following day he posted his 15-minute video on Instagram.

It is distressing to watch – rambling and disjointed, with Davis periodically pausing to compose himself, rubbing his hands across his face, as if on the verge of tears. He talks of how after being drugged, raped and threatened with blackmail, he had spent ‘many a night… wandering the streets of London and Birmingham’.

‘You may ask why would you not just stay away from individuals who wish you harm. That’s what I tried to do, by starting a new life in Australia. But I was followed there also.’

Whoever was behind it, he goes on, knows things he had told the police. They also had ‘access to my medical records’, and had told him they had ‘links to a government minister, and a journalist’. ‘I was gaslighted into thinking I had psychosis when many of the things I said were actually true. They seek to make me look like I am paranoid and crazy.’

The video, he says, ‘is me taking my power back’. He thanks his family and friends for standing beside him, ‘because without you I might not be here. I remember vividly standing by the side of a bridge and a friend helping me off it… [That was] the dark place it brought me to.’ At this point the video abruptly ends. Tagged to his closest friends, the posting was up on Instagram for 24 hours before it was deleted.

Varndell was shocked when he saw the video. ‘His whole appearance, the way he was speaking, it didn’t make sense. He was talking about how this is a government and police conspiracy, and it was – wow, you’re really chucking out some big accusations there, mate. Why would the government and the police be concerned about Levi?’

Was he suffering from some sort of psychosis? ‘I’m struggling, because the person I would meet… wasn’t delusional. He was pretty sound in mind and body. But looking at the video, he doesn’t look like the same Levi I’d seen a month or two prior.’

Another old friend, anxious, called him on the day the video went up. Davis, he remembers, seemed ‘a bit lost’. The friend offered to put him up when he returned to England and Davis replied with a voice note to say he would like to come ‘to figure things out. He never once mentioned Barcelona.’

What happened in Ibiza

On 3 October, before leaving England for Ibiza, Levi had opened an account on the subscription site OnlyFans. His profile, under the name ManDavis, featured a picture of him lying back on a sofa, naked but for a strategically placed pair of boxing gloves. The day before he disappeared, he posted: ‘My first nudes’, with the tagline: ‘Everybody knows the bio is where things get sticky, take a look and see what else you can find.’

Posting on OnlyFans, Squire would later explain to a British newspaper, was something Davis was ‘inspired [to do] by other well-known people who have gone down the same route’.

But to those close to Davis, the move seemed to be ‘desperate and out of character’, not least given that the release of his next single was imminent. ‘He was intelligent enough to understand this would affect his music success, which meant the world to him,’ one friend says. ‘Levi had a strong sense of right and wrong, and whilst he didn’t always make the right choices he did not want to hurt those he cared about in any way. He could however be influenced by people around him which didn’t always result in the best outcomes.’

Davis had also joined the gay dating app Grindr. On the day of posting his first nude pictures on OnlyFans he told Squire he had arranged to meet someone that evening in a restaurant in Ibiza Town. Squire later told the BBC he drove Davis to the restaurant. It was the last time he would see him.

Squire declined to talk to The Telegraph.

Who Davis met, or if he met anyone at all, is not known. But at 3am he contacted a friend in England. The friend tried calling him back but later that morning Davis rang to say he was on the ferry to Barcelona.

He left Ibiza taking only a small backpack and some €40, leaving behind his suitcase, clothes and his laptop. ‘That’s not Levi,’ says one friend. ‘He was terrible at packing, but he’d always take loads with him.’ For Davis, Varndell says, his laptop ‘was like a priest’s Bible. He would take that with him everywhere. I remember once when he left it in London and he asked me to get it and take it back to Birmingham. He had everything on there – there are so many things here that don’t make sense.’

If Davis had arranged an assignation in Barcelona it seems unlikely it would have been purely for casual fun; Ibiza would have offered an abundance of choice. More likely is that he was lured there by a promise of something else.

But the fact that he apparently left Ibiza in a hurry, leaving his possessions behind, begs another question. Was Davis running towards something, or away from it?

A ferry ride to Barcelona

Squire told the BBC that when Davis failed to return from Ibiza town that morning he messaged to ask where he was. Davis replied that he had left the island and was on his way to Barcelona ‘to see some mates’.

The ferry journey from Ibiza to Barcelona takes some eight and a half hours. Davis sent a short video to his mother, smiling and pointing out the view from the deck. ‘Look Mum,’ he says, ‘it’s beautiful’...  the rest of his words blown away in the stiff breeze.

Arriving in Barcelona, he made his way to La Rambla, the city’s tourist and entertainment hub, lined with bars and restaurants, stopping at The Old Irish Pub. According to the bartender who served him, he sat at a table near the front door, drinking a pint of Heinken and watching a Liverpool v Leeds match. He posted a video to his mother of a band playing on stage.

Earlier, he had contacted Julie to tell her he was thinking of staying in a hostel before the next step of his journey, ‘wherever that would be, because he’d left it quite open’.  He asked for money to pay for the hostel. ‘I said, “Oh gosh, Levi, how many more times do you want to borrow some money off me? You’re going to have to sort yourself out this time, I’m not going to do it.”’ Davis told her it was ‘all right’, and he could ask friends for money.

Mike Guida was a close friend from university. When Davis’s 15-minute Instagram message first surfaced, Guida told a newspaper that Davis’s claims in the video were ‘almost word-for-word’ things that Davis had been telling him before leaving for Ibiza, but he’d refused to elaborate.

Davis, Guida said, had told him ‘there’s some things going down, I don’t want you guys to be hurt’.

On the night of his disappearance, Davis called Guida at 9.22pm and again at 11.04pm, leaving a message: ‘Can’t wait to get you over here, can’t wait to see you.’ Guida replied the following morning: ‘Mate, can’t wait to see you either, let me know when you’re free for a catch-up chat.’ But there was no reply.

At 6.30am, Barcelona’s Maritime Rescue received an alert from the captain of an Italian cruise ship, Bellissima, entering the port, saying that a passenger and a crew member had seen someone in the water.

A lifebelt was thrown over the side. The maritime police and rescue services, including a helicopter, were mobilised. The search lasted for a day, but no body was found. After the Bellissima and captains of other nearby ships had verified that nobody on board was missing, the operation was cancelled.

At that time there had been no official report of Davis having gone missing. It was a few days later that Squire contacted Davis’s family, who in turn notified British authorities.

On 8 November, a friend of Davis’s who was working in Madrid notified police there that he was missing. She was told the police had no notification on their database from either British or Spanish police, but informed Barcelona police the same day. It was then that the Mossos d’Esquadra, the autonomous police force under the authority of the Catalan government, began investigating. Three weeks following his disappearance, they released a statement saying Davis’s passport had been found at the Barcelona freight port, without specifying exactly where or when it had been found.

The search for the truth

Reports of Davis’s disappearance had attracted the attention of Gavin Burrows, who runs a private investigation company, Line of Inquiry. His company takes four cases a year on a pro bono basis, and he started to investigate the case on behalf of Davis’s family, offering a £10,000 reward for any information that would lead to Davis being found.

Burrows was able to retrieve the 15-minute ‘help me’ Instagram message that Davis had deleted the day after posting, and put it back online. He also claimed that 38 followers on Davis’s Instagram had apparently been deleted following his disappearance. According to friends, Davis’s Instagram account was still indicating that someone was online, via the ‘last seen’ function, two weeks after he went missing.

That account is no longer available.

A friend added that, ‘weeks after Levi went missing, messages to his WhatsApp and iMessages sent to his mobile were seen to have been opened.’ It is not known who had access to his accounts.

Davis’s WhatsApp account appears to have since been disabled or have no connection, as only one tick shows when a message is sent.

Then, in February, Burrows made his most intriguing claim of all: that a text message that a friend had sent to Davis on 15 December – almost two months after he vanished – had been read. Either Davis was alive and in possession of his phone or somebody else was monitoring it.

In the absence of any hard information about his disappearance, rumours began to circulate. A Catalan newspaper claimed that Davis had got himself into huge debt after his ‘party lifestyle’ spiralled out of control.

‘People do get themselves in trouble,’ Varndell says, ‘but the Levi I know, I just don’t believe that.’

Bartomeu Palliser, a spokesman for Line of Inquiry, had previously speculated that Davis had been kidnapped and was working as a ‘mule’ to pay off a drug debt. We know that he was fleeing, hiding and that he had feared for his life for a long time.’

Spanish police had said little other than to confirm they were conducting a missing person investigation, but in February they issued a statement saying there were ‘disturbing’ issues around the case with ‘no logical explanation’.

When, in April, Julie Davis travelled once more to Barcelona to meet with the police, she was told that they had concluded that, following the reported sighting of Davis at the Hard Rock Café, he had walked to the city’s commercial port area, where his phone gave out its last signal at a telephone tower at the far end of the port.

This was at 12.04am Spanish time (11.04pm UK time) – it was the voice note to his friend Mike Guida.

Police also elaborated on the earlier report of a man being seen in the water by crew on the Bellissima, telling Julie that four crew members on the ship had confirmed the sighting. One said he was shouting for help in English and another that he was wearing a white T-shirt – the same colour Davis was wearing the last day he was seen alive.

Could this have really been Davis, and if so what was he doing there?

The Telegraph has walked the area around the passenger and industrial port to look into this first hand, finding that the area is extensively covered by CCTV and that it would be difficult to pass through the access points without a pass of some sort. If it was Davis, it seems he would have had to climb a fence or find some other way of evading the checkpoints.

Was he running away from someone, and if so who? And why did three weeks pass before his passport was found? Had he dropped it in a panic, or had someone dropped it there later?

Some six hours elapsed between that last call to Mike Guida and the sighting of a body in the water. Friends of Davis are baffled. ‘He was saying [in the voice note] how much he loved Barcelona and wanted us all to go out and see him,’ one says. ‘It was a new place to start. All positive. And for that to be his last contact with anybody, and then potentially be a sighting in the water – it doesn’t make sense.’

What happened in those missing six hours? Davis could swim, but he was not a strong swimmer, and was hampered by his knee injury. If the body in the water was Davis, how had he managed to swim the three kilometres to where the sighting occurred... Or had he been pushed off a boat at sea?

The Mossos d’Esquadra told The Telegraph that the investigation into Levi Davis is ‘still open’ and forwarded an official statement: ‘The drowning hypothesis is one of the research lines that nowadays are open. As of today, none have been ruled out.’

On 18 May, they announced that they were resuming the search in the waters outside Barcelona’s port.

What happened to Levi Davis? Somebody knows.

Additional reporting by Núria Vilà