A new documentary has returned one of Kent’s most notorious murder cases to the spotlight, tracing how a local news report helped reopen the investigation into Debbie Griggs and ultimately led to Andrew Griggs being convicted of her murder.

The timing matters because the case was not revived by a breakthrough in the original police work, but by a complaint from Debbie Griggs’ family after a 2015 article about unsolved Kent cases did not mention her disappearance. Police pulled the files back out of storage and treated her case as live again, turning a long-quiet missing persons investigation into a murder inquiry that would end with a life sentence for Andrew in 2019.

Debbie disappeared from the family home in Cross Road, Deal, on May 5, 1999. She was a nurse, a mother of three and pregnant with her fourth child. Andrew was later arrested and convicted after a trial at Canterbury Crown Court, and he received a life sentence with a minimum term of 20 years. The documentary looks at how a case that had gone cold for years was pushed back into motion by one article and one family refusing to let it stay buried.

That history sits alongside a striking contradiction that has followed the case for years. Deborah Griggs, who married Andrew after the disappearance of his first wife Debbie, says she still believes he is innocent. She said people may think she is in denial, but that she has not changed her view. She has described him as “a true gentleman,” “very protective of his family,” and someone who would give up something so someone else could have it, saying he would “give you the last Rolo.”

She also said Andrew told her early in their relationship that he had been arrested for murdering his first wife, but denied killing her and gave her the option of walking away. “I’d already got to know him, I’d felt quite strongly for him, and I told him I'm not going anywhere,” she said. It is a rare public defense from someone so close to the case, and it cuts against the official outcome that came years later, after a trial in which jurors found him guilty.

The unresolved question now is not whether Andrew was convicted, but what finally led specialist officers to dig in the back garden of a property in St Leonards, Dorset, in October 2022. That search uncovered Debbie’s remains inside a sealed water butt, and it followed contact from one of the couple’s sons, Jake. Andrew had moved to St Leonards from Deal in July 2001 with their three young sons, but the case did not end there. The documentary shows how a disappearance that began in 1999 kept producing consequences decades later — and how one local article changed the path of the investigation for good.