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Oliver “Olly” Stephens was born on November 1, 2007 to parents Stuart & Amanda Stephens & the family lived in Reading in Berkshire, England. Olly had an older sister named Emilia. Amanda & Stuart described their son as a “huge character” & someone who made everyone laugh, he loved to dance & he freely gave his love. As he entered his teenage years, Olly had been diagnosed with autism. He mostly liked to be in his room, gaming & listening to music. Olly attended Highdown Secondary School & Sixth Form Centre in Emmer Green on the outskirts of Reading.
It was January 3, 2021, the Sunday after Christmas & Olly told his parents that he was going out to meet a friend nearby, but he assured his mom that he had his phone location turned on so that she could see where he was. Both Amanda & Stuart watched from two separate windows as Olly left that day, not realizing that it would be the last time they would ever see him alive.
The family was preparing to go back to work & school the next day following the holiday break, so Amanda expected Olly to come home before dark. Shortly after Olly left the house, about fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on the Stephens’ door & Amanda opened it to find a boy that Olly knew. As he spoke, she struggled to take in what he was telling her & she remembers thinking, ‘Did he just say Olly’s been stabbed?’
Stuart & Emilia rushed out the door & headed to a field across from their house & they were stunned to find Olly laying in a pool of blood. Amanda followed shortly behind. Stuart remembers holding his son’s hand & asking him not to leave him. Friends, neighbors & dog walkers quickly gathered, trying to help, but it was too late. Olly died in that field.
Stuart later said that when Olly would lay in his bed, his feet would always hang off the end of the bed & after his son’s unexpected & tragic death, he continued to look for his feet in the morning as he passed by his son’s now empty room & said that not seeing them there hits him each & every time. Olly’s bed remains made up with his favorite duvet cover & Amanda continues to buy his favorite candies. When Amanda vacuums Olly’s room, something he always hated, she continues to mutter, “I’ll only be a minute.”
The night after Olly’s murder, Stuart & Amanda looked through social media posts about Olly & screen grabs his friends shared with their daughter & that’s when they began to realize the role that social media played in what happened to him. Amanda later described the internet as the secret world where you can do & say exactly what you want. “It’s a world that we had no idea existed & that he was being attacked by it.”
Amanda always used the tracker on Olly’s phone to reassure herself that he made it home safely & after he was killed, she found herself checking it as the phone made its way into the hands of the police & followed the signal as it traveled with Olly’s body to the hospital & then again to the Thames Valley police station.
It became the job of Detective Chief Inspector Andy Howard to investigate the contents of Olly’s phone & it turned out that 90% of the evidence that was presented at Olly’s murder trial came from mobile phones & no child witness had to take the stand.
In Olly’s investigation, police found videos of knives being flicked & shown off & the boys linked to Olly’s murder attacking each other & these videos were likely being shared very openly & regularly. They found a very unhealthy attraction to recording acts of serious violence. It was a video posted on Snapchat showing an attack called “patterning” that was the catalyst in a chain of events that lead to Olly’s death.
Patterning is the humiliation of a young person which is filmed or photographed & then shared on social media. The goal is for the film or photo to be forwarded on & on across various social media sites, thus exacerbating the degree of embarrassment for the victim.
In the weeks before Olly was killed, Olly had seen an image of a younger boy being humiliated & tried to alert the boy’s older brother by forwarding the image to him. When two boys that were in a Snapchat group with Olly became aware of the fact that he passed the image along, they became infuriated. They felt that Olly had snitched on them & this led to a fallout in their friendship.
Police discovered hundreds of Snapchat voice notes from these two boys & in them, they discussed attacking Olly & they planned to recruit a girl to set him up. The 14-year-old girl they found agreed to participate & this was a girl that knew Olly in real life & met the two boys involved, online. They all lived locally, but they only met for the first time on the day of Olly’s murder.
The investigators were shocked by the language used by the 13 & 14-year-olds convicted as they made comments like, “You’re going to die tomorrow, Olly.” As well as, “I’ll just give him bangs (hit him) or stab him.” As well as the violent nature of their words, they were also shocked how they spoke with a casual, cold tone which chilled the investigators.
In the voice note, the girl spoke & said, “[Male 2] wants me to set him up so then [Male 2] is gonna bang him & pattern him & shit. I’m so excited, you don’t understand.”
None of the voice notes appeared to have been picked up by Snapchat & under the social media app’s own policy, it’s not possible to report a private message or voice note like this to the site, only the account sending it.
Police gathered the evidence needed to prosecute & only scratched the surface; DCI Andy Howard feels that it’s likely that those involved were so regularly exposed to violent content that they had become desensitized to it. A recent study by the Huddersfield University’s Applied Criminology & Policing Center backs up this idea & found that social media was a key factor in nearly a quarter of crimes committed by those under age eighteen. Most were acts of violence that began with an online confrontation.
BBC.com did their own investigation & created a fake online account using an AI-generated photo & posed as a 13-year-old boy that lived in Reading. Their goal was to see what type of content a 13-year-old would be exposed to & whether social media sites moderate videos & images of knives similar to what was used in murdering Olly.
They found that on Instagram, Facebook & YouTube, their 13-year-old account was recommended content of people showing off knives, knives for sale & images that glorified violence. As they used the profile to actively look for anti-knife crime content, they were exposed to pro-knife groups, videos & pages. TikTok did remove the content for violating its guidelines on dangerous acts & the account was close to being suspended. Snapchat also did not recommend this type of content.
All of these social media sites claim to protect teen users & Meta, who owns Instagram & Facebook say that they restrict what those under age 18 can see in terms of “content that attempts to buy or sell bladed weapons.”
YouTube says that it “may add an age restriction” to content that involves “harmful or dangerous acts that minors could imitate.” BBC’s 13-year-old’s account only came across one video with an age restriction. BBC.com met up with Olly’s friends who assisted in setting up the fake account & they indicated that they began using social media long before they turned 13 which is the age most platforms require to sign up. They all said that there were no attempts to verify their ages & Olly’s parents said that their son joined before turning 13 as well. When they were shown several screen grabs from the accounts, they weren’t at all shocked by the results & admitted that they’d all regularly seen knives & violence on their social media feeds. They also spoke about being exposed to cyberbullying & “patterning” humiliation videos like the one that triggered the dispute between Olly & his killers.
Meta expressed their sympathies to Olly’s family & indicated that they plan to urgently investigate the examples raised in their investigation.
Amanda & Stuart want both answers & solutions to protect other children using social media & they want legislators to listen. The Online Safety Act 2023 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which was passed on October 26, 2023 & is designed to keep children & young people safe by requiring platforms to scan for child pornography & other harmful content. Stuart & Amanda don’t feel this would have saved Olly & want to see more done to verify the age of young users & limit their exposure to harmful posts, even if the content is legal such as violent videos or images of weapons.
The 14-year-old girl lured Olly from his house to Bugs Bottom shortly before 5 pm. It was Olly’s understanding that he would just be meeting the girl, but when he arrived, he was ambushed by the two other boys who were 13 & 14-years old. The 13-year-old was armed with a knife which they used to stab Olly to death.They initially used their fists & Olly defended himself & managed to knock one of them to the ground. After a short while, the younger boy took out the knife he was carrying & stabbed Olly. The two boys & the girl then fled from the scene.
Like the 14-year-old girl, Olly had never met the two boys in person & had only been friends with them online. When he arrived at the field, he was stabbed twice; one blade penetrated 6.5 inches into his back & another to his chest was 3.5 inches deep which caused Olly to bleed to death. An off-duty nurse who was walking her dog at Bugs Bottom witnessed the stabbing & attempted to resuscitate him before emergency medical services arrived & took over. Paramedics performed CPR for 30 minutes, but despite their efforts, Olly died at 5 pm in the ambulance before he could be taken to the hospital. After the Stephens family was told of the stabbing by another boy, they rushed to the field to find paramedics working on their son. They later recalled knowing that their son was “gone” when they saw him.
After the attack, the two boys made an attempt to destroy evidence & threw their bloodstained clothing into an overgrown area near a railway line & deleted incriminating evidence from their phones. They later searched the internet for reports about the stabbing.
Two hours after Olly was pronounced dead, the older boy sent a text message to another teen & told him, “Boy, it was me & my boy innut. I started slapping him up & then my boy backed out & then shanked him.” The younger boy who was the one that actually did the stabbing described it as the “biggest mistake of my life” in another text message & said it was done out of “pure anger.”
The Thames Valley Police led the investigation & three days after Olly was murdered, the perpetrators were identified on January 6.
The two boys were charged with the murder of Olly Stephens which they denied. They were also charged with two counts of perverting the course of justice, relating to attempts to dispose of evidence following the stabbing. Boys boys admitted one count & denied the other. On July 26, 2021, after a five-week trial, both were unanimously convicted of murder. The older boy was also convicted of perverting the course of justice while the younger boy was acquitted of the same charge. The 14-year-old girl who lured Olly to the field was convicted of manslaughter. All three were sentenced on September 24, 2021 to custody in young offenders’ institutions. Following the trial at Reading Crown Court, the two boys were given life sentences which means they will serve at least 12-13 years respectively. The girl was given three years & two months. In December 2021, the Court of Appeal made the decision that the girl’s sentence was too lenient & it was increased to five years in prison.
Judge Heather Norton spoke to the three teenagers & said, “Whatever part each of you played, great or small, what you did that day was utterly cruel & totally pointless. You have taken one life, damaged your own futures & you have caused so much pain to so many people. The effects of what you did will stay with you & with Olly’s family forever.”
The three teenage murderers cannot be identified by name because they are minors. One of Olly’s killers appealed their sentence due to his Asperger’s diagnosis. His defense argued that the 15-year-old’s diagnosis should have been a consideration during his trial. However, the bench at the Court of Appeal emphatically dismissed the application as they deemed the boy’s condition had no relevance to the circumstances of the incident. This boy stabbed Olly twice & Lord Justice Davis said, “In our view, at its heart, this was a straightforward case. He came to the scene with a knife. When he saw his friend getting the worst of it, he pulled out a knife & used it.”
After Olly’s murder, his sister Emilia paid tribute to her brother & said, “I’m so sorry I failed you, I wish I could have saved you from it all. We will get justice for you, my angel.” Stuart said that Olly may have only made up a quarter of the family of four but he provided 80% of the entertainment & their house is now left empty & quiet.
Stuart & Melissa spoke & said, “Within 13 minutes of leaving the safety of his loving home, Olly left us forever. Two minutes was all it took to end him & cause us & our family catastrophic heartbreak. When I reached where Olly fell, I gently held his hand, willing him to respond, with the same love & devotion as I had on the day we met, the day he was born. Olly was our boy. We raised him to the best of our ability. He made people laugh, his sense of humor & his wicked comic timing had us & his friends in stitches many a time. He was warm, kind, soulful, a deep thinker & a great carer of those around him.” Stuart described the moment that he was told that he could no longer touch or hold his son because his body was now “forensic evidence” as “utterly horrific.” Stuart added, “I had one job as a father, to protect my children & I failed miserably – I will never forgive myself.” Stuart could sense that Olly had been troubled by something in the days prior to his murder & he pleaded with his son to confide in him, but he was unable to get the information from him & all he would say was, “snitches get stitches.” Amanda couldn’t wrap her head around why the other teens present at the scene of the crime hadn’t stepped in to stop what was happening, especially since Olly was the type who always stepped up for the underdog.
Only weeks before his murder, Olly was diagnosed with autism & suspected PDA or pathological demand avoidance, but the family never saw this as a problem, just something they would all work together to understand & to overcome his fear of feeling different. Since Olly moved on to secondary school, he found learning & education difficult but he was able to make up for it in so many other ways. His family spoke to him about autism being a gift, something that made him unique & that they would always love him. They referred to his diagnosis as his “autistic ‘superpower’” & wondered what he would be when he grew up; a techno whiz, a musician, artist or mathematical prodigy. The family always reinforced that life was a journey & mistakes were part of the learning process.
Stuart spoke during an impact statement at the trial & indicated that despite their strength as a family, losing Olly has broken them. Olly’s nature was to trust people too much which was part of what made them love him. He knew no sense of danger & he always stood up for himself during confrontations & never backed down, but at the same time, he was exceptionally kind & loving. Amanda & Stuart urge other parents of teens to monitor their cell phone use.
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