Fifteen minutes was all it took for life as Amanda and Stuart Stephens knew it to be changed for ever. At 3.33pm on January 3, their 13-year-old son Olly left their Berkshire home and headed to the park across the road to meet a girl the same age.
‘He had left saying, “Don’t worry, Mum, love you,” and off he went,’ recalled Amanda.
So when there was a knock at the door quarter of an hour later she assumed it was the pair of them coming back.
But when she opened it, her son wasn’t there – just a boy he knew.
‘Olly has been stabbed,’ he told her.
Amanda ran, shouting those same four, terrible words to her husband.
Olly had been lured to the park in a carefully planned ambush. Judge Heather Norton thanked Olly’s parents for their quiet dignity in court, which she described as humbling
Stuart Stephens, the father of Olly Stephens, reads a statement outside Reading Crown Court
‘Stuart ran out without his shoes on, over to the field,’ the 52-year-old said. ‘And when I got there he just fell to his knees and he was screaming, “My boy, my boy” – and I looked over and Olly was just completely lifeless.’
Stuart’s memories of that moment are heart-breaking. ‘I wanted to be near him,’ he said. ‘I ran over to the field and there was a crowd of people surrounding Olly and I just remember the faces – everyone turning and looking at me and the horror just written on their faces.
‘I was kneeling in his blood, so I knew he had lost a lot of blood. Once I held his hand I knew he had gone.
‘Fifteen minutes before he was happy, laughing, joking,’ the 51-year-old added. ‘He had no idea what he was walking into. They are children. You don’t expect children to do that.’
Olly had been lured to the park in a carefully planned ambush.
The ‘cunning and manipulative’ girl was part of it, watching as he was attacked by two boys aged 13 and 14.
At some stage the younger child, who because of his age can only be identified as Boy A, drew a knife and stabbed Olly twice.
As he collapsed, onlookers rushed to help. But despite the efforts of paramedics and an air ambulance crew, he was pronounced dead in the park.
CCTV image issued by Thames Valley Police dated 3/1/2021 of Olly Stephens walking in Emmer Green
Yesterday at Reading Crown Court his killers – all three of whom are now 14 – were detained for a total of 28 years. Boy A and Boy B had been convicted of murder earlier. They received life sentences with minimum terms of 13 and 12 years respectively.
The girl had pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to three years and two months in custody.
Judge Heather Norton thanked Olly’s parents for their quiet dignity in court, which she described as humbling.
‘I know the sentences I am about to give to these defendants will seem to you to be unbearably short,’ she told them. ‘For the defendants’ families, they will seem unbearably long. They are in no way a reflection of the worth of Olly. I know for you he is priceless.’
For the Stephens family that is not the end of the matter. Their one hope is that no other family endures their agony. As Amanda says: ‘We are broken.’
They are particularly angry about the role social media played in Olly’s death.
He was threatened on Snapchat, while on Instagram his killers posed and posted gang-related imagery.
Investigators at a forensic tent in Bugs Bottom field, Emmer Green, in Reading following the horrific ambush
For the Stephens family that is not the end of the matter. They are particularly angry about the role social media played in Olly’s death
‘It is a crazy situation,’ says Stuart. ‘You have companies based in San Francisco harvesting your children’s data and making a lot of money out of it and yet when a child dies they are not held accountable.
‘The only analogy I have for it is if you are a car manufacturer and you make a car and it has a faulty petrol tank or has faulty brakes and people die because of that, you are up in court, you are held to account. With social media no one is held to account and that to me is a big problem because our children are using these tools to threaten, harm and kill each other.’
Raised with his older teenage sister in a quiet cul-de-sac in Emmer Green, Reading, Olly enjoyed a happy, middle-class childhood. He was keen on skiing, fishing and particularly rugby, which he watched with his father at London Irish RUFC, where, at seven, he was the team’s mascot.
Always full of life, anything he approached he did so whole-heartedly.
‘For a quarter of the family he was 80 per cent of the entertainment,’ his father recalled this week as, seated beside his wife, they gave their first media interviews ahead of the sentencing hearing. ‘He gave everything a go.’ But moving to secondary school proved to be a challenge, with Olly failing to settle.
‘He loved the social side of school, but found the educational side very difficult,’ Stuart admits. Diagnosed with autism, in many ways the lockdowns came at a good time, allowing Olly to spend time at home where he would use any spare time perfecting wheelies on his bicycle.
But his family was less aware of the other side of Olly’s life – one conducted through a screen.
‘What we found is you think you know your child but you know a small percentage of what your child is doing,’ says Amanda. ‘We could see on the face of it Olly was in his bedroom on his Xbox. But, on his phone, when we saw how he was being spoken to in conversations it was absolutely horrific – you could almost say it was two worlds going on in one house.’
To be clear, this was no random
