Death by Conspiracy?: 7. Gary's Final Days

0:12So, there's a statue of Hercules here.

0:14Marianna Spring:We're sitting on a bench opposite Shrewsbury School, a grand-looking boarding school. Adam Birch, an artist, has just come off the back of a series of night shifts at a supermarket. He's dressed almost entirely in black and rolls a cigarette as we speak. And whether this is an old wives tale or not, but one of the initiations for the new students is basically they'd go and sleep in here, they'd stay overnight in here, obviously, and then when everyone's gone to bed and the doors have been shut, they'd jump out of their bed, they'd run down this hill, swim over the river, go to Hercules, and they'd have to take his genitalia and bring it back as a trophy.

0:50This happened that many times that somewhere there's a collection of Hercules recast genitalia. And they actually changed it at the end of the day and put like a fig leaf thing on there instead because they just got fed up of having to, you know, give them a new man part.

1:06Marianna Spring:It's a funny story. But as Adam gestures at the opulent building across the River Severn, it brings him to a more serious point. You have a town like this. We're sitting opposite this boathouse for the school and, you know, they're all having a marvellous time. by the looks of it. But you have this disparity. And I suppose in a place like Shrewsbury, it's more evident. It's quite small, but the affluence is affluent and the lack of it is very demonstrably obvious. And it's that disparity, Adam says, that made lockdown so hard for his close friend, Gary Matthews. Gary believed in conspiracy theories about COVID.

1:47Marianna Spring:In January 2021, he caught the virus and died at the age of 46. and yet conspiracy groups continue to cast doubt on his death because in their topsy-turvy world, even being presented with a death certificate, the official verdict of doctors, hasn't been enough to convince them of the truth about what happened. So that's why I need to piece together the events of early January 2021 by drilling down into Gary's last week and tracking down friends like Adam who not only saw him during the difficult months of lockdown, but also in his final days. What else can I uncover which will help me to challenge them once and for all?

2:31Marianna Spring:Will this upside-down conspiracy community change their minds? And as I investigate further, I discover something else. Could it be true that Gary changed his mind once he fell seriously ill with COVID-19? I'm Marianna Spring. From BBC Radio 4, this is Death by Conspiracy.

2:59Marianna Spring:Let's rewind a little. Few people I've interviewed can account for Gary's movements in the fortnight before he died. But I get my first real lead, courtesy of Gary's friend, Peter Roscoe. Apparently he was feeling ill, walked from that flat where he lived, and I think I went to the Shire Hall for some reason, like not the hospital. The Shire Hall is where Shrewsbury Council is based. It's also a place to get Covid tests. It's a decent walk from Gary's flat, around a mile, but several people have told me Gary was feeling ill and thought it a trip worth taking. I give Shire Hall a ring. Hello and thanks for calling Shropshire Council's customer services.

3:40Oh hello, I was wondering if you might be able to help me.

3:43Marianna Spring:No luck. Data protection laws mean they can't confirm if Gary took a COVID-19 test. I also have a copy of Gary's death certificate, saying COVID-19 was his cause of death. In fact, it's the only cause of death listed on the certificate. At the bottom, it has the name of a local doctor who signed it off. So I contact his medical practice. Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered by the next available patient coordinator. He doesn't want to speak to us. Again, rules on confidentiality mean he probably couldn't tell us anything, even if he wanted to. But then I get a break. I learn that Adam, who we heard from at the start, was in close contact with Gary even as late as January 2021.

4:30Marianna Spring:Adam met Gary at the University of Wolverhampton. They remained close friends. During lockdown, both men lived alone. They found it difficult. In fact, it wasn't until I spoke to Adam that I realised quite how hard lockdowns had been on Gary. Within the one street that I live in, you can pick people who are living with four or five people, totally affluent, have a marvellous garden, you know, happen to have the right job and they're furloughed up to their eyeballs and it's all marvellous and what's the problem? You go around the corner and see somebody living on their own with no garden, who's totally depressed, isolated from their family.

5:05there's also the ramifications of the mental health impact of all of this, which obviously Gary suffered, that's evident. But I know a lot of people that have suffered through, I have, very seriously.

5:18Marianna Spring:And it sounds like for Gary, the circumstances of the lockdown, the isolation, the disruption, accelerated his use of social media. He'd be on social media, I mean, constantly. He was on the thing constantly. He was obviously researching on the demon internet, you know, and the internet's like a mirror. It gives you what you put in. If we go to kind of the last few months of Gary's life, when did you last see Gary? A week before he died. Where was that? That was over by the cafe just here, which was, yeah, about 100 metres from where we're sitting. And how did Gary seem? Weird. is the only word I can, in every way, he seemed very weird.

6:07Just off. I can't explain it, I don't know, but he was not himself. That was the last time I saw him.

6:18Marianna Spring:Adam's not sure whether he seemed weird because lockdown was taking its toll, or whether maybe he was starting to feel ill. By the following week, Gary had died of COVID-19. But in that last week, there's still a gap. We don't know exactly when Gary caught Covid. And Adam didn't manage to speak to Gary again after they met. But, he tells me, others might have. He was very close with them. His nephew and his sister, his mum and his dad, yeah. I mean, yeah, he was. Yeah, they were very close.

6:58Marianna Spring:Gary's immediate family has been left heartbroken by his death. But last year, they did film an interview about what happened with Gary's cousin Tristan, a filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles. I won't play those interviews. Gary's family are grieving and in pain. But they've told us they do really hope telling Gary's story will help other people. and so I've been able to watch the footage that Tristan had gathered for his documentary. And there's one section in particular that has what I've been looking for, the critical details from Gary's final days. This is exactly the information I need to rebut the conspiracy community casting doubt on Gary's death.

7:39Marianna Spring:Tristan explained the set-up when we spoke to him more recently. I've had Emma, his sister, Kate, his mum and his dad sort of walked me through the very specifics of his tests, his illness from what they could garner. Let me describe the footage. Emma and Kate are sitting in a kitchen with Tristan. They explain how, on the 7th of January, they received a call from Gary. He told them he felt ill, but he thought it was the flu. We can hear some of Tristan's questions as he drills down into what happened. When did he know he was sick? From the 7th to the 10th of January, his family says, Gary became increasingly ill.

8:25Marianna Spring:On the 10th, he called his mum again. That's when he'd finally decided to go and have a test. Although he did get tested, we haven't found any evidence that Gary went to hospital or sought professional medical attention. Tristan is sure that Gary didn't seek help. And in his interview with Gary's sister and mother, at no point do they mention Gary calling a doctor or an ambulance or visiting the hospital. And as I watch the footage, something really important begins to dawn on me. Having thought for months that the virus was a hoax, that it wasn't real or wasn't very serious, Gary's illness starts to erode those beliefs.

9:04Marianna Spring:He recognised he needed to check if he had COVID-19, and he was suddenly cautious about meeting people and potentially infecting his loved ones. In Tristan's footage, his family confirmed what Peter told me. Gary walked to Shire Hall testing centre, a round-trip distance of around two miles, even though he was struggling to breathe. And the reason he didn't want to ask anyone to drive him was for fear of spreading the virus. He was isolating. He was refusing. His family, his dad and his mum wanted to come over into his apartment, help him out, bring him groceries. And he was like, don't come over.

9:45He wanted to protect him.

9:48Marianna Spring:On the 12th of January, the day before he died, he called his mum again. The test was positive. He had COVID-19. His family advised him to take some paracetamol and rest. They'd known people who'd had the virus and recovered, and so they thought it would be the same for Gary. But it wasn't. His dad, my uncle Bill, went to check on him the morning after and couldn't get into his apartment. The apartment's owned by some undertakers and so the undertakers let him in and he found Gary probably a couple of hours after he just sort of collapsed in his living room and so he found his dead body with an undertaker behind him.

10:33Marianna Spring:The families realised something else too His sister Emma says that after Gary died She took a look at his online search history One of the things he was looking up was the symptoms of Covid That's not something you do if you still thought Covid was a hoax He'd been adamant that there was something fake about the virus Or that it wasn't that dangerous But it seems like his beliefs did crumble at the end just not quickly enough for him to get the medical help he would have needed or to protect himself from contracting the virus. It was all too late. But I think his opinion changed, I think he knew by the end of it, and at least he knew enough to protect his family.

11:17Marianna Spring:In the footage that Tristan recorded, Gary's sister can't hold back the tears. She recounts how Gary's views changed, but that it was already too late. Her voice chokes with emotion. Her brother meant so much to her. And now he's gone. For others left behind, like Adam on the bench in the quarry, there's the pain of loss and the memories of a special friend. This wasn't somebody with tinfoil on the head. This was a very intelligent chap. He's beautiful. He's a beautiful man. I mean, he was very gentle and very delicate.

11:58you know he was kind of he was kind of a pure there was very few pure people that sounds like about to burst into song or whatever but it's actually genuinely true he was just you know how children have got no malice and you get to a certain age as a teenager he bypassed that completely and just kept this thing I hugged him quite a lot

12:25Marianna Spring:It's a grief he hasn't yet processed I can't help but notice he still refers to Gary in the present tense As though he might appear in a second for a chat in the quarry No, I'm quite numbed to the whole thing It's still quite surreal In my head, I suppose it's a coping mechanism You just assume that this will pass and it'll be around the corner in a minute And this will just go away Amid the pain, there's something that still bothers Adam. How what Adam calls the demon internet played a role in what happened to Carrie. It's a common myth that we ultimately have full control over what we believe.

13:07Marianna Spring:Now, of course, personal responsibility plays a part. But so do social media algorithms and what we look at online. And so how does this stuff work? As somebody who has been on social media and experienced that yourself, it literally just becomes you on newsfeed, you see nothing else apart from those kind of sources. I'm Marianna Spring, and that was episode 7 of Death by Conspiracy from Radio 4. In the next episode, I investigate Gary's social media feed. What was he seeing online, and what effect was it having?