Carol Bennett and his wife, Maureen, have become leading investigators into the murder of their son in India.
Their living room in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is packed with computers, telephones, satellite maps, photographs and piles of witness statements. They appear to have asked more people what happened to their son, Stephen, than the police did.

In doing so, they have uncovered vital clues in the search for his killer and forced the police to reopen the investigation.

 
 
The body of Mr Bennett, 40, was found last month suspended from a mango tree about 75 miles from Bombay.

Local police initially claimed that he killed himself. Then they said that he was murdered by hysterical villagers. Now, reluctantly, they have dispatched senior detectives from Bombay to Malsai, a village near the industrial town of Roha, to pursue the new leads uncovered by the Bennetts and journalists.

The Bennetts have told The Times that they believe that the local mafia kidnapped, tortured and killed their son, believing that he was an undercover drugs agent.

Witnesses said that Mr Bennett, a builder, joked about being a drugs investigator while drinking in a bar in Goa.

His mother, Maureen, said: “Stephen was always joking and witnesses say the local mafia who run Goa’s drugs trade took him seriously. If we can find all this information sitting in Gloucestershire, then why can’t officers on the scene?” A police spokesman said: “We are still investigating and will look at any new information. We have never said we have all the answers.”

At first, the family were told that Bennett had killed himself on December 11. Then, after pathologists pointed out that this could not be true, they claimed that he was killed on December 7 by men who thought he was a sex attacker.

Police said that Bennett was chased into the jungle by the family and neighbours of a 25-year-old woman he had molested. Her husband, one of six men arrested, allegedly confessed from his jail cell how the gang beat Bennett with firewood, then throttled him with a sari and hanged him to make it look like suicide.

The Bennetts soon found contradictions in the police version of events.

First, the attacked woman said that she had never seen Bennett or any other foreign tourist in Malsai.

Then it emerged that officers had never bothered to visit Goa, from where Bennett — hours before he died — telephoned his family to say that he was being menaced by two local men. His sister, Amanda, said that he was sure that he was going to be murdered.

Next, police portrayed the father of two as an addict who had travelled to Malsai to buy drugs. They said that witnesses who sat next to Bennett on the Mandovi Express from Goa to Bombay told them that he smoked foul-smelling drugs in compartment S5 and was told to leave the train at Roha.

However, the post-mortem examination showed no sign of drugs in Bennett’s body. It suggested that he had been dragged through the jungle with his hands tied behind his back.

Mrs Bennett is suspicious about the police version, which is that he left the train in darkness, at a town that he had never heard of and at which the train was not meant to stop and caught a rickshaw to a jungle clearing four miles away.

She has studied satellite images of the Maharashtra region and of Malsai and has pinpointed possible routes that her son’s killers could have taken by car.

The police have also been unable to explain what happened to Bennett’s baggage.

The Bennetts have spoken to Goans with knowledge of the local drugs trade and were told that the authorities would rather not admit to the problem for fear of tarnishing Goa’s reputation as a tourist destination. “We know all this is not going to bring back Stephen but we just want the police to fully investigate why he was killed,” Mrs Bennett said.

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