Field lived in Solihull in 1996 and is known to have been driving around in a white van in the vicinity of the boys' last known location on the night of their disappearance, while under the influence of alcohol.
Police interviewed Field in prison on multiple occasions about the boys' disappearance and suspected him of killing them, but did not have sufficient evidence to charge him.
[4] On the evening of Boxing Day 1996, best friends Patrick Warren and David Spencer left their Chelmsley Wood residences to play outside.
Patrick's brand-new red Apollo bicycle was found abandoned behind the petrol station near the bins, although the police did not realise that it was his until several weeks later.
The police initially treated the boys' disappearance as a normal missing persons inquiry, but despite no confirmed sightings of them after Boxing Day, senior officers told the media that there was no reason to suppose that they had come to any harm.
[1] However, the boys' faces were among the first to appear on milk cartons in a groundbreaking campaign launched by the National Missing Persons Helpline in April 1997.
[8] On the tenth anniversary of their disappearance, the boys were the subject of a BBC Crimewatch special appeal for information, which drew no fresh leads.
[6] After the case was reviewed in 2006, convicted murderer and paedophile Brian Lunn Field was named as a suspect; however, police were not able to secure a confession or obtain tangible evidence to connect him to the boys' disappearance.
[11][12] After Field's conviction it was reported that police were already investigating him for Warren and Spencer's disappearance in 1996, alongside the murder of another boy committed in Solihull in 1984.
[11] It has since been ascertained by West Midlands Police that Field was driving round the area of the boys' last sighting in a van on the night of their disappearance, and that he was doing so under the influence of alcohol.
[10] In 2021, criminologist David Wilson released a documentary as part of his Footsteps of Killers series on the subject of Warren and Spencer's disappearance, in which he spoke to Graham Hill, the detective that got Field to confess to Tutill's murder in 2001.
[16] DCI Caroline Marsh of West Midlands Police stated her belief that both boys were deceased, and said that the force would never close the case until it learnt what had happened to them.