Tia Sharp

[LadyBeagleEyes]

Is this now a banned topic on MN?
With the new arrests, and nothing being posted, I'm assuming it is.
Fair enough if that's the decision, I'm just curious.

I would imagine that they simply failed to look carefully enough the first time.

Not sure we're allowed to say that, 5Months!
There are other scenarios to investigate.
Because it comes down to proving intent & us speculating interferes with that process in theory I guess; eg, even if it were found Tia died of non-criminal causes, there'd still be other charges to bring, and proving them depends on who did what & how.

From the DM today; dunno how reliable this inf is but it's a lot more detailed than the Guardian - states that they did use cadaver dogs on previous search though:

'Officers had previously conducted a full search of the house and a second sweep using dogs trained to detect dead bodies. Colleagues suspect the body was behind a door connecting the loft to that of an adjacent property.
Sources claimed a team who spent two hours searching the property last Sunday did not check the neighbouring loft space because they needed a search warrant.
A further search of Sharp?s house began on Friday morning when a junior officer insisted a sniffer dog was ?indicating? towards a bedroom ceiling. The officers themselves could also smell decomposition.
Initially a senior officer co-ordinating the search said the loft had already been checked but was persuaded to change his mind.'

my italics

Rather thorough discussion here on a Police website, goes thru many of the possibilities I had in mind about why the body discovery might have been delayed without significant police error.

That police site is interesting, lljkk. I agree with the comments that say it isn't necessarily easy to find a body, particularly under the scrutiny of the media. I sympathise with the guy who says:

"Let?s put all these clowns in a house where a body sized object has been well hidden with all the same legal parameters that surround cases such as in this tragic case. Let them balance the needs of a distraught family, the baying media and often well intended but ill-informed local people and see how long it takes them to find it."

Tiggytape- Tehre have been lots of miscarriages of justice where the police have put getting a conviction before getting a conviction of the purpetrator.

The police spokesman made it clear that they were treating it as a missing person case and hoped to find Tia alive and well. Very possibly they thought she was hidden somewhere and they were looking at places where a live child might be concealed, and not inside bags and the like.

I would think that when you are aware that there is a large possibility that the person you're looking for is either alive and well somewhere, has been sighted elsewhere, (as they thought) or if not alive, might well have been taken somewhere else, it must be fairly hard to concentrate the mind on searching a house and to what degree you need to look - iyswim.

Like, silly example but if I had lost a pair of earrings and thought they were in my bedroom, I'd look there really thoroughly, but not be so thorough with the living room or kitchen as it would seem a bit daft to, the higher likelihood being that they were in the bedroom.

It is hard to focus on searching somewhere really thoroughly if you have reason to believe the object may not even be there, or is unlikely to be there.

somebody posted on one of the other Tia threads about the case of a boy who went missing from a family "known to social services". Police gutted their house, convinced he'd be there. It turned out he actually had been abducted by a stranger.

I know the police make mistakes, but it's impossible for them always to know what's the right thing to do first in a missing person case - esp when it's a teenager (or a verging-on-teenager) who has been "seen" leaving & really might be safe elsewhere

I'm very sad that this one didn't turn out that way

Me too, Ponders. Even a faked abduction would have been infinitely preferable to this.

5M - good point about the searching. Surely at that point the police were looking for a missing person, eg a girl hiding in the attic. Would be a bit of a jump to immediately assume they were looking for a dead person, especially as the house owners had reported her missing. There wasa girl went missing a several years ago, never found, (not allowed to say her name on MN) but the parents robustly refute even now, years later, any suggestion she might now be dead, so after less than a week would be an extreme conclusion for the police to assume without evidence that Tia might have been dead

if you mean MM, MrsGuy, there's no bar on using her name here

How sensitively put.

If you look at this posted by llkjyou might find it's not as murder-she-wrote as it seems sancerreity.

I'm not a slavish fan of the Police but there is a little thing like the Law, and illegal searches and warrants.

Those rules are there for our good. I don't want the police barging into homes and ripping up floorboards and bath panels without due cause. And I guess they'd want me to understand their difficulties.

I'm not sure why my post that commented on the corrupt and incompetent nature of the Metropolitan Police was removed, when the phone hacking scandal demonstrated their corruption and last year's Tottenham riots that spiralled into national riots demonstrated their incompetence (and the Stephen Lawrence affair demonstrated both).

Can anyone help me understand exactly HOW they missed the poor little things body for all that time when they had cadaver dogs in there on the Wednesday?

I can't understand it! A dog like that would know if a body had been there and then been moved....and even if someone HAD moved her body, then WHEN and how? The house was under constant scrutiny?

God bless her and keep her safe now. x

I can cite an example...a man died in the flat below me when I lived alone ears ago...he was "evident" in the corridor within three days and we were not cadaver dogs!

No, we can't explain it because we don't yet know all the details. I am sure it will all become clear in due course.

I suppose so. It just seems so bloody odd and awful. I hate to think of it and yet I have been trying to work it out. I know that's silly when I don't know the details. But I can't help it. I had a nightmare the other night and I think it was too much of all this horror on the news.

Has anyone else been following the Carole Waugh story? What was striking about that was that the family reported her missing in April, a police officer visited her flat and reported that everything seemed "normal", and then it was weeks and weeks before the police decided things were looking a bit odd and decided to investigate properly. Even then, it was only because people were fraudulently using her bank account. This was a woman who used to phone her mother every day and was in close contact with other members of her family.

That seems genuinely incompetent to me - far less excusable than not finding Tia Sharp's body. Am surprised there hasn't been more fuss made about it.

Reading the police forum someone posted earlier suggests the loft between the house and the neighbours house may be connected. Is this normal?