I've scanned these threads but not posted until now. It's natural people - women especially - will want to talk about this. The 21st century is a horrible time to be a woman. Any short window of progress we made from around the 1970s and 80s has now regressed to a pre-suffragist level of misogyny. Women constantly have to assess our safety: we are heckled, shouted at and have to vary our routes when we go out running, we experience workplace harassment, unwanted touching; all these issues being the lower level of most women's experience. Trains, IME are now dangerous places for women. I can tell numerous stories of harassment on trains that have happened to me alone. Then there's the more serious stuff. The stalking, sexual offences, and murder, sadly not rare occurrences, so that it chills us to the bone when we read of cases like Nicola's.
The fate of these poor women brings every women's situation into stark relief. Emma Pattison and her daughter, Sarah Everard, the hideous events that happened during her vigil, the reams of names read out every year for 'Counting Dead Women'. Last time a name released every five minutes on Twitter - the complete list took 8 HOURS to work its way through the system. We have a systemic problem of hatred against women and I don't know what the hell we do about it. I hope against hope that Nicola hasn't come to harm, but after this length of time, her trail apparently cold, it seems an increasing assumption that she has.
A PP upthread makes the point that any perpetrator might not necessarily have been a male. IF there's a perpetrator, then of course it was. The statistics speak for themselves. Crimes like this - particularly opportunist crimes - committed by women against women are vanishingly rare. This, at least, isn't a matter of conjecture or opinion.