Missing Woman Nicola Bulley 5

[ofwarren]

A new thread about the disappearance of Nicola Bulley in St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire.

Not by the bench, but I think there may be downstream/elsewhere closer to the sea, maybe why they seem so confident and hoped to find her by now.

@SueG60 yeah, it's quite common where I live anyway. A car will be found near a river or beach and the person will often have been found to have had suicidal thoughts etc before. Had a quick google there and the National Water Safety Forum says that there were 631 drownings in 2020 in the UK, of which 232 were presumed non accidental.

The police is paying the price for a PR disaster.

People are not satisfied with the one and only theory of river drowning so some enthusiastic detectives / women rights activists take matters in their own hand. It was writing on the wall. Should have known to educate the public better.

Yes. I think we are at the point now with no body found in the water after 2 weeks, and an expert basically saying he doesn't see how she is in the water, that we have to move on from the assumption that 1) Nicola left the phone on the bench 2) She went into the water. Once you remove those 2 assumptions then things open up a hell of a lot and you can start thinking more clearly.

Sure, carry on searching in the river, but it could be weeks before a body is found now and might never be.

Remember the old saying "Assumption is the mother of all f**k ups"

It is entirely easy to live without a bank account. The FCA estimates that 1.3million UK adults are "unbanked". For starters, how do you think the homeless survive? Just because your lifestyle may require a bank account doesn't mean everyone wants to live like that or can live like that.

I think its almost impossible. I mean its possible if you had help from a third party, like family you could stay with them and they would pick up all your living costs/give you money. But nobody would choose to live like that forever. And the 11,000 you mention are presumably people officially reported as missing so their family don't know where they are.

If someone was trying to get away from a domestic abuser and just did one, then the abuser reported them as missing, the first thing the police would do is work out who all their family and friends are, look at recent communication and then check with those people whether they'd seen the person. They'd quickly find that they'd just left and weren't actually missing. You'd have to be pretty close to someone if they were going to put you up and finance you indefinitely so there would be lots of communication between them.

To be a missing person, it means that they can't locate you having looked into all likely places you could be.

A field a few metres away from a river

"Because there is no criminal element yet identified, and we don't expect there to be in this inquiry, then we're not starting to go into houses because that's not where the inquiry is leading us," she (SR) added.

How can they be so sure of this. Its making me so mad they are like a dog with a bone on their fell in a river theory. Meanwhile she could be trapped in a nearby house. You would at least rule that out by searching.

But the phone was a couple of hundred metres from the field.

She was walking in the field, along a path at the side of the river.

You can't search without a warrant

You can't get a warrant without it being a criminal investigation

You can't make it a criminal investigation without evidence

I keep coming back to the point about it being such a short window of time - too short for anything nefarious to happen.

Well, really? Surely in any abduction, speed is of the essence. Grab somebody, get them under control, get them out of sight asap. They're not going to sit down for an hour's discussion about kidnapping, I'd assume.

I think it's too short a window to have accidentally drowned. I don't think it's really possible to drown yourself at that location (although possibly much further down the river). But if someone was watching her and lying in wait, is it really so impossible to have got her out of sight in fifteen minutes?

If they’d found any belongings of hers in the river they would have to have told the family to identify them.

This is probably the most egregious example of over confidence and defensiveness from SI Riley. "we don't expect there to be in this inquiry". A very strange statement to make. Is she a fortune teller or has she got information she hasn't shared with anyone including the family yet?

I don’t disagree with this. It could potentially take longer to struggle with the dog and fall in and drown than it would to be abducted. Which can happen very quickly.

She only needed to be out of sight of the woman at 9.33, as her husband came I think 10.50.

They didn't need 15 minutes. They had all the time in the world, police weren't called till 10.50

Yet people can live double lives and men who identify as women can get whole new birth certificates once they obtain a GRC their old identity vanishes.

Criminals have successfully forged new identities.

I'm most definitely not suggesting this is the case here but the idea that she cannot possibly have walked of her own volition because it's impossible in the UK to do so is just complete nonsense. It's difficult and unusual but not impossible.

My point is its difficult to live without any financial trail at all, forever. Would imagine most of that 1.3 million fit into other categories, like they're old people who've never had a bank account and they go to the post office to draw their pension in cash, or they're spouses of ethnic minorities who live off their partner's income and don't have an account of their own.

The homeless have to eat, they'd be known to homeless shelters and they also get money from the job centre sometimes.

You can't live in this country without access to money (or someone else's money) in the long term

Interesting to note the comment above about her Strava page being public until around November. Same seems to be true of her Facebook page where you can see lots of family snaps uploaded until early December. One does wonder if there was cause in her personal life to become more aware of what she shared online around that time. As others have said it has made me reflect a little on my own privacy settings.

Expressing sincere concern for her and her loved ones, and wishing strength to all involved in the search. Also, with thanks to the previous posters who have so articulately captured my own thoughts on why this is has caught my attention in the way it has - beyond the obvious sadness of a much loved mother, daughter, friend etc vanishing without a trace. The comments about misogyny, recent murders of women, wanting to feel safe when we’re out doing normal things like walking our dogs after taking our kids to school, and so forth really spoke to me. I appreciate you setting these outs and rebutting the general “armchair detective” and “hysterical Mumsnetters” narrative.

Yet suicide by drowning does happen quite regularly - between around 3.5 and 5.7% of suicides per year in the UK during the first 20 years of this century. - www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2021registrations.

I think people overcome the instinct to save themselves and breathe by weighting themselves down.

No it's definitely possible but it means huge changes in your lifestyle, mostly for the negative.

Well again that depends on how an individual perceives the life they are leaving.

I've caught up on this thread and the precious one. Two comments

1. as with other pp, my Fitbit only syncs with my phone when I choose to open the app which I do about once a week. No schedule. Random timings. Nothing unusual about this.

2. pp suggesting it's it was too shallow for drowning or her coat may have provided buoyancy or that she was a strong swimmer would do well do to read up on the effects of cold water shock. rnli.org/safety/know-the-risks/cold-water-shock
   It's sadly normal for heavy winter clothing to act as a weight when waterlogged.

Although a completely different river, I am reminded of this sad case whereby a rowing coach drowned and despite the best efforts of search teams wasn't located for five weeks until the nature took its course and his body arose to the surface. Despite being within the tidal Thames, he was found barely a couple of hundred metres from where he was last seen.
Body of rowing coach Michael Hill found in River Thames www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-31797143

It would seem that if she has entered the water, it's a very different river whether upstream or downstream of the weir.

Hmmm. No there is 227, 000 homeless people in Britain today, many are unidentified or linked to missing persons. I’m sure some of the 11k are dead or something criminal happened, but I’d not assume the majority and suspect most have started a new life with a new name, don’t want to be found or are homeless.