For two weeks, dozens of police officers, private divers and scores of improvised detectives have been searching in vain for an English mother who disappeared while walking her dog linked to a video conference. His relatives mobilized on Friday.
The mysterious disappearance of Nicola Bulley, whose face is on the front pages of the press every day, has Britons in suspense, arousing strong emotions and doubts about the stubbornness of the police to support the thesis of a fall into the local river.
Friends and family on Friday lined the streets near the village of St Michael’s on Wyre in north-west England where the 45-year-old lived, holding up signs and banners with her photograph and the message: ‘Bring Nikki home’.
They hope to “refresh the memory” of someone who may have seen something suspicious, Emma White, a friend of Nicola Bulley, told the BBC. She compared this research days with “roller coasters”, with “torture”.
“We just need Nikki to get home to her two beautiful little girls who need their mother,” she said.
Nicola Bulley’s companion Paul Ansell has described the “hell” his family is in and his daughters are asking where their mother is.
This mortgage consultant appears to have disappeared on the morning of January 27 while walking her dog near a river. At 9:01 a.m., she was on a work call in Teams. That remote meeting ended at 9:30 a.m., but his phone stayed connected to the call. At 9:35 a.m., a walker found the abandoned phone and the dog, alone and restless.
Lancashire Police prefer the accidental trail and believe Nicola Bulley fell in the river. But the search by police divers and then by a specialized private company was in vain.
Forty police officers worked on this file, the police said and spoke of investigations of “unprecedented” proportions. Since Thursday, the search has shifted towards the estuary and even towards the sea.
The case is so intriguing that people improvise detectives. The police had to issue “an order for dissolution”. According to The Daily Telegraph, videos on social media show people searching for Nicola Bulley in the woods and on private property and criticizing the work of the police.