A forensic diving expert involved in the hunt for missing Lancashire woman Nicola Bulley has reportedly pulled out of the search.
Ms. Bulley seemingly vanished almost two weeks ago on Friday, January 27. She had just dropped her two daughters - aged six and nine - off at school and was taking the family dog Willow for a walk around the River Wyre in St. Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire.
At approximately 09:00 AM the mortgage advisor logged on to a Microsoft Teams call, which ended roughly 30 minutes later. At 10:30 AM, a passerby discovered Ms. Bulley's dog running around in a distressed manner, and found a mobile phone believed to belong to the mother-of-two on a bench beside the river. She was apparently still logged on to the work conference call.
In the days following her disappearance, Lancashire police and forensic experts revealed that one of their working hypotheses is that Ms. Bulley had fallen into the River Wyre and that this was "not suspicious but a tragic case of a missing person".
It was also reported that specialist diving teams continued their attempts to trace Ms. Bulley by returning to the river bank near to the bench with a 20-foot-long probe attached to an underwater camera last week.
Forensic diving expert Peter Faulding has rejected the police's working hypothesis, telling Talk TV (via The Daily Mail) that he's "truly baffled" by the case, and doesn't believe she fell into the water - adding that if she'd drowned her body would have been recovered by now.
"After 25 years of doing this kind of work, after hundreds of cases, I am well and truly baffled. Normally you would expect the divers to find them easily," Faulding stated, further explaining that when a person drowns they "generally go down where they are", with search teams normally finding their bodies within five to 10 meters of where they fell in.
Now, news has broken that Faulding and his team will be calling off their search for Ms. Bulley today (February 8). Speaking to reporters (via the Manchester Evening News) Faulding was asked what he thought happened to the local woman.
"Normally a drowning victim goes to the bottom. There was a bit of flow on the river that day, I wasn't here on the day it happened but normally we recover them within a few meters.
"My only point there is that the police divers did thoroughly search that stretch of water - a highly competent search in that part of the river," he replied.
"Obviously you've got the weir in the way," he added. "We're not always right, we do our best, but if Nicola has managed to get over the weir and she's gone down that way then I would have thought that she would have surfaced by now and been found by dog walkers."
Our thoughts are with the family, friends, and colleagues of Nicola Bulley at this difficult time.
