A specialist diver investigating the disappearance of Nicola Bulley said he has asked her partner whether the missing mum had any "stalkers or enemies" as he fears third party involvement. Private underwater expert Peter Faulding said that questions would be raised of outside involvement if she was not found in the River Wyre soon.
Mum-of-two Nicola, who had been walking her dog Willow by the River Wyre in Lancashire, has now been missing for 11 days. The mortgage adviser was last seen while walking her dog Willow on Friday (January 27) in the Lancashire village of St Michael's on Wyre. Nicola - known as Nikki - left her daughters aged six and nine at school, before heading to the towpath overlooking the river.
She had been on a work conference call and her phone was still logged in when it was discovered on a bench along the towpath. Her microphone and camera had been turned off for the call. Several underwater searches have been carried out in the river next to the bench where her phone was found, but no traces of Nicola have been found. Willow was also found near the bench, but was dry so investigators don't think she had been in the water.
Read more: Nicola Bulley phone may have been left on bench as 'decoy' says forensic expert searching
The expert has now joined the search party using sonar technology in the River Wyre and said he feels like he is searching for an "invisible person" since he was drafted in yesterday, reports The Mirror.
Mr Faulding said that as they search more parts of the river, if the body of the missing woman is not found in the water soon questions will be raised about third party involvement and if she is somewhere else. He said that they are searching around three miles of the weir to rule it out.
He said they started yesterday at the weir around 200 metres away and continued for around three miles to rule that section out. "We’ll continue, we are going to do a really careful survey in the hot zone, where Nicola went missing originally," Mr Faulding explained.
"Where we were searching yesterday wasn’t what I called the hot zone. This is the hot zone, where we are searching today."
He continued: "If she’s here I’m confident we’ll find her in this section of the river. If she’s here. If I don’t get any targets today then she’s not in this part of the river. She’s not here. I don’t think she’s drifted far, that’s my personal opinion. The tide would have pushed her in."
A private team of divers led by Mr Faulding from Specialist Group International (SGI) will be searching the river free of charge for the next four days. But Mr Faulding, who has worked on a number of high-profile missing persons and “no body” murder investigations, has been left baffled by the lack of clues in the search.
However he is "holding out hope" that she is alive and safe somewhere. Mr Faulding said: "I'm baffled and we're all baffled by this case because the police divers searched this area in front of the bench the same day she went missing.
"I would expect a body to be at the bottom of the river. In my experience, it would literally be in the river in front of the bench - that's where you would normally find it. It's mad and it's just very odd if I'm honest.
"But I think we need to hold out hope that she's alive somewhere as she's just disappeared off the face of the earth. We just don't know, we're looking for an invisible person at the moment and we've got no idea. I think we need to do what we can, the police are doing a great job and we're all doing a hard job."
As his concerns for third-party involvement continue, Mr Faulding said he had asked Nicola's partner Paul Ansell if she "had any stalkers or enemies or anything like that but he's completely baffled as well".
He said he had updated Paul, Nicola's partner and the dad of their two daughters, which left him "distraught", and he called for social media users speculating on the case to "leave the family alone".
He said: "I had a half an hour conversation with Paul last night to update him and he's distraught. There's so much horrible things that have been going on, I feel so sorry for the man. He's getting constant flack all the time and it's not fair. The family just need to be left alone and everyone needs to let us do our job."
"The only clue the police have got is just the mobile phone and the dog harness. That's it - there's nothing. I've worked on hundreds of cases and I've never seen anything like this as we would have expected to have found her by now."
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