Mysterious Disappearance In Lancashire

Are you sure it wasn't the former?

 

No, that was a bone.

 

Roll up, roll up! The circus continues and sadly I’m sure very soon the big final performance will take place:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-64656669

Very sad for the family that this information essentially had to be made public such was the ceaseless amount of speculation, hysteria and drivel being aimed at the police investigation team and others in positions of authority locally.

There’s also the sound of furious backpedaling from The Bodyfinder General himself, Peter Faulding (knighthood pending), who says he wasn’t given this information and it would have changed his search strategy if he had. Too right it would. He’d have probably never stuck his oar in and made such a wally of himself breathlessly briefing GB News and Sky News live on the telly if he knew. Still, it’s good for the book sales.

 

Weren’t the police very naive in assuming that they could just say she had “vulnerabilities” and leave it at that?

Still not giving much cause for confidence imo.

 

That is now what I am wondering. Maybe she had pre planned it as well so finding her afterwards would not be easy.

 

I’m not sure I’d say naive. They really should have referenced her general vulnerability from the outset as a number of other forces do when they’re looking for missing people. We can only speculate why they didn’t. My best guess is they expected her to be found relatively quickly such that the media bandwagon would move on and possibly her family were keen to keep it under wraps for the sake of the children and their privacy in such a tight knit community. I didn’t watch the tv interviews last week but I understand her partner never disclosed any of this to the media either or even hint at it.

 

My point is that they specifically let this vulnerability point drop in the press conference this morning in a totally opaque way and then had to expand a few hours later because (wholly unsurprisingly) the world and his wife wondered and speculated upon what that meant.

 

My wife suggested wiring up the dog to some sort of mind reading device. This was after half a bottle of Baileys.

 

From the BBC news site...

Lancashire Police said it was called to a concern for welfare report at her home last month.

Health professionals also attended on 10 January, the force said, adding no arrests were made but it was being investigated.

What the hell was going on? This lady didn't slip into the river did she?

 

That's been my guess all along. The dog harness turned me that direction; it's very difficult to get one of those off by accident so it implies someone took it off on purpose. I find it very difficult to believe that an attacker would take the time to remove a harness from a (presumably somewhat protective) dog belonging to the person they attacked, especially given there would seem to be a non-zero chance the dog would defend the owner. And even if that happened, the dog would almost certainly follow the abducted owner as they were being carried off - it would have no reason to stay in the area.

As a result the scenario that felt most likely to me was that she took the harness off the dog to stop it from accidentally getting hanged/strangling itself, left the phone running so the phone could potentially be traced and get someone to the dog's location, and jumped into the river.

 

Might come up with some leads ? Especially if it involved a pal or a chum ?
Mind you after downing half a bottle of Baileys, I'm not sure the dog's evidence could be trusted anyway ?

 

I must be being thick but I still don’t really get it or why this makes a difference. If she had jumped in the river voluntarily (the 3ft deep river with virtually no current) where is her body? And how would the whereabouts of her body be different to her having fallen in accidentally instead?

 

Thinking the same. Surely the first thing to do is simulate what would happen to a person when in the river at that location.

 

Although the police stated that it was normal for her to remove the dog’s harness during the walk so that it could run around, and then replace it when going home. Seems unusual to me (surely just take the lead off?) but there we go.

 

Yes, and surely they would have considered suicide as a possibility in the initial stages of the investigation. They always did that on Morse!

 

You don't winalot these days for coming up with great ideas.

 

Bit ruff, that one.

 

I see Jacques Cousteau is back in the news this morning angry at the police for ******* up his investigation

 

Surely jumping into a relatively slow moving smallish river whilst taking your dog for a walk is a really bizarre way to commit suicide ? I know she had some issues but even so....
I think I'm going to jump in the car and drive there right now and see if I can piece it all together.

 

I think the point is while the public were presuming the only game in town was an unfortunate and possibly unlikely accident, the assumption was her having gone in right in front of the bench or there or thereabouts. It’s now clearer that’s not the only possibility and presumably if she want for a walk downstream before going in she could have been straight into the tidal bit beyond the weir and therefore in the Irish Sea or much nearer the coast at least by now. Of course she could equally have walked off in land through that one path not covered by CCTV, but I take it the police are confident enough that’s not the case based on other footage they’ve recovered from properties a bit further down the road.

You’re right none of this changes where her body is in reality, but hopefully for the police it puts an end to a lot of the tedious tips and drivel they’ve been getting fed into their investigation by weirdos and true crime attention seekers.

 

Seeing this I did consider posting about a couple of suicide incidents I attended to show people’s chosen suicide methods sometimes can be truly bizarre. Often people use the ‘textbook’ methods but not always. I’ve opted not to in the end in case anyone reading this is in a vulnerable moment and is influenced. But I suppose though the thing I would say is don’t apply the logic of a rational mind to that of someone in acute mental distress.

 

Given that we now know that Mrs Bulley was menopausal and liked a drink it is fairly obvious what happened. While out on a dog walk, she realised that she'd forgotten where she'd parked the car, so she sat down on the seat to call her husband while he was at work in floods of tears. She then started having a hot flush and decided to go into the stream to cool off, but, having seen off the best part of two bottles Pinot Grigio the previous evening, she was a little unsteady. She fell into the water and couldn't get out. Case closed.

Does the police's decision to release this sensitive information improve the chances of finding Mrs Bulley?

 

Makes sense thank you. I guess the only thing that them doesn’t make sense to me is if she did walk much further (in either direction) why the dog didn’t just continue to follow her.

 

How do you know it didn't?

 

I wouldn't let Mrs Lloyd see this post.

 

It was found near the bench was it not? If she’d walked far enough down stream for the search team to have been so far wrong, then presumably the dog would’ve been nowhere near the bench?

My two dogs would just follow me wherever I went, when I’ve gone to the beach and gone in the water before one of them automatically jumps in and swims after me.

 

Plod is getting it in the neck:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-64661487

 

I'm just joining in with all the other armchair sleuths

 

Your dogs are clearly far better trained than mine!

 

It’s not really so much obedience, they just naturally follow me when I’m walking.

 

Yep. My springer loves wide open spaces but is continually checking back and if I took a different turn she’d be following me immediately

 

But until they said that there was a fortnight of incessant speculation a murderer was on the loose, encouraged in particular by her numerous friends. It’s almost a no win scenario. I’ve said all along their media handling has been pretty poor though and this just adds to it. They should have said from the outset they had concerns for her mental health and she was a high risk missing person and, frankly, the media bandwagon would never have got rolling.