Red Flags: The Complete Collection, Vol. 1
Below are the suspicious aspects of Nicola Bulley's case that have been weighing on my mind the most for the past six months. There are many more, so this is probably just the first installment. What stands out to you? Add your own in the comments.
- Nicola's family did not appear jointly with Lancashire Police during any of the police press conferences. In my experience following such cases for the past 20-plus years, it is typical for family members to appear alongside police during searches and appeals for missing persons. While I don't judge Nicola's parents for not wanting to do this, I question why no member of the family, particularly her partner Paul, was willing to be the public face for Nicola during the search for her.
- Nicola's family sat for an interview with Sky News separately from Paul. This interview aired on Thursday, February 2. During the interview, Nicola's sister Louise used phrases that Paul would repeat almost verbatim in his own interview with Sky the next day ("round and round in circles," "vanished into thin air," "there's no evidence," "...no matter how tiny"). She also laughed twice, though you could say this was just from nerves. Nicola's mother Dot seemed reluctant or discouraged from speaking during this interview, and Louise frequently interrupted her father.
- Nicola's partner did not appear or speak publicly until day 7 of the search, on February 3. When he did appear, for an on-camera interview with Sky News, he was wearing a hat that was pulled extremely low over his head and appeared to be covering a bruise at the outer corner of his right eye. This bruise was also visible, but faded, in his Channel 5 interview which aired a week later on February 10.
- In the Sky interview, Paul described the situation as "like a dream," did not mention Nicola by name, laughed about the impossibility of the situation, and had to be prodded by the reporter to say he still had "hope." He could not articulate his feelings, and deflected questions about his state of mind by saying he was focusing on his daughters. He used the words "I" or "my" more than two dozen times. For much more detailed analysis of this interview and the Channel 5 one, please watch the videos on Paul in Superchuffer's Nicola Bulley playlist if you haven't already.
- The fact that Nicola was wearing a Fitbit when she went missing was not mentioned publicly until February 3, a week into the search, at a press conference led by Superintendent Sally Riley. The next day, friend Emma White said the Fitbit hadn't been synced since Tuesday, January 24 (how did she know this? Who told her?) and said the police were trying other means to get information off it. Why was this crucial piece of evidence not included in a physical description of Nicola for an entire week?
- Paul released an audio recording of their daughters watching a helicopter search for their mother to the media on February 5. For someone who later demanded privacy and railed against the public and the very outlet he had given this audio to (Sky News), this, in my opinion, felt like an inappropriate invasion of his young daughters' privacy and a heinous attempt to extract sympathy from the public.
- A little over a week into the search, Emma White created a GoFundMe campaign called #BringNikkiHome with a target of £100,000. When members of a Facebook group questioned the target amount and general purpose of the campaign, given that the search was being funded by the police and independent search expert Peter Faulding was going to be helping for free, Emma lowered the target to £50,000 and then £5,000 before deleting the campaign entirely on February 7, less than 24 hours after it had been created. She claimed Nicola's family had not asked for it to be set up and had had no knowledge of it.
- Emma White and other friends started an "official" Facebook group for Nicola that, despite having more than 12,000 members by late February, only posted a missing poster of Nicola one time and never posted CCTV stills or video of Nicola anywhere to the group. The poster the group shared contained incomplete information, appeared to have been designed by a friend, and looked more like a party invitation than a missing poster. The Facebook group was mostly used to share media interviews featuring friends, and pictures from the ribbon and daffodil tribute on the bridge near where Nicola was allegedly last seen.
- CCTV images of Nicola from her home Ring camera were not released until Day 10 of the search (February 5), and the images were so blurry that people questioned if the images were even of her. Why did it take the friends and police—they released different stills and crops of the same apparent time period, 8:26am on January 27—ten days to release these images? And why were no images of Nicola on Blackpool Lane/Garstang Road, at the school car park, or elsewhere, ever released to the public?
- Two weeks into the search, Paul sat down for an interview as part of a two-hour TV special about Nicola. He did not use the time to appeal to the public and in my opinion appeared emotionally flat and possibly medicated. His face and neck were flushed throughout the interview and he exhibited other nervous behavior like rubbing his leg and scratching his nose. A bruise was visible on the outer corner of his right eye. Paul's answers in this interview were heavily focused on himself, to the point that interviewer Dan Walker actually had to interrupt him when he was going on about his morning routine and "hour to himself." He felt it necessary to (twice) share a bizarre detail about changing into his gym clothes before going to look for Nicola at the river. He stated that his instinct was Nicola was not in the river and demanded that "every garage, every outbuilding" in the area be searched and "the land scrutinized." In the days that followed, Peter Faulding said he would be doing just that, beginning the week of February 13. Paul's comments about Nicola in this interview did not appear particularly loving, specific, or detailed, and he repeatedly spoke about her and their plans in the past tense before correcting himself.
- In a February 15 press conference featuring SIO Becky Smith, Lancashire Police shared that Nicola was graded high-risk "immediately" based on "a number of specific vulnerabilities" shared with them by Paul. After the press conference, the police elaborated in a statement that Nicola had apparently had "problems" with alcohol and menopause. The family then released a statement via the police that elaborated on this further, saying that Nicola's increased drinking and stopping HRT medication had "only ended up causing this crisis." Why was this information released so late, if it was going to be released at all? Early on, Supt Riley was asked at a press conference if Nicola had suffered any health issues and Riley stated, "That is not relevant at this time, no, not at all." If they were not relevant at all, why was Nicola "immediately," in the words of the police, graded as "high-risk"? The victim-blaming language on February 15 suggests to me that Paul, arguably the person behind the family statement, knew Nicola was dead and was attempting to make it appear that she was suicidal (or even that she had been intoxicated the morning of the 27th and fallen in the river accidentally). This was yet another attempt to deflect attention away from himself, in my opinion, and cast judgment on the mother of his children (that was later, at the inquest, completely rejected by him, by Nicola's sister, and others).
- When Nicola's body was found February 19 and identified February 20, the "family" released another statement that attacked the press and the public and made only a cursory reference to Nicola at the very end. The statement contained odd language such as, "You are no longer a missing person," as if to underscore the non-criminal nature of the situation, and lambasted Sky News, despite the fact that Paul had 1) appeared on camera in a Sky interview, 2) sent Sky a voice memo statement, 3) sent Sky an audio recording of his daughters watching a helicopter search, and 4) gave Sky a text message statement about the family's "agony" after an as-yet-unidentified body was found on February 19. The blame was then extended to Peter Faulding, whose calls to Paul in the days after Nicola was found were ignored.
- A "male friend" of Paul's released a ten-second Ring clip from the morning of January 27 to Grizzly True Crime, a YouTuber, on March 13, almost a month after Nicola had been found. This "friend" (and possibly others, or Paul himself) had been feeding information to Gisela of GTC from the start of the case, and in my opinion, it's this information and Grizzly's use of it that ended up confusing, frustrating and baffling the public more than any other coverage of the case. Grizzly's videos routinely received tens of thousands of views, brought the case to the attention of viewers in Europe, Australia, the US, Canada and elsewhere, and contained mind-bogglingly complex and contradictory maps, timelines and failed attempts to properly identify witnesses, their whereabouts, and their statements. She routinely cast aspersions on caravan park owners and their relatives, fed by information from this "family friend," and defended Paul in almost every video, taking everything he and his "friend" said as the truth. But Gisela lost all credibility for me when she released a ten-second clip that would have been much more useful to the public in late January than mid-March. The clip was so low-resolution that it looked doctored, whereas the stills she shared from the same video were high-res. In the video, there was a wheel missing from one of their wheelie bins, strange cloning and ghosting features around the timestamp (common in poor video doctoring jobs), crooked car doorframes, a wing mirror in the wrong place, and much other weirdness. I covered a lot of the CCTV issues on this Twitter thread and in other tweets. In this video, Gisela also mentioned that Nicola's car keys had been found with her body in her coat pocket, but the "family friend" neglected to tell her whether the Fitbit had been found.
- At the inquest, both Paul and Louise dismissed there having been any issues with menopause, HRT or alcohol in the weeks leading up to Nicola's disappearance. Instead, they both said there had been a "blip" over the holidays and that Nicola was back to her usual self and "full of beans" the night before she vanished and in the weeks prior. Louise also said Nicola had never stated anything to her to the effect of "not wanting to be here," although Nicola apparently said this to her children (who would know that?) Despite the above statements, Louise and Paul made it clear they essentially collaborated on making a welfare request for Nicola on January 10, with Louise making the 999 call after presumably being asked to do so by Paul (they were both at the house when the mental health team arrived). We learn that Nicola hit her head on January 10, the day of the welfare check, and got it checked out on January 11 because she'd been dizzy and vomited. We learn that Nicola "appeared intoxicated" to the mental health worker and that she "didn't know how" she'd gotten that way. What I find most disturbing about all this is that Paul was not asked many (or any) direct questions about the welfare call on January 10 at the inquest, and instead Louise had to answer all questions about it on behalf of both of them. Friend Nadia Fell now says via Facebook that Nicola "slipped" coming in the door at some point on January 10 because Willow had gotten wet outside. Did Paul slip too? Or could we please have another explanation for the bruise on his face on February 3? And did Paul really tell friend Anne-Marie Fletcher that Nicola "is struggling" when they spoke on the phone the morning of January 27? If that was true, and if there was a need for a 999 call on January 10, and if there was a need for the release of private information by the police and family on February 15 and 16, how is anyone in this family happy with an inquest verdict of accident? Are we to overlook the £38,000 GoFundMe campaign (the third campaign attempt for the family), the tens of thousands of pounds in business debts publicly available on Companies House, and the tendency of certain life insurance companies to not pay out in cases of suicide? Just asking questions here.
Like I said, there is so much more I could add to this list. But these are the biggest issues that have consumed me since late January. Add yours in the comments.