Red Flags: The Complete Collection, Vol. 2
Picking up where we left off last week, with Vol. 2 of the red flags that concern me most in Nicola Bulley's case.
15. Lancashire Police apparently asked Paul to go home from the river when he first called 999. Paul stated this in his Channel 5 interview, and it was never refuted by the police or anyone else. Some UK residents following this case have said this is normal—for a missing person inquiry to start at the person's home—and I won't disagree with that. But a comment on a MindJuice video from someone who claims to be a former detective keeps buzzing in my ear (thank you @NEONSUNMJJ15 on Twitter who has been brilliant at gathering interesting comments on the case):
It's just troubling to so many of us that Paul, even if innocent, was allowed to go home with Nikki's phone. It's troubling on principle. In my belief, the chain of custody in this case was first broken way back on January 10 during the welfare call, but this action of Paul apparently returning home from the scene of Nicola's disappearance with a crucial piece of evidence (make that four: Willow, harness, lead and phone) certainly represents one of the first broken chain links of January 27.
16. Police arrived at Nicola's house within 25 minutes of Paul's 999 call. This is a bit hard to believe on its own. In other words, like many of us I feel someone else (presumably Penny Fletcher) might have called 999 beforehand, but perhaps police couldn't do anything about a loose dog and abandoned phone. The other (likely) possibility is that whatever Paul said to dispatch was so urgent-seeming that the high-risk flag was raised and police acted immediately. This is certainly the narrative that was given at the February 15 press conference with DSI Smith; they claimed Nicola was graded high-risk immediately. But if Paul put forth on the 999 call that she had been "struggling" or similar (echoing some hearsay stated at the inquest), wouldn't he be frantically running up and down the river calling her name? Since it was the last place her beloved dog was located?
There's another complicating factor here: early reports that Willow was seen running loose "off Garstang Road" and wasn't found for about an hour, shared by Supt Riley in her first on-camera interview. I think "off Garstang Road" was just shorthand for towpath, but regardless, would these details cause Paul to think that she just walked away, got in a car voluntarily, or was abducted? Hence the "it's not the river" narrative and lack of panic about being told to go home instead up being allowed to run up and down the banks of the river (which is what I and many of us would have done)?
And how does the C5 comment of, "She would never leave Willow, she's like our third child" square with his comments apparently relayed to Anne-Marie and perhaps to the 999 dispatcher that Nicola was "struggling"? There was some reason she was "immediately graded as high-risk" and something tells me based on the IOPC slap on the wrist that it was not because the dispatcher immediately looked at their computer and saw there had been a welfare call on January 10. My sense of January 27 is that everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off, including the authorities.
17. Two new eyewitnesses showed up at the inquest to say they'd seen Nicola in the field on the morning of January 27: Claire Chesham and Richard Fife. Chris and Ivy have already done great work on those two and I don't have much to add. What bothers me the most about this issue is that the powers that be also subtracted an eyewitness from the inquest: Keith Barlow, whom many of us deduced as the one Isla Traquair spoke to about seeing Nicola on the 27th and having a "little exchange about the lead" on the towpath. He's moved to later in the timeline and apparently does not see Nicola at all that morning.
A few months ago the admin of a Facebook group apparently spoke to two witnesses from that morning, a couple, and they told the admin the husband was actually "mistaken" about seeing Nicola on the 27th. This is just a rumor, but I believe this to be Barlow and his wife, and that this couple was either asked to lie in order to help hold up the inquest narrative, or they really were mistaken. The weirdness of this is that if you were mistaken, how are you suddenly showing up later in the timeline of January 27? If you got the day wrong, can't we assume that the earlier witnesses at the inquest might have gotten their days wrong too?
As for Fife, the math ain't mathin' and I wouldn't be surprised if both he and Chesham were pressured to recall seeing Nicola on the 27th, even if they saw her on a different day or not at all, or just saw someone who resembled Nicola. Remember that DSI Smith said in the February 15 press conference that the 9:10 witness was "someone that knows Nicola." How well would a man (Fife) who has lived in France until recently "know" Nicola? I guess they're referring to Chesham, but why did they need Fife in there? Just for the "holding her phone out in front of her" info?
The other issue here is that the official police timeline published on the Constabulary's website got very frayed over the weeks, from early February to mid-February: the pre-9:00am witness that appeared in the timeline early on was later removed from the timeline entirely. On February 6 it was:
Then on February 15 it was (8:50 witness removed):
The above timeline and post was removed from the police website, in addition to quite a few others, after Nicola was found, but is archived on Wayback here.
So they let us think there was only one witness from February 15 until the inquest. But suddenly at the inquest we have two new witnesses in the field, as well as two more at the school parking lot. Surely the intrepid friends and reporters who covered this case for the first three weeks would have caught on to those blanks and filled them in for us. But they didn't. Everyone spoke anonymously about everything witness-related, and no one really dug in to this plethora of people who apparently saw Nicola that day, and you have to wonder why. On the friends/partner part, the "why" for me is simply that they weren't treating this like an urgent matter that needed to be solved, or they just put their full trust in the police while not exactly trusting police in some of their public statements. Appearing in the media 17 times sure made it seem like at least one of them was treating it like an urgent matter, but certain people close to Nikki just didn't seem that bothered. It was all "mystery," "vanished," "dream," "nightmare" with "no evidence" of anything and seemingly no evidence willing to be tracked down on their part (cough, Fitbit).
18. Everything about the CCTV clip from the home Ring camera that Paul's "friend" shared with Grizzly True Crime on March 13. Shoutout to Superchuffer for the clip I linked, so we don't have to give GTC any more views. I could write a whole post on this Ring clip, or might just turn the below into its own post after this. But the first and biggest problem with this 10-second clip is what poor quality it was, as presented by Gisela of GTC in a live video. Ring cameras record in HD and save in HD. I know this from personal experience. The still images they provided Gisela were HD or close enough, but for whatever reason, the video wasn't. The video was also cropped differently from the stills, and there were many issues within it. While these issues could be attributed to the low picture quality we were given, I don't think they are. Here are the problems I found back in March.
In the video clip, the top of the left-hand side rear passenger door frame is crooked. It is not crooked in the still images given to Gisela:
Here is the still image of the exact same frame for comparison:
There appears to be a wing mirror at the back of that passenger-side rear door, right above the door handle, which makes no sense from a car design perspective. Maybe that's not what it is, but if not, what is it? Your guess is as good as mine.
The red wheelie bin is missing its right wheel entirely. If this were actually the case, you'd expect the bin to be sitting there lopsided, not straight against the back fence. It also looks like the bricklaying on the ground was cloned using a clone tool, and appears to be edging into the bin itself, because the side of the bin looks concave. But more on that in a minute.
In the same area as the red wheelie bin, where the time stamp appears, the ground is so blurry that you would think the video was taken in pitch darkness. There is no decent explanation for why this area is so blurry and moves so much during the 10-second clip. The brick inlay is completely blurred out in many places (you can see this in the image above). I've seen Ring camera clips (and Wyze clips—a lesser-quality camera) from 10 o'clock at night in full color, not night vision mode, that are clearer than this video. What appears to have happened in this corner of the video is a bad cloning job. Cloning is where you essentially copy parts of an image or video frame in editing software and paste/paint it where you want it to go with a paint tool. I just don't know why this would be done for this particular area of the video, so it could just be the low quality. The next part however...
There is a cutout effect on the numbers and letters in the timestamp. By "cutout" effect, I mean you can see a different brightness level just above the timestamp, almost as if the timestamp was cut and pasted from another video. There also might be ghosting, which is basically seeing faint letters and numbers behind the timestamp from a bad cloning or layering job. But the more I've looked at this, I think the entire timestamp was cut and pasted from a different video. If you look closely at the image below, you can see that the bricks and background just above the "2023 08:26:17" area in particular doesn't match to the brick layout or brightness of the rest of the ground farther above it.
Here's a diagram I put on Twitter back in the day that sums up the issues in this corner of the video:
Here is a timestamp from an HD Ring video put on a Fox YouTube channel (top) for quality comparison with the Nikki clip (bottom):
And one more thing. There's a cutout effect happening around Paul's head too. You can see it a little around Nicola's body as she walks to the car, but it's much more pronounced on Paul. The background greenery appears to travel with him:
It's my opinion that the video given to Gisela was lower quality in order to mask some of the doctoring that was done to it. Why would it be doctored? Perhaps because it's from a different day, or multiple different days.
The "heartbreaking" photos released to the Mirror on June 27, on day two of the inquest, I couldn't help but notice were cropped so as not to include the timestamp or the missing wheelie bin wheel. 🫠 Odd that media never released these after Grizzly posted her video, no? They waited until June 27. Then again, no media outlet said a damn word about the Grizzly video. Why? The Washington Post's motto, just as one example, is Democracy dies in darkness. The entire UK press's motto is apparently Don't call us, we'll call you.
19. Details were missing from home office pathologist Dr. Alison Armour's autopsy comments at the inquest. Presumably (you would hope) Dr. Adeley was given much more info behind closed doors, but there were several things that should have been outlined more thoroughly to prove that Nicola apparently fell in the river around 9:30am on January 27 and died within minutes of asphyxiation from cold-water shock. I covered this more in this post, but a summary (including one additional thing) of the findings that were not mentioned:
- Diatom testing to tell us what type of water and sediment was found in her lungs, throat, stomach and elsewhere. Did the diatoms match those of the location where she was found?
- Bone or fingernail testing to help approximate time of death.
- The presence or absence of fluid, frothy fluid, and sediment in EACH of the following: the lungs, trachea, sinuses, stomach, and mastoid cells to more precisely determine whether or not the cause of death was drowning.
- The presence or absence of gastric distention and ground-glass opacity in the lungs to do the same as above.
- How "early marbling," as described by Armour, can show that Nicola had been dead since January 27, since "early marbling" is normally seen 48-72 hours after death but can start to appear after 24 hours (thank you for @Archie_V on Twitter for reminding me of this one).
- A clear explanation as to why Nicola's bruising to her leg and upper arm, as well as an injury to the bridge of her nose and eye and blood on her chin, were believed to have happened after her death. Take all these injuries together, or even just some of them, and it looks like assault to me.
20. Grizzly True Crime removed a few videos from her Nicola Bulley playlist in early April. At my last check, she'd removed these ones:
What was in these videos? Why did she remove them? Did someone ask her to (the police, Paul's "friend"?) 🤔
That's all for now, because there's already too much here. What bothers you about the above red flags? What else is bothering you?