Running Scared

Before the College of Policing report came out, I didn't have much new to say. After nine long months, I was rudderless. So I focused on Twitter/X and a little of YouTube, on reading what everyone else was still hard at work trying to figure out: walking routes, shoddy eyewitness statements, and the bigger picture. As I wrote previously on here, I was discouraged by Chris Ness saying that I was somehow affiliated with MindJuice, allegedly helping progress a coverup by toeing the line that PA and EW are criminal masterminds. I can assure you (and him) that I have never corresponded with the guy in my life, and I don't trust anyone who uses "such" and "further" so often and so incorrectly 😂.

Chris should know that I've spent hours reading his blog. I've laughed, I've cried, I've had my jaw on the floor. I don't always agree with him, but I've long thought this tragedy and coverup had to be bigger than any one person, and so, of course, does he. My issue is that Nicola's partner is still central to all this. There's no way he can't be. There were and are too many strange incidents, statements, and specious material released by his hand, or at his direction. The question, I suppose, is who is ultimately pulling the strings. But untangle the knots that PA himself created and you start to get some clarity. Not full clarity, but some.

For now, we're all trying to make sense of the news that ACC Peter Lawson died unexpectedly at his home yesterday morning. He was only 50, and I think he looked younger, northern latitudes' gloomy effect on the skin notwithstanding (I can relate). The mind reels. Stress? Fallout over the College of Policing report, in which he was made to look quite bad? The timing of all this can't be dismissed, at least not at the moment.

I don't want to be crass here, so I won't dwell on Lawson long. But we learned from the CoP report that he, among other things, nominated now-retired SIO Smith to lead the February 15th press conference after DCS Pauline Stables, his intended co-emcee, "became unwell" (p. 86 of the CoP report, below). That day, Smith expressed to Lawson, and in her logbook, that she didn't think it was appropriate for her to lead a press conference, and that this would leave her feeling exposed; it's not typical of SIOs to be put in the spotlight like this. The NCA SIO advisor agreed with Smith at the time, but they were both ultimately overruled by Lawson:

Is it any wonder Smith retired early? She's not totally innocent, in my view, but she at least did want the case declared a critical incident way back on February 5th. She made a written request about it that day. She was told by the "chief officer" on the case (who has also since retired, conveniently) that he'd add it to the gold group meeting agenda for the subsequent day. But it was not added or discussed on February 6th, nor any day thereafter. The case was not declared a critical incident until February 16th, after the police statement/family statement fiasco. Of which, it must be said, Stables and Lawson played central roles in creating. I could write a whole post just on Stables, and probably will. But for now I'm mostly feeling sorry for Lawson and his family, for the mess of which he was an instrumental part, but surely not the instigator; he didn't have that much power.

Running scared... A young vet named Ewelina Sasak, employed at Moy Vets, ran away from her home in Blackpool to London after claiming she was being followed by a gang of ten people. Moy Vets was apparently Willow's vet, and was called on the morning of January 27th by Penny. Ewelina was found dead in a London hotel room in late April with "extreme wounds" that a coroner—surprise, surprise—found to be not suspicious. It's hard not to look at that terrible event anew after Lawson's death. From Coroner Ian Potter's concluding statement:

Running scared... Paul Ansell is selling the family home in Inskip, amid plenty of suggestive information that he has poor credit, five figures of unpaid business debt, and a strong desire to get financial help from the public, despite slandering same after Nicola was found. Nicola would surely have had life insurance—and likely mortgage life insurance as well, considering she promoted such products as part of her job. Practically speaking, that house is too much on one income, regardless of what insurance plan(s) Nicola had. But the question (one of many) is: Why so soon, and where is Paul planning to go? Nobody knows—yet.

Then there's Luke of Break the Ice who, after putting together a lengthy Q&A video with Peter Faulding—about Faulding's belief that Nicola was in the river on February 7th, if not before, and left there until the 19th—now says he is no longer covering the case, following the news of Lawson's death. The Faulding video has gone private. Eddy of EVB also recently went quiet again. More distractions, many in this community seem to be saying, and I can't help but agree. You don't need to pick a side, #TeamFaulding or, um, #NotTeamFaulding. That is not the game we're watching. It's just one tiny part of it—one play, one point. And on a more humanistic note, I just feel that everyone needs to be listened to, even the overly dramatic YouTubers and the accusatory Substackers. Take what you want and leave the rest, but keep your eyes and ears open.

Yesterday, until the news of Lawson's death, was a good day on X, where several of us bandied about theories in endless threads about who was in the field and when, why Nicola's phone geolocation data is nonexistent between 9:03 and 9:20, how 100 beats per minute can possibly be considered a heart rate "spike" by someone on a morning walk, and so on. Tarmaa in particular is a must-follow and has been brilliant on all this, trying to separate the wheat from the BS for many months now.

In the midst of all this, pre-Lawson news, I had to make a map. It's certainly not the be-all-end-all, as it doesn't really take into consideration sketchy RF's or sketchy CC's movements in the field. Or sketchy ex-witness KB or sketchy yarn- (twine?-) spinner PF. I don't believe either RF or CC at all, so I only noted down some of their "witness" statements from the inquest and CoP report (don't get me started on the discrepancies between the inquest reporting and the CoP report, but some of that is noted in this map).

Some explanations of the map, which looks like sheer chaos:

The light blue meters are based on actual meter distance of each stretch of path or sidewalk using a distance mapping tool. The steps are approximated based on the inquest info that 273 steps by Nicola equaled 0.2km. Can we even trust that calculation? Who knows. But see info in the red rectangle for where this conversion originated:

The dark blue path in my map is the path I think Nicola took, doing two loops of the smaller upper field closest to Rowanwater. The step/meter distance of this path is closest to the step count digital "expert" DC Greenhalgh gave at the inquest. But obviously even that is suspect. Because, for one thing, what's been given by the inquest information and CoP report suggests that Nicola was walking at an absolute snail's pace of 3km per hour. And the fact is, we have no idea what her phone (much less she) was doing between 9:03:44, when it pinged "near Rowanwater" (CoP report, p. 118) and 9:20:39, when it next pinged at the bench (Daily Mail's reporting from the inquest). This is extremely important.

There's another even bigger problem. The step count per 15-minute increment that Greenhalgh gave at the inquest, which Chris Ness first reported on in July, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. A lot of us on X have thought this for months, but it's bubbled up again since the CoP report was released. Here's what Ness recorded was shared by Greenhalgh:

Again using that step-to-distance calculation, we are expected to believe that Nicola walked 718 steps (526 meters) while getting the girls ready for school and getting ready herself, and another 818 steps (595 meters) while doing last-minute tasks and getting the car loaded up for 11 minutes (between 8:15 and 8:26) and then driving for four minutes (between 8:26 and 8:30; she allegedly reached the school at 8:34). Here are two visuals of what it would look like to travel that distance in your home in the space of 26 minutes (again, 8:26 being when she got in the car, according to the CCTV released by Grizzly on March 13):

If your reaction to this is What the fuck?, I'm with you.

Because remember that PA was adamant that the morning of January 27th was calmer than usual, not the usual "mayhem" of the morning school rush, or "carnage," to use Dan Walker's term. It's not like Nicola took Willow for a long walk around the neighborhood between 8:00 and 8:26 when she allegedly got in the car. If she had, PA would have said so in his Channel 5 interview. What he actually said, and I quote:

The only difference that morning was...there wasn't a lot of rushing...

and

The girls were having their breakfast, everything was pretty much ready to go, I came down, Nikki went upstairs to get ready, um...the routine is basically...

Bro...

Anyway, it is possible to obtain steps in 15-minute increments off a Fitbit by viewing the data on the Fitbit iPhone app or on the browser-based dashboard of someone's account (or through raw data files using Python; Greenhalgh got help from Google/Fitbit so I don't doubt this was an option). But the old problem here is that the Fitbit Versa 4 only stores 7 days' worth of data with that level of detail, and by the time Greenhalgh is claimed to have gotten his hands on the Fitbit, February 19th, the device would have recorded 9 days' worth of data—January 27th to February 4th—for him to be able to access January 27th's data. I don't know what accounts for this (a theory I shared months ago on here is that the Fitbit was synced again at some point before Nicola was found; if you believe Peter Faulding—I'm undecided—that idea starts to look interesting again). If Google was somehow able to get Greenhalgh more data, okay, I guess? Possibly the scant heart rate data from later on January 27th to February 4th meant that the device saved more data than it normally does (there wasn't any step data or other data, so we're told, until February 4th, just intermittent HR data).

Tarmaa on X believes that Greenhalgh just averaged out the steps—that he had a total sum of 4,548 steps (as Tarmaa noted, the total provided above by Chris actually only works out to 4,518 steps, so Greenhalgh messed up there too) from exactly 8:00am to exactly 9:30am to work with, and that Greenhalgh just averaged it out into 15-minute increments or fudged the numbers entirely to make his likely false narrative work. This makes a ton of sense, but it's equally possible that during some portion of 8-9:30, or all of it, Nicola was somewhere else, doing something else, or even that someone else was wearing the Fitbit.

As for the step count for 8:30-8:45, it's approximate enough to match with Greenhalgh's inquest theory (let's call it that). She was theoretically in the car for a few minutes, hanging out at the school parking lot, then walking to the bench area, arriving there at 8:46. That's about 830 steps by my calculation (seen on the map above in light blue), and Greenhalgh says she walked 912 steps in that period. Fine? Ish.

Moving on to the steps from 8:45-9:00. Nope, those don't make sense either. Greenhalgh says she walked 841 steps, but the cell phone pings and other statements from the inquest and CoP report suggest that she can't have walked more than 434 steps during that period, by my calculation.

From 9:00-9:15, we're expected to believe she walked 961 steps, despite the fact that there are only three cell phone pings reported in this 15-minute period: at 9:01, 9:02, and 9:03, all near Rowanwater. Other than that, all we have is shoddy witness CC telling us she saw Nicola around the upper field doing a "second loop" and that didn't see Nicola after 9:10 because CC "left" the fields shortly after that.

I want to reiterate: No cell phone pings have been publicly reported between 9:03 and 9:20. We are told that the phone moved 140 meters (via the iPhone's Health app data) between 9:14 and 9:18 but we aren't told where the phone was. We are told that Nicola walked 273 steps between 9:15 and 9:30 but we aren't told where the phone was between 9:15 and 9:20, when it next pinged at the bench. We are told that the volume and side buttons are used at 9:18:01 and 9:18:11 but again, we aren't told where the phone was at this time. We are told that Nicola's phone received a Whatsapp message from her sister Louise at 9:18:41 that Nicola never read, but again, no location data for the phone for that period.

Things get even funkier. The phone pings three times between 9:20:39 and 9:20:42. Three times in three seconds. Pings happen for a number of reasons, including sending/receiving data or calls, being moved, being turned off/on, being put on/off airplane mode, and more. It's very curious for it to happen three times so close together. Was the phone moved rapidly? Grabbed? Thrown? Switched off, as Tarmaa has suggested on X? We know Nicola hadn't looked at the 9:18 message from Louise (or so we were told). There is no communication on the phone mentioned again until 9:27, when Nicola was sent a group message from an Exclusively Mortgages colleague. Meantime we're told there was a heart rate "spike" of a relatively placid 100 beats per minute at 9:22. Steps stop at 9:30, but since they were apparently given in 15-minute increments, they could have stopped earlier than 9:30. And "stopped," as I have railed about for months, could simply be the Fitbit being removed from Nicola's wrist, and/or Nicola being incapacitated and carried away (into a white van?). The Fitbit data cannot be a diagnosis of cold water shock, to say the least. There are two more pings before (or when) Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum, Tweedle-Dumber, et al arrive at the bench: 9:30:37 and 9:33:28. I think at least one of these was PF.

This is slightly less important, but what about steps before 8:00am? I highly doubt that Nicola didn't get up until 8, knowing she and the girls would need to be out the door to get to school before 8:40, and PA was still getting his beauty sleep. But we're given nothing about what happened before 8am. That's a little too perfect. Maybe the Fitbit was off her wrist or charging before that, but somehow I doubt it.

This is my focus, if it can be called that, at the moment. I hope some of this is helpful. And as I watch people seemingly being scared off by Lawson's death, or from flying too close to the sun, or whatever their reasons may be, I feel it even more necessary to keep talking, tweeting, rehashing, speculating, and most of all, thinking. I hope you'll continue to do the same.