The CCTV: Is There a Smoking Gun, Or Just A Lot of Small Issues?
UPDATE: I feel it's important to note that government records show the black Mercedes in this video has only been registered to its owner(s) since July 2022, which contradicts some of what I state below. I thank Chris of Outside the Cave for pointing out this fact, but I maintain that nothing in this video makes any sense and I still don't believe it's from the day (or even the season) it purports to be from, and may be a composite of different footage. The below was written before I learned of the vehicle registration detail.
To state the obvious, there are a lot of problems with the CCTV of Nicola leaving the house on January 27—or let's just call it getting into the car at some point during her tragically short life, because there's not a lot that can really be gleaned from the video. I dug into a lot of the problems in a post called Red Flags Vol. 2, but I'm going to cover new CCTV problems in this post, inspired by some analysis of foliage that Danbers on Twitter and YouTube pointed out yesterday.
My biggest issue is with the shadows, and what they might tell us about the time of day and time of year. But let's look at the general environment of the video released to Grizzly and the two images released to the media on June 27 (day two of the inquest), starting with the work Danbers has done.
Trees: Danbers noted yesterday that there is a mixture of dormant (leafless) trees, conifers, and one sus-looking deciduous tree that appear in bloom in the background of the two CCTV images that were released to media on June 27. Here are those two images for reference, with the deciduous tree (a horse chestnut tree, Danbers thinks, and I agree) circled in pink in the top right corner:
Danbers also notes: no timestamps in these media-released photos. And apart from the chestnut tree issue, why are these two images cropped differently (the top one features more sky)? Who knows!
Charmingly, the background featuring the trees and buildings is completely cropped out of the CCTV video that was sent to Grizzly, so we can't exactly analyze the chestnut tree or the other background trees in the video itself. Here's a screengrab from the video to refresh your memory on the cropping:
Back to the chestnut tree, this is amazing work by Danbers but I think it's still hard to tell whether it has leaves on it; it could be leafless and dormant but still very full-looking. But it does look pretty damn leafy. The problem is that other trees in the CCTV images and video do look like winter trees, including the tall, young-ish tree in front of the house between 9 Meadow and 8 Meadow, circled in pink below. It's very hard to see but the bark is white-ish and it looks totally bare. There are also some bare-looking trees in the background, at left, and in the middle, behind a house in the distance.
But if that chestnut tree does have leaves on it, that's easily more evidence that this video is either from the spring, or is a composite of different days of footage. Moving on (but we'll come back to the spring bit).
Ground: The ground is damp, as if it had rained the day before or maybe even overnight. You can see water and dampness in the flagstones behind the cars. Could that just be from frost? I don't believe so. Did it rain on January 26, or 25? According to Weather Underground, actual precipitation at Blackpool Airport (closest weather station on WU) was 0.07 in (1.78 mm) on January 26 and 0.03 in (0.76 mm) on January 25. It was 0.00 in for January 27. Could those tiny amounts of rain account for the way the stones look? Maybe. But to my mind it looks like it rained a fair bit more than 2.4 mm in the one to two days before whenever this video was recorded.
Frost: I see frost on the Mercedes driver door window when she opens the door, and on the rear windshield of the white BMW if you look really closely at the video. But it's not visible on the grass, which is bright green (the grass also looks bright green around the fields in some of the press photos taken early on in the search, so green grass alone doesn't necessarily mean the CCTV is from a different time of day or year, in my opinion). Frost on its own doesn't mean much. It could happen in March, in April, in October, etc.
Clothing: The clothing arguably doesn't suggest it was 1C rising to 3C that morning. I'd expect to see a hat and gloves on Nikki, especially since she wore a bobble hat in so many of her photos. (I still think it looks like she's suddenly wearing white gloves when she reaches the driver side door, but that's a minor detail that we could drive ourselves crazy trying to confirm.)
Shadows: Here's where it gets more suspicious for me. I had never dug into the shadows before this week and now that I have, I find them troubling. In late January at 8:26am, shadows on a fully sunny day are long. Really long. Like several meters long for an object of average human height. On a bright sunny day, you'd expect shadows for an object of Nicola's height to not only be long, but to be pointing ahead of her, in a northwesterly direction, approximately 10 o'clock when facing north. Here is data from a website called SunCalc that shows what the shadow length and direction would be (my annotations in pink). I want to note that I don't really understand how they're calculating a shadow of 45 meters from an object of human height, but I trust this site generally as it is incredibly detailed.
It's important to say that a partially cloudy day means shadows are more diffuse, but you can see in the CCTV images and video that while they are faint, the shadows on Paul, their daughters and Nicola are all pointing in a southwesterly direction, approximately an 8 o'clock position (if directly ahead in the images is 12). Shadows, such as they are, are circled below in pink. It's hard to make out Nicola's shadow in the second image (though it still appears behind her) so I only circled PA's:
To me, their shadows look like they're all at about 8'clock. But because the images are so blurry and the shadows so diffuse, I think it helps to pull out some shadow glimpses in the video too. Going frame by frame, I've pulled out some frames with the darkest shadows we can see in the ten-second clip. It's tough to tell because of the damp flagstones, but suffice it to say that these are shadows, and the only shadows we're going to get.
Shadow from closing car boot:
Again it looks like it's a very short shadow (a meter or so in length) cast behind the car, slightly to the left, and pointing to about 8'clock if straight ahead is 12.
Shadow under Nicola's boots as she walks:
This one also appears to be short, cast behind her, and facing about 7 or 8'clock.
And another:
Shadow under open car door:
Again the shadow of the door is short and is behind the open door, to its left, and casts a very wide shadow, due to its shape, in an 8'clock position.
Another frame of a shadow behind Nicola as she walks:
Her whole body is again casting a very short shadow behind her body. It's hard to say where this shadow is pointing. It looks more like 5 o'clock because of the shape of her body. But regardless, it's a very short shadow.
Shadow of PA standing by car:
This one is also short, facing behind him in an 8'clock-ish direction, though it does appear to cast against the side of the house slightly when I go frame by frame (behind him and closest to the camera lens). So it's maybe a meter in length. Moving on.
Rear Windshield: This is another bit of a weird one. As Olivia on Twitter and others have pointed out, it looks like the sun is reflecting on the rear windshield as the boot is closing, maybe partially behind a cloud. To me it looks like the sun is right behind their house or close to it when the boot is closing. This would make no sense at 8:26am in January, especially because it's 11 minutes past sunrise and the clouds in the background of the CCTV images look pink, as you'd expect 11 minutes after sunrise on a partially cloudy day. It would make sense to see the sun that high and above the house if it were about 3 or 4 in the afternoon. But the shadows would be in front of everyone, not behind them, if it was 3 or 4pm on January 27. Anyway here is a pic, with the brightness behind the house and in the sky circled:
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So what can we deduce from all of the above? Again, it's tough, and a rabbit hole I was reluctant to go down because of the grainy, dark nature of the CCTV and difficulty in assessing shadows on a partly cloudy day. But if we can assume from all of the above that almost every shadow is short (a meter or two in length, or less) and pointing around 8 o'clock, what time of day and year could it possibly be? It's not January 27 in my opinion. Here's why.
I clicked around the entire year and different times of day on SunCalc at the location of their home to try to find shadows that would make sense with what all the photos and stills above show. I chose different times of day based on these possibilities:
Early morning: Leaving for school (as purported)
Late morning: Leaving for an activity on the weekend or a day off school (i.e. not January 27)
Mid-afternoon: Leaving to pick up children at school (also accounts for that high sun that might be appearing in the rear windshield)
Thinking of all three scenarios, these are the times that made sense to search. So I tried January early morning, January late morning, January around 3pm. Then I tried every single other month of the year at both 8:26am, late morning, and around 3pm.
For shadows to be relatively short, behind everyone, and facing approximately 8 o'clock, it has to be 8:26am-ish in the morning in late March, in April or possibly in early May. This is the only time of year when shadows would look the way they do in the above videos. Granted, the partly cloudy day is making me question my own theory, but it is still my theory until some, I don't know, astronomer comes along and proves me wrong. Here are some diagrams from SunCalc that show the lengths and directions of shadows you'd see in late March to early May:
Springtime would account for the sus chestnut tree situation. It would also account for the clothing, as mornings in April 2022 were typically around 6 to 7C, still chilly enough for jacket (or two) but no hat. However, it would not explain that sunny reflection in the rear windshield, because that would really have to be afternoon, if it is actually the sun over the house or thereabouts. So that last piece (and all the rest of this case) still has me stumped.
If anyone would like to explore SunCalc and report back, please do. (I've compared with other shadow calculator sites and gotten the same results, and SunCalc is really the most robust and easy to work with.) This is just a theory, and I'm open to any and all ideas about what's happening here.