Nicola Bulley’s disappearance is just one in a long line of missing women cases in the last few months and years. But this one is different. In the cases of Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa and the majority of women reported missing across the world, it’s normally a matter of days before they are found to have lost their lives at the hands of men. Nicola has been missing for 11 days, and still investigators are no closer to knowing what happened to her.
The strongest line of enquiry up to this point is that Nicola, a mother of two young daughters, had fallen into the River Wyre where was she was last seen walking her dog on the morning of Friday 27 January.
But a thorough search of the river this week has so far thrown up ‘absolutely no evidence’ of the police’s ‘working hypothesis’ that Nicola had fallen in. The head of the specialist dive unit commissioned to search the riverbed has claimed that ‘there's something, in my opinion, not quite right here,’ and that it was the most unusual case he’d seen in his 20-year career, according to The Mirror.
The true crime obsession of the last decade is nothing new. Novelists like Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie proved long ago that there is a strong appetite for an unsolved mystery, and there’s no denying that this case has some core components of a compelling detective novel. But this isn’t fiction; a woman remains missing, her family and friends increasingly traumatised by damaging ‘theories’ from social media sleuths, and now there’s an increasing number of people travelling to the site where she was last seen to ‘hassle the police’ and, even worse, take selfies at the bench where she was last seen.
According to one Twitter user who claims she’s one of the local search party helping out police with their investigation, ‘there’s literally loads doing it.’
Another said, ‘Why tf are people taking photos sitting on the bench where Nicola Bulley's phone was found?’
The troubling reports call to mind the two police officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, who were sentenced to two years behind bars for taking and sharing selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Henry and Bibaa Smallman in 2021.
It’s concerning that when it comes to missing women cases or VAWG , it seems very easy for people to dismiss the suffering of women and their families in favour of a salacious narrative that sees them as the expendable victims of a ‘good story’.
‘Ghouls. Can’t distinguish between historical true crime docs and living reality with people’s families nearby terrified,’ said another.
It’s impossible to determine whether those intent on getting their ‘memento’ from the scene of an ongoing investigation are doing so out of a morbid curiosity and an enthusiasm for true crime, or the altogether more sinister rampant fetishisation of violence against women and girls. Either way, their actions are disrespectful at best, deeply harmful at worst and only serve to undermine the very real pain and suffering of the thousands of UK women who go missing – and worse – each year.