A specialist diver has defended himself after he was accused of causing ‘false alarm’ during the search for missing Nicola Bulley.
The mum and businesswoman vanished in January 2023 after she had dropped her children at school and taken her dog for a walk. Her disappearance garnered intense media attention. And led to internet sleuths descending on the village of St Michael’s on Wyre, in Lancashire to try to help find her but ended up disrupting the hunt to find her.
Bulley’s body was tragically discovered more than three weeks later in the River Wyre, just one mile downstream from where she had been believed to have gone missing, where her phone had been found on a bench and her dog abandoned. The search took more than 23 days, with specialist police divers, sniffer dogs, drones and helicopters all deployed. Her death at the age of 45 was ruled an accidental drowning, The Mirror reports.
A BBC documentary that aired tonight on BBC One shone a light on the original search missing. Specialist diver Peter Faulding came under fire in November 2023 when a review into the handling of the search for Ms Bulley implied he had “caused unwarranted distress and false alarm” to her family.
A 143-page report following the review, commissioned by the Lancashire police and crime commissioner, Andrew Snowden, suggested Faulding had contributed to public confusion over Bulley’s disappearance and the search relating to her. It revealed: “his public statements often contradicted the investigative and operational approach, leading to confusion for the public and reducing the family’s trust in the investigation and search operation”.
After the report was published last year, Faulding hit back to defend himself – revealing he found Bulley’s body within minutes of getting into the water after he started a private search for her. In a lengthy statement shared online, Faulding said he and his company, Specialist Group International (SGI): “Were tasked to searched in the non-tidal section of the River Wyre above the weir in an area I would class as the ‘hot zone’. This is the area in front of the bench down to the weir. From experience, if Nicola had entered the water here, this is the area where she would most likely be found.
“My team and I commenced the search at 10.28am and 6 minutes later, at 10.34am, I identified a significant target that appeared, from my experience, to take human form. This target was approximately 75 metres downstream from the bench, just south of the island in the river.”
He went on to claim that he relayed his findings to the Lancashire Police Search Adviser who told him his findings were “nothing”. He continued: “This baffled me deeply as I am not usually wrong when I locate a target, especially a body that shows a clear signature. Sonar shadows cannot be created by ‘nothing’. At 16.30pm that day, we discreetly rescanned the same area which showed the same target in the same location.”
He added at the time: “Having worked closely with police and police dive teams for many years, I had nothing but respect for them and instinctive trust in their ability and had no reason to doubt their findings. Although I thought I had found a very credible target, I conceded that maybe I was wrong and later that afternoon I made a statement to the media saying that there was no sign of Nicola and that I did not think she was in the river.”
The BBC’s new documentary has the support of Bulley’s family, who were involved in the making of the special and said in a statement: “Only we can speak about her as a mummy, partner, daughter and sister. In addition, if our experience of being in the eye of a media storm makes people think twice about how they act and what they say online, then we will have achieved some further good.”
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