Nicola Bulley : Diving expert under spotlight for earlier saying “she is not in the river”

Peter Faulding showed up in Lancashire with the confidence of a man who knows what he’s doing. He promised to solve a mystery that was bothering a family and catching the attention of the whole country.

Ten days after Nicola Bulley went missing, Peter Faulding flew in from Surrey in his own helicopter and looked over the River Wyre near where she was last seen.

He said that with his specialised tools, he could find her in an hour. When it didn’t, he said that she probably wasn’t in the river at all. She was, in fact. Faulding went to help with the investigation, but his statements fueled the rumours and conspiracy theories that spread through the village of St. Michael’s on Wyre. Once the body of the 45-year-old mother and mortgage adviser was found, the police and the media were bound to get a lot of bad press. So has Faulding, whose actions and history in other cases have been looked at. Successes? He has had some.

But there has also been controversy, especially about the evidence he gave at the inquest into the death of MI6 agent Gareth Williams, whose body was found in a locked holdall in Pimlico, London, in 2010.

One former detective at Scotland Yard said that sometimes expert witnesses are so sure of themselves that they “won’t truck anything else.” Emma White, who is a friend of Bulley’s, actually got Faulding to join the search. After being hesitant at first, the police agreed to the request.

As a former paratrooper reservist, Faulding had the tough, practical look of a military man. His presence, with his yellow all-weather coat and large red vehicles with “Incident Support” written on them, was comforting. As questions about how the police handled the missing person case grew, it was thought that Faulding might be able to give Bulley’s family and the public the answers they so desperately needed. His equipment included a £55,000 side-scan sonar.

But after the first day of searching, the team from his company, Specialist Group International (SGI), had found nothing, and the disappointment was clear. Faulding told GB News, “I don’t think any of this is right. I don’t think she’s at all in the river.” During the three days that he and his team were at the scene and in the weeks that followed, he gave dozens of interviews to the media to explain different ideas. Faulding said that he was helping with the search for free and turned down the family’s offers to raise money for him.

He said that he was paid for two interviews with the media, and that the money went to the Lucas Dobson Water Safety Campaign, a charity that Faulding and the father of the six-year-old boy who drowned in the River Stour and whose body was found by SGI four days later. In honour of Lucas, Faulding goes to schools and gives out life jackets. But Faulding has had to explain why he helped with the Bulley case just days after publishing his autobiography.