A day like any other. A mother sets off from home to drive her two young daughters to school and after dropping them off heads to the river nearby to walk her dog. A routine morning – familiar, unremarkable.
Except she never comes home.
Her phone is found on a bench beside the river, the dog next to it. The woman has simply vanished. What follows soon blows up into a mystery of feverish and epic proportions.
The disappearance of 45-year-old Nicola Bulley in the UK, in January 2023, sparked a media frenzy that spread across the world. As weeks went by and the level of scrutiny from news outlets and social media escalated, every detail of her life was picked over, subjected to intrusive speculation. Theories – outlandish, unfounded – concerning her whereabouts took hold. Alongside the mainstream media, online influencers dissected her life, her state of mind, her intimate relationship. ‘Expert’ witnesses had their say. Paranormal ‘investigators’ weighed in. A psychic asserted that Nicola had been kidnapped and was being held in a shipping container. Reports of burial sites gained credence. The morbidly curious trampled over private land, invading privacy, searching outbuildings, in their quest to find Nicola. Far-fetched theories, ranging from abduction to murder, persisted.
Yet, amid all the madness, there was nothing to suggest foul play.
Nicola had likely fallen into the river.
Tragic, an accident.
In all of this, scant concern was paid to those who knew her best. While her close-knit family struggled with the painful reality that their loved one had vanished without trace, the search for Nicola became a tawdry soap opera, fuelled by rumour, unsubstantiated theories, sensational claims.
‘People don’t just vanish,’ one online source asserted.
The truth is they do – more often than you might think.
In the UK, someone is reported missing every ninety seconds. Each year, every year, there are around 170,000 missing persons. In the US, the figure exceeds 520,000.
People go missing for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes, there is no obvious trigger. In other cases, an emotional trauma has prompted their disappearance – bereavement, a job loss, a relationship breakup, financial difficulties, addiction, mental health issues. Sometimes, they return home, life goes on. A happy ending of sorts.
In many instances, they are never seen again.
Only rarely do missing person cases become high-profile. The numbers are so overwhelming that most go unreported, unnoticed. Nicola Bulley, an attractive woman who vanished into thin air in broad daylight, caught the imagination of the public. From the outset, her story was swathed in intrigue, the whiff of sensation. Woman does the school run, walks her dog, then – what? Something had to be ‘off’. Inevitably, fingers were pointed at her partner, Paul, who tried in vain to maintain a degree of privacy for the sake of his and Nicola’s children – leading some to question what he had to hide.
We don’t always think enough about what it’s like for the family when someone disappears without warning. Nicola’s father, Ernest, looking utterly broken in a TV interview, described the experience as having ‘emptied our lives.’
The subject of going missing has always fascinated writers. In Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years, Cordelia Grinstead, on vacation with her family, simply walks away without a word, not a backward glance. She muses that, ‘When her family finally discovered she was gone, they would be baffled. Flummoxed. If she stayed away long enough, they would wonder if she’d met with an accident.’ Yet still she goes and proceeds to make a new life without them.
In Missing Persons, Nicci Gerrard’s subject is Johnny Hopkins, a university student, whose disappearance shatters his family. His going robs them of something solid and familiar, leaving a hole, a crater, in their lives. Heartache follows, questions, the seemingly endless search for answers.
It may seem all that matters is finding the person who has disappeared. In fiction, however, as in real life, the reappearance of a missing person can prove complicated, hurtful, unwelcome, even. Ann Patchett writes in The Dutch House of a mother returning after decades away to visit her sick daughter in hospital – to the fury of her son: ‘She had not been there for graduations or our father’s funeral … She wasn’t at my wedding or at the births of my children or at Thanksgiving or Easter or any of the countless Saturdays when there had been nothing but time and energy to talk everything through, but she was there now, at the Abington Memorial Hospital, like the Angel of Death.’ (The daughter, however, is delighted her mother has come back.)
Almost a century ago, on December 3, 1926, the celebrated ‘Queen of Crime’ Agatha Christie went missing after an argument with her husband, Archie. Archie was in love with another woman, Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce. Agatha must have been distraught. She left home in Berkshire, her car found abandoned at an old quarry. Nearby was an expanse of water where it was feared she might have drowned herself. A huge search involving police and thousands of volunteers was undertaken to find her. Days went by. Her disappearance made headlines around the world. The New York Times ran the story on its front page. On December 14, she was located staying at what is now the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, a famous spa town, in Yorkshire, where she had registered under the name of … Mrs Neele. The hotel now hosts the annual Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, one of the biggest and best-known events of its kind in the UK, attracting an array of top talent – John Grisham, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Child, Dennis Lehane and others.
Questions still surround Christie’s disappearance, which some claim was a publicity stunt. Others believe she had a breakdown caused by emotional trauma – the death of her mother as well as her husband’s affair. Lucy Worsley, author of the biography, Agatha Christie, speaks of the novelist entering what she terms a ‘fugue state.’ Worsley explains: ‘She reported forgetfulness, tearfulness, insomnia, an inability to cope with normal life. Her mental state became so bad that she considered suicide. She then entered, I believe, into a fugue state.’ While in the grip of a fugue, people cannot remember who they are and can end up wandering – fugue comes from the Latin word for flight – finding themselves somewhere unexpected.
In time, there was a happy outcome for Christie. In 1930 she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, and they were together until her death in 1976.
In the case of Nicola Bulley, three weeks after she was reported missing, her body was found in the River Wyre not far from where she was last seen. Despite repeated requests for privacy, a TikToker filmed its recovery.
An inquest recorded an accidental verdict.
No foul play. No abduction. Nothing untoward.
A reminder that endings – like beginnings – are often rooted in the ordinary.
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