Police have said there is a high probability that Gaynor Lord, who has been missing since last Friday, went into the river in Norwich, as detectives confirmed they are working with officers who investigated Nicola Bulley’s disappearance.
Lord, 55, disappeared after leaving work in Norwich city centre earlier than scheduled on Friday afternoon, and her belongings – including items of clothing, her mobile phone, glasses and jewellery – were found scattered through Wensum Park later that day.
Her coat was found in the River Wensum, which runs through the park, and police said specialist underwater divers had been searching the area.
Speaking at the scene on Thursday, Ch Supt Dave Buckley said it would take days to complete the search of the stretch of river. “It’s very, very challenging. The river is very, very full of water with all the rain, full of lots of debris. The divers can see about 1ft in front of them,” he said.
“It’s an extraordinarily challenging environment for them to work in, so it’s slow, methodical at the moment. Working with equipment, it will take probably a couple of days to get to a position where we’re content with what we’ve done. It may even be longer.”
He said the force was keeping an open mind about what had happened to Lord but “everything we know is pointing to a high probability that Gaynor went into the water”, although no witnesses had seen it happen.
“Nobody has seen her go into the river. But we know she ended up in the park. At the moment there’s nothing else the CCTV is showing about who she may have spoken to, any interactions she might have had,” he said.
Buckley said police had been unable to establish why Lord left work early that day, and that some of her behaviour was out of character.
“We can’t explain some of her behaviour that day,” he said. “We’re working really closely with family, with friends, with anybody else who might have had contact with her in the recent days or weeks to try and understand why this might have happened.
“People are very shocked by what’s happened. Nobody knows why she’s done what she’s done.”
Lord is described as white, 5ft 6in, with a blond shoulder-length bob.
A friend of Lord said she “feels terrible” after cutting short a phone call from her on the last day she was seen.
Julie Butcher received a call from her friend at 2:15pm on Friday but had to cut it short to speak to a client.
She told the BBC: “I said ‘I’m at home’ and I explained I was sorting out the internet and my phone rang and it was one of my clients and I had to speak to them.
“I said I would call her back and she said ‘yes’.”
About seven or eight minutes later, she called Lord but could not get through.
Butcher tried again and got through to voicemail and also sent a WhatsApp message to her friend to say she was free.
She received another call from Lord at 4:15pm but said it “sounded like a pocket call – I could hear movement in her pocket”.
Butcher said: “I keep going over the conversation. If I hadn’t answered that call [from the client] would she have talked to me? I feel terrible. I feel so sorry for the family.”
She added her friend seemed “fine” when they last met on Tuesday.
One witness told ITV’s Good Morning Britain they had seen someone who matched her appearance doing what appeared to be a yoga pose in the park around the time of her disappearance.
“She was sort of putting her coat down on the floor and sort of performing a yoga pose. It just seemed a bit off at this time because obviously it was starting to get dark,” she told the programme.
Buckley confirmed his team had consulted officers from Lancashire police who worked on the search for Bulley. Bulley’s body was found in the River Wyre on 19 February, about a mile from where she vanished while walking her dog in St Michael’s on Wyre on 27 January.
The Lancashire force was criticised over its handling of that investigation and the disclosure of Bulley’s personal information, and Buckley said any lessons learned from the case would be drawn upon.
Police released new CCTV footage showing Lord, wearing glasses and a long coat, walking along St Augustines Street in Norwich, which was busy with passing traffic, at 4.01pm on Friday.
Footage released earlier in the week showed Lord jogging up the cobbled Bedford Street after leaving work at the Bullards gin counter in Jarrolds department store at 2.45pm, more than an hour before her shift was due to end at 4pm.
She can then be seen walking on to London Street at 2.47pm and then crossing the road on Queen Street without waiting for a red light, narrowly missing moving traffic, heading towards the cathedral.
About 30 minutes later, at 3.22pm, video shows Lord putting her jacket on as she walks away from Norwich Cathedral, and the last sighting of her is just after 4pm.
