Web ghouls exploiting Nicola Bulley’s disappearance tonight sparked anger by filming themselves digging up woodland close to where the mum vanished.
Two so-called amateur detectives posted a YouTube video of themselves searching an area to the River Wyre in St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancs, where mum-of-two Nicola disappeared three weeks ago.
It comes just days after senior police officers urged people to stay away from the area- stating fake theories and speculation had made the investigation “incredibly difficult”.
Tonight local council chief Michael Vincent told the Sunday Mirror: “It’s almost as though social media idiocy and reality have become blurred.
“We’ve had these weirdos, these ghouls, trying people’s door handles, peering through their windows.
“There has to be an element of decency. We can’t allow social media to be a place where there is no morality.”
The video was posted by an account called Curtis Cool Stuff. It shows a man digging up soil as the other films him while commenting on Nicola’s disappearance.
Lancashire Police have repeatedly warned people to stay away and leave the investigation to trained detectives - while locals dubbed the vloggers as “vultures”.
One said: “They just don’t care what that poor woman’s family must be going through. Those kids desperately need their mum home, but all these vultures care about is publicity for themselves.”
This week another YouTuber, Dan Duffy, was arrested and fined for posting videos from the search scene. Duffy, of Darwen, Lancs, was fined £90 after being arrested a week ago for a public order offence.
Nicola, 45, went missing on January 27 during a riverside dog walk after dropping her two daughters at school.
She was last seen at 9.10am taking her usual route with her springer spaniel Willow.
Her phone, still connected to a work call for her job as a mortgage adviser, was found just over 20 minutes later on a bench by the river, with her dog running loose.
Police say that their “main working hypothesis” is that she fell into the river.
The force has faced a backlash after saying the 45-year-old had been struggling with the menopause and alcohol before her disappearance.
But a former police chief has said criticism of the force has been “unfair”.
Sir Peter Fahy, former chief at Greater Manchester Police, described the investigators as “very diligent”.
Politicians - including the prime minister and home secretary - and privacy campaigners have raised concerns about the police’s release of private details in the public domain.
Lancashire Police said it would conduct an internal review into their investigation.
But Sir Peter said: “It’s disappointing that certain politicians have not perhaps tried to give this a more balanced view and say, yes there is a particular issue about providing personal information and that often happens in major investigations.”
He said: “Part of the difficulty for Lancashire Police is this is just one of the cases where we just do not know what’s happened.
“They have closed off a lot of possibilities through their work on mobile phone and the CCTV.
“A measure of whether a missing person’s investigation has been carried out professionally is not really whether that person has been found because tragically there are many, many cases where the person is not located.”
He said media comments about the appearance of Det Supt Smith,who is leading the investigation, “created huge anger, particularly among senior police officers, and a number of female chief constables came out yesterday absolutely to condemn that and say how unfair it was - so this is just not helpful”.
