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Peter Faulding: Forensic expert vows to find missing mom Nicola Bulley as he believes she’s NOT in water

'If Nicola is in there, we will find her. If she's there, our sonar will pick her up straight away,' Peter Faulding said

LANCASHIRE, ENGLAND: Nicola Bulley, a mother of two, suddenly vanished more than a week ago while she was walking with her dog near the River Wyre in Lancashire. Although there is no conclusive evidence about her whereabouts, it is believed that Bulley had drowned in the river.

Now, a founder of a private search and rescue organization whose team of divers has been brought to find her has promised that he will find Bulley if she indeed fell into the river. A world-renowned forensics expert and the founder of Specialist Group International, Peter Faulding has drafted in 'high-spec' sonar equipment on Monday, February 6, which costs around $66,283 and has a "very high hit rate" and can "find people within the hour."

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What did Peter Faulding say?

"If Nicola is in there, we will find her. If she's there, our sonar will pick her up straight away," Faulding told Mirror. He added, "I will see a body on the bottom. We are dealing with about 10 drownings every summer. We always locate within the hour. It's that quick, it's that good." Faulding said that it is highly unlikely that Bulley would have gone far if she fell into the water because of the shallows but added at the same time that the shock of the cold water could have "taken her breath away."

The forensics expert believes that the mother could have been able to pull her out of the water and that she would not be dragged down. "Normally people would scream out and I don't know if there was other people in the area but you'd scream out, you'd flap around and the dog would normally maybe stay with the owner. There's something, in my opinion, not quite right here," he added. 

While going to the scene via a helicopter, Faulding continued, "We are having a briefing at 8.30 am, and then going to the location to set up. They are getting a briefing at a farmhouse and then they'll move to the scene. 'We are working closely with the police to provide extra support. We are going to be using a high-frequency side scan sonar. That's going to be used to search down the river, past the weir."

"That will give us a crystal clear image of anything on the river bed. It shows every rock and every stone. On a straight river, we can do about ten miles of river a day. But this is a very windy, changeable river, up and down in depth. So we will do the best we can," Faulding added. He continued, "I'm confident with my expertise over 20 odd years that if she is there, I will find her with that sonar. I will be operating that sonar."

Faulding earlier told Sky News, "We're assisting with our dive team. We carry out all the underwater operations in the south east for the police anyway, but we're bringing a particularly high-spec piece of equipment, 1,800-kilohertz specialist side-scan sonar. Each year we deal with a lot of drownings and we locate them extremely quickly. The difference with this sonar is that it's very, very high frequency. It's about £55,000 ($66,326.70) and it scans the river and I can see every stick and stone lying on the river bed. We've got a very high hit rate with this." He further added, "Our sonar is probably a bit more superior but I've got a lot of specialist search expertise and I've worked on hundreds of these cases and we always generally find people within the hour in lakes etc."

What did Nicola Bulley's friends say?

One of Bulley's friends hopes that the specialist search team would not be able to uncover anything underwater as they rule out the police's theory she fell into the river. The friends of the missing woman said on Monday that they hope the family will get answers with the help of the specialist underwater rescue team. 

Emma White, who has Bulley for more than a decade, said Bulley's friends were pleased with Faulding's team helping the police but are keeping everything crossed they don't find anything. "We hope they uncover nothing, like the police have done for the last ten days, and we hope Nicola is not in that river," White told ITV's 'Good Morning Britain'. The tragedy occurred at a time when Bulley was due to watch one of her children perform in a show this weekend which went ahead without her. 

White believes that Faulding's equipments are more advanced and useful than the ones used by the authorities. "Peter's here, working with Lancashire Police, and we just have to have everything crossed that the search continues and Nicola is not in that river," she said according to Daily Mail. She added, "We don't want to undermine all the work police have done but when you get that glimmer of hope and you look at what the company does, his records and what he has achieved then you think we need to get this expert here - and we can't thank you enough for bringing the team down."

She claimed that police theory that Bulley fell into the River Wyre "is based on a theory, with no actual evidence to support it." "The hypothesis is based on limited information - I've said before it's a theory, and we sadly can't base life on a theory," White added. Moreover, White thanked the public for showing their support and expressing their concern about the matter and added that at the core of their rescue campaign are "two little girls who want their mummy".

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