[respectfully cropped by me]
I wish that the investigators had this level of foresight but I think it’s more likely it was a genuine mistake. They released that footage on Day 4 which feels about the right amount of time to have alerted all the nearby locations with cameras to check their footage, and for the various people/businesses to have done so and reported back, and then one presumes the police tried to get someone to ID her (? It’s poor visibility footage) and/or decided to release it anyway figuring it was better to do so than not and if it was someone else they would ID themselves and solve that query, which is what happened. I feel like if it was a tactic it was too early for tactics, and [wince] it was more likely to be a stuff up.
Gut instinct only here, but I feel like the police mucking this up was possibly a much more problematic (for the investigation) mistake than has been publicly admitted. I don’t know anything about police procedures so I don’t know how common or acceptable it is considered to release footage saying “it’s her” vs footage saying “it might be her, pls identify yourself if it’s you instead” but in terms of public consciousness and forming public opinion about the case, this misidentified footage hit the news right as people were really catching on to the situation. It must have fueled a lot of the volunteer searchers and hype/discussion about all that, resulted in tips and drama and taken up a lot of investigative time and energy. I am still consistently seeing ppl on social media and even on WS thinking it was her and being corrected by others, and some news stories took a long time To correct themselves. Could this have resulted in lost time that has affected the subsequent direction and effectiveness of the investigation… did that day or 2 barking up the wrong tree set them back? I don’t know, like I said, but it felt like quite the fumble.
So the general public were and are still led astray by that footage. How much police themselves were confused by it is a different story. I’d really hope that they weren’t putting too much stock in it from too early on, but we’ve all seen the first 72 hours of an investigation get bungled before, it happens despite the best of intentions, especially in cases where the original narrative seems logical and reasonable ie. it’s australia, it’s the bush, people do get lost or get injured and need finding and rescuing quite a bit etc etc
Would welcome other opinions on this.
In my Opinion it was probably quite a bad moment for investigators when the news came thru that she’d been misidentified.
www.dailymail.co.uk
