I have the "touch of scepticism" about this case now.
The "factoids" keep changing....and no one has come out and said "what is what".
An "Anti Terrorist Consultant uncle" and a "Police Officer mother" telling consistently "shift sands" stories.
No "passionate plea's" from his muckers. Not a pip from the RAF (I would expect more from my CO).
Am I being led gently up the garden path here ???
I was looking for a couple of posts that caught my eye. One was saying about the ex-detective who was interviewed by media, and the other was how Nicola has been the public eye of this rather than active detectives who are on the case. So I want to work those things into my response to this post, because this has caught my eye.
The CO has been sending out 'boys' to help SULSAR search the back roads/bushes on the route back to Honington. That means giving guys time off their regular duties or actually taking them off those duties. So the CO is doing stuff, even if he's not going on camera.
The police will always weigh up options as to who goes on camera, and Nicola is the obvious choice given her background and that she's Corrie's mum. Corrie's brothers and uncle have also been doing interviews, either the police appeals or any TV they can get onto. Surely a passionate plea from the mother will outweigh pleas from his mates or his CO, especially given that he's disappeared off-base in civvies, and it's the human side that the police want to appeal to. A uniform could be off-putting to some people, but the mother's appeals tug at everyone's heartstrings.
So I think the police and Nicola purposely made a decision to put her at the forefront as the public face, right at the beginning when it was most likely that Corrie had met with an accident walking back to base and they might have been appealing to a driver of a hit-and-run who'd knocked a late night walker into the bushes at the side of the road and left them there.
But after a month, this has taken on a different thing for Nicola and family. She now has a 'need' to do this. And the extent of what she and other family members are doing is stunning to me. They're very, very savvy in what online is called SEO, which is related to marketing and advertising. They need the story to keep going and keep getting attention and get donations for SULSAR, and they are doing the most brilliant job of it. Most families can't achieve this, it's the type of work (offline) that very expensive agencies paying high wages normally do, and the family are doing it for themselves with the aid of contacts from their respective lines of work. I can easily imagine Nicola putting in 20-hour days doing all these things, pushing herself so hard because she doesn't want to personally do less than she can push herself to, and to avoid going to bed at night at the end of yet another day with no news of her beloved son.
If the police investigations side of this is mostly back-room work, it is going to be tricky to keep that in the media when you don't have anything to say. And this is the short-attention span world, where as was said earlier people easily get switched over to the popular TV programmes and celebrity things and stuff like that.
Corrie isn't a child, he's a grown man. It's most likely a very local case involving Suffolk and maybe Cambridgeshire and Norfolk regions, at a push. If it wasn't for Corrie's family, I think this case would probably never have achieved the widespread awareness that it has, and even people in BSE would have stopped talking about it by now. But the police, after the searches came up empty, would still be working their back-room angles. And in a month's time there would be a part-front page headline on the local papers saying that the police have made a local arrest in connection with the disappearance of a man who everyone had forgotten about.
