The disappearance of Nicola Bulley, a 45-year-old mother from Lancashire, England, became one of the UK’s most closely watched missing-person cases in 2023 — and it also exposed how amateur online investigators can collide badly with real police work.
Bulley vanished on January 27, 2023, while walking her dog along the River Wyre in St Michael’s on Wyre after dropping her two young daughters at school. Her phone was found on a riverside bench, still connected to a work call, with her dog loose nearby. The case triggered a massive search operation and, according to Lancashire’s Police and Crime Commissioner, drew an “unprecedented” wave of social media speculation, including amateur sleuths who traveled to the area themselves.
Her body was recovered from the river 23 days later. Among those drawn to the scene was Curtis Arnold, a barber from Worcestershire who had built an online following making TikTok videos styled as amateur detective work. Arnold managed to get past the police cordon and filmed footage from the scene where Bulley’s body was found, later posting it online. According to reporting from Novara Media, the footage generated close to £1,000 in revenue for Arnold across TikTok and YouTube.
Lancashire Police arrested Arnold on suspicion of malicious communications offences and perverting the course of justice in connection with the footage. He was arrested again months later, this time on suspicion of stalking local residents, and was banned from entering Lancashire under his bail conditions except to pass through. No charges were ultimately brought against him.
Arnold later acknowledged the impact his actions may have had on Bulley’s family, telling reporters he was sorry if they had seen the footage, while also stating his ambition was to build a full-time career as an online creator.
An independent review into Lancashire Police’s handling of the case, conducted by the College of Policing, later found the force had lost control of the public narrative early on and had unnecessarily disclosed personal details about Bulley’s private struggles during the investigation. The review also logged more than 75,000 inbound social media comments about the case within roughly a month.
The Bulley case became a widely cited example in ongoing debates over the ethics of “true crime” content creators inserting themselves into active police investigations — a pattern also seen in cases like TikTok creator Ken Waks’s widely criticized amateur “Smiley Face Killer” investigation, which he abandoned after facing public backlash over his motives.
Sources: BBC, LBC, Novara Media
