A Websleuths forum on missing woman Gaynor Lord was launched 16 hours her disappearance was made public (Picture: PA/Metro.co.uk)
Internet sleuths are poring over the disappearance of Gaynor Lord, who vanished without a trace from a Norwich park on Friday afternoon.
The mystery, which began when the 55-year-old failed to return home after her shift at Jarrold department store, intensified when police discovered her clothing, jewellery and mobile phone scattered in Wensum Park, around one mile from her workplace.
Comparisons were quickly drawn to the death of Nicola Bulley, who was found in a Lancashire river on February 19, 23 days after she went missing earlier this year.
Detectives searching for Gaynor are now consulting Lancashire Police who were involved in the hunt for Nicola, to try to understand what ‘lessons they learned’ from their investigation.
Nicola’s story sparked a nationwide interest that bordered on obsession, as thousands of armchair detectives flooded social media with theories of what might have happened to her.
In a striking parallel, armchair detectives have wasted no time pouncing on Gaynor’s disappearance, taking their thoughts to true crime discussion site, Websleuths.
Police issued a missing persons appeal for the mother-of-three around 8pm on Friday night. Just 16 hours later, a forum dedicated to the case had been launched.
In the six days since, Gaynor’s thread has been filled with 15 pages of comments and conspiracies speculating about what might have happened to her. Over on Reddit, users have been sharing timelines of the disappearance as they debate her last-known movements.
It might seem like a harmless hobby, but the world of online detective work has a a dark underbelly. Just remember Nicola Bulley.
TikTok sleuths gripped by her disappearance threatened to derail the investigation, descending on Nicola’s hometown of St Michael’s on the Wyre where they peered through windows and risked contaminating crucial evidence.
One private security firm owner said the village was flooded with ‘civvy police wannabes’.
Cops conducted round-the-clock patrols due to the sheer volume of ghoulish commentators combing the area.
And many were thought to have come from Websleuths, where amateur detectives group together to discuss, and attempt to solve, cold cases.
The fascination is immense; on TikTok, the #truecrime hashtag now has more than 51.3 billion views.
It was the 2019 Netflix hit documentary Dont F**k With Cats that first offered a no holds barred glimpse into the world of internet detectives.
During the series, now-famous sleuths Deanna Thompson and John Green used Facebook, Reddit, Google Maps, Google Image searches and every other tool at their disposal to identify the name and whereabouts of killer Luka Magnotta.
But the community doesn’t always get it right. Far from it.
One of the most notorious cases involved the hunt for the suspects behind the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. As theories of who the bombers were circulated on social media, a Reddit thread called FindBostonBombers went viral and as people scrutinised pictures of the suspects, several innocent people were wrongly named.
In the case of Nicola Bulley, police arrested a man who posted videos from the search scene on TikTok. The influencer, who also uploaded footage of his arrest on YouTube, says he was fined £90.
Lancashire Police said online sleuths ‘distracted’ the investigation into the 45-year-odl disappearance, with detective superintendent Rebecca Smith claiming officers had been ‘inundated with false information, accusations and rumours’.
Both instances highlight an important distinction between live and cold cases, with amateur intervention in the former often a significant hindrance – and with the potential to cause significant distress to the family of those concerned.
According to a study from Birmingham City University, published in Crime Media Culture, our fascination with web sleuthing goes hand in hand with the growing popularity of ‘infotainment’ – a blend of news with entertainment, together with access to more tools.
‘Audiences now have considerably more participatory opportunities when it comes to infotainment,’ the paper reads. ‘They can post a comment on an online news article, tweet about a television programme using a hashtag or join one of the multiple online communities established to discuss and debate particular cases.’
Chair of the Psychology Department at Illinois Wesleyan University, Amanda Vicary, tells Metro.co.uk that another reason people are fascinated with solving crimes is because they ‘want to learn ways to prevent becoming a victim themselves’.
‘By understanding what sets a killer off or how a victim escaped, for instance, we can learn how to better protect ourselves,’ she explains. ‘If a crime is unsolved, we are lacking that information. We don’t know what happened, who did [it], or why. This can be scarier for people because now we don’t have the information that could help us protect ourselves.
‘There’s a theory in psychology called the “just world” theory. We want to believe the world is a fair place and that bad things only happen to bad people. This is why people have a tendency to try to blame victims or look for something they did wrong. If we have less details about the crime, this can make it harder for us to try to rationalise what happened in a way that can make us feel better about our own odds of being a victim.’
It might seem like a harmless hobby, but the world of online detective work has a a dark underbelly.