Welcome to The Daily. I'm Neil Patterson and I'm recording this introduction at tea time on Friday the 10th of February,

whilst the search for Nicola Bully is still very much ongoing. Nicola disappeared whilst walking her dog in St Michael's On Wire in Lancashire two weeks ago.

On this episode, we're not actually looking at the police investigation itself.

Instead, we'll focus on the hordes of armchair detectives, the amateur sleuths that

have descended on the village.

Their presence has become such a distraction from the search for Nicola that police have

issued what's known as a dispersal order,

giving them powers to send people away if they're there taking videos or photos for use on social media.

This is certainly not the first time that online investigators have hampered police inquiries.

So today we will be asking, why do they do it?

What compels the public to descend on crime scenes and how damaging can it be to the police's best efforts?

But we start in St Michael's On Wire, or at least with someone recently returned from there.

Katerina Vatzi has been reporting on Nicola's disappearance for Sky.

Katerina, just describe the moods in the village for us.

It is St Michael O'Mire a really tiny village and it's effectively three roads, surrounded

by houses, there's one pub, one primary school, a church, a petrol station, and that's about it.

It's very quiet, surrounded by fields.

It's got the river wire that runs through it and it's kind of central to the whole village.

And when we got there, there were a couple of local reporters.

And there were villages still using that path out there, their dogs and there was a lot of concern

but the shift in the mood from the first time I was there which was on the Tuesday and then towards

the weekend was extraordinary and just you could see the difference in what was a really small

...