He's now been charged. I guess it's just now a matter of whether the grandmother was involved as well.

As for the neighbour, it seems he's being held in relation to his 'sighting' of the girl leaving the house, as the apology from the police appears to rule out the theory that the body was moved around between the lofts.

I suspect she was found in a box or suitcase in the roof space and that the 'human error' the police are referring to is that no one actually looked inside this box/suitcase during the initial search. Mind boggling really.

Its certainly a strange one. Did he have help? Why did he kill her anyway?
These details may never be known. Ian Huntley still hasn't said why he killed those 2 girls.

Not really. The initial searches would have been looking for a girl alive and they are much different from the forensic searches that we saw police doing on the TV.

It is very easy to miss a person on a search.

I understand the point about the initial search being one for a little girl who is perhaps hiding, but the unequivocal apology from the Police suggests that they too believe someone has massively messed up by not searching thoroughly enough. Until we find out exactly where the body was found, we can only speculate, but yesterday's statement from the Police suggests that it was not particularly well hidden and should have been discovered even when they were looking for someone who was alive. It doesn't take a full-on forensic CSI-style search of the house to open a suitcase, look inside a box or lift up on old rolled-up carpet, and the Police apology points to an oversight on that kind of scale.

The police apology to me looks like a public relations exercise.

Initial missing person searches work on the basis of "if I can get in there so can the missing person" and need to be a balance of speed, thoroughness and being clue conscious. Having said that, the average plod is not very good at this.

When we got called into searches by the police we would subtlety re-check where they had initially searched because they were known for missing people hanging in trees, but believe it or not this is also common for trained searchers.

The forensic searches take ages and are no good for initial searches as the goal is to find the person quickly.

Well that makes a change from lying through their teeth when they fuck up as they usually do.

I'm not a copper but class myself as an intelligent person. When they were searching early on there were surely three possibilities:
1) She wasn't in the house (dead or alive).
2) She was alive in the house but hidden (i.e. like Shannon Matthews).
3) Her body was in the house and hidden.

So in (1) they're looking for potential clues to where she might be whereas in (2) & (3) they're looking for a person. They knew she didn't have her phone and travel card so the odds must be against (1), unless she's run away. But if she had run away, it would have made sense for the guy to say they'd had an argument over something and that she'd run away.

The fact he said she went out shopping without her card and phone surely should have rung big alarm bells. Therefore it had to be a realistic possibility that she was in the house. Everyone on here was saying that the fact that there were no cctv sightings was deeply suspicious (although the police wouldn't have known that at the time to be fair).

If they're searching the loft then they sre probably looking for her rather than clues to where she might be. Experience of the Matthews case should have told them she could be drugged and confined. So they should have looked everywhere that might be big enough to hold a person. The loft in that house can't be that big so what I suspect happened is some dimwit shone a torch in there for 15 seconds and said there was nothing there.

You are not a searcher either. Believe me (although you probably won't), missing people are very easy to miss even for trained searches and most police are not trained searchers.

You are also making your comments based on information digested with the benefit of time, everything is easy with insight.

I just hope the police train more people in basic missing person searches after this, or use civilian search teams more often.

Is she white?

Eh?

Well, I can't stop hearing about her so I just presume she is white