The Detective's Dilemma - Episode 1

Summary

Casefile True Crime: Casefile Presents

The Detective's Dilemma – Episode 1

Original Release: November 29, 2025
Host/Narrator: Casey
Featuring: Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher, Elaine Pickford (Sian’s mother), Steve Brodie (BBC reporter), Liam O’Callaghan (Sian's brother)

Episode Overview

Main Theme:
The first episode of The Detective’s Dilemma revisits the 2011 high-profile disappearance of Sian O’Callaghan in Swindon, England—a case that would challenge the ethics, instincts, and protocols of Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher. Through first-person accounts from Fulcher, family members, and journalists, the episode sets up the story’s central conflict: When a detective must choose between following strict procedure or risking everything to save a life, what is the right course of action?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Case and Context

• Sian O’Callaghan was a 22-year-old woman last seen leaving a nightclub in Swindon after a night out (09:37).
• Her boyfriend, Kevin, noticed her missing the following morning and reported it to the police (10:49).
• At first, Elaine Pickford, Sian’s mother, believed her daughter was simply staying with friends, but concern grew when police appeared at her house by early afternoon (11:45–12:04).

2. Escalation and Investigation

• Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher was not initially assigned but switched call weekends as a favor—"but for that, I’d have not picked up the Sian O’Callaghan kidnap at all” (13:29).
• Police established that Sian’s phone last pinged 20 miles away in Savernak Forest, 30 minutes after leaving the nightclub (15:48).
• Fulcher immediately categorized the incident as a "Category A crime in action," which demanded full resources and rapid response—“If I assumed she was dead, then she would be dead, because there is no other cavalry... It’s me and my team or nothing.” (17:32)

3. Formulating Investigation Hypotheses

• Fulcher sets out three hypotheses: Sian could have gone off with someone, her phone could have been stolen, or she’d been abducted (15:48).
• The abduction scenario was considered most likely due to the phone’s unusual location and the absence of contact with friends or family (17:32).

4. Procedural Stakes and Police Decision-making

• Fulcher’s decision to treat the case as an abduction and "crime in action" is highlighted as unusual and risky among UK policing protocols. He justified his allocation of resources even though it might have proven unnecessary—emphasizing the responsibility of leadership and the bitter experience that shapes instinct in high-stakes situations (25:35).

5. Community and Media Response

• The case quickly garnered massive public attention; social media and local news mobilized more than 10,000 community members to search the Savernak Forest (34:00).
• BBC journalist Steve Brodie describes the sense that "this wasn’t one of those [cases where the missing person just turns up] ... There was a feeling that this was pretty awful and that something would have to be done." (22:46)
• Sian's brother, Liam, speaks to both the pride and the comfort the family felt due to community support (35:44).

6. The Physical Search

• Police conducted simultaneous search strategies: forensics, mobile phone tracking, dog teams, and appeals to the public (31:16).
• Fulcher describes the massive challenge of searching such a broad area: “You can imagine what resource commitment that would require...” (31:16).

7. Emotional Toll and Professional Commitment

• Fulcher and his team demonstrated extraordinary dedication, refusing to leave their posts as the hunt for Sian continued (36:59).
• Fulcher: “I always talk about 24 simultaneous strands—if you drop one of them, you'll be criticized later or the inquiry will fail... What we did... was extraordinary and all dedicated to this one end. We will find Sian.” (36:59)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Elaine Pickford (Sian’s mother):
  “Sian was a very vibrant person, always happy, smiling, fun... one of those people that would walk in a room and light the room up.” (08:57)

• Steve Fulcher (Detective Superintendent):
  “If I assumed she was dead, then she would be dead, because there is no other cavalry that’s coming. It’s me and my team or nothing.” (17:32)
  “Instinct is honed over many, many years of experience, usually bitter experience... That’s what I did for a living.” (25:35)
  “What we did in this short period of time... was extraordinary, and all dedicated to this one end. We will find Sian.” (36:59)

• Steve Brodie (BBC Journalist):
  “You never know why a story gets to the heart of the public... This was one of those stories where people wanted to find this young girl.” (33:53)

• Liam O’Callaghan (Sian’s brother):
  “I was very surprised... and also proud... to think that the community sort of rallied like that. ... Being an older brother, you kind of want to get involved, ... but then to see all these people in Swindon actually going out, actively trying to find Sian, sort of relaxed my own sort of need to want to go out.” (35:44)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | Speaker | Content/Insight | |------------|--------------------------------------------|--------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 08:26 | Introduction to Sian O’Callaghan | Steve Fulcher | Sian’s personality and background | | 10:49 | Missing report filed; Kevin’s actions | Steve Fulcher | Initial steps after Sian’s disappearance | | 11:45 | Mother’s first reactions | Elaine Pickford | Denial and growing concern | | 13:29 | Fulcher’s accidental involvement | Steve Fulcher | How he joined the case | | 15:48 | Phone evidence: location in forest | Steve Fulcher | Case’s critical break and developing hypotheses | | 17:32 | Abduction statistics, sense of urgency | Steve Fulcher | Stakes of abduction and reflexive leadership | | 22:23 | Media's early reaction | Steve Brodie | Realization this was “serious, very early on” | | 25:35 | Justifying the unprecedented response | Steve Fulcher | Decision-making in policing: resources and instinct | | 33:53 | Community reaction | Steve Brodie / Fulcher | Why public empathy “caught fire” | | 35:44 | Family’s perspective on volunteer search | Liam O’Callaghan | Comfort and pride in the community response | | 36:59 | Team’s commitment | Steve Fulcher | Emotional toll, teamwork, and a drive to “find Sian” |

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Tone and Language

The episode is narrated with a sense of gravitas and empathy. The tone is investigative yet deeply human—balancing the procedural explanations from law enforcement with intimate reflections from Sian’s family and firsthand observations from journalists.

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Conclusion & Key Teaser for Next Episode

The episode ends by highlighting the gravity of Fulcher’s choices and the massive communal and professional response. A preview for the next episode hints at critical breakthroughs involving CCTV footage—setting up further tension between the urgency to save Sian and the strictures of British investigative procedure.

Teaser:
“It’s blatantly obvious that she got in that car.” — Elaine Pickford (38:27)
“Whoever had taken her had done it for criminal purposes.” — Steve Fulcher (38:30)

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Listen to the full series by searching for ‘The Detective’s Dilemma’ wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

[Casey]

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[Casey]

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[Casey]

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[Narrator]

Then clearly we need to do a.

[Casey]

Better job of highlighting the other stories we've put so much care and work into. For those who don't know, Casefile Presents is our broader production platform. While Casefile is our flagship show, we've also created a number of other podcasts under the Casefile Presents banner. Our level of involvement differs from project to project, but we've played a direct role in all of them and I even narrate a few myself. Today we're sharing another one of those shows, the Detective's Dilemma, which is narrated by me. The Detective's Dilemma was originally released as a Spotify exclusive, meaning you could only listen to it on that platform, but.

[Narrator]

Now, for the first time, the entire.

[Casey]

Series is available everywhere for free, wherever you get your podcasts. When 22 year old Sian O' Callaghan went missing, Detective Steve Fulcher arrested a suspect who offered to lead him to her body.

[Narrator]

When the suspect then asked, do you want another one?

[Casey]

It set in motion one of the most significant and controversial investigations in recent UK history.

[Narrator]

The Detective's Dilemma explores the complex questions it raised about the justice system, police procedure, and the cost of doing what.

[Casey]

You believe is right.

[Narrator]

It's a story that leaves you asking, what would you have done in the same situation?

[Casey]

We're releasing the first episode here on the casefile feed.

[Narrator]

You can find the full series by searching for the detective's dilemma wherever you get your podcasts. Now, here's episode one. We covered the disappearance of Sian O' Callaghan and the subsequent investigation back on episode 35 of Case File. It's one of those episodes that has just stayed with me. It's an extraordinary story which shows better than almost any other, the gravity of the decisions a senior detective must make in the heat of a fast moving investigation and the very fine line a modern investigator must walk to balance operational effectiveness with today's increasingly stringent procedures. With exclusive access to the key characters in this story, including family members and lead investigator Steve Fulcher, we will go behind the scenes to unravel how the investigation unfolded and the minefield of legal and ethical dilemmas that distinguish this case.

[Casey]

Such as so starkly from the norm.

[Narrator]

And we will leave you to ponder the fundamental question at the heart of this perplexing tale. If it had been your loved one that Steve Vulcher was looking for, what would you have wanted him to do? And at the same time try and step into his shoes and ask yourself, what would you have done? SA. When Detective Superintendent Steve Vulture of Wiltshire Police first heard of the disappearance of Sian o', Callaghan, he had no idea this case would change his life forever.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

Sean was a 22 year old girl, very attractive. She was an office worker. She lived locally in Swindon. Her family was local. She was in a loving relationship with her boyfriend Kevin. She had a close knit family, mother Elaine, a brother and two sisters and was just enjoying a night out in Swindon. On that particular Friday night into Saturday.

[Narrator]

Morning, Sian o' Callaghan's mother, Elaine Pickford, says her daughter could light up a room.

[Elaine Pickford]

Sian was very vibrant person, always happy, smiling, fun, loving, sociable. You know, one of those people that would walk in a room and did light the room up. I know people say that a lot about people, but in Sian's case, it's definitely true. Atmospheres would change if Sian was around. You know, everybody liked Sian. Loads of friends, sociable, outgoing, bubbly. Yeah. And never really gave me any hassles growing up particularly, you know, all the usual stuff, but nothing out of the ordinary. Yeah.

[Narrator]

Swindon is a large town in the county of Wiltshire, south west England, about 126 kilometres west of London. With a population of about 185,000 people. It has one of the lower crime rates in the country. On the Evening of Friday 18th March 2011, Sian O' Callaghan had a night out with some friends in the Old Town area of Swindon. They went out for dinner before visiting two bars, the Spot and Baker street, after which they went to a nightclub called Sooju. Sian left the Suju nightclub alone in the early hours of the morning of Saturday 19th March. The flat she shared with her boyfriend Kevin was only 800 metres away from the club. But she didn't make it home that night. Concerned by the fact Sian hadn't returned back to their flat, Kevin sent her a text message at 3:24am to check if she was okay. Sian didn't respond.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

The first contact was from Kevin Reap, Sianna Callaghan's boyfriend. They'd been together about 18 months. He contacted the police on the morning of Saturday 19th March 2011. He was concerned about Sian because she hadn't been in contact with him. All he knew was that at 3:24 he'd sent a text to her saying worried with a kiss, and it hadn't been responded to. He'd been desperately trying to phone her phone, phone friends, family to find out where she was. Now, Sian had gone out for a night out in Swindon Old Town with a couple of female friends and they'd gone to various pubs and clubs. And that was as much as Kevin could tell us at that particular point in time.

[Narrator]

Sian's mother, Elaine, wasn't overly worried at first.

[Elaine Pickford]

We just thought maybe she'd gone off, you know, to mate's house afterwards, decided to stay over at a friend's and that she would be in touch.

[Narrator]

It's easy to understand. Sian was 22. The last thing her mother, Elaine, wanted to do was panic.

[Elaine Pickford]

Even by late morning, I was just thinking, well, if she's been out to the early hours, she won't be up yet, you know, and if she is at a friend's, and then also you're thinking, well, hold on, there could be an explanation for this. Even if she's woken up, her phone might be out of charge. So you're kind of running through the logical explanations for it for quite some time, really. By the time I got home back in, I would say that was early afternoon. There were police officers at the house when I arrived back home. So that then was quite an immediate concern that already the police were starting escalating it. By the Saturday afternoon, after taking the.

[Narrator]

Initial report from Sian's boyfriend Kevin, Swindon police immediately questioned the friends Sian was out with. They couldn't offer any useful Information. They hadn't run into any issues throughout the night and there were no incidents or suspicious people in the club. CCTV footage from the Suju nightclub showed Sian leaving the club alone at 2:52am Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher had done a colleague a favour and swapped his encore weekend.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

So I was on call and at home. Always remain in the county and in close proximity when on call. Funnily enough, it wasn't my on call weekend. I'd agreed to swap with a colleague because he'd been working so many hours on a different case. Yeah, but for that I'd have. I'd have not picked up the Sian O' Callaghan kidnap at all. At about 6 o' clock on Saturday 19th March, I was called by officers from Swindon Police station. They were increasingly concerned regarding the safety and welfare of Sian o', Callaghan, who they'd been investigating as a missing person. They'd spent the day doing the obvious checks of hospitals, check of their home address and so on. They decided at that time to escalate the issue to me as the on call senior investigating officer for the force. So of course I. I picked that issue up. I took a briefing over the telephone, obviously shared the concerns of the officers that had been investigating to that point and dropped everything and, and ran up to Swindon to. To see things firsthand, get a first hand account and work out precisely what was known and what lines of inquiry we should be instigating with what level of resource and what urgency. The first call to the police came from Kevin reap at about 9:40 in the morning. I got the call from my colleagues at about 6 o' clock in the evening. So during that intervening period of time they'd have taken an account from the close associates of S. Callahan, pieced together what could be established about her movements from the night before and some basic telephony.

[Narrator]

One of the first things investigators did was check Sian's mobile phone records. The text message sent by Kevin at 3:24am Pinged off a tower that put the location of Sian's phone in the area of Savernak 4 Forest. At the time, the exact location of Sian's phone could not be identified. It could only be narrowed down to a six and a half mile radius around the phone tower. For Steve Fulcher, that was the starting point of the investigation.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

The location of the phone at the time of last contact had moved from Old Town in Swindon to somewhere in the Savernack Forest, a distance of some 20 miles. And that had happened between last known sightings of sian at about 10 to 3 in the morning, till the last contact, when her phone was in savernak forest at 3:24. So within a half hour period, Sian, or at least her phone, had moved from Old Town in Swindon to somewhere in the Savanac Forest with no and that was a primary cause of concern. The instinct is critical and makes the difference between the ability to save somebody's life or otherwise. And I'd set three hypotheses, three possible answers to why her phone is suddenly in savernak forest at 3:24 and in the middle of the night. The first was, well, she could have gone off with somebody she met in Suju's nightclub. She could have had her phone stolen and that could be in the middle of Savernak Forest. Whereas she is somewhere else, yet to be determined. Or the most worrying of all, of course, is that she has been taken there. And the question then for Kevin Reap and for the family is why would she go to the middle of savernak forest at 3:24 in the morning? Is that within character? Is there any reason why she would have visited somebody there that was known?

[Narrator]

How Sian or her phone suddenly moved from Swindon 20 miles to the Savernak Forest was not the only concern. If someone had taken Sian, the statistics were grim.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

The statistics indicate that if a party is abducted with criminal intent, that they live an average of six hours on average. Of course, I would argue that no case is average and that every case must be taken on its merits. But the reality is that that form of criminality results in a very high proportion of cases in the murder of the abducted party. Now, I didn't work on the assumption that she was dead. I had her abduction as one of a number of hypotheses that I was working to. And because of the nature of that hypothesis and what I know about kidnap and survivability, I had to move with every resource and every ounce of energy and effort that I could muster. If I assumed she was dead, then she would be dead, because there is no other cavalry that's coming. It's me and my team or nothing. There is no party to pass the buck to.

[Casey]

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[Narrator]

Vulture made a decision, an important decision, to immediately escalate the investigation. He designated it as a category a crime in action, the most serious category. It means it is a major investigation of significant concern where any member of the public is at risk, the offender is unknown and the investigation and securing of evidence requires the allocation of significant resources. Journalist Steve Brodie covered the case for the BBC at the time.

[Steve Brodie]

I think that the police and certainly Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher knew that at the very least she'd been abducted and I think that's why they took it seriously. They took it very seriously very early on.

[Narrator]

As a journalist, Brodie got the sense right away that there was something different about this case.

[Steve Brodie]

You get missing persons today, police will put out a message saying, we're looking for so and so. By the afternoon they've turned up or even next day, the vast majority of missing persons generally turn up. And this wasn't one of those. I think the people got the feeling. There was a feeling that this was pretty awful and that something would have to be done.

[Narrator]

Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher could feel it too. A young woman who didn't come home and her phone pinging in a forest 20 miles from where she was last seen. His grave concern for the welfare of Shan o' Callaghan was the top priority.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

Information that supported my. My concern was the fact that the family had been desperately trying to get hold of Sian throughout the morning of Saturday the 19th and she hadn't responded to anybody. That's completely out of character. So her phone is in the middle of a remote rural area and she hasn't responded to her mother, to her boyfriend or anybody. So, working on the hypothesis that she's been abducted from the last seen location in Swindon Old Town, I conducted this investigation as a crime in action and what that means is that one prioritizes very clearly the life of the hostage or the victim. In this case, Sian o'. Callaghan. Everything else is subordinate to the notion of finding Sian, finding her as swiftly as possible and seeking to save her life. Got search teams both in the immediate vicinity of Suju's, got house to house inquiries going. I'm looking for more CCTV evidence of where Sian went. I've got telephony inquiries going on simultaneously, because what else can telephony tell me? Simultaneously conducting inquiries with known associates, witnesses at the time, everybody that was in Suju's nightclub, for instance, looking at the family cohort, looking at any known associates and movements on that night. And it all needs to be done fast, time and simultaneously.

[Narrator]

As the senior investigating officer, or sio, Steve's decision to escalate the case to a category A crime in action had a number of impacts on how the investigation was conducted further down the line, which we will explore in detail later. For now, it was a huge escalation in gravity, speed and resourcing, with major knock on impacts for his police department. It was something he knew he would have to justify to his bosses.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

I would suggest that even if we found Sian within a number of hours, it would have Been a worthwhile response because you don't know what you don't know at that given point in time. So that was the first thing. Second thing was that in terms of categorization, particularly after my initial lines of inquiry established that clearly the first two hypotheses were unlikely and the most likely was the most concerning of all, that is, she hasn't willingly gone to the middle of the Savernak Forest of her own volition and therefore was most likely to have been abducted, justified my categorizing as a category A inquiry. Now, inquiries are categorized according to the impact it would have on the rest of policing, the public and budget and finance. So I saw this as a crime in action that required as much resources the police force could find to swiftly and professionally find Sian in the shortest period of time possible. If she was found alive and well and she'd gone off with a friend, well, so be it. But actually, I had called it right, as had my colleagues in Swindon, a great number of police forces and police responses would never have actually got into a position of dealing with this as a crime in action. In the timescale in which we did, it would have been a missing person inquiry. You'd have had a 24 hour period of checking hospitals, you'd have had major crime teams oftentimes claiming that they only deal with homicide. Therefore, they want to see a body before they take it on. So your dedicated detectives around homicide wouldn't necessarily join in. I mean, I talk in general terms and it's certainly not generally the case, but it comes down to individual SIO decision making. What are we going to do here? How much resource are we going to put in how much effort we're going to instigate to ensure that we prioritise the most important thing. Instinct is honed over many, many years of experience, usually bitter experience of cases that one has dealt with. So I'd been a police officer for 28 years, dealt with many crimes in action. Kidnap and homicides, and of course, a whole raft of other offenses as well. I was a professional detective. That's what I did for a living. From the accounts of the girls that she was with that evening, they'd left her in Suju. So we knew that we wanted to get the footage from Suju's nightclub, which we gathered, we could see that she was shown on the cameras in the backyard of that premises socializing with people. So of course the question is asked, who are those people? Do they have any involvement in her disappearance?

[Narrator]

By late Saturday night, Fulcher was still no closer to locating Sian. And the investigation continued into Sunday morning, by which point Sian had been missing for over 24 hours. It was time for Fulcher to retrace the steps of the missing woman and also her abductor.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

On Sunday morning, I went to Old Town, to Suju's nightclub, retraced the steps. This is all about trying to put yourself back into the position both of Sian and potentially of Sian's abductor. What's happened here? What can I sense? What can I see? What's out of place? Where could she have gone? I mean, simple things like the layout of that old town. There's derelict buildings, there's recreation grounds, there's whole rafts of places that could potentially be searched for Sian. She could have been dragged off into bushes in this location. We'd better put a search team in there and so on. So getting a feeling for the size of the task in terms of searching for Sian physically, but also putting yourself back into the mindset of both Sian and the other party to this, if she has been abducted, how did he pick her out? What would he have seen it? What would his mode of approach been? So those kind of things are standard but useful.

[Narrator]

When an examination of CCTV footage showed Sian only at the nightclub and gave no clues to her whereabouts, it was time for Steve Vulture to follow Sian's phone into the forest.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

I had no knowledge of where she'd gone. The last sighting was on that CCTV footage at Sooju's. So obviously there was a search parameter within the immediate environs of Swindon Old Town in the vicinity of Sooju's. But I knew that her phone at least is somewhere in the Savernak Forest. Now, it's a six and a half kilometer radius area, which is huge. And the first thing I did was get traffic officers to do the drive. How long would it take physically to get between those two points and to send the helicopter up on that evening with heat seeking equipment to see whether they could find any traces with a flyover.

[Narrator]

The Savernak Forest is the stuff of fairy tales. Giant oaks with names like Big Belly and Sleeping Dragon twist themselves into agonized shapes. In winter they are dark and bare, covered in snow. In autumn, they shine like gold. On Sunday 20th March 2011, the early morning fog cast a pall over the forest. There was a chill in the air and the temperature hovered around 8 degrees Celsius for most of the day. It was here that the electronic tracking systems that operate between phones and towers sent the police.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

The mobile telephony system works on the basis of signals being passed between fixed points masts which relay the signal and you can get a reading off the relevant mast that the signals bounced off. So we can be definitively clear that her phone at least was in Swindon old town at 10 to 3, but her phone at least was in the middle of Savernak Forest half an hour later. The difficulty with the Savernak Forest is that because it's such a rural remote location, there's only one mast. And what we would generally do is triangulate the signals to get a closer geographic fix on where the phone or the individual is. With only one mast in Savernak Forest, that wasn't possible. So of course it left a huge potential search area of 6 and a half kilometer radius within which Sian, or at least her phone had to be. But clearly the priority, or all I knew at that stage was that her phone at least is in that Savernak Forest somewhere and that's got to be searched. We've got to try and find them, we've got to do it urgently. You know, a significant proportion of resource was put into that because you're talking about a colossal area if you're going to do a formal line search. A line search is a police technique where you, as it suggests, walk in a line, but you're within arm's breadth of each other. So you can imagine what resource commitment that would require if you were going to do that. Obviously the helicopters useful in terms of heat seeking dogs as well. So we sent the dogs out to see whether they could get a trace.

[Narrator]

One of the many early strategies in the investigation was to try and utilise both traditional media and social media opportunities in order to support the investigation. If they could inform the public, perhaps that could lead to a crucial witness coming forward. But something unexpected happened. BBC journalist Steve Brody explains how the public were quick to respond to the story of the missing young woman.

[Steve Brodie]

I think it may have been on the Sunday or the Monday when the public began to get aware of this. And I have to say there was instant rapport between the public and the police and indeed the media. It became one of those stories. You never know why a story gets to the heart of the public. There's no great thing about it.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

Why does it happen?

[Steve Brodie]

Why doesn't it happen? This was one of those stories where people wanted to find this young girl.

[Narrator]

The huge public response took Steve Fulcher by surprise as well. Thousands of people converged on the forest to look for Sian.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

It was the most extraordinary reaction. Even if I'd wanted to set a different press strategy, I couldn't, because social media was alive to the fact that Sian had gone missing amongst her friends and family. People were turning up in Savernak Forest to physically search for her in the hope that she was recoverable, that she'd perhaps been left somewhere and was injured and could be saved. So it's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever come across, actually, in which by the Sunday and certainly The Monday, over 10,000 people from Swindon, voluntarily, unasked for by me, unbidden, had given up their time, their work, their weekend, to look for Sian o'. Callaghan.

[Narrator]

Steve Brody watched the response from the.

[Steve Brodie]

Newsroom and it was quite extraordinary. I was in the newsroom in Bristol and I saw these pictures come in of hundreds of people turned up, not scores, hundreds of people turned up, all passionately wanting to help the police find Sian. An unprecedented public response. In fact, there were so many members of the public turned up that the police didn't have enough officers to direct them properly.

[Narrator]

Sian's brother Liam was awed by the community response for his missing sister. Not only did it help his family to know there were so many people searching for Sian, but it allowed them to stay at home together and wait for news, as advised by their family liaison officer, Flo, for short.

[Liam O'Callaghan]

Yeah, I was very surprised that they'd taken aback and also proud as well, you know, to think that the community sort of rallied like that. I remember seeing on the media coaches turning up and people actually getting into coaches and actually going to Savernack in hordes and obviously going out searching and watching the police sort of coordinate it as well. Being very impressed that you're, you know, living around people that are prepared to do that. Being an older brother, you kind of want to get involved. You kind of want to get involved in the searches. And I had people around me sort of saying that maybe it's best we just sort of stay in our kind of bubble that we had formed in the house and that it wasn't a good idea to be going out. And actually, I think it was one of the family liaison officers actually advised that it probably wasn't the best use of my time. But then to see, obviously on the media, that there was all these people in Swindon actually going out, actively trying to find Sian sort of relaxed, my own sort of need to want to go out and hand out posters and sort of try and find Sian.

[Narrator]

And once the public became involved in droves, it spurred the police to go to even greater lengths. Steve Fulcher explains this flow on effect.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

What was striking about this entire inquiry, the professionalism of the police force, not just Wiltshire Police, but in surrounding forces as well. Officers were, I couldn't send them off duty, they would not leave duty because they were so committed to this notion of finding Sian. You know, my role was to ensure that we had the right hypothesis and the right resources and the right sense of direction, so everybody had a proper role to perform. You can see how many things you need to do simultaneously. I always talk about 24 simultaneous strands that if you drop one of them you'll be criticized later or the inquiry will fail. So of course I want intelligence experts there, I want forensic experts there, I want telephony experts. And these guys come round in one concerted effort. It's one of the. It is the moment in policing which is most gratifying when you've got such a professional team working to a clear direction so effectively. And what we did, what we did in this short period of time is, I'm not going to say it's unprecedented because I'm sure there's lots of other good examples, but what we did was extraordinary and all dedicated to this one end. We will find Sian.

[Narrator]

On the next episode of the Detective's Dilemma.

[Casey]

I just want to say how very.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

Worried we are about Sean. The footage from the CCTV camera was quite a breakthrough on that Monday morning.

[Elaine Pickford]

It's blatantly obvious that she got in that car.

[Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher]

Whoever had taken her had done it for criminal purposes.

[Narrator]

Thanks for listening. If you'd like to hear the rest.

[Casey]

Of the Detective's Dilemma, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Pura. Tis the season to unwrap new memories. Make holiday gifting beautiful, thoughtful and effortless with Pura's Black Friday sale. Shop up to 30% off site wide, including curated gift sets for everyone on your list. Sleek and modern diffusers for home and car and premium long lasting single scents that make the perfect stocking stuffers. Shop the [e-mail] for for a limited time only.

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