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A former detective has expressed concern about the sheer amount of information police have to sift through in the case of missing mother Samantha Murphy, saying volunteer search teams may be making their job more difficult.
There is still no trace of the 51-year-old woman after she disappeared while jogging in Ballarat East on February 4.
The latest update on the case is that investigators reveal they will now be observing mobile phone towers in the area where Ms Murphy went missing to identify the movements of people nearby.
However, analyzing cell tower data could be complicated in the Murphy case due to the number of people living in the area.
Narelle Fraser, who worked in Victoria Police for 27 years, 15 of them as a detective in the rape and homicide squads and the missing persons unit, said police would likely be working 24/7. the week in the case given the large amount of information from the public that comes in.
A former detective has expressed concern about the sheer amount of information police have to sift through in the case of missing mother Samantha Murphy, saying volunteer search teams may be making their job more difficult.
Fraser said he knew the volunteers were “desperate” to help and if they found anything they considered important they would take it to the police.
“Then the police have to file a report and have to find out if it’s part of the investigation or not,” he told ABC.
“All of this takes time and I think sometimes it can cause great difficulties.”
Detectives will now track mobile data from the Ballarat area, with particular interest in phones that “pinged” from towers covering the area they believe Ms Murphy was in hours after her run.
Phone data could help detectives identify people of interest and provide new leads as the search for Ms Murphy enters 30 days.
Police to try new tactic in search for missing mother of three Samantha Murphy
The telephone ‘ping’ would detect people traveling on the roads in cars and even those who ride a bicycle or walk on the roads.
The phone’s metadata has been crucial to the investigation after they identified a precise location in the Mount Clear area, about 7 kilometers from his home, about an hour after running 14 kilometers.
Initial reports claimed Ms Murphy’s phone rang at Buninyong Tower at 5pm on the day of her disappearance.
However, that information, which has not yet been confirmed, came 10 hours after she had gone out for a run.
Former homicide detective Charlie Bezzina said that while detectives focusing on the phone data have just been reported, it is very likely that police have already been investigating that line of inquiry.
Volunteer search teams are seen in the Ballarat bushland on February 24.
“Just because it’s just coming out now, don’t believe for a minute that they’re doing it now,” he told Sunrise on Monday morning.
—They would have done it quite a few weeks ago. They are probably still waiting for the data to arrive.
Bezzina said reviewing phone data would be a “massive task” for detectives who are already trawling through 12,000 hours of CCTV and chasing 700 pieces of information.
“A lot of times it’s going to be a matter of a phone call because they’re just not physically able to go out and talk to these people,” he said.
“They could come from anywhere, on their way to South Australia or further north. So it could be anything. It requires a lot of labor.’