Eleanor Neale
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And it became even more concerning when texts stopped delivering to her phone.
Calls weren't going through.
It had either run out of battery and she hadn't charged it up again, which would have been weird enough, or it had been completely switched off.
It got to a point where there was really no reasonable explanation for her radio silence, and so at 8pm that following night, almost 24 hours since she was last heard from, Sarah's boyfriend reported her missing to the police.
Within hours, news of Sarah's disappearance was spreading like wildfire.
Social media posts were going viral with her picture and her description, appealing for anyone with information to come forward.
And the very next day, it was all over the news, national news, sending shockwaves not only across London, but the whole entire country.
Rather quickly, people were starting to think the worst, that she hadn't just gotten lost or decided to go off on her own for a while.
Everyone feared that something really bad had happened to Sarah.
Her family shared that exact same fear, and they immediately made the 220-mile journey down south to London from York to join the search.
Multiple times, the route that Sarah would have taken home that night was retraced and retraced.
Search parties walked those exact streets again and again, just praying that there was something that they had missed, a clue that might lead them to her.
Within just two days, police had received over 120 phone calls reporting tips and potential sightings.
Everything was followed up on, but none of them led to Sarah.
Door-to-door inquiries had officers speaking with over 750 households in the area to see if they'd seen or heard anything from the night of the disappearance, but again, they got very little from this.
Appeals went out to the public for CCTV footage, both from businesses and even from people's private security cameras, like dashcams in their car or smart doorbells, to see if anyone had caught Sarah at all.
And only with this could police begin to piece together what had really transpired on Sarah's walk home.
CCTV footage catches Sarah during the first 15 minutes of her journey.
She's going the exact route that would be expected and everything seems fine.
There's nothing immediately suspicious or concerning.