A former detective has raised concerns about the vast information police have to comb through in the case of missing mother Samantha Murphy – saying volunteer search crews may be making their job harder.
There is yet to be any trace of the 51-year-old after she vanished while going on a run in Ballarat East on February 4.
The latest update in the case is investigators revealing they will now look at mobile phone towers in the area Ms Murphy vanished to identify the movements of people nearby.
Analysis of mobile phone tower data could, however, prove challenging in the Murphy case due to the number of people that live in the area.
Narelle Fraser, who worked on the Victoria Police force for 27 years, 15 of those as a Detective with the Rape and Homicide Squads and Missing Persons Unit, said police would likely be working 24/7 on the case given the sheer amount of information from the public coming in.
A former detective has raised concerns about the vast information police have to comb through in the case of missing mother Samantha Murphy – saying volunteer search crews may be making their job harder
Ms Fraser said she knew volunteers were ‘desperate’ to help and if they found something they thought was important they would take that to police.
‘Then the police have to take a report, they have to find out whether it’s part of the investigation or not,’ she told the ABC.
‘All this takes time and I think sometimes it can cause great difficulties.’
Detectives will now trawl through mobile data from the Ballarat area, with particular interest in phones that ‘pinged’ from towers covering the zone they believe Ms Murphy was in hours after her run.
The phone data could potentially help detectives identify people of interest and provide fresh leads as the search for Ms Murphy enters 30 days.
Police will try a new tactic in the search for missing mother-of-three, Samantha Murphy
Phone ‘pinging’ would pick up people travelling along roads in cars and even those cycling or walking on tracks.
Phone metadata has been crucial to the investigation after it pinpointed a precise location in the Mount Clear area, some 7km from her home, about an hour into her 14km jog.
Initial reports claimed Ms Murphy’s phone pinged off the Buninyong tower at 5pm on the day she went missing.
However, that information, which remains to be confirmed, came in 10 hours after she had left for her run.
Former homicide detective Charlie Bezzina said while detectives focusing on phone data has only just been reported, it’s highly likely police would’ve already been investigating that line of inquiry.
Volunteer search crews are seen in bushland in Ballarat on February 24
‘The fact that it’s just come out now, don’t think for one minute they’re just doing it now,’ he told Sunrise on Monday morning.
‘They would have done that quite some considerable weeks ago. They’re still probably waiting for the data to come through.’
Mr Bezzina said scouring through phone data would be an ‘enormous task’ for detectives who are already trawling through 12,000 hours of CCTV and chasing up 700 pieces of information.
‘A lot of times it will be a matter of a phone call because they’re just not physically able to get out there and talk to these people,’ he said.
‘They could be from anywhere, on their way through to South or going further north. So it could be anything. It is labour intensive.’