Friday 23 February

Friday 23 February is an important temporal marker in the search for the missing women: while investigators pursue a lead connected to the Briggs twins, Felicity Wanless learns that her captor has brought another woman into the loft to replace her. The date’s narrative thread joins the practical difficulty of tracing disappearances to the serial nature of the captivity.

The investigation and the missing women

The detectives’ working picture begins with separate, ordinary journeys that left few witnesses. Becky Allsopp had returned from a business meeting, taken the Metro from Newcastle Central Station to Sunderland, and disappeared after leaving the Stadium of Light and walking beyond CCTV coverage. Louise Usher had left the gym after work; her father said she sometimes walked the mile home, sometimes took the bus, and only occasionally used a taxi. Investigators believed the women had been bundled into a vehicle, although nobody had reported shouting, screeching tyres, or a comparable disturbance. Their uncertainty was not simply about where the women had gone: it was how someone could take them without attracting notice.

A lead involving the Briggs twins

In a parallel strand, Gary Baxter and Jane Bowman were driving to speak with Billy-Jo Mason, the missing Briggs twins’ best friend. Jane hoped she might provide something useful; the investigators had drawn a blank on all three missing women. The scene emphasizes the mismatch between a town dense with people and CCTV cameras and the ease with which the women had disappeared. The visit is one concrete step in a search that had not yet yielded an answer.

Felicity is replaced

Late that evening, after the captor’s usual ordeal, Felicity heard an unusual commotion downstairs. She was accustomed to the sound of a door slamming or the television, but this time she heard a woman’s pleading voice turn to sobbing. The noise continued for fifteen or twenty minutes before the loft hatch opened and the light came on. A terrified young woman climbed in ahead of the captor, wearing the beige tunic and adult nappy that Felicity recognized from her own arrival. Felicity understood the sequence before it was explained: another woman had been taken, brought into the house, and prepared for the loft.

The captor told Felicity that she was finished and that he had a new victim. He shoved the newcomer forward and warned that she would not last as long if she was less obedient. The announcement makes replacement a mechanism of the captivity: Felicity’s place in the loft is not released but transferred to another woman, while the captor retains control over both their circumstances. On the following morning, he returned as usual and tied rope around Felicity’s legs before untying her ankles, leaving her able to walk only in small steps. That continuation falls after the Friday date marker, but shows that being replaced did not end her confinement or his control over her movements.

The cab clue in the wider search

CCTV later supplied a more specific version of the vehicle theory. Footage showed Jill Richards leaving a supermarket, walking past McDonald’s toward Roker Avenue, briefly disappearing from view, and reappearing at a bus stop outside the Salvation Army. She checked the timetable, then flagged down a car that looked like a black cab, though it had no sign on its roof. Eve Strong immediately connected the footage to the warning that women should hail only white cars displaying a taxi sign. The image sharpened the investigators’ concern: a vehicle could resemble a legitimate cab while failing the very visible test they had asked the public to use. Set beside the earlier gaps in CCTV coverage and the absence of reported struggles, the likely cab offered a way to understand how abductions could occur in the course of ordinary journeys without an obvious commotion.