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A scream like someone gasping in shock was heard by two witnesses when mother-of-two Nicola Bulley is feared to have slipped to her death, an inquest heard today.
Both tennis coach Veronica Claesen and nurse Helen O’Neill told Preston's County Hall the noise rang out from the banks of the River Wyre just after 9.30am.
The inquest heard this morning the icy water in January this year when the tragedy happened could have killed Ms Bulley in just 25 seconds when she fell in and drowned.
This afternoon Ms Claesen said she had heard 'a very short scream', adding: ‘My immediate thought was someone having a bit of fun at the back of the graveyard'.
She described it as sounding like ‘an element of surprise’, clarifying that it was ‘an inhale scream and not an exhale scream’ and giving a gasp in demonstration.
Ms O’Neill, who had been having breakfast when she heard it, had mistakenly put it down to girls playing.
She said: ‘It wasn’t an alarming noise. It was over in a couple of seconds.’
Professor Michael Tipton, a world-leading expert on the effects of falling into cold water, gave evidence about how a typical response to plunging into a river where the temperature was 10C or below was to 'gasp' and inhale one or two litres of water.
Commenting
on Ms Bulley's build and the heavy outdoor clothing she was wearing on
the day she went missing, he said: 'It would only take one or two
breaths to cross the lethal dose for drowning.' Someone in that
situation would have around 25 seconds before they lost consciousness,
he said, experiencing 'very rapid incapacitation'. Police diver Matthew
Thackray said photographs shown to the hearing of the riverbank above
which Ms Bulley was last seen showed there was a steep 'cliff edge' into
the water where she fell....<<<Read More>>>....
