The ripples from ‘Vanished’ documentary
New witnesses and facts have continued to emerge in the wake of the release of ‘Vanished: The Surrey Schoolgirl’ last week on Real Stories, my latest commission for the channel made with journalist Martin Bright and director Ryan Ralph.
Today it appeared as the subject of a double-page spread in The Belfast Telegraph focused on Martin’s partner in crime investigation, ex-counter-terrorism cop Liam McAuley.
The Belfast Telegraph 8th May 2018
Ex-Met officer from Belfast and his search for missing teen Ruth Wilson
Belfast man Liam McAuley is part of a new film which looks at the cold case of Surrey girl Ruth Wilson who disappeared 23 years ago
Ruth Wilson vanished in 1995 after travelling to a beauty spot in Surrey, England. Fifteen years later Liam McAuley, a former north Belfast man who had just retired from the Metropolitan Police, picked up a newspaper, read her story and became enthralled.
Mr McAuley (58) began investigating the disappearance, and has joined forces with an English journalist called Martin Bright, and produced the documentary Vanished: The Surrey Schoolgirl, in the hope of shining a new light on the seemingly forgotten case.
Liam retired from the police nine years ago. A year later, while perusing a Surrey newspaper, he came across the Ruth Wilson case. The 16-year-old girl had gone missing in Surrey in 1995, and he was immediately intrigued.
“I happened to be reading a local paper and came across the article about Ruth,” he said.
“It just didn’t seem to add up to me instinct ively. This was a 16-year-old schoolgirl, who has just disappeared and nothing has been heard of her ever since. We are now approaching 23 years.
“When I read the article for the first time, I just had that feeling that something was just not quite right. A 16-year-old just can’t disappear.
“She comes from a rural village. She wouldn’t have been street smart like her city cousins.
“She’s left home in the clothes that she’s standing up in. She had a bank card that was not activated. She was dropped in a rural part of the country and that was the last that was seen of her.
“You have to think there was something not quite right there.”
The 30-minute film, which is on YouTube, works from the standpoint that Ruth is no longer alive. Surrey Police and the Wilson family opted not to contribute, but many of Ruth’s school friends, along with her ex-boyfriend, did come forward.
“The police in the area remained tight-lipped and were no help. It was all very odd,” he added.
The film claims Ruth had been unaware that her mother, who had died when she was young, had taken her own life until shortly before she disappeared.
It also features interviews with Ruth’s friends who claim she had discussed running away.
Later, the film suggests there is potentially more information available which has not yet been explored.
Liam left Northern Ireland as a teenager and spent 30 years in the Metropolitan Police and Counter Terrorism Unit, focusing solely on Islamic Terrorism.
“I grew up in north Belfast,” he explained. “I lived in what was classed as the ‘murder triangle’. I lived all through the Seventies, going to school hearing all the tragic stories from friends and some of the pupils at school, what happened to them.
“Where I lived I had friends on both sides of the community. When you grow up somewhere like that you think this is your world, this is it. But it was a case of do you get stuck with it or try and carve on with your own life?
ARTICLE CONTINUES in The Belfast Telegraph
Simple Pleasures part 4 
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