39 year old is neighbour, Paul Meehan.

Adjoining lofts too.....

It seems like they had plenty of time to work out a plan before they called the alarm on the poor girls disapperance.

One wonders what might have been in it for him

Gran is a carer whoever asked.

Perhaps the police cant believe the incompetence of themselves and are forcing the fact that the body must have been moved. Along with SH blaming others for his crime.

Yeah well Occam's Razor and all that, but if this were a movie the neighbour would have killed the girl, lied to the media and police, kept the body at his, then planted it in the loft and tipped off the cops anonymously. Unlikely of course, but all explanations here are starting to sound very odd.

Can't believe the nan has been arrested. Surely she's not involved.

Clunge if this were a movie, it would'be been a couple of rogue cops that did it, conducted the initial search and blamed it on the family

Pixie you are correct.

But i hold on to the hope that Christine has only been arrested on suspicion because SH is lying and that she had a car for possible removal of body but that it never happened.

Adjoining lofts?  Well, that does make some sort of sense then..


Incidentally, all this talk about needing warrants doesn't really get to the bottom of things. It apparently standard procedure in every case for the police to check the house from top to bottom whenever a missing child is involved. I doubt that would stretch as far as ripping off wall panels, but it would certainly be very negligent of the police not to have checked the loft thoroughly. If the body was always up there, then it should have been found immediately.

Of course, if the neighbour was involved, and there were adjoining lofts, that might explain a few things...

It was just a thought HonkyJoe....But could provide a possible explanation as to why the poor girls body wasn't found at the time of the original searches....

Indeed Ylime. Lots of possible motives and things that may have happened, but you could well have hit on something there. Good thinking.

Which nick is he in?  I want to bang on the side of the van and yell "ROT IN HELL YOU F@CKING PEEDO MONSTER!" as they take hime to court for his plea hearing.

Clunge, I seriously doubt that would happen if the couple were innocent.  A police officer (probably a woman!) with a sympathetic voice would come in and say 'I'm very sorry Mr and Mrs X, but it is procedure in a case like this to search the house, go through the loft etc. Our officers will try and be as discreet as possible.'   Probably Mr and Mrs X would sob a bit and give their consent and the search would go ahead in the background. It would be highly unusual for a scared and upset couple to go 'No dammit, I demand that you come back with a full warrant!' And as others have pointed out, that would certainly raise a few suspicions at Police HQ if it did happen..  (Although it might give the occupants sufficient time to say to the neighbour, 'ey up, mind if we send a package through your loft space?')

xmoneyx you're 4 hours behing here

is he chief wiggum in disguise?

Yes A_T, but it would be harder to get access to the neighbour's house, unless you had good evidence. Checking the Hazell residence would be a formality, but if the body was being moved into the neighbour's house at certain times, that would make it tricky for the police. Unless the neighbour let them in, they wouldn't be able to search his house without good grounds.   Finding blood stains on bedsheets or a dog picking up some sort of scent would be good grounds.  Just saying 'Ey up mate, your house is connected through the loft, and we've got a hunch something may have happened 'ere' wouldn't be..

Who knows, maybe they waited until the neighbour had left his house for a bit before making plans to search the residence, and that's why the body was, at that time, in part of the Hazell house?

Unfair: too much commentary with hindsight gpong on here :(

Not really unfair. Many people remarked early on how baffling the case was. There was a strong indication that Tia had never left the house (no CCTV of her, mobile left at home) yet she hadn't been found. That bafflement was based on the reasonable assumption that police would have thoroughly searched the immediate environment. They hadn't.

A_T, the issue you're talking about isn't so much about hurting people's feelings (although that may have been a factor in other aspects of this case). We don't live in a police state, thankfully. The police can't just insist on being given access to any house they care to enter. They need to have evidence first, even if it's only a small amount.

They'd need to have some evidence pointing to something having happened in Hazell's house. That might be enough. Some sort of evidence that the body had been stored in the loft space (but wasn't there at this time) would give them very good grounds.

In any case, it doesn't look as though they found the body at the neighbour's house, so they probably didn't need to access his house at all. The police wording was always very strange, as they talked about needing to investigate how long the body had been in its current position. That would certainly play in with the idea that they thought it had been recently moved to its current position, and would tally with the neighbour having had it in his house for part of the time.  Chances are it was found in part of the house belonging to Hazell. But it may have been in the neighbour's house during the other searches...