Closing the net on missing camera mystery

A RETIRED postmistress started a modern Miss Marple-style investigation by enlisting website members to help her track down the owner of a lost camera.

Users of the Flickr website browsed photos found on the camera in the hope they would yield some clues.

They examined parts of car number plates, warning signs on a quarry, a pipe band and a puppy wearing a red coat, and suggested how these might help solve the mystery.

Rhonda Surman, of Alness in Ross-shire, had been on holiday with her husband Sam in April when he spotted a digital camera left at the Bronze Age broch at Glenelg near Kyle of Lochalsh.

Mr Surman left a note in case the owner came back and his wife handed the camera in to the police. Eight weeks later, after no one claimed it, it was returned to Mrs Surman.

"I looked at the photos. There were more than 700 of them, and seemed to be mostly of a young couple in their first home, a stag night and maybe even their honeymoon somewhere in Europe," Mrs Surman said.

She added: "I posted the photos on Flickr's help forum to see if there was any way of using it and its members to find the owner."

Immediately the web forum's members, using names such as "Stooshie", "Sandy", "emarinuk" and "howbeg" began piecing the jigsaw together.

Mrs Surman said: "Some of those on the forum looked at number plates and said the location was definitely Chelmsford or Birmingham. That turned out to be a bit of blind alley."

Then "emarinuk", noticing pictures of a pipe band, wrote: "Why don't you call or search about Stonehaven Pipe Band?"

"Sandy" posted: "I was brought up in Aberdeen and by the looks of it they live in the west end of Aberdeen…"

A picture of a man with a puppy wearing a red coat attracted many posts, with "howbeg" writing: "Why not print off pictures with bloke and dug and stick it on lampposts near where you think it was taken asking if anyone knows the man and dug and if so contact whoever?"

The net began to tighten when a couple of members thought they recognised the architecture in Aberdeen, trying to match lampposts in the photo and driving up and down the street where the camera's owner might be living.

Then "Stooshie" Googled the house number in Forest Avenue in the city and found a planning application for replacement windows on the council website.

Mrs Surman said: "I looked up their phone number and got the landlady. I asked: 'Are your tenants a couple? Do they have a puppy?' She said I was completely right and passed my phone number on to them."

Nick Filippelli, 28, from Pennsylvania, who works for an oil firm in Aberdeen, said: "My partner Tai and I had been across to Skye and Glencoe. On the way home we realised we didn't have the camera and were disappointed to lose our pictures.

"Several months later, out of the clear blue, I got a call saying 'have you lost a camera?' We went on to Flickr and saw a lot of people had done a lot of very creative detective work, and we were very touched. It is a little worrying that you could be tracked down online but they did it in a kind-spirited way."