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In 2012, we were contacted by Nottinghamshire Police for assistance in a missing persons investigation. Nearly two years previously, Debbie married Jamie Starbuck¹ following a relatively brief courtship. They told the family they had planned to leave the country shortly after the wedding and embark on a two-year around-the-world adventure, financed primarily by Debbie’s savings.

Over time, however, Debbie’s family grew concerned. She was writing much less regularly and with much less information than had been her practice on previous trips abroad, during which she regularly sent long emails detailing her travels. Getting increasingly worried, they contacted the police, who wrote separately to both Jamie and Debbie’s email addresses and had a brief exchange with both. These emails suggested that the couple had briefly separated but were essentially well. The email exchanges, however, led the police to become suspicious that Jamie was replying not only from his own email address but also from Debbie’s and writing as her. The police instigated a missing persons inquiry locally, nationally, and internationally and approached the Centre for Forensic Linguistics (CFL) at Aston University to seek assistance in analyzing the emails and to determine whether their suspicions were correct.