The partner of Nicola Bulley has described the horrific messages he received as police searched for his missing partner in January last year

Nicola Bulley’s partner has spoken out for the first time, sharing the horrifying messages he received from strangers and their children’s heartbreaking plea for their mum.

In his tearful first interview, Paul Ansell spoke about what it was really like during the tragic search for Nicola 18 months ago. Her at the end of January last year led to a 23 day police search after Paul had alerted police to her being missing. What followed was huge media attention and coverage on social media. Sadly, her body was found in the River Wyre on February 19, about a mile from where she vanished.

Now, a new BBC documentary looks back on what happened during the days of the search and the frenzy of interest on social media which took its toll on Nicola’s family. Paul describes the media and social media attention as initially being a good thing. However, he admits it soon started to feel like they were “poking a monster”.

Paul Ansell in new BBC documentary ( 
Image:
BBC)
He told the documentary: “I was getting direct messages from people that I’ve never met – they don’t know me, they don’t know us, they don’t know Nikki.”

He said the family felt they were unable to respond to online message as they feared a reply would be reposted or taken out of context. Paul described he felt “silenced” at the situation.

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“On top of the trauma of the nightmare that we’re in, to then think that all these horrendous things are being said about me towards Nikki – everyone has a limit.”

“I was getting direct messages from people that I’ve never met. They don’t know me, they don’t know us, they don’t know Nikki. They know nothing about us,” he added. “Just messages like ‘you b******’. ‘We know what you did’. ‘You know you can’t hide Paul’, that kind of stuff. “There was some that I felt like replying to, but then if you reply to that, they’ll just screenshot your reply, if that’ll end up on social media. And so you’re literally silenced, and you can’t do anything about it.”

The search for Nicola gripped the nation ( 
Image:
BBC News Archive)
Paul realised that Nicola was missing on the Friday morning after she took their two children to school with their family dog Willow. Initially, he hadn’t been worried but when the children’s school phoned him at 10.30am to say that someone had found their dog and Nicola’s phone by a bench, he knew “something wasn’t right here”.

“I mean, that’s not a normal phone call to get,” he explains. “She would never have left Willow.” He added: “It’s where you feel like your legs have gone. In a situation like that, your mind is going absolutely crazy. And so I rang the police as I was driving.”

Reliving the phone call she received from Paul at her desk, Nicola’s sister Louise Cunningham describes him as being “panicky and frantic”. She says: “He was like, ‘something’s happened, something strange has happened’.”

The search had a heartbreaking impact on the couple’s children, with Nicola’s mum Dorothy recalling an incredibly sad conversation with one of her grandchildren. She says: “One morning, I got up. The youngest one, she says: ‘Cold, isn’t it, Nanny?’ She said: ‘I hope mummy’s not cold and hungry’.”

Nicola’s sister spoke about the heartbreaking phone call she received from Paul ( 
Image:
Rogan Productions)Paul said he had tried to remain positive throughout the ill-fated search for the sake of the children he shared with Nicola. However, he admitted it was tough at times. “The nights were the hardest,” he confessed.

“In the morning the hope would be strong. It used to go dark at like 4pm. It used to get to about 3pm and then I’d start panicking that I knew it would start going dark in an hour. So we had an hour to find her. And then obviously I’d have the girls. The first they’d do when they came out of school was run over and say ‘have we found mummy?”

A coroner recorded Nicola’s death as accidental last year. They said she had fallen into the river and suffered “cold water shock”, adding there was “no evidence” to suggest suicide.