Nicola Bulley’s partner in tears over horror messages and kids’ plea for ‘mummy’

s heartbroken partner has broken his silence, revealing the distressing messages received from strangers and voicing their children’s poignant appeals for their missing mum.

, recounted the torment of the search for Nicola 18 months prior. Her disappearance at the end of January sparked a 23-day police operation that began after Paul reported her missingleading to immense public scrutiny and relentless social media speculation.

Tragically, Nicola was discovered in the River Wyre on February 19, not far from where she was last seen.

A new documentary now delves into the tumultuous period of the search and the ensuing whirlwind of online activity that left Nicola’s family distraught. Paul acknowledged the media and social network interest initially seemed beneficial, but it quickly became overwhelming, likening it to “poking a monster”.

During the programme, he disclosed: “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.”, reports .

He expressed how the family felt stifled, unable to reply to online comments for fear their words would be manipulated or misinterpreted. Describing a sense of being “silenced” by the circumstances, Paul shared the added agony of malicious rumors on top of an already harrowing ordeal, saying: “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.”

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’.”

Last year, a coroner concluded that Nicolas unfortunate demise was accidental. It was determined she fell into a river suffering from “cold water shock”.

The father, Paul, also spoke candidly about struggling to stay hopeful for their children during the draining hunt for Nicola. He expressed how nights were particularly challenging, revealing: “The nights were the hardest,” while mornings would renew his hope.

There was “no evidence” pointing towards suicide, putting some speculations to rest.