Nicola and Paul before the tragedy (Image: BBC/Rogan Productions)
An explosive new documentary about the disappearance of and search for promises to detail three new revelations about the case.
It is claimed that police changed a statement about her mental health without telling her family. It will also emerge that her partner Paul Ansell was filmed by a so-called amateur sleuth at the school gates.
The programme also reveals new details about Nicola’s battle with alcohol that led to police releasing private information about her at a press conference.
Mum-of-two Nicola, 45, disappeared at about 9.40am on January 27, 2023 about half an hour after sending a text at 8.57am to a friend about a playdate.
Her last recorded sighting was around 9.10am. Her phone and the dog’s harness were discovered on a bench by the River Wyre about 25 minutes later and Willow, her springer spaniel, appeared distressed.
:
Her phone was also still logged into a Microsoft Teams work call that had ended at 9.30am. On that Friday morning, Ms Bulley had just dropped her two daughters, aged six and nine, off at school.
The subject of the earlier text was so normal against the unfolding situation in St Michael’s on Wyre, that it led many to assume she was unlikely to have disappeared by choice, leading to the intense spotlight and speculation.
Interviewed for the documentary, Mr Ansell described the madness and conspiracy theories that emerged once TikTokers came to the usually quiet area.
He received a string of messages from internet trolls saying they were convinced he’d played a part in Bulley’s disappearance.
Paul Ansell reflects on the search in the documentary (Image: BBC/Rogan Productions)
He said: “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,” Ansell said, revealing that he’d received messages saying ‘You can’t hide’ and ‘We know what you did’.
Mr Ansell tells how people were also suggesting he was having an affair with one of Nicola’s friends, and that a woman caught leaving the house on CCTV on the morning of the disappearance wasn’t her.
He said: “You release something to try and squash something and all it does is then spiral into something else.” He feared if he replied to the trolls, it would be posted online and used against him.
He said: “You can’t do anything about it.. on top of everything else, on top of the trauma of the nightmare we’re in – to then think that all of these horrendous things were being said about me – towards Nicky – everyone has a limit don’t they?”
He also tells how he was picking his daughters up at school when a TikToker called Curtis Arnold was stood in the school car park filming him.
Nicola Bulley by the same river (Image: Handout)
“I thought to myself, you’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. After it emerged that there had been an earlier incident at the family home, police called a press conference to try to stem rumours, but it made matters worse.
Louise Cunningham, Nicola’s sister, told the documentary that the family called 999 on January 10 when Nicola had been drinking and had fallen over and hurt her arm
She explained that Nicola had gone through a period of struggling with mental health, perimenopause and with alcohol consumption.
Mr Ansell said during the incident a call was made to the mental health support team, not police, but officers did attend.
But, before her disappearance she had stopped drinking and was “getting a lot more stability,” he said.
He added: “We were just hoping and praying that none of that would come out – because no one gets the story, no one understands the background.”
But, he said that instead of using the agreed term before with the family of “private medical history” at the press conference, officers added fuel to the fire with the vague reference to “a number of specific vulnerabilities” to explain why she was deemed “high risk”.
He said it was changed without their consent. Detective Superintendent Becky Smith, who used the odd term, says in the documentary: “Obviously the press conference didn’t go as I hoped it would.”
But she said police feared an imminent story about Nicola was about to break in the press.
Police said the statement was agreed, but it was still being finalised when it was released. She said: “By that, I don’t mean they were happy about this, they absolutely weren’t, but neither were we.”
The Bench where he phone was found (Image: ABNM Photography)
The family say they wanted certain paragraphs to be “tweaked” but that before they knew it, while they were still working on it, it had been released.
She added: “I understand in hindsight, it might seem we didn’t need to do that, but in the moment, when you are being told people are threatening to publish stories you know will damage the family, you have to take some action.”
Journalist Inzamam Rashid, who’d covered the case for Sky News, said with the spotlight on the case: “There was a real hunger for new lines on this story, and so you felt that pressure on the ground to deliver and to provide content that would do well.”
Despite all the wild theories, he body was ultimately found in the river on 19 February 2023 and an inquest in June last year found she had died due to accidental drowning.
The coroner recorded Ms Bulley’s death as accidental, saying she had fallen into the river and suffered “cold water shock”, and there was “no evidence” to suggest suicide.
An independent College of Policing review of the investigation into her disappearance found the relationship between police and the media “to be fractured”, and urged for it to be rebuilt.
The Search for Nicola Bulley will air on tonight, Thursday, October 3, at 9pm on One.