Nicola Bulley’s partner Paul Ansell: ‘Strangers told me I had killed her’

Ahead of a new documentary about the mother-of-two’s disappearance, her family reveal the damage caused when TikTokers ‘played detectives’

The disappearance of Nicola Bulley in St Michael’s on Wyre in Lancashire last January quickly became a news story that gripped Britain. The smiling face of the 45-year-old mother of two girls, aged six and nine, featured on every front page and every news bulletin.
In the days that followed, the mystery behind how Bulley seemed to have vanished into thin air after the school drop-off – her phone left on a bench, her spaniel Willow found wandering off the lead – soon became what felt like a TV crime drama.
As one week rolled into two, then three, and with no new information, Lancashire Police revealed that TikTokers who were “playing their own private detectives” were hindering the investigation. Later, TikTok sleuths sparked fury after filming themselves digging up woodland close to where Bulley vanished. Arrests were made, dispersal orders issued. It was the world of social media gone wild.  
Bulley’s body was discovered at 11.36am on February 19, about a mile down the River Wyre from where she had gone missing. By then, Paul Ansell, her partner of 12 years and father of her children, had become subjected to irrational, unfounded conspiracy theories that he was both his wife’s murderer and sleeping with her best friend. Four months later, an inquest ruled Bulley’s death accidental. She had drowned as a result of cold water shock after falling into the river. 
But by this point, Ansell’s demeanour had been picked over and analysed by social media sleuths, who judged him as “too detached”, and who had seen their “views” rise by the millions.
“Have a watch of this. Now why is he smiling? Get that guy in for questioning. There’s something wrong there,” said “Lisa” on Tiktok. It was just one of many such comments.
For the first time since Bulley’s disappearance, her family – Ansell, parents Dot and Ernest, sister Louise Cunningham and her husband Stephen – are telling their side of the story in a groundbreaking BBC documentary, The Search for Nicola Bulley. A year in the making, it explores how the phenomenon of social media blogging impacted police work and caused considerable emotional harm to the family. 
We see Ansell at home in his kitchen, a widower now bringing up their children alone, still trying to compute what he calls the “bats— crazy things” said about him online. 
“You release something to try and squash something and all it does is spiral into something else. You’ve got reality going on. But then they’re watching it like a soap opera,” Ansell says.  
“When you experience something like this, you realise what a huge monster social media can be. I remember us thinking at the time, ‘It needs to be kept in the media spotlight to keep the pressure on the police’. And then, of course, anything that gets out on mainstream media gets out on social media…so the two go hand in hand.”
The documentary has been made by Rogan Productions, the company behind the BBC’s award-winning Stephen: The Murder That Changed the Nation, which was made with the cooperation of Doreen and Neville Lawrence. The victims are put at the centre of its films.“A big part of making this film was to try to understand what happened, and how the social media content creators found it interesting,” explains Xinlan Rose, the documentary’s producer.
“They were key people who changed the course of that three-week period. At the beginning, the family were quite happy [with Nikki’s story being shared on social media (including by the police)] because it helped generate attention. But then it started to impact the actual police investigation, and when the TikTokers started coming down to the site it became a really big problem and just made that incredibly traumatic period in the family’s life even worse. 
“We live in a world where news feeds from social media.… We’re all looking for engagement, but we do need to think about the people who are at the other end of that scrutiny.”
“I was getting direct messages from people I’ve never met,” remembers Ansell. “They don’t know me. They don’t know us. They don’t know Nikki. They know nothing about us. Just messages like, “You b—–d. We know what you did. You know you can’t hide, Paul.” There were some I felt like replying to. But then if you reply to that, they’ll just take a screenshot your reply which will end up on social media. 
“And so, you’re literally silenced. You can’t do anything about it – on top of everything else, on top of the trauma of the nightmare we’re in. To think that all these horrendous things were being said about me, towards Nikki. Everyone has a limit, don’t they?”
“What’s the tail and what’s the dog?” says the documentary’s director, Rachel Lob-levyt, of the way social media conspiracies began to filter into how the mainstream tabloids, the press and television networks were reporting the story. 
A conspiracy theory about a bloody ski glove, for example, made the front page of The Sun, who reported it as “a dramatic twist” and that it had been taken away in an evidence bag. Another TikToker chipped in: “I don’t know how they would do this because the area is being watched. But I feel like she’s being moved.” The result was that the family themselves started to become influenced, considering abduction theories, even though the police had told them at the end of week one that their belief was that Nicola was in the river.
“She’d done that walk a lot,” her mother Dorothy recalls of their thought process then, understandably clinging onto hope that she was still alive: “You don’t [know] who’s looking. You don’t know if somebody’s… two screams were heard.”
With no new lines of inquiry, speculation took a dark turn. “There weren’t really any developments, so by this point there was an unstoppable train of public intrigue in the story, and so people will focus on anything ‘new’ that comes out,” explains Lob-levyt of the hysteria. 
Nicola’s body was eventually discovered after Jason Rothwell, a self-styled spiritual medium, reported that he had seen something in the water about a mile downstream from where she had disappeared (he claimed his “gift” had led him to her). 
By this point, the world had been told that Nicola had struggled with the menopause and had “issues” with alcohol. Seventeen days before she had gone missing, Ansell and her sister had called 999 requesting help from a mental health nurse. A police officer assisted during that emergency visit. 
There was national outrage when information about her mental and physical health was released in a press conference by Lancashire Police’s investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Rebecca Smith. Rishi Sunak, then prime minister,   expressed his “concerns” about the revelation and Lancashire Constabulary launched an internal review. 
The family themselves felt betrayed. “We were sat in the living room going through the statement,” Ansell says, “and we were like, it doesn’t have to say that, it doesn’t have to say this. And then before we knew it they’d released it.”
But what the documentary highlights is that after some of the “sleuths” turned on Ansell, it put Det Supt Smith on the back foot. Panicking about rumours of stories about Ansell that were imminently going to appear in the mainstream press, interpreting the police home visit as a so-called domestic violence incident, she decided to reveal more detail than was necessary.
Speaking for the first time since the inquiry, she says: “I was made aware that there were other stories being posted on social media regarding Nikki and Paul, and some possible involvement with the police… I was really concerned [about] the damage that this would have on the family and particularly Paul.” Of the menopause statement, she explains: “I understand in hindsight it might seem we didn’t need to do that. But in the moment, when you are being told that people are threatening to publish stories that you know will damage the family, you have to take some action.”
“It makes your skin crawl. What would Nikki think of all of this?” says Ansell. “I mean she’d be… Bless her, she would be mortified about what’s happened and how it’s all come about. And you know, it’s horrible to think that.”
There was also the fact that, at first, the TikTokers echoed what the family wanted to hear – Nicola was not in the river. Social media was like a Greek chorus to the family’s natural disinclination to accept the worst. It fractured their relationship with the police.
Smith explains of the climate at large: “It was almost as if people didn’t want to believe the police, didn’t want to believe what we had to say.”
“I think [Rebecca Smith] took part in the documentary because the family were taking part. It was important for the family to be telling the definitive account of what happened and that would have been hard without the police. So I think that tells you something about their relationship [now].” says Lob-levyt. ”The police were trying to get some sort of control on the information that was out there and put it into context.”
There were other setbacks too, fed by the media hysteria. Claims by an independent searcher called Peter Faulding – who does not take part in the film – received extensive coverage in parts of the media. In archive footage you see him criticising the police, proclaiming: “We could have scanned this river with our equipment within a day.” He vowed Bulley was not in the river. The family commissioned him to conduct an independent search. Bulley was not found. 
Following a review into the police’s handling of the case that criticised Faulding’s part in the search, he said: “Although I thought I had found a very credible target, I conceded that maybe I was wrong and later that afternoon I made a statement to the media saying that there was no sign of Nicola and that I did not think she was in the river.”
“I didn’t want to get bogged down with any of it,” remembers Ansell, “so I came off whatever [social media] platforms I was on. But we have friends and relatives online and [saw] stuff that was being said [about her not being in the river]. We were like, “Yeah, we agree with ya. What the heck has happened?”
If there is a wider lesson to be learnt from the Nicola Bulley case, it is to think more of the victims.  
“Hopefully, the documentary will open up a conversation,” Lob-levyt says. “When you share something online, what is the impact of that? It’s not a conversation that you’re having at home or in the pub or in the café. You’re sharing that with other people online and that may influence how they think. It would probably be reductive to say everyone’s just doing it for money, although that is an element of it.”
As Nicola’s body was lifted from the river that morning of February 19, the TikToker Curtis Arnold, who was arrested three weeks later, was filming. That video was viewed nearly one million times. That same day, reporters from both Sky and ITV contacted the family directly despite their request for privacy, which led to Ofcom questioning the broadcasters’ actions. 
More than 18 months on, the family is trying to heal. Cunningham says, “It was just an accident. There doesn’t always have to be something sinister linked to what has happened. Sometimes bad things just happen. I just wish it hadn’t happened to us. We’re just a normal family that’s had a really tough time.”
Ansell sees his wife in his girls every day: “I see all these little mannerisms. And then I just stop sometimes and I’m like, “flipping heck, that was Mummy”, you know? And that is worth everything… Nikki was so beautiful. She didn’t know it. There were no airs and graces about her. We were all about the little things. The beautiful little things that made us who we were.”
The Search for Nicola Bulley airs at 9 pm on Thursday October 3 at 9pm on BBC One