Often it is the unusual, the deviation from the ‘normal’, that serves as the catalyst to capture the public’s imagination. But when it came to the disappearance of Nicola Bulley it was, perhaps, the fact that everything about her was apparently so ordinary that piqued so much interest.
On a cold January day she left home and dropped her two daughters, aged six and nine, at school before setting off to walk the family dog by the river. As a multi-tasking 45-year-old mum, she also logged on to a Teams call with work colleagues.
So far so normal. Then suddenly it wasn’t.
On that Friday morning, January 27, last year, Nicola disappeared. Her phone and her dog Willow’s harness were found on a bench, looking out on the River Wyre, in the Lancashire village of St Michael’s on Wyre, where she lived with her children and her partner of 12 years, Paul Ansell.
But of Nicola there was no trace. Had she slipped and fallen in the near-freezing water? Had she been pushed? Had she been abducted? Or chosen to disappear?
What followed was 23 days of torment for Nicola’s loved ones, agony that was only magnified when Nicola’s disappearance quickly became the focal point for what can best be described as a social media frenzy of speculation about what had happened to her.
Not content with sitting at keyboards around the globe picking apart the minutiae of her disappearance as well as Nicola and Paul’s lives, some of the online ‘sleuths’ even travelled to the tiny village (population: about 600), filming themselves scouring gardens and private land, even digging in search of her body.
Increasingly outlandish theories and speculation spread across TikTok, YouTube and the like and the focal point for some of the most hurtful conjecture was around Nicola’s partner Paul – and whether he might have hurt her.
‘I was getting direct messages [on his own social media] from people I’ve never met,’ reveals Paul in a new TV documentary. ‘They don’t know me, they don’t know us, they don’t know Nikki. They know nothing about us. Just messages like “you bastard,” “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,’ he says. ‘But then if you reply to that they’ll just screenshot your reply and that’ll 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 that we’re in.’
Now, in a deeply moving BBC programme to be shown next week, Paul, together with Nicola’s heartbroken parents Ernie and Dot and sister Louise Cunningham, can finally have a voice and have revealed for the first time the toll the ‘carnival of hysteria’, as it’s described by some, took on them.
‘When you experience something like this you realise what a huge monster it [social media] can be,’ says Paul.
The Search For Nicola Bulley charts the period from Nicola’s disappearance through to Sunday, February 19, the day her body was found in the water, just over a mile downstream from the bench where her phone was found.
The ‘monster’ is a subject Paul refers to more than once in the programme, in which the voices of Nicola’s daughters, the girls on whom she doted, are heard as they prepare to release a balloon in memory of their mummy.
‘We knew that we were fortunate to have that level of interest, that kept the searching and all the effort on finding Nikki [going], but I think anything like that is a double-edged sword,’ he says. ‘That’s the problem, you are poking a monster.’
Just how wide the public interest in the Nicola Bulley case was, and still is, evidenced by the content that continues to be uploaded to social media channels every week.
While all outlandish theories should have been quashed at an inquest last year, when a coroner determined that Nicola fell into the icy river and ‘died almost immediately’ in an accidental drowning, a search for #nicolabulley on TikTok this week revealed a staggering 519.9 million views.
Some of the ‘sleuths’ who perpetuated sensational theories about what had happened to her 19 months ago were still discussing their outlandish and distressing conspiracies this week.
‘I stand by to this day that Nicola Bulley was not walking her dog and fell into that water where the police, sniffer dogs, everyone missed her,’ says one.
Others appear to have used their involvement in the social media sideshow as a springboard to build their own profiles.
You might remember the name Curtis Arnold, identified by this newspaper as the TikTok ghoul who filmed the moment Nicola’s body was found in the river, sharing his footage online.
Curtis, a barber and blogger from Kidderminster, Worcestershire, even showed the Mail his phone, displaying the sum of £716.06, the amount he had made from YouTube for that harrowing video.
In the end his eight-minute video was viewed 59,000 times – earning Arnold almost £1,000 in royalties –before he was forced to delete it.
‘My ambition is to be a full-time YouTuber and make a good living from it,’ he told us.
What is he doing now? That is a subject to which we will return, but it is clear those like him have left their mark on Nicola Bulley’s family.
The documentary lays bare the agonies they went through after a Friday morning ‘as normal as any other’ began when Nikki set off to take the girls to their primary school.
Paul, an engineer who was working from home, wasn’t concerned when his partner wasn’t back by 10am.
‘But when it got to about half ten, the school rang to say that somebody had found Willow by the bench and Nikki’s phone, and they can’t find Nikki anywhere,’ he says, going on to recall his rising panic, the feeling that ‘something isn’t right here’.
Paul called Nicola’s sister Louise, she called her parents and at 11am Paul called the police – poignantly he recalls how he told them ‘She’s been struggling a bit, she’s been a bit up and down’.
‘I knew that would make them act immediately,’ he says.
Police launched an investigation that day and appealed for any witnesses to come forward, but decisions about what to say about her mental state and the impact of that would be a recurrent feature of the ensuing three weeks.
Nicola’s disappearance quickly struck a nerve.
As TikToker Saskia Hodgson says in the documentary: ‘She just seemed like a normal person like myself. It could be me.’
Her first ‘live’ stream, a video she recorded at home, about the disappearance initially drew an audience in the low hundreds, soon it was nearly 2,000.
Meanwhile Paul recalls: ‘We would sit there every day just going over and over and over everything . . .
‘The nights were the hardest; the end of the day where it goes dark because in the morning the hope would be strong.
‘It would get to about 3pm and I used to start panicking that I knew it would start going dark in an hour. So we had an hour to try and find her, and I then have the girls. The first thing they’d do when they’d come out of school was run over and say, “have we found Mummy”?’
It’s heartbreaking to listen to his pain and to witness the raw emotion of Nicola’s elderly parents and proud sister. Paul recounts the moment he found himself in front of television cameras for the first time and how it triggered an onslaught of suspicion.
In the documentary, Detective Superintendent Rebecca Smith states clearly that ‘at no point was Paul ever a suspect’, but at the time an army of social media detectives thought they knew better.
It was in the third week of Nicola’s disappearance that the frenzy escalated further – a dispersal order had to be issued to break-up groups of people filming in the village; Curtis Arnold made various videos, even filming a man digging at a possible ‘burial site’.
And then there was the issue of Nicola’s ‘vulnerabilities’, as police put it, in a Press conference on February 15. It was a strangely cryptic phrase and the ensuing barrage of questions prompted a swift, and controversial, decision to release a further statement that Nicola had ‘suffered with some significant issues with alcohol which were brought on by her ongoing struggles with the menopause’.
As Nicola’s sister Louise puts it: ‘Nikki had it tough.’
She recalled a three-week period in which ‘she just wasn’t functioning like normal Nikki’.
There was the inability to sleep, hot sweats, irritability, brain fog.
‘And then she stopped taking HRT over that period as well, which then just obviously made things even worse,’ says Louise.
Paul adds: ‘She was then having a drink to deal with it, which then was all kind of spiralling.’
What the family never expected was that this ‘blip’ (Nicola had gone back on HRT and was doing well when she disappeared) would become part of the narrative. But once social media reports began to appear on February 14, about Paul and Nicola and a possible involvement with the police, prior to her disappearance, it did.
What had happened was that on January 10 – 17 days before she disappeared – Nicola’s family had made an emergency call for mental health support because they were so concerned for Nicola’s ‘spiralling’ wellbeing. A police officer did arrive but only as standard policy in their area.
‘We made that call on the 10th to get her the help that she needed at that point,’ says Paul. ‘They didn’t deem her a threat to herself or obviously anybody else. Nikki was very angry that we made that call. But over the course of like ten days . . . she stopped the drinking. She was back on the medication. She was getting much more, sort of a lot more stability.’
As for it becoming public knowledge, he says: ‘We were just hoping and praying that none of that would come out because no one gets the story.
‘You know, nobody understands the background. They call it pre-menopause, don’t they? All the horrible symptoms women get before menopause. Nikki had been dealing with that for a couple of years.’
The documentary probes the controversial police decision to reveal that Nicola had ‘significant issues with alcohol’ brought on by struggles with the menopause.
As Det Supt Smith says: ‘We had to do something. We spoke to the family. We came up with a form of words with their agreement. And by that I didn’t mean they were happy with this; they absolutely weren’t, but neither were we.’
The ‘form of words’, however, prompted an angry backlash.
Nicola’s family, scrupulously balanced and fair as they recall their trauma, don’t heap opprobrium on anyone.
Still, when he considers how inherently private Nicola was, Paul recoils: ‘It makes your skin crawl. What would Nikki think of all this? I mean, she’d be. . . bless her she would be mortified by what’s happened and how it’s all come about.’
Louise recalls the family’s agony when Nicola’s body was found, 23 days after searches began: ‘[I will] never forget Dad coming into the kitchen. Just completely breaking down and Paul out in the garden in a complete state.’
‘Me and Paul we just sort of hugged each other, it broke our hearts,’ says Ernie, a man whose love for his daughter is palpable as he recalls how he still talks to her, who chuckles as he describes how he has to shut his bedroom door when he’s getting dressed in the morning, because of the large, framed photograph on the wall on the landing of a smiling Nikki.
Clearly, there’s residual embarrassment at undressing ‘in front’ of his daughter.
Ernie and Dot both remember the cries of the children, when they were told their mummy had died. They all clearly adore the girls and see Nicola in them.
As Paul says: ‘I see her in the girls every single day you know. 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, I think.’
The social media furore is far from forgotten, however. Paul knows the name Curtis Arnold and recalls the day Arnold turned up outside the car park at the children’s school, filming, as Paul was on the school run. He knows too that it was Arnold who filmed that video when Nicola’s body was found.
Arnold, 35, was arrested on suspicion of malicious communication offences and on suspicion of stalking Nicola’s neighbours. However, save for being banned from entering the county of Lancashire under bail conditions, no charges were brought.
But has Arnold slunk away into the long grass? No, despite being forced to delete accounts relating to Nicola Bulley, the Mail can disclose he is now more prolific than ever on social media. A High Court injunction sought against him in February this year revealed he uses the alias Daniel J Edwards. His YouTube channel DJE Media has 120,000 subscribers – 20 times more than his former Curtis Media channel.
Rather than amateur detective, he now calls himself a ‘citizen journalist’ who carries out ‘audits’ of newsworthy sites ‘with respect’.
His channel, which boasts over 1,000 videos, states: ‘We explore interesting and
unusual places and exercise our rights to film and fly drones whilst holding our government and authorities to account’.
Some might consider that he is merely making a nuisance of himself, confronting security at migrant hotels, for instance, before being carted off by police.
Whether he is in a position to hold anyone else to account given the agony he heaped on the family of Nicola Bulley is questionable. Ultimately, there was no mystery for armchair sleuths to unpick. Just a terrible incident.
As Louise Cunningham so poignantly puts it: ‘As far as Nikki going missing and the mystery to it, I guess it was just an accident.
‘It doesn’t always have to be something sinister linked to something that happens.
‘Sometimes bad things just happen. I just wish they hadn’t happened to us.’
n The Search for Nicola Bulley airs on Thursday, October 3 at 9pm on BBC One