The partner of Nicola Bulley has described the online obsession with her disappearance as a “monster” that got out of control.
Paul Ansell said his family initially welcomed the huge public interest after the mother of two vanished while walking her dog in Lancashire in January last year. However, Bulley’s disappearance quickly grabbed the attention of would-be sleuths on social media who began posting misleading theories about what had happened.
“I think anything like that is a double-edged sword,” he told the BBC. “That’s the problem. You’re poking a monster.”
Bulley, 45, vanished on 27 January 2023 while walking beside the River Wyre in St Michael’s on Wyre, shortly after dropping off her two daughters at school. Her body was found in the river on 19 February. An inquest in June last year found she had died due to accidental drowning.
The search for Bulley prompted weeks of speculation and multiple conspiracy theories online, with people travelling to Lancashire to “help” police.
“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. He said he was also told “you can’t hide” and “we know what you did”.
He added: “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.”
Ansell was speaking in a BBC documentary, The Search for Nicola Bulley, which explores the media coverage and the impact of amateur internet sleuths conducting their own investigations, as well as hearing from Lancashire police and Bulley’s family.
Experts say conspiracy theories have become much more common in public discourse since the coronavirus crisis, when speculation on a range of issues from the origins of the virus to vaccine safety became rife. They say joining in speculation on stories such as Bulley’s disappearance or the health of the Princess of Wales can be a form of “entertaining mystery or distraction” for social media users.
Police accused people on TikTok of “playing private detectives” in the area, and said they had been “inundated with false information, accusations and rumours” relating to the case. At the time, MPs and campaigners said the release of personal information about Bulley was “deeply troubling”.
At a news conference days before she was found, Lancashire police made public that Bulley had “significant issues” with alcohol brought on by struggles with menopause. The release of such personal information was “avoidable and unnecessary” and police and media needed to rebuild trust, a report into the case concluded.
The independent College of Policing report found that in policing terms the missing persons investigation was handled well, but that the force had lost control of the public narrative at an early stage. Senior officers had failed to brief mainstream accredited reporters because trust between police and media had broken down, leading to an information vacuum and unchecked speculation.