Nicola Bulley online obsession became ‘monster’, family says

The documentary hears the turmoil the family went through as the search for Nicola intensified – and the impact it had on Nicola and Paul’s young children.

“One morning, I got up,” Nicola’s mother, Dorothy, tells the programme. “The youngest one, she says: ‘Cold, isn’t it, Nanny?’ She said: ‘I hope mummy’s not cold and hungry’.”

“The nights were the hardest,” Paul remembers of the search. ”In the morning the hope would be strong. It used to go dark at like 4pm.

“It used to get to about 3pm and then I’d start panicking that I knew it would start going dark in an hour. So we had an hour to find her.

“And then obviously I’d have the girls. The first they’d do when they came out of school was run over and say ‘have we found mummy?”

As the search for Nicola continued, so-called ‘amateur detectives’ began travelling to Lancashire to see what they could find.

As their fascination with the case spiralled, police became increasingly concerned they might interfere with the investigation.

At the same time, the amount of online hate focussed on the family began to get worse.

“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 Nicky,” Paul says now.

He was told “you can’t hide” and “we know what you did”. Unable to reply, he says he felt “silenced”.

“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 Nicky – everyone has a limit.”