Nicola Bulley: Conspiracy theories about missing mother have to stop, says friend

Nicola Bulley’s partner, Paul Ansell, has said he is “100 per cent convinced she’s not in the river” two weeks after the mother-of-two vanished while walking her dog in Lancashire.

Speaking to reporters, Mr Ansell said that as the extensive searches, divers and underwater rescue teams had found nothing over the past two weeks, he is certain something else has happened to her.

“People don’t just vanish into thin air. It’s absolutely impossible,” he told Channel 5 News. “So something has happened. Something has happened. Find out what it is. Find out what it is.

“You cannot, you cannot walk your dog down a river and just vanish into thin air. Something happened that day. Something.”

A private diving team led by Peter Faulding, using specialist sonar equipment, joined the search of the River Wyre on Tuesday, but did not find anything to suggest Ms Bulley had fallen in.  

It came as a close friend of Ms Bulley said that conspiracy theories around her have to stop.

Speaking two weeks to the day since the mother-of-two went missing, Emma White urged the public not to take the “law into their own hands” or “speculate” about her disappearance.

Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme on Friday, she said that amateur sleuths knocking on people’s doors to help find Ms Bulley “are not helping the situation”.

“Ultimately, yes, we all want to bring Nicky home,” she said. “But we need to do it in a logical, systematic way and we have to leave it to the police.”

Distance from River Wyre to the sea

Her comments came after Lancashire Constabulary was forced to issue a dispersal order on Wednesday to remove social media influencers from the scene near the River Wyre where the 45-year-old mortgage adviser went missing on Jan 27.

The order means that anyone taking photos and videos for social media can be sent away.

Ms White described the need by the force to issue the order as waste of “valuable resources” taking away from the “ultimate goal to bring Nicky home”.

Friends of Ms Bulley are in and around the village of St Michael’s on Wyre with placards and banners of her face to try and help jog people’s memory about the morning of her disappearance.

Ms Bulley vanished within a 10-minute window while walking her spaniel, Willow, leaving her phone, which was still connected to a work call, on a bench.

On Thursday, Lancashire Constabulary said that the focus of the investigation was now in a tidal area of the River Wyre and “out towards the sea”.

Two police boat teams had been seen searching in Morecambe Bay before moving further upstream.

Police officers were also seen searching the banks of the estuary at Shard Bridge, near Skippool, about five miles from the coast.

Police have been working on the theory that Ms Bulley fell into the river but stressed they remain open-minded.