Nicola Bulley was captured playing in the snow with her children in the weeks before she completely vanished without a trace.
The poignant footage - recorded off a phone - was shown on a Channel 5 documentary aired on Friday evening, February 10. During a sit down chat with Dan Walker, Nicola's partner, Paul Ansell, described how he tried to encourage the couple's dog to help him find Nicola.
He was speaking two weeks since Nicola's disappearance in Lancashire, having disappeared in St Michael's on Wyre half an hour after dropping her kids off at school on the morning of January 27. Paul said: "I was saying to her (the couple's dog), where's mummy? Where's mummy? You know? And she was just looking at me like, you know, let's go for a walk.
"I would've thought that if something had happened by the riverbank, I would've thought that she'd had gone through the gate and gone that way. But she didn't, whenever we go on that walk, we go through the gate and we always go left. And that's what she did. She just went left down, you know, ready to do the normal thing."
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He said: “We’ve always been very careful that we don’t want to say, ‘oh, we think it’s that’, and then push that when it might not be. The most obvious thing, of course has always been the river. It’s always been my gut instinct and her sisters, and family that, that isn’t the case.
“Extensive searching, as you know is probably well aware has gone on in that river.”
Paul said he was struggling to know what to say to the children: "It is impossible," he said. "As any parent knows, all you want to do is make everything better for your children, isn’t it? Whenever they’re worried or they are scared or anything like that, you just want to make it better for them and I can't.
"I can't do that. So all I can do is be as strong as I can so that they don't see the level of like worry on my face and reassure them as much as I can with what we know which isn’t much and then try and distract them so that their minds aren’t focused on it. I find that that’s the best way of doing it so reassure them as much as I can, to distract them." He added: "The only thing that I can do is tell them that everybody is looking for mummy.
"The best people like in the world are looking for mummy, just to give them that you know that that level of hope that they can understand that everything that can be done is being done. I just have to hope that that is enough for them, to sort of put them at rest at that particular moment before the questions come again. There isn't really anything else I can say because I don't know anything else."
He said his two daughters had seen the 'missing' posters dotted around the area. "They’re obviously seeing the posters around," he added. "At first I tried to like shelter them from that but obviously you can’t. I was trying to keep things as normal as I can for them but it’s everywhere. So they've obviously seen all that now. But they've looked at it in a positive way."
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