Nicola Bulley's heartbreaking last photo with kids and painful question they asked each night

The disappearance of Nicola Bulley sparked a frantic police search, with her body found in the River Wyer three weeks later - around a mile from where she is believed to have fallen into the icy water

Mum-of-two Nicola Bulley dropped off her beloved children at school as usual on the morning she vanished.

She later took the family dog on their regular walk along the River Wyer in Lancashire, but it was here where she fell victim to tragedy. Still logged into a work call with Teams from her phone, the 45-year-old was found to have slipped down the riverbank and into the icy water, with her body retrieved from the river three weeks after her initial disappearance on January 27, 2023.

An inquest into her death later that year concluded that Nicola had drowned, with experts suggesting her death would have been almost instantaneous. She was last pictured with her precious daughters getting them ready for the school day.

Video doorbell camera footage shows the girls, Nicola, partner Paul Ansell, and dog Willow outside their home, getting into the car. And now a new BBC documentary is set to lay bare how the devastated family struggled to cope with the media frenzy that surrounded Nicola's shock disappearance and the heavy weight of their subsequent loss.

The 23-day police search had a heartbreaking impact on the couple's children, with Nicola's mum Dorothy recalling an incredibly sad conversation with one of her grandchildren. In the documentary, set to air on October 3, she says: "One morning, I got up. The youngest one, she says: 'Cold, isn't it, Nanny?' She said: 'I hope mummy's not cold and hungry'."

Dad Paul, who had been with Nicola for 12 years, said he tried to remain positive throughout the ill-fated search for the sake of their kids. However, he admitted it was tough at times. Tearing up in the doc, he revealed that the girls would ask him each night where their 'mummy' was.

"The nights were the hardest," he confessed. "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?"

Paul realised his partner was missing on the Friday morning. He initially hadn't been worried but when the children's school phoned him at 10.30am to say that someone had found their dog and Nicola's phone by a bench, he knew "something wasn't right here".

"I mean, that's not a normal phone call to get," he explains. "She would never have left Willow." He added: "It's where you feel like your legs have gone. In a situation like that, your mind is going absolutely crazy. And so I rang the police as I was driving."

Reliving the phone call she received from Paul at her desk, Nicola's sister Louise Cunningham describes him as being "panicky and frantic". She says: "He was like, 'something's happened, something strange has happened'."