Dad?
[man] Yeah?
Are you up here?
[man] Mm-hmm.
Dadda, can you help me draw Mummy on this piece of paper?
Alex, look at me.
When you saw the bad man, was he in front of you like I am?
Or was he on this side, or was he on that side?
-He was in front of me. -He was right in front of you?
-Mm-hmm. -Did Mummy see him?
I don't think she did.
No? Did you see him first?
Yeah, I saw him first.
Did he have a bag?
Yeah.
And did he open it, or was it already open?
He opened it.
And what did he get out?
A knife.
-What did he do to you? -Knocked me over!
-He knocked you over? -Yeah.
The bad man was sticking his things in her.
What was he sticking in her?
A knife. There's his knife.
Did you see it?
Yeah, I saw the knife.
Did you see all the times?
I saw it… Yeah, I saw it all.
[ominous music playing]
[man] My son witnessed his mother's murder.
But nobody could have possibly known
how long it was gonna take to find the person who did this.
[ominous music continues]
[music fades]
[birds calling]
[gentle instrumental music playing]
[woman] Oh!
What… What have you got?
-[man] I've got a camera. -What for?
[man] Take pictures of you.
[Rachel] Cuddles.
Hmm?
[indistinct speech]
We don't like those much, do we, Alex?
-Oh! [chuckles] -[Alex giggles]
[man] Rachel and Alex were, you know, they were a unit.
He was the center of Rachel's attention every day.
She wasn't at all drawn to the sparkly things.
She just really enjoyed the simple things of life.
Enjoying the company of the people she really cared about.
This was someone who could really squeeze fun
out of the simplest of things.
[character on TV] Can't wait.
[character sighs, yawns]
Sleep. Need…
[Rachel] Give Molly a nice stroke. Lie down and give her a nice stroke.
[André] At the time, I went to work five days a week as a dispatch rider
and travelled all over the country.
So I was down getting my bike out, ready for the day.
And, uh, even though we'd already said goodbye,
they both appeared.
Came down the stairs and, uh, waved me off.
That's my lasting memory, yeah, of them smiling.
Standing on the steps, hand in hand.
You know, Alex completely relaxed and Rachel looking lovely.
[birds singing]
It was their routine to visit Wimbledon Common.
It's always had a reputation of being a safe place.
And, uh, Alex, he needed as much exercise as the dog did.
Otherwise, they'd both be bouncing off the walls.
[ominous string music playing]
That day, I happened to be in London,
and I was sent to the outskirts.
It's pre-mobile phone.
So a couple of times a day, I'd phone in to make sure everything was all right.
[ominous music intensifies]
Late in the morning, I stopped,
found a phone that was working.
-Rang the number. -[phone rings out]
[music continues]
[phone ringing]
[music intensifies]
[phone ringing]
[music stops]
A man's voice answered the phone.
And my blood ran cold.
I just knew immediately that something was seriously wrong.
[poignant music playing]
He said, "I'm a policeman."
So I said, "Where's Rachel?"
And he said, "There's been an accident."
I said, "Is she dead?" He said, "I can't tell you that."
I said, "You just did."
And I asked, "Where's Alex?"
He said, "Alex is safe. He's at the hospital."
He said, "Stay where you are. We'll send a police car to you."
The moment I put the phone down, I collapsed to the floor and broke down.
[Rachel laughs] André, I'm right up on your stomach.
Press pause.
[Alex] Hey, I don't…
I don't know what you say.
[André] We like that bit.
-You like that bit? -[André] Yeah.
Every belief I had about, you know, the firmness of reality disappeared.
I was in a state
which you can only describe as bordering on the edge of insanity.
[tense music playing]
[man] 15th July '92,
I was informed that a body has been found on the common by a… a dog walker.
It… it's our job, um,
to, to deal with these situations as, as a professional.
To stand back from what you see as a fellow human being.
I was walking through grass,
and then I sort of turned right into a small, um, glade.
It really was the worst crime scene.
It… it just looked like a frenzied attack.
The victim had been attacked, dragged,
stabbed 49 times in and around the neck and chest area.
And she lay with her hands sort of up in front of her face,
as if she was still trying to protect herself.
It was monstrous.
The detectives told me that Rachel had been attacked from behind.
She'd been… [hesitates] …stabbed multiple times
and that she'd been assaulted.
That Alex had been found clinging to his mother's body.
And that they had to basically prize him away
to attend to him.
Alex had been taken to this hospital.
When I got there,
they said that they would like me to speak to a psychologist before…
before I saw Alex.
[Alex chatters]
[André] The psychologist said, first of all, children are resilient.
They can get through the worst of things.
He said they need to know
that this is definitive, that this person is not coming back.
[poignant music playing]
Alex came out in the arms of a nurse, and he looked incredibly subdued.
He had cuts under his eyes. He had bruises on his cheeks.
And, uh, he had an intense look in his eyes, you know,
like a… a very old person in a very young body.
And I picked him up and basically recited what the psychologist said.
There's been an accident,
that Mummy's dead, that she's not coming back.
And he just kept staring. He didn't ask any questions.
But it was clear that he was telling me, "I already know that."
You know? "That's something you really don't have to explain to me."
[Rachel] Alex, turn around and wave to me.
Wave.
He never asked again where his mother was. Not once.
-[music fades] -[birds singing]
[indistinct chatter on police radio]
[reporter] Police sealed off Wimbledon Common
moments after the woman's half-naked body was found by a passer-by.
Detectives say she'd been murdered in a frenzied attack,
which was witnessed by her two-year-old son.
[woman] The news editor called and said,
"We've just read on the wires
there's been some sort of fatal stabbing on Wimbledon Common."
"We need you to go with a crew now."
Wimbledon as a place,
it's very affluent, very beautiful houses.
Wimbledon Common is something like 1,100 acres of parkland,
literally right on the edge of Central London.
The murder happened in broad daylight,
and police say they're certain the killer would have been heavily bloodstained.
Eve Richings, Sky News.
It was palpable how shaken the police officers on the scene were.
A passer-by found her half-naked,
and clinging to the body was a small boy.
Superintendent Bassett,
who was, um, the lead officer in charge of the investigation,
he was the one that gave the first briefing.
The small boy was caked in mud and blood,
the blood possibly coming from the mother.
I was a detective sergeant and, at the time of the inquiry,
was John Bassett's right-hand man.
When we arrived at the scene,
I could see that she had suffered horrendously
during this attack.
When we looked closely at her body, her body was in a not-natural position.
Her clothing had been ripped from her.
There was moistness in and around her body.
That indicated there's possibly a sexual connotation to this.
It was frightening to think that somebody who could commit that sort of crime
was on the loose.
Obviously, if you've got somebody who's gonna do this,
then that's likely to happen again,
and the pressure is on to get this man, uh, before he does it again.
[reporter] Police teams spent a second day combing 1,000 acres of Wimbledon Common
for clues to the savage killing.
[Paul] The size of Wimbledon Common,
straight away, I realized that we had a difficult job on.
Normally when a murder breaks,
you probably get 10, 15 officers.
On this, I think we had about 40.
And it was quite obvious from the start that this was gonna be a big one.
[reporter] They officially named the murdered mother as Rachel Nickell.
Her body was identified today by the father of her small son.
[Eve] To see pictures of Rachel Nickell,
to see what she looked like,
she sort of shone with vitality.
People could project… themselves into that life.
They could remember being 23
or remember being a new parent.
We were getting a love story in the pictures that they released.
[poignant music playing]
[André] It was an instant connection.
It was… You know, I'd never had that experience before,
and I've never had it since.
We were inseparable. We did feel that we just bonded completely.
This is the experience that people, you know, they… they dream of having.
You know, falling head over heels in love and feeling so complete with someone.
So we both felt blessed to have that.
When Rachel became pregnant, it was a shock.
I was 25, and Rachel was 19.
She was very much on the track of, you know, getting studies finished,
getting a career, getting a good job.
But the moment that Rachel could see I was committed,
she could see that we could make this work.
So we just went for it.
That first time that you pick up… pick up a child
and see them breathing,
it's… it's supernatural.
It's absolutely supernatural.
You can't not believe in magic if you've seen a child being born.
Rachel was a natural mother.
She was… She was, uh, breathtaking.
The two of them were so passionate about each other.
They were so fulfilled with each other.
I think it's a human reaction.
You wish it had happened to you rather than it happened to them.
The detective suggested we pop back to the flat
and pick up a few things.
I was throwing Alex's favorite stuff into a bag, you know.
His favorite teddy bear, you know, shorts and T-shirts, his pajamas,
and the sheepskin that they slept on since he was, uh… since he was first born.
We never lived there again.
It felt like a space that had been violated.
The boyfriend of Rachel Nickell,
the young mother murdered on Wimbledon Common
in South London yesterday,
has appealed for help to track down her killer.
-[cameras clicking] -[indistinct chatter]
[André] I wasn't prepared when I walked through the door into that room.
There must have been a hundred press present.
So it was cameras, telephoto lenses,
TV cameras all pointed towards you like a… an enemy battalion.
Everyone wanted to see what Rachel's partner was like.
Somebody must know something,
um, from the ferocity of the attack.
They couldn't have walked down the road and not be noticed.
And I would say to anybody who does know this person,
no matter how they feel about them,
please come forward before he destroys anybody else's life.
But also everyone really wanted to know what had happened to Rachel's son.
It was just so shocking.
He hasn't said anything. Um…
I don't know how he's gonna be in the future, but… he's not too bad.
He wasn't injured, thank God.
And the most fortunate thing is that they tell me
he's small enough that he won't remember much.
We went back to the common to leave the rose for Rachel
to say our farewell,
and we were now front-page news.
There was a full color picture printed of Alex in my arms,
completely identifiable.
They were identifying the only witness to his mother's murder,
and there was a possibility that some deranged person may come back
to try and dispose of the only witness to his crime.
I knew from now on,
if we weren't in danger before, now we were in the gravest of danger.
Two-year-old Alex Nickell is said to be bearing up,
but in a state of deep shock after his ordeal.
[woman] I think a two-year-old would have no concept of death at all.
[man] How long could this trauma last?
Well, it could last a lifetime.
[Rachel] Down came the rain And washed the spider out…
[André] We were able to find some sanctuary at my mother's home.
Alex, he's had nightmares, terrible nightmares.
If he could sleep soundly through the night, for the last hour,
he'd be… you know, he'd be in a difficult place.
So whatever I was feeling, I had to swallow it, put it away.
You deal with it later. You can't deal with it now.
No matter how, you know,
how terrible my circumstances were in that particular moment,
our child's needs came first.
[siren wailing]
[reporter] The police effort to hunt down the murderer involves 54 detectives.
What name is that, then?
[reporter] This is one of three special incident rooms.
There have already been 1,500 calls from the public.
Every one has to be assessed and acted on.
It was a very complex case to… to put together.
[phone ringing]
Morning, incident room.
We had to go through this chaos of getting as much information as possible.
The telephones are ringing.
[officer] You've seen the photographs of Rachel.
-[man] Yeah. -Yeah?
-Had you seen her before up here? -[man] No.
[Paul] On the common, we were taking statements.
Surely somebody must have seen the person
coming towards the murder scene or going away from the murder scene.
[indistinct speech]
Lots of pressure was on to find a witness.
That's the Rachel Nickell murder squad at Wimbledon. You've already been stopped?
[John] We are responding as quickly as we can.
We do have a backlog. I will not deny that.
But we eventually will get round to see everyone.
It's left to me and it's left to the officers I have working for me.
We will catch him.
[Ron] Samples were taken from the crime scene
and submitted to the lab for DNA analysis.
And I just kept hitting a wall.
The biologist was saying, "We're getting nothing."
And I thought, "What do you mean nothing? What about her DNA?"
"No, we're getting nothing."
And I'd never encountered that before. That was kind of strange.
And so the scientist was saying,
"Well, we'll look at it again from a different aspect."
But still nothing.
There's a feeling of hopelessness because this person had to be traced ASAP.
And here we were two or three weeks down the road
and no nearer that than we had been on the day.
There we had a murder scene with no witnesses,
with no forensic evidence.
And that was it. Where do you go from there?
[pensive music playing]
[André] The situation being as dire as it was,
the police then wanted to talk to Alex about what he'd seen.
Because our greatest concern
is that we find this person, but more than anything,
that we stop it from happening to anybody else if we possibly could.
We had to be very careful how we dealt with young Alex
because this was obviously a traumatic incident that he witnessed.
Therefore, we were obviously taking advice as to how to do that.
[indistinct chatter]
[man] How's it going?
[Paul] The advice was that we should deal with that
through a child psychologist.
[André] Will you show Jean your dinosaur book?
[indistinct speech]
[man] I like the pterodactyls.
[Alex] Yeah.
[woman] I was a child and adolescent psychiatrist.
And this was unique in our experience.
This is the only case I've ever worked with
where the child was the only witness to a crime of violence.
[Alex] Look, my dinosaur book.
[man] Yes, I like these ones, the flying ones.
[Alex] But I like all of them.
[man] You like all of them, yeah.
[Jean] I said we could use my home.
And, uh, the first interview, there was a policeman there,
André and myself and the little boy.
The police were intensely hopeful
that this child, young as he was, could give them more information.
I had no experience of how this piece of very intensive work
could affect a small child.
And yet the rational part of my brain fully agreed that it was important
to try and prevent further killings.
So there was a dilemma there.
It was a very, very hard call to make.
So I was just trying to be as vigilant as possible.
If I felt we'd crossed a line, we just had to stop.
[André] There was a scary bit yesterday, wasn't there?
[Alex] Mmm.
[André] What was that like?
[Alex] The dinosaur was that big one.
[André] There was this huge dinosaur on the ground.
The three little ones were eating it, weren't they?
-[Alex] Yeah. -They were covered in blood, weren't they?
[Jean] Covered in blood? That must have been difficult.
[indistinct speech]
[Alex] They're not going to see that.
The decision was made that it would be best
if her questions came through me
to get Alex to respond as naturally as possible.
[Jean] Alex had blood on him, didn't you? You had blood on you.
[André] All your clothes were covered in blood, weren't they?
[Alex] Yeah.
[André] When you were with Mummy that day.
Hmm?
[Jean] Mostly, I was just trying to focus only on Alex and to observe him.
He'd had few words at this point.
He was reluctant to look at people.
But… I think he was… he was showing stress
after a very, very extreme trauma.
His whole body language, every movement he made showed that.
I think you know now that terrible things suddenly happen.
I think you're very frightened.
From Jean's point of view, she thought it was better to push.
So when you saw the man standing there,
was he looking at you, or was he looking at Mummy?
[Alex] Mummy.
-[André] So he didn't say anything to you? -[Alex] No.
[André] He didn't shout at you?
-Did he shout at you or not, Alex? -[Alex] No.
[André] As my questions led more towards the incident,
you could see there was a change in him. He was tensing up.
-Alex, did he hit you? -[Alex] No.
-[André] With his hand? -[Alex] No.
My concern wasn't how much information we could get out of a small child.
It was, you know, what sessions like this, what distress they were gonna cause
and what damage they were gonna do to his recovery.
[Alex] Well, I can't tell you that bit.
[André] No, it's really painful to remember it, isn't it?
[Jean] You're saying, "I can't tell you that bit"?
-[Alex] I can't tell you that bit. -[André] No?
There was a mystery about just how much he might have seen.
I wish that he hadn't seen any of it, you know?
That was a hope,
that he'd been pushed away and all this had taken place out of,
you know, out of his, uh,
recognition and understanding.
You know when Mummy was lying on the ground and the man had gone?
-Did you say anything to her? -[Alex] No.
-[André] Did you talk to her at all? -[Alex] No.
[André] Were you scared?
[Alex] Mmm.
-[André] Did you think she was asleep? -[Alex] Mmm.
-[André] Did you? -[Alex] Mmm.
[André] Did you want her to wake up?
Did you want her to wake up?
[Alex] Mmm.
[André] Did she wake up?
[Alex] No.
[André] It was pretty intense.
Every few days, there was another session. This was going on over several weeks.
Alex was able to again show the incredible recall,
you know, of a small child.
The events, how they unfolded,
where, you know, the bad man came out from,
you know, from behind them
and, uh… how afterwards, he moved away,
washed his hands in a stream, and then disappeared.
[man] Alex, the man who hurt your mummy, what type of trousers did he have?
-[Alex] This one. -[man] That one?
[André] And then Alex started to describe this person.
-[man] What color were they? -[Alex] Blue.
[man] What color were his shoes?
[Alex] That color.
We got a description from him of a younger white man,
white shirt over blue trousers,
brown shoes.
But the most significant item of all
was Alex remembering he was wearing a belt over his white shirt,
almost like a butcher's apron.
[Paul] Alex's description was similar to one from a woman
who'd seen a man walking towards the murder scene
ten minutes before the murder,
wearing a white top, dark trousers,
carrying a sort of bag.
So we… we came to the conclusion that of all the people on the common,
that was most likely to be the suspect.
Now we just had to find him.
Superintendent, would it be fair to say
you've made very little progress in reality so far?
Yes, uh, that is a fair assessment.
Uh, I'd have hoped by now that we'd have had the man in custody,
uh, but when you see the enormity of my problem here on the common,
you'll understand why.
[reporter 1] In the absence of evidence, police turned to criminal psychologists
to help build up a profile of the attacker.
At the time, we're seeing films such as Silence of the Lambs…
We're interviewing all the serial killers now in custody
for a psycho-behavioral profile.
…where criminal psychologists work out who their suspect was
through offender profiling.
I'm interested in it.
Uh, as I say, the Americans have a lot of success.
[reporter 2] One expert they've consulted is Robert Ressler, a retired FBI agent.
Ressler has interviewed many of America's most notorious sex killers,
like Jeffrey Dahmer.
He says the man who murdered Rachel Nickell is disorganized.
The first thing people think about is this is a serial killer.
Are we gonna see this again, uh, within days or weeks?
We're dealing with a disorganized, uh, frenzied,
possibly mentally disordered individual.
[Paul] Although John Bassett had met Bob Ressler,
that was basically a flying visit.
But it was thought that we probably should progress the offender profiling idea.
And so the most important offender profiler,
who'd worked with the police before,
became involved in this inquiry as an advisor.
When the police ask me to come and help,
it's usually because things have stuck in some way.
And I'm quite sure this was true with the murder of Rachel Nickell.
[reporter 3] Leicester University's Paul Britton
has worked on some of the country's most notorious crime cases.
[Paul Britton] In each case, the police, they say,
"What I want from you
is something that will help me to identify a perpetrator."
[reporter 4] Dennis Nilsen, interviewed in prison by psychologist Paul Britton,
preyed on homeless young men.
"Something that will take me closer to preventing this person doing it again."
[reporter 5] Paul Britton, a forensic psychologist,
says the Wests aren't as unique as people might believe.
He's certain there are other mass murderers at large.
I was asked to come along and look at this case
between three and four weeks after Rachel had been killed.
And what they wanted from me was my opinion,
a psychological analysis of who might have done this.
[ominous music playing]
I have the crime scene materials.
I have the video. I have the maps of the common.
But what I need to do
is to actually make a visit to the scene itself.
There's a car park by a windmill on Wimbledon Common.
We parked there,
and we walked across to the crime scene.
[ominous music continues]
What the offender would be looking at
is a place where he can find a victim of opportunity.
It's somewhere where he would be able to observe,
to monitor.
He waits to find whoever it is that's closest to his preference,
and it happens to be poor Rachel Nickell.
He was able to look and watch
because he's a watcher. He's a surveiller.
[music intensifies, ends]
And so very often,
and I speak plainly, if you don't mind,
you would have this…
"That bitch would look down her nose at me."
"I'm not having that."
"I'm gonna have her."
What you have is a very focused intention to obliterate this young woman.
[poignant music playing]
But Rachel Nickell, she would not likely just give herself up to death…
without there being some response.
But if someone is basically saying,
"You do what I want now or I'll hurt the child,"
that changes everything.
The child is there as a hostage.
The child is there as a bargaining counter.
She knows that she's giving up her life for her child's.
[poignant music continues]
I was able to be absolutely clear.
He will kill other people.
This is just not a static picture.
This is just a frame in a film that's carrying on.
[soft, sorrowful music playing]
When you got back to Mummy, was she standing, or was she lying down?
[Alex] Huh. I can't remember that bit.
Don't keep asking me these questions, Daddy.
[André] You're doing very well, Alex. You're doing very well.
The days are turning into weeks. Weeks are turning into months.
And we reached a point
where it was just becoming heavy and repetitive.
And that was a point where I felt, "This is…"
"We're playing for diminishing returns. What more can he possibly give?"
-When you got back to Mummy… -[Alex] I'm fed up.
-You're fed up? -[Alex] Yes.
-One last question, Alex. -[Alex] No. No more.
Okay, all right, that's fine. Come here.
[man] You've done well. You've done really well.
[André mutters reassuringly]
Talk another time about the rest, huh?
[Alex] No.
No, I… I would be still fed up.
-[André] You'll still be fed up? -Yes.
[André] We won't talk anymore.
[Jean] The police wanted to try one last throw of the dice.
Came up with this still more desperate idea
that perhaps we could go to Wimbledon Common and relive that.
They hoped, I think,
that seeing the actual site of the killing would trigger yet more memories.
I thought it was a very long shot,
but I didn't feel I could forbid them to do it.
[man] All right.
[André] So now, okay, it's not another repetitive session
in the same… in the same environment.
Maybe there is some value in it.
And when we got there, he was actually reluctant to get out of the car.
The thing that was bothering him was the presence of all these unknown adults,
because the police had turned up.
It wasn't just the detectives he was used to.
There were several other officers.
We eventually got out of the car, and we started walking.
Once we started walking, he was happy.
We were walking down that path.
We just started running, Alex and I, for the fun of it.
He was having a good time. But we had a bunch of coppers running behind us
and a psychologist running behind us.
[Jean] The police were taking us,
but I could see that the little boy knew where we were going…
and was remembering things.
We were getting nearer and nearer to the site of the crime.
I was aware the child was stiffening and stiffening,
and I'm pretty sure he was remembering.
[André] Alex?
The man who killed Mummy, where was he?
Was it here?
When did he start talking to Mummy?
Do you remember?
You said to me once
that he was talking to Mummy before he killed Mummy.
Do you remember where he was talking to Mummy?
Hmm? Down by the pond?
[Alex cries]
And then there came a point when he stumbled and fell forwards.
[Alex sobs]
[Jean] And he howled and sobbed.
[Alex wails]
[Jean] And that's the point when André had had enough.
[André] This is fucking stupid.
[Alex cries]
He was crying, and, uh, I snapped.
That was enough for me. I had enough.
This was… This was, uh, taking too heavy a toll on… on… on him
and too heavy a toll on me as well.
[André shouts] Go! Let's fucking go!
So I picked him up and just headed back to the car.
[Alex cries loudly]
We, you know, we drove off at full speed, left them in our dust, basically.
But, uh, I was in no fit state,
so I pulled up as soon as I could, found a quiet spot.
And, uh, I really burst into tears,
and I just… I just couldn't stop.
I just couldn't, uh… prevent myself.
I couldn't be strong at that point.
And I knew he was watching me. He was calm by then.
But, uh, I just had to let it out.
And then, you know, once I got myself together,
I said that… I said that I was sorry,
and, uh, we head back to Grandma's house.
So we pulled away.
[Jean] That was the last time I ever saw them.
I'd done what I could.
I wasn't very happy with what I'd done, but I'd tried and, um…
Sadness. And…
just awareness that it was an attempt that hadn't worked.
First, a notorious crime
that, two months ago, made headlines all over Britain.
On Wimbledon Common in Southwest London,
a young mother, Rachel Nickell, was waylaid and repeatedly stabbed.
It appears to be a random killing,
which, of course, makes it extremely hard to solve.
Tonight, detectives are putting all their cards on the table,
and they're appealing for the nation's help to name the killer.
We came to a stage in the inquiry
when we were quite satisfied that the description we had,
there's a good chance he was the murderer.
So that was time now to go to the media
to see if anybody could come up with any names
as to who that person might be.
[host] The man was in his twenties or thirties.
He was tall, more than five feet ten, and had short brown hair.
He had a white shirt with buttons and dark trousers, possibly blue,
and was carrying a small, dark bag.
Curiously, his belt was over his shirt rather than round his trousers.
Now, from this point, let's add some informed conjecture.
A consultant clinical psychologist is drawing up a likely profile of the killer.
[Paul Britton] What they got from me
was a point-by-point psychological analysis of the killer,
in my view.
[host] The killer is under the age of 30. He lives locally.
He has few friends and has solitary hobbies.
He may have an interest in martial arts.
He likes pornography.
He doesn't have a steady girlfriend.
If he's had previous girlfriends,
they'll have found him unsatisfying, sexually inexperienced…
[Britton] I told them this is an offender who wouldn't live very far away.
This is someone who knew the common, who knew his way around.
He would have been travelling on foot.
The telephone number to ring…
[Paul Penrose] After Crimewatch,
a lot of telephone calls came in.
As far as the Rachel Nickell murder is concerned,
90 calls here to the studio the last time I spoke to the team.
Ten of them are very interesting.
One man has gone straight to the top of their priority list.
[Penrose] We were getting phone calls from two or more local people,
saying that the artist's impression…
looked like a man called Colin Stagg.
[tense music playing]
And they indicated that they thought
he was the type of individual that could have carried out this killing.
And he admitted having been on the common
around about the same time as Rachel was found.
The lady who saw a man walking towards the murder scene
then later picked Stagg out of an identification parade
as that person.
[reporter] Police say the man was arrested around midday yesterday.
He's still being questioned.
[Penrose] Stagg lived near to the common,
so when he was arrested, his flat was searched.
It was a very strange set-up in that flat.
I remember when we arrived, there was something on the front door.
It said, "Christians beware," or words to that effect.
And there was one room
where the sort of signs of the Zodiac were painted on the floor,
and there was gothic images all around the place.
It was just a bizarre place.
One of the officers found a cupboard,
and in the cupboard, there was some survivalist equipment.
There were knives.
There was also a club with a ball on the end of it.
And it certainly indicated that this just wasn't a normal member of the public,
that there was something odd about him.
Plus, of course, he fitted to a tee the offender profile.
But there was a problem.
Despite the fact that he fitted the offender profile,
we just didn't have enough evidence to link him with the murder.
He admitted that he would sunbathe naked on the common,
and he was charged with indecent exposure.
But then he was released.
[music fades]
It was obviously disappointing, because not only was he a good suspect,
but he was the only suspect from the whole inquiry.
So we needed to work out, "Is he our man?"
And without forensic evidence,
we didn't know.
[soft, sorrowful music playing]
[André] After they released Colin Stagg, the press were on our doorstep.
Alex was the only witness to his mother's murder,
and whoever had perpetrated that was still on the loose.
So he was in danger.
That's when I knew we really weren't safe here,
and I had to take him away.
[tense music playing]
We didn't have a lot of trust in anybody.
So we just took every precaution possible not to be followed, not to be tracked…
and head off into the dark.
And we, you know, headed to the coast
to put as much distance between us and…
and a killer on the loose
and a press pack that was willing to stop at nothing.
And we left friends and family. We left everything material behind.
We left the home that we'd shared.
It was only what we could literally carry with us that we took forward.
We crossed the frontier and, uh, entered a new world.
[music softens]
[birds singing]
[music fades]
[Alex babbles]
[gentle music playing]
Rachel and I had always talked about moving to France.
I'd spent a lot of time in France when I was a teenager.
Played a lot of tennis
and, uh, hitchhiked around, so I knew the country pretty well.
We were in a small village, just a few miles from the coast.
Pulled up outside the front door for the first time
with the keys in our hand, opened the door,
just had a wonderful feeling of something new starting.
[indistinct speech]
I've only got two. You've got about 50 over there.
Look under…
It was absolutely idyllic.
A lovely little house.
A view out of the courtyard.
There were chickens in the run. There were puppies running around.
And, uh, we really could finally stop
and… and take stock and feel some peace and quiet around us.
Alex, calm down.
-Calm down. -[Alex giggles]
You're gonna get a tummy ache if you eat like that.
What it felt like is that we'd left a great deal of the evil behind us.
You know, it felt like we were in a place of peace.
[indistinct speech]
Finally, it seemed like things were… things were going in our direction.
It was, uh, absolute bliss.
You know? Just to have that anonymity again.
Good evening. The detective leading the hunt for the killer of Rachel Nickell,
the young woman murdered on Wimbledon Common a year ago,
says the inquiry may be scaled down within weeks,
unless there's a major development.
I would think if nothing crucial comes to light within the next two months,
then I would say that will be the end of the investigation.
John Bassett was telling the press that there were no new leads,
that the inquiry, we'd gone as far as you could,
and it was winding down,
whereas all the time there was something going on.
[intriguing music playing]
[woman] It said, um, "I've enclosed a fancy letter,
and if you don't want to read it, then you don't have to."
Um, but curiosity got the better of me, and I had to read the letter.
[Paul Penrose] We received a phone call from a woman
who'd seen Colin Stagg on the television,
and she said, "That man
is a man who I've had a lonely hearts club exchange of letters."
"And they're very strange letters."
[woman] Every word,
he uses the most filthiest, vulgar words you can use.
He asked if I liked the letter that he'd written to me.
Um, I said I wasn't impressed by it, basically,
and that he said he'd written me another one
and would I like him to send it to me, and I said no.
If I did get another letter from him, I was gonna give them to the police.
[Penrose] She sent those letters to us,
which gave us some insight into the way that Colin Stagg was thinking.
Then John Bassett asked me to go upstairs to his office,
and I was introduced to this female police officer.
Bassett said, "This is my detective sergeant,
and I want him to know what's happening."
And then it was explained to me
that there was gonna be an undercover operation
to discover if Colin Stagg's sexual fantasies
would reveal some information about the murder
that only the murderer would know.
The police came to me
and asked if I could help them with an undercover operation.
The way that it would work
is that the undercover police officer would write a letter to Colin Stagg
with the fake name Lizzie James.
She's trying to get him to write to her about his sexual fantasies
so that if he wrote back
in a way that was similar
to the way that the killer of Rachel Nickell might write back,
then you had the basis for further investigation.
And Colin Stagg did write back.
[Colin] Dear Lizzie, I'm so glad you like my letters
and that you are as broad-minded and uninhibited as me.
I want to dominate you.
The things I'm going to do to you will literally make your eyes water.
You will be left humiliated and dirty.
[Britton] The police were very excited
at the first sexual elements that came back from Colin Stagg.
They're now feeling justified in their operation,
that there was more to know,
and that they hadn't wasted their time.
[church bells ring]
[André] One day, after we'd been there for maybe a year,
Alex and I were doing pretend sword fighting.
[indistinct chatter]
And, uh, he said, "This is like when the bad man came."
And I tried…
I caught myself,
and I tried to carry on as naturally as possible.
So, um, one morning, I just sat down at the little red table,
put the… put the… put the camera up, and, uh….
and, uh, just attempted to talk about what happened.
Alex wanted to draw,
and he wanted me to help him with the drawing.
Dadda, can you help me draw Mummy on this piece of paper?
[André] As we continued with the drawing, Alex came up with information
which made it absolutely clear what he'd seen.
Did Mummy see him?
I don't think she did.
No? Did you see him first?
Yeah, I saw him first.
Did he have a bag?
Yeah.
And did he open it, or was it already open?
He opened it.
And what did he get out?
A knife.
There's Mummy. There's the bad man.
[André] Where's the knife?
-What did he do to you? -Knocked me over!
-He knocked you over? -Yeah.
The bad man was sticking his things in her.
-What was he sticking in her? -A knife. There's his knife.
Did you see it?
Yeah, I saw the knife.
Did you see all the times?
I saw it… Yeah, I saw it all.
All of it.
[André] He'd been there, seen it all, had… had…
assimilated all of this, you know, survived nearly a year,
basically withholding this in his head on his own.
-Did you see everything pretty much? -Yeah, I saw everything.
Did you look the other way?
Yeah, I looked that way.
I looked that way to see if anything else was happening.
-Did you? -Yeah.
Was it really horrible?
Yes, it was really horrible.
[André] It was very hard to hear.
You know, this is your child. This is your baby.
He was there. Rachel was there. I wasn't there.
I tried to imagine that all the way through that year,
over and over, night after night. I wanted to know what they'd been through,
because I wanted to be able to do something about it
or share in some way.
And here, you know, I was getting confirmation
of exactly what, you know, what took place, what Alex had seen,
and, uh… it put me right back in a state of imagining
what that must have been like for… for… for both of them.
And then a couple of weeks later,
well, the news came
that they were gonna charge Colin Stagg for Rachel's murder.
Scotland Yard says Colin Francis Stagg was arrested at 5:30 this morning
at his home in Roehampton in Southwest London.
[reporter 1] The address where the arrest was made
is within a mile or so of the spot on Wimbledon Common
where Rachel was killed just over a year ago.
[reporter 2] Police spent the day digging up his garden
and scanning the ground with metal detectors.
Colin Stagg was arrested, uh, and brought to Wimbledon Police Station,
uh, as a suspect for murder.
[reporter 3] His detention followed an undercover operation
involving a woman police constable.
She struck up a close relationship with Stagg.
[man 1] Would you like to introduce yourself formally?
[woman] Yes, I'm a serving police officer.
For the purpose of this interview, I'm known as Lizzie James.
[man 2] If I were to show you some 30 or 40 letters
that you've exchanged with Lizzie James,
would you have anything to say concerning your desire
to have sexual intercourse and sexual practices
on Wimbledon Common and in open woodland
involving the use of knives…
No comment.
…where blood is caused to flow?
No comment.
[Paul Britton] During the undercover operation,
Colin Stagg met with the undercover policewoman,
and what he did was hand her a letter
which introduced the notion of knives and all sorts of other things
that were present in the fantasies of the killer.
[Lizzie] Do you remember this letter now, Colin?
No comment.
[Lizzie] "The man then goes over to his pile of clothes
and produces some string and a knife."
What the killer of Rachel Nickell had
was a series of very specific elements in their fantasy
that are not that common.
And now Colin Stagg seems to have exactly that same set of fantasies.
[man 2] We have to look at the fantasies as they've progressed
as you've written to Lizzie James.
The increasing deviance,
the increasing domination, the increasing violence.
The need to humiliate and dominate.
There was just so much pointing towards him as being the murderer.
[man 2] I think what happened is you walked off down the windmill path,
and you sat down on a little patch of grass.
I think you actually described it in one of your letters to Lizzie James.
The fact that you see this gorgeous blonde woman
approaching from a distance.
-Is that what happened to Rachel? -No comment.
[man 2] You looked down from your vantage point and spied her.
And you rushed down, and you ambushed her.
And you pushed the little boy face down.
Pushed the little boy face down into the mud.
-No comment. -[man 2] Then you stabbed Rachel 49 times.
No comment.
On 15th July 1992, on Wimbledon Common,
you murdered Rachel Nickell,
causing her death by multiple stab wounds.
No comment.
[indistinct chatter]
[reporter] After being held overnight at a police station nearby,
Colin Stagg was driven quickly into Wimbledon Magistrates Court,
charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell.
Magistrates remanded him in custody until next week.
[Penrose] The Crown Prosecution Service were consulted
with all the evidence relating to the letters and the interview,
and it was decided that there was enough evidence
to charge him with the murder.
With Colin Stagg off the streets,
as far as I was concerned, this was all finished.
So I decided that it was a good time to go for something else.
So I left the investigation.
The fact that Colin Stagg was now in custody,
it gave a certain… certain feeling of relief.
But we'd learned really early on,
I knew that if you'd been through a situation as we'd had,
you're constantly protecting yourself, and you have a wait-and-see mentality.
[crickets chirping]
[quiet, tense music playing]
Police in South London hunting the killer of a four-year-old girl and her mother
say it's one of the most shocking cases they've ever had to investigate.
I'm Mummy. [laughs]
[reporter] Close friends of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset
are still trying to take in what happened.
What has shocked police is the ferocity of the murders.
A senior officer said Sam Bisset's injuries were horrific.
[man] I mean, I consider myself fairly hard,
uh, not affected much,
but… [sighs]
…even now, it makes me think,
"Christ, what on earth went on there?" I mean, it was horrendous, you know?
Micky Banks was my detective superintendent.
He was the senior investigating officer, and he actually…
I remember he put his arm around me
and said, "Rog," you know, "just brace yourself, son."
"This is the worst one I've ever seen." I remember that to this day.
And then we went in together with the forensic team
and went through the flat.
It was a small flat. It was one-bedroomed,
and we understood that Samantha Bisset lived there
with her four-year-old daughter, but they had to share a bedroom.
She was a single mum, probably didn't have much money.
There were lots of toys in the bedroom, lots of Jazmine's paintings on the walls.
It seemed to me that they were very close.
Uh, and when we walked in,
it became apparent that Samantha had been possibly stabbed to death in the hallway,
dragged through to the living room,
and placed on a large cushion in, like, a star formation.
And she'd been mutilated.
Uh, an attempt had been made to remove her legs,
and the body had been opened up.
When we walked back down the hallway,
the bedroom was at the right-hand side near to the front door.
And we went into the bedroom,
and there was a little girl's head peeping out of a… underneath a duvet.
You could just see these tousled, um, hair,
and it turned out that she'd been suffocated
and sexually assaulted.
So she was dead, but she looked like she was asleep.
[sorrowful music playing]
[Micky] First thoughts was,
"We've gotta get whoever done this, because this is a maniac."
Everybody wanted to catch this bastard that had done this crime, you know?
Uh, it was… it was a thing that we all agreed on,
because if you don't, there'll be another murder.
Because once these people start this,
you know, it's quite obvious they would become a serial killer.
There was hundreds of fingerprints in the flat,
and, of course, it had to go through the fingerprint department,
each one looked at individually.
The fingerprint officers would look through a magnifying glass
at a fingerprint and identify it through the swirls and the marks,
which is an art.
But within maybe two months,
we'd managed to eliminate all of those finger marks,
which in itself is quite unusual
because there's normally one or two marks which remain unidentified,
and they're often the suspect's.
There was no… no DNA. There was no clues.
Nothing at all that would help the investigation.
We found absolutely nothing, which is most unusual.
[reporter] There was no sign of a break-in at the flat,
and detectives admit they have few clues in this case.
As for the motive for this murder of a mother and her young daughter,
it appears only the killer knows that.
I was approached by my then-detective chief superintendent
that, uh, I should get Paul Britton in
because he was an expert.
He'd done a lot of work on the Rachel Nickell inquiry.
[Paul Britton] I was then taken to the scene of the murders itself.
The flat that Samantha and Jazmine Bisset lived in
is really quite important in its location.
Immediately behind the flat,
there is a garden area.
And then beyond that,
you have a tree-banked area,
where he sits, he watches, he fulfils his fantasies,
and gets these sort of thoughts.
"You're not going to tease me."
"You're not going to ridicule me."
"Let's see how you get on when I've finished with you."
Paul Britton's a clinical psychologist. How much do you think you know him?
I think we know quite well what was going through his mind
at the time of the offense,
but I would like him to tell me how he got started on the pathway
that led him eventually to kill, to harm Samantha.
You'd like him to tell you?
He's not very likely to ring up and say,
"Can I speak to Paul Britton, please?" and here are his answers.
I think that there is a possibility that he might want to do that.
[Roger] It's extremely rare that strangers attack members of the public.
Children being present is even rarer.
He's probably done something similar before.
He's not gone out and just done this. You work up to that level of violence.
And we couldn't fathom out how,
within a gap of 16 months
between the Wimbledon Common murder and the Plumstead murder,
how two different people could commit such ferocious, audacious crimes.
So was it possible that the same person committed both?
The victims were very similar in age and looks.
Both had a child present during the attacks.
And the number of stab wounds on Rachel Nickell and Samantha Bisset
were in the region of 50.
So at our request,
the senior detectives investigating the Nickell investigation
came over to our incident room
to discuss the similarities between both scenes.
And they basically dismissed our suggestion
that the two crimes could have been committed by the same person.
Because, of course,
Colin Stagg was in custody when the Bissets were murdered.
And we tried to impress upon them that they may have got the wrong person.
[woman] And how was that met?
Uh, with hostility and just absolutely…
"There's no way we haven't got the right person."
[Micky] They had their suspect, and, uh, they just…
they weren't interested in discussing it.
They were convinced that they had the right chap.
[sing-song] Opening the presents!
[giggles]
[André] It had been a year and a half, and Alex was, you know, in a good place.
There are not much presents under the tree now.
[André] There's loads of presents under the tree.
He was settled in at school, happy with his friends.
So, you know, he was really thriving.
It's a big crane.
[André] Around that time,
the word got to me that, uh…
that the police needed Alex to give evidence at Colin Stagg's trial.
They were hoping he could provide physical descriptions of the assailant
and also descriptions of his movements before and after the attack.
So once again, we're caught between a rock and a hard place.
What do we do?
If this is the person and, uh, we don't turn up,
he's back on the street.
But what is the price that Alex is gonna pay
in coming face-to-face with the person who did this?
[TV playing in background]
[suspenseful music playing]
[Micky] I think it was just a feeling, you know.
Just a feeling that there was something so wrong here.
Because it was one of the first crimes I've ever been to
where every print that was there was eliminated.
[Roger] Micky Banks spoke to me,
and he wanted the finger marks to be searched again,
especially those belonging to Samantha Bisset.
Micky really, really pushed hard for that to be done,
and the fingerprint branch eventually gave in
and agreed to re-examine some of the more suspicious marks
which were found at the Bisset flat.
Sometime afterwards, he called me and said, "We've had a result."
Some of the fingerprints
that had initially been identified as belonging to Samantha Bisset…
did, in fact,
belong to a man called
Robert Napper.
[Micky] And that was a eureka moment, I'll tell you.
I'll never forget it, you know. God… Jesus, I was over the moon.
They found about three or four prints of Napper in the flat.
Uh, one was on the ledge outside the patio door,
and some on the inside,
where he'd obviously got in through the French windows.
He lived locally. He had a very, very short criminal history
and had, in fact, spent, uh, two months in custody.
[reporter] Napper was arrested at his home on Friday.
He was living in Plumstead High Street,
half a mile from where the killings took place.
After he was arrested and assessed, it was apparent
he was suffering from some sort of mental illness.
And when he was interviewed,
um, he did give very, very strange answers in the third person,
as if he was talking about someone else.
He was the sort of bloke who thought that he was different to the rest of us.
He was aloof. Weird, weird chap.
Everybody said the same, anybody who met him.
He just… He was weird.
[Roger] We went to his flat at Plumstead High Street,
a very, very small bedsit.
Uh, he didn't have a bed or a mattress, which I thought was strange.
He slept on the floor, apparently.
And then we began to search the property.
And very quickly we found the red toolbox,
which was on the floor.
Uh, it was padlocked,
and obviously we were desperate to find out what was inside.
When we opened it,
there were knives.
There was a book.
And in the book, there were methods of, I think, strangulation
and vulnerable points on the body,
which were used to attack people and either immobilize them or kill them.
There was an A to Z.
And in his A to Z, there were all sorts of markings and doodles.
At the time, we couldn't work out what they were.
And we thought they were obviously gonna be very important
in the possible identification of, uh, of scenes of his crimes.
And on one of the doodles,
there was a set of steps
which looked like it could have possibly been Heathfield Terrace.
And in that doodle, he wrote the words "potential area."
He'd identified it as a possible target for him.
A 28-year-old man has been charged with the murders
of a single mother, Samantha Bisset,
and her four-year-old daughter last November.
[reporter] Today, Robert Napper denied murder
but admitted their manslaughter.
Samantha's killer is expected to be sentenced later today.
The really sad thing about this case is that Samantha was an only child,
and her mother, Margaret,
never recovered from the loss
of her only grandchild and her only daughter.
[Micky] I mean, it's bad enough losing your daughter,
but your granddaughter as well?
The family's wiped out.
You know, tragedy. Awful.
And to add to the distress of this case,
her mother died
the very day before Napper was due to stand trial at the Old Bailey.
So it's just a very… very, very sad case.
[suspenseful music playing]
Sometime later,
looking at his maps again,
although most of the markings were within Southeast London…
there was a particular mark
way away from Plumstead
in Richmond Park, Southwest London.
It's called Isabella Plantation,
which was a plot of open land very, very close to Wimbledon Common,
the scene of the Rachel Nickell murder.
[reporter] Stagg was first questioned by detectives last September.
He's due to appear here at court
charged with murdering Rachel Nickell this morning.
I was informed before the trial that, uh, Alex wouldn't be needed,
that his testimony wasn't necessary.
A part of me was very grateful he wouldn't have to go through the ordeal.
Another part of me was concerned
that we weren't putting everything into this we possibly could.
And then a few days later, the shock news came.
A friend called to see how I was, to see if I was holding up with the news.
And I said, "With what news?"
And he said, "You don't know?"
He said, "It's been… It's been thrown out."
The man accused of the brutal murder of Rachel Nickell
on Wimbledon Common two years ago
today walked free from court before the trial proper had even begun.
It was an absolute shock.
An Old Bailey judge launched a stinging attack
on police methods today after throwing out the case
against the man accused of killing Rachel Nickell.
[reporter 1] Colin Stagg walked free, having spent more than a year in custody
after being entrapped by an undercover police operation
that was strongly criticized by the judge and ruled to be inadmissible.
I was angry because whoever decided that this evidence was good
and would stand up to challenge had obviously made a big mistake.
And I was angry that maybe the person who decided to kick it all out
was going to an extreme, because there was strong circumstantial evidence.
There was probably a feeling that if there was a decision to be made
as to whether Colin Stagg committed a murder,
that decision should be made by a jury.
But we didn't get that far.
[reporter 2] William Clegg QC, defending, argued WPC James had lied,
offered inducements of sex and a relationship.
[reporter 3] Mr. Justice Ognall said
the police behavior betrayed not merely an excess of zeal
but a blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect
by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.
We failed.
And, um, that is not a good feeling.
"My life has been ruined by a mixture of half-baked psychological theories
and some stories written to satisfy the strange sexual requests
of an undercover police officer."
"The judge recognized there was never any evidence against me,
no forensic evidence, no confession evidence, nothing."
[reporter 4] Asked if Stagg should receive an apology from the police,
Sir Paul Condon said the police had already apologized
to those it thought necessary.
I… I make no apologies at all
for the Metropolitan Police inquiry in this case.
I fully support the action of my officers,
and I take full responsibility for police action in this case.
[poignant music playing]
[André] It felt like we were back at day one,
you know, with the killer on the loose and no protection.
And what really underlined that
was Paul Condon, the head of the Met, making a statement
that they weren't looking for anybody else.
At the moment, there is no new information,
no new leads for us to explore.
[André] They made it clear that they thought Stagg got away with murder
and was now on the loose.
I was left feeling like I couldn't trust anybody,
and we always wondered whether or not we were treated in a different way
because, uh, I was a young man of color.
You lose all faith in… in the system.
So now any closure that we…
that was gonna be truly meaningful was something we'd have to find for ourselves,
and we couldn't rely on outside circumstances
to provide us with that.
[gentle music playing]
[man] For many, many years, there was no real… real progress.
Nothing had really changed in terms of, you know, what we knew.
From day one, it was the three of us.
You know, my father and me and our dog, Molly.
That was who we were as a family.
My father knew that I understood what had happened.
That my mother loved me,
and, um, that she wouldn't have wanted to leave me.
So, my father and me,
we didn't talk about… about my mother.
You know? We didn't talk about the past.
But I still… I felt an anger that this had happened,
and, you know, that no matter what I did, I couldn't stop it from happening.
I think if you witness that degree of evil,
you know, as a small child,
the illusion that you have, you know, that your parents,
no matter how good a job they do,
can really protect you from harm,
I think that that… you know, that collapses.
[André] Alex was absolutely a really sweet little boy.
There was a joy that was there.
But then in the preteen years, there was an anger, you know,
and the anger was, you know, quite rightly directed towards me.
I was very angry about a lot of the things we'd lived through.
The sessions that went on for weeks and months.
The thing that was most distressing for me was to be taken back,
you know, to that day repeatedly
and suggestions given about how I should feel about it.
And, you know, I guess I carried that with me somewhat.
[André] He did get into trouble with the authorities.
Just small stuff, but the police were on the doorstep on occasions.
[Alex] I don't think that I had the same… the same respect,
the same trust for my father as I once had.
And the fundamental point was that he was the protector of the family as the father
and, you know, unfortunately had allowed this to happen to us.
So in my teenage years, you know, we had a lot of conflict.
[André] I had a huge sense of guilt that… that I hadn't protected my family.
And you do feel stupid.
You feel like a fool,
because we're told to put our security in the hands of other agencies.
Once upon a time, it was the Wild West, and you took the law into your own hands,
and you protected, you know, your loved ones with whatever it took.
And that's what hit me at the time.
I didn't do that.
And I wish I had.
[music fades]
[Alex] With every week that goes by, with every month that goes by,
with every year that goes by,
you've kind of come to terms with, on some level,
that this may never be resolved.
[suspenseful music playing]
[carousel clicks]
[woman] By 2002, the Rachel Nickell case did become a cold case.
The police came and asked if I and my team would have a look at it.
I knew from reading the newspapers that this had been a very violent attack.
But I was aware
Colin Stagg had been accused and then acquitted.
But I think he was still a suspect as far as the police were concerned.
And so they wanted us just to cast a fresh pair of eyes over it
and see whether or not,
out of the things that they'd collected at the time,
whether there was anything in that
that could possibly be used, um,
to identify Rachel's attacker.
There were some tapings, these sticky tape lifts,
um, taken from Rachel's body
and particularly the intimate parts of her body.
And we noticed
that the original scientists hadn't found any DNA on these tapings.
And so we knew immediately that something was wrong,
because there should've been
an enormous amount of Rachel's own DNA on these tapings.
I think what probably happened is,
if you have too much DNA in a sample,
it can swamp the technique so that you don't see anything.
And so one of the first things we did was, of course, to repeat it,
but doing it in a slightly different way.
[suspenseful music continues]
Just as expected, we got lots of Rachel's DNA.
But we also got a tiny trace of male DNA.
When we got this hint of male DNA,
we really didn't know
whether we'd be able to develop it enough, get enough information out of it
to identify one particular individual.
And so we developed a whole new technique,
a new sensitive technique,
um, and this involved taking a tiny amount of DNA from a sample
and then multiplying up the DNA,
or we call it amplifying.
So you've got several times your original amount,
so you've got enough to actually analyze.
It took about two years
to develop this technique to the point where we could use it.
Before we ran the… uh, the information that we had,
this DNA profile we had, through the database,
we checked it against Colin Stagg,
and it definitely didn't match him.
[keyboard keys clacking]
And so we put it through the National DNA Database.
And when we did that, that's when it came up as a match.
[André] The phone rang one day,
out of the blue, and it was the police, and they had news.
And the news was there was a positive identification.
And they said that the person that had been identified
was a completely new name.
[Angela] The DNA database produced a match
for someone called Robert Napper.
And then we discovered that Napper was in Broadmoor
because he'd also committed a murder of a mother and a young daughter.
[poignant music playing]
It had been somebody else all the time.
So that moment in time
was when our worst possible scenario had proved to be played out,
that somebody else had been murdered
by the same person in the same circumstances.
Another family's been destroyed.
So if I didn't know how blessed I'd been that Alex survived,
when we found out what happened to Samantha and Jazmine,
I thank God every day.
Because it's only by the grace of God that… that we've survived together,
and it's only by the grace of God that he survived physically.
[poignant music continues]
[music fades]
[crowd cheering, whistling on TV]
[man] I was watching a football match on TV one evening.
There was a knock on my door,
and I was a bit annoyed 'cause I was missing the match.
There was two journalists standing there. And they said, um… um,
"Did you know that the police have arrested another man
in relation to the Nickell murder,
and they got DNA evidence to prove he was guilty?"
I was like, "Can you come back in about an hour's time?"
"I'm watching the match."
They were like, "No problem," and they walked off.
I was sick of the whole thing, you know?
It dragged on for about 15 years.
[reporter 1] Colin Stagg had police protection today
as the Rachel Nickell case continued to haunt him.
[Colin] From when I was arrested, there were articles in the newspapers
stirring people's emotions up against me.
People shouting out stuff like, "Guilty," "Hang him,"
stuff like that, you know.
[reporter 2] Mr. Stagg remained uncomfortably in the media spotlight
even after his release.
[woman] Don't!
[Colin] Instilling in people's minds
that, "We know we had the right man, but he got off on a technicality."
You know? So I had to live with that.
[man] Many people thought he was guilty,
but nobody actually heard the evidence either for him or against him.
That meant that he was in a kind of limbo for all these years.
Now, 15 years on, a man has been charged.
He's 41-year-old Robert Napper.
The last man to be charged, Colin Stagg, was cleared
because a policewoman had tried to entrap him.
[Colin] I'd never had a proper girlfriend up to the point of 29.
So when I received a letter from Lizzie James,
I just felt really, um… happy
that, um, a woman had shown some interest in me.
It is clear that he is completely innocent of any involvement in that case.
And I today apologize to him
for the mistakes that were made in the early 1990s.
[Colin] I had very low self-esteem anyway before this started.
This knocked me back even further, so even deeper and deeper.
It did make me feel very paranoid.
If I would accidentally sort of look at a woman crossing the road and that,
I used to immediately think, like, "No, look away,"
because somebody could be watching me
thinking, "Hang on, he's stalking that woman."
And I just thought, "Well, you know, this is your life now."
"You've just got to get on with it. You know, don't trust anybody."
[André] On the build-up to the trial, one of the lead detectives said, uh,
"After you fly in," he said, "we'll meet."
There was something I needed to know before we got to the courtroom itself.
Seven o'clock in the evening, we met at Hendon Police Station.
He showed me into a back room.
We're just the two of us present, and he pushed a dossier across the table.
[tense music playing]
What I saw in the dossier of documents
was just what an utter chaotic catalog of errors
this whole investigation had been.
It was absolutely devastating.
It took me all the way back to the very first day.
The very first call,
the very first news that Rachel had been taken from us,
and that Alex had been through such an ordeal.
We'd been trying to make sense of that
week after week, month after month, year after year.
And all that's just exploded.
Because here it says it was all preventable.
[sorrowful music playing]
[Roger] In the summer of 1989,
three years before the murder of Rachel Nickell
and also the murders of Samantha and Jazmine,
a serial rapist started attacking women,
some with children present,
on the Green Chain Walk pathway,
which runs through woodland and open common land in Southeast London,
which is also not far from the scene of the Bisset murders.
DNA had identified one suspect for that series of rapes.
Two people who had seen the poster contacted the police and said,
"That artist's impression
looks remarkably like a guy called Robert Napper."
Two detectives investigating the Green Chain Walk rapes
went to his, uh, known address.
He appeared. They both spoke to him.
He was, uh, told that he had been identified as a possible suspect.
And he then was asked to come and voluntarily give blood,
which he agreed to do.
But he failed to attend the police station,
so they went back to his address.
He'd packed his bags and left.
He'd gone.
Subsequently,
on the grounds that he was taller
than the descriptions given by the rape victims,
the decision was made
by the senior investigating officer and his deputy
to exclude him as a suspect from that inquiry.
So basically nothing else was done.
Which baffles me to this day.
[music fades]
Had Napper attended the police station,
as he said he would do, and his blood sample taken,
he would have been then arrested for the Green Chain Walk rapes.
That didn't happen, which…
It had catastrophic consequences.
[poignant music playing]
[André] And then there was something in the dossier
that was, for me, even more devastating.
In September or October of 1989, and years before Rachel was killed,
Robert Napper's mother reported to the police
that he confessed that he'd raped a woman on Plumstead Common.
But the police didn't follow it up.
This was a fork in the road.
If the police had followed up on Robert Napper's mother's call
and taken a blood sample from him,
this could have prevented all of the attacks that followed.
The attack that Alex witnessed was preventable.
Rachel's death was preventable.
Samantha and Jazmine's deaths were preventable.
If they'd done their job properly, he would have been taken off the street.
[reporter 1] We watch today as one of the great unresolved murders
was finally resolved.
[reporter 2] Today, the killer of Rachel Nickell was found guilty
of stabbing her to death on Wimbledon Common 16 years ago.
[laughter and chatter on video]
Robert Napper was led out of the cells,
up into the dock of Court 1 here at the Old Bailey,
and there, gray-faced and balding, with Rachel Nickell's parents looking on,
he finally confessed to killing their daughter.
[Rachel laughs] André, I'm right up on your…
[Alex babbles]
[reporter 3] Today's confession brings to a close
one of the most damning episodes in Scotland Yard's history.
[reporter 4] They admitted they could have caught Napper earlier
and stopped him killing.
If the police had done things differently,
Rachel Nickell and Samantha and Jazmine Bisset
would not have lost their lives.
More could and should have been done.
Had more been done,
we would have been in a position to have prevented this
and other very serious attacks by Napper.
[music fades]
[birds singing]
[André] We all grew up with fairy tales.
We all grew up with that warning not to go into the woods.
The darkness, the monsters, the… the danger.
But it's not a fairy tale.
There is true evil in this world.
[soft, pensive music playing]
I was really forced to… to come to terms with that.
My greatest confusion was, uh… was why, you know?
You know, the anger with God that, uh…
that these kind of things can happen to good people
with absolutely no explanation.
And so I had a mission,
and, uh, that was to bring, you know, Rachel's child through this
in the best way possible.
[Alex] I think with people you live through difficulties together,
they either break you and they break the relationship
or they make the relationship that much stronger.
We were ultimately forced to find our own closure,
which I think is actually a good thing.
And that was ultimately the realization that,
you know, you have no choice but to make peace.
Make peace with it.
My parents believed in the infinity of the spirit.
That my mother would be with me always wherever I went.
My father sacrificed everything for me and for what he believed in,
without any guarantees of how it would turn out.
He was brave enough to… to do what he felt was right in his heart.
I'm forever indebted to him for that.
[music fades]
[soft, sorrowful music playing] that.