Rachel Nickell was brutally stabbed to death in broad daylight in front of her young son Alex Hanscombe. What followed would go down as one of the most damning chapters in Scotland Yard history
On a beautiful July morning in 1991, little Alex Hanscombe, his mother Rachel Nickell, and their dog Molly set off on a walk across Wimbledon Common. What happened next would change the life of that young boy forever.
Then just three weeks shy of his third birthday, Alex witnessed his mum being brutally attacked and stabbed to death right in front of him. In a quiet, wooded area, Rachel was ambushed, sexually assaulted and knifed 49 times in her neck and chest.
When passersby stumbled across the horrific scene, Alex, two, was clinging to his mum’s lifeless body, and had to be prised away. In a heartbreaking attempt to help, the toddler had placed a piece of paper on Rachel’s forehead as a makeshift bandage after pleading with her to wake up.
The trauma of witnessing his mother being killed in front of him is more than any child should bear. But for Alex, and for his father André, a catalogue of police errors meant their ordeal was made all the more unbearable.
It would take 16 years for the right man to be brought to justice, after a collapsed trial and twisted honey trap scheme. The case is the subject of a new three-part series for Netflix dramatisation, The Witness, alongside an accompanying documentary featuring never-before-seen archive footage, including little Alex describing his mother’s murder, and other deeply personal accounts from those who lived through the tragedy.
The toll it took on Alex and André was immeasurable. As the only witness to the crime, Alex was quizzed repeatedly about his mother’s horrific murder by police experts – something his father agonised over. At one point, the toddler was even taken back to the scene of the crime. As filmmaker Lucy Bowden notes: “He [André] is in this really difficult position where he obviously wants to protect his child, but he also knows that he could help to find the murderer and stop other murders from happening.”
But it was when Alex was taken to the scene of the crime that André decided they had to walk away. Soon afterwards, father and son relocated to an isolated area in the south of France in an attempt to escape the evil that had destroyed their family. And they tried to find peace there, with Alex living a happy childhood.
The police investigation, meanwhile, continued. Their focus fell on a man named Colin Stagg, who was known to walk on the common. Believing that he was the man responsible, the Met decided to use a ‘honeytrap’, and an undercover officer contacted Stagg. Over the course of five months, she attempted to get information from him, meeting up and exchanging letters about sexual fantasies – some of which were violent. But he did not admit to the killing.
During a taped conversation between the police officer and Stagg, she claimed to enjoy hurting people, to which he said, “Please explain, as I live a quiet life. If I have disappointed you, please don’t dump me. Nothing like this has happened to me before”. When she went on to say, “If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right”, he replied, “I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t”.
Stagg was nevertheless arrested and charged on the basis of claims that he had described aspects of the murder scene that only the killer would have known. His trial was scheduled at the Old Bailey in September 1994. But it never got underway.
Mr Justice Ognall ruled that the police had shown “excessive zeal” and had tried to incriminate Stagg by “deceptive conduct of the grossest kind”. He excluded all the entrapment evidence on the grounds that Stagg’s descriptions of the murder were not nearly as close to the reality as the police had maintained.
With no other evidence to present, the prosecution withdrew its case and Stagg was acquitted. The police, however, stood by their belief that he was the man responsible and stated they would not be looking at any other suspects.
Ten years after her death, Rachel’s murder was re-investigated as part of a national cross-force investigation into the unsolved murders of 207 women. An examination of tapings taken from Rachel’s body uncovered a tiny trace of male DNA which did not match Alex or André. The sample was so small that a new technique had to be developed to enable analysis – a process that took two years.
But when the results came back, they were monumental. The DNA did not match Colin Stagg – but they did match with someone else on the National DNA base, a man named Robert Napper.
At the time, Napper was serving time in Broadmoor for murder, having been convicted of the double murder of Samantha Bisset and her daughter Jazmine Bisset in November 1993, just 16 months after Rachel’s death. The cases were strikingly similar’ not only did Rachel and Samantha resemble each other, but they were both stabbed around 50 times. Chillingly their children were also both present.
Napper attacked 27-year-old Samantha in the home she shared with her daughter. He stabbed her repeatedly in her neck and chest, killing her before attempting to remove parts of her body. He then sexually assaulted and smothered her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine. It was a horrific scene that continues to haunt attending officers to this day.
On 28 November 2007, Napper – who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as well as Asperger syndrome – was charged with Rachel’s murder. He initially pleaded not guilty in January 2008 and his trail got underway in November that year.
On 18 December 2008, at the Old Bailey, Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Mr Justice Griffith Williams said that Napper would be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor because he was “a very dangerous man”. It is unlikely he will ever be released.
Stagg, meanwhile, finally received an apology from the police, having spent years being targeted as the supposed killer. He had remained uncomfortably in the media spotlight, even after his release with the consensus – purported by the police – that he was the right man, and that he had got off on a technicality.
André and Alex’s ordeal, meanwhile, was further compounded when it came to light that Rachel, Samantha and Jazmine’s deaths were all preventable. Napper had been identified as possible suspect in rapes, two years before Rachel’s death. He agreed to come in for a police interview – but did a runner. And since he was slightly taller than the description given to police by the rape victims, police decided no to take it further.
Then, in October 1989, Napper’s own mother contacted police to say he had confessed to raping a woman. Again, nothing happened. “They didn’t follow it up,” André says, describing Samantha and Jazmine’s deaths as the “worst possible scenario” after the loss of Rachel.
“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’d have been taken off the street.”
The case stands as one of the most damning episodes in Scotland Yard history. And it took its toll on Alex. As a teenager, he acted out – and he felt angry towards André for failing to protect his family. It was another heartbreak that the family had to work through.
Speaking on the documentary, André recalls: “There was a joy that was there, but then in the years, there was an anger – an anger that was directed quite rightly at me. “
Alex says: “I was very angry about a lot of the things we lived through. The sessions that went on for weeks and months. The thing that was most distressing for me was to be taken back 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. I don’t think I had the same respect, the same trust for my father as I once had.”
Happily, father and son managed to overcome those difficulties together. “There is true evil in this world. I was forced to come to terms with that,” André explains. “I had a mission to bring Rachel’s child through this in the best way possible.”
“My father sacrificed everything,” Alex tells the documentary. “For me, and for what he believed in. “He was brave enough to do what he felt was right in his heart and I am forever indebted to him for that.”
Alex began a career as a mechanic before following his passion for music and moving back to London to train as a session musician. He has also travelled extensively in Asia and Africa and studied yoga in India, according to an author biography for his book, ‘Letting Go: A true story of murder, loss and survival’.
He moved to Barcelona and went on to study hypnotherapy as well as graphology, which is the analysis of handwriting, as well as travelling.
