On the morning of July 15, 1992, 24-year-old Brit Rachel Nickell and her two-year-old were standing son Alex Hanscombe on the doorstep of their home and waved goodbye to Rachel’s partner and Alex’s father André Hanscombe.
Rachel and Alex planned to spend the day as usual: playing indoors and then taking their dog Molly for a long walk through Wimbledon Common, a popular park in southwest London. But when André called home to check that everything was going, Nickell didn’t answer. It was a police officer who gave him the devastating news – Nickell was dead, and Alex was the only witness to the murder.
Now Netflix is taking on Nickell’s brutal crime and the subsequent police investigation that caused a national stir – from the active manhunt to a years-long cold case. On June 4th, the streaming service released two projects. “The Witness,” created by Rob Williams (“Suspicion,” “Killing Eve”) and directed by Alex Winckler (“Mary & George”), is a dramatized version of the murder and investigation. “The Murder of Rachel Nickell,” on the other hand, allows André, Alex and the police officers involved to speak in original interviews and traces how the case was shaped by relentless media attention and one investigation after another.
Four insights from the documentary
Here are four things we took away from The Murder of Rachel Nickell.
The huge crime scene made it difficult to search for clues
Nickell and Alex were walking on Wimbledon Common when the young mother was attacked from behind. A jogger came across the body – with Alex clinging to her – and called the police.
According to Paul Penrose, the detective sergeant in charge of the case, Nickell’s body was lying on his back, in an unnatural position. Her hands were raised towards her face – as if she had tried to defend herself in her final moments. Her clothes had been torn off and there were signs of sexual assault. She had been stabbed 49 times.
The park was a public area that young families enjoyed using. But it extends over more than 400 hectares of meadows and forest areas. More than 40 officers were deployed to conduct an initial search of the site, but little usable physical evidence was found. The police set up a hotline that was immediately flooded with calls – there were initially no specific suspects.
Alex was supposed to identify the perpetrator
Because Alex was the only witness to the murder, police believed the two-year-old had seen important clues that could lead to a suspect.
When André reached the hospital where Alex had been placed after the murder, a doctor made it clear to him that he had to tell the little boy honestly from the start that his mother was dead. According to André, Alex never once asked where his mother was – which led him to believe that his son had somehow already understood death.
The biggest conflict in the first months of the case was the tension between the pressure of the police to investigate and the fragile state of a child who had just experienced severe trauma. Alex had several sessions with a child psychologist, who wrote down questions that André then asked his son. Alex gave some answers: the “bad man” had appeared from behind, possibly washed his hands at a stream and was wearing a belt over his shirt – nothing more could be gotten out of him.
André was anxious for Alex’s healing and did not want to traumatize his son again by recalling the memories of the crime. When the police took father and son back to Wimbledon Common to retrace the steps of that day and Alex began screaming and crying, André ended the interview. Media representatives followed the family at every turn and pressed them for statements. When a local photographer published a recognizable image of Alex’s face, André feared for her safety and left England – moving with his son to a remote part of France.
Wrong lead: Colin Stagg
At the time of Nickell’s murder, there was enormous pressure from the public on police to name a suspect as quickly as possible. The officers called in the renowned forensic psychologist Paul Britton, who had made a name for himself by creating criminal profiles. Britton described Nickell’s killer as someone who lived near the crime scene, had difficulty with relationships and may have had few close friendships. After police released a phantom drawing of a man walking off Wimbledon Common on the day of the murder, a caller called the hotline saying 29-year-old local resident Colin Stagg matched the description.
When officers searched Stagg’s apartment, they found satanic symbols, a sign that read “Christians beware,” and strange characters drawn on the carpet and around an emergency kit. Convinced he was the murderer but without any hard evidence, an officer using the name Lizzie James began writing letters to Stagg to get him to confess.
The officer encouraged Stagg to write down his sexual fantasies, which became increasingly violent. Although he never confessed to Nickell’s murder, the police saw his fantasies about blood and knives as sufficient grounds for charges. He was arrested on August 17, 1993 and spent over a year in custody. But shortly before the trial began, a judge threw out the case, calling the police methods a trap.
In the Netflix documentary, Stagg says the allegations against him robbed him of years of his life. Speaking to the press, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon said he stood behind his officers’ actions – implying that Stagg was guilty but had escaped justice.
“I had never had a real girlfriend until I was 29. When I received a letter from Lizzie James, I was just happy that a woman was interested in me,” Stagg explains in the documentary. “I already had little self-confidence. And that set me back even further.”
Police missed opportunities
After Stagg was acquitted, Nickell’s case remained unsolved for more than eight years. But in 2002, a review of the forensic evidence secured at the crime scene, combined with technological advances, led to a breakthrough. Police found a DNA match with Robert Napper, a man who lived near Wimbledon Common at the time of the crime and was now serving a prison sentence for several rapes and murders.
The same year Nickell was murdered, Napper was linked to another murder of a mother and her child: 27-year-old Samantha Bissett and four-year-old Jazmine Bissett. Both were abused and killed.
In the documentary, André reports that an employee of the Crown Prosecution Service – the British public prosecutor’s office – showed him a report that said police failure contributed to Nickell’s murder. Around 1989, more than 70 women were raped in a crime spree that police dubbed the “Green Chain” rapes. Napper matched a description of the perpetrator provided by a witness. But when the police came to his home, they simply asked him to voluntarily provide blood and DNA samples at the station instead of arresting him. When he didn’t show up at the agreed appointment and officers went to his apartment again, it was empty. Napper had disappeared. If he had been arrested then, he would have been deprived of the opportunity to kill Nickell, Samantha or Jazmine.
Napper, who investigators believe suffered from severe mental illness for years, eventually confessed to Nickell’s murder. He was convicted in 2008. Alex and André say their lives no longer revolve around the case. Instead, they want to remember Nickell for who she was.
“Our life has been a struggle,” the two wrote in a press release. “Our journey has been sustained by God’s grace and the promise of moving forward together. We feel incredibly blessed to be able to share our story in this way. We hope audiences come away with a testimony of the uphill battle that life demands of all of us – and the power of faith, hope, love and the will to never give up.”