She had over 40 stab wounds to her body. It was a scene out of a horror movie. Good evening.
The savage knife murder of a young mother in broad daylight stunned detectives in London today. It is a massive jolt to society that life is much more dangerous than it used to be. She was 23 when she died.
She was a shining light. Talks about the sort of things the offender would be interested in, which was sexually sadistic fantasies. You know, what sort of person could have done this to another human being.
It was unbelievable. You know, it was frightening. Today’s developments bring another twist to the story, but the common still holds its secret.
On the morning of the 15th of July, 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell was getting ready to take her young son, Alex, for a walk. Less than two hours later, she would be dead. Across London, on the tough Alton Estate in Roehampton, less than a mile from Wimbledon Common, local man Colin Stagg had woken up early and was preparing to leave his flat.
I initially did go on the common very early in the morning just to walk my dog. I remember I had a very bad headache that morning, so what would have normally been a quite long walk, which is a daily thing, I only did a short walk, just around a little pond called Skiou Pond, and then back home again.
Colin returned to his flat to sleep off his headache. It was around 9:25 in the morning. A mile away, Rachel, Alex, and their dog, Molly, had set off across Wimbledon Common for a stroll through the woods.
As they enjoyed the early summer sun, they were totally unaware of the killer stalking them. The area of the common, as I recall, was really quite wide open. I think the area had some tree cover around it.
But essentially, this was broad daylight. This was not an area you would think twice about going to. She was killed on a path which was well frequented, probably less than 200 yards from an open green area on Wimbledon Common where mothers were walking their children.
Just minutes into the family’s walk, the killer struck. The attack was so ferocious, one of the blows that cut her throat to silence her before the main attack almost decapitated her. She had over 40 stab wounds to her body and throat.
It was a scene out of a horror movie. Police soon flooded the common, quickly realizing that their crime scene stretched to over 1,000 acres of woodland that contained over 500 people on the morning of the murder. A murder that had only one eyewitness, a two-year-old boy that had seen his mother butchered.
Feeling better, Colin Stagg decided to head back to the common to take his dog for a longer walk, a decision that would affect the rest of his life. Saw a uniform police officer standing on the common side. He advised me not to go onto the common because there had been an incident.
I basically asked him what it was, and he said they had found the body of a young girl. I told him that I had been on the common that morning. And he asked if I had seen anything suspicious, and I just said no.
He asked me for my name and address in case they needed to question me later, and I freely gave it. And that was it. I just basically went home.
The Metropolitan Police assembled a crack team of detectives to work on the case. From the start, the Nickell murder squad was hindered by lack of evidence. There was a minute speck of what at the time was regarded as organic material, but the science of the early 1990s was not enough to mark it as DNA.
So, the police were starting from a very difficult place. After a month of inquiries and hundreds of interviews, the detectives still seemed to be getting nowhere. They could not even categorically say whether Rachel’s killer was male or female.
Faced with a stalling investigation, the police took the unusual step of calling in a criminal profiler to provide a psychological assessment of the killer. In the UK, psychological profiling was new. I was very personally cynical about what a profiler could offer, although not dismissive of it.
They are not going to be able to name the killer. What they might be able to do is put someone in a bracket and say, well, this type of individual is the sort of thing they could do. The man the detectives turned to was Paul Britton, a renowned criminal psychologist who had worked on several high-profile cases in the past.
Working hand in hand with the inquiry team, Britton was asked to profile Rachel Nickell’s killer. There were two profiles written, one which we might call a demographic profile. Someone between 20 and 30 with isolating hobbies who probably lives on his own and probably does not live very far from the common.
And the second one was this so-called sexual fantasy profile where he talked about the sort of things the offender would be interested in. Which was sexually sadistic fantasies and he actually listed some of these. Would be interested in knives and the occult and that type of thing.
The profiles along with a photo fit of a possible suspect were featured in a national TV appeal. The broadcast prompted hundreds of calls from members of the public and many were claiming they knew who the man in the photo fit was. The police were inundated with calls putting a name to this face.
Colin Francis Stagg.
On the 15th of July 1992, Rachel Nickell was walking with her two-year-old son Alex on Wimbledon Common. In a few short minutes, a laughter-filled stroll in a popular beauty spot would be turned into a scene of horror. Her son, ripped from her arms, would be the only witness to the dreadful attack.
The pathologist, Dr. Richard Shepherd, told the inquest it was a frenzied attack. The killer kept up the stabbing even after her death.
She had been sexually molested. The image of her, the beautiful blonde model, is an iconic image now and it seems to speak to the loss of innocence of a period of time when a young woman could not take her child out in the middle of the day on a summer’s day. So, it became one of these cases that put incredible pressure on the police.
There are suspects. Four men were spotted near the scene. Perhaps the most important was the one seen washing his hands in this stream shortly after the murder.
He, like the others, has not been traced and the police fear that if it was the killer, he may strike again. Faced with an almost complete lack of eyewitness and forensic evidence, the police asked criminal psychologist Paul Britton to devise a profile of the killer. This profile, along with a well-publicized photo fit of a suspect seen near the murder site, led to the spotlight falling on a local man, Colin Stagg, who lived a few minutes walk from Wimbledon Common.
Early in the morning, about 8:00 or 9:00 I think it was, someone was knocking on my door. I opened it and it was plainclothes officers. And they said they wanted to question me in regard to the Rachel Nickell murder.
To be fair to the police, they had interviewed other suspects. They had followed up other leads. But as time wore on, those leads and those suspects petered out.
The only man who figured large, and was to do so for the next two years, was Colin Stagg. I had never been arrested for anything in my life at that time. Being accused of something like that, I was in a different world.
It was strange. Lots of police officers came in. They searched my home top to bottom.
I had a couple of books about the occult and stuff like that, and they focused on that. After they searched my place, they took me to Wimbledon police station, and then they held me for three days.
As the police began to question their suspect, they were presented with a huge stroke of luck. Colin Stagg was about to reveal a piece of information that would convince detectives he was the killer. I can see why Colin Stagg rose to the top of this inquiry.
He almost offered himself up, quite frankly. He was on the common at the time. He is a known loner.
Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes with that, perceived to be just a little bit odd in some way or another. I have never been arrested before for any crime. And it was very, very scary.
Amazingly for the police officers involved, he talked frankly and openly. He did not deny anything, but other than to insist that he had not murdered this young mother.
As police continued to question Colin, a search of past incidents on the common delivered a breakthrough. They discovered a sighting by a woman of a man who was lying naked on the common, who she claimed 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 himself to her. Basically, I was just doing 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 sunbathing, which I did in a regular spot every summer.
And it was an area used by 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 sunbathers. I pleaded guilty to it because I thought, well, basically, I had been advised to do so by my solicitor. And I just wanted to get out of there.
I did not want these things to drag on. So, I thought, get rid of it. I got a fine for 200 pounds and after that, I was released after three days.
That decision was to have long and lasting effects on the case and his life.
Stagg’s naivety fueled the police’s theory that he matched Paul Britton’s profile of the killer. As Colin returned to his life on the Alton estate, where he assumed the trauma of the past few months was behind him for good, an innocent decision he had made years before the killing of Rachel Nickell was about to come back to haunt him. I think it was about two years prior to the murder of Rachel Nickell, I answered a dating advert for friendship.
And so, I wrote a letter to Julie Pines. We got on okay. We chatted on the telephone at first, and we seemed to be okay.
And then, being a normal red-blooded man, you know, I thought, this could go a bit further. So, I just chanced my arm, really, and wrote her a sexual letter. It was just of my own sexual fantasy of meeting a woman in the open air, getting on together, and having 𝒔𝒆𝒙 together in the open air.
And she kept that letter for two years, and she contacted the police after I was arrested for those three days. And that was it. And the police, once they read that letter, and of course, Rachel Nickell was murdered in the woodlands, they seemed to find a connection with that.
After a detailed examination of the letter from Julie Pines, the police were now even more certain that Colin had murdered Rachel Nickell. But, they were still completely unable to prove it. Faced with an ever-mounting pressure from both senior officers and the public, the inquiry team hit upon a daring idea.
It was believed, now we know hugely problematically, that it would be useful to get an undercover operative in there to evaluate whether Stagg had any guilty knowledge of the case. The inquiry team wasted no time in recruiting a star female undercover officer known during and after the operation as Lizzie James. With her in place, and after lengthy consultations with Paul Britton, Operation Edsel, as it was code-named, began.
The carefully concocted plan, made with the approval of senior Metropolitan Police officers and lawyers, was that Lizzie should write to Colin and earn his trust in the hope he would reveal some intimate knowledge of the crime. I received a letter from a woman calling herself Lizzie James. And she claimed that she was a friend of Julie Pines, and she had read the letter, and she found it interesting.
And she wanted to get to know me. The first letter was something like, dear Colin, you might remember a lady called Julie Parnell. Dear Colin, I hope you are not offended by this intrusion as we have never met before.
Julie was fairly close-minded. I am a lot more open-minded, and basically I want to start a dialogue with you.
Of course, Stagg, you know, a 30-year-old guy getting a bit of attention from a woman writes back. Dear Lizzie, thank you so much for your letter, which I read with great interest. We struck up a conversation.
I was sending letters to her. She would send letters to me. I am sure your fantasies hold no bounds, and you are as broad-minded and uninhibited as I am.
Some of the early letters by Stagg show his degree of naivety, where he talks about making parsnip wine, and we will go out on the veranda and have our parsnip wine, and I will kiss you and cuddle you, and it is all pretty benign stuff. And then in a very significant letter that she writes back, she says, I need you to show me what a real man is. The things that happened when I was with this man were not what normal people would like.
And even though these things are bad, and I feel guilty, I can never forget how exhilarating they made me feel.
Now, there are only so many ways you can take that. So, unsurprisingly in the next letter, Stagg plays back that exact verbatim sentence. I will show you who a real man is.
And then in the next letter, Lizzie James writes back, I need to feel defenseless and humiliated. And guess what? In the next letter, Stagg uses those exact terms, defenseless and humiliated.
In all my letters, I would always say, is this the kind of thing you mean? Is this the kind of thing that you like? If not, I apologize, you know, because I was a lot younger.
I never had a real sexual relationship with a woman, so I would have told any woman anything they wanted to hear if I thought I was going to have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 back then.
The exchange of letters continued and the content quickly became more sexual and violent. To the detectives, it seemed Stagg was playing right into their hands. Encouraged by the results, they decided to have the couple meet in London’s Hyde Park.
I remember the day clearly. I thought she was late. Then I saw this woman, long blonde hair, quite attractive.
So, I said, you know, excuse me, are you Lizzie James? And she said she was and she realized who I was. And that was the first meeting we had.
His first encounter with Lizzie was not the private 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 that Colin had hoped for. The park was full of undercover officers watching every move he made. Each of them fully aware that one of their colleagues was meeting with a supposed sadistic killer.
Over lunch, Lizzie James wasted no time in appealing to what the team thought was Colin’s dark side. That is when she told me she had a dark secret. I have quite an extreme appetite for some things.
Her ex-boyfriend was into black magic and stuff and she claimed that she had done a human sacrifice of a pregnant woman and baby. Yeah. We did.
And things got pretty heated and we screwed around. At first I thought, yeah, she is a nutter. Yeah, she is off her head.
But she was very attractive. And again, all I was thinking about was like, yeah, you know, she is just in one ear and out the other.
Ever eager to impress Lizzie, Colin responded to her dark secret with a violent fantasy of his own. It was not long before their exchanges turned to the murder on Wimbledon Common. I told her I think everyone second or the third meeting that I had been arrested for the Rachel Nickell murder.
And she found that very exciting. Lizzie James wanted me to be the murderer. She said she could only be with a man who could have committed that crime.
And so I have 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with that man. And I just kept saying, no, sorry, it is not me. You know, I kept apologizing and saying, you know, sorry, it is not me.
I did not do it. Throughout the entire operation, Colin Stagg never once suggested he had anything to do with the Nickell murder. But despite this, the sexual content of his letters to Lizzie James was exactly what Paul Britton and the police thought they would see from the killer.
On the 17th of August, 1993, Stagg was re-arrested on suspicion of murder. Myself and my solicitor, we sat in a room being interviewed by the police, and they were reading some of my letters out that I had written to Lizzie James. Yeah, I felt obviously very small because I thought, you know, they were personal letters between two consenting adults.
And it was at that point one officer left the room, and he came in with Lizzie James. Hello, Colin. Remember me?
I knew straight away then that she was part of this. I could not say anything. I was just saying no comment all the time.
But what I really wanted to say was that, you know, well, you started this. You know? You wrote to me.
I did not write to you. So that was it. And then I was charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell.
With their prime suspect safely behind bars, the murder squad celebrated a job well done. However, what they did not and could not know was that for the past months all their efforts had been focused on the wrong man. The real killer of Rachel Nickell was still at large.
And in the autumn of 1993, he was preparing to strike again.
Detectives investigating the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992 had spent over a year hunting her killer. The police had launched an audacious undercover operation to trap their prime suspect, Colin Stagg. A female plainclothes officer had befriended Stagg, and through a series of letters and meetings, the police had amassed evidence that they felt proved him to be the killer.
In August 1993, Stagg was charged with the murder and remanded in custody. However, the detectives had been focused on the wrong man. From the first moment that Colin had appeared on their radar, their judgment had been clouded, and clues to the real killer’s identity had been missed.
Back in 1989, a brutal rape in Plumstead, Southeast London, marked the start of a series of attacks that would blight the area for the next four years. A woman with children in the house was getting the kids ready for school, and the back door was left open. She turned around after drying her hair to see the offender standing there with a knife, threatening her and threatening to attack the children if she did not comply.
And that rape was the first of what became known as the Green Chain Rapes, which was a series of attacks along Green Chain Walk in Southeast London. These rapes went on for a number of years, and no one was caught for them.
Tragically, the Green Chain Rapes could have been stopped after the first attack. The police received a call about the Plumstead rape in August 1989. The caller was the rapist’s mother and her son had just confessed to her.
His name was Robert Napper. He confessed to her that he had raped a woman and his mother took him at his word and went to the police and said, look, my son has confessed to raping a woman. Has anybody been raped recently around Plumstead Common?
The police checked their records, but no trace of an attack was found. Had the crime been properly investigated, one of the worst killers in British history could have been stopped in his tracks.
Robert Napper is one of a very unusual and small set of offenders. Mercifully rare that really are known as a sexual sadist, sexually sadistic killer. There is some suggestion that he was abused before the age of 10 and apparently by someone quite close to him, although specifically who that is, we do not know.
I think what is significant about him as a child and as an adult is this isolation. Isolation from his peers, isolation from friends, and isolation from family, which got more and more extreme also throughout his criminal career. We also know that he had Asperger’s, which is a learning difficulty as well, which probably added to that isolation.
Throughout the 1990s, the Green Chain Walk, a tranquil series of linked parks in Southeast London, was the location of some of the most terrifying rapes London had ever witnessed. The attacks would continue for months, increasing in brutality, until when, in early summer of 1992, just weeks before Rachel Nickell was killed, Napper attacked a woman walking with a child. Napper jumped out at her, pushed her to the ground, tried to strangle her in front of her child, and brutally raped her while she pleaded for him not to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her.
The similarities between this and the Nickell murder a few weeks later, when you look back on it, are so stark. But, it did not seem to be picked up at the time. I mean, hindsight, as we say, is a marvelous thing, but it was very similar, and the crucial thing was she had her child with her.
Not only were the Green Chain attacks not linked to the murder of Rachel Nickell, a succession of missed clues meant that Napper was free to carry on his reign of terror. Twice, he was asked to give a DNA sample after his neighbors positively identified him from a photo fit of the Green Chain suspect. In both cases, he did not turn up at the police station.
And incredibly, this was not followed up.
In November 1993, 16 months after Rachel Nickell’s killing, and with Colin Stagg awaiting trial for murder, London was rocked by news of another terrible crime. What has shocked police is the ferocity of the murders. A senior officer said Samantha Bisset’s injuries were horrific.
Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jasmine lived together with Samantha’s boyfriend Conrad Elam in Plumstead, Southeast London. Samantha was a very strong personality. Before she had Jasmine, she was quite wayward, but then when she had Jasmine, it gave her more focus in life, I guess, and she became a very devoted mother.
I should remember Jasmine. She is the adorable little child. I mean, she is a lovely girl.
I would take her to the swings and she just thought it was brilliant. She just thought it was a kind of amazing day out just going on the swings for a couple of hours, and you know, she was so happy.
As Samantha and Jasmine carried on with their lives, Robert Napper had already begun stalking them. She never had curtains. You know, sometimes she would walk around the flat naked.
And I would say, look, you know, you should be careful here. There could be like a peeping Tom looking in. And it was only a week or so before the murder when she did actually see someone looking in through a bedroom window one night.
I think after that she was a bit more careful, but I guess it was too late by then. I let myself in. And straight away, I mean, I saw this stain on the carpet.
Walked into the front room and saw, I mean, Sam had actually been covered over, so there was not much to see, but I am standing looking at this little pile of clothes and blood stains and things and it took quite a while for me to sort of actually grasp what had happened. And then thought, what about Jasmine? I felt good that I had not even thought about it.
I thought I would phone the police without even checking on Jasmine. I thought she might still be alive. Jasmine was in the bed with the covers over her.
And for a second I thought maybe she is still alive, but then there was no movement. She was not breathing. So then I phoned the police.
The investigation into the Bisset murders was headed up by Detective Superintendent Mickey Banks. Yeah, it was I would say the most gruesome scene I have ever attended. You know, I did 32 and a half years.
I have never seen a scene like that or an accident or anything as bad as this. So, obviously the body had been left there to be displayed as if to say, look what I have done. Look what I am capable of.
And I immediately thought, this has got to be some nutter. As forensic investigators examined the flat, they began to piece together what they thought had happened. Sam is going about her business with Jasmine in the house and there is a knock on the door.
At that point a very sudden violent attack takes place where Napper immediately stabs her with a knife. Takes her into the lounge and then commits some horrific acts of mutilation on her. Very shortly after that also rapes and murders Jasmine, a four-year-old girl.
So, a really horrendous and horrific offense.
One of the first things that struck Mickey Banks was that his case could be linked to the Green Chain rapes. To test this theory, he enlisted the help of the criminal profiler who had worked on the Green Chain rape inquiry and the Rachel Nickell murder investigation, Paul Britton. The amazing thing about Paul Britton’s involvement was that he was involved as an advisor on the Green Chain rapes.
He was an advisor on the Bisset murder and he was an advisor in the staircase. And at no point does he talk about the possibility of them being linked. And he worked on all three cases and Napper walked through all three of them completely unseen.
By early 1994, there were three different police inquiries running in South London, all independently and unknowingly investigating the crimes of one man, Robert Napper. The Green Chain team had ruled out Napper as a suspect for being too tall. Tellingly, they had not pursued him when he had twice failed to provide a DNA sample.
Mickey Banks had also invited the Rachel Nickell murder squad to Plumstead to discuss whether their respective crimes could be linked. I had already charged Stagg. And they were convinced that they had the right man.
This was the attitude I got from their officers when they came to visit us and we discussed both cases, but they would only tell me what they wanted me to know. They were convinced Stagg was their murderer. It was as simple as that.
Paul Britton, the one man who had intimate knowledge of both cases, reinforced the lack of connection between the Nickell and Bisset murders. I think Mickey Banks says to Paul Britton, are they not linked? And Paul Britton says, no, they are not linked because it does not have the same degree of frenzy.
And my answer to that is, well, it is pretty simple that if you have got a victim inside a house and in a confined area, you can do more or less what you want with them and you can express whatever weird sexually deviant fantasies you have. Paul Britton would later suggest that he, in fact, had claimed the attacks could be linked. The Metropolitan Police dispute this version of events.
Eventually, the Bisset murder squad received the break they had been waiting for. In a twist of fate, the fingerprints of victim Samantha Bisset were uncannily similar to those of Robert Napper. And in the first sweep of the crime scene, they were assumed to be the same prints.
However, a re-examination had spotted the differences, and detectives now had a fingerprint of their killer. There was a fingerprint found which matched about six or seven points of Napper’s fingerprints. This was found on the balcony outside the address.
And it was subsequently found to be partially comparable to him. He became a very good suspect for us. The police had his fingerprints on file from a number of different offenses.
So, as soon as they realized that these were someone else’s prints, they looked in their computer and his name came up.
Not only did Robert Napper appear in the system, it was later revealed that police files were littered with clues that pointed to him being a depraved 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offender. Clues that were, at the time, largely ignored. Robert Napper had cropped up on the police radar at least eight times before he murdered Samantha Bisset and her daughter.
And I think most significantly is in 1992 when he was arrested for stalking a civilian employee at the police station in Plumstead, and police went round to his flat and searched his flat. They found an A-Z with pages marked in it of Plumstead Common, marked and annotated in the side were comments about women and women being covered up in cling film and women being abused and violent towards women. They did not make any links with the Green Chain rapes, with anything else, and then he was released and there he was back on the streets again.
Thankfully, the detectives investigating the Bisset murders two years later were more attentive, and Mickey Banks and his team spent months assembling evidence against Napper. Along with the fingerprint, they found a bloody footprint in Samantha Bisset’s kitchen that they matched to a pair of Napper’s shoes. This, along with reported sightings of Robert Napper in the area at the time of the murders, was enough for Banks.
Well, his interview was stone cold. He seemed as if he was looking down on us, that he knew something we did not know, and he seemed, to my mind, that he was sort of you are never going to find out. I am who I am.
I am better than you. In his own mind, he was laughing at us.
In May 1994, Robert Napper was charged with the murders of Samantha and Jasmine Bisset. A DNA sample taken at the time also proved conclusively that Napper was the Green Chain rapist. He was placed on remand awaiting trial.
Across London, another remand prisoner, Colin Stagg, was about to have his day in court. Charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell, it would not just be Stagg on trial. Also under scrutiny would be the Metropolitan Police themselves, and the audacious operation to ensnare their suspect.
In July 1992, 23-year-old mother Rachel Nickell was murdered on Wimbledon Common. Detectives investigating the horrific crime used a female undercover police officer to befriend prime suspect Colin Stagg and earn his trust in the hope that he would either confess to the crime or reveal evidence that he was involved. After 28 weeks, Operation Edsel, as it was known, ended with the police confident that they had gathered enough evidence to prove Stagg was guilty.
He was charged with murder and he was remanded in custody awaiting trial.
After 14 months on remand in Wandsworth Jail, Colin Stagg arrived at the Old Bailey. Going up in court is a very frightening thing. I mean, especially if you know you are innocent.
The police and the prosecution seemed quite confident with the material they had got. And yet I was talking to sort of experienced court reporters and other crime correspondents who were sort of looking at each other thinking how are they going to get away with this? Colin’s defense team had employed a series of experts to analyze Operation Edsel and its findings.
They quickly realized it was littered with problems. In my analysis of what Stagg revealed, there is actually nothing very unusual at all. There are several pathways that Stagg tries to satisfy Lizzie James, where he will say, you know, I am kind of interested in this, are you?
I am so glad that you like my letters and that you too are as broad-minded and uninhibited as me. I cannot wait to read some of your fantasies. And he is trying and trying to feel out what she is kind of interested in.
And of course, where he hits gold is where she reinforces him, if you like, and throws him a bone every time he says something which is either violent or sexually sadistic. I believe I will only ever feel fulfilled again if I meet a man who has the same history as me. He talks about another man using a knife on a woman on the common.
And then of course, bingo, the inquiry team think this is exactly what we thought we would see. But it is a completely self-fulfilling prophecy because they only saw what they wanted to see by virtue of only reinforcing those elements that got them there.
After listening to the evidence against Colin Stagg, the judge in the hearing had decided that enough was enough. And he wasted no time in throwing out the evidence from the undercover operation, dismissing it as a honey trap. As the detective in charge of that, you could not have listened to the judge’s words and be in any doubt that he was not only dismissing the case, he was seriously angry about the way in which Colin Stagg had been led.
With their case in tatters, the Rachel Nickell murder squad were left to reflect on the events of the past two years. The team had taken over four and a half thousand statements, and the inquiry was said to have cost over three million pounds. Despite the murder investigation being at the time the most expensive in British criminal history, the squad were left with nothing.
You wonder why no one said hold on, what is the judge going to think of this?
Colin Stagg left the Old Bailey after 14 months in prison a free man. The judge’s ruling meant that his case would not be heard by a jury. But Colin was about to face a different trial.
This time by the media and the public. When Colin Stagg was released from prison, he was mobbed. The pictures, we all know the pictures of him coming out of court and being mobbed.
And instead of being treated as an innocent man, he was treated as a killer who had got off. All the crowds were there and police on horseback. And everybody was just shouting out and all I could hear was like, you know, hang him.
Guilty. Hang him. Minutes later, a statement was read out by Rachel Nickell’s father.
I understand that the police will now keep the files on my daughter’s murder open, but they are not looking for anyone else. Releasing a statement that is so absolutely positive that we are not looking for anything else. That is a big message to deliver.
You are saying to everyone out there, we know who this man is. The law has been upheld, but where is the justice? I am surprised we ever made that statement.
Colin Stagg returned to his flat and would spend the next 14 years as a social pariah. To most people, he was the man who got away with murder. In the autumn of 1995, the focus was back on the Old Bailey.
This time for the trial of Robert Napper, charged with the murders of Samantha and Jasmine Bisset. As the prosecution made the final touches to its case, the detectives received some unexpected news. We got a phone call to say he was going to plead guilty.
He was going to plead diminished responsibility. What did we think of that? And I said I was quite satisfied with it.
I mean, I believe he was diminished. That there was something. He was not so mad that he did not know what he was doing.
He knew what he was doing, but he was. There was something totally wrong with him.
In October 1995, Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Samantha and Jasmine Bisset on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He also confessed to one rape and two attempted rapes. He was sent to Broadmoor High Security Hospital indefinitely.
The relatives of Samantha and Jasmine left court to rebuild their shattered lives. It is strange how odd little things can remind me sometimes. Just a particular song on the radio that Sam liked or there are always things like that.
And it is always strange. I do not go over to Plumstead that much, but I do sometimes still go over past the flat and it is always strange to go walk past it and see the place. I should remember Jasmine as an adorable little child.
I mean, she was a lovely girl.
The relatives of Rachel Nickell had no such closure. It would be another seven years until a breakthrough in the case was found. In 2002, a case review team began pouring over the evidence amassed in the decades since Rachel’s murder.
Every witness statement was re-looked at and known offenders and possible suspects were re-examined. One of the first names that was flagged up was a sexually sadistic killer currently detained in Broadmoor, Robert Napper. At the same time, scientists were taking advantage of rapid advances in technology to review the forensic evidence found on Rachel Nickell’s body.
There was a small amount of DNA on Rachel Nickell’s jogging pants and that was tested and you are able from that now, although they were not then, to rule people out and Stagg was ruled out as being a forensic link to that DNA. The second piece of evidence was there were some very small paint flakes that were found in Alex Hanscombe’s, the little child’s hair, that they were able to link and actually match to paint flakes on Robert Napper’s metal toolbox.
Further analysis of the DNA proved that Robert Napper had been in contact with Rachel Nickell on the day she died. The paint flakes found in her son Alex’s hair were the final confirmation. Armed with this new evidence, Robert Napper was charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell.
He appeared at the Old Bailey on the 18th of December, 2008. It is now thought that as well as being a triple murderer, Robert Napper could be responsible for up to 70 sexual assaults. They took place in South London parks like here at Plumstead Common close to the Thames, the so-called Green Chain rapes.
But if police had properly investigated reports that were put to them by members of the public, including Napper’s own mother, then Samantha and Jasmine Bisset and Rachel Nickell would not be dead.
He sat there and he did not flinch and he was a kind of presence of evil. I do not often say this, but he appeared to be like that and it was the most tense courtroom I have ever been in actually and it really brought tears to your eyes because then you could just see her parents finally, finally they had got the right man and it was really, really moving actually. Mr.
Napper has been found guilty of Rachel’s murder. That means in total he has murdered two women and one child, raped at least one woman and attempted to rape two others. Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
He was sent back to Broadmoor with a judge stating he was unlikely ever to be released.
Napper’s admission of guilt brought to a close one of the most notorious cases in British criminal history. It has since emerged that in August 1993, a knife was found on Wimbledon Common near where Rachel Nickell was murdered. That knife was matched to Robert Napper when he was arrested in 1994.
And again, nothing was done. Stagg was in jail on remand, nothing was done. So, they had a knife with his fingerprints on.
They had clues as to his stalking grounds, his raping grounds in his A-Z. They had all the evidence of a violent stalker, rapist, potentially killer, and they did not put two and two together. I think that was just bad policing, total incompetence.
It was not until 2010 that the Independent Police Complaints Commission delivered their damning report on Operation Edsel and how Napper was able to avoid the police’s clutches for so long. The Nickell case, along with other high-profile crimes, led to dramatic changes in police tactics. Since the Rachel Nickell murder, the way murders are investigated have changed beyond recognition.
Nowadays, you have dedicated murder investigation teams who are specialists. And with that, what has evolved from that is probably the most effective way of investigating murder anywhere in the world.
Colin Stagg, for so long at the heart of the case, would receive over 700,000 pounds in compensation from the Home Office, as well as an apology from the Metropolitan Police. The shadow of the murder, however, has stayed with him. There are still people today who do not know that they have actually got the man who did 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Rachel Nickell.
They always say to me like, you know, did they ever get the bloke who did it? And like, yes, they did. But, you know, it amazes me that the Robert Napper arrest and charge did not get as much press coverage as what he did with me.
Yeah, and it should have done and made people realize that you know, they have got the man who did it. He was for years treated as a pariah and his life was ruined. You know, he was not serving a sentence inside, but he was serving a sentence outside.
And had Napper never been caught, you know, Colin Stagg would still be the man who killed Rachel Nickell to this day, I think.
