“On the 15th of July 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell, a young mother out walking with her son, was savagely murdered on Wimbledon Common in Southwest London. She had over 40 stab wounds to her body. It was a scene out of a horror movie. Within days the murder was front page news, with the press and public clamoring for her killer to be caught.”
“It seems rightly or wrongly that there’s a massive jolt to society that life is much more dangerous than it used to be.”
“The police would launch an audacious operation to trap the killer, an operation that would lead to an innocent man being charged with murder. The killing of Rachel Nickell was a crime That Shook Britain.”
“Good evening. The Savage knife murder of a young mother in broad daylight stunned detectives in London today. Rachel Nickell was 23 years old with a life of Promise ahead of her. She lived with her partner Andre and a 2-year-old son Alex in Balham South London. On the morning of the 15th of July 1992, she was getting ready to take Alex for a walk. Less than 2 hours later she would be dead, brutally murdered in a popular Beauty Spot.”
“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 take his dog for a walk.”
“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 a long walk, which was a daily thing, I only did a short walk, just around a little pond called Scio Pond and then back home again.”
“With his headache getting worse, Colin decided to take some painkillers and settle down on his sofa to sleep it off. The time is around 9:25. As Colin slept, Rachel, Alex, and their dog Molly had set off across the Common for a stroll through the trees. As they enjoyed the early summer sun, they were totally unaware of the killer stalking them.”
“The area of the Common as I recall, I mean it was it 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.”
“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 a thousand acres of Woodland containing over 500 people on the morning of the murder. A murder that had only one eyewitness: a 2-year-old boy that had seen his mother butchered.”
“Back at home Colin Stagg had woken up and was feeling better. With the day warming up he changed his clothes and decided to take his dog for a longer walk, a decision that would affect the rest of his life.”
“I walked under the underpass at Putney Vale Cemetery into the Common, and um I 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’d found the body of a young girl. I told him that I’d been on the Common that morning and he asked if I’d 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 which I freely gave, and that was it. I just basically went home.”
“The Metropolitan Police assembled a cracked 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 ’90s was not enough to mark it as DNA. So the police are starting from a very difficult place.”
“She was 23 when she died. She was a Shining Light, a bright star in my life and everybody who knew her.”
“After a month of inquiries and hundreds of interviews the detectives still seemed to be getting nowhere. They couldn’t 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 their killer.”
“In the UK psychological profiling was new. I was very personally cynical about what a profiler could offer, although not dismiss it. They’re 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, it’s 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, including the Abduction of Stephanie Slater. Working hand in hand with the inquiry team, Britton was asked to profile Rachel Nickell’s killer.”
“There were two two profiles written. One which I guess we might call a demographic profile, somewhere between 20 and 30 with isolated Hobbies who probably lives on his own and probably doesn’t 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 profile provided by Mr. Britton bore an uncanny resemblance to Colin’s own life. The profiles, along with a photo fit of a possible suspect, were featured in a national TV appeal. The appeal 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.”
“Early in the morning, uh about 8:00, 9:00, I think it was, someone was knocking on my door. I opened it and it was uh plain clothes officers, and they said uh they wanted to question me in regard the Rachel Nickell murder.”
“You know, 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.”
“You need to answer a few questions.”
“Come on Colin, don’t waste our time. We don’t come around any.”
“I’d never been arrested for anything in my life at that time, been accused of something like that and it was like, he 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 the Wimbledon police station and they held me for 3 days.”
“As the police began to question Colin they were presented with a huge piece of Luck: Colin Stagg was about to reveal a piece of information that would convince detectives he was the Killer.”
“On the 15th of July 1992, Rachel Nickell was walking with her 2-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 image of her, the the beautiful blonde model, is is is an icon image now and it seems to speak to the loss of innocence of of a period of time when a young woman couldn’t 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.”
“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 local man Colin Stagg, who lived a few minutes’ walk from Wimbledon Common.”
“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’s he’s a known loner (nothing wrong with that), but sometimes with that perceived to be just a little bit odd in some way or another.”
“Stagg had admitted being on the Common on the morning of the murder and this, along with evidence found during the search of his flat, made him the prime suspect. Colin Stagg was arrested at his home, taken to Wimbledon police station and questioned.”
“I’d never been arrested before for for any crime and uh it was it was very, very scary.”
“Amazingly, for the police officers uh involved, um he talked frankly and openly. He didn’t deny anything but ex- 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 the nude sunbathing which I did in regular spot every summer and it was an area used by nude sunbathers. I pleaded guilty to it cuz I thought, ‘Well basically you know I’ve been advised to by my solicitor and I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t want these things to drag on,’ so I thought ‘Get rid of it.’ Got a fine for £200 and after that uh I was released after 3 days.”
“That decision was to have long and lasting effects on the case and his life. By naively admitting to the indecent exposure charge Colin Stagg fueled the police’s notion that he possessed the characteristics laid down by Paul Britton’s profile of the killer. As Colin returned to his life on the Alton Estate where he assumed the traumas of the past months were behind him for good, a seemingly innocent search for companionship years before the killing of Rachel Nickell would come back to haunt him.”
“I think it was about 2 years prior to the murder of Rachel Nickell I answered a a dating advert for friendship, and so I wrote a letter to Julie Pines. We got on okay, you know, we chatted on telephone at first and we seemed to be okay. And then being a normal red-blooded man you know I thought you know this could go a bit further so I just chanced my arm really and wrote her a uh a sexual letter was just of a mild sexual fantasy of um meeting a woman in the open air, getting on together and having sex together in the open air. And she kept that letter for 2 years and she contacted the police when I was arrested for those three days and that was it. And the police, once they read that letter, and of course Rachel 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. They were still however 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 stark female undercover officer known during and after the operation as ‘Lizzie James’. With her in place and after lengthy consultations with Paul Britton, Operation Edzel as it was codenamed began. The carefully concocted plan made with the approval of senior metropolitan police officers and lawyers was that Lizzy should write to Colin and earn his trust in the hope that he would reveal some intimate knowledge of the crime.”
“I received a letter from a woman called, call 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 Pines.’ Dear Colin, I hope you’re not offended by this intrusion as we’ve never met before. Julie was fairly closed-minded, I’m a lot more open-minded and basically I want to start a dialogue with you.”
“Of course Stagg, you know 30-year-old guy getting a bit of attention from a woman, writes back, ‘Dear Lizzy, thank you so much for your letter which I read with great interest.’ We struck up a conversation. I sent letters to her, she’d sent letters to me. ‘I’m sure your fantasies hold no bounds and you’re 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 past-knit wine and ‘we’ll go out on the the Veranda and have our peanut wine and I’ll kiss you and cuddle you’ and it’s 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’s only so many ways you can take that. So unsurprisingly in the next letter, Stagg plays back that exact verbatim sentence: ‘I’ll 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 cuz I was a lot younger, never had a real sexual relationship with a woman, so I would have told any woman anything what 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 take the operation a step further and have the couple meet.”
“I remember the day clearly, I thought she was late. Then I saw this woman uh 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. ‘Nice to meet you, you got it all right, found it all right?’ ‘Yeah, sorry if I’m a bit late.’ And that was the first meeting we had.”
“His first encounter with Lizzy 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’s when she told me she had a dark secret: ‘I’ve got um 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 and a baby.’ Yeah we did um and things things got pretty heated and um yeah we we screwed around.”
“At first I thought she’s a nutter, you know, she’s off her head. But she was very attractive and again all I was thinking about was like, ‘Yeah you know just in one ear and out the other.’”
“Ever eager to impress, Lizzy Colin responded to her dark secret with a violent fantasy of his own. It wasn’t long before their exchanges turned to the murder on Wimbledon Common.”
“I told uh I think either on the second or the third meeting uh that I had been arrested uh for the Rachel Nickell murder and she found that very exciting. Lizzie James wanted me to be the murderer. Uh she said she could only be with a man who could have committed that crime uh and to have sex with that man. And I just kept saying no, sorry it’s not me. You know you know I kept apologizing, saying ‘Sorry it’s not me, I didn’t 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 were exactly what Paul Britton and the police thought they would see from the killer. On the 17th of August 1993 Stagg was rearrested 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’d written to Lizzie James.”
“‘Not only do you want to befriend this certain lady, what shocks me is what you prepared to do to her as well in the name of fun. Have a look at that one.’”
“Yeah, I felt obviously very small, cuz I thought you know there were personal letters between two consenting adults, my comment, and uh 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 couldn’t say anything you cuz I was just saying ‘no comment’ all the time, but what I really wanted to say was like you well ‘You fucking started this, you know, you wrote to me, I didn’t write to you.’ So uh 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 didn’t and couldn’t 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. With the help of a criminal profiler 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 they felt proved him to be the killer. Now with Stagg charged with murder and remanded in custody awaiting trial, the detectives could prepare for the trial. However, what the inquiry team didn’t realize was that they 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.”
“In the summer of 1989 a brutal rape in Plumstead, Southeast London, marked the start of a series of attacks that would blight the area for the next 4 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 uh threatening her and threatening to attack the children if she didn’t 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.”
“He confessed to her that he’d raped a woman and his mother took him at his word and went to the police and said, ‘Look, my son’s confessed to raping a woman. Have has anybody been raped recently around Plumstead Common?’”
“The police checked their records but in what would be a tragic oversight no trace of an attack could be 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 uh one of a very unusual and small set of offenders uh mercifully rare that really are what is basically known as a sexual sadist, a sexually sadistic killer.”
“There’s some suggestion that he was abused uh before the age of 10 and apparently by someone quite close to him, although specifically who that is we don’t know.”
“I think what’s 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.”
“The Green Chain Walk, a tranquil series of linked parks in Southeast London, was during the early 1990s the scene of some of the most terrifying rapes London had ever witnessed. The attacks would continue for months, increasing in brutality until in the early summer of 1992, just weeks before Rachel Nickell would be killed, Napper would attack 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 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, so Stark. But it didn’t 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 lack of thorough police work ensured 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 didn’t turn up at the police station. Incredibly he wasn’t pursued.”
“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 Ellum in Plumstead, Southeast London. Samantha was 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… she was a very devoted mother.”
“I should remember Jasmine. She was adorable, little child. I mean she was a lovely girl. I take her to the swings and and she just think it was brilliant, she just think it was amazing day out. Just got in the swings for a couple of hours and you know she was so happy.”
“As Samantha and Jasmine carried on with their lives, what they couldn’t have known was that Robert Napper had already begun stalking them.”
“She never had curtains, you know, and sometimes she’d walk around the flat naked and I’d say, ‘Look you know, you should be careful here. They could be like 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’s too late by then.”
“The day I found Sam and Jasmine I was staying at um my father’s house in Sidcup and I planned to call in the flat on the way to work. I let myself in and um straight away, I mean I saw this stain on the carpet and went into the kitchen to get something to clean up this stain. I thought, ‘I’d better help clean that up,’ and all the kitchen was in chaos where Sam’s clothes have been pulled out of the cupboard and the floor was just carpeted with clothes.”
“And then walked into the front room and saw… I mean Sam had actually been covered over, so there wasn’t much to see, but I understand they look at this little pile of clothes and all the blood stains and things and took quite a while for me to sort of actually grasp what had happened.”
“And then thought ‘What about Jasmine?’ I felt really bad that I hadn’t even thought about it. I thought I’d found 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’s still alive, but then um there was no movement, she wasn’t breathing. So um then I found the police.”
“The investigation into the Bisset murders was headed up by detective superintendent Mickey Banks.”
“Well when I first got there, it was a block of council Flats, scene of crying people were already there. I was given access to the place, went through and to be met by this horrendous scene. It was, I would say, the most gruesome scene I’ve ever attended. Uh, you know, I did 32 and a half years, I’d never seen a scene like that or an accident or anything as bad as this. Obviously the body had been left there uh to be displayed as if to say, ‘Look what I’ve done, look what I’m capable of,’ and and I immediately thought this is got to be some lunatic.”
“As scenes of crime officers examined the flat they began to piece together what they thought had happened.”
“Samantha was going about her business with Jasmine in the house and um there’s 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 adviser on the Green Chain rapes. He was an adviser on the Bisset murder and he was an adviser on the Nickell case, and at no point does he talk about the possibility of them being linked. And he worked on all three cases and Napper walks 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. They 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 a 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’re not linked because it doesn’t have the same degree of frenzy.’ And my answer to that is: ‘Well, it’s pretty simple that if you’ve 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.’”
“Meanwhile the Bisset murder Squad had 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 uh 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 um a number of different offenses. So as soon as they found realized that these were someone else’s prints, they looked on their computer and his name came up.”
“Not only did Robert Napper appear in the system, it emerged after his conviction 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 around to his flat and searched his flat; they found an A-to-Z with pages marked in it of Plumstead Common, marked and annotated in the side were comments about women, women being covered up in cling film and women being abused and violent acts towards women. They didn’t 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 2 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 uh stone cold. He seemed as if he was looking down on us, that he knew something we didn’t know. And he he seemed, to my mind, that he was sort of ‘You’re never going to find out. I am who I am. I’m 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 man, prisoner Colin Stagg, was about to have his day in court charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell. It wouldn’t 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 Edzel as it was known, ended with the police confident that they had gathered enough evidence to prove Stagg was guilty. Charged with murder 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 in of Courts is a very frightening thing, I mean especially if you know you’re innocent.”
“The police and the prosecution seem quite confident with the material they’d 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 Edzel 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’ll say, ‘You know, I’m kind of interested in this, are you? I’m so glad that you like my letters and that you too are as broad-minded and uninhibited as me. I can’t wait to read some of your fantasies.’”
“And he’s trying and trying to feel out what she’s 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’d see.’ But it’s a completely self-fulfilling prophecy because they only saw what they wanted to see by virtue of only reinforcing those elements that got them.”
“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 had been led.”
“With their case in tatters, the Rachel Nickell murder Squad were left to reflect on the events of the past 2 years. The team had taken over 4 and a half thousand statements and the inquiry was said to have cost over £3 million. Despite the murder investigation being at the time the most expensive in British criminal history, the squad were left with nothing.”
“You wonder ‘Why? Why did no one say hold on, what’s 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 wouldn’t be heard by 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’d got off. The judge recognized that there was never any evidence against me.”
“No, all the crowds were there, and placed on horseback, and everybody was just shouting out and all… like you know, ‘Hang him! Guilty, 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 um 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 this man is…’ The law has been upheld, but where is the Justice?”
“I’m 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 that there was… so he wasn’t so mad that he didn’t know what he was doing. He knew what he was doing, but 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 particular song on the radio that Sam liked or there’s always things like that, and it’s always strange.”
“I don’t go over 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. She was adorable little child. I mean she was a lovely girl.”
“The relatives of Rachel Nickell had no such closure. It would be another 7 years until a breakthrough in the case was found. In 2002 a case review team began pouring over the evidence amassed in the decade 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 weren’t then, to rule people out. And Stagg was ruled out as being a forensic link to that DNA.”
“The second uh piece of evidence was there were some very small paint flecks that were found in Alex’s hair, the little child’s hair, that they were able to link and actually match to paint flecks 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 flecks 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.”
“He sat there and he didn’t flinch and he he was a kind of presence of evil. I don’t know say this, but he he appeared to be like that and it was the most tense courtroom I’ve ever been in actually, and you really brought tears to your eyes because then you you could just see her parents, finally finally they’d got the right man and it was really really moving actually.”
“Robert Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He was sent back to Broadmoor with the judge stating that 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’s 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-to-Z. They had all the evidence of a violent stalker, rapist, potentially killer and they didn’t put two and two together. I think that was just bad policing, total incompetence.”
“But Scotland Yard was listening, and the Nickell case, along with other high-profile crimes, led to dramatic changes in 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 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 don’t know that they’ve 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?’”
“He was for years treated as a pariah and his life was ruined, you know? He wasn’t 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.”
