On a Summer afternoon in 1992, Rachel Nickell (23) was brutally murdered on Wimbledon Common in London, England. Her two-year old son was the only witness and was found clinging to her body. This crime that shocked Britain and sparked one of the most controversial investigations in modern criminal history.
As public pressure mounted, police became fixated on a suspect and launched an unprecedented undercover “honeytrap” operation, only for the case to collapse spectacularly in court. The hunt for Rachel’s killer exposed serious flaws in police methods, fueled years of media scrutiny, and ultimately led to a breakthrough that revealed a very different perpetrator—turning the Rachel Nickell case into a haunting story of tragedy, obsession, and justice delayed.
This case is the subject of a Netflix documentary titled The Murder of Rachel Nickell.
Rachel Jane Nickell was born on 23 November 1968 to Monica and Andrew Nickell.
According to the Netflix documentary, when she was around 19, Rachel met Andre Hanscombe. Andre was a few years older than Rachel.
The couple were besotted with each other.
In 1989, the couple’s first and only child, Alexander Louis Hanscombe was born. His parents called him Alex.
“Alex was absolutely a really sweet little boy,” André said. “There was a joy that was there.”
The family lived in Southwest London with their dog Molly. Andre worked as a motorcycle courier and Alex spent most of his time with Rachel.
Rachel and Alex would often visit Wimbledon Common.
Wimbledon Common is a large open space in Wimbledon, southwest London. The area of the space is around 460 hectares or 1140 acres.
On Wednesday, July 15, 1992, Rachel and Alex visited the common with their dog Molly.
Rachel was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted. She was stabbed 49 times in the neck and torso and she died at the scene. Her stab wounds were so ferocious that she was almost decapitated.
Rachel’s body was found later that day by a dog walker. Alex was said to be hugging his mother and clinging to her. He was physically unharmed. According to the Guardian, he had placed a tiny piece of paper on Rachel’s forehead like a bandaid and was crying ‘Get up Mummy!.’
Rachel was said to have been found on her back in an ‘unnatural position.’ Her hands were up towards her face, indicating that she had fought until her last breath.
Alex was taken to hospital and Andre w was informed about what had happened. When the father arrived at the hospital, he was told by professionals to be honest with Alex about what had happened. He was told to tell Alex from the start that Rachel was dead. Andre has said that Alex never once asked where Rachel was, which made him believe that he somewhat understood what had happened.
In the coming months, Alex had several sessions with a child psychologist. She wrote down questions for Andre to ask Alex. Alex gave some answers, like the “bad man” appeared from behind, possibly washed his hands in a stream, and was wearing a belt over his shirt. He was not able to provide much solid information.
Police asked Andre and Alex to return to Wimbledon Common to see if they could retrace the steps. Andre agreed and they went to the area. Alex became very upset and began to scream and cry. The media had been following the group at the Common and they took photos of the incident. Media agencies posted identifiable photos of Alex’s face and Andre began to fear for their safety. They ended up moving out of England to France for a period of time.
Due to the heinous nature of the crime and the fact that an innocent child had witnessed his mother’s brutal murder and had been left begging her to wake up, this case garnered a lot of media attention from day one.
Officers of the Metropolitan Police were under a lot of pressure to find Rachel’s killer and they began a large-scale investigation.
They questioned 32 men in connection with the case.
Paul Britton, a criminal psychologist, was asked to create an offender profile of the killer. This was due to a lack of forensic evidence being left at the scene.
Paul’s profile determined that the killer likely lived close to Wimbledon Common, struggled with dating and did not have many/any close friends or relationships.
A sketch of a possible suspect was created after a witness saw a man leaving the area on the day of the murder.
After the sketch was released, a tip was phoned in saying that the sketch resembled a man named Colin Stagg (20).
Colin was a 29 year old unemployed man who lived in Roehampton, near Wimbledon Common. He regularly walked his dog in the area. He lived alone, had few close relationships and was described as shy, eccentric and introverted. He had interests in nature, bodybuilding and Wicca – a pagan religion.
When police searched his flat, they found Satanic imagery, a sign that said ‘Christian’s beware’, as well as symbols drawn into the carpet and around a survival kit.
Authorities became convinced that Colin was responsible for Rachel’s murder. They designed a cover operation ‘ Operation Edzell’ to see if they could get Colin to either eliminate or implicate himself in the crime. This operation would later be labelled as a honeytrap.
A female officer going by the name Lizzie James began contacting Colin. He had previously used lonely hearts’ columns in newspapers to try to meet women. One of the women he had contacted got in touch with police about some creepy correspondence that she had with Colin.
Once police had this info, ‘ Lizzie’ posed as a friend of the woman. Over a five month period, she attempted to get information from Colin. She pretended to have a romantic interest in him, met up with him, spoke repeatedly over the phone and exchanged letters containing sexual fantasies. During one meeting in a park, they spoke about Rachel’s murder.
“I’d never had a proper girlfriend up to the point of 29, so when I received a letter from Lizzie James I just felt really happy that a woman had shown interest in me,” Stagg explains in the documentary. “I had low self-esteem before this all started. And this knocked me back further.”
Lizzie obtained Colin’s confidence and trust. She drew out fantasies from him that Paul Britton said were ‘violent’. He never admitted to killing Rachel. During a taped conversation between him and Lizzie, she claimed to enjoy hurting people. He replied “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”
Despite this, police believed the violent sexual fantasies and knives found in his home were enough to implicate him in Rachel’s murder.
He was arrested on August 17, 1993. He was held in prison for over a year. Just as the trial was about to begin in September 1994, Mr Justice Ognall ruled that police had shown ‘excessive zeal’ and had tried to incriminate Colin by ‘ deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.’
Ognall excluded all the entrapment evidence that had been gathered by police on the grounds that information given by Colin did not match up with the circumstances given regarding Rachel’s murder. The prosecution ended up withdrawing the case and Colin was acquitted and freed.
Colin appears in the Netflix documentary and says that the allegations against him ruined years of his life.
After Colin’s acquittal, the case seemingly grew cold.
In the early 2000’s, advances in DNA technology began to be made. This allowed evidence from Rachel’s case to be re-tested and re-examined.
Officers began to compare Rachel’s injuries to those suffered by victims in other attacks and they also consulted forensic specialists about improvements in DNA matching.
In July 2003, it was announced that after 18 months of DNA testing on Rachel’s clothes, they had found a male DNA sample that did not match that of her husband or her son. The sample was said to be insufficient at the time to confirm an identity but was enough to rule suspects out.
Eventually, the police did come up with a match to the DNA found on Rachel’s body and clothing. The DNA belonged to a man named Robert Napper.
Robert was born in February 1966 and he grew up in Plumstead, London. As a child, he was said to have witnessed attacks on his mother Pauline, carried out by his father Brian. When the couple ended up divorcing, Robert and his three siblings were placed in foster care and underwent psychiatric treatment.
Robert appears to have suffered more than his siblings. He had to undergo six years of treatment in a hospital. He encountered more psychological trauma when he was assaulted by a family friend at the age of 12.
Pauline said that Robert became introverted, obsessively tidy and reclusive after the assault. He would only come out of his room to bully his siblings and to spy on his sister while she was getting changed.
Robert’s first criminal offence was recorded in 1986. He was fined and given a conditional discharge after being found in possession of an airgun.
Not long after this, Robert confessed to his mother that he had raped a woman on Plumstead Common. She called police who said they could find no evidence that such a crime had ever occurred and they dismissed her information.
This was despite a mother reporting to police 8 weeks earlier that she had been raped in her home in front of her children. The suspect had entered through a rear door of the property, masked and armed with a Stanley knife. Her house backed on to Plumstead common. Police took DNA from the woman. Had they bothered to investigate Pauline’s claim, Robert may have been arrested at that point.
Pauline ended up cutting off all contact with Robert.
Robert had lived near the Common at the time of the murder. By then, he was in prison for multiple rape and murder convictions.
Robert went on a horrific rampage of rape and murder in the early 1990’s. We are going to run chronologically through his crimes.
Robert is suspected of being a serial rapist, known as the ‘Green Chain’ rapist. It is believed he carried out at least 70 savage attacks across a four-year crime spree.
Possible victims of Robert’s have come forward. A woman claimed that in May 1992, she was out for a walk with her daughter in a pram/buggy. Robert grabbed her from behind with force, placed a ligature around her neck and she was pulled to the ground. She said that she was stripped, raped and battered about the head for severeal minutes in front of her child. She was left looking like a ‘bloody rag doll.’ “I asked him not to kill me,” she said. “He didn’t stop hitting me. He put a rope around my neck and kept bashing me on the head.” It is thought this woman was the first victim in the Green Chain string of attacks.
A few days later, another member of the public called police to say “Bob Napper” looked like the rapist. Officers returned to his flat and asked him again to go to a police station and give a blood sample.
Robert failed to go to the station and nobody followed up. A few weeks later he was eliminated from the investigation because the rapist had been estimated as being 5’7 tall and Robert was 6’2.
In October 1992, Robert became the subject of police attention again. He was arrested over suggestions that he had been stalking a civilian employee at a local police station.
Authorities searched his apartment and found a .22 pistol, 244 rounds of ammunition, two knives, a crossbow and six crossbow bolts. Police files from the inquiry show they also found pocket diaries, hand-drawn maps, notes written on the borders of newspapers, and a London A-Z.
(An A-Z (pronounced “A to Z”) in the 1990s was a pocket-sized paperback book of street maps, universally used for navigation in the UK before the invention of digital GPS and smartphone apps.)
Robert had made notes that mentioned ways to restrain someone, including the phrase “clingfilm on the legs”. Another note named particular streets and gave map references for them on the A-Z. Pages had been marked with black dots highlighting certain areas; other locations were marked with dashes. They were concentrated in the Plumstead, Eltham and Woolwich areas of south-east London.
Robert kept diaries where he wrote vulgar things about women. He called one woman a “sodden filthy bitch”. In one of the A-Zs was a fitness card for a young blonde woman from Eltham. It was placed in the page corresponding to her home address.
Robert would end up pleading guilty to possessing a firearm and ammunition. In court, references were made to his disturbed mental state and a psychiatric report was produced saying he was “without doubt an immediate threat to himself and the public”.
He was given an eight week stint in custody at the time. No further investigation was carried out on the things found in his apartment.
In April 1993, Robert’s fingerprints were found on a tin box that had been buried on a Common. There was a Mauser handgun inside the box. Robert was never questioned about this, despite his fingerprints being found.
In July 1993, Robert’s name was logged on a report after he had been reported as spying on a woman in her flat. A man had spotted Robert while he was spying and followed Robert back to his home. Police went to question him. The officers’ notes read: “Subject strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist, indecency type suspect.”
Robert committed murders in November 1993, months after Rachel was killed. He murdered single mother Samantha Bisset and her daughter Jazmine (4) in their home in Plumstead, London. Both were brutally assaulted and murdered.
Police have said that they believe he used to watch Samantha and her boyfriend making love in the lounge room of her home.
Robert went to the home on November 3, 1993 when Samantha’s boyfriend was at work. He knocked on the door. When Samantha opened it, he began his attack immediately. He stabbed her with such ferocity that her spinal cord was almost severed. He stabbed Samantha 70 times.
He raped and suffocated Jazmine upstairs, leaving her lying on the bed as if she was asleep.
Returning to Samantha, he propped her body against the sofa in the position in which he had seen her making love. With his seven-inch knife, he sliced her torso open, pulling her rib cage apart as if to display her. Before he left, Robert removed part of her womb as a trophy.
Robert was convicted of the murders of the mother and daughter in 1995.
In 2006, Robert was interviewed by authorities for over two days at Broadmoor, where he was being held. Broadmoor Hospital is a high-security psychiatric hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England.
By that time, Robert was 40 and had been diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia and Asperger’s (terminology from the time). He had been in Broadmoor for over ten years.
On November 28, 2007, Robert was charged with Rachel’s murder.
After Robert was identified as the likely perpetrator in the case, Paul Britton spoke out. He said that he had been brought in at an early stage to advise on the Green Chain rapes. He said he gave police three tips which would lead them to the offender:
- The attacker would already be on their records for minor offences
- He would have been noticed by neighbours
- His suspicious behaviour would have been mentioned at local police briefings.
“To this day I do not understand why this did not happen,” said Paul.
“We were looking at an escalating offender. My advice was to look at the case from a local level.”
He also spoke about his thoughts on the Colin Stagg honeytrap failed investigation.
He said that he was not the person who had written the Lizzie James letters and that the plan had never been his idea. “Not only did I not write them but I did not see them until they had been sent. It was never my notional suggestion that it would be a good idea to write the letters.” he said.
“My first question was, `Is this legal?’ What the police said echoes for ever: `Please don’t concern yourself with legal issues,'” he said.
“This case was at the very top of the then Attorney General’s watch list. The highest legal authorities in the land were involved. One of the myths that has been allowed to perpetuate is that they [the police] were a bunch of mavericks. They were fully monitored at higher levels.”
Professor Laurence Alison, the chair of forensic psychology at Liverpool University and the author of a book on Robert told the Guardian: “Frenzied random motiveless knife attacks on women are rare. Even more unusual are frenzied, random knife attacks on women with their young children present. Here was Britton with two of them under his nose and no one noticed.”
On January 24, 2008, Robert pleaded not guilty to Rachel’s murder. His trial started in November 2008. On December 18, 2008, Robert ended up pleading guilty to Rachel’s manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Mr Justice Griffith Williams said that Robert would be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor because he was “a very dangerous man”. It is unlikely he will ever be released.
In terms of what happened with Andre and Alex, as mentioned, they lived in France for a period before moving to Spain. Alex left school at age 16 to become a car mechanic. Since then, he has explored many career paths – a session musician, he is a certified hypnotherapist and has trained in graphology which is the analysis of handwriting for psychological purposes.
He also spent time in India and studied to be a yoga teacher.
Andre has spoken about the anger that Alex experienced as he grew up.
“In the preteen years, there was an anger, and the anger was quite rightly directed towards me,” André said in the Netflix doc, while later adding, “He did get into trouble with the authorities, just small stuff, but the police were on the doorstep on occasion.”
Alex has explained where some of the anger came from. “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 I guess I carried that with me somewhat,” he said.
Alex added that he took a lot of his anger out on his father, because he did not have the “same respect” and the “same trust” for him as he once had.
“The fundamental point was that he was the protector of the family as the father and unfortunately had allowed this to happen to us, so in my teenage years, we had a lot of conflict,” he shared.
In 2014, Alex and Andre worked on a series of children’s books titled ‘ The Adventures of Little Louis’ which they say helped them both with their recovery.
Alex wrote a memoir in 2017 titled ‘ Letting Go – A True Story of Murder, Loss and Survival.’
He is now 36 and lives in Barcelona.
He has said that he tries to live every day with the same belief “in the infinity of the spirit that my mother would be with me always wherever I went.”
“My father sacrificed everything for me and for what he believed in without any guarantees of how it would turn out,” he shared. “He was brave enough to do what he felt was right in his heart. I’m forever indebted to him for that.”
“Our life has been a battle,” the two said in a press release. “Our journey has all been by the grace of God and a promise to go on together, and we feel incredibly blessed to be able to share our story in this way. We hope that audiences will be left with a testament to the tough battle of life we all face, and to the power of faith, hope, love — and never giving up.”
SOURCE LIST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Rachel_Nickell
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/dec/18/robert-napper-clues
https://people.com/where-is-rachel-nickell-son-now-11991043
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/gallery/2008/dec/17/rachel-nickell-ukcrime