RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT - The Murder of Rachel Nickell #285

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Netflix's new drama The Witness has brought the story of Rachel Nickell and her family back into public attention. For the true story behind the murder that rocked the UK, we've resurfaced our episode from February 2023.--Rachel Nickell’s brutalised body was found on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex wiping her bloodied face and begging her to 'wake up'. The nature of the broad daylight attack and the horrific injuries put enormous pressure on the Met to get the case solved and fast. However, none of that justifies the shoddy police work, cut corners, and tunnel vision that allowed serial rapist Robert Napper to go unchecked for years.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

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I'm kidding, I'm kidding. One day it will. One day it will. One day it will. But today is not that day. I'm a liar and a bounder and a cad. We've actually got a very sad story for you today. And very specifically one that would have, I mean, at least for me, I was very aware of this always.

Oh, me too. Me too. So it's about time. We covered it. Often perceived as a brutalist concrete jungle, London is actually the greenest city in Europe. We have 3,000 parks and green spaces. Richmond Park is a whopping 2,500 acres,

and they've got deer and stuff. Yeah, I mean, if you go stand in the middle of Richmond Park, you feel like you are in the countryside, but it's fucking far from here. So far. Sometimes on a Sunday, I'll be like, should we go to Richmond Park? And then I look up how far it is, and I'm like, no.

I don't think I've actually ever been. I've been once. It is so far. I just go sound in Ebbing Forest instead. Kind of feels similar. There are cows in Apping Forest. Are there? I've never seen a cow. Big ones with big horns. Really? I don't know if they're Highland, but they're like shaggy with big horns. Oh, fun. I think they're called like long horns. But they're there. They're there in NEPING. Oh, I'll go and find them. But if you're more interested in Wombles than cows or deer, the 1,100 acres of Wimbledon Common might be more your speed. There are very, very few podcasts on this case, which I was surprised by. The amount of people who don't know what a womble is.

What? Terrifies me. Who doesn't know what a womble is? Fucking... I know. Uncle Bulgaria. Keep Britain tidy. If you don't know what a womble is, I can't help you.

I used to have a lunchbox with the Wumbleball. Did you? I still have a T-shirt that has a great Uncle Bulgaria on it that says keep written tidy. It's a good me. Good wholesome message. It is because all they do is live on the common and tidy up. Something that's adorable. Southwest London home to tennis and Great Uncle Bulgaria, Wimbledon has never been particularly rough.

Traditionally speaking, the air in West London was always a lot cleaner, so that's where all the rich people lived and all the poor people lived in the east and the slums, because that's where all of the air was much dirtier. Wimbledon, always been nice. And that's why Rachel Nekelle often took her toddler son, Alex, and her Labrador Molly to Wimbledon common for walks, rather than some of the other green spaces, closer to her home a few miles away. 23-year-old Rachel lived in Ballam with her partner, Andre. They had met a few years before, while Rachel was working as a lifeguard in Richmond. Andre Hanscombe was a former tennis coach, and they were a super attractive couple. I think if you see pictures of Rachel in particular, she is just, she's beautiful, she's beautiful.

And not even in a like kind of 90s way where you're like, Like, oh, she was beautiful for the night? No, no. She and Andre are like Love Island material. Totally. Like, they are timelessly beautiful, both of them. And a year after they met, they had their son, Alex. Rachel even did a bit of modelling before pursuing an English in history degree.

But once little Alex came along, she threw herself into motherhood. She held onto aspirations of being a children's TV presenter. And she kind of does look like a children's TV presenter. And I think with her, Andre and Little Alice, Alex, who was probably the fucking cutest baby you could imagine. There's a lot of video footage of him doing like, when kids get to their age where they're just asking questions about everything. There's a lot of very 90s videos. Because in the 90s, like everyone had handheld camcorders.

It's like what we had. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so there's a lot of footage of Alex being like, but why? It's adorable. Yeah. So they were the perfect young family. On the 15th of July, 1992, Rachel took Adelaq.

and their dog for a walk on Wimbledon Common, like she did all the time. But this time, she would never come home. About a mile away, 28-year-old unemployed Colin Stagg also took his dog for a walk on the Common quite early in the morning. He did this often, mostly for hours. But that day, Colin Stag wasn't feeling too hot. So he and his dog returned to their home on the Alton estate in Roehampton at 9.25am. Colin took some painkillers and went back to bed hoping to sleep off his headache. At 9.45, Rachel, Alex, and their dog Molly were walking along minding their own business.

They were not off the beaten track. It was broad daylight. They had no reason to be afraid. What they didn't know is that they were being stalked. Less than 200 yards from a well-frequented green area, Rachel was grabbed and ferociously attacked by a white man, about 5'10 with dark hair. He wrestled Rachel to the ground and in an attempt to sidest, the young mother screams, he cut her throat so violently, he almost decapitated her. Let me just remind you that this is before 10 o'clock in the morning. The frenzied attack continued and Rachel sustained 48 stab wounds to her body. All of this happened in front of her two-year-old son.

Alex, just a couple of weeks shy of his third birthday, picked up the keys and money that had fallen out of his mother's pockets and put them back in. Then he took a piece of paper he had found and dabbed his mother's forehead trying to make her better. There's a lot of documentaries about this case and there's an interview with one of the police officers first on the scene

and he was like, through all of my years of policing, that's the one that still makes me cry. Yeah. And it's going to get worse because Alex sat there repeatedly saying, wake up mummy. In his adult life, Alex would claim that after he said this for a third time, he realised that his mum wasn't coming back.

Quickly, because the park was so full of people, a dog walker saw the young boy covered in blood and mud next to a woman he assumed was sunbathing. As he got closer, the dog walker realised what he was really looking at. Soon, the London Metropolitan Police descended on the common. There were about 500 people there that day. All of them were questioned, and the area was cleared. Eventually, only Rachel Nichelle's car was.

left in the car park. And the five-foot-ten man with dark hair was nowhere to be found. No one had seen a blood-stained man. The horrified André was informed, and a murder squad was assembled swiftly. Rachel's parents were on holiday in Canada, so two officers flew out there immediately to tell them what had happened before the press could. Once all of Rachel's family were gathered together, they held a press conference, imploring the public to come forward with any information.

Like so many cases we deal with in this fair country of ours, the British press would have a hefty part to play. Can you imagine being on holiday in Canada? I know. And there's just a knock at the door. I know. And it's two British bobbies being like, by the way, your daughter has been stabbed to death in front of your grandson.

Yeah. The murder of Rachel Nichelle swept the nation. People were terrified. Could women not even walk on Wimbledon Common in broad daylight anymore? And like always, that meant that the Met were under an enormous amount of pressure to find the man who had killed Rachel. I feel like it happens in Britain way more than it happens in anywhere else, but this like balance of like, we need the press because we have nothing to go on.

But the flip side of that is that the Met is then under much more pressure to get it done fast. Yeah, I think it is the trade-off, right, that they've got to make. It's like, how much do you want the press to be involved? And then when you let them in, they're not going to go away. Oh, yeah, they ain't going anywhere. No. And then they're there. And the Met really don't have much to go on at all,

despite the hundreds of people on the common two-year-old Alex was the only witness. He was questioned by a child psychologist, and he gave a description of the man who killed his mum. Alex told the child psychologist that the man was wearing dark trousers in a white shirt, and he was carrying a black bag that he pulled the knife from. When Alex was asked to draw a picture of the man who hurt mummy, he repeatedly stabbed the paper with a pencil. The murder squad was led by Detective Inspector,

Keith Peder, remember that name. He was newly promoted and he had a lot to prove. But Keith Peder had a problem when it came to the Rachel Nicole case. He had literally no evidence. He had also been told, in no uncertain terms, that this investigation was so high profile, if he fucked it up, his career would be over. And when we say that they had nothing,

we mean they had nothing. Forensics found nothing. The 90s were not the CSI Evidence King's, that we live in today, but there was no DNA, no stranger's blood, no murder weapon, no fibres, only the testimony of a two-year-old boy. So samples are taken. Yeah. They just didn't have the technology to test them sufficiently.

Yeah. Now, any of the usual suspects known in the area couldn't be placed on the common that morning. The police had absolutely no idea, therefore, where to start. Whoever the assailant was, peddothor, they had the luck of the devil. hoping that the devil would return to the scene of the crime the Met set up sensors linked to an alarm and even lay a chemical on the ground that would mark any shoes that laid tread there. The sensors were triggered pretty quickly

but it turned out that it was just some drunk teenagers, a pretty common occurrence in Britain. And that plan was swiftly abandoned and the surveillance team was withdrawn. I could have told you that. It's a public park. Yeah. And if you cordoned it off, then the person's also not going to turn up and just stomp all over it because it's cordoned off.

Honestly, like, I think drinking in public parks in London is not like, everyone does it because nobody has a fucking garden. So like it is much less common in other cities where people have bigger houses and everyone has a garden. But in London, drinking in the park isn't a particularly look down on thing to do unless you're Mark Corrigan and you get put on the news. But make light of things no longer because Rachel's autopsy brought with it more horror. It revealed that she had been sexually assaulted during the fatal attack and it was confirmed that she had been stabbed a total of 49. times. Horrible, but nothing forensics could use. So the police turned to a relatively new and much maligned discipline, forensic profiling. They brought in Paul Britain, who seemed to be the only man for the job. He seems to be the only man in Britain that's ever done this. He'd worked on

the West's and the abduction of Stephanie Slater, amongst loads of other cases that you would recognise the names of. And Paul Britain put together the following profile. Whoever had sexually assaulted and killed Rachel Nekau, would be a man who lived within easy walking distance of Wimbledon Common, he would live alone in a flat or a bed sit, or he'd live with his parents. This man would also have a long history of failed relationships, an interest in the occult, an obsession with knives,

and above all, if this man wasn't caught, he would inevitably strike again. With all of this in mind, along with Little Alex's description of the killer, and the interviews compiled from the hundreds of people on the common that day, an artist's impression of the assailant was made and broadcast on the British Institution Crime Watch. So after the program aired,

800 viewers called in saying that they recognised this man and a few of them, enough to make it notable, said that this man was Colin Stagg. I mean, imagine that. Imagine doing a Crime Watch appeal and then getting multiple people calling in and telling you that this is the name of the person. Stag had actually returned to the common that day that Rachel died.

He'd woken up feeling better and decided to take his dog out again. When he got to the common, he was stopped by an officer who explained why the park was closed. Colin Stagg told this officer, did he be on the common that morning, but hadn't seen anything. He gave the officer his name and then went on his way. But after the crime was showing, police now wanted a word with him again. The Met searched Collins' house, and they found books on the occult, and allegedly a hooded cowl and a pentagram. I don't believe that.

But that is what they say. Colin had been described by those who knew him as a loner and by the police as, quote, a very unusual individual. So far, then, he's ticking all of Paul Britain's boxes. And based on that alone, Colin Stagg would very quickly become the Mets prime suspect. Colin freely told the police what we already know, that he had been on the common, but he left at 9.15. And he was at home at the time Rachel was murdered.

But Colin's neighbour told the police, that she had seen Colin head to the common at 925, which would, if she didn't have her days mixed up, place him on the common exactly at the time when Rachel was attacked. So Colin was held for three days at Wimbledon Police Station and questioned at length. During these interrogations, Colin was shown a crime scene photo of Rachel Nekel as she laid dead.

Remember this, it's very, very important. This photo was taken from the back. It did not show Rachel's face, or crucially, her hands. Colin was also picked out of an identity parade by a woman who claimed to have seen a man acting suspiciously on the common on the date of Rachel's murder.

Yeah, this lady is like one of the hundreds, right? And she's said, I was pushing a pram and I saw this man. And I was a bit worried because I thought he was following a woman. And then I lost track of him, basically. And then she picks him out of an identity parade. So the police looked through any previous disturbances on the common in the past few years.

and they found a complaint of a woman who said that a man had exposed himself to her. And that man was Colin Stagg. He claimed that he'd been sunbathing naked, which a lot of people did in the area of the common in the 90s, apparently. I tried to look into this, right? We are not a body positive nation. We don't like nakedness. Not very many people do it.

When Colin Stag talks about this, he was like, there was a particular area in the common where people would do that. I tried to look it up, and I came across this article about something called the secret swimming club that is apparently a group of people who swim naked on Wimbledon Common, specifically. So maybe we're more German than I thought. Who knew? It's all underground though. Secret. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's probably like those fucking house-buying WhatsApp groups that you have to know somebody knows.

So this man was Colin Stag and like he said, apparently he was just sunbathing naked. But the police were having none of it. And Colin Stagg was charged with Indyceau. in exposure. His solicitor advised him to plead guilty, and he got a 200-quid fine. I think I've made it quite clear. I'm very much on Colin's side. This is a fair cop. He deserves this. You are not allowed to be public naked in this country, and I don't believe he, you know, aggressively exposed himself to this woman. I do believe he was nakedly sunbathing, but the problem is that's against the law. Colin said that he pleaded guilty because he thought it would just all go away. And I understand why his solicitor is saying, plead guilty, you'll get a 200-quid fine.

It'll all be over. but it didn't. Yes. Colin Stag was now on a sex pervert list. This is the problem, isn't it? Is that the sex offenders register, there's many ways you can end up on there. Let's just say that.

Public urination. Public urination, public nudity. And obviously sliding a little bit along the scale of like if you're 18 and have sex with your like 16 year old girlfriend, something like that. Like there's a lot of different ways that people can end up on this list. And then if you are on that list, if something does happen,

you become suspect, numero, uno. Exactly. It becomes very easy to tie you with the same brush. And that's exactly what happens to Colin Stagg because the Met used this indecent exposure charge to tick another Paul Britton box, violent sexual fantasies. I don't think that's the same thing. But they're like, pervert, done, next, great. And admittedly, Colin Stag did not help himself by running out of the magistrate's court where he was convicted like a bat out of hell and flipping the vs to the press.

in September of 1992, so Rachel's only been dead a couple of months. And he does look menacing. But crucially, the most consistent factor of identification of the man who killed Rachel O'Kal is that everyone says he's about 5'10. Colin Stag is nowhere fucking near 5'10. And we need to remember that. I think it's interesting that the most consistent description is the one that seems to be completely ignored. But an indecent exposure charge was not enough to pin Colin Stagg for the murder of

Rachel Neckel. So the Met got their thinking caps on. Very problematic thinking caps. Now, before we go into all of the very, very problematic things that happened with this case, the only one sentence I'm going to utter in favour of the police, not even in favour, but in mildest defence, mealy-mouth defence, is that when you are facing a case like this of a young, murdered woman, where the child is there, like, this was such, we must have been so young, but I remember this case being like full front headline. You'll remember the reopening of it. Yes, exactly, exactly.

And I think that when they had nothing to go on, and then you get multiple people calling in and telling you that it's Colin Stagg. And although they should have exercised the idea that there are many different shades of wrongen on the sex offenders register, when you have nothing else, following this line of inquiry into Colin Stagg, yes. But how they do it, no, no, no, no. And also no, no, no, no to the fact that they ignore a lot of things that come in and a lot of connections are not made. They go after him and they do not pursue any other lines of inquiry.

It's one of the most blinkered cases that we've come across. So finally, they get a lead, they think. In the wake of the Crime Watch broadcast, a woman got in touch with the police explaining that a couple of years previously, she had exchanged a series of letters with Colin Stag after he replied to her lonely hearts ad in the paper. Julie Pines explained to the police that she was concerned because one of these letters from Colin Stag had contained a sexual fantasy.

Di-I. Keith Peder, with his job on the line, remember, came up with a plan. A honey trap. A sticky, sticky honey trap. Sticky, sticky, very illegal. Yes. Sir Peder enlisted the help of an underline cover copper who had worked on the gang scene for a long time. So she was very well practiced in getting information out of people trying to hide it.

Now, we've never found out this officer's real name. She's only ever been known as Lizzie James. And this honey trap would be called Operation Edsel. Which is apparently a village in Scotland. Oh, well, we did find out from our conversation with former detective Colin Sutton a long time ago that they just apparently pick names for these operations alphabetically. So if it comes back to E, what's an E word? Let's go. So under this fake name, Lizzie James wrote to Colin Stack,

saying that she hoped that he didn't mind her intrusion, but that she'd been given his address by a good friend, Julie Pines, and that she wanted to get to know him, as she was much more open-minded than Julie was. Naturally, nearly 30 and extremely single, Colin Stag wrote back, and a pen-powell relationship began. Colin Stack, if you believe him, is a virgin at this stage in his life. What followed the initial contact from Lizzie James was a series of letters,

each one more explicit than the last. Lizzie James would introduce more and more violent fantasies into the letters, telling Colin that she wanted a real man. And when Colin didn't respond in a violent enough way, Lizzie James would keep pushing him, saying that she felt like he was being restrained and that she wanted him to quote, burst and that she wanted to be completely in his power, quote, defenseless and humiliated. Can we make up a siren for entrapment?

What does entrapment sound like? I think that covers it for honey trap and entrapment. Thank you, Hannah. If people haven't come across this, they actually did turn this story into a TV show. show. I don't know if you've seen this. Deceit. Deceit on Channel 4. It's actually got like 6.9 out 10 on IMDB. I started watching the first episode and I think I just wasn't in the right headspace for it and I gave up. But it's basically all about the honey trap situation. It follows Lizzie James. And it's got that actor out of Coronation Street or EastEnders. She's very good. But maybe I'll come back to watching it because this is all sorts of fucked up. This made this story absolutely insane.

So the inexperienced Colin, in his own words, just trying to get a shag, wrote back to Lizzie James with the type of fantasies he thought that she wanted. This is like fucking the most basic shit. But even still, so he would give her what he thought she wanted because he's desperate for a shag, right? But even still he would follow up these like, oh, I'll sort you out kind of things being like, but please don't think I'm violent. Oh, God. Oh, God. He says things like, I think I have an idea of what you want. Is it this, but I really don't want you to think that I'm going to hurt you?

Like, that's a very consistent theme in the letters. Eventually, after a series of escalating correspondence, including an audio-recorded sexual fantasy by Lizzie James delivered to Colin Stag on cassette tape, Colin wrote her a letter describing an open-air sexual experience between the two of them on Wimbledon Common that included a knife, cutting of flesh and the flowing of blood. Till this very day, Keith Peder will swear up and down that the violent themes were only introduced by Colin and never by the elusive Lizzie James.

But that, my friends, is bollocks. It's also fucking provable. Yeah. Because the letters are there. Yeah. And you can piece them together in which fucking order they go with. Exactly. How stupid do you think we are Keith Peder? I mean, he really gets his comeuppance,

but like the whole Lizzie James thing is some of the most fucked stuff I've ever read. Oh, it truly, truly is. So after a few months of steamy letter writing and steamier cassette recordings, Lizzie James arranged to meet Colin Stag in Hyde Park. She was surrounded by more undercover officers and she gave Colin a black hat that she said was a present. But it was actually,

so he could be more easily identified by the officers at a distance. Maybe give him a high vis hat, wear a black hat. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people wearing black hats, you know. So during this in-person meeting, Lizzie told Colin that she had a dark secret. She said that she had been abducted as a child and inducted into a satanic sect. What's our satanic panic noise? You're going to make a cat now, is like you?

I just saw it in your face. You can't help yourself. Satanic cat, satanic kitty. Okay, fine. Thank you. So whilst in this devil worship phase of her life, there you go. Lizzie said that she had assisted in the sacrifice of a pregnant woman and an unborn baby. Then she said she had taken part in a massive orgy

and was under the control of a man who she described to Colin as, quote, the best man ever. Colin gave very little reaction. Presumably Colin is standing in Hypat wearing this black hat confused out of his fucking mind about what is going on. And the police took this lack of risk. reaction from Colin to mean that he was completely unfazed by all of this stuff that Lizzie was telling him and that he did things like this all the time. So that's where he's not running away.

But according to Colin, he thought that she was, quote, off her head. But he still wanted to get his end away. Men will ignore a lot. Just because she's crazy. So after the satanic panic meeting, the pair met a few more times and Lizzie James eventually brought up the murder of Rachel Nacal. And how she wished that Colin had done it. Fucking out. She even said that she could only be with a man who had committed a murder, specifically the murder of Rachel Nackel.

Colin, still trying to get his leg over, explained that he was actually on the common on the day that Rachel died, but he was very sorry he hadn't killed her. But he's still trying to impress Lizzie James, so he tells her that he had actually seen a crime-season. scene photo. And then Colin imitated the way Rachel's body had been in the picture he was shown when he was interrogated.

I told you to remember it. He placed his hands flat on the ground to lower himself into the fetal position he had seen in that crime scene photograph during questioning the years before. And as he pushed himself back up off the ground, he dusted his hands off as he would. Lizzie James reported back to the Met that Colin

had crossed his wrists and placed his palms together, which just so happened to be how Rachel's hands were when she was found, which considering Colin had never been shown her hands in the photo, means that he must have killed her. How else would he know? They got him. They thought they were like, great, this is it. But in reality, they weren't even close. Soon after this exchange, the press interviewed Colin Stagg about his involvement in the case, and he gave a very strong denial.

Shit, Keith Petter thought, there was no way after such a public denial that he would confide in Lizzie James, so they had to reel it in. I don't understand the, I mean I don't understand a lot of things about Keith Peder but I don't understand this idea of like oh because he's denied it in the press he's never going to tell anyone that he actually did it. I don't get that. For me I feel like there's something that Peder isn't saying. I think it's because he watched that denial and he's like, fuck he didn't do this.

I think that's what it is. And he's like, we better just fucking cut and shut this. Yeah, I bet, yeah. But cut and shut this in the worst way, which is a headache. And then take it to the CPU. Yeah, yeah. Take it to the C. I cut and shut this.

He's like, cut and shut this boys. And they're like, do you mean stop going after this man who clearly didn't do it? No, I mean take it to the CPS. Jesus Christ. So for the murder squad, this point felt like it had been five months worth of work down the drain, with no evidence to show for it. They were running out of time. But Keith Petter and his team had to chance their luck with the CPS.

So they arrested Colin once again and brought him in for even more questioning, bearing a mind that between. between the time that they originally questioned him and now they have no new evidence, besides some bizarre conversations with Lizzie James. And some crime watch calls. Yes. So this time, Colin was a lot less amiable and no commented his way through everything for hours. So Keith Pedder played his last ace.

Lizzie James walked into the interrogation room and revealed herself to her former pen pal. It's like they think they're making a 90s thriller. Literally. She was not his maybe girlfriend. She was definitely never going to have sex with him. She was an undercover cover. However, this bombshell didn't have the desired effect. I think they thought they was going to crack him wide open.

But the big reveal didn't break Colin. He was visibly shocked, but he continued to no comment. He was thinking to himself, all I've done is write some sexually letters. This is utterly absurd. But somehow, with not one witness apart from a toddler, no forensics, no confession, no murder weapon, and a man significantly shorter than the assailant described,

this case made it all the way to the old Bailey, and Colin Stagg was officially charged with the rape and murder of Rachel Nackel, and was held on remand for 13 months. When basically all the police had was forensic psychologist Paul Britton, saying that Colin Stag fit the personality type of someone who was capable of such a brutal murder. And some crime-watch calls. So while Colin Stag was inside, police dug up Collins' garden, and the papers were filled with images of items being pulled from the ground

and taken away in bin liners. Nothing ever came of those items. We don't even know what they were. Like, honestly, such a press stunt, like, they never show up again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just to be like, look, we better be seen to be doing something. Yeah, totally. Just like, dig up a bunch of shit, put some bricks in some bags,

and carry it out of his front door. But it was all pointless anyway because the real murderer of Rachel Neckel was still very much out there and by August 1993 he was preparing to strike again but no one was looking for him no other leads were followed on the Rachel Nichelle case

because as far as the Met were concerned they had their man so when an unidentified knife showed up on Wimbledon Common it was squirreled away in an evidence locker and forgotten about when Colin Stagg got his day at the old Bailey the Met were on trial just as much as he was.

Collins' defence counsel made the very logical case that all he had done was give Lizzie James what he thought she wanted. He wanted to satisfy her. He had never actually had a sexual relationship before. And in light of the fact that the only evidence the police actually had was Colin Stagg being a slightly odd guy, the case was eventually thrown out of court.

Judge Harry Ognell dismissed the case on two counts. Firstly, that using a psychological profile to prove identity was inherently dangerous, completely agree. And secondly, that Operation Edsel had used deception of the grossest kind. Also agree. Yes. It's also not even that it's just gross and, like, immoral and, like, unethical. It's the fact that it is dangerously unsafe. Yeah, absolutely.

Because it is completely debunk. It's like beating a confession out of him and being like, well, there you go. Yeah. And just like that, the Met's case against Colin. Stagg collapsed. Judge Ognor declared it to be improper, unfair and inadmissible. And in a matter of moments, Colin Stag was a free man. In one of the documentaries, he talks about this and he was like, no one explained to me what would happen. I thought it was going to be like, send him down or you're a free man. He's like, none of that happened. They were just talking in this legal jargon that I didn't understand. I was just sitting there waiting and then my lawyer turned around

and winked at me and then I realized that I was okay. I think he expected it to be more of an event, like there to be more drama, but the judge was just like, this is fucked, like, absolutely not. But free, yes, but Colin Stag's ordeal was far from over. Colin walked out of the old Bailey to be met with screams of guilty and hang him from the people outside. But still, he gave a prepared statement to the press, which basically says, they never had anything against me, they never had any evidence, and the judge has confirmed that. And the Met gave a statement afterwards, declaring that they would not be looking at anyone else for the murder of Rachel Nekel,

which is just as good as saying they still believe that they had the right man, he'd just got away with it. Rachel's father told news cameras that the law may have been upheld, but justice certainly was not. And Di-I. Keith Pedder later said in interview, I do not believe that justice was served to anyone on that particular day.

Pedder was forced to resign, and we're about to find out why. In 2002, the murder of Rachel Nekele, investigation cold case was reopened. Technology had come a long way since the early 90s, and the DNA samples taken from Rachel's body were thankfully kept, firstly, because we don't always see that happen. Yes, yeah, that's very true.

And they were re-examined. And this time, they turned up a match. And guess what? It was most definitely not Colin Stagg. These samples were a match for a then-55-year-old Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic, who was already being held indefinitely. in Broadmoor.

In 1993, Napa had pleaded guilty to manslaughter of Sam Bissette and her four-year-old daughter, Jasmine, in Plumstead. He killed them 16 months after Rachel Nichols' death. The only reason he was given a manslaughter charge rather than murder was his paranoid psychosis, meeting the threshold for diminished responsibility. In order for you to be getting diminished responsibility, there has to be something really fucking wrong with you. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't know right from wrong.

It means that your ability to understand the nature of what you're doing and form rational judgment and exercise self-control is substantially impaired. And I do think that is true in the case of Robert Napa. But it's very rare that that happens. So strap in, because what you're about to hear now is pretty horrible. So Jasmine, who was his four-year-old, remember, and Sam, her mum. were discovered stabbed to death by Sam's partner, Conrad Ellum. One evening, Sam had answered the door to Napa,

and he had immediately attacked her. And what he did to her was so horrific. The one of the police officers attending the scene said that it was the most gruesome sight he'd ever seen. Robert Napa had been stalking Sam for quite some time. She had no curtains in her ground floor flat, and she had seen him looking in on her just days before she was killed. Once Napa made his way into Sam's flat, he continued his frenzied attack on the young mum. Napa severed her spinal cord.

He cut her open from her genitals to her chest, pulled her rib cage apart, and exposed her internal organs, and then stabbed every single one of them. A piece of her abdomen had been taken as a trophy, and Napa had also attempted to cut off her left leg. The crime scene photographer present was never able to work again. Napa was identified by a fingerprint that he left on an exception. external window sill and sent down for life. But when it came to the case of Rachel Nichelle,

the Met didn't just have Napa's DNA all over their evidence samples. Flex of paint taken from Little Alex's clothes were also found to be a match for a red toolbox belonging to Napa. It really is pretty damning stuff once they reopen it. Yeah. So when Napa was questioned in Broadmoor, he denied the crime. But the similarities and the brutality and all of the evidence were pretty hard to ignore. And so he ended up doing the same thing that he'd done before. Napa pleaded guilty to the crime,

but on a basis of diminished responsibility due to his paranoid schizophrenia. Robert Napa was convicted of the manslaughter of Rachel Nekyll in 2008. And it's incredibly unlikely that he will ever get out of Broadmoor. Yeah, hold on there, I think. But that is not where our story ends. The fact that Napa was overlooked for so long and allowed to roam free for years is absolutely shocking.

And allowed to roam free. and murder again. And he is suspected of far more crimes, mainly a series of sexual assaults called the Green Chain Rapes. The Green Chain is a 40-mile walk that connects a series of parks in South London, and in the late 80s and early 90s, there were a series of sexual assaults,

some at knife point along this walk. But Robert Napper was nowhere on anyone's radar. But the Plumstead Local really, really, really should have been because of the following reasons. In 1986, he was a lot of. given a conditional discharge for a possession of an air gun. In March 92, he had attempted to rape a 17-year-old girl and sexually assaulted another at knife point. Two months after that, he grabbed a 22-year-old mother in broad daylight as she pushed a buggy down the green chain,

strangled her and raped her. That is staggeringly similar to what he did to Rachel Neckel. But the link between the two cases was never made. The police know, the police obviously, because we know about it, obviously they know that he jumped out at this poor woman. and raped her in front of her child. And it's, you know, months before Rachel Nakal, but no dots are ever connected because they're too busy going after Colin Stack because he's a bit weird.

Yeah, because poor Britain told him to look for somebody who was into the occult. So after this attack, Napa's house was searched by police, the house that he lived in with his mother, by the way, and officers found an A to Z. This A to Z was covered in annotations of the local area. A to Z, by the way, for anybody... I don't know, did they do them outside of Britain?

I don't know. It's a big book of maps. Yeah. It's a big map book. It's a map book that's small enough to fit in your car. Exactly. Everyone who is like our age remembers there was one in the back of their car. Oh yeah, totally.

A friend of mine who's only a couple of years older than us, when he went to uni, he had to take an ATAZ to go to flat viewings. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like fully ubiquitous. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this A2Z that they found in Napa's house was covered in annotations of the local area, where someone could find a woman and where to follow them to. The margins were full. filled with scribbles of stabbings and bloodshed and disturbingly a description of a woman being wrapped in Klingfilm.

I hate Klingfilm so much. Yeah. I refuse to have it in my house, actually. I can't stand the smell. I mean, it is suffocating feeling. And this is the stuff with Napa. I'm like, okay, look, he's never going to get out of Broadmoor, so like, fine. But I'm like, he's so clearly sexually fixated.

He's so clearly premeditating his attack. It's not like he just goes out into the street, sees a woman, loses, control and attacks her. Like, I understand why they give him diminished responsibility because they're saying he, like, has this thing wrong with him, but I'm also like, this man should never be allowed out of prison. No. It should never be allowed out of Broadmoor. Because Napa is a clear-cut sexual sadist. They are incredibly rare, and you'd think that a profiler would know that. But Napa was never linked to the green chain rapes, and he was never under suspicion for the murder of Rachel Nekyll until it was years, years, years too late. Even though he lived in Plumstead was no

known as a stalker and had a murder A to Z and his own mother called Plumstead police in 1989 and told an officer that her son had confessed to raping a woman. But she was dismissed. That's the most mental thing to me. There are rapes happening. The green chain rapes are happening in 89. And this poor woman is brave enough to call the police and be like, my son has just confessed to raping a woman and I don't know what to do.

Can you imagine the thought process for that woman, for that woman that had to go into making that call and then to just be dismissed by the police after you've built yourself up to making that call. Fucking out, man. But basically she's told that they can't match up what she said with any unsolved rape that they have on file, so she's just dismissed. Napa was called to give a DNA sample twice by the Plumster police, but he never showed up and they never pursued him neither.

If the police had in 1989, when his mum literally told them what Napa was doing, Rachel Nicole and Sam and Jasmine Bissett would still be with us today. I bet you can understand why Keith Peder resigned now. The whole story that we just told you got a lot of people into a lot of trouble. The London Metropolitan Police were forced to admit that they'd made grave errors in going after Colin Stagg and ignoring all other potential leads, including the phone call made by Robert Napper's actual mum. Do you think that the Met just have like a filing box filled with like different categories of apology that they have to give. I'm sure they do. I've got a template. I mean, I understand, like, being a police force of a major city like London is going to lead to errors being made. It's a very, very big police force that we've talked about before. Five times is that of like an average police force in this country. Also, London is going to be the place where you're going to deal with a lot of crimes. I understand all of those things. And people are also going to fix date on the mistakes that were made rather than like applauding you for the positive work that's done. But Jesus fucking Christ, my God, the Metropolitan Police is just so in case.

and has been for such a long time. If this case happened today, I would believe you. If you told me that this case happened, not in the fucking 90s, but happened today in 2023, I would believe you that the Met would still be capable of fuck-upery on this scale. Oh my God, I'm upset.

So you may be thinking that Robert Napper matches all of the same personality profiles that were put forward by Paul Britton. And you'd be right. He was a loner. He lived with his mum. he had violent sexual fantasies, and he did go on to kill again.

Tick, tick, tick, tick. But what is truly staggering is that profiler extraordinaire, rumoured basis for TV show Cracker, and author of The Jigsaw Man, not only worked on the Rachel Nicole case, he also worked on the Sam and Jasmine Bissette case, and he was consulted for a profile on the Green Chain Rapist.

I am speechless, because, just to be really, really clear in case, but he didn't understand what I just said. This man, Paul Britain, was the consultant forensic psychologist for all three of these fucking cases. And the man did not seemingly once seem to understand, connect the dots, that maybe they were looking for the same fucking person. Isn't that supposed to be his whole job?

Sexualists are so rare, so rare. And these are all happening in the same area. Yes. with the same MO and not once. At the same time. Does he say maybe we're looking for one guy? It's just mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling.

And that's the thing is like, you know, often with cases like this, you can be like, oh, it's cross-jurisdiction, there are too many police forces involved, there's too many different investigators, nobody was there to connect the dots. That's not the case here. You cannot make that argument here. And how this happened is just absolutely horrifying.

So yes, not once did Paul Britain suggest that all of these crimes had been committed by the same person. Now that could be taken as a slight against Paul. It's not, well, kind of, but it's more of us making the point that forensic profiling of a killer or any criminal just can't be the only evidence used to charge someone with a crime. And the fact that it got as far as it did is abominable. I know. It feels like, right, with Keith Peder, he's, I'm. Under all this pressure to solve the Rachel Nicole case, he doesn't have anything to go on. So he's like, right, I'm going to be this guy that cracks this case with this brand new.

Because, you know, at this point, forensic profiling is still sort of in its early days, in its infancy. And it feels like he was just like, I'll be the one to crack this case and I'll do it with this forensic psychologist, with his profiler. And then people will write books about me and I'll be, I'll be fucking... I'll be the jigsaw man. I'll be the jigsaw man. He has to write his own book. Exactly. It's just so problematic. The good thing is, while we are railing against Paul Britain and Keith Peder,

we do have to say that it is very rare that a forensic psychological profile of a killer is the only evidence used to pursue somebody. Because it's dangerous. Because it's dangerous and stupid and illogical and it makes no fucking sense. So in 2008, the Met formally apologized to Colin Stack. 2008, they ruined this man's life. they completely destroyed him. And Keith Petter in particular made it very known that he was just like, oh, well, he just got away with it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what he was known as. The fact that they came out and gave a public statement after the hearing and said, well, we're not looking for anybody else in connection with this crime. Just put a target on Colin Stag's back. There was no humility in that. No, like taking anything away from what the judge had said to them. They're just like, no, it was him. We just can't prove it.

So yes, in 2008 they formally apologize, probably pulling their fucking, you know, decades-long overdue apology thing out of their fucking file of facts, and apologize to Stack. With a public statement of regret and an independent commission, hooray, we need an independent commission, claxon. Produced a report damning the Met and confirming that they had missed multiple opportunities to get Robert Knapper off the streets and save lives. an independent report I'm sure that the Met just shredded because that's all they seem to do with independent reports and all of the suggestions that they make for how to improve. So because Robert Napper is still in Broadmoor and he's still alive, we don't actually know too much about him.

All we know is that it's pretty likely that he was sexually abused as a child by someone very close to him in an outdoor area. His mum, concerned by his rape confession, did send him to a psychiatrist in 89, but all that happened was that he went home and told his mum, quote, the psychiatrist thinks I'm mad. Napa also has autism and a lot of the literature describes him as having Asperger's, but Hans Asperger was responsible for the deaths of loads of children under the Third Reich and was a firm believer in eugenics.

We'll definitely shorthand it, but perhaps the term Asperger's need rethinking. Robert Napa's condition, so his paranoid schizophrenia and his autism, didn't stop him from getting a job as a warehouseman. Forget this. of fucking defence. What are they warehousing? The Lost Ark? The Hindenburg? Walt Disney's Frozen Courts.

Like, why do the Ministry of Defence need a warehouse? I don't know. Aliens. Aliens. Yeah, of course. The... In summary, nobody connected the dots. For years, Colin Starr was portrayed as the man who got away with murder

through a legal loophole. And it ruined his life. If it weren't for the advancements in forensic technology and the cold case review into and the fact that thank fuck they kept those samples, he may have stayed that way. And Colin has amazingly never blamed the police, not publicly anyway. He says that he knows that they were just doing their job. Colin, I think you're being very, very gracious there.

I know. Because they weren't doing their job. I really like him. I think he calms down a lot as he gets older. But I do think he probably was a bit of a misfit and a bit of a hellraiser. But like, you know, he's middle age now and he's so just like, ah, you know. Yeah. And just being like a weird guy in your 30s is a far cry from being somebody who's going to stab a woman to death and rape her in front of their two-year-old child.

He has, however, blamed Paul Britton because Colin thought that he was responsible for the undercover operation. So the whole honey trap situation. Until that is, the two of them made a documentary together in the 2000s, where Colin decided that poor Britain was actually quite a nice man. Paul Britain, on the other hand, has never blamed himself for Colin's plight. He denies that he had anything to do with the Lizzie James letters. And Ashley says that had the police listened to him when he consulted on the green chain rapes, neither Samantha Bissette nor Rachel Neckle would have died. Okay.

I don't want to turn this into a poor Britain bashing. No. But I don't know how to not. He basically says all I was doing was my job and they didn't listen to me anyway. And I didn't write the letters. I only saw them after they had been sent. That's probably true. I do think he has been villainised because it's easier than the Met being like, we're bad at our job.

Yeah, I think the problem with this case is that it's Paul Britain doing his isolated part. Yeah, yeah. And then they're just seemingly being no checks and balances in place for people being like, okay, we have this piece of evidence, we have these eyewitnesses, we have this testimony, we have X, Y, Z. Yeah. What is the corroborating evidence that points to it being this man that we are going to go full force behind? And this bat-shick crazy fucking undercover operation, if you can even call it that, it's a stitch up. That's what it is, pure and simple.

And the blame, in my opinion, falls firmly at the feet of Keith Peder. He did not have to use Paul Britton's profile and use that as the only piece of information he had to go after this man, that they had nothing else against. So Paul Britton, he's doing what he's doing. Should he have been able to connect the dots between these three different cases? You would say, yes, but also everybody makes mistakes. The blame here in my opinion is Keith because he should have known better and he should have done better. And Paul Britton claims to have told the Met that the Green Chain rapist would be local, on their records, noticed by neighbours and would have been mentioned at police briefings. And he claims that they ignored him.

But again, like these points that Paul Britain is making are pretty general. Yeah. I haven't read his book, hands up, but the sort of snippets that I have read, he seems to use that. as a, there's like a bit in his book who's like, you know, I often wonder whether I should have gone back and knocked down their door and being like, no, you really need to look at this. And he's right. Robert Napa is all of those things. But you also didn't realize that it was the same guy, you know, like I think he uses it as a bit of a smokescreen. But like, yeah, I'm not a forensic psychologist. Maybe I'm missing the big picture. But like, it seems to me a little bit like a, well, like I got that right. Like so, do you know what I mean? Yeah. I think the more grievous thing is the fact. that this woman rings them and tells them that she thinks her son is a rapist and that the police don't look into him and when they ask him to come in and give a DNA sample

and he doesn't, they don't pursue that. Like they should know that for a mother to make that kind of call they should have taken it a bit more seriously. But who cares what we think? We are morons. Luckily for Britain, he was exonerated in 2002 after an eight-year inquiry by the British Psychological Society, so at least someone somewhere is taking something seriously. Britain still advises the police and maintains to this day

that Peder and his team were not mavericks disobeying direct orders. Operation Edsel was not a secret. The whole letter writing operation was approved at the highest possible level. And I don't necessarily think that's not true. No, I think that's true. I think it's very easy to scapegoat either of them, but the fact is that the Met knew what was happening. This is the thing.

I think this comes back to being an institutional problem where the Met are just like, look, we're under a lot of pressure to solve this case. close this case at any cost. That is like the fucking narrative of this story. Which we've seen many a time before and it would not be a London Met case without an appearance from our ultimate fave, Cressida Dick. Cressida crawled out of the woodwork to make an apology

to Alex and Andre Hanscombe in 2009. She apologised for the Met not investigating Napa properly after his mum reported him for literally raping someone and then for what was termed as a catalogue of bad decisions. Cressida also made sure to stress that the police are quite different today she says that lot or she did say when she was Chief Commission

Are they? I don't know Dino And this is fun No one was ever reprimanded in the police Over Operation Edsel Because by the time the commission rolled around Most of the major players in operation

Were either retired or dead Which is quite convenient Eventually Colin Stagg Was awarded over £700,000 pounds in compensation, a record at the time, but a small price for what he'd lost. Lizzie James also got £100,000 in compensation for some reason. I've been thinking about this. I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. I think it's because, not that she was put in danger, but that she was ordered by senior people to do something that was completely illegal, I think.

And also, it probably ruined her career. like and that's why she's got a fake name and like I don't know I don't know but she I'm not sure I mean yeah all we can do is theorize on that because I personally don't really have that much sympathy for her because she's not a rookie that they pull out of like the police academy and they're like hey you you look like Clarice you yeah yeah you look like Rachel Nekel yeah because they do they pick her because she she looks like Rachel Nicole and they're like that's obviously his type you're going to go and seduce him etc etc etc It's not like they sort of force her into doing this. She was an experienced undercover police officer who should have known. And yes, I'm not saying it's easy to stand up to your boss or to more senior people than you, especially in an organisation like the Met. But the compensation strikes me as odd. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's something we don't know.

So Robert Napper is still in Broadmoor and it is thought that he is guilty of at least 106 rapes, exposures and sexual offences. Though he's never admitted anything, his mom has burned every person. picture of him that she had. Totally disowned. She's just like, I'm not fucking having any of this. And I do want to stress that I'm not trying to perpetuate this image of paranoid schizophrenic people of being super dangerous, terrifying people jumping out of the bushes. Robert Napa is that, but it's incredibly rare, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly rare. And also it's like, we don't know what treatment he was undergoing for this paranoid schizophrenia, if any. And I think I was listening to like quite an interesting podcast that was talking about, you know, all of the challenges

people have like talking about mental health and like whether, you know, know, obviously we know that when people are treated for conditions like paranoid, schizophrenia, etc., they're not any more of a danger to society than anybody else would be. The problem is like, it's at what stage they're in, right? And if it's untreated, undiagnosed, and this man is also experiencing violent sexual fantasies, of course he's more of a danger. And like we said, after his mom finds out that he might have raped somebody in 1989, she just sends him to a psychiatrist, he's like, the psychiatrist thinks I'm mad.

and that's kind of the only thing we know about any sort of psychiatric treatment that he's receiving. Either one, I'm very glad that he is in Broadmoor. Can he be rehabilitated? I don't think sexual sadists can be. I hope that he stays in there forever because 106 rapes, exposures and sexual expenses.

He's a scary man. So yes, let's move away from him and let's talk about little Alex Hanscombe because he is little no longer. He's our age. And he and his dad actually moved abroad shortly after Rachel's death. I don't blame them at all.

this was a case that was absolutely enormous in the UK and who wants to spend their entire life seeing their mum's face on the front page of every newspaper talking about how she was murdered. So it was clear to Andre that Alex would never be able to lead a normal life if he stayed in the UK. Alex has given a few interviews as an adult in which he claims that he remembers everything

that happened that awful day. But he doesn't want to be labelled as a victim and he doesn't believe in trauma. And he's never let what happened to him and his mum ruin or rule his life. There are a lot of interviews of Alex on YouTube talking about it and would recommend going and watching them. Very composed, clearly a very intelligent guy.

And I completely understand why they moved abroad. Oh, yeah. And again, I think Alex is the perfect example, right, of what we talk about on this show all the time. Like different people going through different levels of trauma, their makeup of themselves and how that can impact you. What happened to him? And I don't mean this in a crass way.

It's like Dexter level shit, right? anybody else that that had happened to, somebody with a different psychological profile, would have gone on to... 100%. ...become somebody incredibly violent and dangerous. And there is no inkling of that whatsoever with Alex. He's an incredibly, as you said, composed, articulate, kind, warm man. And I'm glad that that's Rachel's legacy.

Me too. So sorry if that ruined your day. Yeah, that's fucking miserable. Really, really miserable. But do nice stuff. Don't be afraid of walking in parks. Don't be afraid of walking in the parks. Like, these horrible people are out there,

but you can't be a victim. Or see yourself as prey. And if you don't know what a womble is, dear God, look it up. And we'll see you next time for something else. We will. Bye.