Original subtitles

- MALE NARRATOR: 15th of July, 1992.

London, England.

On a summer morning, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell

was walking her dog, Molly, across Wimbledon Common

with her 2-year-old son, Alex.

- What started off as such a normal day

had become an incredible human tragedy.

- NARRATOR: A man appeared from the undergrowth,

stabbing Rachel nearly 50 times, then sexually assaulting her.

- GEOFFREY: It's an act of most unspeakable violence.

He's doing it to desecrate her body,

and he's doing it in front of her son.

It takes the breath away.

- NARRATOR: Rachel's young son, Alex, was left alone,

clinging to his mother's blood-soaked body.

- The level of violence he used is absolutely horrific,

and it's something that really did shock the nation

to the core.

- NARRATOR: The depraved killer

was 26-year-old Robert Napper.

Sixteen months later, he would strike again,

killing a four-year-old child, Jazmine Bissett,

and her twenty-seven-year-old mother, Samantha,

who was brutally dismembered.

- NAME: Leaving a woman posed in a way

that robbed her of dignity, that is...

beyond simply wanting to be rid of somebody.

That is truly evil.

- NARRATOR: Robert Napper was a rapist

who sadistically attacked mothers

in front of their children.

He brutally killed two women,

then desecrated their bodies,

making Robert Napper one of the world's most evil killers.

- ♪

♪♪

- NARRATOR: When Rachel Nickell's murder

hit the news, the public were appalled.

Her toddler, Alex, was found alone by a passerby,

pleading with his dead mother to, "Get up, Mommy."

- GEOFFREY: This was a killing of a young woman

in front of her infant son, broad daylight,

a sunny day in July, on Wimbledon Common,

not far from the tennis, I mean, this is...

desecration of everything that people in Britain hold dear.

It literally hypnotized the nation.

- DR. YARDLEY: This was a murder that really did shock

because it's that stranger violence that when it happens,

it makes us all question our own daily activities,

it makes us think about our own level of risk,

and while somebody is out there who was preying on strangers,

everybody has something to fear.

- NARRATOR: In the desperate hunt to find Rachel's murderer,

police became fixated on an innocent man

called Colin Stagg.

Meanwhile, the real killer, Robert Napper,

slipped under their radar.

Just over a year later, he brutally killed

and sexually assaulted Samantha Bissett

and her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine.

Forensic psychologist Laurence Alison

was part of Colin Stagg's defense counsel.

- LAURENCE: A real human tragedy in the sense that

whilst all the attention was being allocated to Stagg,

right on the very doorstep of this was another

very similar offense.

The horrific, mutilation attack of a young woman.

- ALAN: The scene was something

out of Dante's "Inferno."

Her body was cut completely open,

the--the ribcage had been taken out

and the legs had been severed at the knees.

The internal organs had been pulled about

and repeatedly stabbed, it was beyond belief.

- NARRATOR: Fingerprints left at the scene

identified Robert Napper as the depraved killer,

but it wasn't until a cold case review

of Rachel Nickell's murder that DNA evidence

finally led to Napper's conviction in 2008

for one of Britain's most notorious crimes.

- GEOFFREY: There is something about Napper

that, still to this day, sends a shiver down my spine.

In that sense, he is a Satanic figure.

- NARRATOR: This killer's story began

on the 25th of February, 1966.

Robert Clive Napper

was born in Erith, Southeast London,

and grew up on the nearby Abbey Wood estate.

He was the eldest of four, with two brothers and a sister.

- ALAN: His parents had a violent relationship.

His mother was terrified of the father,

and this so upset the children that they were all subjected

to some counseling through some children psychiatrists.

The other children seemed to have gotten over it quite well,

but, uh, Robert Napper continued to display

behavior which was unusual for a child of his age.

- GEOFFREY: At one point, he turned to his father

and said, "They think I'm mad."

His father thought it was a joke,

but the awful truth, the reality,

is that Napper probably realized,

even at a very young age,

that he had the capacity for something quite extraordinary.

- NARRATOR: At the age of 12, his parents divorced,

and his father left the home.

Young Napper found it difficult making friends

and preferred to spend time on his own.

Eventually, he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.

- Asperger's syndrome, you know, is a social disorder,

very difficult to make connections with people.

He was very isolated at school, a very remote figure,

and that seemed to carry forward all the way

through his life.

- NARRATOR: As Napper entered adolescence,

his isolation continued.

The young loner was mercilessly bullied

at secondary school.

- He was despised at school,

there's no question about that.

People wouldn't play with him, they wouldn't sit with him,

he was... the archetypal outsider.

- LOUIS: Napper was teased and bullied a lot in school,

which is always devastating for people.

These types of things that go on in early childhood

are very impactful

for how somebody develops later on in life.

- DR. YARDLEY: He spent quite a lot of time in and out

of foster care,

and what tends to happen when children come

from those kind of backgrounds is they develop

this very defensive attitude and outlook.

"Nobody is going to be there to look out for me,

"so I have to retaliate first,

I have to always be on the attack."

- NARRATOR: Young Napper's anger at the world

escalated following a trauma he suffered

at the age of 12.

He was sexually assaulted by a family friend

on a camping holiday.

- Now, that may have given him a distorted view of sexuality.

It may have triggered some kind of reaction in him

that identified all sex as somehow abusive.

It's possible he had a completely distorted

vision of women.

- NARRATOR: As Napper progressed through his teenage years,

the angry victim of abuse emerged as the abuser.

- LAURENCE: There were early indications of violence

towards his siblings,

I believe he discharged a air gun in the face

of one of his siblings.

- GEOFFREY: It's pretty clear that he was a bully.

He bullied his brothers and he spied on his sister.

He was a voyeur.

He started peeping at his own sister,

and emerged from that.

And that aspect of voyeurism,

plus a very uncomfortable adolescence,

led to Napper becoming effectively a time bomb.

- NARRATOR: The troubled Napper left school at 16

and took a job at a local warehouse.

Soon, he was stalking the streets of Southeast London,

spying on women he saw at home alone.

- This was a man who, as he emerged into adulthood,

was literally a volcano.

- NARRATOR: One day, his peeping Tom behavior

focused on a house next to Wimbs Common,

and turned into something more sinister.

- GEOFFREY: In August 1989, a woman was upstairs

drying her hair,

and her two children were downstairs,

and Napper broke into the house through the rear door,

which they'd left open.

- He walked past two children who were having breakfast

at the table, went upstairs,

raped his victim, and then said to her,

"You should keep your door locked,"

walked back downstairs, past the children,

out and back over onto the Common.

- LOUIS: He blamed the victim:

"You never should've left the door open."

Do you know how many times I've heard that

from offenders over the years?

They blame the victim, and it's a way to rationalize:

"Well, they're not fully responsible."

You hear it time and time again.

- NARRATOR: But Napper couldn't keep his dark secret.

A few months later, he confessed to his mother.

- ALAN: His mother was so concerned,

she reported it to Plumstead police station,

she was told at the time

that a rape hadn't happened on Plumstead Common.

- NARRATOR: The police could find no trace of the rape

in their records, so Napper's confession

was never followed up.

But his mother was so concerned about her son's mental state,

that she sent him back to a psychiatrist.

- ALAN: She certainly was worried enough

to refer him again to the Maudsley Hospital

for further treatment, which he did go back to,

but discharged himself after a short period

of analysis and counseling.

- NARRATOR: As Napper's mental health deteriorated,

his mother cut off contact.

He continued his stalking behavior,

and marked his hunting grounds on an A-Z.

His favorite was the Green Chain network

of foot paths that winds its way through park ground

across southeast London.

- GEOFFREY: This is a sexual predator on the loose.

In the first months of 1992, he commits a series of attacks.

Attacking women chillingly, almost caressing his victims

with a knife blade.

He's a man out of control

and absolutely consumed by sexual lust.

Not for a relationship, but simply for the power.

- NARRATOR: By March, he'd made two attempted rapes.

- He really didn't penetrate the victims sexually,

because he was impotent at the crime scene

in almost all of the cases.

What does that mean?

The violence takes the place of it.

- DR. YARDLEY: He was becoming, I think,

increasingly frustrated, with feelings of rage

and that violence was bubbling beneath the surface.

- NARRATOR: His attacks became progressively more violent.

He changed his target,

aiming for a different type of victim.

- GEOFFREY: His fantasies rotated around young mothers

with young children.

And in May 1992,

he ties a ligature around a 22-year-old

as she pushes her baby daughter in a buggy.

He pulls her into the undergrowth,

strips her, rapes her, beats her.

She begs for her life, and he runs off.

- ALAN: He viciously assaulted her.

When she arrived at a relative's house,

she wasn't recognized initially, she was so badly injured.

- LOUIS: The child was absolutely terrorized,

and that was just another level of sadistic gratification

for Napper.

- NARRATOR: But soon, sexual assaults and beatings

wouldn't be enough to satisfy the depraved urges

of the mentally unstable Robert Napper.

Soon, he'd feel the need to carry out

the ultimate of his sadistic fantasies: murder.

By now, police have linked these sexual attacks

and, in June, established Operation Eccleston

to investigate the so-called Green Chain Rapist.

But Robert Napper remained at large,

and on the morning of the 15th of July, 1992,

he set his sights on another young mother

walking with her child on Wimbledon Common:

23-year-old ex-model Rachel Nickell.

The events that followed would make an indelible mark

on the nation.

- LAURENCE: Such as any normal day in July,

it was a nice sunny day, Rachel's walking with her son

and their dog across the Common for what should've been

the most normal walk in the world.

- DR. YARDLEY: This is a place where she went often,

it was where she felt safe, she felt secure,

and it's quite likely that Napper had been stalking Rachel

for--for some time.

- GEOFFREY: Napper was lurking in the undergrowth nearby.

He was clearly looking for a victim,

but this time it wasn't so much the sexual urge,

it was the fantasy of killing a woman

that had come into its fullest.

- NARRATOR: Napper waited until Rachel and her young son Alex

came close, and then attacked.

- LAURENCE: He prodded her in the back with a knife

to move her to a sort of cops-- slightly more secluded area,

forced her to kneel down and attacked her.

He slit her throat and then stabbed her nearly 50 times

in front of her son.

A really horrific, disturbing offense.

- ALAN: She was stabbed in the abdomen many times

after she had obviously been killed;

she was sexually assaulted,

and then left in the company of her child

whilst he made good his escape.

- NARRATOR: A witness saw Napper washing Rachel's blood

off his hands in a nearby stream.

- GEOFFREY: It was an act of such callousness

and such bravura, he didn't run,

he walked calmly away from this obscenity

that he committed.

Without, apparently, a moment's hesitation

or looking back.

He just calmly walked away.

- NARRATOR: Two-year-old Alex was left alone

holding his mother's dead body

until an elderly walker found him

amidst the horrific scene.

- DR. YARDLEY: Absolutely heartbreaking stuff.

He's thinking that she's asleep or she's unconscious

and she's basically lying there

and he's saying, "Wake up, Mommy,"

you know, this is--this is really horrific.

He wouldn't really know how to make sense of this.

- NARRATOR: Soon, the news spread of Rachel's death.

Stories about the abhorrent crime

continually hit the headlines in the weeks that followed.

- GEOFFREY: It absolutely captured the public imagination.

Unprovoked attack on a young woman and her child...

in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common.

And the stories of the boy saying, "Wake up, Mommy,"

or "Get up, Mommy,"

I mean, tugs the heartstrings of the nation.

It occupied everyone's mind.

- WILLIAM: I think there was a huge amount of pressure

on the police to solve the crime,

and the difficulty was that the killer had actually

left no forensic clue that was capable of being detected

at the scene at all.

And the police really had absolutely nothing to go on.

- NARRATOR: Pressure to solve the case was mounting.

In an effort to determine the type of individual

most likely to be Rachel's killer,

the metropolitan police brought in a psychological profiler.

- LAURENCE: Between the police and the profiler,

they constructed a profile of the offender:

a guy in his late 20s, early 30s,

an individual that didn't have very successful relationships

with women, that may well live on his own

and was interested in strange things,

such as Satanism and so on.

- NARRATOR: An E-FIT photograph was constructed

based on the suspect seen washing his hands,

and this was sent out across the national media.

Thirty-year-old local man Colin Stagg

was named in several phone calls to the police.

- LAURENCE: Colin lived within about two miles

of the offense, he was also picked out

in an identity parade and subsequently was interviewed

by the police, police visited his flat,

they felt that the flat was odd,

partly because Colin Stagg

had one of the rooms painted black,

and on some of the walls there was some seemingly strange

chalk drawings which we now know were part

of the Wiccan religion,

but were interpreted in more sinister ways

by the police at the time.

- ALAN: They had no real evidence apart from

identification evidence of one witness

who put him on the Common at the time.

So they made a decision to try and draw that evidence

from him by introducing an undercover police officer

to get him to confess to the murder.

It was all sanctioned at the very highest level

at New Scotland Yard.

- NARRATOR: Under Operation Ezdell,

a young, blonde female detective was sent undercover

using the pseudonym of Lizzie James.

In a so-called "honeytrap" operation,

she approached Colin Stagg through a dating section

in the local newspaper.

- LAURENCE: Very risky, very unusual operation,

and the idea essentially was to befriend Stagg, uh,

through a series of letters through a Lonely Hearts column,

and the intention of the undercover operation

was to establish whether Stagg would know something

about the offense that only the offender would know.

And secondly, would he in his dealings with Lizzie James

show any of the sexual fantasies or behaviors

that the profiler had predicted that this sort of offender

would be interested in.

- NARRATOR: The police now seem fixated on proving

Colin Stagg's guilt, using the relatively new trend

in criminal investigation: psychological profiling.

- In any case where profiling becomes prominent

in investigation, you're headed for disaster.

Profiling behavior can be useful but only as an add-on,

it's just a way to give the police another way

to look at things.

Profiling should never, ever take the place

of time-tested investigative techniques.

- NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Rachel's real killer,

Robert Napper, was still on the loose.

- LAURENCE: So obviously part of the problem

with the fixation on Colin Stagg at the time was that Napper

must have been thinking, "Wow, this is fantastic,"

you know, "All the heat's off me, no one's looking at me,"

so I suspect that this emboldened Napper to go on.

- NARRATOR: At the end of August 1992,

Napper did, however, come onto the police radar,

but this was under Operation Eccleston--

the team investigating his earlier rapes

along the Green Chain Walk.

After publicizing an E-FIT of the suspected rapist,

Napper's name had been put forward by two of his neighbors.

- GEOFFREY: Napper is invited to the police station

and asked to give a blood sample.

He doesn't turn up.

He's invited again, he doesn't turn up again.

There are countless occasions in which Napper is identified

as a possible suspect, he slips through the net.

- NARRATOR: Eventually, in late October,

the police wrongly concluded that Napper wasn't their man.

- ALAN: The description given by all of the victims,

except one, was that the attacker

was approximately 5'10" tall, so police's decision was made

that anyone below 5'6" and over 6' would be eliminated

from the inquiry; he was described as being

over 6'1", so on that and that alone,

he was eliminated from the inquiry.

- NARRATOR: Now Robert Napper had escaped

the police's watchful eye,

he was free to roam the streets unhindered once again.

Using his trusty A-Z Map, he continued to stalk

southeast London, marking places he'd spotted

more potential victims.

- LAURENCE: So it's very common to engage in what we call

behavioral tryouts.

So if thinking of attacking a particular victim,

they won't suddenly go out one day and make that attack.

They will stalk, track, uh... observe,

and all the indications are with Napper

that he was doing that, he would go for walks,

he would select victims,

peeping Tom behavior by looking through windows,

selecting victims, targeting specific houses.

It was all very significant in Napper's criminal repertoire.

- NARRATOR: In July 1993, Napper's name

came onto the police radar once again,

when he was reported prowling and spying

on a house near Plumstead Common.

The police officer who investigated

reported him as a potential rapist.

Once again, no further action was taken.

Now Napper was stalking homes

around one of his favorite haunts--Wimbs Common.

He was looking for his next victim.

- GEOFFREY: Napper is hiding in the bushes again,

and sees a 27-year-old woman called Samantha Bissett,

who has a daughter, Jazmine.

Well, one version of it is that he sees Samantha

making love with her boyfriend through the window,

and is so aroused by this.

- LAURENCE: One night, Samantha Bissett

said to her then-partner,

"I've seen someone at our window,

looking in at the window."

We now know that that was Robert Napper,

so again, the modus operandi was exactly the same.

Peeking on a victim, stalking the victim,

ruminating through what he was gonna do

to that victim.

- NARRATOR: On the evening of the 3rd of November,

Napper saw that Samantha was alone in her flat.

Her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine,

was asleep in her bedroom.

Napper climbed onto the balcony and broke in through the window.

He startled Samantha in her hallway.

- GEOFFREY: He attacks Samantha with a knife.

He stabs her eight times, one blow so severe

that it...snaps her spinal cord.

It is...yet further example

of Napper's grotesque depravity.

But it doesn't even end there.

- NARRATOR: The killer turned his mind

to Samantha's sleeping daughter.

- GEOFFREY: He proceeds to sexually assault

the four-year-old daughter, Jazmine, and suffocates her

in her bedroom with her duvet,

and leaves her body on the bed,

surrounded by her toys.

- DR. YARDLEY: If we look at the method that Napper used

to kill Jazmine, after he'd sexually assaulted her,

he suffocated her.

So he's using a different method than the method he used

on her mother, and I think this is potentially a case of him

mixing up his offending, because offenders get bored,

they liked to vary it,

they like to keep things interesting.

- NARRATOR: But Napper's grotesque fantasies

were not complete.

He then dragged mother Samantha's body into the lounge.

- GEOFFREY: Napper eviscerates Samantha's body.

He cuts her from the chest to the crotch,

peels back her skin, cracks the ribs,

literally eviscerates this innocent young woman's body

in a horrifying, horrible attack.

- NARRATOR: After pulling away her ribs,

Napper repeatedly stabbed Samantha's internal organs.

- DR. HAMILTON: He mutilates her body,

he actually takes a part of the skin

from her abdominal wall,

presumably as some sort of trophy;

there are deep cuts in her legs,

almost as if attempting to dismember her.

This is an escalation of his behavior.

Once he has finished with the mutilation,

he poses Samantha in a very sexually provocative pose.

- DR. YARDLEY: He positioned her body on a cushion,

and her body was left in the same position

as it was when she had sex with her boyfriend.

Now, that basically is saying that this woman

is sexually available, he's trying to create

a narrative here,

he's trying to say that she deserved this,

and that really does tell us about his misogyny.

- LOUIS: Posing a victim following a murder

of a sexual nature is very, very common.

They pose the victim because killing alone

is not psychosexually sufficient.

And so they go beyond killing to satisfy themselves,

it's sexually stimulating,

it's a fusion of sex and aggression,

so that the aggressive act itself is eroticized.

- NARRATOR: Robert Napper had now gained the status

of a serial killer.

Treasuring the part of Samantha's abdomen

that he removed for safekeeping, the triple murderer

left the horrific scene.

Samantha's boyfriend made the tragic discovery

the next morning.

- ALAN: He entered the flat and found Samantha's body

in the living room.

At first he thought it was some sort of macabre joke,

because the body was destroyed,

and he thought it was some form of mannequin,

and he ran back to the kitchen and called the police.

- NARRATOR: Former detective Sergeant Alan Jackaman

was one of the first to arrive at Samantha's flat.

- ALAN: In all my years of service,

I've never seen anything so dreadful and so horrific,

from the state that the body was in,

the way that she'd been attacked and dismembered,

this was a crime way, way beyond normality,

way out of the ordinary.

- NARRATOR: One member of the forensic team

investigating at the scene was so traumatized

they had to take two years' sick leave.

The way Samantha's daughter Jazmine had been left

by the killer was also deeply troubling

for investigators.

- ALAN: Jazmine had been attacked in her cot,

her quilt had been put back over,

and she had the appearance of being a child asleep,

which was somehow more disturbing

than seeing what was left of her mother.

- NARRATOR: Napper had seemingly left little

in the way of evidence,

except a partial footprint in blood.

Every single fingerprint that the police found

in Samantha's flat was eliminated,

including those belonging to little Jazmine's friends,

who'd recently visited for her fourth birthday party.

- ALAN: There wasn't a good suspect coming into the frame,

uh, we went six months down the line,

and we all knew that this wasn't a one-off killing,

so we concentrated our minds to try and find out

who was responsible for this.

In addition to that, of course, it had no...oxygen

or publicity from the media,

because it was a single mother whom the press

erroneously believed was on the edges of prostitution,

so it didn't get much past

the second page of "The News Shopper."

- DR. YARDLEY: When we're comparing the media coverage,

Rachel Nickell's murder received an awful lot more attention

than Samantha and Jazmine Bissett.

And they're making judgments about this victim

as to how worthy they are of attention,

and what we've got here is judgments being made about

appropriate femininity, appropriate motherhood,

so Rachel was in a secure long-term relationship

with her partner.

Samantha's daughter-- her father didn't live

with the family, so I think all of those

kind of new right, neoliberal values about

what a family should look like are coming out here

in the media's choice to emphasize on a cold case

over the Bissett case.

- NARRATOR: With few leads to go on,

the team investigating Samantha and Jazmine's murders

was wound down to just five officers.

Desperate for a breakthrough, in May 1994,

the senior investigating officer took a punt,

and asked for the fingerprints found at the scene

to be reexamined.

- ALAN: He insisted that it was done,

and then within a few days, sheepishly,

the fingerprint officer returned to say that

they had made a mistake.

It transpired that three fingerprint sets

within the flat did not come from the victim,

they came from some unknown person.

When they were sent back for analysis,

they came back as Robert Napper--

a man who had not featured in our inquiry at all.

- NARRATOR: At last, the police had Robert Napper

in their sights.

When they delved into his history,

they discovered he had a criminal record.

- ALAN: We found that he had this firearm offense,

and in the property store, was still some of the property

pertaining to that offense, one of the items

was an A-Z book, which, when we looked at it,

had lots of roots, plans, which coincided

with our murder and, more specifically,

with the Green Chain rape offenses.

Also, clearly marked out was the Isabella Plantation,

very close to Wimbledon Common, and that immediately rang bells

with Rachel Nickell.

- NARRATOR: When Detective Sergeant Jackaman found

Napper's mug shot on police file,

they made another startling discovery.

- ALAN: One of the indexers took one look at the photograph--

she had worked on the Green Chain rape inquiry,

and she said, "That is the Green Chain rapist."

So I ran out to the front office,

and took down from the wall the poster

asking for information on the Green Chain rapist,

which had a Photo-Fit on it, and we compared photographs,

and they were very, very similar.

- NARRATOR: Having possibly connected Napper

to further crimes, as well as the Bissett murders,

Detective Jackaman and his colleagues

put the suspected killer under surveillance.

- ALAN: The surveillance team had followed him

and he was carrying out some really strange behavior,

going on long walks on his own,

looking at camping equipment, firearm magazines,

buying, uh, pornographic magazines.

So it was felt, as it was a bank holiday weekend,

we couldn't take the risk that he might go out

and kill somebody.

- NARRATOR: The net was now closing in on triple murderer

Robert Napper.

On the 21st of May,

detectives went to his Plumstead flat

to make an arrest.

- He went to work, like clockwork,

every morning at 7 a.m.

We stood outside well before 7 a.m., he didn't appear.

So we started to get worried then

that perhaps he wasn't in there.

- NARRATOR: It turned out that Napper had been fired

from his job the previous day and was still in bed.

He was startled when the police knocked at his door.

- ALAN: He was totally shocked,

and he was immediately handcuffed,

told why he was under arrest,

and a search was subsequently made and another A-Z found,

knives and lots of incriminating evidence.

- NARRATOR: Police have now found a second A-Z

belonging to Napper that showed markings

next to Samantha Bissett's home.

In his flat, detectives also discovered a receipt

for a pair of size nine Adidas trainers.

A bloodied footprint from exactly the same shoe

had been found at the murder scene.

- ALAN: We were able to take his DNA.

The DNA, no surprise to us,

matched that of the Green Chain rapist.

So he was then in the frame for two rapes

and two attempted rapes, plus now our two murders.

- NARRATOR: In July, Napper was charged

and held on remand in prison,

but there still wasn't a link with the first murder

of 23-year-old Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common

2 years earlier.

However, Detective Jackaman was convinced

he was Rachel's killer.

- ALAN: We went to the Wimbledon inquiry

and put Napper up as, uh, a suspect

for the Rachel Nickell murder,

by which time they had in their frame,

their suspect, Colin Stagg.

Despite our bringing this new suspect into the frame,

he was never ever considered.

- NARRATOR: This innocent man, Colin Stagg,

was being held in custody for Rachel's killing.

Barrister William Clegg was working on his defense

for the forthcoming trial.

- WILLIAM: I always thought he was a very unlikely killer

because of his personality,

but it wasn't 'til I really read the papers,

it became obvious to me that there was not

a shred of evidence against him.

- NARRATOR: The police, however,

believe their honeytrap operation proved

Colin Stagg was Rachel's killer, based on exchanges he'd had

with their undercover female operative, Lizzie James.

Criminal psychologist Laurence Alison examined

this evidence for Colin Stagg's defense team and was concerned

by what he found.

- LAURENCE: He said that in one of the meetings

that he had with Lizzie James he almost dropped his chips

in talking to her because what she was asking him for

was so bizarre and off the wall, and of course,

Stagg starts rising fantasies that go down that line

not because he has them but because he wants

to please a person that's offering him sex.

- ALAN: This was turned gradually into the attack

on Wimbledon Common, and he was encouraged

to admit to having committed the murder,

but he never ever did.

- NARRATOR: When it finally came to a pre-committal hearing

on the 14th of September, the judge threw out the case

against Colin Stagg.

- NAME: Colin tragically spent 13 months in custody

awaiting trial, but it never went to full trial,

and Lord Chief Justice Ognall described it

as deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.

The undercover operation quite rightly was thrown out.

- The judge recognized that there was never any evidence

against me, no forensic evidence,

no confession evidence, nothing at all.

- NARRATOR: Colin Stagg was eventually awarded

over £700,000 in damages by the Metropolitan Police

and given a formal apology.

Five days after his acquittal,

a review of the Rachel Nickell murder investigation

was launched.

- GEOFFREY: Gradually at that point,

the recognition is that perhaps there is a link

between Rachel Nickell's killing and Samantha Bissett's killing.

Gradually the two forces coalesce,

so that it becomes clear that Napper could well

have been responsible for both killings.

- NARRATOR: Napper was interviewed by the review team

about Rachel's killing,

but as the police still had no evidence

linking him to the scene, this led to a dead end.

Nearly a year later, though, in October 1995,

Robert Napper's trial date was set for the murders

of Samantha and Jazmine Bissett and for one count of rape

and two counts of attempted rape

for his Green Chain Walk attacks.

Barrister William Clegg was defending him.

- WILLIAM: I'd met Robert Napper at Broadmoor Mental Hospital

where he was on remand awaiting his trial.

It was soon fairly obvious to me that he was, um, suffering

from serious delusions.

He firmly believed members of the royal family

were visiting him in Broadmoor.

He was an extremely ill man.

- NARRATOR: Despite being diagnosed

as a paranoid schizophrenic,

an assessment by four different psychiatrists concluded

Napper was fit to stand.

The trial for the murders of Samantha and Jazmine Bissett

began at the Old Bailey on the 9th of October.

- ALAN: We were on the edges of our seats as we sat

outside number one court, waiting for the trial to begin,

when all of a sudden, the commotion

and everybody started running out of the court,

and the word goes around that he's pleaded

to manslaughter through diminished responsibility.

There's a mixed feeling because manslaughter

is not a conviction of murder.

However, under the circumstances,

it was obvious that he was mentally very, very ill,

and it was an admission of sorts and a conviction.

- I think what can tend to happen is that

the assumption can be made that the offender isn't responsible

for what they've done,

but he actually was in this case,

he knew exactly what he was doing,

he knew what he was doing was wrong,

and he chose to do it anyway.

- NARRATOR: Napper was sentenced to life

in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Barkshire.

- WILLIAM: I think the sentence was inevitable,

the best place for him was a special hospital,

and it was important for everybody

that he remained there.

- NARRATOR: But D.S. Jackaman wasn't finished

with Robert Napper.

He was still convinced Napper was also responsible

for the killing of Rachel Nickell

on Wimbledon Common in July 1992.

- ALAN: That became all-consuming.

We became more and more convinced over the years

that he was responsible for the Rachel Nickell killing.

- NARRATOR: D.S. Jackaman had relayed his suspicions

about Napper to Rachel Nickell's original murder inquiry team,

but they already had a suspect awaiting trial,

and the evidence he presented wasn't given

the recognition it deserved.

Now, under a new review team, D.S. Jackaman made it

his business to tell the senior investigating officer

about Robert Napper.

- ALAN: I went into my office, wrote out a report

giving all the details as to why I believed that Robert Napper

was guilty of killing Rachel Nickell,

gave it back to him, and he took it

and put him on the list.

- NARRATOR: A new forensics team was appointed

and, in July 2004, advances in DNA techniques

led to a breakthrough.

Samples taken from Rachel's body revealed

a mixed DNA profile of her killer.

Soon, this was identified as belonging

to serial murderer Robert Napper.

Other evidence was also re-examined,

linking him to the scene.

- ALAN: In Rachel's child's hair were found some flakes

of red paint.

Nobody quite knows how this happened,

but they were found to match

a tool box recovered from Robert Napper's flat

on his arrest.

- NARRATOR: An old pair of shoes

that Napper still had with him in Broadmoor

were also seized.

- ALAN: They were examined against shoe prints

found against the man seen washing his hands

near the scene of Rachel Nickell's murder,

and those shoes matched the shoe prints

next to the stream.

- Gradually, the case is built against Napper.

But it's not until 2006 that he's interviewed again

about the possibility of his killing Rachel Nickell.

- NARRATOR: It took another two years,

until the 18th of December, 2008,

for Rachel's family to finally see justice.

Sixteen years after her death, Forty-two-year-old Robert Napper

returned to the Old Bailey, charged with her murder.

- ALAN: He sat there and he didn't look much different,

and it was in a dream that the charges were read

and he pleaded guilty to Rachel's manslaughter.

- NARRATOR: Once again Napper pleaded guilty

to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The judge sentenced him to remain in Broadmoor Hospital

indefinitely.

For Detective Sergeant Jackaman,

it was the moment he'd waited years to witness.

- ALAN: Just before he went down the steps, he turned,

looked directly at me and recognized me,

and I just mouthed, "Hello, Bob."

It was a satisfying moment, but it was more than that,

it was--it was relief, it was vindication, really,

after all those years of plugging away.

- NARRATOR: It brought to a close one of the most

upsetting murder cases in British criminal history.

- DR. YARDLEY: Napper is completely devoid

of any conscience, he doesn't care about

the impact of his actions on others,

and that makes him a very dangerous man indeed.

- LOUIS: His mental state, whether he's schizophrenic,

really had nothing to do with the crimes,

the important point is that he's off the street

and can't hurt anybody again.

- GEOFFREY: The man knows no humanity,

the man has utter disregard for human life.

He took inordinate pleasure

from the suffering of his victims.

- NARRATOR: Napper raped and sexually assaulted women

as they walked across London's park lands and commons.

He honed in on vulnerable mothers

and took sadistic pleasure from attacking them

in front of their children.

He brutally slayed two women

in the prime of their life,

then sexually assaulted and killed a four-year-old child,

that makes Robert Napper

one of the world's most evil killers.

- ♪

♪♪

- [whooshing]