Original subtitles

It's 10:30 in the morning, a sunny day.

Wimbledon Common is busy with dog walkers,

lots of men, women, and children.

Hundreds of people use Wimbledon Common every day.

Women went there jogging and walking.

It was thought to be entirely safe.

Emergency, which service do you require?

A man out walking with his dog

sees the naked body of a young woman.

She'd been walking her little boy on Wimbledon Common,

and he was found clinging to her body,

crying, "Wake up mummy, wake up mummy."

She was covered in blood.

The only thing that he felt in his little mind

that he could do to help his mother

was to try and staunch her bleeding.

He was only two years and a few months.

He has placed a till receipt on her forehead

as a make-do bandage.

He's clearly distraught.

He's asking for his mummy to get up,

but unfortunately that can't be the case because she's dead.

The Rachel Nickell case just hit the headlines.

I don't think I'll ever forget the image of her

that was circulated at the time.

Beautiful young woman with all her future ahead of her.

For somebody to have the gall to do something like that

in broad daylight and in front of a child is shocking.

Many people must be asking, is anyone safe

when murders can take place in broad daylight?

The crime was so horrendous

it began to herald in a whole new era of fear.

Police sought to dispel fears

about sex attacks on women in open spaces

like Wimbledon Common.

He needs to be stopped before women felt safe again.

I can honestly tell you that this is the most horrendous

and vicious attack that I've ever seen.

The inquiry that was launched was one of the biggest

since the Yorkshire Ripper.

Millions of pounds were spent trying to capture this man.

No stone was left unturned.

Despite this, no one was convicted

for the murder of Rachel Nickell for another 16 years.

Most people remember the murder

of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common.

However, what a lot of people don't realize,

the perpetrator could have been caught earlier.

This killer could have been apprehended

if only there hadn't been a catalogue

of tragic missed opportunities

Could there have been serious offenses stopped

for want of a better word?

And I think the answer to that is yes.

To understand how it was that Rachel Nickell's killer

was free to commit a whole chain of atrocities,

we need to go back to 1989.

Still into the mid-20s today

across the region with some light winds

going into the afternoon.

There's a chance of a few light showers later this evening

moving through the region,

but with high temperatures remaining.

There was a young mother at home with her children.

The children were having breakfast.

It's going to be quite a muggy night

with humid temperatures down to around 14 degrees in the region.

When a man entered via the rear door.

He was armed with a back-handled Stanley knife.

He threatened the mother saying that if she didn't comply,

she would endanger the children.

The mother's natural instinct would of course be to

protect her children beyond anything else.

He made her kneel on the bed,

pull her T-shirt over her head,

and then he raped her.

He then left saying that,

"You should really make sure you lock your back door."

It's almost like he's saying she's responsible.

The woman immediately contacted the police,

and she was very brave to allow herself to be examined.

To come forward as a woman and be examined

and tell your story and go through it all again is difficult.

It's very, very difficult.

The forensic officers were able to recover DNA,

but we had nothing to compare it against.

DNA profiling back then isn't like it is now.

There wouldn't have been a DNA database like there is today.

They weren't even on computer,

so it's completely different now.

It's so much easier and so much quicker

to match somebody if they're on the system

and they've been previously arrested.

In 1989, it required police to catch the individual

and do a match to that individual.

That incident happened in South East London,

near Winn's Common.

That bit of parkland is dissected by a road,

and then you have Plumstead Common

on the other side of that road.

The commons of Plumstead and Winn's Common

form part of what they call the Green Chain Walk.

Over the next two or three years,

there were a number of very nasty attacks on women

on the Green Chain, which was a series of parks

and open spaces linked by footpaths,

popular with dog walkers and joggers

and people out for a stroll.

It's places people can go for a nice country walk

where you're not in a built up area.

And it's a nice relaxing place to go and walk.

And of course, it's an ideal hunting ground

if you're a potential rapist.

At the time, I was living around South East London.

I was late teens, early 20s.

My dad was telling me, "You don't go near

the Green Chain Walks without somebody being with you,"

because of what was going on.

Makes you feel very, very uneasy.

Everybody needs to look after each other,

so you need to keep an eye on other people.

And if the worst things happen,

you need to try and attract attention to yourself.

Shout and scream, kick your shoes off and run away.

Back then, you didn't have mobile phones.

The only thing you could rely on is if you had a panic alarm

or what we used to call back then,

we used to call them rape alarms.

And if it's dark, I'd have your keys between your fingers

or you make sure you've got something with you for safety.

Back in 1989, we were really something in the dark ages

in terms of what the police could do.

There was hardly any CCTV, so the man responsible

was able, unfortunately, to carry on and attack other women.

We didn't think it was just one man who was responsible

for all of those attacks.

But in March 1982, that changed.

In 1992, in South London near Lewisham,

a teenager, a 17-year-old was getting off a bus.

It was evening

and she notices a man following her.

We are so aware, as women, who's behind us.

If there's a guy walking a bit too close behind you,

it's very unnerving.

He was following her and then he disappeared,

and then he reappeared in front of her

and he produced a knife.

He made her undress and tried to rape her,

and then he punched her in the face very hard.

The young lady obviously feared for her life.

She eventually runs to a friend's house

and does report the attack to police,

and they are able to take DNA evidence.

The DNA taken from the 17-year-old girl

could be compared to the 1989 offense near Plumstead.

It revealed that it was the same individual.

This was a light bulb moment for the police

because they suddenly realized

that the 1989 incident had not been a one-off.

And the 1992 incident was not a one-off.

These were linked offenses,

and there was a probability that with a gap of three years,

there have been other offences where they hadn't been able

to recover forensic evidence.

And so they began to look at other crimes

that had been reported.

They realized then that they had

a serial attacker on their hands.

The individual has now escalated

the level of violence against his victims.

It's an unnecessary physical assault on the young woman,

which would then indicate that he probably enjoys

inflicting pain onto his victims.

And in all likelihood, he will continue to escalate.

It's now obviously extremely important

that this man is arrested as soon as possible.

Operation Eccleston was formed.

A team of officers whose sole job

was to try and track this man down and put him in jail,

where obviously he belonged.

But the police have no one to go on.

The descriptions were poor.

Obviously events were traumatic.

We had a description of a white male,

medium build, height around 5'8.

The advice is to try and remember

as much as you can about somebody.

But if you were being attacked by someone,

your first thing is self-preservation.

To have the height of somebody,

they're not standing up in front of you nicely and straight.

So it's a guess.

The Eccleston team have an artist impression

of the Green Chain Rapist based on the information given

from the actual victims themselves.

That circulation, they would hope, would then lead

to someone known to the culprit coming forward

and making an identification.

Unfortunately, that didn't work.

Let's have a reality check here.

You've got a rape inquiry team.

You're talking about 10, 15 officers of that.

If you've thrown a team of, say, 50 detectives

onto the Green Chain Rapist series,

I'm sure he would've been arrested much, much quicker.

But the harsh reality is that's not how it was.

In a fairly short space of time, another attack happened,

and both these attacks took place, you know,

late in the evening.

But in May 1992, there was a complete departure

from this pattern of crime.

A woman was walking along a footpath in a parkland area.

It's 2:00 PM in the afternoon.

And she has her child with her in a buggy.

Why would she think in broad daylight

that she would be at any risk?

She was aware of a man following her who disappeared

and then suddenly he wrapped some form of ligature

around her neck and pulled her to the ground.

He punches her several times very hard, and he rapes her.

It's very unusual for someone to attack a young mum

out with a pram in broad daylight.

He must know the threat of attack on the child

will ensure compliance.

DNA linked that attack to the Green Chain rape series.

She was able to give a description of a man

around a six-foot mark, which was of course, very different.

The other victims were giving a height range

of a man who was 5'7, 5'8.

And this becomes quite a crucial part of the case

in terms of the police investigation

and the focus on the height of the assailant.

Sometime later, the woman changed the description

to a shorter man.

She gave a height around the 5'7, 5'8,

bearing in mind that she's been badly beaten up.

A member of her family was unable to recognise her.

She was in such a, you know, bad way.

It told the police that they were dealing with

a very dangerous man.

I mean, if he was prepared to do that to a woman

in front of a child, what else was he prepared to do?

And fast forward a few months,

you have the Wimbledon Common slaying of Rachel Nickell.

It was very traumatic, very unusual.

I had certainly no memory of anything like that

happening in the UK.

Murdered in broad daylight,

a woman is stabbed and her son attacked.

The attack happened

in a secluded part of Wimbledon Common in broad daylight.

A man out walking his dog came across

a woman he believed was sunbathing.

It was difficult not to hear about the murder of Rachel Nickell.

It was such a high-profile case.

It was on all of the news channels.

Police are hunting for a man who murdered a young woman

and attacked her 2-year-old son while they were walking

on Wimbledon Common this morning.

She was sexually assaulted and her throat had been cut.

When you have a crime like this,

it does bring everybody up short and everybody thinks,

"Oh, maybe that could have been me there,

but for the grace of God."

You think you're going to be safe in broad daylight

right in the open like that.

The level of publicity does create

an enormous amount of pressure to arrest the culprit.

It is very trying, very, very challenging.

There was a huge police response to this crime.

I think, you know, from Land's End to John o'Groats,

people were saying, "I'm not going out on my own

while this killer is out there."

No stone was going to be left unturned

to try and identify and arrest this individual.

The body of the victim is generally

the main source of evidence.

Adhesive tapings are placed on the body

and hopefully sticky adhesive then will lift skin cells,

semen, saliva, and fibers that

may have been transposed by the culprit.

Rachel's 49 stab wounds were created by a very sharp knife.

And the depth of those wounds would indicate

that the knife was thrust inside the body so hard

that the hilt left marks on the skin.

And so the individual who created those wounds

clearly meant to kill.

It was a frenzied attack by a very disturbed individual.

Rachel's son Alex had been pushed face down into the mud

at one point and dragged by his feet away from his mother.

And the crime scene manager had the presence of mind

to comb the child's hair.

The police recovered red material from his hair.

It was identified as being paint.

The crime scene manager at that time

wouldn't have known the importance

that would play sometime later.

Alex clearly had had a look at the man

he referred to as the bad man.

We enlisted the help of child psychologists

in order to obtain the best evidence from him.

This is a 2-year-old who's gone through

an unbelievably traumatic experience.

He was, however, able to give a man's description.

He's seeing a white man with a white shirt.

This does tie in with the other witnesses.

One woman in particular recalled seeing a man

who wore a white shirt.

He was washing his hands by a stream nearby

and she got a good look at his face.

The woman described the man as possibly being flat-footed.

He had an unusual gait.

We examined that area and we found shoe marks in the mud.

Plaster of Paris casts were taken off those marks

in the hope that one day we would find a man

who possessed such a pair of shoes

and therefore link them back to the crime scene.

All of these clues have no use

until we can actually lay hands

on the man who killed Rachel Nickell.

The police are desperate.

They don't really have any leads.

There's no forensic evidence

that connects them with the killer.

Around about this time,

there was an increased interest in the science

of forensic psychology across all police circles.

The police started to think

that having a forensic psychologist on board,

that might be useful to solve the murder of Rachel Nickell.

So one thing they did was to introduce

a man called Paul Britton,

who was a forensic psychologist.

They invited Paul Britton to tell them

what kind of person they thought would've committed a crime

of this horrendous nature.

The profile that Paul Briton produced

was that the suspect would be a white male.

He would be in his 20s.

He probably lived alone.

He would work in a low-skilled job.

Probably very shy.

He probably didn't have a girlfriend.

He wouldn't be able to have a sexual relationship of his own.

He was inadequate in that way.

The man was a loner.

He probably was interested in pornography.

He would live locally and would know the area very well.

It was decided to use the publicity surrounding the case

to find the suspect.

So the police contacted "Crimewatch."

"Crimewatch UK" started in 1984.

It was a whole new concept in television

because we were showing people real crimes

and asking people if they could help.

Nick Ross and I were the presenters.

The hope of course of the programme

was to solve serious crimes that police

hadn't been able to solve themselves.

The first thing of course "Crimewatch" does is

we reconstructed Rachel's walk

across the common with her little boy.

And we showed a photo fit of a man

who'd been seen in the area at the time.

Some information was released from the profile

provided by Paul Britton.

It was a crime of such magnitude

and everybody knew about it.

Every single call, no matter how trivial it might seem,

had to be checked and checked over and looked at.

There may just be one call that will make the difference,

someone who will provide a name.

Among the calls, we had people who thought

they recognised the photo fit we'd shown,

and a name was mentioned, and that name was Colin Stagg.

Colin Stagg was a person of interest.

They went to Colin's address.

They found this individual who lived alone.

During the search of his home,

it was noted by the officers that one of his bedrooms

was painted black with various,

what they considered to be occult symbols

on the walls, which was unusual.

There were certain things about Colin Stagg

that did absolutely tally with Paul Britton's analysis.

He had some pornographic type, girly magazines,

collection of knives.

When they asked Colin Stagg if he could provide them

with the shoes that he was wearing that day,

he told them that he'd thrown them away,

which was, in police eyes, a major red flag.

Colin Stagg is arrested for questioning.

When Colin was arrested, he answered every question

and he agreed he'd been on the common

that morning walking his dog Brandy.

But he had left the common,

and when he woke up having recovered from a headache

that he'd suffered, he went back up to the common

to discover that it was closed

because the murder had taken place.

He had had a conversation with a uniformed PC

and that police officer felt that

he'd been acting suspiciously and had an unhealthy interest

in what was going on.

Is it that the killer will return

to the scene of his crime?

Or was it just the interest of somebody,

"Why can't I go on the common where I normally take my dog?"

The forensic psychologist thought our murderer

might well have committed other sexual offenses.

He may or may not have been caught for them,

but he thought that there'd be a history there somehow.

During the course of the interview,

Colin offered up to the police the fact that

he had on occasion sunbathed nude on Wimbledon Common.

And he felt someone might have seen him.

A short time after Rachel was murdered,

a woman reported to the police.

She'd seen a man sort of lying on the grass

and he'd indecently exposed himself to her.

They supported the profile provided by Paul Britten

as someone who would indulge in indecent exposure

or similar offenses.

A light bulb goes on and they think, "Aha,

look at the profile, look at the profile.

This is our man."

This is where he's edging towards

being our red hot suspect.

Colin Stagg spent three days in police custody.

At the end of the three days of interview,

the police are left with no physical evidence against Colin.

No blood evidence, no DNA evidence,

no identification evidence.

All they have is this admission by him

to sunbathing nude on the common.

They have nothing else against him at all.

So in the end, Stagg goes before the local magistrates,

pleads guilty for indecent exposure.

He gets a fine, and as far as he's concerned,

he thinks that's the end of it.

Of course, once Colin has pleaded guilty

at Wimbledon Magistrates Court to indecent exposure,

he's named and shamed.

It's in the newspaper.

It was on the news that night,

him coming out of court looking angry and upset.

And so everybody that has seen him on the common thinks,

there is Colin Stagg, convicted sex offender.

A lot of people believe there's no smoke without fire.

No!

As far as the newspapers were concerned,

Colin Stagg was public enemy number one.

The fallout from that is a woman contacts Scotland Yard.

And she says, "I've been looking for a partner.

So I've been putting some advertisements

into a Lonely Hearts column."

Lonely Hearts columns were where people would put

an advert in a newspaper for looking for love.

And somebody has responded, and this person

is a chap who signs himself Colin Stagg.

The letter he wrote to her

was not an ordinary love letter.

This was highly sexually explicit.

And of course, at Scotland Yard, their ears prick up

and they say, "Oh, you know, we really need

to see those letters please."

Part of the profile provided by Paul Britton

had stated he would have extreme sexual fantasies.

The letter added to the suspicion against Colin Stagg.

Subsequently, Colin received a letter from a woman

calling herself Lizzie James, who claimed to be

a friend of the lady who Colin

had the unwelcome correspondence with.

And Lizzie made it quite plain in that first letter

that she would welcome such graphic and blunt

and explicit correspondence.

And Colin took that letter at face value

and he began to enthusiastically write back.

Lizzie James was a female police officer.

So they set up a honey trap basically.

One way or another, by his responses to this woman,

he'll either rule himself in or rule himself out of this inquiry.

So there's Colin sitting at home, lonely,

as famously became known, a virgin.

Starts getting these incredibly sexually explicit letters.

And every time Colin responded to them,

they would encourage him to write

even more extreme material.

The correspondence convinced the investigation team

that Colin Stagg had violent sexual fantasies.

There was a mention of a knife

and that was obviously the method

used to kill Rachel Nickell.

The team felt he was further implicating himself

and he may reveal where the murder weapon was located

and provide evidence that only the killer would know.

During the course of the correspondence,

eventually it was agreed that they would meet

and they met in Hyde Park.

As far as Scotland Yard was concerned,

they're dealing here with a pathological killer.

Lizzie James purported to being involved

in the ritual sacrifice of a mother and her baby

and having sex afterwards

and that being the only time she'd ever had an orgasm

and that she could only be excited by somebody

who had been involved in something similar.

He just thought she was nuts,

but he was so desperate for a relationship,

he didn't end it after she raised that fantasy

'cause he didn't believe it was true.

Colin had let Lizzie know that he had been arrested

in relation to the Wimbledon Common killing.

He described being shown photographs of Rachel's body

and described her lying with her hands as if in prayer.

The police said that that was a description

that only the killer would've known.

At one point, she actually expressed,

"Oh, I wish you'd done it.

Then we could be together."

So there was Colin desperate to have the relationship

and was still not willing to admit what she wanted him to admit,

namely that he was the killer because he wasn't the killer.

It was a step too far.

The undercover officer, Lizzie James,

never elicits a confession from Colin Stagg,

but the police decided that there were sufficient

circumstantial evidence to present the case at trial.

Colin Stagg is rearrested.

Get out of the way.

After being held overnight

at a police station nearby, Colin Stagg was driven quickly

into Wimbledon Magistrates Court

charged with the murder of Rachel Nickell.

Colin was remanded in custody for 13 months.

As far as the police are concerned,

Colin Stagg has been eliminated as a danger to women.

He's behind bars.

The risk of the public is now nil from him apparently.

And the case is solved.

On the other side of London,

the investigation for the Green Chain rape series

thought that Colin Stagg could well have been responsible.

The DNA of Colin Stagg was checked against those on file.

Colin's DNA was not a match for the Green Chain rapes.

So they were looking for another suspect.

Then the Green Chain Rapist team

are contacted by the member of the public

who having seen the artist impression compiled by them,

felt that he was a very good likeness

of her neighbour, Robert Napper.

Robert Napper presented himself

to the officers as a quietly spoken individual,

someone who didn't openly display

any sign of mental illness.

Really nothing unusual about him.

Obviously to their mind, didn't fit the behavior

of someone who would be responsible for those crimes.

And seeing him in the flesh, so to speak,

assessed him in excess of six feet.

He was about 6'1, 6'2,

which of course didn't match the height profile

provided by the victims.

Police asked him to provide a DNA sample for comparison.

He said he would, and the officers made an appointment

and Robert Napper didn't turn up.

Sometime later, and another request made for him to attend,

again, to give a DNA sample,

and again, he didn't attend.

When they looked at his height,

they decided, no, he's too tall.

And he was eliminated from the inquiries.

It's easy in hindsight saying, "Well, why didn't you?"

Well, that is a tough call for me.

And the fact that you don't get DNA

and you don't go chasing the guy for it is wrong.

You know, Napper should have been chased.

His address should have been sat on.

Soon as he comes out, you're nicked.

In October 1992, the police get a call

from the manager of a print shop.

And they said a man has been in requesting copies

of note paper with the Met Police logo on it.

You know, to copy that is an offence.

The man was arrested.

It was Robert Napper.

His address was then searched.

A handgun was found with 200 rounds of ammunition,

a crossbow, and an A-Z of the streets of London.

The A-Z contained dots, markings.

X's on various locations in woodland areas

in the South East of London.

At the time, the police don't pay much heed to this.

He said that these were just areas that he was visiting

or he was going for a walk in.

That was his reason for marking the A-Z.

Robert Napper was subsequently charged

for the possession of a firearm and the ammunition.

In 1992, it was not standard practice

to take DNA from everyone who was arrested.

His offense was nonsexual.

So they don't take any DNA evidence from Robert Napper,

which meant they couldn't link him

with the evidence they had from the Green Chain rapes.

Were the officers involved in the arrest

and search of the firearms on the rape inquiry team?

Probably not, so you're not getting the link.

So much was paper-based back then

that you haven't got the manpower to check everything

that somebody's done, and for that person

to have the knowledge of what's going on in the area

to be able to link everything.

In July 1993, police receive a call from a neighbor

of a young woman who lived in Rutherglen Road

who would often leave her curtains open at night.

It's a row of houses,

which back onto the Green Chain Walk.

And the neighbor says that this man's

been sort of lurking in the area, a Peeping Tom,

and she's concerned about this.

Police arrived, spoke to the man, searched him.

The person turned out to be Robert Napper.

The detective who apprehended Robert Napper at the time

did make a note that his behavior was suspicious

and that perhaps this should have been looked into further.

But it wasn't.

There hadn't been an attack

on the Green Chain Walk for over a year.

Operation Eccleston had been closed down.

And so therefore that information remained locally

and wasn't actioned any further.

Opportunities were missed to stop him in his tracks

before he did any more harm.

The luck of the devil.

On the morning of November the 4th, 1993,

the boyfriend of a young mother who lived in Plumstead

came home after a night shift to her flat.

And he was met with a horrendous scene.

There were clothes all over the place.

At first he thought there might have been

a break in or something.

And then he found the body of his girlfriend,

Samantha Bissett, sitting upright on the sofa

and her arms were sticking out of what looked like clothing.

And his girlfriend had a young daughter, Jasmine,

and he went to look for her and found her under the duvet.

Clearly thought something awful had happened

and didn't look any further and called the police.

The first day at work,

I was sent to Thamesmead Police Station

on the Bissett murder inquiry.

You arrive at the police station

and all you know is you've got a female victim.

You don't know anything else.

And it just comes in little bit by bit by bit.

And obviously 22 years old, you're seeing stuff that

is quite shocking to realize

what one human being can do to another.

Samantha had been cut from

pretty much her abdomen to her throat.

The way he left Samantha was disgusting.

Absolutely disgusting.

He obviously had no respect at all.

They discovered the body of her daughter, Jasmine,

and she had been sexually molested.

Good evening.

Detectives say it's the most vicious murder

they've ever had to investigate.

Samantha Bissett was brutally murdered

along with her 4-year-old daughter, Jasmine.

It's a double murder,

but the circumstances of what's been done

to Samantha is truly horrendous.

The police had a very urgent need

to find out who'd done this.

Is this the work of a serial killer?

Has he struck already and is he going to strike again?

Police want to question a number of men

seen in the area on the night of the murders.

Their fear that the killer might strike again

cannot be overstated.

In a murder investigation,

you're looking for fingerprints, fibres, any blood,

DNA left by the suspect.

Unfortunately in this case, there was no DNA found.

There were fingerprints at the scene

which were all accounted for.

The best evidence we found was a training shoe mark

in blood at the scene.

But we have nothing to compare it against.

She was a young woman as we were.

And you feel a connection to her age group,

or it could have been us or, and her family as well.

You just, because you're in the middle of it,

you feel for everybody involved.

The whole team was focused on one thing.

They desperately, desperately wanted to catch him

and wouldn't stop until they caught him.

Paul Britton was called in to do a profile

concerning the Bissett murders.

He felt it wasn't the same.

Rachel Nickell was a blitz attack

over a very short period of time.

This killer had taken his time.

He had been with Samantha well over an hour.

And he felt it wasn't the same.

The senior investigating officer decided

to rerun the fingerprint search again.

It was a fingerprint on the headboard of Jasmine's bed.

And that turned out to be the perpetrator.

The fingerprints were run through the police indices

and they matched Robert Napper.

All of us got a phone call to say they've got him.

As soon as we identified Robert Napper

as the suspect for the Bissett murders,

his police file was pulled.

When we saw the photograph of him, one of the team

immediately said, "That's the Green Chain Walk rapist."

It fits the photo fit.

The Bissett team revisit his previous arrest

for the firearms offense.

Personal items have been taken during the course of the search.

One of those items was an A-Z with markings there on.

When they examined that A-Z,

they can see the markings matched up

with the Green Chain rape series locations.

He's not gonna go straight for murder.

And the rapes were a buildup to that.

Realized there was a lot more markings

than the crimes they had before them.

So the question is, what else has he done?

Is he responsible for other unsolved crimes,

including the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common?