Death on Wimbledon Common: Rachel Nickell

 

A twenty-three-year-old part-time model, Rachel Nickell, was out on Wimbledon Common on the morning of 15 July 1992, walking her dog. She was attacked, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death; she was stabbed forty-nine times. She had her two-year-old son Alex with her at the time. He was thrown aside into the undergrowth by the attacker. The police were foxed for some days by a piece of paper stuck to Rachel’s forehead after the murder. They wondered if this was intended as a symbolic signature by the killer, who was clearly mentally unhinged. Then they realized that the little boy had made his way back to his mother, found her terribly injured and stuck a piece of paper on her because it was the nearest thing he could find to a sticking plaster – to make his mummy better. One of the most horrific aspects of the crime was that it was committed so callously in front of the little boy.

This kind of senseless, out-of-the-blue attack is what we all secretly dread, because we cannot really prepare ourselves for it or protect ourselves from it. We are all vulnerable to random acts of violence from the criminally insane. There was, naturally, a great deal of media coverage. Alongside this, the police felt themselves to be under the spotlight, and under pressure to catch the killer quickly. And this led to serious mistakes.

The police turned to a forensic psychologist called Paul Britton, who was an expert in offender profiling. What he could do was to use the details of the crime to piece together the sort of person the criminal must be. Britton had had some conspicuous earlier successes. He had helped the police to identify the killers of Jamie Bulger in Liverpool. The police had meanwhile come up with someone who looked like a suspect. He was Colin Stagg, who lived in an apartment near Wimbledon Common. The police became interested in him because he appeared to be on the edge of society, a loner with strange interests that included paganism. They became even more interested when they heard from a woman who had made contact with Stagg through a lonely hearts column in a local paper. She showed the police some sexually explicit letters he had written her. Paul Britton analyzed the sexual nature of the Rachel Nickell murder, and also looked at the available evidence about Colin Stagg’s psyche. He came to the conclusion that whoever killed Rachel Nickell and Colin Stagg had exactly the same ‘sexually deviant based personality disturbance’. He also came to the breathtakingly unjustifiable conclusion that this so-called personality disturbance was so rare that Colin Stagg had to be the killer. This arbitrary decision has in effect ruined Colin Stagg’s life.

The police were being told by a highly reputable expert that Colin Stagg was the murderer. All they lacked was evidence. Some evidence had to be found to connect Stagg to the murder. The only witness evidence they had was a single sighting of Stagg on Wimbledon Common later that day, which was of course of no value at all. To make matters worse, two other witnesses were sure they had seen Stagg at two other locations at the same time, so the witness evidence cancelled itself out.

Under Paul Britton’s guidance, and with the approval of the Crown Prosecution Service, the police set up a trap for Stagg. Entrapment is always ethically questionable. This particular entrapment amounted to a breach of Stagg’s basic human rights. In simple terms, no one should be treated the way Stagg was treated. The trap was dignified with a code name, Operation Edzell. A policewoman, who would be known as Lizzie James, was to contact and befriend Stagg, win his confidence and try to worm a confession out of him. Lizzie James claimed to have spent her teens in a satanic cult, in which she had taken part in the ritual killing of a mother and baby. She could only form a sexually satisfying relationship with someone who had also taken part in such a killing.

Of course, a great many men will agree to anything, anything at all, if it means a woman will agree to have sex with them. It was a honey trap. In effect, Lizzie James was telling Stagg that he could have sex with her if he said he had killed Rachel. It was a disgraceful plan, one the police officers concerned should never have contemplated, and one the Prosecution Service should not have condoned. Colin Stagg fell into the trap. He was so keen to please Lizzie James that he admitted to killing a woman in the New Forest in order to win favour. He made it up. James reported the confession back to her colleagues, who checked it out and found that there had been no such murder. She went back to Stagg and told him she didn’t believe his New Forest story, adding, ‘If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder. If only you had killed her it would be all right.’ Stagg answered, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I haven’t.’

Rumours that Colin Stagg had become the prime suspect in the police investigation filtered out to the press. A tabloid journalist interviewed him and in the interview Stagg emphatically denied having anything at all to do with the Wimbledon Common murder. The police became concerned that the press activity might endanger their Operation Edzell and called it off after several months. They reviewed the evidence they had so far and, almost incredibly, in view of the lack of evidence and the total and utter failure to elicit a confession by way of seduction via Lizzie James, decided to go ahead and arrest Colin Stagg. In August 1993, he was arrested and charged with Rachel’s murder.

The unfortunate Colin Stagg spent thirteen months in prison on remand before his case came before Mr Harry Ognall at the Old Bailey on 14 September 1994. It turned out to be a surprisingly short trial. In the pre-trial submissions, Mr Justice Ognall was asked to consider whether the evidence gathered during Operation Edzell was admissible in Stagg’s trial. Justice Ognall considered, and then had some very harsh words to say about the police and their ‘puppet master’ Paul Britton. He denounced them all for setting up what amounted to a conspiracy to incriminate Colin Stagg. It was ‘a skilful and sustained enterprise to manipulate the accused, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.’ The plan overall was a ‘wholly reprehensible’ attempt to incriminate Stagg using ‘deceptive conduct of the grossest kind’. The judge ruled that the evidence gathered in this way was inadmissible under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.

The so-called evidence acquired by Lizzie James was of course all the evidence the police had; none of it could be used in court, so the prosecution case collapsed instantly. Colin Stagg was acquitted and set free.

Because of the publicity, Stagg acquired a profile he had not had before and, ironically, acquired a girlfriend too. A woman called Diane started writing to him while he was in prison and later visited him. After he was acquitted, they were married. It was not to be a long-lasting marriage. Stagg commented that Diane ‘wasn’t all there’ and she deserted him after a few months. She then turned out to be a major danger to his security. In 1998, Mrs Stagg gave an interview to the Mail on Sunday in which she claimed that there was a ‘terrifying anger’ inside Colin Stagg, and – most damaging of all – that he had twice told her he was responsible for Rachel’s death.

Fortunately for Colin Stagg, the age-old principle of autrefois acquit (already acquitted), sometimes called double jeopardy, meant that he could not be put on trial for the murder a second time. But it would in any case be understandable for Colin Stagg to feel a towering anger at the way he had been treated in the wake of Rachel’s murder.

Life after Operation Edzell proved to be difficult for the policewoman who had played the role of Lizzie James. She had a nervous breakdown which was brought on by post-traumatic stress. She was given £125,000 in compensation by her employers, in addition to a pension. No compensation or help of any kind were offered to Colin Stagg.

Life after Edzell was also bumpy for the police officer in charge of the Stagg case, Keith Pedder. He retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1995, but was not in the clear. In March 1998, he was arrested and charged with inciting a police officer (aka Lizzie James) to commit a corrupt act. The charges were later dismissed when the court concluded that he, in his turn, had ironically been the victim of an entrapment operation by the Criminal Investigation Bureau.

Keith Pedder wrote a book about the Rachel Nickell case, which revealed that Operation Edzell had had approval from the highest levels in the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. It seemed that the functionaries at those senior levels had been unaware of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; if they had been aware, they must knowingly have conspired to illegal entrapment. Pedder also revealed that the Deputy Assistant Commissioner who was in charge of the investigation into the conduct of the inquiry into the handling of the Nickell case in the wake of the Stagg trial – Ian Johnson – was the very man who had authorized the undercover plan in the first place.

Inevitably, Paul Britton became the subject of a formal allegation of misconduct. This was launched by Colin Stagg’s original solicitor. By 2002, when the British Psychological Society eventually got round to considering the question of Britton’s alleged misconduct, it decided to waive the complaint because too long a time had elapsed. During the hearing, Stagg and Britton came face to face and Stagg let Britton know what he thought of him. Britton unwisely considered making a formal complaint that Stagg had called him a pervert, but it was not clear who Britton imagined was going to preside or arbitrate, still less how he might emerge unscathed from such a procedure.

As is usual in such cases, the police refused to back down and admit that they were wrong. They injudiciously and unethically (given the court’s decision to acquit) made it very clear that they still considered Colin Stagg to be guilty. Sir Paul Condon, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, publicly announced, ‘We are not looking for anyone else.’ This was a straightforward contradiction of the acquittal. It also showed a determination to stick with their prime suspect, even though no genuine evidence against him had ever emerged – even during Edzell. They wanted to create the impression that they had got it right; they had identified the killer; that through some tiresome technicality of the British legal system the killer had got off. The press (notably the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday) went along with this, partly because of some off-the-record briefings by the police. Rachel Nickell’s parents and her boyfriend were also persuaded that Stagg was guilty in spite of the acquittal.

During the years that followed, more of the ‘evidence’ gathered during Operation Edzell emerged. The picture of Colin Stagg that came out tended to reinforce the idea that he was innocent, not that he was guilty. He came out as a rather timid, lonely and sensitive person who was keen to have the companionship of a woman. It was clear that he struggled to understand the (completely fake) persona adopted by the policewoman. He begged her, ‘If I have disappointed you, please don’t dump me. Nothing like this has happened to me before. Please, please tell me what you want in every detail.’ Colin Stagg was a bewildered, lonely man who wanted above all to please this woman. Operation Edzell really showed that Colin Stagg was a very long way from having the personality of a killer; there was nothing aggressive about him at all. It really then looked more remarkable than ever that on the strength of Operation Edzell the police decided they had enough evidence to arrest him. More and more people considered the possibility that someone else must have murdered Rachel.

Operation Enigma was an imaginative project that explored 200 unsolved murders to see whether there were serial killers at work. April 1998 brought the news that Operation Enigma had identified a cluster of four murders that were committed by one person: the Wimbledon Common murder was one of them. Subsequently, there were more murders that looked as if they might be the work of the same killer. The murder of Margaret Muller at Victoria Park in Hackney in February 2003 was one; the sexual assault and stabbing of Sally Bowman at Blenheim Crescent in Croydon in September 2005 was another.

But there was one murder in particular that looked very similar indeed to the attack on Rachel and her son. That was the murder of Samantha Bissett and her four year old daughter Jazmine in November 1993. This double murder happened at Samantha’s home near Winn’s Common at Plumstead. Samantha Bissett was sexually assaulted and then stabbed to death; her body was then mutilated by her killer. The little girl was also sexually abused, then suffocated to death. The mutilation inflicted after death was so grisly that the police photographer, who must have seen some very gruesome sights, was off work for months afterwards.

A mentally ill man was arrested and charged with the Bissett double murder in May 1994. He was Robert Napper, and he was (eventually) identified on the evidence of fingerprints found at the crime scene. By a strange coincidence, Napper’s fingerprints were almost identical to those of his victim, so they were very hard to distinguish from one another. There are in fact renewed doubts about the reliability of fingerprint evidence in general after tests have shown that different fingerprint experts reach different conclusions on the same evidence, and can also be influenced by police expectations. Even so, Napper’s and Bissett’s fingerprints were almost identical. By another extraordinary coincidence, Napper and Samantha Bissett had the same birthday.

Once in custody, Napper was identified as the perpetrator of a whole string of violent sex crimes against women. The police identified him as the Green Chain rapist, who over an eight-year period had carried out perhaps forty rapes and other sex attacks on a Thames-side path called the Green Chain Walk. Napper went on trial, and was described by the judge as ‘highly dangerous’; he was too dangerous to be on the loose and was sentenced to an indefinite sentence in Broadmoor.

There were certainly enough similarities between the murders of Rachel Nickell and Samantha Bissett for the police to conclude that Robert Napper was responsible for killing Rachel. But at the time when Napper was arrested, they had contrived to get Colin Stagg imprisoned on remand. They had someone for the Wimbledon Common murder and did not need the complication of admitting they had the wrong man. While Napper could have killed both Samantha and Rachel, Stagg could not have killed Samantha because he was in prison at the time – the very best of alibis. Napper had no alibi for the time when the Nickell murder took place. Keith Pedder, who was in charge of the Nickell case, later admitted that he and his team had thought of Napper as a possible suspect but ‘there was nothing to tie him to the Rachel Nickell murder’. This was an extraordinary comment to make. There had been nothing to tie Colin Stagg to the Nickell murder either, yet the police were ready enough to pin the Nickell murder on him.

At Scotland Yard, there is a Murder Review Group, an elite squad that has the task of investigating cold case murders, murders that have remained unsolved for a long time. It has been known since 2002 that the Murder Review Group considered Robert Napper as a suspect for the Wimbledon Common murder. In 2003 the Group announced they had made a breakthrough in the Nickell case. Using a new DNA technique (DNA Low Copy Number) on Rachel Nickell’s clothing taken from the scene of the murder, fragmentary human DNA had been recovered that could belong to the killer. Colin Stagg offered to give a DNA sample, knowing that it would prove his innocence, but his offer was significantly declined, which implied that the investigators were no longer trying to pin the murder on him. A year later it was announced that the analysis had yielded DNA details suggesting a match with Robert Napper. Unfortunately the match was not sufficiently well-defined to amount to proof; it was not going to stand up in a courtroom. Robert Napper could not have been convicted on this DNA evidence. After the Operation Edzell fiasco, the Murder Review Group were treading very cautiously.

The Murder Review Group were keen to interview Napper about the Nickell murder, but they were barred by the Broadmoor psychiatrists. Eventually the psychiatrists relented. In June 2006, detectives from the Murder Review Group questioned ‘a forty year old man’ at Broadmoor regarding the Nickell murder. It began to look then as if Napper might be charged and tried for the Nickell murder.

For Colin Stagg, this was of paramount importance. If someone else was convicted of Rachel’s murder the cloud of suspicion and gossip that still hung over him would disperse. There might even be compensation. Stagg is aware that he has never been able to shake off his association with the Wimbledon Common murder. ‘You will always have people who will always believe I had something to do with it in some way. They’ll just think there’s no smoke without fire, and the police had every reason to arrest me.’

The fragmentary DNA evidence points towards Robert Napper as the murderer, a serial offender now imprisoned in Broadmoor for two other murders. Colin Stagg’s situation has changed, and it looks as if he is in line for a large sum in compensation for, among other things, wrongful imprisonment. Stagg’s life was irretrievably damaged by his arrest and imprisonment, and by the press campaign against him. The Daily Mail described him as ‘the violent oddball with a taste for kinky sex and knives.’ He was clearly the victim of prejudice. He was a loner with an interest in wicca; he had a picture of the Cerne Giant in his home. These, the police considered, were more than adequate reasons for treating him as a suspect. Then, when they were unable to find any other suspect, he became the prime suspect. But for the probity of Mr Justice Ognall, police and press prejudice would have sent Stagg back to prison – by the law of the lynch mob.

Stagg was unable to get a job for twelve years, unable to go out without fear of abuse and threats, and was virtually a prisoner in his own apartment. And Colin Stagg is not the only victim of the police’s determination to pin the Wimbledon Common murder on him. If they had not had a fixation about Colin Stagg, the police might have connected the murder with Robert Napper, and taken Napper into custody before he had the opportunity to kill Samantha Bissett and her daughter.