The Wrong Man on the Common - The Murder of Rachel Nickell
On the morning of Wednesday 15 July 1992, Rachel Nickell went for a walk.
She was 23. She lived with her partner and their 2-year-old son in a flat near Wimbledon Common, a large area of open heath and woodland in London, England, about 12 km south-west of the city centre.
That morning she took the little boy and the family dog to the common. She knew the place well. It was summer, it was broad daylight, and there were other people out walking.
At about 10:20, on a quiet stretch of path between trees and bushes, a man attacked her.
He stabbed her 49 times and sexually assaulted her. Her son was right there beside her. He was not physically hurt.
A short time later a passer-by found them. The boy was holding on to his mother's body. He kept saying "Wake up, Mummy." He had put a piece of paper on her forehead, the way a child puts on a plaster.
Rachel died where she lay.
Nobody had seen the attack. Hundreds of people used the common every day. Not one of them came forward to say they had watched it happen.
This is the story of the 16-year hunt for her killer. For most of those years, the police were chasing the wrong man. The real killer was already known to the police before Rachel died, and he was caught for other crimes in 1994. The question this file answers is not who did it. That is now known. The question is how a killer who stood so close to the police slipped past them, again and again.
A city in shock
The murder shocked Britain. A young mother, killed in daylight, in front of her child, in one of the best-known green spaces in London.
The pressure on the police was enormous. The story stayed in the newspapers for weeks.
The investigation was run by the Metropolitan Police, the London police force.
The detectives had very little to work with. No witness to the attack. No confession. No obvious suspect.
The forensic scientists did what they could. They pressed strips of sticky tape against the parts of Rachel's body that had been exposed in the attack, to lift any tiny traces the killer might have left. They kept her clothes.
The hope was to find male DNA that did not belong to her partner or her son. In 1992 the science was far weaker than it is today. The tests gave the police nothing they could use.
So the detectives fell back on old methods. They looked for men who had been on the common, men with a record, men who seemed odd. They questioned 32 men.
The man the police chose
One of those men stood out to the detectives. He was a local man who lived nearby and regularly walked his own dog on the common.
Nothing physical linked him to the murder. No forensic evidence. No witness who placed him at the spot where Rachel died.
But the detectives became convinced he was their man.
To build a case, they brought in a criminal psychologist. His task was to draw up a profile: what kind of man would commit a crime like this, and how such a man might behave.
The police now had a suspect and a profile. What they did not have was evidence. They decided to try to get it in a way that would later be judged one of the worst decisions in modern British policing.
The honey trap
The plan was code-named Operation Edzell.
An undercover policewoman from a specialist unit made contact with the suspect. She pretended to be a woman who had come across him through a lonely hearts column.
For 5 months she wrote to him, telephoned him and met him. She pretended to be falling for him.
In her letters she described violent sexual fantasies, and invited him to share his own. The idea was that if he really was the killer, he would sooner or later reveal it to a woman who seemed to want to hear it.
He never did.
At one meeting in a park in central London, the conversation turned to the murder. The policewoman told him that if only he had killed Rachel, everything would be all right between them.
He answered: "I'm terribly sorry, but I haven't."
The police arrested him anyway, in the summer of 1993, and charged him with murder. They said that during the operation he had described details of the crime that only the killer could have known.
He spent the next 14 months in custody, waiting for his trial.
The trial that never happened
In September 1994 the case reached London's central criminal court.
The judge examined the undercover operation, and he was appalled. He said the police had shown "excessive zeal". He said they had tried to incriminate the suspect by "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind".
He also found that the details the suspect had described were far less accurate than the police claimed.
The judge threw out all the evidence from the operation. Without it there was no case. The prosecution withdrew, and the man was acquitted.
He walked out of court a free man. But the accusation followed him for many years.
**It must be said plainly: this man was innocent. He was never convicted of anything connected to this case, and in 2008 the police apologised to him publicly.**
After the trial collapsed, the murder of Rachel Nickell was left unsolved. The police had spent 2 years on one man. Every other line of inquiry had gone cold.
Meanwhile, across London
Now the story has to go back a few months, and to the other side of the city.
In November 1993, 16 months after Rachel's death, a young mother of 27 and her 4-year-old daughter were murdered in their flat in Plumstead. Plumstead is a district in south-east London, about 20 km from Wimbledon Common.
The mother had been sexually assaulted. The attack was savage.
The detectives working on these killings noticed something. The crime had disturbing similarities to Rachel's murder: a young mother, a small child present, extreme violence with a knife, a sexual motive.
They tried to raise this with the team handling Rachel's case. According to later accounts, they were turned away "with hostility". The Wimbledon team already had their suspect in custody, and the honey trap was their case. They were not interested in a second theory.
In Plumstead, the police found a fingerprint in the flat. In May 1994 it led them to a man named Robert Napper.
Robert Napper was in his late 20s. He lived in south-east London. Behind him lay a long history of disturbing behaviour, stalking and sexual violence.
In October 1995 he was convicted of the 2 Plumstead murders. At the same time he admitted 2 rapes and 2 attempted rapes. He was sent to a high-security psychiatric hospital, with no release date.
The detective who had arrested him found the similarities with Rachel's case convincing. He suggested Napper as a suspect for the Wimbledon murder.
For years, that suggestion went nowhere.
The chances that were missed
Only much later did it become clear how often Napper had already crossed the path of the police before Rachel died.
In October 1989, almost 3 years before her death, his own mother called the police. She said her son had told her he had raped a woman on a common near their home in Plumstead.
The information was not acted on. Yet 8 weeks earlier, a 30-year-old woman had in fact been raped in front of her children, in a house that backed onto that same common.
At that time, south-east London was living through a series of rapes and attacks on women. Many happened along a network of footpaths and parks called the Green Chain Walk. The press called the attacker the Green Chain Rapist.
Napper was looked at by the detectives hunting that attacker. He was eliminated because of his height. He was taller than 1.83 m, and victims had described a man of about 1.70 m.
Napper walked with a stoop.
Investigators later concluded that he very probably committed most or all of the attacks blamed on the Green Chain Rapist, over 4 years that ended in 1994.
In 1992, the year Rachel died, he was questioned about unsolved attacks. Again he was eliminated.
In August 1993, police spoke to him again, after complaints that he had been spying on people. Notes described him as strange and as a possible sex offender. By then the Wimbledon team was deep into its honey trap.
So this much is known about the first 2 years. The man who killed Rachel had been reported by his own mother, assessed by rape detectives, questioned twice more, and finally caught by a fingerprint. At no point did anyone connect him to Wimbledon Common in time.
Starting again
In the late 1990s, a national review called Operation Enigma looked again at the unsolved murders of 207 women across Britain.
In 2002, 10 years after the killing, Scotland Yard opened a cold case review of Rachel's murder.
Part of the work went to a private forensic company. One of Britain's leading forensic scientists, who ran it, put a team on the case.
They went back to the samples collected in 1992: the sticky-tape lifts from Rachel's body, and her clothes.
The difficulty was size. Whatever the killer had left behind was tiny, and it was mixed with Rachel's own DNA. The tests available in 1992 could not separate the two.
In July 2003 it was reported that, after 18 months of tests on her clothes, the scientists had found a male DNA profile. It did not belong to her partner or to her son. But it was too incomplete to identify anyone. It could only be used to rule people out.
The scientists kept going. They used a technique known as DNA enhancement, which can build a usable profile from extremely small traces. Working on DNA found on Rachel's jeans, they finally obtained a profile good enough to compare.
It matched Robert Napper.
The published accounts do not agree on exactly when the match was made. Some give 2004, others 2006. They agree on the result.
In July 2006, detectives went to the secure hospital and interviewed Napper over 2 days. By then he had been held there for more than 10 years. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and Asperger syndrome.
On 28 November 2007, more than 15 years after the murder, he was charged with killing Rachel Nickell.
In January 2008 he pleaded not guilty. His trial began on 11 November 2008.
Then, on 18 December 2008, he changed his plea. He admitted killing Rachel. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Under British law, that means the court accepted that a mental illness had substantially reduced his responsibility. It is still a conviction for the killing.
The judge ordered him to be detained indefinitely, and called him "a very dangerous man".
That same month, through his lawyer, Napper apologised to the man who had been wrongly accused. The Metropolitan Police apologised to that man in public too.
Earlier that year, the government had announced the compensation he would receive: £706,000, for the 14 months he had spent in custody for a crime he did not commit.
The official verdict on the investigation
In June 2010, the independent police watchdog of England and Wales published its report on the case. It described "a catalogue of bad decisions and errors" by the Metropolitan Police.
Its conclusion was hard to read. Without those errors, the report said, Napper could have been off the streets before he killed Rachel Nickell - and before he killed the mother and daughter in Plumstead.
No officer faced disciplinary action. Those involved had retired or died.
An internal police review had already estimated that the original investigation cost £3 million, and that vital scientific information had been missed along the way.
There was one more bitter detail. The undercover policewoman left the force early, in 1998. In 2001 her claim against the police for the psychological harm the operation caused her was settled for £125,000. Rachel's son, who had been beside his mother when she died, received £22,000 from the state compensation scheme. The comparison caused public anger.
**This is where the record is complete. Who killed Rachel Nickell is known, and the killer admitted it in court. What is not fully on the public record is why the investigation held on to the wrong man for so long, and ignored the warnings that pointed elsewhere.**
So the story ends like this. The crime is solved. The killer is locked away for good. An innocent man lost years of his life. And a little boy who had said "Wake up, Mummy" grew up while the police looked in the wrong place.
Conclusions and Open Questions
There is no mystery left about who did it. DNA matched, and the killer admitted it in court. The open questions are about the investigation itself, and they are still taught to detectives today.
**Why did the detectives fix on one man?** The evidence: the pressure on them was enormous, they had no forensic lead, and a psychological profile seemed to fit the man they already suspected. The official watchdog later described a chain of bad decisions. The problem: the full internal reasoning of the original team has never been published. We know what they did. We do not fully know why each decision was taken, or who argued against it.
**Could Rachel have been saved?** The official watchdog said yes. A mother had reported her son's confession in 1989. Rape detectives had him in front of them and dismissed him because of his height. The problem: hindsight is easy. In 1989 there was no national DNA database in Britain - it began only in 1995 - and reports of attacks were spread across different units. Seeing the pattern at the time would have needed people to connect files that the system kept apart. That is exactly what the watchdog says should have happened.
**What part did the psychological profile play?** One view, voiced by critics after the trial collapsed: building a trap around a profile turned a theory into a self-fulfilling hunt. The police looked for a man who matched the profile, and then read everything he said through it. The other view: a profile is only a tool, and the decision to arrest and charge without evidence was made by the police, not by the psychologist. The problem: both views can be true at once. The case is still used as a warning about what happens when a profile is treated as proof.
**Why did the 2 investigation teams not work together?** The Plumstead detectives saw the link in 1993 and tried to raise it. They were turned away, because the Wimbledon team was committed to its suspect. The problem: this is one of the oldest failures in policing - separate teams, separate files, and a team that has already decided. It happened here between 2 teams of the same force, in the same city.
**Did Napper commit other crimes?** Investigators believe he was very probably behind most or all of the Green Chain attacks. He was convicted of only some of them. The problem: he is held in a secure hospital and has been diagnosed with serious mental illness. Whether he will ever give a full account is unknown.
**What finally solved it?** Not a witness, and not a confession. It was a few cells, collected with sticky tape on a summer morning in 1992, and kept for more than 10 years until the science could read them.
That is the hardest lesson of this file. The evidence that named the killer was in police hands from the very first day. What was missing was the science to read it - and, for too long, the willingness to look beyond the man the police had already chosen.