A walk in the park turned into a TRAGEDY. The TERRIBLE story of Rachel Nickell 

A walk in the park turned into a TRAGEDY. The TERRIBLE story of Rachel Nickell 

this heinous story which took place in England has over the years become one of the country’s most famous criminal cases a young woman was murdered while walking in the park with her two-year-old son the only witness was her child and the police couldn’t find the culprit for 16 years when the case was solved the police were accused of catastrophic on professionalism it turned out that they had made a huge number of mistakes that had cost several lives in this video we will tell you how one murder story grew

into something bigger over 16 years and how it all ended Rachel Jane Nichol was born on November 23 1968 in a village near Colchester England she grew up in a decent full family her father was an army officer and her mother a housewife from an early age the young woman took part in various volunteer programs helping the elderly and children with disabilities at age 11 she enrolled at Colchester High School for Girls where she was active in dance singing and acting all of her teachers insisted that the young woman had real

talent and should developed in that direction however Rachel herself was more deeply into the study of history and English after school she got a job as a lifeguard at the pool in Richmond Rachel later planned to try her hand at hosting a television program for children in 1988 when she was 20 years old Rachel met her future husband Andre the couple began dating and a year later they had a son Alex together other they move to an area of London called belham by then she had already been offered a job as a model but she decided to devote

her full attention to her family for a few years and then try to get a job in television on a summer morning July 15 1992 Rachel took her son and their Labrador for a walk in the local park at the time Alex was only a month away from his third birthday this park in Wimbledon common neighborhood was popular with the locals there were always a lot of people there during the daytime mostly parents with children and dog walkers despite this because the large area and the abundance of greenery it was always possible to get away from

prying eyes and enjoy nature and Solitude unfortunately there was a downside to this at about 10 30 a.m a woman walking in the park noticed a gruesome scene a young woman was lying on the ground there was a lot of blood around and a small child was sitting next to her the victim was Rachel several dozen police officers arrived on the scene they had to cordon off an area of four square kilometers where there were hundreds of potential Witnesses and possibly the Killer detective soon realized that none of the Park’s

visitors had seen either the moment of the attack or the killer himself no one except for one witness Rachel’s son Alex they were to get all the information from the two-year-old boy of course this was extremely difficult to do the child was first admitted to the hospital for examination to make sure he was not injured later the detectives did get some information from him he said he and his mother were approached by a tall thin white man with brown hair everyone in that Park was questioned it took the police almost an entire day but it only

took a few hours for reporters to get the whole country to hear about this gruesome crime Rachel’s case instantly caused a wide resonance which is not surprising a young mother died in front of her child in one of the most popular parks in London residents of Britain were even more shocked when the newspaper’s leaked information from the pathologist’s report Rachel had been stabbed 49 times with a sharp object there was enormous pressure on the Metropolitan Police Society demanded that the sadists be caught and punished

as quickly as possible and detectives did indeed have to work at an accelerated Pace in the first few weeks they interviewed 548 men 32 of whom were even arrested for a short period of time but all to no avail the police simply had no leads the only thing the experts were able to find was a tiny piece of organic material that they thought might be connected to the killer but 1992 technology simply didn’t allow them to study it by September investigators were left with no suspects so they Enlisted the help of Paul Britton a renowned

profiler to compile a description of the killer he here’s what he came up with he is a man in his late 20s to early 30s most likely living alone all of his hobbies are also socially unrelated he’s interested in knives and the Occult and has sadistic fantasies in addition he lives near the park at the request of the police department this profile along with this catch was shown on television after that they received at least four calls all with the same matching name Colin Francis Stagg in addition to the fact that he fit the sketch the police

ran his name and realized that he had already been on their radar the fact is that stag had tried to enter the park the day Rachel was killed Colin stegg 27 had led a secluded lifestyle he had lost his job and was struggling to find money to pay for housing and food he had a dog that he walked every morning in Wimbledon common Park according to his testimony on the day Rachel was killed he went there with his dog but because of a severe headache he quickly went home and went to bed toward evening he felt better and decided to take his dog

out for a walk again however on this approach to the park he was stopped by the police stake calmly answered all questions and gave his details the police had no evidence against egg but he seemed to them to be a suitable candidate for the role of the killer in addition the Press kept pressuring law enforcement agencies and they needed a breakthrough in the case urgently that same day stag was brought to the police station where he was held for three days when questioned he denied any involvement in the murder

but the detectives were beginning to believe more and more the opposite first occult books were found in his home which coincided with the profiler’s suggestion second the police were able to find two women who gave some disturbing details about stag one woman accused him of exposing himself in front of her in that very part in his defense Collins said he was just sunbathing in a secluded part of the park and the woman came there herself another woman reported that she had been exchanging intimate letters with him for some time

time in one of them he confessed to her that he dreamed of having sexual intercourse Outdoors all this was already enough for the police to consider Colin a pervert and finally believe his involvement in the murder of Rachel except they knew that all these circumstantial arguments would not stand a chance in court for this reason the man had to be released on the advice of his lawyer he agreed to pay a fine for exposing himself to a woman in the park though he continued to insist on his innocence detectives along with a profiler came up

with a very unusual plan that was supposed to help force a confession a metropolitan police officer under the pseudonym Lisi James began writing column letters of intimate content she said she knew the woman’s stake had corresponded with before despite the Ridiculousness of the situation the plan worked Colin responded to all the letters and each time their dialogues became more and more explicit and perverted Lizzie played the part of a woman with violent and sadist Hobbies sometimes even illegal and their communication lasted five months all

this time stag insisted that they finally meet in person and the detectives decided it might actually help to get a confession out the location end date was set at a park Lizzie didn’t go there alone but stag didn’t know that plain clothes officers were keeping an eye on them in case the man decided to attack their colleague during the conversation Lizzie on the provider’s advice shared with Colin a fictional story about her secret Hobbies she revealed that her ex-boyfriend was into the occult and that they performed

a ritual sacrifice on a living person together stag took this information rather calmly at least he kept in touch with Lizzie and they spent a few more hours together and parted ways after that they met a few more times and finally the police decided to move on to the final part walking in the park Lizzie talked to Colin about Rachel’s Murder She told him that she wished he had been the murder because she was aroused by thoughts of the crime but it didn’t work stag apologized to her and told her that he had nothing to do with the murder Lizzie

tried to get him to confess several more times but he kept denying his involvement it looked as if the police had botched a six-month operation they couldn’t get any evidence that stake had killed Rachel but the detectives were still convinced they were right that’s why they did arrest him in August 1993.

 at the interrogation Colin was told all the cards and that all this time he had been in correspondence with a police officer he was read excerpts from these letters describing various perversions and was also introduced to the real Lizzie herself stag was shocked but on the advice of his lawyer refused to answer police questions investigators had hope to the last that under such pressure he would confess to the murder but he did not all they had to do now was to take the case to trial all this dragged down for a year which steak spent in custody when

the case finally went to trial his lawyers blew the prosecution’s arguments to Smithereens even the judge was forced to admit that the whole operation with Lizzie James was Overkill and that the police had behaved in an extremely unprofessional manner in September 1994 Colin was acquitted of all charges and released Lizzie James later resigned from the police citing serious psychological Trauma from the operation the police who had spent more than 3 million pounds on this investigation were deadlocked they had not a single

suspect and most of the detectives continued to think the stake was the murderer and they were not alone in this opinion the newspapers and the public continued to blame him for what happened every time he went out on the street he caught the embittered looks of passerby almost the entire entire country believed that the murderer had gotten away with it and this only added to the hatred towards stag this went on for years the Rachel nickel case was finally hung in the balance and the police made little effort to look for new suspects

why when they were all sure of Colin’s involvement by then Rachel’s husband along with Alex had gone to live in Europe for several reasons first he was constantly harassed by journalists which reminded his son of his mother’s murder secondly the father felt it was not safe for a son to remain in London he was the only person who saw the murderer for a long time no one knew which country they had moved to later journalists did get wind that they lived in Spain and France in 2000 Scotland Yard took up the case

and assigned a new team to it they studied all the collected material and witness statements but they failed to find a new suspect only three years later they announced that they had found DNA from an unknown man and Rachel’s clothes analysis technology had only just matured to such a capability and in 1992 such a discovery was simply impossible even in 2003 this tiny sample which took experts 18 months to find was not enough to establish identity the data from that sample was only enough to rule out unsuitable people and a year

later in 2004 the police finally had a new suspect his DNA was already in the database and a comparison with a sample from Rachel’s clothes showed mixed results that man was the 38 year old Robert knapper a convicted murderer and serial rapist who at the time had already spent 10 years in a halfway house his biography is striking in two ways the cruelty of his crimes and the ease with which he evaded Justice later because of this the police would face a wave of outrage from the public Napper first came into the hands of law

enforcement in 1986. he was then given a suspended sentence for assault with an air gun in 1989 he broke into a young mother’s house and abused her for the next four years there was a series of similar attacks but the police did not tie them together and could not reach the suspect What followed was something truly amazing Napper confessed to his mother that he had carried out all these attacks she called the police and told them everything and what do you think they found no connection between the crimes and the woman’s story so they

didn’t look into napper’s involvement the only thing the mother could do was convince her son to see a psychiatrist when Napper came back from there he said that the specialist thought he was crazy but took no further action a short time later he assaulted and abused a woman and her child in Crystal Palace Park the this happened just weeks before Rachel’s murder but again the police failed to see the connection this was by no means the only such attack in Crystal Palace Park and police at some point figured

out that one man was committing the crimes from the words of witnesses they compiled a sketch of him after the publication in the newspapers several of napper’s neighbors contacted the detectives they all pointed to the man and the police called Napper for a blood sample he simply ignored the request and the detectives did not go looking for him they simply forgot about him in November 1993 London was rocked by another high-profile crime which as it later turned out was also committed by Napper a young mother Samantha Bessette

was attacked in her room in addition the perpetrator did not spare her young daughter what he did to them shocked even experienced Detectives the police photographer who arrived on the scene could not return to work for several months because of the shock of what he saw remarkably the same profiler who had been brought in to investigate Rachel’s murder worked on all of these cases and he believed that all of these attacks had nothing to do with each other the detectives also saw no possible connection to the Rachel case because

they were 100 sure that Colin stay was guilty the team of investigators handling the attack at Crystal Palace Park also saw no connection Napper was nearly 190 centimeters tall and based on witness testimony the perpetrator was shorter but the maniac made one mistake in the attack on Samantha Bessette he left a fingerprint in her apartment that allowed his identity to be run through the database Napper had previously been fingerprinted after he stalked a woman in the street he was not arrested until May 1994. when questioned he denied

guilt and was extremely calm in his apartment they found maps of London on which the locations of the attacks and murders were circled including the place where Rachel was murdered they also found several nodes on how to properly abuse women shortly before that police found a knife in the very Park where Rachel was murdered the fingerprints on the handle match Nappers but even that wasn’t enough to make detectives consider him for the killer because they were still convinced Colin steg was guilty Napper however was still considered a suspect

in Rachel’s murder for a while but those charges were quickly dropped the thing is that Napper said he was at work that day in 1995 Napper went on trial for the murder of Samantha and her daughter the prosecution struck a deal with him in which he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and the court sent him to a closed Psychiatric Hospital instead of prison the fact was that Napper had been diagnosed with a number of disorders including Asperger’s syndrome and schizophrenia because of this the maniac could have avoided prison anyway with or

without a confession as a result the judge sent him provide more psychiatric hospital for treatment with no time limit later detectives wanted to question him about Rachel’s murder but the doctors forbade it they feared it might aggravate napper’s mental status back to 2004 the new team of detectives on the Rachel nickel case finally began to take a closer look at Napper as a suspect after they compared his DNA to a small sample found on the young woman’s body the results were very mixed that sample wasn’t enough to confirm the

similarity it was only enough to rule out other suspects in namper’s case the results did not do with a hundred percent certainty investigators kept digging further using new technology on Rachel’s clothing they managed to spot a microscopic piece of paint experts examined it and concluded that it matched the paint on napper’s iron toolbox prior to his arrest he worked as a storekeeper for the Department of Defense it is not entirely clear how we could have gotten a job there with his set of mental disorders but the fact

remains he Combined Assault and murder with his day job it took Scotland Yard three years to prepare this case for trial and in 2007 Napper was charged with the murder of Rachel nickel during the first hearing he pleaded not guilty which prolonged the trial for almost a year in the end Napa agreed the same deal he had been offered 12 years earlier a change of plea to manslaughter in exchange for a confession on December 18 2008 16 years after the murder he finally confessed for Napper himself the verdict did not change anything he was

left in the same Hospital under heavy guard most likely he will never be released but the news made a lot of noise all over Britain the police suffered it the most fixating on Colin steg and completely ignoring on Colin stag and other serious leads instead the investigation was divided into three separate lines each team of detectives looked for different criminals while behind all the attacks and murders was Napper that same year 2008 stag sued the police department for 706 thousand pounds a record for Britain for

unwarranted criminal prosecutions the Metropolitan Police also issued a public apology to him he subsequently wrote several books about his life experiences in them he described what it was like to be accused of murder stag admitted that for 10 years his life was effectively ruined by journalists and the police after the whole of Britain finally believed in his innocence he decided to spend all the compensation on travel expensive cars and other things that brought him Joy in 2010 a special commission issued a report criticizing

the actions of homicide detectives this document was called a catalog of wrong decisions and mistakes and the reason for this is not only the fact that the murder could not be solved for 16 years the whole point is that if the police had done their job properly they could have arrested Napper before he killed Rachel Samantha and her daughter no disciplinary action followed however all of the detectives involved in the case retired and one of the lead investigators passed away as for Rachel’s son Alex he did not give his

first interview until 2017 25 years after the incident he said that growing up without his mother had been problematic but that he had found the strength to let go and move on shortly before the interview he went to the very place where his mother was murdered and in that moment he was able to finally let go of the heavy weight of the past one can only hope that this story like others like it will serve as a lesson for law enforcement agencies around the world it is too late to speculate about whether or not the police could have

saved Rachel and Samantha but it is never too late to draw conclusions and prevent future crimes take care and thank you for watching