LETTING GO OF RACHEL
The legacy of a tragic murder
For much of 1992, most news passed me by. I just about registered John Major’s unexpected election victory over Neil Kinnock. My focus was on the baby I’d given birth to nine weeks prematurely. But one event was so utterly shocking that it was impossible to ignore. For one thing, it happened right on my doorstep in south London. The family at its centre lived just down the road from us.
Rachel Nickell was a local mother who often took her child to the leafy commons that are a wonderful part of life in this area of London. But on 15 July 1992, the peace of Wimbledon Common, where Rachel, 23, and her toddler son Alex were walking with their dog, was shattered. She was murdered in broad daylight. Alex was thrown into the mud and found later by passers-by. The detail that was seared on to my memory and that of many others was the scene in the moments after the killing: a toddler, clinging to his mother’s lifeless body, calling to her to wake up.
It was an unthinkable, devastating tragedy. For weeks, there was talk of nothing else at every mother and toddler group I attended. We could imagine some of the details only too clearly; others we couldn’t begin to imagine at all. And at the heart of our conversations there was always concern for the little boy, who turned three a few weeks after the tragedy. How, we asked one another, was her young son going to survive?
Twenty five years on, I am sitting opposite a handsome young man with a beard and a broad, warm smile. His clothes – jeans and a checked shirt – are pressed, pristine, and there’s a vaguely hippy air about him, with prayer beads round his neck and a baseball cap on his head. On his wrists are tattoos – ‘duty’ on the right, ‘faith’ on the left (‘Those are the things I think life is about,’ he tells me later) – and a little further up his
right arm is the name of his mother. Rachel.
Alex Hanscombe tells me of the rocky ride he’s been on during some of the years since his mother’s death. However, the young man with me today is calm, centred and confident. A couple of years ago he returned to the scene of the murder for the first time and was surprised by how much he remembered. Now he’s written a memoir, which starts with his mother’s senseless death on that Summer’s day, meandering back over the brief and joyful life he had with both his parents, then describing what happened in the aftermath to him and his father, Andre.
His story, it goes without saying, is at times almost unbearably sad – especially when told in the first person by the child who remembers asking his mum to get up and then, when she failed to respond and he was convinced she was still acting, shouted with all his might: ‘Get up, Mummy!’
Alex, now 27, is four years older than his mother was when she died, and remembers all too clearly the freezeframes of that day. ‘It all happened so quickly,’ he tells me. ‘We were walking, and we both sensed something. We both turned to our right, and we saw a man lurching towards us. I was pushed on the ground and my face dragged across the mud. My mother was beside me.’ He remembers the man washing the knife he’d used to stab Rachel in a stream and then walking quickly away, leaving Alex alone. He called out to her, he says, several times. Then, remarkably given his age, the realisation of what had happened hit him. ‘I suddenly knew that she was gone and she was never coming back.’
In that moment, he says, his life changed irrevocably. ‘The first time someone close to you dies, that’s when you become an adult,’ he tells me. ‘The realisation my mother was gone, I felt deep in my soul.’
He relates the chaos of the hours, days and weeks that followed, as his father struggled to keep him away from the relentless glare of the press. The two of them moved to live in north London with his paternal grandmother, before leaving Britain altogether, fleeing from the intense scrutiny of the press and a killer on the loose. They lived first in France and then in Spain.
At first, Alex couldn’t bear to let his father out of his sight for even a second. Then, over time, with new friends and a new school, he relaxed. But as he grew older, he says now, his relationship with his father became more complicated. ‘I’d always looked up to my father – he was my hero,’ he explains. ‘But he hadn’t been able to protect us, and that made me lose respect for him – even though it wasn’t his fault.’
There were difficulties, too, with Rachel’s parents, and contact broke down when he was about eight years old. ‘There had always been tensions between my father and my mother’s parents,’ he says. Several years ago he exchanged letters with them, but there are no plans to meet. He says he wishes them well.
In his early 20s, Alex travelled to India, where he lived for two years. He credits his time there for giving his life a new direction, and helping to shape the views that have brought him to a place of acceptance. ‘In the West, we believe that if you die young it’s a tragedy. But I don’t think that’s right,’ he tells me. ‘I’ve come to believe life is like a play, and I think we determine for ourselves what role we want to play. So the fact that someone passes away young, that may just have been the role they had to play.’
Looking back, Alex can see events that he believes foreshadowed Rachel’s murder. She was, he remembers, always afraid of being attacked from behind; in his book he describes a dream his mother had described to his father, in which someone whose face she couldn’t see was attacking her with a knife. Alex tells me the story of Birdie, an injured bird he looked after for a few days. When it died, Alex remembers his mum telling him how Birdie didn’t need his body any more, and that he’d gone somewhere else. ‘It was almost as though she was preparing me for what was to come,’ he says.
Rachel’s murder investigation was one of the UK’S most expensive – and also most bungled – ever. Officers quickly became convinced that her killer was a local man, Colin Stagg, and they attempted to trick him into a confession via a honeypot operation. That failed – Stagg was tried and acquitted. Finally, in 2008, convicted sex killer Robert Napper admitted to the crime: he is now in Broadmoor.
But Alex’s belief that everything happens for a reason has given him a remarkable capacity for forgiveness. He has, he says, forgiven the man whose face he cannot remember, whose crime stole both his mother and his childhood. ‘Somehow,’ he says, ‘I was always able to understand how someone could be capable of doing something like that.’ He pauses. ‘Although it was a frenzied attack, the strange thing was that there was also a sense of peace. I remember a feeling that day of someone leaving their body. I think that’s why I didn’t realise straight away what had happened, because, the thing was, at the heart of it was something very peaceful.’
Saying goodbye to Alex, it’s impossible not to think how proud Rachel would be of him and how sad it is that she missed out on so much. But Alex, it is clear, has done the best thing anyone in his situation could possibly do – and the key to it is in the title of his book, Letting Go.
His whole life has been a process of release from the moment that came to define him, but which he was determined would never imprison him. ‘The message of the book is about moving from darkness to light,’ he explains. ‘But the light isn’t simply waiting at the end of the tunnel – it comes from somewhere inside ourselves.’
The message is about moving from darkness to light