The moment I saw my mum murdered on Wimbledon Common
Alex Hanscombe’s harrowing account of the killing that shocked Britain
WHEN young mother Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her toddler son on Wimbledon Common in 1992, the brutal murder shocked the nation. A bungled police investigation led to the wrong man, Colin Stagg, being arrested and charged. His trial collapsed – and it took 16 years before the true killer, Robert Napper, was finally brought to justice. Here, as the 25th anniversary of his mother’s death approaches, her son Alex, now 27 and the only witness to the crime, talks for the first time of the day that changed his life for ever.
GET UP, Mummy!’ She didn’t respond. ‘Get up, Mummy!’ I said louder. Why didn’t she move or answer? ‘Get up, Mummy!’ I shouted with all my strength.
The moment I watched my mother’s soul leave her body is one I will never forget. Even today, almost 25 years later, I can still see the film running inside my mind.
I WAS less than a month away from my third birthday. In our flat in Balham, South London, my father Andre bent down to kiss me before he left for work as a motorcycle dispatch rider. ‘See you later, Alex. Have fun!’ he said, before hugging my mother and kissing her goodbye.
My mother and I spent every day together. She was 23 and truly beautiful – tall and athletic with long, golden hair and a smile that lit up her face. When I remember her, though, it’s not in details like these. Instead I recall the feeling of being loved and of loving in return.
Fast forward and we are walking on Wimbledon Common, which my parents felt was safer than our local park. The midsummer sun warmed our skin while our labrador-greyhound cross Molly ran in circles around us.
As my mother and I carried on down a path, it was dark but I could see blue sky through the leaves. All of a sudden we both turned our heads to the right as a man with a black bag over his shoulder came lurching out of the undergrowth.
There was no time to respond. I was grabbed and thrown to the ground and my face forced into the mud. Seconds later my mother collapsed next to me. There were no screams. Everything was so silent that for years to come the memories of those moments would play out like an old film, without sound.
I saw the stranger’s blank face, the clothes he wore and the knife he took from his bag. I picked myself up from the ground as fast as I could. I felt unsteady and my face was hurting. I caught sight of the man a few yards away, kneeling to wash his hands in the stream. A moment later he rose and headed rapidly off through the trees, his black bag still over his shoulder.
I looked down at my mother lying on the ground beside me. She looked peaceful, as if pretending to be asleep, like in one of our imaginary games, ready to wake up at any moment and gaze adoringly into my eyes.
I noticed a piece of paper on the ground nearby, which had fallen from her pocket, and reached down to pick it up, holding it out to her. In a split second, life seemed to come to a standstill. She was gone.
I was very young, yet at that moment I knew she was never coming back. My heart was completely broken.
She was never going to get up and play with me again. I would never look into her loving eyes and see her adoring smile again.
I would never hear her soft voice again, telling me how much she loved me.
I reached down and placed the piece of paper – a receipt from a cash machine, I later learned – delicately on her forehead so it would be with her wherever she was.
Around me, the woodland was silent. I ran out of the woods up on to the grassy slope from which we had come. Strangers ran towards me. They must have noticed my battered face and the blood splattered across my clothes. They were kind and somehow I knew I could trust them. But it felt inside like I was floating somewhere far away.
I heard the sirens wailing in the background. I heard people talking to me, but the words no longer registered. In the distance the first flashing blue lights of police cars appeared and when the ambulance arrived I was rushed inside, sedated by doctors and drifted off into a deep sleep.
How much time passed I don’t know. But eventually one of the hospital nurses led me by the hand to where my father stood waiting. He lifted me into his arms and gave me a crushing hug. I gazed intensely into his eyes. They were red and raw and tears were running down his cheeks.
‘There’s been a terrible accident,’ he began, his voice breaking as he struggled to find the words. ‘Mummy has been killed and she’s not coming back...’
MY PARENTS’ paths had first crossed in 1988 at a water park where my mother, then 19, was working as a lifeguard while studying English literature at university, and my father at 25 was a semiprofessional tennis player.
I made my way into the world just after 7am on August 11, 1989. Despite the regular strains that all households suffer, life was happy, and yet for my mother there seemed at times to be a strange sense of foreboding.
On more than one occasion she had asked my father to promise that, if anything ever happened to her, he would find someone else. ‘I’m afraid of being attacked from behind,’ she once told him. On another occasion, she woke in the middle of the night. In her dream someone whose face she couldn’t see was attacking her from behind with a knife.
Now her deepest fears had come true – and I was the only witness.
On the first night without my mother the nightmares began. I sounded like a dying animal. I was trapped inside a horrifying nightmare and my father couldn’t snap me out of it.
My father had once read an arti-
‘I saw his face… and the knife taken from his bag’