10YRS ON FROM
Cradling her giggling baby boy in her lap in this previously unseen snap, Rachel Nickell must have been excited for her future. The young mum had given birth to healthy tot Alex just six months earlier, and was enjoying the start of family life in her South London home with boyfriend, Andre Hanscombe.
But less than three years later, in a crime that horrified the nation and led to one of the most controversial investigations in Metropolitan Police history, Rachel’s future was snatched away.
On the morning of July 15, 1992, she was sexually assaulted and stabbed 49 times while walking with Alex and their rescue dog, Molly, through Wimbledon Common. What followed only intensified the grief, anger and torment for Andre, who was forced to raise his toddler son – the only witness to an unthinkable crime – alone. For 16 years, the pair endured more and more pain instead of the justice they rightly deserved.
First, police lured loner Colin Stagg, who frequented the common, into a honeytrap after becoming convinced he was the killer.
While Stagg spent a year in jail for a crime he did not commit, Rachel’s real killer, Robert Napper, went unnoticed, and was free to slaughter another young mother and her child.
Ten years ago this month, Andre sat in court as Napper – who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia – finally confessed to the killing, and was sentenced to be held in Broadmoor highsecurity psychiatric hospital, in Berkshire, indefinitely.
Incredibly, Andre, 55, can now calmly say he forgives Napper, and even seems to show some sympathy for him. He says: “There is forgiveness, of course.
“He was a poor, mistreated child – he was in care and foster homes. That allows you to feel some kind of compassion.”
Alex adds. “Forgiveness for us is that if you don’t forgive the person who caused you harm, then you become that person in time.”
I meet Andre and Alex, now 29, for a rare joint father-and-son interview, in a hotel bar in Barcelona, where they have lived for two years, after initially moving to France following Rachel’s death. Robert Napper
Looking back on that day in the Old Bailey a decade ago, when he faced his girlfriend’s killer in court, Andre says he doesn’t feel any rage. “It was a surreal experience, it was extremely intense,” Andre remembers.
“He didn’t look at me – he was probably heavily medicated. You could see that this was very dysfunctional and distressed person. I always knew that anyone who could commit an act like this was an extremely troubled person.
“It’s a process. We were victims of an attack, we were victims of a police failure. But it gets to the stage where you think, ‘Am I going to do this forever?’ We didn’t want to be victims.”
Maybe this merciful attitude comes from Andre and Alex having already exhausted their anger on the wrong man. In September 1994, Stagg was VICTIMS Samantha Bisset and Jazmine
formally cleared and awarded £750,000 in compensation for the bungled police operation. The case then lay cold until 2004, when advancements in DNA techniques led police to Napper, who confessed to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
He was already in Broadmoor for the 1993 murders of model Samantha Bisset and four-year-old daughter Jazmine.
Andre then wrote Stagg a letter, apologising for thinking he had killed Rachel. “I was a lot more angry with Colin Stagg, it was a lot more raw then,” he explains.
Like so many father-son relationships, Andre and Alex have had their ups and downs. Alex moved back to London to study music but eventually returned to Barcelona to live with his father, and the pair spent four years travelling together in Egypt, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India, where Alex studied yoga.
Alex’s deeply spiritual side has clearly