Recreated for TV: agony of detective used as honeytrap to frame Colin Stagg for murder of Rachel Nickell
HER face etched with despair, the anguished officer stumbles into the sea as the burden of her role in the investigation into the killing of Rachel Nickell bears down on her.
These exclusive photographs were captured on the set of a forthcoming Channel 4 drama that will detail how an undercover officer – known only by the codename Lizzie James – befriended the main suspect to entice him into a ‘confession’.
For five months, Lizzie, played by Irish actress Niamh Algar, 28, called and wrote to the innocent loner Colin Stagg, even dangling the possibility of sex as bait.
There was never any evidence linking Mr Stagg to the murder of Ms Nickell, who was stabbed 49 times in front of her young son on Wimbledon Common in July 1992. Yet he was still charged and spent a year on remand before the case collapsed in 1994 when a judge ruled the police evidence inadmissible and described the honeytrap operation as ‘reprehensible’.
These scenes for My Name Is Lizzie were filmed at Leysdown Beach in Kent. In them, Lizzie collapses in tears before wandering fully clothed into the sea.
Harry Treadway portrays Detective Inspector Keith Pedder, who led the investigation, and Eddie Marsen is forensic psychologist Paul Britton.
While it is unclear at what point in the inquiry these scenes take place, Lizzie did pay a heavy price for her involvement. In 1998, she took early retirement aged 33, and three years later was awarded £125,000 compensation after claiming the Met failed to adequately support her. In 2008, Robert Napper was finally convicted of the manslaughter of Ms Nickell, 23.
Channel 4 says the script draws on previously unheard audio, video and written material from the bungled inquiry and the drama will ‘ examine the complicated and toxic sexual politics of the early 1990s and the police’s obsession with the wrong man’.