Serial Killer Documentary - Robert Napper

Serial Killer Documentary - Robert Napper

Speaker 1: 15th July 1992, London, England. On a summer morning, 23-year-old

Rachel Nickell was walking her dog Molly across Wimbledon Common

with her two-year-old son Alex.

Speaker 2: What started off as such a normal day had become

an incredible human tragedy.

Speaker 1: A man appeared from the undergrowth, stabbing Rachel nearly 50 times,

then sexually assaulting her.

Speaker 3: It's an act of the most unspeakable violence.

Speaker 4: He's doing it to desecrate her body and he's doing

it in front of her son.

Speaker 3: He takes the breath away.

Speaker 1: Rachel's young son, Alex, was left alone, clinging to his

mother's blood-soaked body.

Speaker 5: The level of violence used is absolutely horrific and it's

something that really did shock the nation to the core.

Speaker 1: The depraved killer was 26-year-old Robert Knapper. 16 months later,

he would strike again, killing a 4-year-old child, Jasmine Bissett,

and her 27-year-old mother, Samantha, who was brutally dismembered.

Speaker 6: Leaving a woman posed in a way that robbed her

of dignity, that is beyond simply wanting rid of somebody.

Speaker 3: That is truly evil.

Speaker 1: Robert Knapper was a rapist who sadistically attacked mothers in

front of their children. He brutally killed two women, then

desecrated their bodies, making Robert Knapper one of the world's

most evil killers. When Rachel Nickell's murder hit the news,

the public were appalled. Her toddler Alex was found alone

by a passer-by pleading with his dead mother to get

up mummy.

Speaker 3: This was the killing of.

Speaker 4: A young woman in front of her infant son, broad daylight,

a sunny day in July, on Wimbledon Common, not.

Speaker 3: Far from the tennis.

Speaker 4: I mean, this is desecration of everything that people in

Britain hold dear.

Speaker 3: It literally hypnotised the nation.

Speaker 5: This was a murder that really did shock because it's

that stranger violence that when it happens, it makes us

all question our own daily activities. It makes us think

about our own level of risk. And while somebody is

out there who is preying on strangers, everybody has something

to fear.

Speaker 1: In the desperate hunt to find Rachel's murderer, police became

fixated on an innocent man called Colin Stagg. Meanwhile, the

real killer, Robert Knapper, slipped under their radar. Just over

a year later, he brutally killed and sexually assaulted Samantha

Bissett and her four-year-old daughter, Jasmine. Forensic psychologist Lawrence Allison

was part of Colin Stagg's defence council.

Speaker 2: A real human tragedy in the sense that whilst all

the attention was being allocated to Stag, right on the

very doorstep of this was another very similar offence. A

horrific mutilation attack on a young woman.

Speaker 7: The scene was something out of Dante's Inferno. Her body

was cut completely open. The ribcage had been taken out.

The legs had been severed at the knees. The internal

organs had been torn. pulled about and repeatedly stabbed. It

was beyond belief.

Speaker 1: Fingerprints left at the scene identified Robert Napper as the

depraved killer, but it wasn't until a cold case review

of Rachel Nickell's murder that DNA evidence finally led to

Napper's conviction in 2008 for one of Britain's most notorious crimes.

Speaker 4: There is something about Napper that, still to this day

sends a shiver down my spine.

Speaker 3: In that sense, he is a satanic figure.

Speaker 1: This killer's story began on the 25th of February 1966.

Robert Clive Knapper was born in Erith, south-east London, and

grew up on the nearby Abbey Wood estate. He was

the eldest of four, with two brothers and a sister.

Speaker 7: His parents had a violent relationship. His mother was terrified

of the father, and this so upset the children that

they were all subjected to some counselling through children's psychiatrists.

The other children seemed to have got over it quite well,

but Robert Knapper continued to display behaviour which was unusual

for a child of his age.

Speaker 4: At one point, he turned to his father and said,''

They think I'm mad.'' His father thought it was a joke.

But the awful truth, the reality, is that Knapper probably realized,

even at a very young age, that he had the

capacity for something quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1: At the age of 12, his parents divorced and his

father left the home. Young Knapper found it difficult making

friends and preferred to spend time on his own. Eventually,

he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Speaker 2: Asperger's syndrome we know is a social disorder, very difficult

to make connections with people. He was very isolated at school,

very remote figure, and that seems to have carried forward

all the way through his life.

Speaker 1: As Napper entered adolescence, his isolation continued. The young loner

was mercilessly bullied at secondary school.

Speaker 4: He was despised at school, there's no question about that.

People wouldn't play with him, they wouldn't sit with him.

He was the archetypal outsider.

Speaker 8: Knapper was teased and bullied a lot in school, which

is always devastating for people. These types of things that

go on in early childhood are very impactful for how

somebody develops later.

Speaker 7: On in life.

Speaker 9: He spent quite a lot of time in and out

of foster care.

Speaker 5: And what tends to happen when children come from those

kind of backgrounds is that they develop this very defensive

attitude and outlook. Nobody is going to be there to

look out for me, so I have to retaliate first.

Speaker 9: I have to always be on the attack.

Speaker 1: Young Knapper's anger at the world escalated following a trauma

he suffered at the age of 12. He was sexually

assaulted by a family friend on a camping holiday.

Speaker 3: Now, that may have given him a distorted view of sexuality.

Speaker 4: It may have triggered some kind of reaction in him

that identified all sex as somehow abusive. It's possible he

had a completely distorted vision of women.

Speaker 1: As Knapper progressed through his teenage years, the angry victim

of abuse emerged as the abuser.

Speaker 2: There were early indications of violence towards his siblings. I

believe that he discharged an air gun at the face

of one of his siblings.

Speaker 3: It's pretty clear that he was a bully.

Speaker 4: He bullied his brothers and he spied on his sister.

Speaker 3: He was a voyeur. He started peeping at his own

sister and then emerged from that.

Speaker 4: And that aspect of voyeurism plus a very uncomfortable adolescence

led to Napa becoming effectively a time bomb.

Speaker 1: The troubled Napa left school at 16 and took a

job at a local warehouse. Soon he was stalking the

streets of southeast London, spying on women he saw at

home alone.

Speaker 3: This was a man who, as he emerged into adulthood,

was literally a volcano.

Speaker 1: One day, his peeping-tom behavior focused on a house next

to Wynne's Common and turned into something more sinister.

Speaker 4: In August 1989, a woman was upstairs drying her hair,

and her two children were downstairs. The napper broke into

the house through the rear door, which they'd left open.

Speaker 7: He'd walked past two children who were having breakfast at

the table, went upstairs, raped his victim, and then said

to her, you should keep your door locked, walked back downstairs,

passed the children, out, back over onto the common. He

blamed the victim.

Speaker 8: He never should have left the door open. Do you

know how many times I've heard that from offenders over

the years? They blame the victim, and it's a way

to rationalize, well, they're not fully responsible. You hear time

and time again.

Speaker 1: But Knapper couldn't keep his dark secret. A few months later,

he confessed to his mother.

Speaker 7: His mother was so concerned, she reported it to Plumstead

Police Station. She was told... at the time, that a

rape hadn't happened on Plumstead Common.

Speaker 1: The police could find no trace of the rape in

their records, so Knapper's confession was never followed up. But

his mother was so concerned about her son's mental state

that she sent him back to a psychiatrist.

Speaker 7: She certainly was worried enough to refer him again to

the Maudsley Hospital for further treatment, which he did go

back to. but discharged himself after a short period of

analysis and counseling.

Speaker 1: As Knapper's mental health deteriorated, his mother cut off contact.

He continued his stalking behavior and marked his hunting grounds

on an A to Z, His favourite was the green

chain network of footpaths that winds its way through parkland

across south-east London.

Speaker 3: This is a sexual predator on the loose.

Speaker 4: In the first months of 1992, he commits a series

of attacks, attacking women chillingly, almost caressing his victims with

a knife blade. He's a man out of control and

absolutely consumed by sexual lust. not for a relationship, but

simply for the power. By March, he'd made two attempted rapes.

Speaker 8: He really didn't penetrate the victim sexually because he was

impotent at the crime scene in.

Speaker 7: Almost all of the cases.

Speaker 8: What does that mean? The violence takes the place of it.

Speaker 5: He was becoming, I think, increasingly frustrated, feelings of rage,

and that violence was bubbling beneath the surface.

Speaker 1: His attacks became progressively more violent. He changed his targets,

aiming for a different type of victim.

Speaker 4: His fantasies rotated around young mothers with young children. And

in May 1992, he ties a ligature around a 22-year-old.

As she pushes her baby daughter in a buggy, he

pulls her into the undergrowth, strips her, rapes her, beats her.

She begs for her life and he runs off.

Speaker 7: He viciously assaulted her. When she arrived at a relative's house,

she wasn't recognized initially. She was so badly injured.

Speaker 8: The child was absolutely terrorized and that was just another

level of sadistic gratification for Knapper.

Speaker 1: But soon, sexual assaults and beatings wouldn't be enough to

satisfy the depraved urges of the mentally unstable Robert Knapper. Soon,

he'd feel the need to carry out the ultimate of

his sadistic fantasies, murder. By now, police had linked these

sexual attacks and in June established Operation Eccleston to investigate

the so-called Green Chain Rapist. But Robert Knapper remained at large,

and on the morning of the 15th of July 1992,

he set his sights on another young mother walking with

her child on Wimbledon Common. 23-year-old ex-model Rachel Nickell The

events that followed would make an indelible mark on the nation.

Speaker 2: So this was any normal day in July. It was

a nice sunny day. Rachel's walking with her son and

their dog across the common for what should have been

the most normal walk in the world.

Speaker 5: This is a place where she went often. It was

somewhere she felt safe, she felt secure. And it's quite

likely that Napa had been stalking Rachel for some time.

Speaker 4: Napa was lurking in the undergrowth nearby. He was clearly

looking for a victim. But this time, it wasn't so

much the sexual urge, it was the fantasy of killing

a woman that had come into its fullest.

Speaker 1: Napa waited until Rachel and her young son, Alex, came

close and then attacked.

Speaker 2: He prodded her in the back with a knife to

move her to a sort of cop's slightly more secluded area,

forced her to kneel down and attacked her. He slit

her throat and then stabbed her nearly 50 times in

front of her son, a really horrific, disturbing offense.

Speaker 7: She was stabbed in the abdomen many times after she

had obviously been killed. She was sexually assaulted and then

left in the company of her child whilst he made

good his escape.

Speaker 1: A witness saw Knapper washing Rachel's blood off his hands

in a nearby stream.

Speaker 3: It was an act of such callousness and such bravura.

He didn't run.

Speaker 4: He walked calmly away from this obscenity that he'd committed

without apparently a moment's hesitation or looking back.

Speaker 3: He just calmly walked away.

Speaker 1: Two-year-old Alex was left alone holding his mother's dead body

until an elderly walker found him amidst the horrific scene.

Speaker 9: Absolutely heartbreaking stuff.

Speaker 5: He's thinking that she's asleep or she's unconscious, and she's

basically lying there, and he's saying, wake up, Mommy. You know,

this is really horrific. He wouldn't really know how to

make sense of this.

Speaker 1: Soon, the news spread of Rachel's death. Stories about the

abhorrent crime continually hit the headlines in the weeks that followed.

Speaker 4: It absolutely captured the public imagination. Unprovoked attack on a

young woman and her child. in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common,

and the stories of the boy saying, wake up, mummy,

get up, mummy, I mean, touched the heartstrings of the nation.

It occupied everyone's mind.

Speaker 10: I think there was a huge amount of pressure on

the police to solve the crime, and the difficulty was

that the killer had actually left no forensic clue that

was capable of being detected at the scene at all,

and the police really had absolutely nothing to go on.

Speaker 1: Pressure to solve the case was mounting. In an effort

to determine the type of individual most likely to be

Rachel's killer, the Metropolitan Police brought in a psychological profiler.

Speaker 2: Between the police and the profiler, they constructed a profile

of the offender, a guy in his late 20s, early 30s,

an individual that didn't have very successful relationships with women,

that may well live on his own and was interested

in strange things such as Satanism and so on.

Speaker 1: An e-fit photograph was constructed based on the suspect seen

washing his hands, and this was sent out across the

national media. 30-year-old local man Colin Stagg was named in

several phone calls to the police.

Speaker 2: Colin lived within about two miles of the offence. He

was also picked out in an identity parade and subsequently

was interviewed by the police.

Speaker 3: Police visited his flat.

Speaker 2: They felt that the flat was odd, partly because Colin

Stagg had one of the rooms painted black and on

some of the walls there were some seemingly strange chalk drawings,

which we now know were part of the Wiccan religion

but were interpreted in more sinister ways by the police

at the time.

Speaker 7: They had no real evidence apart from identification evidence of

one witness who put him on the common at the time.

So they made a decision to try and draw that

evidence from him by introducing an undercover police officer to

get him to confess to the murder. It was all

sanctioned at the very highest level at New Scotland Yard.

Speaker 1: Under Operation Edsel, a young blonde female detective was sent

undercover using the pseudonym of Lizzie James. In a so-called

honey trap operation, she approached Colin Stagg through a dating

section in the local newspaper.

Speaker 2: Very risky, very unusual operation. And the idea, essentially, was

to befriend Stagg through a series of letters, through a

Lonely Hearts column.

Speaker 3: And the intention of the.

Speaker 2: Undercover operation was to establish whether Stagg would know something

about the offence that only the offender would know. And secondly,

would he, in his dealings with Lizzie James, show any

of the sexual fantasies or behaviours that the profiler had

predicted that this sort of offender would be interested in.

Speaker 1: The police now seem fixated on proving Colin Stagg's guilt

using the relatively new trend in criminal investigation, psychological profiling.

Speaker 8: In any case where profiling becomes prominent in an investigation,

you're headed for disaster. Profiling behavior can be useful, but

only as an add-on. It's just a way to give

the police another way to look at things. Profiling should never,

ever take the place of time-tested investigative techniques.

Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Rachel's real killer, Robert Knapper, was still on the loose.

Speaker 2: So obviously part of the problem with the fixation on

Colin Stagg at the time was that Napa must have

been thinking, wow, this is fantastic. You know, all the

heat's off me. No one's looking at me. So I

suspect that this emboldened Napa to go on.

Speaker 1: At the end of August 1992, Napa did, however, come

onto the police radar, but this was under Operation Eccleston,

the team investigating his earlier rapes along the Green Chain Walk.

After publicising an e-fit of the suspected rapist, Napa's name

had been put forward by two of his neighbours.

Speaker 4: Napa is invited to the police station and asked to

give a blood sample.

Speaker 3: He doesn't turn up. He's invited again. He doesn't turn

up again.

Speaker 4: There are countless occasions in which Napa is identified as

a possible suspect.

Speaker 3: He slips through the net.

Speaker 1: Eventually, in late October, the police wrongly concluded that Napa

wasn't their man.

Speaker 7: The description given by all of the victims, except one,

was that the attacker was approximately 5 foot 10 inches tall.

So a policy decision was made that anyone below five

foot six and over six foot would be eliminated from

the inquiry. He was described as being over six foot one.

So on that and that alone, he was eliminated from

the inquiry.

Speaker 1: Now Robert Knapper had escaped the police's watchful eye, he

was free to roam the streets unhindered once again. Using

his trusty A-Z map, he continued to stalk southeast London,

marking places he'd spotted more potential victims.

Speaker 2: So it's very common to engage in what we call

behavioral tryouts. So if they're going to attack a particular victim,

they won't suddenly go out one day and make that attack.

They will stalk, track, observe, and all the indications are

with Napa that he was doing that. He would go

for walks, he would select victims, heaping tom behavior, looking

through windows, selecting victims, targeting specific houses, was all very

significant in Napa's criminal repertoire.

Speaker 1: In July 1993, Napa's name came onto the police radar

once again when he was reported prowling and spying on

a house near Plumstead Common. The police officer who investigated

reported him as a potential rapist. Once again, no further

action was taken. Now Napa was stalking homes around one

of his favourite haunts, Wynne's Common.

Speaker 3: He was looking for his next victims.

Speaker 4: Napa is hiding in the bushes again and sees a

27-year-old woman called Samantha Bissett, who has a daughter, Jasmine. Well,

one version of it is that he sees Samantha making

love with her boyfriend through the window and is so

aroused by this.

Speaker 2: One night, Samantha Bissett said to her then partner, I've

seen someone at our window, looking in at the window.

We now know that that was Robert Knapper. So again,

the modus operandi was exactly the same, picking on a victim,

stalking the victim, ruminating through what he was going to

do to that victim.

Speaker 1: On the evening of the 3rd of November, Knapper saw

that Samantha was alone in her flat. Her 4-year-old daughter, Jasmine,

was asleep in her bedroom. Knapper climbed onto the balcony

and broke in through the window. He startled Samantha in

her hallway.

Speaker 3: He attacks Samantha with a knife.

Speaker 4: He stabs her eight times, one blow so severe that

it snaps her spinal cord. It is yet further example

of Napa's grotesque depravity, but it doesn't even end there.

Speaker 1: The killer turned his mind to Samantha's sleeping daughter.

Speaker 4: He proceeds to sexually assault the four-year-old daughter Jasmine and

suffocates her in her bedroom with her duvet and leaves

her body on the bed surrounded by her toys.

Speaker 5: If we look at the method that Napper used to

kill Jasmine, after he'd sexually assaulted her, he suffocated her.

So he's using a different method to the method he

used on her mother. And I think this is potentially

a case of him mixing up his offending because offenders

get bored, they like to vary it, they like to

keep things interesting.

Speaker 1: But Napa's grotesque fantasies were not complete. He then dragged

Mother Samantha's body into the lounge.

Speaker 3: Napa eviscerates Samantha's body.

Speaker 4: He cuts her from the chest to the crotch, peels

back her skin, cracks the ribs... literally eviscerates this innocent

young woman's body in a horrifying, horrible attack.

Speaker 1: After pulling away her ribs, Napa repeatedly stabbed Samantha's internal organs.

Speaker 6: He mutilates her body. He actually takes a part of

the skin from her abdominal wall, presumably as some sort

of trophy. There are deep cuts in her legs, almost

as if he's attempting to dismember her. This is an

escalation of his behavior. Once he has finished with the mutilation,

he poses Samantha in a very sexually provocative pose.

Speaker 5: He positioned her body on a cushion and her body

was left in the same position as it was when

she had sex with her boyfriend. Now that basically is

saying that this woman is sexually available. He is trying

to create a narrative here. He's trying to say that

she deserved this. And that really does tell us about

his misogyny.

Speaker 8: Posing a victim following a murder of a sexual nature

is very, very common. They pose the victim because killing

alone is not psychosexually sufficient. And so they go beyond

killing to satisfy themselves It's sexually stimulating. It's a fusion

of sex and aggression so that the aggressive act itself

is eroticized.

Speaker 1: Robert Knapper had now gained the status of a serial killer.

Treasuring the part of Samantha's abdomen that he'd removed for safekeeping,

the triple murderer left the horrific scene. Samantha's boyfriend made

the tragic discovery the next morning.

Speaker 7: He entered the flat. and found Samantha's body in the

living room. At first, he thought it was some sort

of macabre joke because the body was destroyed, and he

thought it was some form of mannequin, and he ran

back to the kitchen and called the police.

Speaker 1: Former Detective Sergeant Alan Jackerman was one of the first

to arrive at Samantha's flat.

Speaker 7: In all my years of service, I've never seen anything

so dreadful and so horrific. From the state that the

body was in the way that she'd been attacked and dismembered.

This was a crime way, way beyond normality, way out

of the ordinary.

Speaker 1: One member of the forensic team investigating at the scene

was so traumatized they had to take two years' sick leave.

The way Samantha's daughter Jasmine had been left by the

killer was also deeply troubling for investigators.

Speaker 7: Jasmine had been attacked in her cot, her body, had

been put back over, and she had the appearance of

being a child asleep, which was somehow more disturbing than

seeing what was left of her mother.

Speaker 1: Napa had seemingly left little in the way of evidence

except a partial footprint in blood. Every single fingerprint that

the police found in Samantha's flat was eliminated. including those

belonging to little Jasmine's friends who'd recently visited for her

fourth birthday party.

Speaker 7: There wasn't a good suspect coming into the frame. We

went six months down the line and we all knew

that this wasn't a one-off killing, so we concentrated our

minds to try and find out who was responsible for this.

In addition to that, of course, it had no... oxygen

of publicity from the media because it was a single

mother whom the press erroneously believed was on the edges

of prostitution. So it didn't get much past the second

page of the New Shopper.

Speaker 5: When we're comparing the media coverage, Rachel Nickell's murder received

an awful lot more attention than.

Speaker 9: Samantha and Jasmine Bissett.

Speaker 5: And you're making judgements about this victim as to how

worthy they are of attention.

Speaker 9: And what we've got here is.

Speaker 5: Judgments being made about appropriate femininity and appropriate motherhood. So

Rachel was in a secure long-term relationship with her partner,

Samantha's daughter, her father didn't live with the family.

Speaker 9: So I think all of those kind of.

Speaker 5: New right neoliberal values about what a family should look

like are coming out here in the media's choice to

emphasize the Nickell case over the Bissett case.

Speaker 1: With few leads to go on, the team investigating Samantha

and Jasmine's murders was wound down to just five officers.

Desperate for a breakthrough, in May 1994, the senior investigating

officer took a punt and asked for the fingerprints found

at the scene to be re-examined.

Speaker 7: He insisted that it was done, and then, within a

few days, sheepishly, the fingerprint officer returned to say that

they had made a mistake. It transpired that three fingerprint

sets within the flat did not come from the victim.

They came from some unknown person. When they were sent

back for analysis, they came back as Robert Knapper, a

man who had not featured in our inquiry at all.

Speaker 1: At last, the police had Robert Knapper in their sights

when they delved into his history, they discovered he had

a criminal record.

Speaker 7: We found that he had this firearm offence and in

the property store was still some of the property appertaining

to that offence. One of the items was an A

to Z book, which, when we looked at it, had

lots of roots, plans, which coincided with our murder and,

more specifically, with the Green Chain rape offences. Also clearly

marked out was the Isabella plantation, very close to Wimbledon Common,

and that immediately rang bells with Rachel McKell.

Speaker 1: When Detective Sergeant Jackerman found Napper's mugshot on police file,

they made another startling discovery.

Speaker 7: One of the indexers took one look at the photograph.

She had worked on the green chain rape inquiry and

she said, that is the green chain rapist. So I

ran out to the front office and took down from

the wall the poster asking for information on the green

chain rapist, which had a photo fit on it. and

we compared the photographs, and they were very, very similar.

Speaker 1: Having possibly connected Knapper to further crimes as well as

the Bissett murders, Detective Jackerman and his colleagues put the

suspected killer under surveillance.

Speaker 7: The surveillance team had followed him, and he was carrying

out some really strange behaviour, going on long walks on

his own, looking at... camping equipment, firearm magazines, buying pornographic magazines.

So it was felt, as it was a bank holiday weekend,

we couldn't take the risk that he might go out

and kill somebody. The net was.

Speaker 1: Now closing in on triple murderer Robert Knapper. On 21st May,

detectives went to his Plumstead flat to make an arrest.

Speaker 7: He went to work, like clockwork, every morning at 7am.

We stood outside well before 7am, he didn't appear. So

we were starting to get worried then that perhaps he

wasn't in there.

Speaker 1: It turned out that Knapper had been fired from his

job the previous day and was still in bed. He

was startled when the police knocked at his door.

Speaker 7: He was totally shocked and he was immediately handcuffed, told

why he was under arrest. and a search was subsequently made,

and another A-Z found knives and lots of incriminating evidence.

Speaker 1: Police had now found a second A-Z belonging to Napa

that showed markings next to Samantha Bissett's home. In his flat,

detectives also discovered a receipt for a pair of size

9 Adidas trainers, a bloodied footprint from exactly the same

shoe had been found at the murder scene.

Speaker 7: We were able to take his DNA. The DNA, no

surprise to us, matched that of the green chain rapist.

So he was then in the frame for two rapes

and two attempted rapes, plus our two murders.

Speaker 1: In July, Napa was charged and held on remand in prison,

but there still wasn't a link with the first murder

of 23-year-old Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common.

Speaker 3: Two years earlier.

Speaker 7: However.

Speaker 1: Detective Jackerman was convinced he was Rachel's killer.

Speaker 7: We went to the Wimbledon inquiry and put Knapper up

as a suspect for the Rachel McHale murder, by which

time they had in their frame their suspect, Colin Stagg.

Despite our bringing this new suspect into the frame, he

was never, ever considered.

Speaker 1: This innocent man, Colin Stagg, was being held in custody

for Rachel's killing. Barrister William Clegg was working on his

defence for the forthcoming trial.

Speaker 10: I always thought he was a very unlikely killer because

of his personality, but it wasn't until I really read

the papers it became obvious to me that there was

not a shred of evidence against him.

Speaker 1: The police, however, believe their honey trap operation proved Colin

Stagg was Rachel's killer based on exchanges he'd had with

their undercover female operative, Lizzie James. Criminal psychologist Lawrence Allison

examined this evidence for Colin Stagg's defense team and was

concerned by what he found.

Speaker 2: He said that in one of the meetings that he

had with Lizzie James, he almost dropped his chips. in

talking to her because what she was asking him for

was so bizarre and off the wall. And of course,

Stagg starts writing fantasies that go down that line, not

because he has them, but because he wants to please

a person that's offering him sex.

Speaker 7: This was turned gradually into the attack on Wynwood and Common,

and he was encouraged to admit to having committed the murder,

but he never ever did.

Speaker 1: When it finally came to a pre-committal hearing on the

14th of September, the judge threw out the case against

Colin Stagg.

Speaker 2: Colin tragically spent 13 months in custody awaiting trial, but

it never went to full trial, and Lord Chief Justice

Ognall described it as deceptive conduct of the grossest kind.

Speaker 3: The undercover operation, quite rightly, was thrown out.

Speaker 4: The judge recognised that there was never any evidence against me,

no forensic evidence, no confession evidence, nothing at all.

Speaker 1: Colin Stagg was eventually awarded over £ 700, 000 in damages by

the Metropolitan Police and given a formal apology. Five days

after his acquittal, a review of the Rachel Nickell murder

investigation was launched.

Speaker 4: Gradually, at that point, the recognition is that perhaps there

is a link between Rachel Nickell's killing and Samantha Bissett's killing.

Speaker 7: Gradually, the two.

Speaker 4: Forces coalesce so that it becomes clear that Napa could

well have been responsible for both killings.

Speaker 1: Napa was interviewed by the review team about Rachel's killing,

but as the police still had no evidence linking him

to the scene, this.

Speaker 3: Led to a dead end.

Speaker 1: Nearly a year later, though, in October 1995, Robert Knapper's

trial date was set for the murders of Samantha and

Jasmine Bissett and for one count of rape and two

counts of attempted rape for his Green Chain Walk attacks.

Barrister William Clegg was defending him.

Speaker 10: I'd met Robert Knapper at Broadmoor Mental Hospital, where he

was on remand awaiting his trial. It was soon fairly

obvious to me that he was suffering from serious delusions.

He firmly believed members of the royal family were visiting

him in Broadmoor.

Speaker 3: He was an extremely ill man.

Speaker 1: Despite being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, an assessment by

four different psychiatrists concluded Knapper was fit to stand. The

trial for the murders of Samantha and Jasmine Bissett began

at the Old Bailey on 9th October.

Speaker 7: We were on the edges of our seats as we

sat outside number one court waiting for the trial to

begin when all of a sudden the commotion and everybody

started running out of the court and the word goes

around that he's pleaded to manslaughter through diminished responsibility. There's

a mixed feeling because manslaughter is not a conviction of murder. However,

under the circumstances, it was obvious that he was guilty

mentally very, very ill. And it was an omission of

sorts and a conviction.

Speaker 5: I think what can tend to happen is that the

assumption can be made that the offender isn't responsible for

what they've done. But he actually was in this case.

He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what

he was doing was wrong and he chose.

Speaker 9: To do it anyway.

Speaker 1: Napa was sentenced to life in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Berkshire.

Speaker 10: I think the sentence was inevitable. The best place for

him was a special hospital, and it was important for

everybody that he remain there.

Speaker 3: But D.S.

Speaker 1: Jackerman wasn't finished with Robert Napper. He was still convinced

Napper was also responsible for the killing of Rachel Nickell

on Wimbledon Common in July 1992.

Speaker 7: That became all-consuming. We became more and more convinced over

the years that he was responsible for the Rachel Nickell killing.

Speaker 1: DS Jackerman had relayed his suspicions about Knapper to Rachel

Nickell's original murder inquiry team, but they already had a

suspect awaiting trial and the evidence he presented wasn't given

the recognition it deserved.

Speaker 3: Now, under a.

Speaker 1: New review team, DS Jackerman made it his business to

tell the senior investigating officer about Robert Knapper.

Speaker 7: I went into my office, wrote out a report giving

all the details as to why I believed that Robert

Knapper was guilty of killing Rachel McHale, gave it back

to him, and he took it and put him on

the list.

Speaker 1: A new forensics team was appointed, and in July 2008...

in DNA techniques led to a breakthrough. Samples taken from

Rachel's body revealed a mixed DNA profile of her killer. Soon,

this was identified as belonging to serial murderer Robert Knapper.

Other evidence was also reexamined, linking him to the scene.

Speaker 7: In Rachel's child's hair were found some flakes of red paint.

Nobody quite knows how this happened, but they were found

to match a toolbox recovered from Robert Knapper's flat on

his arrest.

Speaker 1: An old pair of shoes that Knapper still had with

him in Broadmoor were also seized.

Speaker 7: They were examined against shoe prints found against the man

seen washing his hands near the scene of Rachel Kell's murder.

And those shoes matched the shoe prints next to the stream.

Speaker 4: Gradually, the case is built against Knapper. But it's not

until 2006 that he's interviewed again about the possibility of

his killing Rachel McKell.

Speaker 1: It took another two years until the 18th of December

2008 for Rachel's family to finally see justice, 16 years

after her death. 42-year-old Robert Knapper returned to the Old

Bailey charged with her murder.

Speaker 7: He sat there and he didn't look much different and

it was in a dream that the charges were read

and he pleaded guilty to Rachel's manslaughter.

Speaker 1: Once again, Knapper pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds

of diminished responsibility. The judge sentenced him to remain in

Broadmoor Hospital indefinitely. For Detective Sergeant Jackerman, it was the

moment he'd waited years to witness.

Speaker 7: Just before he went down the steps, he turned, looked

directly at me and recognised me, and I just mouthed, hello, Bob.

It was a satisfying moment, but it was more than that.

It was relief. It was vindication, really, of all those

years of plugging away.

Speaker 1: It brought to a close one of the most upsetting

murder cases in British criminal history.

Speaker 5: Napper is completely devoid of any conscience. He doesn't care

about the impact of his actions on others, and that

makes him a very dangerous man indeed.

Speaker 8: His mental state, whether he's schizophrenic, really have nothing to

do with the crimes. The important point is that he's

off the street and can't hurt anybody again.

Speaker 4: The man knows no humanity. The man has utter disregard

for a human life. He took inordinate pleasure from the

suffering of his victims.

Speaker 1: Napper raped and sexually assaulted women as they walked across

London's parklands and commons. He homed in on vulnerable mothers

and took sadistic pleasure from attacking them in front of

their children. He brutally slayed two women in the prime

of their life, then sexually assaulted and killed a four-year-old child.

That makes Robert Napper one of the world's most evil killers.