It has been nearly 35 years after British model Rachel Nickell was murdered in broad daylight on a busy London Common with her two-year-old son as the only witness. Now, her story is finally being told in full.
Netflix has released both a dramatized series, The Witness and an accompanying documentary, The Murder of Rachel Nickell, both available to stream now.
What happened to Rachel Nickell?
On July 15, 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell was walking through Wimbledon Common in South West London with her young son Alex and their dog Molly when she was attacked without warning. She was sexually assaulted and stabbed 49 times, all in broad daylight, as her toddler son could not do anything but look as she was being murdered.
Little Alex tried to wake his mother, not fully understanding what had happened. “There was blood everywhere. Everything was silent,” he recalled to The Sun as cited by TIME. “I said, ‘Get up, Mummy’ and she didn’t respond. Then for the last time, with all my strength I said, ‘Get up, Mummy.’ She didn’t. At that moment, reality came crashing down. I was very young but I knew at that moment she had gone and she was never coming back.”
Alex claims he saw the killer emerge from the bushes, grab him and throw him to the ground before his mother collapsed beside him. He also says he watched the attacker wash blood from his hands in a nearby stream before vanishing. “He just disappeared off into the distance like a ghost,” Alex told The Sun.
Other parkgoers found the toddler wandering through the trees covered in blood and called an ambulance. His father Andre, who met him at the police station, told the young boy there had been a “terrible accident,”
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How probe went wrong before real killer was found
What followed was one of Britain’s most criticized criminal investigations. Despite Alex being the sole witness, he was not questioned by detectives for three weeks after the murder. Thirty-two men were interrogated before police charged unemployed local man Colin Stagg in August 1993 with no forensic evidence linking him to the crime.
Stagg spent 13 months in custody before a judge cleared him in 1994. London police were later found to have used “honey trap” methods to try to coerce a false confession from him, and Stagg was compensated £706,000 for the wrongful charge, per TIME.
The case was not reopened until a decade later. By 2002, advanced DNA techniques allowed investigators to reexamine evidence found on Nickell’s body. The DNA matched convicted murderer Robert Napper, who was already detained at Broadmoor Hospital for a series of rape attacks dating back to 1989. Napper was found guilty of Nickell’s murder and confessed to the crime, leading to his conviction in 2008.
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What is ‘The Witness’ on Netflix?
The Witness is a three-part dramatized series now streaming on Netflix. It is created, written and executive produced by Rob Williams and directed by Alex Winckler. It is based on Alex Hanscombe’s 2017 memoir Letting Go and both Alex and his father Andre served as consultants on the series.
Rather than focusing on the crime itself, the series centers on how Andre and Alex navigated life in the aftermath, dealing with intense media scrutiny, a chaotic police investigation and the weight of unimaginable grief.
“Our life has been a battle,” Alex and Andre told Netflix. “Our journey has all been by the grace of God and a promise to go on together, and we feel incredibly blessed to be able to share our story in this way. We hope that audiences will be left with a testament to the tough battle of life we all face, and to the power of faith, hope, love and never giving up.”