Nearly 35 years after British model Rachel Nickell was brutally murdered in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common in London, her story is finally being told in full. Netflix has released a three-part dramatized series, The Witness, alongside a companion documentary, The Murder of Rachel Nickell.
The series is created and written by Rob Williams, who was just 18 when Rachel was killed in 1992. What happened to Rachel Nickell and how the investigation went wrong is a shocking tale of police mistakes and systemic failings.
Rachel Nickell was walking through Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old son Alex and their dog when she was attacked without warning. She was sexually assaulted and stabbed 49 times in broad daylight, with little Alex as the only witness.
After the attack, Alex tried to wake his mother. “There was blood everywhere. Everything was silent,” he later recalled. “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.”
What followed was one of Britain's most heavily criticized criminal investigations. Police charged local man Colin Stagg in 1993 with no forensic evidence and were later found to have used “honey trap” methods to try to coerce a false confession from him. Stagg spent 13 months in custody before being cleared and was awarded £706,000 in damages.
It was not until 2002 that advanced DNA techniques led investigators to Robert Napper, already held at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. Napper pleaded guilty to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility in 2008 and remains at Broadmoor indefinitely.
Screenwriter Rob Williams came across the case again decades later after Alex, now 36, published a memoir about his mother's murder and its aftermath. “There had been this huge amount of interest in this little boy but actually no one knew what happened next,” Williams said. “No one knew what happened to the 'tragic tot' as the media called him.”
Williams said he was struck by how open Alex and his father Andre were during the series. “The idea of somebody putting words into my mouth during the rawest time of my life, that's just mind-boggling but I think it's a testament to just how passionately they feel this is a story they want to be told,” he said.
Today, Andre and Alex still live in Barcelona, Spain, after relocating from France to escape the intense media scrutiny.
