Suruti

Rachel's parents were on holiday in Canada, so two officers flew out there immediately to tell them what had happened before the press could.

Once all of Rachel's family were gathered together, they held a press conference, imploring the public to come forward with any information.

Like so many cases we deal with in this fair country of ours, the British press would have a hefty part to play.

The murder of Rachel Nickell swept the nation.

People were terrified.

Could women not even walk on Wimbledon Common in broad daylight anymore?

And like always, that meant that the Met were under an enormous amount of pressure to find the man who had killed Rachel.

Yeah, I think it is the trade-off, right, that they've got to make.

It's like, how much do you want the press to be involved?

And then when you let them in, they're not going to go away.

No, and then they're there.

And when we say that they had nothing, we mean they had nothing.

Forensics found nothing.

The 90s were not the CSI evidence kingdom that we live in today, but there was no DNA, no stranger's blood, no murder weapon, no fibres, only the testimony of a two-year-old boy.

Yeah.

Now, any of the usual suspects known in the area couldn't be placed on the common that morning.

The police had absolutely no idea, therefore, where to start.

Whoever the assailant was, Petter thought, they had had the luck of the devil.

Hoping that the devil would return to the scene of the crime, the Met set up sensors linked to an alarm, and even lay a chemical on the ground that would mark any shoes that lay tread there.

The sensors were triggered pretty quickly, but it turned out that it was just some drunk teenagers, a pretty common occurrence in Britain.