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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you.
I'm Hannah. I'm Suruti. And welcome to Red Handed, episode 755. One day it actually will be that. Oh, my dead body. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. One day it will. One day it will. One day it will, but today is not that day. I'm a liar and a bounder and a cad.
We've actually got a very sad story for you today, and very specifically one that would have, I mean, at least for me, I was very aware of this always. Oh, me too, me too. So it's about time we covered it. Often perceived as a brutalist concrete jungle, London is actually the greenest city in Europe. We have 3,000 parks and green spaces. Richmond Park is a whopping 2,500 acres.
And they've got deer and stuff.
Yeah, I mean, if you go stand in the middle of Richmond Park, you feel like you are in the countryside. But it's fucking far from here.
So far.
Sometimes on a Sunday I'll be like, should we go to Richmond Park? And then I look up how far it is and I'm like, nah. I don't think I've actually ever been. I've been once.
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Chapter 2: What tragic event is the focus of this episode?
It is so far. I'll just go stand in Epping Forest instead. Kind of feels similar. There are cows in Epping Forest.
Are there?
I've never seen a cow.
Big ones with big horns. Really? I don't know if they're highland, but they're like shaggy with big horns.
Oh, fun. I think they're called like longhorns, but they're there. They're there in Epping. Oh, I'll go and find them. But if you're more interested in Wombles than cows or deer, the 1,100 acres of Wimbledon Common might be more your speed. There are very, very few podcasts on this case, which I was surprised by. The amount of people who don't know what a Womble is... What? ...terrifies me.
Who doesn't know what a Womble is? Who doesn't know what a Womble is? Fucking... I know. Uncle Bulgaria! Keep Britain tidy.
LAUGHTER
If you don't know what a womble is, I can't help you. I used to have a lunchbox with the wumbles on. Did you? I still have a t-shirt that has Great Uncle Bulgaria on it that says keep Britain tidy. It's a good message. Good wholesome message. It is because all they do is live on the common and tidy up. Something that's adorable.
South-west London home to tennis and great-uncle Bulgaria, Wimbledon has never been particularly rough. Traditionally speaking, the air in West London was always a lot cleaner, so that's where all the rich people lived and all the poor people lived in the east in the slums, because that's where all of the air was much dirtier. Wimbledon always been nice.
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Chapter 3: Who was Rachel Nickell and what happened to her?
It'll all be over. But it didn't. Yes. Colin Stagg was now on a sex pervert list.
This is the problem, isn't it? Is that the sex offenders register. There's many ways you can end up on there. Let's just say that.
Chapter 4: What were the circumstances surrounding Rachel's murder?
Public urination. Public urination. Public nudity. And obviously sliding a little bit along the scale of like if you're 18 and have sex with your like 16 year old girlfriend, something like that. Like there's a lot of different ways that people can end up on this list. And then if you are on that list, if something does happen, you become...
suspect numero uno exactly it becomes very easy to tie you with the same brush and that's exactly what happens to Colin Stack because the Met used this indecent exposure charge to tick another Paul Britton box violent sexual fantasies I don't think that's the same thing but they're like pervert done next great
And admittedly, Colin Stagg did not help himself by running out of the magistrate's court where he was convicted like a bat out of hell and flipping the V's to the press in September of 1992. So Rachel's only been dead a couple of months. And he does look menacing.
But crucially, the most consistent factor of identification of the man who killed Rachel McHale is that everyone says he's about five foot ten. Colin Stagg is nowhere fucking near five foot ten. And we need to remember that. I think it's interesting that the most consistent description is the one that seems to be completely ignored.
But an indecent exposure charge was not enough to pin Colin Stagg for the murder of Rachel Nickell. So the Met got their thinking caps on. Very problematic thinking caps.
Now, before we go into all of the very, very problematic things that happened with this case, the only one sentence I'm going to utter in favour of the police, and not even in favour, but in mildest defence...
Mealy mouth defence is that when you are facing a case like this of a young murdered woman where the child is there, like this was such, we must have been so young, but I remember this case being like full front headline.
You'll remember the reopening of it.
Yes, exactly, exactly. And I think that when they had nothing to go on, and then you get multiple people calling in and telling you that it's Colin Stagg, and although they should have exercised the idea that there are many different shades of wrongen on the sex offenders register, when you have nothing else, following this line of inquiry into Colin Stagg, yes, but how they do it...
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Chapter 5: How did the police respond to Rachel's murder?
But in reality, they weren't even close.
Soon after this exchange, the press interviewed Colin Stagg about his involvement in the case, and he gave a very strong denial. Shit, Keith Pedder thought, there was no way after such a public denial that he would confide in Lizzie James. So they had to reel it in.
I don't understand the, I mean, I don't understand a lot of things about Keith Pedder, but I don't understand this idea of like, oh, because he's denied it in the press, he's never going to tell anyone that he actually did it. I don't get that. For me, I feel like there's something that Pedder isn't saying.
I think it's because he watched that denial and he's like, fuck, he didn't do this. I think that's what it is. And he's like, we better just fucking cut and shut this.
Yeah, I bet. Yeah.
But cut and shut this in the worst way, which is. And then take it to the CPS. Yeah, take it to the CPS. Buy cut and shut this. He's like, cut and shut this, boys. And they're like, do you mean stop going after this man who clearly didn't do it? No, I mean, take it to the CPS. Jesus Christ.
So for the murder squad, this point felt like it had been five months worth of work down the drain with no evidence to show for it. They were running out of time. But Keith Petter and his team had to chance their luck with the CPS.
So they arrested Colin once again and brought him in for even more questioning, bearing in mind that between the time that they originally questioned him and now, they have no new evidence, besides some bizarre conversations with Lizzie James. And some Crimewatch calls. Yes. So this time Colin was a lot less amiable and no commented his way through everything for hours.
So Keith Pedder played his last ace. Lizzie James walked into the interrogation room and revealed herself to her former pen pal.
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Chapter 6: What mistakes did the police make during the investigation?
of Sam Bizette and her four-year-old daughter, Jasmine, in Plumstead. He killed them 16 months after Rachel Nickell's death. The only reason he was given a manslaughter charge rather than murder was his paranoid psychosis, meeting the threshold for diminished responsibility.
In order for you to be getting diminished responsibility, there has to be something really fucking wrong with you. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't know right from wrong. It means that your ability to understand the nature of what you're doing and form rational judgment and exercise self-control is substantially impaired. And I do think that is true in the case of Robert Knapper.
But it's very rare that that happens.
So strap in, because what you're about to hear now is pretty horrible. So Jasmine, who was this four-year-old, remember, and Sam, her mum, were discovered stabbed to death by Sam's partner, Conrad Ellum. One evening, Sam had answered the door to Napa and he had immediately attacked her.
And what he did to her was so horrific that one of the police officers attending the scene said that it was the most gruesome sight he'd ever seen.
Robert Napa had been stalking Sam for quite some time. She had no curtains in her ground floor flat and she had seen him looking in on her just days before she was killed. Once Napa made his way into Sam's flat, he continued his frenzied attack on the young mum. Napa severed her spinal cord.
He cut her open from her genitals to her chest, pulled her ribcage apart and exposed her internal organs and then stabbed every single one of them. A piece of her abdomen had been taken as a trophy and Napa had also attempted to cut off her left leg. The crime scene photographer present was never able to work again.
Napa was identified by a fingerprint that he left on an external windowsill and sent down for life.
But when it came to the case of Rachel Nickell, the Met didn't just have Napa's DNA all over their evidence samples. Flecks of paint taken from little Alex's clothes were also found to be a match for a red toolbox belonging to Napa.
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Chapter 7: What role did forensic profiling play in the case?
And Keith Pedder in particular... made it very known that he was just like, oh, well, he just got away with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what he was known as for years.
The fact that they came out and gave a public statement after the hearing and said, well, we're not looking for anybody else in connection with this crime, just put a target on Colin Stagg's back. There was no humility in that. No, like, taking anything away from what the judge had said to them. They're just like, no, it was him. We just can't prove it.
Yeah.
So yes, in 2008, they formally apologized, probably pulling their fucking, you know, decades long overdue apology thing out of their fucking file of facts and apologized to Stagg with a public statement of regret and an independent commission. Hooray, we need an independent commission, klaxon.
Produced a report damning the Met and confirming that they had missed multiple opportunities to get Robert Knapper off the streets and save lives. An independent report, I'm sure that the Met just shredded because that's all they seem to do with independent reports and all of the suggestions that they make for how to improve.
So because Robert Knapper is still in Broadmoor and he's still alive, we don't actually know too much about him. All we know is that it's pretty likely that he was sexually abused as a child by someone very close to him in an outdoor area. His mum, concerned by his rape confession, did send him to a psychiatrist in 89.
But all that happened was that he went home and told his mum, quote, the psychiatrist thinks I'm mad. Napper also has autism and a lot of the literature describes him as having Asperger's, but Hans Asperger was responsible for the deaths of loads of children under the Third Reich and was a firm believer in eugenics. We'll definitely shorthand it, but perhaps the term Asperger's needs rethinking.
Robert Napper's condition, so his paranoid schizophrenia and his autism, didn't stop him from getting a job as a warehouseman. Forget this, the Ministry of Fucking Defence. What are they warehousing? The Lost Ark? The Hindenburg? Walt Disney's Frozen Courts? Why does the Ministry of Defence need a warehouse?
I don't know.
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Chapter 8: Who was Colin Stagg and why was he a suspect?
Don't know. And this is fun. No one was ever reprimanded in the police over Operation Edsel because by the time the commission rolled around, most of the major players in operation were either retired or dead, which is quite convenient.
Eventually, Colin Stagg was awarded over £700,000 in compensation, a record at the time, but a small price for what he'd lost. Lizzie James also got £100,000 in compensation for some reason.
I've been thinking about this. I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. I think it's because, not that she was put in danger, but that she was ordered by senior people to do something that was completely illegal, I think. And also she probably ruined her career. Like, and that's why she's got a fake name. And like, I don't know. I don't know. But she, I'm not sure.
I mean, yeah, all we can do is theorize on that because I personally don't really have that much sympathy for her because she's not a rookie that they pull out of like the police academy and they're like, hey, you, you look like Rachel McHale.
Because they do.
They pick her because she looks like Rachel McHale and they're like, that's obviously his type. You're going to go and seduce him, et cetera, et cetera. It's not like they sort of force her into doing this. She was an experienced undercover police officer who should have known.
And yes, I'm not saying it's easy to stand up to your boss or, you know, to more senior people than you, especially in an organization like the Met. But the compensation strikes me as odd.
Yeah. I mean, maybe there's something we don't know.
So Robert Knapper is still in Broadmoor and it is thought that he is guilty of at least 106 rapes, exposures and sexual offences. Though he's never admitted anything, his mum has burned every picture of him that she had.
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