Journalism / Case Closed (Analysis)

Case Closed
by David Kessler
Copyright (c) 2008, David Kessler

Colin Stagg spent thirteen months on remand for the murder of Rachel Nickel before the judge threw out much of the so-called evidence. At the time – because of the way the tabloid newspapers behaved – Stagg was believed to be a guilty man who beat the rap. In fact, he was an innocent man who nearly got sent down for murder because of the actions of a devious psychologist, an inept police inspector and a seductive but ruthless undercover policewoman.

Despite evidence available at the time, only now has the real guilty person finally been brought to justice.

This is the story of deception, betrayal and downright stupidity that came perilously close to putting an innocent man behind bars for a murder that he did not commit.

On the fifteenth of July, 1992, at 10:35, a retired architect called Michael Murray, going for a walk on Wimbledon Common, found a three-year-old boy (Alex Hanscombe) clinging to the body of a young woman lying on the ground in a foetal position in a sheltered copse beneath a silver birch tree. The boy was crying and pleading “get up Mummy”. The woman – later identified as twenty-three-year-old Rachel Nickell – was clearly dead. Her jeans and undergarments had been left around her ankles suggesting she had been sexually interfered with.

Murray prized the child’s blood-stained fingers from his dead mother, lifted him up and ran onto open ground nearby to get him away from the scene. There he saw a group of young mothers and shouted to them to give him a hand. He handed the child to Emma Brooks who was with her two children and dog and her friend Penny Horne who was with her four month old boy Joe. He then hastened off to raise the alarm.

Emma Brooks ran back to Penny Horne, cradling little Alex in her arms. He had blood and mud smeared on his face and kept saying “I want my mummy... I’m cold... I’m tired.” They saw a jogger running along the main path and shouted to him to call the police. Then Penny Horne wrapped baby Joe’s quilt around Alex. Meanwhile, the jogger, Sean Beckett, went off and summoned Stephen Francis, a mounted Park Ranger who quickly proceeded to the scene, where Emma Brooks was still cradling little Alex in her arms.

“Over there in the bushes,” said Emma Brooks. “I believe there’s a body.”

“Hold on to the child,” he said. He entered the wooded area and saw the body for himself. He went closer to see if there was anything he could do and noticed immediately that the shirt was covered with blood. Then as he looked more closely, he saw that her throat had been cut. Realising that he could do nothing more, he moved back so as not to interfere with the crime scene. He rejoined Sean Beckett and the two women, and used his radio to summon the police and call for assistance from other Park Rangers.

Meanwhile, Michael Murray, who had been the first to find the body, went first to the Windmill Cafe, from where he was directed to the adjacent Ranger’s office. He told the female Ranger on duty what he had seen. Stephen Francis, the mounted Ranger, had apparently already notified her, but she phoned the police again nevertheless.

Just after this, John Marshall and his wife Janet, who were on the Common walking their dog, also came across the body. But as Emma Brooks had gone back to where she and her friend Penny had been before Michael Murray called them, Marshall didn’t see anyone else in the immediate vicinity. So he ran to get help, passing a schoolmaster with a group of children on the way. This was apparently a school party from Dick Shepherd School in Brixton. His wife, Janet, stopped to tell the schoolmaster not to take the children down there. Shortly after that, Emma Brooks saw figures in the wood running towards the windmill and heard shouts of “There’s a body.”

John Marshall arrived at the cafe and told the cook what he had seen. The cook, in turn, called the police. There Marshall met Michael Murray who told him that he too had seen the body and called a Ranger.

Meanwhile, PC Ephgrave, on uniformed duty that morning, got a call to go to the Common. In response to this call, he proceeded to the scene in a marked police car with PC Morgan, PC Bland and WPC Smith, arriving at the Ranger’s office at 10:50. From there, they were directed towards the Windmill accompanied by a Panda car with officers PC Reilly and PC Adler that had also been dispatched to the scene. They made their way to the wooded area where the body had been found. PC Reilly went into the area first, followed by PC Ephgrave. Fifty yards away, they saw the horrific site of Rachel’s body, with no clothing on the lower half of her body. Ephgrave approached to within ten yards of the body and saw blood around her neck. He made his way back to the Area car.

“Get a first aid kit!” he shouted to PC Morgan.

“You won’t need a first aid kit,” Ranger Stephen Francis shouted back. “It’s too late.”

The Ranger was ex-ambulance service and knew whereof he spoke.
Morgan joined Reilly in the wooded area and felt Rachel’s wrist for any sign of a pulse. There was none. But he noticed that her wrist was warm.
Meanwhile, as a result of the various calls, another police car joined the two already on the scene, this one with PC Bailey, PS Coleman and Inspector Muir. At this point, the police went in to action, taping off the area to preserve the crime scene. More police officers arrived on the scene, some with metal detectors, and based on some initial witness sightings, a search immediately began for a long-haired suspect. The police were joined by representatives of the Coroner’s office.

At 11:05 a police helicopter was scrambled to over-fly the scene. The police observer in the helicopter was Sergeant Anthony Mephan. By 11:14 a police helicopter was flying over the near Alton Estate. It was heard by various locals on the estate, including the local butcher Pat Heanen, who put the time at about 11:15. Sergeant Mephan saw a white male aged between 40 and 50 walking along a footpath near a place called Stag Ride. When visual contact with this man was lost, the helicopter landed in a playing field to the west of the equally ominously named Stag Lane.

Back on the ground, one PC Bailey spoke briefly with potential witness Amanda Phelan who had seen a man washing his hands in water from a broken ceramic sewage pipe in a nearby drainage ditch. At about 11:40, PC Kevin Jones also spoke briefly with Ms Phelan. She was to be one of a number or important witnesses in a murder investigation that at its height involved over a hundred police officers and ultimately cost some three million pounds.

* *

Twenty nine year old Colin Stagg had been on the Common early that morning to take his dog Brandy for a walk after doing a paper round for local newsagent Navnit Patel. But he decided to cut the walk short because he was still suffering from a headache that he had woken up with. Feeling guilty about having curtailed Brandy’s exercise earlier, he decided to take the dog back to the Common for a proper walk. Entering the Common via the Putney Vale cemetery underpass, he noticed a uniformed police officer at the far end of the underpass. Trailing Brandy, who had raced on ahead, Stagg emerged from the underpass and was challenged by the policeman, PC Andrew Couch.

“Excuse me sir,” he said, his manner quite affable. “Do you have any intention of taking your dog onto the Common?”

“Yes.”

“I advise you not to because there’s been an incident,” and went on to explain that they were clearing the Common of people.

“What happened?

“Well, you’ll know sooner or later; a girl’s body has been found.”

“Where?” asked Stagg in shock, interpreting the word “girl” as meaning a female child.

At that moment they were joined by one PC Biles who had heard the exchange as he approached from the direction of the cemetery.

“Over by some hills somewhere,” Couch replied, waving his hand in the general direction of the Common.

“I was on the Common with my dog this morning,” Stagg volunteered

“When?” the first PC asked.

“I started about 8:15 or 8:30. I started heading back at 8:50 and must’ve got home by about 9:15.”

“Did you see anything suspicious — or hear anything?”

“No.”

“I’ll need to make a note of your name and address.”

Stagg gave the details he requested, then thinking no more about it, went back, through the underpass, with Brandy to the Alton Estate
There is however a dispute as to the precise time when this occurred. Initially PC Couch claimed that he had come on duty at 10:30 a.m. and that he challenged Stagg approximately an hour and a half” after that. This would suggest that the time of this encounter was 12 O’Clock. However Couch gave a statement over a month later, in which he said that “The time that I stopped Stagg would have been somewhere between 12:30 and One PM.” The issue is significant because it pertains to the question of how Stagg could have known things that he said to others. What is clear is that PC Couch hadn’t written down the time of the incident in his notebook and so had to rely on memory somewhat later to try and gauge the time as best he could.
After returning to the Alton Estate, Stagg decided on a detour to Patrick Heanen, the local butcher, whom he knew quite well. While there where he mentioned that a body had been found.

“How do you know?” asked Heanen.

“The police told me at the underpass just now.”

Pat called over to Les, his assistant.

“Les, you saw the police over there this morning didn’t you?”

“Yeah, Les replied. “I thought they were looking for a lost kid.”

Stagg bought a quarter pound of mincemeat from Sean Heanen, the Butcher’s son and then went to Navnit Patel’s newsagent shop next door. Navnit wasn’t there, but his son Yagnesh was. Stagg bought a bar of chocolate and told Yagnesh Patel what the policeman had told him. Yagnesh confirmed that he knew about it. Some one had told his father. News travelled quickly on this South West London estate.

From the newsagent, Stagg went home, leaving his front door open, as he often did on summer mornings. This enabled Brandy to sit on the communal balcony, his favourite position. A neighbour, Peter Witt, passed by on the way to his own flat and Stagg again told him what he had heard from PC Couch.
After a while, Stagg went into the kitchen and cooked some lunch using the mincemeat he had bought at the butcher, while Brandy lay snoozing on the balcony. After lunch, Stagg – again troubled by Brandy not getting her morning exercise, decided to take the dog for a walk round the block. While on this walk he met an elderly neighbour he barely knew called Lillian Avid. They talked briefly about the events on Wimbledon Common, or what little was known about them at the time. Then they went their own separate ways – although their paths were to cross again later.

* *

One of the great myths about the Rachel Nickell murder is that no one saw the killer making his getaway. In fact there were several sightings of a man running away from the crime scene. But because of the times that the witnesses gave, these sightings were assumed to be irrelevant. Most of them supposedly happened too early. But it is a well known fact that people often under-estimate how late it is – especially in the morning, when time goes by a lot more quickly than people realize.

One such sighting was made by lorry driver witness MGS who saw a white man in his late twenties or early thirties, walking towards the windmill with dirt on his right arm and the right leg of his jeans “as if he had been in a swamp.” The man was “glancing over his right shoulder” and “appeared slightly nervous.” MGS put the incident at between 10:20 and 10:30, which is just before the time Rachel was believed to have been murdered. However, he also describes seeing several police cars and an area of road being taped off, which strongly suggests that this was after the body was found.

That same morning, female witness MK was driving along Parkside, just past Tibbetts Corner, when a man aged about twenty five, desperately trying to cross the road, ran straight out in front of her car, forcing her to brake suddenly. He didn’t stop of look at her but merely ran on, even though she sounded her horn and called out through the open window, “You bloody fool, I could have killed you.”

She noticed that the man’s blue denim jeans were soaking wet from the knees down as if he had been in water and that his white T shirt was dirty. She also noticed that he was carrying an item of clothing tucked under his left arm, brown in colour. She put the time at between 10:02 and 10:07 based on what she was listening to on Capital FM radio. She also said that when she braked abruptly, he was no more than six feet away and that he then ran north on the footway, appearing very agitated and constantly looking over his shoulder. Again, the time doesn’t fit, but the appearance and behaviour are so highly incriminating, that this sighting cannot be dismissed lightly. Also the location – Tibbetts Corner – was the subject of another sighting.

Witness TJM, was driving along the A3 at 11:35, again towards Tibbetts Corner, and also saw a man, aged about twenty eight to thirty, acting suspiciously. The man emerged from the bushes between two of the three police cars parked nearby, looking up and down the road and then went back into the bushes as if he had seen something. As TJM drew close, the man emerged again and TJM saw him in the rear view mirror, stepping into the road to his right, but then appearing to change his mind and go left towards Roehampton Lane. TJM observed that the man’s shirt was damp or wet around the chest area, possibly from sweat.

The timings of course, don’t match. But as other examples below will show, people can be way out when it comes to their estimate of time. There is therefore a strong chance that these were all sightings of the murderer making his escape near Tibbetts Corner.

Case Closed

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