Netflix's &34;The Murder of Rachel Nickell&34; revisits the shocking 1992 killing of a young mother, and the frustrating investigation that delayed justice for over a decade. Where is Robert Napper now? What happened to the man behind The Murder of Rachel Nickell Netflix's &34;The Murder of Rachel Nickell&34; revisits the shocking 1992 killing of a young mother, and the frustrating investigation that delayed justice for over a decade. June 8, 2026 5:52 p.m. ET Leave a Comment :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/rachelnickell121bc4980b5e84c69b9bda901b331c647.jpg) Robert Napper; Rachel Nickell.

Netflix's "The Murder of Rachel Nickell" revisits the shocking 1992 killing of a young mother, and the frustrating investigation that delayed justice for over a decade.

Where is Robert Napper now? What happened to the man behind The Murder of Rachel Nickell

Netflix's "The Murder of Rachel Nickell" revisits the shocking 1992 killing of a young mother, and the frustrating investigation that delayed justice for over a decade.

June 8, 2026 5:52 p.m. ET

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Robert Napper; Rachel Nickell. Credit:

- In 1992, 23-year-old Rachel Nickell was brutally murdered in front of her 2-year-old son.

- Netflix's *The Murder of Rachel Nickell *revisits the case and the frustrating investigation that led to an innocent man being arrested and incarcerated for the murder.

- The real culprit, Robert Napper, was identified and charged with Nickell's murder 16 years later, in 2008.

*The Murder of Rachel Nickell* has viewers gripped. Netflix's latest true-crime documentary revisits the shocking 1992 murder of 23-year-old Nickell in London, and the frustrating investigation that resulted in the arrest of an innocent man and delayed bringing her actual killer to justice for over a decade.

As recounted in the Netflix doc, the circumstances around Nickell's murder are profoundly devastating. On the morning of July 15, 1992, Nickell was walking her dog with her 2-year-old son, Alex Hanscombe, on Wimbledon Common when she was attacked by an unknown assailant. Nickell, who was stabbed 49 times and sexually assaulted, died at the scene. A passerby discovered Alex, who was mercifully unharmed, holding on to his mother's body.

Nickell's partner, André Hanscombe, was working as a courier at the time of her killing. In *The Murder of Rachel Nickell*, Hanscombe recalls stopping on his route to phone their home and check on his family. "A man's voice answered the phone and my blood ran cold," says Hanscombe. "I just knew immediately that something was seriously wrong."

It took police 16 years to identify and convict Robert Napper, the man responsible for killing Nickell — and others. Here is what you need to know about Napper and where he is now.

Who is Robert Napper?

Per *The Guardian*, Napper was born in 1966 and raised in Plumstead, not far from where Nickell and Hanscombe lived at the time of her murder. Napper experienced significant trauma as a child, having witnessed his father abusing his mother, Pauline Lasham. When his parents divorced, Napper and his three siblings were placed in foster care and received psychiatric treatment. According to *The Telegraph*, Napper was diagnosed with a "highly toxic mixture" of paranoid schizophrenia and Asperger's syndrome.

At the age of 12, Napper claimed he was sexually abused by a family friend. After the incident, Lasham claimed that Napper's personality changed in several ways: he grew introverted, became aggressive with his brothers (he allegedly shot one of them in the face with an airsoft gun), and spied on his sister while she was undressing. He had his first run-in with the law in 1986, when a 19-year-old Napper was fined for carrying a loaded gun in public.

Just three years later, in 1989, police received a call from a 31-year-old woman who reported being sexually assaulted in her home near Plumstead Common while her children were present. According to *The Guardian*'s reporting, this was the first in a series of assaults known as the Green Chain Rapes, named for the walking area along which they occurred. Three women were assaulted over a period of two months leading up to the murder of Nickell.

Also in 1989, Lasham called police to report that Napper had confessed to sexually assaulting a woman on Plumstead Common. Police could find no reports of recent assaults in the area, so they never followed up. "I told them my son had raped a woman but they said there’d been no rape and that he must have made it up," Lasham told *The Mirror** *in 2008. "Now I know it was missed and that he went on to murder. I can’t believe they let him slip through their fingers. I feel so sorry."

In 1992, after the Green Chain attacks began, a police inquiry identified 86 women who were attacked in a similar fashion. Over the course of the inquiry, Nickell was murdered and investigators received calls from two different citizens reporting that Napper resembled a police sketch of the suspect in the Green Chain case. Both times, police attempted to make contact with Napper to obtain a blood sample, but he failed to appear at the local station. Police ultimately dismissed Napper as a suspect because he was taller than the description they had been given.

That October, Napper was arrested on suspected stalking charges and a search of his home turned up numerous weapons, including two knives and a .22 caliber pistol, along with conspicuous maps and handwritten notes, including profane descriptions of women.

Napper pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm and ammunition, and a psychiatric report submitted during the hearing described him as "without doubt an immediate threat to himself and the public." Despite the evidence, Napper was sentenced to just eight weeks in custody, and police did not investigate him any further.

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Who is Colin Stagg?

Investigators interviewed over 30 men about Nickell's murder before settling on Colin Stagg, a local man who walked his dog on Wimbledon Common, as Nickell often did. He became their prime suspect despite a total lack of forensic evidence.

Police conducted a controversial sting operation involving an undercover policewoman, who contacted Stagg through a personals ad and tried to bait him into confessing to Nickell’s murder by posing as a romantic interest.

As detailed in *The Murder of Rachel Nickell*, the undercover officer said to Stagg, "If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right," to which Stagg replied, "I'm terribly sorry, but I haven't."

Though he never confessed to Nickell's murder, Stagg was arrested in 1993. He spent 13 months behind bars before a judge threw out his case, citing the "honey trap" sting operation and "deception of the grossest kind." In the Netflix documentary, Stagg recalls how he continued to face accusations and suspicion for several years after his exoneration. "It dragged on for about 15 years," he says. "From when I was arrested, there were articles in the newspapers stirring people's emotions about me. People shouting out stuff like, 'Guilty! Hang him!' Stuff like that."

While Stagg was in custody, another young mother was assaulted and killed in Plumstead. Twenty-seven-year-old Samantha Bisset and her 4-year-old daughter Jazmine were brutally murdered in their home.

How was Robert Napper caught?

Rachel Nickell.

Six months after Bisset and her daughter were murdered, police matched Napper's fingerprints and a shoe print to the scene of the crime. Napper was arrested and charged with the murders, which he confessed to in 1995, along with one assault and two attempted assaults in the Green Chain area. As *The Herald* reported at the time, Napper admitted only to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to his psychiatric diagnoses.

Nickell's case was subsequently reopened in 2002, and Napper was finally identified as the killer thanks to advances in forensics. Using DNA from the scene of the Bisset murders, police were able to link Napper to the killing of Nickell. Napper, meanwhile, was already serving an indefinite sentence at Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital.

Police summoned Hanscombe to meet with them ahead of Napper's trial. In the Netflix doc, Hanscombe recalls being handed the dossier on Nickell, which he describes as an "utter, chaotic catalog of errors."

"It was absolutely devastating," says Hanscombe, noting that Nickell's murder, as well as those of Bisset and her young daughter, were "all preventable."

Where is Robert Napper now?

Napper was charged with Nickell's murder in 2008. As with the previous charges related to Bisset and the Green Chain attacks, Napper pleaded guilty to manslaughter — and not murder — on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

In 2010, the BBC reported that the Metropolitan Police admitted "that more could, and should have been done, and had more been done we could have been in a better position to have prevented very serious attacks by Napper." The Independent Police Complaints Commission additionally found that "police failed to sufficiently investigate" multiple tips related to Napper over the years.

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IPCC Commissioner Rachel Cerfontyne called the police's errors "dreadful" and said, "Without these errors, Robert Napper could have been off the streets before he killed Rachel Nickell and the Bissets, and before numerous women suffered violent sexual attacks at his hands."

Napper was ordered to serve another indefinite sentence at Broadmoor for the murder of Nickell. During the sentencing, per *The Guardian*, defense attorney David Fisher said Napper was "highly unlikely ever to be released from detention."

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Published: June 8, 2026 at 07:38PM on Source: PRIME TIME

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