'The Witness' True Story And Rachel Nickell Murder Case: Where is Alex Hanscombe Now?

The 2026 true-crime documentary film on Netflix, The Murder of Rachel Nickell, takes us back to the summer of 1992, when London was left shocked after the brutal murder of a woman in broad daylight. 23-year-old Rachel Nickell had not been a victim of a homicide related to her romantic or personal lives, but was stalked, attacked, and killed on the grounds of Wimbledon Common, a large open area in Southwest London, with fields and forests. This real-life case has also inspired Netflix’s limited series, The Witness, which has been simultaneously released on the streaming platform. The documentary focuses more on the minute details from the Rachel Nickell murder case and the tedious investigation that followed, spanning over a number of years. What really made the incident even more harrowing, and the police investigation significantly difficult, was that the only witness to the crime happened to be Rachel’s 2-year-old son, Alex. So, without any further ado, let’s jump into the details.

What happened to Rachel Nickell?

On the morning of 15th July, 1992, Rachel Nickell took her son, Alex, and their pet dog, to Wimbledon Common for a walk, as she had been doing for years. Wimbledon Common was considered a very safe place for citizens to walk and exercise at, and since Rachel was habituated to leaving home by herself, she did not think twice before going about her daily practice. Her partner, Andre Hanscombe, worked as a dispatch rider, and had to travel all over the country, and on that particular day, he was assigned on duty to London. As Andre knew of Rachel’s regular habit of taking a walk at Wimbledon Common, he would call up their home telephone late every morning just to ensure all was well. On the 15th, Andre called home as usual, and was shocked to have a man, a police officer, pick up and inform him that Rachel had been attacked during her walk, and that young Alex was injured and in the hospital. 

Rachel’s lifeless body had been found by a dog walker, with her clothes torn apart, and her traumatized and helpless son crying and clinging to her. The dog walker alerted the police immediately, and while Alex was taken to the nearest hospital for treatment, there was nothing that could be done for Rachel. There were clear signs of her having been lunged at, dragged along the ground, and stabbed to death, with 49 stab wounds around her chest. The position in which her body was found, with two hands trying to protect her face and her chest, suggested the woman had desperately tried to protect herself till the last minute, possibly begging the attacker to not harm her. The state of her clothes and also moisture found on her body made it clear that the attacker had also sexually assaulted her before stabbing her to death. Little Alex also had some cuts and bruises on his face, which seemed to suggest that the attacker must have pushed him away while committing the brutal crimes.

A police investigation quickly began, and a thorough search of the forested area was carried out by officers in search of clues, but nothing significant was found. In fact, absolutely no DNA evidence could be found at the crime scene either, which was very strange and suggested some system malfunction at the biologist’s office, for Rachel’s own DNA could not be found from the samples collected at the scene either. As a result, the police had to rely entirely on witness statements, and they took a shot in the dark by talking to every citizen who visited the area on a regular basis, in case something odd stuck out. They finally resorted to talking to the only direct witness too, which was a terribly difficult task, for it was the 2-year-old boy who had just lost his mom. 

The police treaded carefully, talking to Alex only in the presence of a child psychologist and, of course, Andre, trying to get visual information about the man who had attacked them in the forest on the morning of the 15th. Eventually, the police also took Alex back to the spot in the forest where the crime had taken place, in the hopes that revisiting the place would help the boy remember more. But they also had to be careful about not causing Alex more trauma because of the investigation, and so when the boy expressed his disinterest in talking about the same thing all over again, and Andre also wanted to give his son a rest, the police had to change their methods. With no forensic evidence and no reliable witness statements, the investigators decided to try their luck with forensic psychology, which was increasingly becoming more popular in criminal investigations.

Who was the prime suspect?

Based on the crime scene and the information available, it was evident that Rachel Nickell had not been killed by an acquaintance, but some random man who must have been on the prowl for a target that morning. The forensic psychologist appointed as a consultant, Paul Britton, confirmed that Rachel must have unfortunately fit the profile of the kind of victim the perpetrator had been looking for. Having found a match, the man must have stalked Rachel through the woods, and then launched a brutal attack on her, pushing Alex out of the way when he needed to. With all this information, the police made a possible profile of the murderer and started looking for anyone who fit the description. According to this profile, the killer was a local man under the age of 30, with very few friends, no romantic connections, and an addiction to pornography, especially content that involved power play and physical domination. 

The profile was released to the media, and a few news channels telecast it, asking viewers to leave tips about anyone who might fit the description. This was when the police came across the prime suspect in the case, after a woman called up the news channel and stated that someone in her neighborhood, Colin Stagg, seemed to match the profile. A woman who had seen a suspicious man in Wimbledon Common around 10 minutes before the murder took place was also shown a photo line-up, and she chose Colin Stagg’s photo as the man she had possibly seen on the morning of the 15th. Thus, the police decided to act quickly, arresting Stagg from his home, which was then thoroughly searched. They found occult symbols and anti-Christian posters, along with survivalist gear, which included knives and blunt weapons. All this made the investigators confident they had finally found the killer, but they still did not have enough evidence to bring any charges against him.

But they soon found out that Colin Stagg had written two explicit letters to a woman he had met at a singles’ club, and they felt that the letters clearly suggested Stagg’s perversion. Therefore, the police lay a trap for the man, in which a female officer posed to be a woman named Lizzie James, who was romantically interested in Stagg. She wrote letters to him, asking him to write back, which he obviously did. In the letters that Stagg wrote back, he mentioned domination and humiliation, all in the purview of sexual pleasure, and this was considered enough evidence for an arrest. On the 17th of August, the Met Police arrested Colin Stagg from his apartment, and charged him with the rape and murder of Rachel Nickell. He was put behind bars as the authorities prepared to start a court trial.

Was Colin Stagg really innocent?

The case of the murder of Rachel Nickell, which was believed to have been solved after the arrest of Colin Stagg, took a wild turn in November of 1993, when 27-year-old Samantha Bisset and her 4-year-old daughter, Jazmine, were found murdered in their apartment in Southeast London. Both Samantha and Jazmine had been sexually assaulted before being smothered to death, confirming that a brutally perverse criminal was on the loose. At the time, the police investigators working the Samantha Bisset case wanted to consider the possibility that it could be connected to the Rachel Nickell case, since the victims looked similar in both cases, they were both attacked in the company of a young child, and both had been stabbed about 50 times. But such a possibility would mean that the investigators in the first case had messed up, since Colin Stagg was already in prison when the Bisset mother and daughter were killed, and so they did not want to entertain such a theory.

The investigators in the second case had to rely on the fingerprints found at the victims’ apartment, and this was when they found prints belonging to a local man named Robert Napper. Although Napper was a seemingly ordinary man with a very short criminal history, he showed clear signs of mental illness when the police interrogated him. A toolbox was found at his apartment which contained knives and other sharp weapons, a guidebook to strangulation, and most importantly, a map of London on which he had made numerous markings and drawings. It was evident from the map that Napper was actually a predator looking for not just potential victims, but also relatively safe areas where he could commit crimes and get away unnoticed. He had clearly marked the house of Samantha Bisset as a place to carry out his upcoming crime, and he was soon charged by the authorities.

During trial, Napper pled guilty to charges of manslaughter, and was sentenced to life in prison, but his connection to the Rachel Nickell case would be uncovered many years later, in 2008. With an advancement in technology after the turn of the century, it was finally possible to get substantial DNA evidence from the samples collected at the scene of Rachel’s murder, and it was matched against the DNA database that the police had. This ultimately proved that Robert Napper had been the perpetrator in this case as well, and he quickly confessed to the crime and pled guilty to the charge of manslaughter. The DNA of Colin Stagg had also been tested, and it was conclusively proven he had had no connection to the brutal crime against Rachel Nickell. But Stagg had already been released in 1994, about a year after his arrest, as the judge ruled against the police, stating their method of baiting the suspect was highly unlawful. Ultimately, it was proven that Colin Stagg was indeed just an innocent man who had become a targeted suspect only because of his slightly unordinary life and preferences.

Why were the Met Police considered utter failures in the case?

As the police carried out further investigation, more shocking details were revealed about Robert Napper and some more crimes that he had committed. Way back in 1989, Napper was considered one of the suspects in a case of serial rapes being committed in a woodland area in Southeast London. At the time, two officers had visited his apartment and told him how he was a suspect and therefore had to report at the nearest police station to give his blood for DNA tests. Napper had agreed to cooperate but obviously never followed through, and instead fled the area. The senior investigating officer and his deputy then decided to drop Napper from their list of suspects since he was taller than the man described by the victims. To put it frankly, the police simply did not want to go through the hassle of investigating Robert Napper, since he was missing and they had to find him first, because of which they chose to let him slide.

A few months later, Napper’s own mother had made a phone call to the police, informing them of how her son had confessed to assaulting women, but her report was not taken seriously either. Perhaps the investigators felt the senile woman was simply trying to frame her son. The heartbreaking reality was that had the police taken any of these matters seriously and arrested Robert Napper in 1989, he could not have committed the horrific crimes in 1992 and ’93, and the lives of two women and a young girl could have been saved. There was simply no explanation the Met Police could provide about why or how they had botched the investigation so terribly, and all the authorities could do was to apologize to the aggrieved families and the public.

Where is Alex Hanscombe now?

After Rachel’s murder, and the subsequent falling out with the police, Andre had decided to give his son, Alex, a fresh start. He moved to France with his son, which he and Rachel had seriously planned to do in a few years. It was in France that Alex grew up, among a new set of neighbors and friends, and the trauma and shock that he had been affected by gradually subsided. However, the memory of having lost his mother in such a terrible manner did linger, because of which Alex, in his teenage years, started to believe that his father had not done enough to protect his mother and him. Because of this haughty interpretation, which is quite normal in teenage, Alex grew apart from Andre, before finally understanding his mistake and eventually reconciling. At present, Alex Hanscombe is 36 years old and currently lives in Barcelona. According to information on the internet, Alex moved to Barcelona as a young adult, where he studied hypnotherapy and graphology. He has also published his own book, titled ‘Letting Go: A True Story of Murder, Loss and Survival,’ on the horrific ordeal that he faced as a child.

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