Alex Hanscombe, the son of murdered Rachel Nickell, has revealed that he blamed his father for her death, despite the many years Andre Hanscombe spent trying to protect him. Alex was nearly three years old when he witnessed his mother's brutal killing on Wimbledon Common in 1992.
Years of Conflict
In a new documentary, Alex, now 36, explains that the intense questioning he underwent in the weeks following the murder put a strain on his relationship with his father. 'I was very angry about a lot of the things that we'd lived through - the sessions that went on for weeks and months,' he says. 'The thing that was most distressing for me was to be taken back to that day repeatedly.'
He adds: 'I don't think I had the same trust and respect for my father as I once had. And the fundamental point was that he was the protector of the family as the father, and unfortunately had allowed this to happen to us. So in my teenage years we had a lot of conflict.'
Andre's Guilt
Andre Hanscombe, now 62, acknowledges his son's anger, saying he also held himself responsible. 'There was an anger and that anger was, quite rightly, directed towards me. I had a huge sense of guilt that I hadn't protected my family and you do feel stupid, you feel like a fool.'
The decision to allow Alex to be repeatedly questioned by psychologists and police was a difficult one, as the investigation had few leads. Child psychiatrist Jean Harris Hendricks, who worked with Alex, admits she had no experience with a child who was the only witness to a murder. 'I had no experience of how this piece of very intensive work could affect a small child and yet the rational part of my brain fully agreed that it was important to try and prevent further killings. So there was a dilemma there.'
After several weeks, with Alex becoming increasingly stressed, the team returned him to the scene of the attack to jog his memory. Hendricks describes it as 'a very long shot' and 'an attempt that hadn't worked.'
Moving Forward
Soon after, Andre moved with his son to an isolated area in the south of France, and they relocated to Spain in 1996. The documentary, made with Netflix, aims to show how they eventually came through their ordeal. 'There is true evil in this world. I was forced to come to terms with that,' Andre explains. 'I had a mission to bring Rachel's child through this in the best way possible.'
Alex now expresses gratitude for his father's care. 'My father sacrificed everything for me and for what he believed in without any guarantees of how it would turn out. He was brave enough to do what he felt was right in his heart and I'm forever indebted to him for that.'
Police Failings
The documentary also lays bare repeated police failings in the quest to find Rachel's attacker. Andre says it was 'absolutely devastating' to discover that the killer, Robert Napper, had twice come close to being caught as a serial rapist in 1989, meaning the attack on Rachel was 'preventable.'
Andre recalls being shown a leaked CPS dossier the night before Napper's court case in 2008, which revealed a 'chaotic catalogue of errors' that allowed Napper to remain free while Colin Stagg was wrongly charged. 'It was absolutely devastating - Alex had been through such an ordeal, we'd been trying to make sense of that week after week, month after month, year after year. And all that's just exploded, because here it says it was all preventable.'
Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic, confessed to Rachel's manslaughter after being held in Broadmoor hospital for 13 years, having gone on to murder and mutilate single mother Samantha Bisset and suffocate her daughter Jazmine in 1995. The dossier showed that three years before Rachel was killed, Napper was a potential suspect in a serial rape investigation but was excluded for being 'too tall.' Police now suspect him of 106 attacks involving 86 victims.
Worse, Napper's own mother had contacted police to report her son after he confessed to a rape. 'They didn't follow it up,' Andre says. 'This could have prevented all of the attacks that followed. The attack that Alex witnessed was preventable, Rachel's death was preventable, Samantha and Jazmine's deaths were preventable. If they'd done their job properly, he'd have been taken off the street.'
The documentary features never-before-seen photos and videos from Andre's personal archive of himself, Rachel, and Alex in their Balham home.
The Murder of Rachel Nickell launches on Netflix on 4 June.
