Torn apart: Alex on a beach holiday with his mother. Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her toddler son on Wimbledon Common in 1992.
Torn apart: Alex on a beach holiday with his mother. Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her toddler son on Wimbledon Common in 1992.
When young mother Rachel Nickell was stabbed to death in front of her two-year-old son in 1992, the brutal murder shocked the UK.
A bungled inviestigation led to the wrong man being arrested and charged.
But 25 years on, her son Alex Hanscombe, now 27, the only witness of the crime, opens up for the first time about the day that changed his life forever.
"Get up, Mummy!" She didn't respond. "Get up, Mummy!" I said louder. Why didn't she move or answer? "Get up, Mummy!" I shouted with all my strength.
The moment I watched my mother's soul leave her body is one I will never forget. Even today, almost 25 years later, I can still see the film running inside my mind.
I was less than a month away from my third birthday. In our flat in Balham, South London, my father Andre bent down to kiss me before he left for work as a motorcycle dispatch rider.
"See you later, Alex. Have fun!" he said, before hugging my mother and kissing her goodbye.
My mother and I spent every day together. She was 23 and truly beautiful - tall and athletic with long, golden hair and a smile that lit up her face. When I remember her, though, it's not in details like these. Instead I recall the feeling of being loved and of loving in return.
Fast forward and we are walking on Wimbledon Common, which my parents felt was safer than our local park. The midsummer sun warmed our skin while our labrador-greyhound cross Molly ran in circles around us.
As my mother and I carried on down a path, it was dark but I could see blue sky through the leaves. All of a sudden we both turned our heads to the right as a man with a black bag over his shoulder came lurching out of the undergrowth.
There was no time to respond. I was grabbed and thrown to the ground and my face forced into the mud. Seconds later my mother collapsed next to me. There were no screams. Everything was so silent that for years to come the memories of those moments would play out like an old film, without sound.
I saw the stranger's blank face, the clothes he wore and the knife he took from his bag. I picked myself up from the ground as fast as I could. I felt unsteady and my face was hurting.
I caught sight of the man a few yards away, kneeling to wash his hands in the stream. A moment later he rose and headed rapidly off through the trees, his black bag still over his shoulder.
I looked down at my mother lying on the ground beside me. She looked peaceful, as if pretending to be asleep, like in one of our imaginary games, ready to wake up at any moment and gaze adoringly into my eyes.
I noticed a piece of paper on the ground nearby, which had fallen from her pocket, and reached down to pick it up, holding it out to her. In a split second, life seemed to come to a standstill. She was gone.
I was very young, yet at that moment I knew she was never coming back. My heart was completely broken.
She was never going to get up and play with me again. I would never look into her loving eyes and see her adoring smile again.
I would never hear her soft voice again, telling me how much she loved me.
I reached down and placed the piece of paper - a receipt from a cash machine, I later learned - delicately on her forehead so it would be with her wherever she was.
Around me, the woodland was silent. I ran out of the woods up on to the grassy slope from which we had come. Strangers ran towards me. They must have noticed my battered face and the blood splattered across my clothes. They were kind and somehow I knew I could trust them. But it felt inside like I was floating somewhere far away.
I heard the sirens wailing in the background. I heard people talking to me, but the words no longer registered. In the distance the first flashing blue lights of police cars appeared and when the ambulance arrived I was rushed inside, sedated by doctors and drifted off into a deep sleep.
How much time passed I don't know. But eventually one of the hospital nurses led me by the hand to where my father stood waiting. He lifted me into his arms and gave me a crushing hug. I gazed intensely into his eyes. They were red and raw and tears were running down his cheeks.
"There's been a terrible accident," he began, his voice breaking as he struggled to find the words. "Mummy has been killed and she's not coming back..."
'Truly beautiful': A family snap of Rachel Nickell. Stagg's trial collapsed - and it took 16 years before the true killer, Robert Napper, was finally brought to justice. Photo / PA
My parents' paths had first crossed in 1988 at a water park where my mother, then 19, was working as a lifeguard while studying English literature at university, and my father at 25 was a semi- professional tennis player.
I made my way into the world just after 7am on August 11, 1989. Despite the regular strains that all households suffer, life was happy, and yet for my mother there seemed at times to be a strange sense of foreboding.
On more than one occasion she had asked my father to promise that, if anything ever happened to her, he would find someone else. "I'm afraid of being attacked from behind," she once told him.
On another occasion, she woke in the middle of the night. In her dream someone whose face she couldn't see was attacking her from behind with a knife.
Now her deepest fears had come true - and I was the only witness.
On the first night without my mother the nightmares began. I sounded like a dying animal. I was trapped inside a horrifying nightmare and my father couldn't snap me out of it.
My father had once read an article about a man who used some toys to tell his grandson a story in which a nasty character played the role of a villain. Over time the little boy became disturbed by the presence of the threatening figure, until finally his grandfather had no choice but to destroy the toy so that his grandson could regain his sense of security.
And so, one morning my father drew a gingerbread man with a knife in his hand.
"This is the man that killed Mummy," he said. "He is a bad, bad man and I hate him. This is what I want to do with him!"
He grabbed the piece of paper, scrunched it violently in his hands and slammed it straight into the bin. I squealed with delight and, when he drew it again, I leapt to my feet, pounded the drawing into a little ball, ran away from him into the kitchen and slammed it into the bin with all my strength.
At that moment my father was overcome with pride. It was the first time I'd left his sight since he'd collected me at the hospital 36 hours earlier.
Rachel's killer: Paranoid schizophrenic and serial rapist Robert Napper. Photo / PA
The police drove us to the hospital to see my mother's body.
"She has gone now, sweetheart," my father explained. "What's left behind is just the shell, it's just like old clothing. It's not her any longer." Hesitantly I stood, studying him for a few seconds, before reluctantly walking forward and allowing him to lift me up.
I glanced sideways for a moment and then looked away again. Resting on a table, the body lay on its back, wrapped from neck to toe in a robe that left only vague contours visible. There was no sign of any wounds, and her face looked like wax. "Can we go now?" I asked. "In a minute," he replied. "I want to say goodbye." Holding me in his arms, he bent over and kissed her forehead.
Within a few days of my mother's death, the room where I played had been filled with enough video equipment to make a film. The police didn't want to miss a word I might say.
There had been more than 500 people on the common on the morning of the attack, but so far there were no firm leads: the police were becoming desperate.
At a visit to a child psychologist, a detective placed a tray in front of me containing household cutlery, a bread knife, several large kitchen knives, a penknife and a hunting knife. I instantly picked out the hunting knife.
Later, it would be confirmed that the blade matched the shape of the murder weapon.
"What did the bad man do after he had killed Mummy?" one of the detectives asked. "The bad man washed the blood off in the water," I said.
In a bid to show me how tough the police were, the detectives took me with my father to see a real, locked cell and encouraged me to see how secure the doors really were.
Suddenly a man lurched forward out of the shadows and tried to grab me, scaring the life out of me.
The detectives rushed to throw him back into the cell, slamming the heavy door behind, which had mistakenly been left unlocked.
They were mortified. "That was close!" one of them said under his breath. They bustled us away. I was badly shaken and no longer interested in their games.
I held on to my father's hand and wanted to leave.
Two months after the murder, BBC's Crimewatch programme presented an identikit picture of my mother's assailant based on my description. Several callers identified Colin Stagg, who lived nearby.
Stagg was arrested, but the evidence against him was at best flimsy and he was released without charge. Despite the lack of evidence, the police were so convinced he was the killer that they eventually mounted an undercover "honey-trap" operation to tempt a confession.
He was duly charged, but in the autumn of 1994, when I was five, the trial against him collapsed in a storm of controversy.
My mother's killer remained at large, free to kill again. As long as that remained the case, my father would be forever looking over his shoulder, fearing for my safety.
When my father had first announced to our family that we would be leaving the country, it caused a great deal of upset. My mother's father stopped talking to him and her mother told him that he was causing them a second bereavement. Bringing me up in France without my mother in our new home was lonely and hard for my father. Eventually, we were tracked down by the press - and if they could find us, so could the killer. We fled secretly to Spain.
The years that followed were rocky. Once, during a heated argument, I threatened my father with a large kitchen knife.
When I was 13, on an exchange trip to France. I was caught smoking a joint in a toilet, and also had several run-ins with the police. Eventually, I was forced to look at myself.
There had been all sorts of claims made about what would happen to me in the wake of the attack: that I would never talk again, end up living under a bridge or even repeat the violence I had witnessed.
I began to seriously question why some people consistently stumbled into difficulties while others were able to glide through life.
A police car near the murder scene at Wimbledon Common. A bungled police investigation led to the wrong man, Colin Stagg, being arrested and charged. Photo / Unknown
Was there a reason for my mother's death that went deeper than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time? I wondered about her fear of being attacked and came to understand that, if we focus more on the things we don't want rather than those we want, we inevitably draw them into our lives.
I promised myself that I would strive to leave all negativity behind and make a new start. I was certain I had seen the depths of darkness and was determined to learn the lessons life had handed me.
I can't pinpoint exactly when I forgave my mother's killer.
For me it was a process that happened gradually over time. Just as the nightmares faded when I was a child. I was no longer the little boy who screwed up paper cutouts representing "the bad man" and pounded them into the rubbish bin. I forgave him long before he even had a name...
In September 2004, a month after my 15th birthday, my father was given a shocking piece of information from a senior police officer that threw everything we'd been led to believe out of the window.
A cold case review team had used new DNA techniques on samples from the scene of my mother's murder. They had found a match, not to Colin Stagg, but to a man called Robert Napper.
In 1989, Napper had raped a woman near Plumstead Common in South London. Napper, consumed with guilt, confessed to his mother and she told police, but he was never even questioned.
His arrest would have stopped him from committing a string of further crimes.
In May 1994, Napper was finally arrested and charged with the brutal murders of a young mother called Samantha Bisset and her daughter Jazmine.
He pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, also pleading guilty to two counts of attempted rape and one of rape relating to attacks in South London where a staggering series of violent sexual attacks on more than 80 women took place between 1989 and 1994. He was sent to Broadmoor indefinitely.
In December 2008, 16 years after the attack, Napper was convicted of the manslaughter of my mother on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Two years later, a damning report was published by the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluding that, without the police's mistakes my mother's murder and attacks on countless other women could have been avoided.
Finally we received our first apology from the Metropolitan Police. It was signed by Cressida Dick, then assistant commissioner (now commissioner).
In 1994 my family had received £97,000 from the Criminal Injuries Board for the loss of my mother. Given that Colin Stagg received £700,000 for spending ten months in prison on remand, it appeared that being wrongly accused was calculated to be of much greater significance than my mother's life.
There had already been other occasions where the police had used taxpayers' money to compensate victims of crime for their incompetence. Stephen Lawrence's family had been paid £320,000 in recognition of the seven-year delay in apprehending his assailants.
Why, then, would the police refuse to even reimburse our legal costs? In my mother's case, not only had the failure of the police to apprehend Napper led to her murder, but their lack of professionalism led to a delay of 16 years before his conviction.
Many argued that the underlying reason behind the payment in the Lawrence case was because the police were being condemned as "institutionally racist" and the payment would help clean up their public image.
Numerous women suffered at the hands of Napper because of the direct mistakes of the police. I believe Scotland Yard feared that making any kind of payment to us would set a precedent - with expensive repercussions.
I returned to Wimbledon Common, 23 years after my mother's murder. I reached the spot where the attack took place and knelt down on the soft earth.
I placed my hands together in prayer and closed my eyes, thanking my mother for everything she gave me, the Daily Mail reported.
"Molly, Molly!" Suddenly I was brought back to the moment. Was I dreaming? I stood up and turned. Yards away I spotted a man calling his dog. I was certain.
A higher power was watching over me, making sure everything was perfect and letting me know by sending a sign.
