THE TRAGIC MURDER OF RACHEL NICKELL

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime kiss today we are going to be talking about one of the biggest most prolific cases in uk true crime history this case has probably some of the most plot twists and turns you are ever gonna see in one of my videos you literally cannot predict where this case is gonna go at any point up until right at the end before we carry on with this video i do wanna let you know that this case will be not a one-parter not a two-parter but a three-parter it's such a big one such a big one if you've heard of this case before you will understand why it's gonna take me three videos to tell the whole thing so if you're down for that make sure you're subscribed make sure you've clicked the bell notification button thing so that you get notified when i upload part two and part three i promise i'll be quick with these ones they'll be like every other day so get ready for those but before we get into part one of this case i just want to thank our 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guys now before we get into this case i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video just a couple of content warnings before we get into this one there are going to be themes of sexual assault and suicidal thoughts so if that is something that you don't want to watch right now i totally understand please click out the video and look after yourself your mental health is the most important thing hopefully i'll get to see you again some other time with a different case that's a little bit more suitable for you all that being said let's just get straight into it rachel jane nickell was a 23 year old woman born on november 23rd 1968 near colchester in essex which is in the south of england her parents were andrew and monica nikal she had a brother named mark and by all accounts they were a very average normal happy family rachel was known for her sweet kind nurturing nature right from a child literally from a tot she was the sweetest little girl just a super super helpful kid she got on really well with all the elderly people that lived on her street she was just a little angel growing up rachel was a performer she had a real passion for the arts so acting singing dancing any way that she could perform she loved it and she was good at it as well but she was encouraged to take a little bit more of an academic route in life i mean she was equally as talented in her brains in her intellect as well so she went for a little bit more of an academic path in life she ended up studying english and history at university and while she was there she kind of struggled for money i'm sure a lot of students can relate to this she was really struggling to get by and so she went and got herself a part-time job well she actually had a couple of money-making ventures at this point in her life i believe she did a bit of modelling she was such a beautiful woman but she needed something a little bit more reliable a little bit more stable and so she went and got herself a job as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool this swimming pool was in richmond in southwest london and it was literally just supposed to be a little part-time job just to get her through university but she ended up getting a lot more than she bargained for when she met the man that would later become her life partner his name was andre hanscom and he was a motorcycle courier so like a delivery guy i think he was a little bit older than her she was 19 at this point when she met him and he was 25 but the two of them like as soon as they saw each other they just thought each other were the most beautiful people they'd ever laid eyes on and andre just knew that he wanted this woman in his life and so he walked up to the beautiful lifeguard at the swimming pool and he asked her out on a date and she accepted and they went on what sounds like the sweetest little first day ever apparently rachel was so buzzing when she got home from this she called her mum and she was saying like mum i think this is the guy i'm gonna marry like i think he's it bear in mind this is like their first impressions of each other i mean they met briefly at the swimming pool but this was their first date so this must have been such a strong connection that they shared for her to feel this way about him and he felt the exact same way about her and the two of them continued to date and after a few months they made it official they were officially boyfriend and girlfriend and it was around that time that rachel very unexpectedly found out that she was pregnant and this was a little bit of a wobble for the couple as i'm sure you can imagine she was so young i think she'd probably just turned 20 when she found out she was pregnant so this was a big commitment like a big thing to happen for her so young and this was a little bit sooner than they'd imagined having a kid you know just after a few months of meeting each other but this connection that they shared andre and rachel they felt like this was their forever thing you know they knew that they were going to be together forever like they knew they were gonna spend the rest of their lives together and have a family at some point so why not do it now so the two of them decided to get their own place together they moved into an apartment in balum in south west london and they waited for this baby to come and when she was around 2021 rachel nickell gave birth to a perfectly happy and healthy baby boy that they're named alexander and they were all just over the moon about it and it really felt like rachel's calling in life was to be a mother she was such a natural at it she had this real strong maternal instinct and andre has since said that he has never seen two people have such a strong connection than rachel and alex those two people would just kind of made for each other they were like soul mates mother and son soul mates the three of them decided to get a rescue dog together and they named her molly and over the next few years they settled into family life really really well i think rachel was a stay-at-home mother and andre obviously had his motorcycle career job so during the day it would be rachel alex and the dog molly and so for most days they would actually go on big long walks through the parks so that she could get alex out into the fresh air so he could run around the fields and play and molly could go for a walk and that's exactly what they did on july 15 1992 by now rachel was 23 years old and alex was two i think it was about a month off of his third birthday so it was almost three it was a beautiful warm summer's day they woke up that morning they all had breakfast together and then andre left for work as a motorcycle career and alex and rachel waved him off through the window and then they decided to get ready and go out for a walk on wimbledon common which was their closest park it was literally just such a big open nature area it had so many different things it was mainly like fields and paths and walking trails it had some wooded area kind of bits it had a big pond some little streams as well i think just a really nice area to take your kid and your dog usually on a warm day like this one it would be absolutely packed with people there'd be thousands of people there sunbathing having drinks you know having little picnics on the common but on this particular day they'd caught it on quite a quiet day actually with it being a weekday it was early in the morning lots of people would have been at work kids would have been in school and so on this particular morning there was only about 500 people on wimbledon common so they all headed out and they were walking through the parks and stuff until eventually they got to this wooded area now rachel nickell was a very sensible woman she would never put herself let alone her son her two-year-old son in a dangerous situation and although this wooded area was quite covered over it was quite secluded there was no one around it was broad daylight it was the morning there were people in other places in the park you know she didn't feel unsafe walking through this wooded area and they were walking for a little while until suddenly both of them rachel and alex both got a sinking feeling that something was wrong so they both turned their heads to the right and immediately their fears were confirmed they saw a large man coming out of the bushes with a black bag over his shoulder and running towards them this all happened within a split second they saw this guy and all of a sudden both of them were being attacked first this man grabbed two-year-old alex and threw him to the ground first first he didn't do anything to hurt him i mean i'm sure being thrown to the ground would have hurt but he didn't you know start attacking him and once alex was out of the way and on the ground this man's attention turned to rachel nickell and before she knew it this man had produced a knife from his pocket and from behind her he reached around her neck and slashed her throat he then began stabbing her over and over and over again until she eventually collapsed down on the ground next to where two-year-old alex was actually just picking himself up after being thrown down he turned over to see his mother who was laying down next to him already dead and he just remembered how peaceful she looked in that moment she just looked like she was sleeping she didn't look like she'd just been through a horrific ordeal she just looked like she was resting this all happened so fast within seconds a life was taken and a baby was left without a mother and the absolute horror of it is that he actually witnessed her being taken from him alex looked up to see where the man was now and he watched as this man walked over to a nearby stream bent down and started washing his hands in the water presumably this man had a lot of blood on him after what he'd just done to rachel alex noticed how this man was very calm he just washed his hands then stood back up and walked away as if nothing had happened as if he hadn't just torn their lives apart alex then turned to rachel again and of course being just two years old he didn't understand he didn't understand what had just happened he didn't understand death and that his mother was now gone he thought his mother was asleep and so he walked over to her and started tugging on her arm saying wake up mommy come on wake up and he said it didn't take long for the realization to actually set in he didn't fully understand what death was but in that moment he just knew that his mother wasn't coming back rachel's body was eventually found about 10 minutes later by an older gentleman named michael murray he'd been walking through this wooded area when he noticed rachel's bare legs sticking out into the path and at first he didn't think too much about it he thought oh it's probably just a sunbear that you know people go and sunbathe on wimbledon coming quite a lot and this was a nice day but as he got closer to rachel's body he realized that that wasn't the case at all he saw her and noticed that she was half dressed there was blood all over her and he said that her eyes had a stony glazed look to them and he just knew that this woman was no longer alive and actually when this man found her alex was still standing at the side of his mother's body tugging on her arms saying come on mummy wake up so emergency services were called and ambulance police the whole lot all came down to wimbledon common and they made the decision to sedate alex they decided that that would probably be the best thing to do for his mental state at this point in time after everything he just witnessed they just wanted him to be out of the chaos until they actually had a bit of a plan of course within being just two years old they had to be so careful with how they went about this kind of thing psychologists were going to have to be consulted they needed to talk to his father as well and they just didn't want to do anything wrong they knew that he'd already been through a lot and they didn't really want him to feel alone you know maybe just like in the back of a police car with a bunch of adults after you've just seen what's happened to your mother they just thought that sedating him would probably be the best thing to do so alex was taken to the nearest hospital while police back at the scene taped up the whole of wimbledon common immediately a forensic team was brought in to have a look at the crime scene and at rachel's body and it was immediately theorized that rachel was probably attacked from behind like i said partly because of how the slash wound on her neck was but also because a lot of the stab wounds seem to be in her back kind of area and this also means that whoever killed rachel whoever did all of these stabbings probably didn't have that much blood on them the blood flow out of a wound in the back is actually a lot less than what the blood flow would be in the front so it probably got all over the killer's hands but it was mainly on rachel and this means it'd probably be quite easy for the killer to just walk out of wimbledon common undetected which you would think after committing an attack this frenzied the killer would be covered in blood there'd be no way that they could hide what they'd done but i mean all it really took was washing his hands and it seemed that he'd gotten out of wimbledon common without being detected without anyone being suspicious of this guy immediately from looking at the crime scene and the way that rachel's body was found like i said she was found half naked so it seemed that she had been sexually assaulted as part of this attack now i'm not sure when this actually happened i don't know if alex was knocked out during this attack you know when he was thrown to the floor by this guy that's not a fact by the way that's not something i've read in a source that's just my own personal question i suppose because he seems to only remember being thrown to the ground and then he wakes up and he's seeing the guy going and washing his hands it seems that he's missed a lot of the attack i know it was a super fast attack but still for him to only remember being thrown to the ground and then the next time he wakes up his mother's already dead then it makes me think that he has missed a chunk of this story so i don't know exactly when rachel was sexually assaulted but it was confirmed in her autopsy and her autopsy also found that she had a total of 49 stab wounds which is a lot this must have been quite a prolonged attack for how frenzied it was it was fast for the amount of stab wounds that she sustained but even then 49 stab wins you can only do that so fast this guy must have been there stabbing rachel for a little while a fair few of these injuries were actually on rachel's hands and arms you know self-defense wounds it seemed that rachel mckellar had put up a fight for her life until the very end but like i say the main injury that caused rachel nickell's death the main injury that she bled out from was the huge slash wound on her neck it was actually so deep that she was almost decapitated on the ground at the crime scene rachel was actually found to have like all the contents of her pockets kind of spilling out and it's believed that this is actually due to her son alex because obviously during this attack it was very frenzied she was fighting for her life this was a big altercation things were like flying out of her pockets left right center and it's believed that after rachel was dead and her killer had left the scene two-year-old alex had run around picking up all of his mummy's things and putting them back in her pockets for her i also read that a cash machine receipt was actually found placed on rachel's forehead which at first police really didn't understand the significance of that but after speaking with alex police actually found that this was down to him as well he'd found this receipt after the attack and he thought that it could act as a plaster or a band-aid for his mum and so he placed it on her forehead and this is his exact words to make mummy better which if that is not the most heartbreaking thing you have ever heard in one of these cases this boy was two years old and he witnessed literally the most hellish thing you could even imagine and to then be left alone with her body for like 10 minutes over 10 minutes desperately trying to make her better in any way that he could it's just such a nightmare it's awful as for crime scene evidence there really wasn't much to be found at the scene i mean this was 1992 so forensics really wasn't a thing so they kind of relied on a lot more obvious evidence back in those days so they were looking for anything that the attacker might have dropped or hidden they couldn't find any weapons in the area there was absolutely nothing but there was one piece of dna evidence well they believed it was dna evidence but they just didn't have the technology to test it it was tiny it was a tiny tiny piece of evidence and back in those days it needed to be like this big to be able to be tested which is crazy so i mean they saved it hoping that they would be able to do something with it maybe at some point but right now it was kind of useless all they actually had to go off was a partial footprint in the mud that they believed belonged to the killer and there were also some flecks of red paint found in alex's hair although they didn't know if that was significant or not at this point in the investigation so due to a lack of evidence police knew at this point that this investigation was going to very heavily rely on witnesses so for that exact reason police locked down wimbledon common and they got every single person's name number address a description of every single person as well they were doing quick little like unofficial interviews just there on the common with these people they were just asking them have you seen anything did you see anyone leaving the wooded area and it seemed that no one had seen anything there were absolutely no witnesses to this murder the only witness was the victim's two-year-old son so by now it had been a couple of hours since police were called down to the scene and they knew that they had to inform rachel's boyfriend and the father of her child andre hanscom and like i said andre worked as a motorcycle career so he was out on the road a lot of the day so it took them a while to actually get in contact with him but he did nip home between certain deliveries so that he could use the bathroom get something to eat stuff like that and they actually managed to catch him while he was on one of these breaks at home and andrea said as soon as he picked up the house phone and he heard just that heller he knew that it was something very very serious like he'd never heard this voice before in his life but he somehow knew that it was something bad it was like he could tell that it was a police officer or like an official law enforcement something like that he could just tell from the sternness in the voice but also just the sadness in the voice as well it was a very particular feeling that he got from it that just kind of told him everything he needed to know already so the police officer says to andre it's about rachel something's happened i can't tell you exactly what's happened over the phone but i'm gonna need you to come down to the police station so we can talk about it so andre was like oh my god what's happened and the guy was like look i i can't tell you on the phone just come down to the station and we'll talk about it and andre was like no please just just tell me what has happened to rachel and the guy wouldn't and so andre lost his call for a moment and he starts shouting at this guy like look this is my girlfriend this is the love of my life tell me what has happened to her he said she's dead isn't she she's dead and that's why you're not telling me if it was anything else you'd be able to tell me just just say it she's dead isn't she and the officer just said look i i'm really sorry i can't tell you anything on the phone you are gonna have to come down to the station and andre just said you already have you've already told me with the things that this guy was saying he had he had told andre just indirectly that rachel was dead so andre asked the officer on the phone he said well where's alex is he okay like what's he doing and the officer was like look he's safe he's fine he's at the hospital just please come down to the police station so that we can talk about this and it was at this point that andre started getting light-headed this was so much for him to take in all at once he'd just been told but not even told that his girlfriend was dead his son is in a hospital and he just collapsed he just collapsed to the ground when he eventually found the strength to get up he went down to the police station where they very briefly informed him what had happened but he wanted to see his son he didn't want to be in questionings and interviews and things like that he wanted to be at the hospital where alex was and so police allowed him to go down to the hospital and see his son and on this drive to the hospital andre said that his mind was going to some very scary and dark places he didn't want to live without rachel and he didn't want his son to live after everything that he'd witnessed on that day he didn't want his son to live with these traumatic memories replaying in his mind literally for the rest of his life and like i said rachel and her son alex were like soul mates it was like their souls were meant to be together on this earth and now his mother had been ripped away from him and andre thought that alex probably wouldn't want to go on without his mother either and so andre spent most of that car journey on the way to the hospital thinking of the different ways that he could end his own and his son's lives so they wouldn't have to go on without rachel but he had a plan to kind of almost get alex's consent to do this in a way i'll come back to that in a second but for now andre arrived safely at the hospital and he was going up to where his son was but before he was allowed to see alex he was sat down by a child psychiatrist who pretty much briefed him and made sure that he was saying the right things to minimize the trauma because it was inevitable that alex was going to have trauma from this situation long-lasting trauma that would likely affect him for the rest of his life and so they wanted to make sure that he wasn't holding on certain hopes that his mother would come back they just needed to make sure that andre's wording when he first spoke to his son was spot on so that there was no doubt in alex's mind about what the situation was so alex was eventually brought round from his sedation and andre went in to speak to him and literally the first thing that alex said to his father was where's mommy where's the dog where's molly he was concerned about his family he was concerned about the people that he loved he didn't care what he'd just been through he didn't care about his ordeal the fact that he was hurting after he'd been thrown to the ground he wanted to know if his mum and the dog were safe andre tried to have a little bit of a normal conversation with alex and he noticed that alex was very very quiet he really didn't say much other than asking where his mum was and where molly was and it was then that andre broke the news to alex that mummy was gone and she was never coming back but there wasn't much more he could say to him that he didn't already witness himself he just wanted to make it clear in alex's mind that that was what the situation was from that point on it was just him and his dad by lunchtime that day so this murder had happened in the morning and within a matter of hours this case was front-page news in the uk within hours this was the biggest story the uk had had in a while and one of the most harrowing as well a young mother stabbed to death and sexually assaulted in front of her two-year-old child when they were on a nice family walk in the park this was the most horrifying thing the british public had pretty much ever heard and the way that the british media and reporters and journalists went about this was actually vile actually grim it was so disrespectful like they crowded wimbledon common literally within hours of rachel's murder they also crowded the hospital where alex was being kept they found out where he was and they went and crowded outside waiting to see if they could speak to him if they could speak to rachel's partner this was literally a few hours after this two-year-old baby had witnessed his mother being brutally murdered literally at his side and these grown adult reporters were trying to shove cameras in his face police actually had to put that hospital on lockdown nobody could go in nobody could come out because reporters were actually trying to sneak in the hospital to get a better look at alex or to try and get some pictures or get an interview an exclusive that night andre and alex went to go and stay with andre as parents because they didn't want to go back to their house you know the house that they shared with rachel they didn't want to they didn't want to go back there without her and that night alex was laid in bed staring at the ceiling he looked so sad and this was when andre decided to ask him a very important question like i said earlier andre had been thinking all day about whether or not he was going to take both of their lives he didn't know if it was worth carrying on without rachel but he wasn't going to kill alex if that wasn't what alex wanted so he went and laid next to alex in bed and he gave him this analogy about their dog molly he said one day molly's going to be really old she's going to be poorly she's going to be sick she's not going to want to wake up anymore she's just going to want to sleep forever and andre said it was at that moment when his two-year-old son looked up at him looked him right in the eyes and told him that he would want to wake up and that was andre's mind made up he knew that his son wanted to carry on without his mother and so that meant that he would carry on too they would do this together for each other so much depended on alex's answer that he gave to that analogy that night and without knowing it he saved both of their lives so anyway police immediately got to work on this case because they were so concerned with some of the characteristics of this it seemed like the killer was a stranger it didn't seem like it was someone that rachel knew and it seemed as though they'd gotten away with it completely like they hadn't been seen they hadn't been suspected these are all the characteristics of a repeat offender of a potential serial killer who just goes to a park with a knife hides in the bushes and just waits for some unsuspecting person to walk by so that they can attack and murder them these are characteristics of a serial killer and they worried that every day that this case remained unsolved was another day that this killer was at large and that they were planning their next attack but like i said there really was nothing in the way of evidence like at all crime scene evidence there was nothing so police knew that the only way that they were really going to progress in this case was through witnesses through people coming forward to say oh i saw this kind of person in this area on that day or i saw this vehicle you know different leads that could take them elsewhere so for that reason andre hanscom did a lot of public appeals on the news begging people to come forward if they'd seen anything or if they knew of anything police did get literally hundreds of calls in the beginning of this investigation and they followed up on everything but nothing was really going anywhere and this whole time they knew that their best bet in this investigation was the only eyewitness to the crime alex but as i'm sure you can imagine the ethics with this one are very very tricky this is a two almost three-year-old child who will have a lot of trauma attached to this case they can't exactly sit him down in a room and just make him relive the whole thing and because he's a child he won't really know how to either he won't know how to answer certain questions so police and psychologists came to the conclusion that the best way to try and get any kind of information out of alex would be to keep him in as much of a natural environment as they possibly could so that means keeping him at home or at someone else's house at least keeping toys around him making sure that he's comfortable happy and then they were gonna try and hide loads of cameras and microphones in those houses just in case he said anything you know just a random little comment maybe about the man that did this to mummy then that would be caught on on cameron on audio so that they could use it as evidence the main technique that they were going to use to draw some information out of alex was a child psychologist i think she came to his house sometimes they went to her house it wasn't in like a hospital or a psychologist's office or anything they kept toys around him they gave him paper and pens they just let him do whatever they want while this child psychologist sat next to him and would ask him different questions and although this was like the most comfortable way that they could do it alex still wasn't responding very well to it they got pretty much no information out of alex through all the sessions that they did to the point where they ended up just canceling it because it seemed as though it was doing more mental harm for this child than it was good for the investigation you could tell that he was very distressed by the whole situation as this psychologist was sat next to him talking to him asking him questions you know can you tell us what the bad man that hurt mummy looked like he would just be sat there with his toys banging them on the floor banging them off each other trying to drown out the sound of this psychologist asking him questions there was one particularly powerful moment in these sessions where they actually managed to get alex to draw the bad man that hurt mummy and once he'd drawn it he picked up another crayon and started jabbing it as though he was stabbing this man over and over and over speeding up as fast as he could and then after that he came up from this picture still had the pen in his hand not how you would hold a pen but how you would hold a knife and he walked over to andre and he was holding this this crayon up at him like it was a knife and you could tell that this child remembered a lot from the incident but just didn't feel capable of talking about it so like i said these psychologist sessions were cancelled because this was doing a lot of mental damage to this poor child that had already been through enough in his life so at this point they were kind of down about it thinking well alex is the only witness to this whole murder he saw the perpetrator with his own two eyes and we just can't get any information out of him it felt like such a dead end like there was this block between the police and the investigation and so much information like golden nugget pieces of information on the other side that they just couldn't get to but on one particular day when andre was driving alex home i believe from one of these psychologist sessions alex was sat in the back of the car kind of reading this book i say reading he was more looking at the pictures in the books i don't think he could really read at that age and alex was kind of talking to himself pointing at the different characters going fat man fat man and andre in the front of the car in that moment he had this realization that alex could understand different physical characteristics of people and this gave andre an idea so as soon as they got home he got out loads of paper and a pen and he drew like pairs of stick men he would draw like one fat man one thin man and he would say to alex was the man that killed mummy a fat man or a thin man and alex would point to the thin man he then did it for a bunch more characteristics you know short hair long hair tall man short man all these different things until eventually they got a description of his mother's murderer it took a matter of minutes to get a full description from this kid all those psychology sessions where they were desperately trying to draw it out of him but all it took was this simple little exercise with his dad so the full description of this man that alex gave was that he was a thin white man with short brown hair on the day of the murder he was wearing blue trousers a white button-up shirt brown shoes a black bag and a belt over his shirt so it wasn't through the belt loops in his jeans but it was over his shirt so now they finally had as vague as it was they finally had a description of the attacker and you know this was the biggest thing they'd had in a while and the news quickly broke in the media that the victim's two-year-old son was helping to solve her murder and oh my god did the media get ten times worse at this point they followed this two-year-old child everywhere like paparazzi between like his grandparents house to the psychologist's house to the hospital to literally wherever he was going there was one day that andre and alex went to wimbledon common to go and leave a rose at the site where rachel was murdered and the press followed them there literally grown adults jumping the fence at wimbledon common where police were literally trying to tape it up they were trying to keep these people out they would jump in the fence to run over and try and get pictures of this grieving son and grieving boyfriend at the murder site of their loved one andre literally had to take the hat off of his head and put it over his son's face and literally carry him out so that the press couldn't take pictures of it the reason the media wanted pictures of alex so bad was because not only was this a tragic awful murder of a beautiful young mother but the only witness to the murder was her two-year-old son he witnessed the whole thing and that was the spin that they wanted to put on these articles they wanted it to be more about alex than it was about rachel newspapers really clung to that a lot of the headlines and stuff were about alex rather than rachel and it actually got to the point where in the early investigation one of the biggest media publications in the whole of the uk posted a full color picture of alex hanscom who was just three years old now in a national newspaper there is a full colour photograph of the only witness to his mother's murder and that killer is still out there on the loose and he knows that alex was the only witness to that murder so who's to say that that killer won't see that picture and then want to get rid of the only witness to the murder that put alex hanscom's life in complete danger if it wasn't already in danger already just at the thought that that killer was still out there and the killer knew that alex witnessed it but now the killer had a reminder of what alex looked like so what if he went and tried to find him too it's actually just so dangerous and careless and heartless of the media to purse things like that when they know that that three-year-old is going through absolute hell and of course the fact that they were putting his life in danger too but in terms of the actual police investigation at this stage they were stressed to put it bluntly they were very stressed there was no evidence to go off there were no suspects there were no witnesses other than a two-year-old who gave the best description that he possibly could they had nothing they literally had no direction to go in this case they tried all the obvious lines of inquiry so they went and questioned all rachel's friends and family ruled every single one of those out as a suspect none of them were suspicious they asked all of them if rachel had any enemies if they knew of anyone that might want to do this to her but they didn't they said that rachel was very loved you know she had a lot of friends she didn't have any enemies which to be fair police didn't believe it was someone that knew rachel anyway they thought that this looked like a random killing of a stranger police had a look at all of the sex offenders in that general area that kind of lived close by wimbledon common they questioned a lot of them and pretty much all of them were ruled out they even looked at previous murders in that general area previous sexual assault cases in that general area to see if any connections could be made again no connections they literally had absolutely nothing else that they could do and they were really feeling like they were a dead end so soon in the investigation that was until one particular day when they received a phone call it was from a woman who was claiming to have been on wimbledon common on the morning of rachel's murder although i think she left the park before police ended up locking it down so that was why she wasn't interviewed her details weren't taken on the day but she said she'd been walking on the common literally just before rachel was murdered and she remembered seeing a very suspicious looking guy immediately this sounded promising so police asked her to tell them more and she said that this guy was just kind of like pottering around in the wooded area kind of in the bushes and stuff he seemed directionless he he seemed like he didn't really know what he was doing or what he wanted to do he wasn't walking in a particular direction he was just kind of looking around he'd move a few steps and he'd look around again but one of the most interesting parts of this was that she thought this man was trying to hide his face from her she said that as she walked by him she kept looking at him to try and you know smile and say you know good morning she was trying to be friendly and polite but every time they would make brief eye contact he would quickly look away and like put his head down she gave a description to the police of what this guy looked like and it actually matched the description that alex gave of his mother's killer so already they were feeling a bit more confident that they were on the right track with this sharp brown-haired thin white man so i mean having this description was was better than nothing it was better than anything else they had at this stage in the investigation but it still really wasn't gonna take them anywhere was it and so police knew that they had to do something more so this is when police decided to bring in a rather famous criminal profiler and psychologist named paul britton now paul britain you might have heard of him if you're into uk true crime he's worked on a lot of prolific uk murder cases he's very accurate at predicting the type of traits that a murderer will have so if you don't know what a criminal profile is let me explain it real quick so a criminal profile is where you look at the murder and look at the way that it was carried out you know all the specific little things that were done can tell you a lot about the person that actually committed the murder and so from these tiny little specific things you can predict the kind of traits and characteristics that the murderer probably has so for example this is quite a a broad example but the fact that rachel nikell was sexually assaulted suggests that her killer was probably a man because she was a young woman it's usually men that sexually assault young women that's quite an obvious example and quite a unspecific example but trust me it gets very very specific and you'll see in a minute but just little things like that where they can look at you know maybe the weapon that they used and determine what kind of person they are or the motive for the murder based on the weapon you know obviously a criminal profile is probably not going to be 100 accurate and police know that they know that it's not like a science but they have proved to be mostly accurate in the past with a lot of other cases the criminal profile seems to be quite accurate to the killer that they end up apprehending so it's useful to do these to know what kind of suspect you're looking for so paul britain had a look at all the evidence all the crime scene photos absolutely everything autopsy reports and he came back to police with a very specific character profile of this murderer he told them a lot of things that they already predicted like he thought that this person would have been a stranger to rachel they didn't know rachel beforehand they hadn't pre-meditated that they were going to attack her specifically he believed that the attacker was a young male no older than 30 it was believed between kind of mid-20s to 30. he probably lived relatively close to wimbledon common because it seemed that he knew exactly where to carry out this attack so that he wouldn't be spotted he probably knew that wooded area knew it was quite secluded knew that not many people walked through there on a morning he probably also chose quite a local spot because he knew that he was going to attack with a knife which meant a lot of blood and if he did have a lot of blood on him he wouldn't have wanted a long journey home because then there's so much more opportunity to be spotted and suspected so immediately they're thinking he lives within a couple of miles of wimbledon common britain concluded that the killer was probably single or at most in a relationship but they probably weren't engaged or married they were more than likely single which is so specific the killer probably had very average intelligence performed average in school they didn't think that this was particularly a genius or particularly an idiot it was just kind of a regular person also the same for their physical appearance as well they were probably just a very average looking person the killer probably hadn't had much experience with romantic relationships in the past you know probably not that many relationships in their life and the ones that they did have likely ended rather quickly there was a probable history of rejection by women as well due to likely bad social skills he believed that this guy probably either lived alone or still with his parents it was unlikely that he lived with friends or a girlfriend or something roommates britain also believed that this was probably the murderer's first kill it was unlikely that they'd done anything of this severity yet although he did believe that they probably committed a few smaller crimes in the past and those smaller crimes were more than likely sexual crimes you know sexual assault harassment possibly things like indecent exposure or maybe even having illegal pornography there were a lot more traits that paul britain came up with in his full report but i don't know if there's access to that on the internet anywhere but i know it got so specific so now police had this kind of template of a suspect that they were looking for obviously they weren't looking for someone that would fit it to a t because they know that it's not 100 accurate but this gave them a better idea when they were looking at potential suspects but by now it was two months since rachel nickell's murder and police were no closer to even finding a suspect never mind apprehending a killer and the pressure was intense not only did they want to solve this case obviously for rachel and for alex and for her family and her loved ones but they also needed to solve this for the whole of london they had to protect london from this murderer that had the potential to become a serial killer police feared that if they didn't act fast then any day now they could be waking up to another call of another body being found and the media were on police's backs about this case they were very very critical of the police force throughout the whole thing actually which i mean it does make sense it had been two months since this woman's murder and there are absolutely no developments on it there was nothing for the media to report on let's be honest that was why they were mad it wasn't because they really cared about the investigation but they had a point there was nothing going on there was nothing going on that the public could see and people were scared they thought the police just weren't weren't doing anything but then finally in september of 1992 police got the next development in this case they were able to make a composite suspect sketch using witnesses from the scene so that woman that had called in to say she'd seen that guy acting weirdly and he was trying to hide his face she came in and she helped to make a sketch but there was also another woman that had since been in touch with the police and she said that she'd also seen another guy acting weirdly and he was washing his hands in the stream which she predicted was around the time of rachel's murder so these two women work together to make a composite sketch of this guy that they'd seen acting suspiciously in the park and this sketch was put all over the news and mainly on crime watch and if you don't know what crime watch is it used to be a show here in the uk and it was kind of like a weekly uk crime update show which sounds really weird but it was it was really good like everyone used to watch it i remember coming home from school like almost every day to watch crime watch it's a wonder how i turned out the way i did isn't it but they used to give updates of current crimes in the uk and put like police numbers that you could contact if you had any information about a particular case and this police sketch got its own section in a crime watch episode and after it was aired police got so many phone calls of people believing that they recognized that police sketch and they were giving up so many names so many different people but there was one name that seemed to come up over and over and over again in these phone calls a lot of people were convinced that this police sketch was of this one particular man but that is where i'm gonna end part one thank you so much for watching i'm sorry it's a bit of a cliffhanger but make sure you've got my notifications on click the little notification bell so you can come back for part two as soon as it's uploaded thanks again to function of beauty for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get 20 off of your first set you can go through the link down below in the description and i really recommend you do because function beauty is one of the best things i've ever found for my like personal care product needs that's the weirdest way i could have said that it's basically my favorite brand when it comes to personal care there you go huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below because that would really help me out make sure you're subscribed and the bell notification is on so that you're notified when part two comes out if you want to subscribe there'll be a link to do so right here if you want to subscribe to my second channel there'll be a link to do so right here and if you want to watch 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,683,143

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, rachel nickell, nickell, rachel, colin stagg, robert napper, sam bissett, samantha bissett, jazmine, bissett, crimewatch, alex hanscombe, true crime daily, son, andre

Id: 3i-VCf9HntQ

Length: 50min 20sec (3020 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021