Killer in the Shadows: The Monstrous Crimes of Robert Napper

"Yes, it’s a big chunk of my next book. But yes, Rachel Nickell was killed on Wimbledon Common in 1992. I got involved in 2006, I think. Napper killed Rachel Nickell, he stabbed her 47 times. He was still stabbing her after she was dead. In broad daylight, in the middle of London on a summer’s day. She had her two-year-old son with her at the time. And the police absolutely fucked up the investigation, pretty much from top to bottom: fitted someone up. They used this man called Paul Britton who was a forensic… let’s call him an offender profiler, which is a term they used then, but nobody would use now. Britton was naïve, but the cops were the opposite of naïve. This profile led them to Colin Stagg, and they just put on their blinkers after that and didn’t listen to anything else. “The police absolutely fucked up the investigation, pretty much from top to bottom” Stagg was tried at the Old Bailey in 1994, but the judge kicked out the case. He was just appalled by it. He really leaned on the police and the prosecution. He obviously thought the case was nuts and should never have brought near a court. Then the case remained unsolved. Apart from the Stephen Lawrence case, it was the single biggest investigative failing in the many failings of the Metropolitan Police. I used to work in the Metropolitan Police forensic lab. Now, in 2006 I was asked to review this case. Napper had actually killed another woman the year after Nickell: Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter, in absolutely horrific circumstances. So horrific that at least one of the persons at the crime scene never worked again. Utterly horrific. The upshot of the story is that Napper came to court in 2008. Napper is now in Broadmoor. There was no trial. He pleaded guilty to the murder with diminished responsibility. By that time he had already been convicted of the previous murders. They reckon he could have raped as many as 100 women. Given what we were saying earlier, it’s interesting that they used, as a subtitle, ‘The Monstrous Crimes of Robert Napper.’ I think most people would have no trouble in describing Napper as a monster. Laurence Alison and Marie Eyre, I think Alison’s student at the time, are much more interested in Napper than the crime; I was reviewing the crime—although I always want to try to figure out what he was doing. During my review I had a really smart detective from the Met who was my interlocutor; they wanted an independent review because they had had so many problems with the case. The main problem was that evidence could potentially have been contaminated, because they didn’t know cases from Napper were actually in the lab at the same time as the original Nickell case—because they hadn’t linked the cases. The situation in the lab was so bad, that when they told me what had happened I basically thought to myself: ‘You’re fucked. There’s no way on Earth this can’t be contamination.’ Then they said to me: ‘If you say this is potentially contamination, there will be no trial, no prosecution.’ So no pressure then! But at the end of the case, when I’d reviewed it—and it was a horrifically detailed and complex thing to do—I decided that it probably wasn’t contamination. I couldn’t possibly rule it out. You can almost never rule out contamination, there’s always the possibility, but it was unlikely. “This guy targeted women with children. That’s really, incredibly unusual” It takes a long time to get your head around these cases. There’s a huge difference between getting directly involved in a case and going to the scene and seeing it first hand, and just having a lot of documents and photographs. So I was constantly meeting up with the Met detective to ask, ‘what about this?’ and ‘what about that?’ There was an interesting conversation we had while I was building up for my review, when I said to him one day: ‘this guy targets women with children. That’s really, incredibly unusual. I’ve never come across this before.’ And he told me, smiling, ‘I’ve been told not to discuss that part of the case with you, because we want a completely independent review.’ I said, well, I didn’t need to know, I really didn’t. But it seems to be rather obvious. All the documents in the case were disclosed to me. To my surprise this included correspondence between the Home Office, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Forensic Science Service (FSS), who had carried out the early forensic work. Later the police transferred the case to another forensic lab, which found DNA evidence that the FSS had missed. The case papers showed how the FSS tried to cover up their failings. I also got the distinct impression that the Home Office were trying to distance themselves from the row because they were concerned that it might impact on the planned privatization of the FSS. Alison really opens up what might be in the mind of Napper. And we can only speculate, but it’s a very dark place, a very strange world, where there’s this connection between sex and horrific violence and humiliation and torture. It’s pretty horrible. I’ve used a quote from Alison as an epigraph. Because in the outside world these people are described as monsters who are hiding in the dark shadows. But Alison says, no. They’re right in front of you. There are serial killers there in plain sight. I thought, oh, that’s cute. That’s much more chilling that the man hiding in the shadows. Napper worked as a cleaner in a school. They all thought he was a bit odd, sure. But there he was in plain sight. I wouldn’t over-worry about it, because you are a bit remote from the really serious action. You do have to go to crime scenes, and there are bodies—and some of those bodies can be in pretty horrible circumstances. But that’s only a certain type of forensic scientist. Nobody would ever make you go to a crime scene. You could choose not to. It would curtail your work a bit, but the people who really tend to suffer from PTSD are cops and crime scene investigators who see this day in, day out. How many bodies have I seen throughout my career? Not that many, to be honest. I don’t know how many, but perhaps only 30. I’ve seen some pretty horrible photographs—and even photographs could set you off. But even then… it’s a subset of a subset of forensic scientists who get exposed to this kind of stuff, whereas cops and crime scene investigators and pathologists are exposed all the time. So I don’t think it’s a huge problem for forensic scientists. “If you engage in a highly emotional way, you are probably in the wrong business” But if you have that personality type, where you engage in a highly emotional way, you are probably in the wrong business. You do need to be able to distance yourself from this. You need to be able to cope with the details of how somebody might have been raped or tortured or murdered, and you need to be able to listen to what has happened and think: ‘what does that mean for my investigation?’ Only on a tiny number of occasions have I been involved in cases where I’ve heard the details about a case and felt that I didn’t want to hear any more. In the Robert Black case—a serial child killer—I had to think: ‘what has he done to these children?’ And I can remember myself just thinking: no. A bit of me was saying: ‘You really don’t want to think about this.’ But it would tend to be cops who get the real brunt of this because they deal with the victims—and the offenders, you know, people who will lie to you, and boast or brag, when you believe they’re guilty. So that’s a much trickier psychological environment than just reading the story in a case file. Oh, yes. I mean, I’m not sure how many serial killers I’ve dealt with, but you could count them on one hand, probably. They’re pretty rare. Whereas if you pick up a crime fiction book, every second book has a serial killer. There soon won’t be any people left!"