On the morning of July 15, 1992, Rachel Nickell took her son, Alex, and the family dog for a walk on Wimbledon Common in south-west London. Alex was a month short of his third birthday. Witnesses saw the three of them enjoying the common at about 10:20 a.m. Twelve minutes later another witness noticed a man with a bag washing his hands in a ditch near the spot where, soon afterward, a walker found Rachel Nickell's body. She had been stabbed 49 times and sexually assaulted. Alex was holding on to her arm, covered in blood, saying "Get up mummy." He had put a small piece of paper on her forehead, like a plaster.
The man at the ditch was Robert Napper, a twenty-six-year-old from Plumstead, twelve miles away in south-east London. He had already raped and attacked women in his own part of the city, and the police had already had his name. It took sixteen years, one wrongful prosecution, two more killings and a scientific advance before he admitted, at the Old Bailey in December 2008, that he had killed Rachel Nickell. He pleaded guilty to her manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He has been held at Broadmoor high-security hospital since 1995.
Robert Clive Napper was born in February 1966 and grew up in Plumstead. For the first ten years of his life, according to the Guardian's 2008 account of his background, he watched his father, Brian, beat his mother, Pauline. When the couple divorced, all four children were placed in foster care and given psychiatric treatment. Robert's treatment, at the Maudsley hospital, lasted six years.
When he was twelve, a family friend assaulted him on a camping holiday. His mother said that afterward he became introverted, obsessively tidy and reclusive. He came out of his bedroom, she said, mainly to bully his brothers and to spy on his sister while she dressed. Later reporting described him as a loner and a fitness enthusiast who read military and survival magazines, worked for a time at the Ministry of Defence as a warehouseman, and in 1993 was working at a plastics factory in Plumstead.
His first recorded offense came in 1986, when he was fined and given a conditional discharge for possessing an airgun. Psychiatrists would later agree that by the early 1990s he had both paranoid schizophrenia and Asperger's syndrome.
In August 1989 a thirty-one-year-old mother was raped in her home, a house that backed on to Plumstead Common. A masked intruder had come in through the back door with a Stanley knife while her children were in the house. The police took DNA from her.
Some weeks later, Napper, still living with his mother, told her he had raped a woman on Plumstead Common. Pauline Napper, later Pauline Lasham, rang the local police station. The officer checked the paper files and the computer and told her there was no record of a rape on the common. The call was never matched to the attack on the woman whose house backed on to it. Napper was not interviewed, his home was not searched and no blood was taken from him. "I told them my son had raped a woman but they said there'd been no rape and that he must have made it up," she told the Mirror in 2008. Reports give the month of her call as August, October or November 1989.
After that, the Guardian reported, his mother cut off contact with him. He moved into a bedsit and worked a string of low-paid jobs. The 1989 rape was later linked to him by his DNA, in July 1994, but according to the Herald it was not taken to court because of a scientific error, which the paper called "transposition."
The Green Chain Walk is a network of footpaths linking parks, woods and commons across south-east London. The rape in 1989 came to be counted as the first of what police called the Green Chain rapes. In the spring of 1992 the attacks along the walk became more frequent and more violent. In March two seventeen-year-old girls were attacked; according to the Crime+Investigation case file, one was the victim of an attempted rape and the other was sexually assaulted at knifepoint eight days later.
On the May bank holiday weekend of 1992, a twenty-two-year-old mother, identified in court reporting only as C, was pushing her two-year-old daughter in a buggy along the Green Chain Walk in Eltham on her way to a barbecue. A man grabbed her from behind, put a ligature around her neck and pulled her to the ground. He raped her and beat her about the head for several minutes in front of her child. "I asked him not to kill me," she said later. "He didn't stop hitting me. He put a rope around my neck and kept bashing me on the head." She survived.
A major inquiry was set up after the 1992 attacks. Over its life, the Guardian reported, officers identified 106 crimes involving 86 women. The inquiry had a description of a man about 5 feet 7 inches tall.
Rachel Jane Nickell was twenty-three. She grew up in Great Totham, near Colchester in Essex, and had worked as a model. She met André Hanscombe when she was nineteen, while she was working as a lifeguard, according to A&E's account of the family's 2017 interview with the Guardian. They lived in Balham, south London, with Alex and their rescue dog, Molly, and she called the family her "little pack." Hanscombe worked as a courier and tennis coach. The couple had been planning to leave Britain for a quieter life abroad.
Seven weeks after the attack on C, Napper was on Wimbledon Common. The account given at the Old Bailey in 2008 by the prosecutor, Victor Temple QC, and by the judge, is that he forced Rachel Nickell off the path into an overgrown area, made her kneel and stabbed her repeatedly, then moved her to a nearby tree and continued, and sexually assaulted her. He carried what the Guardian called a rape kit and knives. Alex had abrasions above both eyes and on his cheeks and mouth; a consultant pediatrician said they were consistent with his being dragged face down. The judge concluded that Napper had almost certainly dragged the boy away from his mother, and that Alex survived "almost certainly" because Napper was anxious not to be caught by staying too long.
When André Hanscombe stopped on his rounds that day to phone home and check on his family, a man's voice answered. "My blood ran cold," he recalled in the 2026 Netflix documentary The Murder of Rachel Nickell.
Crime+Investigation calls the Nickell inquiry the largest murder investigation in British history; it took thousands of statements and cost an estimated £3 million. Detectives found almost no usable forensic evidence. A tiny trace of material was recovered when Rachel Nickell's body was swabbed with tape soon after her death, but science in 1992 could not analyze it. Investigators called in a forensic psychologist, Paul Britton, who produced a profile of the killer as a local man living alone with solitary interests and sexually sadistic fantasies. The profile and an artist's impression from witnesses were shown in a national television appeal. Several callers named Colin Stagg, a twenty-nine-year-old unemployed man from the Alton estate who walked his dog on the common.
There was no forensic evidence against Stagg. He had a previous fine for indecent exposure on the common, which he said had come from sunbathing nude in a secluded spot. Under the direction of Detective Inspector Keith Pedder, and with Britton's advice, the police set up Operation Edzell. An undercover policewoman using the name Lizzie James wrote to Stagg through a lonely hearts contact, met him and spoke to him in taped phone calls, describing violent sexual fantasies and inviting him to share his. At one meeting she told him, "If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder, if only you had killed her, it would be all right." Stagg answered, "I'm terribly sorry, but I haven't." He never confessed. According to a Guardian report in 1999, the operation was approved by senior Met officers and the force's solicitors, and the Crown Prosecution Service agreed it should continue.
Stagg was arrested in August 1993 and charged with murder. He spent thirteen months on remand. In September 1994, at the Old Bailey, Justice Ognall ruled the evidence from the undercover operation inadmissible, calling it "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind" and a "blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect." The prosecution offered no other evidence and Stagg was formally acquitted without a jury being sworn. For fourteen more years much of the press and public treated him as a man who had got away with murder.
While the Nickell team built its case against Stagg, Napper came to police attention again and again in south-east London.
In August 1992, a month after the Wimbledon killing, a neighbor in Plumstead rang the police to say Napper looked like the published e-fit of the Green Chain rapist. Detectives visited him and asked him to give a blood sample at the local police station. He did not go. A few days later another caller said "Bob Napper" looked like the rapist. Officers went back and asked again. He did not go. Within weeks he was eliminated from the inquiry because, at 6 feet 2 inches, he was much taller than the description the inquiry was using.
In October 1992 he was arrested on suspicion of stalking a civilian employee at Plumstead police station. In his bedsit officers found a .22 pistol, 244 rounds of ammunition, two knives, a crossbow and bolts. They also found diaries, hand-drawn maps and a London A-Z marked with dots and dashes around Plumstead, Eltham and Woolwich, and notes on ways of restraining someone, including the phrase "clingfilm on the legs." Inside one A-Z was the fitness card of a young woman from Eltham, placed at the page for her home address. Napper pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm and ammunition. A psychiatric report told the court he was "without doubt an immediate threat to himself and the public." He received an eight-week custodial sentence, and no one followed up what had been found in his room.
In April 1993 his fingerprints were found on a tin box buried on Winns Common, next to Plumstead Common, with a Mauser handgun inside. He was not questioned about it. In July 1993 a couple called police about a man spying on their neighbor, a young blonde woman. Officers spoke to Napper, who gave his name and address, and wrote: "Subject strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist, indecency type suspect."
The Guardian later counted at least seven occasions on which Napper came onto the police radar before he was arrested. Paul Britton was advising both the Green Chain inquiry and the Nickell inquiry. When Stagg was charged in August 1993, his barrister told the Guardian, he was told to attend an identity parade in south-east London for the rapes, which police were by then linking to the Nickell case, and then told he need not go because his DNA did not match. The case against him for Nickell's killing went on.
Samantha Bisset was twenty-seven. She was originally from Dundee in Scotland; her mother, Maggie, and stepfather, Jack Morrison, a former councillor, lived in Aberdeenshire. The Crime+Investigation case file says she had lived as a New Age traveller when she was younger but had become a focused, caring mother. She lived with her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine, in a basement flat on Heathfield Terrace in Plumstead, not far from Napper's home. Her boyfriend, Conrad Ellam, an environmental consultant, loved Jazmine as his own. "She was a happy child, very easy to get on with," he said in 2008. "I would take her to the swings and she would think it was brilliant, like Christmas."
Police believe Napper had been watching the flat for some time. On November 3, 1993, while Ellam was at work, Napper came to the door. He stabbed Samantha Bisset with such force that the first blow almost severed her spinal cord, and kept stabbing her. He then sexually assaulted and suffocated Jazmine in her bed and left her covered by her duvet as if asleep. He mutilated Samantha's body and took part of it away with him. The police photographer who recorded the scene was off work for two years afterward.
Conrad Ellam found them the next day. He first saw a stain on the carpet and thought Jazmine had knocked over some paint. Then he found Samantha. "I went to phone the police and suddenly thought, 'What about Jazmine?'" he said. "I looked in the bedroom and I could see she was in her bed with a duvet pulled over her."
Ellam asked the police whether there could be a connection with Rachel Nickell's killing sixteen months earlier. "They said there were too many differences," he said in 2008. "But at the time they had Colin Stagg under surveillance and they were putting all their resources into that." According to the Guardian, Detective Inspector Pedder took Paul Britton to Plumstead to look at possible links, and Britton dismissed them. In his book The Jigsaw Man he wrote that it was "a completely different scenario." Britton later said he had told police that the same man had killed both women. The police disputed that.
Napper had left fingerprints in blood in the flat and a trainer print. It took about six months to match them to him. In the meantime, reports say, he had been arrested and released over shoplifting sweets. The Bisset inquiry placed him under surveillance in May 1994, arrested him and charged him with the two killings. DNA tests linked him at once to the Green Chain rapes, including the 1989 attack.
From May to September 1994, Napper and Colin Stagg were both on remand, for killings twelve miles apart, both with a knife, both of young blonde mothers attacked in front of small children. Police later admitted that the senior investigating officer in the Nickell case knew of the similarities but chose to wait for the outcome of the Stagg prosecution before looking at Napper.
In October 1995, at the Old Bailey, Napper pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset on the grounds of diminished responsibility. He also pleaded guilty to one rape and two attempted rapes of women he had stalked on the Green Chain Walk. The judge told him: "You present a grave and immediate risk to the public." He was sent to Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital at Crowthorne in Berkshire, without limit of time.
Samantha's mother, Maggie Morrison, died shortly before the case came to court, of what her family called a broken heart. Her stepfather, Jack Morrison, said later that he did not blame the police for the deaths. "They worked so hard," he told the Aberdeen Press and Journal. "They protected us, looked after us after they died and I do not believe that they failed Samantha or Jazmine by not catching somebody else's killer."
When Napper arrived at Broadmoor he was deeply unwell. He believed people were out to get him, that he had won the Nobel peace prize, that he had millions of pounds in the bank and that he was listed in Who's Who. In December 1995 detectives questioned him about Rachel Nickell. He denied ever going to Wimbledon Common. With no forensic link, the matter rested. At some point after his detention he changed his surname to Poole, according to the Independent.
The Met did not close the Nickell file. Under Detective Chief Inspector Tony Nash, a review team re-examined the forensic material. Scientists, among them Dr. Angela Gallop, went back to the tapings from Rachel Nickell's body and reasoned that they should have contained a great deal of her own DNA. They found a tiny trace of male DNA and, using new low-copy-number techniques that amplify very small samples, produced a profile. It did not match Colin Stagg. In 2004 it was confirmed as a match to Napper, whose profile was on the national database. The Evening Standard reported the link at one in 12 million. A shoe mark from the scene could have come from his shoe, and later reporting mentions tiny paint flecks matched to a metal toolbox he owned.
Detectives interviewed Napper at Broadmoor in 2006, and he did not admit the killing. The Guardian later reported that the team spent several days questioning him there in difficult conditions, after taking advice from psychiatrists. He was charged with Rachel Nickell's murder in November 2007, and in January 2008, appearing by video link from Broadmoor, he pleaded not guilty.
On December 18, 2008, Napper, then forty-two, stood in Court One of the Old Bailey in a check shirt. Asked how he pleaded to the murder of Rachel Nickell, he answered in what reporters described as a clear but faltering voice: "I plead not guilty to murder but guilty to diminished responsibility by manslaughter."
Victor Temple QC told the court that two psychiatrists agreed that when he killed Rachel Nickell, Napper had Asperger's syndrome and paranoid schizophrenia, and that after consulting the police, lawyers and the family, the prosecution had decided it was "proper and appropriate" to accept the plea. Hilary Bradfield of the Crown Prosecution Service said the decision was based on his DNA on the body, the shoe mark and the similarities with his other attacks. Temple told the court that "the defendant had a propensity to stalk and/or seek out vulnerable young women with a view to rape, arming himself with a knife in order to intimidate or control them," that the violence had increased year by year from 1989, and that he had bought commando-style knives and tended to bury weapons near the scenes of his crimes. He added: "It is now accepted that Mr Stagg is wholly innocent of any involvement regarding the murder of Miss Nickell."
Dr. Natalie Pyszora, a Broadmoor psychiatrist, said Napper was severely mentally ill and should go back there for treatment. Without it, she said, there was a high risk that he would commit further sexual offenses, and a high risk of suicide. At the time of the killing he would have been irrational and felt "almost untouchable." Of release, she said: "The possibility of release is highly unlikely. I could not envisage that happening."
Rachel's parents, Andrew and Monica Nickell, sat in court a few yards from André Hanscombe, who had traveled from Spain. Their victim impact statement compared describing the effect of their daughter's death to "trying to describe how you felt after being run over by a large truck."
Napper's lawyer, David Fisher QC, said Napper wished to apologize to Hanscombe, Alex, Rachel's parents and her friends for "the dreadful thing that he did," and had asked him to apologize to Colin Stagg as well. "At the time of these events, the arrest and the preliminary trial of that man, this defendant was not in a satisfactory mental state to really appreciate what was going on. He is now. He realises how dreadful that period of time in Mr Stagg's life must have been." Fisher accepted that his client was "highly unlikely ever to be released from detention."
Justice Griffiths Williams ordered that Napper be returned at once to Broadmoor and held there indefinitely. "You are on any view a very dangerous man," he said. "You still present a very high risk of sexual homicide which can only be managed in a high security hospital." Addressing what Alex had lived through, he said: "Now, 16 years or so later, in early adulthood, Alex knows the man who killed his mother has been brought, albeit belatedly, to justice."
Outside court the Met apologized to Colin Stagg. Assistant Commissioner John Yates had already sent him a letter: "I must offer you an unreserved apology for the proceedings instigated against you in 1994. I acknowledge the huge and most regrettable impact this case has had on you for the last 16 years." On the steps of the Old Bailey he said Stagg was "completely innocent of any involvement in the case." René Barclay, director of serious casework at the Crown Prosecution Service, apologized publicly as well and said he had written to Stagg to express regret that a prosecution had been brought. In August 2008 the Home Office had paid Stagg £706,000 in compensation.
Commander Simon Foy, head of homicide at Scotland Yard, said the Nickell and Bisset families had both received apologies: "We have been frank with them about a number of missed opportunities to arrest Robert Napper. Where it has been appropriate we have apologised unreservedly." Of the 1989 call from Napper's mother, he said: "If it had been followed up Rachel could be alive now." Of the chances in 1992 and 1993, he said that if any had been taken, "it is probable that he would have been in custody and would not have murdered Samantha and Jazmine." Yates said: "More could, and should, have been done."
Two days later, the Met said it had "no plans for a further review," citing earlier reviews and changes to murder investigation since 1992. Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, said an internal review was necessary.
In 2009 André Hanscombe complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission about the Met's handling of the case. The commission's report, published in early June 2010, found what Commissioner Rachel Cerfontyne called "a catalogue of bad decisions and errors." The failings it listed included not investigating properly after Napper's mother reported his confession in 1989, when she was never asked for a formal statement and no record of her call survived, and eliminating him from the Green Chain inquiry because he was over 6 feet tall and so outside the parameters set for the suspect.
"It is clear that a catalogue of bad decisions and errors made by the MPS led to missed opportunities to take Robert Napper off the streets before he killed Rachel Nickell and the Bissets, and before numerous women suffered violent sexual attacks at his hands," Cerfontyne said. She described "gross errors of judgement in the early stages." She noted that no one had ever publicly apologized "to the other people whose lives were so terribly affected by this case," and recommended that the Met make an unreserved public apology to Hanscombe and his son. Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick said she would write to Hanscombe, and the Met repeated the private apology Yates had made in 2008, saying that "had more been done we could have been in a better position to have prevented very serious attacks by Napper."
No officer faced disciplinary action. All of those involved had retired, and one key senior detective had died. Crime+Investigation reports that Hanscombe and Alex took a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in 2010 over the failure to catch Napper; no outcome of that complaint was reported. Paul Britton had faced professional misconduct charges over the case, which were dismissed in October 2002. Keith Pedder, who ran Operation Edzell, retired in 1995; a corruption charge brought against him later was dismissed in 1999, and he said he had been set up over a book he was writing about the case.
Napper has been convicted of three killings, one rape and two attempted rapes. Since 1995 he has also admitted, in a handwritten note, a fourth Green Chain rape, the 1989 attack. Beyond that, the record is suspicion. Detectives on the Green Chain inquiry linked as many as 106 offenses against 86 women to the series, and in December 2008 the Guardian reported that he was suspected of involvement in 83 other sex attacks along the route for which there was no forensic evidence. He has told detectives he will admit only offenses for which there is forensic proof.
After the 2008 plea, Commander Foy said detectives would interview him again. Press reports speculated about three unsolved knife killings of women in the early 1990s: Penny Bell, forty-three, stabbed in her car in Greenford, west London, in 1991; Jean Bradley, forty-seven, stabbed as she got into her car near Acton; and Claire Tiltman, sixteen, stabbed in an alley in Greenhithe, Kent, in January 1993. No charge against Napper for any of them was reported. Claire Tiltman's killing was later solved: in December 2014 a jury convicted another man, Colin Ash-Smith, of her murder.
Napper is detained under two indefinite hospital orders, made in 1995 for the Bisset killings and in 2008 for the killing of Rachel Nickell. Reports published in June 2026, when Netflix released the documentary The Murder of Rachel Nickell and the drama The Witness, said he remained at Broadmoor. He would be sixty in 2026.
No transfer out of Broadmoor has been reported. The judge in 2008 ordered that he be returned there immediately, and the 2026 reports describe him as still held there. Under the law on restricted hospital orders, a mental health tribunal, or his psychiatrist with Ministry of Justice approval, could in principle discharge or move him if he no longer needed hospital treatment and his risk had fallen, a forensic psychologist told the Mirror in 2026. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was moved from Broadmoor to prison in 2016 in that way. The court in 2008 heard that release for Napper was highly unlikely.
His time at Broadmoor has made the news more than once. In 2013 a Broadmoor healthcare assistant, Robert Neave, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office after selling stories about Napper and Sutcliffe to the Sun. A former hospital worker quoted in the Mirror described him as a model patient who was good at board games, liked Scrabble and used the gym.
Rachel Nickell's parents, Andrew and Monica, said outside court in 2008 that they hoped Napper would spend the rest of his life in a secure environment, thanked the police despite the mistakes, and asked to be left alone. They had become estranged from André Hanscombe over custody of Alex in the years after her death. Hanscombe took Alex first to France and then to Spain, where they settled, in part to escape reporters; his book The Last Thursday in July was published in 1996. Alex later wrote his own account, Letting Go: A True Story of Murder, Loss and Survival, and in 2026 both of them consulted on the Netflix drama. "My message is: 'There's light at the end of the tunnel,'" Alex told the Guardian.
Conrad Ellam was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2008 he said he did not feel bitter, but believed the deaths of Samantha and Jazmine could have been avoided. "I was more upset about Jazmine," he said. "She would be 19 now. When I see children who were her age I wonder what she would have been like."
Colin Stagg stayed in the same council home on the Alton estate, which the compensation meant he could now afford to buy, according to Crime+Investigation. Napper's mother, Pauline Lasham, disowned her son. "He should die a slow death and be treated in the same way he treated those poor people," she said in 2008.
The Met said in 2008 that murder investigation had changed since 1992. Homicide detectives now look at serious sexual assaults for patterns when they investigate a killing, Foy said, because in Napper's case three separate inquiries had failed to connect rapes and killings that overlapped in time and place.
Proven by conviction: the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell (plea, December 18, 2008), the manslaughter of Samantha and Jazmine Bisset (pleas, October 1995), and one rape and two attempted rapes on the Green Chain Walk (1995). All three killings were accepted by the courts as manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, not murder. Some 2026 articles say he was "convicted of murder" for the Bisset killings; the 2008 Guardian, Independent and Evening Standard reports all describe the 1995 outcome as manslaughter.
Admitted but not tried: the 1989 rape of a mother near Plumstead Common, which he acknowledged in a handwritten note while at Broadmoor. His DNA had linked him to it in 1994.
Suspected only: the wider Green Chain series of up to 106 offenses against 86 women. No charges followed.
Speculation: the 2008 reports linking him to the killings of Penny Bell and Jean Bradley. Nothing in the reporting connects him to either beyond the similarity of the attacks. The third name in those reports, Claire Tiltman, was killed by another man, who was convicted in 2014.
Disputed: whether Paul Britton told detectives that the Nickell and Bisset killings were linked. The Guardian quotes his own book saying the scenes were completely different; he later said he had told police they were the same man, and the police disagreed.
Not established: the dates and details of his mother's 1989 call, which sources give as August, October or November; and the date the IPCC report was published, which Crime+Investigation gives as June 2009, while contemporary trade reporting places it in June 2010.
February 1966: Robert Clive Napper born; raised in Plumstead, south-east London.
1986: Fined and given a conditional discharge for possessing an airgun.
August 1989: A mother is raped at knifepoint in her home backing on to Plumstead Common, the first known Green Chain attack.
Autumn 1989: Napper's mother tells police he has confessed to a rape on Plumstead Common; the call is not followed up.
March 1992: Two seventeen-year-old girls attacked on the Green Chain Walk.
May 1992: A twenty-two-year-old mother, C, raped in front of her daughter in Eltham.
July 15, 1992: Rachel Nickell, 23, killed on Wimbledon Common in front of her son, Alex.
August 1992: Two members of the public name Napper as resembling the Green Chain e-fit; he twice fails to give blood and is eliminated on height.
October 1992: Arrested over stalking; weapons, maps and notes found; jailed for eight weeks for a firearm offense.
April 1993: His fingerprints found on a buried tin box holding a handgun on Winns Common; not questioned.
July 1993: Police note him as "strange, abnormal" after a report of spying.
August 1993: Colin Stagg arrested and charged with Rachel Nickell's murder.
November 3, 1993: Samantha Bisset, 27, and Jazmine Bisset, 4, killed in Plumstead.
May 1994: Napper arrested and charged over the Bisset killings; DNA links him to the Green Chain rapes.
September 1994: Justice Ognall throws out the case against Stagg.
October 1995: Napper pleads guilty at the Old Bailey to the manslaughter of the Bissets on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and to one rape and two attempted rapes; sent to Broadmoor.
December 1995: Questioned about Nickell; denies involvement.
2004: Low-copy-number DNA from the Nickell tapings matched to Napper.
2006: Interviewed at Broadmoor; makes no admission.
November 2007: Charged with Rachel Nickell's murder.
January 2008: Pleads not guilty to murder by video link.
August 2008: Colin Stagg awarded £706,000 compensation.
December 18, 2008: Pleads guilty to the manslaughter of Rachel Nickell on the grounds of diminished responsibility; ordered detained indefinitely at Broadmoor; Met and CPS apologize to Stagg.
2009: André Hanscombe complains to the IPCC.
June 2010: IPCC report finds "a catalogue of bad decisions and errors"; Met apologizes to Hanscombe and his son.
2013: A Broadmoor healthcare assistant admits selling stories about Napper to a newspaper.
December 2014: Colin Ash-Smith convicted of the murder of Claire Tiltman, one of the killings once speculatively linked to Napper.
June 2026: Netflix releases The Murder of Rachel Nickell and The Witness; reports say Napper remains at Broadmoor.