Britain gets the right man at last

This is the ultimate vindication for Colin Stagg and the ultimate disgrace for the know-all British cops involved in his conviction

A convicted killer and sex attacker was brought to justice on Thursday 16 years after the brutal murder of a British woman in front of her two-year-old son. Robert Napper, 42, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey court in London to killing Rachel Nickell, a former model who was sexually assaulted and stabbed 49 times in a London park in 1992. Judge John Griffiths Williams said he would accept the plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility from Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic who is already being held in a high-security hospital after subsequent attacks. Telling him he would be kept in the Broadmoor hospital indefinitely, the judge said: "You are on any view a very dangerous man."

The end of the probe raised fresh questions over the original investigation into the murder and the missed opportunities to catch Napper, who went on to kill another young mother and her daughter. Napper was questioned about the Nickell killing in December 1995 but denied involvement. He had been sent to Broadmoor two months earlier for killing Samantha Bissett, 27, and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine in a savage attack in south London in November 1993.

A tiny particle of Napper's DNA was picked up from Nickell's body soon after her death, but it was too small to be analysed until recent scientific advances made it possible. A match was finally confirmed in 2004 but he was not charged with murder until December last year.

Police had become convinced that a loner, Colin Stagg, who lived near the crime scene at Wimbledon Common was the killer. But Stagg was freed by an Old Bailey judge in September 1994, who criticised police for using a "honey-trap" undercover policewoman to try to make him confess. Stagg, 45, spent 13 months in custody and endured more than a decade of speculation that he was the killer. This year, he was awarded 706,000 pounds ($1.5 million) in compensation from the government and London's Metropolitan Police made a full apology to him for the first time on Thursday.

Original report here



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