Lazy British Police face big payout for murder investigation blunders

Rachel Nickell's murder could have been prevented by police, according to a damning report which paves the way for a huge compensation payout by Scotland Yard. But infuriatingly for her family, it adds that no officers can be disciplined over the fiasco because they have all retired.

Miss Nickell's former partner Andre Hanscombe and their son Alex, who as a toddler saw his mother stabbed to death on Wimbledon Common, are expected to receive a public apology from the Met after the report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission is published this week.

Police are expected to offer a six-figure sum in damages to the pair, who have issued a High Court writ seeking compensation over the murder in July 1992. The legal action was launched after Mr Hanscombe, 47, made a formal complaint to the IPCC last November alleging the Met could have done more to prevent Miss Nickell's death at the hands of psychopath Robert Napper.

He also alleged detectives should have locked up Napper before he slaughtered a mother and her young daughter 16 months later. Insiders have told the Daily Mail that the IPCC report is scathing about the fiasco, highlighting how senior officers made wrong decisions about various investigations in the 1990s. A source said: 'It makes it clear that Rachel's death could have been prevented. It goes into great detail about the blunders that allowed Napper to continue his reign of terror.'

Miss Nickell, 23, was stabbed 49 times and sexually assaulted while she and two-year-old Alex took their dog Molly for a walk. For 16 years it remained a notorious unsolved murder. But in December 2008, following a DNA breakthrough in the case four years earlier, Napper finally admitted her manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

As an Old Bailey judge ordered Napper, now 44, to be detained indefinitely in Broadmoor, it was revealed that police missed a series of chances to arrest him before his five-year series of up to 86 sex and rape attacks was brought to a close. Had they taken the first chance to interview him about a rape in 1989, when his mother told police he had confessed the crime to her, he would never have been at liberty to kill former part-time fashion model Miss Nickell.

Napper followed that killing with the grotesque slaughter of Samantha Bisset and her four-year- old daughter Jazmine in their South London home in November 1993.

After submitting a series of complaints to the IPCC in November last year, Mr Hanscombe - who now lives on the Continent - said: 'To have found out that Rachel's death may have been prevented initially left me numb. 'Now that I have had time to come to terms with it, I feel determined to bring all of the issues and events and mistakes out into the light.'

Mr Hanscombe said he wanted an apology from the police and an independent inquiry into the fatal blunders by Scotland Yard which ruined 'countless lives'. He told the Daily Mail that he wanted to 'hold the police accountable for all these apparent failures, going back to 1989, when Napper's mother reported his rape confession to them'. He added: 'It is important for me that all the suffering, the whole ordeal that so many people have been through, is not completely in vain, and that something positive can be taken out of it.'

Mr Hanscombe invited former prime suspect Colin Stagg to help his legal action against the Met. Mr Stagg received £706,000 compensation from the Home Office after being wrongly accused of Miss Nickell's murder. He was cleared in 1994 after a year in jail awaiting trial, but remained a social pariah for a further ten years because police remained convinced, falsely, that he was the killer.

Sources believe Yard chiefs will be keen to reach an out-of-court settlement with Mr Hanscombe and Alex, now 20. The level of compensation could come close to the record £320,000 the force paid to the parents of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence for the police bungles which hampered the hunt for his killers and caused them additional distress.

Original report here



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