Overview

On the morning of 15 July 1992, Rachel Nickell was murdered on Wimbledon Common while walking with her two-year-old son. What followed was almost as devastating as the murder itself. For sixteen years, the Metropolitan Police pursued the wrong man. An innocent person was imprisoned, entrapped, publicly destroyed and acquitted, while the actual killer walked free and attacked again. The real perpetrator murdered a young mother and her four-year-old daughter in the interval. The investigation's failures were so numerous and so profound that an official inquiry would later describe them as a catalogue of bad decisions. Wake Up, Mummy is the complete story of the Rachel Nickell case, told from the inside. It follows the child who witnessed the murder and could not speak of it for years. The father who raised that child alone, first in England and then in exile in France. The grandparents who had not seen their grandson since he was eight. The wrongly accused man who gave half his compensation to charity and asked for nothing more than a face-to-face apology that never came. The forensic scientists who refused to accept a null result and spent four years rebuilding a case from tape samples and a child's hair combings. And, finally, the man who killed Rachel, how he was made, how many times the system had the means to stop him, and why it did not. Colin Stagg spent thirteen months in custody for a crime he did not commit and fourteen years as a social pariah afterwards. Robert Napper, the actual killer, had been named to police by his own mother in 1989. He had been identified from a police e-fit by two independent members of the public. His flat had been found to contain weapons, detailed maps of attack locations and a psychiatric report describing him as a certain and immediate danger to the public. Officers who interviewed him wrote in their own files that he should be considered a possible rapist, and then let him walk away. He was not convicted of Rachel Nickell's killing until December 2008. The evidence that finally secured the conviction was found by a private forensic team who asked a question the original scientists had never thought to ask, and spent four years answering it. This is the first book to tell the complete story of this case in a single narrative: the murder, the honey trap, operation edzell, the wrongful prosecution, the institutional failures, the cold case breakthrough, and the long human cost to every person touched by it. Alex Hanscombe was two years old when he told his mother to wake up. He has never forgotten what he saw. Thirty years on, neither should we. Wake Up, Mummy is the book this case has always deserved. Order your copy today and bear witness to one of Britain's most devastating untold stories, finally told in full.

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