It took 25 hours, 14 calls and a final assurance that the family would pay for any damage before the Metropolitan police agreed to force entry to Bibaa Henry’s flat, where her family hoped she was safe, somehow, with her sister Nicole Smallman. The last communication friends or relatives had had with either of them was at about 1am on Saturday 6 June 2020, as they had a last dance in the park where they had gone to celebrate Bibaa’s birthday. By 2.30am, a trickle of concerned messages had begun, which would become a flood. Bibaa & Nicole: Murder in the Park follows, in three dense and unsensationalist episodes, the harrowing story of the women’s murders, which only becomes even more harrowing after their deaths.
The police found that Bibaa’s flat had not been slept in. “You might assume,” says the women’s mother, Mina, “that the next thing the police would do would be to search the park.” But they didn’t. Nicole’s partner, Adam, and his parents, Jill and Dave, did. Adam found the sisters’ bodies in the bushes their killer had dragged them into after stabbing them each multiple times. His parents didn’t recognise the sound of him screaming at first. “Then – the floor drops away.” Dave called Mina. “We found them,” he said. “They’re gone.” That was 36 hours after they went missing. The police turned up once he called them with news of their terrible discovery.
