A son who watched a man stab his mum to death in a horrific murder says "racist" cops should pay up after they bungled her case.
Rachel Nickell, 23, was walking her dog with her toddler son Alex Hanscombe near their home on Wimbledon Common in 1992 when she was stabbed 49 times and sexually assaulted in broad daylight.
Her killer Robert Napper was only convicted of her murder in 2008, with a Metropolitan Police inquiry later finding there had been a "catalogue of errors" in their handling of the case.
Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic with Asperger's syndrome, had carried out a series of rapes without ever being convicted for his crimes.
It was only when he killed Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine in November 1993 that he was finally caught, with another 11 years coming before he was finally connected to the Nickells case.
Now 33, Alex says he is considering opening a new legal case against the Met along with his father Andre after the family were not offered a "single penny" in compensation for the failings.
He told The Sun : “Things don’t go away just because you sweep them under the rug.
“In 2008 the police admitted they made mistakes and should have sent Napper to prison before he killed my mother but they were not held accountable.
“We’ve had our lives turned upside down but never been compensated with a penny for her life. That is why we are exploring reopening legal action against them. We want to put pressure on them."
Alex also believes the errors in the case were motivated by racism, commenting that if he and his dad "looked like Hugh Grant" detectives would have "treated us differently.”
He added that the case would not be about the money but rather a way to hold the force to account for their mistakes.
Before Napper was eventually found guilty of the murder, an innocent man named Colin Stagg spent 13 months behind bars after being caught by police in a 'honey trap' sting.
Stagg, who was 29-years-old at the time of the incident, often walked his dog on Wimbledon Common.
After police received a tip-off, an undercover police officer feigned a romantic interest in Stagg in a ploy to get him to confess to the murder.
The officer spent five months meeting Stagg and exchanging letters that contained violent sexual fantasies but did not secure any confession.
Police charged Colin with the murder a year after Rachel was killed, but the trial at the Old Bailey would quickly collapse as Mr Justice Ognall condemned the police operation as “deceptive conduct of the grossest kind”.
He would later be awarded £706,000 in compensation by the Home Office for his wrongful prosecution after after police caught Rachel's real killer.
A Met Police statement in 2010 said: “Failings in the investigation have been publicly acknowledged and the Metropolitan Police Service has apologised unreservedly to the Hanscombes for this.
“After careful and detailed consideration, the decision has been made not to offer any compensation to the Hanscombes.”
