By Michael Holden
LONDON (Reuters) - The independent police watchdog said on Thursday it would launch a probe into the bungled investigation into the 1992 murder of Rachel Nickell following a complaint from her partner.
Nickell, 23, was sexually assaulted and stabbed 49 times as she walked through Wimbledon Common in southwest London 17 years ago. Her two-year-old son Alex was found by a passer-by clinging to her blood-soaked body.
The murder inquiry that followed was one of the most error-strewn and embarrassing ever conducted by London's Metropolitan Police force.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission said Nickell's partner Andre Hanscombe had formally submitted a complaint about the police handling of the case and the watchdog would now investigate.
"The allegations made in this complaint are numerous and serious," said IPCC Commissioner Deborah Glass.
"They range from allegations that investigating officers overlooked, discounted or otherwise wrongfully evaluated evidence, through to high-level strategic decisions by senior officers about the direction of the investigations."
She said the probe would take some time.
Acting on the advice of an offender profiler, detectives wrongly identified Colin Stagg who lived nearby as Nickell's killer. They used an undercover female officer acting as a "honeytrap" to try and entice him into making a confession.
But his high-profile trial collapsed in 1994 with the judge lambasting the now totally discredited police tactics as "deceptive conduct of the grossest kind."
The real killer was serial sex attacker Robert Napper, who finally pleaded guilty to the murder in December last year.
Detectives admitted there had been a series of missed opportunities to arrest Napper, the first of which had been in 1989 and another in 1992 before he also murdered Samantha Bisset and her daughter Jasmine and committed series of rapes.
Napper, who was already in jail for rape and the Bisset murders, was eventually found to be Nickell's killer after new technology was able to identify him from DNA evidence.
Following his admission, police apologised for the blunders made admitted more should have been done.
(Editing by Steve Addison)
(c) Reuters 2012. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.
