The Witness: A Harrowing Look at the Rachel Nickell Murder's Aftermath

All murders are shocking, but few unsettle a nation in the way that of Rachel Nickell did in 1992. She was stabbed 49 times while walking on Wimbledon Common during the day with her two-year-old son, Alex. The viciousness of the attack, in a public place and in front of a child, lingered darkly in the minds of the public, especially since Alex being the only witness enabled the killer to remain at large for years.

It is a crime that has been discussed, analysed and dramatised, but never quite in the way The Witness does. Across its three episodes, narrative emphasis rarely falls where we expect it to, because the main characters are not the police or the killer but the family Rachel left behind: Alex (Jahsaiah Williams, then Max Fincham as the older boy) and his devastated father André (Jordan Bolger). This harrowing new perspective proves to be rewarding.

André has to deal with the grief of losing his partner, the challenge of becoming a single parent overnight, the complexity of caring for a traumatised young boy and the demands of the police investigation. The Witness is particularly interested in whether Alex, who is too young for anyone to be certain about how well he understands what he saw, will be further damaged by efforts to extract whatever information is locked up in his preschooler’s brain. André must make the call about how far to push him.

Any one of those is a task for which there is no instruction manual – how do you cope with all of them together? The Witness courageously gives you the unvarnished answer, which is that André doesn’t. He repeatedly makes decisions that we and the people around him question, whether it’s showing irritation at Alex misbehaving in front of a child psychologist, or his insistence on taking Alex with him to identify Rachel’s body. The latter scene is unforgettable: the boy seems to know better than the man that no good will come of seeing his dead mother, so he ignores his dad and stays on the floor, playing with toys.

As the story hops back and forth in time, we see Alex as a teenager, rebelling in normal ways, with the unique extra fissure of the disagreement between him and his father about how to address their past: Alex doesn’t want to, but André knows this is unsustainable. The war between them can make them frustrating protagonists, constantly butting up against problems they don’t know how to resolve, and Bolger sometimes struggles to bring depth to a role that requires him to be extremely sad and stressed at all times. When they do eventually find a path, though, it is a sweet redemption, very well earned.

Their situation could only ever have been painful, but The Witness is unequivocal in showing what made it so much harder. Even taking into account the long history of despicable behaviour by the British tabloid press, their portrayal here is startling: they are everywhere, at André and Rachel’s home, at the police station and the crime scene, a feral pack barking out crass questions that combine into a wordless roar. When André seeks refuge at his mother’s house, reporters and paparazzi work out where it is and camp outside, rifling through the bins and stealing the post. After one visit to the police, André steps into the car park to the familiar wall of aggressive squawking, but now one of the hacks is doing a racist monkey chant to try to provoke him into engaging. André moves to France, and then Spain, but even years after the murder and in a foreign country, journalists pursue him and his son with pitiless intensity. André and Alex live like fugitives.

If some details are so appalling that they are difficult to believe, it is easier to do so considering how honest The Witness is about how imperfectly André and Alex, who consulted on the script with writer Rob Williams, conducted themselves after their loss. This programme deals in difficult truths; how toxic our media can be is one of them.

In the background are the police, and in this truncated telling the lead detective, Keith Pedder (Neil Maskell), is a flawed but essentially sympathetic professional whose use of an undercover female officer to entrap his chief suspect, the innocent Colin Stagg, is a mistake made by a man coming under severe pressure from his superiors and, again, the media.

If both that section of the narrative and the one following the later cold-case investigation that caught the real killer feel perfunctory, they give us a strange sort of respite from André and Alex’s ordeal. They had to live it, without help or relief; The Witness is a valuable insight into what that hell was like.