UK5 min(s) read
Published 10:33 29 Apr 2026 GMT
The one phrase that a toddler repeatedly said to his mom after she was brutally murdered has been revealed for the first time.
An upcoming Netflix documentary titled The Murder of Rachel Nickell is set to delve into the infamous killing of the young British mother.
Just 23 at the time, Nickell was stabbed 49 times on Wimbledon Common, in London, while she was walking her dog with her son Alex, back on July 15, 1992.
The crime shocked the nation, as Nickell was also sexually assaulted by the attacker before he fled, with Alex, three, later found next to his mom's body in the park.
Decades on from the grueling crime, never-before-seen footage is being broadcast to the public, showing the boy and his father having a harrowing conversation about what happened that day.
But Alex has previously addressed what happened in the immediate aftermath, in a 2021 interview.
Now in his mid-30s, he spoke to the Daily Mail about the ordeal around five years ago, recalling: "My strongest memory is of waving goodbye to my father at home.
"Then it moves on to walking hand-in-hand with my mother on the common. I remember making our way into the trees, walking with our dog, Molly.
"I remember a stranger walking up towards us. I remember being grabbed and thrown around roughly."
He horrifyingly explained: "And I remember my mother being grabbed and thrown around, collapsing on the floor beside me. And I remember the realization of what happened.
"I said: 'Wake up, Mummy.' And she didn't respond. So I said again: 'Wake up, Mummy,' and she didn't respond... I knew my mother was gone. She wasn't coming back."
Before long, a passerby found the boy and his mother's body, as he kept telling her to "wake up," in a heartbreaking recount of events.
Home video footage, which will be included in the documentary, as per the Daily Mail, shows Alex speaking to his father, André Hanscombe, about what unfolded on that fateful day.
The pair can be seen sitting at a table, with the former in a Thunderbirds outfit as he asks for help in drawing his mom on a piece of paper.
"Alex, look at me. When you saw the bad man, was he in front of me like I am, or was he on this side, or was he on that side?" André calmly asked.
The toddler said that he was "in front of me," revealing that he didn't think his mom saw the attacker before he attacked.
After revealing that he had a bag, Alex said he opened it and took out "a knife" before knocking the child over.
Alex draws a chilling picture on paper, with the father asking: "What's he sticking in her?"
"A knife, there's his knife," Alex said, telling his father: "Yeah, I saw the knife. I saw it, yeah, I saw it all.
André moved to rural France with Alex after the incident, to both start a new life and stop him from being found, as he was the only person to have witnessed the murder.
The killer was still at large when they made the move.
Speaking today, André said: "My son witnessed his mother's murder, but nobody could have possibly known how long it was going to take to find the person who did this."
Authorities questioned 32 men after the murder, as the original suspect Colin Stagg, a man who lived locally and also walked his dog on the common, spent 13 months in custody.
He was widely believed to be the killer for over a decade, despite being freed by an Old Bailey judge in 1994.
The judge criticized police for using a "honeytrap" undercover policewoman in an attempt to make him confess to the killing.
Mr Justice Ognall said it was a "blatant attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind".
The case would be reopened by Scotland Yard in 2002, utilising DNA forensic techniques that had recently surfaced to find that convicted murderer Robert Napper was a suspect.
He would later plead guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility in 2008, as he was ordered to be detained indefinitely at Broadmoor Hospital.
Stagg would be awarded £706,000 in compensation from the Home Office as a result of his wrongful arrest, though he had spent all the cash by 2017.
'The Murder of Rachel Nickell' will be available to stream on Netflix on June 4
