British Krypteia case files: ’90s Wimbledon and Plumstead common attacks; Part One: Napper a mere peeping tom?
The murder of Rachel Nickell, in front of her child in broad daylight on a Wimbledon Common being used by 500 people on the morning of July 15th, 1992, would have been as traumatic an incident as any that the British krypteia could muster. It was a rape (so the Metropolitan Police says) and savage murder even under the noses of day trippers on a summer’s morning, and if the killer could execute this crime without being detected, clearly any woman was a potential victim. That’s why it received heavy coverage in corporate-media. In contrast, the more gruesome horror inflicted upon Samatha Bisset and her child, in Plumstead, by a home invader on 3rd November, 1993, was a little less well publicised – and this is not the opinion of the author, but the judgement of someone, a corporate-media journalist, who should be the best sort of judge on the matter:
In contrast to Rachel Nickell’s high-profile death, the frenzied killing of Samantha Bisset and her four-year-old daughter Jazmine went largely unnoticed.
If the krypteia also committed the Bisset murder as well as the Nickell one, which is indeed what is being proposed in a series of articles of which this is the first part, then it would appear that it had a different purpose: to mop up – by being seen to bring the perpetrator to justice – an operation whereby Londoners had been being terrorised by a sexual predator along the so-called Green Chain, a linkage of footpaths in south east London from Thamesmead to Nunhead Cemetery, taking in various woods and bits of parkland, including Plumstead common. With the Met Police so bloody-mindedly determined to pin the Nickell murder on a patsy, Colin Stagg (who wouldn’t play ball, because he obviously wasn’t on the inside), there was no initial effort to link the two murders.
Thus, with the Bisset murder being so grisly and deviant, it meant that the Metropolitan Police were asking for people to believe that the Green Chain rapist would, all in one go, make a degenerative leap into becoming a sex attacker of children, and a killer and butcher to boot. The man who had all this pinned on him, Robert Napper, was mad (schizophrenic) – it was explained – as if that was enough to cause the transition. Given that modern criminology and police work gives great store to psychological profiling, and taking into account his supposed previous behaviour, it is somehow overlooked that Napper would have been looking to humiliate Bisset for his instant gratification, not creating a horror tableau intended to shock after the act. But then, as the Stagg debacle would allow us to conclude, psychological profiling isn’t science after all, but it is useful in targeting a patsy against whom there is no other evidence. Above all else, Napper hadn’t been so mad that he had not been rejected for employment by the Ministry of Defence – who vet everyone. Robert Napper was working as a stores person for the MoD in Woolwich at the time of the Bisset incident. Some corporate-media can’t get a cover story straight, with one publication claiming that he was a “warehouseman and machine operator at a plastics factory,” but Napper’s employment by the MoD is verified by appearing as a fact in several accounts.
Although the MoD as Napper’s keeper is strong stuff from the get-go, there are other indications that Napper was an asset of UK Government, and they will be covered by and by. And, to begin to do so in the most colourful way possible, there was one particularly fanciful piece of writing that was published by the Daily Mail at the much later time (i.e. 2008) of his being on trial for Nickell’s murder: an unsolved murder, ever since the case against Stagg had been thrown out in 1994, that was evidently to be resolved by pinning it on Napper. Because Nickell’s murder had been so high profile, it seems, a lot of effort had to be expended on selling Napper’s lunacy to the public, and the Mail piece in question is an excellent example: it claimed that Napper had a fit as a school child, as if he was being possessed with evil as he was being read Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart:
It describes how a madman commits a murder and dismembers the body.
It’s only Victorian fiction, of course. But years later, it would be chillingly mirrored in the grotesque killings that Napper perpetrated.
This is all too obviously crude propaganda. If Napper was somehow predestined through his school child nature to commit bloody murder, then his parents and teachers should be doing time.
In reality, Napper was ruled out as being the Green Chain Rapist, even as the enquiries were ongoing, on account of being too tall. Napper was 6 feet and 2 inches in height, while the suspect had been described as being 5 feet and 7 inches. Seven inches is a big difference, especially separating someone who is at least six feet tall from someone who isn’t. The average height of a British female was 5 foot 5 inches in 2017, and this figure wouldn’t be very different to the average in the four years to 1994 when Napper was supposedly tallying up 106 crimes on 86 victims. The difference of those 7 inches to a woman of 5 feet and 5 inches is an attacker who looms over you, or one who is about the same height as you are. It should be a very obvious thing to spot.
However, the narrative that would have Napper guilty for all but the two rapes and two attempted rapes that he was convicted of explains the height discrepancy with “conflicting witness reports of the rapist’s height and [that] Napper walked with a stoop”. The line is from the Wikipedia entry on Napper, but it doesn’t help the official case from the perspective that this article is coming from. What it in fact suggests to us is that if Napper was guilty of some offences, he wasn’t the only man who was the Green Chain Rapist.
Context is crucial when looking back at this case, which is usually treated for the effect it creates with all facts accordioned into as close proximity together regardless of the separating dates when they occurred. Napper wasn’t in the frame as being the Green Walk Rapist until he was also looked at as being the “Plumstead Ripper”, or the murderer of Bisset and child. It’s a very significant detail.
Moreover, he wasn’t convicted of all the Green Chain attacks, but only a very few: two rapes, and two attempted rapes. When he was tried for the murder of Bisset and child in 1995, he was also tried for these other crimes. Furthermore, he admitted everything. Conveniently, he didn’t actually have to be tried on even one count. Although we are evidently supposed to believe that Napper was compelled to come clean because of pressure borne to bear by incriminating forensic evidence, we are so far removed, chronologically speaking, from the case that it is hard to find out if this could be true. For all the mess the murderer made, no DNA was found at the scene of the Bisset murders, although it appears that his fingerprint was supposed to have been found. This evidence is problematic, however, as we will see when we look at the incident specifically in a future article. Suffice to say, the problem should be self-evident, albeit a little disguised, in this paragraph from retrospective corporate-media reporting (emphasis added):
By May 1994, Napper was no longer the unseen psychopath in the shadows. After initial forensic delays, he was arrested and charged with the Bissett murders. DNA tests linked him immediately and conclusively to the Green Chain rapes.
It means that the matter of Napper being implicated in the crime by his fingerprints wasn’t understood until the year later. It’s almost as though it wasn’t realised that the fingerprints belonged to Napper until the whole package to send to trial needed to be assembled.
And it’s not that Napper and his fingerprints were not known to police: his first infraction was back in August 1986, when he was given a 12-month conditional discharge for possession of a loaded air weapon in a public place.
And please consider the following, from Crime+Investigation (and wonder how Napper could ever have been employed by the Ministry of Defence):
Napper’s fingerprints are on record from eight previous police meetings. One, in 1992, saw him arrested for stalking a civilian police employee who lived in Plumstead.
As far as the attempted rapes, and actual rapes on the Green Chain Walk are concerned, if the forensic evidence has the same constitution as that which caused an admission of murdering Bisset, then it would also be pretty poor. There is a story that Napper’s fingerprints were found on a knife on one of the Green Walk commons in August 1993, and a more substantial accusation that in April of that same year, his fingerprints were found on a tin box containing a Mauser handgun, buried on Winns common (which was never pursued). This could circumstantially link him to the crimes, but it could also mean that he was a weapons nut who didn’t want to be discovered with firearms on his premises, and who was careless with his knives. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no information to be found in the corporate-media on the internet regarding detail of the DNA that so conclusively incriminated him in the Green Chain cases.
A firearm has been mentioned, and we should perhaps not wonder that Napper had an antique weapon – which the Mauser could well have been – that might not be illegal, but which Napper still felt he had to secrete. However, in December 1992, he was jailed for two months for being in a possession of a firearm and ammunition without a certificate. This appears to come out of the Met Police’s brief interest in him regarding the Green Chain Walk attacks, so that when they made further enquiries, this weapon and ammo was evidently found. So, it’s not that any gun ownership of Napper’s was overlooked. The mystery in all this is how does Napper get what sounds to be a useable firearm, and why was this deemed not worthy of its own line of investigation when Napper’s name had come up in the Green Chain Walk investigation.
And a pistol wasn’t the only thing overlooked (and please note the context of accusation of police incompetence):
Another error came in October 1992, when Napper’s home was searched after he was arrested for a minor offence. As well as finding a pistol, knives and a crossbow — which led to a criminal conviction — police discovered what amounted to a rapist’s tool kit inside a padlocked box.
It included a restraining cord, notes on how to torture people and an A to Z on which Napper had marked places where he had attacked women. Despite a psychiatric report on Napper at the time describing him as “disturbed” and “an immediate threat to himself and the public”, no significance was attached to the contents of the box.
Could it be that no significance was attached to the box, not because the Metropolitan Police were rubbish, but because Napper was on no account to be connected with the Green Chain Walk attacks on account of his being an intelligence asset? (Likewise, from whence he could get a gun is not to be explained). Or could it be that there was no significance in what were the collections of a fantasist, and a man so socially inadequate (Napper had Asperger’s Syndrome) that he wouldn’t have been able to rape, which included notes that could be interpreted in a number of ways, including the way that reflected what he was really up to, with the A to Z actually showing the “plot[ting of] positions from which to peer into women’s homes”, with “one particular mark pinpointed an address in Plumstead… [which] was the basement flat where 27-yearold Samantha Bisset lived”.
Napper appears to have been a known peeping tom. Consider the following:
[Napper] was said to be an obsessive Peeping Tom who kept notes on the women he stalked and fantasised over.
Remember that he stalked the police employee? Also consider how police were called on Napper in July 1993 when a husband and wife see him peeping at their neighbour. Napper was apprehended at the scene, and taken home – but the matter was not pursued. Although a police officer involved in the incident noted that Napper “should be considered a possible rapist”, we note the judgement is for potential – and in fact, it is not the full story (and this serves as an example of how information can be presented in order to serve as evidence to fit):
In July of the same year, according to police files, Napper’s name was logged on an intelligence report after a couple phoned the police to say they had seen a man spying on their neighbour, a young blonde woman who often walked in her flat semi-naked. The husband followed the man, and when police arrived they spoke to Napper, who gave his name and address. The officers’ notes read: “Subject strange, abnormal, should be considered as a possible rapist, indecency type suspect.”
So, here we have an incident after the date of the Bisset murders where Napper is behaving as one who hasn’t yet suffered that development into committing rape that the psychiatrists, professional and amateur alike, think is inevitable. Maybe Napper could manage to expose himself indecently while watching a naked woman in her home, but could he rape? And maybe being a presence on the street in this way was all that was required of him (the Met Police only didn’t want him being in possession of a gun). And put it this way: if Napper, who was always too clumsily coming to the attention of the police to be a slick predator, was conscious of being the Green Walk Rapist, why would he get himself into trouble, and a 12-month conditional discharge, for shoplifting sweets in Plumstead High Street in January, 1994?
We should note that Napper’s reputation as a rapist started when his mother called police in November 1989, to report that her son had admitted to her that he had committed rape on Plumstead common. Now, this incident is reckoned, by those who want to talk about gross police incompetence that led to Napper always being overlooked, as some kind of irresistible clue. The fact is, however, the accusation very likely emanated from some power dynamic going on between Napper’s mother and her son, which involved the repression (or so it seems to the author) of some abuse committed upon Napper when he was a boy (by a “family friend” as the stories tell) and this telephone call was probably the act of a woman trying to apply more cosh to someone who had moved out of her sphere of influence. When Napper’s mother made the phone call, there had already been a rape in August 1989, so the existence of a rapist was something that people would have known about, and it can’t be ruled out that Napper’s mother was hoping that police would make the connection. The police did not do this, and were right not to: although Napper was charged with this attack, it was dropped when he went to trial in October 1995. Thus, even the whole creation mythology is flawed.
This is not to say that Napper didn’t commit rape – there’s no way that this piece can argue against the convictions against him on those charges, because the detail is missing that would allow it. If he did rape, however, arguably he wasn’t the only one doing it on the Green Chain Walk – although he took the blame for the entire operation (mass rape is a weapon of war) when the Metropolitan Police decided no more to turn a blind eye on him. And actually, in a scenario that explains why police had to turn so many blind eyes, his patsy-hood suggests it entirely possible that all that was required of him was to be that mentally ill sort of dupe (kept by his employment by the MoD, and then sent to the high security hospital, Broadmoor, never to be heard of again) so favoured in terror case entrapments, who could serve as a presence on the scene where these rapes were taking place, to be seen doing something deviant, and to inspire a sense of threat – and to ultimately take all the rap.
