The Rachel Nickell story was one the media adored. The investigation was sabotaged and exploited. She was blonde, she was pretty, she was with her small child. Rather like the Madeline McCann fracas the tabloids became obsessed with the wrong suspect. Blonde victims are especially welcomed by the media. And added to that --Wimbledon...and small child. It was a red hot story. The Wrong man was inevitable. As re Jill Dando.Another blonde. Another wrong man.
There is a lot of element of truth to that, Cat.
I had a gut feeling from the start that Stagg was innocent. I hated how the media picked on him, including Roger Cook from the Cook Report. Roger was a bit angry as Stagg did all the tests apart from the truth serum, which is BS.
Stagg was put in a bracket for being a loner and having a book. In the 1990s, if you wanted to meet someone, you either had to go to a nightclub or you were writing to the personals in the local papers.
The lady copper who "befriended" Stagg only pretended to be interested in fishing out information from Stagg and only heard what she wanted to hear to give back to her bosses. She resigned when Stagg was clear. It annoys me that he got a feeble settlement for having his life ruined. £700,000 is peanuts, he should have been given millions. Nothing wrong with working in a supermarket either.
www.thesun.co.uk/news/14254636/colin-sta...esco-rachel-nickell/
I had a feeling Barry George was innocent from the start, he is clearly an oddball and a stalker who needs/needed professional help, he is lucky to have a strong-minded sister to defend his corner. Barry George was bullied in prison, and he just took the abuse. When the media showed the picture of George in a gas mask holding a gun, the eyes don't match the other photos of Barry George, IMHO. I would say he has served his time for stalking.
The police said it was odd that he subscribed to an in-house BBC magazine; he had done a work placement at the BBC when he was young that came to nothing (like the result of most work placements, companies love the cheap free labour), and he was probably a subscriber to the magazine from his first shift at the Beeb. I bet Barry George was one of hundreds if not thousands of people who had a work placement at the BBC as a youth.
I doubt George had the brains or the know-how to execute a person gangland style. The media are also very quiet about Jill Dando doing investigative work in Ireland at a boys' home.
The police were clutching at straws about a single spec of gun powder, which could have come from anywhere, like a bus, tube or park bench. It's London FFS.