Death on the Common: My Mother's Murder, review: unimaginable horror turned to hope

In 1992 Rachel Nickell was walking on Wimbledon Common with her two-year-old when she was attacked and brutally murdered. Her son, Alex, the only witness, was found covered in mud and blood: he too had been savagely beaten. It was a horror that gripped the nation but one that was compounded by the looming shadow of Alex’s future – he was a victim as much as his poor mother. What sort of life could possibly emerge from such grievous beginnings?

Death on the Common: My Mother's Murder (Channel 4) was an attempt to answer that question, and, as a study of the man Alex has become it was full of hope. Alex and his father, André, moved to Barcelona 29 years ago in order to escape what André called the howling mob of the media. Here, they came back to the UK in order to meet some of the key players from the time: crime scene investigator Ron Turnbull, who examined Alex in the hours after the attack; Detective Chief Inspector Mick Wickerson; Chief Crime Correspondent for the Mirror, Jeff Edwards; and child and adolescent psychiatrist Jean Harris Hendriks, who was tasked by police with gleaning further details from the toddler.

As is often the case with deeply personal documentaries, the question that hung over the whole hour was why would Alex and André agree to do this in the first place? Why put themselves through such an ordeal on camera? One answer would be because they were persuaded by a film-maker who knew it would make a striking documentary. Alex said he did it because he wanted to “understand and know myself better”.

In any case, I hope he likes what he’s found – he is a remarkable man; calm, eloquent and forgiving. As he met the various adults who’d been involved with his mother’s murder you could see how amazed they were at the adult the boy had become. The tacit expectation, of course, was that he would be damaged beyond all repair.

To be fair to director Dan Harrison, his film stayed calm too. Alex’s return to the UK offered up several opportunities for sensationalism of the sort that had blighted the initial media coverage of the murder. Taking Alex and his father back to Wimbledon Common, for example, could have been handled as a dramatic coup. My Mother’s Murder is a title that wouldn’t have been out of place late night on Channel 5. Instead, the tone was measured and the coverage judicious – the focus remained on Alex and his father, not on the details of the crime or the police gaffes that followed.

Of the reunions, it was Harris Hendriks who was the most remarkable – the whole film was really a tale of child psychology, and how early experience forms later character. Harris Hendriks knew the most about the effects of serious trauma on young minds and, on the evidence here, was the one who did the most to help the young Alex. The sight of her meeting him again for the first time, 30 years later, was particularly moving. “I just want to look at you,” she said.

After all the interviews, however, we ended with Alex and his father, alone, talking. That was an apt conclusion – in amongst all of Alex’s strange meetings it was the father/son relationship that had evolved out of the mother’s horrific murder that was most striking. Alex and André look the same, sound the same and are evidently one another’s confidante and succour. If any good has come out something so terrible it’s the strength of their bond.