When I was seven, the Babes in the Wood murderer left me for dead. This is how I put him behind bars

Yahoo

09-05-2025

There's a beach at Saltdean on the south coast of England where Rachael Watts would go shrimping as a child. She remembers climbing on the rocks, wading waist deep in the ocean. One day, she says, she hopes to be able to enjoy these pleasures again. She cannot imagine this day, not at the moment.
A fearless, outgoing girl in her younger years, Watts does not remember much else from her childhood. Very little at all from after she was seven years old.
'I don't recollect anything after the attack,' she says. 'I have massive gaps in my memory.'
She was seven when she was abducted, sexually assaulted, strangled and left for dead at a beauty spot in Brighton by a man who, it later transpired, had previously murdered two other young girls. Watts survived, miraculously, and managed to identify her abductor as local man Russell Bishop, who was imprisoned for life. But now 42, she still lives in the shadow of the day she met a killer.
Today, talking to me from the garden room at her home in an undisclosed location, she gives me a raw, frank and heartbreaking account of how her past is still very much affecting her present. Wearing a white vest and heavy-framed glasses, hair pulled back from her face, she sits beside her attentive husband Justin, who gently intervenes to offer reassurance when needed.
'Some days are just OK,' she says. 'Some days are awful and I go to very dark places in my head.'
For decades, Watts did not reveal her story. She was granted anonymity and lived what looked like a normal life into early adulthood, mostly keeping her secret to herself. It was only in 2022, when Bishop died in prison of brain cancer, aged 55, that she felt safe enough to waive her anonymity – even talking about her past to her own children and close friends for the first time.
'It wasn't a pleasant discussion,' she says of the conversation with her children. Her friends were 'truly lovely' about it, but she can't help wondering how much they could really grasp.
'I still have this sense that they don't fully understand,' she says. 'I don't think anybody can, unless you've been through it.'Today, speaking to me exclusively ahead of a new two-part Sky documentary about her life called The Girl Who Caught a Killer (which will be the first time Rachael will ever have been seen on screens), she explains the relief of opening up about what made her the way she is.
'It's nice… for it not to be this secret I'm holding on to,' she says. '[When] you hold on to something so long, it starts as a piece of gravel in your pocket and accumulates over time until eventually you're trying to drag around a boulder and you can't move.'It was a sunny afternoon in February 1990 and she was out and about on her white rollerboots. 'My dad was in the front garden planting pansies,' she recalls in the documentary. 'To this day I can't stand pansies.'
The youngest of four daughters, she had only recently moved to the area in Brighton with her family. Her plan was to skate to see a friend, but the friend was not at home. On returning, she hit a wall and bumped her head. When she arrived back home her father, a mechanic, gave her £1 to buy sweets at the local shop, and so off she went again.
But in the unfamiliar streets, she lost her way coming back and asked a man for directions. He was tinkering with his car, a red Ford Cortina. Seemed safe enough, a mechanic like her dad, she thought.
Next thing she knew, she was trapped.
'It was just instant. He scooped me up, rollerboots and all, threw me into the boot of his car,' she says in the film.
He drove to Devil's Dyke, five miles north of the city. It was an isolated spot, known for its panoramic views, its picturesque scenery.
Watts only knew she had to escape, and in the boot of the car found a hammer and struck it against the lid. She screamed that she would give the driver the money her dad had given her. He told her, 'Shut up or I'll kill you.'
With astonishing presence of mind, Watts took off her rollerboots to aid her escape once the boot was opened. But she never had a chance.
When the driver reached the beauty spot, he stopped the car, removed the little girl and put her on the back seat, where he removed her clothing, raped her, strangled her, then left her unconscious in the mud underneath some gorse bushes.
'He disposed of me like he was flytipping. Just like I was an old mattress or something, just thrown into a bush somewhere. He left me thinking I was dead,' she tells the documentary-makers.
When she came around, it was dark and she was alone: naked, bloody, dizzy and desperately cold. In a clearing, she saw some headlights. She did not know if it was her attacker, yet she had no choice but to head towards them, knowing she would freeze to death if she stayed where she was.
Inside the car were a woman and man in their 20s called Susan and David. They saw her emerge from the bush in tears, mud down her legs, hair dishevelled, blood on her body.
'It was dreadful, it was surreal, it was something that will never come out of my head,' David recalls in the film. 'It was obvious to me what had probably happened to her.'
After wrapping her in a blanket, he and Susan drove to a nearby golf club and called 999. The little girl was saved.
Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway were two other little girls growing up in Brighton in the 1980s. Although Watts never knew them, her story is inextricably linked with theirs.
The pair were nine years old when they went missing from their homes on the Moulsecoomb council estate in 1986. Nicola was a chatty girl who loved the new television soap opera EastEnders and the Sister Sledge pop song Frankie. Karen was a lively and loving child who lived a couple of doors away and had been her friend for years.
When the two went out to play on 9 October that year and failed to come home, their families went looking for them. A mist began to fall, and when darkness came the families called the police.
The following day their bodies were found side by side in woodland in a local area called Wild Park. They looked somehow as if they were sleeping. In fact they had been sexually assaulted and strangled, in what became known as the Babes in the Wood murders.
Police arrested a local man, Russell Bishop, a 20-year-old labourer and petty criminal. He was already known to them and had been spotted in and around Wild Park when the girls disappeared. He was also known to both girls' families and had even joined in the search.
When two teenagers found the bodies, Bishop had been close by. A blue sweatshirt was found near the scene, bearing the word Pinto. Bishop's girlfriend, Jennifer Johnson, confirmed to police it was his.
He offered police contradictory stories and in December they charged him with the murders, which he denied. In 1987, amid a frenzy of national interest, Bishop stood trial at Lewes Crown Court.
But the prosecution's case all but collapsed when Johnson went back on her earlier claim that the blue sweatshirt was Bishop's. A crucial piece of evidence was lost to them, just like that. A jury found Bishop not guilty and he walked free.
Three years went by before Watts was abducted in the same city. The first her mother knew of the attack was when police informed her that her daughter had been taken to hospital. They asked her not to show her distress when she rushed to her bedside, in case this stopped the child from speaking freely about her ordeal. Watts, covered in scratches, was sitting in her hospital bed with a colouring book. Her mother sat beside her as she coloured in a picture of Rupert Bear.
Sussex Police meanwhile began the hunt for her attacker. With the details she provided, the articulate, intelligent child was able to help them. She told them the colour of the car, that her assailant was a man with a moustache, and that she had used a hammer to strike the door of the boot from the inside. She didn't tell the police or her parents what the man had done to her on the back seat. She felt ashamed.
The police search covered an area six miles wide. About 10 yards from its perimeter, an officer eventually spotted a ball of clothing under a tree.
It turned out to be the items Watts had been wearing.
Information came through to detectives that Russell Bishop – a man with a moustache – had been seen driving a car in the area. Tyre tracks matching those of his car were found, as were the hammer marks on the inside of the door of Bishop's boot. Watts was able to pick him out of a line-up.
He was duly charged with the attack, and Watts gave evidence against him in court, helping secure his conviction for attempted murder, kidnapping and indecent assault. In the press she was dubbed 'Britain's bravest girl'.
Does she feel brave?
'I don't,' she says bluntly, even though her actions stopped a paedophile killer from harming more children.
She has never managed to take pride in what she did, at such a young age, to send her attacker to prison.
While Watts is visibly anxious, her husband Justin is cheery and upbeat. He takes an opposing view of her role in putting Bishop behind bars.
'Without you,' he interjects warmly, 'that broken individual undoubtedly would have racked up more killings, so you stopped it becoming a serial killer [case]. If you're not proud of it, I am.'
Watts feels something more painful. 'I definitely have survivor's guilt, I know that much,' she says.
Under the 800-year-old 'double jeopardy' principle, Bishop could not be retried for the murders of Nicola and Karen, despite his conviction for attacking Watts. In 2005, that changed when double jeopardy was scrapped. It meant an acquittal could be quashed and a retrial ordered if new and compelling evidence came to light.
Bishop didn't reckon on having to face justice again for the killings. But advances in DNA testing enabled a forensic scientist to find evidence linking the crucial blue sweatshirt to Bishop's home and to the murdered girls.
In October 2018, Bishop was retried at the Old Bailey and this time convicted. It had taken 32 years for justice to be done.But justice has never meant closure or recovery for his surviving victim.
Watts was in her teens when she first discovered, to her horror, that 'life' did not mean life when it came to a jail term. She had nightmares that Bishop would climb through her bedroom window and kill her.
After the attack, she had stopped going out to play, didn't want to have sleepovers with friends and generally preferred to stay closer to trusted adults.
Otherwise, life carried on. She left school at 16 and spent a few months at college, then dropped out and took a full-time job instead, working in a branch of Thorntons. She moved on to a role in a bank and then to a hospital pathology laboratory.She moved around a lot, changed her name a couple of times, clung to her anonymity and stayed silent about the attack. She became a mother – her four children are now 20, 17, 15 and 12, but until 2022 she didn't share the truth with any of them.
'I swore I was never going to tell them,' she says. 'I felt it was something I was going to take to my grave.'
This became harder when her mental health began to spiral downwards. She can pinpoint one triggering moment she thinks happened around 15 years ago, when, despite her efforts to stay under the radar, she received a phone call from the Victim Support charity to inform her that Bishop was up for parole.
'It came as a bit of a shock,' she says. 'It was definitely a case of, 'How did you find me?''
After all, if they could find her, couldn't anyone? Bishop was denied parole, but there began an unsettling cycle whereby she was kept abreast each time he was up for parole again. 'It was on this continuous loop,' she says. 'I did take a bit of a knock.'On a couple of occasions when leaving the house, she suffered panic attacks, and so slowly started to pull back from normal life. She struggles to remember exactly when this started, but says it was within the last decade.
'I was already on antidepressants and had started gaining significant weight because I was using food as a crutch,' she says. 'Whereas before that, we used to take the kids to the beach, to the park, to soft play, and I used to walk them to school, after 2018 the panic attacks got too much.'
Bishop and everything concerning him seemed to keep returning to haunt her, not least with the second attempt to convict him of the Babes in the Wood murders.
'You had the Hadaways and the Fellows rightfully looking for their justice as well, so between the parole and [that] it just never went away… it was just constant,' she says.
Increasingly, she found it a challenge even to leave the house. Her last job was as a dinner lady at the school up the road, but she hasn't been able to work for about six years. Having stopped going out to see friends, she grew distant from them. 'It does get very, very lonely,' she admits.
She could keep the past from overshadowing the present no longer. Depression, agoraphobia and complex post-traumatic stress disorder have crowded in on her, and she remains in the grip of her darkest memory, although it can feel almost like a dream.'I've felt ashamed of what happened to me and felt talking about it was a taboo. [I feel] like a prisoner of my past as I can't seem to break free of what he did to me,' she says.
'I just want people to understand that I'm not some weirdo who can't go out.'
Twice divorced, Watts met Justin, the father of her youngest child, through friends of friends around 15 years ago. They got to know each other through their shared love of online gaming. It has otherwise been hard to trust others; hard to avoid trying to wrap her children in cotton wool and protect them from every harm. On one occasion, when her eldest was late coming home, she was on the verge of calling the police.
'And at that time [my children] had no clue and just thought I was being some overprotective, annoying parent,' she says. 'Since I've told them all, the oldest especially was like, 'Oh right, now I get it.''
In April last year, Sussex Police apologised to Nicola and Karen's families for mistakes made in its original investigation into their murders. Lessons, they said, had been learnt. At the request of the families, details of the failings were not released.
But what of Watts, who would never have encountered Bishop had he been convicted at his first trial? She says she received a private apology, but that police have never publicly acknowledged the impact any failings of theirs had on her.
'Sussex needs to know what those failings were and they need to tell everybody that they've acknowledged these things, and what they've done to make sure it never happens again,' she says, her tone turning angry. 'I don't understand why that should be a private topic. I think that's something the whole community deserves to know.'
Her parents, she says, agree. They have told her that 'if [police] hadn't made those errors, then you would not have had 30-plus years of misery'.
Sussex Police say they have publicly accepted failings in the 1987 case of Russell Bishop that may have affected the outcome of the trial. 'While policing practices have significantly improved over the last 38 years, we do not underestimate the devastating and lifelong impact Bishop's attack has had on Ms Watts,' says assistant chief constable Tanya Jones. 'We have committed to issuing a formal apology to Ms Watts in our correspondence with her.'
Today, Watts describes herself as broken. 'I haven't been able to control my mental health so far since it hit me like a 10-ton truck,' she says.
She doesn't know when she might feel better but she does know what Justin tells her: to take each day one by one.'Yeah,' he agrees. 'Just be happy with little steps. At the moment we're happy you're sitting down in the garden, not in the house.' The next step after that will be to go to the shops.
For now, she takes solace in watching everything grow in her garden, in taking care of the plants. She hopes in future to have a career, perhaps working with animals. To go out and spend time with her family and sit in a pub beer garden. To go shrimping in the sea again.
To live a normal life.
The Girl Who Caught a Killer will air on Sky and streaming service Now on Sunday 25 May
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