The Babes in the Wood Murders was the name given to the murders of nine-year-old best friends Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway.

The pair lived near Moulsecoomb, Brighton, and on October 9th, 1986, went out to play together after school.

When the girls didn’t return home, the police were called by Hadaway’s mother, and a search party was gathered – with both police and neighbours looking for them. What they didn’t know at the time was that the killer, Russell Bishop, was also in the search party.

The bodies of both Nicola and Karen were found in a makeshift den in Wild Park on October 10th by two searchers. They had both been strangled and sexually assaulted.

In 1990, Rachael Watts, seven years old at the time, was out roller skating near her home in Whitehawk, Brighton, to get some sweets at a local shop.

Having just moved to the area, she got lost on the way home and asked a man who was fixing his car for directions. What she didn’t know was that this man was Russell Bishop, the man who had murdered Karen and Nicola. Instead of answering her, he snatched her off the street and threw her into the boot of his car.

Rachael bravely attempted to escape by taking off her skates and bashing the boot door with a hammer – which later helped prove her story – but was unsuccessful in her efforts.

Driven to nearby Devil’s Dyke, she was sexually assaulted and strangled before being left for dead in gorse bushes.

She bravely managed to get out of the gorse bushes and miraculously was found and rescued by a couple who had driven up to the beauty spot to watch the sunset.

Three days later, Rachael was able to identify Bishop in a line-up. At the trial in December 1990, she testified against him in court from behind a screen. She was praised as ‘the bravest little girl in Britain’ in an article in the Daily Mail.

Due to legal and reporting laws, Rachael had a right to anonymity, with her name and face kept hidden from the public for decades.

However, after Bishop’s death in 2022, she waived her right to anonymity and went public with what she had experienced – as well as the mental health struggles she had battled in the years since.

She had been living with complex PTSD, acute anxiety, agoraphobia and major depressive disorder, unable to leave her house without suffering debilitating panic attacks.

While she was now a married mum of four, she had also become so scared of history repeating itself she admitted to struggling to allow her teenagers to have their own independence, needing to know where they were.

Russell Bishop was a 20-year-old roofer and petty criminal at the time of the Babes in the Wood Murders, living about a mile and a half from where the girls lived. He was known to both families and used to play football with Barry Fellows, Nicola’s dad.

After Nicola and Karen were found, Bishop claimed he saw the bodies and tried to feel for a pulse (in case any fingerprints were found on their necks) but a constable who was with him at the time said he didn’t touch the bodies at the time they were found.

Bishop was officially charged in December 1986, but was acquitted at his trial in December 1987, having been found not guilty of the crimes.

Three years later, he was arrested again – this time for the attempted murder of Rachael Watts. This time he was convicted, and in December 1990 he was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping, indecent assault, and attempted murder. But ‘life’ meant only a minimum of 14 years.

For years, it was not possible to retry him for the Babes in the Wood murders, due to the double jeopardy laws.

In 2003, this law was changed, and the cold case was investigated once again. Attention was drawn to a light blue Pinto sweatshirt that was found abandoned on a footpath near the park, with DNA testing linking the sweatshirt to Bishop.

Bishop was finally arrested again for the murders of Karen and Nicola in 2016.

In 2017, his acquittal was officially quashed, meaning he could stand trial once again for the murders – and in December 2018 he was put back on trial and finally convicted of the murders of Nicola and Karen, getting two more life sentences.

On top of that, Jennifer Johnson, his teenage girlfriend at the time of the murders, was later convicted of perjury, having lied about the sweatshirt he was wearing on the night to police, producing a similarly coloured one and claiming it was that. She was sentenced to six years in prison.

Bishop died of brain cancer in prison at the age of 55 on January 20th, 2022.

The Girl Who Caught a Killer will air on 25 May 2025.

It will be available on Sky Documentaries, and to stream on NOW.