Samantha Bissett was the daughter of middle-class parents who took to travelling after rebelling against her conventional upbringing in Scotland.

She had the misfortune to settle down in the South London neighbourhood preyed on by Napper.

Ms Bissett and her four-year-old daughter, Jazmine, lived in a one-bedroom flat in Plumstead, near to Napper, and on one of the streets where he cultivated the obsessions that led from voyeurism to rape and murder.

In November 1993, 16 months after Ms Nickell was killed, Ms Bissett, 27, was murdered in the hallway of her flat in Plumstead, southeast London. She was raped, stabbed up to 20 times in the head and neck, and dragged into her living room, where Napper mutilated her body. Her daughter was sexually assaulted then suffocated. The scene was so horrific that a police photographer was unable to return to work for almost two years.

Ms Bissett, born in Dundee, was the well-spoken and well-educated daughter of an artist and had travelled around Europe and in a peace convoy to Stonehenge. She lived in various hippy communes before becoming pregnant by a fellow New Age traveller, the son of a barrister and a teacher.

Ms Bissett’s father had died of lung cancer when she was 14 and her mother, Margaret, travelled from Scotland to help her daughter to find somewhere to live with her new child. They settled on the flat, where Ms Bissett devoted herself to her daughter, taking her responsibility seriously without losing her carefree nature, which included occasionally sun-bathing topless in the garden and walking around seminaked without drawing the blinds or locking the doors.

On one such occasion she is believed to have caught the prying eye of Napper.

Ms Bissett’s mother, Margaret, died two days before Napper was due to go on trial for the murder in 1995. Her stepfather, Jack Morrison, said that he still thought frequently of Samantha and Jazmine. “When Samantha first died I was so angry that if I’d got my hands on a gun I would definitely have killed Napper. I just hope he never gets out. That day should never come.”

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