# 64: Stabbed Her Mother NINE TIMES & Begged Police To Stop Her

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 6 Feb 2024, 1 h 22 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1080656386.mp3

Today’s case is about Nicola Edgington, the woman who stabbed her own mother nine times and watched her die. She was only locked up for three years before she went on to kill again, in another savage attack. Trigger Warning: assualt, miscariage, domestic abuse, references to suicide Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:00] When 25 year old Nicola Edgington savagely butchered her
[0:03] very own mother, the public were horrified.
[0:06] This was a woman that should be locked away for a very long time
[0:10] for the safety of the rest of the community.
[0:12] But in a shocking turn of events, she was let out of
[0:14] psychiatric care just three years later.
[0:17] Nicola pleaded with doctors and police for help with her
[0:20] psychotic episodes, warning that if she didn't get help soon, she
[0:24] might do something dangerous. She'd killed someone once before
[0:28] and she could feel that she was ready to to do it again.
[0:30] It was only a matter of time and she was begging someone to stop
[0:34] her. Today we're going to be talking
[0:36] about Nicola Edgington, the infamous killer known as the
[0:40] Bexley Heath Butcher. Now, before we get into the true
[0:45] crime case, I just want to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[0:48] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in this
[0:51] video. This video is for educational
[0:53] purposes and everything that I'm about to say is publicly
[0:56] available information that myself and my team have found
[0:59] online and compiled into this video.
[1:01] We will be covering a lot of sensitive topics in this video,
[1:04] including assault, domestic abuse, miscarriage, and
[1:08] references to suicide. So if any of that seems too
[1:11] triggering or too intense for you, I would click out of the
[1:14] video now. Hopefully I'll get chance to see
[1:16] you some other time with a different video, but look after
[1:19] yourself in the meantime, while we make every effort to Fact
[1:22] Check our sources and make sure that all of our information is
[1:24] correct, no action should be taken in reliance upon the
[1:28] information in this video. And I want to take this
[1:30] opportunity to remind you all that these are real people that
[1:34] we're talking about South. Please keep everything kind and
[1:36] respectful in the comments. I'm sure you will.
[1:39] I'm sure I don't need to ask you, but just a reminder, all
[1:42] opinions that are about to be stated in this video and mine
[1:44] and mine alone. And with all of that being said,
[1:47] let's talk about the Bexley Heath Butcher.
[1:50] So today's case takes place, well it begins actually in East
[1:54] Sussex, which is on the southeast coast of England.
[1:58] I know she's called the Bexley Heath butcher.
[2:00] Bexley Heath is in London, so the geography is a little bit
[2:03] confusing at the start of this case.
[2:04] Don't worry, it will all work itself out.
[2:06] But the case does begin in East Sussex on the South Coast of
[2:10] England, among beautiful coastals towns like Brighton and
[2:13] Eastbourne on was a place called Forest Row.
[2:16] And that's where 25 year old Nicola Edgington was living with
[2:20] her mother Marion and her two younger siblings in 2005.
[2:24] For a bit of context and don't worry, we will definitely get
[2:27] into this a lot more as we go through the video.
[2:30] But I just want to let you know right now that Nicola was
[2:32] struggling terribly with her mental health and she always had
[2:36] all the way through her life. She'd had it really, really
[2:39] hard. She was a mother of two
[2:40] children, but she didn't actually have either of her kids
[2:43] with her any more because they'd both been taken away either by
[2:47] social services or by the child's or the parent, because
[2:50] Nicola was so mentally unwell that she couldn't care for them.
[2:54] And I believe that's actually why she was staying with her
[2:57] mother when she was aged 25, because she had moved out of the
[3:00] house before, but she'd then come back because she needed her
[3:03] family, she needed to be cared for.
[3:05] Nicola had undiagnosed schizophrenia until after the
[3:09] age of 25, so for the 1st 25 years of her life she was
[3:13] struggling terribly and she had no idea why, no idea what was
[3:17] wrong with her. She knew that something was
[3:19] wrong but she thought it was just in it, like she thought she
[3:22] was just a bad person because she'd always acted out in
[3:26] school, she'd always gotten into trouble all her life.
[3:29] Everyone just regarded her as a quote UN quote problem child.
[3:32] They thought she was going to grow out of it as a child, they
[3:34] thought she was going to grow out of it as a teenager, but she
[3:37] never did. And at what point do you view
[3:40] these behaviours and these misbehaviours as symptoms rather
[3:44] than just kids being kids, teenagers being teenagers when
[3:48] they are that consistent through their life?
[3:51] When, when do you agree that it is a problem?
[3:54] Well, Nicola's parents or her mother, I'm not sure if her
[3:57] father was in the picture, but Nicola's mother never really
[4:00] did. As I say, Nicola was always just
[4:02] regarded as a problem child. And once a kid gets that label
[4:06] thrown on them, they're kind of disregarded.
[4:09] It's very similar to what happened to Nancy Spungen.
[4:11] If you caught our episode on Sid and Nancy.
[4:14] Nancy had been regarded as a problem child when she was
[4:16] young, but she definitely had some sort of undiagnosed mental
[4:20] issue that went undiagnosed for her whole entire life.
[4:23] But anyway, that was Nicola Edgington.
[4:26] I'm sorry. That was quite a lot of context
[4:27] to just throw out you right at the beginning of a true crime
[4:30] video. But you need to know that this
[4:32] woman has been struggling for 25 years, but no one really sees it
[4:36] as struggling. People just see her as weird and
[4:39] disruptive and aggressive. So anyway, on November 4th 2525,
[4:45] year old Nicola and her two siblings go to their local pub
[4:48] just for a bit of a catch up, a bit of a reunion.
[4:51] Now Nicola had a reputation that preceded her at this pub.
[4:56] Like I said, she is known for aggressive behaviour, outbursts,
[5:00] general disruptive, weird behaviour.
[5:02] And of course she was known for that at the pub.
[5:04] To be fair, she was known for being like a loud, howdy,
[5:08] aggressive drunk. But on this particular night on
[5:11] November 4th, she wasn't loud, she wasn't aggressive, she was
[5:14] just acting very bizarre. She was barely speaking to her
[5:18] siblings, which this is the whole reason they went to the
[5:21] pub is for a catch up. Imagine going to catch up with
[5:24] people and just not speak to them.
[5:25] She was sat there just like scribbling in her notebook and
[5:28] she wouldn't ever let anyone see what was in her notebook so it
[5:31] was all a bit odd. And then at one point she got up
[5:33] from the table and started practicing karate kicks.
[5:37] I don't whatever. She was like mumbling to
[5:40] herself. She was just acting really
[5:42] strange. It was very uncomfortable for
[5:44] everyone around. And eventually someone actually
[5:47] complained to the owners of the pub and they kicked Nicola out.
[5:50] So as she was gathering her things to leave, she looked up
[5:54] at her younger brother Tom, looked him dead in the eyes and
[5:57] just said he is evil. Which is very disturbing, isn't
[6:00] it? It's very disturbing.
[6:02] But Tom was kind of used to Nicola being like this.
[6:05] She was always a bit creepy, creepy, like, I don't know, her
[6:09] behaviour was always very bizarre, unpredictable, often
[6:12] aggressive. But even if it wasn't
[6:14] aggressive, it was like creepy like this.
[6:17] It wasn't uncommon for her to act like this.
[6:20] So Tom just kind of heard he is evil and he was like, all right,
[6:23] Nicola, just leave. When she did eventually leave,
[6:26] the other two siblings got on with their evening just fine.
[6:29] They had a couple more drinks, they were chatting, they were
[6:31] catching up. Meanwhile, the chaos followed
[6:34] Nicola back home. Well, followed her on her route
[6:37] back home because she didn't just go straight home after
[6:40] getting kicked out of the pub. On her walk back, she decided to
[6:43] stop by a Church of Scientology for some reason.
[6:47] And it's not like she went to one.
[6:49] It wasn't like she was a participant in any of this.
[6:52] She was just walking past a random Church of Scientology and
[6:55] thought, yeah, I'll go in there. There aren't really clear
[6:57] reports of what she was doing in that Scientology church other
[7:01] than just being generally disruptive, shouting, being
[7:04] quite like just aggressive to the people there to the point
[7:07] where they had to again kick her out.
[7:10] Although one of the people in that church was very kind to
[7:13] her. They sat with her and tried to
[7:14] calm her down and then walked her home, walked her the rest of
[7:17] the journey to where she lived with her mum.
[7:19] This whole time Nicola is displaying some very concerning
[7:24] behaviour, very concerning symptoms of something.
[7:27] Surely something is not right. They'd always said all her life
[7:31] that something had to be wrong with her, but she never got a
[7:34] diagnosis, she never really spoke to doctors about it.
[7:37] And so that night Nicola was very likely going through a
[7:42] schizophrenic episode. But no one had any idea.
[7:45] They just saw her behaviour as weird and everyone just kept
[7:48] like, pushing her away. No one wanted Nicola in their
[7:52] space. The pub didn't want her there.
[7:54] The Scientology church didn't want her there.
[7:57] She's not being helped. She's just being pushed away.
[8:00] She's someone else's problem. Once she left the pub, she was
[8:03] someone else's problem. Once she left the church, she
[8:05] was someone else's problem. Well, actually that one person
[8:08] at the church, it was very sweet for walking her home, but the
[8:11] problem still persisted. When she got home, she wasn't
[8:14] feeling any different. She was still in that episode,
[8:17] but again, no one knew. So naturally when she arrived
[8:20] back home, almost as soon as she made it through the front door,
[8:23] Nicola and her mother began arguing and it it quickly became
[8:28] like a very fiery argument. And this was pretty common in
[8:31] this household. The walls were paper thin and
[8:34] the neighbors were very used to like loud screaming matches.
[8:38] Coming from Nicholas household. She was very aggressive.
[8:42] I know I keep saying this but that was one of the main kind of
[8:45] characteristics of how her schizophrenia manifested.
[8:50] She was just very aggressive, very violent a lot of the time.
[8:53] So that night in the house she's shouting, screaming, swearing at
[8:56] her mum and her mum's doing the same back.
[8:59] And the neighbors were very used to it at this point.
[9:01] This is like the 100th time that they just had to turn the volume
[9:05] up on the TV to drown out the screaming from next door because
[9:08] it's such a common occurrence. Most of Nicola and her mum's
[9:11] arguments would often be about the same things.
[9:14] Like Marian, her mother was very concerned for her daughter of
[9:18] course, but her daughter never seemed to want to help herself.
[9:22] She never like. She would do a lot of
[9:24] self-destructive things, knowing that they were making her worse,
[9:27] making her mental state worse. Nicola would take a lot of
[9:30] drugs, she would meet a lot of unsavoury characters and make
[9:35] friends with them. People that weren't good for us,
[9:36] situations that weren't good for us.
[9:38] Finances were a big thing that they would argue about a lot of
[9:41] the time because Nicola couldn't keep a job and she was very
[9:44] reliant on her mother, but she also couldn't spend money very
[9:49] smartly. She would waste money.
[9:51] She would spend a lot of money on drugs again that she's never
[9:53] going to see back. It even got so bad that Marion
[9:57] took Nicola out of her will because she didn't trust how she
[10:01] was going to spend the money that she would inherit when her
[10:04] mum died. I believe this is what their
[10:06] argument was about that night. Nicola felt very betrayed by her
[10:09] mum for taking her out of the will.
[10:11] She felt like a mum didn't care about her.
[10:13] She didn't care about what was going to happen to her when she
[10:15] died. But Marian was trying to explain
[10:17] this to Nicola, that it's not that she doesn't love her or
[10:20] anything like that. She just simply cannot trust
[10:23] her. She didn't feel like Nicola was
[10:25] mentally responsible enough to handle things like large
[10:29] finances or a house or, you know, her, her children or a
[10:33] life of her own. I mean, she had to be under her
[10:35] mother's care at the age of 25. And she wasn't trying to help
[10:39] herself. She wasn't trying to get out of
[10:41] drug addiction, she wasn't trying to go to therapy or
[10:43] anything like that. And her mother said, look, when
[10:46] you start caring for yourself and showing me that you can be
[10:48] responsible, maybe I'll put you back in the will.
[10:50] But for the time being, she just didn't want to trust her
[10:53] daughter with a large sum of money.
[10:55] If anything was to happen to her, Nicola wasn't going to get
[10:58] anything. It was all going to go to the
[10:59] other two siblings. So on that particular night,
[11:02] this argument was out of hand. And both of these women were
[11:06] very stubborn. Neither of them were going to
[11:08] back down. Both of them wanted to be the
[11:10] one to have the last word, they wanted to one up each other and
[11:13] their arguments were always so explosive for this exact reason,
[11:17] because they would just get angrier and angrier at each
[11:20] other for not backing down. And this fight just dragged on
[11:25] and on and on all night for hours.
[11:28] They just would not stop arguing.
[11:29] It was going room to room to room, like neither of them could
[11:33] leave this situation alone. And Nicola was getting more and
[11:36] more frustrated and aggressive. She was on the brink of a
[11:41] psychotic brick, and she didn't know she didn't.
[11:44] She could feel that something was building up inside her, but
[11:47] she didn't know what that was, and she didn't know how to
[11:49] control it. Of course, because she didn't
[11:51] have a diagnosis, there was no way for her to be aware of all
[11:55] of these symptoms and warning signs.
[11:57] The warning signs had been building over the course of
[12:00] these few hours, but she didn't know how to recognize them.
[12:03] All of that anger and energy and frustration inside of her needed
[12:07] to find its way out. And had Nicola known what she
[12:11] was struggling with, that it was schizophrenia, maybe she would
[12:14] have been able to find a safe outlet for all of that
[12:17] aggression and frustration. But because she didn't
[12:20] understand herself, she didn't understand that that's what she
[12:22] needed. And when she wasn't able to get
[12:24] all of these feelings out of her system safely, instead a tragedy
[12:30] ensued. As the argument moved into the
[12:32] kitchen, Nicola spotted a huge sharp knife on the kitchen side
[12:38] and without even a split second of thought, she leapt and
[12:41] grabbed it and turned to her mother.
[12:43] Before Marian could even realise what was happening, Nicola had
[12:47] plunged the weapon into her chest and pulled it straight
[12:50] back out again. And with that, Marian just
[12:53] dropped to the floor. It all happened so fast.
[12:55] Now Nicola was just standing there with the knife in her
[12:58] hand, dripping blood, and she can see her mother on the floor,
[13:02] blood pouring out of that singular wound in her chest.
[13:06] But that was just the start of this attack.
[13:09] By this point Nicola was so out of control.
[13:12] She wasn't in her own mind and she wasn't done.
[13:15] She got down on the floor next to her mother who was bleeding
[13:18] profusely, and she just continued to stab her over and
[13:22] over again in the kind of neck, chest area.
[13:25] Finally, when she was done, Nicola stood up and looked down
[13:29] at her mother, who was laying in a pool of her own blood, already
[13:33] dead. She had just stabbed her nine
[13:35] times in total in the house that she grew up in.
[13:38] It seemed that staring down at her mother's dead body and
[13:42] realizing what she had just done kind of snapped Nicola out of
[13:46] this episode that she was in, and she suddenly started
[13:49] panicking, realizing that she was now a murderer.
[13:52] Not only that, she had murdered her own mother.
[13:55] She had a dead body on her hands.
[13:58] She probably didn't know what to do at this point in time.
[14:01] I can't imagine how her brain would have been working if she's
[14:04] still kind of in this episode but mostly snapped out of it and
[14:08] she's starting to feel things again.
[14:10] I wonder. Well, we don't know what her
[14:12] brain was kind of telling her to do at this point.
[14:14] She just turned and ran out of the house.
[14:17] I guess the only thing she could think to do was to run away and
[14:20] get away from what she'd just done.
[14:22] So she left. A few hours later, Nicola's two
[14:25] younger siblings returned home from the pub and at this point
[14:28] it was pretty late and they assumed that everyone in the
[14:31] house was going to be in bed, so they kind of snuck through the
[14:33] front door. They were trying not to make any
[14:35] noise, but then they realized that the kitchen light was on
[14:38] and they were like oh someone is awake, we don't need to be that
[14:41] quiet. So they headed into the kitchen
[14:43] to go and say hi to whoever was awake.
[14:45] But of course as they entered that room, the whole world came
[14:50] crashing down around them. They saw their own loving
[14:53] mother, Marion, laying cold and dead on the floor in a pool of
[14:58] her own blood. It was clear that there was no
[15:01] bringing her back. They could call an ambulance,
[15:03] they could try to resuscitate her, but she was long gone.
[15:06] You just can't imagine the the fear and the and the sorrow that
[15:10] comes with not only finding your mother dead, which is awful
[15:14] enough, but finding your mother murdered, brutally murdered,
[15:19] knowing that her life hadn't just come to a natural end.
[15:22] It wasn't disease, it wasn't old age.
[15:25] Someone had ripped her life from her in the most brutal, violent
[15:29] way possible. Someone had inflicted pain and
[15:32] terror on their loving mother in her final moment.
[15:36] There was no dignity, no respect in the way that she'd been left
[15:40] and worst of all, her children feared.
[15:43] They knew exactly who could do such an evil thing to their
[15:47] mother. They didn't want to believe it,
[15:49] but who else could it have been if not their own sibling,
[15:53] Nicola? She was known for violent
[15:55] outbursts and aggressive behaviour and always arguing
[15:58] with their mother. And then one day, after knowing
[16:01] that their sister had been acting weird all day, they then
[16:04] walk in and find their mother brutalized on the kitchen floor.
[16:08] There was hardly any question in it, and they'd already spotted
[16:11] Nicola's notebook laying out on the side.
[16:14] And this was a very rare occurrence because like I said
[16:17] earlier, she never let anyone read what was in her notebook.
[16:20] So either she'd intentionally left it out on the side to be
[16:24] read, or maybe it was an accident.
[16:26] Maybe she had left in such a rush that she didn't even
[16:28] realize she'd left it out there. But either way, they were going
[16:31] to read it. The page that it had been left
[16:33] open on was just a list of names, people's names.
[16:37] And at the top there was the headline Condemned People.
[16:40] And it started out with famous names like George Bush, Osama
[16:44] bin Laden, Reggie Cray. But then it eventually went into
[16:48] Nicola's real life connections. Her mother's name was written on
[16:52] that list. And the eeriest part about it,
[16:55] it had a line through it. Her mother's name had been
[16:59] crossed stout, almost as if this was a hit list.
[17:01] And that was a successful hit. And right underneath her
[17:04] mother's name in that list was her brother's Tom.
[17:08] Was she planning to kill Tom next?
[17:11] But right now, no one knew where she was at all.
[17:14] She wasn't in the house. She was out there somewhere,
[17:17] with blood on her hands and the intent to kill again.
[17:21] And if that hit list was anything to go by, it seemed
[17:24] that Nicola had embarked on a mission to wipe out her whole
[17:28] entire family, starting with her mum and crossing off their names
[17:32] from her hit list after each kill.
[17:34] Like I said, there had been a lot of warning signs throughout
[17:37] Nicola's life that this kind of thing might happen.
[17:40] And all these warning signs had been ignored or shrugged off as
[17:45] just typical bad behaviour from Nicola.
[17:48] Because she was categorized as just a bad kid.
[17:51] No one had ever thought that maybe her misbehaviour and her
[17:54] violent outbursts are signs of something deeper going on inside
[17:58] her. Maybe she's not just trying to
[18:00] be a naughty kid and trying to get attention, maybe there is an
[18:04] issue. It's actually really upsetting
[18:06] how long this child was left to suffer with the symptoms of
[18:10] something undiagnosed. Of course now we know that it's
[18:13] schizophrenia, but at the time I'm sure a lot of doctors would
[18:17] have looked at that kid and thought something is definitely
[18:20] wrong. I think even outside of her like
[18:22] disruptive and bad behaviour, there were some really clear red
[18:27] flags that she was already lacking empathy at a really
[18:30] young age. When she was only four years
[18:32] old, she actually pushed her two year old brother down a flight
[18:36] of stairs. A few years later she pushed the
[18:39] same little brother into a big Bush of roses, which I mean
[18:43] famously, roses have a Frick load of thorns.
[18:46] Of course when he fell into the Bush he was covered in cuts and
[18:49] scrapes. He was crying.
[18:50] It was it was a horrible moment for him, but Nicola seemed
[18:53] completely unfazed. Even when their dad ran out of
[18:57] the house to come and rescue his son from from this rose Bush.
[19:00] Nicola just looked at their dad and said it's gone.
[19:03] It is how she would refer to her brother.
[19:06] She would never call him, he him, not even Tom.
[19:10] He was always it. It's gone.
[19:12] Her family put a lot of this disturbing behavior down to just
[19:17] general sibling rivalry. And I mean, I, I know a lot of
[19:20] siblings that were kind of evil to each other as kids, but they
[19:25] grow out of it. But that's the thing.
[19:27] Nicola just was not growing out of it.
[19:29] In fact, as she was getting older, she seemed compelled to
[19:33] hurt other people as well. Not just her siblings, anyone.
[19:37] As a young teenager, Nicola became a straight up bully at
[19:41] school to the other kids. In fact, she was a nightmare
[19:44] student in every aspect. She often wouldn't turn up to
[19:47] lessons. She would skip school a lot, but
[19:49] on on the off chance that she did come in, she'd be horrible
[19:52] to everyone. She'd misbehaved so badly in
[19:55] class that she would get kicked out anywhere.
[19:57] She started fights in the playground.
[19:59] She would have violent outbursts almost every other day, and that
[20:03] was consistent both at school and at home.
[20:05] She was the same wherever she was.
[20:07] And again, these are all. Signs that it there was
[20:11] something wrong and that she's not just trying to seek
[20:13] attention or or whatever they must have thought she was doing
[20:17] as a child. These quote UN quote bad
[20:19] behaviours are following her from place to place, from person
[20:22] to person. Everyone that she interacts with
[20:25] is seeing these same concerning behaviours.
[20:29] She even started shoplifting like she was just a little
[20:32] terror in every possible way that she could.
[20:35] And all of this is before the age of 13.
[20:38] She was completely out of control.
[20:41] Her parents didn't know what to do, her teachers didn't know
[20:43] what to do and so no one did anything.
[20:46] No one even tried. In fact, Nicola was pretty
[20:50] neglected by everyone that should have been caring for her.
[20:53] Her mother became so helpless with Nicola that she actually
[20:57] put her in a care home at the age of 11 because of course, her
[21:00] mother had two other children that she had to worry about that
[21:03] she had to protect and Nicola was a danger to them to be
[21:08] honest. So between the ages of 11 and
[21:10] 15, Nicola was in children's care homes and when she was
[21:14] finally allowed out and allowed to move back to her family at
[21:17] 15, it only took her a couple couple of months to be in
[21:21] trouble with the police again. This time it was because she had
[21:24] literally battered her mother with her phone, which is a very
[21:28] eerie foreshadowing of what was to come exactly a decade later.
[21:39] After that incident, after she battered her mum with her phone
[21:42] and her mum got the police involved, Nicola packed her bags
[21:46] and just moved to London. She was about 1516.
[21:49] She moved to London all on her own.
[21:52] She had no job, she had no nothing.
[21:55] She had a suitcase and maybe a little bit of cash and that's
[21:58] all. She had a 16 year old girl on
[22:01] her own in the big smoke. It was the mid 1990s at this
[22:04] point. She managed to get herself a job
[22:06] as a receptionist, but that didn't last very long.
[22:09] When she she eventually lost that job, she took up stripping
[22:12] to make ends meet. But this new environment that
[22:15] she was in at the strip club and with all these other strippers
[22:18] and kind of unsavory characters, there were like pimps and drug
[22:22] dealers around. It was not good for her mental
[22:25] health. She became addicted to a lot of
[22:27] substances, which only made her mental even worse.
[22:31] She was still exhibiting all that same like violent,
[22:33] aggressive, irrational behaviour, but these people
[22:37] seemed to either put up with it well or just not really care.
[22:41] I think when you're surrounding yourself with questionable
[22:44] people anyway, they might have done a lot worse than have a
[22:47] violent outburst at the strip club.
[22:49] But these new friends that she'd made were slowly killing her.
[22:53] Well, she was slowly killing herself with the amount of drugs
[22:56] that she was taking with them. On 2 separate occasions Nicola
[23:00] overdosed on some sort of drug and she very nearly died both
[23:04] times but was brought back around by her friends.
[23:07] And all of this is before her 18th birthday.
[23:11] She's not even an adult yet and she's nearly died twice.
[23:14] She's moved out of her family home.
[23:16] I couldn't find if she was kicked out of the home by her
[23:19] mum or if she did just like pack and leave.
[23:21] Nicola Edgington's case is terribly sad for so many
[23:25] reasons, but it breaks my heart even more when I remember how
[23:28] young she was when she was going through such horrific events.
[23:33] She was put into care at the age of 11, she moved to the big city
[23:37] all on her own with no job, no house.
[23:40] I don't know where she was staying.
[23:41] She was stripping to make ends meet as a teenager.
[23:44] She's not even an adult yet. She's making friends with drug
[23:47] dealers and almost dying on their sofa twice.
[23:50] At the age of 17, Nicola took herself to the hospital's
[23:54] emergency department one day, claiming that she could hear
[23:57] voices, and they were telling her that it was time to go to
[24:01] the next line. The hospital took this very
[24:03] seriously, and they brought in a psychiatrist and a clinical
[24:06] psychologist to interview her and to speak with her and to
[24:09] figure out what she was going through.
[24:11] And Nicola was very honest with them.
[24:13] She was telling them all about like horrific intrusive thoughts
[24:17] that she would get about killing herself or killing her mother,
[24:20] killing other people. She was never diagnosed with
[24:23] anything by this psychiatrist and this clinical psychologist.
[24:27] I'm not sure why. I really don't understand why if
[24:30] a psychiatrist was there and he evaluated her, then why is
[24:33] there? Why did we not follow that
[24:35] through until we got a diagnosis?
[24:36] But whatever. They were just kind of there to
[24:38] help her in the moment. They assessed that eventually
[24:41] she was out of the episode that she was having where she was
[24:44] hearing voices. And with that, Nicola was free
[24:47] to go. She wasn't diagnosed with
[24:49] anything. She wasn't offered help, that
[24:52] was it. It was also around this time, I
[24:54] think she was about 18 years old, when Nicola fell
[24:58] unexpectedly pregnant, which was quite frankly the last thing she
[25:02] needed in her life right now. If she wasn't going through
[25:05] enough mental hell at this point in time, the man that
[25:08] impregnated her was also an abusive asshole.
[25:12] He was evil and on top of all of that, she's now worrying about
[25:16] the fact that she is pregnant with a child that she could
[25:19] honestly do without. I think there was a part of
[25:22] Nicola that wanted to keep this baby, although she knew she was
[25:25] very young and her circumstances were not really allowing her to
[25:31] have a child. But whatever.
[25:33] She went and spoke with her horrible, horrible boyfriend at
[25:36] the time and she told him that she was pregnant.
[25:38] And the way that he reacted is one of the most evil things I've
[25:42] ever heard and that's why I feel quite confident calling this man
[25:45] evil, even though this is my only impression of him.
[25:47] He took it upon himself to physically abort the child
[25:52] himself. He threw Nicola down onto the
[25:55] bed and just repeatedly punched her in the stomach until she
[25:59] miscarried. And that is just the most
[26:02] harrowing thing I've ever heard. This incident absolutely
[26:06] traumatized Nicola. As if she wasn't traumatized
[26:09] from the rest of her life enough.
[26:11] She was still struggling through every single day until
[26:15] eventually she was actually caught shoplifting.
[26:18] She'd never even really thought about getting caught before
[26:21] because she'd been shoplifting for for years since she was a
[26:24] child and it had never happened. Maybe she'd gotten into like,
[26:28] little things with the police, gotten warnings or made to give
[26:31] things back or whatever, but she had never been like, arrested,
[26:35] charged and like, sent to court and gonna go to prison for
[26:39] shoplifting. This was a shock to the system,
[26:41] but Nicola actually managed to avoid prison time for this.
[26:45] Instead, she was given 12 months conditional discharge, which is
[26:49] essentially like parole. This was put on her criminal
[26:52] record and she had like a parole officer for a year that she had
[26:56] to check in with regularly. At this point she'd broken
[26:59] things off with that horrible evil boyfriend of hers and she
[27:02] was on to like a new string of toxic romantic relationships.
[27:07] She never picked a good one did Nicola.
[27:10] She had loads of different things ranging from flings to
[27:13] situation ships to like full on relationships, but they were
[27:17] usually all horrible people, people that she would meet
[27:20] through her seedy friends. At one point Nicola was having a
[27:25] bit of a fling with a drug dealer when she fell pregnant
[27:28] with his baby and she knew she wanted to keep it.
[27:32] Actually she was just 19 years old when she gave birth to a
[27:36] baby boy, three months premature.
[27:38] The baby was very lucky to survive actually.
[27:41] They had a lot of issues when he was first born, he had to stay
[27:44] in hospital for a while, but All in all he was good, he was
[27:48] healthy in the end. But just a few months into this
[27:51] baby's life, his father was deported, his drug dealing was
[27:55] found out by the government, whatever, and they deported him
[27:58] to wherever he was originally from.
[28:00] But because this man had a child, when they did deport him,
[28:04] social services got involved, you know, to make sure that this
[28:06] child is going to be all right without one of their parents.
[28:09] And luckily Nicola was able to get some sort of help.
[28:13] I'm not entirely sure what it was.
[28:15] They did suggest that she should move back in with her mother
[28:18] though, so her mum could help look after the baby.
[28:21] And so she did. Everyone thought this was going
[28:23] to be a really good thing for Nicola, you know, being back
[28:27] home with her mum and her siblings in East Sussex, being
[28:30] out of the big city, just being able to get away from that very
[28:34] toxic life that she'd created for herself in London.
[28:37] Maybe, you know, getting away from all of that and getting
[28:39] back to the countryside and having a baby to like properly
[28:43] focus because her time and energy and love on to her.
[28:47] Everyone thought this was going to be really good for Nicola,
[28:50] but it wasn't because unfortunately she was the same
[28:53] angry, explosive, violent, aggressive person that she'd
[28:57] always been and it was only a matter of time until that broke
[29:01] everything apart. On one occasion, Nicola's mother
[29:04] Marion was holding her son and Nicola walked over.
[29:08] They must have been having an argument of some sort.
[29:10] Nicola walked over and threw a cup of boiling water at her
[29:14] mother and her son. Even her own son wasn't safe
[29:20] from Nicola's dangerous outburst.
[29:22] And it was after that incident that once again Nicola left her
[29:26] mother's home. She moved back to London, this
[29:28] time with a baby boy in her arms.
[29:31] And this time around London, life was 10 times harder than it
[29:35] had been before because, well, this time she had a whole other
[29:38] human being to take care of. She couldn't just strip all
[29:41] night and sleep all day to make money.
[29:43] Well, lucky for Nicola, she met and married a very nice man not
[29:48] long after moving to London and he really cared for her.
[29:52] He, he seemed really sweet actually.
[29:55] He helped her to get a life back on track.
[29:57] He helped her support her. He treated her son as if it was
[30:00] his own. He was a wonderful man.
[30:02] And when her family met this man, they were so impressed that
[30:07] he was just good, that he was nice because they knew the kind
[30:10] of people that Nicholas surrounded herself with, and
[30:13] they just imagined that she would end up getting with
[30:16] another ship boyfriend. But no, this guy was lovely.
[30:19] He was very supportive and kind and patient with Nicola, which
[30:23] is one of the most important things.
[30:25] No one ever had the patience and the understanding to be able to
[30:29] deal with her outbursts. But this man was very tolerant.
[30:33] He would care for her son when she was, you know, in the middle
[30:36] of some sort of episode. He knew that she was a nice
[30:41] person at the core of it all, or at least he thought that he
[30:44] believed that, that Nicola could be really lovely.
[30:48] She just really struggled with something undiagnosed at this
[30:52] point in time. It was a lovely little situation
[30:54] that Nicola had found herself in at this point in her life.
[30:57] She was surrounded by love and care.
[31:00] And then when she fell pregnant again, this time with her
[31:03] husband's baby, they were all over the moon.
[31:06] It was a new no brainer that they were going to keep and love
[31:08] this baby but unfortunately this happiness couldn't last forever.
[31:13] Nicola was getting worse with her violent outbursts even
[31:17] though she seemed to have a very happy stable life with very few
[31:21] triggers in it anymore. She was still very unwell, and
[31:25] although her new husband was very supportive and kind and
[31:28] understanding, that only went so far.
[31:32] And I think there's something to be said about how quickly they
[31:35] got together and how quickly they married.
[31:37] I don't think this man realized quite how bad Nicola could get.
[31:42] And I think by the time they were married and he was locked
[31:44] into it, I think it was then that he saw the worst of her and
[31:48] he realized that he couldn't actually do this forever.
[31:51] He couldn't be with Nicola forever.
[31:53] So just a few months after the birth of their son, now Nicola
[31:56] had two sons. This man left her, and not only
[32:00] did he leave her, he actually left England full stop and moved
[32:04] back to Jamaica, which is where he was originally from.
[32:06] Don't get me wrong, he wasn't abandoning Nicola.
[32:09] Nicola could still get a hold of him.
[32:10] They were still in touch, they had regular contact.
[32:13] It wasn't like he was like leaving the country now that
[32:15] she'd had his baby. He just kind of wanted to go
[32:18] back home, go back to his family and everything.
[32:20] Nicola took this breakup very badly, but not in the way that
[32:24] you might expect. It sent her a bit cuckoo, not in
[32:27] the way that she was used to. She was getting delusions, a lot
[32:31] of religious delusions actually. And she wasn't a religious
[32:34] person. She joined a church around this
[32:36] time. That actually sounds a bit more
[32:38] like a cult than a church to me. Everyone that joined had to give
[32:43] over like a percentage of their income and the church promised
[32:46] that God would grant them supernatural gifts if they did
[32:50] give over this money to the church.
[32:52] Which always just sounds like a scam to me personally.
[32:54] What's God going to do with money?
[32:56] I can't imagine like God himself asking through his priest like
[33:00] get get a fiver off her and I'll give her powers.
[33:03] Like what? Yeah, for like 2 months after
[33:05] the breakup, Nicola was getting really, really into this church
[33:08] and she was making friends there and they were kind of like they
[33:12] were, they were infiltrating her mind and unfortunately, she had
[33:15] quite an easy mind to infiltrate.
[33:17] She was very susceptible to being manipulated and being
[33:22] pushed around a little. Eventually, after a couple of
[33:25] months, she kind of snapped out of that and realized that she
[33:28] didn't actually want religion. She wanted Herman back, she
[33:32] wanted her husband back and how was she going to do that?
[33:34] She was going to fly to Jamaica and get him back.
[33:38] I think she actually flew out with their child and went to go
[33:41] and meet him, but the meeting did not go as well as she would
[33:45] hoped. In fact, they just argued and
[33:48] argued and argued. He could tell that Nicola was
[33:50] very mentally unwell at this point in time.
[33:53] Like differently to how she had been when they were together.
[33:57] She was, she was going through something.
[33:59] The way that she was behaving and acting and speaking was not
[34:03] like Nicola. She was in the middle of some
[34:05] sort of episode. She was doing and saying some
[34:08] crazy, crazy shit and he was actually quite worried for
[34:11] herself to the point where he actually said to her, look,
[34:15] you're not taking my son home. You're not taking him back to
[34:18] England. I want him here with me.
[34:19] I want to look after him. I need to make sure that he is
[34:23] OK. I'm not entirely sure how Nicola
[34:25] took that. I assume there was a lot of
[34:27] arguing and a lot of fighting. But at the end of it all, she
[34:30] did return to England without that son.
[34:33] So now she only had one son in her custody.
[34:36] So now she was 20 years old, and she'd moved back to London, and
[34:40] she was right back to that crazy party lifestyle, you know,
[34:44] clubbing, stripping, hookups, drug binges, drinking for days
[34:49] on end. And she was bringing all of this
[34:51] around her toddler son. Sometimes she would leave him at
[34:54] a mum's house to be cared for, or at a friend's house to be
[34:57] cared for, but a lot of the time she wouldn't even bother.
[35:00] She would bring the party to her house so she wouldn't have to
[35:04] find someone to care for her son.
[35:05] She could do both at once, which is not good.
[35:09] Especially the kind of partying that Nicola Edgington would do.
[35:12] It wasn't just having a few friends around at the house for
[35:15] a casual drink. It was like drugs and orgies and
[35:21] crazy shit. Around this time, Nicola again
[35:24] started seeing another very horrid, horrid man.
[35:27] She was very attracted to these like toxic, violent, threatening
[35:32] relationships. I think because she was so used
[35:35] to that, it was almost comforting to her to have a
[35:39] violent partner. That is what love felt like to
[35:42] her. That's a pattern that you often
[35:44] see and it's a really sad one where people that are so used to
[35:48] dysfunction and stress in their life, they will start to
[35:52] subconsciously seek out those kind of situations and bring
[35:56] them around themselves again because it feels comforting,
[35:58] because that's what they're used does all they know.
[36:01] It's almost like fear and stress become their new comfort, become
[36:07] their new normal. One of the worst incidents from
[36:09] this new relationship is when Nicola actually fell pregnant
[36:13] again. I believe the man wanted an
[36:15] abortion but she didn't. She wanted to keep the baby and
[36:18] they argued over it for a long, long time until the man one day
[36:23] grabbed a knife and put it to Nicola's throat and told her
[36:27] that if she didn't get an abortion he would kill her.
[36:29] Eventually she did get the abortion and she stayed with him
[36:33] unfortunately, and he was abusive to her and so for many
[36:36] different ways. He would manipulate her all the
[36:38] time. He would wear down herself
[36:40] esteem. He would even like physically
[36:42] keep her in the house. He would keep her isolated from
[36:45] the rest of the world, from her own social life.
[36:48] She would spend a lot of her time just sitting in the house
[36:51] and drinking to numb her feelings.
[36:53] Her outbursts, her violence and her aggression was just as
[36:57] common as it always had been. But it never seemed to scare
[37:00] this man that she was currently with.
[37:02] I guess because he was a piece of shit himself that, I don't
[37:05] know, maybe he just wasn't scared of Nicola.
[37:07] But the longer Nicola was kept cooped up in the house, the more
[37:11] her paranoia was going out of control.
[37:15] And she was very paranoid about the outside world.
[37:17] Now, she believed that there were people out there that
[37:20] wanted her dead and they were trying to kill her.
[37:23] And I don't know who she thought they were, but, you know, she
[37:26] thought people were trying to kill her.
[37:27] It got to the point where she was like trying to block up the
[37:30] letterbox on the front of the door because she was scared
[37:32] someone was gonna like post a bomb through it or start a fire
[37:35] through it. She would sit up awake during
[37:38] the night. She would sit next to her son's
[37:39] crib with a knife in her hand or a hammer, some whatever fucking
[37:44] weapon she could find because she was convinced that someone
[37:47] was going to break into the house and try to kill them and
[37:50] she was going to have to protect herself and her family.
[37:52] Nicola was becoming so detached from reality, but no one was
[37:57] clocking it at this point in time.
[37:59] She wasn't surrounding herself with people that actually cared
[38:02] about her. Her boyfriend at the time was
[38:05] like say a piece of shit on the bottom of my show.
[38:08] So he didn't realize nor care that she was going through
[38:12] serious issues with her mental. If she would have been back home
[38:16] with her family, maybe they would have seen her symptoms
[38:19] getting worse and worse and worse and maybe they would have
[38:21] tried to help her. But this boyfriend being the
[38:25] closest person in her life, he was never going to do anything
[38:28] to help her. These delusions and the paranoia
[38:30] that she was having at this point was following her through
[38:33] every part of her life. She was getting into arguments
[38:36] with random strangers like at the supermarket or at her son's
[38:39] school or at the job centre because she just believed that
[38:43] everyone was out to get her. She was ready to explode over
[38:46] the tiniest things and she would explode at least once a day.
[38:50] Things were really ramping up at this point, and it's so
[38:54] frustrating that no one around her cared because she was
[38:58] getting into all of these fights and arguments in public.
[39:02] Social services quickly became aware of how bad Nicola
[39:05] Edgington had gotten with her mental health, and it was around
[39:08] this point that they took her son away from her.
[39:12] So this mother of two now had zero children to actually look
[39:17] after. And it's just so incredibly sad
[39:19] to me that at this point in her life, she didn't even have a
[39:22] diagnosis. Every thing is going wrong,
[39:25] everything is falling apart for her.
[39:27] She knows that she keeps ruining parts of her own life, but she
[39:31] doesn't even understand why. She doesn't understand what
[39:34] she's doing wrong. Well, I'm sure she understood
[39:36] that her actions were wrong, but she doesn't understand why she
[39:39] feels compelled to do them. But now that both of Nicola's
[39:42] children were taken from her, her toxic like drinking, drugs,
[39:48] partying lifestyle only accelerated and all of those
[39:52] substances, especially all in combination with each other was
[39:56] so destructive and so damaging to her mental health that was
[40:00] already hanging on by a thread. Again, she was having a lot of
[40:03] like religious delusions, although I find that very
[40:07] interesting because religion wasn't like a part of her life.
[40:12] On a normal day, at one point she ran into a church, obviously
[40:17] in the middle of an episode, she ran into a church with a sheet
[40:20] over her head claiming that she was Jesus, saying that she could
[40:24] see people that weren't there, like seeing spirits.
[40:27] She could hear people's thoughts.
[40:29] Like at this point how was she not sectioned and taken
[40:33] seriously? Like this person is clearly so
[40:36] unwell, clearly so deluded. Do you never know how this kind
[40:39] of thing could develop if left untreated?
[40:42] And I know that's easy to say in hindsight.
[40:44] Now that we know how it did develop, it developed horribly.
[40:48] But that's why we continue to talk about and learn from cases
[40:52] like this, because help does need to come sooner.
[40:54] Nicola was in her mid 20s and her undiagnosed schizophrenia
[40:58] had already caused so much turmoil for her.
[41:01] She lost her two kids, she couldn't get a job, she couldn't
[41:05] live alone. And that's why she was staying
[41:07] with her mother at the time of this case when she was 25.
[41:10] In fact, just a few days before her daughter would brutally
[41:14] murder her, Marian had actually called the social services
[41:17] asking for some help with Nicola because she was really, really
[41:21] bad and she was really worried for her daughter.
[41:23] And she knew that she was quite powerless to do anything on her
[41:26] own. She really did love and care for
[41:28] Nicola and she really wanted her to get better.
[41:31] On the phone to social services, Marian told them.
[41:33] Nicola is the most unstable I have ever known her to be.
[41:37] And for the longest period too. And actually, on the very
[41:40] morning of the murder, Marian had been expressing the same
[41:44] concerns to one of their neighbors.
[41:46] And that night when that neighbor heard a screaming
[41:49] argument coming from their household once again, little did
[41:52] they know this time it would end in murder.
[41:55] Later that night, it would be Nicola's siblings that came in
[41:58] and found the complete bloodbath in their mother's home, her
[42:02] corpse just covered in stab wounds and their sister was
[42:06] nowhere to be found. They called the police and an
[42:08] investigation was set up. Right away they knew that it was
[42:11] a matter of absolute urgency that they find Nicola Edgington
[42:15] as soon as humanly possible. A police manhunt was underway,
[42:18] searching absolutely every single place that Nicola had
[42:21] connections to, but somehow she managed to evade them for over 2
[42:27] weeks. For two weeks they were out
[42:29] there searching for her and they couldn't get a lead on her.
[42:31] I don't know where she was, I don't know what she was doing
[42:34] for two weeks, but she was out there somewhere avoiding them.
[42:38] Sussex Police actually felt very powerless in this case.
[42:41] They couldn't understand how she was evading them so well.
[42:44] And they were appealing to the public.
[42:46] If anyone had any like leads on her, if anyone knew anything,
[42:50] they were begging people to come forward and help them.
[42:52] Because if Nicola could murder her own mother, what else might
[42:56] she do? It had been two weeks.
[42:58] Who knows if she was still in this kind of schizophrenic
[43:01] episode. Maybe she'd snapped out of it.
[43:03] Maybe she was in another one by now.
[43:05] Who who knows who or how many people could be in danger
[43:10] because of Nicola Edgington? The general public were worried
[43:13] sick, knowing that there was a killer on the loose.
[43:16] People were too scared to leave their homes.
[43:18] People were walking in pairs. But probably the most terrified
[43:22] person of all was Nicola's own brother, Tom.
[43:25] His name was next on her hit list, right underneath their
[43:30] mother that she'd already taken care of.
[43:39] After a huge, huge search 16 days after the murder took
[43:44] place, Nicola Edgington was eventually found on a London
[43:47] bus. And it seemed that she was in
[43:49] the middle of another schizophrenic episode.
[43:51] And I believe that's actually how they found her.
[43:53] I think just the general public, people on that bus had reported
[43:57] to the police that there was a woman acting very strangely and
[44:00] they were scared. So when police came and saw to
[44:03] this concerning individual on the bus, they realized that this
[44:07] was the woman they'd been searching for for a couple of
[44:09] weeks. When the police came onto the
[44:11] bus and grabbed Nicola, they were thinking they were just
[44:14] going to take her somewhere quiet and safe and private to
[44:17] speak with her. But obviously in her head she
[44:20] knows that she's committed a murder and police are here.
[44:23] And so she like, pulled away from them and said Tom did it.
[44:26] The little brother that she had always practically bullied, she
[44:30] was now trying to frame for murder, for the murder of their
[44:35] own mother. I mean, she didn't frame him
[44:36] very well. Police didn't believe her, but
[44:39] still, Nicola was taken back to the police station where she was
[44:43] assessed by a psychiatrist and determined to be actively
[44:46] psychotic at that moment in time.
[44:48] And it was actually here, finally, upon her arrest for
[44:51] murder, that she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia at
[44:56] the age of 25. A year later, her trial took
[44:59] place and Nicola pled guilty to the manslaughter of her mother,
[45:03] not murder. It was manslaughter, she said,
[45:05] because of course, she was in a schizophrenic episode and she
[45:09] was claiming to be of diminished responsibility.
[45:11] And the courts actually agreed. I mean, of course, I, I think we
[45:15] can all agree that she probably was in some sort of episode
[45:18] then. So instead of any prison time,
[45:20] Nicola Edgington was sent to a psychiatric unit and she was
[45:23] supposed to just get the care and the treatment that she'd
[45:26] always needed but had never received.
[45:28] And while she was there, she was undergoing a lot of very, very
[45:32] thorough assessments because obviously she'd never had mental
[45:35] health help in her life. And she's now 25, and clearly a
[45:39] fucking lot has gone on in her poor little brain.
[45:42] So they're trying to really pick apart her life.
[45:45] And when certain things happened, they're just trying to
[45:48] get a sense of her whole entire mental health history throughout
[45:51] her whole life. They wanted to know how long
[45:53] she'd been suffering like this and it turns out forever.
[45:58] The psychiatric report that was done on her said that there was
[46:00] evidence of acute psychotic episodes and emotionally
[46:04] unstable personality traits. Since Nicola was a child at the
[46:08] time, her siblings released a statement that said finally
[46:11] Nicola is where she should be so she cannot hurt anyone else and
[46:14] she can get the help that she desperately needs.
[46:17] Nicola was put into a long term rehabilitation program.
[46:20] She was prescribed with antipsychotic drugs and mood
[46:24] stabilizing drugs and it was helping her a little bit, but
[46:27] not the full way. She was still very disruptive in
[46:30] the hospital. She was aggressive, violent and
[46:33] abusive with other patients and staff members and for the first
[46:37] few months of her being in that hospital she insisted that she
[46:41] had no memory of killing her mother.
[46:43] But slowly overtime, Nicola started to calm down more and
[46:47] more and it seemed that the drugs were taking some time to
[46:51] set in. But they were setting in around
[46:53] a year into her hospital treatment.
[46:55] Nicola Edgington was allowed escorted leave from the
[46:58] hospital, which was a very controversial decision.
[47:02] I mean, this is a murderer that is allowed out during the day a
[47:05] year after committing the murder.
[47:07] That is a bit soon. Like no matter what the
[47:10] circumstances. I personally also believe that
[47:13] is a bit fucking soon. I mean, there has to be some
[47:16] level of deterrent and taking away your freedom is like the
[47:19] biggest deterrent that we have. That's what prison is.
[47:22] And I mean, I know she wasn't in prison, but there has to be a
[47:25] level of having your freedom taken away from you because you
[47:27] did something bad. I know that Nicolas case is a
[47:30] very special circumstance that she had an undiagnosed mental
[47:35] illness that she wasn't aware of, but still the public were
[47:38] very worried, very concerned to hear that a murderer was being
[47:43] let out on supervised leave, like walking among them just a
[47:47] year after committing the murder, That is unsettling.
[47:49] But the hospital were very proud of Nicola and all the progress
[47:52] that she'd made. They deemed that she was stable
[47:55] and independent by the end of her stay in that hospital.
[47:58] And she was taking her medication.
[48:00] I mean, it is kind of forced when you're in a hospital to a
[48:03] degree, but she was taking it and it seemed to be working.
[48:07] And then after just three years of her hospital treatment,
[48:10] Nicola Edgington was discharged and she was allowed back out
[48:15] into the world. She quote, UN quote, served
[48:17] three years in a hospital for a brutal murder, which is a bold
[48:22] choice from the hospital to let her go so soon.
[48:25] But I guess they were very confident in her, otherwise they
[48:29] wouldn't have done it. You would hope.
[48:30] I know she probably met like certain goals that were set for
[48:34] her and criteria. There's definitely like rules as
[48:37] to when they're allowed to let people out.
[48:39] And I'm sure that Nicola's case was eligible.
[48:43] Well, I mean, obviously it was. But Nicola's case did go on to
[48:47] prove that three years in hospital probably wasn't enough.
[48:50] It was nowhere near enough. Because as I'm sure you have
[48:54] noticed, this video is nowhere near over.
[48:56] We have more to talk about. Nicola went on to do some more
[48:59] shit in September 2009, Nicola moved into a small flat in
[49:03] Greenwich, which was in East London.
[49:06] Um and she was allowed independent living.
[49:08] She was supposed to have regular check INS with a care
[49:11] coordinator that was going to, you know, see how she was doing
[49:14] after her release from hospital. But other than that, she was a
[49:17] free lady. This was supposed to be her
[49:20] fresh start at life. She was supposed to be able to
[49:24] move on with her life. I mean, she was on the correct
[49:26] medication. She had her diagnosis now.
[49:29] She had all of this information. She knew what was wrong with
[49:33] her. I hate to say that it's
[49:34] something wrong, but it is an illness.
[49:36] But my point is, is that she'd been in years of therapy now and
[49:40] she knew better how to handle her own emotions.
[49:43] But despite her being set up for success, yes, a lot of things
[49:48] went wrong after Nicholas released from hospital.
[49:50] For example, she was not getting those regular check insurance
[49:53] that she was promised. I don't know just how many she
[49:56] got. I don't know how often they
[49:57] were. All I do know is that she wasn't
[50:00] getting as many as she should have had as many as were
[50:03] promised to her, which is very concerning.
[50:05] Like right off the bat, First of all, the fact that they let a
[50:08] murderer out of hospital after just three years is batshit
[50:12] insane to me. And then the fact that you're
[50:14] going to let that murderer out and not even regularly check in
[50:17] on them. What the fuck was going it?
[50:19] Like what was actually going on? That is just insane to me.
[50:22] Like who was on that board? Who made that decision?
[50:24] Who was in that meeting? Nicola had actually reached out
[50:27] to her care team and said that she was really struggling living
[50:30] alone, especially because she really struggled with intrusive
[50:34] thoughts and just her thoughts in general.
[50:36] Her, her mind wasn't a very kind, nice place to be.
[50:40] And she really struggled when she was on her own.
[50:42] And of course, now she was living on her own all her life.
[50:45] Nicola was used to having someone there, whether it was
[50:48] her mum and her siblings when she lived at home or her
[50:51] boyfriend, whenever she lived with her boyfriend or even her
[50:54] baby boy when she had kids, there was always someone there
[50:57] to distract her. But now there was no one.
[51:00] She was left alone with her thoughts and she was scared of
[51:03] her own mind. She was scared of her delusions
[51:06] and they would especially get really bad at night when she
[51:09] felt so alone and everyone was asleep and she had no one to
[51:12] talk to, no one to turn to. But when she told her care team
[51:15] this, they insisted that she was doing well and she didn't need
[51:19] constant supervision. Even if she wanted it, they
[51:21] weren't going to give her it. On the whole though, Nicola did
[51:24] seem to be doing quite well. I mean for two years after her
[51:27] release from hospital she didn't get into trouble again, which is
[51:31] great. At one point she was even
[51:32] allowed to fly over to Jamaica to visit her younger son.
[51:36] But when she got over there things went incredibly tits up.
[51:39] She got like really randomly violent and aggressive with the
[51:42] kids father. I don't know where that came
[51:45] from because she hadn't been like this for a while.
[51:47] She'd been really stable, she'd been really good.
[51:49] It was quite shocking that this, like anger and aggression was
[51:54] rearing its ugly head again after laying dormant for a
[51:57] couple of years. My own personal theory is that
[52:00] maybe Nicola stopped taking her medication around this time,
[52:04] maybe just before she flew out to Jamaica, because you will see
[52:09] that when things weren't dramatically tits up at this
[52:11] point, they never got good again.
[52:13] It was like all of the progress that she'd made over the past
[52:16] five years had been completely wiped.
[52:19] And like I said, my own personal theory is that she wasn't on
[52:23] those mood stabilizers and those antipsychotics anymore.
[52:27] And when Nicola returned home from Jamaica, the drama only
[52:30] continued. She got in touch with her care
[52:32] team and told them that she believed she was pregnant.
[52:35] And then a few days later, she got in touch again and said that
[52:38] she had actually miscarried the baby.
[52:40] Now, we don't know if any of that was true.
[52:43] We don't know if it was true that she was expecting true that
[52:46] she missed carried. It could have been delusions.
[52:49] But I mean, a lot of the sources that I read online believed it
[52:52] was delusions. But I don't know.
[52:54] It seems that Nicola does seem to fall pregnant quite easily.
[52:58] I mean, she's fallen pregnant what, like at least four times
[53:01] in her life. And to be fair, she was seeing
[53:03] someone at the time, one of her old ex flings from like years
[53:07] and years ago. They'd reconnected.
[53:09] And again, this was a horrible, horrible man.
[53:12] He was always threatening her over text, which I found quite
[53:15] random. That was like a key
[53:16] characteristic of their relationship.
[53:18] Whenever they weren't together he was being vile to her.
[53:22] Like over text. And I don't know the exact
[53:25] content of these texts. All I could find online was that
[53:28] they were threatening. And they actually got so bad
[53:31] that Nicola called the police one day three times in the space
[53:35] of 10 minutes because she was so scared of her boyfriend.
[53:38] The 1st 2 calls she was incredibly panicked and
[53:41] flustered but then the third call was actually the complete
[53:45] opposite. The third was actually her
[53:46] calling back to tell the police that she didn't want to press
[53:49] charges. The first two times that Nicola
[53:51] had called up her case has been graded as an S grade, which
[53:56] basically means that the police have to attend within an hour.
[53:59] Basically it's an urgent call. It's not a right away get there
[54:03] within a split second, but it is very urgent and it needs seeing
[54:07] to as soon as police can. But then she called up a third
[54:10] time and told them that she didn't want to go any further
[54:13] with this. She wanted to retract her
[54:14] statement, she didn't want to press charges on her boyfriend.
[54:17] And so the case was then taken down to an R grade, which means
[54:22] that police aren't actually required to attend to the
[54:24] situation. And so they didn't.
[54:26] Police never came out to Nicola, which I find very upsetting.
[54:30] Like I do kind like I understand this whole grading system.
[54:35] And if the victim themselves calls up and says you know what,
[54:38] never mind, then I get why the call has been downgraded.
[54:42] But also I don't agree with it. Just because I understand it
[54:44] doesn't mean I agree with it. I don't think that should have
[54:46] happened. I think that's actually very
[54:48] dangerous to do that, especially in a case of domestic violence.
[54:52] Domestic abuse. Isn't it like rule #1 when
[54:55] handling domestic abuse cases that you don't give up on a
[54:59] victim when they're saying things like this, when they're
[55:01] trying to go back on the claims and when they're trying to go
[55:03] back on their reports. I feel like that's when officers
[55:06] need to make even more of an effort to try to get through to
[55:09] the victims, speak to them in private, let them know that they
[55:12] have support and that there are people around them.
[55:15] Because a lot of the time when the domestic abuse victims try
[55:17] to retract their statement and say that they don't want to
[55:20] press charges, it's not because they genuinely don't mean what
[55:24] they said anymore. It's just that they're too
[55:26] scared to press charges against the person that is abusing them.
[55:30] Of course they are. And I just think it's so
[55:32] incredibly dangerous to just give up on someone that is
[55:35] reporting domestic abuse. Just because they've said that
[55:38] they don't want you to come anymore doesn't mean that the
[55:40] police shouldn't go. I think that's so, so dumb.
[55:45] Find me those police officers. There's a lot of people I want
[55:47] to have a conversation with from this case.
[55:49] So yeah, police never attended that specific altercation, and
[55:53] there were plenty more. Although I don't know if Nicola
[55:56] was calling the police very often, but I know that this
[55:58] boyfriend was just horrible to her.
[56:00] And also around this time, Nicola was falling back into her
[56:03] religious delusions, which again, is another reason that
[56:06] makes me think she had stopped taking her medication at this
[56:09] point. In fact, she was delusional in
[56:10] all kinds of ways. So all the religious stuff as
[56:13] usual. She was going into church as
[56:15] claiming she could hear the voice of God and all this kind
[56:17] of shit. But there were other things.
[56:19] Like she once called the police and said that she believed 2
[56:22] druggies outside had stolen her keys.
[56:25] Umm. But then she let her call back
[56:27] up and said that she'd found them.
[56:28] Oh, and she was suddenly really into like demons and witchcraft,
[56:32] which was kind of linked into her religion like stuff because
[56:37] like I said, it wasn't just normal religion that she was
[56:39] into. It was like this like culty
[56:41] church that obviously wasn't a proper denomination of
[56:45] Christianity. And they were really bad for
[56:47] Nicola at this point in time. They were like an echo chamber
[56:51] for her delusions and shit they were, I don't know, they were
[56:55] encouraging her. She was telling them that she
[56:57] could see this 100 eyed demon and that it sat upon the throne
[57:01] of God. And sometimes it would take the
[57:04] form of police officers on this earth, which is so fucking
[57:08] dangerous, isn't it, that this woman who was having severe
[57:12] delusions and like really bad mental issues, is now seeing the
[57:16] police as the embodiment of a devil when those are the people
[57:21] that are trying to help her or actually fucking not, are they
[57:24] they? I feel so, so bad for Nicola
[57:27] Edgington throughout this whole thing.
[57:30] As terrible as the things that she did were, I think she was
[57:34] let down so many times by so many people.
[57:37] It makes me so upset. Nicola Edgington was on the
[57:40] verge of another psychotic break.
[57:42] Things were reaching ahead and she was so desperate one day
[57:46] that she actually reached out to one of her siblings on Facebook.
[57:50] Tom, her younger brother. Since her release from hospital
[57:53] and obviously since she had murdered their mother, her
[57:56] siblings didn't want anything to do with her.
[57:58] They hated her. It must have been so incredibly
[58:00] hard for them to process that from their point of view.
[58:04] There are so many complexities with this case that your mother
[58:08] has been brutally murdered and the person that did it is your
[58:11] sibling that you've grown up with, someone that you also
[58:14] love. I just can't imagine what it
[58:16] must feel like for one of your loved ones to be murdered by
[58:19] another one of your loved ones. What like how does your and even
[58:24] like what side do you I I can't imagine, but for Nicholas
[58:28] siblings, they'd always taken their mother's side because
[58:31] Nicola had always been forgive me a little shit all her life.
[58:36] They'd all always said it, that she was problem, she never meant
[58:41] to be. She couldn't help it.
[58:43] She didn't realize how badly she was struggling with this
[58:46] undiagnosed mental illness. But point of the matter was she
[58:49] was very difficult to be around. She was very aggressive, very
[58:52] violent, and they felt as though she was a ticking time bomb.
[58:57] So, yeah, when she murdered their mother, they didn't talk
[58:59] to her anymore. That was until September 2011,
[59:03] when she decided to reach out to Tom on Facebook.
[59:06] This was the first time they'd spoken in six years.
[59:08] And the Facebook message that she sent said sorry if you don't
[59:11] want to talk to me, I'm missing mum bad to be honest.
[59:15] No one's taking care of me like she could and I don't think she
[59:18] would want us to be a part like this.
[59:20] In the message, she also told him about her recent miscarriage
[59:23] and she told him that she loved him.
[59:25] She still loved him. She ended the message by giving
[59:27] him her phone number and saying that they should stay in touch.
[59:31] But when Tom received that message, he did not take it well
[59:34] at all. He was absolutely seething and
[59:37] honestly he hated Nicola. The family here to Nicola for
[59:41] what she had done. His response was very blunt and
[59:44] actually very harsh. Trigger warning with this next
[59:48] bit. This is it's a lot.
[59:50] He wrote back to Nicola saying you stabbed her to death and
[59:54] left me to find her body. Good news about your miscarriage
[59:57] though. People like you should be
[59:58] sterilized for the good of the world.
[1:00:01] Do us all a favour and just slit your wrists.
[1:00:03] It's a lot, a lot on both sides. And I don't think I really want
[1:00:09] to get into that anymore. It's, it's just so sad all
[1:00:12] around. But what I do want to focus on
[1:00:14] from that message exchange is that Nicola is admitting that
[1:00:18] she's struggling really badly at the moment and she's getting
[1:00:21] even less help than she ever has before.
[1:00:24] No one is there for her at all at this point in time.
[1:00:27] Her situation was pretty horrid in 2011.
[1:00:31] She was in the pits of her mental illness once again.
[1:00:34] Both of her kids have been taken away from her.
[1:00:36] And let's not forget that she's living with an abusive boyfriend
[1:00:40] again at this point in time, one that she has to call the police
[1:00:43] on because she's terrified of him.
[1:00:44] And then the one time that she tries to reach out to the family
[1:00:48] that she has left, she gets told to kill herself.
[1:00:52] It was a fucking horrible, horrible situation for Nicola
[1:00:55] Edgington. And at this point, as if she
[1:00:58] couldn't get any lower, she did. She started to spiral out of
[1:01:04] control. A couple of weeks later, in the
[1:01:13] early hours of the morning of October 10th, 2011, Nicola
[1:01:17] called a cab and asked it to take her to the local hospital
[1:01:21] emergency wing. However, when they got there,
[1:01:24] she didn't get out of the car. She just told the taxi driver
[1:01:27] that it wasn't open right now and he should just take her back
[1:01:30] again. And he was really confused
[1:01:32] because hospital emergency wings don't close.
[1:01:35] That's the whole point. They're open 24 hours for
[1:01:37] emergencies. He was just really confused.
[1:01:39] And so he turned round in the car to have a look at his
[1:01:42] passenger and he saw Nicola just kind of like slumped in the back
[1:01:46] seat. She was drooling.
[1:01:48] He could tell that something wasn't right.
[1:01:49] She was, he thought she was on something.
[1:01:51] And she might have been, we don't know, but he thought she
[1:01:55] was on something. He was trying to speak to Nicola
[1:01:57] about this situation. Of course, he needs to figure
[1:01:59] out where to drop her off and how to get the money and stuff.
[1:02:02] And then she started saying that she didn't actually have any
[1:02:04] money for the fare. So this taxi driver drives the
[1:02:08] car with her in it back to the taxi rank so that, I don't know,
[1:02:12] they can she can take up this issue with his managers.
[1:02:15] And when they get there, a huge argument breaks out between
[1:02:19] Nicola and all of the taxi drivers.
[1:02:22] Nicola was shouting and screaming at them.
[1:02:24] And eventually one of them calls 999.
[1:02:26] They want help from the police and it was around this time that
[1:02:30] Nicola just sat down and she seemed very defeated by the
[1:02:34] whole thing, almost like she's she'd accepted that this
[1:02:38] argument, all of this was her doing.
[1:02:40] She was saying things like it's all in my head, I need to be
[1:02:43] sectioned, I haven't slept for weeks and I need to go to the
[1:02:47] hospital. She was realizing in this moment
[1:02:50] that it wasn't all the taxi drivers fault and it wasn't
[1:02:54] always someone else's fault. It was her.
[1:02:57] And she was realizing that it was her head now.
[1:03:00] And you know what, as sad as this whole case is, this is
[1:03:03] progress. This is tiny progress that she's
[1:03:06] realizing in this moment. I mean, it got very far.
[1:03:09] It got to a point where she was fighting a bunch of taxi
[1:03:12] drivers. But eventually she realized that
[1:03:15] wait, no, this is my schizophrenia.
[1:03:16] Police eventually arrived at the taxi rank and they took Nicola
[1:03:20] to hospital and they actually sat with her in the emergency
[1:03:23] wing and they were going to wait with her until she got seen by
[1:03:25] one of the doctors. And actually during the time
[1:03:28] that they were all sat there in the waiting room, Nicola tried
[1:03:31] to run away. She had been saying that she
[1:03:33] wanted to go to the hospital, she needed the hospital, she
[1:03:35] needed to be seen. And then as soon as she got
[1:03:37] there, when she was in the waiting room, when it all kind
[1:03:40] of dawned on her what was happening, she got up and tried
[1:03:43] to run away. She fucking ran out of the
[1:03:45] hospital. The police had to chase her
[1:03:47] down, grabbed her in the car park and then dragged her back
[1:03:50] in and plunked her back down. And they were like, Nope, wait
[1:03:53] for the doctor. Eventually the police officers
[1:03:56] that were waiting with her had to leave, I don't know, their
[1:03:58] shifts ended or something. The NHS waiting times in A&E
[1:04:02] over here can be fucking ridiculous, upwards of like 15
[1:04:05] hours sometimes. So anyway, these police officers
[1:04:08] couldn't wait with her any longer and so they left and they
[1:04:11] were going to leave her in the waiting room on her own.
[1:04:13] The staff kind of knew that she was there and she was waiting to
[1:04:16] be seen, so they hoped that people would have an eye on her.
[1:04:20] But very quickly after the officers left, Nicola started to
[1:04:23] get very visibly agitated. She was very restless.
[1:04:27] That was one of the main symptoms that something was
[1:04:29] about to kick off with Nicola, was that she would get a lot of
[1:04:33] like physical energy in her body and she'd be moving around a
[1:04:35] lot, shuffling. At one point she got up from her
[1:04:38] seat, went over to the receptionist and asked how long
[1:04:40] am I going to be here? Is it going to take for me to
[1:04:43] kill someone as I've done it before so I can get seen.
[1:04:46] But still no one came to help her.
[1:04:48] She was to just sit down and wait and she couldn't.
[1:04:52] She there was too much just energy and frustration in her
[1:04:56] body. So she got out her phone and she
[1:04:58] called 999 and she begged for the police to come back and sit
[1:05:02] with her in the waiting room because she said that she
[1:05:04] couldn't physically do this on her own.
[1:05:07] The operator tried to calm her down and they said unfortunately
[1:05:11] they couldn't really send police officers out to her because she
[1:05:14] was deemed to be in a safe place.
[1:05:16] A hospital is deemed to be a safe place where there are, I
[1:05:20] don't know, professionals around that can look after her.
[1:05:23] Eventually the call ended with the 999 operator telling Nicola
[1:05:27] to go and find a member of staff and talk to them and tell them
[1:05:30] that she needs help. I mean she has been doing that,
[1:05:33] but whatever. I think she did do that.
[1:05:34] But again, she was just told to wait.
[1:05:36] So she goes back, sits down, calls 999 again and says do you
[1:05:41] want me to hurt someone here? She said that the hospital staff
[1:05:44] were just ignoring her at this point and she said if anything
[1:05:47] she needed taken into police custody before she hurt someone
[1:05:51] innocent. She was literally saying this
[1:05:54] straight up to the police, to doctors.
[1:05:57] She was saying I feel like I am going to hurt someone, please
[1:06:00] stop me from doing that, please help me.
[1:06:04] And she wasn't receiving any help.
[1:06:06] Another 2 calls were made to the police from that waiting area.
[1:06:10] So that's four calls in total. She has asked the hospital staff
[1:06:14] numerous times. She's called 9994 times and
[1:06:18] still literally nothing which I find absolutely unbelievable.
[1:06:22] I can understand that maybe A&E was very busy that day and they
[1:06:26] couldn't properly see her. But someone that is this erratic
[1:06:29] in the waiting room, surely you can give them just like a quiet
[1:06:33] room, sit them down, give them a glass of water.
[1:06:36] I don't know. There are things you can do.
[1:06:38] I know there are things they could have done but they didn't
[1:06:41] do. And I know that the NHS are very
[1:06:43] understaffed, but I think, I don't know, I think when someone
[1:06:47] has come up to the reception multiple times, when someone has
[1:06:49] literally called 9994 fucking times from their seat in the
[1:06:53] waiting room someone do something.
[1:06:57] Especially with the kind of things that she was saying.
[1:06:59] I'm going to hurt someone if I don't get some help.
[1:07:01] I have killed someone before and I can feel that I might do it
[1:07:05] again. I just cannot understand how not
[1:07:07] a single person gave her any kind of help, not even a little
[1:07:11] bit. And I just hope that a lot of
[1:07:13] lessons have been learned from Nicola Edgington case because a
[1:07:17] lot of mistakes were made and lives were lost because of it.
[1:07:21] Multiple lives were lost. Honestly I don't know what more
[1:07:25] Nicola could have done. She was literally in a hospital
[1:07:28] waiting room asking for help and when it wasn't coming quick
[1:07:31] enough and when she could feel these murderous urges coming in,
[1:07:36] she was calling the police 4 fucking times begging to be
[1:07:40] taken into police custody. What more could she have
[1:07:42] actually done? She knew that she was becoming a
[1:07:45] danger and so she was trying to stop it and no one was letting
[1:07:49] her stop it. Nicola Edgington did everything
[1:07:52] right in those few hours at the hospital.
[1:07:55] I mean, she did run away, but I guess that is just her mental
[1:07:59] illness. When she's not in that kind of
[1:08:02] state, she is doing everything right.
[1:08:03] She is wanting to be in that waiting room, she's wanting to
[1:08:06] be seen. Finally, when someone did come
[1:08:08] and see and speak with Nicola, she said that she needed to be
[1:08:11] sectioned. She needed to be locked away in
[1:08:15] a psychiatric unit. And so they escorted her to the
[1:08:18] psychiatric wing of the hospital.
[1:08:20] But just as they got to the reception area, she told the
[1:08:22] staff that she actually needed to make a call to her care
[1:08:25] coordinator. I mean, of course, she has to
[1:08:27] keep checking in with like, a supervisor, a parole kind of
[1:08:30] officer. And she just wanted to let them
[1:08:32] know where she was and that she was checking into the hospital.
[1:08:35] And so the staff said, OK, cool, go make your call.
[1:08:38] Nicola goes outside of the front of the building to take this
[1:08:40] call and then runs away and doesn't come back.
[1:08:44] It's such a shame that every time she would get so close to
[1:08:49] helping herself, she would self sabotage somehow.
[1:08:53] She would run away. She would freak out.
[1:08:54] That's three times in the space of 24 hours that she had tried
[1:08:58] to get help from the hospital but then self sabotaged and ran
[1:09:02] away every time help came. And from here, once Nicola left
[1:09:06] the hospital grounds, she was acting on pure impulse, still
[1:09:11] very much touching the grip of this schizophrenic episode.
[1:09:15] So Nicola wandered off, and she just hopped on a bus at a bus
[1:09:18] stop, and then she hopped on another bus.
[1:09:20] And of course, at this point in time, hospital staff had
[1:09:23] realized that she'd run away. And with everything that she'd
[1:09:26] been saying beforehand, that she thought she was going to hurt
[1:09:28] someone and she'd killed someone before, did she really have to
[1:09:31] do it again? All that kind of shit.
[1:09:33] They were scared that this woman had now just run off, and they
[1:09:37] didn't know where she was. So they called the police and
[1:09:39] they reported that she was missing and they had no idea
[1:09:42] where she was. And finally the police snapped
[1:09:45] into action. Finally, they took this
[1:09:47] seriously. They realized how dangerous this
[1:09:50] woman was, and now that she was out on the loose, they were
[1:09:53] actually putting effort into catching her.
[1:09:55] So they went and searched all the obvious places, her house,
[1:09:59] her family's houses. They spoke with her care team,
[1:10:01] but no one had seen or heard from Nicola since she ran away
[1:10:05] from the hospital. She was just bus hopping until
[1:10:08] eventually she got off at Bexley Heath Asda, which is a big, big
[1:10:12] supermarket in southeast London. She very calmly walked into the
[1:10:16] building. I mean, you wouldn't have known
[1:10:18] just by looking at her what was going on in her head.
[1:10:20] She didn't look like she was actively psychotic, but she made
[1:10:24] a beeline right for the kitchenware section and picked
[1:10:27] out a huge knife that was the only thing she wanted from the
[1:10:31] shop. She somehow managed to check out
[1:10:34] with just one singular huge fucking weapon and nothing else.
[1:10:38] Without anyone speaking to her or questioning her or stopping
[1:10:42] her, she just bought this knife and walked out of the shop.
[1:10:44] She headed right back to the bus stop that she'd gotten off at
[1:10:48] before, and by now there was a young woman standing there
[1:10:51] waiting for her bus. It was 22 year old Kelly Clarke
[1:10:54] and she was just listening to music as she saw Nicola
[1:10:57] approaching and it took her a second to realise quite what was
[1:11:01] happening. Nicola was coming right at her
[1:11:03] and she seemed aggressive and Kerry couldn't figure out why.
[1:11:06] She couldn't figure out if she was definitely coming to her or
[1:11:09] someone behind her but then she saw the knife swinging by her
[1:11:13] side. Before Kerry could even turn and
[1:11:16] run, Nicola rushed at her and grabbed her by the coat.
[1:11:20] A struggle followed where Kerry managed to like wiggle back and
[1:11:23] then push Nicola away from her, but it wasn't enough.
[1:11:27] Nicola lunged at her again, this time with the knife raised in
[1:11:30] the air screaming at her. You fucking bitch, you fucking
[1:11:33] bitch. Kerry was beyond confused and
[1:11:36] terrified, like she didn't understand why she was being
[1:11:39] attacked but right now she didn't have time to think about
[1:11:42] that. Her adrenaline kicked in and she
[1:11:44] managed to fight Nicola. She had her down on the floor
[1:11:48] and she was like wrestling the knife out of her hand.
[1:11:50] Eventually the two of them both ended up on the ground and the
[1:11:54] knife was like thrown far away from them.
[1:11:56] Genuinely sounds like a scene from an action movie.
[1:11:59] At one point Nicola was on top of Kerry and she was trying to
[1:12:02] overpower her, but Kerry managed to fucking kick her in the chest
[1:12:06] and like launch her off of her. She sounds like a superhero.
[1:12:09] But eventually Kerry overpowered the situation.
[1:12:12] Nicola was on the floor, Kerry had picked up the knife and she
[1:12:15] had it away from her so that Nicola couldn't cause any more
[1:12:19] harm. Once she knew she had the whole
[1:12:20] situation under control and that Nicola wasn't going to her
[1:12:23] anymore, she looked down at her and just said what is wrong with
[1:12:27] you, you crazy bitch? And to that Nicola looked up at
[1:12:30] Kerry and responded. I'm not the crazy one, you're
[1:12:33] the one with the knife in your hand.
[1:12:34] And I'm sorry but that is one of the funniest things I've that's
[1:12:38] really, really funny. I know I'm really not supposed
[1:12:41] to laugh but the way like that just came out so fast.
[1:12:45] But in all seriousness, I think it is a bit mad that Nicola
[1:12:49] tried to flip the situation on Kerry when she'd actually almost
[1:12:52] just murdered her. Anyway.
[1:12:54] Kerry yelled at Nicola to just leave, and she did.
[1:12:58] She got up and she walked away. The knife had been taken off of
[1:13:01] her and everyone at that bus stop was safe.
[1:13:04] But as Nicola kept walking around town, the urges weren't
[1:13:08] dissipating. She still wanted to hurt
[1:13:11] someone, and she was going to find a way to do it.
[1:13:14] She spotted a butcher's just down the road, and she snuck in
[1:13:17] very calmly and just stood there naturally, as if she was like
[1:13:21] shopping for meat. She was browsing the meat
[1:13:24] selection on the counter, and she waited until the butcher had
[1:13:27] turned his back and then she swiped one of the knives off the
[1:13:30] counter and just ran out of the shop.
[1:13:33] She stole a fucking butcher's knife again, like something out
[1:13:36] of a cartoon. Obviously, everyone in the
[1:13:38] butcher's shop just saw that happen.
[1:13:40] All of the other customers and even the butcher himself heard
[1:13:42] the commotion, turned around and saw this woman leaving his shop
[1:13:45] with one of his knives, which is very weird.
[1:13:48] And also a bit like scary obviously.
[1:13:51] So he called the police to report this strange knife
[1:13:55] stealer and it was one of many 999 calls that day to report a
[1:13:59] maniac on the loose in Bexley Heath.
[1:14:02] Nicola ran and ran and ran down the road with this knife
[1:14:06] swinging in her arm until eventually she saw a woman
[1:14:09] walking towards her. It was 58 year old Sally Hodkin
[1:14:12] and Nicola decided in that moment Sally would be her next
[1:14:17] victim. She raced towards her and
[1:14:19] tackled Sally to the ground and then just started stabbing her
[1:14:22] over and over and over, mainly in the neck, with so much force
[1:14:27] that she almost decapitated her. Within a matter of seconds,
[1:14:31] Sally Hodkin had been tackled and butchered and she was
[1:14:36] already dead. She was already dead.
[1:14:39] She had lost so much blood so fast that there was absolutely
[1:14:42] no saving her. She probably didn't even realize
[1:14:45] what was happening Within seconds of murdering Sally in
[1:14:49] broad daylight. Nicola then heard police sirens
[1:14:53] in the distance and she knew she needed to get away from this
[1:14:57] dead body in the street, and so she just turned and ran.
[1:15:00] She ran into the first shop she saw and she told the staff with
[1:15:04] blood still all over her. And I think I may have just
[1:15:08] killed someone. You think you may have.
[1:15:11] Anyway, within minutes police had arrived at the scene and
[1:15:14] they had Nicola Edgington arrested and charged with the
[1:15:18] murder of Sally Hodkin and the attempted murder of Kelly
[1:15:21] Clarke. When the case went to trial,
[1:15:23] Nicola actually pled not guilty again on the grounds of
[1:15:27] diminished responsibility, saying that she was very
[1:15:29] mentally unwell, suffering from some sort of psychotic episode,
[1:15:33] and therefore she shouldn't be found criminally responsible for
[1:15:37] everything that she'd done. And while that is technically
[1:15:39] true that she was in a psychotic episode and she, you know, maybe
[1:15:43] wasn't fully, fully responsible for her actions and her
[1:15:47] behaviour, she was kind of responsible for taking her
[1:15:51] medication, which is something I don't believe she was doing.
[1:15:54] This is a woman that knew how bad her psychotic episodes could
[1:15:59] get to the point where she had murdered her own mother before.
[1:16:03] At this point, you can't really use diminished responsibility as
[1:16:07] an excuse when you have proved that you can take medication and
[1:16:11] be stable. It was her choice to stop taking
[1:16:15] her medication. She had every opportunity to
[1:16:19] start taking her medication again, but she didn't.
[1:16:22] She knew what could happen if she didn't take her medication.
[1:16:25] She was completely unmedicated for the 1st 25 years of her life
[1:16:29] and look at everything that happened.
[1:16:30] So I think it was a choice to stop taking her medication.
[1:16:35] It was Nicola's own choice and then she went on to murder
[1:16:39] again. So I feel at that point you
[1:16:41] can't claim diminished responsibility.
[1:16:43] It was your responsibility to be taking your medication if you
[1:16:46] knew you could be a murderer if not.
[1:16:49] And I think for that reason, the jury just didn't agree that she
[1:16:53] was 100% without responsibility for this crime.
[1:16:56] Well, for these multiple crimes. And so she was found guilty of
[1:17:00] both, both the murder and the attempted murder.
[1:17:03] They could agree that, yes, she was in a psychotic episode at
[1:17:06] the time, but she knew how to stop having psychotic episodes
[1:17:10] by taking her medication. And I mean, I know that once
[1:17:14] this particular psychotic episode had begun, it was like
[1:17:18] taking medication at that point is going to be futile.
[1:17:20] It's not going to stop the the episode mid swing.
[1:17:24] But truthfully, it shouldn't have gotten to that point.
[1:17:26] She shouldn't have been off of her medication when she knew how
[1:17:29] bad it got. And the jury thought that, yeah,
[1:17:32] it was her responsibility to have been taking her medication.
[1:17:35] And she didn't. And someone died.
[1:17:37] Two people nearly died because she wasn't taking a pill every
[1:17:41] morning. So at the age of 32, Nicola
[1:17:43] Edgington was handed a life sentence with a minimum of 37
[1:17:48] years, which is a big, chuffing sentence, bigger than a lot of,
[1:17:52] like, cold, calculated evil murderers get.
[1:17:56] But I think the reason it was so high was because this was her
[1:17:59] second round of murders. She had already gotten to this
[1:18:03] point once, and everyone had given her the benefit of the
[1:18:06] doubt that obviously she didn't have her diagnosis, she didn't
[1:18:08] realize she had schizophrenia, and something terribly tragic
[1:18:12] happened the first time. But this time around it's less
[1:18:15] tragic when she knew how to stop it.
[1:18:19] She knew that this was a possibility if she didn't take
[1:18:21] her medication, but she did it anywhere.
[1:18:24] And I think that's why her sentence was so high because
[1:18:26] what is there to say that she could like get out of prison and
[1:18:29] then stop taking her medication again in however many years time
[1:18:33] and then kill someone again when she's like 70 years old?
[1:18:35] Her defense have tried to appeal this sentence saying that it's
[1:18:38] like way too harsh because well, I mean she was suffering from a
[1:18:41] schizophrenic episode at the end of the day.
[1:18:43] But the appeal was denied. Although I think the judge that
[1:18:47] denied the appeal was very fucking harsh.
[1:18:50] He said that Nicola's actions were consistent and calculated,
[1:18:53] and he even called Nicola manipulative, exceptionally
[1:18:56] dangerous and selfish. And while I think some of those
[1:19:00] words are true, I think she was exceptionally dangerous.
[1:19:03] I think she could be selfish. I think calculated and
[1:19:07] manipulative and not quite it. Like this woman was literally
[1:19:12] begging for help in the hospital saying I think I'm going to kill
[1:19:15] someone, please lock me up in police custody.
[1:19:18] To me, that doesn't sound manipulative or calculated.
[1:19:21] It just sounds like a woman that was in the grasps of a
[1:19:24] schizophrenic episode that she was trying her best to get out
[1:19:29] of. I absolutely think that Nicola
[1:19:31] Edgington should be imprisoned, but I don't agree where the
[1:19:35] judge seems to think that she is this like cold blooded evil
[1:19:39] killer. I think she was just tragically,
[1:19:41] tragically unwell and she needed way more than just three years
[1:19:45] in psychiatric hospital after murdering her mother.
[1:19:48] She needed a lot more rehabilitation, a lot more
[1:19:51] therapy. And I don't know, she needed
[1:19:54] more constant supervision once she was out of that hospital.
[1:19:58] She needed regular check insurance to make sure that she
[1:20:00] was on her medication. She needed to be in place, but
[1:20:04] it wasn't. And she murdered again.
[1:20:06] And I hope that we can learn our lesson from this.
[1:20:09] Police, hospitals. I mean, I don't like, what am I
[1:20:13] going to learn from this? She's still in prison right now,
[1:20:15] of course, And her first parole hearing will be in 2050.
[1:20:20] And by then she will literally be 70 years old.
[1:20:23] That was actually a guess earlier when I said it, but she
[1:20:25] will actually be 70 years old and who knows, maybe at that
[1:20:29] point they will just let her like hobble out of prison
[1:20:33] because she might not physically be a danger to anyone.
[1:20:36] Do you think she'd be able to kill anyone at 70?
[1:20:38] To be fair, I wouldn't actually put it past anyone.
[1:20:41] Truly stranger things have happened.
[1:20:43] Have you heard that they're letting Joseph Fritzl out of
[1:20:45] prison? That's fucking insane to me.
[1:20:48] If they can let Joseph Fritzl out of prison, they will
[1:20:50] probably let every other criminal out of prison.
[1:20:53] Joseph Fritzl is genuinely one of the most evil men I've ever
[1:20:56] heard in my whole entire life. I'm sorry I don't know where
[1:20:58] this has come from at the end. I think it's because after
[1:21:00] hearing that he is being released from prison but people
[1:21:03] like Nicola Edgington have got a life sentence with 37 years
[1:21:07] minimum. Like I say, I do agree that she
[1:21:10] should be in prison, but I think that's an insane sentence if
[1:21:13] we're also going to be letting out rapist murderer in vestual
[1:21:17] evil men like Joseph Fritzel. Maybe I should do a video on
[1:21:20] Joseph Fritzel at some point. I haven't actually done that.
[1:21:23] And that's one of the first true crime cases I got like truly
[1:21:26] fascinated with in the worst way.
[1:21:29] In the absolute worst way. It's genuinely one of the worst
[1:21:32] true crime cases I've ever heard of in my life.
[1:21:34] Anyway, sorry, that's not what this video is about, but this
[1:21:37] case is finished. Thank you so much for listening
[1:21:43] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:21:46] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:21:48] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:21:51] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:21:55] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[1:21:58] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[1:22:01] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:22:03] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:22:07] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:22:10] production. See you next time.

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