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Police Took SELFIES With Girls CORPSES: The Tragic Story Of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman
Eleanor Neale's 85-minute breakdown, the fullest single telling on file.
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On 6 June 2020, sisters Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27, were murdered in Fryent Country Park in north-west London. Danyal Hussein, then 18, was convicted of both murders in July 2021 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 35 years. Hussein believed that killing six women within six months would fulfil a pact made for financial reward.
Bibaa Henry, born 5 June 1974, lived in Wembley and worked as a social worker for Buckinghamshire Council; her family described her as an advocate for safeguarding vulnerable children and families. Nicole Smallman, born 3 August 1992, lived in Harrow and worked as a freelance photographer after graduating from the University of Westminster. The sisters were daughters of the Church of England's first female archdeacon from a black and minority ethnic background.
On the evening of 5 June 2020, the sisters and friends held a picnic in Fryent Country Park to celebrate Bibaa's birthday, gathering locally amid COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. After the other guests left, the sisters remained in the park, exchanging a message and photographs shortly after 1 a.m.; calls from relatives went unanswered after 2:30 a.m. Reported missing that evening, the sisters were found on 7 June by Nicole's boyfriend and others searching the park, who found their sunglasses, a bloodied knife, and then the bodies under a treeline. Bibaa had been stabbed eight times and Nicole around 28 times.
Hussein, born 10 May 2002, was arrested on 1 July 2020 at his mother's home in Eltham, south-east London. A student at Orpington College who had been diagnosed with autism, he had drawn up a handwritten note, signed in his own blood, describing a pact for financial reward, including a lottery jackpot. Days before the murders, he bought kitchen knives and a balaclava and signed onto an online lottery betting website. CCTV showed him leaving home on the evening of 5 June and returning in the early hours of 6 June missing his trousers and with a self-inflicted hand injury; he told hospital staff he had been mugged. A DNA sample led police to raid the family home. Hussein had previously accessed far-right and Satanist material online, and had been monitored under the Prevent strategy as a teenager.
Hussein was charged with two counts of murder and pleaded not guilty at the Old Bailey on 11 March 2021. His trial began on 9 June 2021, and he was convicted of both murders on 6 July 2021. In October 2021 he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 35 years; he is imprisoned at HMP Belmarsh and becomes eligible for parole on 20 July 2055.
In the weeks after the murders, two Metropolitan Police constables, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, photographed and shared images of themselves beside the sisters' bodies at the crime scene, prompting an Independent Office for Police Conduct investigation; six further officers were investigated for not reporting the images. Jaffer and Lewis pleaded guilty to misconduct in public office and, in December 2021, were each sentenced to two years and nine months in prison; Lewis was dismissed and Jaffer had already resigned. A separate inquiry found the police response to the family's missing-persons reports unacceptable, and police apologised.
The case prompted widespread discussion of violence against women, police conduct, and systemic racism. The sisters' mother called on Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick to resign over how the case had been handled; Dick resigned in February 2022 following this and other controversies. Vigils were held for the sisters, including one at Fryent Country Park on 3 August 2021 attended by the Mayor of London and other public figures.
