WHEN sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry went missing in 2020, their family were frantic – but the police didn’t go and look for them.
Despite more than 20 desperate phone calls to the police in the space of 36 hours, it was left to family and friends to launch a search party for the missing siblings.
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Eventually, Nicole’s horrified boyfriend Adam Stone found their murdered bodies in the park where they had been last seen celebrating Bibaa’s birthday with a picnic.
And when police did attend the scene, the two officers charged with protecting it instead compounded the family’s distress by taking pictures of the dead women’s bodies and sharing them on WhatsApp.
Now in a new Sky documentary, Bibaa and Nicole: Murder in the Park, family and friends of the two women describe in devastating detail their desperate attempts to get police to take their missing reports seriously – and how the murders and police misconduct have impacted their lives.
And despite an enquiry finding that the women’s race was not a factor in the failings, the family believe that it was.
Bibaa and Nicole’s sister Monique says: “Adam found them. He should never have had to see that. You can’t erase that from his mind.
“How do you get over seeing your soulmate ( that way)? You can’t erase that, it is there forever.”
Mum Mina Smallman adds: “My girls had been murdered and we had been failed over and over again by the police.”
She adds: “What was it that made you decide (not to look for) a woman coming to her nearly 50s, and a woman of 27, one of whom was a senior social worker? You tell me why the proper procedure wasn’t followed? If it wasn’t race, what was it?”
It was 5 June 2020, and after months of lockdown, Bibaa decided she would celebrate her birthday with a picnic in the park with friends.
Mina, a former teacher and priest, recalls: “Birthdays in our family were always important. I partied with my girls, I taught them how to party, actually.
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“We’d have the family gatherings, but also the girls would go off and do their own things.”
Bibaa, 46, and Nicole, 27, planned it together – a sunset picnic in London’s Fryent Park with music, dancing, blankets, cushions and fairy lights.
It was the perfect evening filled with laughter, as pictures taken on the girls’ phones prove.
Bibaa’s friend Nina remembers: “When I left, Bibaa and Nikki were on their own, just before midnight.
“As I was walking down the hill, I saw them dancing with the lights. I remember smiling, thinking they are going to be there for a couple of hours at least, having their own little rave.”
Nicole last messaged her boyfriend Adam at 1am, saying they were in the field, and he sent her several messages checking they were OK, but he got no response.
Nina adds: “The next day it was really raining, the weather was awful. I was messaging Bibaa.
“I sent all the photos I’d taken of the sunset and everyone in anticipation of getting some photos back, and just finding it strange that my message didn’t go through.”
But Adam was convinced something was terribly wrong and rang Mina to ask if she had heard from the girls – she hadn’t.
He then started contacting Nikki’s friends, and none of them had heard from her, either, sparking alarm bells.
Mina says: “Adam called saying the girls were missing. I came off the phone and remember calling Bibaa and Nikki multiple times. No answer.”
Nicole’s dad, Chris, says: “I kept phoning and texting, no answer. That’s when the doubts started to come in.”
Horrific find
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The girls’ friends created a WhatsApp group to brainstorm and started calling hospitals, but the girls weren’t there.
One called the police to report the girls missing while Adam went to Bibaa’s flat, but nobody was answering.
Police said they needed to do a room search at Nikki’s flat even though the friends told them she hadn’t been home. Adam waited for them to arrive, but they never did.
Mina says: “I said I will phone the police, thinking that if a mum phoned the police, they would take it seriously, they would do what they should do.
“The woman I spoke to said she would look into it, but she never got back to me.”
Nicole’s friend Hannah says: “It is as if the police weren’t treating them like the everyday stable healthy respectable professional women that they were. They communicate, they check in.
“They were treated like they were criminals or alcoholics or something, where they would have a more unstable form of communication or unstable life.”
By 1am the girls had been missing for 24 hours, and the police still hadn’t turned up, with the friends ringing around shops for CCTV and posting missing posters online.
The girls had been missing for 34 hours by the time police broke into Bibaa’s flat, but the girls were not there.
They were treated like they were criminals or alcoholics or something, where they would have a more unstable form of communication or unstable life
Hannah, Nicole’s friend
Mina says : “You might assume that the next thing the police would do was search the park, but no they didn’t.”
Chris set off to the park, as did Adam and his parents, to meet Nina who’d been at the party.
Nina says: “When I got there, this feeling of dread came over me and my stomach was in knots.”
Almost as soon as they got to the spot where they had had the picnic, Nina saw Bibaa’s expensive prescription sunglasses in the grass – bent and out of shape.
“I was panic-stricken. I felt physically sick.” Nina called 999 and was casually told to take the glasses to the nearest police station.
“Adam asked me if he should keep looking,” she says. “And I said to him ‘If you can bear it.’”
Adam and his parents continued to search the park when Dad Dave spotted a knife on the floor.
Frantic Adam kept searching in some bushes – when his parents heard him let out a horrible scream. He had found the bodies of Bibaa and Nicole.
When David called the police to report the tragic find, it was the 23rd call family and friends had made to them that weekend.
As it was the evening and with the light fading, police made the decision to leave the bodies in situ overnight with a police guard to make it easier to collect forensics the next day.
But that decision was to eventually bring more heartbreak to the family.
The pathologist’s report eventually came back to reveal that both girls had been stabbed many times.
Police believed Bibaa had been attacked first as she had no defence wounds so must’ve been taken by surprise, but Nicole had lots of defence wounds, indicating that she had fought for her life.
Family liaison officer Isla Edwards says: “It is desperately sad to think she fought for her life, presumably having watched her sister be killed first.”
Nicole’s dad Chris adds: “Isla had told us about the horrendous brutality of the stabbings.
“You can’t process that, it is just unbelievable, you don’t want to think about it, you don’t want to think about their last moments. I do sometimes.
“But you just had to pray that it wasn’t too painful, but I bet it was.”
But Nicole’s fighting spirit was to prove vital – blood found at the crime scene didn’t belong to either woman, so police believed it could belong to the killer.
But their DNA was not on the police database.
Satanic killer
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As the police investigation continued, Mina and Chris went to London to lay their girls to rest. And it was while they were there they got a devastating call from Isla.
Somebody had called Crimestoppers to report that an officer at the original police cordon had taken pictures of the two dead women and was sharing them on social media.
Isla says: “Two officers had been sent to protect the girls while they were in situ and pictures were taken. We hadn’t even caught the suspect.
“I didn’t know what to say, I was so embarrassed, I was mortified, I was ashamed, I was terrified of losing the family. It jeopardised the whole investigation.”
Mina says: “When I found out what had happened, I was so incensed because it was so despicable.”
But despite the police failings when the girls went missing, and the latest abhorrent actions of the two police officers, Mina says she had every faith in Isla and the rest of the investigation team to do their best for her girls.
Police failings
By Kevin Adjei-Darko
The Metropolitan Police came under fire for their handling of the tragic murders of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, with an official watchdog branding their response as “unacceptable.”
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) found that the Met’s response fell below the expected standard.
An inspector and two staff members were identified for inadequate performance, with recommendations for performance reviews and additional training.
Compounding the tragedy, two officers assigned to guard the crime scene, PCs Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, took unauthorised photographs of the victims and shared them via WhatsApp, referring to the sisters as “dead birds.”
Both officers admitted to misconduct in public office and were sentenced to two years and nine months in prison.
The Met issued an apology to the family, acknowledging that their service fell below the expected standard and compounded the family’s distress.
However, the sisters’ mother, Mina Smallman, criticised the apology as too late and insufficient, suggesting that racial profiling, misogyny or classism may have influenced the police’s inadequate response.
The knife found by Adam’s dad was proven to be the murder weapon, and police established it had possibly been bought in a local Asda.
And eventually familial DNA brought back a link to someone on the list of names from the store – 18-year-old Danyal Hussein.
When they eventually arrested him a month after the murders, he still had his hand injuries, proving how much Nicole had fought.
DI Maria Green says: “The fact that she fought him off and caused him to have that injury is the only reason he hasn’t gone on to kill more people because he couldn’t because was injured.”
Isla says: “Undoubtedly, Nicole fighting back did lead to the identification of the suspect, and perhaps that did bring some comfort to Mina and Chris to know that their daughter fought, she really did.”
What police found in Hussein’s house was deeply disturbing – masks, dark clothing, what looked like a ‘kill kit’.
He was obsessed with the occult and had signed what he believed to be a contract with the devil in blood to kill six women every six months in order to win a multi-million pound lottery jackpot.
“My girls died for that delusion, that nonsense,’ says Mina.
Despite pleading not guilty to Bibaa and Nicole’s murders, the evidence against Hussein was overwhelming.
He was found guilty in October 2021 and jailed for 35 years.
Meanwhile the officers who had taken the photos of Bibaa and Nicole’s bodies had been arrested and suspended from duty.
Investigations revealed the images had been shared to a WhatsApp group with around 40 other officers – and one of the officers had superimposed himself into the picture with the girls.
And the language used on the group was often misogynistic and racist in tone.
The Metropolitan Police apologised after the police watchdog found Scotland Yard had mishandled the initial missing persons reports by the sisters’ friends and family, with information recorded inaccurately and the call handler initially “dismissive”.
The two officers who took pictures of the girls’ bodies, PCs Deniz Jaffer, 47, and Jamie Lewis, 33, were each jailed for two years and nine months after pleading guilty to misconduct in a public office.
And despite the mishandling of the search for her daughters, and the disgusting actions of the two disgraced officers, Mina is grateful to the team who brought her daughters’ killer to justice.
She says: “There are not just a few rotten apples, there are too many there, but the vast majority of police are trustworthy.”
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Bibaa & Nicole: Murder in the Park airs 11 May on Sky Documentaries and NOW.