Helen Archer | On 20, May 2025

Friday 5th June 2020 was Bibaa Henry’s 46th birthday. As Covid-19 lockdown restrictions were being eased and people were able to congregate again in open spaces, she decided to make an evening of it, organising a picnic in London’s Fryent Park. The last CCTV images of her, and her 27-year-old half-sister Nicole Smallman, show them shopping for food, carrying blankets and cushions to the park, their body language happy and carefree. They set up a base in the “middle of a field”, as Nicole referred to it in her final text to her boyfriend, where Bibaa’s friends and family could come, eat, drink, dance to the playlist she’d made, and celebrate with her. 

We all know now how that evening ended, after Bibaa and Nicole took the last of their selfies together, framed in the darkness by specks of dazzling light. This three-part documentary, directed by Alex Thomas and Lindsay Konieczny, features close friends and family of the sisters, as well as investigating officers, and looks at the catalogue of failures – and outright violations of power – made by the police following the double murder. It also paints a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait of the sisters, and delves into the endless well of grief their killings left in those who loved them. 

The first episode deals solely with their ‘disappearance’, and the awful panic that hit Nicole’s boyfriend Adam almost immediately, and, as the hours ticked by, the rest of the search party. Despite numerous calls to the police – from an increasingly frantic Adam, from Nicole and Bibaa’s friends, and from their mother Mina – no action was taken, which Mina, understandably, puts down to racism (why else would they ignore the inexplicable disappearance of two responsible, middle-class women, she asks). It would be a full 25 hours later, as Adam and his parents searched the park and Adam stumbled across the bodies himself, before police officers finally deployed – in the meantime, a rainstorm, as well as litter collectors, had disturbed the crime scene, ruining valuable evidence. 

Already obviously traumatised by the discovery of their bodies – a sight you can’t unsee – that trauma would be exacerbated to an unfathomable degree with the news that officers Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, who were meant to be preserving and protecting their corpses overnight, had instead taken photos of them, sending the pictures to a WhatsApp group of serving Met Police officers, along with degrading racist and misogynistic messages: making sick jokes about their deaths. Now that those photos are out there, Mina and her surviving daughter Monique say, they are forever afraid they will one day stumble across them on social media.

By the third episode, the perpetrator – 18-year-old Danyal Hussein – has been tracked down, thanks in no small part to the fight Nicole apparently put up for her life, leaving him with his own injuries. And again, the family’s grief is compounded by the fact that – despite the colour of his own skin – Hussain was motived by a far0right, racist ideology, fomented online, particularly by the Utah-based ‘Satanist’ EA Koetting, on whose forum Hussain was active. Staring him down in court as he taunted the family was the one small victory Monique Henry could claim.

It is something of a triumph, then, that this series, cataloguing the causes of so much justified pain and anger, is ultimately filled with tenderness and grace. That is thanks to the people who participated who loved and cherished Bibaa and Nicole – Mina, Monique, Nicole’s father, Chris, and the close friends of the sisters, who speak so elegantly here, bringing alive two remarkable spirits for those who were unfortunate enough to never have known them.

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