Tuesday 1 November 2022 10:25 PM Amid fears of a sickening culture among police, a mother courageously tells her ... trends now
This is how Mina Smallman wants to remember her daughters, Bibaa and Nicole — as two vibrant women whose smiles radiate joy in photographs taken on the last night of their lives.
Snapped at a picnic with friends to celebrate Bibaa's 46th birthday at Fryent Country Park in Wembley, North-West London, in June 2020, Mina treasures these poignant images of happiness and laughter.
She could talk for hours about the characters behind those smiles.
Social worker Bibaa Henry was a 5ft tall 'pocket rocket'. A bundle of energy, she combined a career in children's services with being a single mum to her daughter. During lockdown, she'd discovered a passion for cycling.
Photographer Nicole Smallman, 27, from Mina's second marriage to former English teacher Chris, was the baby of the family. A gentle 'social butterfly', she was very much in love with her boyfriend, Adam.
'Bibaa sent me a picture from her camera phone that night,' recalls retired priest Mina, 65. 'I replied: 'It looks like you are having a good time, I'll talk to you later.'
These are the images she holds dear — but not the ones she sees when the night terrors start. What haunts her sleep are the ones taken after a Satan-obsessed teenager wearing a grotesque mask came at the sisters with a knife in a random attack as they danced together in the dark, draped in fairy-lights, after their guests had left.
Mina described the officers' actions as a 'betrayal of catastrophic proportions' and 'reminiscent of lynchings from the American Deep South'
Bibaa Henry (left) and Nicole Smallman (right) were stabbed to death while celebrating the former's birthday at Fryent Country Park in Wembley, north London
Deniz Jaffer (left) and Jamie Lewis (right) were police constables assigned to guard the scene where the bodies were found
The sisters (above) were found dead in bushes after being stabbed in an unprovoked attack
Those sickening images were captured not by her daughters' killer, Danyal Hussein, but on the mobile phone of a Metropolitan Police officer who'd been deployed to guard their bodies and protect the crime scene.
PC Deniz Jaffer, 47, sent the unauthorised pictures to three friends and two colleagues, also manning the cordon. One of them, PC Jamie Lewis, 33, then used the Snapchat app to superimpose his face on a picture of the dead women, which he shared on WhatsApp, referring to the sisters as 'dead birds'.
So, nothing surprised Mina in Baroness Casey's damning review of the Met's leadership, recruitment, vetting, training, culture and communications last month.
Commissioned after the abduction, rape and murder in March 2021 of Sarah Everard, 33, by PC Wayne Couzens, it found that hundreds of Met officers were getting away with misconduct and even breaking the law.
Exposing a culture where many claims of sexual misbehaviour, misogyny, sexism, racism and homophobia were badly mishandled, Baroness Casey described the system as 'not fit for purpose' and said: 'This has to be a line-in-the-sand moment'.
'I can only compare what those two police constables did to us as an acid attack — only the corrosive scars are on the inside. They can't be seen, but they will never heal,' says Mina.
'After Bibaa and Nicole were found, we never wanted to see any images or forensic photographs because we wanted to try to block out the horror,' she says.
'But as soon as I was told those police officers had taken pictures of my girls' bodies, even without seeing the images, I'd get flashes of what those selfies must have looked like.
Danyal Hussein was given a life sentence, with a minimum term of 35 years, in October after being found guilty of the women's murders
Nicole and Bibaa's mother Mina Smallman and her husband Chris pictured at the appeal hearing for the two officers at the High Court on May 11
'I visualised things I didn't want to see. I woud have night terrors, thrashing around, shouting out, trying to warn my girls, to protect them.'
Last December, at the Old Bailey, Jaffer and Lewis were each jailed for 33 months after pleading guilty to misconduct in a public office. The court heard they'd shared the photographs for 'cheap thrills and bragging rights'.
Sentencing them Judge Mark Lucraft KC, Recorder of London, described the officers' actions as 'appalling and inexplicable'.
The Metropolitan Police described them as 'unprofessional and shameful'.
They were convicted five weeks after Hussein, then aged 19, was sentenced to life for murder, with a recommendation he serve at least 35 years. Jurors had heard that the disturbed teenager had made a blood pact with the Devil to kill six women every six months in exchange for winning millions on the Lottery.
At the time, Mina described the officers' actions as a 'betrayal of catastrophic proportions' and 'reminiscent of lynchings from the American Deep South'. Today, she is convinced that had her girls been white, they would not have been so horribly degraded.
Nor can Mina see any other explanation for the lack of urgency behind the Met's initial response to reports that the two women had gone missing, after failing to return to their respective homes the night of Bibaa's birthday celebration.
This is yet another shocking aspect of this distressing story which has compounded the family's trauma.
One call handler recorded one of the sisters as a 'suspect' and appeared dismissive when the alarm was raised, after neither of the women could be reached by phone on the morning of Saturday, June 6, 2020.
Despite increasingly frantic calls from loved ones, who insisted their disappearance was out of character, a duty inspector later closed the missing persons' log. A whole night passed during which they could have been found.
'Bibaa was 46 and Nicole was 27. They weren't teenagers, and yet we were being asked: 'Is this typical behaviour? Have they ever gone missing before?' No, they hadn't,' says Mina, who felt helpless as calls from her home in Kent to her daughters in London went unanswered.
Officers guarding forensics tents at Fryent Country Park near Wembley, north London on June 8, 2020
'Maybe at first they might have thought that two sisters together were probably safe, but the last text Nicole had sent to her boyfriend, Adam, said: 'I'm dancing in a field and coming home soon.' I had to demand they break down Bibaa's door. She wasn't there, but still they sent no one to the park.'
Had Bibaa been white and her home in a leafy suburb rather than on a Wembley council estate, would the police have done more? Mina can't help but think so.
Instead, it was left to Adam Stone, Nicole's boyfriend of six years, to organise a search party on Sunday, June 7.
It was his father who found the knife that had been used to kill the women. They
