Wembley park murders: Heartbroken mother describes 'sad, deluded killer'
Tap above to watch Ronke Phillips' full interview with Mina Smallman
The mother of two sisters murdered in a North London park described their teenage killer, Danyal Hussein, as 'sad and deluded' as he was found guilty of their murders.
Speaking to Senior Correspondent Ronke Phillips, Mina Smallman recalled the moment she found out daughters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were missing. She also recounted the horror of knowing she would never see them again.
Mina waited by the phone as friends and family searched Fryent Country Park where the sisters had been celebrating a birthday.
First a knife was found and then Mina received the phone call she had been dreading from Nicole Smallman’s boyfriend Adam Stone.
"Adam suddenly said Mina, Mina, I need you to sit down. I found them and they're gone. I just remember screaming really just screaming... please don't let this be. How could it be?" said Mina.
She added: "Bibaa had been taken completely by surprise. They could tell. And our little Nicole, she had something like 38 wounds and quite a few of them were defense wounds.
"So even after she had fallen to the ground, he continued stabbing her."
The Old Bailey heard how Danyal Hussein, 19, repeatedly stabbed Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman after using his own blood to sign a pact with mythical King Lucifuge Rofocale.
In a “campaign of vengeance” Hussein pledged to kill six women every six months to win the Mega Millions Super Jackpot of £321 million and carry on killing women as long as he was able, jurors heard.
The family were in court for most of the trial sitting just yards away from the man who murdered the sisters.
"The link between his pact with a demon and me being a clergy person, you may have thought, oh, that must be horrifying," Mina told ITV News London.
"Actually at the moment I heard about this pact I felt the Holy Spirit just fill me up.
"And I said, I've got this, I've got this. And when I see him for the first time, I'll know whether he is actually deluded or actually dabbling.
"And I can say actually deluded. It's just a sad, sad, young man. I don't hate him because I wouldn't allow that to hold me back. He's not going to hold me emotionally captive. I know who he is and I know what he's done," she added.
Mina also described the frustration she faced with the initial "lack of urgency" from police to investigate.
She said: "There seemed to be no sense of urgency. Anybody I was talking to - it was a different person every time. There was no follow up to cut a very long story short. We had to do the missing persons. We had to track down who was at the picnic. I knew from the pictures a couple of people. But when your children get in their forties and closer to their thirties, you don't have the telephone numbers for their friends. So we did that through Facebook."
Mina also talked about the huge outpouring of national grief and anger after the death of Sarah Everard.
"You can do a direct comparison of what the coverage was for Sarah. And this is not a competition - actually in places like Brent or South London there's a view of who they think we are as people of colour. And we get treated differently," Mina said.
The family are planning a mass public vigil for the day Nicole shared her birthday with her father. They want to reframe the sisters' legacy so they are remembered not for the way they were killed - but for the life they lived.