A mother who waited 31 years to see her seven-year-old daughter’s killer brought to justice will take legal action against the police force which botched the initial murder inquiry.

In October 1992, Nikki Allan was lured to a derelict building and was stabbed and hit with bricks by David Boyd, now aged 55, and left dead or dying in the basement.

Northumbria Police charged innocent George Heron with the crime only for the trial to collapse when his confession after three days of oppressive questioning was deemed inadmissible.

Nikki’s mother Sharon Henderson never gave up her fight for justice, made her own investigations and repeatedly called on the force to re-open the inquiry into the murder in Sunderland. After a DNA breakthrough and painstaking police work, Boyd was jailed for life for Nikki’s murder at Newcastle Crown Court in May.

Ms Henderson told the BBC’s Newsnight she will take legal action against the force, saying: “I was treated really badly by the police.”

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Boyd was the boyfriend of Nikki’s babysitter, lived in the same block of flats as her and told officers he had seen her on the night she disappeared.

He was never treated as a suspect, even after he was convicted of a child sex offence in the late 1990s, and remained at large until the DNA breakthrough in 2017.

Ms Henderson’s lawyer Harriet Wistrich has written to Chief Constable Vanessa Jardine to say that legal action will begin.

Ms Wistrech said: “Sharon and her daughters have suffered immense pain and damage. Now the murderer has been convicted, she wants answers and a full inquiry into the historic failures by Northumbria Police.”

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