So news that ITV is going to revisit this shocking case in a new TV drama will lead to some concern about the suitability of such a series as ‘entertainment’.

Recent dramatisations about serial murderers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein led to criticism of their voyeuristic depiction of the crimes and fascination with the killers.

Both at the cinema and on TV there have series that fetishised crimes and made the guilty men the star of the show, a potentially traumatising experience for victims’ loved ones.

However, such worries are probably wide of the mark with regard to Believe Me, the title of this latest series. This does not sound as though it will foreground the perpetrator, played by Daniel Mays.

Rather, the focus is on two victims: Sarah, played by Aimée-Ffion Edwards, and Laila, portrayed by Aasiya Shah (both character names are pseudonyms to protect the identities of the real women). These characters are seen reporting sexual assaults by Worboys, the driver of a black London taxi.

As the story unfolds, it soon becomes clear their allegations are not being thoroughly investigated.

Instead, they have to go through the indignity of reporting rape – an experience highlighted by many victims – the many interviews, intimate evidence gathering, only to be treated like a criminal themselves.

At one point, apparently, we see Laila being asked by an officer if her red nail varnish is an insight into her character.

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Difficult though such events are to dramatise sensitively, the value of such true-crime depictions – from the post-office scandal to serial-murder cases – is that they allow us to have some understanding of how these terrible events happen.

ITV also has a fine track record of making high-quality dramas that explore the most challenging cases. The Long Shadow in 2023 explored the lives of the victims of Peter Sutcliffe, along with their families, and the calamitous failures of the police investigation.

Appropriate Adult (2011), about the Fred West case, was nominated for eight Bafta awards, winning four including two for lead actors Dominic West and Emily Watson.

The Pembrokeshire Murders (2021), Des (2020) and Manhunt (2019-2021) were all compelling and superbly written series.

Worboys was convicted in 2009 for crimes including sexual assault and drugging with intent against 12 women between 2006 and 2008. Police complacency in investigating was partly down to the prejudice that a ‘respectable’ licensed black cab driver would be unlikely to have alcohol or drugs in his cab to overpower victims.

The attacker’s method of entrapment was to pick up female customers, claim he had had a lottery or casino win, and offer them a glass of drug-laced Champagne.

True scale of Worboys’ crimes

Following his trial, police finally came to realise that Worboys was connected to sexual offences against more than 100 women.

Predators such as Worboys are bad enough, but series like Believe Me keep alive the fact in our minds that it is often institutional and/or political failings that allow them to continue damaging lives for so long.

Carrie Johnson (née Symonds, played by actress Miriam Petche), who was targeted by Worboys in her youth but had a narrow escape, said, ‘I hope Believe Me serves as a wake-up call to the police, the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] and the parole board. Far too often, women and girls are failed by the very institutions meant to protect them.

‘The treatment of the victims in this case was truly shameful.’

In terms of the production, we might spare a thought for the actors having to perform in such a devastating drama based on real events.

Daniel Mays as Worboys found he had underestimated the toll the role would take on him. ‘It was a difficult thing to have rolling around in my head before filming,’ he has said.

‘It was a very isolating character to play. When I was announced to play him, I got this tirade from family and friends and work colleagues who can’t quite believe it, going, “Why would you want to play something like that?”

‘So, the challenge was to humanise him, really, and that was a very difficult and unsettling thing to take on.’

• Believe Me is coming soon in the UK to ITV1, ITVX, STV & STV Player

• I appeared on the documentary series Murder by the Sea in an episode about the Pembrokeshire murders. You can read about it here

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Along with the wonderful beaches and beautiful scenery of the Mornington peninsula, I couldn’t resist a trip to the Victorian hellhole that was Old Melbourne Gaol.

After my visit to Wandsworth prison in south London in January, I was curious to compare Melbourne’s forbidding old gaol, which originated from the same period. Melbourne opened in 1845 (Wandsworth six years later), based on Joshua Jebb’s new ‘model’ prison at Pentonville, near where I live in London.

Jebb, who had been a military engineer, was Surveyor-General of convict prisons and adviser to the Home Office in London.

As Britain’s policy of transporting its convicts to the colonies was wound down in the 1850s (it, too, had failed to deter people from committing crimes), the country started foisting its ‘model’ prisons on them instead.

Solitary confinement, hard labour, religious instruction and abstinence were the order of the day, designed to cow inmates of both sexes into reforming their ways. On arrival, they were locked up 23 hours a day.

Silence and separation of prisoners were part of the routine, with inmates having to wear ‘silence masks’ – white hoods – to hamper communication.

Mental breakdown and hangings

Behind walls are two-feet thick, the layout featured a central ‘panopticon’ building that allowed the guards to have a 360-degree vantage point to observe the prison wings spanning from the centre.

The cell windows were high up, ensuring prisoners could not see the outside world.

Unsurprisingly, the depressing solitude did nothing to raise inmates out of their criminal ways – nor out of the desperate poverty that no doubt frequently contributed to their lawbreaking. Mental breakdown was more likely.

The architecture is as grim and overbearing as Wandsworth. What was chilling was that the gallows at Melbourne Gaol were at the end of one of the landings.

In Wandsworth they were in a soundproof room and condemned inmates were brought into a condemned cell without any other prisoners seeing them. When an execution was to take place there, everything was done to ensure inmates would be busy and not distracted/distressed by the process or sound of the hanging of one of their number.

At Melbourne, no such efforts seem to have been made. When the gang leader Ned Kelly was hanged in 1880, he was brought across the prison’s hospital yard and marched to a cell next to the gallows.

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Ellen, Ned’s mother, was actually in the prison serving her own three-year sentence for an altercation with a policeman. Her cell was just feet away from her son’s.

One-hundred-and-thirty-three prisoners were executed there (the tally at Wandsworth was 135). Today the prison profiles some of these unfortunates on its walls and a frequent theme of their trials is poverty along with circumstantial and flimsy evidence.

Of the first 10 hangings in Melbourne gaol, five were of Aboriginal Australians.

The Old Melbourne Gaol museum is a well-run institution with insightful guides. But it was disconcerting to see tourists and children milling around the gallows, scene of so much torment not that long ago (the prison closed in 1924).

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Sometimes visiting an archive or interviewing a person turns out to be a disappointing endeavour. On another occasion you don’t just uncover what you hoped to find, but find something totally unexpected.

At the London Metropolitan Archives I was stunned to see a message written by the serial murderer Gordon Cummins to his wife on the morning of his hanging in 1942. I’ve included the contents of this extraordinary letter in my forthcoming book, Force of Darkness: Confronting Blackout Killer Gordon Cummins.

A short while before Christmas, it was on a visit to the Metropolitan Police Museum in Sidcup, south London, that I was stunned to make another discovery in regard to the same case.

Vital fingerprint evidence

This was a speculative outing for me – I was simply curious to see what artefacts and archives this police museum held (the website is not that detailed).

The museum consists of one large room inside the police station. You have to make an appointment to visit and join a guided 90-minute tour of the exhibits. Among the visitors are detectives also curious to learn about past investigations and forensic breakthroughs.

Having spent the best part of a couple of years researching the Gordon Cummins, I was fascinated to see that the Metropolitan Police Museum had on display the items marked by his fingerprints that did so much to establish his guilt at the Old Bailey.

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Cummins, a 28-year-old RAF cadet, had been charged with attacking two women and murdering four others in one week during 1942. However, he actually stood trial for the murder of only one of his victims, Evelyn Oatley.

She was a married woman living apart from her husband. She was known to solicit around Piccadilly and this was how she encountered Cummins.

His attack on her was vicious, but he had recklessly left forensic clues behind, namely his fingerprints. The veteran Scotland Yard fingerprint expert Fred Cherrill found these marks – on a tin opener and broken mirror – and these offered clear proof that Cummins, despite his constant denials, had been in her flat.

Cherrill was challenged fiercely and at length by the defence team, but the expert stood up to this and the jury accepted his assurance that the prints were Cummins’.

The RAF man decided to go into the witness box and give evidence in his own defence, but he was an appalling liar and was quickly forced to admit he had lied to police.

It is sobering to realise that these everyday household items, so easily discarded by Cummins, could in the end expose him as a depraved killer.

He appealed but this dismissed. Cummins was booked to meet on 25 June 1942 the hangman Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison (as recounted in my previous post).

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Wandsworth Prison in south London. An institution opened in 1851, today it is rundown and crying out for, what – investment, modernisation, demolition? Built to hold 1,000 prisoners, it now contains some 1,500 and is dogged by accounts of overcrowding, violence and staff shortages.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons cited a dismaying seven suicides in 12 months in its 2024 report. It makes for shocking reading.

If Wandsworth’s thick walls could tell tales from its past, these would be of birchings, 135 executions between 1878 and 1961, and the confinement of the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, and the traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw).

It was the institution’s grim past that brought me there on a wet morning last month. And so I was delighted that my spell behind bars was scheduled to last only a little over an hour.

The Blackout Murders

I was there to do research for my next book, Force of Darkness: Confronting Blackout Killer Gordon Cummins, due for publication on 20 August (the History Press). Cummins was executed at Wandsworth in 1942.

He had been an RAF cadet. In an unremitting burst of violence, he attacked six women in one week in February 1942, killing four of them. The story of how two women survived his assaults – one fought him off – and the tragedies of his victims, along with his wife and family, who could not believe his guilt, is compelling and moving.

I saw the execution suite where he spent his last months (now a staff room for prison officers) and the execution chamber where the gallows had been. This is now a storage room.

Cummins is still buried in what was once the prison’s cemetery. However, today this is under tarmac, serving as a road within the prison grounds.

Condemned cell

The accused was never allowed to leave this sparse suite, consisting of a bed, table and three chairs. The condemned cell – actually three cells knocked into one – was connected to a visiting room and bathroom facilities. The condemned man would not mix with any other inmates.

At one end was a locked door through which Cummins was whisked by hangman Albert Pierrepoint on his final morning straight to the adjoining gallows. One myth that was dispelled for me was that there had been a wardrobe in the cell to conceal the door to the gallows.

Visiting Wandsworth left me with a sense of oppression and dread. Passing through countless locked doors and into the gloom of E wing, gives a feeling of entering a place of no return.

The events that always brought men here were of terrible seriousness; the way out again was long and fraught – if there was to be a way out.

However, even from my cursory visit I could see that these days Wandsworth is rundown – dirty, peeling, with a clear atmosphere of neglect.

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Hardened criminals need to be locked up. But the political assault on the administration of justice – from the mass closure of police stations to the backlog of court trials – has left the UK with a system that is failing everybody. This ranges from the accused to victims to society as a whole.

The one upside to my visit was being able to witness that the culture of floggings and hangings has long gone. Even the former prison officer who showed me around was glad the whole grisly system had been abolished.

He had been in the service for more than 30 years but said the his final couple of years had been the worst, as cutbacks put increasing strains on the job.

Ending capital punishment was the decent, civilised thing to do. Throwing prisoners (and their guards) into overcrowded, dangerous institutions is not.

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A seventh series is in the works and leads Vicky McClure, Martin Compston and Adrian Dunbar are signed to return as the detectives trying to root out bent coppers.

The BBC drama, a big hit both sides of the Atlantic with fans including Stephen King, ended in May 2021. The finale, watched by 12.8million fans, had the distinction of being the most watched episode of any drama (excluding soaps) since 2002, when modern multi-viewing records started.

So good was the show that in 2023 I wrote a book about it – The Real Ted Hastings: The True Story of the Copper at the Heart of Line of Duty.

At the time, the publishers (Mardle Books) and myself hoped sales would skyrocket when the new seventh series came along – only for showrunner Jed Mercurio and his team to put Line of Duty into instant hibernation.

Anyway, who cares about book sales? Line of Duty is back at last for another six episodes and that news will have fans cheering.

And there is certainly unfinished business in the Line of Duty Universe. Something of a consensus emerged after Series 6 that the finale was lacklustre, as dim-bulb Chief Superintendent Ian Buckells emerged as the senior figure running the conspiracy.

The sense of letdown was probably because viewers had expected a Moriarty-type mastermind to be the Big Bad ’un, whereas Buckells was a charisma-free flunky.

My own feeling was that Buckells being exposed as the fourth man in ‘H’ quartet touched on a truth about the nature of corruption.

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Bent coppers, politicians etc are not usually the most gifted people around. They are often greedy wannabes – lazy, lacking in self-esteem, unable to resist taking a shortcut to ‘success’.

This was the genius of the series (and the theme of my book). Line of Duty was a brilliant fusion of high-octance entertainment based on real life. All of instances of corruption and bent coppering featured were drawn from headline cases in modern Britain.

Buckells may have been outed, but there was no victory lap for AC-12’s Ted Hastings (Dunbar), Kate Fleming (McClure) and Steve Arnott (Compston). Their nemesis Chief Constable Philip Osbourne hushed up Buckells’ wrongdoing and dismantled AC-12.

The department’s been replaced by an Inspectorate of Police Standards in the new series. This will be investigating an inspector accused of being a sexual predator…

Filming starts next year.

Oh, if you want a copy of the book, it’s available here, here and here.

Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey, you didn’t expect me to pass up the chance to plug it, did you?

My next two books

I must plead guilty to being absent without leave here on Substack recently.

The reason is that this year I’ve signed contracts to write two books.

I’ve just handed in the manuscript, photos and map for my next non-fiction crime book, which will be published in August/September 2026.

To be honest, I found it difficult to combine writing, researching, fact-checking and editing the book in addition to composing worthwhile posts here. Hence, my hiatus.

As I get on with my other book, about some 1960s gangsters – to be published in March 2027 – I hope to be on the beat here more frequently.

I’ll be forthcoming about both projects soon.

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DS Arnott, played by Martin Compston, refuses to help cover up police culpability in this tragedy, marking him out as candidate for Supt Ted Hastings’ anti-corruption unit AC-12. This moment sets us up for six series of brilliant duplicity and suspense.

This inciting storyline, along with all the instances of corruption featured in writer Jed Mercurio’s riveting series, was based on real events. In this case it was the police shooting, 20 years ago this summer, of young Brazilian man Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station.

Mercurio’s use of real police cover-ups and wrongdoing to add impact to his drama was the theme of my most recent book, The Real Ted Hastings. The showrunner and writer had been explicit in his aim to make his cop show hard-hitting in its relevance.

Mercurio originally had no plans to write a police drama at all – until he began following the de Menezes case. ‘What was interesting to me about that tragedy,’ he said, ‘was not only that the mistake occurred, but what followed was an institutionalised effort to cover up the truth.’

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

The drama would be all about how that institution dealt with its errors and bent officers.

No doubt news that another distinguished British screenwriter, Jeff Pope, is about to scrutinise the de Menezes case again in a new four-part drama will have Met chiefs grinding their teeth.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes – on Disney+ – will explicitly deal with the case and its aftermath.

First, let’s remember the facts. On Friday 22 July 2005 Jean Charles de Menezes was shot by police officers at Stockwell underground station following an anti-terrorist surveillance operation.

At the time, London was on high alert following the terrorist bombing of the London transport system on 7 July 2005, which killed 52 people, and the failed attacks on the transport system on 21 July 2005.

The very next day after the second attempted attack, 22 July, police were watching a block of flats in Tulse Hill, where it was believed one of the failed bombers was living. It is thought de Menezes, a resident there, came out of the communal entrance and was mistaken for the terrorist.

He was followed as he took a bus to Brixton tube, which was closed, then onto Stockwell station and was allowed to enter the tube station.

Confused and rushed operation

If he was a suspected terrorist, why was he not stopped in the street before he could endanger anyone on the transport network? Why was he allowed to enter the tube? Why did the operation continue despite the fact that he was not positively identified by any surveillance officers.

In a feature that Pope wrote in The Observer recently, his anger shone through over how this disaster was handled. He describes the surveillance operation as confused and rushed, and is dismayed by the response of Cressida Dick, the officer in charge of it, who was later promoted to become Met Commissioner.

At the inquest she refused to say any mistakes had been made.

While London’s police and security services were on high alert at this time (the bombers were all still on the loose), the Met’s disinformation after the shooting was unforgivable.

It was suggested de Menezes was wearing bulky clothing that could have hidden a bomb (he was wearing a denim jacket), that he had behaved suspiciously, that when he was challenged he refused to obey.

An undercover officer was even sent to check up on a public meeting of the Justice for Jean campaign. This was a tactic used against the family of murder victim Stephen Lawrence, and others, too.

You have to wonder what the authorities hope to achieve by spying on victims. Dirt with which to smear them?

In his Observer article, Pope, who won a Bafta for his drama about the Moors Murders, See No Evil, writes, ‘The point of this drama is to tell the truth. To dispel the myths about what happened that day, and afterwards.’

A starry cast – Daniel Mays, Russell Tovey, Max Beesley, Emily Mortimer, Alex Jennings – along with the controversial subject matter are likely to create a lot of focus on this drama.

The Met hierarchy will no doubt be hoping its impact will be somewhere short of last year’s fact-based agenda-setting drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is available on Disney+ from 30 April

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He needed some liquid soap for the dispenser in the men’s toilet and went outside to a shed to fetch it. His firm’s building was alongside a railway embankment, and he often checked down the side of it for discarded cast-off property that he sometimes found a use for.

On this day he found something out of the ordinary. ‘I first noticed a pair of feet and I could see them up to the ankles,’ he later told detectives. ‘My first reaction was that I was looking at a dummy.’

Nobody would take his claim that there was a body outside seriously until the production manager told everyone not to touch anything. Acton police were called.

Bridget ‘Bridie’ O’Hara, 27, had last been seen on a night out in Shepherd’s Bush over a month previously. Bridie was a sex worker, the last of six murdered by a kerb-crawling serial killer on the streets of west London between 1964 and early 1965.

The victims were Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Frances Brown and Bridie O’Hara.

All were sex workers whose clients were often kerb-crawlers. They were petite, around 5’1”. The killer’s preferred MO was asphyxiation, after which he would remove all the victims’ clothing and belongings that he could, even dentures, presumably to avoid leaving forensic clues behind.

Hundreds of police hunt the serial killer

The killing spree prompted a huge response from Scotland Yard. Hundreds of uniformed and detective officers were drawn into the manhunt that dragged on for months.

Chief Superintendent John du Rose was called in to take charge after Bridie O’Hara was discovered. At his command were some 200 CID officers and another 100 men and women in uniform.

Du Rose also requested a further 300 officers from the newly formed Special Patrol Group. He got them.

Police observation points were set up around a 24-square-mile area of west London to monitor drivers going into the Hammersmith/Shepherd’s Bush area. Drivers spotted doing so three times were visited by detectives.

Officers were instructed to spend time in pubs, cafes and clubs from Soho to Shepherd’s Bush. Here the job was to mingle with prostitutes and punters, sifting for leads on suspicious characters.

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Women police constables dressed as sex workers and loitered on the streets around Queensway, Kensington High Street and Shepherd’s Bush, recording on hidden tape machines conversations they had with cruising men.

Around 300,000 vehicles were logged by the police observation posts, 1,700 drivers spoken to, including kerb-crawling doctors, clergymen, company directors and lawyers.

Thousands of people were interviewed, statements taken. Officers bought new cars with the overtime earned.

And yet despite the monumental amount of legwork and records generated, du Rose and his team never really had one good suspect to pursue linked by forensics or witnesses.

Little sympathy for the victims

I spent many months researching this case for my 2017 book The Hunt for the 60s Ripper.

Reading newspaper coverage of the case at the British Library for many hours, what struck me was that for all the volume of effort that went into the investigation, there was hardly any sympathy in the press for the victims.

This was reflected by the speed with which du Rose and the Scotland Yard hierarchy wound down the investigation once the murders stopped.

It was true that the probe had put a strain on Metropolitan Police resources. But du Rose rather dishonestly claimed that he had known who the culprit was all along, but that this man – a drunk who was never really a compelling suspect at all – had committed suicide and could not be brought to justice.

Du Rose’s dishonest claim was not only an attempt to shut down speculation about the spectacular failure of his investigation and restore the gloss to his reputation as a top detective, but it was also a cruel disservice to the families of the victims.

Will the killer ever be unmasked?

I’ve written elsewhere on Substack about why the huge manhunt came to nothing.

However, as we pass the 60th anniversary of Bridie O’Hara being found, speculation continues about the identity of the man who cruelly ended so many lives. If he was in his twenties at the time, he could still be alive today.

My own feeling is that because du Rose and his colleagues were so quick to wash their hands of the case and there was so little public/media pressure to find this killer of these disreputable women, we will never know now. When the headlines ceased so did public interest in the case.

There is little likelihood that any new evidence will emerge, though I did report on one intriguing development in the case last year.

The BBC TV documentary sparked by my book, and which I appeared on, Dark Son: Hunt for a Serial Killer, suggested strongly that convicted killer and rapist Harold Jones was the culprit.

I point out in The Hunt for the 60s Ripper that Jones, who died in 1971 from cancer, had lived within a couple of streets of Bridie O’Hara and Frances Brown in Hammersmith, and that this was a hotspot identified by a leading geographic profiler I consulted, Kim Rossmo, as being one the police should have focused on.

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Jones certainly had psychopathic tendencies, having served 20 years for attacking and killing two girls when he was a 15 year old growing up in Abertillery, Wales.

It was clearly a huge missed opportunity that detectives did not spot Jones at the time. He had been using aliases while living in London – Harry Stevens, Harry Jones – and was certainly a conniving, calculating man.

But had the investigation been more focused, as a modern one would, and not sidetracked by what one detective described to me as a ‘huge wall of administrative shite’, they may have been able to spend more time checking out the past lives of people such as Harold Jones.

Jones should have been a prime suspect and was a stronger suspect than anyone else looked at by detectives. He worked on the Heron Trading Estate where O’Hara was found and where some of the bodies had been kept.

There was strong witness evidence that the killer deposited the victims while driving a grey Hillman Husky-type van. Did Jones drive? Did he own such a van?

These are questions a researcher like myself cannot answer because we don’t have access to the driving records of the time. However, they would have been simple questions for detectives at the time to resolve.

From what I have seen, there is no indication that police even spoke to Jones at all.

But if Jones had access to such a van, he would have been heading to custody at Shepherd’s Bush nick at the speed of James Bond’s Aston Martin.

It is now some seven years since I wrote The Hunt for the 60s Ripper, but the secret of who was behind these appalling crimes keeps the questions and interest alive.

I will be recording an interview with a podcast show in Ireland next week. Of which, more later…

• Mail online feature on the 60th anniversary of the ca

How does a factory worker get away with a devastating series of sexual attacks for 30 years?

In an area with a relatively low population?

Would he have to be a criminal mastermind, with a fiendish ability to outwit all the agencies of law enforcement? Would he need to have extraordinary luck to evade the best minds in the police time and again? And again?

No, it turns out he would only need toxic levels of indifference from the local cops and politicians to wreck the lives of many local women with near impunity.

I’ve just watched a powerful, engrossing French drama on BBC iPlayer (in the UK) – Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime. It’s a fictionalised depiction of a scandalous one-man crime spree that took place between 1988 and 2018.

A predator in plain sight

More than 50 women and minors were sexually assaulted by one man during these years. He was not a sinister recluse living along, but a well-known and garrulous member of the community.

He was a buddy of local police officers, he coached the kids’ football team.

This six-part drama is sombre, each episode telling the story of one crucial figure in the unfolding tragedy – a victim, judge, mayor, scientist, detective and, finally, the perpetrator.

Here he is Enzo Salina, a fictionalised version of real attacker Dino Scala, convicted in 2022 for multiple sexual assaults.

Many factors have been attributed to explaining the catastrophic failure to catch Scala – lack of coordination between jurisdictions along the Sambre river in northern France and Belgium, where he operated; blindness of police in recognising patterns in the attacks and failure to link them; delays in utilising DNA evidence; unwillingness to believe witness testimony from victims.

But the drama focuses very much on the institutional indifference to taking the crimes seriously.

A victim is asked if she actually wants to report her attack

In episode one, a senior cop explains to a new recruit that their sleepy town is a cushy job for police, with just the odd barroom brawl to sort out. When victims turn up to report their ordeal at the hands of the rapist, the cops struggle to even go through the motions of recording the crime properly.

They downgrade the report of the first victim we see, Christine, to ‘attempted robbery with assault’.

The cops want to keep paperwork to a minimum, they are insensitive, make jokes. One victim is asked if she actually wants to make a report, as if she just popped into the station to chat about the pain and humiliation she’s suffered with a bunch of strangers. ‘Are you serious?’ she asks.

A politician says you never know who to believe when dealing with such cases. Best leave it alone.

A female mayor, on discovering that police have never alerted locals to the ongoing wave of sexual attacks taking place, is horrified and says it is her duty to warn her constituents.

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The police resist this, claiming it might jeopardise their ‘investigation’. Her brilliant response is, You just said you have no leads, so there is nothing to jeopardise.

We never lose sight of the victims in this series, whose struggles to cope with what has happened to them is recounted down the decades.

Perhaps the most devastating episode concerns the scientist, or geographic profiler. She actually builds a convincing profile of the rapist and his likely whereabouts – one that challenges the official inaccurate presumptions.

But ultimately, it is the dead hand of bureaucracy that once again buries this valuable intel and effectively assists the rapist.

If you can find Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime on a streaming platform near you, I would recommend it. It may make you want to scream at the TV, but it is also a powerful tribute to the humanity of the women depicted.

It also makes a strong case for police accountability in their communities.

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Cooper, through ruthless, deviousness and lucky, had evaded detection despite multiple burglaries, robberies, murders and sexual attacks over more than a decade. However, his good fortune was about to expire – at least as far as his burglaries were concerned. A woman called Sheila Clarke was watching the telly in her bungalow in Sardis, near Milford Haven, on a winter night in 1996. This was a few months after the five youngsters had been ambushed by the man in a balaclava. Now, it was Sheila Clarke who was confronted by the balaclava man, brandishing a sawn-off shotgun.

“Money,^⁠ I want money,” he shouted.

He battered her with the gun’s butt, hitting her head and body. He tied her up. He began searching for jewellery. Sheila was expecting her husband to return home soon. The terrifying possibility of another double murder was averted when Sheila managed to hit the panic button on her home burglar alarm system. The intruder fled. A neighbour tried to intervene, but the gunman threatened him and set off over the fields.

For once, the police got a lucky break. In the hedgerows of surrounding fields they found items dumped by the retreating attacker, including a rope, fleece, balaclava, gloves and a double-barrelled shotgun. A home-invader’s attack kit.

Operation Huntsman was launched to investigate the burglaries, and it closed in on a suspect who would be found to have possessions that had been stolen in a number of past home raids. The suspect was John Cooper. During house-to-house inquiries, he had been obstructive and refused to give a DNA sample. However, two years before, a police dog handler had traced a scent from a burglary at Castle Hill Crescent to a field opposite Cooper’s home in the parish of Jordanston.

The Huntsman team were suspicious of the aggressive Cooper and, after months of further investigation, he was arrested. As he was led in for trial, he shouted to journalists that he had been “fitted up”. The jury did not fall for it, and he was finally given a 16-year sentence in 1998, after being found guilty of 30 burglaries and an armed robbery. At this point, in terms of evidence, Cooper still remained unconnected with the murders of the Thomases and Dixons, and the assault on the five youngsters. Though he had been questioned about the murders, he admitted nothing, and for now the police had no positive leads linking him to the killings.

In 2005 Detective Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins recommended a forensic review of Pembrokeshire’s unsolved historic cases of 1985 and 1989. Wilkins was born in Liverpool in 1959. The Cooper investigation would become the biggest case of his career. A concern for him and his team at this time was that John Cooper could be released from prison in the near future. If he was the murderer they were seeking, as had been suspected, it was likely that he would kill again. Since Cooper had been in prison, the robberies in the vicinity had ceased. The two double murders had featured elements of Cooper’s mode of offending: shotguns and robbery. Wilkins’ trepidation as Cooper came up for parole was understandable.

Operation Ottawa

Operation Ottawa was launched in January 2006, initially to scrutinise the forensic evidence from the past offences. If a case against Cooper could be mounted, it would likely be based on forensics. What was thought to be a six-month operation ended up lasting six years.

The Ottawa team built a detailed picture of the series of burglaries that had hit the Milford Haven area over more than a decade. In excess of 60 burglaries had been committed with a similar modus operandi, or plan of action. This pattern suggested a single offender who refined his strategy. There were also four robberies, starting in 1985, the year of the attack on the Thomases at Scoveston Park, and culminating in the break-in at Sheila Clarke’s bungalow in 1996. Scoveston Park was the first to involve a gun. The attacks were always on lone women in isolated properties. After Scoveston Park the attacker always used a shotgun.

It was the geography of the burglaries that had originally put Cooper in the frame as a suspect and ended in his imprisonment for them. Wire fences that had been cut, and the direction in which tracker dogs had followed the intruder’s escape routes had revealed that Cooper lived at the epicentre of the crime wave in Jordanston. Officers from Operation Huntsman had arrested him and found 3,800 items of property and evidence in and outside Cooper’s home, such as ropes, jewellery, 500 keys taken from properties, and ammunition. A sawn-off shotgun was among the items.

The evidence gathered from Huntsman now became the focus of Operation Ottawa. Wilkins pulled in the help of a private company, LGC Forensics. Professor Angela Gallop was its director of science and innovation.

The police originally wanted Gallop’s team to restrict themselves to looking for DNA. While DNA traces were found, there was not enough to, as Prof Gallop put it, “get your teeth into”.

Eventually, after many months, the detectives lost patience with her scientists and threatened to give the case to another forensic provider. Prof Gallop responded to detective criticism in something of a showdown meeting with them in Fishguard, where Operation Ottawa was based in an empty suite of rooms belonging to the Port Office. She told officers her team had put in something of a straitjacket with the police insistence that the scientists only look for DNA evidence.

She recalled, “And he [Wilkins] rather reluctantly agreed, and he said, ‘All right, you can look for textile fibres, whatever it is you want to look for.’”

Evidence mounts against Cooper

The scientists started scrutinising old gloves that Cooper had hidden in hedgerows near his home. When people come into contact with each other, it is likely that clothing fibres will be exchanged. This was the kind of evidence Prof Gallop’s team were looking for.

She said, “Almost immediately we started finding matching fibres, particularly with one marvellous tatty old glove, whose exhibit number was BB109. BB109 was something special, but we found fibres to link the Dixons with this glove that was found in the hedgerows.

“That started a whole series of fibre findings, which ended up with a myriad of fibres that connected the Dixons with the stuff in the hedgerow, and also provided connections with the sexual assaults at Milford Haven and even the body of Richard Thomas in Scoveston, which was extraordinary.”

Then came a major breakthrough. The irony was that while examining fibres they found traces of blood, which meant potential DNA evidence they had failed to find earlier.

Prof Gallop said, “We were interested in a pair of shorts that had been recovered from his [Cooper’s] old house some years beforehand [during Operation Huntsman]. We didn’t have an awful lot of clothing from him to look at. But this pair of shorts interested us, and we were looking for textile fibres on them, which we found. We were looking on this sticky tape strip, which is how we recover surface debris like textile fibres from things like clothing. And we saw a tiny flake or two of what looked like blood. We tested it – I mean, it’s microscopic – and it did indeed appear to be blood. And we DNA-profiled that and that looked like it matched Peter Dixon.

“I remember ringing Steve Wilkins,” Prof Gallop said. “I got him on the phone and he was driving, and I said , ‘I think you’d better pull in, because I’ve got some news for you.’”

When she told him the news, Wilkins simply said, “Angela, I love you.”

After three years of meticulous hard work, here was a forensic hit. The scientists moved on to the shotgun. Found near Cooper’s home in a hedge, it was connected to him by a screw discovered in his house that fitted it. Prof Gallop’s team noticed that the barrel had been painted black and that the paint was flaking.

Under that paint, blood was found, which had obviously got on there before the barrels had been painted black. When those blood samples were profiled they provided another DNA match with Peter Dixon.

Prof Gallop’s team found other DNA fragments on the shorts, amounting to quite a lot of evidence indicating that it was John Cooper who had been wearing the shorts.

The gloves, the shotgun, even the shavings from Cooper’s shed floor, were all providing traces linking him to the murders. But there were still further questions about the shorts. The laboratory team noticed that the hem had been taken up and whoever stitched it had done a professional job. It was also known that Cooper’s wife had worked as a seamstress. They unpicked the hem, and a small stain was found inside. The DNA of this sample was tested and it was found to belong to Julie, daughter of the Dixons. While this at first was thought to be unhelpful to the case against Cooper, it was then remembered that the contents of the Dixons’ rucksack had been thrown around the crime scene near the coastal path. This suggested Cooper may have got blood on himself firing five times at the Dixons, and helped himself to a fresh pair of shorts, which had previously been in contact with Julie.

It was the forensic work that made the lawyers really pay attention to the possibilities of getting a conviction. Gerard Elias QC was the barrister brought in to assess the evidence for the Crown Prosecution Service. He was a big man, quietly spoken but confident, distinguished-looking with a wealth of silver-grey hair. He found that what initially looked like a decent circumstantial case was transformed by the forensic work. In addition to the shorts and shotgun forensic evidence, traces of foliage and fibres from Cooper’s gloves further linked him to the murder of the Dixons as well as the Milford Haven attack on the teenagers.

The case against Cooper included his proximity to the crimes – his home was within an easy distance of Scoveston and the coastal walk. He was known to walk and cycle around the area, and he had been convicted for burgling properties throughout.

Cooper’s hubris betrays him

And there was a witness. This is where Cooper’s hubris in appearing on Bullseye finally betrayed him (see part 1). The police had the “wild man” identikit description given by the witness passing the Haverfordwest cashpoint. Ottawa’s officers needed to confirm what Cooper looked like back in 1989 around the time of the coastal path murders. During their inquiries they had heard about his Bullseye appearance, which had been recorded a few weeks before the coastal path attack. After a lot of digging and some luck, ITV had located the recording from 20 years before. One still angle of Cooper on the show bore a striking similarity to the “wild man” with collar-length hair, moustache and shorts.

Like the police, prosecutor Gerard Elias was struck by Cooper’s recklessness in appearing on television in front of millions of viewers. “An extraordinary performance, in my view, for a man who was at that stage committing the sort of crimes that he was, let alone the murders that were to come. And, of course, he had already killed the Thomases, unbeknownst then to anybody.”

Having served 10 years of his 16-year sentence for burglary and robbery, Cooper was paroled and returned home in December 2008. As if the horror of this man’s life had no end of harrowing twists already, there then occurred yet another unexpected death. On the very first day of John Cooper’s return to the family home, Pat Cooper, his wife, had had an evening meal with him, gone to bed and died. The post-mortem revealed she had three heart conditions that could have caused her death. As Det Ch Supt Wilkins said later, “My personal view, not in any medical books, is that Pat Cooper gave up and could not face living with this man again.” She clearly dreaded the possibility of returning to the life of physical and mental abuse she had suffered with Cooper.

It was less than a month after the forensic breakthroughs in April 2009^⁠ that Cooper was arrested for the two double murders and assault on the five teenagers on 13 May. Gerard Elias appeared for the prosecution in Cooper’s trial, which finally began at Swansea Crown Court on 21 March 2011. Elias would later describe the accused’s effect on the courtroom: “I think he came across as cold and calculating. He was a man who from time to time would shout out to correct a witness or to correct a proposition that maybe I was making to the jury. He wanted to give the impression that it was all rubbish and we shouldn’t be listened to at all.

“Then he gave evidence himself. He sought to build up a picture here that he was a family man living a normal life, present at the wedding of his daughter, where he’d given her away and so on.” But later under cross-examination, Cooper would be forced to admit several times that he was a liar.

“The stares that he would give,” Elias continued, “the stares he gave me when I was cross-examining him were there for the jury to see. I don’t think it did him any good. It was a man who I think didn’t believe that he could be stopped, that he could be convicted – but ultimately, of course, he was.”

Evidence at trial

The mountain of painstaking police and forensic work was distilled by the prosecution to demonstrate to the jury how Cooper carried out his crimes. Their case was that Cooper had gained access to Scoveston Park in the belief that Helen Thomas was alone. He tied her up and left her in an upstairs bedroom, when Richard Thomas returned home in his car. Richard was attacked and killed in an outbuilding and dragged into the main house. Cooper had done labouring work at Scoveston Park years before, so was almost certainly known to the Thomases. Helen may even had recognised his voice if he had been wearing a mask. Cooper had then used an accelerant, probably diesel, found on the property, to set ablaze the main building containing the bodies.

Regarding the Dixons, the prosecution said that Cooper, armed with a shotgun, had confronted the couple during their walk. He took them to a secluded spot around 15 yards from the path, where he forced Peter Dixon to give him his PIN number and sexually assaulted Gwenda. He killed the couple with multiple shotgun blasts and searched their belongings. He then covered the bodies with foliage and branches.

Investigators had also uncovered a fibre link between the rape and indecent assault during the Milford Haven attack and the gloves Cooper threw away fleeing from the Sardis burglary on Sheila Clarke’s bungalow.

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On 26 May, Cooper was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was 66 years old.

Outside Swansea Crown Court, the victims’ families paid tribute to their lost loved ones. Richard and Helen Thomas’s family said they were devastated by the murders and had been plagued for years over why the Thomases had been attacked. The brother and sister had been much loved by their extended family, who had “missed out on their involvement and kindness”.

Julie Ann Pratley, Gwenda and Peter Dixon’s daughter, said her parents were irreplaceable and “had wisdom, humour and were compassionate”.

Chief Superintendent Steve Wilkins said Cooper was a “very dangerous and evil man”.

He stole to support his gambling addiction. He was also a psychopath, sadistic in his desire to control and terrorise those around him.

Two chilling facts about Cooper remain. First, we may never know the full extent of his crimes.

Second, after his arrest in May 2009 for the double murders and the attack on the teenagers, police searched Cooper’s car. In the boot they found^⁠ rope and a pair of woollen gloves. Officers also discovered that he had ordered an Ordnance Survey Map of South Pembrokeshire. It would appear John Cooper had been planning a new wave of horror across the estuary.

• I originally covered this case in Murder by the Sea

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In an episode recorded on 28 May 1989, a Welshman called John Cooper appeared on it. With a mullet hairstyle and moustache of the kind popular with footballers at the time, Cooper spoke quietly to the host, comedian Jim Bowen.

This appearance on primetime television would later astonish detectives of the Dyfed-Powys force in Wales. Bullseye, with its jaunty theme tune and light-hearted gags, was an incongruous setting in which to find Cooper. He was not a jaunty, light-hearted kind of guy. He was sadist, violent robber and murderer of a defenceless brother and sister who lived locally to him.

Within weeks of recording Bullseye, Cooper would commit another horrendous double murder, and later traumatise a group of teenagers, raping one young woman and assaulting another. Jim Bowen and ITV would have been aghast to know the truth about the man they were welcoming on to this family show.

Cooper was an arrogant risk-taker, a gambler, and clearly thought he was too smart to be caught by police. However, if he was expecting to be a big success on Bullseye with plenty to crow about down the pub later, he was to be disappointed. He was a flop in the quiz section of the game, shown up by a female contestant next to him who was faster on the buzzer and knew the correct answers. He cracked a smile, but inside he would have seethed at being beaten by a woman.

Reckless, violent, burglar

John William Cooper was born in Milford Haven on 3 September 1944. He left school at the age of 15 and married his late wife, Patricia, in 1966, the couple having two children, a boy and a girl. He trained in upholstery and carpentry, worked as a farm labourer and in the building trade.

It was in 1978 while working as a welder’s mate on the Gulf Oil Refinery at Milford Haven that Cooper hit the jackpot. He won £90,000 (approximately £530,000 today) in a newspaper spot-the-ball competition, along with an Austin Princess car worth £4,000 (£23,000 today). He was rich, the win having changed his life.

Unfortunately for Cooper’s family, he was too reckless to enjoy the benefits of this windfall for long. He lost money on a series of house moves and through gambling. Within a couple of years he had frittered his winnings away.

He also had a history of lawbreaking and was a violent man. Police think that by 1983 he had started burgling homes. He was a prodigious housebreaker and would eventually be convicted of 30 break-ins, but he was linked to many more. He fancied himself as an outdoorsman and survivalist, keeping a copy of the SAS handbook. As a keen fisherman and local of the area around Milford Haven, set in the beautiful Pembrokeshire coastal area, he had intimate knowledge of the pathways and fields nearby. He would roam the fields at night, watching houses, planning which to attack.

Cooper was not what might once have been called a cat burglar, slipping in and out of properties. He took a shotgun with him and was not put off by encountering the residents. In one incident, he kicked and tied up the homeowners, and kept returning to them to hit them with the butt of his gun.

From burglar to murderer

Three days before Christmas in 1985, Cooper targeted a manor house three miles
outside Milford Haven. Scoveston Park^⁠ was the Georgian home of wealthy siblings Richard and Helen Thomas.

At around 11pm, flames were seen coming from the direction of the house. By the time emergency crews arrived it was obvious that if anyone was inside the building, they would not have survived the inferno. A strong smell of petrol was noticed by the firefighters. Just after midnight the body of Richard Thomas was recovered from the burnt-out property. A wound was evident on the right side of his abdomen. An x-ray showed that it contained lead shot. Scoveston Park was now a murder scene.

The building’s wooden floors had burned through and collapsed, but Helen Thomas’s body was eventually found on the ground floor. X-rays revealed that she had also been shot, lead particles being found in what remained of the bottom of her skull.

The deaths were shocking because they were so out of character for this quiet area. Richard, aged 58, owned a lot of land and had followed his father into farming. Both he and his sister, who was 54, were rather reserved. Though they were wealthy, the idea that they had been targeted by a violent gang just seemed too alien in this part of the world.

The post-mortems revealed that Helen’s body was tied with black rope, and around her neck was a bloodstained shirt with sleeves knotted. It seemed to investigators that she had been bound and gagged or blindfolded.

Now a burglary that got out of hand was considered. The property was thoroughly searched and no shotgun could be found, further ruling out any suspicion of suicide. Detectives realised they had a brutal double murder on their hands. Crime rates were low in North Pembrokeshire, an area of outstanding natural beauty and farming. The Scoveston Park murders had shattered the local sense of pastoral charm and safety.

An incident room was set up, and scene-of-crime officers and forensic experts sifted the debris. It soon became clear the killer had taken his shotgun and discharged cartridges away with him after setting fire to the house. Further searching advanced the detectives’ understanding of what had occurred. On Boxing Day a pool of blood and lead pellets were found in an outbuilding. It looked as though Richard had returned to the house, been confronted by the intruder and shot. His body was then moved to the house.

Because the level of violence was senseless and out of proportion to the normal pattern of a burglary, it confounded the police. It was a challenge to work out what, if anything, might have been stolen from the property. However, the value of any stolen belongings was impossible to reconcile with the appalling level of brutality and carnage inflicted here. Richard was even found to have £75 in his pocket. Had the Thomases recognised the intruder, who then felt they must be silenced with a shotgun blast?

Houses and farms in the locality were visited and residents’ movements recorded, road checks were used to question motorists, and a £25,000 reward was offered. But all detectives were left with was a theory: this was a robbery of a woman at home alone that went wrong when Richard Thomas returned home unexpectedly. The intruder lost control of the situation and killed them both.

John Cooper had got away with this brutal double murder – for several years, at least.

The murder of the Dixons

It is worth looking more closely at the kind of man Cooper was. Steve Wilkins, the detective superintendent who ended up heading the team that would eventually snare Cooper, built up detailed knowledge of his criminal activities. He said the sadistic killer started out as a peeping tom who moved on to burglary, robbery and finally murder. Wilkins believes the control he gained over victims and the disproportionate violence he used aroused him sexually. Valuables that he took would pay for his gambling habit.

It was four years after he murdered the Thomases – and just four weeks since his Bullseye appearance – that Cooper’s rage erupted into homicide again. The crime was discovered after Tim Dixon and his sister, Julie, visited their parents’ home in Oxfordshire on 3 July 1989 and found their mum and dad had not returned from holiday.

Peter and Gwenda Dixon had been on their annual summer trip to Little Haven village on the coast in North Pembrokeshire. Tim and Julie were surprised their parents had not yet returned. Surprise turned to worry when it was learned that Peter was also absent from work. Tim called the owner of Howelston Farm Caravan Park, where the couple were staying, to ask about them. It was learned that they had last been seen several days before, on 29 June, their last day booked at the site. Police were alerted. Search teams, dog handlers and a helicopter scoured the coast.

Finally, on 5 July, a police dog handler saw swarms of flies and a strong smell coming from near the cliff edge, below the path between Little Haven and Borough Head. The decomposing bodies of Peter, aged 51, and Gwenda, 52, were found in undergrowth.

Detective Chief Superintendent Don Evans,^⁠ who had also worked on the Scoveston Park investigation, recalled the moment the Dixons were found: “I heard, ‘Boss, boss, come quickly.’ My heart jumped and I ran along the coastal path to the dog handlers. There I saw this horrible scene. Peter and Gwenda Dixon – Peter shot, tied, and his dear lady, partly unclothed. Shot. The most horrific sight you’ve ever seen.”

It would become clear that Peter and Gwenda had each been shot with a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun. Peter had three gunshot wounds, including one to the head, and Gwenda two. Cooper would have reloaded the weapon twice during this cold-blooded annihilation. He had, once again, been careful to collect all the spent cartridges. Gwenda had also been sexually assaulted. The couple’s belongings and the contents of their rucksack had been thrown around the scene. Peter’s wallet was missing, as was his gold wedding ring.

The calculations of an entomologist, who examined the insects on the bodies, along with the account of a witness who had heard five shots fired while walking on the beach below, indicated that the Dixons had been killed on the morning of 29 June.

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The investigation got a lead when Peter Dixon’s stolen cash card was used on four occasions following the murders. In a series of cashpoint withdrawals in Pembroke, Carmarthen and Haverfordwest, a total of £310 was withdrawn. Either Cooper had found the PIN number on a piece of paper, or he had forced Peter Dixon to reveal it.

It is difficult not to feel appalled and dismayed that Cooper had inflicted unspeakable trauma and injuries on two unassuming holidaymakers for the sake of a sexual assault, a gold ring and £310. One of the victims had been forced to witness the murder of the other, knowing they would be next.

Cooper’s senseless brutality had subverted the peace and security enjoyed by local residents and visitors to this idyllic stretch of coast. It was now a place of trepidation and fear, where people were wary of strangers and made sure to lock their doors.

He would not be arrested for the two double murders for another 20 years, but Cooper had already made mistakes that would help to incriminate him. For example, he had been spotted by a motorist as he used Peter Dixon’s cash card in Haverfordwest. He was described as being five feet ten inches tall, late thirties to early forties, collar-length hair, unshaven with a moustache, wearing ankle boots and khaki-brown shorts. An artist’s impression of the ‘wild man’ was produced and shown on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme, which later would help to incriminate Cooper.

Cooper’s reign of brutality continues

Unfortunately, Cooper was able to rampage and devastate the lives of more innocent victims. On 6 March 1996, five youngsters aged 14 to 16, were in fields near the Mount council estate on the edge of Milford Haven. The three girls and two boys were stopped by someone shining a bright light at them across a field. They thought it might be a friend. Then they realised the man closing in on them was wearing a balaclava and carrying a shotgun. He ordered them to lie on their stomachs. He raped a 16-year-old girl and assaulted a second girl, aged 15. The man demanded to know if they had money. He told them not to reveal to anyone what he had done or he would kill them. The youngsters hurried away and on reaching the home of one of the girls, they telephoned the police.

If a masked predator with a shotgun, intent on murder and sexual abuse, could roam the spaces around Milford Haven, no one was safe. Police, well aware that the area was plagued by a wave of burglaries and robberies of lone women, in addition to the two unsolved double murders, interviewed suspects and checked leads, but again the investigation lost momentum. Scoveston Park and the coastal path murders remained painful, ongoing wounds for police and the community during these years.

The investigation continues: The Pembrokeshire murders part 2

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Women don’t commit anything like as many crimes as men, their exploits rarely being depicted in TV dramas. Many are serving short spells, often on remand.

The story of Joan Hannington is clearly out of the ordinary, however, and it is easy to see why it has been dramatised by ITV.

The channel’s six-parter, Joan, starring Sophie Turner, started this week and has attracted a lot of media attention.

Like many women who end up in prison, Hannington had a tough upbringing. Money was tight in her family of six siblings in Acton, west London. Her father was brutal with his fists and sadistic in his control of the household.

Reading her memoir, I Am What I Am, you feel that the bleakness of her home and school life was such that it was either going to crush her or forge a resourceful personality with attitude. Hannington came out of it with attitude.

In her memoir, she relates how she dropped out of school at 13 after a particularly fearsome beating from dad. She married her first husband, a convicted armed robber, at 17. Seven months later, she gave birth to her daughter, Debbie.

When Debbie was four, Hannington’s husband was in jail, and in a desperate moment she asked social services to place her girl in foster care. Desperate to reconnect with her daughter, Hannington stole a car to visit her but was caught by the police.

In the 1980s, she landed a job in a London jeweller’s. Having learnt a lot about gems, and in a bid to prove herself stable and solvent enough to get her daughter back from social services, she leaves that job and takes her first steps to becoming a master jewel thief. Over the years, she became so skilled that she apparently stole millions of pounds worth of assets.

I Am What I Am gives a flavour of the real Joan. She describes working alone and how pinching diamonds became ‘my life, my buzz, my drug’.

‘I couldn’t read or write properly, but I could be skint one minute and 50 grand richer the next.’

She would pilfer rings and loose stones, and her MO was simple but sharp. She would go to Bond Street, eye up a diamond ring worth tens of thousands of pounds, and then get an imitation of it made in Hatton Garden, with a glass stone as stand-in for the diamond.

She would turn up at the jewellery shop, all furs, cleavage and New York accent. She would flirt with the shop assistant – ‘he was never sure whether he wanted to sell me the ring or fuck me’ – swap rings and swallow the real one. Pulling a theft like this, she says, was ‘better than sex’.

While she loved dressing up to pull her scams – fur coats, wigs, fake tans – once the job was done she was back in Doc Martens, football shirt and baseball cap. No flash.

‘We were supposed to stay home and make babies or cook nice dinners,’ she writes. ‘Well, not Joan Harrington. I tried that and the system fucked me. Now I was fucking the lot of them…’

For me, her story has added colour because she ended up living on my manor, so to speak. She stayed on Upper Street, Islington, for a while. Then she turned up on Mildmay Grove, near Dalston, before landing a council flat on Tufnell Park Road.

And what a brilliant cover her modest flat was. While living there and dressing casually like everyone else in this area off Holloway Road, she says she had £800,000 worth of stolen diamonds buried in a tin near the walls of Wormword Scrubs.

You have to go back to 1983 and Lynda La Plante’s Widows, also on ITV (remade as a movie by director Steve McQueen in 2016), for one of the first portrayals of women going over to the criminal side on TV.

According to professor of television studies Milly Buonanno, who wrote a book entitled Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama, the depiction of women on the wrong side of the law really gathered pace in the 1990s.

It was then, she argued, that ‘the rule of male prominence and power [was] challenged by a wave of anti-heroines who have made inroads into the criminal underworlds and have provided evidence of women’s capacity to be “good at being bad” against the myth of female innocence’.

Again La Plante was ahead of the game with her creation Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) in Prime Suspect. This was followed by the likes of Alice (Ruth Wilson) in Luther and Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in Killing Eve.

Joan was certainly good at being a thief and shrewd enough to avoid the pitfalls of crime beloved by her male counterparts. She worked alone, kept her mouth shut, no guns, no vendettas, no drama, no lavish living.

As for the TV series? It tells an engrossing story of survival and I gulped down the first three episodes in one sitting.

Sophie Turner must be delighted to have left behind the dragons and X-Men for now. She emits star wattage as the chameleon, vulnerable Joan, switching accents and disguises, fronting up to disdainful men.

She is reckless and impulsive. But there is something powerful about a person with little education from an abusive background who has the will to fight back for a life with her daughter.

As Hannington writes in her book: ‘To me, the world was my stage and I played my roles to perfection. I never got the Oscar – I got the diamond instead. Every time and with no regrets.’

Viewers in the UK can watch Joan here

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Journalists and academics will mount their high horses and blast the popular interest in non-fiction books, TV and podcasts about crime.

Headlines such as The human cost of binge-watching true crime series, Why are we obsessed with true crime? Is the obsession with true crime turning nasty? and We must kill off our true crime obsession bombard us.

What they are often attacking is the indefensible – TV productions that disregard the feelings of a victim’s family, the glorification of killers, the prurient depiction of victims. This is what I think of as the Chamber of Horrors approach to real-life cases.

In my view, however, such squalid output is the exception. I’ve read some ugly true-crime books myself and know well how offensive merchants of this stuff can be.

London’s CrimeCon

At CrimeCon in London last weekend I saw what serious, conscientious true-crime producers offer. Thought-provoking and empathetic insights into crime, how and why it occurs, what we can sometimes do about it.

A genuinely moving panel concerned the case of Joanna Simpson, who was murdered by her BA pilot husband Robert Brown in front of their children in 2010.

Speaking was Joanna’s mother, Diana Parkes, and her best friend, Hetti Barkworth-Nanton.

By my estimation there were about 200 people, mostly women, crammed into the conference room to hear these two speak about their remarkable campaign to stop Brown’s automatic release from prison, having served 13 of his 26-year sentence.

Together with Laura Richards, whose Crime Analyst podcast did so much to promote their campaign, they described their battle with authorities to ensure he remained locked up.

It was hard not to agree with their description of his trial as a ‘miscarriage of justice’ in the first place. He was – mind-boggingly – convicted of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility rather than murder.

This was despite the fact that he had already dug a grave for her and had clearly planned the killing, which he committed with a hammer within earshot of the couple’s two children, just a week before their divorce would be finalised.

Jo’s mother, now in her mid-80s, and Hetti gave a remarkable, inspirational talk that highlighted appalling shortcomings in the justice system. Not least among their dismay was the way in which the case had been turned into a trial of victim Joanna.

Coercive control, entrapment

The audience listened intently as the warning signs of a relationship that could turn violent were outlined – coercive control, entrapment in a deteriorating marriage, manipulation, threats.

A powerful case was made for the rights of victims and their children, family and friends.

A clarion call was made at the end of the session: We Should Not Have to Fight So Hard for Women and Children to Be Protected.

I had read about this case and remember being bemused by the verdict. But sitting in on this 45 minute session left me mute in admiration for those fighting this campaign and shock at the cruelty and unfairness of the system.

There was nothing crass or exploitative about this or any other panel that I saw at this year’s CrimeCon. The sessions were sober and thought-provoking, the atmosphere positive, and overall the mood was constructive, particularly in featuring event partners such as Inside Justice, a charity investigating claims of miscarriages of justice.

Laura Richards, the podcaster and a former New Scotland Yard criminal behavioural analyst, made a strong point when she said, and I paraphrase, that we have to bear witness if we are going to make changes highlighted by cases such as Joanna Simpson’s.

Not all true crime is focused on such campaigning, of course. But the quality books, programmes and podcasts out there give a chance to confront and gain some understanding and insight into the dark side in society.

Details of London CrimeCon 2025

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What starts as a rather mundane police inquiry balloons into an international investigation that unfolds a sequence of family torment and murder. It is chilling, shocking and an object lesson in the harm one emotionally cold manipulator can wreak.

A tightly bound package is found by a block of flats in Beddau (pronounced be-tha, population around 7,000) in Wales. A couple of residents poke and prod it and are disturbed by the contents.

Amid some mucky sludge inside is a skeleton. Is it real, or a medical model? Is this rubbish, or has a crime been committed?

It turns out to be real. But who is it? Who put it there? Is this a murder victim?

It’s a headache for DCI Gareth Morgan. And what could it have to do with Anne ‘Lee’ Sabine, a rather over-the-top woman who recently died of a brain tumour and had been living in the flats?

Sabine was all big hair, fishnets, tall stories and phoney accent. Those who got to know her tolerated her eccentricities, though this indulgence of the colourful neighbour had likely turned to revulsion by the time DCI Morgan’s team unpicked this disturbing, twisting case.

Lee Sabine – who was she?

Sabine has quite the backstory. While police try to identify the skeleton, we learn of Sabine’s life back in New Zealand with husband John and their five children.

The first shattering revelation is that Sabine and John abandoned those children. Three of these now adult children are interviewed by the programme makers. Their accounts are both jaw-dropping and heartrending.

Son Steve condemns Lee as ‘evil’ for abandoning him at the age of six. ‘They dropped us off somewhere and never came back to pick us up.’

That’s it so far as I’m going with the spoilers, but the three-parter is absolutely compelling as it talks those who knew or investigated Sabine, delves into her and John’s past (he went missing in 1997) and finally reveals all about the skeleton.

The Body Next Door grabs us with questions going back five decades. Anyone with a scintilla of curiosity about human nature will be intrigued and dismayed by the revelations in this series.

It is moving, never loses it moral compass for easy salaciousness and is told at pace. It’s only failure is in a rather garbled explanation early on of the events leading to the skeleton’s discovery.

The Body Next Door was discussed above on ITV’s This Morning programme. And it will feature at CrimeCon in London this Sunday (2.05pm). There will be a panel interview with the programme makers and Mary West and Lynne Williams, who both knew Sabine and are interviewed in the series.

In the UK you can watch The Body Next Door here or on Sky Documentaries or Now.

Check out CrimeCon in London here.

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The 55-year-old was the wife of Alick McKay, a deputy to newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Australian then laying the foundations of his UK press empire. The kidnappers had mistaken the victim for Anna, Murdoch’s then wife, expecting the mogul would be rich enough to pay a huge ransom.

The case was a shocking news story at the time, with many twists. These days, however, it had largely been forgotten when I was asked to talk about it, which meant I had some digging to do to research it.

However, just this year the case has sprung back to life, as the McKay family seeks to resolve the question of where Muriel McKay’s body is.

Abduction and a £1m ransom demand

The recent developments powerfully demonstrate how a case that almost 55 years ago was a passing media obsession has never ceased to be a source of pain and heartache for the family.

Mrs McKay was abducted from her home in Wimbledon, south London. The kidnappers were two Trinidadian brothers of Indian descent, Arthur and Nizamodeen Hosein.

Alick McKay arrived home from his job as acting chairman of the News of the World, the scandal sheet then owned by Murdoch, the first of his Fleet Street acquisitions. The kidnappers phoned Alick, demanding £1million.

The husband, flanked by the McKay’s adult children – Jennifer, Dianne and Ian – read out a public appeal to the kidnappers for his wife’s return.

Alick McKay apparently annoyed the police for calling the editor of The Sun, which Murdoch had bought after his purchase of the News of the World, and given the daily paper the story for a front-page splash.

After further calls and a missed rendezvous with the kidnappers, the police finally traced a dark Volvo used by the brothers to a farm they owned in Hertfordshire, 35 miles north of London.

The Hoseins were arrested and tried at the Old Bailey. They were found guilty of kidnap and murder. Arthur died in prison, while Nizamodeen was deported to Trinidad after serving 20 years.

However, Muriel McKay’s remains were never found, despite extensive searches of Rooks Farm, the Hoseins’ property. This prompted painful rumours for the McKay family that she had been fed to pigs.

Prosecution without a body

The case was unusual at the time because there had been a reluctance previously to charge suspects when no body could be found. The McKay trial was one of the first to be prosecuted when the victim had not been located.

I seem to remember that during my interview on The Real Prime Suspect , which was shown on CBS Reality (now rebranded as True Crime in the UK), I was asked about blame in this case. The implication was that the press, particularly The Sun, had not helped the police investigation.

One of the old books about it that I had found on a second-hand book site was written by two journalists at the time – Peter Deeley and Christopher Walker’s Murder in the 4th Estate: An Investigation into the Roles of the Press and Police in the McKay Case (Golancz 1971).

This book and other research led me to argue on the programme that police at the time had little experience of kidnapping investigations, such crimes never having been common in the UK. The police certainly made mistakes, despite their determination to get Mrs McKay returned safely.

Even after the ransom demand, at first suspected of being a hoax, detectives were still considering a scenario in which Mrs McKay had absconded of her own accord.

The tragedy was compounded by the bungling and callousness of the Hoseins, who did not even think to leave a ransom note, which led to much initial headscratching by police over what had actually happened in the McKay home.

On the other hand, publicity stirred up by The Sun and an early statement to the Press Association had led to police being bombarded with phone calls that had hampered the investigation.

After a 2021 Sky documentary called The Wimbledon Kidnapping, Nizamodeen Hosein started talking. He had had some king of epiphany, responded to a lawyer for the McKay family and eventually spoke to Dianne, now 84.

He claimed her mother died of a heart attack. He agreed to help the McKay family locate Muriel’s body on the farm and pointed to her whereabouts in a photo. There has been a subsequent police search, which has failed to find any remains.

McKay family battles on

However, the family believed police had been looking in the wrong spot and that the search had been too limited. Nizamodeen has offered to return to the UK to assist a search.

Here’s an ITV interview with the family this summer in which they voice their frustrations with police and their plans to press on. Muriel’s grandson, Mark Dyer, talks also of a third kidnapper called Adam, who died in 2021.

‘We haven’t had a Christmas for 54 years in this family,’ Mark says, succinctly depicting the grief ignited by this awful crime.

After the guilty verdicts at the Old Bailey, Mr McKay apparently said, ‘I wish to God I knew what happened to my wife. All I want to know is where my wife has been buried so that I can go and place some flowers.’

The ITV interview carries a police statement that the Met don’t believe bringing the surviving kidnapper to the UK will help the search, which may perhaps suggest they don’t trust him. This final chance to lay Muriel to rest after all these decades, while tantalisingly close, for the moment remains cruelly just out of reach.

• A new BBC podcast also covers the case – Worse than Murder

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Published in 2014, this is Helen Garner’s account of the trial of an Australian father accused of murdering his three sons. Father’s Day, 2005, window cleaner Robert Farquharson is driving to the home of his ex, with whom he had three boys, who were in the car. On a dark road, the car swerved off the highway and into a dam. The boys drowned while the father escaped from the water. Australia was rocked with the horror of it – but then left wondering whether this was really an accident, as the father insisted.

Several reviewers compared the book to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which, if anything, does it a slight disservice in that Capote, we now know, fictionalised some of his account. In This House of Grief, Garner is our eyes and ears at the trial, wondering, questioning, trying to comprehend the enormity of the crime levelled at Farquharson. She brings her novelist’s sensibility to recording the proceedings, emotions and characters involved.

For me, the book’s power is that Garner is compassionate while also fairly non-judgemental as an observer. She shares her impressions rather than pretends she knows it all or has special insight. This was apparently not an easy book to write, but while the case is heartbreaking, the book is absorbing thanks to the skill and sensitivity of the author.

Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police by Tom Harper

Last week, London’s Metropolitan Police drew the dire headline, Inspection finds Met Police failing or inadequate in key crime-fighting areas.

We’ve become numb to the unremitting parade of Met scandals. Met in special measures, Met racism, Met misogyny, spy cops, murder of Sarah Everard and on and on.

Researching The Real Ted Hastings, my book about how real-world corruption is reflected in the BBC drama Line of Duty, gave me a good perspective on the long history of bent coppering in the UK’s biggest police force.

However, after reading Tom Harper’s book, I felt like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life – stuffed to bursting with incidents of police illegality, arse- covering, collusion with serious criminals, institutional cowardice and frequent failure to protect the public and uphold the law.

Harper has covered policing as a journalist for 16 years. For this book he has pulled together penetrating interviews with officers of many ranks. It is a compelling account of asymmetric failures in the capital’s force in recent decades.

The failures roughly fall into three categories. First, devastating and politically motivated cuts have left the capital’s divisions denuded of adequate resources to fight crime. Second, there are the chilling instances of the force either being penetrated by criminals or bent cops colluding with criminals. And finally, there is the ingrained self-serving management culture, more interested in playing down failures and whitewashing the Met’s reputation than rooting out wrongdoing.

From 1994’s Operation Othona, which suggested a network of traitors colluding with criminals at all levels of London’s force, to accounts of ‘black ops’ against police whistleblowers, the five failed investigations into the axe murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan, the attempted victim-blaming of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man accidentally shot by police in 2005, to the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard by off-duty officer and predator Wayne Couzens, and much more, this book is a formidable case against the modern Met.

Broken Yard has the effect that the weekly drip of horrendous, brain-dulling headlines does not. It leaves you with the firm conclusion that the whole institution needs to be broken up and re-constituted with new management, dedicated and on-going anti-corruption structures and an ineradicable focus on serving the public.

Anyone who thinks Line of Duty is over the top will realise after reading Broken Yard that the reality is worse.

Behold the Monster by Jillian Lauren

The crimes of US serial killer Samuel Little are the stuff of nightmares. He confessed to murdering 93 women, most of whom lived on society’s fringes and whose disappearance would not be investigated too rigorously.

Author Jillian Lauren got extraordinary access to Little while he was in prison. In hours of interviews, he confessed to being America’s most profilic serial killer.

Hoping to make a difference, restore the identities of forgotten victims, she talked at length to Little and wrote this account.

I could not read past page 70, however. Why? In a bid to give the victims a voice, the author makes up their thoughts and dialogue.

She describes the first victim, Mary, who encountered Little in a bar in 1971. The book switches to novel mode. Mary had not wanted to forget her cardigan. Every time the bar door opened, she thought her luck might change. Little comes in, calls her ‘little kitten’, asks why she’s so far from her family. She tells him they want to control her, then the men in her life wanted to do the same. ‘They don’t understand you,’ Little says to her. He drives her to a quiet spot, Mary leans back against her seat, more from exhaustion than from pleasure: ‘Let’s get in the back…’.

I could not read on. This felt creepily voyeuristic. Rather than giving the victims a voice, respect, the author, to my mind, was misguidedly fictionalising the horror of their encounter with Little. It seems extremely insensitive to me for a non-fiction writer to imagine their way into the thoughts and feelings of a victim in this way. She had the interviews, she could research the victims. Making it up offers no insight.

The jacket has a quote lauding the book as a ‘bewitching blend of empathy and brio’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘bewitch’ as to ‘enchant and delight’, which says more about the book’s backfiring effect than any high-minded stuff about doing justice to the victims.

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Highbury Grove Comprehensive School was then an all-boys school. Our obsessions were fashion and pop, naturally.

Anyone who thinks music was always better in the old days should bear in mind that in June 1974 Ray Stevens topped the charts with his novelty record The Streak. Other residents of the chart scene were Dutch duo Mouth & MacNeal, Arrows and Gigliola Cinquetti. Remember them? No, neither do I.

The dark side of the 1970s is denoted by repeated appearance of sex offender Gary Glitter in the Hit Parade that year.

His crimes, of course, remained hidden for years. However, two news stories from the real world that did puncture our adolescent haze that summer were two rare and disturbing murders discovered in our neighbourhood.

One has never been solved, while the other was only resolved recently.

The still unsolved case was that of 17-year-old Michael Lowe. His body was found stuffed in a chimney chute by builders at an empty property above a shop on Upper Street.

The news was chilling. Lowe was a couple of years ahead of me and my friends in age, and he went to our school. What had happened to him? How did he die? How had he ended up in the chimney?

It would later emerge that he had gone missing from a children’s home, also in Highbury.

Rare case of a body found in Highbury

The other case was that of a woman’s body discovered in June 1974 a couple of streets from where I’m typing this today (I still live in Highbury).

The victim’s name was Eileen Cotter, aged 22. She was found dumped by some secluded garages off Hamilton Park, a quiet residential street.

Ms Cotter had been found by a neighbour. She had been hit and strangled after having sex with a man. She was said to be a sex worker.

She was, however, also a sister and a daughter, and her loss would have a devastating affect on those close to her for ever afterwards.

Again, the nagging questions. Highbury was not an area known for this kind of sex trade (though Finsbury Park, less than a mile down the road, was blighted by kerb-crawling).

Who could have done such a brutal and senseless act in our area?

Such crimes can be notoriously difficult to solve. Sex work is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, and sex workers in London are 12 times more likely to be murdered than those in the general population.

Compounding this for the police is the fact that the victim has been killed by a stranger, leaving investigators with few personal connections to pursue.

There is rarely much public pressure to throw resources at such crimes because the media seldom display much concern for the victims. And the police have been known to show little motivation in dealing with them.

As one detective who joined the Met in the 1980s told me, back then the attitude was, why push hard on such an investigation when the victim had been ‘putting themselves out there’.

The Cotter investigation, however, would appear to have been serious and extensive. Some 92 potential suspects were interviewed, kerb-crawlers checked and women officers used as decoys to flush out the killer, but the effort eventually ran into the ground and stayed dormant for decades.

Decades later, DNA points the finger

As usual, it was DNA that changed things.

In 2019, a former mini-cab driver, John Apelgren of Sydenham, south London, was investigated by police for attacking his third wife.

He got a caution for the attack but had to submit his DNA. The Cotter case had been re-opened in 2012, the vital pieces of evidence being two DNA samples taken from the victim’s body.

When Apelgren’s DNA was run through the system, it matched the samples found on Ms Cotter.

Apelgren, from South Africa, was tried at the Old Bailey last summer. After a two-week trial and 11-hour deliberation by the jury, he was acquitted of murder but found guilty of manslaughter.

He denied knowing Cotter or paying for sex. He admitted to having affairs and the court heard he had abused his ex-wife and grabbed her neck on one occasion.

Apelgren, aged 80, was also convicted of an indecent assault in 1972 against an 18-year-old guest at his own wedding.

He was jailed for 10 years and six months.

As a schoolboy I could not have imagined it would take five decades before this callous, shocking crime would be solved. But DNA does not forget, and there is some small measure of justice in Apelgren finally being brought to account.

However, he got to live his best years as a free man. Eileen Cotter never got beyond 1974, and her family has had the pain of her loss since then.

Her brother, Patrick, was five at the time and was taken into care. He was quoted in the media after the trial: ‘No one ever spoke to me about my sister’s death. I have no memory of her funeral.

‘As a result of the traumatic event during my childhood, I shut down emotionally. It’s made it difficult for me to form close relationships.

‘To sum it up, the impact of Eileen’s killing had on my life: I was not only deprived of a sister I had little time to get to know, the knock-on effect also meant I lost my mother to suicide and my father to mental illness and alcoholism, all brought about because John Apelgren took Eileen’s life.’

A cold case that was never cold for the victim’s close ones.

Meanwhile, the tragic case of how 17-year-old Michael Lowe died and ended in that chimney remains unsolved.

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It is a crime that taunts us from the past. To this day there has been no justice for the victims – Elizabeth Figg, Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Frances Brown and Bridie O’Hara. While all media attention at the time was devoted to the police investigation and the lurid lifestyles of London’s ‘good-time girls’, the women themselves were largely forgotten.

Time and again, suspects were not picked out in an identity parade, their premises were searched and nothing was found, forensic samples were taken but no match was established. Time and again, a senior detective noted there was ‘no evidence to hand despite many inquiries’, the suspect ‘did not possess a car, nor could he drive one’, ‘no evidence was found’, ‘again no useful information was obtained’, ‘no evidence was found to connect him to any of the murdered women’. And so on.

There are two possibilities here. The first is that the murder squad had identified their man but failed to realise it. Leading detective Bill Baldock mentioned on several occasions that ‘time or lack staff’ did not allow certain inquiries to be completed. Just as detectives on the Yorkshire Ripper hunt confronted Peter Sutcliffe nine times and let him go, did one of these curtailed inquiries enable the Nude Killer to slip away?

The second possibility is that the guilty man was never even suspected by detectives. Geographic profiler Kim Rossmo told me, ‘It is possible that the reason they were unable to find sufficient evidence to charge anyone was because they never had the right person... There is nothing about the identified suspects that suggests they should be regarded as anything other than suspects. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people with dodgy pasts and suspicious behaviours come to the attention of the police in major inquiries, especially in serial murder cases. Concluding that a suspect is the offender in the absence of very strong evidence is a mistake.’

The most promising suspects were the men who received the most in-depth police scrutiny, including the Disgraced Cop and night watchman Mungo Ireland, mentioned in Part 2 of this post. It is easy to assume that the killer was among the group of top suspects. But hundreds, possibly thousands, of other men were also questioned or checked out.

As Rossmo makes clear with this statistical example – ‘If you look at it in just numbers, and I’m looking at 7,000 suspects they interviewed [on the Heron Trading Estate], the probability that he is in the 6,990 who are not top suspects is still higher than the top 10. Just bear in mind that even if you have the top suspects, it could be one of the ones that just didn’t come to their [the murder squad’s] attention.’

Looked at in these terms and in the light of problems already laid out – a vast investigation spread thinly that could not properly process all the data coming in – it is perhaps not that surprising that a devious, determined murderer could stay in the shadows. One fact should be borne in mind: the officers on this case had never experienced an inquiry of this type or scale before. What had worked on previous cases did not work here. This had been a huge challenge for everyone involved.

The Nude Murders hunt was certainly not the first or last to struggle to catch a serial killer. Jack the Ripper had infamously escaped Scotland Yard’s detectives just 77 years earlier. The Zodiac Killer in the US taunted the authorities in letters to the San Francisco Bay Area press, but he was never caught and the case, dating from the late 1960s, remains open today.

And the nature of the apprehension of some serial killers further attests to how difficult they can be to identify, even showing that luck can be a vital ingredient. Ted Bundy confessed to 30 murders in seven US states between 1974 and 1978, though the actual total could have been higher. It was not a brilliant piece of Sherlockian sleuthing that unmasked him but a routine traffic stop by a Utah Highway Patrol officer, Sergeant Bob Hayward. He simply became suspicious of Bundy’s VW Beetle passing at 2.30am through the pleasant neighbourhood where Hayward happened to live. It was another diligent patrol officer, Sergeant Robert Ring, accompanied by probationer Robert Hydes, who brought Peter Sutcliffe in for questioning after a routine stop in Sheffield on 2 January 1981. A five-year reign of murder that shocked Britain was brought to an end by uniformed officers on patrol. Thank goodness for no-nonsense sergeants.

If there was any luck going round, the Nude Killer had it all. But were there weaknesses in the Nude Murders investigation? By looking at the case through modern eyes it is possible to see how contemporary police practice has made improvements out of past failures, and to get some insight into how the killer cheated the massive hunt to find him.

How would Scotland Yard hunt for the Nudes Killer today?

Driving through west London with two retired detectives in May 2016, I found it almost bewildering to see how the area still closely resembled the 1960s city terrorised by the Nude Killer, while at the same time having changed so dramatically.

We were visiting the body-deposition sites, as would be done in a cold-case review. This was at the suggestion of Brian Hook, who spent the majority of his police career serving on specialist investigation units and was a crime-scene examiner. We were on a sobering tour to get into the mindset of the murderer and consider the original investigation from a modern perspective.

Brian and his colleague Andy Rose, a former Met detective inspector, are both now lecturers in forensics, investigative skills and criminology at the University of West London. They share an ironic sense of humour that police officers seem to specialise in and between them have a wealth of experience in dealing with serious crimes.

‘There’s no doubt society had a different view in the sixties,’ said Andy. ‘From my experience of investigating sexual offences against prostitutes even into the 1980s it was seen as a case of, “Why would you [bother to] do that?” The women are putting themselves out there. Whereas obviously they are just as much victims as anyone else, probably suffering more than many.’

Brian’s first impression was of how close the crime scenes were. ‘All the deposition sites are within two or three minutes’ driving.’

The tour of the deposition sites brings one fact home with force – just how anonymous the killer was driving around west London with a corpse in his car back then. Not much traffic (1965’s 12 million licensed vehicles compares to 2011’s 34 million), few police patrol cars, and little incentive for the police to stop cars when they had no on-the-spot means of verifying vehicle ownership. ‘You think about him marauding around and getting stopped by the police, but it was unlikely,’ Brian said. 

‘There was no national computer to check for stolen vehicles, so why would a police officer begin stopping people? There were not many police cars. You would have one area car for the whole district. Today you would have area-response cars, but these were the days before Panda cars [introduced in the mid-60s]. Back then, people walked, simple as that.’

However, the dangerous moment for the killer was getting the body out of the vehicle, as two deposition sites made clear. The alley off residential Swyncombe Avenue was the first occasion on which the murderer almost gave himself away. It was around 6am when he reversed a short distance into the 200-yard track linking Swyncombe Avenue and The Ride on 24 April 1964. It would have been daylight as he lifted the naked body of Helen Barthelemy and dropped her by a fence.

Then he tore off, swinging into Boston Manor Road and almost colliding with motorist Alfred Harrow, who had to brake violently to avoid a vehicle he described as a Hillman Husky or Hillman Estate.

‘He took a huge risk here,’ Brian said. Then he recalled the press photographs of detectives standing all over the crime scene. ‘The forensic capabilities now are far, far more advanced. To have a body found in these circumstances and then three hours later to have a post-mortem, you’re like, Oh, hang on.’ By which he meant the forensic examination at the scene would have lasted many more hours today. ‘And the cop standing there on potential tyre tracks peering over the screen [that had been erected to shield the victim]. It’s not a question of blame, it’s just a lack of knowledge and training. So those actions would be different today.’

The killer described in the police report as ‘cool and calculating’ was certainly not so in July that year. The two detectives were, like their 1960s forebears, struck by how close the Berrymede Road disposal of Mary Fleming was to where the decorators spotted the van driver acting strangely behind the ABC restaurant on Chiswick High Road. ‘This is a weird spot,’ Brian said. ‘It reeks of desperation.’

Both former detectives concurred that the killer was very likely to have been a local person. The area where the prostitutes were picked up were the obvious kerb-crawling streets, such as Bayswater and Queensway. But the deposition sites – down by the river, an alley, the side of a storage shed – these reveal his local knowledge.

Twenty-first-century Notting Hill, an area of spectacular wealth north of Kensington, is a stunning contrast to the boarded-up houses, piles of trash and peeling plaster work that was the norm there half a century ago. Mary Fleming once slummed it in a multi-occupancy flat with several families sharing facilities on Lancaster Road – that same property costs more than £3.5million today. The kerb-crawlers and street workers have vanished from Queensway and Bayswater, the trade having migrated to the internet.

The Heron Trading Estate, scene of the last deposition, has also changed considerably. The spot where Bridie O’Hara was left between the warehouse and the railway siding has gone, as new industrial units have replaced many former businesses.

The final murder – why did he stop?

This was the final Nude Killing. Because the murderer had effectively drawn attention to his body-storage site by leaving Bridie outside the building where he had been keeping his victims, it was tempting to view this as a sign-off by him. So was that a final flourish to taunt the police? I’m done and this is where I’ve been keeping them...

Brian did not think so. ‘I don’t think it was a decision consciously made not to do it anymore. There’s been an event [that diminished his need to kill]. The body was in an area where nobody goes – behind the shed by the railway line, partly covered up. It could have been there for months and months if somebody hadn’t made effectively a chance finding.’

So, why did he stop?

Andy said, ‘He might have been arrested, might have died. Everyone’s an individual.’ He cites the example of Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright, who only turned to killing them at the age of 48.

Leaving aside technological advances that were simply not available to the 1960s murder squad – DNA, modern forensics, CCTV, tracking of mobile phones and the like – there were problems with the way the 1960s team was set up in the face of what was a complex and data-heavy investigation.

Looking at how today’s murder inquiries work – which have been built on and corrected past investigative failures – it becomes clear where Detective Chief Superintendent John du Rose’s squad got bogged down. Two major inefficiencies become obvious.

First, the Nude Killer investigation was too unfocused, and, second, the squad’s dictatorial hierarchy – standard for the time – could not cope with the huge amount of statements and data generated by six major, concurrent murder probes during 1964–65.

Crime fiction fans will have heard about the importance of taking control of an investigation in that first ‘golden hour’, when clues and memories are freshest. In the 1960s a lot of early decisions were taken by constables who were first on the spot and awaiting the arrival of their inspector. ‘In those days there wasn’t a permanent murder team,’ Brian said. ‘Whoever got called down to the crime scene was whoever was on duty. Never mind if the on-call detective inspector was good at murder investigations or not.’

Andy adds, ‘A murder would happen and two or three detectives would just get taken out of the office – right, you’re on this murder now. The likelihood was you chose people who didn’t have a lot on. You were reliant on them being paired up with somebody who knew what they were doing.’

Today’s priority is to get a specialist expert team there as fast as possible. A car carrying the Homicide Assessment Team would aim to be at the crime scene within 10 to 30 minutes. Their job is not to go onto the scene but, if required, to call in a specialist homicide unit, alert a senior investigating officer and get efforts such as house-to-house inquiries under way.

Forensics are obviously more advanced today. The scene assessment of the body in situ would probably last for many hours more than it did in the mid-sixties, more samples – soil, vegetation, tyre tracks – would be taken, and the victim may even be examined on the spot, with temperatures taken for potential time of death.

The point is to gather as much information in the golden hour or first few hours. The second phase of the investigation is to gather the team together. ‘You’ve got your SIO [senior investigating officer] and you’re going to have your office meeting,’ Andy said. ‘These are very open and while they are led and directed, everyone’s view is listened to equally. It’s not hierarchical.’

This open approach was not the norm in the 1960s. It recalls the comment of former detective superintendent Chris Burke: ‘Other members of the enquiry were “mushrooms”, kept in the dark and only told what the detective superintendent or inspector wanted them to know.’

Nepotism, a dictatorial boss and data overload

Brian expands on this. ‘There was nepotism. You had a system of bag carriers. You would have a detective superintendent and a detective sergeant, and the sergeant would be the superintendent’s bag carrier, basically a PA. It was very much a closed team at the top.’

It is a point that had been made to me by several former detectives. The attitude was that the top detective was the clever, experienced one. This may have worked on smaller, less complicated investigations, but when faced with the tidal wave of tips, statements, car sightings, house-to-house inquiries, dust samples and the rest, there is no knowing what connections or possibilities were missed.

Consider the ‘immensity of the operation’, as Bill Baldock referred to it, of interviewing more than 7,000 current and past employees on the Heron Trading Estate, where the bodies were stored. As Brian explained, ‘The SIO has to read every single statement that is relevant. Now, even if 10 per cent of those 7,000 statements are relevant, that’s 700 statements. There is no way John du Rose could ever have read those and assimilated where they fit in at all.’ And there were tens of thousands of further statements on top of that for du Rose, Baldock and the ‘closed team’ under them to get through.

Brian adds, ‘TV programmes still go back to that – Oh, it’s this person that solves it. That’s because what happens now in reality wouldn’t make good TV.’

‘I think that is the biggest difference,’ Andy added. ‘Nowadays, you can’t have a dictatorial SIO. The system doesn’t allow it, the review processes don’t allow it. Within 21 days of a crime, somebody’s already started to review those first 21 days – what have you done, how did you do that?’

The culture now is of having outside detectives quickly moving in to review the decision-making on an investigation.

Senior investigators are scrutinised more closely and have to fill out decision logs detailing what they did and did not do, why and at what times.

‘Which would never have happened in the 1960s,’ Andy said with a laugh. ‘They wouldn’t have countenanced anybody else coming in to somebody at that [du Rose’s] level and saying, “I want to have a look at the way you’re running this investigation...” Initiative was not encouraged. A senior officer’s justification used to be we’re doing it this way because I say so. That’s not the case anymore.’

However skilled were John du Rose and his inner sanctum, it is clear they were swamped by the investigation.

A huge wall of administrative shite

‘You can see what they were doing but it was so unproductive,’ Brian said. ‘Trying to find out the registered keepers of all those cars – all that actually did was take a huge amount of time and resources. It was so unproductive, it wasn’t focused. It was a case of, “Let’s cast the net out and see what we drag in”, which is just nonsensical and counterproductive.’

We also know about the daunting hours and overtime that went into these efforts. But again, often all that was achieved by the long hours put in by senior and junior officers was to generate a mass of useless information. Think of the effort devoted to the night observation of vehicles, for example, sitting in vans for 12 hours at a time, peeing into a bottle, taking down numbers. ‘Hard to maintain focus and motivation,’ Brian said. ‘But it was all they had. The problem they had was that it creates such a huge amount of work.

‘You had fixed observation points all round Kensington, Chiswick and Shepherd’s Bush. If they’re told they are looking for a Humber van, they would take the number of every single Humber van. What that means is that in the morning, when they give their lists in, they had to cross-check the lists for vans that appear more than once, and then phone up the councils or take the lists to the councils, who had to physically search for them. Out of, say, 50, 10 won’t be registered to anyone now... And that’s every single night.

‘What you’re doing is creating a huge wall of administrative shite, basically.”

The two former investigators were in no doubt that this kind of hugely labour-intensive investigation could have been scaled down and managed far more effectively today. Investigation is all about elimination, and they point out that a modern inquiry would be able to eliminate far more vehicles and suspects to allow the murder team to focus on fewer targets.

Even without all of the 21st-century technology, however, Brian and Andy are adamant that today’s more collaborative approach to investigation, with its decision-logging and constant assessment, would have greatly enhanced the investigation back then.

Brian said, ‘And because there was no Murder Investigation Manual [a thick book outlining procedures and methods], there was no structure to it. Now there are far more studies into how murders are solved. The SIOs who solve the most crimes are the innovative ones, who’ll say, “This has never been done before but I’ll try this.”’

‘It was very blinkered and prescriptive,’ Andy added.

The corollary is clear: such open-mindedness was far less common in the 1960s.

Perhaps the greatest failure of the old autocratic management style came in the area of information sharing. The drivers of 1,700 vehicles were questioned and dust samples taken, 783 Hillman Husky owners traced, 120,000 residents and business owners seen during the house-to-house operation, and thousands of statements taken. All of these separate bits of information were gathered by individual officers. It would have been impossible for John du Rose and his select senior group to collate and make sense of all that.

Today murder teams have two advantages. One is technological. There are suites of inputters who feed HOLMES 2, the database used by the police since 1994, with statements, forensics, descriptions of witnesses, vehicles, phone numbers, addresses, even details of tattoos. The miracle of the system is that the police can use it to cross-reference data to reveal unsuspected connections – who has phoned whom, witnesses who frequent the same pub – all of which can expose suspicious discrepancies in witness statements.

The other advantage is in the more open organisation of modern investigations, as cited above, with team meetings to share information where suggestions would be listened to. Had that been standard practice in 1965, who knows what unforeseen evidential links might have turned up?

With the data the police today have access to, it is also possible to sift car owners by make, year, colour, locality of vehicle – an undreamed-of advantage in Bill Baldock’s day.

Modern investigative processes are there because of mistakes of the past. The Nude Murder team threw everything they had at finding the killer; they were not the first or last to have difficulties in understanding and trapping a serial killer.

Mistakes had been made in the much quoted case of John Christie. The Rillington Place murderer killed his first victim, Ruth Fuerst, in 1943, but was not exposed, tried and executed until 1953.

In the 1970s, the police would struggle to stop Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, during an investigation that was badly bungled. Detectives here ran into similar problems to those that Scotland Yard had in 1964–65 – a stifling command structure and serious information overload that swamped the police and obscured possible leads. Even today, with all the latest technology and knowhow, things still go wrong in serial killer cases.

When I asked Andy and Brian who they thought had committed the Nudes Murder, the police officer’s trademark bleak sense of humour emerged. ‘It was either a friend, a relative or someone they didn’t know,’ Andy said.

Why did Scotland Yard's biggest manhunt fail: Part 1

Why did Scotland Yard's biggest manhunt fail: Part 2

My book on the case, The Hunt for the 60s’ Ripper, can be found here

Photo licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

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The victims were: Hannah Tailford, Irene Lockwood, Helen Barthelemy, Mary Fleming, Frances Brown and Bridget ‘Bridie’ O’Hara.

The Hammersmith Nude Murders case triggered a huge investigation involving hundreds of officers. And yet by the summer of 1965, a few months after the final body was discovered, the operation was wound down, no compelling suspect having ever been found.

Here, I want to look at the disparate band of suspects that detectives focused on. In Part 3, I’ll explore why, ultimately, the killer of these appalling crimes was never caught.

Suspects – a mortuary worker, a newsagent, a caretaker, and many more…

So many officers, around 600, were needed because there were so many leads to check and so much ground to monitor.

Could the killer be a 45-year-old man from Fulham. He’d been convicted of murdering a sex worker in 1952, found insane and sent to Broadmoor.

However, he was released on licence in 1961 and returned to London. He was questioned and his vehicle examined, but there were no links to the murders.

A 52-year-old newsagent from Brighton drew police attention. He liked to dress in women’s clothing, but when checked, none of these items were found to belong to any of the victims.

A number of false confessions took up more police time. A tubby 54-year-old caretaker called Kenneth Archibald bumbled into Notting Hill police station in April 1964 and said he had killed Irene Lockwood, victim number two.

Archibald was charged. But at the Old Bailey, he changed his story, confessing not to murder but to being depressed. The jury believed him, the rather flimsy case was dismissed.

A 42-year-old mortuary assistant, a stoker from East Acton, a 36-year-old engineer from Kingston, Surrey – all were among those flagged up to detectives but proved to have no links to the victims.

Mungo Ireland

One man who was connected to the Heron Trading Estate – where police discovered the killer had kept his victims’ bodies in a derelict building – would become hugely significant in the Nude Murders case.

He was 46-year-old Mungo Ireland, who lived on Tildesley Road, Putney, with his wife, Elizabeth. He worked as a patrol man on the estate for Night Security from 6–24 October 1964.

He was a heavy drinker and his home life was fraught with problems. Mungo Ireland committed suicide on 3 March 1965. His suicide note read:

I can’t stick it any longer. It may be my fault but not all of it. I’m sorry Harry [the name of Ireland’s brother] is a burden to you. Give my love to the kid,

Farewell, Jock.

PS To save you and the Police looking for me I’ll be in the garage.

A sad sign-off from a man clearly at a low ebb. He was due to appear at Acton Magistrates’ Court on the morning of his death to answer a summons for failing to stop his car when required to do so. Instead, the night before his court date, he got into his car and drove to his garage in Solna Avenue, a few streets away. There, he left the engine of his Ford Consul running and died of asphyxiation.

Could he have been the man who eluded the massive man-hunt for so long?

As with many of the other suspects, Ireland had tantalising circumstantial links to the case. During just under three weeks as a security man on the Heron Trading Estate he was on site during the nights. He left Night Security on 13 November 1964 and joined the New Century Cleaning Company in Harlesden, before moving on again on 28 November to be foreman cleaner on contract at Jute Industries in Dundee, Scotland.

That job ended and he returned to London on the day before it was thought that Bridie O’Hara’s body was deposited on the Heron Trading Estate, which was 12 February 1965. He committed suicide during the high point of media publicity caused by the latest discovery of a body.

However, it is clear that despite these circumstantial links, Bill Baldock, second-in-command of the Scotland Yard investigation, did not consider Ireland a strong suspect. Ireland’s car, number plate YUL 333, did not crop up in the police index of kerb-crawling motorists, which was how it was believed the killer picked up his victims.

Dundee police also confirmed that Ireland was working as a foreman cleaner in their city on 11 January 1965 – the date Bridie O’Hara was last seen.

The detective

The man who Detective Superintendent Bill Baldock did view as a ‘strong suspect’ was still alive when I was researching my book about the case in 2016, The Hunt for the 60s’ Ripper. For that reason I did not name him, but the investigation of him back in 1965 was one of the most extraordinary episodes during the Nude Murders case.

This man came to notice a couple of weeks after final victim Bridie O’Hara’s murder in early 1965. At that time the man was a car salesman in west London, but prior to that he had been a detective constable whose career ended in disgrace.

The suspect joined the Met in 1956 and in 1961 became a CID officer at Kensington police station, then Hammersmith. In June 1962 he transferred to T division, working at Acton and Brentford stations.

Interestingly, during this time he lived in police married quarters in Eastfield Court, East Acton Lane – half a mile from the Heron Trading Estate, where victims had been stored and Bridie O’Hara found.

At best, the detective could be described as a misfit, at worst a spiteful loner. In 1961 and 1962 there were complaints and suspicions about him. In one incident at Kensington station, a detective sergeant returned from an evening drink to find his court papers burning in a toilet bowl. Someone had taken them out of his tray.

Later, the office’s crime book went missing. It was found in the street by a passer-by and handed in. The feeling was that the office loner was behind it. His former sergeant said, ‘Well dressed, always spotless... He had no pals that I remember. Normally in the CID you’d pal up with somebody, but nobody seemed to be his pal.

‘He was a creepy type of bloke. He always seemed to be hanging around... bloody listening to other people’s conversations.’

The man failed his detective sergeant’s exam in January 1962. It was during the next month that he was sent to Hammersmith for supervision. There, a WPC’s handbag was stolen. The thief was spotted running down a corridor and she and several others chased him towards Shepherd’s Bush Green, but he got away. Again, word was that the thief was recognised as being the loner.

Then, on 17 September 1962, his police career crashed permanently. He was suspended from duty and charged with office-breaking. A psychiatrist’s report concluded the man knew right from wrong, and the break-ins were a display of vindictiveness towards his former colleagues. He was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment and dismissed from the Met.

He was found guilty at the Old Bailey of breaking into properties around Brentford and Isleworth and stealing a bizarre array of goods – paintbrushes, files, a spanner, £11, some tobacco.

He also attempted to break into Admiralty Oil’s laboratory on the Great West Road, Brentford.

He had been caught when a security man there saw him on the roof and noted the registration number of the moped on which he made his escape.

He eventually said that when he joined Kensington CID he felt other officers were watching him. He became unhappy. ‘I found I was doing stupid things,’ he told the police.

At Brentford he was accused of theft and felt persecuted. He said, ‘My feeling, wrong as it was, was that if they thought so strongly that I was a black sheep, I will show them and be a black sheep.’

This is how he explained his crimes. ‘I did not set out to steal but rather have the satisfaction of doing something which I knew my colleagues would have to work on but get nowhere.’

Were the Nude Murders a similar poke in the eye for former police colleagues? An escalation of crimes intended to drag detectives into a time-consuming and ultimately fruitless investigation?

Baldock zones in on disgraced detective

The ex-cop became the most compelling suspect for Det Supt Bill Baldock. Not only had he lived half a mile from the Heron Trading Estate and had a self-confessed grudge against a police service, he also worked throughout the whole area where the murders were committed. This stretched from the pick-up streets of Notting Hill out to the Heron Trading Estate, as well as the car park off Kensington High Street where Frances Brown was left.

Baldock said the ex-cop started to figure in the investigation two weeks after Bridie O’Hara’s murder.

An extensive investigation into the Disgraced Cop got moving.

He came out of Ford prison in June 1963 after serving seven months of his sentence. This, of course, was almost eight months before the first of the six confirmed victims, Hannah Tailford, was found in February 1964.

He went to live in Essex with his wife and family, and found a job as a travelling salesman until February 1964. He become a car salesman for a firm based on the Old Brompton Road, west London. The firm’s managing director told officers the Disgraced Cop had been employed at their depot in Hadleigh, Essex, and was eventually dismissed for being inefficient.

Essex police were asked to keep a watch on the suspect, to record which vehicles he drove and search any premises he might be able to use to store the victims’ clothes or their bodies.

However, when pubs, clubs and west London’s streets were canvassed – with locals being shown enlarged photos of the Disgraced Cop – no one could place him. In addition, none of the many cars he used as a salesman turned up in the police index of kerb-crawling motorists.

It was time to interview him. He denied any knowledge of the Nude Murders. In a statement he said he had only been to London during the evening three times during the sequence of murders.

These were two occasions when he attended the Motor Show at Earl’s Court (23 and 30 October 1964), while the other was for a Volvo sales course at the Washington Hotel, Curzon Street (25 January 1965). He had used public transport and taxi, always returning home no later than 11pm. He said he avoided London because of his past troubles, no doubt a reference to his humiliating police career. He confirmed he was now working for another second-hand car dealership in Hadleigh, Essex.

Before working for the Hadleigh car dealer, the Disgraced Cop had been employed by another motor business in Leigh-on-Sea. The managing director of this outfit told the police that the suspect had been a good salesman and confirmed his trips to the Motor Show and sales course. He said the Disgraced Cop had manned the Volvo and Saab stands at Earl’s Court on 23 and 30 October 1964, which was confirmed by another witness. His expenses for attending the show seemed to further confirm that he was there.

Detectives were also particularly interested in the first date at the Motor Show – 23 October. This was the night Frances Brown went missing after being separated from her friend when they were picked up and driven from Portobello Road by two motorists they’d just met.

Suspicions at the time were that the two men who had picked them up, and had never been traced, were themselves attendees at the Motor Show. So, Beryl Mahood, the prostitute and friend who had been with Frances Brown, was shown a photo of the Disgraced Cop. She did not pick him out as being one of the two mystery motorists. This was frustrating because the police felt that the Disgraced Cop resembled the identikit picture Mahood provided of the man who drove with her on Frances’s last night.

Clearly, it was the other man, the one who drove Frances, who was the killer, but a positive ID from Mahood might have implicated the Disgraced Cop as being an accomplice. However, this turned out to be another dead end.

The question remained – what had the Disgraced Cop done after finishing at the Motor Show? Did he really go home by public transport? The investigation could find no way to disprove this. The killer had been using a vehicle to pick up and dispose of his victims. The Disgraced Cop, for all his oddities and circumstantial links, was not fitting the bill as a realistic prime suspect.

For Bill Baldock, the Disgraced Cop could not be eliminated from the inquiry and remained a strong possibility. But they had so far found no positive identification of him from witnesses such as Beryl Mahood, and had uncovered no evidence linking him to the victims or crime scenes.

Not a shred. Baldock concluded, ‘The circumstances surrounding his mental history, knowledge of the area and background are ideal in every respect for his being the murderer. If he is the man responsible, he will certainly kill again…’

By the time Baldock wrote this in his final comprehensive report on the case, in September 1965, almost seven months had elapsed since the final victim had been found.

The evidence trail was cold. The investigation was being wound down. Public interest in the case, never great because the victims were sex workers and afforded little sympathy, quickly waned.

The investigation fizzled out, a complete failure. The killer of six women never faced justice and went free.

The question no one wanted to ask was: why had such a huge investigation, overseen by Scotland Yard’s top detectives, failed so comprehensively?

• Why did Scotland Yard's biggest serial killer hunt fail so badly? Part 1

Dr Angela Buckley The Killer of Little Shepherds by Douglas Starr, The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, Murder by the Book by Claire Harman

Dan Smith The Profession of Violence by John Pearson, The Jigsaw Murders by Jeremy Craddock, Midnight in Peking by Paul French

Sarah Bax Horton The Hunt for the 60s’ Ripper by Robin Jarossi, No Ordinary Day by Matt Johnson with John Murray, To Hunt a Killer by Julie Mackay and Robert Murphy

Robin Jarossi Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, Mapping Murder by David Canter, Manhunt: The Night Stalker by Colin Sutton

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