Crime stories on TV
Crime stories on TV
Thanks for all the new subscribers who have started following Behind the Crimes. As something of an introduction to friends old and new - here's a selected history of my TV crime reporting.
As a television news correspondent, I have covered some of Britain’s biggest crime stories. Many have later been featured in books, podcasts and TV dramas.
I try to focus on cases which tell us something about the world in which we live.
The most absorbing part of being a reporter is the immediate access you get to an inquiry, to meet the people involved, to be in court as the drama of justice plays out.
It is a huge honour that people have trusted me to tell their stories.
But by their very nature, the reports are transient. There is no public record of TV news features.
Most of these reports - all for ITV News - have never been seen since the day they were broadcast. But they were important to me at the time, and they remain so now.
The Cold Case of Melanie Road (2016)
This is one of the cases which means the most to me. I was honoured enough for the lead detective, Det Supt Julie Mackay, to trust me to later write the book of how she fought for years to solve the ‘cold case’ of Melanie Road: a 17-year-old student murdered on a night out in Bath in June 1984. Special mention must be made for Gary Mason who also worked alongside Julie over the years. Elsewhere in my reporting, I had an interview with Melanie’s wonderful mother Jean who explained that it was never a ‘cold case’ to her and what justice meant after 30 years. This is an incredible case of how the persistence of a small team of police officers can pay off - and how a killer can live silently among us for decades.
You can grab a copy of our award-winning book To Hunt A Killer here.
The Detective’s Gamble: Christopher Halliwell (2011-2016)
I’ve never written at length about my coverage of how taxi driver Christopher Halliwell murdered Becky Godden-Edwards and Sian O’Callaghan. One day I might. I reported on the inquiry from day one in March 2011 - and this story continues to this day, I am the only journalist who has covered every step.
This is a wild case of how a lead detective Det Supt Steve Fulcher broke arrest guidelines to gain a confession from killer Christopher Halliwell. Had he not broken the rules, it is likely that police would never have found Sian or Becky. But because Fulcher did, and his career exploded in the most public and humiliating way possible.
The story was later turned into the drama A Confession. I like Steve a lot, he is highly intelligent and good company. You wonder what you would have done in the same dilemma.
I may do a full Substack just on this case - let me know if it’s something you’d like.
Assassination Attempt in Suburbia: The Salisbury Poisonings (2018)
Sometimes you get a gut feeling when you read a police press release. And on March 4th 2018, when I saw the official note that there was some strange ‘chemical incident’ in a Salisbury street, I just knew it would be an extraordinary case. Of course, I could never have imagined it was a full-blown assassination attempt on a former Soviet double-agent by a Russian crew.
Fortunately, Sergei and Yulia Skripal survived. So too did Det Sgt Nick Bailey, who attended the scene. But in the following weeks, the Novichok chemical agent, disguised as a bottle of perfume, was picked up by Charlie Rowley and given as a present to his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess, who was exposed to a lethal dose.
This first report features an interview with their friend in the hours which followed Dawn and Charlie’s call for help. At this stage, Dawn was still alive, and we were not sure at first if the case was even linked to the Skripals. It was the interview with the friend, which confirmed it was.
And this second report, on the anniversary of the attack, features an interview with Marina Litvinenko, whose husband Alexander was killed in London in 2006. By then we had a better idea of who was behind the attack - and how unlikely it is the agents will ever see justice:
A Killer’s Covert Confession (2023)
This is a true first. Never before - in Britain - has a killer confessed his murder to an undercover police officer and that tape has been presented as evidence before a jury. This was an absorbing case from last year. Mum-of-four Claire Holland had vanished a decade earlier. Then her ex-boyfriend Darren Osment handed himself into police in 2019. But he retracted that confession. What followed was an extraordinary TWO YEAR covert operation involving an agent befriending the prime suspect. I was the only journalist to cover the case and successfully argued for the court to release of the video confessions.
The Parachute Murder Plot (2015-18)
This is an jaw-dropping case of the upstanding army sergeant Emile Cilliers who was leading a double-life: cheating on his wife Victoria, then plotting to kill her. He tried blowing her up by tampering with the family’s gas supply - as their children slept upstairs. When that failed, he sabotaged her parachute. Somehow, she survived a 4,000ft drop, yet she turned hostile-witness in the subsequent two trials.
I produced an eight-part podcast No Strings Attached, about the case. And Channel 4 broadcast a 3-part docudrama featuring the detectives and Victoria. For this report - I got to fly in a private jet to show the hight of Victoria’s fall.
There are more absorbing interviews with the brilliant detectives Paul Franklin and Maddy Hennah on these links.
The husband killer: abuse or excuse? (2021)
I was torn about this case. Penelope Jackson killed her husband David. No doubt about it. She boasted to police of what she had done. But in her extraordinary confession during the aftermath, was she pretending she had suffered years of physical and emotional abuse? Or was she really a victim and had genuinely seen no other way out? If she was really driven to the brink, I had sympathy for her. Not for her actions, but for how she must have felt. Or, was she the abusive one who had subjected her husband to years of dominance before killing him?
My podcast mini-series about the case is here.
Decoy news
Yesterday, my film Decoy hit the TWO AND A HALF MILLION VIEWS-mark on YouTube.
With little budget, I produced it as an experiment - I was fascinated about the story (of a team of rookie female cops asked to go undercover to catch a monster in 1970s Bristol.) But had never created anything of its type before. Since then it has:
Helped the re-arrest and conviction of the killer
Won a Royal Television Society Award
Been turned into a book: (you can grab a copy here.)
Many prime time shows shown on conventional TV will only get a fraction of the 2.5 million views. So thank you everyone who has watched and been absorbed by the case.