VIEW: A Killer's Confession
Two-part documentary about one of England's most controversial police interrogations on-air from today
In March 2011 Det Supt Steve Fulcher arrested killer Christopher Halliwell.
He broke arrest guidelines to obtain a confession: the murder of a missing office worker Sian O’Callaghan.
But the killer then admitted to a second murder from years earlier, a death about which police were oblivious: a young woman, Becky Godden-Edwards.
Fulcher was feted.
Working for a small force, Wiltshire Police, he was catapulted onto the national stage for having taken the initiative to exact the confession.
But then all went wrong.
And at one point it appeared as if a man who had admitted to two murders might even walk free.
From today, in the UK and Eire, Amazon Prime Video is showing a two-part documentary about the case and that confession.
It’s told from the perspectives of four main characters: Karen Edwards, whose daughter Becky was killed; Det Con Maddy Hennah, who worked on the case as a live murder inquiry; Det Supt Sean Memory, who rebuilt the cold case four years after the confession, and me, as a journalist who has covered the story from the beginning.
Amazon Prime subscribers can watch the film by clicking above. It will be rolled out to the USA, Canada, Australia and other territories in the coming months.
The story is well-known in the UK. There has been a TV drama, A Confession, and several books, including two superb offerings by Karen Edwards and Steve Fulcher.
But these films bring the story up to date by detailing institutional failings by a police force in the years that followed Halliwell’s imprisonment.
And it asks the question: what is more important?
A victim’s right to life? Or a killer’s right to silence?