[NEW]Killer In My Village 2026💥New Episode Out💥S09E44💥UK Murder Documentary

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:07]In 1993, the small Rutland village of Hamilton was left reeling when two muchloved members of their community went missing.

[00:00:15]>> The friends who called the police were extremely concerned. They weren't just casually interested in what had happened. They thought there's something seriously wrong.

[00:00:23]>> But a missing person investigation soon turned into a murder inquiry. Suddenly the county was full of police vans, forensic support units, u men in white coats and gloves.

[00:00:34]>> And when the police arrested their prime [music] suspect, nobody could quite believe just how close to home this crime really was.

[00:00:42]>> It was truly shocking. And the local people there, from what I understand, could not get to grips with it.

[00:00:53]Heat. Heat. N. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Nestled between Melton Mobre and Cambridge lies the stunning county of Rutland.

[00:01:34]Rutland is, as everybody knows, the smallest county. In fact, you can get 10 Rutlands into Yorkshire. Um, [music] it's got a tiny population of 37,000.

[00:01:42]It's quite a small county, [music] very easy to drive past. Um, but once you're here, people stay and love it.

[00:01:50]>> And in this tiny county lies the beautiful [music] village of Hamilton, which has its own unique geographical position.

[00:01:58]Hamilton is a very special village because it sits on the peninsula [music] with rutland water each side of it and so it sits in a beautiful position on a hill overlooking the water.

[00:02:09]>> Being surrounded by water makes it a picturesque and peaceful place to live.

[00:02:14]>> A sleepy little village Hamilton is uh nothing happens in Hamilton. It's there's no shops there, just one pub.

[00:02:22]>> Hamilton Village, it's a lovely place to live. Everybody knows everybody and everyone's [music] got a cheery smile on their face.

[00:02:31]>> If you walk down the street, it's almost inevitable that you have to say hello 10 times before you get to the end of the street. So, there's a huge community spirit.

[00:02:39]>> Helmet is a place where you retire to and stay there forever.

[00:02:45]The 14th of November 1993 was an ordinary Thursday morning for Leicester [music] Constabulary until a call came in from a Hamilton resident expressing concern about a muchloved local couple who'd missed several appointments.

[00:03:00]>> Well, they were very reliable people.

[00:03:02]That's what I'd say about Mr. and Mrs. Se. You could they could be trusted to do what they said they were going to do.

[00:03:08]And Mrs. Severs, for instance, had promised to take somebody to hospital earlier in the week and she just didn't turn up.

[00:03:15]>> And Mrs. Severs would never ever have let anybody down. And when she didn't turn up, people thought there was something wrong.

[00:03:22]>> It was completely unexpected that a couple should go missing from such a quiet little village.

[00:03:30]Eileen and Derek Severs, both in their 60s, [music] had been married for decades and were well known in the Hamilton community where they had lived for 20 years. [music] >> Derek and Eileen Severs were a hugely popular couple within their community.

[00:03:45][music] Mr. Severs was an executive from ICI and had semi-retired.

[00:03:52]Eileen had been awarded an MBE for her charitable work and they were went to meetings. They would get involved in local fates [music] and bizars. Very well thought of indeed.

[00:04:04]>> It's a lovely day, isn't it?

[00:04:05]>> It is beautiful. And the garden works well. [music] It >> does.

[00:04:12]>> At first, the call seemed to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. And the police felt sure that the sever's 38-year-old only son, who lived with them in their bungalow, would have an explanation.

[00:04:23]>> Well, the initial call didn't cause a great deal of alarm. Uh the routine was to send an officer around to see Roger Se to see if he could tell us where the parents were. And that's exactly what happened.

[00:04:40]>> Good afternoon, sir.

[00:04:42]>> They met Roger, who was the son of Mr. and Mrs. service and he told them there was no reason to be concerned whatsoever. He was very calm and he said they'd gone away on holiday. They gone away on Monday and they were coming back the following week.

[00:04:54]>> Okay. Thank you very much.

[00:04:55]>> That day the officer was satisfied that everything seemed to be normal.

[00:05:00]>> The message in the police station log was endorsed gone away and that was it.

[00:05:04]But the inspector that came on, he thought it was worth a further inquiry.

[00:05:08]So he detailed the next morning for a sergeant and a PC to make a further visit to the address.

[00:05:16]It was completely out of character for these people to be so unreliable.

[00:05:20]They're not unreliable people. They're completely reliable. And the inspector said, "We'll have another look at this."

[00:05:25]And he was right to do as well.

[00:05:29]>> Yes.

[00:05:29]>> Well, on the Friday morning, the sergeant and PC asked for permission to have a look around the house, and that's exactly what they did. Roger got no concerns about that. But as the police inspected the premises 24 hours after the initial call, the sever's home didn't seem to be in its typical orderly fashion.

[00:05:48]>> They went into the bathroom of the house and they saw that the carpet was missing in the bathroom.

[00:05:53]>> There's a copy here before.

[00:05:59]>> And Roger's explanation for that was that um [music] his father had recently had a stroke. It had been in the bath and the water had overflowed and ruined the carpet and there was the carpet mitten out of the kitchen.

[00:06:11]>> We have carpet in here, Mr. Sus.

[00:06:13]>> Yeah, we did have Yeah.

[00:06:14]>> And his explanation was in a similar sort of vein.

[00:06:17]>> There's a bit of an accident with some cooking oil.

[00:06:20]>> What? Just down on the floor there.

[00:06:25]>> And Roger burnt both carpets in the in the garden. And that was his explanation. The detective inspector contact me and he told me that he was very concerned about this. It looked very suspicious.

[00:06:36]>> I was intrigued by it and I couldn't work out where on earth they had gone.

[00:06:40]It was so unusual and so out of character. [music] They just vanished into thin air.

[00:06:48]>> And I felt that this wasn't right. And I wanted him in the police station and we'd start talking to him and find out exactly what was happening.

[00:06:55]>> They went back to the house and Roger was missing. being gone and we circulated him as wanted for questioning.

[00:07:02]>> Alongside this search for Roger, police continued to investigate the last [music] known movements of the couple and followed up on what Roger had told them that they'd simply gone on holiday.

[00:07:12]>> We sent people to King's Cross station in London and we sent people to Peter Station trying to find sightings of them really and there'd have been nobody happier if somebody had told me they'd seen them.

[00:07:25]The last time that um Eene had been seen was on the Saturday afternoon. There had been a a bring and buy sale and a raffle.

[00:07:34]>> Oh, you know the usual Victorious sponges, um carrot cakes.

[00:07:39]>> Derek had been in a local pub and he'd been there at lunchtime. [music] Neither of them had mentioned anything to anybody about going away. In fact, they had been behaving in their normal way and would everybody was expecting them to be in their normal places at their normal [music] times as would normally be their case.

[00:07:58]>> Meanwhile, John was already looking ahead to a time when they had Roger in custody. And almost simultaneously, I authorized his forensic team to go to the house under the direction of Orlando Elmos, who was head of scenes of crime for me, to take possession of the house and start an initial search to see what we could find.

[00:08:17]>> Based on Roger's behavior, the missing person's case [music] was gathering speed.

[00:08:22]>> I knew relatively little um to start off with. I just knew there was this missing couple. I knew the police were concerned. I was aware that they they were having suspicions about the son.

[00:08:31]And the idea was generated that we would then enter the premises and then do a forensic investigation. It was a fairly modern building, but it was set in sort of a large grounds. That grounds had got [music] uh sort of vegetable patches on it and grass and there's a bit of a grazing area as well. So it was quite a large acreage.

[00:08:53]>> And in the neighboring village of Sanford, Leicersha police finally caught up with Roger.

[00:09:01]When he was arrested at the dog pond, his response was that he couldn't understand what the problem was.

[00:09:08]Why were we concerned? Because there was nothing to be concerned about. He expected them back the following week and that was it.

[00:09:17]>> They were on holiday.

[00:09:18]>> I was aware that these people had gone missing and therefore we were being asked to see if we could find any intelligence items that could help the police locate what had happened or where these people were. It is very much a case of uh going in and just hoping there's nothing there because then if there is nothing there, the end result is that hopefully they're alive and well and uh doing as they were supposed to be doing according to the sun.

[00:09:42]>> While they were waiting, Orlando and his team took the opportunity to take a closer look at the gardens surrounding the house.

[00:09:49]>> In our little preamble around the building, there was one or two signs that we we we did spot. One was because it was a very frosty day. Um there was differential frosting on some of the the clouds of earth which we thought looked a bit odd. Could there be a burial here or something? We weren't sure. Uh there was a small burntout bonfire as well.

[00:10:07]But again, what was going on here? It it looked a little bit out of context. A little, you know, pile of ashes in the middle of a garden. Uh so we were taking this all in. We finally got a call on the radio uh saying that uh Roger had been taken into custody and consequently we were then given permission to enter the building.

[00:10:26]Would Eene and Derek returned to the village in a few days as Roger claimed or were the suspicions of the police justified? [music] It was six days since Derek and Eileen Severs had gone missing from their bungalow in the picturesque village of Hamilton in [music] Rutland. And news of their disappearance was spreading fast amongst the community.

[00:10:55]>> It was horrendous at first. Nobody sort of quite believed it. [music] >> It was truly shocking and the local people, from what I understand, could not get to grips with it.

[00:11:08]Mr. and Mrs. Severs were thoroughly good people. [music] Mrs. Severs worked for charity. She got the MBA for her good work. She was thoroughly reliable, would help [music] anybody. Mr. Severs was a hardworking executive with ICI. They got a beautiful bungalow overlooking Rutland water in a beautiful place. They were looking forward to a long and happy retirement. I could think of nobody who's ever said a word against them as far as I know. But the couple's only son, 38-year-old Roger, had been arrested on suspicion of their murder and was being formally questioned by police as they were dissatisfied with his version of events. And forensic officers were on standby to enter the Sever's home to see if there were any clues as to the whereabouts of the couple.

[00:11:52]>> His story never changed. [music] The story was always the same and consistent that they'd gone away because his father had had a slight stroke, was unwell, and they needed a rest and they were going away and coming back the following week.

[00:12:03]What we wanted to do was to have a good thorough look inside the house and to see if there was any evidence to suggest what might have gone [music] on. So, we wanted to take possession of it, seal it so that we could do that.

[00:12:17]>> Having been given the uh the all clear to enter, all the doors were locked. Um however uh there was one window that was a jar um leading into the bathroom. In some ways this was ideal because uh one of the basic one things one is taught in the scenes of crime school for beginners is don't use the same [music] path in and out as the offender would have used because obviously you could well be destroying evidence. Unfortunately, I was in charge of the team and also I was the smallest member of the team. So, it was my role to get up and climb in through the window.

[00:12:50]>> Having entered the property through the window, Orlando noticed the missing carpet, which had initially raised suspicion and meant the room needed closer inspection.

[00:12:59]>> It had no carpeting. It was bare floor.

[00:13:02]Uh, which obviously strikes one as a little bit odd. Quite quickly, having got down on my hands and knees, there was some little pin pricks of blood.

[00:13:13]blood if it's wet and [music] impacted upon. So you have this sort of repeated hitting on a wet wet surface. The blood then sprays.

[00:13:23]It's not like a drip drip drip that you might get from a cut. You get this very fine mist and that creates these small little blood drops. And it was these that were uh evidence on some of the lower surfaces around the backs of some of the units that we were looking at.

[00:13:44]At this very early stage, it was dawning on us fairly strongly that something was going on here that was not normal.

[00:13:53]>> The police thought they were dealing with a missing person's case. But within 3 days of the Sever's friends raising the alarm, the investigation escalated into a suspected murder inquiry.

[00:14:04]>> We thought we found blood. We needed further analysis to prove that it was blood, but we we knew what it was what it was. It was blood [music] and we thought that we got a murder and the murder scene was in the bathroom.

[00:14:15]>> The morning after Roger had been arrested, Orlando and John returned with forensic experts who slowly and meticulously began searching the rest of the property. We examined the rest of the bathroom and [music] uh under some of the surfaces like the uh the cover of the bath where it sort of dips under and down there was some washed out blood stains on there and there were one or two other little primicks of blood on the other side of the bathroom. It did look as if someone had been cleaning up. So again there was an element here of this is not a normal flow of blood. The next room we went into was the hallway which was directly outside of the the bathroom and that had a carpet on it. On our hands and knees again we spotted uh yellow fibers, greeny yellow fibers that had been rolled up, piled and again we we we didn't quite know what the relevance of this was. So again we clicked those in the kitchen. Uh we we discovered that there was no carpet there either. So it was not unlike the bathroom but it didn't look right. The rest of the house was immaculate.

[00:15:20]>> And there was another clue in the kitchen which heightened the suspicions of the investigating officer. A list of chores on the kitchen worktop written by Roger detailing all the cleaning he needed to do in the house.

[00:15:32]>> Well, when I saw the to-do list, when you read it through, you you'd see all the things that he'd put down to do, and you could make it fit, and you could say, "Well, what he's doing is disposing of evidence, and that's what it appeared to be to me. I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. A list that was left for us really. I mean, he disposed of everything, but he hadn't disposed of the list saying dispose of things.

[00:15:57][music] The only other room that was of interest was a garage uh that had no car parked in it. There was a damp patch on the the floor. We didn't quite know what it was, but it sort of had that bleachy, cleany sort of smell to it. Uh it certainly didn't react to any of our blood tests.

[00:16:14][music] Um, but even so, seemed a bit strange.

[00:16:22]>> The case was [music] mounting, but there was still no sense of the whereabouts of Derek and Eileen Severs, and Roger continued to [music] insist they were safe and well.

[00:16:31]>> They got away for a few days. I understand all the fuss is.

[00:16:34]>> All the time that we were finding evidence, there was an interview team talking to Roger who was in custody.

[00:16:39][music] Anything we found, we put to Roger. It caused him no concern whatsoever. that they were just routine matters [music] that he told us about the carpets.

[00:16:48]>> Roger said that the to-do list was just a list of chores that he got to do.

[00:16:52]There was it was just [music] a list.

[00:16:54]What's what's exciting or unusual about people write lists?

[00:16:59]>> We told him about the blood. He didn't actually actually accept that it was blood. He didn't know what the reason was that it was there. [music] >> Don't know.

[00:17:08]He showed no sign of explaining the death of his parent because he said they were not dead.

[00:17:15]>> Criminologist Elizabeth Yardley has researched and analyzed [clears throat] Roger's actions retrospectively.

[00:17:21]>> When we look at Roger Sever's behavior under police questioning, um he he constantly denied it. No, my parents are away. They're on holiday. You know, I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:17:31]And he was essentially sticking to his story. He decided this is what I'm going to do. This is my strategy. and I'm not going to waver from it and I'm just going to keep repeating myself and and you know everything will be fine.

[00:17:44]>> When the sweep of the house was complete, [music] Orlando and his team moved outside to Derek Sever's car.

[00:17:52]>> It looked quite muddy and quite grubby.

[00:17:54]So under the wheel arches, it was certainly quite thickly layered with [music] soil and yet these were fidious people. And they were so figious that we'd actually found three car cleaning [music] tokens in the glove compartment.

[00:18:09]Inside it there was sort of evidence of mud smearing almost as if it had been cleaned up. And we did get one or two little traces of uh positive for blood tests. And again in the boots there were these yellow fibers that were again cropping up. Interesting. We had a very strong feeling that this might hold the key to what was going on. 3 days into the investigation, John felt confident he could establish what had taken place in the bungalow despite no trace of the bodies.

[00:18:38]>> We think Mrs. Seers had been killed in the bathroom and Mr. Se was killed when he arrived home from the pub as soon as he got out of his car. We thought that the car had been used to transport the bodies, but I decided that we got enough evidence that these violent crimes had happened. Mr. and Mrs. Sevens were definitely missing. Uh, so we charged him with the murders without finding the bodies. And that our next job was actually to carry on proving it by finding the bodies.

[00:19:03]>> Where's the evidence? Where's the bodies?

[00:19:06]>> A few days ago.

[00:19:07]>> And how could they charge him with murder when you don't have a body?

[00:19:13]>> The village had been inundated with forensic officers and police. And now news was spreading amongst the locals that two of their own had been murdered.

[00:19:22]But hearing who the prime suspect was shocked the community to the core.

[00:19:27]>> Well, when they found out it was the son and you know, I mean, everyone thought, "Blime, you know, no one ever thought to this day it [music] was someone in the family."

[00:19:35]>> Roger at no time had admitted murdering his parents. We were sure he had.

[00:19:40]>> He never ever weakened. [music] He insisted always that they were on the holidays and we shouldn't be concerned even when he was charged.

[00:19:47]>> A son charged with killing his parents.

[00:19:50]But greater challenges lay ahead for police to find the bodies of this couple and Roger's motive for murder.

[00:20:09]In the adilic county of Rutland, Leicersha police had descended on the house of the Severs, a local retired couple who'd mysteriously gone missing.

[00:20:18]And after forensics found traces of blood, senior investigating officer John Kavanaaugh had upped the investigation from that of missing persons to murder.

[00:20:28]While the couple's only son, Roger, who [music] lived with them, insisted they were just on holiday.

[00:20:34]>> They've got away [music] for a few days.

[00:20:36]Understand what the fuss is. But SIO John didn't believe this account [music] and despite not having any bodies or proof the couple were dead, he took the bold step of charging the 38-year-old son with the double murder.

[00:20:50]>> I was absolutely satisfied that Roger had killed his mother and father.

[00:20:53]There's no doubt in my mind and we decided that he should be charged and he should be kept in custody. It was so unusual and it's almost against nature that a son should want to kill his parents and I don't think um that the local people could quite grasp what had happened.

[00:21:12]>> Hamilton village was in shock.

[00:21:15]>> Very uncommon to to get a murdered, you know, sort of in in any village in any time, but around here it it was very very extraordinary, you know, to hear it and no one could believe it. With Derek and Eileen's son charged with murder, John and Orlando were still missing vital evidence. The bodies of the couple.

[00:21:37]The search was on and every inch of the village and surrounding areas were combed for clues.

[00:21:43]>> Well, the case was incomplete without the bodies. We needed the body of Mr. and Mrs. Seers. We needed an explanation from the bodies of what had happened to them. Uh without the bodies, we got what we thought, but not what we knew. So we wanted to know the search was a massive search. We told the media that there were two people missing. It was extremely cold and we had hundreds of people turning up, members of the public, and we had them walking the area looking.

[00:22:10]>> Villagers were shocked that two of their own could just disappear from such a close-knit community.

[00:22:17]>> And everybody really wanted to find out what had gone on. They couldn't believe it. Suddenly everybody was saying, "Well, where are they?" And there was lots of people who turned up and said, you know, can we help? Can we be of any assistance?

[00:22:28]But suddenly the county was full of police vans, forensic support units, u men in white coats and gloves. So it was all sort of quite distressing at the time.

[00:22:38]>> There's a lot of difficulties with the search.

[00:22:42]Hamilton is right next to Rutland water and of course there's a possibility that they're in Rutland water.

[00:22:50]There were divers in Rutland water.

[00:22:54]People were out looking. The police were searching and they were making appeals for anybody [music] to come forward with the sighting of this couple.

[00:23:03]>> We got in touch with Rutland water and they decided to search the lake for us.

[00:23:07]They put a camera underwater. We also used sonar and we were very satisfied at the end of that that the bodies were not in Rutland water. The search parties were completely negative. We never found anything, any clue whatsoever that might suggest where Mr. and Mrs. Evans were.

[00:23:25]>> With the search fruitless, the village remained tense, desperate to know where Derek and Eene had been taken to and why. It was time to re-examine the evidence before them, and attention turned back to Derek Sever's car, which when examined was unusually muddy.

[00:23:41]>> Several days into the inquiry, what we knew was that the car had been used to take the bodies. It had been washed. It was clean, but it wasn't like the bathroom. It wasn't a very good job of cleaning it. Uh, and when we had a look at it, we could see that there were still soil traces on it.

[00:23:59]>> Senior crime scene manager Orlando Elmhurst began to think laterally.

[00:24:04]>> I used to be an archaeologist and I was aware that mud isn't just mud. It it is significant. I decided to contact the local university, which was Leester University, and asked if they had any soil experts or [music] anyone who could do something with this. soil over and above just giving me a vague geographical location. So we agreed to meet and the lecturer was more than happy to try and do something with it because the mud has been uh so thickly pied onto the uh the wheel arch you could get a strategraphy I you know there were layers within it and therefore those layers you could then do um some form of timing sort of relative timing between the various uh layers and he then took away some samples from all four of the wheel arches and disappeared back to Leicester and we awaited his outcome.

[00:24:51]>> [music] >> So we then got a phone call from Leicester University and they were able to give us a summary of the findings.

[00:24:58]This is what we were told.

[00:25:02]The soil originates from a road verge or parking place by water used by fishermen in or adjacent to woodland with a significant proportion of oak, horse, chestnut, ash and lime. the wood edge also bordering arable fields and pastures and located on or adjacent to soils derived from linker limestone.

[00:25:25]>> Well, what what he told us was the car had definitely been in woodland but there is a lot of woodland in Rutland and what he said but there was a combination of trees growing where [music] the car had been and the combination of trees was what we need to be looking for. So I said so we start looking for trees then do we? And he said, "Well, basically you do start [music] looking for trees, but at that point, he said, but I can tell you where they grow."

[00:25:49]>> This forensic bot was absolutely groundbreaking.

[00:25:55]>> I don't think anybody had ever come up with this sort of analysis before. And my first reaction was, I hope it's right because we've got no idea at this minute where they are. And what he came up with was a number of priority areas that he said [music] that trees would be growing in the right combination.

[00:26:12]I decided, well, what we'll do, we'll put a specialized search team in each of those areas. I prioritize the areas and we decided that we'd give it a go.

[00:26:23]>> Knowing that Mr. Seis was a a large gentleman, they would then look at an area 50 m either side of vehicle access because really his body could not be transferred too far by a single person.

[00:26:34]Suddenly, we could be quite specific about what we were doing and why we were doing it.

[00:26:44]Well, we started searching and the first area was negative as was the second area.

[00:26:54]And then on the third area, they came to me. Uh the uh search team were eullant.

[00:27:00]They were over the moon because they thought they'd found something.

[00:27:05]I then got a phone call saying that as part of the police search, they'd uncovered a small bit of what they thought might be flesh in a mound within um Armley Wood.

[00:27:16]>> When the bodies were found in a shallow grave in Armley Wood, um the whole of the national press descended on the scene. It was chaos. The villagers would never have seen anything like this before. The news just exploded all over the country.

[00:27:35]So the first thing we did is we moved the soil layer by layer as one would do in archaeology and then established whether or not we had a body.

[00:27:48]By the time we had removed it layer by layer we had a pair of feet. [music] But more importantly these feets were also covered in a yellow blanket. The fibers on the yellow blanket coincided [music] and were an identical match forensically with the previous fibers that we found in the house and in the car.

[00:28:10]I thought it was unbelievable really.

[00:28:12]Nobody had told us, nobody had given us any indication where the bodies were at all. This was entirely [music] down to the analysis on the underside of the car.

[00:28:21]Well, I was over the moon really that we could actually use this forensic analysis to find bodies.

[00:28:29]Roger had been telling us lies all along. His parents obviously were not on holiday. They were the victims of this very awful crime. And there they were buried together in the wood.

[00:28:41]>> And news spread fast amongst the Hamilton community that Derek and Eene had been finally found two weeks after [music] they went missing. most shocking especially around here you just don't get anything like that at all you know >> people could hardly believe it because and people would go around the same town saying I saw them last Wednesday they were buying fruit here on the market or this and they could relate to the people >> everyone felt very sorry for this elderly couple and they were vulnerable they were in an isolated bungalow they couldn't shout for help no one would hear them this was a despicable crime We sent a team to see Roger after he after we found the bodies. They went to see him in prison. They told him what had happened and his response was no comment.

[00:29:31]>> Don't know. No comment.

[00:29:33]>> We got a a substantial amount of evidence. I was confident we got enough evidence to convict him and [music] we took him to trial charged with the murders of his mother and father.

[00:29:44]>> Most murders are committed by somebody known to the victim. very often that's within the the family circle. Uh but most often we see murder happen between between partners. Um and children killing their parents is a very very rare phenomenon indeed.

[00:29:59]>> The police felt they had a watertight case against Roger. But what they were lacking was a motive. Why would he choose to kill his parents in cold blood?

[00:30:23]November 1994 and 38-year-old Roger Severs was due to stand trial at Nottingham Crown Court for the double murder of his parents, Derek and Eileen Severs, who'd been fatally attacked in their home and then buried in a shallow grave in local woods.

[00:30:40]The postmortem examination revealed that both of them had been killed by severe blows to the head. Mrs. Severs had been hit at least eight times and Mr. Severs had been hit at least 10 times.

[00:30:57]The suggestion of the postmortm was that the attack had been with a hammer. We can't say what sort of a hammer, but it's appeared to be a hammer with a circular head.

[00:31:07]The murder of Derek and Eileen Severs was a particularly brutal one. Um, we know that his mother was was killed first. Um, he he obviously attacked her several times and and it took her around 30 minutes to die, we we believe. And then he knew that his father would be we would be coming home. So, um, he he then went and attacked his father when his father arrived home.

[00:31:33]Before the trial, the couple [music] were laid to rest and senior investigating officer John Cavana felt compelled to attend.

[00:31:41]>> When I went to the funeral [music] of Mr. and Mrs. Simmons, I realized what a sad occasion it was that [music] it was such a dreadful thing to do and the the emotion of people there was very upsetting really.

[00:31:57]It's it is a shocking case to think of somebody killing their parents.

[00:32:02]The murder trial began in November 1994.

[00:32:05]When I first saw Roger in court, um, he just turned away from the public gallery. He looked [music] at the wall. He was hunched up. He didn't look at the jury, the judge. He didn't seem [music] to be paying attention to what was being said.

[00:32:22]>> The investigation team were anxious to hear Roger's version of events [music] and his answer to the key question, why?

[00:32:29]Up until the trial, he was admitting nothing and he was pleading not guilty.

[00:32:33][music] When we got to the trial, we realized that his plea was not that he hadn't killed them, that he had killed him in a sudden fit of temper. So, it was a loss of control. There was no premeditation.

[00:32:45]The [music] loss of control was because they said things to criticize his his previous girlfriend. He was pleading not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

[00:32:58]He is emotionally empty. He doesn't feel any remorse. He doesn't feel any shame.

[00:33:03]He's not going to react in any way [music] when he's confronted with, you know, quite emotional statements about his his parents' death because all he's concerned with doing is meeting his needs, his wants, his desires. That's a very cold, very calculated way of looking at things.

[00:33:19]>> The prosecution presented their case.

[00:33:22]The evidence told us that the first attack was against his mother in the bathroom because he killed his mother. He's now got a problem because his father's coming home. So we what I think he did was wait until his dad got home and then killed his dad as soon as he got out of the car.

[00:33:54]The blood on the garage doors was showed hammer blows. You could see where the blood splatter on the door indicated each blow to his dad's head. So I'm I'm satisfied that he killed him there.

[00:34:06]Killing his father, for instance, was premeditated. When his dad got home, he was waiting to kill him. That's what I think.

[00:34:14]He said that he did not follow his mother into the bathroom intending to kill her and that he just um seemed to lose his mind and have no recollection.

[00:34:25]The next thing he knew, she was half lying over the bath panel covered in blood and [music] and then he wandered outside and his father just appeared and he lashed out uh blindly really and then went off and drank some whiskey. after he killed his mother, either there and then or later, he wrapped her in the yellow blanket.

[00:34:48]And that's the blanket that was actually found she was wrapped in in the grave.

[00:34:53]>> And it was this yellow blanket that had left clues for police in the car and in the house.

[00:34:58]>> The fibers showed that she'd been dragged through the hall of the house and there were fibers in the inside the boot of the car.

[00:35:08]After battering his parents [music] to death, Roger had to get rid of the bodies. And the yellow fibers found in Derek Sever's car proved that he must have used this vehicle to transport his parents to Armley Woods.

[00:35:22]But the car also offered another way of linking Roger to the crime.

[00:35:27]Tire marks as well. We found tire marks where the vehicle would have gone in and out. And again, they were matched up to the tires on the car. So it was all coming together. We could put the vehicle at the scene and just as importantly we could put the scene on the vehicle.

[00:35:43]>> We don't think that he took them both at the same time because it would have been too much in the back of the car. He took his mother put her in the grave and he took his father at a later time and put him in the grave and then he built the grave around them.

[00:35:57]>> And the careful considered construction of this makeshift grave [music] also proved to be Roger's undoing.

[00:36:04]because we'd excavated in in a sort of a a sectional way, we were able to look at the profile of the soil that had been put on them.

[00:36:12]So, uh at the bottom there was these white shingly sort of stones. There was also some slates, um bits of roofing and then on top of that there were layers of mud of different color um that had come from different places. Part of what we then had to do was to try and establish where some of this material had come from. The the white stones came from the path that went around Hamilton Peninsula, >> and the roof slates found at the grave were a perfect match to slates found in the family's garage, suggesting Roger had brought them from the house along with the soil, >> the mud, well, that were all the hallmarks of having come from the sever's bungalow address. More importantly, we uh found a potato and this was quite a rare potato and we took that to a potato expert and he was able to say that it was of the same species of potatoes that had come from the garden of the service bungalow.

[00:37:12]What uh Roger Sus had done was to use the soil from the garden, transported it down to the burial site and then poured it over the bodies. This would explain the whole raft of other issues that we'd locate or thought about earlier on such as why the soil was shown as differential frosting because obviously some of it had been disturbed as he dug up for the soil to transport across.

[00:37:36]>> This forensic information and analysis was presented to the court to try to prove that the murders were premeditated and that Roger had acted with intent.

[00:37:47]>> Roger Sees didn't react to anything that was being said. It was as if he um had blanked everything out around him. He didn't show any emotion at all. He didn't look around the room and he just seemed disinterested or just detached really from the proceedings.

[00:38:06]>> And following the double murder, Roger's cover [music] up began.

[00:38:11]>> The carpet had gone from the kitchen.

[00:38:13]The carpet had gone from the bathroom.

[00:38:14]The carpet had gone from the car. All of them would have been blood soaked. So removal was obviously very important for Roger.

[00:38:21]>> He was trying to dispose of the evidence from the house, but we know he got fires in the garden. And we think all of those fires were for the purposes of disposing of evidence. It was burning. It was cleaning. It was trying to tidy the car up. He was going to the tip and taking stuff to the tip. All of this was trying to get rid of it. And he had a week to try to do that.

[00:38:45]So he'd obviously made what in his eyes were a good attempt at trying [music] to clean up afterwards, but it's very very difficult to clean up all evidence types. [music] You can't see necessarily these microscopic little spotlets of blood, these tiny fibers that hang around. So he's not really done a very good forensic [music] job at all.

[00:39:09]>> There's a lot to do and what he did was write himself a list. So he didn't miss anything. [music] >> That suggests that somebody is going through a very systematic, very cold, removed process essentially of covering up this murder. This is essentially his to-do list. It's a to-do list for something that is incredibly horrendous.

[00:39:29]But he would deal with this to-do list in the same way that he would deal with a shopping list or a list [music] of things to do at work.

[00:39:37]He didn't miss anything, but what he did miss was getting rid of the list that he'd wrote to [music] do it.

[00:39:50]>> After several [music] weeks, all evidence on both sides had been presented.

[00:39:54]>> It all came down to what the jury thought of what he was saying. Did they believe what he was saying, or did they think that it was a murder, as it as it certainly was? And what they decided was that he'd murdered his parents and that it was premeditated.

[00:40:08]>> His story didn't ring true [music] and it didn't ring true with the jury either because they took just two hours to find him guilty on two counts of murder >> and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

[00:40:21]>> Retrospectively, Roger's behavior and personality has been analyzed and studied.

[00:40:26]>> Well, Roger Severs led quite a privileged life. um he was the only child and he had everything that that a young person could want.

[00:40:35]>> However, later in life, he really let his parents down. He didn't hold on to a job for longer than a couple of months.

[00:40:43]>> He's not [music] making any move whatsoever to find work.

[00:40:49]>> And he actually told lies about what he had achieved. He would boast in the pub about business successes that were just a figment of his imagination. He was a real Walter Mitti character.

[00:41:03]>> Can't keep building bailing him out all the time or we can't.

[00:41:05]>> I think Roger tried to give the impression that he was a successful businessman that wherever he went he put on this act that he's doing well. He was uh sort of living in a fairy land really. He wasn't doing well. He was thoroughly dishonest and he was dishonest to the people he spoke to.

[00:41:22]Dad, that £500 we spoke about. Any chance of owning it today?

[00:41:26]>> Spoke about it, but I never promise I'll lend it to you.

[00:41:28]>> If you owe me 300, that'll sort me out until the end of the month.

[00:41:31]>> We help you out the less you >> £300. £300, please.

[00:41:35]>> Not this [music] time.

[00:41:36]>> I won't ask again. It's the last time will be the last time I ask you.

[00:41:40]>> He had a range of different success [music] stories which he would present to to women and and friends in in his life. Um he would regail people with tales of sporting achievements playing rugby for England. He would say he saved people from the the Harrods bomb that he was there at the Kegworth air disaster driving ambulances. So these were some some [music] incredibly incredibly large scale lives.

[00:42:02]>> I'm a doctor.

[00:42:04]>> Yeah. Local GP.

[00:42:06]>> That was his way of kind of reeling people in [music] and and he he wanted to to basically create an image create um an image of himself which would be appealing to to other people. And with hindsight, perhaps the writing was on the wall all along.

[00:42:23]>> Lots and lots of of different warning signals are are present in in Roger Sever's case. His glibness, his superficial charm, his proness to boredom, need for stimulation.

[00:42:41]Today, life has returned [music] to normal in Hamilton, but the community hasn't forgotten the much-loved members of their village.

[00:42:48]>> An overwhelming sadness [music] really that such a lovely sounding couple came to such a painful, brutal end. They really didn't deserve it.

[00:43:00]>> [music] >> and villagers still remember how the community came together in an attempt to find two of their own who were simply looking forward to their [music] long- awaited retirement in this beautiful county.

[00:43:12]And although the double murder took place two decades ago, it's [music] left a lasting impression on those who worked to bring justice for the couple.

[00:43:19]>> From the forensic point of view, it was a really nice rounded investigation. All the diction pieces fitted together. um even though they didn't at the time ultimately it worked well and the right experts were called in and they came up with the goods every time it was a new way of using soil and pollen [music] as I say up to that point it was can't do much with it give you a local geographical area [music] and this was really the first time that it had been used to produce this environmental profile and to be used so effectively as well is what made it so so so [music] good a case to be involved in >> it's a long time ago this offense. It's more than 20 years now. [music] And but I'll never forget it. I'll never forget the crime.

[00:44:07]I'll never forget the severity of the attacks and I'll never forget the work that we did and the help that we got to find these bodies. I think it was extraordinary.

[00:44:21][music] >> [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:44:44][music] December the 9th, 1988.

[00:45:15]I heard my door knock. I looked out my window. There's about five C outside.

[00:45:20]Said, "What do you want?" They said, "Oh, John, can you come with us to the police station about the Lynette White murder?" I was in shock. You know, I mean, complete shock.

[00:45:30][music] >> Lynette White was 20 when police found her mutilated body in her flat in Cardiff's Docks area. She had been stabbed and slashed 50 times.

[00:45:42]The police just wanted to put the community down even more by accusing black people of committing the murder against a white girl.

[00:45:51]>> All five men here at Swansea's Crown Court today have pleaded not guilty to murder.

[00:45:58]>> The lowest part of your life you could ever be. You know, being accused of mutilating a young girl, all you're thinking is you're going to get a life sentence, but something you haven't done.

[00:46:13]>> [music] >> You'll get all the prostitutes working up this area, all the punters driving around in their cars, you know, and it was very busy. Lynette would be working up on the streets up the top by the custom house. You just see her on the streets. Nice little smile she had. You know, she's passed. Although I uh she was a pleasant kid. It's unfortunate what happened to her. You know, it's it's terrible.

[00:46:51][music] >> On the 14th of February 1988, the body of 20-year-old Lynette White was found in a flat on James Street in Buttown in the Dockland's area of Cardiff.

[00:47:03]John Ecti lived in Buttown. Button back in the 80s was a good community. There was all nationalities down here. You know, Portuguese, Polish, Somali, African, you know, West Indian, Jamaican, you know, white people and everyone just got on.

[00:47:22]But the way they painted But it was a bad place to go. Prostitutes, drug dealers, people carrying knives, and you go down there and something's going to happen. So keep it well away from button.

[00:47:35]>> Having begun working as a prostitute when she was a teenager, Cardiff local frequented but town's red light district. And it was here in late 1987 that she crossed paths with BBC radio reporter Tim Rogers. It was a wet autumn's night here at Fitz Salmon embankment which in those days was frequented by sex workers like Lynette White.

[00:48:12]She was probably the most visible girl who patrolled this street here every day, every evening. I wanted to talk to her because I was investigating child prostitution in Cardiff at the time. She was little more than a child herself.

[00:48:28][music] It was a cold night. It was a miserable beat. So, she gave me the time of day and we spoke and talked [music] about the reality of her life and how it wasn't unusual for her to see 50 or 60 men a day.

[00:48:48]She was a young, vulnerable adult, a girl who looked far older than her years, worn down by the stress and the pressure of living that hard life. It was deeply shocking then sometime later when her face came up on the news bulletins, the girl I'd spoken to had been murdered.

[00:49:17]Lynette White had gone missing on the 9th of February 1988.

[00:49:22]>> The police were expecting her to give evidence in a trial, but she went missing.

[00:49:29]>> Brent [music] Perry, an officer in the South Wales Police Major Crime Squad, would come to know Lynette's case well.

[00:49:36]>> They were looking for her to give evidence in this trial, but nobody came forward to see where she was.

[00:49:44]It wasn't until 5 days [music] later on the 14th of February that fellow sex worker Leanne Ve contacted the police about Lynette.

[00:49:53]Leanne rented a flat 7 James Street in but town which she and Lynette used for the purposes of prostitution.

[00:50:03]>> Leanne [music] had gone to that premises said that she couldn't find entry that she had given keys to Lynette. And so the police went with her to [music] the flat. The person living on the top floor of the premises threw some spare keys down. So they the police and Leanne went and entered that premises and that's when Lynette's body was found.

[00:50:32]Lynette was on the floor and had received multiple wounds. Her throat had been cut. There was over 50 stab wounds.

[00:50:45][music] It's unclear where Lynette spent the last 5 days of her life, but evidence showed she had died in the early hours of Valentine's Day.

[00:50:59]>> Lynette's watch stopped at 2:00 in the morning, so that was the [music] likely time when she died.

[00:51:07]It was really sparse the room itself.

[00:51:11]There was a Dean bed, no clothing on it, no mattress. Lynette's body was underneath the window. There was blood [music] everywhere.

[00:51:22]It was pretty horrific scene for anybody to uh to walk into really.

[00:51:31]One of the first priorities in finding Lynette's killer was to gather any forensic evidence at the scene >> back in 1988. [music] They would have secured that scene. The scenes of crime officers would have been called as would have forensic investigators and together they would have taken samples.

[00:51:53][music] The most important thing as far as investigations were concerned in those days would have been fingerprinting.

[00:52:04]But fingerprints realistically didn't tell that initial investigation anything. They would have also taken blood. [music] Whilst the majority of blood at the scene was Lynette's, worldleading forensic scientist Angela Gallup believes such a frenzied attack would have left the original forensics team hopeful to find some of the killer's blood alongside it. Because of the nature of the attack, the fact that it was a knife attack and that so many blows were struck with this knife, there was always the possibility that there might be some blood from not only the victim but also from the offender there because it's very easy to cut yourself.

[00:52:45]You're delivering all these blows. It's easy for the hand wielding it to slide down onto the cutting edge of the blade and then the blood can be spattered about at the crime scene. So the original scientists were doing exactly what you'd expect. They were looking for foreign blood, i.e. not Lynette's blood at the scene.

[00:53:02]>> There was evidence that there was a foreign blood there. So there was blood from somebody else.

[00:53:13]>> They had a certain amount of this foreign blood and some of it was on critical items like Lynette's jeans and on her socks. However, forensic capabilities were a lot less advanced in 1988.

[00:53:26]>> DNA was not existent. So, what you had was blood grouping. So, that would give you the blood group and also it would be able to tell you if that was male or female.

[00:53:40]>> The foreign blood was found to contain the male Y chromosome and was of the rare blood group AB. They were able to say that this lad occurs only in one in 3,800 people. I mean, these [music] days we're used to one in a billion statistics from DNA, but in those days that wasn't a bad result, but at the time, you know, it couldn't be made use of. That was the problem.

[00:54:02]>> Whilst this was a significant forensic find, there was no way of using this blood group to help detectives identify Lynette's killer. What officers needed now was a suspect to match it to.

[00:54:34]On Valentine's Day 1988, 20-year-old Lynette White was found brutally murdered in a flat in Buttown, Cardiff.

[00:54:43]Police had found what they believed to be the killer's blood at the scene. But limitations in forensic technology at the time meant they first needed to find a suspect to match the sample to.

[00:54:56]>> Most murders [music] in this country are committed by uh people who are known to the victims. A boyfriend, a loved one is often uh comes under intense police scrutiny.

[00:55:10]Lynette's boyfriend, 22-year-old Steven Miller, was immediately brought in for questioning.

[00:55:15]>> He did have an alibi. He was with another person who backed up his story, saying he was with him all day and and through the evening. Also, when they recovered his clothing, there was no blood and things like that. So, he was ruled out >> [music] >> um quite early in the investigation.

[00:55:37]But it wasn't long before South Wales police had a lead. A number of witnesses came forward having seen a suspiciousl looking man near the crime scene on the day Lynette was murdered. Barbara Lee vividly remembers her sighting.

[00:55:52]>> We've been living for a while with my mother and it was always, you know, nice to get out of the house. So we got in the car with no particular aim and ended up driving down to the docks.

[00:56:11]We parked at the end of But Street, got the push chair out, and as we approached the railing at the end of But Street, I became aware of a man. His shoulders were hunched and he was clutching his hands to his chest.

[00:56:30][music] I noticed then that he had blood stains, cloths wrapped around his hand.

[00:56:34]I don't know whether it was a a towel or a a napkin or something, but I thought something not quite right here. Something I don't like. I felt unnerved, unsettled, and uncomfortable.

[00:56:51][music] So, I called to my husband and we got back in the car and we left.

[00:56:57]Very quickly, the police said that they had a witness and that they were looking for a white man.

[00:57:03]>> That was a major line of inquiry. There was a photo and it went on to crime watch. So, the public was made aware that a person of that description then was seen near the scene the following day, but they didn't get anywhere with that line of inquiry.

[00:57:22]Whilst no significant leads were generated from this appeal, the police did now have an image of a suspect.

[00:57:29][music] And one line of inquiry they were pursuing was that Lynette was murdered by a client.

[00:57:40]By April 1988, a man already known to police dubbed Mr. X became the prime suspect.

[00:57:48]>> Mr. X was brought to the attention of the investigation as a result of intelligence, but the inquiries that went on as far as Mr. X was concerned came to nothing.

[00:58:01]>> After reviewing the evidence and trying to match the blood types, Mr. X was ruled out.

[00:58:07]>> The initial investigation was difficult [music] without any forensic really giving them a lead. And because of the nature of Lynette's work, a lot of people don't like coming forward either to assist. By September 1988, the police investigation appeared to be stalling.

[00:58:30]>> They were under a lot of pressure because the community [music] had been frightened and disturbed by what was the most savage of murders.

[00:58:42]a girl who was almost decapitated. The violence was horrific. The killer was on the loose and the police hadn't found him.

[00:58:52]>> Then suddenly, after 10 months of looking for a lone white male, an entirely [music] different set of suspects were taken him for questioning.

[00:59:02]>> The media had been informed. The community had been told that the key suspect was a white man with blood on his hands. Then all that changes and suddenly the police announce that they've arrested five black guys from but in December 1988. Despite having been ruled out early on in the investigation, Lynette's boyfriend Steven Miller became a prime suspect along with four other men. Ysef Abdalahi, Tony Paris, Ronnie Acti, and his cousin John Acti.

[00:59:49]>> That morning they come knocked my door.

[00:59:50]I went downstairs. It was a local inspector who I knew. I opened the door.

[00:59:55]I said, "Yeah, what do you want?" They said, "Oh, John, can you come with us to the police station about the Lynette White murder?" Crazy. Absolutely crazy.

[01:00:02]I hadn't done nothing.

[01:00:06]>> [music] >> telling you I swore, you know, and I said to him, "I ain't coming nowhere with you." He said, "Oh, John, if you don't come, I'll have to call back up."

[01:00:16]Literally, I'm shaking. Adrenaline was just going right through me.

[01:00:22][music] I went back in. I said to the Mrs., "He wants me to go down." Give her a kiss. I said, "I'll be about half hour now. Half hour." Hour.

[01:00:32][music] Four witnesses, including Lynette's fellow sex worker, Liam Ve, and a neighbor who lived above the James Street flat, placed the five men at the scene.

[01:00:47]Seemed they were arrested for gossip because somebody said it was them and that seemed to be good enough.

[01:01:05]I've never heard so much rubbish.

[01:01:09]Absolutely unbelievable.

[01:01:13]Pressure was on Cardiff Bay Marina was coming. There was a lot of money being spent down there. The police must have had people from up top telling them, you know, you better solve this murder. You better solve this murder. And 10 months down the line, they was run out of options. And you know they took it out on the five of us. [music] >> The five men had alibis. Ysef Abdalai had a very strong alibi. He was working on a ship, the Coral Sea, 8 to 10 miles away, which was corroborated by others who were there and were working with him. It didn't seem to make any difference.

[01:01:52]John Acti had been working on the door [music] of Btown's famous Casablanca nightclub on the night in question.

[01:02:01]>> I told her from the beginning, I know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. I know you're fitting me up. I wasn't there.

[01:02:07]>> Despite their protestations of innocence, the police really weren't listening.

[01:02:13]Their attitude seemed to be, "We know these these boys are guilty.

[01:02:18]Guilty of something. they will deny it and we're going to break them down.

[01:02:23][music] >> As I was getting older, you know, I was getting into more trouble and then ended up going to a young offenders institution and prison. And then after the prison sentence, you know, I I just snapped out of it, you know, and and didn't didn't go back to jail. I was just getting on with life. But the police, you know, I used to stand up for my rights. They didn't like it when I stood up and told them no, they hated me.

[01:02:54]>> To make matters worse, Miller spent 5 days in police custody where he was submitted to a series of gruelling interviews, after which he finally and falsely admitted to being present at the crime scene, [music] also implicating the other four men.

[01:03:12]Steven Miller actually said that Tony Paris committed the murder and I think that was pressure uh from that investigation.

[01:03:25]Oh, you could sit there and say that and being in that room, seeing that girl there in the state she was in and you supposed to had all this wonderful care for her, seeing a damn head hang off and her arms cut and stabbed to death and you sit there and tell her you know nothing at all about it >> how you can ever I just don't know how you can sit there. He broke under that interrogation. After hour upon hour of allegation and denial, in the end, he could take no more.

[01:03:58]>> After Leanne came in, she started shouting. She said something to somebody. My father's eye. She ran out.

[01:04:03]Nothing to [ __ ] crazy man.

[01:04:09]>> But what forensic evidence, if any, did police have that linked these five men to the crime scene? They did have samples of blood that were found at the scene, but nothing that would categorically link them to any of the accused. There was no forensic evidence.

[01:04:27]>> It was all down to what the witnesses said and also that confession as well.

[01:04:36]>> Despite the non-existent forensic evidence, all five men were charged with Lynette's murder.

[01:04:48]>> [music] >> Everyone was horrified. How could they believe these people who said that?

[01:04:55][music] I lost all hope. I lost all hope the minute they charged me. The lowest part of your life you could ever be. You know, being accused of mutilating a young girl.

[01:05:07]What could people think? You're animal.

[01:05:11]I was at my wits end. I I just didn't know what to do.

[01:05:17]>> The men who had become known as the Cardiff 5 were held on remand awaiting their trial.

[01:05:23]>> Every second of every minute of every hour of every day being in that cell.

[01:05:30]You know some of you haven't is terrible. Absolutely terrible.

[01:05:39]On the 3rd of October 1989, 10 months after their arrest, the trial of the Cardiff 5 began.

[01:05:47]In court today were Ronald Acti, aged 31, and his cousin John Acti, aged 27.

[01:05:53]There was 32-year-old Anthony Paris, and Yousef Abduli, 28, all from Cardiff. And from London, Steven Miller, who's 24 and who was Lynette White's boyfriend.

[01:06:06]>> [music] >> The trial is held in Swansea Crown Court and that's significant as far as the men are concerned. John Acti in particular feels Swansea was a largely white city.

[01:06:20]>> Swansea is is white. There's no black down there. There's no black down there at all. So, we had to deal with that.

[01:06:27]>> It was definitely not home ground. So the men felt that when the case began, they were in a hostile environment where their stories [music] were not likely to be believed.

[01:06:41]>> All five men here at Swansea's Crown Court today have pleaded not guilty to murder.

[01:06:47]>> The judge was really against us [music] and the prosecution. The way they described the Buttown area, everyone carries knives. It's a drugfueled area with pimps and prostitutes.

[01:07:01]There was no forensic evidence on no one. Absolutely no one. There couldn't have been because we wasn't there. None of us was there. All you're thinking is you're going to get a life sentence, but something you haven't done.

[01:07:14][music] >> But after 4 months, the trial had to be unexpectedly halted.

[01:07:20]>> The judge has a heart attack and dies.

[01:07:23]It's unbelievable.

[01:07:26]And then another judge come in and he reminded us back in custody. So we had to do it all over again.

[01:07:33][music] A whole new trial had to start which culminated in it being the longest criminal trial in British legal history up to that point.

[01:07:47]>> On the 22nd of November 1990, the verdict was finally in. [music] The Cardiff 5 stood accused of the brutal murder of 20-year-old Lynette White on Valentine's Day 1988. Now, nearly 2 years after their arrests, the men were about to learn their fate.

[01:08:20]The jury goes out on the Monday.

[01:08:25]>> Tuesday, Tony's [music] guilty. Steven Miller's guilty.

[01:08:33]Wednesday, Ronny's not guilty.

[01:08:38]They called builder up. They said guilty.

[01:08:43]And then they called me. I couldn't actually get up the stairs.

[01:08:47]My legs was like lead and the prison officer helped me up.

[01:08:53]Then I stood there and looked at the jury. I can remember holding the the the rails on the thing. They [music] asked the the jury and he said, "Not guilty. God almighty Jesus."

[01:09:15]Absolutely crazy. The cart erupted.

[01:09:18]Literally erupted. Everyone [music] screamed and screamed and it was unbelievable. [music] Absolutely unbelievable.

[01:09:40]John and his cousin Ronnie were finally free. But Tony Paris, Steven Miller, and Ysef Abdullahi, [music] who were to become known as the Cardiff 3, were each sentenced to life in prison for Lynette's murder.

[01:09:54]>> That led to an eruption, an outpouring of anger and demonstrations and a feeling within Buttown and the community at large that this just wasn't right.

[01:10:15]a celebrity black campaigner, the Reverend Elsharton, came over to South Wales. He came because he felt there was such an injustice and this community were not being heard. There was a prejudice against them and eventually journalists and others, lawyers started to look at this case and the closer that we looked, the more uncomfortable we became.

[01:10:46]After almost 2 years of campaigning, on December the 7th, 1992, an appeal hearing commenced for the Cardiff 3. By the time the case came to appeal, a lot of column inches had been filled with important questions about this case which just didn't seem to add up.

[01:11:07]The most shocking and revealing moments of the case were when the court of appeal heard the police interviews with Steven Miller, which had been key evidence at the original trials.

[01:11:17]>> You're with me? Into the flat. There she is. I'll give her a slaps a few times. a knife. Good idea to cut it and then it goes wrong.

[01:11:29]It's very very wrong.

[01:11:32]He had a mental age of 11 year old and they broke him. He admitted being there through the pressure from them and then they were feeding him names and he was agreeing to what they were saying. That interview was condemned by the judge and it was found that Steven's confession was unreliable and hit overturned that conviction in the court of appeal.

[01:11:57][music and bell] With no forensic evidence linking the accused men to the crime and the court of appeal concluding that police misconduct had led to a forced confession. In December 1992, having spent four years in prison, the Cardiff 3 were finally acquitted and all five men now had their freedom.

[01:12:18]>> When it came to the judges summing [music] up this was categorically, he said, one of the worst miscarriages of justice that had ever come before a British court.

[01:12:31]>> But the finger was still pointed at us.

[01:12:33]You had to live with the stigma of being accused of a murder and still they haven't caught the the white guy with the greasy air, you know, and you got the police saying, "Well, we've done our job. We believe it was them."

[01:12:46]>> The only way the Cardifi's names would truly be cleared, was if the real killer of Lynette White could [music] be caught.

[01:12:57]But it wasn't until 1999, 11 years after Lynette's murder, that the case was reopened with Kevin O'Neal at the helm.

[01:13:07][music] My boss wanted to show that South Wales police could investigate serious cases professionally with integrity, and he wanted the public to trust South Wales police.

[01:13:25]I felt we had to stop looking at the five and move forward on that main track of forensic with the advances in DNA. We were thinking well we can get somewhere with this. So we took up with an independent forensic company which was Angela Gallup. It was the first big reinvestigation that we had attempted with our new DNA techniques and our new understanding about crime scenes.

[01:13:56]>> Key to this new investigation would be revisiting the evidence from 1988 and applying advances in forensic technology.

[01:14:04]>> In the original investigation, scientists show possession of a lot of stuff. They took the wallpaper off the wall and stored that. They had carpet.

[01:14:13]They had clothing. We had 900 exhibits, many of those from the crime scene.

[01:14:22]>> The original forensic investigation had found foreign blood on some of those items believed to have come from the killer. However, when Angela and her team started to reexamine some of these exhibits, they hit a problem. Previous attempts to [music] understand from whom this foreign blood might have come involved using up an awful lot of it from critical items, Lynette's jeans and her socks. A chemical used in fingerprinting had also ruined any chances of extracting DNA [music] from other samples of blood.

[01:14:52]>> One chemical in particular that had been used to treat the wallpaper had damaged the DNA in the blood on it. And so we weren't getting any results. [music] if they wanted any chance of catching Lynette's killer. Angela and the team now faced the challenge of finding fresh forensic evidence in a case that was over a decade old.

[01:15:14]Because there was so little foreign blood left on the original items, we had to find some more of it. So, as we went back to the photographs, we saw things we hadn't seen before. Hiding in clear sight, we found more. [music] >> There was this tiny bit of cellophane near the body >> and they said wrapping for a cigarette.

[01:15:41]And I said, "Have we got it?" "Yeah."

[01:15:43]"Have we examined it?" "No." [music] So, straight away, an opportunity.

[01:15:51]There was quite a lot of blood staining on it and most of that was smears.

[01:15:55][music] But there was one stain that was slightly different and it was a round spot and that meant that it must have come from blood being cast off something traveled through the air and landed as a spot on this cellophane.

[01:16:10]>> Very often when people stab somebody, they cut their own hand on the knife.

[01:16:15]Now that normally would come down in droplets. The scientists at the time will have thought, well, there's not much point looking at that. But now with our advanced techniques, we certainly did.

[01:16:29]>> The blood spot on the cellophane wrapper was tested for DNA.

[01:16:33]>> That was our breakthrough [music] because she found partial DNA profile which was foreign to Lynette White.

[01:16:44]The forensic team and detectives now had a prime suspect in their sights.

[01:16:49]>> That [music] then became known as Teleophane Man.

[01:16:52]>> But they would need a full profile in order to search for a match on the national DNA [music] database.

[01:16:57]>> So then the race was on to see what else we could find that match cellophane man.

[01:17:17]11 years after the murder of 20-year-old Lynette White, [music] a new investigation team had used advances in forensic technology to find a partial DNA profile of her killer.

[01:17:27][music] Nicknamed Cellophane Man, investigators were now on the hunt for more of the offender's blood in order to gain a full DNA profile.

[01:17:41]There was some skirting board immediately behind Lynette and we knew that a swab had been taken originally that had produced a foreign blood grouping result and so we knew that in that general area there was the blood that we were looking for. It's just that it had all been painted over.

[01:18:00]>> So I went back to the flat and I said could I take a slice of that skirting board? Fortunately, the owner of the flat at the time agreed to it.

[01:18:14]>> We found some blood underneath the paint on the skirting board, but more importantly, we found some blood that had actually dripped down the back of it.

[01:18:23]>> Every [music] bit of blood they got developed that profile, grew the profile.

[01:18:28]>> In the early days of their investigation, Angela and the team had visited the crime scene. And as they continued to search for new blood samples to build Cellophane Man's [music] profile, what they had learned from their visit would prove pivotal.

[01:18:44]>> We decided to go back to the crime scene at night so that we would have a clear indication of what was going on in that flat.

[01:18:55]>> Even if it's years after the event, it's really important just to go back and get the geography of it. It's about understanding the crime scene.

[01:19:05]After visiting the flat, Angela was able to build a reconstruction of the scene back in the lab.

[01:19:12]>> The other thing that helped us tremendously was the fact that at the time the police had removed strips of wallpaper so we could pin up the wallpaper, too, so we could begin to see the blood patterns on the walls.

[01:19:28]Using crime scene photos and her reconstruction, Angela was able to track the killer's movements on the night of the murder. The flat was in complete darkness cuz the electricity meter had run out. And so you can imagine how they actually found their way out. And you can see through the blood patterns. You can see this fumbling along the walls of the hall upstairs and then trying to get out of the front door. And you can see a blood smear that runs right across the the letter box in the door and up to the catch.

[01:19:58]Miraculously, the front door had not been replaced. [music] So, they chipped away at the paint and taken the layers off. And we managed to get a result which was a mixture of cellophane man and lynette. [music] And that's really important because that associates cellophane man with the crime because it's not enough just to find one stain of foreign blood and say that's the the person who did it. You've got to show that it forms some sort of pattern that it's consistent with the crime.

[01:20:35]And then of course it was seemed very important at the time to establish that there was some of cellophane man blood on Lynette herself and we had her clothing um that we could examine. Um but it was really difficult because the victims bled all over it. So, we did a little reconstruction to work out how she had been manhandled. And then that might tell us where to go for the blood that could have come from the offender.

[01:21:02]Angela's reconstruction predicted that there could be some of Cellophane Man's blood on the wrist area of Lynette's jacket, and her predictions were correct.

[01:21:14]And so when you put all of the um cellophane man blood together, you have absolutely got the sort of pattern that we were hoping for. [music] You've got it on Lynette herself. You've got it on the wall behind her. You've got it on various items. And then you got it on the exit route, which is exactly what you would expect if Cellophane Man had been the offender.

[01:21:42]The team now had a full DNA profile for Cellophane Man and enough proof that he was Lynette's killer.

[01:21:49]>> Of course, one of the first things that the police were keen for us to do was to check that Cellophane Man wasn't one of the original Cardiff 5.

[01:22:01]>> They come and took the DNA. Then they proved that, you know, it wasn't us.

[01:22:07]the the weight was just gone off your shoulder because the stigma of being accused of a murder was still stuck with us, but the killer was still out there.

[01:22:18][music] We then had to work out how to find him.

[01:22:24]So, the first thing we did obviously was to submit the profile to the national DNA database and uh the answer came back that he wasn't on it.

[01:22:36]So then we thought, well, why don't we go back to the national DNA database and see if there's a member of this chap's family on there? In other words, is there a profile on there which is significantly similar to cellophane man to warrant the police doing an investigation around that family?

[01:22:54]>> The team decided searching via familial DNA was the best option.

[01:22:59]>> DNA profile contains anything from 10 to 20 different components. And so we looked for the rarest component, FGA27.

[01:23:10]We managed to refine our search to look for only males of a certain age and who lived around Cardiff and there were 600 people with this [music] particular component in their DNA.

[01:23:24]>> This was now real. We we were on the trail. We were going to get Saliva.

[01:23:32]Detective Sergeant went through each of the 600 profiles looking for any that had seven other components that also matched cellophane mans. And there was one profile.

[01:23:48]>> This profile had come from a 14year-old.

[01:23:52]>> This boy is from the Cardiff area.

[01:23:55]>> His father very similar. Wasn't a match.

[01:23:57]Were there any other family members?

[01:23:59]Yes, there was. a reclusive brother who hadn't been seen for years and lived uh just outside Cardiff.

[01:24:11]>> Could the 14year-old's uncle be cellophane man?

[01:24:14]>> So the officers went down to speak to him. He said he'd give his DNA, but he then told us, "Look, I had sex with her prior to to the murder."

[01:24:30]He says he's had sex with Lynette and he'd had it a couple of days before she died. Now, now we're talking. This is our man.

[01:24:39]>> We raced his DNA up and it came back as a full match.

[01:24:47]The man was 38-year-old security guard Jeffrey Gaffur, who bore a striking resemblance to the photo fit of the man that witnesses saw near the crime scene on the day of the murder.

[01:25:00]>> We needed to have everything in place to [music] make an arrest. So, this came on a Friday afternoon and we were going to make the arrest on Tuesday morning.

[01:25:12]The chief superintendent put a surveillance team on him. On that Friday evening, I received phone call from the surveillance team saying that Gapor had bought paracetamol at two premises and what did we want to do?

[01:25:30]>> Clearly the indication is that he's going to do something [music] take his own life. After some discussion, I said we got to go in.

[01:25:40]We broke into the premises, arrested [music] him and he had said that he had taken paracetamol tablets >> and he made some sort of admission. I knew he was going to catch me up sometime. I deserve everything I get.

[01:25:52]Words to that effect. He was hospitalized. So that gave us some time to set up the proper interview procedures.

[01:26:02]Jeffrey Gaffur was arrested on February the 28th, 2003, 4 years after the cold case investigation began.

[01:26:12]On the Tuesday morning, he was released from hospital and we went through the interview process where he would only tell us, "Yes, I committed that murder, but wouldn't say much more about it."

[01:26:26]>> He had kept his guilty secret for 15 years. Then advances in DNA analysis revealed security guard Jeffrey Gur as the frenzied killer and he confessed.

[01:26:38]>> Jeffrey Gour pleaded guilty and on the 4th of July 2003 he was sentenced to life with a tariff of 12 years and 8 months.

[01:26:48]Finally 15 years after her murder, Lynette's killer had faced justice.

[01:27:00]Forensic was the driving force. Forensic and DNA was the silver bullet.

[01:27:08]Without the progression in forensic science, I think we'd still be looking for Jeffrey Capo.

[01:27:19]There was an awful crime committed against Lynette White, but there are other victims, too.

[01:27:24]>> [music] >> And I think that that's what's driven that passion for using science to its limits to help identify those people who have committed crimes, but also exonerating those who haven't.

[01:27:42][music] >> We'll always be remembered as being arrested and being imprisoned for the Lynette White murder, but [music] we never ever ever done it. And now they call Kafur, it can lay it to rest that he was the person and he was the one who acted [music] alone.

[01:28:00]Although you still have lost a life, [music] I just hope the families, friends, and people involved in all this feel that they have had some justice at the end [music] of the day.

[01:28:33]>> [music]