Birmingham’s Most Notorious Murder Cases

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[00:00:00]In 1991, six men walked out of prison after 16 years inside for a crime they did not commit. The real perpetrators have never been charged.

[00:00:10]That case alone would be enough for a video, but it is one of 10. Birmingham has produced some of the most consequential criminal cases in British history. Cases that rewrote the law, disbanded entire police units, and left questions that have never been answered.

[00:00:26]A 13-year-old paper boy shot in a farmhouse. Children taken from streets and school routes and never properly accounted for. A woman hidden in a cupboard for three weeks. A single piece of chewing gum that waited 36 years to tell the truth. This is a city where justice failed loudly, repeatedly, and in ways that changed how the entire country handles criminal investigation.

[00:00:50]10 cases, six decades, some solved, some not. All of them worth knowing. Section one, the Birmingham pub bombings, the mass taking of life that was never solved. It was a Thursday night in November 1974.

[00:01:06]Thursday was payday for a lot of people in Birmingham, and the city center was busy. Two pubs were packed. The Malbury Bush sitting on the ground floor of Birmingham's rotunda building in the Bull Ring, and the Tavern in the town, a basement bar on New Street, not far away. Young people, mostly workers wrapping up the week. A couple meeting after work, brothers out together. At 8:11 p.m., a man with an Irish accent phoned the Birmingham Post and Mail with a warning. He said a device had been placed at the tax office on New Street, offices that sat directly above the Malbury bush. He said nothing about a pub. He gave no second location. Police had minutes, not enough of them. At 8:17 p.m., the first device, estimated to weigh between 25 and 30 lb, detonated inside the Malbury bush. 10 people lost their lives instantly. 7 minutes later, a second device of similar size went off in the tavern in the town. 11 more people were taken. 21 people total.

[00:02:05]Another 220 were left with injuries. The 21 who lost their lives were aged between 16 and 51. Most were young, the bulk of them between 17 and 25. Among them were two brothers, Desmond and Eugene Riley, who were taken on the same night in the same place. One of the victims, 18-year-old Maxine Hamilton, had stepped into the tavern in the town only to hand out party tickets to friends. She had been standing next to the bag containing the device when it went off. She was taken within seconds of walking through the door. The full list of those who lost their lives.

[00:02:41]James Kaddock, John Jones, Stanley Bodman, John Roland, Charles Gray, Jimmy Craig, Trevor Throp, Michael Beasley, Thomas Chaita, Marilyn Nash, Steven Wally, Eugene Riley, Desmond Riley, Moren Roberts, Pamela Palmer, Anne Hayes, Maxine Hamilton, Lynn Bennett, Jane Davis, Paul Anthony Davies and Neil Marsh. It was the single deadliest act carried out on English soil during the Troubles, the 30-year period of conflict between Republican and Unionist groups in Northern Ireland.

[00:03:24]It remained the highest death toll from a single attack on the British mainland until the London bombings of July 2005.

[00:03:32]Within days of the attack, the British government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The home secretary at the time described it as draconian.

[00:03:41]It allowed police to hold suspects for up to 7 days without charge. It was pushed through parliament in under a week. The Irish community in Birmingham, which had been a large and settled presence in the city since the 1950s, immediately became the target of hostility.

[00:03:58]Anti-Irish attacks followed across parts of England. The annual St. Patrick's Day parade that Birmingham's Irish community had held since 1952 was cancelled and did not return for 22 years, not until 1996.

[00:04:14]Five men were detained at Hisham Port the night of the attack. They were traveling back to Northern Ireland, four from Belfast, one from Derry to attend the funeral of James McDade, an IRA member who had accidentally taken his own life days earlier while placing a device at a telephone exchange in Coventry.

[00:04:33]Some of the men were carrying mass cards for him. A sixth man who had gone to the station to see them off was also arrested. These six men, Hugh Callahan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McKilkiny, William Power, and John Walker, became known as the Birmingham Six. After 3 days in police custody, four of them had signed confessions. At trial in 1975, all six said those confessions had been beaten out of them through physical harm and threats. Patty Hill later described officers pressing a firearm into his mouth, breaking his teeth, and telling him they had been instructed to get a conviction whether or not he was guilty. They slowly counted to three and pulled the trigger three times. He said each time he expected to take his last breath.

[00:05:24]Neither he nor Gerard Hunter signed anything. The police claimed instead that they had made verbal admissions, which both men disputed. A forensic scientist named Frank Skus told the court he was 99% certain the men had handled explosives based on a chemical test called the GCE test. What the court was not adequately told and what a home office expert had actually noted was that the same test could produce a positive result from handling everyday items like playing cards and cigarette packets. The six men had been playing cards on the train that night before they were detained. All six were convicted and handed life sentences.

[00:06:04]A journalist named Chris Mullen spent years digging into the case. Through a pair of world inaction documentaries and a book titled Error of Judgment, he presented evidence that the wrong men were in prison and that an IRA member had provided information pointing toward those actually responsible.

[00:06:22]Despite this, a 1987 appeal failed. It was not until 1991, 16 years after their conviction, that the Court of Appeal finally quashed all six convictions, ruling them unsafe. The men walked free.

[00:06:37]No apology from the state has ever been issued. The actual people responsible for placing the devices have never been formally charged or tried. A 2019 inquest jury ruled that all 21 victims were taken unlawfully by the IRA. The jury was not permitted to determine the identities of those responsible. A witness who appeared at that inquest named four alleged IRA figures. Sheamus McLolin, Mick Murray, Michael Hayes, and James Gavin. Three of those four are dead. The fourth, Hayes, has acknowledged his involvement publicly.

[00:07:14]In November 2020, a 65year-old man named Michael Patrick Riley was arrested in Belfast on suspicion of involvement. He was questioned and released. No charges followed. In October 2025, the British government announced it would not hold a public inquiry into the bombings. As of today, not one person has ever been convicted for taking the lives of those 21 people on the night of November 21st, 1974.

[00:07:42]The Birmingham pub bombings remain the largest unsolved mass taking of life in British history.

[00:07:48]Maxine Hamilton's sister, Julie, has been campaigning for over a decade under the banner Justice for the 21. She has said the families are stuck in limbo, that those in power assumed they would eventually stop asking questions. They have not stopped. What happened in those two pubs in 1974 is one half of this story. The other half, what happened to six innocent men in a police interview room that same week, is a story about how a justice system can become the very thing it was built to prevent. And that story connects directly to what came next in Birmingham's criminal history because the same police force responsible for the wrongful convictions of the Birmingham 6 would go on to do something very similar to four more men just a few years later. This time over the body of a 13-year-old paper boy found shot dead in a farmhouse on the edge of the city. Section two. Carl Bridgewwater and the Bridgewwater 4. a boy, a shotgun, and 18 years of the wrong men in prison. Carl Bridgewwater was 13 years old. He was born on the 2nd of January, 1965, and by the time he was at secondary school, he had a paper round to bring in some extra money for his family. He was described by people who knew him as polite and reliable, the kind of kid who would push the paper through the door, even when nobody answered. On the 19th of September 1978, Carl set out on that paper round and stopped at Utree Farm in Storon, a small settlement near Stbridge in the West Midlands. The farm was the home of two elderly cousins, Mary Pool and Fred Jones. The back door was open. They were not home. Carl went inside, as he sometimes did when the door was a jar, to leave the paper somewhere it would be found. Someone else was already in the house. Police believe Carl disturbed a burglary already in progress. He was taken to the living room and shot once in the head at close range with a shotgun. He was found slumped in a chair. He had not been robbed. Nothing about the scene pointed to the shot being accidental. The farm had antiques inside, good ones, and police believed whoever broke in had come specifically to take them. The killing of a child who recognized them was, detectives concluded, the reason Carl did not walk back out. In the days that followed, witnesses came forward to say they had seen a pale blue Voxil viva near the farm around the time Carl was shot. The driver, they said, was wearing some kind of dark uniform.

[00:10:18]There was a man in the area who matched that description exactly. His name was Bert Spencer. He was 38 years old, an ambulance driver based at Corbett Hospital in Stbridge, and he lived a few doors down from the Bridgewater family.

[00:10:32]He knew Carl, his daughter and Carl had been friends. He drove a blue Vauxhall Viva. He wore a uniform for work. He held a shotgun license. He had permission to go shooting in the grounds of Utree Farm, having done casual work there previously. In his spare time, he collected antiques.

[00:10:53]Spencer was questioned by police. He said he had been on duty at the hospital all day. A secretary at the ambulance station confirmed his story. That was enough. The investigation moved on. 2 months later, in November 1978, a farmhouse was raided at Chapel Farm in Romsley near Hail Owen. James Robinson, 44, a career criminal, and 16-year-old Michael Hickeyi, stormed in wearing balaclavas carrying a shotgun. Police began working that case alongside the Carbridge Water investigation and soon connected the two. Robinson, Michael Hickeyi, Michael's cousin Vincent Hickey, and a man named Patrick Malloy became the new focus.

[00:11:37]Malloy was arrested first. Under questioning, he told police he had been in an upstairs bedroom at Utree Farm while the house was being burgled when he heard a shot from downstairs.

[00:11:48]He said he came down to find Carl already on the floor. The others denied everything. No forensic evidence linked any of the four men to Utri Farm. No physical evidence connected them to Carl's killing at all. The case went to trial at Stafford Crown Court in November 1979.

[00:12:06]Three of the men, Robinson and the two Hickeys, were found guilty of taking Carl's life and given life sentences.

[00:12:13]Robinson and Vincent Hickey were each told they would serve a minimum of 25 years. Michael Hickey, who was 18 by the time of sentencing, was detained indefinitely at her majesty's pleasure.

[00:12:24]Malloy was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter and given 12 years. All four denied any part in Carl's death throughout. Patrick Malloy died in Stafford prison on the 11th of July 1981, 2 years into his sentence. He was 53.

[00:12:41]The campaign to prove what had actually happened was taken up by journalist Paul Foot, who published a book called Murder at the Farm in 1986 and by Michael Hickeyy's mother, Anne Wan, who spent years fighting her son's case. An initial appeal in 1989 failed. The home secretary eventually referred the case back to the Court of Appeal a second time in 1996 after fresh evidence was put forward. That fresh evidence came from a piece of technology called an electrostatic detection apparatus or ESDA. Forensic experts used it to examine the paper that Malloyy's confession had been written on. The machine could detect the pressure of writing on sheets of paper placed underneath the original at the time it was produced. What the test revealed was that Mallaloyy's confession had been written on paper placed on top of another document. A document that turned out to be a fake statement supposedly from Vincent Hickey claiming he and the others had been at Utree Farm. That fake statement had been fabricated by police.

[00:13:43]They had shown it to Malloy to convince him that Hickeyi had already given him up. Once Malloy believed that, he gave a version of events placing himself at the scene. He later said it was a lie told in desperation and anger, that he had signed it partly because he believed Hickeyi had betrayed him and partly because of the pressure being applied in the interview room. One of the officers central to that interview, Detective Constable John Perkins, later transferred to the West Midland Serious Crime Squad and was twice disciplined for producing false evidence in separate unconnected cases. He died of illness in 1992 before any further action could be taken. On 21st of February 1997, the Court of Appeal quashed all four convictions. The three surviving men walked out of prison after 18 1/2 years.

[00:14:33]The court found the trial had been fundamentally unfair because the confession at its center had been produced through a strategy of deliberate deception. The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the unit that handled the investigation, was disbanded in 1989 following mounting evidence of widespread misconduct across dozens of cases. Over 60 convictions secured through their work have since been overturned. The Birmingham Six, covered in the previous section, were among them. Nobody has ever been charged with taking Carl Bridgewwater's life. Bert Spencer has been the subject of renewed scrutiny more than once. In 2016, a Channel 4 documentary called Interview with a Murderer showed criminologist Professor David Wilson interviewing Spencer over the course of many hours.

[00:15:19]During filming, the hospital secretary, who had given Spencer his alibi, told Wilson she could not now confirm where Spencer had been for the full day of the shooting. Spencer's ex-wife, Janet, spoke on camera for the first time about finding him washing a green jumper on the day Carl was taken. a jumper he washed himself, which he never saw again, and about him disposing of a legally owned shotgun the day after.

[00:15:45]Spencer committed a separate shooting just months after the four men were convicted. In December 1979, he shot and took the life of his friend, 70-year-old farmer Hubert Wilks, at a party at Holay Farm in Prewood, just a short distance from Utree Farm. Wilks, like Carl, was found shot and slumped. Spencer served 15 years for that and was released in 1995.

[00:16:09]He has always denied any involvement in Carl's case. Staferture police reviewed the fresh material in 2017 and said there were no grounds to take further action. No one has been charged. No one has been convicted. The case remains open and unsolved.

[00:16:26]Carl Bridgewwater would have been 60 years old this year. Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously.

[00:16:37]The case that comes next involves the same West Midland streets, a very different kind of criminal, and a disappearance that not only sparked one of the biggest child searches in British history, but also raised a question that has never been fully answered about how many lives one man took before anyone thought to look carefully enough.

[00:16:55]Section three, the Kakchase takings.

[00:16:58]Raymond Morris and the children who disappeared near Birmingham.

[00:17:03]The first time Raymond Morris harmed a child, he nearly got away with it completely.

[00:17:08]On 1st December 1964, 9-year-old Julia Taylor was approached in Lemore near Walsaw by a man who told her he was a friend of her mother. She got into his car. He drove her away from where she was supposed to be going. He assaulted her, strangled her, and left her unconscious in Blockswitch Lane. A passing cyclist found her before the cold did what Morris had not quite managed to finish. Julia survived. She remembered very little about the man.

[00:17:37]The car was described. A two-tone paint finish, small fins at the rear, a distinctive spot lamp near the driver's door, but it was never traced. The crime went officially unsolved.

[00:17:49]9 months later, on the afternoon of the 8th of September 1965, 6-year-old Margaret Reynolds walked out of her home on Clifton Road in Aston, Birmingham, and headed back to Prince Albert Primary School after her lunch break. Her older sister, Susan, walked part of the way with her before they split off to their different schools. Margaret never arrived. When she failed to return home that evening, her parents reported her missing to police immediately. Within hours, 2,000 people were out searching the Aston area for her. They found nothing. In the weeks that followed, 160 officers questioned more than 25 zero people in and around Aston. Every lead went cold. 200 posters were printed by the Birmingham Evening Mail featuring a description of what Margaret had been wearing. Nobody came forward with anything useful. She stayed missing.

[00:18:42]Three months later, on December 30th, 1965, 5-year-old Diane Tiff said goodbye to her brother Terrence and set off on the short walk from her home to her grandmother's house on Chapel Street in the Blake and all area of Walsaw. It was a walk of about 400 yd. She never reached the other end of it. On the 12th of January 1966, a workman found a child's body in a ditch at a place called Manste on Canic Chase, the large area of Heathland and Forestry in Staferture to the north of Birmingham.

[00:19:14]When the small body was moved, a second one was found underneath, pressed into the earth. Margaret Reynolds and Diane Tiff had been lying there together for weeks. Both had been assaulted and harmed before being partially buried.

[00:19:29]Neither family had known where their daughter was for months. No one was charged with their takings. The investigation that followed was described at the time as the biggest manhunt in Britain up to that point.

[00:19:41]Larger even than the Moors murders investigation that was also running at the same time. Led by Sir Stanley Bailey, Stafer's assistant chief constable, 150 detectives visited 39,000 homes and interviewed 80,000 people. Officers combed through 1.4 million vehicle records and physically checked around 25,000 cars. Every Austin A55 and A60 in the Midlands because witnesses had described seeing a gray car near the area where Christine Derby, a third child, would later be taken. Christine Darby was 7 years old. On the 19th of August 1967, she was playing near her home on Camden Street in Coldmore, Walsaw with two friends. A man in a gray car pulled up and asked for directions to call more green using the local pronunciation karma green, which told investigators he was almost certainly from the area. He asked Christine to get in and show him the way, saying he would drive her straight back. Excited at the idea of a car ride, she got in. Her friends watched the car reverse and drive at speed in the opposite direction to where Christine had pointed. 3 days later on 22nd of August, a soldier taking part in a search party found Christine's body beneath Bracken at Par's Warren on Canic Chase, less than a mile from where the first two girls had been found. She had been assaulted and suffocated.

[00:21:07]All three victims had lived within a 17-mi radius of each other, all near the A34 road that passes through Canic Chase. Raymond Leslie Morris was born in 1929 in Walsaw. By the time of the Canic chase cases, he was working as a foreman engineer at a precision instruments factory in Oldbury in the West Midlands.

[00:21:27]He had an IQ reported to be around 120.

[00:21:31]He had a wife, a flat, and a respectable looking life on the surface. His flat in Birchill's Walsaw sat directly opposite a police station. He had been interviewed about the Christine Derby case. His wife, Carol, told police they had been out shopping together on the day Christine went missing. That alibi was enough to move investigators on. In 1965, Morris's own brother had walked into Can Police Station and told officers he believed Raymond was capable of harming children because of what he described as an unnatural interest in young girls. The claim was looked at.

[00:22:06]Morris appeared to have alibis. He was dismissed as a likely suspect. It was a failed attempted taking in 1968 that finally brought him down. On November 4th, 1968, 10-year-old Margaret Alton managed to get out of a green and white Ford Corsair in Walssaw after a man attempted to force her in. An 18-year-old woman who witnessed it made a note of the vehicle's registration plate. The number given was 429 LO P, but when officers checked it, that registration did not match a green and white Ford Corsair. Rather than stock there, two detectives, DC's Joseph and Atkins, went through the vehicle records one by one, transposing digits on similar numbers. When they switched the 29 to 92 and checked 492 LO P, they found a match. The car was registered to Raymond Morris. They went to his workplace and brought him in for questioning. When police searched his flat, they found photographs he had taken of a young girl. The girl was Carol Morris's 5-year-old niece. His wife, who had given him his alibi for the day Christine Darby was taken, was shown the photographs. She retracted her statement. When Morris was told in the interview room that his wife had withdrawn her account of them being out shopping together, he put his head in his hands and said, "Oh, God, she wouldn't." He was shaking. Morris was charged with Christine Darby's taking on November 16th, 1968. He was also charged with two counts of assault on his wife's niece and the attempted taking of Margaret Alton. His trial at Stafford Asises began on 10th February 1969.

[00:23:46]He pleaded not guilty to the taking and the attempted taking but admitted the assault charges against the 5-year-old.

[00:23:52]His defense asked for the charges to be heard in separate trials, arguing the assault charges would influence the jury's view of the rest. The judge rejected that request. The 7-day trial ended on February 18th, 1969.

[00:24:06]The jury took just 2 hours to convict him of Christine Darby's taking. He was sentenced to life in prison. No charges were ever brought against Morris for the takings of Margaret Reynolds or Diane Tiff. Following the conviction, a Staferture police spokesman told the media that every investigator involved in bringing Morris to justice remained convinced he was responsible for all three children. Former detective Morin Freeman, who worked the case from start to finish and was only 22 when it began, said decades later she had absolutely no doubt he had taken all three. Morris spent 45 years in prison. He made several failed appeals, including one at the age of 81. The Criminal Cases Review Commission rejected his bid in 2010. The Court of Appeal confirmed in February 2014 that his whole life sentence would remain. He died at HMP Preston the following month, aged 84, of suspected natural causes. The takings of Margaret Reynolds and Diane Tiff remain officially unsolved. No one has ever been charged. The next case on this list is different in nature. No disappeared children, no canic chase, no gray car.

[00:25:18]Instead, it is a case about a woman who survived something that should have taken her life and about how the man who did it to her was caught years before another family could go through the same thing. Section 4, Michael Sams and the Birmingham kidnapping. The box, the ransom, and the voice on the radio.

[00:25:37]Michael Sams was born on the 11th of August, 1941 in Keithley, West Yorkshire. He joined the merchant navy at 20, came home after 3 years, and spent the following decades working as an engineer. In 1976, he went to prison for stealing a car and filing a false insurance claim. While he was inside, he was diagnosed with cancer. Doctors told him his leg had to come off to save his life. They amputated it. He spent the rest of his life using a prosthetic.

[00:26:06]After his release he lost his business, worked for a time at Black & Decka, then eventually set up a small workshop selling power tools in Swan and Salmonard in Newark upon Trent, Nottinghamshire. He was married three times. By 1991, he was living in Sutton on Trent with his third wife. He was 50 years old and had a plan. On 9th July 1991, Sams drove to Chapel Town in Leeds, an area known at the time as a red light district. He found 18-year-old Julie Dart. She had, by some accounts, only recently started working the streets. Sams bundled her into his vehicle, drove her to his Newick workshop, and forced her into a wooden box he had built and nailed to the floor. He then had her write a ransom letter to her boyfriend, demanding £140,000, threatening that she would never be seen again if the money was not paid. He had no real plan to collect that ransom. The day after making Julie write the notes, Sams took her life with a hammer. Nine days later, he dumped her body in a field near Eastern Lincolnshire where it was found. Her postmortem later confirmed he had strangled her, crushing her windpipe before her body was kept in a wheelie bin for a week. His later confession to the detective leading the case made on tape inside prison was direct. When he went to Chapel Town that night, he said there was only one intention, and it was to end her life.

[00:27:31]Julie Dart was 18 years old. Police investigators, including clinical psychologist Paul Britain, who advised on the case, concluded that Sams had chosen Julie partly because her abduction would be relatively straightforward and would not cause too much immediate disruption. In his own terms, she was practice, a rehearsal for something bigger. Sams kept sending ransom demands and notes to police after Julie's body was found. He also wrote letters threatening to derail a British rail express train unless he was paid £200,000 and at one point suspended a block of sandstone from a bridge in Staferture to show he was serious. He wanted attention. He wanted investigators to see him as a challenge worth rising to.

[00:28:13]None of the ransom money was ever collected. Nobody caught him. 6 months passed. On 22nd of January 1992, a 25-year-old estate agent named Stephanie Slater arrived at a two-story property on Tbury Road in Great Bar, Birmingham for what she believed was a routine viewing appointment. She had started her job at Shipways Estate Agency on Warsaw Road in Great Bar just a month earlier in December 1991.

[00:28:41]Sams had booked the viewing under a false name. When Stephanie arrived, he ambushed her at knife point, bound and gagged her, forced her into his car, and drove her more than 100 miles to his workshop in Newark, the same space where Julie Dart had been held and where she had lost her life. Inside the workshop, Sams had constructed a new box. It was a wooden structure fitted inside a wheelie bin laid on its side with a lockable lid. Stephanie was put inside. She was handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged, and had electrodes attached to her leg. Sam's told her that if she moved, she would be electrocuted. She was allowed out briefly for food, otherwise she was in the box for up to 23 hours a day. At 12:22 p.m. the same day, a call came through to Shipway's estate agency. Sams told the person who answered that he had taken Stephanie and would take her life unless he received £175,000.

[00:29:40]He did not disguise his voice. That was his first significant mistake. Sam set a deadline of January 29th, 1992 for the ransom to be paid. He called Stephanie's manager, Kevin Watts, directly and asked whether the money was ready. Police were involved by this point and had around 1,000 officers positioned to try to intercept Sam's when Watts went out to deliver the cash. Sams, however, directed Watts along a route where any following officer would be immediately visible. He collected the money and walked away without being caught. On the night of 31st of January, a red metro pulled up two streets from Stephanie's home in Great Bar. She was let out of the car, still blindfolded, and ran to her front door.

[00:30:25]No one answered immediately. A family liaison officer who was stationed at the house opened the door and did not recognize the pale, disoriented young woman standing outside. Her parents came running. Stephanie was free. Sams was not caught. 3 weeks after her release, West Yorkshire police appealed for help on BBC Crime Watch. They played a recording of the call Sams had made to the estate agency. A woman named Susan Oaks called the program after recognizing the voice. Susan Oaks was Sam's ex-wife. She named him. Police went to his workshop in Newark. Sams immediately admitted to the abduction of Stephanie Slater. He denied having anything to do with Julie Dart's death.

[00:31:08]At Nottingham Crown Court in June 1993, he admitted the kidnapping and false imprisonment of Stephanie and the ransom demand, but pleaded not guilty to Julie's taking of life. After the jury deliberated for just over 3 hours, they returned a guilty verdict on all counts.

[00:31:25]He was given four life sentences. 3 days after the verdict, Sams met Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Taylor in the dining hall of Full Sutton Prison in East Yorkshire and gave a full recorded confession to Julie's death. He described in detail what he had done and where he had taken her body. Stephanie Slater later revealed that Sams had assaulted her during the 8 days she was held. She had kept it from police initially because she did not want to upset her mother who had a heart condition. She spent years working with police forces to improve how they supported those who had been through kidnappings. She wrote a book called Beyond Fear, My Will to Survive. She moved to the aisle of white in 1993 and never returned to work in a state agency. In September 2017, she was diagnosed with cancer. 11 days later, she was gone. She was 50 years old. Sams is now in his 80s. His parole applications have been rejected. He remains in prison. Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously.

[00:32:33]The case you are about to hear is different from everything so far. No kidnapping, no ransom, no waiting. It is about a woman who was taken from her home in Birmingham, hidden in a cupboard and left there for 35 years before a single piece of chewing gum finally told the truth.

[00:32:51]Section five. Nova Welsh. The chewing gum that waited.

[00:32:57]36 years. Nova Welsh was born in Jamaica in 1957.

[00:33:02]When she was 10 years old, her mother Lorna moved the family to the United Kingdom.

[00:33:08]Nova grew up in Birmingham and by the time she was 16 she had met a man named Osmond Bell. The two of them moved in together. They had two sons, Jonathan and then Lee. Neighbors would later tell police the relationship was loud and often physical. Osmond was violent towards Nova on more than one occasion.

[00:33:28]One specific incident confirmed in court involved him trying to choke her in her own kitchen. By July 1981, the relationship was over. Belle had moved out. Nova was 24 years old, a part-time cleaner with two young children, living in a flat at a block on Lightorn Avenue in Ladywood, Birmingham. She had started seeing someone new. Belle did not accept this. Nova was believed to have been taken from her flat in the early hours of Monday, 27th July, 1981.

[00:33:59]She did not disappear dramatically. She simply stopped being seen.

[00:34:03]Neighbors had noticed a figure arguing with someone in the days before, visible through a kitchen window. Then nothing.

[00:34:11]Nobody reported her missing straight away. Belle, when eventually asked by police, said he assumed she had gone off with her new boyfriend. He had not raised any alarm. 3 weeks passed. On August 18th, 1981, maintenance workers at the block on Lighhorn Avenue went to check on a communal utility cupboard that had a broken lock. Inside, covered with a blanket and papers, was Nova's body. A post-mortem confirmed she had died from pressure to the neck. She had been there, hidden in that cupboard for approximately 3 weeks. Police arrested Osman Bell immediately. He was held at Ladywood Police Station and questioned for 4 days. He denied everything and said he knew nothing about what had happened to her. There was no physical evidence directly connecting him to the cupboard. He was released. The case went cold. Then, shortly before Nova's body was found, 6 days before it was discovered, according to prosecutors, an anonymous handwritten letter arrived for one of Nova's friends. The letter claimed to be from a woman. It described seeing Nova fighting with a man through her kitchen window and suggested her new boyfriend was the one responsible. The letter was designed to shift suspicion away from Belle and towards someone else. In 1981, police had no way of proving who wrote it. It appeared to be in a woman's handwriting. The envelope was sealed. Without forensic technology that simply did not exist yet, it was a dead end. Belle remained free. For more than three decades, West Midland's police preserved everything they had from the original scene. The blanket, the papers, the broken cupboard lock, and a small piece of chewing gum that's been used to hold the broken lock on the cupboard door shut. stuck there by whoever had placed Nova's body inside and then tried to keep the door closed.

[00:35:57]Police reopened the case in 2011 as part of a cold case review. By 2014, forensic science had advanced far enough to extract usable DNA from surfaces that in 1981 would have yielded nothing.

[00:36:11]Officers took a saliva sample from Osmond Bell and submitted it alongside the old evidence for testing. The gun came back as a match. The probability of it belonging to anyone other than Osman Bell was assessed at 1 in a billion. The lick seal on the envelope of the anonymous letter also produced a match.

[00:36:30]An incomplete DNA profile, but one consistent with Bells. That letter written in what looked like a woman's hand sent to deflect blame onto another man sent before Nova's body had been officially discovered had been sent by the man who put her in the cupboard.

[00:36:46]Prosecutors put it plainly to the jury.

[00:36:48]Whoever wrote that letter already knew Nova had not simply gone away. They knew she was not going to come back because they knew where she was. Belle was rearrested in September 2014 and charged with taking Nova's life. He denied writing the letter. He told the court that during his 4-day interrogation in 1981, police had shown him the letter and allowed him to handle it. His explanation for how his DNA could be on the envelope. He claimed the 1981 questioning had been a dark and terrible experience. He denied any part in Nova's death. The trial at Birmingham Crown Court lasted 6 weeks. The jury convicted Bell of manslaughter by an 11 to1 majority. They did not find him guilty of the more serious charge of intentional taking of life. On March 22nd, 2017, Judge Patrick Thomas sentenced Osmond Bell to 12 years in prison. In his remarks at sentencing, Thomas said that Belle had used force on Nova's neck and that having done so, he concealed her body and did nothing to reduce the pain and grief of his own children, who grew up not knowing what had happened to their mother. Nova's mother, Lorna, told the BBC the family could now have closure, knowing the person who took Nova's life had been brought to justice. Nova's sister, Valyria, said she had forgiven him. She remembered Nova as someone everybody in the community loved. Always laughing, always present. She was 24 years old with two small children and a new start in front of her when Osman Bell walked into her flat and took all of it away.

[00:38:22]The single piece of evidence that solved the case was a small strip of chewing gum pressed against a broken cupboard lock in a Birmingham tower block in the summer of 1981. Belle chewed it, stuck it there to keep the door shut, and left. It sat in a police evidence bag for 36 years. Then it told the truth.

[00:38:40]The next case in this series is not a cold case. It is one of the most watched and most chaotic criminal events in Birmingham's modern history. Three men run down in the street during a night of riots. A city in shock and a jury that ultimately set eight accused men free.

[00:38:56]Section six, the Winson Green takings.

[00:38:59]Three men, three cars, and no convictions. The summer of 2011 was already on fire before Birmingham got involved. Riots had started in London on the 6th of August after police took the life of Mark Dugen in Tottenham during an operation to arrest him. Within days, the disorder had spread. Shops were being looted in multiple English cities.

[00:39:21]Cars were burning. By the night of 9th August, the unrest had reached Birmingham. In Winston Green, a tight inner city neighborhood in Birmingham's west, a group of local men had watched the previous night's looting hit businesses on their street. They decided they were not going to let it happen again. By the evening of 9th August, between 50 and 100 men had gathered on Dudley Road to stand guard. Tar Jan, a local man, was there. So were his two sons, one of them, 20-year-old Harun.

[00:39:52]The atmosphere was tense. Some in the crowd had covered their faces. Some were armed with sticks and rocks. Cars passed the group repeatedly through the night with passengers inside shouting at the crowd. Some of the men on the street threw bricks back, smashing rear windscreens on at least two different vehicles. Tar Jan spent much of the night trying to keep the younger men calm. He told them they were there to protect, not to start anything. At approximately 1:15 a.m. on August 10th, a Mazda car driven by a 30-year-old man named Ian Beckford came down Dudley Road. According to prosecution evidence heard at trial, the car had not slowed at all before it hit the men. Police estimated it was traveling at between 37 and 45 mph at the point of impact. Tar Jan told the court he heard the roar of an engine moving at speed past the junction and then a loud thud. He described it as sounding like a car hitting something solid. He heard shouts and then ran to the road and saw his son lying there. Harun Jan, 20, died.

[00:40:58]Brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Misavia, 31, also died from their injuries. Postmortm examinations showed Shazad Ali and Harun Jahan had suffered serious spinal injuries. Abdul Masavia died from a severe head injury. Shazad Ali's wife was expecting their first child in a few months. His uncle Abdullah Khan said in the days after that Shazad had been looking forward to becoming a father and that the family had lost two sons in the same night.

[00:41:26]Police moved quickly. Eight men were eventually charged with the takings of the three men. The prosecution's case was that the deaths were not an accident, that the defendants had been traveling in three cars, had coordinated a plan in a side street shortly before, and that the vehicles were used in a deliberate effort to drive into the crowd. The prosecution called it a modern-day chariot charge.

[00:41:49]Ian Beckford, who was driving the Mazda that directly struck the men, told the court he had been friends with Shazad Ali and Abdul Masvir. He said he had been frightened, that the crowd was armed, and that he was simply trying to get past and away from the area. He denied any plan. He said the deaths were an accident. Several of the other defendants gave similar accounts. They happened to be in the area. The cars were not coordinating. Nobody meant for anyone to die. The trial at Birmingham Crown Court ran for 3 months. On July 19th, 2012, all eight defendants were found not guilty of taking the lives of the three men. The driver of the Mazda, Ian Beckford, was cleared not just of the main charge, but also of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

[00:42:38]All eight men walked free. Mr. Justice Flo addressing the court after the verdicts described what had happened as a tragic and pointless loss of three young lives and said the jury had decided this was not a deliberate act and there had been no plan. He appealed for calm in Birmingham. No further charges have ever been brought. The morning after his son's body was found on Dudley Road, TK Jan stood in front of cameras and journalists and community leaders and spoke. His son had just been taken from him hours earlier. He was in shock and yet he asked for calm. He said losing a family member was something no mother or father or son or sister should have to go through. And he asked the young men of Birmingham not to use the deaths as a reason for more violence.

[00:43:27]He asked people to come together. That speech delivered by a man in the worst hours of his life was later credited by the West Midlands chief constable as a decisive intervention. the moments that helped prevent what many feared would become serious racial violence in the city. The police investigation that followed was later found to have been handled incorrectly. The Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded that a detective inspector named Khaled Keani had made an unauthorized offer of immunity from prosecution to witnesses at a public meeting, promising that people who came forward to give statements would not face charges for taking part in the disorder. That offer was never properly cleared by senior officers and defense barristers were not told about it until the 10th week of the trial. The IPCC found Keani had acted recklessly. He had already retired by the time the report was published, so no misconduct proceedings could be completed. Tariq Jan told a reporter in 2014 that the police had put him on a platform to help stop the riots and that he had believed in the justice system and expected it to work for his family.

[00:44:33]He said all he got in return was a slap in the face. He has since called for a public inquiry into the handling of the case. As of the time this was written, none has been held. Nobody has ever been convicted for the taking of Harun Jahan Shazad Ali or Abdul Masir. Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing.

[00:44:56]It helps the channel tremendously.

[00:44:58]The final case in this series is unlike anything else covered here. It is not one event, but a pattern of events stretching years, carried out in broad daylight across the West Midlands, and the investigation it triggered became one of the largest police operations in British criminal history. Section 7, Donald Nielson, the Black Panther, and the West Midlands post office killing.

[00:45:21]Donald Nielsen was born Donald Nappy in Bradford in 1936.

[00:45:25]He changed his surname by deedpole in 1960 after his daughter was born, not wanting her to carry a name he had been mocked for throughout school and national service. He worked as a carpenter and tried running a taxi firm and a security business, both of which failed. He turned to burglary in the mid 1960s, eventually committing around 400 breakins across the country. By the early 1970s, burglaries were not producing enough money. He moved to armed robberies of subpost offices, targeting them at night, wearing a black balaclava and dark clothing, moving quietly and leaving little behind. The press eventually gave him a name, the Black Panther, after the widow of one of his victims described him as so fast he was like a panther. He carried a shotgun he was not afraid to use it.

[00:46:15]On 15th of February 1974, Neielson broke into a subpost office in Harriut, North Yorkshire and took the life of the postmaster Donald Skpper when Skpper confronted him. 7 months later, he entered the subpost office at Higher Baxendon near Akrington in Lanasher and took the life of Postmaster Derek Aston, 41, after forcing him to open the safe.

[00:46:38]He shot him twice. Nine weeks after that, Neielson came to the West Midlands.

[00:46:44]On the 11th of November 1974, the same night the IRA was placing devices in Birmingham city center pubs, Neielson approached the Langley Telegraph sub office in Oldbury. He knocked at the rear door. Postmaster Sydney Gland, 55, answered. Neielson was wearing his hood and carrying a torch with a bottle of ammonia attached to it, which he intended to use as a weapon. The ammonium misfired and sprayed back on him. He was forced to tear off the hood to protect his face. And when he did that, Margaret Graand, Sydney's wife, walked into the room and saw his face.

[00:47:20]Neielson attacked her, fracturing her skull in multiple places. He then shot and took the life of Sydney Gland. He left with £800 in cash and postal orders. Margaret Grand survived. She gave investigators a description that turned out to be the most accurate photo fit produced of Neielson throughout the entire investigation. Three post offices, three people taken in less than 9 months, all committed by the same man.

[00:47:47]Police knew they were looking for one person because forensics matched the bullets at all three scenes. But Neielson wanted something bigger. The post office takings had not brought the attention or the money he was looking for. He had read in the press about the Whittle family of Shropshire, owners of a coach company and about the inheritance that 17-year-old Leslie Whittle stood to receive. He spent time planning. On the 14th of January 1975, Neielson entered the Whittle family home in High Shropshire in the early hours and took Leslie from her bedroom. He left ransom notes demanding £50,000 and told the family not to involve police.

[00:48:25]He drove her 65 mi to Bathpool Park in Kidsg Grove, Staferture, where he had prepared a hiding place, a narrow platform 54 ft underground inside a drainage shaft.

[00:48:37]He tethered her to the platform by a wire noose around her neck. A series of failed ransom handoffs followed over the next few days with communication breakdowns between police forces and the family, contributing to none of the attempts succeeding. Leslie Whittle's body was found on March 7th, 1975, hanging from the wire in the shaft. She had been 17 years old. The cause of death was recorded as veagal inhibition.

[00:49:01]Neielson claimed she had fallen accidentally. A jury did not believe him. He was arrested on the 11th of December, 1975 in Mansfield Woodhouse after two police officers spotted him behaving suspiciously near a local post office. When they stopped him, he produced a firearm. They overpowered and restrained him. A search of his home uncovered multiple balaclava hoods. He confessed to being the Black Panther. On July 1st, 1976, he was convicted of four takings of life and sentenced to five life terms with no possibility of release. He died in prison in December 2011, aged 75. The Birmingham connection in this case, the taking of Sydney Gland in Langley sits in the same month as the pub bombings, the same city and the same years that the West Midlands was discovering how dark a place it had become. What comes next takes that darkness and brings it inside a home and inside a marriage and keeps it hidden in plain sight for over three decades.

[00:50:03]Section 8, the Birmingham 6, when the justice system became the crime. The previous section in this video covered the Birmingham pub bombings, what happened on the night of November 21st, 1974, who was taken, and why the real perpetrators have never faced a court.

[00:50:21]But there is a second story running alongside that one, and it cannot be separated from it. The Birmingham 6 were six Irish men living in Birmingham. They were Hugh Callahan, Patrick Hill, Gerard Hunter, Richard McKilkiny, William Power, and John Walker.

[00:50:38]Five of them had been on a train leaving Birmingham shortly before the bombs went off, traveling back to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, an IRA member who had taken his own life 2 weeks earlier while placing a device in Coventry. The sixth, Hugh Callahan, had been at New Street Station to see them off. They were detained at Hisham Port.

[00:50:58]Some were carrying mass cards for McDade. Police from Birmingham traveled up to Morham where the men were being held and began questioning them over 4 days. By the end of those four days, four of the six had signed confessions.

[00:51:12]At trial in 1975 at Lancaster Castle, all six said the confessions had been obtained through physical harm and threats. Patty Hill later said officers had pushed a firearm into his mouth, counted to three, and pulled the trigger three times, and told him directly that they knew he was innocent, but had been told to get a conviction. Despite this, four men signed. Hill and Hunter refused to sign anything. Police claimed those two had made verbal admissions, which both denied.

[00:51:44]The forensic case rested on a scientist named Frank Skuse who claimed a chemical test called the GCE test showed that two of the men, Hill and Power, had traces of nitroglycerine on their hands. What was not properly put before the jury was that the same test produced positive results from contact with ordinary items, including playing cards and cigarette packets.

[00:52:07]The six men had been playing cards on the train that night. All six were found guilty of 21 counts of taking life. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.

[00:52:17]The first appeal in 1976 failed. In 1980, Lord Denning dismissed a civil claim the men had brought against West Midland's police, saying that if the men were right, it would mean the police had committed perjury and the convictions were wrong, and that accepting this was such an alarming prospect that the case should not go any further. He was in plain terms saying that protecting the reputation of the institutions mattered more than whether the men were innocent.

[00:52:46]In 1985, journalist Chris Mullen published a book called Error of Judgment, later making four television documentaries on the case. The Home Secretary referred the case back to the Court of Appeal in 1987. That appeal also failed. It was not until 1991, after police notebooks were found to have been extensively rewritten and the forensic evidence was admitted to be worthless, that the Court of Appeal finally quashed all six convictions on 14th of March, 1991.

[00:53:18]The six men walked free after more than 16 years inside. They were later awarded financial compensation ranging from £840,000 to 1.2 million each.

[00:53:31]Patrick Hill shouted outside the court that the police had told them from the beginning they knew they were innocent, that they had been selected, and that the system did not know how to spell the word justice, never mind dispense it. He later founded the Miscarriages of Justice organization to help other wrongly imprisoned people. He died in 2024, aged 80.

[00:53:54]The real people responsible for placing those devices have still never faced a court. Before we move on, if you're enjoying this analysis, please consider subscribing. It helps the channel tremendously.

[00:54:07]Everything across the eight cases in this video points to one conclusion, and the next section brings it all together because when you lay every case side by side, a pattern emerges that is impossible to ignore. Section 9, the Erington murders. the same crime 157 years apart.

[00:54:26]At 6:30 in the morning on May 27th, 1817, a man named George Jackson was walking to work through the fields near Erington, then a village on the northern edge of Birmingham. He came across a bundle of bloody clothing, a hat, and a pair of shoes left near a pit that had been filled with water. He raised the alarm. When authorities arrived, they found the body of 20-year-old Mary Ashford in the pit. She had been assaulted and drowned. The previous evening, Mary had attended a dance at the Tyburn House public house. She had been seen dancing with a 24year-old brick layer named Abraham Thornton.

[00:55:04]Witnesses reported them leaving together in the early hours of the morning of 27th May. At around 4:00 a.m., Mary called at her friend Hannah Cox's house to collect her workclo. She appeared calm and well. About 15 minutes later, she walked away alone.

[00:55:21]She was found dead approximately 3 hours after that. A medical examination found she had been assaulted before her death and that she had bruising on her arms.

[00:55:31]Abraham Thornton was arrested the same day. At his trial at Warizises in August 1817, the jury deliberated for 6 minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty.

[00:55:42]Thornton had produced multiple eyewitness accounts placing him on a different road at the time Mary would have reached the pit and the case against him was not considered strong enough. The acquitt caused national outrage. Mary's younger brother William refused to accept the verdict. He invoked an archaic legal procedure called an appeal of murder which allowed a private individual to bring a second prosecution. When this case reached the Court of King's Bench in London, Thornton's lawyers found an even older legal provision that had not been used for centuries. Trial by battle. Under this surviving medieval law, the defendant could challenge the accuser to physical combat. Thornton threw his glove onto the courtroom floor and accepted the challenge. William Ashford, who was considerably smaller than Thornton, declined to fight. As a result, all charges against Thornton were discharged. The Mary Ashford case led directly to the abolition of appeals act 1819 which ended both the appeal of murder process and trial by battle as legal procedures in England. Thornton left for the United States shortly afterwards. The taking of Mary Ashford has never been solved. That would be extraordinary enough on its own. But on 27th May 1974, exactly 157 years to the day later, the body of another 20-year-old woman was found near the same area of Erdington. Her name was Barbara Forest. She had been assaulted and strangled, and her body was left in a ditch on the edge of Pipes Park within a quarter of a mile of where Mary Ashford was found.

[00:57:16]Barbara had spent the evening of 26th of May at several bars with her boyfriend, Simon Belchure. He told police he had walked her to a bus stop at around 1:00 a.m. on May 27th, and that was the last time he saw her alive.

[00:57:29]Over 100 detectives were assigned to the investigation. Police identified a suspect, Michael Ian Thornton, a 38-year-old coworker of Barbara's at the Pipe Hayes Children's Home. He lived on Chester Road near the location where she was found. Blood stains were found on his clothing. The alibi provided by his mother was found to be false. He was arrested and charged with her taking of life. During the trial, the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to put to a jury and directed a verdict of not guilty. Michael Ian Thornton was released.

[00:58:04]Both victims were 20 years old. Both were found on 27th of May. Both had been at a dance on the night before their death. Both suspects shared the surname Thornton. Both were acquitted. Neither case has ever been solved. Barbara Forest's taking of life remains officially unsolved today. The final section of this video draws every case together and asks the only question that matters. What do all these cases combined actually tell us about justice, about institutions, and about a city?

[00:58:36]Section 10. What Birmingham's cases tell us? The pattern no one wants to name. 10 cases, six decades of criminal history.

[00:58:45]a city that has produced some of the most studied, most contested, and most consequential legal proceedings in British history. Laid out one after another, these cases do not tell 10 separate stories. They tell parts of the same story. And the thread running through most of them is not the people who committed crimes. It is what happened or failed to happen afterwards.

[00:59:07]Of the 10 cases in this video, at least five ended with no one being convicted of the original act. In two of those, innocent men went to prison instead. In several, the investigations that followed were later found to contain serious errors, fabricated evidence, or unauthorized conduct. The West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the unit at the heart of the Birmingham 6 and Bridgewater 4 wrongful convictions, operated from 1974 to 1989.

[00:59:36]In those 15 years, officers were documented to have falsified confessions, planted evidence, denied suspects access to legal representation, and used physical methods to extract admissions from people in custody. By January 2017, 60 convictions secured through their work had been overturned.

[00:59:55]Not a single officer was ever prosecuted.

[00:59:58]That unit was also operating during the pub bombing investigation of 1974.

[01:00:03]It was operating when Carl Bridgewwater was shot in 1978.

[01:00:08]The same period, the same geography, the same structural failures. The cases that did produce the right result, Raymond Morris caught because his own wife retracted her alibi. Michael Sams identified by his ex-wife hearing his voice on television. Osman Bell, exposed by a piece of gum he left on a cupboard lock 36 years earlier, was solved by accident, by individual decision, by the slow advance of technology. Not one of them was solved by the system working as it was designed to work. That matters.

[01:00:40]It matters because when you see it altogether, the pattern is not a series of unfortunate exceptions. It is a consistent enough feature of how serious crime in this region was handled across decades that it demands to be named as a failure, not a series of bad luck.

[01:00:56]Two major institutions exist today, partly because of what happens to innocent people in Birmingham. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 introduced mandatory tape recording of police interviews and strict rules on the treatment of people in custody. The Criminal Cases Review Commission, established in 1997 and based in Birmingham, was created specifically to review potential wrongful convictions because the appeal courts of the 1970s and 1980s had repeatedly refused to do so, even when the evidence was in front of them. Lord Denning, one of the most senior judges in England, said in open court in 1980 that accepting the Birmingham 6 might be right would create an appalling vista and dismissed the case on that basis. 11 years later, they walked free. The cases in this video that remain unsolved are not cold in the way that old cases become cold. The families of the 21 people taken in the pub bombings have been asking the same questions for 51 years. Carl Bridgewwater would have been 60 years old this year. The Barbara Forest case has never had an answer. Two different women 157 years apart in the same part of Birmingham with suspects sharing the same surname. Both acquitted, both cases unresolved. Birmingham is not uniquely dark. Every major city in Britain has its share of cases that went wrong.

[01:02:21]Cases that never closed. Cases where the justice system produced the opposite of justice.

[01:02:27]What makes Birmingham specific is the concentration, the density of significant cases within a defined geography and a defined era, and the way those cases taken together reveal what was happening inside the institutions charged with responding to them. The cases did not fail because Birmingham was unlucky. Some failed because the people investigating them decided that getting a conviction mattered more than getting the right one.

[01:02:54]Some failed because technology that would have solved them in days did not yet exist.

[01:02:59]Some failed because witnesses declined to speak. Some are simply still open.

[01:03:05]What the cases in this video share is not a single cause. What they share is the fact that real people, Nova Welsh, Carl Bridgewwater, Leslie Whittle, Harun Jan, the 21 people in those two pubs were taken and the world carried on around the space they left.

[01:03:24]Some families got answers. Some got the wrong answers and then the right ones decades too late. Some are still waiting.

[01:03:33]That is the honest summary of what 10 of Birmingham's most notorious cases tell us. Not that the city is more dangerous than anywhere else. Not that justice always fails, but that when it does fail, it tends to fail the same way for the same reasons. And the people who absorb the cost are never the institutions that made the errors. If you enjoyed this breakdown, make sure to subscribe. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next