Across seven episodes broadcast between June 2012 and April 2013, criminologist David Wilson revisits the crimes of six men whose convictions, he argues, mark only the start of their tally. Standing in a prison corridor or outside a crime scene, he lays out the proven murders, then tests fresh evidence that could add victims long written off as unsolved. The Suffolk Strangler, Peter Tobin, Robert Black, Levi Bellfield, Stephen Griffiths, Robert Napper and Anthony Hardy each get an hour; Wilson’s thesis is that recognising signature behaviour lets police join the dots they missed first time round.
The format never varies: archive news footage, crime-scene stills, a map dotted with red pins, and Wilson walking the camera through each discrepancy between the killer’s timeline and the disappeared. When he suggests Steve Wright strangled Michelle Bettles in Norfolk four years before the Ipswich spree, or that Peter Tobin’s hoard of women’s jewellery links him to Jessie Earl on Beachy Head in 1980, the programme treats the theory as a working file, not a headline. Contributors include detectives who retired still haunted, mothers still leafleting, and pathologists asked to second-guess their own reports.
Channel 5 commissioned two short runs, totalling seven episodes, before closing the casebook. The series survives as a compact archive of late-20th-century police missteps and a primer on how murder investigations ossify without a body, a witness or a conscience.
Production Details
5 / 2 Seasons / 7 Episodes / 2012
Main Cast
David Wilson as Self - Presenter
