Catching Serial Killers - Police Detective Colin Sutton tells his story

you can now follow me and all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications button so you're notified for when my next podcast goes live yeah he was he was a you know absolutely weird sort of case really because he he'd break into these houses where mostly women some men and all elderly all very very much those that lived alone and you know been in the house for a long time and they must have felt you know so secure in their own bed at night and and uh he would break in he'd remove the light bulbs or turn the electricity off so they couldn't put a light on he'd hide their phones they couldn't go for help and they'd be woken up by this dark figure looming over them shining a torch in their face the guy who was refused the mission set light to the place 11 people died as back in i think it was 94 and uh yeah it all left from postmortems in one day that was a that was a bizarre day you know you just it was it was just such a um and that deals with the the levi belford investigation so that was you know if helpful was this horrible serial murderer and paedophile who um is the only man ever to be given whole life sentences of two different trials in the country and he killed two young women in south london and tried to get another one that was my case and of course he'd also killed millie dowling which is uh you deal with that then at the start but when you get put forward to then try and catch one of the biggest serial killers on the list at that time the first reaction is am i up to it i'm not gonna lie that was you know that's how i felt what we're well i know this is gonna be really high pressure you know when you watch you know when you read a book or you you you watch a film or whatever there's always this pressure isn't on the on the deck can they catch him before he strikes again you know that that's so common i was living that for real that was going to be my life you know i was actually literally on me was going to be that pressure if we don't catch him henry morty going to kill boomerang in today's case we've got former detective colin sutton how are you calling i'm very good thanks james nice to be here yeah great to see you very fascinating stories you've got a couple of books as well um but one of your biggest cases your last case i think and before you were retired you were called into trying find the uk's biggest sex predator it was nearly at large for 20 years he was breaking into folks houses at 17 18 he was raping them and doing some dark [ __ ] male and female that and thankfully you come on the scene and eventually caught him but first of all how are you i'm very well thank you yeah i'm very good i mean it's been a bit of a manic few days with a you know book coming out and then the drama series coming out on telly and uh my phone's been a bit hot but yeah it's been you know it's been good it's been good it's both the book and the and the tv series seems to have been really well received so you know i'm really pleased yeah that's a great thing man especially giving it more publicity as well some of these times these set crimes don't get mentioned enough like this guy was it delroy grant was on the run for nearly 20 years raping all women and men and breaking out their homes like yeah he was he was a you know absolutely weird sort of case really because he he'd break into these houses where mostly women but some men and all elderly all very very much those that lived alone and you know been in the house for a long time and they must have felt you know so secure in their own bed at night and and uh he would break in he'd remove the light bulbs or turn the electricity off so they couldn't put a light on he'd hide their phones they couldn't call for help and they'd be woken up by this dark figure looming over them shining a torch in their face he was in control i think he liked that part of it you know he'd talk to him sometimes for hours and and occasionally he would rape them quite often he would indecently assault them uh and then steal virtually nothing you know steal 20 quid or a few few bits of jewelry or something like that it wasn't i don't think he was in it for the money you know he wasn't in it to make a profit he i think he really got off on the the thought of being able to go and do that to other people he's just a you know unique i hope individual yeah pebble trap became the controller yeah yeah yeah some sex [ __ ] that but you've got some other fascinating cases calling which we'll touch on later in an interview but i always go back to the start of my guests where you go how it all began yeah well i grew up in in enfield in north london um and my father was a police officer uh he was a traffic cop actually pc and i went to school in in north london um nor sort of things as a kid you know played football badly you know i didn't play too badly actually um yeah i played for the local representative side and things like that did okay at school went to university but from about 12 or 13 i'd really wants to be a police officer so i started off um during the met and started off as a pc at tottenham in north london in 1981 which was a an interesting place it was it was you know i think in those days the the suburbs of london were a lot quieter and a lot more sort of genteel in some ways london has just sort of spread out into them now so just six miles seven miles down the road from where i lived in enfield tottenham was a very different place you know in 1981 they have a culture shock really it's very busy there was a lot of crime there was a lot of public all the stuff to do at tottenham hotspur football club you know and things like that so i i kind of got a good grounding in policing i guess it's you know it was the sort of place you either you had a sink or swim i think fortunately i swam yeah how did people treat you with your dad being a police officer yeah it was good really in some ways because i'd kind of grown up with seeing him and his colleagues and his friends and so kind of grown up within that environment and you know there were a lot of people uh there when i joined that knew knew my dad and knew who i was and so yeah it kind of i guess it probably probably helped me that i knew quite a bit about the kind of culture and what it was like before before i went in yeah so it was just an ingrained and you straight away that you wanted the kind of fight crime yeah i think so when i joined you know i never never dreamt of being a detective i didn't i didn't really know what i wants to do uh probably want to do what dad did in traffic because i'd have had to be ridden a motorbike and it scared me stiff but um i didn't really know what i wanted to do and it was only really when i did a few um few years a few months working and got involved and investigated some crimes i i kind of realized that i liked doing that i like the almost a mental challenge you know the sort of guy who does the crossword in the paper and goes to quiz nights in the pub and things like it's just a sort of a mental challenge i suppose and that's that's kind of how i lent that way and but when it went down that path what is did you join the force i was 21. was that was that an ease limit then was it 21 you had to beat johnny no you had to be 18 and a half but i said i've been off to university where i didn't i didn't actually finish i went to leeds to read law and i hated being away from london hated being i think i was too young too mature if gap years had been a thing then i'd probably carried on and done it we wouldn't be sitting here you know um because it's quite ironic i gave up after a year in a term and uh joined the police and just four or five years later the police said oh you haven't got a degree and they sent me back and i went full time to university college london i did my last degree there well and the police force yeah well i was in the police yeah how did you manage that then they just wrote me off duties i was just doing it full-time like i was a student that's good man yeah why did they do that it was a scheme they used to have i think it's a you know as a hangover then from the days when far fewer people went to university anyway and and i'd go on to this sort of accelerated promotion scheme and um every year they ran this scheme and they had six places for people to apply to go and do a scholarship at university the course i happened to be on there were only five of us who didn't have degrees so we all applied and we all got it and i think as time moved on and education changed and more and more people were getting degrees they they abandoned the scheme why did you not stick to it why did you go straight back to a police officer oh because by that time i had about five years service six years service in the police and uh i knew it was the career for me it's what i wanted to do is there a buzz doing it as well even though you must see a lot of that scary stuff like is it a buzz to then try to catch people because everybody's different i've had a few police officers on but everybody i'm kinda again for the right reasons but then as time goes on over all the reasons changed is it changes that person at the start yeah i think there's something in there i think there's no doubt that being a police officer changed me as a person i think it changed me for the better i think it made me you know my son's currently serving not very far away from where we're sitting and you know when he joined i said to him you know that i hoped that he would mature as a person in the same way as i think i did as usual being in the place um so what was it like then getting your first uh case of catching your first criminal oh i remember the very first person i ever arrested it was an irish lady called mary kelly arrested for being drunk and disorderly in tottenham um it's funny i think most cops will always remember the name and the circumstance the first person they visited um but i had this this kind of strange career where because i was on this promotion scheme i couldn't really be couldn't do the normal path towards becoming a senior investigating officer so i never did the role of dc or ds i was in uniform until i was an inspector um so it wasn't really until i was it was a di and i'd had i had about 11 years service i think by then that um i got involved in being you know at the deputy on a on a murder and doing serious crime but i kind of i mean there's a story in my first book i'll be late i relate it again now it was i was back in 1983 i was uniform constable tottenham we'd been on doing some overtime and friend and i stopped off at a party that i knew was going on in enfield and as we were driving home we saw this shop that was on fire and there was no mobile phone so andy andy taylor who was with me ran down to find a phone box and i managed to get through a shop through a restaurant slap people there and get to the back of this shop and going through the fire escape and just got confronted with this place that's completely ablaze it was a like a hammer dashes it's old neck curtains you imagine how they went up you know but of course there was a flat at the very top and there were two people in there that ran the shop and they died so it was a murderous obviously an arsenal it was a murder investigation and i felt really bad about it for a bit because i thought could i have could have done more you know i was just dressed like i am now and uh yeah i had no protection at all and if i had gone in i think i'd have ended up dying with them and being quite honest but the the powers would be in the police i think recognize this and and i had to go down and make a statement about what i'd done and what we've seen and the guy who was the sios was a lot of spread it you can stick around and work with the team for a few weeks you know it might make you feel you're doing something towards what went on and i've never been into a murder room before the murder team room and and when they sit down and have these briefings and the the so sits out the head of the horseshoe and all the team are recounting what they've been up to and he's keeps his mantra going almost what have you done what do we know what does it mean what do we do next and it was kind of like that and he's writing away in his book and there was it was that sort of moment like the kid that sees the sees the fireman ringing the bell on the fire engine i thought wow that's that's just such a job i'd love one day i can do that i can do that i'd love to do that job of course it took a few years and i got to do it so once i got it i wouldn't let go of it what's it like seeing drama for the first time did you see much as a kid before you joined the police force no no not not at all no i mean it's um so how was that is that difficult because i've spoke to a few police officers and they'll tend to say a lot ton to drink and stuff there's not enough help for police officers because of the stuff that they actually see which is sad but how is that when you see trauma like for the first time is it just the kind that get on with your job is there help there for you to speak about that certainly back in the 80s it was it was yeah the early 80s when i joined it just get on with it you know there's no there's no phrase that people sue you to say if you can't take a joke you shouldn't join the job and they can't say it in those circumstances when something horrible happens or something horrible happens to you or whatever um it changed i mean changed after broadway to farm in 1986 whenever i was 85 85 85 yeah um because shortly afterwards in early 86 i was i was doing a course at henderson police college and they had a nursing home there and they had a lot of the officers who'd been involved in bulwarks fungi and uh it was it was like something from mash you know so what happened there well it was it was an uprising i suppose in in against the broadway pharma state um sorry spread it that bit let me get the thought of it we called the pharma state in tottenham was an estate built in the in the 60s and um for various reasons it had a higher concentration of sort of problem quote families as well and high concentration of ethnic minority families and there was drug dealing was a lot of crime around on the estate and it was kind of a sort of place that was could be made into a fortress if you know what i mean there's sort of three entrance points you've got these big buildings and walkways very difficult place to police now i was a community officer there for about three or four months and a very difficult time in the service and by the time october 85 came there was you know there was a lot of resentment about how it was being policed and there was a an incident and uh then there was a deputation after the incident was a woman died at her home not on the estate after a police search during a police search and there was a deputation went to the police station and tension had been quite high and it turned you know ends up with a few things being thrown and then it all went back to the estate and there were false calls made to police to call them onto the estate and then they were attacked with bricks and bottles and petrol bombs and the whole thing just carried on for for hours and of course during that time there was a fire engine fire crew that were trying to put a fire out on the shops on the estate and they were given the police um syria group police officers to try and protect them and they were all attacked and as a result of that two police officers kind of fell over as they were trying to retreat one of them keith blake was was murdered and the other one was seriously injured um and yeah i mean it was it was a kind of dark day in in policing for so many reasons but there were a lot of people there who saw things that traumatized them greatly and say i i wasn't there um thankfully i had been transferred to sergeant by then i was working elsewhere but you hung around in pendant at that time and there were you know there were a dozen or so people in the nursing home who were suffering from what we'd now recognize as ptsd and i guess it's the early days of it being recognized in the police service then yeah and and it it was a powerful image to see the effect that being involved in something like that can happen on a human being what was the first part of trauma you that sticks out in your mind where you think [ __ ] man that and you probably didn't realize it then that affected you but you look back and you think okay that was a trigger point for something i think the one that i really remember was funny enough my very last day of duty at tottenham and uh we we had to deal with a road accident where essentially uh because of the traffic for the football match there was a car tried to do a three-point turn tottenham high road and was t-boned by a much heavier car an old mini was the car that did the three-point turn it was a big rover that hit it it was a bad accident little girl who was in the back of the car five-year-old girl was kind of thrown out through the side window of the mini and died and say it was my very last day of new year i think it was new year's day you know it was kind of after after the holiday and i was acting as sergeant then i was getting promoted literally the next day and going for my course and the inspector asked me to to do various things might deal with with with the family and go and see them and uh yeah it was it was the first time i come face to face with recently bereaved people and where that bereavement was a child and you kind of got two things there and it was just also senseless and so hopeless and you know the same as a bank holding this little girl in the back of the car and they're just trying to get through the traffic to go and see their family how do you deal with that then calling especially later on in your career when you're trying to kind of come away from it all and chill out about yeah it's there were certain i dealt pretty well with the fact that there were things that i saw and experienced that most people don't even know about let alone see you know and and that there is a whole different world to the life that you and i live and you never know how other people live their lives and what happens in those lives so i i kind of separated that out pretty much from from the beginning and pretty early on and i guess i developed a thick skin and i guess that it was only the few occasions when that thick skin was pierced were the ones i really remember you know and some of those you know i've been lucky enough to be able to to kind of share by having them dramatized in in the two in the two dramas um and probably mark how good the dramas are i feel all the same emotions when i was watching it being enacted at the time one of those in the most recent series was this business of this woman who was she was actually 93 years old and she when she's grasping my hand whispering to me he interfered with me you know um and my head spun and i just i knew that i had to carry on being professional and do what i had to do but i just wanted to burst into tears and you know because it was just this lovely old lady and what's she being put through and it kind of brought it home to me that this yeah there are there are still things that i can find emotional and in some ways i'm pleased about that because if you do 30 years as a police officer and you're relatively you know active and and operational then you do see an awful lot of sadness and human frailty and you know all the other things and yeah and it can you know it was it's almost reassuring to know that i was he could still get to me you're still human yeah because you become colder the martian you would bottle all that [ __ ] up to then try and move on to the next job and catch the next criminal and that's why shows like this are so important because a lot of people from the streets have grown up to not like the police to not cooperate to take hate or no minutes if you're active and being bad it's understandable that the police have your enemy but it's to under is to show that police officers are human yeah the [ __ ] that they need to say dnd out rapes murders suicides overdose a lot of bad bad stuff and that affects them mentally effect it scares them for life that people are out there trying to clean up the streets like no matter in life is always good and bad i always say this it's just life but if you show people that we're all kind of human and kind of all under the same sky try to fight the same battle but it's them to show people that what you actually have to go through to then try and survive because then you eventually have family and kids and if you're seeing bad stuff every day it must play a massive part in your mental well-being yeah yeah absolutely it does it does it's funny you talk about the kitchen actually you kind of you kind of try and shield them from it a bit and you know my kids would be young when i was when i was investigating murders all the time and you know what do you do at work today daddy well you know it's just yeah it's just um you try and you try and sort of shoot them from that and keep that separation um listen i've i think i think i've come out of it relatively unscathed you know i'm i'm in a sort of a happy place but the fact is there are many who don't and you know thankfully that's that's that's being recognized within the service now and you've got i know just just lots of little initiatives and things just to just the phrases you know it's okay not to be okay it's it's a phrase you know yeah um and you you kind of realize that actually quite often all it needs is something to talk to to talk to about it you know and just say how you feel but it's it's encouraging people who are in you know if i say i'm a kind of a macho culture that's not reducing it or is excluding it to you know to to men um but because it's that kind of tough culture anyway within within policing maybe it makes it even more difficult for people to say do you know what this is getting to me do you know what i can't cope with this yeah and they must they must be allowed to and they must be able to and they must have help to get through it do you become more protective towards your family and kids calling as time goes on especially in the murder investigation scene when you're seeing some horrific things like do you become so protective because you know how bad the world can be sometimes yeah i think i think it's right i think it's wider than that james i think you think actually police officers are far more fearful of crime than everybody else because of what they've seen and what they know yeah you know and and so i'll be with with with my wife or with with with my friends who haven't been police officers and when i sort of say all right let's be a bit careful watch what's up with you you're paranoid about this i'm not paranoid i know what goes on you don't you don't understand what goes on you know so yeah it does it it does some would say it just makes you awfully cynical about other human beings perhaps it does but it kind of yeah you you know things or appreciate things that others don't and they're probably better off for not knowing it not appreciating you know how hard is it to see the beautiful things in life like there's so much goodness and so many beautiful things but how hard is it when you're constantly seeing negatives like i had a man just on before you called daniel cross who great man who just you watch the news you see horrific crimes and things happening and you never think that would ever happen to me but he was on the phone his house was getting burgled his wife phoned him says look i think there's something to try to get in the guy got in while he was still on the phone he was working away and he had his wife get murdered the guy tried to kill the kids also but the wife protected the kids but she ended up getting killed in the crossfire and then they tried to take the kids away but thankfully the police were there in time and then he he's like [ __ ] me that that can really knock somebody but that man never let that defeat him because i know people childhood trauma's a big thing the kid that sexy son seen that trauma and so he's still affected by it six years later and it's understandable but um dan himself has now opened up uh strong man a mental health thing that he pushed through and try to understand that you can kick on in life bad things do happen but it's just crazy that when you actually speak to people you realize [ __ ] me that some people are so um blinded by actually some of the serious stuff that goes on which you would have probably seen that and then me and mother investigation like how many mud does the j get called out to oh called out to i really don't know the number because we don't also do sort of on-call stuff yeah once we where we'd kind of start it off and then hand out somebody else but i think i was responsible for 39 as a senior investigator over the years um but do you know sometimes i mean what you're saying about that man he sounds absolutely remarkable how can you you know how can you even start to understand what he's been through um but but occasionally what does what does make me realize that this this there's still hope for humanity sometimes is that out of something as tragic and as awful as acts and who can come and you know he's he's used channeled the all the anger and maybe bitterness and sorrow and grief that he had obviously would have had about him and changed that challenged that and channeled that to to be a force for good uh one of my cases i did that we did a program about in the sky crime and documentary suicide uh earlier in the year there's a loud eighteen-year-old day called christopher donovan who was essentially kicked to death in one of the most stupid and senseless murders i think i ever came across uh where literally he's walking with his brother and friend and another group of young people come towards him they're all a bit drunk the other group um taking a few drugs and there's just a silly argument there's the two groups of kids walking along in the street you know and turns into a fight and he ends up getting kicked to death it's just completely completely avoidable and pointless and i saw his parents uh ran by one of them uh very soon afterwards when i got given the case to investigate and they're just the most remarkable people that that you know they were committed christians very ordinary people but very sensible people and they grieved they had the sorrow they had the bitterness they had the anger that everybody has enough it's natural to have no sort of circumstances and when that trial was over and they did the thing that so many members so many bereaved families will do and they'll come up as if you've been some kind of savior for them and i always find that's the worst time because it's the time i realize there's nothing else we can do for them it's like we've investigated their loved one's death we've taken it to court there's been a conviction the perpetrator is going to prison still doesn't bring him back does it still don't bring her about the loved one and i can't do any more for you now you know well i suppose i could do i can do and did with them because i've stayed and touched them to this day but what they did i think with the help sort of counseling they've gotten through their church and so forth they formed a trust in his name to promote restorative justice and to try and divert young people away from crime and they both got obese now for what they've done for their services to justice and they go around to prisons they go around for schools they've got this charity and none of that good would have happened if christopher hadn't been murdered yeah so you know and so that's why i try and support them as much as i can they have sort of carel services and things of christmas with the met choir and i'm getting into that they say try and survive with it so i think that's you know that's really my answer it's a long-winded way of saying yes sometimes amongst all this mayhem and grief something good can evolve and it's it's those things that make us think actually we're not all doomed yeah yeah did you have to see all the the name other cases did you see all dead bodies um yeah pretty much so i think so certainly yeah i think so um you the senior investigating officer really should always go to the post multiple examination they're they're obviously they're grizzly um things and yeah but once you've once you've been to one or two kind of you become a bit sort of you know hardened to that as well they take an awfully long time now and when i started they would take two or three hours you can be in there now for eight nine hours because they progress of science and the investigation science has meant there are so many more things that can be done and so it takes longer to do and uh yeah i once did 11 on the same day i was i was the iron it was a case of fire it's a unlicensed cinema in smithfield in london the guy who was refused the mission set right to the place 11 people died as back and i think it was 94 and uh yeah you'd already left from postmortems in one day that was a that was a bizarre day you know you just it was it was just such a a production line almost we had two pathologists two scenes of crimes officers two photographers two exhibit substances two slabs side by side and i was sort of single and yeah they did six we went and had lunch and came back and did the other five and it was just that's not how you can hard on yourself that's the sort of yeah well that's the same james what did you get yeah what what kind of a day at work was that you know just absolutely mind-blowing but oh that's very unusual yeah yeah but but you know you know things things happen like that we have sadly we have we have terrorist attacks we have you know tragedies uh disasters and things where somebody has to do that somebody has somebody's involved in sorting all that out at the end you know you just go straight back into what the next day any time no time off nothing as as mad at if i see ants on the road i'll step over them because i don't want to hurt them they're not going to work and seeing a loving body's bump into the ground like it just shows you like i say for people watching this to understand that what police officers have to go through to then environment and firewalls yeah but imagine it would make you so cold that it's a bit difficult to adapt to normal life because that's not normal things you see you see people in the army as well seeing that yeah terrible shetland the majority of people are homeless are ex-military and because as human beings we shouldn't be seeing darkness like that but like you says there that it happens and somebody's got to be there at the forefront yeah yeah so when you started moving through the ranks and colin because you you became very at the top of your craft that how did you keep getting promoted just because of the working i was on this sort of scheme so so um essentially if you came but how it worked back then was you could take the sergeant's exam for promotion if you had two year service when you've done your probation and i took my i was encouraged by my my then chief superintendent to take it at the very first opportunity which was i had two years and three days service and i took it and if you passed in the top 100 i think in in the met at the time you were then given an interview to go on this accelerated motion scheme but i came 27th i think so it's quite high and uh got on that went on the interview got through that and then had to go to one of these three-day extended interviews um up in lancashire actually where you had do all sorts of exercises and things over three days and write stuff and they've interviewed and and i got through it and i got selected for this course and it meant that in um [Music] january 1984 as i said the day after that fatal road accident i talked about i was off down to brampton which was then the police college in hampshire to do a year there in what they called the special course as a sergeant and uh that was sort of half and half um law and procedure and half and half sort of management and leadership training it was you know it's a big jacobian mansion in 270 odd acres in hampshire countryside it was just a wonderful place to live for a year i was the youngest on the course i was i was only 23 when i went down there and uh yeah i made some friends for life there from people who were on other course from other forces and and from the met and they looked after me because i was the baby um particularly a couple of ex-military guys on there both ex-marines who who i became friendly with and took care of me i had a wonderful time i mean i was i played it's like university i had wednesdays with sports day and i had a football team i had a qriket team so i played in both of those and and had a great time and passed past the course at the end and that meant i came out as a sergeant and i only had to do one year as a sergeant in uniform and because we'd take an inspector's exam while we were down there we were qualified for inspector if we did a satisfactory year as a sergeant we were an inspector how many ranks is in the police force oh god don't ask me this is the night yeah so the first one is a beat that's just yeah yeah constantly starts off then you go to sergeant and then inspector um so i was a uniform inspector in december 1985 having joined in january 1981 i had i had like four years 11 month service i was 25 years old of age and i was in charge of a whole response team leighton in in east london what's the top one oh the commission is the top one how's that yeah you see the reason the met has other levels as you get really high up the county forces don't have but you know i mean it's very it's very bottom heavy the bank structure there are only a very few at the very top and then it gets done so yeah i achieved the middle ranking role of chief inspector detective chief inspector um yeah only a smallish percentage of all police officers ever retained that rank or higher so but it wasn't for me about necessarily having the you know the best rank i could or that the best i i always counted myself i still count myself really lucky that i spent 30 years doing a job where i loved going to work every day and so few people can say that other than podcast hosts but you know it's right there isn't you know if you i'd know where you're from but you know where i came from the the the um there were factories nearby and you can see when i was a kid you see all these men mostly men actually some women obviously as well but cycling to and from the factory so this big yellow plastic capes over their boats because and they're going to a factory every day other parts of the country you've got people going down coal mines every day and i've been denicon one proper coal mine up new yorkshire in the 90s and i have to tell you as far as i'm concerned those guys who did that paid them whatever they were asking for you know because there is nowhere on earth i could do that every day for a while yeah a tough old job so so you know there's so many people who who who have to work are motivated to work no you know decently enough people i'm not going to rely on the state i'm not going to learn handouts i'm not going to try to turn a crime i'll do this job even though i hate it because i want to provide for myself my family and they do that and there are lots of people do that and i was lucky enough to be doing something i could do that and i loved every minute of it so you know um that was always my my kind of motivation really was was was to enjoy what i was doing and when i started being a senior investigating officer it was just the best job in the world i just loved loved doing it which is probably why i did it for so long yeah what about um you had books how many books have you got calling i've got excuse me i've got two out and one both of them came out to coincide with the manhunt martin clinton's tv dramas because they were the books upon which they were based so one's been out since um 2019 it's just called manhunt and uh that's um not a title i particularly wanted but itv forced you on listen it's made no sense to make the uh the book and the tv under a different title um and that deals with the the levi belford investigation so that was you know levi was this horrible serial murderer and pedophile who um is the only man ever to be given whole life sentences at two different trials in the country um he killed two young women in south london tried to kill another one that was my case and of course he'd also killed millie dowdler which is uh was the sorry case and he got mixed with that as well so that's the book about that one the first book and then the next book is is about uh the derral grand investigation that we mentioned at the start where where was something after after bellfield and um before i retired i was just asked to go to do a review really for a couple of weeks and probably made the mistake of coming up with an idea that somebody liked and got the gig as it were and you know i'm glad i did because we succeeded and we took him off and stopped these old people from being terrorized in their own home yeah so it's difficult to to not think that you know you've done some good by doing that so they're the two books i've got another one that i'm contracted to write but i'm not quite sure when that's going to be finished because the story hasn't really finished yet um and that's about some murders that happened in london during the 1970s and i did some review work on when i was in the police but kind of we all got on the back burner yeah so it's a fascinating story so yeah um so yeah i'm pretty they're they're both out man hunt men have all on amazon no places we'll leave links in the description because yeah why do you think that through crime sales why is that such a turn on for people like you going to netflix you're going to it's all mudders it's all serial killers like why is it so much attraction for human beings well i think it touches on what we talked about earlier on james i think it's it's kind of the fact that it's so removed and so different to other people's lives and by reading about it seeing about it on television hearing about it on podcasts they can kind of try to understand and try to imagine what it's like being involved in in in that and you know how how it is for both the victims and i guess for the perpetrators and for the detectives as well it's but you're right there's i mean there's an apparently inexhaustible sort of demand for it yeah at the moment both here and abroad and [Music] yeah um it's interesting watching the i mean the audience reaction to manhattan nightstalker last few days it has been amazing and i know i know twitter's twitter's not the world is it thankfully but but it's a window to the world or window [Music] the reaction i'm told no i don't i don't answer numbers and things like this but i'm told that um the tweets about the third episode which was the night before last third episode of manhunt 2 exceeded the number of tweets for the not only the first two episodes but also the whole of the previous series all put together yeah um and and you know i've been sitting there my wife and i've been sitting there sort of scanning it going through it and trying to reply to people that ask reasonable sort of questions but what actually stands out is the number of negative things negative tweets out of the literally thousands and thousands we've seen you know it's three or four it's it's i'm blown away by the audience reaction to it because there were no car chases no fights no no no gun gun shots and you know i wasn't an alcoholic who was having affairs it was it was kind of it's none of the sort of tropes and the normal sort of fictional detective stuff it was just about what it's like for these detectives who are you know they're ordinary men and women who just do a particular job and it's what it's like to be in their shoes to go through together that's what i've tried to do with the books it's giving them for the point of view of this is i wouldn't i don't want to write a book about levi bellfield or delray grant i don't want to see them on the television i don't you know they're they're worthless but the people who did the work to put them in prison to stop them they're worth a million of them yeah that's who i wanted to have so the first book because you've worked in that's nearing off two of the biggest cases in the uk that are mega cases like to be involved in them but the first one the serial killing won the belf as a belfast yeah like how do you deal with that how what's the game plan when you see young girls getting uh brutally murdered was it four yeah and then how do you three in an attempt how do you deal with that then at the start like when you get put forward to then try and catch one of the biggest serial killers on the list at that time the first reaction is am i up to it i'm not gonna lie that was you know that's how i felt and what we're well i know this is going to be really high pressure you know when you watch you know when you read a book or you you you watch a film or whatever there's always this pressure isn't it on the deck tips can they catch him before he strikes again you know that that's what is so common i was living that for real that was going to be my life you know i was actually literally on me was going to be that pressure if we don't catch him henry was he going to kill and that's a big old responsibility to take on uh and and i think i think if anybody said they would never have the you know slightest doubt they're up to it then i think they'd probably be telling lies i think everybody would ask themselves and you kind of think well i'm trained for it i've done the courses and there's funny thing about investigating cereal crafts like this there are only a few detectives to get trained as senior investigating officers full stop only a few of those get trained to do these serial cases and only a very few of those actually get to do one life because thankfully there aren't that many of them so when it comes it lands in your lap you you yeah you sort of think well would there be anybody else who's better you know i really did but i can't believe someone someone's got to step up someone's got to do it someone's got to take that take that risk of feeling that you'd failed on something really important yeah that's that's that's the the risk isn't it he said you know if i don't do a good job if somehow we don't somehow we mess it up other people might will be dying and that's that's a huge thing to appear so that's an under another pressure so if you you're on a case like that and then it strikes again and someday gets murdered how do you feel with that does that totally deflate you and thinking more pressure that well before you feel that you that it didn't it didn't happen but but with with belford because before he struck him we did arrest him but although it took a long time to to get the evidence and to convict him he was at least arrested and on riemann so he couldn't do any harm um oh god i i think it would be devastating to me personally i i i really i really don't know how how you would how i would go on and cope living with that every day then i'd mess something up and somebody died as a result you know and it's i say just fortunately it didn't happen but until he was locked away that was that was a reality you know that was the reality that you were facing that and and it wasn't just me you know this this team is all right i often say this most of the team most of these detectives run these murder squads are very experienced very talented highly trained officers and actually the difference between them means i get paid just a little bit more for signing the piece of paper at the end of the day and and making decisions you know um so they you know they would have felt the same i'm sure and in cases where it's happened i i don't know i don't know how those officers must feel but it yeah it would be a weighty thing to have on your mind what was the what was his motive for his killings well we don't really know um he he's such a narcissistic self-centered person he kind of just did whatever he pleased all the time and that didn't matter what he felt they had another person didn't matter what effect they had on the legality of what he was doing he was just uh you know just did what he wanted and all that mattered to him was him um what we were able to work out from the emily de la grange mode was that she was walking along the road and because we had so many cctv sightings that built him in his van we worked out the one point he must have driven past her and because it then took her longer to get from the point we last saw her before he went past her to the point where we last saw her i explained this but basically she died to slow down she'd stop at the time and that was the time when the van was near so we think knowing what he's like what people have told us about him we think he was cruising around looking for a woman a young woman not necessarily to murder but to chat up and take away his car maybe drug and rape because he did do that as well um and when she said no in that exchange outside the road he let her go and then followed her out of the car and passed her on the head what sort of stuff was he doing to the woman that was it that was all he did that's all he would do with these blitz attacks and he carried out a number of them um because apart from the two that died and the one that nearly died there's at least another two that we know of that survived um he he would just we think best guess we can say until he comes clean shows him remorse and admits it one day we'll never know what motivates him but what we think is that he would drive around looking for a young woman to pick up and when they get brush off he would get out they can't hit them ahead and it's kind of simple as stark as that see when they get i found guilty there's the officers still try and go back and speak to them to try and get the most to see if there's any yeah anybody else he's done on any bodies he was trying with both battlefield and withdrawal wrong but because they both said no we didn't we we didn't do it so how can we help you we haven't done it we're not guilty we've been wrongly convicted so you get nothing wrong nathan eason who is the d.i fabulous bloke who was under the the i on i'm not pressure minister derrick on the dera grant case he um shortly before he retired which was some time after me he went to see derral blanton prison in the hope that he could get him to finally explain and to talk to him and joey just simply said [ __ ] off so okay and had to leave it at that you know can't make these people chill yeah do you ever get any serial killers there's people who've come forward they've been lifted off and they've said that okay there's a body there on the body there yeah have you ever came across that yourself not personally no i mean i know it has happened on number occasions yeah but uh you know it it's there's a there's a sort of a campaigners in the type of law to say that the murderers can't be um paroled and less than until they give up whether where the body's buried and i i think that means it's kind of adding insult to injuries and it's bad enough having a loved one murdered but then not being able to have a proper funeral not having that cause that proper closure yeah you know i mean close is a funny word i don't often use it really because as far as i've seen you know i've i've spoken to more recently bereaved people that's probably good for one individual but i have and they all react in different ways and always tell them there's no right or wrong way because god forbid you or i wouldn't know how it reacts until it happened and let's hope it never does um but i think what the bereaved victims do is learn to live with it as opposed to getting closure i i think every day they miss their loved one every day they probably think about them but what they do is they learn to have some sort of life and carrying life with that knowledge yeah um you never you can never you know they'll never they'll never get over it completely because yeah you can't i says that's my last interview time's not a healer that yeah that's the pain you learn to deal with it and move on with it but we all face pain and drama because peter tobin and glasgow do you ever remember that kid i don't know he was just [ __ ] he had the he was working with the priest but i think he was yeah shagging hookers himself i think it was all [ __ ] up like he had the young polish girl and he buried that in the church in the church yes but i think he's done a few yeah and they i think they're digging up gardens and stuff yeah but it's scary i'm not people that has went missing and it could be all connected does that constantly play in your mind do you try and connect dots even when you're off work when you see things on the news and newspapers it could be connected to something from 20 30 years ago yeah absolutely yeah absolutely you know it's um it's funny how these things can sometimes come to the surface years and years later as well you know and uh yeah i mean there are still real genuine mysteries out there you know there's still you know many of them and i guess i don't know yeah this with the fascination with it you know with with kind of this this demand for true crime stories um it won't go away no what about all the mothers you've investigated and speaking to the murderers did anybody ever just come clean straight away and put their hands up or the dog plead their innocence yeah no one or two did one or two did put their hands up straight away i mean if you get i don't know what the figures are now for say for london 120 130 maybe 150 i don't know murders a year um most of those almost all of those will be unplanned yeah will be spontaneous and is that correct i thought they'd maybe be gang related no well yeah but even those not quite often the gangs don't go out they're not cool bloody if she says no i'm gonna kill her so i'm gonna switch my phone off i'm gonna drive around these streets where i know there's no cctv you know and things like that this sort of planning i'm gonna make sure that i've got gloves and i don't leave dna i think so many murders are that spontaneous that the people doing it don't think about cctv about their phone signal communications data about dna about fingerprints and they do it and because we as a society and the police still treat murder rightly as something big and the ultimate crime they put lots of resources into it so you get a whole team of skilled detectives with pretty much unlimited budgets for scientific work and forensic work it is limited but generally if you if you want something done you can get it done and if you throw that these spontaneous crimes it's pretty easy to find out who did it and actually you can end up arresting somebody and present them with so much evidence they've got no choice to say yeah okay it was me but it's those little ones at the end that tends to be your serial murderers or people like bellfield and and people like grant who wasn't a murderer they plan what they're doing they know how they might get caught and they take steps to avoid it and when you've got that going on they're the really tough cases they're difficult cases you know do you know you can kind of tell something's not right with people sometimes but sometimes these guys you see a lot of american ones as well a lot of films that come across very well dressed very polite very smart very manipulative with narcissistic traits kick in if you ever sat across with someone you think how can you do how could you do that was there always telltale signs that there's something not really upstairs um i think yeah i mean derrick grant's a good example of that in some ways because he was he had a real double life you see when we charged bellefield with the murders and we spoke to people who knew him they sort of said yeah we it was only a matter of time we always knew he was wrong and we always knew he was weird we always knew he was fine psychopathic whatever when we spoke to the people in new delhi they told us we must have the wrong man they said i can't do it now he's you know he's the mainstay of the cricket team he's a bloku we have a laughing joke playing uh domino's with it he's a devout carer devoted carer for his disabled wife before she was so disabled he used to go out with her knocking on doors to with jehovah's witnesses um we have a street party in the cul-de-sac here and he always does the barbecue and put some music yeah he's just regular sort of nice guy bloke you must have the wrong man and so and and when you know if if you watch on the reading a book or watch on the drama last night it was absolutely true i had this conversation with him about cricket the first time i met him he'd just been arrested just been arrested he'd just given a dna sample uh that he knew was gonna put him in prison for probably the rest of his life certainly the rest of the good years of his life and because he was dressed all in white and because we you know we stereotype a bit it was it was a joke really it was like a joke of an icebreaker when they got introduced to me and he was very polite very respectful about his hit hands with me and and uh but he's dressed all in white because she's been given the themselves and and and jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt because they're taking his clothes on they're all white and i thought west indian man his age he's probably been to qriket and he'll understand the jokes i saw are you batting or bowling and just said it like that and he seized on it because are you into cricket i said yeah i am he says he don't still play i said i do occasionally yeah well i am bold oh no no my knees won't let me bowl never you know i still bad a bit but not very well he says i still batman tell me what you think about the english squad going to south africa for the tour this year i said well we could do another fastball yeah i've been saying that to the boys at the pub you know we've literally had a conversation it's gone on that long and i said suddenly uh after this it was a joke and i spoke i didn't expect it to be like one of the the rain incidents in test match special special you know we just had this sort of conversation about cricket and like you might do about football or anything else in the pub with the bloke you know that you know and that was i now realize that was that was part of him wasn't it that was him i was seeing the devil right there that everybody else saw that told us we had the wrong man that told us he was the nicest bloke in the world the life and soul of the party couldn't do enough for you he was being that man there to me is that a spot personality i don't know i'm not my pay grade james i don't know i'm no psychologist but but he definitely had two personalities yeah and one that everybody knew and then the one that these old people lying in their beds yeah before that before yeah you get called into this court case that yeah that's to catch him like were you were you just about to retire um no i had about a year to go so i was um and and i'd i didn't have to retire they weren't really forcing you wouldn't have forced me out i suppose um but i kind of wasn't sure what i was going to do whether i was going to retire or not and i was still with my own murder team that had done bellfield working at putney um and you know i enjoyed working with them they were so bloody good they were they were delight to manage and to lead um so i'd have carried on maybe for a bit beyond my 30 years but what happened was that the year before i got i was asked to go over and look at minnesota i ended up there and i was there until my retirement day came up and and it was i was kind of underused really to a degree because we would we arrested him and charged him we were doing the papers for court we didn't we weren't even finding any more evidence like billfield we carried on investigating all the times it was all circumstantial evidence we grant we had his dna it was it was yeah it was no context really um so all i was doing was supervising the putting together of the case papers for the crown prosecution service and it got to the day when i could go and i thought well i've had a good run i've had 30 years i've got to go some time to be honest if i carry on coming to work next week i'm coming to work for half pay because i can get half not turn up you know the pension so you kind of weigh things out and i i'm sort of 50 years old it's about 51. i'm thinking well actually i've got a few good years left still who knows i might be able to do something else and i didn't know what that might be i certainly didn't think it would be all this sort of stuff i got a job delivering flowers you know when i first left the police the first job i did was delivering flowers for like minimum wage for three flourish shops in surrey i loved it and somewhere i would just drive around with this van everybody was pleased to see me cause i was giving them flowers completely stress-free you know yeah sometimes that's all you're watching that's all i wanted yeah so when you get called up for the one of the biggest sex cases on the run in the uk that how long did it take for you to catch them uh well i went over to look at it to do my review i think it was the end of may in 2009. um and i made some suggestions about how they should work and change it around and they asked me to stay on and i wasn't given the sort of the reigns to it the the original sio was still there but he um i mean he terribly said he he he'd had a really bad injury uh to his back some years before in the fight with the prisoner and he was in a lot of pain and he devoted himself so much really to to trying to solve operation instead that he at the night stall covered him um he he carried on and carried on and carried on when perhaps he really you know could and should have been given a nail health pension and not medicine he was in a lot of pain sometimes simon um and he's through his credit he wouldn't do that you know he was so determined to try and get through this so he was still the senior investigating officer and some of the things i'd suggested he completely went along with and took on board and we changed the way it worked a bit and then he had to go into hospital for a period for another operation his back and so i was given the kind of sio role and it was about the time then that um that i was able to get this event operation going and and um you know i had an amazing amount of help from other people in the met who were real experts in their field you know and and they advised me and helped me uh immeasurably um and yeah we put this thing together and we did it for 17 days and it was he knocked uh the women november 13th 14th i think that he was arrested so it's about six months altogether it took you six months yeah so how do you so she see when you came in colin yeah and this man has been at large for over 15 years do you need to look at all the files over that period how does it work yeah not myself enough dusty files there are a few videos i've watched again you've seen the drone because see some of the interviews the victims have been recorded on video yeah um it's the only way to do it because if if you don't know something you know the last thing i want to do is to come up with a brilliant idea spend a couple of days writing reporting here presenting it and people who know the case between they said well no that's not true because you know i had to know all those because so yeah i didn't have any choice but to get myself up to speed with it and and it took a while and it was harrowing yeah so when delroy done his first um break-in and uh sexual assault and stuff he never done it for a longer period after that as well was that correct because they thought maybe he was in prison or yeah it was a kind of break or is there potential that he could have been getting breaking out how she's raping them but people weren't too scared to maybe come forward as well i think either or both yeah yeah the first offense that he left dna at rape was in 1992 they didn't get dna from it straight away because dna wasn't really a thing there but in 1998 there was another one and they did then get dna for it and by that time they've been kind of going back over the old exhibits and swabs and things from the old cases and that's when the match came oh this is the same as one same man as well in 92. so that was what became the series and became operation incident was given to us specially his team to to to investigate so there was nothing apparently between 92 and 98 and then even during the times that he was active there were lulls but the trouble was that because he didn't rape somebody every time because he didn't in this assault something every time because he never left his fingerprints anywhere because he knew that his fingerprints were on fire one fingerprint he'd been he'd been potted um i don't think we can be absolutely sure that there weren't other burglaries because there have been all sorts of burglaries reported in london during those periods uh and in south east where we know he he only worked um i don't know how many of those sitting there in a dusty box somewhere might be might be derek grant crimes you know i'm i'm certainly the psychologist and sort of profilers and things that i speak to are all very skeptical that he would go quiet for long periods unless there was a reason so he was living abroad or he was in prison or he was in hospital or something like that but you know so people like him don't just stop for a while and then wake up one day and think you know i'm gonna start again you know it's that's not that's not how their mind works do you ever have a girlfriend wife did he yeah yeah he had two wives didn't know about each other sorry yeah no he was married oh married married married the first wife um told us all about you know she had a really terrible time with him in terms of domestic violence and abuse and things like that the second wife um she contracted muscle cirrhosis and it was a sort of degenerative progressive version of it and she gradually became more paralyzed and infirm and disabled and he was looking after her he was her carer he was paid by the local council to be her carer and apparently he did a good job of it during the daytime and then at night time he's here up it's bizarre and he had a yeah over girlfriend we we came across um and we we we found out after he'd been charged that he'd been working as a mini cab driver um in south london in the um in the early 2000s and uh as a result of that we found out that one of his passengers um had sort of started a relationship with him do you think that's what he was finding a lot of these victims though and nikai may be dropping them off at home i think it's entirely possible yeah but i mean what he was he was a creature of habit he had a he had a particular way that he liked you know vast majority of his offenses he'd actually removed a whole plane of glass he went to houses where there were like 1930s houses like the one i grew up in um and probably a bit like i think you know my dad retired in i don't know 1884 something like 85 and he used his retirement money to get the windows replaced and the windows you get replaced at those times had beading on the outside if you peeled it off you could just take the pane of glass at home and he knew that that's how he got into houses most of them was by removing a whole pane of glass um so he had that and he had he didn't do social housing he didn't do flats he only ever did houses and bungalows and they were mostly that sort of vintage sort of 1930s places and you know if you go down to the suburbs south eastern suburbs anywhere and look at estates of these 1930s houses you can see the ones where people live you still can it's not just the grip the gut grip around on the side the door but you know they won't have had won't have had their garden concrete over to part four carson because their children have got cars or something like that um the garage might still have the old double doors on um it just you know you could walk down any survival street like that and old person lives out the shelter and he knew that he was switched onto that and he was at large for 17 years how do you deal with that calling like going over all footage you're interviewing someone in their 80s who's been raped but how did they do how did they even deal with that with the victims like a lot of victims i imagine you would be dead now but the vast majority of them unfortunately how heartbreaking is that for an officer at the beginning yeah absolutely listening to that absolutely you know it's just i mean you know reading i i've got it all sort of second hand reading either reading their statements in most cases or looking at the videos um real live officers have sat down across the table like you and i and spoke to somebody about that and what what what comes over to me is this you know this the generation that we're talking about here are the generation that grew up either were children during the second world war and they grew up with rationing and things in the 50s and and they're just a lot more sort of stoical they're just a lot more reserved and quiet and suffering about their about their problems i think and and that's why i'm sure that there are indecent assault and probably rape victims of his that we don't know about because they just didn't they were pushed to burglary but didn't say what happened because sometimes it was a considerable time after the event that they'd come forward i said well actually do you know what this is what he did this way did to me because people of that generation didn't like talking about intimate stuff like that they felt shame some of them absolutely no reason for them to but you can understand you know they did and that was really part of the motivation of writing the book and and and making it into into the drama was that what i realized was that these old people never had a voice there was no twitter there was no petitions.org there was no kind of facebook groups instagram you know they didn't have access to [Music] report what happened to them and we know from talking to journalists at the time the newspapers were trying to get the youth market you know and that an editor apparently actually said to one journalist people don't want to read about old ladies being raped over their conflicts so there was just no pressure put on and and you know we say it's true nathan said it to me if the victims have been aged 18 to 35 it would have been dealt with by the media and by the police in a very different way but they were aged 68 to 95. yeah imagine that living your whole life and your 80s a man and then your house was broke down and [ __ ] guys coming in and yeah what how many charges was he charged with he was 29 eventually he played not guilty [ __ ] second oh it's even better that his his defense was like the comedy defense to people comedy defenses his defense was that in 1979 when he left his first wife as he was leaving her because they were having problems when they had sex she saved semen and saliva she got a doctor friend to keep it in a freezer guys hospital and then in the 90s and 2000s somebody went out with these samples squirting them into old lady's clothing yeah dna is an identification thing you know it wasn't a thing until the mid-90s you know it just it's just absolutely plausible defense he was just it was comical if he was serious you know um yeah but but he he i think the the i wanted to ask some questions about how we how society how we deal with old people and there was a there was a wonderful scene in the drama last night with with with colin martin clunes as me talking to the foundation officer and they see some old ladies and talking the street and they're just talking about how they're invisible and how we don't think we're going to get there we don't think we'll do that we won't have the zimmer frame and the bedpan and the forgetfulness and because of that it's it's kind of pushed to one side and none of us perhaps i think that because i'm getting so close to it myself you've got a few years to go [Music] but you know it's a really serious point that these old ladies mostly these victims of their grant were largely invisible and nobody could speak for how many victims we know officially i think there's 204 offenses i suspect there were hundreds more sad on it do you think you would have retired if you never caught them do you think you'd have kept going an extra year or two years to eventually catch them knowing me myself as i do 100 yeah yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't have given that halfway through this yeah you started putting was it like spy cams everywhere and how did you eventually catch well it's just really um you know it was by the very first meeting i ever went to everything they were talking about was dna and i wrote in the margin in my book what if i didn't have dna and that was just a note to myself being okay if i'm trying to think of other ways of doing this everything they're talking about you know let's take that away tim we haven't got it what do we do then it was kind of an extension of that and i said well he's actually a burglar we're we're we're saying he's a sexual predator he is but every single fence yeah yeah he's really a sexual predator we know we know he's no that's wrong i've got this all confused sorry i can't back again um everyone was treating him because he was a sexual predator and he was a sexual predator but he was also a burglar and that's the important thing for me is that every single offense he committed started with the burglary some of them a lot of them went on to be assaults or rapes if there was a burglary there every time so how do we catch burglars and i sort of thought back to my time working on divisions and that and all the way back to tottenham when i was when i was a wee lad and you know we had this this guy that was plaguing a tiny part of the division because all the houses had louvered windows and you could prize them out from the outside when climbing through the window but he was so parochial he was so restricted to one area that he took about 20 officers that we could get together he'd sit in cars or borrow people's bedroom windows and eventually he came along he won his arrest in the house and he sorted so what i wanted to do was to scale that up and do it for a quarter of london it takes a lot more 20 offices to to to to do that in the course of london that was but so what we had to do was we had to get intelligent i was talking to the crime analyst and saying okay let's try and narrow this down to a manageable area where we know he likes to offend because the housing stock and because the demographics are right and um the analysts did that for us and uh yeah we had about 70 or 80 people instead that's still quite a big area to cover and we just sat there hoping and waiting that he would come and do one in front of her eyes and he kind of did feel a trap did he stay in the other area calling yeah man a few miles away you know three or four miles away yeah i mean everywhere that he offended was actually reasonably close to where he's they lived yeah it's mad that let people how people can go through that that seem you catch somebody like that like so i'm not comparing it but look if i'd imagine for a football player calls a hat trick or something and there's feel good like when you do that how how good do you feel you've brought some [ __ ] circle like that to justice yeah oh yeah she's i'm sure it is just like that it's just you know it's it's um the the two of the really sort of standout moments of my life when i you know when that jury form and said guilty for belfield and when nathan phoned me up and said i think we've got him colin because we knew once we got him wrong the trial wasn't an issue because we had dna it was going to prove it it's a bit different troll was by no means a poor inclusion but um yeah it was just you know emotional um you feel pride you you you know i felt i felt so pleased for members of my team particularly the belfry one because we had people who were so determined they said no it's right i'm not going i'm you know they've been qualified for promotion and they get offered a post and they say no i said i'll wait for a little while i don't want to be promoted yet had somebody put off their wedding you know because they didn't want to miss being part of it and so people have made sacrifices i mean it's a wonderful story about belford investigation when we before we'd identified him when we didn't have to fight his van we didn't have registration we knew the type of van i couldn't thought we had to find it around twickenham and i'd go leave home i'll leave work rather say i didn't know seven o'clock or something let's go home i'll just give you an hour around twickenham and hereby just see if i could see this van so i'd pull up there radio ones to drive live in the football or something like that you know and uh just sit there and watch for this wife anchoring class but the number of times i saw other people of my team in their own cars doing exactly the same thing and we never waved to each other we never even discussed it at work because we'd all been a bit embarrassed for everybody else to know that we were spending our own time trying to find this bloke i wasn't the only one that was that you know that kind of dedication like that it gets to people and um yeah they're special people sometimes these cops so seem you caught uh leroy was doing that delroy yeah see when you caught delroy when he was dry was it it was uh like a surveillance on him was just you got the that you knew it it could have been him as it just pounced on him straight away no it was he was he's we knew what sort of car he drove from the first night of surveillance because he'd done some offenses close by but not in our area but we knew he must have driven through our area so we went to the cctv a local school managed to identify what must have been his cars who knew what color it was when i saw the car and that was the road i've been down with belford and i didn't want to go down again because finding a car in those settings is really tough um so we kept the surveillance going and then one of the offices he'd been into the same um observation post in this building uh every night for 17 nights and as they walked in he saw this crazy fear of the type that we knew he drove parked up so he told everybody else that there's this sort of car that's not been there before to be aware and then sometime afterwards said delroy as we now know came jogging down the street going the car and drove off so what we then did was we had a mobile surveillance team nearby on standby they were deployed behind the car but what we needed to do was to try and get him as far away as possible from our area before he was stopped because otherwise he might think if it's the wrong person he's not arrested it might otherwise show where we're doing observations so we can't stop people there we have to let them go away so that's what they did they followed him for a couple of miles um and he was actually turned off the main road into another residential area of sort of old residential houses um so part of the thinking at the time was is he actually looking for somewhere else to break into but in the meantime we'd gone back around near where his car was parked and actually found a bungalow that he'd broken into there so it's by the time he got stopped it was pretty much uh it's pretty good bet that we had the right man there but of course the dna confirmed it do you think because it has character being the nice guy in the pubs and playing for the cricket team that it then it's more hard to catch people like that because of it's it's not just a case of luck because even his crimes he's leaving fingerprints he's leaving semen he's leaving all the stuff that you need for a conviction but yet it took 17 years to catch him i mean he wasn't leaving fingerprints because that would have that would have got him because he had convictions going years back and his fingerprints on file he was very careful not to do that and but dna didn't care about she knew he had nothing to match it to um but i think it his character and his split personality yeah that made it more difficult to catch him because there was quite a bit of publicity not as much as i think we should have been there's quite a bit of local paper and local radio publicity around this case but because people all knew him as delroy life and sold the party nobody would come to and said you know i think he could be him because he'd done nothing to make people think that he could be him contrast that with belford where we have people coming forward to us including one of his ex partners saying i think your murderer could be this man because you know nobody was ever going to say that about their work because nothing you know massive respect for catching those people that honestly that's what people don't see like you imagine one of these creeps like attacking your sister or criminal your grand or grandma's house yeah it's it's mad to think that yeah that happens like a sick [ __ ] that you don't really hear about unless you watch those dramas or read your book that how do you feel now that your book's been turned on a successful tv drama and martin clinton's playing yeah yeah i mean i just roll with it james you know it's all unexpected i know i'll tell i'll tell the story of how it came about because when i when i finished working i started writing i read like writing a bit now started writing this book and i did about 20 000 words on the belfry book and i thought this is nonsense nobody's ever going to want to read this let alone publish it you know so i stopped and and a friend of a friend of a friend like they do got ed whitmore who's the scriptwriter who writes manhattan got him to talk to me because he was doing something for bbc it never got made but he wanted some advice on authenticity so he came and saw me in my house and we just got on you know and uh we we got on really really well and um ed is like a complete walking encyclopedia of murder i mean you know and i've i've done some other work with him for fictional stuff as well he'll sort of be discussing something say oh yeah what about in that case in tuscany in 1997 what what why do you expect me to know about that edge you know because he that's what he does because it's his job so he heard outside writing his book we were just talking like he said i want to see it once he wants it so i gave him and he read it and he said i've got to carry on it's really good you've got to carry on you know screams oh yeah okay i took it with a pinch of salt and unbeknownst to me he was working for buffalo with the production company on something else and he said oh there's a really good story that i think you'd be interested in making into a crime drum but you know we've got to persuade uh colleagues to write it and so i had lunch with him and we talked about it and they said yeah we want to we want we want to option your book that you haven't written yet so okay um and then it was ed came and stayed with me for a week and we did the first episode of the first man itv commissioned the whole thing on that sudden i had a book to write and a script to help write all over summer 2017 it's a bit busy and we got it done and that's it that's where i'm where i am sort of thing and then we knew there was you know i'd always thought i always thought the night stalker story probably was a better story for dramatisation in some ways but because it was so unknown there's no way we could have done that first we had to do the battlefield one first because everyone knew about millie doubt everyone knew about levi bellfield um and that gave us the sort of the weight or the the sort of reputation with that one so we could do the second one and much including this was i mean it's his wife that runs the production company and at the beginning she said i don't know who will get to play you you know it's not it's not i'm not doing this for martin it was only when ed had finished the script and we submitted the scripts and she showed them to martin he said yeah i want to do that i'm going to play that so that's how he came back great guy really really good guy great company good fun to be with it's a fascinating life you've learned calling that some madness yesterday some darkness and now you're living the celebrity life people playing your parts and why list both the best jays but yeah it's just as i say just roll with it you know life life throws things at you take them in your stride mm-hmm is there any cases you've you that does the people are stalling around you would have liked to have worked on i don't think so really i don't think so i've i've got a fascination with the looking case but that's that's been done on television recently as well yeah but no no you know i just don't take life take things as it comes and well with it yeah do you look at cases they'll call in and think that you look at like do you know the babel john case that was in the battlelands the guy was just taking the girls and killing them that yeah they look at those old cases and see because there was no dna there was no forensics so it's obviously harder than you look at then going in and in your mind you start putting the clothes together a lot of these people kind of have the same mind where they kind of think the same as well a lot of these cases that you do is that correct does everyone totally different no i think i think there is a lot there's i don't think they're all totally different i think they're clear there are things that connect again certainly it's um yeah but no i just you know it's um i i kind of i could sometimes look sort of jealously at you know i think i'm good you know it was the boss of being in and amongst the investigation first time was was quite huge really sometimes and i sometimes miss that and then i remember the grief that he also brings you know the pressure that it brings and so i think actually i don't miss it that much yeah jesus it's easier telling stories than he was actually doing yeah the imagine like being in that life is being in a life of chaos can be quite exciting as well because it's like you're in your own tv series it's like you're in your own real life [ __ ] that's that's that's remarkable that's that's that's the sort of the the head exploding point for me is that millions and millions of people are watching these things and tweeting and saying how much they enjoyed and how wonderful it was that was my life i lived that for real that was my that was my day of work you know that was my day for the years and it kind of gives you a yeah say sort of a head explodes moment i nearly said head [ __ ] but you know what i mean i think hang on a minute this was just that's just life that's just what i did you know and so it's for over 30 years being a detective and not many people patting you on the shoulder just your officers yeah not really knowing who you are what you've done but then when your story comes to the forefront you see that you're a soldier that some of these things that no human should see no swimming should be witnessing and you're there doing what you do try to catch real sick people that that's i take my heart off to you for that last question brother going forward for the future man what's the plans we're getting films out more books um there's definitely one other book there's definitely some more documentaries i start filming um back in london filming in october for the real manhunter season two which is probably going to be the the the the the remaining um documentary no sorry that's not put another way it's probably going to be the remaining sort of cases that i did the suitable to be to be sort of made into a documentary and talk about um and plans for another documentary for the year after about something a bit different i'll um i'll keep them on tennis hooks about because it's not signed up yet um and as in terms of the drama we would dead whitmore and i would love to do another series of manhunt it is possible that we might but there's a lot of a lot of talking negotiation to be done you know it takes a long time but if we can we will because yeah i've just been bowled over by by people's reaction to it how much they like it and um yeah so we'll see and but if he doesn't have any doesn't happen for anybody that's watching this maybe we want to join the police force like what advice would you go for them don't do that no no hey listen you know i would i would say if you think that you want to [Music] serve your community in a way that is exciting and interesting dispiriting boring everything you can think of um it's a good job you know uh um and we need people to come forward and be because quite frankly we'd be we stuffed without them wouldn't we yeah numbers are going down as well but i think there's a lot they're trying to get them up again yeah yeah yeah which is sad because crime seems to be rising as well not so much as through lockdown but again no things seem to appear i think i think that the big the big thing that i have a real issue with about it about recruiting is this this this nonsense to say we we've got to have people with degrees everyone's going to have a degree before they can be a police officer some of the very best police officers i worked with the pleasure to work with orlando were didn't have degrees many of them had a background in the armed forces and they did foreign they make good coppers last question colin what makes a good police officer common sense knowing right from wrong sense of humor not money i've come across a sense of humor if i'm honest but listen i thoroughly enjoyed your story great character great individual and well done for all the work that you've done over the years unbelievable and i look forward to seeing more series and more checks out that you've become a you know we wouldn't see an overnight success because everything that you've done it nobody ever seen that but for what you've done and putting yourself at the forefront to see those horrific things to them let other people sleep better at night i take my heart off to you and fair play here but god bless you calling in thank you very much likewise

Channel: Anything Goes With James English

Views: 70,913

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Id: L5w1rQhNz9o

Length: 92min 37sec (5557 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021