Behind the Crimes with Robert Murphy

It was the occasional smell of weed which made detectives suspicious at first.

Then a mystery delivery alerted police to the former nuclear bunker in the middle of the English countryside.

But when detectives mounted a raid on the underground fortress, they had no idea if they could get through the atomic blast doors. And when they did - what would they find?

What followed was a moment of high-tension as the team had just seconds to catch an organised crime group in the act.

And detectives uncovered a unique drugs factory built on a scale not seen before in England.

But this is no crime caper. Soon police saw for themselves the dark side of drugs production.

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To welcome new listeners to Behind The Crimes, every day this week I’m highlighting some of the incredible stories we have covered in the last year. This is a replay of an episode from June 2023.

In the early hours of October 4th 1922, a woman who was about to become Britain’s most notorious murder suspect walked home from the theatre with her husband.

Edith Thompson was 28, she was beautiful, had a career, a good social life… and a lover 8 years her junior.

Freddy Bywaters leapt from the shadows and stabbed her husband to death. Edith was terrified. She didn’t want her husband dead, she hadn’t held the knife.

But why did detectives charge her with murder?

In what ways did her love letters scandalise puritanical Post-War society? And as the hangman’s noose awaited a guilty verdict, how important was that opinion on the jury?

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This podcast is based on an interview with Laura Thompson, whose book ‘Rex vs Edith Thompson, a Tale of Two Murders’ can be bought here in the UK and here in the USA.

NB. As a welcome to new Substack subscribers, this is a reissue of an episode released in 2023.

Roy and Joan Clarke are found dead in their home in rural England in December 2004. They’ve been stabbed in a ‘ritualistic-style’ attack.

Det Ch Supt Paul Howlett’s suspicions fall on one man. But does his prime suspect have the opportunity to kill? There is little evidence at first.

But the country’s top forensic psychologist warns Paul if the suspect is the murderer ‘it’s not a question of if he will kill again, but when.’

The killer has laid the perfect alibi. Or so he thinks.

The route to justice takes some dark turns.

And twenty years on, and Roy Clarke’s daughter is still seeking answers.

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NB. This is a replay episode - first released in July 2023.

What does it take to be a cold case detective? How do you solve a case from the past when all the files have vanished?

All Julie and Gary had was one sheet of paper: a laboratory submission form.

Nothing else.

They didn’t know the details of the attack, who the victim was, what or where it happened.

But by methodically reviewing the case Julie and Gary were able to rebuild the investigation.

There was a DNA hit linking the attack to another unsolved crime scene.

And the attack had been so terrifying, all the original officers and witnesses had never forgotten that freezing night in January 1986 when they came across a young woman called Samantha who had been subjected to this traumatising assault.

But just when Julie thought justice was within her grasp she faced another challenge: lawyers who were refusing to charge their prime suspect.

The case culminated in a dramatic and emotionally-charged court hearing.

Warning: while this episode does not give graphic or intimate descriptions of this sexual assault, some of the details and imagery may be distressing. Listener discretion is advised.

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Who is Banksy? It is a question that has taunted the art world for two decades.

As a graffiti-artist, he has committed criminal damage. Which is why I’m including him in Behind the Crimes.

I uncovered a ‘lost’ interview with the secretive stenciller.

When researching the artist’s background, I came across an old report which had lain in a tape archive for more than a decade and a half. Even the journalist who had interviewed the then-unknown Banksy had forgotten about it - even though he had seen the artist’s face without a mask.

Today, Banksy could genuinely claim to be the world’s most famous artist. Some of his work sells for tens of millions of dollars.

But no-one knows what he looks like.

So this ‘lost’ interview I discovered has now become an important part of modern art history.

When I found it I had no idea it would set me on a trail that would lead to direct contact with the artist himself.

In this one-off special, I’m telling you the story behind the discovery.

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How long would you wait for justice? What about fifty years? Liz Roberts was assaulted as an eight-year-old girl. She didn’t tell her parents - even though her father was a high-ranking murder detective.

A decade later Liz became a policewoman herself. But Liz still kept the attacks a secret, thinking her force wouldn’t believe her.

After all - she had no proof.

It took fifty years before Liz was able to bring herself to confront her abuser - her own older brother. Still, she felt detectives wouldn’t take her claims seriously.

How wrong she was.

And what happened when Liz confronted the perpetrator in court?

Liz has waived the automatic right given to anonymity to all victims of sexual assault to speak with Behind the Crimes.

If you’ve been affected by issues raised in this episode you may find support at:

UK: https://siblingsexualabusesupport.org/ or liz-roberts.co.uk

USA: https://www.siblingsexualtrauma.com/ or https://5waves.org or

https://siblingstoo.com

Southern Hemisphere: https://handingtheshameback.org

NB - This is the same episode as the bonus podcast interview with Dr Rossmo - just in-vision!

For fourteen years, a man described as looking like ‘a Ghoul’ terrorised a huge area across the North and East Midlands of England. Detectives thought he was behind at least seven attacks on women.

In one case, he even superglued his victim’s eyes shut so she wouldn’t see him.

He was forensically-aware and left few clues at the attack-sites.

Desperate, three forces combined to run Operation Lynx. And they hired Dr Kim Rossmo who was a mathematician-turned-cop from Vancouver.

How could the new science he was developing - Geographic profiling - catch The Ghoul?

An in-depth interview with Dr Rossmo is available at: robertmurphy.substack.com

Isla Traquair, the TV presenter and journalist, has made history with her ground-breaking podcast ‘The Storyteller: Naked Villainy.’ In this interview she tells Behind The Crimes host Robert Murphy about the case of murdered geneticist Dt Brenda Page, how her killing was overshadowed by her work as an escort and how Isla has been granted audio recordings from a British trial for the first time to produce her podcast.

You can find ‘The Storyteller Naked Villainy’ here: https://audioboom.com/posts/8363075-naked-villainy-ep-1

To Subscribe to ‘Behind the Crimes’ click here: https://robertmurphy.substack.com/podcast

In the 1970s, the city of Bristol was terrorised by a man nicknamed ‘The Clifton Rapist.’ The stranger-attacker assaulted seven women over a two-year period.

PC Chris Gould suggested a daring honeytrap: Avon and Somerset Police should set up an innovative undercover sting, using young rookie police officers as decoys to catch him.

This was a monumental gamble, putting the lives of their youngest, least-experienced female officers on the line.

But 12 women volunteered.

As the weeks passed, with no further attacks, commanders made an even more innovative move. And Chris’s career was never the same again.

How was the predator caught and justice achieved? Chris has never spoken in this detail before.

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