02x03 - Jones Jr. and Ablewhite

[bunniefuu]

[tense music]

NARRATOR: This time, on ''K*llers Caught on Camera''.

NARRATOR: In Atlanta, Georgia, a man is discovered in a pool

of blood in his own bedroom.

What happened is a mystery.

WOMAN: The bedroom was in disarray.

It was covered in blood all over the walls.

NARRATOR: And in the UK, a woman is ambushed

and k*lled in her own home.

WOMAN: This behavior is very suspicious.

I think most of us would look at this behavior

and think this is a really odd.

NARRATOR: A brutal end to a brief relationship.

[tense music]

MAN: It just sounds like something

bad is happening to her.

WOMAN: We know what happened because the video

tells us what happened.

MAN: I heard some g*nshots.

POLICE: Drop it, whatever it is.

Drop it.

That does not prove that I k*lled my wife.

MAN: The camera doesn't lie.

NARRATOR: In the United states, Marietta,

Georgia, 20 miles northeast of the state capital, Atlanta.

In Cobb County, a 911 dispatcher received a disturbing call.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: Detective Sara Penirelli

was one of the officers called to the scene.

SARA PENIRELLI: I got the phone call,

and my supervisor at the time said,

we have a person who may have been shot or stabbed

and gave me the location.

NARRATOR: When the police arrived,

the front door was wide open.

SARA PENIRELLI: We don't know if the person's still there.

We don't know if they're holding hostages.

NARRATOR: They needed to locate the caller inside the property.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The man was locked inside a room.

Officers resorted to brute force.

And were met with a shocking scene inside the bedroom.

DETECTIVE PENIRELLI: He was kind of in a corner

bleeding out and just saying, help me, help me, he shot me.

NARRATOR: He was unable to identify his attacker.

NARRATOR: The medics arrived on scene

and tried to keep him alive.

NARRATOR: As the medical team tried to stabilize him,

the police started to try and work out what happened.

SARA PENIRELLI: Seeing the blood all over the wall

and glass being cut, they knew some kind of struggle

had happened.

So they were trying to absorb all that in.

SARA PENIRELLI: The bedroom was in disarray.

It was covered in blood all over the walls.

Bottles had been broken on the ground.

Everything had kind of been moved around in the room.

NARRATOR: Badly injured, the man was bleeding heavily.

The neighbors had come outside to see what was going on.

[intriguing music]

[melancholic music]

NARRATOR: 31-year-old, Mitchell Jones Jr., Had moved from Erie,

Pennsylvania, to Atlanta, Georgia,

in search of a better life.

SARA PENIRELLI: He worked at a local restaurant

that was nearby his house.

He was the life of the party, everybody

loved being around him.

He was sweet, he liked to hang out with dogs and adopt them.

And he was in the process of wanting

to make it to the big screen and work for Hollywood.

He had been an extra in several movies,

where he really took pride in that.

So his big dream was to make it to Hollywood.

[melancholic music]

NARRATOR: But Mitchell's dreams were shattered.

As he succumbed to his multiple injuries.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: This was now a m*rder case.

The police needed to catch Mitchell's k*ller.

Detective Carey Grimstead was the lead investigator.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: Any investigation,

but particularly homicide, the longer it goes,

the colder the evidence gets.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: One thing leads to another.

You need to follow that up, follow that up, follow that up.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: The faster we can

act on the evidence, the fresher it is,

the better the evidence is going to be.

NARRATOR: Jesse Evans was leading

the Major Crimes Unit at the district attorney's office.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We knew who the victim

was, we knew that his cell phone had been taken from him.

We knew that this was a particularly violent as*ault.

But we didn't have a whole lot of details

that we could glean from him before his passing,

about who might have caused these injuries to him

or how this may have occurred.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: The only things he did say was,

''my neighbor knows''.

[intriguing music]

SARA PENIRELLI: She could tell us that Mitchell called

her that night, told her that he had to come home,

and she had seen a couple of people

come in and out of the house.

And only knew one person really that stood out to her.

SARA PENIRELLI: And she said that if anybody could have hurt

Mitchell, it would have bit of ''that boy.'' That's what

everybody described him and called him, ''that boy''.

NARRATOR: Police started to look for the suspect.

Crime scene investigators worked their way through the property.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: I am a certified bloodstain pattern

analyst, so I was analyzing what types of blood

smears there were or stains there were.

There was passive blood spatter, there was pooling spatter.

Most of what was on the walls were

what were called contact transfer,

where a bloody object makes contact

with a non bloody surface.

So that being said, I didn't see any impact spatter

or anything like that that would come from a possible firearm.

JESSE EVANS: One of the critical pieces of evidence

that police identified very early on,

which is very significant to us, was a 90 degree blood

drop that was at the threshold of this crime scene at the door.

Clearly out of place.

Detectives had the foresight to say that's out of place.

We need to swab that.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We knew for one that wasn't Mitchell Jones,

because he didn't leave the room until he was transported

by medical personnel.

So we knew that had to be our suspect's blood.

NARRATOR: The variety of blood stains

provided vital information about the relationship

between Mitchell and the person who k*lled him.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: Didn't r*fle through a bunch

of drawers or anything, like it was a robbery.

We know that the the k*ller was covered with blood,

because especially right here, you'll see

the blood transfer on the sofa.

And that's a pattern transfer from the clothing.

And you can tell it looks like somebody sat down

that was covered with blood.

They sat on the sofa to rest for a minute.

That indicates that he's not in fear of anybody

coming right to the house.

Indicates a level of comfort inside of the residence.

NARRATOR: The suspect also seemed to have been

welcomed into the property.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: There was no forced entry to the residence.

There's no damage to the door frame,

indicating the door was opened, most likely by Mitchell Jones.

NARRATOR: But the m*rder weapon remained a mystery.

SARA PENIRELLI: When Mitchell called 911 and said that he was

shot, it had kind of confused us because he

had so many multiple stab wounds and we could never

find a g*n or shell casing.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Perpetrators of homicide

are much more likely to use a handgun than they are a knife.

In fact, knives are only used in about 10% of cases,

according to the FBI.

In his 911 call, Mitchell actually

says that he's been shot, rather than that he's been stabbed.

SARA PENIRELLI: When the autopsy was completed,

there was no b*llet wounds.

All the medical examiner can tell us is that there

were multiple stab wounds.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: I talked to the medical examiner

who performed the autopsy.

And instead of being able to indicate the exact number,

he identified them as clusters.

Couldn't actually count how many.

His aorta was punctured.

One of his lungs was punctured.

Numerous other near fatal injuries occurred.

NARRATOR: The scene upstairs provided

more insight into Mitchell's relationship with his k*ller.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: When I initially went into the master

bedroom, there were candles that had

been lit, which indicates there was

possible romantic involvement.

SARA PENIRELLI: The crime scene tells you

that this had to be somebody that was close to Mitchell,

some kind of passion involved for someone

to k*ll Mitchell like that.

JESSE EVANS: We also learned that he happened to be single

and was dating other men.

These things had to be looked at when we didn't

have any actionable leads at the beginning of the investigation.

NARRATOR: The police needed to investigate Mitchell's lovers,

but they were still missing a critical piece of evidence.

SARA PENIRELLI: We learned on that first day

that the suspect had taken Mitchell's cell phone.

Your entire life is on the phone,

so we didn't have a whole lot of who he was with last, who did

he call, who did he contact.

NARRATOR: Police tracked down one of Mitchell's

close friends, Jasmin.

In a text message to her, Mitchell said he

was in an a*usive relationship.

DR. JULIA SHAW: I think when people think

about domestic violence, they assume

that the victims are always women

and the perpetrators are always men.

And while that's usually the case, so in the US,

it's estimated that one in four women

will be the victims of domestic violence

at some point in their lives.

One in 9 men in the United States

are also the victims of domestic violence.

And if you're a g*y man, your ratio goes way back

up to the same rate as women.

NARRATOR: Because Mitchell's messages didn't name who

was a*usive, detectives needed to check his relationships

and start ruling people out.

SARA PENIRELLI: One of the pictures Mitchell had sent

of that boy to Jasmin was a FaceTime photo of the male,

and he was shirtless.

In that photo, I noticed that there were praying hands

on tattoos and the tattoo was of a praying hand on his chest

with a Rest in Peace and the date of when

that person was deceased.

So I did a hashtag search and I found a post

made by a person named Eric.

SARA PENIRELLI: When I clicked on the profile,

I saw that that tattoo matched the same tattoo that I was

looking at from that boy, and that's

how I was able to identify him.

NARRATOR: The police tracked down

a friend named Eric and brought him in for an interview.

NARRATOR: Eric told the police that he'd

been hanging out with another male at the time of the m*rder.

SARA PENIRELLI: Detective Raissi and I

went to the apartment complex of this male

that he was hanging out with.

And as we were getting off the elevator,

detective Raissi noticed a dog poop

on the side of the elevator.

NARRATOR: This bizarre observation,

actually became very important after they

checked Eric's cell phone.

SARA PENIRELLI: There was a picture

that he had taken of the same dog poop that we saw,

and he had sent it to a close friend of his, which

at the time of him taking that photo and sending it,

there was no way he would have had enough time to send

that photo at that time, then drive to Mitchell's

house to commit the homicide.

SARA PENIRELLI: That picture gave Eric an alibi.

He wasn't there.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: With Eric completely cleared of all charges,

the police were back to square one.

They searched the area looking for cameras.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: A lot of people have

ring door cameras or ADT security

or any number of cameras around their house.

And if we see any of those, we try to make contact.

And we did locate one camera that was

in the vicinity of the scene.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: The video shows a vehicle

pulling into the residence.

[intriguing music]

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: It left maybe a minute

or two after the 911 call.

[intriguing music]

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: You can't say a tag number on the vehicle,

but you can see the brake lights pretty clearly.

And two weeks prior, we see another vehicle

that has the same brake lights.

And this is daytime.

And you can actually see it's a black vehicle

or dark colored vehicle.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: Numerous people in the office

helped us look for vehicles that had similar tail lights.

And then we finally identified the vehicle it was.

SARA PENIRELLI: It was a Buick Lucerne,

we searched around to see if in the locally have

we stopped anything similar to it

and we just couldn't find anything.

SARA PENIRELLI: At this point, the case stalled because we

didn't have anything to go by.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: The longer the time goes on,

the less evidence you're going to have,

because phone data only lasts a certain amount of time.

Video only lasts a certain amount of time.

And unfortunately, some of the dating sites he was on

would not honor a subpoena from us for records.

It was very disheartening.

SARA PENIRELLI: It was so frustrating at this point.

Mitchell's mom at the time was very upset.

She was calling for answers and wanting us to do everything.

And at one point she was very upset

with me, because she didn't think I was doing a good job.

NARRATOR: With no more leads, the case

went cold for four months before a digital forensic breakthrough.

[intriguing music]

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: One of the detectives

in the office just come back from training with the FBI.

He had heard about a geofence technology, which where you put

a virtual fence around the location,

and any phone that crosses that, that number would show up.

NARRATOR: Analysts at Google were

asked to identify the phones that were active close

to the crime scene.

JESSE EVANS: We saw essentially that there were

four users that were within the geofence

that we submitted to them.

Three of those were quickly eliminated

as potential suspects, because they were neighbors.

[intriguing music]

JESSE EVANS: And then there was one user that was unknown to us,

had not been a name even on the radar

in terms of the investigation.

We asked Google to unmask the number

and to give us the information associated.

[intriguing music]

SARA PENIRELLI: The email came back to Dunte Holmes.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We have a person now, let's

start digging on this person.

Let's start working, let's start going.

He was actually on probation for a violent crime.

He lived in the Atlanta area.

SARA PENIRELLI: We obtained a search warrant for that iCloud

and we received what was uploaded.

Well, that night of the homicide,

there was a picture that was uploaded on the iCloud for Dante

with an ankle wrapped up in bandage around it.

So it looked like the person had been cut.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: There was one other key piece

of evidence that linked Dunte Holmes

to the scene of the crime.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We noticed that Dunte Holmes's

mother had a Buick Lucerne.

We also learned that Dunte Holmes was the primary operator

of that vehicle.

JESSE EVANS: We all agree that the next step would

be to try to obtain an arrest warrant from a judge to execute

that on Dunte Holmes in the hopes

that we would be able to get some additional information

either forensically or through an interview.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: Dunte Holmes was arrested

and brought into custody.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: He was transported back to Cobb county,

where we interviewed him.

We also collected his DNA to compare it to the suspect

DNA at the scene.

It was a very emotional roller coaster, even going

into the interview, because knowing

all the work that we had put in all the man hours we've put in.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: This is the cl*max.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: During the interview,

we're looking for several things.

We're looking at how they move, how they look.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: When they're answering questions,

how's their tone, you know, we'll ask several questions,

which they're going to give positive answers to.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: How's that compare to an answer

when we ask him, was he at the m*rder scene.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: That's going to be slightly different.

We're looking for little hints that they'll drop.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: At the start of the interview,

he was very sure of himself, very standoffish.

NARRATOR: The officers started to put

more information to Dunte.

DR. JULIA SHAW: That is a specific technique

in interrogations, where you let the suspect start talking

and then you start coming with information

that you already have evidence for saying,

actually, we know this.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Rather than putting all your cards

on the table at once, you are selectively

releasing that information to see how the suspect changes

their story or whether they change their story,

and then to try and trip them up in a lie

and hopefully to end up in a disclosure.

[melancholic music] As we confronted him

with the evidence that refuted what he was saying.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: He began--

The only thing I can think of looking defeated.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: It's not like television where

you've got good cop, bad cop.

Detective Stoddard and I both took the, you know,

the grandfatherly approach.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Research very much

finds that being nice and treating people as human beings

and asking them about what they rather

than trying to force it out of them

is a much more useful strategy.

The idea is that if they trust you,

they're more likely to disclose the truth to you.

And they're more likely to give you information that you need.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We know what happened,

we know you needed to get it off your chest.

NARRATOR: With Dunte uncooperative,

the officers sat and waited in silence.

[intriguing music]

DR. JULIA SHAW: Having this really long silence

feels really intimidating.

I think if you're in a room with two police officers

and you know what they think happened

and you know what happened, it must be terrifying.

It's almost a game of, well, obviously

we're not going to end this, you're not going to leave

until you start talking.

NARRATOR: For the following four minutes,

no words were exchanged.

[intriguing music]

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: And then, Dunte Holmes finally broke down.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: More than 25 individual wounds that Dunte

claimed were in self-defense.

[intriguing music]

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: We did not believe self-defense.

The scene indicates the opposite.

Mitchell had broken it off with him, didn't want to be involved,

because Mitchell liked to date people.

He didn't want to be tied down to one person.

Mitchell had broken off with Dunte.

Dante had convinced him, hey, let me come over one last time.

They'd gone up in the bedroom, and that's when

Mitchell Jones was assaulted.

DR. JULIA SHAW: Preceding intimate partner m*rder,

you often find what are just generally referred

to as strong emotions, and that can be anger,

that can be things caused by someone saying,

I want to break up.

Something that ignites the first move towards violence.

And it makes sense to me that they

were talking about breaking up.

And then this started, not to say that that excuses it

by any means, but that is exactly the kind of thing that

is often the precipitating factor

for intimate partner m*rder.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: Once he admitted that he did it,

it was just such an elation and at the same time, a relief.

NARRATOR: Dunte's DNA also matched the swab taken

from the scene of the crime.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The case never went to trial.

On January 6th, 2020, Dunte Holmes pleaded

guilty to aggravated as*ault, aggravated

battery and malice m*rder.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

JESSE EVANS: Mitchell Jones's family

was grateful for the fact that there would be some finality

and that they knew that Dunte Holmes would serve life

in prison based on this brutal crime

that he had committed against their their loved one, Mitchell.

SARA PENIRELLI: With this case, technology played a huge role.

Having the video surveillance, having the iCloud photo that

was uploaded, having geofence being there,

all of those things collected together,

put everything together as a big puzzle,

led us to Dunte Holmes and the conviction of the m*rder.

CAREY GRIMSTEAD: Being a homicide detective,

it's like you're speaking for people who cannot speak.

Victims can't tell you what happened.

It's satisfying knowing that it will

help bring closure to the family, to the victim's family.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: In the US, it's estimated

that 30% of the population have done online dating.

Almost 100 million people.

But online interaction lacks the nonverbal cues that we

rely on to assess honesty.

PROF CORAL DANDO: You can never truly know somebody

that you've met online, if you've only

interacted with them online.

And that honesty in the relationship

develops over continual face to face meetings, which is all

important for human beings, in us trying to understand what it

is we're seeing in front of us.

So, understanding doesn't depend on what I say,

it also depends on how I behave and the interaction

of those two things.

NARRATOR: As the quest for romance

moves increasingly online, new ways to lie

are quickly evolving.

Research has found that more than half of US online daters

admit to lying in their profiles.

PROF CORAL DANDO: In order to detect when someone's deceptive,

you need to speak to them, face to face.

NARRATOR: And in our next case.

In the UK, in the County of Nottinghamshire,

the transition from screen time to time in real life

was problematic.

With messages misread, red flags never spotted Colston Bassett,

a small village southeast of the city of Nottingham,

home to Clair Ablewhite.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair Ablewhite was 47 years old.

She was a mom of three.

She had previously been married and had

always been working on a farm.

NARRATOR: When her marriage ended, Clair left the farm

and went to live in the close knit village of Colston Bassett.

AMBER HAQUE : She was living a very rural life there,

working in a stables, looking after horses.

Clair loved animals and she was also

running a really successful business,

walking dogs at the time.

And people who knew her would always

talk of her as this really popular, well-liked, sociable

woman.

NARRATOR: But on February 26th, 2022, Clair failed to turn up

at the stable where she worked.

[intriguing music]

AMBER HAQUE : A friend of hers turned up

on the morning and Clair wasn't there, like normal,

tending to the horses.

So something started to seem a little bit odd to her.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair's father decided to pop over

to the house to check on her.

He called up, there was no answer.

He walked up the stairs, that was when he found Clair,

laying in a pool of blood.

[tense music]

NARRATOR: Clair's father called an ambulance.

AMBER HAQUE : He says she looks dead,

she's white and she's cold, but they ask him to start doing CPR

and mouth to mouth on her, which must

have been incredibly traumatic.

NARRATOR: When the ambulance arrived,

Clair had already succumbed to horrific injuries

and was pronounced dead.

[tense music]

AMBER HAQUE : When the police arrived at the crime scene,

they found a number of details around in the room.

There was blood splattered everywhere.

She had blunt force trauma to the head,

she'd been heavily assaulted to the face.

There was slash wounds on her neck.

They actually discovered stab wounds in her chest as well.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair had been left so long,

that rigor mortis had started to set in on her body.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The police now had a m*rder

investigation on their hands.

The house was made a crime scene.

AMBER HAQUE : The police naturally will look for details

of forensic evidence.

Unfortunately, Clair's phone had also

been removed from the scene.

There was no evidence that they could check on her mobile phone.

And crucially, no m*rder weapon found at the scene,

nor was there any other DNA evidence.

AMBER HAQUE : Police are up against it here.

They have a k*ller on the loose at this point.

And it's really difficult if the police

don't have some of these solid bits of evidence to work off.

NARRATOR: Professor Coral Dando is a forensic psychologist.

PROF CORAL DANDO: Whenever we go into any situation,

we leave some sort of trace of having been there.

But when people go prepared to leave as little trace evidence

as possible, it makes the police's

job and the forensic scientist job, well, almost impossible.

NARRATOR: The police decided to use ultraviolet powder,

dusted over the crime scene to try and find more evidence.

AMBER HAQUE : The powder around the whole scene,

turn the lights out and this will then show up evidence

that the naked eye can't see.

NARRATOR: The police make a significant discovery.

AMBER HAQUE : They find shoe prints,

which they discover could only have been caused by the k*ller.

These prints were made whilst Clair's blood was still fresh.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The shoe prints were a useful lead,

but the police had very little else to go on.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: The crime was committed

in a remote location, where there weren't many cameras.

NARRATOR: The police appealed to the public for information.

AMBER HAQUE : They got a really significant breakthrough.

One of Clair's neighbors were away on holiday.

They believed that they might have caught Clair's m*rder*r

on one of their CCTV cameras.

They call the police, fly back from holiday

and rush home to give them the evidence.

NARRATOR: The camera captured crucial footage.

A figure loitering nearby.

PROF CORAL DANDO: Clair's house is behind the fence.

This behavior is very suspicious, I think most of us

would look at this behavior and think this is a really odd,

to be walking partway across a neighbor's drive,

next door to someone that we now had been m*rder*d.

NARRATOR: The video gave the police vital clues.

NARRATOR: Professor Vasilios Karagiannopoulos

is a specialist in cybercrime.

DR. VALISELIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: He's wearing a jacket,

he has a rucksack and he is wearing Adidas sneakers,

with a distinctive three stripes that match the footprint

that was found in Clair's home.

NARRATOR: But even more shocking,

the video was recording sound.

The audio was graphic and never released.

AMBER HAQUE : We can hear Clair.

She's having a conversation with a neighbor

and we see this male sort of hanging around waiting

for a little while.

He then goes and knocks on Clair's door.

The dogs are barking.

She lets him in.

AMBER HAQUE : Once he then enters the house,

what we can then hear, which is really just

unbelievable and harrowing, is Clair's screams

as she is being m*rder*d.

NARRATOR: The person in the footage

was now the prime suspect for Clair's m*rder.

Now, they needed to work out exactly who

the k*ller was and try to trace their journey to

and from Clair's house.

NARRATOR: Scrolling back through the footage on Clair's

neighbor's CCTV, the police hit upon a clue, which

was captured purely by chance.

[intriguing music]

PROF CORAL DANDO: This is a really

rural area of the country.

It's dark, it doesn't look as if there are any street lights.

So this would be really, really difficult to see.

But it's the fact that if we watch carefully,

a car drives past.

This enables the CCTV camera to pick up this person on a bike,

riding in the direction of Clair's house.

NARRATOR: This short glimpse gave

the police vital information about the route

he took to her house.

But they still had no idea who her k*ller was.

DR. VALISELIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: The investigators scanned

the cameras along a cycleway to Colston Bassett,

where Clair was staying, and they can see someone cycling

on the night of the m*rder.

PROF CORAL DANDO: We can see a light colored backpack

on this piece of footage.

And the previous footage had an individual

with a light colored backpack.

AMBER HAQUE : This crime happening in such a remote

place means that no one else would

have been around at the time.

And the image of this guy matched the CCTV

from the neighbors camera too.

So the police were really on to something.

NARRATOR: Police tracked down CCTV cameras close

to Clair's home, and after an extensive search,

they found multiple clips showing

a cyclist with similar identifying features.

DR. VALISELIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: It gives more evidence, more

clues to the police in terms of what the person might look like,

what they might have been wearing,

and then that makes it easier to spot them in other footage

and create a map of their movements.

NARRATOR: The police thought they had caught

the k*ller on camera, but they still

couldn't identify the suspect.

NARRATOR: Pressure was mounting to find Clair's m*rder*r.

AMBER HAQUE : Ten days into the investigation, the police

have another huge breakthrough.

Someone from the team manages to locate Clair's phone

at the bottom of a local river, and they somehow managed

to get it working again.

NARRATOR: The police accessed messages, which

revealed that Clair had been having a relationship

with a younger man.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair had been using a dating website,

messaging this younger guy who was 26 years old.

They hadn't really known each other that long.

They'd gone on a few coffee dates, stuff like that.

NARRATOR: He was identified as John Jessop.

AMBER HAQUE : He was a local guy, local to Nottinghamshire.

On the surface, a quite normal guy, to be honest.

He was quite keen tennis player.

Someone who hadn't been on the police's radar.

He had no history of violence, no DNA in the police's system

at any point.

NARRATOR: There is a 21 year age gap between John and Clair.

AMBER HAQUE : As the police are delving into the message chain

between these two, they kind of work

out that most of this was John instigating stuff with Clair.

They'd met each other a few times.

They'd only been intimate once.

And then it's at this point, Clair decides

to call the relationship off.

We can see in the messages that she

was kind of having some doubts because of the age difference.

AMBER HAQUE : It's at this point where we see a real

switch in John's behavior.

He absolutely feels rejected.

He starts bombarding Clair with messages.

AMBER HAQUE : There's one really, really long message,

where he says he starts to feel really used and wants answers

from Clair about why she's decided to end

the relationship and leave him.

NARRATOR: John Jessop appeared to have

a motive for k*lling Clair.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair says she feels conflicted

about the age difference.

And she sort of wants to call the relationship off.

And I just wonder if this was some kind of trigger

point for John Jessop.

NARRATOR: There was something else that raised suspicions.

AMBER HAQUE : John is someone who had never come forward

at any point to help the police's investigation,

despite being in Clair's life in the build up to this crime.

NARRATOR: The police also made another important discovery

about John.

He doesn't have a driver's license,

so the only way he could have come in was with a bike.

[intriguing music]

NARRATOR: John Jessop was now suspect number one.

But the police still needed evidence

to link him to Clair's m*rder.

AMBER HAQUE : The police start their digging and what they find

is some CCTV from around 18 miles away

from where Clair was k*lled.

NARRATOR: The footage was recorded while Yohan Mather

was working in the store.

NARRATOR: A major breakthrough.

The camera captured John Jessop close to Clair's home just

a few hours before her m*rder.

DR. VALISELIOS KARAGIANNOPOULOS: This footage

is really important for the police,

because it's giving them the person,

how he looks, what he's wearing, the details of the rucksack.

And in particular, we can see the distinctive three stripe

sneakers that he is wearing, that we

know this person outside Clair's home was wearing.

PROF CORAL DANDO: There isn't any such thing

as a series of coincidences.

John doesn't have a driving license,

and he doesn't have a car.

It's more likely that he would have had to ride

his bike to Clair's house.

[intriguing music]

AMBER HAQUE : This was now enough evidence for the police

to go and arrest him.

NARRATOR: Elven days after Clair's death,

the police moved in.

[intriguing music]

AMBER HAQUE : Police go to John's place

of work to arrest him.

When they go in, he's hiding in the toilet,

they go in with tasers because they're not really

sure how he's going to react.

Remember, this is someone who's just

committed a really brutal and frenzied stabbing of someone.

PROF CORAL DANDO: Words are carriers of information,

carriers of deception.

And we know that the more that people say, the more likely

it is that we can understand whether what they're saying

is being deceptive.

The fact that he's immediately said I didn't do anything,

I think is unusual to us.

But it's not at all odd for those people that work

with offenders, such as him.

PROF CORAL DANDO: I think that the way he's behaving there

is in line with all of the CCTV footage that we've seen.

He's quite a calm, measured individual, albeit

that he had committed a very violent attack on Clair

and ultimately m*rder*d her.

And he's just very silent, very measured.

And it doesn't seem to come as any surprise

to him, which suggests that maybe he lacks empathy.

PROF CORAL DANDO: But again, you can clearly

see from his face it's the same man in the shop

and the evidence is obviously there to arrest him.

NARRATOR: John Jessop was taken into custody and questioned.

AMBER HAQUE : The police interviewed John

over the course of three days.

Initially, he denies any involvement.

But on October the 12th, he confesses to k*lling Clair.

NARRATOR: The police were able to piece

together exactly what had happened

the night of Clair's m*rder.

AMBER HAQUE : On the 25th of February, John Jessop cycles 18

miles to get to Clair's house.

He leaves his phone at his home.

John cycles past Clair's house.

He stores the bike away and sort of waits in the shadows

for her to get back.

He listens to her talking to a neighbor

and then waits and goes into her home.

The police estimate that he was at her house for around an hour

during the m*rder.

After k*lling Clair, John steals her mobile phone.

He goes to a local stream and discards it in there,

then gets back on the bike, puts his hat back on,

starts to cycle back home.

NARRATOR: But the question remained,

was her m*rder premeditated?

AMBER HAQUE : His version of events is that he went over

there, they'd had an argument in the sort of heat of the moment,

he'd grabbed a knife and k*lled her.

The tricky thing about this case was

that the police were never able to locate the m*rder weapon.

That then meant the prosecution had this real challenge

that they couldn't prove that this was a premeditated m*rder.

NARRATOR: John Jessop confessed.

There was no trial.

John pleaded guilty to m*rder at Nottingham

Crown Court in October, 2022.

On January 4th, 2023, he was sentenced to life with

a minimum term of 17 years.

AMBER HAQUE : The fact that that m*rder

weapon was never found meant that John got a lesser sentence.

PROF CORAL DANDO: I think he thought that he would

get away with it, definitely.

And and, in fact, arguably, if Clair's next door

neighbor's CCTV footage wasn't available,

chances are he would have got away with it.

AMBER HAQUE : The CCTV and the digital forensics,

they were essential to getting a conviction within this case,

because there was no DNA evidence

that was found in the house.

The footage that was caught on Clair's neighbor's

camera and that footage that we see of John in the shop,

it was essential.

You know, we would not have been able to reach that point.

AMBER HAQUE : When you think it wasn't really that much

of a relationship that they had built,

for that then to have escalated into Clair being k*lled

in this way, it just disproportionate

is the word that comes to mind.

AMBER HAQUE : Clair did nothing wrong and women

should be able to say no.

This just speaks to an issue that keeps continuing to happen

with a minority of men, who are not

able to accept someone turning them down or rejecting them.

AMBER HAQUE : It is just so tragic that this loving mother

of three, that was starting this new chapter

in her life has had her life taken

away from her so senselessly.

[melancholic music]

[end credits music]