When I am murdered, as I inevitably shall be if I carry on being rude about every actor on TV, what I don’t want is for the crime to be investigated by estate agents.
But that’s how Bedfordshire police behaved when they arrived at the house of a missing woman, chronicled in the two-part documentary 24 Hours In Police Custody: The Butcher Of Suburbia.
‘It looks like an old chapel,’ mused one copper, arriving at the dormer bungalow in Fairfield on Sunday’s episode, after lodger Scott Paterson reported that he hadn’t seen his 74-year-old landlady, Annette Smith, for six weeks.
‘Quite big, isn’t it?’ the officer added, on footage captured by his bodycam. ‘There’s an upstairs as well,’ he marvelled.
Channel 4 is agog for anything to do with homes and properties, but the serious crime squad should leave guided tours to Phil and Kirstie.
Police forces give film crews access to their investigations because they want the publicity. Solving messy homicides, they reason, will make them look efficient, dedicated, implacable.
But shows like this have become commonplace, and viewers are growing adept at deciphering the clues even before the first ad break — which can make detectives appear to trail far behind.
Bedfordshire police behaved like estate agents they arrived at the house of a missing woman, chronicled in the two-part documentary 24 Hours In Police Custody: The Butcher Of Suburbia
Channel 4 is agog for anything to do with homes and properties, but the serious crime squad should leave guided tours to Phil and Kirstie
They arrived at the dormer bungalow in Fairfield on Sunday’s episode, after lodger Scott Paterson reported he hadn’t seen his landlady, Annette Smith, pictured, for six weeks
It wasn’t until three months later, when Paterson, pictured, was picked up for drink-driving, that they began to suspect the lonely lodger wasn’t as innocent as he acted
While the bobbies from Beds were taking note of the house’s potential for modernisaton, we armchair sleuths had already spotted one glaring contradiction in the lodger’s story.
Paterson claimed Annette failed to return after packing a suitcase for a trip with a friend. But the house was almost stripped bare. How big was that suitcase?
Even her bedclothes were gone. Paterson clearly wasn’t expecting the old girl to return. He dabbed away a few tears as he told investigators how mystified he was. He couldn’t have been less convincing if he’d pretended she was abducted by aliens.
Incredibly, the police sent him away with a promise that he’d let them know if Annette turned up. It wasn’t until three months later, when Paterson was picked up for drink-driving, that they began to suspect the lonely lodger wasn’t as innocent as he acted.
Belatedly, the Beds feds pursued a few old-fashioned lines of inquiry. They discovered that emails purportedly written by Annette had been sent from her home, weeks after she vanished. And her jewellery kept turning up with an online cash-for-gold merchant.
It wasn’t until a detective constable thought to ask an obvious question that guilt was established beyond doubt. ‘Are you responsible for the death of Annette Smith?’ she wondered.
Paterson paused dramatically for a few seconds, and then agreed that yes, he’d killed her, dismembered her body and distributed her remains in public bins.
A keen chief inspector, scenting more confessions, asked: ‘Have you ever done anything like this before?’
Another extended pause. ‘Not that I can think of,’ Paterson said. The detectives seemed satisfied with this denial. Move along now, nothing to see here.