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00:00The following programme contains distressing scenes.
00:15In 1994, tapings were taken on almost every item.
00:23I was looking for extraneous fibres on the clothing.
00:26We recovered hairs which didn't match the victims.
00:34DNA was still a fairly new concept.
00:40I didn't realise that some 30 years later,
00:43these tapings would lead to the apprehension
00:46of the person who'd murdered Ricky Neve.
00:56So, in 1994, the Welland Estate was a high-crime area.
01:13There, unfortunately, was lots of deprivation here.
01:16Low-level criminality, in terms of burglary and vehicle crime.
01:22There was drug dealing.
01:23And there was significant truancy.
01:25Children would be truant on a regular basis.
01:28And everybody knew everybody in the community.
01:32By the nature of the estate, the way it set out,
01:35in terms of alleyways and cul-de-sacs and cut-throughs,
01:42there was limited police presence,
01:44which, unfortunately, attracted the opportunity
01:46for people to do things that were breaking the law.
01:50In 1994, one of the boys growing up on the Welland Estate
01:54was Ricky Neve.
02:08Sir Ricky was a really well-known six-year-old boy.
02:11He was very much older than his biological years,
02:15in terms of his mannerisms
02:17and in terms of how he interacted with people.
02:19He was a little boy who was clearly a handful.
02:29He was a cheeky chappy, as his mum used to call him.
02:33He was cheeky.
02:36He was naughty.
02:37He had a big personality.
02:41And, sadly, there was a lot of unhappiness.
02:45His mum, a single mum with a young baby,
02:49left him to run around safely on the estate.
02:52But, sadly, it wasn't safe.
03:01And the alarm went off at quarter to eight.
03:05I shouted, Ricky.
03:07No answer.
03:08I kept saying, Ricky, Ricky.
03:11I said, Ricky, what are you doing?
03:13I don't want to go to school.
03:15So, look, Ricky, we've had this over and over again.
03:18You've got to go to school.
03:21He says, I want some breakfast.
03:23I said, well, get yourself some breakfast then,
03:25which was Weetaflakes or Weetabix.
03:28He sat at the table.
03:32And he looked so handsome, he did.
03:35All in his white shirt, his trousers.
03:40His lovely haircut.
03:41He says, come on, boys, ready to go to school.
03:49Around about 9.30 in the morning,
03:52he leaves the house and walks himself to school,
03:55which may sound quite peculiar.
03:56But where they lived in Red Mile Walk in Peterborough,
04:01the alleyway ran all the way direct into the school,
04:04that's something he did all the time.
04:05And then, you know, I slipped off back to sleep.
04:12I suddenly woke up, it was about a quarter to 11,
04:14and it'd gone like...
04:16..to work.
04:19Ruth was struggling,
04:22in terms of trying to support and manage her children.
04:26Ruth had had, literally, next to no sleep.
04:29and in some ways was very grateful for ricky um getting himself ready eating his breakfast
04:34and going to school really so it's quite a chaotic lifestyle that particular time
04:40ricky left the house wearing his school uniform including his blue coat i do remember ruth assumed
04:50that he'd been to school that monday she'd assumed that he'd perhaps gone home with a friend
04:55for a glass of squash that he often did or a biscuit popped into someone else's house
05:02by 6 p.m ricky was nowhere to be seen and his mother ruth dialed 999. emergency i said i'll report
05:10on my son missing he hasn't been back to school okay what's your name please
05:14rude name what's your son's name please ricky r-i-k-k-i how old is your son to speak
05:21what time was the last time you saw him when he went to school right what was he wearing
05:28i think a little blue coat
05:35where was six-year-old ricky neve
05:39at 6 p.m on the 28th of november 1994 the police arrived quite quickly uh they are there within
05:53about 15 to 20 minutes and they turn up at her address get initial inquiry around what's happened
06:00when did he go to school who was he last seen what was he wearing the whole community the whole country
06:06was shocked this had been an estate where youngsters were able to go out and play
06:13and suddenly after these events children were kept in and there was a very almost eerie quietness
06:22around the estate
06:27they did initial inquiries with the school
06:29what they also did is they undertook a search of the house initially and just said we'll just check
06:35the bedrooms and just make sure that everything's okay they then start searching for ricky neve
06:42on the well end estate at the time it was cold it was dark it was wet it wasn't very nice weather for
06:51anybody so very very quickly the police call in additional resources and over the next hour or so
06:57there's a heavy police presence on the welling estate trying to search for ricky neve
07:05whilst people were looking to be really really helpful later on as the missing from home inquiry
07:10had progressed it actually become quite distracting because actually people thought they had seen
07:16things but they may have seen somebody but that may not have necessarily been ricky neve which
07:21caused the inquiry quite a lot of work
07:27the search soon became a major operation
07:33they called in those police officers probably about a dozen people that they would have called in
07:37from around the county to try and look for this six-year-old boy
07:41but there was also some volunteers there was residents there there were people trying to help
07:46they would then organize what they called pulsa which are police search teams and that would
07:51have been around a dozen people who would have arrived earlier the next day who would have then
07:57looked at it and systematically searched particular parts of the estate and worked through around how
08:03they were going to try and look for ricky neve and the hope was that he was going to turn up
08:17in 1994 police had been searching for missing six-year-old ricky neve for less than 24 hours and were
08:33now scouring the woodland opposite his home they went through the wooded area and around about five
08:42minutes after 12 on that particular day a search officer sees the legs of what appears to be a small
08:51child in a distance this officer continues walking forward and it becomes obvious that it's the body
09:01of a young boy who's naked and is laid out in a star-shaped pose
09:07he left his home in red mile walk alone on monday morning but never made it to school
09:15because the little boy often stayed out at night with friends he wasn't reported missing until six
09:19o'clock that evening a huge police search started and today ricky's body was found in undergrowth 500
09:25yards from his home the attack seems senseless at the moment we can find albeit early stages in this
09:32investigation no motive whatever uh for the killing of a six-year-old boy he was found naked
09:39the post-mortem will be held later this evening in an attempt to determine precisely what caused his
09:44death and that will obviously have to look at the possibility of some form of sexual interference
09:52the news was devastating ricky's family was shattered his mother ruth left utterly bereft
09:59i just remember his cheeky little face just saying he loves me i love you mummy with lots of lots of
10:05the cherry on top
10:15anybody that knew ricky he was full of life and now he's been taken away from us
10:29so this is the wooded area just off of eye road in peterborough this is the the location the deposition
10:40site where ricky neve was murdered uh back in november 1994 it would have been dark it would have been
10:51cold it would have been wet the foliage was to be nowhere near to what it is today
10:58it's an area where children would have played and frequented and unfortunately it's the tragic
11:06location where young six-year-old ricky neve was was brutally murdered
11:11with the crime scene secured the forensic consultants were called in among them dr peter lamb
11:28ricky's body was examined by dr nat carey at hinchinbrook hospital mortuary i was sent some
11:38some images of ricky's neck which showed a repeat linear pattern on the neck and dr carey had suggested
11:49that ricky had died from strangulation this six-year-old little boy he didn't have any defense
11:57injuries on his arms or any parts of his body he had no idea what was about to happen
12:02the police undertook their forensic analysis they looked at everything and the only things that
12:10were here was a button there was nothing else here
12:15ricky's clothes were nowhere to be seen prompting a meticulous sweep of the surrounding area by police
12:25search teams
12:29police today displayed a set of ricky's school clothes identical to the ones found in a dustbin
12:35only 150 yards from where the six-year-old's body was found the bundle also included underwear socks
12:43and shoes we're satisfied from the post-mortem that he had not been sexually interfered with but we have
12:49been searching high and low for his clothing we are very pleased we've now found that
12:55whenever a case came into the laboratory where two people had potentially been in contact
13:03then we would take tapings to recover extraneous hairs and fibers these would provide compelling evidence
13:13of contact between two people in 1994 the process of collecting fibers using tapings
13:24was very similar to what it is today we had an acetate sheet which would hold the tapings that we produced
13:31and we used a material was very much like ordinary sellotape in 1994 during the investigation fibers
13:42were found on ricky's clothes that couldn't be accounted for
13:48so i was invited to go to ricky's home to see if i could find the types and colors of fibers
13:56which were still outstanding no comparisons were found so the fibers were sealed and stored
14:06but it was ricky's coat that gave investigators their first real insight into how he was killed
14:13one of the things that the police wanted to know was was there an instrument involved in the strangulation
14:20or was it manual and on the blue jacket there was a coarse zip of the jacket
14:30and there was also half of a coarse zip which appeared to be there so that you could zip on a hood
14:38to the jacket the hood was missing i made detailed photographs drawings and impressions
14:47from the zip because if you put tension on the zip then the spaces can open up
14:54the teeth of the zip can become distorted they can present different surfaces and faces
15:01which might make different marks so i went to meet dr carey at the mortuary
15:07and along with some photographs taken of the injuries and some clear acetate sheets with the marks on the acetate
15:19and we overlaid those onto the marks and compared the original photographs and
15:26we couldn't find any discrepancies and therefore it could have been that the jacket was being worn
15:34whilst he was being strangled
15:39pathologist dr carey concluded that ricky had been strangled from behind using a twisting grip on his clothing
15:48further forensic analysis of his stomach contents would also prove vital to the investigation
15:54ricky neve was a young boy of habit he always ate his breakfast he liked his wheatabix and then on this
16:03particular day he'd eaten his wheatabix and it transpired during the post-mortem the stomach contents
16:09he had consumed his last meal around about one to two hours before he was murdered
16:13the new scientific evidence contradicted multiple claims of seeing ricky on the evening he was killed
16:24ricky's murder was in national news the pressure on police to get answers was mounting
16:29and fear was spreading through the community it's hit me hard i've got a five-year-old she'll be sick soon
16:39and i all i can think is it could have been her it really is frightening and upsetting and i just
16:44hope to god it isn't children yet again copying the james bolger episode this information started
16:51coming through around ruth neve people had seen or heard ruth shouting her children she'd been
16:57heard to shout at her kids she'd been to smack her kids she'd been heard to say i'll kill you
17:06the evidence they were relying on was evidence of cruelty and neglect
17:11ruth was rejected by her own parents because they were unable to cope even when she had children of
17:22her own and proudly took them home to show her mum and dad they didn't want to know i remember ruth telling
17:31me that her own parents had died in a suicide pact and it just seems that for ruth's whole life
17:41it was beset with tragedy after tragedy
17:50and she wanted to do the very very best for her children but where she struggled was in terms of
17:57guardians and role models and moral compass what do you say to those people who say you could be
18:03your little boy's killer oh yeah of course i am that's why i'm sitting here crying my bloody eyes out
18:10i've got nothing to hide nothing at all i won't know perfect mother but who is
18:18she didn't give the answer that society particularly wanted to hear
18:23she wasn't able to because she probably didn't have the educational vocabulary to put into words
18:35her feelings so all this evidence pieced together to paint a picture of ruth uh as having a potential
18:49motive for murdering her son alongside the stuff they'd found at her address when they did the search so
18:57some true crime books um and some occult books and they used this as part of their hypothesis is that
19:03ruth neve had killed ricky neve at home in a fit of rage that she'd then called the police
19:11when the police had left she'd wheeled his body out to the deposition site she'd stripped him naked as
19:17some sort of ritual sacrifice while investigators became focused on ruth being the killer there was
19:25forensic evidence that would contradict the hypothesis in the form of ricky's muddy shoes
19:32the purpose of looking at his school shoes was to understand if there was any evidence of where he
19:40might have been when a person goes missing and then found dead you have to retrace their steps and
19:47the best way to do that is through their shoes on most soles of shoes if you turn them over you'll
19:55have a series of ridges that are essentially there to stop you slipping we have positive ridges and
20:02negative ridges the negative ridges are the gaps in between that you can sometimes put your finger in
20:08between and the positive ridges are the bits that stick out to basically stop you from slipping
20:14if somebody has walked in mud and then walked home the mud will have rubbed off naturally and
20:22you can see that if you stand in a puddle and get mud on it it will just fall off naturally
20:27but in this case the mud was so caked on and associated with both positive and negative ridges
20:34that it was clear evidence that ricky hadn't stepped out of the woods that he'd only stepped in
20:46despite forensic findings showing ricky had entered the woods on his own
20:51undermining the theory that ruth transported his body there
20:55police still arrested his mother for murder in february 1995.
21:10this interview has been conducted an interview room at the thorpewood police station in peterborough
21:14what's your phone name what's your phone name how would you view the way that you deal with your
21:22children how you bring them up one went to my best ability the first of october 1994 you were visited by
21:34detectives at your home address this officer tells us when i went up to a child's room the door was tied up
21:43someone had taken the time to tie the handle firmly
21:47so how was the child able to get out of the room i wasn't able to get out of the room so she was a
21:54prisoner in her own bedroom oh she wasn't a prisoner in her own room i had to put a bit of string around
21:59the banister if she didn't settle down at night she'd be running around this is 11 o'clock in the morning
22:05the child is stuck in a room
22:11do you recollect an incident just before christmas 1991 where uniformed police officers came to see you
22:18but on about when ricky was on the doorstep what is ricky doing on the doorstep because he kept
22:23messing about and messing about he wasn't even on the doorstep for more than five minutes
22:28you're putting a three and a half year old child out in the middle of winter not in the middle of
22:33winter at all what december and what was he dressed in charms and that's your idea of reasonable
22:42chastisement well it's better than beating them in it
22:45there was never any evidence at all that ruth had directly been seen or responsible for the death of
22:57her son there was no forensic evidence in court the forensic evidence of mud on the shoes
23:04which challenged the police's original theory was never presented
23:08ruth was vilified as a mother and the police announced very quickly after the jury cleared
23:20her of murder that they would not be looking for anyone else in connection with ricky's death
23:27that sent a clear message to everyone that they thought she'd done it and got away with it
23:33and while she'd been found not guilty on the murder she was going to be sentenced to seven years
23:40for the child cruelty
23:44so if ruth neve didn't kill her son who did
24:03ruth during your trial you admitted what a judge later called some of the worst child
24:13cruelty i had ever i had no choice but to plead guilty if people want to believe all them lies
24:19which they have for 20 years because due to the police lying to people that's fine
24:24i didn't hear from ruth from when she was sentenced for child cruelty until she got in touch with me out of
24:36the blue to tell me that she had convinced her new husband gary that she was innocent and that he was
24:45going to try to prove her innocence
24:53in 2014 i'd made a decision we were going to review the case into ricky neve and then what become very
25:00clear once i'd looked at all the evidence is that we needed to reopen this investigation
25:05it's just traumatic it's just been unreal i just i've had to deal with it and i've had to stand up
25:16by myself it's um not a time for celebration um it's in it's in the right direction and i think this is
25:25long time coming and i've been fighting for this for the last 20 years and at last i've been believed in
25:32we launched a reinvestigation into the murder of ricky neve and we needed to look at this case
25:41in two two parts really firstly we needed to investigate the case as if it happened yesterday
25:49using the latest forensic techniques and how we'd investigate homicide but we also need to look in
25:54detail at the first investigation to see if there'd been anything there that was of relevance for our
25:59investigation i had about 25 dedicated people working with me it was a really really comprehensive
26:09investigation unfortunately the exhibits the clothing and shirts and everything had been destroyed in a
26:19flood in a police station so that just caused us some issues but what we learn over the years when we
26:27do a cold case murders is that we go to the forensic archives
26:32back in the day forensic scene-to-crime experts they were taking sellotape tapings and things they'd
26:39effectively put them on their case papers
26:44police officers came to my home and brought my case file with them i was able to identify the fact that these
26:52these tapings still existed and were in secure storage they were subsequently retrieved from storage
27:03and submitted to another forensic provider for modern dna extraction and interpretation
27:10at the time that these tapings were taken dna profiling was in its infancy we had no idea
27:22that it would progress to the stages which it has done now the dna that was present on the tapings was
27:30extracted cleaned and then a dna profile was derived from
27:38any dna that was present within the sample
27:45with a mixed dna profile they can be different amounts of dna from different individuals
27:54the presence of additional dna is quite obvious in most cases
28:00for example if the profile is being derived from
28:04a victim's clothing then we know that that victim's dna will be present
28:12that will then leave another one or maybe two profiles
28:18which can then be interpreted further based on individuals who you might want to
28:24either include within your inquiry or eliminate from the inquiry
28:32from the review it become really really clear that lines of inquiry were not properly followed up
28:39and that there'd been a real fixation on roof neve
28:41it become clear that there are probably around 20 to 30 people who needed to be looked at again in a bit more detail
28:53when a profile is of interest which doesn't match any of the suspects that you might have
28:59providing it meets certain criteria that profile can be loaded to the national dna database
29:10automatically that profile is then searched against all the other profiles on the database
29:19at the moment there are about six million
29:24it's all done by computer so it is relatively quick
29:27and then the police will receive a report that the profile has matched a certain individual
29:35and then the police can actually take that further then and investigate that individual
29:49we got a phone call and this was from a from a scientist who effectively said we've got a dna hit
29:55on the sellotape tapings which had been taken from the clothing of ricky neve and it's a guy called james watson
30:11now investigators faced a new question who is james watson james watson was 13 years of age at the time
30:22of the murder of the murder of ricky neve
30:27he was a troubled individual
30:31so we had this dna hit that effectively said that james watson's dna was on ricky's clothes
30:38now james watson during the original investigation he'd been interviewed by the police as that somebody
30:42who may have been in the presence or been nearby ricky neve but he was discounted almost immediately
30:47but the more we looked at him the more concerns we had around him
30:55we'd set fire to a british transport police station and ended up in prison for a number of years he
31:00committed indecent assault against a five-year-old little boy shortly before ricky neve was murdered
31:07and then when we started going into his history he'd been in and out of care we spoke to one of his
31:15partners and his partner would say that when they would have sex he would strangle her and that's how
31:22he would ejaculate
31:29we spoke to some of the care homes that he was in and they would give us information around him
31:35laying out dead animals um in the the room that he stayed and there'd be catalogues of children in the room
31:43when he gave his original statement at the age of 13 watson only mentioned a fleeting interaction with
31:53ricky almost a day or two after ricky neve had been murdered he turned up at his school with a
31:59newspaper and the front page of the newspaper was ricky neve
32:02and he'd asked his teachers if he could photocopy the the newspaper around 25 30 times they thought
32:12that was quite strange they reported that to the inquiry but he was still discounted
32:18so the more we looked at him the more concerned we were around him and we were able to discount
32:23other people as we were going along we're working very very closely with the crown prosecution service
32:29we were working with them throughout and we've made a decision that we were going to arrest james
32:33watson
32:43i wasn't surprised at the age of james watson
33:08i was shocked but i wasn't surprised i think everybody wants justice to be done
33:17they want the right person behind bars
33:22okay james tell us about your involvement in ricky neve's murder no comment
33:45monday the 28th of november tell us about that day this was the day that i met ricky
34:01okay
34:05the first thing you refer to in your statement is
34:08you want to the well in the state i think it was just at the time that they were doing a lot of
34:14work in the area but they were working at the back of these two hours okay and it's right here that
34:20i remember meeting ricky right on this point okay so tell us about that meeting with ricky
34:24yeah as i'm going past i think he said something like you know look at that big digger or
34:28or a tractor and i corrected me just i said it's not tractor it's a thing because that's when they
34:33you know the eggs go out and dig them i remember just looking through uh looking through the fence
34:39for a knothole they used to get like the little knotholes that you push through yeah
34:43i picked him up and we went around the fence um watched the guys doing the work and then we left
34:51and walked off let's just go back a little bit then because i'm slightly confused as to what you just
34:57said you don't make any mention of the defense in your statement yeah
35:06in essence what he was trying to do was to basically justify why his forensic dna might be on
35:11ricky's clothing and at this time you know he wasn't fully aware of what we knew we tried to
35:18speak to the crown prosecution service because we were very much of the view that you know that
35:23they were sufficient to charge him with murder but they weren't of that view so he sadly was
35:27released on bail he went out on bail and he went to remand hostel in northampton and almost
35:35so in a few weeks he escaped from that uh hostel
35:42police brought in watson's former cellmate for questioning
35:49told me that he was being investigated for the murder of a six-year-old boy
35:54and he told me that the police found his dna before he's proven i had my six
36:01built my home in the hospital and one day my wife and james come in and out of the toilet
36:07when you're in a stab jacket he cleaned police gave him and he was welding a knife
36:11and put it to my phone and put it to my phone and he was driving me out the country today
36:17from there i just fell through we were so happy to go and vote
36:21we went with the ferry he got his plane in his lines and he was in there he forced me to drive
36:28in for three days to porto
36:30whilst he was in portugal he had then decided that he was going to announce himself to the media as the
36:44suspect in the case of the ricky neve murder and it was on the basis that he was innocent but the
36:50police were trying to charge him and that he was a suspect and he contacted media he ended up on the
36:56front page of some of the national newspapers he'd spoken to journalists and effectively was baiting
37:02the police around that you know i'm i'm the suspect but i'm not guilty and you're not going to get me
37:07effectively with their prime suspect overseas police now had to find a way to bring him back to face more
37:16questions
37:32in 2016 james watson fled to portugal to avoid answering difficult questions about the murder of six-year-old
37:41ricky neve even bringing him to court was beset with difficulties and it seemed to prolong the agony
37:58for everyone who wanted justice to be served
38:04we then ended up extraditing him back from portugal to the united kingdom but we couldn't extradite him
38:10for the murder we had to extradite him for breaching his bail we eventually got him back
38:15to the uk and he was remanded almost immediately it had taken almost five months to bring watson home
38:25but in that time there had been a breakthrough in the case
38:31james watson had given an account in his interview during the area where he said he'd lifted ricky neve
38:36up which to try and justify why there's dna on his clothes he had said there'd been a fence there to
38:42look over a digger and through some really good detective work one of our officers was able to
38:48find some media footage of that location and it become very very clear that that fence wasn't there
38:55that fence was never there this was a complete figment of james watson's imagination to try and justify
39:00why his forensic evidence was there even with this latest development the crime prosecution service
39:09stated that there still wasn't enough evidence to bring the case to court
39:16i took a telephone call from a senior and distinguished lawyer
39:21the crime prosecution service appeals unit who was considering a victim's right to review
39:32in the case of ricky neve it had come about because the local area had decided there was insufficient
39:39evidence to prosecute the mother had invoked her right to have that decision reviewed
39:46the crown prosecution service reviewed the case and the new evidence leading them to revise their
39:54earlier decision that there wasn't enough to proceed and in this particular case the appeals unit
40:02overturned the original decision and decided that there was sufficient evidence to charge james
40:07watson with the murder of ricky neve we eventually get him to trial at the old bailey and we aren't there
40:22for three to four months 151 witnesses the biggest trial that the constabulary's ever been involved in
40:30in numerous statements media attention all the way through absolutely essential to the case against james watson
40:45was the new dna evidence and whether it could be demonstrated that the only plausible explanation
40:55for the presence of that boy's dna on fibers taken from the clothing of this child were that that contact
41:05had occurred as part of the event in which the child had died
41:13but it wasn't just the evidence that would be compelling
41:17it was also james watson's statement of lifting ricky up to see over the fence
41:23james watson had told very significant lies about the events of the morning upon which the little boy
41:32went missing and once you put all of the pieces together i do believe it demonstrated that the
41:41only sensible explanation for any physical contact between james watson and the little boy ricky
41:50was that he killed him james watson now 41 but 13 at the time was convicted of murder
42:06historical murders are notoriously difficult to investigate
42:11and this came with significant challenges but we've used every tool available to overcome these obstacles
42:20there's only one sentence for murder life imprisonment but because he was a 13 year old boy at the time of
42:26the murder he could only be convicted and sentenced as a child so the maximum the judge could give him
42:34was 15 years imprisonment minus his remand time had he been an adult at the time he would have been on
42:40away to 30 to 40 years so he actually got sentenced for 15 years which the family were really upset about
42:47but it was the law because he was a child he could only be sentenced as a child he appealed his appeal
42:53was quashed and he is now serving his life sentence for the murder of six-year-old ricky and eve this little
43:00boy who was loved and cherished by many many people by his family by his parents and by his community and
43:06hopefully we brought justice and closure for his family
43:14i know that from my numerous dealings with ruth over the years whilst justice might have been served
43:23it didn't bring her life back it didn't bring ricky back he was denied his teenage years his adult life
43:36and everything that she dreamt of for him and it hasn't repaired her relationship with her daughters
43:43although they now know that their mother didn't kill their brother the damage that has been done
43:59is unreconcilable and that's an immense tragedy for for human beings for those girls
44:10and for ruth
44:13so
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