Britain's Almost Perfect Murders Season 1 Episode 5
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00:01The perfect murder, the unsolvable crime, does it really exist?
00:07In a TV first, we reveal the cutting-edge technology now used by British police to join the dots
00:15and reveal new evidence in all homicide investigations.
00:19I'm Tim Tate. I've been an investigative journalist for almost 50 years.
00:26I'm Sam Robbins, and I'm a criminal intelligence analyst.
00:30For over 20 years, I've worked alongside detectives on major murder investigations.
00:34Together, in this new series, we are going to discover the fatal mistakes
00:39which prevented the perfect murder from ever being committed.
01:16Alfred Arthur Rouse was a clever man, confident, charming.
01:23He was a veteran, some might say a hero, of the First World War.
01:29But Alfred Rouse had a secret, a lethal secret.
01:34He was a shameless philanderer, bigamist and liar.
01:41By the summer of 1931,
01:45if his double life was rapidly catching up with him.
01:50Known as the blazing car murder,
01:52I think it's important to stress at the very beginning
01:56that this was an extremely brutal murder.
02:04Alfred Rouse, what struck me is that because this is an historical case,
02:15we have an absolute cornucopia of case papers.
02:21Yes.
02:22What emerges is a really clear pattern, isn't it?
02:26Yes, absolutely, it's an amazing thing to do to be able to look at the historic case papers
02:33and provide a really detailed timeline of the events and people that are associated with Alfred Rouse.
02:40So, what do we know about Alfred Rouse?
02:43We've got this one surviving still of our man.
02:48What does his biography tell us?
02:50So, the tale of Alfred Rouse is one of high sexual appetite,
02:56multiple marriages and illegitimate children and the racking up of a huge amount of debt
03:03and being chased by the mothers of the children,
03:07which then ultimately ends up in Rouse trying to plan a perfect murder
03:13in order to abscond with no trace of himself.
03:16It's like something out of an Agatha Christie story, isn't it?
03:19This is almost a textbook example of a classic case of English murder.
03:25Mmm.
03:30Alfred Rouse was born in 1894 in London
03:33and typical of young men at that time left school quite early,
03:37in fact, when he was 14 years old.
03:39He started a career initially in carpentry
03:41and he spent five years working as a furniture manufacturing company.
03:47He was quite an exceptional athlete,
03:51quite good at all sports
03:52and a very good accomplished musician.
03:55He could play the piano, the violin and the mandolin.
04:01In his teenage years, he became a staunch member of the Church of England
04:06and worked as a sacricant in the local church.
04:10He was a very, very well-respected, well-behaved individual.
04:15And around 1910, when he was around 16, he met a young lady
04:19and they very quickly formed a relationship.
04:21Obviously, in those days, it's quite common
04:23for people to form an early relationship, get married early.
04:28Alfred meets Lily May Watkins in 1909
04:32and he eventually marries her in 1914.
04:36And in that intervening time, he joins the war effort as a private
04:41and is sent to Paris
04:44where he fathers an illegitimate child with a Parisian lady.
04:48So, he's meant to be fighting in World War I.
04:51Yes.
04:52And he's got his own little battles going on in some kind of hotel in Paris.
04:57Yes, very much so.
04:59And this would be a repeating pattern of behaviour,
05:02you know, as we quite often see with offenders,
05:04particularly where motives are sex and money,
05:08you'll see a repeating pattern
05:09and that one certainly plays out in the case of Alfred Rouse.
05:15He was posted to France
05:17and had some unpleasant experiences
05:20as would be expected in the First World War,
05:23some dreadful events,
05:25which culminated in the Battle of Festerbert in France.
05:30This regiment was involved quite heavily
05:32and it's during this experience
05:34that Alfred became really sort of a hand-to-hand combat
05:38with a German soldier, a bayonet attack.
05:41And he stabbed first at the German soldier and missed
05:44and he was waiting for that retaliatory strike back at himself,
05:48which never came.
05:49But it was an experience that sort of haunted him
05:52for the rest of these days.
05:53He'd wake up with nightmares
05:54off this almost hand-to-hand battle with his German soldier.
06:00On the last day of the Battle of Festerbert,
06:03Alfred suffered severe injuries to his head and his legs
06:06and other parts of his body
06:08when a bomb exploded quite near to his head actually
06:11and he was invalided out.
06:13He spent a year in a military hospital.
06:15When he went home,
06:16he found it very difficult to walk correctly.
06:19His leg wouldn't bend at the knee
06:20and he'd have complained of dizziness, had headaches.
06:24So he was really awarded quite a good pension from the army
06:28when he first returned to London.
06:32The effect of the shrapnel, which was embedded into his head,
06:36caused some sort of personality problem to him.
06:40He became very, very talkative, apparently.
06:43He would laugh for no apparent reason during conversation.
06:47He complained of dizziness and insomnia
06:50and he suffered with short-term memory loss.
06:53That dreadful incident in the war certainly affected him mentally.
06:59So there's a very interesting case of a guy called Phineas Gage
07:03in psychology who suffered a very similar incident
07:06in terms of a brain injury to his frontal lobes.
07:09And he's often cited as a case of somebody
07:12who suffered a very significant brain trauma
07:16but changed his personality quite significantly.
07:19And we see this very similar kind of situation
07:22in terms of Alfred Rouse in that he suffered an injury
07:26which to some extent really altered his personality
07:30and made him into a very different character
07:32than he'd previously been.
07:37In terms of his personal life, everything from the surface looked rosy.
07:43He had a job, he had a house, he even had a car.
07:45He had a very well-paying job,
07:47so he was a travelling representative for a company
07:50where he was receiving £4 a week,
07:53which, you know, back in the late 1920s, 1930s,
07:57was a really decent wage.
07:59And the fact that he, you know, had his own car
08:02and had his own transport just goes to show the sort of status
08:05and the life that he was leading.
08:07But unfortunately, the balance was not in his favour
08:10in terms of that wasn't enough money
08:12to keep up with the lifestyle
08:14that he was choosing to leave privately.
08:21Rouse had always had an eye for the ladies
08:23but it seems that after his injury in the Great War
08:26he became more promiscuous
08:28and after he took a job as a travelling salesman
08:32he travelled all over the countries
08:34meeting various ladies and having affairs with them.
08:39At the point when he's discharged, he's a war veteran.
08:42He is.
08:43He's got a pension.
08:45You might look at him as a respectable war hero.
08:49Yes.
08:50But the reality was?
08:51But the reality was is that there was really a secret life taking place.
08:56He commits bigamy
08:57and marries one of the ladies that he's involved with,
08:59a lady called Helen Campbell.
09:01She was only 14,
09:02so that also tells you something about his background
09:06and his willingness to have relationships with very young females.
09:10So he's a predator, isn't he?
09:11Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
09:13And he will do whatever he needs to do to fulfil his sexual desire
09:19and if that means having relationships with children,
09:23which is essentially what Helen is,
09:27then so be it.
09:28That's what he will do.
09:31He got her pregnant within months of meeting and seducing her
09:35and then in what would become a familiar pattern,
09:38he abandoned her.
09:40He began an affair with Nellie Tucker, a young domestic servant.
09:46He's married to two women at the same time.
09:49He's married to Lily and Helen
09:50and then he begins affair with a lady called Nellie Tucker
09:55and in 1928 she has his baby.
09:59Now at this point he is juggling several relationships
10:03with several women and several children,
10:06all of whom are unknown to each other.
10:09So Nellie catches on to this
10:13and the fact that Rouse isn't around,
10:14you know, there's been abandonment issues
10:16in terms of he's not providing for the child that he's fathered.
10:19I thought it was quite an unusual thing to happen back then
10:22but potentially not.
10:24It's that Nellie goes to court for a maintenance order.
10:27She asks the court to deal with the errant father.
10:32Yes.
10:33So in order for him to financially start to supply
10:39and take care of her and her child and his child.
10:42We often, when you put together a timeline like this,
10:46we see something which could be a tipping point.
10:50Is that where you see the tipping point?
10:53I think essentially the tipping point comes a little bit further back here.
10:56But I think it's to do with personalities
10:59and how strong the women are really in this case.
11:02And the women that Rouse, you know,
11:05potentially thinks that he's got control over
11:07are the ones that ultimately lead to his downfall.
11:10Helen, he's married her whilst being married to Lily.
11:13But Nellie, yeah, potentially Nellie being of a strong character
11:17and deciding that actually she's not going to stand for what he's peddling.
11:21I think that is definitely a tipping point
11:23because obviously he then has to start supplying money,
11:27which he's now starting to run out of
11:29because he's got so many relationships
11:32that he's trying to juggle at the same time.
11:36Times were hard. Obviously, it was the 1930s.
11:39It was post-war Britain, First World War,
11:42and money was short.
11:45So things were looking a bit desperate for Alfred.
11:48He wasn't earning enough money to pay the mortgage,
11:51keep his family at home in London
11:53and support these maintenance payments.
11:55So he decided he didn't need to come up with a plan
11:58where he could rid himself of this pressure
12:01that was building up on him financially.
12:14A flurry of court orders began to arrive,
12:19demanding Alfred Rouse pay support for the children he'd fathered.
12:25He realised the position he had got himself into was unsustainable.
12:30He needed to find a solution, and quickly.
12:35He really must have thought that this was the end of the line, really,
12:39and what he wanted to do was to sort of wipe the slate clean and start again.
12:43What we see in these kind of cases is that
12:46there's a certain level of ruthlessness that people would go to
12:49in order to get out of these situations.
12:53For most people, they would face up to the consequences of what they'd done.
12:58At some point, he hatches a plan.
13:00How do I get out of this ridiculous situation,
13:04all these financial pressures, etc?
13:11This is what struck me as the next tipping point.
13:15He takes out an insurance policy.
13:20He does. And it's a very specific one.
13:23And when we look at cases where people have potentially died
13:29in unusual circumstances, it's always a red flag.
13:33If there is an insurance policy that is taken out shortly before an incident happens,
13:38that's always a massive red flag in a murder investigation.
13:43And lo and behold, Rouse takes out an insurance policy here
13:46to provide for Lily, his first wife.
13:49Which is interesting, you know, it was Lily,
13:51but whether he felt that that was the first relationship
13:54that he'd cemented and married her and maybe that he owed it to her
13:59and he wanted her to be taken care of.
14:02But he takes out an insurance policy,
14:04and it's very specific, this insurance policy.
14:06It's should he die in a road accident.
14:09That's a very unusual wording.
14:11It's very unusual and very specific.
14:15The plan that Alfred Rouse came up with was to fake his own death.
14:20But he took out this £1,000 insurance
14:23with the intention of finding someone to take his place
14:28in the death, in the car, and he would simply disappear,
14:32start a new life elsewhere where no-one knew him.
14:37Eventually he would admit that his plan was to disappear up in Scotland
14:41where he was unknown, and just start again.
14:45So those kind of people who try to fake their own deaths
14:48and start a new life somewhere else,
14:52whether it's to collect insurance money
14:54or whether it's because they've got an affair that they want to continue,
14:57it clearly reflects a certain level, really, of fantasy, of daydreaming.
15:03They'll go through these kind of different scenarios that they want to plan out
15:08and how they think that their life will suddenly miraculously change
15:12and they can just start again.
15:13However, we know that it's very, very difficult to erase your past,
15:19and it certainly brings to light some kind of flaws, really, in their thinking,
15:24and it's almost this kind of fantasy belief that they have that leads to their downfall.
15:33On your timeline, we're now at November 1930.
15:37Yes.
15:38So his planning is, I'm going to stage a car accident.
15:44Oh.
15:44Bear in mind the insurance policy.
15:46Yes.
15:47And my body is going to be found in the car.
15:52Yes, but what's the problem with that?
15:53You have to find a victim.
15:56Yes.
15:58Alfred Rousey's plan was to find a man that was similar build,
16:03similar height to himself,
16:04and get him in the car that he was going to destroy
16:08with the intention that the insurance people would accept
16:12that he himself had died in this car accident.
16:16We're right in the middle of the two world wars, as it were,
16:20when Britain was in pretty dire straits.
16:23Money was very difficult to earn.
16:25There were a lot of impoverished people.
16:28Of course, pubs and clubs were where people would go to sort of
16:32forget their problems, et cetera.
16:35Any individuals, particularly men, were often homeless
16:38or living in sheltered accommodation, et cetera.
16:42He was in the perfect time period to find someone
16:45that would probably be not noticed if they disappeared
16:48or quickly forgotten if they were.
16:52A few days before the plan was put in place,
16:55he remembered that he'd met this chap in a nearby pub
16:59that he knew didn't have any family, no friends or family.
17:03And he was very, very similar to Alfred in appearance.
17:06So he went and sought him out on the 2nd, 3rd of November,
17:10and sure enough, the chap was still sitting having a drink.
17:14So to Rouse, he appeared the ideal victim.
17:18So he offered this chap the promise of work in Leicester
17:23and he'd give him a lift up to Leicester
17:25so that he could then get employment.
17:31He really has planned what he thinks is going to be the perfect murder
17:36by finding a victim that he thinks is going to hurt.
17:39It's not going to be missed.
17:40Very sadly for this individual, we know that he'd let Rouse know
17:46that there wasn't a person in the world who would care
17:48if he lived or died.
17:50So he'd almost written his own fate into that.
17:55Rouse had spotted him in terms of physical appearance
17:58and then, you know, that had been backed up
18:01by no-one was going to miss this individual.
18:03That's one of the things that I took out of the case papers,
18:06this statement that this soon-to-be victim said to Rouse,
18:14Governor, there's no-one going to care if I live or die.
18:18Oh, it's heart-rending, isn't it?
18:20It's really heart-rending, isn't it?
18:21Particularly, you know, if you've gone to war
18:23and you've fought for your country, you know,
18:26essentially you return from war a hero,
18:29but not hero enough that anyone's going to miss you
18:31if you die on your homeland.
18:33There's a date which crops up very quickly
18:36and it's, in terms of Rouse's perfect murder planning,
18:42it's a significant date.
18:44It is.
18:45Obviously he has to get round the fact that the body,
18:48the victim is going to be identified as not being Alfred Rouse,
18:52so the idea of fire-setting starts with Alfred.
18:56You know, there is no more perfect a date to set a fire
19:00than the 5th of November.
19:03He had selected the 5th of November, 1930,
19:07as the night that he would carry out this attack, this murder.
19:13Bonfire night, fires are put together,
19:15made out of wood or whatever, materials,
19:18and lit all over the country in gardens, on hillsides,
19:22beacons, if you like.
19:23And traditionally fireworks are set off.
19:27This fitted well in with his plans
19:29because when he set fire to the vehicle,
19:31people would naturally think,
19:33well, look, there's another bonfire up on the lane there,
19:36up the hill.
19:37And so the fire in the vehicle would attract no attention.
19:42To make sure that his potential victim had no resistance,
19:46Alfred bought a bottle of whiskey in advance
19:48and, sure enough, picked up the gentleman.
19:51They made their way up to supposedly driving up from London to Leicester,
19:55and all the while this passenger was drinking whiskey,
19:58so he was quite insensible.
19:59By the time they got to Hardingstone, near Northampton,
20:03he was quite drunk.
20:06Rouse turned off the main road onto a little side road
20:10leading to the small village of Hardingstone.
20:13And he pulled up at the side of the road
20:16and told the man, who was now very drunk,
20:20he said, I'm just getting out for a pee.
20:24It's believed that Rouse knocked his victim unconscious
20:29with a wooden mallet that was found at the crime scene.
20:36Rouse stuffed the man into the Morris saloon car
20:40and pushed his own wallet in the man's trousers
20:44so that if he were found,
20:46it would look as if it was Rouse in the car.
20:49He believed the man was dead.
20:52Then, as part of the plan which he'd thought through,
20:55he loosened the joint underneath the vehicle,
20:59the petrol pipe which feeds the carburetor
21:02from the petrol tank to the carburetor,
21:04which caused petrol to flow into the vehicle
21:07and, in fact, underneath the vehicle.
21:10He then set fire to the vehicle.
21:17And he might have gone away with it.
21:19His plan for the perfect murder might have worked.
21:27Now, Rouse's story changed...
21:31Yes. ..at various times,
21:33but what we can say with certainty
21:37is that he staged a car crash in a little lane
21:42off a little village.
21:43Yes.
21:44How close does he come to getting away with this?
21:46Very close. Very close.
21:48Yes.
21:48He could have, if he'd have chosen another route
21:53or he'd not taken the actions that he takes next,
21:58then he could have walked away.
22:01The car would have burnt to the point
22:03where everything would have been fairly difficult to identify
22:06and he could have walked away into the sunset.
22:10Lily would have been taken care of
22:12and his plan would have been carried out
22:14in the manner to which he thought it was going to.
22:17But...
22:17But that is not what happened.
22:35Alfred Rouse took a match
22:37and set fire to the car with the man inside.
22:42He then picked up his briefcase
22:45and strolled off down the road
22:47away from the little village of Hardingstone.
22:51His plan for the perfect murder might have worked.
22:57Unfortunately for Alfred,
22:59as he was walking away from the vehicle
23:00back towards the main road,
23:02two young men who had just been to a firework display
23:06about half a mile away, met with him.
23:09And he turned and said to the two young men,
23:12oh, look, there's a fire up there.
23:15Somebody's having a bit of a bonfire
23:17to try and make light of what they could see.
23:21And what they say then is that this man,
23:23who they described,
23:25then walked off towards the main road quite nonchalantly.
23:30These two men then made their way over to where the fire was
23:34and realised it wasn't a bonfire,
23:36it was a car in flames.
23:38They sent for the local police officers
23:41and with the aid of the water from a nearby pond,
23:44they managed to douse the fire
23:46and then they saw the charred remains of a body
23:48lying across the driver's seat and the passenger seat.
23:58On examination of the vehicle, of course,
24:01the constable discovered,
24:03lying on the front seat,
24:05sideways with his head on the driving seat,
24:08basically a charred corpse.
24:10And he described the head of the victim
24:14as almost like a burnt rugby ball.
24:17I think Roush had the right idea in thinking
24:22that if I set light to the car,
24:24it will burn the body beyond recognition,
24:26it will never be identified.
24:28And to that extent, it's true because to this day,
24:32the body still hasn't been identified,
24:34there's no name to it.
24:36But unfortunately for Roush,
24:38he left far too many clues behind
24:41that gave the police evidence to suggest
24:45that another person had been involved in that arson
24:50and it wasn't simply Roush laying in his own car,
24:54having been burnt to death.
25:01So inside, police can see that the fire hasn't taken
25:08as much as Roush probably anticipated it would.
25:11There's a body in the car.
25:15It's badly burnt.
25:17But also the number plate of the vehicle
25:21hasn't completely melted.
25:22So there's a partial number plate available to the police as well.
25:27Today, you know, we take number plate recognition, ANPR.
25:30We take it for granted, don't we?
25:32Yes.
25:32This is 1930.
25:34Yes.
25:35Yeah.
25:35I was quite surprised by this, I've got to say.
25:37Yeah.
25:38I was surprised that there was a database
25:41and it was checked
25:44and very quickly that car was identified
25:47as belonging to Alfred Roush.
25:50Senior officers were involved, were called in,
25:53and the murder scene was sealed.
25:56It was then discovered by forensic examination
25:59that, in fact, the nut underneath the petrol tank
26:03had, in fact, been loosened purposely
26:05and that was proven by a scientist,
26:08which, of course, allowed the petrol
26:09to ignite beneath and inside the vehicle.
26:13This is a fascinating case
26:15from a forensic science perspective
26:17because it happened in the 1930s
26:20when forensic tests, as we know them today,
26:24were simply not available in the investigation.
26:26And so we have a situation
26:29where an individual is found in a burned-out car
26:33and the identification of that individual
26:37obviously is paramount to the investigation.
26:42Once an individual has been subject to a fire,
26:48then it makes identification very difficult
26:50because the things that we might rely upon,
26:53such as fingerprints or facial recognition,
26:56are no longer available.
26:58And we have to rely on the traditional identifying marks,
27:06such as dental records
27:07and or any sort of surgical intervention
27:11that they may have sustained in life
27:14that leads the investigators to that individual.
27:17So we don't have the things that are available to us now,
27:22such as DNA technology,
27:24which we can apply to even samples
27:27that have been extremely degraded as a result of fire.
27:32So although the police called in forensic experts
27:35with regards to the motor car
27:37and they were able to see that it had been tampered with
27:40and thereby a deliberate fire rather than an accident,
27:43their attempts at identifying the victim
27:46were much less successful.
27:49They tried dental records with no luck
27:52because the gentleman who had been picked up in the pub by Rouse
27:55didn't have anything about him which could be identified.
28:00And Rouse had obviously planted some of his own clothing
28:03and his wallet on the man when he left him in the car.
28:06So there was very, very little police to go on.
28:09And in fact, he was never identified at the time,
28:12although they did take the precaution
28:13before he was buried at Hardingstone Cemetery
28:16of taking a tissue sample to go into the archive.
28:23But a post-mortem on the victim
28:25showed that there had been trauma to the head.
28:28It showed injuries,
28:29which of course was caused by Alfred striking the victim
28:33with the wooden mallet on the head.
28:36And in fact, the mallet was found nearby at the scene,
28:40thrown on the ground.
28:43Within really a day, both the press and the police thought
28:49that they needed to find Rouse
28:51because these two chaps that were walking back to Hardingstone
28:54were able to give a description that matched Rouse.
28:58So they thought he was likely still alive
29:00and needed to get an account from him as to what had happened
29:03and how someone had come to be dead in his car
29:06and how his car caught light.
29:12At that point, in Rouse's mind, does he still think he's got away with it?
29:18Yes, 100%.
29:20I think he has, in order to ensure that his plan is foolproof,
29:26he leaves his wallet.
29:28So to all intents and purposes, the police have arrived,
29:31they've found this scene,
29:33they've found a body that isn't wholly identifiable
29:36but is a male, clearly of a certain age,
29:39and in the pocket they find identification belonging to Alfred Rouse
29:44and they also have been able to trace the car back to him.
29:50So, the police then take the wallet to Lily,
29:54Lily Watkins, who is his first wife.
30:00Alfred Rouse's plan had been thwarted.
30:03He planned to go from Northampton on the train to Scotland
30:05but he realised had he been seen by two men
30:08and they'd caught a good description of him.
30:10He realised that his idea that it was his body in the car
30:14wouldn't be believed.
30:16So he thought up, on the spot almost,
30:19another plan that his car had been stolen
30:21and it was nothing to do with him,
30:23the fact it had ended up in Northamptonshire.
30:25This is something that criminologists recognise as a pattern.
30:30Routinely,
30:32killers who think they've committed the perfect murder
30:36sabotage their own plans,
30:37by doing something foolish.
30:42He decided to make his way back to his home at London,
30:45going to Scotland.
30:47The people would realise it wasn't him that died in the car
30:50and they'd be looking for Alfred Rouse.
30:52So, instead, he made his way back to London,
30:54he'd arrived back about six o'clock in the morning,
30:57he'd hitched a lift back there.
30:59He came in without saying a word to his wife,
31:01he was in the house for about half an hour,
31:03and then he disappeared again.
31:04Lily was asked at one point to identify the body of the victim,
31:12but it was felt that it was in such poor condition,
31:15because it was badly burnt and charred,
31:18that that wouldn't be right to show her a dead person of that nature,
31:22which is understandable.
31:23But she was able to identify positively Alfred's wallet,
31:29which was in the pocket of the victim,
31:32and also describe the clothing worn by the victim as similar.
31:41Rouse, true to form, couldn't resist going
31:45and seeing one of his female interests.
31:49So he travelled to Wales to see Phyllis Jenkins.
31:53He was surprised that he'd turned up without his car,
31:56and he said, oh, it'd broken down,
31:58and he'd come by other means to come and see Phyllis in Wales.
32:01She wasn't that happy with that story.
32:05And then newspapers had started to report the fact
32:08that a male had been found burnt out in a car,
32:12and Phyllis puts two and two together
32:15and challenges Rouse and says,
32:18I think that you've staged a murder.
32:21Rouse leaves Phyllis's,
32:22and he starts to head back to London,
32:25and Phyllis goes to the police and says,
32:28this newspaper article here,
32:29I think it's Alfred Rouse and I think he's alive and well.
32:33We're in 1930. Yes.
32:36You know, communications in 1930 weren't quite as they are now.
32:41No. And yet, by the time Rouse arrives in London,
32:45Scotland Yard's waiting for him.
32:47Yes. I mean, it's a staggeringly good piece of old-school detective work.
32:54Detective work and luck,
32:56and luck in terms of obviously finding a really good witness in Phyllis,
33:02finding really good witnesses with the two males that find the car in the first place.
33:07So, yes, by the time Rouse gets back to London,
33:10detectives from Scotland Yard are waiting for him.
33:13Rouse is arrested.
33:14Yes.
33:15And he tells the first of a number of tall stories.
33:23Now, initially, when Rouse was arrested,
33:25he stuck to his story that his car had been stolen.
33:29But then, on arrival at the police station,
33:32he gave a different statement.
33:33He changed his story.
33:34This time, he said he had been in the car.
33:37He must have realised there'd be evidence that would incriminate him
33:39of being inside the car.
33:41His wallet, for instance, was recognised as being in there.
33:44So, he then said, well, actually, he had been the driver,
33:48but it had been a complete accident,
33:49and he'd panicked in disappearing.
33:52He'd given a lift to a hitchhiker.
33:55He'd stopped in Hardinstone Lane in order to relieve himself,
34:00and as he left the car,
34:02he asked the hitchhiker that he'd picked up
34:04if he would refill the petrol in the car
34:09with a canful of petrol that was in the back.
34:12And he'd also given this chap a cigar to smoke.
34:16The car had burst into flames.
34:18It was too late to do anything,
34:20and in a panic,
34:20he'd just walked away from the scene of the crime.
34:22And he stuck with this story that it is an accidental fire
34:25for the rest of his incarceration.
34:33Once again, what is surprising about this case
34:36is, given the timing of it,
34:38is how good the forensics were.
34:40So, the forensics obviously came through
34:44and suggested that actually the male had been beaten,
34:49so he hadn't died standing outside the car,
34:52which was another, you know, tall tale of Rouse's.
34:56But actually, he'd been beaten,
35:00so it was clear that the male had been beaten,
35:02which we know that Rouse had done with the mallet.
35:05And very sadly, that they could tell
35:08that the victim was alive when he set fire to the car.
35:12And it's possible to tell that,
35:14having worked jobs where exactly this scenario has happened,
35:20it's possible to know that they were alive
35:22at the time that the fire was set,
35:24because smoke is inhaled, very hot smoke is inhaled,
35:29and it damages and blackens the windpipe and down to the lungs,
35:33so that's how they know that somebody is alive
35:36when a fire has been set.
35:37There was another piece of forensic detection,
35:40which you've identified,
35:44which undermined Rouse's tall story completely.
35:48Yes, so the story about the vehicle
35:51accidentally catching light simply wasn't true,
35:54and the vehicle, even in its bad state, had been examined,
35:59and it was clear that the fuel pipe of the car
36:02had been tampered with.
36:04So, obviously, by Rouse hoping that it was going to help ignite
36:08and keep the fire burning long enough
36:10to destroy any evidence that a crime had taken place.
36:16Well, of course, by examining the vehicle,
36:19by the pathology, by the forensics, etc.,
36:22by the evidence of the witnesses,
36:24the story was quickly dismantled, absolute nonsense,
36:28and he was charged with the murder of a then unknown male person.
36:34Alfred Rouse may have tried to talk his way out of trouble,
36:38but he didn't succeed.
36:40He was charged with murder and put on remand to await his trial.
37:01Alfred Rouse's trial at Northampton Assizes in January 1931 lasted four days.
37:10Rouse insisted on giving evidence in his own defence.
37:14It's a mark of his arrogance that he believed even then he could talk his way out of trouble.
37:20The trial attracted quite a bit of media attention,
37:24not least because it was a trial with an unknown victim.
37:28I think that's why it became quite well documented in the local press
37:33and certainly also the national press.
37:36At the time he got to the trial, it was big newspaper coverage.
37:40There was a lot of big factors there,
37:42iconography of a blazing car,
37:45photographs of that car, an unknown victim.
37:47And despite Rouse being constantly quizzed as to the identity of the man,
37:52he stuck with his story that he was a hitchhiker and he never asked the name.
37:58I think the time he showed most nerves was when he was handed the actual carburettor
38:04from the car that the prosecution alleged had been tampered with in order to help start the fire.
38:11And with that in his hand, he did appear quite nervous.
38:15It didn't take very long for the jury to find him guilty and he was sentenced to be hung.
38:21And when the judge pronounced the guilty verdict, he merely said,
38:26please, your honour, I am innocent and my appeal will prove this.
38:33Once the execution at Bedford jail was set, Rouse seems to have had a change of heart.
38:38And although he didn't make a statement confessing he's guilty,
38:42but he did write a letter to a newspaper, The Daily Sketch,
38:45in which he outlined the events, actual events that took place
38:48on the night of the 5th of November.
38:52Quite bizarrely, he admitted everything in the letter.
38:56He confessed all, explaining how he had planned the whole thing,
39:00planned to fake his death, claimed the £1,000 insurance,
39:05and that he had set fire to the vehicle using petrol,
39:08that he had loosened the pipe,
39:09and all these issues that were suspected at the time of his trial,
39:12he fully admitted.
39:16And also why he never revealed the identity of the victim,
39:21because he simply said,
39:22it never occurred to me to ask what his name was.
39:29There was one really sad little coda to this story.
39:36Yeah, and it's very sad, actually, when you think about it.
39:39So, the victim, so the man who said that,
39:43no, would he care if he lives or dies or goes missing?
39:46It seems that really is the case, and that he was never identified.
39:51There was a twist to this sad little tale 80 years after Rouse went to the scaffold.
40:00DNA techniques had come in and had advanced.
40:05At that point, there was an attempt to try and find out who this unknown victim was.
40:14In 2012, a family of a man who'd gone missing in 1930 came forward saying,
40:21this man might be our relative.
40:24They'd always been told, as they were growing up,
40:28that William Briggs was Rouse's victim.
40:32And they wanted to know if the police could do anything with advances in DNA technology
40:38to try and identify the victim and show once and for all whether it was or wasn't William Briggs.
40:47By that time, I'd retired from the police,
40:50so Northamptonshire Police forwarded the inquiry to me at the University of Leicester.
40:55The thing about forensic science is that it can be applied to samples that have been taken today or decades
41:03ago.
41:04And so in any case, if material is retained,
41:08then it is amenable and available for testing further down the line.
41:16This is an interesting case for forensic science
41:19because we're working with DNA that was deposited nearly 100 years ago now.
41:27It's stretching what we can actually do with current DNA technology.
41:32In 1930, the post-mortem of the victim was carried out by a very eminent pathologist,
41:38Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
41:40And the London Hospital Archive has a number of specimen microscope slides from Sir Bernard's post-mortems.
41:49And amongst those was a number of slides from his post-mortem of the victim of Rouse's murder.
41:57And what we want to do is extract from that cellular material in order to obtain a DNA profile.
42:06We've got a full male profile from the sample
42:10and it was compared against the mitochondrial DNA of the descendants of William Briggs.
42:17But there was no match.
42:20So the relatives, unfortunately, were no longer able to think that William Briggs had been Rouse's victim
42:29and were left not knowing what happened to him back in 1930.
42:36Since then, there's been a total of eight families have come forward saying that their relative had gone missing around
42:43that time
42:43and offering DNA samples against this tissue.
42:46So although, to date, the man has never been identified and he lies in a grave recently rededicated in Hardingstone
42:56Cemetery,
42:56he is an unknown victim.
42:58But because this DNA sample exists in the archives, there's hope that he may one day be identified.
43:06I think it's only right and proper that that man who lays in an unknown grave at Hardingstone Cemetery near
43:16Northampton
43:17deserves to have his name put on the tombstone.
43:23So whether Rouse suffered from personality disorder or psychopathy is up to some debate.
43:29Certainly people who go on to kill other people have a certain level of ruthlessness that we might link with
43:37something like psychopathy.
43:39However, in my opinion, there's an underlying brain dysfunction, some physical situation that's led to him committing these crimes
43:47and it's not necessarily just down to his personality.
43:53Here you have an excellent example of an individual, Alfred Rouse, planning this murder down to the last detail,
44:02taking his time to think it through, pick the right victim, pick the right time, pick the right location to
44:09carry out the murder.
44:11He's thought it all through the method, how he would do it, up to the point of walking away from
44:16the vehicle,
44:16had it been completely destroyed and had he disappeared, possibly it would be, we could call it a perfect murder.
44:25People would have thought, his family would have thought, his friends, poor old Alfred has died accidentally in a fire
44:32in his car.
44:35In terms of the criminology of almost perfect murders, what does that tell you about how to commit a, quotes,
44:47perfect murder?
44:47Oh, goodness, is there such thing as a perfect murder?
44:52Personally, I don't think there is, for several reasons.
44:56The likelihood of you being witnessed taking some form of action that can ultimately be linked back to an offence
45:03is very strong.
45:04I think the other reason is that quite often offenders who think that they have planned an almost perfect murder
45:11don't allow for the fact that police forces are vast and in amongst them they have people who have dealt
45:19with hundreds of murders and hundreds of cases
45:23and have the ability to take those expertise and come together as a unit to work out what has happened
45:32in an incident.
45:34And I think that gets underestimated by murderers on a regular basis.
45:42He concocted this plan to escape from all these pressures and he almost got away with it.
45:47If it hadn't been for the two young men that had been walking towards the blaze as he was going
45:51away and they recognised him,
45:53if he'd have made his way to Northampton station without being seen and got his way to Scotland to live
45:58out a life unidentified,
46:00it would have been the perfect murder.
46:10.
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