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murder uk s03e09
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00:11I'm David Wilson, Emeritus Professor of Criminology, and for over 30 years I've
00:18investigated the phenomenon of murder and what it is that might motivate someone to kill.
00:27Every murder case is different, but time and again, a deadly pattern emerges of warning
00:34signs and red flags.
00:40In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's most harrowing murder cases to understand
00:48how and why these terrible crimes occur.
00:55This is Murder UK.
01:22Sun, sea and the holiday lifestyle.
01:26This is the backdrop of sandbanks, styled as Britain's Palm Beach.
01:33A group of young men, calling themselves The Firm, arrived, ready to enjoy the excesses
01:39of this party town.
01:41As the sun set, their revelry began.
01:52Typical Saturday night out, we'd get a table in a club somewhere, start off drinking, get
01:56all the lads together around sort of Camphor Cliffs, Sand Max, all sort of start local and
02:01then we'd head off into a club and just enjoy a night, really.
02:06There's always stuff going on, there's always an event, there's always like a club which
02:09has like really cheap drinks.
02:11Turner, at 19, had the seemingly endless means to fund his hedonistic ways.
02:18He would never go out with like a small amount of money, not even go out like some people
02:22go out with like 40 or 50 quid, he would go out for like 250, 250 quid, sometimes even
02:27500 pounds.
02:28And maybe on a very rare occasion, he'll go out with like a grand or something.
02:31He'd always be laughing, joking, talking quick, even if he wasn't on the drugs or the drink,
02:38he'd still always be very hyper.
02:41That's just the person that he was.
02:43I mean, it was pretty evident that Elliot Turner had a lot of wealth at his disposal.
02:49And we gather from afterwards that his grandparents were particularly kind of well off, I guess
02:56nouveau riche is probably the word people would use.
02:59And that meant that Elliot Turner kind of had what he wanted, but he just seemed excessively
03:05materialistic.
03:06He was obsessed with money and the status that it gave him.
03:11He'd walk into a bar, you know, he'd know everybody, shake everyone's hand, he'd order,
03:17probably order a bottle.
03:18He would just flash, you know, he could tell he had a lot of money.
03:22He was well dressed, well spoken.
03:24Like he'd walk into a place and you know, he'd have everybody laughing, very confident.
03:28Yeah, that's just what he was like.
03:31It was a lifestyle in part funded by selling drugs and one subsidised by parents who,
03:39at least when it came to money, seemed to never say no to their son.
03:44He was spoiled in a material sense rather than an emotional sense.
03:49His parents were very disengaged from him and gave him everything he wanted materially so
03:55that he would appear to be happy and perhaps not be a problem for them.
04:04As far as I can see, one of the key dynamics of the Turner family is enabling behaviour,
04:11specifically enabling the behaviour of Elliot Turner.
04:15They're not giving him money, material wealth, out of love,
04:20but as a means of managing his behaviour,
04:24a means of buying his silence, a means of buying his absence.
04:28And of course, what that ultimately is going to create in Elliot Turner
04:33is a feeling that money can solve any of his problems
04:37or create any circumstance in which he would like to control.
04:43Say he asked his parents for, say, 15 quid.
04:49They'd give him 20.
04:50Or say, oh yeah, I can have 85 pound.
04:52So he'd get 100.
04:54He had a lot of money, but he didn't have a lot of class.
04:59I get the distinct feeling that Elliot Turner
05:03had a real shaky sense, insecure sense of who he was in reality.
05:11And therefore, projecting this image of a good fellow,
05:15projecting this image of a gangster,
05:17was a way of performing self
05:19that didn't necessarily reflect Elliot Turner at all.
05:24He'd carried a steel hammer around with him
05:27and taken it out to clubs
05:29and said that he was going to threaten people with it.
05:33His personality, he was so keen.
05:35Like, if there was something he couldn't have,
05:37he would try and get it.
05:38Or the girl out of his league.
05:40He wouldn't just stand there and just watch her for the whole night.
05:44He would approach her, like, do anything that means necessary,
05:47you know, to get her back to his.
05:49He wanted to live that kind of, like, gangster dream.
05:51Like, the highest of the highest.
05:53Like, the Tony Soprano, for instance.
05:55Like, the person everyone looks up to,
05:56the person, like, everyone goes to ask, you know,
05:58oh yeah, can you help me with this?
05:59Can you help me with that?
06:00Oh, can you sort me out?
06:01Can you get me in here?
06:03He lived in a world where he was serving his own needs predominantly
06:08and it didn't seem to have anything to do with responsibility
06:12or looking for work.
06:13And no sense of responsibility at all.
06:15Just fun, fun, fun as he saw it.
06:17And it was a world where he was the centre of attention.
06:22Aged 19 and wired into the local in-crowd,
06:27Elliot Turner seemed to have nothing and nobody stopping him
06:31from doing exactly what he wanted.
06:34Least of all, his parents.
06:37His mother, Anita, was Indonesian.
06:40She had moved to England to marry his father, Lee,
06:43who owned a local jewellery store in Bournemouth.
06:47When Elliot, who had dropped out of university, needed cash,
06:51his dad would hire him to work.
06:54Elliot, naturally, would boast to his friends that he was the manager.
07:01Lee, his father, you know, I know Lee very well and he is a good man.
07:06He's a good dad and everything else and he has bought Elliot a lot of things.
07:11He has gave him a lot.
07:12We saw how good he was at manipulating his own mother
07:17and using that, I suppose, to Hector, his own father,
07:20to get what he wanted.
07:22Elliot Turner met his New Zealand girlfriend, Emily,
07:25in a beachfront bar in Sandbanks.
07:28Emily had settled well into England
07:31and Turner was never shy about approaching girls.
07:35The two quickly became an item
07:38and, at first, they seemed perfectly happy.
07:42You got a sense of a very sophisticated young woman
07:46who seemed to really be enjoying an adventure that she was on.
07:50She'd had a chance to kind of create a room the way she wanted to.
07:54She seemed like a really nice young woman.
07:57The sort of person that, you know, anyone would want to know
08:02and have as a friend.
08:05She was clearly an attractive, ambitious young girl.
08:08She'd been born in Britain but she'd moved to New Zealand
08:10at quite a young age and she'd come back here to study business
08:14at a place called Brockenhurst College, which is in the New Forest,
08:17a very leafy area of Hampshire in southern England.
08:20She was living with her grandparents and she clearly wanted to go places.
08:26Turner had cash, lived in a beach-bums paradise
08:30and now he had his trophy girlfriend.
08:34But from the start, he was possessive.
08:37I think Elliot was besotted by Emily.
08:39I think he felt that he needed to keep hold of her
08:42because she was very attractive, very good-looking.
08:45I think that's all he was looking for, really.
08:47I think he was with a lot of girls and he wanted to find the, you know,
08:50the right one.
08:51I think he thought he did and I think he thought he'd have to hold on to her
08:55no matter what.
08:57There was just one problem.
09:00Emily didn't feel the same way.
09:03She, that that girl is,
09:05why we meet them, that that girl is ruined my life.
09:07Yeah.
09:08She's ruined my life.
09:09She did.
09:10She did ruin your life.
09:19Elliot Turner was living the high life.
09:22At home, his parents appeared to be completely cowered
09:26by his aggressive, dominating personality.
09:31There appeared to be no boundaries at all from his parents.
09:36Rather, they turned a blind eye to what he was doing,
09:39were disengaged from his life, certainly,
09:43and just provided the means by which he could continue,
09:47sometimes financially,
09:49sometimes by just allowing him to use the houses as he wanted.
09:54Outside the family home,
09:56he had surrounded himself with friends who hung on his every word.
10:01I looked up to him as like, kind of like an idol.
10:03Like, oh yeah, you know, pulls a lot of girls.
10:06You know, Elliot gave me a lot of confidence when I went out.
10:10Of course, Turner needs more than wealth,
10:15an image, a trophy girlfriend.
10:18He needs an audience to accept who he is in that fantasy.
10:24He needs validation from a group of people
10:27who would be prepared to accept him on the terms that he would prefer.
10:31And of course, Tom Crow is a kind of stooge-like character
10:35who's going to give Turner what he demands.
10:40He wants to be validated.
10:41He wants to be admired.
10:43He wants to be respected.
10:44He wants to be something that he imagines himself to be,
10:49but actually isn't.
10:50But by surrounding himself by these people who are unworldly,
10:55who are naive,
10:57means that he can behave as if he really was the character that he was playing.
11:05The naive Tom Crow would soon play an unwitting part in the tragic events that were about to unfold.
11:13But in 2011, he was just one of the guys in the firm, enjoying their company and always finding Elliot
11:21Turner the life and soul of the party.
11:24He had to be the centre of attention.
11:27There was the grandiosity.
11:30Absolutely everything he did was wonderful and perfect.
11:34He would lie constantly about his achievements and his abilities.
11:39And this is classic of a narcissist.
11:42They cannot really perceive of anybody else being in their world.
11:48They are the most important thing in that world and everything revolves around them.
11:57Yeah, he did.
11:58He did have his insecurities.
12:00I mean, when, just from what a girl sort of used to tell me,
12:04he'd always be fishing for compliments.
12:06He'd always want you to say, God, Elliot, you're looking sharp tonight.
12:09Or he'd always want girls sort of saying, you know, you're looking well, Elliot.
12:13Or, you know, I like your hair.
12:14Just always fishing for compliments, really.
12:18That insecurity fed his intensely jealous nature.
12:22Any lack of obedience or subservience, particularly from his girlfriends, was not well received.
12:30He would have been like this with all of his girlfriends.
12:34In fact, I do believe he had a history of stalking and harassing women before.
12:40He's never going to change.
12:41He was clearly a very jealous guy.
12:43And that made him a very dangerous guy.
12:58Five months after they met, in spring 2011, Emily returned home to New Zealand.
13:05A chance for a break from a young man who, predictably, was beginning to show his aggressive side.
13:15There'd been some kind of assault or some kind of, you know, physical attack.
13:21And that he'd had to try and make amends for that.
13:24That Emily had asked him, pleaded with him in writing to please, you know, stop threatening her.
13:31Stop doing those things that did her head in when he grabbed her around the throat.
13:35Those kinds of things.
13:36So, clearly, this was a pretty controlling relationship, even at that point.
13:42The pair even wrote their feelings down to each other.
13:45And Emily's notes contains messages like, stop threatening to kill me.
13:50You know, you scare me that you're always so aggressive.
13:55On her return, the couple resumed their volatile relationship.
14:00But the exuberant young Kiwi refused to toe the line drawn by her possessive boyfriend.
14:10Elliot was keeping a very close eye on Emily and trying to control her as much as he could.
14:15And he found text messages from another man and realised that they had arranged a meeting.
14:20So, Elliot actually takes a lump hammer and goes to threaten this man at the club where they were going
14:27to meet.
14:28Once again, Turner's friends dismissed the lump hammer incident as him being all talk.
14:35And they didn't believe that he'd ever take real action.
14:40In the context of him being a self-described bullshitter, I think a lot of people just let go.
14:47But perhaps they needed to just sort of stop for a moment and think, hang on.
14:52The stuff coming out of this guy's mouth is pretty loathsome.
14:57But there was no one there.
14:58It just seems like there was absolutely no one there to rein him in.
15:02Elliot began cyber-stalking Emily, hacking her Facebook and private text messages.
15:08His infatuation was morphing into dangerous obsession and his lies were growing in scale.
15:16He came back out from the club and said he had murdered Emily and convinced his friend that he had.
15:21He was crying, he said, oh, what have I done? What should I do?
15:24And I was like, no, really, have you actually killed her? Show me.
15:28And I said, oh, no, I'm not going back up there.
15:29There's probably, like, police patrolling.
15:31Oh, look, Tom is at an ambulance. He's out of the police car.
15:34Until he just switched and said, no, I'm only kidding.
15:38And then he was all happy and jovial again.
15:39It was another example of the big shot with the big mouth.
15:46Still not believing Turner's threats, his friend Tom was drawn into a bizarre episode with a chilling question.
15:55Tom, how did I kill someone?
15:58And the friend allowed him to practice strangulation on him in preparation for killing Emily.
16:05So I showed him a few, like, chokeholds, sleepholds, and we're just, like, practicing and stuff, like, you know, horseplay,
16:11like, fighting each other.
16:12Like, we even started getting a bit violent.
16:14And then we started pushing each other about, just, like, wrestling.
16:17Like, oh, yeah, if someone gets you, like, in this lock, you can do this to get out of it.
16:23This isn't horseplay with Tom Crow.
16:26This is Elliot Turner working out the script, engaging in the MO that he would ultimately use later.
16:37This is him working out the limits of the violence he might be able to use before anybody, perhaps, would
16:45lose consciousness.
16:46So this time it might be with one of his stooges in plain sight.
16:52But the next time, well, who knows where this so-called horseplay might go.
16:59But as always with Turner, his friends wrote off his behaviour as pure fantasy.
17:08Elliot talked a lot. He said a lot of stuff. And to be honest with you, nobody took him seriously.
17:13If you, you know, if you knew him, like I knew him, if he said something to you, like he
17:17was going to kill somebody
17:18or was going to hit someone over the head with a hammer, you'd just laugh it off.
17:22Tragically, that's exactly what all of Turner's friends did.
17:26They simply laughed off his dark idiosyncrasies.
17:30In criminology, we have a concept of somebody who's called an intimate handler, who can stop criminal acts and certain
17:39behaviours occurring.
17:40And nobody in Elliot's group, the firm as they called themselves, appeared to act in that way as a sort
17:47of moral guidance.
17:49And no one in his life that was there to say, mate, you're completely out of order.
17:57And, OK, maybe that's not a problem for most people, but I guess this was a guy who, because he
18:03had this woman in a particularly vulnerable situation
18:06where she was so far from home, he was really able to do almost as he liked.
18:11And no one pulled him up about it.
18:15On the 4th of May 2012, Emily was on her latest big night out, and Turner had heard she'd be
18:24seeing another man.
18:26When he found out that Thursday that she was going for another drink with the bloke, he just completely lost
18:30the plot.
18:31He would hit the steering wheel, he would scream and shout, kind of like a baby throwing his toys out
18:36of the pram.
18:37Emily was obviously worried about how violent Elliot was getting.
18:40She actually sent text messages to friends saying that he'd, you know, arrived in this club and had a hissy
18:45fit and made threats to alter.
18:49Elliot Turner had already lied boastfully about killing Emily.
18:55He'd been seen wielding a lump hammer around exclusive night spots and had been violent to former girlfriends.
19:04Emily very publicly fell victim to his bullying too.
19:09Emily and Elliot were sat together at a table and Elliot actually grabbed Emily's head and smashed it into a
19:15table.
19:17That was the kind of violence that he was dishing out to her.
19:22She'd returned from New Zealand.
19:23It seemed, just from what I saw pretty clear, that she didn't really want to have much to do with
19:28this guy anymore.
19:30Perhaps something in her background or her life made it difficult for her to really shove someone like that away.
19:38Perhaps he was just so persuasive.
19:41Turner seemed to command compliance from those around him.
19:45Despite being told by Emily he was no longer wanted, he persevered and she relented.
19:51He would need to be the king in her eyes and no other man could have at any point come
19:59into her life.
20:00Security cameras captured Elliot at a bar in the Canford Cliffs area of Poole.
20:08They kind of came to blows in a club.
20:10She tossed a drink in his face.
20:13She was shoved up against the wall by him at one point.
20:18When Emily throws the drink in Turner's face at the bar, this is her final act of autonomy.
20:27Her final act of standing up to Turner, but done in a very public setting.
20:34And the fact it is done in a public setting would mean for a narcissist like Turner, he would see
20:42this as a challenge to his sense of self.
20:45And feeling that his sense of self has been challenged in that public way, that is only going to lead
20:52to an escalation.
20:55Turner tells friends he's seen Emily looking glamorous and taunting him about seeing other men.
21:03They both head to the Café Shore bar overlooking Sandbanks where a confrontation escalated.
21:11Emily is frightened enough to message her parents in New Zealand.
21:17And on CCTV, the pair are seen leaving. Emily goes first and she's shortly followed by Elliot.
21:24And Elliot's heard screaming, she's twisted my heart out on the, you know, while he's out on the streets.
21:30Now, somehow, Elliot convinces Emily to come back to his house and he gets her inside.
21:36And a witness outside the house saw them go in together and he actually said to another passerby, he was
21:43scared for Emily's life.
21:45Got back to Elliot's house, we all went in, just had a beer, Elliot and I.
21:52Then Elliot said, oh yeah, I think it's time for you to go.
21:54So I called a cab and that was the last, that's the last time I saw Elliot and saw Emily.
22:05Despite the public row, the couple head for Elliot's bedroom at the back of the house.
22:10His parents appeared to be asleep.
22:14The next morning, the emergency ambulance services received a call from Turner's mother, Anita.
22:24Just tell me what's happened there, no reason for the call.
22:27What it is, my son's friend is saying that this morning I tried to wake both of them up but
22:35the girl didn't wake up.
22:36We tried to wake her up, I don't know what it is.
22:39I need you to pull back the duvet from it and just look to see if you can see any
22:42signs of breathing.
22:46I tried to hold the path.
22:48No, I need you to put your face next to her mouth, can you feel any breath?
22:53Can you see her chest going up and down?
22:56No.
22:56Nothing.
22:57What colour is he?
23:00Erm...
23:00What colour is he?
23:01Yeah, what colour is he?
23:02Is he blue?
23:03Is he...
23:03Is he red?
23:05Is he...
23:06My husband is having a look now, hang on.
23:10At this stage, Anita Turner continues a disturbing charade.
23:16She knows Emily is dead, but she doesn't tell the operator.
23:22Does it look like she's choked on anything?
23:25Erm...
23:26Nothing around her neck.
23:28No, she's cold.
23:29She's cold?
23:30She's cold?
23:31Yeah.
23:32You hear Anita Turner talking to the operator, but she doesn't sound like someone who has just
23:39found a teenage girl, her son's girlfriend, dead in her house.
23:45If you could look at her face, what colour is her lips?
23:48Her lips is off.
23:49What colour is her lips?
23:51Pinky.
23:52Pinky.
23:53Pinky's earthly.
23:55The tape recording of Anita Turner's 999 call is frankly deeply disturbing,
24:04because she's trying to plant a narrative which suggests that this was a sudden, unexpected
24:11illness, because the girl didn't wake up.
24:14This is again another feature of the enabling behaviour that we've seen throughout Elliot
24:22Turner's life.
24:23His parents are now becoming co-conspirators in terms of covering up what their son has
24:30done, as opposed to seek justice for the girl he's just strangled to death.
24:36She sounds almost calm, almost quiet, and she tries to say that a necklace around Emily's
24:49neck might be responsible for her not breathing.
24:52Got anything round her neck?
24:54Anything around her neck?
24:56Oh, that necklace.
24:58Necklace could be this.
25:00No, she's got a necklace very tight.
25:03Very tight round her neck?
25:04Yeah.
25:04Can you get that necklace off?
25:07Okay.
25:07How tight?
25:09Very, very tight.
25:10Alright.
25:11Okay, so you don't think she's had an allergic reaction to anything, but you need to get
25:15your...
25:15While you're talking to me, you need to get your husband to get that necklace off from
25:19around her neck.
25:20Okay.
25:20Could you take the necklace off?
25:21How big a necklace is it?
25:22A thick necklace, or...?
25:24Right.
25:24Can you get the door open?
25:26Is your son there, is he?
25:28The ambulance is here.
25:29Right, I need you to undo that necklace, and somebody needs to open the door.
25:32Your son, can you check your son?
25:35Sorry?
25:35Can you...
25:36Is it your son there?
25:37Can he go and open the front door?
25:43The truth was chilling.
25:46Elliot Turner had murdered Emily using the deadly chokehold he'd rehearsed with his friend,
25:52Tom Crowe.
25:53If I knew for 100%, you know, 100% fact he was going to kill her, I'd have done something
25:57to stop it.
25:58100%.
25:59I would not have tolerated him going in there and killing her.
26:03You know, him killing me in any means necessary.
26:05Soon after killing Emily, Elliot wrote a note to his parents, Anita and Lee, which they found
26:13when they woke.
26:14He confessed to having a physical argument with Emily, but stopped short of confessing
26:20to murder.
26:21Instead, he vaguely claimed she was probably in the room crying.
26:34The exclusive Sandbanks, Poole and Bournemouth area of England's south coast woke to the
26:42news of a tragedy.
26:44Wave 105.
26:46It's 7 o'clock, an investigation has been launched after a teenage girl was found dead
26:51in Bournemouth.
26:52The 17-year-old...
26:54Emily had suffered asthma and recurring chest infections since being in Britain.
27:01With Elliot's parents insisting that they'd had and seen nothing amiss, and no coroner's
27:07report yet complete, the police could only collect evidence.
27:11Could this be death by natural causes?
27:15We first reported the story on the Sunday morning.
27:18At that point, it was the tragic death of a young girl.
27:21It was a death unexplained.
27:23There was no indication at that point that it was murder.
27:26Turner posted pictures of himself and Emily on Facebook, protesting he was devastated by
27:32her death.
27:34Meanwhile, his parents made a fateful decision.
27:38To destroy the letter they'd found.
27:42You were right to destroy it.
27:44What?
27:45You didn't know the right to destroy it.
27:48Yeah.
27:50As you refer to the course of justice, you've destroyed vital evidence in this case.
27:58You didn't know the right.
28:00Yes.
28:07The destruction of Elliot's letter by his parents is technically perverting the course of justice.
28:16This isn't about them being grieving for what their son has done, but about them deliberately
28:23manipulating evidence so as to ensure that he wasn't going to be arrested and charged with murder.
28:35After the police received reports of Emily being with Elliot and Tom Crowe the night before, they arrested Turner for
28:43questioning and visit his younger friend.
28:46I said, oh, Mr Crowe, Thomas Crowe, you're under arrest of suspicion of murder.
28:52I got arrested.
28:53I kept my calm because I know I hadn't done absolutely nothing wrong.
28:57I thought it was a hoax.
28:58Tom soon realised this was no hoax, but at first he didn't tell the police about the couple's rouse or
29:08Turner's volatile behaviour.
29:11I didn't believe him for a split second that he'd killed her.
29:15I was confused.
29:17I still couldn't get my head around that she had died, so I didn't know what to say.
29:21He told police about the lump hammer his friend carried into nightclubs,
29:25and he recalled a chilling threat Elliot had made just a week before Emily's death,
29:32triggered by information from one of her friends.
29:37Emily's going for a drink with someone tonight, and he was like, what?
29:41You know, then he just got frustrated, called everyone together, told everyone that he's going absolutely mad.
29:46And, um, yeah, I've had it with her, I'm going to kill her.
29:54Tom Crowe, having given police everything he knew, was released without charge.
29:59Elliot was also released.
30:02With the Turners still claiming they simply found Emily dead and no post-mortem completed,
30:09the initial days of the inquiry proved frustrating.
30:12Well, the police went through several lines of inquiry with this.
30:15They looked at whether drugs had led to Emily's death, but toxicology tests turned up nothing.
30:21There was a line about a stalker, possibly Emily putting reports of a stalker on her Facebook page.
30:28That line of inquiry led nowhere.
30:32Cause of death is a basic starting point for any murder inquiry.
30:38In the days following Emily's death, her killer remained free.
30:43I assumed that he'd done nothing wrong, because I thought, well, how could he?
30:46If he's done this, he wouldn't be able to go out, he wouldn't be able to do anything.
30:51It'd just be, it'd be absolutely in bits.
30:53You know, knowing that what he's done and obviously that he's going to, he'll be serving a life sentence.
30:57So, yeah, he was, obviously I thought he was completely innocent.
31:02It's highly unusual for the police to be given permission to bug a suspect's home, requiring senior judicial approval.
31:10But the police, awaiting the cause of death findings, strongly suspected a deliberate cover-up by Elliot and his parents.
31:20They successfully applied to plant covert microphones in the Turner household.
31:26I think something like 200, maybe 300 hours worth of private conversations recorded at the family home of Elliot Turner.
31:37The microphones capture a terrifying revelation.
31:42The entire family is covering up the truth.
31:47Elliot Turner is in absolute command, orchestrating the destruction of evidence and coaching his mother on the lies that will
31:55protect him.
31:56From the moment she finds Emily lying dead in her house, she is on the side of Elliot.
32:03She doesn't phone 999 straight away.
32:07She calls her husband instead.
32:09And through all the covert recordings you can hear her saying, you know, this girl has ruined your life.
32:17What's becoming clear to the police is the manipulation and control that Elliot has over his parents.
32:25And more alarmingly, the bizarre relationship that he has with his mother
32:30and the extreme lengths, she'll go to protect him.
32:35You would have known she was breathing, she was breathing well.
32:38You can't be, you gotta think, think, think, think.
32:41Brain, brain, brain.
32:43When we look at the transcript or listen to the tapes
32:47and consider the way that Elliot's speaking to his mother, it's quite interesting.
32:52Because in no way is he asking her to defend him.
32:56That seems to be a given.
32:58He is absolutely confident that everybody sees that he's the victim in this.
33:04I just thought that she was, you know, I don't know, I just thought that she wasn't.
33:08I thought that she was just knackered.
33:10Just really tiny, as it's happened before, and I can't get her out of bed.
33:14Hence, hence, officer, I made a cup of tea at first, because I thought she was okay.
33:19Mum, that's fine, it's so believable.
33:22He is coaching her in what to say to the police so that her story is plausible.
33:29So she's taking a very subservient role here,
33:32which is probably quite indicative of the way that their relationship actually was.
33:37You really felt like you were sitting there listening to two or three people
33:43arguing or unburdening themselves, and that was the real thing.
33:46They were so confessional.
33:47Lee Turner just honestly seemed like he was sitting there hoping someone was hearing what he was saying.
33:55It's burning me inside.
33:57Every second of my day, it's burning.
34:00But I know something that they don't know.
34:04It's burning me, eating me up.
34:06He was just sick in his stomach and couldn't do anything other than go along with his family.
34:11That's honestly what I believe.
34:14I think it's pretty clear that his wife wanted to believe their son more than anything else
34:21and was prepared to do anything to make sure that the rest of us believed it too.
34:27But the stuff that you hear from Elliot Turner's mouth,
34:31it's just this constant attempt to sort of shape the world to his own ends.
34:36We sometimes use a phrase called a philia de, a madness shared by two, a delusion that's shared by two.
34:44Anita really does seem to believe that her son is innocent of the crime for which he has been accused
34:53and arrested.
34:54She actually has come to the conclusion that Elliot didn't kill Emily,
35:00although Elliot's father seems to be far more skeptical.
35:03But of course, that enabling culture that existed within the Turner household,
35:08it's the enabling culture that sets Turner off on a particular course of behavior
35:14that would ultimately lead in lethal violence.
35:23Finally, pressed by his parents,
35:26Turner tells them, in graphic detail, exactly what he's done.
35:32I've just grabbed it up and I've fucking grabbed it as hard as I've heard from my wife,
35:36and I've grabbed it up and pushed it up.
35:39He's describing this as if he's proud of what he's done.
35:43It's almost like he's bragging about the way that he killed Emily.
35:51It was the key recording, Elliot confessing to killing his girlfriend.
35:56He was arrested and charged with murder.
36:00But the strongest evidence is the taped family conversations.
36:05There's a problem.
36:07Will this audio material be accepted in a court of law?
36:12And those tapes, they spent a week before any of this trial began arguing the admissibility
36:17because I guess the defence knew it was so damning.
36:22From his cell on remand, Turner writes to friends in the firm,
36:26urging them to act as character witnesses.
36:29He's confident that, once my list is finished, all witnesses will be called.
36:37He says, then he can begin mourning Emily.
36:42He warns that, if this doesn't happen, a miscarriage of justice will take place.
36:49In another letter, he speaks of his post-acquittal plans.
36:53Nothing is impossible, he says.
36:56Hitler was an artist.
36:58Branson was dyslexic.
37:01I'm going on a journey of success.
37:04Emily would want me to be successful.
37:07He even told Ashley Costello that the pair would have new stage names when he got out.
37:14Shard, Diamond, Rockefeller.
37:17And Martello, J.D. Vantage.
37:22Prosecutors worried he might be found not guilty.
37:26Their strongest evidence was the secret tapes.
37:29And in May 2012, a legal debate raged at Winchester Crown Court over their admissibility.
37:38Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the death of a girl with so much to live for generated huge publicity.
37:47It seemed pretty clear that something nasty had happened to her.
37:51But we didn't really get a sense of who this guy was until the court case itself began.
37:57And it started, I think, about a week before the anniversary of her death.
38:03So for quite a long time, people really didn't know what to make of Elliot Turner.
38:08In the dock, Turner exuded his trademark confidence.
38:13He was with a tie for the first couple of days.
38:16He was trying to look as respectable as possible.
38:18Groomed, carried himself off, like a reasonably confident, slightly sophisticated,
38:26or trying hard to be, sophisticated young man.
38:32Turner's defence was that they had a heated physical fight.
38:35And while he had held Emily down for a few seconds, she was fine when he let her go.
38:41And they both went to sleep.
38:43And somehow, when he wakes up, she's dead.
38:51The post-mortem was inconclusive.
38:54Emily had asphyxiated.
38:56But was it due to her necklace or her existing respiratory problems?
39:03Investigators feared Turner could put doubt in the jury's minds.
39:07The recordings meant everything.
39:12The prosecution knew that it was so damning, so compelling,
39:17and that anyone that listened to people speaking in their own voices
39:20about what had happened, they'd convict themselves.
39:23After a week of arguments, the judge at Winchester Crown Court
39:27ruled that the secret recordings were admissible.
39:32Elliot's defence was almost destroyed by the covert recordings
39:36because in those, he's heard telling what really happened.
39:39And that is true. That's going to come out.
39:42You know, me when I get a call, I'm going to be .
39:45But pretty quickly, you got a sense of the guy from listening to the tapes,
39:51the covert tapes, I suppose, which were so crucial to this case.
39:53And that presented a very, very different picture of a fantasist, really.
40:00A young guy who, I think, was completely out of his depth,
40:06had this sort of monstrous self-image of himself as some kind of gangster,
40:11had obviously pretty much dictated every decision that had ever been made.
40:17There was other evidence, the angry arguments witnessed by others,
40:22the threats he'd made, and a chilling discovery inside Turner's bedroom.
40:28One of the key pieces of evidence was a pillowcase that had an impression,
40:35a facial mask of Emily and her make-up imprinted on it.
40:40And they believed that was used to smother her.
40:44The prosecution evidence seemed irrefutable.
40:48And their strongest evidence?
40:51Turner's own words, confessing to the crime.
40:56Hit my internet, browsing on the computer, typed in,
40:59death by strangulation, death by suffocation, man's law to trial,
41:05how to, how to go up in a sin.
41:08And I also typed in Google, how to get away with serious crimes.
41:13Marks on her neck with the death by strangulation,
41:16with the suicide now, life sentence, boom.
41:24Turner was duly found guilty of murder,
41:26and given a life sentence with a minimum of 16 years to serve.
41:32In his letters, the fantasist claimed he would one day be out buying expensive cars
41:39from the proceeds of a movie about a story that the world would no doubt want to see.
41:47The spoiled rich boy still believed he would be partying with the firm.
41:54He was talking about he wants to buy a Range Rover,
41:56to buy a Porsche and stuff, and all, you know, just...
41:59It was quite muddled, to be honest with you.
42:01I don't think he had a clue what, you know, what he wanted to do.
42:03But it's things like he said he wanted to get a book deal
42:05and maybe some write about his life and stuff,
42:08everything that's happened to him.
42:11Ashley Costello visited his friend only once,
42:14before stopping all contact.
42:18Experts believe Emily's death could have been averted
42:22if she'd gone to the police when Turner first exhibited the warning signs,
42:27which are all too familiar to those who study the patterns of killers.
42:33We don't need hindsight to see that Elliot was going to end up killing Emily.
42:41She was very high risk for being killed.
42:45If the man is making death threats, that should be taken very, very seriously.
42:51Another high risk behaviour would be practising that homicide
42:55on somebody else prior to it being done.
42:58Six months after Elliot was jailed,
43:01his parents faced charges of perverting the course of justice.
43:05A different jury listened to the tapes of their plotting.
43:10You can't tell them that that's what he's doing, the glitch.
43:14So you can ask you or not, you've been to the other.
43:16No, I didn't feel bad.
43:28Elliot's mother appeared to be quite cold.
43:33When she attended court, it was said by Emily's parents
43:39that she was able to look them right in the eye
43:42with no emotion apparently on her face at all.
43:47Certainly no shame, remorse or guilt.
43:51And that surprised them.
43:53But it perhaps tells us something about her as a person,
43:57as perhaps a bit emotionally incapable.
44:01And this would have allowed Elliot to have a good deal of control over her.
44:07Anita seemed like a very indulgent parent.
44:11Someone that really would believe her son, would refuse to believe,
44:18didn't want to believe, she told us, that he'd committed murder.
44:22But was prepared to sort of go to any lengths to protect her son.
44:27There was a really touching moment where Lee Turner talked about sitting on the bed
44:32beside the cold dead body of Emily Longley before the ambulance people arrived.
44:38And just, he said, he sat next to her.
44:40He patted her cold dead body and said,
44:43there, there, butterfly.
44:44And I think that one little shred probably meant a lot to the family.
44:49Despite Lee Turner's apparent show of humanity,
44:52both he and Anita were found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison
44:57for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.
45:02Elliot Turner had been given everything he wanted from his parents
45:06and received friendship from those impressed by his drug-fuelled, high-energy lifestyle.
45:13He had charmed a beautiful girl who, without family support nearby,
45:19was completely exposed to the danger of his jealous rages.
45:25He was a complete fantasist who didn't seem to have any boundaries,
45:33didn't seem to care about anyone other than himself,
45:36only cared about other people as far as what they thought of him.
45:40We mustn't accept Elliot Turner's self-delusion.
45:46This wasn't some organised criminal.
45:49This wasn't some mafioso.
45:51This wasn't some criminal mastermind.
45:55All we have here is a spoiled child,
45:59somebody who's desperate to be something other than he was,
46:03which was frankly a pretty weak, narcissistic, self-obsessed boy.
46:19To be continued...
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