- 7 hours ago
Britain's Almost Perfect Murders Season 1 Episode 3
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00:01The perfect murder, the unsolvable crime, does it really exist?
00:08In 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.
01:10I'm Sam Robbins and I'll see you next time.
01:21Criminologists have long recognised that the best way to get away with a perfect murder
01:28is to kill someone whom nobody will miss or even report as missing.
01:35And if that seems unlikely, there's one group of people who fit this profile exactly.
01:43The homeless.
01:47On any given day, there are around 350,000 men and women homeless in Britain.
01:57On average, 65% of homeless men and women have suffered violence, assaults, attacks and even murders.
02:11The fatal attack on 51-year-old Thomas Downey in the centre of Bath shortly before Christmas 2014 is a
02:21textbook example of how the murder of a homeless man could have been a perfect murder.
02:34Any given year, this country, 500-and-something homicides on average?
02:41Yes.
02:41The most difficult homicides to investigate?
02:45They are investigations where there is seemingly no motive and investigations where there is seemingly no relationship between two individuals.
02:57In order to move towards a suspect, you have to retrace the steps and get to the critical point in
03:04time where the murder and the victim came together.
03:07And unless you can establish that relationship, you can't carry on with an investigation.
03:12So, essentially, what the investigating officers are looking for is the sort of thing that you do when you create
03:21an associations chart.
03:22Yes. Yes, very much so. So, in investigations where you're unsure or you don't know the relationship, the best thing
03:32to do is to try and establish all of the associates that that person had.
03:36You may have witnesses who give you information and a description about somebody, but they don't necessarily know the name
03:44that goes for that person.
03:46You're searching all the other information coming into the inquiry to see if you can match up the description to
03:51a named individual.
03:53So, if you can put person A with place B with circumstance C?
03:58Yes. So, it's a building. It's a layering of that information until you can adequately identify an individual or a
04:05potential suspect.
04:07What did you discover about how and when the case started?
04:10The case started, as a large majority of cases do, with the discovery of a dead body.
04:24I got a telephone call on Christmas morning to say, there's a job in, boss.
04:30And, in effect, there was a case in Bath, which was local to where I was living at the time.
04:36And, basically, somebody had been discovered there the day before, and they were dead.
04:44The victim had been discovered in a railway arch, a disused railway arch, at about lunchtime on Christmas Eve.
04:52The body was discovered as a result of somebody who said they were walking past the railway arch
04:58and had noticed that the person lying down in there, the victim, hadn't moved for several days.
05:04Police were called. They gained access into the railway arch.
05:07There was nobody there, a lot of debris on the floor, mud floor, and the victim lying there covered by
05:15a blanket.
05:18They arrive on the scene. There's no-one else around, just the body.
05:23What's the automatic initial assumption?
05:27Depending on the weather, you know, was it bitterly cold?
05:31Had they died from some form of exposure?
05:34Or, also, is it in relation to some kind of alcohol or drugs-related incident?
05:42So, could it potentially be an overdose?
05:50The assumption was that he had died as a result of either natural causes, it was very cold,
05:57he may have had a medical condition, or he'd suffered some form of overdose,
06:00which isn't unusual, necessarily, in that community.
06:04And that dictated the initial response, as well, by police.
06:08It was clear that they went in looking at it through that lens.
06:13In any investigation where somebody dies, you should always keep an open mind.
06:18So, there's a potential here that, actually, there's some bias already creeping into this investigation,
06:25and that it's been assumed that because it's a member of the homeless community,
06:31that it could potentially be an overdose.
06:35It was not unusual for somebody from the homeless community
06:38to be either dying from an overdose or, tragically, from some sort of violence.
06:46It's not unusual for homeless people to have an unlawful killing, I think is probably the best way to say
06:53it,
06:53but not always in a...in the way that you might have a gang-related killing,
06:56so it's not always from stabbing, but often from some sort of violence.
06:59So, he was from the homeless community.
07:03It was later identified that he was alcohol-dependent and he misused other substances.
07:09And, in particular, other substances that were misused at that time were spice,
07:14which was a relatively new drug that we genuinely didn't know much about.
07:19The reality was very different, wasn't it?
07:22It was different, and that was only discovered once the body had gone for a post-mortem.
07:29When it had been clear that, actually, that person had received a fairly severe beating
07:35and that it was likely to be an instrument that was long and thin and heavy,
07:41so maybe a metal bar of some kind.
07:45The traditional blunt instrument.
07:46The traditional blunt instrument.
07:48Hammers and metal bars, yeah.
07:53All we could ever ascertain was that there was an argument about something insignificant.
08:01When we first managed to get an examination of him done,
08:05and it became more apparent during the course of the post-mortem,
08:08he had injuries to his head that were significant,
08:13like a weapon had been used to hit those blunt force trauma.
08:16He had defence injuries on his arm,
08:20so he'd obviously put up his arm to protect himself, broken bones there.
08:24And he also had injuries across his shoulder that was broken,
08:28again, where he'd been hit by something really, really hard.
08:34The hypothesis was that there had been a fight or an argument
08:37or something had gone on,
08:39and that during the course of that,
08:41that person had then violently assaulted him.
08:44And, I mean, it was excessive.
08:45You didn't need to hit him that many times.
08:52The crime certainly impacted the homeless community
08:56because whilst their lives can often involve violence between themselves,
09:03and that's just sporadic or knee-jerk reactions,
09:06they still don't expect each other to be the victim of homicide.
09:12That's unusual.
09:14It is a really close-knit community, the homeless community,
09:17and they know each other well,
09:19and particularly in that city like Bath,
09:21which is a relatively small city,
09:23everybody tends to hang around in the same places
09:26or sleep in the same places,
09:28visit the same locations to get help and support.
09:31So they were shocked,
09:33and it was impactive because it was at Christmas as well.
09:39Why does the fact this is the homeless community,
09:43why does that make it more difficult?
09:45There's several issues.
09:46One of which is being that they're an incredibly transient community,
09:51so they may be in one place for a few days, a few weeks,
09:56and then they may choose to move to an entirely different section of the UK.
10:00And that community has its own set of rules that you all abide by,
10:06and relationships, and relationships are based on a variety of factors
10:12that sometimes to the people outside of that community might not be entirely clear,
10:17but they work within the community itself and how they police and self-regulate themselves.
10:25The homeless community can be challenging when engaging in investigations,
10:30because they don't trust the police,
10:32often because of their own criminality and their lifestyle.
10:36And the other challenges we had was because it was in the depths of winter,
10:40and everybody was obviously very cold.
10:42If we wanted to seize anything, we had to make sure we replaced it for them.
10:48Very few people really are concerned about the murder of a homeless person,
10:54and that's because we just see these people really,
10:57that they've kind of somehow failed or they're worthless.
11:01Had he been, you know, the son of a doctor or somebody, an airline pilot,
11:08we would have probably seen much more media attention,
11:11we would have seen much more police attention.
11:14You know, all of those lives are equally valuable,
11:16but for some reason we don't necessarily see this as something that's worthy of the attention
11:21and worthy of the resources to investigate that murder.
11:27Sadly, on Christmas Eve, when he was first discovered,
11:31nobody knew who he was, we weren't sure who he was,
11:35and it took a little while because he was living a long way
11:39from where his family came from to actually get him identified.
11:45Who is this man?
11:47Homeless people don't carry much in the way of identification.
11:50No, and that is always a significant problem, identifying people,
11:54and quite often this community will operate on nicknames,
11:59and those nicknames are interchangeable,
12:00and the people that you think are known by one nickname might be somebody else.
12:05Luckily, officers had a very good relationship
12:09with the homeless community and they could talk to them and communicate with them.
12:15For me, as an investigating officer, I was really lucky that the local community
12:21team based in Bath knew everybody in that community, spoke to them on a daily basis,
12:26and already had those links.
12:29Rather than sending in detectives or people that didn't know them asking difficult questions,
12:36what we did was we agreed the questions set to us, the homeless community,
12:40and then got the people that they knew to do that for us.
12:43And that worked really, really well.
12:47And they established fairly early on that the victim in this case was 51-year-old Thomas Downey.
12:53In that community, he was known as Manchester Tommy.
12:58This, then, was the victim of the attack just before Christmas 2014.
13:05Now police had a problem. What to do next?
13:25The victim was known locally as Manchester Tommy, obviously because he had Mancunian accent,
13:31and that's where he'd originated from, but he'd been in Bath for some time.
13:35He was well known in Bath as part of the homeless community,
13:37not necessarily for any high-level offending.
13:41Tommy had children. He was estranged from his wife.
13:45He'd lost his job. He'd started drinking.
13:49And really it was just a sequence of events that had led to Tommy becoming homeless.
13:54As a consequence of being homeless, that had then led him to become more dependent on alcohol
14:00and also then engaging in taking drugs.
14:07In amongst his antecedents, of which, you know, he'd been on the street for 10 years,
14:12so he had 233 minor criminal offences.
14:16But the standout one and the one that he was most well known for is in 2011, during the riots
14:23in
14:23Manchester, he took the opportunity to take a box of well-known doughnuts from a well-known doughnut shop,
14:31which gained him quite a reputation in that community.
14:35I mean, he literally stumbled out of the doughnut shop.
14:39He did.
14:39Into the arms of riot police.
14:42He did, yes.
14:43So his doughnut joy did not last a very long time, but it also lends itself to the sort of
14:48character
14:49that he probably was, and he was probably a lovable rogue.
14:55For his trouble, he got another 18 months in prison.
14:59When he emerged, he gradually made his way south, and he ended up in the Bath and Bristol areas.
15:08And here, he lived rough.
15:11He continued to abuse alcohol, and he also began taking illicit drugs, including spice.
15:19Now, spice was then a new phenomenon.
15:22It is a synthetic cannabinoid.
15:26It was originally designed to mimic the effects of marijuana, but its effects are far more devastating.
15:33Paranoia, heart and chest pains, and sometimes people who take it become immobile, having taken this.
15:45The senior investigating officer now has a name.
15:47We know this is Thomas Downey.
15:50Yes.
15:50Read me from Manchester.
15:51Yes.
15:52What an amazing SIO.
15:54Community itself, and also, as it turns out later on, the family thought that not much attention was going
16:02to be paid to this case, and that the police weren't going to do as thorough as a job as
16:08they normally
16:08would on other murder investigations.
16:11Thomas Downey's murder would be investigated, but maybe not with the full force of the major crime
16:17team behind it, but how wrong they were.
16:20She faces a dilemma at this point, doesn't she?
16:24It's Christmas Day.
16:25Yes.
16:28Had a really difficult decision to make on Christmas Day when we identified the victim of going to see
16:34his family and upsetting their Christmas Day forever more.
16:37It was clearly the right thing to do, because it's not something you want to hide from somebody
16:42any longer than you needed to, and I was really fortunate to speak to the family of the victim
16:47when they came down a few days later to visit us down in the incident room.
16:53The victim's family are really important, and one of the reasons that the cases involving the homeless
16:59community don't often get any media coverage or feature on anything is because the victims aren't
17:06very well thought of. When that victim's family came to see me on the first day, the victim's family
17:13said to me, we didn't think anyone would be interested in the death of a homeless alcoholic,
17:19and it really struck a chord with me, as I said to them, well, not only am I interested in
17:24it,
17:24we're going to absolutely find who's done it and bring them to justice.
17:28And as we were having that conversation, people were being arrested, people who were not
17:33subsequently charged, but people were being arrested. And I think and I hope that that gave
17:39them some confidence that what I said was going to happen was going to happen.
17:48So now we've got a dead body known to be Thomas Downey.
17:54We've got a family who knew and cared about him.
17:57Yes.
17:58We've got a senior investigating officer who's fired up to get at the truth.
18:03What's the missing bit?
18:05So at this stage, you're at the most difficult part of the investigation because you are then
18:13going to have to establish the circumstances in which Tommy ended up underneath those rail arches,
18:21beaten to death. So at that point, you're left with a murder victim and no suspect and no weapon.
18:31So in a case like this, you've got to start to rely on the old adage of somebody knows something
18:40and put in the fact that that is a community. And what do communities do?
18:45They talk to each other and they know what's going on.
18:48And somebody did know something, didn't they?
18:50They did.
18:51Not an entire identity.
18:53No, exactly that.
18:56People knew who he was within the community, but they didn't really know his name. They weren't sure
19:03who he was. But as soon as we got the first name of Daryl, that's where our community policing team
19:09came in. And they were able to say, well, the only person we know is Daryl, who's been in this
19:15area
19:16recently, is Daryl Richards. Then we started looking for CCTV. And once we get an image of him,
19:23then we could start to confirm that.
19:26Daryl Richards was somebody who'd been on the streets for a number of years.
19:30He misused substances, which included alcohol and controlled drugs. He did have a criminal history
19:38in the same way that a number of people do who live on the streets, which usually centered on
19:45property theft, so shoplifting and lower level offending, which is usually in line with stealing
19:52alcohol or stealing food or maybe stealing something to sell in order to source those other things.
19:57So not somebody who was necessarily particularly violent. He did have a violence in his background,
20:04but was not known on a regular basis for someone who was violent.
20:10So it appears that there was some intelligence that he had been responsible for Tommy's murder,
20:17and people around that kind of homeless community start to suspect that he had done that. There's
20:23possibly some previous incidents where he has threatened people, he's used violence and
20:28intimidation in the past. And certainly he would have used that fear and intimidation to exploit those
20:35people. These are people who are, you know, living day to day. They're looking after themselves to survive.
20:41So they would not have wanted to find themselves, even though they wanted to help their friend Tommy,
20:46and to try to solve the murder. At the same time, they need to look after themselves. And had the
20:52police
20:52not been able to secure a conviction, they would have left themselves vulnerable in that situation.
20:59So the relationship between the victim and killer was just that they were two homeless people who
21:03resided in the same area at the same time. And in that particular railway arch, they have both been
21:11staying there. The homeless community, so whilst you say they are homeless, they're actually quite
21:17territorial about where they do sleep, and who they do share that space with. So that's when conflict
21:24can arise. So if somebody is imposing on somebody else's area, then that can lead to upset. I think in
21:31this case, the victim and offender, whilst they were both sharing that same railway arch, there was a
21:38little bit of conflict around who should be there, or how big the fire should be, or what noise was
21:45going on. So it's not dissimilar to being in a home environment. It's just they're on the street.
21:52So Tommy was homeless. He was somebody who was, you know, on the fringes of society. He had very few
21:57connections, very few kind of people looking out for him, if any. And so he's very, very vulnerable.
22:04And he would have seen this, Darrell Richards would have seen this as an opportunity, really,
22:08to commit this crime, and that no one was going to really be looking. No one was going to be
22:13really
22:13miss him. And even if they did find his body, it was unlikely that police were going to extend
22:18great resources into trying to find the murder of, you know, another homeless person who's died. And
22:24such is the state, really, of some people where they find themselves in society, is that they are really
22:31neglected in that situation. And he would have known that, and he would have used that to his advantage.
22:36And that's potentially why Tommy became a victim.
22:44So if we go to your association chart, we've now got Thomas Downey. We've now got Darrell Richards.
22:51Yes. Next problem.
22:53So the next problem is tracking where Darrell Richards is. Given that he also had antecedents,
23:00then there would have been visual images. So we've now got a name, we've now got an image of somebody,
23:06and the local bath area was scoured. The PCSOs once again did a sterling job along with the
23:13major inquiry team, and he was nowhere to be seen. Again, particular problem with the homeless community,
23:21isn't it? They are, as you say, transient. Police did identify a member of the homeless community
23:29called Timmy. And Timmy had said, yeah, he'd witnessed a dispute between Tommy,
23:40Manchester Tommy, who is our victim, and another male. He didn't really know what it was about,
23:46but he had witnessed his dispute, but he did know that the other male was called Darrell.
23:53Our victim, Tommy, was discovered on the 24th of December, and we thought he had died around the
24:0021st of December. And through doing some CCTV work, we then identified the key witness, Timmy,
24:10who told us that Darrell was present. He too was alcohol dependent, and whilst he gave some account,
24:20he was very frightened and didn't want to give the full account. Coupled with, he said he had gone to
24:27sleep in the arch and wasn't really aware of everything that had gone on.
24:33So the grounds for making the suspect, Darrell Richards, our key suspect and the person we
24:39wanted to find, was initially the account of the witness, Timmy, who was present there at the same
24:45time. He told the police that he remembered the date on which he had seen Tommy and Darrell Richards
24:54together. He said, it was December the 21st. And he knew that, he said, because on that day,
25:01he'd gone to a local petrol station and stolen snacks from it.
25:08Timmy talked about going into the petrol station, buying some stuff, stealing some stuff,
25:14and CCTV corroborated that. Timmy had gone to the petrol station on that day.
25:22Timmy. But that date didn't match the forensic evidence. The post-mortem had shown that Tommy
25:32had been killed several days before the 21st. So Timmy couldn't be right, could he? The police
25:42decided to go back through all the evidence they'd taken from underneath the arches.
25:49Timmy. When we were revisiting the exhibits, and in this archway, there was a lot of items that we
25:55recovered. There was the railway ticket that related to the 16th of December, and we hadn't
26:02been able to get a last sighting of Tommy alive, so we went back to that as our start point,
26:08managed to
26:09get him coming back to Bath from Bristol. On the 17th of December, the same sequence of events going to
26:16the
26:16petrol station, the petrol station stealing things that Timmy had relayed to us also took place. So in fact,
26:22the actual date of the murder was the 17th of December.
26:26Timmy. It reinforced the belief that Daryl Richards had killed Tommy Downie.
26:37But there was a major hole in the police's case, and one which could cause problems should the case
26:45ever come to trial. That problem? There was no sign of the murder weapon.
27:05This is what we call a category B murder. Category B is where the victim and the assailant weren't
27:12connected with each other. Although they knew each other within the community, they were effectively,
27:16they weren't in a relationship or household. We didn't know who the murderer was to start with,
27:21and we just had a really, really small team.
27:27We were not sure at the beginning what the murder weapon was because there was nothing present within
27:32the archway. There was one item that I thought was a great fit, and when I showed the pathologist,
27:39he's like, no, that's not it, it's not good enough. So having a look at the area, there was a
27:45river
27:45really nearby, and I asked the divers to go into the river. This was about 10 days after, I suppose,
27:54so maybe even 15 days after the actual murder itself.
28:01Any murder investigation, how crucial is it for a successful prosecution to find the murder weapon?
28:09It's critical to establish the item that caused those injuries, particularly from a point of view of
28:17putting it in the hands of your suspect. So you're looking for those solid forensic links that are going
28:25to really firm up your investigation. To bring this case to court, she knows she's got to find the murder
28:33weapon. Yes. This is December. Yes. This is Bath. Yes. This is the River Avon. Yes.
28:44It's very fast and very deep. And very cold. Would you have liked to have been the person speaking
28:50to the underwater team, asking them to go in the water in December to look for an item that might
28:57be
28:58a metal bar? Bearing in mind it's been thrown from a bridge where probably all sorts of things, be it
29:06shopping trolleys and various items on drunk nights out, the conditions must have been horrendous for that
29:13underwater search team. There's an aspect to this that if I can't see it, then nobody else can and nobody
29:24would ever find it. So disposing of the weapon into a water body is very commonly encountered in crime
29:30investigation because it's one way to try and destroy and hide the evidence. Police divers are very
29:41specialist individuals who are trained to recover material from water bodies. And in this particular case,
29:50they would have methodically examined where they believe the murder weapon may have been discarded. Once they
29:59find it, there's a very clear set of processes that need to be followed in order to ensure that the
30:06material,
30:07the item is recovered in a safe and secure way. And that once it is removed from that water,
30:14that any material that is associated with it is protected. The river in winter is high, fast flowing,
30:24and not an area that you would usually search unless you had a really, really good strong reason at that
30:30time of year. The divers brought out of the river four items. Three of them were covered in green slime
30:37and not quite barnacles because it's not the sea, but that sort of thing, layers of rubbish on them.
30:43The fourth article was a long barbell that you have the dumbbells screwed on either end,
30:48and that was relatively new. When we took that out, I was talking to our forensic coordinator,
30:57and I said to him, I don't know, I'm not sure that's going to be the weapon. And he said,
31:00well,
31:01I think it looks quite good. We'll send it off to get DNA. We know that the weapon would have
31:09been
31:10affiliated with blood staining from the victim. So that is a very rich source of DNA, which can persist
31:19in very inhospitable conditions, including submersion in water. Our DNA techniques are so sensitive that
31:28they would still have a very good chance of recovering viable DNA from that type of weapon,
31:35even if it has been submerged for some time. And anyone who handles that implement will also be
31:42leaving their skin cells and DNA, which, again, can get caught in the nooks and crannies of a weapon.
31:51If there's a textured surface, it might persist there longer than, let's say, if it was a smooth surface.
31:57And we know very well that we can recover usable and viable DNA from items that have been submerged for
32:05decades.
32:07Having submitted our barbell, which we now believe to be our murder weapon,
32:11the forensic scientists managed to recover from one end of it, a partial profile, DNA profile of the victim.
32:19And from the other end, a partial profile, DNA profile of the offender, Darrell Richards.
32:25And that was the first that any item that had been in water that long had had any form of
32:30DNA
32:30recovered for it in a murder trial. So along with our witness testimony,
32:38our albeit partial profiles of DNA from the murder weapon, we then managed to identify some CCTV.
32:46And whilst it was from a distance, it showed the splash in the river when he was throwing the
32:51weapon into the river. And we could marry that up with some other CCTV, which showed him crossing the
32:57road almost moments before. We just didn't quite have him in sight throwing it over. But the amazing work
33:03that the team did around that helped to bring it all together. It's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle when
33:07you investigate murder.
33:10It was enough. The problem was finding him because Darrell Richards was not in Bath and was nowhere to be
33:19found.
33:20Where and when, from what you laid out, did the police first lay hands on Darrell Richards?
33:30So what they had to do once they realised he wasn't in the Bath area and the likelihood is he
33:36would have
33:36gotten is to start to widen the search for him. Theoretically, he could have been anywhere in the UK.
33:43He could have gravitated to a homeless community in a seaside town. They widened the search. Starting
33:50in the local area, as you do, you tend to start small and then work out. And once again, through
33:56excellent communications saying, putting wanted people out and he would have been down as wanted,
34:02a local beat officer from Bristol had seen him and he was in the Bristol area.
34:11Daryl was arrested having been found in an underpass in Bristol, interestingly by another beat officer.
34:18So it just goes to show the importance of the community beat teams. And he was brought into
34:22custody but very mild-mannered, didn't say anything, didn't give protestations about anything.
34:30Daryl was somebody who was used to being in police custody and he behaved in a very mild way.
34:38He gave a prepared statement and basically said that he wasn't responsible.
34:44He couldn't remember being there with Tommy and it was not to do with him.
34:51Were the police ever able to ascertain
34:57that middle word on our trinity of police investigative must-haves?
35:03We've got the means, we've got the opportunity, what's the motive?
35:08Yeah, they've never established a firm motive as to the reasons as to why
35:17Daryl Richards felt it was necessary to beat Tommy to death.
35:22When I presented this case, which had been challenging from the beginning to our barrister,
35:28who was not that enamoured at prosecuting, I portrayed it as a skeleton.
35:34And the way I described it was that also was the victim and he was at the heart of it.
35:40The right arm was our key witness and the left arm was effectively the perpetrator.
35:47The legs that it was built on were the CCTV evidence, the DNA evidence and just tying everything together.
35:56And then the bit on the top, the head, was the understanding of how it all linked in and how
36:02we could then present it to a court.
36:06Richards maintained his innocence up until the last moment, but shortly before the case was due to go to trial.
36:15He told police he would plead guilty to manslaughter, not murder, but the lesser charge of manslaughter.
36:24In essence, he said he lacked what lawyers call the mens rea, the intention to commit the crime.
36:33It had happened in the course of an argument.
36:40This crime was not a premeditated murder. This is something that arose out of a low-level argument
36:48whilst they were in that railway arch over the fire and who was going to do what.
36:55I think, and of course we'll never know because nobody's ever told us exactly what happened,
37:01but I think that Tommy was probably goading Daryl a little bit.
37:07And then it was backwards and forwards and it's just escalated and very quickly to extreme violence.
37:20The law is clear. You don't have to meticulously plan out a killing to make it murder.
37:28Even something that happens in a short space of time in the heat of an argument can be classified as
37:37murder.
37:38And so police and prosecutors refused to accept Daryl Richards' lesser plea of manslaughter.
38:06We didn't accept his plea to manslaughter and we had a full trial.
38:13In the courtroom, Richards behaved in the very same way that he had in custody.
38:17He's still portrayed as somebody who was quite mild-mannered.
38:22He didn't speak at all during the course of his trial.
38:25He didn't give evidence and was just present in the dock looking on.
38:31The victim's family did come to court and they had their victim impact statements that were read out.
38:38And I go back to that point of people think because somebody's homeless they're not worthy
38:42or they don't have a life or they don't matter to anybody.
38:45But their victim impact statement talked about how the fact that Tommy was a father,
38:50he was a brother, he had been a husband, he was a son, and he was somebody who clearly really
38:56did matter to them.
38:58In December 2015, one year after he beat Manchester Tommy Downey to death with a metal bar,
39:08Daryl Richards was convicted of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment and given a minimum tariff of almost 11 years.
39:19This case hit the media locally because it always will.
39:25If ever there's a murder locally, then the local news are interested as they should be.
39:30It didn't go any wider than that.
39:32And when Daryl Richards was convicted, again, it was very local reporting in the media.
39:39I think people underestimate a case like this, the impact it has on the community,
39:45so the homeless community. The amount of work that still goes into investigating a homicide like that is significant.
39:52And it is important that we learn from it and help to prevent it happening in the future.
39:59So whether he could be rehabilitated is really quite a difficult question to answer.
40:03There is obviously a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and he obviously found himself on the streets.
40:09So it's not to mitigate what he did in any way. And we must remember that he committed a very,
40:14very violent crime and murdered a very vulnerable, innocent person.
40:19So that goes at odds with whether we could safely release this person into the community again.
40:26I say sometimes in situations where there is a precipitating mental health problem or substance abuse, then there are some
40:33avenues there to address it.
40:35But certainly whether, you know, it's possible to then, you know, where would he go, what would he do if
40:42he has any ability to find himself and build himself a new life, then potentially he does have a chance.
40:48But the fact that he was already on the streets and he was already struggling initially would go against him
40:55in some respects.
41:01When you look at the portrait, the pen portrait, if you like, that you've been able to put together of
41:09Daryl Richards, this doesn't strike me, or I suspect anyone else, as the picture of a calculating murderer, someone who
41:21set out to carry out the perfect murder.
41:25No.
41:26Was it the case that he tried to make it a perfect murder after the event?
41:34Yes. I mean, obviously, we don't know where that murder weapon came from, if it was just lying around at
41:42the arches.
41:42And it was this argument that escalated and exploded into extreme violence after a relatively minor incident.
41:51But through covering the body, disposing of the murder weapon, and then leaving the local area, he thought he was
41:59going to get away with it, because why would somebody care about a homeless person that's been found under the
42:05arches?
42:06And if that person had been subjected to an assault, was the full force of a major crime investigation team
42:13going to work as hard as they normally do?
42:16So, and he's transient, so a bit of a case of catch me if you can.
42:26I think Richards believed he had committed the perfect murder.
42:30I think he thought he'd committed the perfect murder because the time between the murder and when he was arrested.
42:38I think he thought that perfect murder was definitely because he'd got rid of the murder weapon in the river
42:43and didn't think we'd get it out, let alone get any forensic evidence off it.
42:49I think he thought he'd got away with it, and it was the perfect murder in his view, because it
42:55involved another homeless person, homeless alcoholic, and the police wouldn't bother investigating it as well as another type of murder.
43:05He was wrong on all counts, but he was also almost right.
43:15In my own career, this was really challenging, because the time of year, so Christmas, we had a really small
43:24team investigating it.
43:26There's something like 14 of us in total. If you think the average murder will attract 50 detectives, maybe 100,
43:33depending on the scale of it.
43:35And the challenges around recovering items, that barbell from the river, the dive team finding it, and the forensic scientists
43:45getting that DNA on it, you know, that was really, really important, as well as being able to match the
43:51actual weapon to the injuries that Tommy had suffered.
43:55It was layering it up. I think we learned a lot about how to engage with that community, and we
44:02had almost a year to the day a similar incident where a homeless person was killed by another one, and
44:09the response was much more positive and on the front foot, and our homeless community were much more engaging.
44:18So that's why it endured, because we learned a lot from the way we investigated it. We learned how important
44:24it was to engage with the community, and we learned when the next one came along, which sadly it did,
44:30we were good at investigating it.
44:33One of the things that struck me was that this case was unusual for the rigour and the perseverance shown
44:43by those police officers.
44:45Yes, yeah, and also the excellent relationship that the beat officers had, and the officers from the major crime investigation
44:56team.
44:56That community held the key to this murder, literally held the key to it in their hands, and without their
45:03cooperation and a mutual respect to one of their community, and also to the relationship that the police officers had,
45:12that was what got this case over the line.
45:15In another place, in another time, with another homeless community, and a police force not quite as dedicated, that could
45:26have been a perfect murder, couldn't it?
45:28It could have been. If he'd have absconded to Scotland, you know, or another area, it might have been months
45:36and months and months he would have had to have been potentially arrested for something before he'd been caught for
45:43this particular crime.
45:43So, really excellent, excellent police work.
45:48An almost perfect murder.
45:50And an almost perfect murder.
45:54The murderers themselves underestimate the police.
45:59They underestimate the desire of the community to actually engage when there's a homicide.
46:05So people who perhaps don't usually engage with the police generally always do when there's a murder.
46:10And I think they underestimate the impact that it has on the victim's family.
46:17And that victim's family will always be a driver to say, we want justice and we want an outcome.
46:23And we'll be pushing behind any investigation.
46:56And we'll be pushing behind any other crises.
46:56We'll be facing the same thing as the crime of the foes of the police.
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