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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. For over 20 years, I've worked alongside detectives on major murder
00:33investigations.
00:34Together, in this new series, we are going to discover the fatal mistakes which prevented the perfect murder from ever
00:43being committed.
00:55Once an investigation ends, we're looking at the first death of a police police officer and police police chief of
01:05police police.
01:18And the first death of a police police officer, we're looking at the police police force, the police officer at
01:24the police police police officer and police officers.
01:25or whether he had it knocked into him in the notoriously violent atmosphere of Britain's borstalls.
01:34As a young offenders institute, as we would now term them, is unclear.
01:38What is clear is he began offending in an appallingly violent way.
01:48William Thomas Mottashed is without doubt one of the most violent, vicious and dangerous criminals in the history of the
01:59United Kingdom.
02:01William Thomas Mottashed was a largely unremarkable individual who committed extremely violent sexual offences against women,
02:12particularly vulnerable women and those who were older.
02:14And he was someone who would not have stopped offending had he not have been caught.
02:22He was described, rightly described, by one police officer as pure evil, sadistic and brutal.
02:31Him choosing these victims and inflicting incredible levels of violence on them, it makes him an absolutely despicable human being.
02:44Sam, as you put together this chart, the timeline and then the association chart,
02:51what's the most important thing that stuck out to you straight away?
02:56So this is a particularly disturbing case and I've dealt with terrible sexual offences in my career
03:04and this most certainly stands out as one of the worst cases that I've ever seen.
03:12Let's start with what we know about William Mottashed.
03:17Where was he operating and when did he start?
03:20So he was operating in the north of England and it was over a significant period of time.
03:29William Thomas Mottashed was born in Manchester in 1946.
03:35He was a criminal from a very young age.
03:38His first recorded criminal conviction was when he was 12 years old.
03:44By the age of 12 years, he appears before the courts for offences of dishonesty, stealing.
03:51And over the next two to three years, that behaviour, that pattern of dishonesty repeats itself.
04:01Moved on to start from last days to, as that was then now theft, to burglaries.
04:09By the age of 14, he appears before the court and he is sentenced to a detention order, a juvenile
04:16detention order,
04:17which today we would call an approved school or certainly many years ago it was known as Borstel.
04:24And so his criminal history, if you like, really begins in earnest.
04:34Borstel's, or approved schools of that era, conditions in them?
04:40Very, very rough indeed.
04:42So he would have been mixing with children who also displayed delinquent behaviours.
04:48It could be anything from ABHs, GBHs, fire setting, which you quite often see with young offenders.
04:56Not necessarily a lot of love and care and support and guidance is being given.
05:00It's probably more of the punishment in order to try and knock it, knock that sort of behaviour out of
05:06them.
05:07So the stick, not the carrot?
05:08Most definitely the stick, not the carrot.
05:10It would have been, my guess is it would have been very harsh conditions indeed.
05:16In 1962, he was released and he found work as a casual labourer.
05:21It was the start of an adult life in which he would drift between dead-end jobs with periods of
05:29unemployment
05:30and rarely rising above the poverty level.
05:36By the age of 23, Motter's head had committed his first violent offence.
05:43And it's the violence that is really important when we talk about him.
05:48He attacked a woman who was known to him, a friend.
05:51They had some sort of disagreement.
05:53And for no reason whatsoever, he punched her straight in the mouth, causing an injury to her lips and her
06:00jaw.
06:02And for that, he appeared before the courts on a charge of actual bodily harm.
06:09But when it comes to court, it appears that that wasn't taken seriously.
06:14No.
06:15And once again, something that will become a pattern in this particular case
06:20is the level of punishment that Motter's head receives for really very serious offending.
06:27So lenient was the punishment for this.
06:30He pleaded guilty to ABH and was given a £45 fine.
06:35Nothing more?
06:36Nothing more.
06:36No incarceration, just a fine.
06:43The criminal minds, the funny thing, they don't see anything wrong in what they're doing at the time
06:48and they don't really see why other people should bother.
06:51And a lot of them think the police, because of a lot of bad press that they get every now
06:56and then,
06:56are not really bothered and then, are not efficient enough to catch them.
07:02So they'll keep on offending, as in the case with Motter's head.
07:08How quickly does he move on from that to what would become his motif of offending?
07:16It's a very, very quick escalation.
07:21And by 1969, July through to November 1970, he's worked out that elderly women are a lot easier to attack
07:30and overpower in order to satiate his sexual desires.
07:35There's a calculation going on here.
07:37There's a calculation with all of this offending.
07:40There's a very clear pattern of planning.
07:43So he's a predator.
07:48We see his offending behaviour really escalate as he matures.
07:54So he begins with quite innocuous offences, such as burglary.
07:58But then the home invasions become about attacking women who are within that space.
08:03So the fact that he starts offending at a very young age, the fact that those offences become much more
08:12violent as he escalates,
08:14he enjoyed it.
08:16He wanted to feel power over his victims.
08:19He planned his crimes quite meticulously in terms of geographical location and victim choice.
08:27Between July 1969 and November 1970, he forced his way into a succession of homes.
08:36Sometimes he pretended to be a police officer and attacked the women living there.
08:48He's arrested for a total of 12 offences and he's sentenced to a substantial sentence of 10 years imprisonment
08:56for offences of assault, wounding, actual bodily harm and wounding with intent and burglary.
09:05Importantly, all the offences had an element of a sexual motive.
09:11And that's what's really important when we look at Motter's Head as an offender, as a dangerous criminal.
09:18At the time, there were no treatment programmes for sex offenders in British prisons.
09:25Such official policy as existed, and it was minimal, was predicated on the belief that somehow you could punish repeat
09:35sex offenders
09:36out of their pattern of behaviour, and that they would emerge reformed and would never attack people again.
09:44It is nonsense.
09:47And Motter's Head proved this.
09:54By the age of 32, he is sentenced to life imprisonment, the longest term possible, for four offences of burglary,
10:03during which he entered the premises of elderly women and tried to attack them.
10:08And on one occasion, he uses a garden spade to enter the house, and threatens the elderly victim with the
10:16implement.
10:17For that offence, as I say, he's sent away for life, but he appeals against his sentence,
10:24and his sentence is reduced to eight years' imprisonment by the courts.
10:30It would be a fair question to ask, was that an error of judgement, a grave error of judgement, by
10:35the judiciary,
10:36when you think of what was to follow in respect of his offending?
10:43That judicial leniency would, in time, have fatal consequences.
11:06William Motter's Head was given a life sentence, but he appealed against the severity of that sentence,
11:14and a judge reduced it to eight years.
11:19Within five, Motter's Head would be out on parole.
11:26It's such a significant reduction.
11:28I was shocked when I read that.
11:30Do you think that's a tipping point in the case, or should have been?
11:33Yes, yeah, it should have been.
11:34He isn't being treated as a sexual offender.
11:38It feels like he's being treated more as a burglar, a violent burglar.
11:43From your knowledge and your experience, how unusual is it for police forces not to take sexual crimes against women
11:52seriously in that period?
11:54Yeah, I think very sadly, back then, it was fairly common.
11:59On the day of release, he breaks into a young lady's home this time, and assaults her.
12:05Police are made aware, and they arrive in time for him to be found at the scene, and he assaults
12:11a police officer.
12:13Is this just somebody with anger control issues, or is this some deeper pathology?
12:18I think it is very much the case it is a deeper pathology, that those five years spent in prison
12:23has been pent up to the point where the minute he comes out, there has to be a release.
12:29And the fact that the police officer arrives was not going to stand in his way.
12:33He was willing to assault a police officer in order to try and evade capture.
12:39He's just come out from life down to eight years, served five.
12:44He commits a serious offence on the day he's released.
12:49Yes.
12:50What does he get?
12:51So, he is indicted for two counts of burglary and two counts of assault, obviously one for the female and
12:59one for the police officer, and also resisting arrest.
13:02And he's given an 18-month suspended sentence for that.
13:09He was given a suspended sentence.
13:12Now, this is for aggravated burglary.
13:14And given his previous convictions, it's a fair question to ask by the public is, was that a far too
13:21lenient sentence?
13:23Because in essence, he walked free from the court.
13:26And again, within a short time, he's again committing burglaries at the homes of elderly people.
13:34His living standards are very poor, and he's described as an unkempt individual.
13:40He frequented pubs, and any sort of interaction with young women was rebuffed pretty quickly,
13:46and this undoubtedly formed part of the core of his offending and his criminal violent behaviour that was to follow.
13:56He did have a living girlfriend, but we see that one of the most violent assaults actually took place following
14:04an argument with his living partner.
14:06And it's almost as if that was a reaction against the frustrations that he felt with his partner.
14:14What do you think was driving, Marta said?
14:18It was most certainly his need to offend sexually.
14:23Need or choice?
14:25Need.
14:25Mm!
14:27His defence is that he has impulses that he cannot control, which is a ridiculous statement to make.
14:34Obviously, you can control it, but the drive, it's so high in this case of offending that I, I, you
14:42very rarely see offending of this nature.
14:45These days, alarm bells would ring very, very early on because you'd get to have the statements from people that
14:52would give you behaviours that you'd be looking for
14:54to know that you've potentially got a serial offender on your hand.
14:58And in those serial offences, looking forward to December, Christmas Day, 1983, there appears to be what I would recognise
15:11as a trigger.
15:12For a few of these offences, you can most certainly see the trigger of alcohol combined with rowing with either
15:21a partner
15:21or that he approaches a younger person and is rebuffed by them, a younger female and is rebuffed.
15:28And when he's rebuffed?
15:30And when he is rebuffed, angry, he reacts angrily.
15:34Not necessarily to the women who rebuff him, but he certainly then goes out and that anger is taken out.
15:44It's very likely that he chose to target elderly and vulnerable women because they were an easy target.
15:50They would be easy to overpower.
15:53They would be someone who he would feel that he had extreme dominance over.
15:58They were usually people who lived alone.
16:01Even though often that these were women who lived in supported housing, they were very easy targets as victims.
16:11They also lived close to his house.
16:13So he was able to make an escape in reasonable time without being apprehended many times.
16:26On Christmas morning, 1983, William Mottased had a row with his live-in girlfriend.
16:34He resorted to his usual pattern.
16:37He stormed out of the house and went out looking for a victim on whom he could take out his
16:44anger.
16:49Florence Kelsall was 75.
16:54She'd never married, and by 1982 she was living in sheltered accommodation in Bagley Moor Sale.
17:02She was, by and large, healthy and happy, and she was very proud of her little bungalow.
17:08And an on-site warden and a security alarm made her feel safe.
17:16William Mottased hammered on the door.
17:21She opened the door, and Mottased pounced.
17:26He pushed her back into the hallway, beat her brutally,
17:33stripped her, and raped her.
17:40Causing unbelievable injuries, bruising, swelling, fractures to her jaw, to her face, and sexually assaults her.
17:50So much so that she was put into hospital for quite a considerable time,
17:56and she never returned to her home, and in fact was unable to live an independent life after that.
18:05Florence passed out during this ordeal.
18:09Well, when she came to, she found herself completely naked,
18:15covered in bruises.
18:17Her face, her cheek, her eye socket,
18:21had been broken.
18:25And whoever had done this
18:27had left deep bite marks
18:30in her breast.
18:39The biting, I think, is very significant.
18:42It's very violent in this way.
18:45And these are women who are in their 70s and 80s,
18:48and he is a fully grown adult male in his late 30s.
18:52That level of trauma that was inflicted on his victims
18:55makes him an incredibly dangerous individual.
18:59He uses violence as an overkill.
19:02He doesn't need in this situation
19:04to be quite as violent and aggressive.
19:07He enjoys that, he enjoys that power.
19:10But he only ever seems to really do this
19:12with people who are very vulnerable
19:14and susceptible to his advances.
19:18People like him
19:19belong to an almost entirely different category of offenders.
19:23Because of the victims he has chosen,
19:25subjects them to an incredibly violent
19:29and often sustained sexual assault.
19:32That puts him
19:33in an extremely dangerous category of sexual offenders.
19:37He is someone who absolutely
19:39would not have stopped
19:40had he not have been caught.
19:45So, Watershead certainly has a high level
19:47of psychopathy in his kind of MO
19:50and the way that he's developed over time.
19:52He's shown no remorse,
19:54he's shown no regards for society's rules.
19:57He has a long history of offending
19:59and certainly his crimes are starting to escalate
20:02and he's getting enjoyment out of what he's doing
20:05and they're becoming more frequent
20:07and more violent as time is going on.
20:11Greater Manchester Police
20:13went over the house,
20:15went over all the evidence with a tooth comb.
20:27In the 1980s we did not have the National DNA Database which is effectively a library of DNA profiles from
20:38individuals and unsolved crimes.
20:41In the 1980s we did not have the National DNA Database which is effectively a library of DNA profiles from
20:48individuals and unsolved crimes.
20:48To try and identify the potential source of an unknown DNA profile and in this case of course we're dealing
20:58with body fluids, semen, saliva and in a contemporary sense those would be subjected to DNA testing.
21:07The DNA profile would then be loaded permanently onto the National DNA database and it would be regularly checked against
21:18anyone who might have caused to be on that database.
21:23In this case, in the 1980s, that tool wasn't available so although they may have known that the source of
21:33the body fluids is likely to be the same individual without something to compare it to,
21:40then they were essentially just results that sat on a shelf waiting for an individual to be brought to their
21:50attention.
21:53He leaves Kelsol in a pretty dreadful state.
21:58He does. Her life has changed forever at that point.
22:02She is hospitalised with injuries that she receives at Mottishead's hands and from that point on when she leaves hospital
22:12she has to go into full-time care.
22:14I found it very, very hard to read the statements and the information that we managed to obtain on this
22:21case.
22:21It is really horrific offending.
22:25But Mottishead isn't caught for this.
22:28He's not caught and, you know, this plays into him planning and offending an area that he knows and that
22:35he's well versed with.
22:37So, for this particular case, he did literally walk away.
22:43Having got away with the attack on Florence Kelsol, I'm of the opinion that he thought he would never get
22:51caught.
22:52He thought it was untouchable that he could just stay in the same area and keep being persistent in trying
22:57to attack him.
22:58And nobody would really want to find him.
23:00That nobody would care about the age of the victims.
23:04I think he actually believed that they probably wouldn't survive to give evidence against him in the future.
23:13William Mottishead had most likely got away with it.
23:17He was in the wind and feeling safe.
23:35This is December 1983.
23:38You've got a vicious assault and a rape on an elderly woman.
23:43Hmm.
23:44An area where a man who has, from what you pointed out here, a litany of offences for exactly that.
23:54What this case plays into quite nicely is to show the benefit of analysis.
24:00So, analysis isn't just used for major crimes and big murders or big organised crime groups.
24:09Analysis is used on everyday offences.
24:13So, offences such as burglary and car crime.
24:16And one of the jobs of an analyst is to look for patterns.
24:21So, they'll look for patterns of behaviour.
24:23We know whether that is vehicle offences or burglaries.
24:28And should this have happened today, I believe that this series of offending would have been picked up by an
24:35analyst a lot earlier than it was in 1980s.
24:45For almost nine months, Mottishead remained at large.
24:50The police, despite numerous investigations, failed to trace the culprit.
24:55And he was allowed to carry on with his offending.
25:00He is someone who wants power and dominance and control, but doesn't have that in his normal life.
25:07He maintained some types of normal relationships, but often worked dead-end jobs.
25:14He was someone who didn't really do anything that was very remarkable in his life.
25:19And having these periods where he exerted such dominance and power and control over these victims
25:25would have given him a real taste of what it could have been like if he was someone more than
25:32he ended up being.
25:33Someone who he wanted to be.
25:39On the night of Friday, September 28th 1984, William Mottishead went out drinking.
25:46He went to a local pub and sat there, sinking beers alone.
25:51At some point before the night ended, he spotted a pair of sisters.
25:55They were out for a night of pleasure in the local pub.
26:01Mottishead approached them and tried to pick them up.
26:06They weren't interested.
26:08And they rebuffed him.
26:10It infuriated, Mottishead.
26:12And whenever he fell into that kind of rage, he did what he always did.
26:20He went looking for a victim.
26:25He attempted to enter three separate homes occupied by elderly ladies living alone.
26:32The same modus operandi or method, if you like, that would continue throughout his criminal history.
26:39But on each occasion, although he tried to fool, if you like, the occupants that he was a police officer,
26:46he was prevented from entering and the police were called and he made off into the darkness.
26:54With all the calls coming in to the police station about a man trying to break into the bungalows, the
27:03uniformed department deployed as many officers as were available to search the area and visit the three other attempted burglars
27:12and interviewed the people.
27:18Mottishead didn't go far.
27:21He traced his steps to Bagley Lane.
27:26The home of Lily Morris.
27:29The former home of Florence Kelsall.
27:36Lily Morris had been married.
27:38She had four children.
27:41Her husband died in 1973.
27:44And then, due to having a hip operation, she felt herself a burden on her two sons who she was
27:52living with and moved into sheltered accommodation in the Sailmore area.
27:59Mottishead startled Lily, towering over her.
28:03You can only imagine how that must have felt, the terror of an elderly lady seeing a stranger standing in
28:11the dark, looking over her.
28:15Mottishead.
28:17He was assaulting her, getting on top of her, telling her he wanted to have sex with her.
28:23But the unusual thing was that he kept saying he was going to give her the same as he gave
28:28Florence Kelsall, which is a woman that was assaulted the same way in that bungalow the year before.
28:39Mottishead knew that premises, that house, and the inside of us, because he had been there before.
28:44He mercilessly beat Lily about the head and face, kicking and punching her, fracturing her jaw, fracturing her cheekbones, fracturing
28:55her arm, and leaving her bleeding and distraught on the floor of the bedroom.
29:02Thankfully, she was able at some point to grab the alarm cord that was hanging in near her bed.
29:10While one of the policemen was at a house that had been attempted burglars, another call came in for an
29:18assault, and it was the assault on Lily Morris.
29:24When the police got there, the mobile warden was in attendance.
29:28When the warden attended the first time to the alarm call, Mottishead slammed the door in his face and escaped
29:35through the back window at his point of entry.
29:39Well, it was clear from the facial injuries on Lily, she was naked on the bed, that she'd been both
29:47sexually assaulted and violently assaulted.
29:49She had extensive bruises into her head and her body, and she had bank marks on her breast.
29:58It was evident from the scene, and from her injuries, that whoever it was was a determined, violent man.
30:05And then taking into account that there had been a series of attempted burglars for over an hour and a
30:11half in the area,
30:13he'd obviously been determined to what he was going to do, because he knew he'd been seen.
30:18He knew people were going to call the police, but he still persisted in what he wanted to do.
30:24Pretty much anyone who considers committing a crime obviously knows that there are people there who are going to be
30:30either watching them, trying to catch them.
30:32And to some extent, there is a certain level of arrogance and belief in yourself that you are able to
30:39pull this crime off,
30:40whether it's a burglary or fraud or a murder or whatever it could be.
30:45So certainly in these situations, we find that people at odds with the police, and even when they are being
30:51investigated and showing the evidence against them,
30:53they're still unwilling to admit that they've been caught, because they have this self-belief, this arrogance that they have
30:59got away with these things,
31:00probably on previous occasions, and that they're going to do it again.
31:06Two night detectives were on the way to the scene when they saw Motta's head walking down the road.
31:14He was completely wet through, though it was only lightly raining at the time, so he'd obviously been about for
31:20a while.
31:21And they noticed that he had what appears to be bloodstaining on his forehead and a cut to his hand.
31:28His explanation was that it fell over.
31:32They arrested him on suspicion and took him to Alteringham Police Station,
31:37where he was detained, awaiting examination by a police surgeon.
31:45He showed no signs of remorse at all during the interview, initially denying it was him.
31:55One of the things that struck me, reading the case files, was Motta's head's reaction in that first interview.
32:06At this point, Lily Morris is still alive.
32:10He is.
32:10What is Motta's head's attitude, and what does he say?
32:15He fabricates an entire story about having an argument with one of his male friends in a pub,
32:23and he decides that he's going to go and stay with his parents for the evening.
32:28So he starts to give this whole account of that he didn't have enough money to get the bus,
32:35so he starts to walk, and that he then thinks that there's a house that he could maybe sleep in.
32:40So he finds a screwdriver.
32:42You know, the fabrication of this story is immense,
32:47until police start to provide evidence to suggest that they know that that's not the case,
32:52and here's what's happened.
32:53At which point, Motta's head then reverts to the,
32:58I'm so ashamed of what I've done.
33:00Yes, I did break into that elderly lady's house and assault her.
33:04He doesn't say that he rapes her.
33:07I'm so ashamed, you know, I can't control my sexual urges.
33:14When he was arrested, he actually stated to police that he couldn't control his sexual urges,
33:19but the level of planning that we see in these crimes really suggests otherwise.
33:23He was quite meticulous around the victim choice.
33:28He was meticulous around the geographical location of his victims,
33:33and although he wasn't a particularly intelligent individual,
33:37the planning that went into these crimes demonstrate that it wasn't a urge that he wasn't able to control.
33:45It was something which he really, really thought about.
33:52Eventually, he admitted it, but he didn't want to talk about details.
33:56He always said is, I'm ashamed, I don't want to talk about that.
34:00And then he kept saying, is she dead?
34:02And then he mentioned the previous assault on Florence Kelso.
34:08And he mentioned her by name.
34:12It was in the same house, the same MO.
34:15The injuries were a mirror of each other.
34:18And all throughout, he wouldn't openly admit what he was doing, but he wouldn't deny it.
34:25All he would say is, she's telling the truth.
34:30As one would expect, for the horrendous attacks on the women,
34:36he was charged with, first of all, rape, indecent assault, aggravated burglary, etc.
34:45All he said, I'm ashamed, but there wasn't any remorse or sorrow.
34:49He was more worried that she would die,
34:51which if he hadn't have been disturbed during the assault,
34:56I think would have been the likely outcome,
35:00because within a month of the assault and the injuries that it inflicted on her,
35:06that the medical people were unable to repair, she died.
35:15But even then, Moteshed could have got away with him.
35:19Lily Morris had a heart condition,
35:21and this could have resulted in Moteshed getting away with her murder,
35:25because in court, his lawyers would have claimed she died from a pre-existing condition.
35:34But thankfully, both pathologists, both the defence pathologists and the prosecution pathologists,
35:42agreed that she died from the brutal injuries inflicted upon her by Moteshed.
36:04Lily Morris died from her injuries, injuries that Moteshed had inflicted.
36:11He was re-interviewed by the police, but this time not on a charge.
36:18..of assault or GBH, but for suspected murder.
36:26Lily has managed to give a false statement.
36:29There's a heartbreaking account, actually, by her daughter,
36:32who sees her in hospital, and Lily essentially knows that she's dying.
36:37It's heartbreaking to read it.
36:39Lily's statement is really detailed in terms of the language
36:43and the behaviours that Moteshed uses, and it's absolutely to her credit
36:48that she was willing and able to make that statement.
36:52But she does actually then die from the injuries that are inflicted on her,
36:58and the information is delivered, so Moteshed had been remanded by that point,
37:03and the police officers visit him imprisoned to deliver the news.
37:07Yeah, this is a murder case now. Yes, yes.
37:13We interviewed him in prison and told him he was going to be charged with murder.
37:17His attitude changed.
37:18It wasn't him anymore that had done it.
37:21He'd broken the house to steal.
37:23The person who came, which was the warden,
37:28he said he did it after I broke up, got out of the house again
37:31and slammed the door in his face.
37:34They had ample evidence.
37:36We actually completed, like, a timeline of everything he'd done
37:41so that they could build up a case where he was determined
37:46to break into a house for an old lady and attack them.
37:51Everything was the same systematically for the assaults on both women,
37:55and they built the pattern of it.
37:59I'd obtained a full witness statement from Lily,
38:03which is unusual that you've got a statement from her deceased,
38:08which detailed the attack on her all the time,
38:13and that we tried to get admitted in evidence,
38:18but then we couldn't.
38:21Unlike today, in 1984, you couldn't include a statement from a dead person in a trial
38:27without specific consent from the judge.
38:32And at the trial, he denied it was him throughout.
38:36When asked why he'd signed a statement and wrote the endorsement at the bottom himself,
38:43that it was his statement and a true account,
38:46he said it's due to the police assaulting him in the cells that he made the confession,
38:53which the jury didn't accept.
38:59In July 1984, at Manchester Crown Court, after a four-day trial,
39:06Mottershead was convicted of murder.
39:12The judge, when he sentenced Mottershead,
39:17he immediately gave him a life sentence with a minimum of 30 years,
39:23but he actually marked the file that he should never be released again,
39:28because he saw him as a public danger,
39:30and he openly said that you will be a danger to the public,
39:35and especially elderly women, throughout your life.
39:41Although it's just a judge's comment,
39:43we can only hope that he, William Mottershead,
39:46in fact, will spend the rest of his life and never be released.
39:54Looking back over all of this,
39:57I mean, what you've laid out is a criminal career that escalates,
40:04and escalates, by and large, with impunity.
40:09Yes.
40:10How, in your experience, can that have happened?
40:15So, this case is a classic.
40:19If you were to read a textbook of escalating sexual offending,
40:23it would look like this.
40:25But for me, it goes to show that Moshe had really seriously offended
40:32early on in his career,
40:33and had never been dealt with properly by the judicial system.
40:38And for him, that gave him the licence to carry on offending
40:44and increase the way that he offended.
40:47There's now a belief that, in prison, sexual offenders like this receive some form of treatment,
40:57some form of intervention to interrupt their cycle of their behaviour.
41:02There wasn't any of that during this period, was there?
41:05No. No. None whatsoever.
41:09My guess is that at the times that he did go to prison,
41:12he was just allowed to mingle with the rest of the prison population.
41:16In amongst those would have been sexual offenders.
41:20And once you get sexual offenders together, what do they like to do?
41:23They like to talk about sexual offending.
41:26And so they reinforce themselves.
41:28Exactly.
41:31Marta Shedd has, by all accounts, never shown any remorse for the crimes that he has committed.
41:36And that's not untypical of extreme sexual predators.
41:40They have absolutely no consideration for their victims.
41:44It's all about their own gratification, their own end results,
41:48and their own wish to feel power and to feel that dominance over their victims.
41:55In terms of rehabilitation, I think it'd be quite problematic to try and address a lot of his behaviours.
42:00Not only are they quite extreme end of human behaviour in terms of their sadistic nature
42:06and the blatant disregard for the victims and the outcomes of his crimes.
42:12It's also become quite ingrained in his personality.
42:15He sees himself as somebody who is at odds with the law, at odds with society's values.
42:22He's quite an angry person.
42:25And to try and change those patterns of behaviour, although not impossible,
42:29we find that trying to alter those things through rehabilitation programmes is quite difficult to do.
42:36I have no doubt in my mind that had this case have happened recently,
42:41that it would have been investigated and he would have been identified much quicker.
42:48Apart from the biological side of the investigation,
42:52in this context we would have a much more sophisticated digital platform around this case.
42:59It's very difficult to evade detection, it's very difficult not to be seen when we are committing these types of
43:08offences
43:09because of CCTV, because of our fascination with digital technology,
43:15and it places a different net around this type of investigation.
43:22What is the big takeaway in terms of Motishead and his offending and punishment?
43:31The repeating pattern that you see that Motishead can offend in a very, very serious nature.
43:39He's arrested, he's arrested relatively quickly, but the punishment does not match the offence.
43:45The fact that the punishment is so lenient for such serious offences almost reinforces the behaviour.
43:55He thinks that he can just carry on and actually if he spends a few months in prison, so what?
44:00He's probably mixing with people that share some of his views.
44:03He felt invincible.
44:05I think so, I think so.
44:07I think the judicial system really has to stop and ask itself here if they contributed to this pattern of
44:15offending
44:16by not enforcing as strict as punishment as they could have done
44:22and not taking violence against women seriously enough
44:27has allowed him to go on and offend in such a horrific manner.
44:33Was it always going to end in murder?
44:36It didn't need to.
44:37It's a cycle of offending.
44:41And actually, if you can break that cycle, and as you say,
44:44if there were appropriate sexual offenders treatments in prison which there weren't,
44:50potentially that cycle could have been stopped, but in this case, yes,
44:55it was always going to end in murder.
44:58To what extent do you think he thought he'd got away with the perfect murder?
45:05You know, he was caught very, very quickly after that,
45:08but the fact that he's got the absolute front to go back to an address
45:14where he so seriously injured and assorted an elderly lady shows his total disregard for the law,
45:25the judicial system, and most importantly, for his elderly vulnerable victims.
45:31Essentially, he thought, I got away with it there, I'll get away with it here.
45:37Yes.
45:42William Motta's head remains behind bars, and probably will do so until he dies.
45:56I believe that he thought he wouldn't get caught, because he hadn't 12 months before got caught
46:03for the assault on Florence Kelso, and he thought he was capable of doing the perfect crime,
46:09and in this case, that crime was murder.
46:16All right.
46:30Let's see.
46:30Let's see.
46:32Let's see.
46:54Transcription by CastingWords
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