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Murdered or Missing? - Season 1 Episode 2
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00:28Transcription by CastingWords
00:59Transcription by CastingWords
01:00Amajit Chohan's badly decomposed body was discovered near Bournemouth Pier.
01:07There are now concerns for other family members who disappeared with the millionaire businessman.
01:19Amajit Chohan's body washing up on Bournemouth Beach wasn't a case of someone's gone swimming and drowned, was fallen off
01:26a boat and drowned.
01:27He was gagged. He was murdered.
01:31The vibe around the team was horror and the sadness that we're now looking for the rest of the family.
01:37You know, where are they? Are they being detained somewhere? Or worse, have they been killed?
01:42I immediately authorised aircraft to fly over around that immediate area, see if we can identify any bodies in the
01:51sea.
01:56We had to find that family and we had to do everything we could to try and find them.
02:21My job as a crime scene manager was basically, we were on call for any serious incidents, that's murder, shootings.
02:30We would go out and assess the scenes and deal with it like a murder scene until we were happy
02:35that it was not suspicious.
02:38But certainly this one, the fact that he had tape around his face and was gagged, that really pushes it
02:44straight up to this is a suspicious death.
02:48We've got to try and piece together, you know, what has happened to this man. He's obviously met a very
02:52uncomfortable end.
03:04The body was fully clothed and it often takes quite a while to remove each item of clothing.
03:11A, either navy or purple sweatshirt, v-neck, long sleeve, had a certain amount of grit on it.
03:19A pair of blue jeans, heavily contaminated by sand.
03:23I felt each sock as I took it off. It felt squashy like any saturated sock.
03:30And there was a pair of navy boxer shorts.
03:34However, the important thing that was still left was the bindings round the lower face.
03:40It consisted of a mixture of a scarf and brown wide parcel tape that had been wound round and round
03:48the head repeatedly.
03:50There was a very mutilating injury to the top of the head, not just to the scalp but the skull
03:56underneath it.
03:57This was obviously a blunt force injury.
04:03If that had happened during life and we were dealing with a fresh body, you would expect to see bruising
04:10of the scalp.
04:11There was no bruising around that.
04:15He had fracture of the very bottom of the spinal column in his neck.
04:21If it had happened during life, you would expect to see bruising around the fracture.
04:25There was no bruising around this one.
04:27And I felt that because that's a structure deep inside the body, that's probably a post-mortem fracture.
04:35It's often called the undertaker's fracture because if a body is roughly handled after death, that is where it tends
04:42to break.
04:44I finished the autopsy saying this is a highly suspicious death.
05:02The matripartum police said he died in appalling circumstances.
05:12I could see that Ankur's body was slightly trembling and he regrouped himself and started asking more questions on where
05:20that was, how that was found.
05:25We were shocked, totally horrified by what we were being told and trying to digest that information.
05:34And I think both of us thought, so how do we find Nancy and the other family members?
05:41But my kind of head was going, this is not looking good for us at all.
05:58The day that Amajit's body washed up on Bournemouth Beach was the 10-year anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's murder.
06:09And at my level, we were very conscious of the fact the eyes of London, the eyes of the country,
06:14the eyes of the world were on the Met Police.
06:15What we did, what we did, what we did, what we did, how we did it, had we moved on.
06:22Fact, Amajit Chohan was an Asian man.
06:26The person had been lying to us all along about him being in touch and missing and going to meet
06:31us and get passports, was a white man.
06:37Kenneth Regan was a good liar and he gave us this story of the Chohan family going off on holiday.
06:44What's wrong?
06:46Yeah, of course I'm running the business.
06:48I'm a partner.
06:50So all the focus was on Kenneth Regan and his associate William Hornsey.
06:57And Belinda Bruin was someone who was working on behalf of Regan on a daily basis for Ciba Freight Amajit's
07:04business.
07:04The complete focus now of the investigation was to track down Regan and Hornsey.
07:13And at this time, Belinda Bruin was also being sort of quite extensively interviewed because she clearly knew a lot
07:20of the background.
07:22And in a sort of throwaway comment, right at the end of her interview, she happened to sort of mention,
07:27I don't know if this has got anything to do with it, but I did come home, you know, a
07:31week or so ago.
07:32She had been working in London and had gone home to Tiverton and Devon earlier than she'd planned and had
07:39come across Regan, Hornsey and another man who she knew to be a guy called Peter Rees.
07:48And they'd been digging in the corner of her field.
07:55She had a couple of fields opposite her house where she kept horses.
07:59She was quite angry and said, what are you doing?
08:03And Regan said, look, you know, I told you I'd sort out the drainage in your field for you, so
08:07I've done it as a favour.
08:09That set alarm bells ringing, to say the least.
08:14So we immediately dispatched Detective Sergeant Tony Bishop down to Belinda Bruin's property.
08:23We were told, once you find this ditch, get it dug up.
08:28We get there and Belinda comes zooming up the lane in a massive panic, explaining that she's literally just bumped
08:36into Regan and Hornsey at the end of the lane.
08:40They had said to her, look, get in the car, we need to speak to you.
08:46As far as she was concerned, if she'd got in the car with them, that would probably be the end
08:50of her,
08:51because she's clearly a very loose end as far as they're concerned, certainly in terms of all the activity in
08:56the field.
09:01The DCI had sort of said to us, right, you know, you two stay down there and basically make sure
09:07Regan and Hornsey don't come back.
09:09And if they do come back, then arrest them.
09:13We didn't have any sort of protective equipment, so we were literally looking around, trying to sort of think, what
09:19could we arm ourselves with as potential weapons?
09:21We were looking at sticks and rocks.
09:25It was a pretty surreal moment in my policing career anyway.
09:30But Regan and Hornsey didn't come back.
09:36We found out two o'clock the next morning, Regan and Hornsey booked onto a ferry going across to Calais.
09:48Why do people skip the country?
09:50Well, they skip the country because they've got something to hide, fear, run away from.
09:55We sent a couple of officers over to France to see if we could physically track where they were going.
10:02Over time, we did find out they'd gone to Spain.
10:09We started working with the authorities, Europol, Interpol, Spanish police.
10:14So if Regan and Hornsey had turned up at an airport and tried to book a flight to the Far
10:20East, we would have got them that way.
10:25Regan, Hornsey and Peter Rees were our three key suspects in this murder investigation.
10:31Peter Rees, we didn't know where he was.
10:33Norman McKinley, as the SIO, had made a decision of, I want to get Regan and Hornsey before Rees.
10:44The police then not just distributed two pictures of their prime suspects, but held them up for the TV cameras.
10:52I am satisfied that these two men are involved.
10:56It was a bold and dramatic move, but it showed just the sense of importance of this number one priority.
11:03The Met Police had at that time.
11:08I'm still hopeful and I'm praying to God for my mother, my sister, and my two nephews.
11:22There was lots happening both in London and in Devon.
11:28The next step was to excavate in the corner of Belinda's Field.
11:36There was evidence that an area had been recently dug up and re-filled.
11:41With forensic officers and exhibits officers, we did do literally a fingertip forensic search of this trench.
11:49They were looking for anything that would put the Chohans, or could put the Chohans, into a potential gravesite.
11:58Very difficult process.
12:00Basically, everything has to be dug out and then put through sieves.
12:04I think it had rained for nearly two weeks non-stop down there, so it was like a quagmire.
12:11I don't think any of us really thought that there were going to be any bodies in this field.
12:15You know, it just seemed too incredulous.
12:35Police already knew about Kenneth Reagan's significant criminal past,
12:40and that he had associates, some of the highest and most dangerous criminals in London and the south of England.
12:50We then found out that in the 90s, when he'd been charged with possession with intents to supply heroin,
12:57he had turned Queen's evidence and actually gave information against his co-conspirators.
13:05As a result, given that evidence, he had a reduced sentence from 20 years to 8 years.
13:11The names that Reagan handed over to the police in 1998 resulted in a Ā£100 billion cocaine operation being busted
13:19and 15 people being convicted, one of which, quite astonishingly, was his best mate, William Hornsey,
13:27who somehow had forgiven Reagan for landing him behind bars,
13:31and they were now as thick as thieves in an even closer association.
13:43I got a phone call from one of the officers in the field in Devon.
13:49We haven't found any bodies, but we have found something.
13:55They've recovered Indian jewellery, bits of hair,
14:02certainly poppers, which look like they might have come off nappies or children's clothes.
14:06There was burnt bits of wood and furniture.
14:08We weren't sure where that had come from at that stage.
14:12In our minds, we think the family were buried here,
14:15and Regan, Hornsey, and Rees have then come back and excavated the bodies.
14:23There was clear indication that bodies have been buried too.
14:29Certainly we believe one body, and that is Mr. Chohan.
14:34It's too early to say whether there are other members of the family,
14:38that is the two children and the two female adults who are here.
14:55Regan, having told us all these stories, he was the focus.
15:01Some people that worked at CBER were saying that all they could hear Ray's voices
15:07whenever Amitric was on the phone.
15:09And then we heard that he was quite nervous about going to this meeting at Stonehenge about the business.
15:17Subsequently, we found out that meeting was with Regan and these two Dutch guys.
15:24We believe that he met with Regan.
15:27Hornsey was there and Rees, but Rees was making out he was a Dutch buyer.
15:30So, start to look what's around Stonehenge.
15:36And we quickly established that Kenneth Regan was living with his father in Wiltshire,
15:41which is not that far away.
15:44Officers had visited Kenneth Regan's father's address.
15:49The weekend that we knew that Chohan had gone missing,
15:53Kenneth Regan had told his father that he was packing him off for the weekend.
15:58The father, when he spoke to us, said that when he came home,
16:01he had new carpets and a new sofa in the house.
16:10You go in there thinking, this is possibly a major crime scene.
16:16And when you walk in the front door and you smell fresh paint,
16:19that definitely makes you think, has there been a cover-up?
16:24There was a new carpet.
16:26You could see where maybe an old carpet had been,
16:28and certainly some new wallpaper had been put up.
16:33There seemed to be some bits of furniture missing,
16:35which may account for some of the bits of wood burnt down in Devon.
16:41To me, this is covering up something that's happened in this house.
16:47So we called Claire Austin from the Forensic Science Service to come out,
16:51and we used luminol, which is a chemical which we spray around,
16:55and then we leave it for a few days, and then we go back,
16:57and we can see where possibly blood has been cleaned up.
17:03The problem is luminol reacts with peroxide,
17:08and they'd use bleach to clean up.
17:11We found sort of 20 areas which possibly was blood,
17:15and they were swabbed and sent off for analysis.
17:19But it all came back negative.
17:23After spending several days examining inside of Forge Close,
17:27we looked around the outside of the house
17:28to see if there was anything out there,
17:30and approximately four feet in height from the ground
17:34on the outside wall of the house,
17:36we found a small blood stain
17:39that looked like it had come from above in a downward trajectory.
17:44And that was then sent for DNA analysis
17:46and found to match one of the Chohan males of the family.
17:51Hello?
17:53Nina, Nina, Nina, Nina!
17:56We started to realise that potentially all five of the Chohan family had been murdered.
18:06Kenneth Reagan was actually very, very canny.
18:10He covered his tracks very well initially,
18:12and he wrote letters,
18:14he told people he'd been speaking to Amajit,
18:16and Amajit was running away.
18:20When Chohan's belongings were recovered in a suitcase sometime later on,
18:24there were 23 blank pieces of papers signed by Amajit Chohan.
18:32Some of the documents that we recovered were printed on Rishi's home computer
18:37or on his word processor.
18:39We managed to match the paper up.
18:42I can only imagine that Amajit Chohan signed those pieces of paper under duress.
18:48So they were either torturing him
18:50or his family being tortured in front of him.
19:13The police had been given information that Peter Rees was in hiding
19:20in a bed and breakfast at a forest of Dean.
19:24He'd watched this press conference
19:27and said something spontaneous like,
19:31I know this case.
19:33And he told the owner of the bed and breakfast,
19:35and she got really worried and frightened,
19:37and she rang the Batspotton police to give more information.
19:41I think he was cornered.
19:44He didn't know me from Adam.
19:46He just started saying,
19:48have I seen him on TV?
19:51And I said, no, should I have done?
19:53And he just said that he was involved
19:55with an Asian family that had disappeared.
19:59They could put me at the scene,
20:01but I didn't kill anybody.
20:03He was going, I can't pin that on me.
20:05And I'd say to him, you know, what is going on, you know?
20:08He just said that Regan was crazy.
20:12It was Regan, he's a psycho.
20:15I knew what I had to do.
20:20It wasn't that long before Peter Rees was found
20:24by a police team from the Met just drinking in a pub.
20:27When he was arrested, you know,
20:29he knew his time was up and sort of came quietly.
20:34Rees was charged and interviewed by police
20:37and predictably said not a single word.
20:42He was someone, I think, overawed by the fact
20:46that he was dealing with such superior league criminals.
21:10Months after the body of Armajid Chohan
21:13came up at Bournemouth Pier,
21:14a body came up in a fishing trawler
21:17just off the coast at Dorset.
21:20They found the body.
21:22It had been tightly wrapped in tarpaulin,
21:25arousing some suspicion.
21:27The body had been in the water for some time
21:30in quite a dilapidated state.
21:32We had a special post-mortem and samples were taken.
21:37And it came back that it was Nancy Chohan.
21:48It was a moment knowing that she was dead.
21:52She had a head injury.
21:54It was quite obvious that she'd recently given birth.
21:58She was just post-natal.
22:00She was just post-natal.
22:00It's so sad.
22:03I don't know how anyone could do that to someone.
22:17It's only when we are told what happened,
22:21it becomes even more horrifying
22:23because you realize that you're not going to find them.
22:27Anka is just breaking.
22:32The funeral director actually rang and said,
22:34I understand that you want to see the body.
22:37Can I tell you that it's battered?
22:39Because Nancy had received a hammer blow on her head.
22:44And I said, look, I need to talk to Anka.
22:46I don't need to see it, but Anka is insisting in it.
22:48And I actually went to the funeral director with Anka.
22:52And Jean, the funeral director,
22:54actually tried to be as sensitive as possible.
22:57What she'd done was clothed the coffin
23:00and put a scarf around the skull,
23:02but actually had a massive image of Nancy
23:05in her beautiful sari.
23:09For me, it was not a skeleton.
23:11For me, it was my baby sister.
23:16For me, she was still alive,
23:19and I was talking to her.
23:25And that was it.
23:29A tearful goodbye.
23:31That's what I said.
23:47Then we heard from the Metropolitan Police
23:49that the mother had been found.
23:56Mrs. Cor's skull was found on Allen Bay Beach
23:59on the Isle of Wight.
24:03Some children playing football came across a skull.
24:10Anka is a man who has lost everything
24:15in a period of months.
24:18There is still, I think, in Anka's head,
24:20you'll find the children.
24:22It's not common sense.
24:23It's irrational.
24:26When Nancy Chauhan was dredged up by a trawler,
24:30the trawler men did see a package fall,
24:32or something fall from her body.
24:38We can only assume that they were the children.
24:44Speaking to sort of marine experts,
24:46they said that children, you know,
24:47bodies that size would just never resurface.
24:54I don't think we'd believe before that day
24:57that anyone would be capable of murdering
24:59three generations of one family.
25:01Two baby boys, a mum, a dad, and a grandmother.
25:04I didn't think anything like that was possible.
25:07We've seen some horrific cases in our time,
25:08but at this time, it was the realisation
25:11that the family were all dead.
25:14It was shocking.
25:21By now, the investigation had become a huge,
25:24widespread investigation.
25:26You know, you've got crime scenes in London,
25:28potentially crime scenes in Stonehenge,
25:30the crime scene where Chauhan has been held as a prisoner.
25:36Belinda Bruin, I think she literally only had, like,
25:38one or two neighbours.
25:39But the neighbour did also recount to us
25:42what Linda had said about Kenneth Regan,
25:44William Hornsey, and Peter Rees digging in the field.
25:48A neighbour had seen them with a white transit van
25:51that they had tried to sort of block the view into the field.
25:56So we started looking at Regan, Hornsey, and Rees
26:00as to any vans, any cars they've hired,
26:03have they hired any diggers?
26:06We established that Regan had hired a white transit van
26:10using his own driving licence,
26:12paying by his own credit card,
26:14making no attempts to sort of cover their tracks.
26:18The guy who ran the van hire company,
26:21you know, actually remarked that when they returned the van,
26:24there was just this awful smell.
26:28But the inside of the van had been pressure washed,
26:30which, according to the van hire guy,
26:32is unheard of, not pressure washes the van.
26:35And Regan sort of explained
26:37that they'd been moving some dead livestock.
26:39Well, it was clear that that van
26:41had obviously been used for something by Regan.
26:43Clearly, he hadn't been moving livestock,
26:45so the van was immediately seized
26:47and brought in for a forensic examination.
26:54Regan, Hornsey, and Rees
26:56seem to be very forensically aware.
26:58Their actions of redecorating forge close
27:01and cleaning the back of the van
27:03suggest that they were aware of their actions
27:05in trying to get rid of any evidence.
27:08I think someone would expect,
27:09if they pressure washed an area,
27:11to have got rid of all the evidence that could be there,
27:14but blood will go in places you wouldn't expect it to go.
27:19We went over it, literally,
27:22millimetre by millimetre, looking for blood.
27:24Looking for blood in crevices or gaps
27:27or areas that might have escaped.
27:30We did find blood inside the van
27:32that looked like it had been as a result of an impact,
27:35and that blood was sent away for DNA analysis.
27:39And that blood matched that of Amarjit Chohan.
27:45We were making huge, extensive CCTV inquiries.
27:52We were able to track your transit van
27:54going into a service station
27:56down to the coast,
27:57and we found that Regan had bought a boat.
28:06The boat was brought into the lab,
28:08and it was stored in one of our forensic garages,
28:10and me and some assistants examined the boat.
28:14We spent several days going over it,
28:17doing a fingertip search of it.
28:18We think that they were transported
28:21in the open part of the back of the boat.
28:24And when we lifted up one of the mats,
28:26we found some hair.
28:29The hair looked like it had just fallen off the head,
28:31so it was obviously off someone who had been dead.
28:34And whether they had a head trauma or something,
28:36it was sort of black, very black hair.
28:41Finding something like the hair on the boat
28:43was a little bit of a breakthrough.
28:45I remember we phoned the police officer in charge
28:47and gave him the news that we'd found this hair
28:50and rushed it through for forensic analysis
28:52to see if we could get any DNA from it.
28:56We got a partial profile.
28:58Of DNA, it indicated the hair had possibly come
29:01from an Asian male that we believed
29:02to have originated from Amadjit Chohan.
29:07That was an indication that the bodies
29:09had come out of the pit in Devon,
29:11put into a speedboat, and taken out to the sea.
29:18We subsequently realized, looking at all the timeline,
29:22that was when Regan was becoming spooked
29:24by the police investigation, and probably
29:26felt that they could just lead us a bit of a merry dance
29:29with the story about meeting Chohan in Newport.
29:35That's when they went back to Devon,
29:38exhumed the bodies from their makeshift grave,
29:41put them in this transit van,
29:43then put them on the boat, and went out to sea.
29:47There was a local police marine unit coming into Harbour
29:50as they were going out.
29:52They sort of pulled up alongside to say, look,
29:54it's pretty choppy conditions out there.
29:56You know, you guys know what you're doing.
29:58Regan and Horncy were sort of, yeah, thank you very much.
30:01Yeah, we know what we're doing.
30:02We're fine.
30:02So off they went.
30:04You know, and we know now that once they got out to sea,
30:08all the bodies were dumped into the channel.
30:17The thing with Regan is, it seemed that crime had moved on
30:21since he was last sort of in prison.
30:25And he just didn't seem aware of any phone cell site evidence
30:30that we could use.
30:34Sophisticated criminals tend to use sort of burner phones
30:36that they use for a very short period of time,
30:39and then they discard.
30:40But throughout this entire crime,
30:43Kenneth Regan, William Horncy, and Peter Rees
30:46each kept the same mobile phone.
30:49Now everybody knows about phones being tracked.
30:52But in 2003, you've got to remember,
30:54this was cutting edge technology,
30:56and not many people actually comprehended or understood it.
31:01You could not pinpoint, but you could find a location
31:04of where a phone had been and when it was last used.
31:07There was an awful lot of telephone evidence
31:09showing Regan, Horncy, and Rees
31:12moving around the country at the times
31:15to the sites where we know the bodies were buried originally,
31:18and also when they moved them down to the south coast.
31:27We started to look and see where Ammajit Chohan's phone had gone,
31:31you know, around the time of the alleged sale of the business.
31:34And it's quite clear that Chohan's mobile phone
31:38is mirroring Kenneth Regan's mobile phone.
31:42Chohan would have realised at some point he'd been duped,
31:45was clearly then taken down to Regan's dad's house down in Wiltshire,
31:51where he was held prisoner and tortured,
31:55and made to sign a number of sheets of paper
31:58that were subsequently used by Regan to be made into letters of power of attorney
32:03so that they could be presented to the CBER employees
32:08and obviously any authorities that came sort of asking.
32:13I think he probably really felt, or bomb-proofed, that he'd covered dead tracks.
32:20Then once Chohan was either being held prisoner or had already been murdered,
32:24Regan and Hornsey then had to deal with the rest of the family.
32:29They couldn't leave that avenue open.
32:33We'll never know what exactly took place in that house,
32:37but quite clearly Regan and Hornsey murdered Nancy Chohan,
32:42murdered Charanjit Kaur,
32:43and most chilling of all, murdered those two young boys,
32:48one who was eight weeks old.
32:50Kenneth Regan was a fairly major criminal
32:54and had been involved in the large-scale importation of drugs,
32:59but it's beyond belief that they went to those lengths
33:04just for the pure greed of taking over this warehouse
33:07so they could use that as a front for importing drugs again.
33:17Regan and Hornsey, they jumped on a ferry, went off to France.
33:20We know that.
33:22They're both wanted for multiple murders.
33:25They've both got sort of extensive criminal connections,
33:28certainly with the ability to make false documentation, passports, etc.
33:35We were able to see through cell site analysis
33:38where Regan's phone was, where Hornsey's phone was.
33:42They were actually in Belgium.
33:48So officers were dispatched,
33:50and they worked with the northern part of the Belgium authorities,
33:54and we identified where Regan was.
33:59He was tracked down to a campsite
34:01and was pretty robustly taken into custody.
34:06He was adamant he wasn't coming back voluntarily.
34:10But it was upheld by the High Court in Brussels,
34:12and we were given 15 days to extradite him, basically.
34:22Meanwhile, Hornsey was elsewhere in Belgium,
34:25in the southern part,
34:26and we asked the northern authorities
34:28to contact their counterparts in the southern part,
34:31but one lot were Flemish and one lot were French,
34:34and they didn't really talk to each other.
34:35So we missed the opportunity of arresting Hornsey in Belgium.
34:42Hornsey was just on his own
34:43and didn't seem to have the same sort of contacts
34:46and connections and finances that Regan had had.
34:52One Friday afternoon,
34:54we got a phone call from a solicitor for Hornsey saying,
34:57look, he's had enough.
34:59He's getting on the ferry at Calais.
35:01Two or three of us immediately sort of jumped into the car
35:03and shot down to Dover.
35:06Literally got there just as he was coming off the ferry.
35:10I arrested him for murder.
35:14And he was brought back to a London police station,
35:17subsequently interviewed and ultimately charged.
35:21Both Regan and Hornsey were interviewed by police
35:24and predictably declined to give any evidence whatsoever.
35:29They never, ever, ever gave an account of what they did.
35:34And that, for me, spoke volumes by itself.
35:46Murder cases at the Old Bailey are very big stories.
35:50And a family wiped out entirely is a massive story.
35:58It's going to be front page material.
36:01And what's more, it's going to run for a long, long time.
36:06Onker was wrought with worry whether we'll get the conviction.
36:12There's no admission.
36:14There's no eyewitness accounts,
36:16apart from circumstantial evidence of where they are.
36:18Nobody's seen the killings taking place.
36:22Any jury trial has unpredictable, uncertain quality to it.
36:27It was by no means a foregone conclusion
36:30that this would end with guilty verdicts.
36:34The prosecutor took over a day to outline all the evidence
36:37against each of the defendants,
36:39producing what he described as a compelling case of their guilt.
36:44As he described it, even though they got what they wanted,
36:48the documents signed that they took the decision,
36:51Amarjid and his family all had to die.
36:54They then went off and buried them a week later in some remote part of the country,
37:00hoping the police would never discover the bodies.
37:03This gang, utterly ruthless, utterly immoral,
37:08and utterly intent on getting away with their crimes,
37:11was not just the horror of what the prosecutor was describing.
37:15It was the moment when he produced, I think, his Trump card.
37:19There's almost a universal lean forward and scribbling started,
37:24even more furiously.
37:34Claire Austin from the Forensic Science Service rang me
37:37and we just went through all the exhibits before the trial.
37:41There was a pair of pants and a pair of socks
37:44which belonged to Amarjid Chohan,
37:46which she had on when he came out of the water.
37:50You don't get much evidence from socks or pants normally,
37:53you know, unless it's some sort of sexual thing going on.
37:55But Claire was very thorough and she said,
37:57well, send them up to me.
38:01We took it out the bag to see if we could find anything externally,
38:05whether maybe someone had been wearing it without their shoes on.
38:08There might be some DNA evidence on the sole of the sock.
38:12I think it was about four days later, she rang me back and said,
38:15oh, you're never going to believe this.
38:19There was a piece of paper that was folded up inside the sock.
38:23I remember the realisation that this could change the whole case.
38:30The letter was a letter from the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Society
38:34addressed to Regan and Mr Avery, his father,
38:39in relation to a mortgage for Forge Close where they lived.
38:45Which means that Amadric Chauhan had been in Forge Close when he put it into his sock.
38:53So it was a piece of evidence which absolutely categorically put Chauhan in that house at the time that he
39:01was murdered.
39:04It seemed Chauhan had probably realised he was going to fall foul of these men.
39:09And perhaps when he was left unattended for a moment,
39:11must have seen that letter on the side and just thought,
39:14if anyone finds me, I'm going to give them a clue.
39:18In headline terms, there's nothing more exciting than evidence arriving almost from beyond the grave.
39:33Each defendant had a team of their own,
39:36which meant that every witness was subjected to one of the defence teams individually,
39:42consecutively questioning them.
39:46I had no idea that they were going to go with the angle that the letter that was found in
39:51Amadric's sock
39:51had been planted there by myself or one of the other police officers in the case.
39:58It's vital when collecting evidence in a case like this to have a chain of custody
40:04between the people transporting it to the evidence store,
40:08the evidence store to the laboratory, the laboratory to the court.
40:11So every person that handles it has to sign the label.
40:14So there's a complete chain of evidence.
40:16So that was done with everything.
40:19Continuity of evidence just proves an item's not been tampered with, for example.
40:23It can't have been planted because the pathologist put it into the brown paper bag
40:27and I was the person to open it.
40:33The police, when they retrieved the body from the sea in Bournemouth, gave the defence the opportunity to say,
40:40how could possibly a letter survive having been in the sea for two months,
40:43let alone been underground for several weeks?
40:46It did plant confusion in the minds of the jury.
40:51The letter survived because it's been folded up so many times, like, into the size of a stamp.
40:58And because it's, you know, postage size and it's really squashed together,
41:02the sea water hasn't got into the paper.
41:19I did worry about jury fatigue.
41:23The sheer amount of evidence that the jury had to sit through,
41:27you're sitting there thinking, I really don't know how this is going to turn out.
41:32We started getting worried because normally, if somebody's going to be found guilty,
41:36it comes up very quickly.
41:39You were sitting there, almost like an expectant mother,
41:43wondering what the result is going to be.
41:47I knew that they were guilty, I knew that there was no reason to doubt anything else,
41:51but the jury have to consider everything very carefully.
42:06This was a quintuple murder case, record-breaking in terms of length and amount of evidence that's produced.
42:12It was unbelievably tense.
42:15This was a big, big moment.
42:18They come back, and the foreman of the jury stands up,
42:21and when he gets asked, do you find the defendants guilty or not guilty?
42:26His foreman says, guilty.
42:36It was almost like a release of pressure.
42:40Yes, we got it through. We've managed it.
42:52It was a total sense of relief.
42:55We were happy that people were found guilty, and justice had been done.
43:00It's unfortunate that Onka cannot be here and express his concerns with you.
43:06He believes the death of his nephew's very young children could only be influenced by hatred and contempt by the
43:14killers.
43:15Mayors...
43:15With that.
43:17With that.
43:30To be continued...
43:49The judge told the two men,
43:52your crimes are uniquely terrible.
43:55The cold-blooded murder of an eight-week-old baby
43:59and an 18-month-old toddler,
44:01not to mention the murders of their mother,
44:03father and grandmother,
44:06provide a chilling insight into the utterly perverted standards
44:11by which you have lived your lives.
44:14Your characters are as despicable as your crimes.
44:19Each of you is a practice, resourceful and manipulative liar.
44:24For these crimes, you two highly dangerous men
44:27must now pay the heaviest sentence.
44:31They had no prospect of release.
44:37That is absolutely what should have happened to them.
44:39For what they did, how they did it,
44:43lack of remorse, lack of explanation,
44:46it was absolutely the right sentence.
44:51I've dealt with a huge number of cases.
44:54I've met families in enormous, tragic circumstances.
44:57But I think Ankur is one of the most bravest men
45:01that I've ever met in my life.
45:03He's brave not just because of the enormity of the tragedy
45:06that he's had to deal with.
45:08He's, throughout the whole process,
45:10yes, he cried,
45:11but he kept his composure
45:14and his dignity
45:15and his calmness throughout the process.
45:17I don't know how he did it.
45:21And I just wish that
45:25we could go back
45:26and get his family back.
45:28I don't know how he did it.
45:58I don't know how he did it.
46:00I don't know how he did it.
46:01I don't know how he did it.
46:02I don't know how he did it.
46:02I don't know how he did it.
46:03I don't know how he did it.
46:03I don't know how he did it.
46:04You
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