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Expert Witness - Season 5 Episode 2 -Death on Duty englishsubtitle fullmovie❌⭕️ Secret Engagement
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00:01in this program when two police officers are murdered in a gun and grenade attack
00:06a forensic voice analyst is brought in to help prove the identity of their killer
00:12it's a voice which wouldn't turn your head in the street and in london an expert witness takes dna
00:19from the footwear of a prolific thief to help put him behind bars the guy's run away and all he's
00:26left us as a shoe welcome to expert witness the series where we reveal how science helps solve
00:44some of the uk's toughest criminal investigations
00:55tameside greater manchester the 18th of september 2012
01:00police emergency i heard someone just threw a big concrete slab through that window and
01:05runoff greater manchester police get a 999 call reporting an attempted break-in two local
01:12officers respond unaware they're walking into a deadly ambush it was a routine call on a sunny
01:19morning but it became one of the blackest days in the history of british policing
01:26bbc special correspondent judith moritz was based in the manchester newsroom the peace officers who
01:32were sent out to respond to that call were young police officers pc nicola hughes and her her shift
01:42partner that day pc fiona bone nicola hughes was 23 years old and described today as a great bobby
01:50who was always smiling 32 year old fiona bone had been planning to get married colleagues said she was a
01:57calm gentle woman unbeknownst to the two officers and the call handler lying in wait was known criminal
02:05dale cregan he was already wanted for two murders and heavily armed
02:10he'd have seen their police van as it came towards the house they turned off the engine went through the
02:17little garden gate and he was waiting for them
02:23sir peter farhi was greater manchester's chief constable at the time he immediately came out
02:29and essentially you know shot them in cold blood um he must have known that they were unarmed
02:35he certainly obviously knew there were two female officers nicola hughes turned up the garden path
02:44and cregan carried on shooting and hit her in the back fiona bone turned out of line of sight she
02:52was
02:52crouching underneath the window the front window and he then turned his attentions
02:56to her and carried on firing and i can't quite emphasize how savage this attack was and cregan kept
03:06on firing he he fired a total of 32 bullets at the two women
03:16he then hurled a military grenade at the two officers before abandoning the firearm and driving off
03:22the level of violence was just so brutal that neither officer had any chance whatsoever to defend
03:28themselves fiona bone died at the scene nicola hughes was badly wounded and died later in
03:36hospital it was a breaking story i went live on the bbc's rolling news channel two police officers
03:43have been injured in an incident in tameside which is a suburban area to the east of manchester
03:52i then went to abbey gardens by the time i turned up it was a crime scene it was cordoned
04:01off
04:05this is something that that obviously has taken everyone by surprise by shock and then on top of
04:11that the news that two police officers have been killed here in the line of duty ramifications of
04:18that not just for local people here but also for the police i remember it feeling very close to home
04:25them and the community being really shaken as well and the police officers who served that area and
04:33were grieving for their colleagues were having to show up and work
04:42fiona's father paul bone recalls the life-changing moment he learned of his daughter's murder
04:48we heard briefly on the bbc news that two policemen had been killed in manchester
04:55and she didn't answer her phone which was uh fairly normal to be honest during the working day
05:05and then about two minutes three minutes after that was a knock on the door and the local police
05:15had come to say uh your daughter's been involved in an incident fiona was dead you've got to get over
05:24the shock of being told your daughter's dead for a start and wasn't too interested in how or why
05:31um it's just a shock of her being dead at the same time the police also informed brin hughes
05:39nicholas father of the tragic event phone call came through from somebody who introduced themselves
05:46as a a detective chief inspector from great manchester police and the conversation went
05:51backwards and forwards which which felt like hours but it was literally seconds before
05:57before before alarm bells had started ringing that there was something seriously wrong
06:01was great manchester police wasn't fully aware of everything what went on so they were still
06:05gathering evidence and information so but he he briefly went through described what they knew what
06:12they thought they knew what happened so far it was totally random and callous attack
06:21at 11 30 the same morning just over an hour after murdering two officers creagan walks into his local
06:29police station creagan turns up to hide police station walks into the the reception area says to the
06:37officer on the front desk i want to buy the police and i've just done two coppers someone like him
06:44in some ways he doesn't fear being captured he wants the notoriety
06:51while creagan remained in custody investigators looked back at his criminal history in search of a
06:58motive for the brutal execution months earlier a number of gang related shootings had occurred
07:04the result of a long-running feud between two criminal families a 23 year old had been shot dead in
07:11the
07:11cotton tree pub a killing that bore the hallmarks of a gangland execution three months later the dead
07:17man's father was gunned down in his own home cctv pictures revealed how what appeared to be a grenade
07:24had been detonated as part of the attack
07:29at the time creagan was the prime suspect in the shootings and grenade attack
07:35police suspected he was being harbored by family members so they questioned them and even offered a
07:41fifty thousand pounds reward for his whereabouts creagan was incensed he claimed his family were being
07:49harassed we'd had intelligence that he was very angry that we'd been into members of his family we knew
07:58that creagan you know it was an absolute danger to police officers
08:03creagan may have handed himself in and claimed responsibility for the murders
08:08but he later retracted his confession the prosecution were going to take no chances of him being acquitted
08:16they needed as watertight a case as possible you still have to prove every single element beyond reasonable doubt
08:24peter and his team now needed to establish the significance of every piece of evidence
08:29including the audio recording of the 999 call
08:33police emergency
08:35i had someone just threw a big concrete slab during that window and ran off
08:38right i'll get an officer up there have a look around and see if they can see anybody similar and
08:42they'll come and see you
08:44the caller sounded calm wanted the police to come
08:48i don't think there was anything that the the 999 call handler would have picked up on as being unusual
08:56all right thanks very much okay i'll wait uh i'll be waiting
09:01the man called himself adam gartree but detectives believed it was in fact
09:07they'll creagan setting an ambush for police when they arrived
09:12if they could pin creagan to that voice recording what they've then got is the deliberate intent
09:19that he lured the officers to that address
09:23to get to the truth detectives turned to professor peter french
09:29a leading expert in the field of forensic speech analysis
09:35i'd heard about the case before i was approached by the police
09:38i think there would be very few people in the uk who hadn't heard about the case
09:43peter has played a key role in many high-profile criminal cases
09:48they brought me in to try and help them establish that the voice of
09:52the caller who was calling himself adam gartree was in fact dale creagan
10:00to do that peter needed to compare the 999 call to another call known to be creagan
10:07police provided him with a recording of a phone call
10:10made by creagan from inside prison while in custody
10:14that call was recorded by the prison service
10:17it was good quality there wasn't like a lot of prison calls
10:22lots of landing noise and banging and cluttering and shouting
10:25you know it was pretty clean it allowed me to compare life with life
10:29i was comparing creagan talking over the telephone
10:33with adam talking over the telephone
10:37first peter listened to adam's 999 call
10:41police emergency
10:42i had someone just threw a big concrete slab in the back window
10:45right i'll get an officer up there have a look around
10:48and see if they can see anybody similar and they'll come and see you
10:50all right
10:50all right then thanks very much
10:52okay
10:52i'll wait uh i'll be waiting
10:54here we have a very standard greater manchester area accent for
11:00a younger speaker from that area
11:03nothing particularly distinctive or unusual about it
11:08i mean i'm not hearing anything like
11:09a speech impediment a stammer
11:12it's a voice which wouldn't turn your head in the street
11:16peter then listened to the call creagan made from prison
11:20it's cheaper if i ring you at night time
11:22right i'll ring you tomorrow night yeah
11:23to the untrained ear they may sound similar but to prove it beyond doubt
11:28peter had to conduct a series of highly sensitive acoustic tests
11:32these involve taking measurements of physical parameters of the speech signal using computer software
11:41here we have the phrase thirty abbey gardens
11:46now this first syllable of thirty has the vowel er in it
11:53thirty so in pronouncing that vowel we can see that there are three bars of energy
12:02these are the resonances so any word which has an er vowel in it we would do the same thing
12:08and we would if you like make a profile of what the resonance structure is of this speaker's er vowel
12:16and repeat the exercise not just for er but for a and a and e and oo etc
12:24peter then created a similar profile for creagan's prison phone call
12:29if the two profiles matched it would provide direct proof of creagan's premeditation
12:37in october 2012 the funerals of nicola hughes and fiona bone were held at manchester cathedral
12:44on consecutive days nicola hughes loved policing greater manchester today the city's police came out
12:52to return that affection thousands lining the road to the cathedral as the funeral cortege passed by
12:59their murders affected the whole police community the roads were lined with police officers from all over the country
13:10when nicola and her younger brother when they were kids if there was a police car behind us
13:15and you looked at you look in the rear view mirror and it said eccilop police backwards
13:20i'd always say to them oh no we're being chased by the eccilop and then i got a text out
13:26of the blue
13:27um and she said i'll never guess what i'm joining the eccilop um and that was when she was 19
13:34i was well aware that she'd get into scrapes or fights what i'd having i don't think even in wildest
13:41nightmares you could imagine or envisage what what would have happened or what did happen i knew
13:46manchester could be difficult at times but never realized how difficult it would be
13:55when they took her protective clothing off there was 15 bullets in it cregan continued to maintain
14:03his innocence making peter's forensic speech analysis all the more crucial when we looked at the vowel
14:09resonances they were very very closely aligned and seminations provided very strong support for the view
14:17that the caller was in fact dale cregan cregan had clearly planned every moment of this he wanted
14:26to shoot vulnerable unarmed neighborhood bobbies and that's who turned up
14:33in february 2013 the trial began at preston crown court the families of pc's bone and hughes have been in
14:42court and they sobbed as they heard the details of the women's deaths cregan was in the dock with nine
14:48alleged gang members he was charged with four counts of murder and attempted murder and causing
14:55an explosion with a grenade we'd all turned up to the beginning of the trial dale cregan still maintaining
15:02that he wasn't guilty despite the stack of evidence against him i was on standby i was going to be
15:09called to give evidence for the prosecution but four days in to that trial we realized in court something
15:19was about to change faced with overwhelming evidence cregan dramatically changed his plea to guilty
15:31he was jailed for life sentencing him the judge said he'd shown a cold-blooded and ruthless determination
15:38to end their lives he was given a whole life tariff he'll never be released from prison and that is
15:45unusual it's reserved as the most serious punishment for people guilty of crimes of this severity this scale
15:54it was actually justified and appropriate that he should be given a whole life sentence that he
15:59should never ever gain liberty again our lives have been shattered i will never be the same again
16:05to have a child taken away from you such a cruel and meaningless way is without doubt the worst thing
16:11any parent could imagine with cregan in jail nicola and fiona's legacy has continued to touch the lives of
16:19their fellow officers during the trial brin and i were chatting away and said if you're in the armed
16:26forces and you died in the heat of battle you'd have got the elizabethan cross and so brin took that
16:35forward now if you die in the line of duty as a public servant she'll get the elizabethan emblem
16:43which is one good thing that has come out of this it is at least an acknowledgement you've given your
16:51life for the state once upon a time the dictionary of crime did not include phone snatching but in our
17:02next case the thief would leave a clue behind and earn a fairy tale nickname but can an expert witness
17:09bring a fairy tale ending and justice for his victim central london the 7th of august 2024
17:25when a thief attempts to snatch a phone in broad daylight he gets far more than he bargained for
17:33pc jake dean is from the city of london police cycle team
17:37and part of an overall effort to curb this type of crime
17:42in london there's been 300 phone thefts a day on average we've been working closely with the
17:47metropolitan police service our partner and we've seen a 40 reduction based on those efforts
17:53but this was no ordinary call out it was about midday when i became aware of a call to police
18:00of
18:00phone snatchers operating in the area of saint paul's i immediately headed towards the area where the
18:05uh cause began to escalate of a fight breaking out 65 year old canadian national brian du clair was in
18:15the city for work i regularly traveled to london and this was one of my regular trips i was going
18:22to a
18:23meeting and i was using my phone to guide me to get there and in an instant it was being
18:30pulled away from
18:30me the thief riding an electric bike expected to snatch the phone and beat a hasty retreat
18:39but a plucky bystander andy had other ideas suddenly this figure came out from the side
18:47and did this flying rugby tackle on on the cyclist and and essentially stopped him dead the bike fell over
18:56the cyclist was on the floor then i thought well hold on i might be able to catch him now
19:00so i went running up and he then at that point was on his bike and trying to get away
19:06but i had his
19:07i had managed to get hold of his rucksack and other people then tried to stop him as well
19:13he had to abandon the bike but eventually he managed to get away from everyone so he was very fit
19:19very fast and um and that was the last i saw of him though he made his escape the thief
19:28left three
19:29things behind his bike his rucksack and a single shoe he ran away with only one shoe on one foot
19:39at this point pc dean had arrived it was quite chaotic i've come across the victim and 11 witnesses
19:47i spoke to the victim uh took his statement on scene found out exactly what happened checked he
19:52was all right made sure he didn't need any medical assistance after taking witness statements he
19:58checked the offenders rucksack there was three stolen phones tinfoil and face masks tinfoil is often used
20:06by offenders in phone theft to wrap the phones to try prevent gps signals coming out of the phones to
20:12stop him being tracked and recovered at this point csi millie hood had arrived at the scene usually in
20:19the case of phone snatches the suspects fled the scene and they are gone so when we hear items have
20:26been left behind we seized that opportunity and attended as soon as we could to see what could be done
20:33forensically but she would face an initial problem i'd been made aware that the mobile devices had been
20:41touched by multiple members of the public that had been involved involved in the altercation just
20:48meaning that contamination had begun it hadn't been preserved and left untouched the bike had suffered
20:55the same fate her last hope was the final piece of evidence remaining on the scene the lost shoe
21:03police hoped to use it to track down their suspect who they nicknamed the cinderella thief
21:09the shoe in this job stuck out as having a very high forensic opportunity due to the fact there
21:15were multiple witnesses that had been involved in the altercation that all stated that this shoe has
21:21come off the suspect so shoes can be valuable forensic evidence specifically in jobs like this due to dna
21:29and that's a form of trace evidence that all of us leave behind i sent that item off for dna
21:37analysis
21:38which our director of forensics tracy alexander is an expert in expert witness tracy alexander is the
21:47director of forensic services for the city of london police and heads multi-specialist areas including dna
21:54analysis the guys run away and all he's left us as a shoe we were really reliant on getting a
22:01dna
22:02profile but the joy of a shoe is that quite often they're never washed at all we often find wearer
22:08dna
22:08on bottoms that aren't washed or aren't washed regularly so as well as the body fluids that we would
22:14normally look for in a crime scene investigation we also know that there there might well be either
22:20touch dna from where somebody's put their hand onto an item or if it's an item of clothing
22:26then the wearer dna of the person who's had that in contact with their body
22:33could the shoe be carrying the cinderella thieves dna only a thorough forensic analysis would find out
22:42the first stage of dna analysis is an extraction phase so you want to cut out some of the material
22:48that actually made up the fabric of the shoe because that's most likely where the genetic
22:53material has soaked in so after you've extracted it from the shoe there's then a little stage of
22:59genetic photocopying so you double up the quantity that you've got so that you've got enough material to
23:06then analyze and say these are the properties of this particular profile tracy and her team pin their
23:14hopes on being able to build a dna profile but this will take time meanwhile pc dean was tracking the
23:23thief's movements after fleeing the scene and it wasn't long before he uncovered some intriguing cctv
23:31so upon reviewing city of london police cameras i saw the offender run towards in the general direction
23:38of ludgate circus and private cctv then shows him run onto pilgrim street so this is the footage he's
23:45got to the top of the stairs you could see he's undoing his helmet i think he was looking around
23:49for
23:49cameras he's also taking his shoe off at this point and he throws the items into this construction
23:55site and then he carries on walking towards the camera and looks directly at the camera and this is
24:00the moment where i knew we had him we did some enhancement and you can see his face clearly i
24:05think
24:05he knew had been rambled it was a stroke of luck they could now see the face of the thief
24:13but that
24:14alone wasn't enough to easily identify him the victim brian du clair has had time to reflect on the
24:21event and especially the bravery of passerby andy without andy's tackle i don't think anyone could have
24:30stopped him by then because he would have already got off and accelerated away it was everyone's
24:36quick thinking that meant the thief didn't succeed one of the phones police found in the rucksack was
24:41brian's i got my phone back it's not a pleasant experience because someone's stealing something from
24:50you particularly a phone is it's all the information emails enormous amounts of information and knowledge
24:57that i have on that phone so it would have been a big effect back at tracy's lab a dna
25:05profile had
25:06come back it was crucial evidence to finally identify the thief based on one final task if you don't know
25:14who it is you search the the profile that you have against the dna database and if that person's been
25:20arrested
25:20before for a recordable offense their name will come up we then searched against the dna database
25:27and it gave us the name spencer duarte which then enabled officers to search for that individual in
25:33order to arrest them as soon as they possibly could i was extremely happy when i got the name of
25:38the
25:38suspect it meant i could go back to that victim and tell him we've got a name we're going to
25:42go arrest
25:43them good policing work i think you never know which one of these pieces of evidence is actually
25:49going to be the the key one and i would never have picked the um the shoe
25:56pc dean was now able to put a face to the name or in this case a name to the
26:01face in the cctv
26:02i immediately marked him as wanted on the police national computer so if he came into police contact
26:07officers would know it needed to be arrested for the offense of theft
26:11about a month after the incident we'd been struggling to locate him he wasn't at the address
26:15that um we'd previously held on our systems for him then police got a break the metropolitan police
26:23were on patrols looking for phone snatchers in the west end where they've come across him trying to
26:28steal another phone and found out it was wanted on the police national computer spencer duarte
26:35the cinderella thief was finally in custody the offender in this case was known to police and
26:41had had previous convictions for other theft offenses duarte was uh charged with theft from person
26:48going equipped to commit theft and two counts of handling stolen goods
26:55given his prolific career history duarte was sentenced to 15 months in prison
27:02when i heard about the dna so wow that is something i would never have thought of that's an incredible
27:11way of of catching someone tracking down the cinderella thief would not have been possible
27:17without expert witness forensic lead tracy alexander and her team in this particular instance there
27:25was literally nothing else that was going to help us work out who the offender was so it was really
27:31vital that we could do something useful with the shoe he left behind
27:39through all of the hard work put in for the city of london police and all involved
27:43this suspect definitely didn't get his fairy tale ending
27:51these stories highlight the vital work of expert witnesses working behind the scenes their findings
27:58can challenge narratives confirm suspicions and ultimately guide the course of justice
28:13the
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