Original subtitles

The double jeopardy rule m were tried and acquitted, you couldn't s

charge again. However, when the double j abolished in respect of murder, it becam

The police sometimes will periodically go back and look at co

cases and they will review them to see if there are any grounds for evidence to

take them forward. In 2008, 9 years after Maureen had gone missing, Colin go

hold of the review and looked at it and he was clearly not happy at what he saw.

I mean this was a staggeri his wife has gone missing 2 days before

is offering a large sum of money to use incinerator, the only use of those is to

She disappeared and no one knows what happened to

her, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence against the husband.

I'd say he was shocked, it was my opinion that he had no idea

he was going to be arrested or the polic were even reinvestigating the matter.

The whole thing has cost him his business, it's cost him everything.

Every SIO, every murder sq number of investigations that are unsolv

opportunity with new evidence or somethi it's worthwhile re-opening one of these

There are a number of justifications for re-opening a stalled case, quite often i

when advancements in science means you c get DNA from the exhibit you could not g

back at the time or another witness comes

forward. In the case of the disappearance of.

Maureen Hale, it was slightly more unusu circumstances, it was a change in the la

At the time, her disappea investigated one would hope thoroughly.

Arrested as prime suspect in her disappe it could never be established obviously

been murdered without a body. There appe hope of taking the case further. Her dis

literally chalked up as a missing person Hale and family continued their lives wi

The double jeopardy rule m tried and acquitted, you couldn't stand

again. The fear for the Hale case was th Martin were charged for her murder and a

hadn't been found, at some point in the be discovered and there might be good ev

which will point to his guilt and it wou take him to court again, that's why it h

Colin and that team looke at the circumstances here and decided th

needed to go with it, that they needed t the apple tree and see what dropped off.

When we looked at the circumstances and we were able to lay it

and think about what happened to Maureen Hale it became an amazingly compelling

case and really it looked even at the first review that we didn't even need

any more evidence that what had been discovered before, but we did find some.

I joined Colin's major i team during the Levi Bellfield case, so

investigating team there and I worked al a number of years after that on other in

I hadn't worked with Kev M been around the CID in South West London

a lot of people on the team had worked w available, they encouraged me to say we

onto the team and not a single second of regret that I did that

because he was a very capable man, he could be trusted through anything

to a good standard and he did it all wit too, so he was a real valuable addition

In 2008, the Metropolita cold case review on the disappearance of

is when a fresh investigation was initia trial of Levi Bellfield and obviously he

but he made sure he spoke to me every mo the case officer, and my job was the day

the investigation so we would discuss wh day and how we were going to move the in

We had to do the two simul we were going to really make some progre

Hale's disappearance, so that was why it another part of the team and principally

Mcsharry and DI Amy Perrot had a look at we were able then to finally disentangle

the Bellfield investigation, then Mauree disappearance became a kind of priority

It was given to our team to revisit all the witnesses, look at al

the evidence and make decisions around w direction that investigation would take.

Maureen Hale was born as Maureen Weatherly

and she got married at a young age, at about 19, she got

married to a man named 'Agg', so she bec they, together, had a son named Nathan a

split up, she took Nathan, he was still quite young then,

she took him with her and then she got together with Martin.

Hale, Nathan was adopted into the family on to have 4 more children, Nathan was v

family and they always thought of themselves as having 5

children. Maureen Hale really fell nicely into her role as

sort of 'stock broker belt mother' she d have to work, Martin's business was boom

her time looking after the children and were at school it would be coffee mornin

and socialising with the other women in in a similar position to her, and she ha

Martin Hale was essentially a self-made in many ways, he started off on the frui

and vegetables at Kingston Market and by the 90s he had built up a business worth

over a million pounds based at Western International Market, he was a wholesale

and vegetables. It was a very lucrative business for him, he employed 2-3 people

and the profits from that meant they cou afford to live in Ember Court Road in a

5-bedroom detached house in the stock br belt. Maureen Hale didn't have to work,

she brought up the 5 children and became part of the local mum's set going to cof

mornings, making friends, to all externa appearances she had an idyllic life.

Martin Hale was a trader in here for many, many years, he was

one of the biggest wholesalers in Western International, I used to work

opposite Martin for a number of years, he was a very quiet man and seemed

just a decent sort of chap. He had a very good catering business whi

did restaurants and food service side th wholesale, he had the wholesale unit, th

which seemed to work very well. Very hard working, very conscientious, did

everything right as far as the stand goe well run stand, good business.

But it did have its pressu trade that works in the early hours of t

years he was getting up at 2 in the morning 6 days a week and althoug

he was home by lunchtime that sort of lifestyle puts pressure on anybody.

The hours are a bit off, it's got earlier an earlier, it used to

a 5 o'clock start, we're now here by 1 o'clock, some of the guys are even here

midnight. There's two different sets to business there's the wholesale business

then there's the food service, the food services are 24 hours they supply restau

He would come home, grab some sleep and then be back again

early hours of the morning, it had its rewards, but it was a tough life

To the outside world they happy married couple living a comfortabl

reality, Martin and Maureen had a fracti there had been suggestions he had assaul

Martin Hale working all th Maureen has her life with children, taki

mornings with the other mums and that so toll on their marriage and it started ar

Maureen, despite all the wonderful surro and the children and everything, thought

than this and started thinking about bei that was what led her into starting affa

Maureen being unhappy in her marriage, feeling she wasn't getting the companion

she wanted from Martin, started to look elsewhere the first person she turned

to, was a man called John Potter who was a local plumber who did work for the

That didn't work out for her they went out for a drink and they'd had a quick

kiss in the car, but, what happened was that for some reason Martin had suspecte

something was going on between the two and he put a recording device in Maureen

car, and he had a recording of her with John Potter and was able to confront

her with it and she had to admit it and it caused further conflict between them.

It's perhaps worth thinking that you kno most people don't feel the need

to put listening devices into their partner's cars, there was obviously

something going on that put some sort of suspicion in Martin Hale's mind that.

Maureen was up to something or might be up to something otherwise he wouldn't

have gone to those lengths to record her in the car when she went out. Clearl

Martin Hale had a lot to lose, if Maureen walked out the door and divorced

him, there were 5 children, there was an expensive house and a thriving

business, she potentially had claims on all of those things if they divorced.

So, the next time she was more careful and struck up a relationship with a

man called Andrew Horton, Horton was a gardener and worked at the military

cemetery at Brookwood. Maureen Hale had been visiting with friends to look a

the gardens and grounds, got into a conversation with him and they exchanged

phone numbers. It's quite fair to say Andrew Horton was something you'd descri

as a ladies man, he was not backward at trying to make new relationships

with women he encountered during his job. Maureen, although she was absolutel

devoted to her children, became disillusioned with the marriage and ther

were one or two episodes of severe arguments between her and Martin, some

domestic violence but not enough to cause serious injuries. Maureen decided

1999 that the marriage wasn't going anywhere, and she needed to be out of it

and filed for divorce. This all came to a head on the 22nd of June 1999, the

very day that Maureen had divorce papers served on Martin Hale and about 10pm

that night they had a terrible row, it was a blazing noisy row that all the

children heard. Martin Hale's version of events for it was that at the end

of that row, Maureen took up, left the house and was never to be seen again.

MIKE SULLIVAN The police sometimes will periodically go back and look at co

cases and they will review them to see if there are any grounds for evidence to

take them forward. In 2008, 9 years after Maureen had gone missing, Colin go

hold of the review and looked at it and he clearly wasn't happy with what he saw

Maureen was still outstanding while the case never came to

conclusion. The Metropolitan Police decided there would be a cold case revie

When we started to re-open Maureen Hale's disappearance, the first

was repeat all those inquiries that had a decade before when she went missing, s

at her bank account and at her doctors, records, all her friends and family that

trace and we got the same answers, nothi trace of her, no brush with officialdom

She disappeared and no on there was a lot of circumstantial eviden

On the evening she was last seen, she certainly had an argument

with Martin Hale and the children in the house gave evidence of this, they heard

noisy argument between the parents. Coincidentally perhaps, it was the day t

Martin received the divorce papers throu the post saying his wife wanted a divorc

It wasn't until the 25th of June, some 3 days after Maureen Hale had

disappeared, that her husband Martin Hale came here to Kingston Police statio

to report her missing. The missing person report, as they all are, were

assessed by supervising officers to see if anything else needed to be don

No hide or hair was ever heard from

her again, she didn't attend dental appointments,

no money was taken from her account, she take her son to a medical appointment wh

was very strange, and she missed out goi concert which she had tickets for and ha

eagerly looking forward to going. For al and purposes, she disappeared into thin

And then finally in the mi about 2-3 weeks after the report was mad

here in Kingston decided to arrest Marti of murder. They didn't have the evidence

charge him unless he admitted it once he But it did give them the opportunity to

him, get his side of the story, his acco also to search both his home and his wor

The gist of the allegation was that Maureen had wanted a

divorce from her husband and he didn't want to settle an expensive divor

claim and lose his house and lose his children potentially and the argument

was that he decided to kill her rather than go through the divorce.

So, if Martin Hale were to believed and she just upped and left aft

the argument, she did so without any of the

basic necessities, clothing, means of support,

money, means of communication and transp No trace of Maureen Hale existed officia

after that moment, she hadn't spoken to doctor or dentist, hadn't used her bank

or phone. Everything was just dead there was no trace of her in any way. She hadn

contacted any of her friends or family a crucially she hadn't contacted any one o

children. Everyone said that was complet out of character, even if it had all got

much for her and she disappeared, she wo have maintained contact with those child

There were a number of things that were out of the ordinary in relation to.

Martin Hale's business here on the night Maureen went missing. First he called

his manager and told him he was unwell and wouldn't be in work that night, but

the manager drove past Martin Hale's house at 2am as he did every day as they

used to check each other had woken up, and he noticed Martin Hale's BMW car was

missing and he found this a bit odd, and his boss had phoned him to say, 'I'm

not well I'm not coming to work' but when he went past the house in the early

hours of the morning the car wasn't there implying that he was out somewhere

You could say that was su further circumstances which would have c

When the manager got to work they found there was a spade missin

they had a spade for clearing up bits of rubbish and old fruit and veg and the

had to find another way of doing it for a few days and then Martin Hale brought

the spade back to work and no one asked him about it, he was the boss he could

do what he liked but it was an odd thing that he would want to use the spade at

home in that period after Maureen had gone missing. Lastly both Martin Hale as

the owner of his business and his manage had company cars but they were very

different, Martin's was a 7 Series BMW w the manager had a little Ford Fiesta.

An employee of Mr Hale st that on the night in question when Maure

vanished, Martin, Mr Hale had rung him a that he wanted to use his Ford Fiesta ca

He said, 'Well I just fanc allowed to change my mind, they are both

to my business and I'm entitled to drive just fancied driving something different

During the course of the a briefcase was recovered and within tha

In his briefcase were the divorce papers Maureen had sent

to him but also with them was a pad and on that pad, in Martin Hale's own

handwriting, to which he admitted to writing himself, there was a numbered

'at sea, landfill, by acid, by fire' and when he was asked

why he had written that he said 'I've been having some dark thoughts' and

he thought if he was to kill his wife, how he was to dispose of her body. He

had written that down as his brainstorming session with himself, but

said he wouldn't have gone through with it and never did go through with it

He told the investigatin officers that he was going through

a black time at that stage and that he u to make notes about absolutely anything.

He said, 'Yes, I did write that's what they are, I was in a particu

dark place, but it doesn't mean that I d it, I was just writing down dark thought

Who knows why someone wanted to write those things down, but

it could be argued that it may be in the instance of disposing of a bod

When the double jeopardy rule was changed and it became possible

try people twice for the same murder, th that really was the removal of the barri

to prosecuting him, so that was why in 2 we decided to re-open the investigation

thinking that even if we couldn't find t body, we still had a chance of prosecuti

It's so difficult to search in this part there's so many woods and forest and ope

that in the Millie Dowler investigation police searched their county virtually c

months and still hadn't competed it, the could do a speculative search like that.

To search somewhere it was going to have intelligence, with a good idea we were g

So, when it came to the searches that we were going to do fo

Maureen Hale's body, we had to be a little bit selective and

the only place that we had any source of that it was a good place to look, was of

They had a large garden and we searched the house and the entire building but th

grounds and that even meant going as far recently erected shed and looking undern

had ground penetrating radar there to se land had been disturbed and the whole th

days and was quite a large operation and came to nothing and we found no trace of

I assisted the exhibits officer when the back garden was re-exam

and that was dug up to see if they could find a trace of her there which they did

We dug up the patio and we dug up areas of interest in the

garden, but we never found any body or any bones or anything like that.

I don't think they realis had an expectation of finding Maureen,

wherein lay the great problem with this because without her body and the potenti

forensic opportunities that might have thrown up. It neither rules Martin in as

definite suspect nor rules him out as be innocent, at least in the eyes of the po

During the course of the investigation, we were contacted

a man by the name of Timothy Gilbert, he was the manager of the Silvermere.

Pet Crematorium, he told us and said that around the time that Maureen had

gone missing, that a member of the public had asked to hire the crematorium

There was another remarkab piece of evidence. Martin Hale had a hab

drinking at a sports club effectively in middle of Sandown Park race course, ther

and he used to go in there and drink a l just a day or two after Maureen went mis

he is at the bar and he meets a man he w school with who he hadn't seen in 30-40

And he's chatting to him and this man te him that he's now the manager of a pet

cemetery and golf course down in Cobham Silvermere. So, Martin says, 'that sound

interesting I might pop down and have a and the man who he was speaking to thoug

that he meant the golf course and he was interested in playing golf, but Martin t

up the very next day and it wasn't the g course he was interested in it was the

crematorium. He asked the manager if he rented out the incinerators at the crema

and he looked at him aghast and said no and Martin Hale then said, 'what if I we

to offer you 20 thousand pounds, would y let me borrow one for the weekend then?'

We found this quite interesting because it wasn't the norm

and we asked Mr Gilbert, 'was it the norm' and he said it was very, ve

unusual for individuals to approach and ask to hire it, not to cremate an

animal, so he found it very interesting, and we also found it very interesting.

I mean this was a staggeri his wife has gone missing two days befor

is offering a large sum of money to use incinerator, the only use of those is to

He said, 'No, that didn't happen, I went to the man in charge, who was an old fri

primary school, but I went there to look the golf course, not about the pet crema

The legal position is when someone has gone missing and there is no proof o

life for over 7 years you can apply to court to have them ruled and deemed as

dead and leaves you free to marry again and also claim on any insurances or

any other things. The person is legally treated as dead then even though there

is no hard evidence of it. As I understa it, it was very shortly after that

7-year period was up that Martin Hale made the application to the court and

the court had no option but to declare her dead because there was absolutely

no trace of her being alive since that day in 1999 when she was last seen.

Our thought was 'if you put everything w case to the jury, you have Hale trying t

for a few days, borrowing a shovel from piece of paper ways he might dispose of

and then asking if you could pay a large rent a pet crematorium for the afternoon

there to build a circumstantial case tha time we went to the CPS and said, 'what

A file was eventually presented to the Crown Prosecution.

Service and because he never had previously been charged or tak

to court and acquitted, there were no do CPS gave the go ahead for him to be pros

It didn't take the CPS lon and say, 'yeah we've looked at this circ

and we think there's a realistic prospec based on the criteria they used, so 'go

I was the arresting offi Martin Hale, Colin Sutton decided that h

arrested at his home address because we bring any more pain to his family. So, h

away from his address, when he came to a engage with him and he would be arrested

as we were following his car away, surve sight of him, and we 'bomb-bursted' to a

of Surrey to try and find him. I parked car park and was reviewing what was said

He left home address with an orange carr as I sat in the car on my own I thought

so I drove to the nearest Halfords and h parked up there. He came out of Halfords

male, as he approached his car, I stoppe myself, formally arrested him and cautio

I had never met him so I'd not formed an cold case review I met him on a number o

be accessible, he would always talk. Pre didn't dislike him, but I had a job to d

When Martin Hale was arres he was polite, he was a reasonable

man, he was a man who ran a business and knew how to interact with people.

I'd say he was shocked, no idea that he was going to be arrested

reinvestigating the matter so when I for the expression on his face I'd describe

Martin Hale was arrested, denied knowing anything more than he had

disappearance of his wife, that he had n at all. So, we were always unable to fin

nevertheless we went to court in 2008 an confident that we had enough evidence th

jury would look at the facts and conclud murdered by him. The children didn't kno

once we'd arrested and charged him because they'd already

lost their mother, they've lived with their father growing

into adults, most of them and you know i for us to deal with them because they wa

of their father and we sort of tried to officers to them as we would do to the c

murder victim. But of course, the diffic was also very close to them, it's a real

The children I'm sure wer traumatised by losing their mother and I

supported their father throughout the wh and didn't believe that he could have ki

And perhaps even more so b last 7-8 years thinking their mother des

are living with their father so there is conflict and conflicted ideas and views

to understand. It was something we was n come to terms with satisfactorily, the r

the children was always a little bit at like a normal family liaison relationshi

By the time the case came to trial in 20 Martin Hale had already had his wife,

Maureen, declared legally dead by the co so although we had to go through the

process of proving that and make sure we could find no trace of her being alive,

really don't think that was an issue for jury, their sole issue was who killed he

The defence case was clearly that Martin to do with it he couldn't answer for any

hadn't answered already, and he didn't k to his wife she just left. What they did

kind of exploited the lover Andrew Horto was eventually charged with his wife's m

trial here in Kingston Crown Court in Ja 2009. What happened was that Andrew Hort

Maureen Hale's lover was called as a wit a rather colourful account of his lifest

philandering and misogyny I suppose. He how he would often have several lovers o

same time and I don't think he endeared jury and the defence then called a coupl

girlfriends and the jury heard how he wa them and he threatened on one occasion t

There was some potential Martin Hale, otherwise the case would ha

There was a note he'd written, he didn't which he wrote about the various means o

he'd gone to see someone about the poten crematorium. There was the aspect of his

with Maureen, there was some evidence th presented to the jury in the sense that

But Martin Hale had a reasonable explanation for all of the evidence that

was put against him. The fact that his marriage broke down, that kind

thing happens, it doesn't mean that someone has killed someone or murdered

someone, it doesn't necessarily provide a motive for killing his wife.

All that you need is a reasonable doubt and all it needed was

couple of members of that jury to think this rather unsavoury character they see

before them could be responsible for this murder. It was a 3-week trial and a

the end of the trial he was found not guilty and allowed to leave a free man.

It took the jury 3 hours him, hardly anything in a long murder tr

as this was, or a longish murder trial, must have been fairly certain that there

not enough evidence to convict and that therefore not guilty of the crime, the o

way that could ever be changed now is wi jeopardy laws and the discovery of a bod

I was sitting at Kingston Court waiting for the verdict and it cam

rather more quickly than we might have e And it's a fools game really to try and

read into that because you can have guil verdicts very quickly and you can have n

guilty verdicts very quickly. But I gues given the amount of evidence we had pres

to the court, I kind of expected it to t little bit longer for the jury to delibe

through it and I was shocked, I really w shocked because I thought we had present

a compelling case and we'd worked hard a and it was difficult really to see if th

jury accepted the evidence we'd discover then I thought they were bound to convic

The children gave evidenc in court, saying there had been a row

between their parents on the night that Maureen vanished, but their demeanour

towards their father was the all-importa thing for a jury, they would have

been looking very carefully at that and it wouldn't have failed to register with

them that Martin's children were support of him in what must have been his

darkest hour at that point, facing trial for the murder of his wife, their

mother, a very difficult situation. But the fact that the children didn't tu

their back on him would certainly have been a compelling factor in this case.

It's always difficult when got a good and solid case, you go to cou

acquit. In this case we had a mass of ci all the evidence about Maureen not havin

with her bank, doctors anything like tha important family events, walking out and

word again to 5 children. You also have the night she went missing, Martin Hale

he took from work from his place of work take back for a few days. And bizarrely

Series BMW with his manager's car, a For swap that back until after he had been a

and they'd searched the Fiesta. But the is the prosecution that bring the case a

prove it beyond any reasonable doubt, if jury has a reasonable doubt they have to

It's always slightly dis you get a non-guilty verdict, but the ev

before 12 men and women and they came ba guilty conclusion, so we have to accept

I think in this case there was a witness called Andrew Horton who w

Maureen Hale's lover. What the defence t did was brought two witnesses who were f

girlfriends of his who painted a picture him as a misogynist who had been violent

to them, threatened violence to them and one case actually threatened to kill her

I remember watching Andr give evidence at Kingston Crown Court du

course of the trial, he was very confide he came across as very believable and th

a case of swaying the jury with what he tell. He had been involved in numerous a

and he had assaulted numerous ex-girlfri but he was quite happy to talk about tha

I think it's easy to understand how the jury didn't take to h

and the suggestion it could have been him and not Martin Hale that could have

murdered Maureen Hale was enough in some of those jurors' minds to provoke some

reasonable doubt and that's all they nee reasonable doubt and they must acquit.

And I think it was the main reason that the jury found a doubt.

Because you had the question hanging there, you had Maureen's lover at the

time is this man, who has a record of us Is it possible, members of the jury, tha

I was surprised that the jury found him not guilty, but our

justice system means there only has to be a small amount of doubt to go

for a not guilty verdict, so I can only assume they thought there was

some reasonable doubt that he had murdered his wife. That's what happened.

Ultimately professionally, I did my job, I got a team together to g

the most evidence we could and put it be a court and then the rest of that proces

takes over. Of course, during the trial, fact that Martin Hale might have been in

another relationship himself was never p forward to the jury and indeed it was di

for us to work out, we still don't reall know how long his relationship had been

on and whether that was prior to Maureen disappearance or something that occurred

afterwards. I think the depth and breadt evidence that we presented to the court

this case, exceeded that in other cases I had where the defendant was found guil

At the conclusion of the trial, the Metropolitan Police made

statement to say there was no further leads for them to pursue at that moment

time so unless it goes back to another c case review, or someone approaches the

investigation with some new information at this stage it's not being re-opened.

He seemed a very decent quie chap, and still is

a very level headed calm sort of person, that's as much as we

know him. The whole thing has cost him h him everything. Yes it's a very strange,

MIKE SULLIVAN The law was served and pol position have to expect that verdicts ar

to go their way they may invest a lot of of resources they may spend weeks and we

administration that goes into mounting o at the end of the day it's a jury of 12

whether a person is guilty or not quite instance the world has to assume that Ma

I'm overjoye really, it put some sort of closure on t

and really I'd just like to thank my leg team, Richard Christie, that's worked ve

hard to put the case together over the l few months. There's not much really more

say on the matter at the moment. I'm jus to be out and there's some closure on it

After Martin Hale's acquit met police re-assessed the case and deci

proceed with the inquiries any further, the case effectively now is closed.

One has to accept a cours but perhaps were also entitled to look a

in the first place against a suspect, th what happened to Maureen, because her bo

We took every opportunity there was, we found ne

evidence, we found compelling evidence, the only clincher may have been had we'd

been able to find Maureen's body, becaus that may have given us more scientific

evidence, or its location might have pointed towards guilt or otherwise.

Martin Hale was found not guilty for his wife's murder, so he

free to continue the rest of his life an in the meantime, Maureen remains missing

It's increasingly difficul without trace because everything has a r

dentist, all sorts of things like that a of Maureen Hale from the day she was las

It was the only case I did where there w body, where we didn't find a body. It wa

the only murder case that I ever had tha before the court and the defendant was a