All language subtitles for Expert Witness S05E02 720p WEB H264-JFF[EZTVx.to]

In this programme, when two police
officers are murdered in a gun and

attack, a forensic voice analyst is
brought in to help prove the identity of

their killer.

It's a voice which wouldn't turn your
head in the street.

And in London, an expert witness takes
DNA from the footwear of a prolific

to help put him behind bars.

The guy's run away and all he's left is
a shoe.

Welcome to Expert Witness, the series
where we reveal how science helps solve

some of the UK's toughest criminal
investigations.

Hameside, Greater Manchester.

The 18th of September, 2012.

Police emergency.

I heard someone just threw a big
concrete slab through me with that

ran off.

Greater Manchester Police get a 999 call
reporting an attempted break -in.

Two local officers respond, unaware
they're walking into a deadly ambush.

It was a routine call on a sunny
morning, but it became one of the

in the history of British policing.

BBC special correspondent Judith Moritz
was based in the Manchester newsroom.

The police officers who were sent out.

To respond to that call were young
police officers, PC Nicola Hughes and

shift partner that day, PC Fiona Bone.

Nicola Hughes was 23 years old and
described today as a great Bobby who was

always smiling.

32 -year -old Fiona Bone had been
planning to get married.

Colleagues said she was a calm, gentle
woman.

Unbeknownst to the two officers and the
call handler, lying in wait was known

criminal Dale Cregan.

He was already wanted for two murders
and heavily armed.

He'd have seen their police van as it
came towards the house. They turned off

the engine, went through the little
garden gate, and he was waiting for

Sir Peter Farhey was Greater
Manchester's chief constable at the

He immediately came out.

and essentially, you know, shot them in
cold blood.

He must have known that they were
unarmed. He certainly obviously knew

were two female officers.

Nicola Hughes turned up the garden path
and Cregan carried on shooting

and hit her in the back.

Fiona Bone turned out of line of sight.
She was crouching underneath the window,

the front window, and he then turned his
attentions.

to her and carried on firing and i can't
quite emphasize how savage this attack

was when cregan kept on firing he he
fired a total of 32

bullets at the two women he then hurled
a

military grenade at the two officers
before abandoning the firearm and

off their level of violence was just so
brutal that neither officer had any

chance whatsoever to defend themselves.

Fiona Bone died at the scene.

Nicola Hughes was badly wounded and died
later in hospital.

It was a breaking story.

I went live on the BBC's rolling news
channel.

Two police officers have been injured in
an incident in Tameside, which is a

suburban area to the east of Manchester.

I then went to... Abbey Gardens.

By the time I turned up, it was a crime
scene. It was cordoned off.

This is something that obviously has
taken everyone by surprise, by shock.

then on top of that, the news that two
police officers have been killed here in

the line of duty.

Ramifications of that, not just for
local people here, but also for the

I remember it.

feeling very close to home and the
community being really shaken as well.

And the police officers who served that
area and were grieving for their

colleagues were having to show up and
work.

Fiona's father, Paul Bone, recalls the
life -changing moments he learned of his

daughter's murder.

We heard briefly on the BBC News that
two policemen had been killed in

Manchester.

And she didn't answer her phone, which
was fairly normal, to

be honest, during the working day.

And then about two minutes, three
minutes after that, there was a knock on

door. And the local police had come to
say...

Your daughter's been involved in an
incident.

Fiona was dead.

You've got to get over the shock of
being told your daughter's dead for a

and wasn't too interested in how or why.

It's just the shock of her being dead.

At the same time, the police also
informed Bryn Hughes, Nicola's father,

tragic event.

Four call came through from somebody who
introduced themselves as a...

A detective chief inspector from Great
Manchester Police.

And the conversation went backwards and
forwards, which felt like hours, but it

was literally seconds before alarm bells
had started ringing and there was

something seriously wrong.

Because Great Manchester Police wasn't
fully aware of everything that went on,

they were still gathering evidence and
information, but he briefly went through

and described what they knew, what they
thought they knew had happened so far.

It was...

Totally random and callous attack.

At 11 .30 the same morning, just over an
hour after murdering two officers,

Cregan walks into his local police
station.

Cregan turns up to Hyde Police Station,
walks into the reception area, says to

the officer on the front desk, I'm
wanted by the police and I've just done

coppers. Someone like him.

In some ways he doesn't fear being
captured.

He wants the notoriety.

While Cregan remained in custody,
investigators looked back at his

history in search of a motive for the
brutal execution.

Months earlier, a number of gang
-related shootings had occurred, the

a long -running feud between two
criminal families.

A 23 -year -old had been shot dead in
the Cotton Tree Pub, a killing that bore

the hallmarks of a gangland execution.

Three months later, the dead man's
father was gunned down in his own home.

CCTV pictures revealed how what appeared
to be a grenade had been detonated as

part of the attack.

At the time, Cregan was the prime
suspect in the shootings and grenade

Police suspected he was being harboured
by family members, so they questioned

them and even offered a £50 ,000 reward
for his whereabouts.

Cregan was incensed. He claimed his
family were being harassed.

We'd had intelligence that he was very
angry that we'd been into members of his

family. We knew that Cregan, you know,
was an absolute danger to police

officers.

Cregan may have handed himself in and
claimed responsibility for the murders,

but he later retracted his confession.

The prosecution were going to take no
chances of him being acquitted. They

needed as watertight a case as possible.

You still have to prove every single
element beyond reasonable doubt.

Peter and his team now needed to
establish the significance of every

evidence, including the audio recording
of the 999 call.

Police emergency.

Someone just threw a big concrete slab
through me back window and ran off.

Right, I'll get an officer up there,
have a look around and see if they can

anybody similar and then they'll come
and see you.

The caller sounded calm, wanted the
police to come. I don't think there was

anything that the 999 call handler would
have picked up on as being unusual.

All right then, thanks very much. OK,
I'll be waiting.

The man called himself Adam Gartry.

But detectives believed it was in fact
Del Cregan setting an ambush for police

when they arrived.

If they could pin Cregan to that voice
recording, what they then got is the

deliberate intent that he lured the
officers to that address.

To get to the truth, detectives turned
to Professor Peter French.

A leading expert in the field of
forensic speech analysis.

I'd heard about the case before I was
approached by the police. I think there

would be very few people in the UK who
hadn't heard about the case.

Peter has played a key role in many high
-profile criminal cases.

They brought me in to try and help them
establish that the voice of the caller

who was calling himself Adam Gartry was
in fact Dale Cregan.

To do that, Peter needed to compare the
999 call to another call known to be

Cregan. Police provided him with a
recording of a phone call made by Cregan

inside prison while in custody.

That call was recorded by the prison
service. It was good quality.

There wasn't like a lot of...

Prison calls, lots of landing noise and
banging and clattering and shouting. You

know, it was pretty clean. It allowed me
to compare life with life. I was

comparing Cregan talking over the
telephone with Adam talking over the

telephone.

First, Peter listened to Adam's 999
call.

Police emergency.

I heard someone just threw a big
concrete slab through that window and

Right, I'll get an officer up there,
have a look around, see if they can see

anybody similar, and then they'll come
and see you. All right. All right, then.

Thanks very much. OK. I'll be waiting.

Here we have a very standard Greater
Manchester area accent for

a younger speaker from that area.

Nothing particularly distinctive or
unusual about it. I mean, I'm not

anything like a speech impediment, a
stammer.

It's a voice which wouldn't turn your
head in the street.

Peter then listened to the call Cregan
made from prison.

It's cheaper if I ring you at night
time. I'll ring you tomorrow night,

To the untrained ear, they may sound
similar.

But to prove it beyond doubt, Peter had
to conduct a series of highly sensitive

acoustic tests.

These involve taking measurements of
physical parameters of the speech signal

using computer software.

Here we have the phrase 30 Abbey
Gardens.

30 Abbey Gardens. Now, this first
syllable of 30 has the vowel

er in it, 30.

So in pronouncing that vowel, we can see
that there are three...

Bars of energy, these are the
resonances. So any word which has an er

we would do the same thing. And we
would, if you like, make a profile of

the resonance structure is of this
speaker's er vowel and repeat the

not just for er, but for a and e and e
and u, etc.

Peter then created a similar profile for
Cregan's prison phone call.

If the two profiles matched, it would
provide direct proof of Cregan's

premeditation.

In October 2012, the funerals of Nicola
Hughes and Fiona Bone were held at

Manchester Cathedral on consecutive
days.

Nicola Hughes loved policing Greater
Manchester. Today, the city's police

out to return that affection.

Thousands lining the road to the
cathedral as the funeral cortege passed

Their murders affected the whole police
community.

The roads were lined with police
officers from all over the country.

When Nicola and her younger brother were
kids, there was a police car behind us.

And you look in the rearview mirror and
it said, Eculop, police backwards.

I'd always say to Paul, I know we're
being chased by the Eculop.

And then I got a text out of the blue.

She said, I'll never guess what, I'm
joining the Eculop.

And that was when she was 19.

I was well aware that we could get into
a grave or fight.

I don't think even in wildest nightmares
you could...

imagine or envision what would have
happened or what did happen?

I knew Manchester could be difficult at
times, but never realised

how difficult it would be.

When they took her protective clothing
off, there was 15 bullets in it.

Cregan continued to maintain his
innocence, making Peter's forensic

analysis all the more crucial.

When we looked at the vowel resonances,
they were very, very closely aligned,

and examinations provided very strong
support for the view that the caller was

in fact Dale Cregan. Cregan had clearly
planned every moment of this. He wanted

to shoot vulnerable, unarmed
neighbourhood bobbies, and that's who

In February 2013, the trial began at
Preston Crown Court.

The families of PCs Bone and Hughes have
been in court and they sobbed as they

heard the details of the women's death.

Cregan was in the dock with nine alleged
gang members.

He was charged with four counts of
murder and attempted murder and causing

explosion with a grenade.

We'd all turned up to the beginning of
the trial.

Dale Cregan still maintaining that he
wasn't guilty despite a stack of

against him.

I was on standby.

I was going to be called to give
evidence for the prosecution.

But four days in to that trial, we
realised in court something

was about to change.

Faced with overwhelming evidence, Cregan
dramatically changed his plea to

guilty.

He was jailed for life.

Sentencing him, the judge said he'd
shown a cold -blooded and ruthless

determination to end their lives.

He was given a whole life tariff. He'll
never be released from prison. And that

is unusual.

It's reserved as the most serious
punishment for people guilty of crimes

severity, this scale.

It was absolutely justified and
appropriate that he should be given a

sentence, that he should never, ever...

gain liberty again.

Our lives have been shattered. I will
never be the same again.

To have a child taken away from you in
such a cruel and meaningless way is

without doubt the worst thing any parent
could imagine.

With Queegan in jail, Nicola and Fiona's
legacy has continued to touch the lives

of their fellow officers.

During the trial, Bryn and I were
chatting away and said, if you're in the

forces, then you died in...

the heat of battle you'd have got the
Elizabethan cross.

So Bryn took that forward and now if you
die in the line of duty

as a public servant you get the
Elizabethan emblem, which is one good

has come out of this. It is at least an
acknowledgement that you've given your

life for the state.

Once upon a time, the dictionary of
crime did not include phone snatching.

in our next case, the thief would leave
a clue behind and earn a fairytale

nickname. But can an expert witness
bring a fairytale ending and justice for

victim?

Central London, the 7th of August, 2024.

When a thief attempts to snatch a phone
in broad daylight, he gets far more than

he bargained for.

PC Jake Dean is from the City of London
Police Cycle Team and part of an overall

effort to curb this type of crime.

In London, there's been 300 phone thefts
a day on average. We've been working

closely with Metropolitan Police
Service, our partner, and we've seen a

reduction based on those efforts.

But this was no ordinary call -out.

It was about midday when I became aware
of a call to police of phone snatchers

operating in the area of St Paul's. I
immediately headed towards the area

the calls began to escalate of a fight
breaking out.

65 -year -old Canadian national Brian
Duclair was in the city for work.

I regularly travelled to London, and
this was one of my regular trips. I was

going to a meeting, and I was using my
phone to guide me to get there.

And in an instant, it was being pulled
away from me.

The thief, riding an electric bike,
expected to snatch the phone and beat a

hasty retreat.

But a plucky bystander, Andy, had other
ideas.

Suddenly... This figure came out from
the side and did this flying rugby

on the cyclist and essentially stopped
him dead.

The bike fell over. The cyclist was on
the floor then. I thought, well, hold

I might be able to catch him now.

So I went running up and he then, at
that point, was on his bike and trying

get away. But I had managed to get hold
of his rucksack.

And other people then tried to stop him
as well.

He had to abandon the bike, but
eventually he managed to get away from

So he was very fit, very fast, and that
was the last I saw of

him.

Though he made his escape, the thief
left three things behind, his bike, his

rucksack and a single shoe.

He ran away with only one shoe on one
foot.

At this point, PC Dean had arrived.

It was quite chaotic.

I'd come across the victim and 11
witnesses.

I spoke to the victim, took his
statement on scene, found out exactly

happened, checked he was all right, made
sure he didn't need any medical

assistance.

After taking witness statements, he
checked the offender's rucksack.

There was three stolen phones, tinfoil
and face masks.

Tinfoil is often used by offenders in
phone theft to wrap the phone.

to try and prevent GPS signals coming
out of the phones to stop them being

trapped and recovered.

At this point, CSI Millie Hood had
arrived at the scene.

Usually in the case of phone snatches,
the suspect fled the scene and they are

gone. So when we hear items have been
left behind, we seized that opportunity

and attended as soon as we could to see
what could be done forensically.

But she would face an initial problem.

I'd been...

made aware that the mobile devices had
been touched by multiple members of the

public that had been involved in the
altercation, just meaning that

contamination had begun, it hadn't been
preserved and left untouched.

The bike had suffered the same fate.

Her last hope was the final piece of
evidence remaining on the scene, the

shoe.

Police hoped to use it to track down
their suspect, who they nicknamed...

The Cinderella thief.

The shoe in this job stuck out as having
a very high forensic opportunity due to

the fact there were multiple witnesses
that had been involved in the

that all stated that this shoe has come
off the suspect.

So shoes can be valuable forensic
evidence, specifically in jobs like

to DNA, and that's a form of trace
evidence that all of us leave behind.

I sent that item off.

for DNA analysis, which our Director of
Forensics, Tracey Alexander, is an

expert in.

Expert witness Tracey Alexander is the
Director of Forensic Services for the

City of London Police and heads multi
-specialist areas, including DNA

The guy's run away.

And all he's left us is a shoe. We were
really reliant on getting a DNA profile.

But the joy of a shoe is that quite
often they're never washed at all.

We often find wearer DNA on items that
aren't washed or aren't washed

So as well as the body fluids that we
would normally look for in a crime scene

investigation, we also know that there
might well be either touch DNA from

somebody's put their hand onto an item,
or if it's an item of clothing, then the

wearer DNA of the person who's had that
in contact with their body.

Could the shoe be carrying the
Cinderella thief's DNA?

Only a thorough forensic analysis would
find out.

The first stage of DNA analysis is an
extraction phase.

So you want to cut out some of the
material that actually made up the

the shoe because that's most likely
where the genetic material has soaked

after you've extracted it from the shoe,
there's then a little stage of genetic

photocopying. So you double up the
quantity that you've got so that you've

enough material to then analyse and say,
these are the properties of this

particular profile.

Tracy and her team pin their hopes on
being able to build a DNA profile, but

this will take time.

Meanwhile, PC Dean was tracking the
thief's movements after fleeing the

and it wasn't long before he uncovered
some intriguing CCTV.

I saw the offender run towards, in the
general direction of Ludgate Circus.

Private CCTV then shows him run onto
Pilgrim Street.

So this is the footage. He's got to the
top of the stairs.

You can see he's undone his helmet.

I think he was looking around for
cameras.

He's also taken his shoe off at this
point.

And he throws the items into this
construction site and then he carries on

walking towards the camera and looks
directly at the camera. And this is the

moment where I knew we had him. We did
some enhancement and you can see his

clearly. I think he knew he'd been
rambled.

It was a stroke of luck.

They could now see the face of the
thief, but that alone wasn't enough to

identify him.

The victim, Brian Duclair, has had time
to reflect on the events and especially

the bravery of passer -by Andy.

Without Andy's tackle, I don't think
anyone could have stopped him by then

because he would have already got off
and accelerated away.

It was everyone's quick thinking that
meant the thief didn't succeed. One of

phones police found in the rucksack was
Brian's.

I got my phone back.

It's not a pleasant experience
because...

someone stealing something from you,
particularly a phone.

It's all the information, the emails,
enormous amount of information and

knowledge that I have on that phone. So
it would have been a big effect.

Back at Tracy's lab, a DNA profile had
come back.

It was crucial evidence to finally
identify the thief based on one final

If you don't know who it is, you search
the profile that you have against the

DNA database. And if that person's been
arrested before for a recordable

offence, their name will come up. We
then searched against the DNA database

it gave us the name Spencer Duarte,
which then enabled officers to search

that individual in order to arrest them
as soon as they possibly could.

I was extremely happy when I got the
name of the suspect. It meant I could go

back to that victim and tell him, we've
got a name, we're going to go arrest

them.

Good policing work, I think. You never
know which one of these pieces of

evidence is actually going to be the key
one.

And I would never have picked the shoe.

PC Dean was now able to put a face to
the name, or in this case, a name to the

face in the CCTV.

I immediately marked him as wanted on
the police national computer, so if he

came into police contact, officers would
know he'd need to be arrested for the

offence of theft.

About a month after the incident, we'd
been struggling to locate him. He wasn't

at the address that we'd previously held
on our systems for him.

Then police got a break.

The Metropolitan Police were on patrols
looking for phone snatchers in the West

End, where they'd come across him trying
to steal another phone.

and found out he was wanted on the
Police National Computer.

Spencer Duarte, the Cinderella thief,
was finally in custody.

The offender in this case was known to
police and had had previous convictions

for other theft offences.

Duarte was charged with theft from
person, go and acquit, commit theft, and

counts of handling stolen goods.

Given his prolific career history,
Duarte was sentenced to 15 months in

When I heard about the DNA, I was like,
wow, that is something I would never

have thought of. That's an incredible
way of catching someone.

Tracking down the Cinderella thief would
not have been possible without expert

witness, forensic lead Tracy Alexander
and her team.

In this particular instance, there was
literally nothing else that was going to

help us work out who the offender was.

So it was really vital that we could do
something useful with the shoe he left

behind.

Through all the hard work put in for the
City of London Police and all involved,

this suspect definitely didn't get his
fairytale ending.

These stories highlight the vital work
of expert witnesses.

Working behind the scenes, their
findings can challenge narratives,

suspicion, and ultimately guide the
course of justice.