Original subtitles

I've worked in a job that only ever deals with the bad side of things.

But I always set myself

this idea that the minute

I cease to be shocked

or angry,

that was the time to hang up my boots and move on.

We know that he killed in 1987.

But even I didn't think

that as a human race we could be so cruel.

And it's that moment when you first plug in the hard drive

and you look at what you're confronted with,

that that's when the kind of reality of the case can start hitting home.

You catch a breath and you know that what you are seeing

is so far out of anyone's frame of reference,

this is not a human being doing this.

So this has to be something other.

This is a monster.

Those things they haunt you and they can haunt you for a long, long time.

I think this job is still very raw with me.

It's the hardest case I've ever worked on,

but I wouldn't...

I wouldn't have not wanted to be involved.

POLICEMAN: (Straight in.)

I just kept thinking to myself

that we are going to actually arrest the person

who was responsible for two of the longest running unsolved murders

in British criminal history.

And the person that people still lived in fear of.

I was only seven years old when these murders happened.

But they were massive in Tunbridge Wells.

I grew up knowing full well that the person responsible for these murders

was still on the loose.

POLICEMAN: Seize the drawer, pull the drawer out, put it in the bag.

You just want the whole lot done like that?The whole lot.

That's... We'll have that one as well.

If I'm honest, I don't think anyone could have predicted

what we were gonna find when we searched his house.

The investigation has stolen a piece of my soul.

And I'm...

I'm confident that I'm not the only officer that feels that.

In 1987 Tunbridge Wells was a really nice place to be.

It was affluent, very sort of middle-class,

you know,

I was 18 then, 19, and, erm,

I think you have this feeling of invincibility, don't you,

that nothing's going to happen to you,

and it is perfectly alright to be walking back over the common

late at night.

We lived a nice life at that time.

The summer of 1987 is a summer I'll not forget.

I was head of Kent CID.

Which entailed the investigation of all serious crimes

committed in the Kent police area.

Just as in most towns, Tunbridge Wells has got certain areas

where older houses have been converted into flats and bedsits.

And I was made aware

that there were increasing reports coming in of prowlers.

Imagine you're a woman alone in your bedsit

and you look up

and you see a shadow looking through your window.

Terrifying.

Prowlers are difficult to catch.

They know the back alleys, they may have been doing it for years.

And they get away with it.

We received a call. A young woman's body had been found in a bedsit

by her boyfriend.

She lived in Guildford Road

which is one of the areas where we knew that there was prowler activity.

It was a tiny flat, a one-room bedsit.

Over in one corner there was a partially opened window.

And then you could see laying on the bed

was what appeared to be a body covered in a duvet.

There was bloodstaining on the floor at the side of the bed,

there was blood spatters on the wall.

The body was laying on her left-hand side

with her knees slightly bent.

And rather than just dumped there,

appeared to have been just carefully placed.

Once we uncovered the body

you then saw that there was obviously signs of a head injury.

We removed the duvet, the pillowcases to preserve them.

There was a pink towel which appeared to be bloodstained.

And there was also a bloodstained plastic bag.

At the postmortem it was established that the woman had received

a heavy blow to the head,

had been strangled and then been sexually assaulted.

She was 25 years old

and her name was Wendy Knell.

When Dad got the call he drove straight down to Wendy's flat.

Police were everywhere, swarming around.

He tried to get in and they wouldn't let him,

they just said the girl inside the flat was dead.

So, that's how he found out his daughter had died.

My name is Jane

and Wendy Knell was my little sister.

Everyone loved her,

no one I've spoken to ever had a bad word about her.

I was the quiet, boring, sensible one,

and she was the daft, scatty, silly one.

She left home and got married and it didn't work out at all,

so she ended up having to get divorced.

But she come through it the other side

and made a new life for herself.

Wendy has a good career starting after that.

She got a job in a shop called SuperSnaps.

She enjoyed it, and she made her way up to manageress.

She got a new fella and he lived over Tunbridge Wells as well,

so it gave her a very, very good new start.

(BIRDSONG)

Mum's 85 now, and I...

I still think she finds it hard to process this.

She was killed in June on her father's birthday.

She only lived 25 years.

She would've been 60 this year.

Once we'd got the news it was as though part of you had died,

if you know what I mean?

You knew you'd gotta carry on but you didn't know how.

You didn't wanna believe it, but you've got to believe it.

I've got a photo next to my bed of Wendy,

taken just before she was killed.

And I always kiss it night and morning.

That's the only way I've got of seeing her.

That keeps me going.

And it gives me that, I don't know what it is,

but it gives me something.

It hurts more than anything.

I don't think I'm the same person,

you'll have to ask my daughter that one.

Initially when this all happened the police interviewed

literally everyone. Everyone, you know, was a suspect,

even her boyfriend, my dad,

my, even my husband, they...they literally interviewed everybody.

NEWSREADER: "At 12 o'clock, BBC radio Kent news.

Police today issued a fresh appeal for witnesses following the murder

of the Tunbridge Wells shop manageress Wendy Knell

earlier this week."

This was a gruesome murder of a young woman alone,

so there was a lot of public expectation,

especially in a town like Tunbridge Wells.

NEWSREADER: "Wendy, who was 25,

was found battered to death in her bedsit in Guildford Road."

We knew this neighbourhood had a problem with prowlers,

but this murder took us to another level.

There was nothing that we wouldn't do to try and catch that killer.

NEWSREADER: "As the murder hunt is stepped up,

police are warning other women in the bedsit land to be

on their guard, and they're appealing to anyone

who spots a prowler to contact them immediately."

The town suddenly became not a safe place to be anymore

and you had to think twice about, well, should we walk home

this way or that way or at all.

But I think we all assumed that the police would catch whoever did it

and that would be the end of it.

We had no idea where it was going.

NEWSREADER: "25-year-old Wendy Knell was sexually assaulted

and beaten to death. Police describe it as one of their most complicated

murder investigations for years."

There was no sign of a forced entry, and the door to her flat was locked.

There was one window into the bedsit which wasn't totally secure

and could have been a means of entry.

From the scene itself,

it appears that the killer likes to be in control.

Wendy's clothes were piled in a neat pile.

Her bed was tidied.

That's not the hallmark of somebody in a rage.

That is somebody who's methodical and controlled.

Our officers at the scene collected every bit of evidence

that they could.

In those days we couldn't rely on DNA analysis

because it was in its infancy.

There was a shoe print on the sleeve

of a blouse in blood.

And we looked at all the shoe shops in Tunbridge Wells

and it was identified as being from a particular Clarks shoe.

It wouldn't have solved the crime on its own,

but put together with other evidence, it was very useful.

NEWSREADER: "Police have already visited every home in the area

and taken 200 statements,

but say they want more help from the public."

We interviewed people from all over the surrounding areas,

people who were stalkers and prowlers.

But we just didn't have that break.

NEWSREADER: "The picture built up is of a moody and vicious killer,

a man who goes out on his own late at night,

returning home in the early hours."

There was an event at the Assembly Hall in Tunbridge Wells.

Police were talking about what we can do to be as safe as possible,

and we were all given those personal alarms, the screech type things.

I think we were supposed to carry those round in our handbags

and use them...

if we were attacked.

It felt like, actually, this is very, very dangerous if they're

doing this, then things are really bad.

Suddenly it wasn't nice little Tunbridge Wells,

it was unsolved murder town.

(CRIMEWATCH THEME TUNE)

The first of this month's reconstructions

tells the story of a 25-year-old woman who lived alone in a bedsit.

Local residents recall two events that night.

At 12:30 a peeping tom was spotted outside a house

in nearby Grovehill Road.

And at ten past one, neighbours remember a car,

possibly a blue Talbot Horizon,

having difficulty starting outside Wendy's house.

At this point we really had no idea who the killer was.

Was it somebody who'd been following her about, stalking her?

We need to eliminate that it was a light blue or grey Talbot Horizon,

it left Guildford Road, did anybody see it leaving Guildford Road

or did you see it arrive near where you live

sometime in the early hours?

It was established that a couple of things were missing.

A diary from 1987 and some keys.

The keys are quite distinctive.

The key fob she brought back from a recent holiday in Austria.

The whole thing is one mighty jigsaw puzzle

that you're trying to put together.

At 8:30 as usual, Wendy Knell left her bedsit for her

15-minute walk to work.

That was surreal seeing some woman pretending to be my sister.

Right, all you've got to do is check the prices on them

and put them into the calculator.

Talking, and her hair cut's similar.

Getting off the motorbike and dressing like she did.

That was... that was really quite painful.

Was her killer, do you think, someone she knew

or was this an opportunist crime, do you know?

Well, I'm hoping that a telephone call tonight

will answer that question for us.

They still didn't get anywhere and the time just went on and on and on.

I think Dad took the news of the sexual assault really bad.

But he didn't talk about it very much.

It was heart-breaking with them not finding anything or not finding him.

PRESENTER: He's on the loose now in the Tunbridge Wells area,

we understand. How worried are you about that?

I'm very concerned. He may not be in the Tunbridge Wells area,

but I'm very concerned that at this time

we haven't charged anyone with it.

It was the sort of crime you take home with you and think about.

What have I missed?

Have I missed something important?

I was feeling frustrated because my detectives were working very hard

to find the killer.

We believe we've got a clear picture in our own minds

of what the man is like and we don't feel that we're that far away

from capturing him.

We just need that little bit of extra help from the public.

The truth was we didn't have any one major suspect.

And then I received a call

that another young woman had been reported missing.

You wanna jump out?

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

Do you wanna stand up?

The day was always gonna come when the truth was gonna

catch up with him.

I think once he was at the police station he knows that

he's already on that path to prison.

I did hear comments from other police officers asking

whether we were sure we'd got the right person

because he appeared on the outside to be a decent old man.

Nothing untoward about him.

He had a family, he had children.

But, actually, we weren't dealing with the man in front of us today -

it was the person 33 years ago who was young, athletic and very fit.

ARRESTING OFFICER: Pass that, and what cell are we going to?

It's horrific what he did back in 1987.

But it's all the other stuff that then came afterwards

that I wasn't expecting.

His offending over the years has been relentless.

And we established that he was offending

up to three days before his arrest.

Back in 1987, just come out of school,

just having a really nice summer,

there's freedom of not being at school anymore.

It was a real adventure actually.

I think my mum and dad were completely exasperated,

I think they, you know, they'd expected I would go to university

and I think their heart must have sunk when I said,

"Oh, I'm going for a job at Buster Browns." You know, "That'll be fun."

It was an American restaurant.

Everyone was very, very friendly.

You'd finish a shift at midnight, one o'clock sometimes,

and it would end up round at someone's house.

And, you know, new friendships were made.

I'd known of Caroline, she'd been at my primary school,

and then at secondary school as well, she was a year above us.

She was a manager at Buster Brown's,

she'd already been there for a year or so when I started.

So Andy worked up in the cocktail bar in Buster Brown's.

Very good-looking guy, very cool,

very fun, you know, there was never a dull moment when Andy was about,

and everyone was swept up by him.

And he got together with Caroline.

Something about her just, I was just drawn to her straightaway.

There was a certain force about her.

We started seeing each other

round about October, November in '86.

Caroline was like my first proper relationship,

and we moved in together, it was quite a big thing.

I was very happy.

She had an energy about her and, you know, sometimes it was good,

sometimes it was bad, but she was always up for doing something.

She was right there and she'd be at the centre of it.

Andy was so doting, you know, he looked after her and they just had

a lovely time together. And, yeah, they were certainly the first couple

I knew who'd moved in together,

I thought it was very grown up and exciting.

And it was, I think, for, you know, for quite a while for both of them.

Over a period of time, I'd started to feel there was a distance

between Caroline and myself,

I think that she had started aspiring to something else

and then she started mentioning she wanted to move out.

There was another waitress at the restaurant who had a bedsit

in Tunbridge Wells and she was moving out of it.

She had felt a big anxious there because on several occasions

they'd thought they'd seen a peeping tom through the window.

I didn't like the idea of Caroline moving in there, but she moved in.

One evening she rang me up late at night

saying she thought she may have seen somebody through the window.

So, I went straight round there and she was a little bit unsettled

and said would I stay there. I said, yeah, of course.

Did you try and tell Caroline, look, please don't move there?

Yeah, I suggested it's not a good place to move to, you know, but...

Sorry.

I remember she'd come up to my house,

we were cooking a chilli con carne.

And then when that was done we dropped her into town.

And that was the last time I saw her.

Caroline hadn't turned up for work on that day

and obviously people were making phone calls,

"Have you seen Caroline? Have you heard from her,

has anyone seen Caroline?"

And suddenly she was a missing person.

Nobody knew where she was.

NEWSREADER: "20-year-old Caroline Pierce was last seen when

a taxi driver dropped her near her home in Grosvenor Park

in Tunbridge Wells around midnight on November the 24th."

REPORTER: You have a missing woman. Do you have any reason at all

to suppose something serious might have happened to her?

Obviously when a 20-year-old girl is missing in the circumstances

that I've described to you, we have to be concerned.

REPORTER: "Caroline worked in Buster Brown's restaurant in Camden Road,

Tunbridge Wells. This is the same road where Wendy Knell worked."

You had the similarities of Wendy Knell, a 25-year-old woman

living alone in a bedsit, now we've got another young woman,

20 years old, living in a bedsit

about a mile away from where Wendy lived.

Those two factors alone were enough to raise considerable concerns.

As police continue their search for clues here in Tunbridge Wells,

they've warned women in the town to be extra vigilant and

they've increased the number of routine foot patrols.

It wasn't until my officers started house-to-house where Caroline lived

that neighbours

told us about the screams.

Police told us that nine different sets of neighbours had reported

hearing screams that night.

And no one had done anything about that.

The screams were described as being loud screams to start with,

but dying off.

She was dropped off at about four minutes to midnight,

and about that time a number of people heard a female screaming.

She lived at the end of a cul-de-sac.

And her bedsit was the final house on the right as you went up.

Her door would be in darkness.

If you wanted to ambush someone, that would be a good place to do it.

And then a few days after Caroline had disappeared,

there was a really, really, very, very vicious rape attack.

A single woman living alone in a bedsit was attacked and raped.

This was a vicious, premeditated sexual assault on a young woman,

who as a result of it is terrified and she's now in a state of shock.

It was suddenly getting very dark.

Because there was the potential connection that the person who had

killed Wendy and possibly even taken Caroline had now struck again.

Suddenly you're catapulted back into, you know,

a high state of panic.

And then we had a major breakthrough.

A man was arrested,

his name was Stuart Durkin.

INTERVIEWER: "You have a case at the moment in Dudley Road

where a woman has been raped.

It was a very serious attack,

and the woman is obviously very distressed.

Durkin admitted the rape.

So, naturally we thought, ah, we've got him, we've got the guy

responsible at least for Wendy Knell.

And perhaps Caroline's disappearance.

Durkin further admits over 20 burglaries

in the Tunbridge Wells area and he admitted a burglary at Caroline's

bedsit in the September of that year before she'd moved in there.

We then started a much more intense scrutiny of Durkin's past.

We found out that he was a prowler,

he was out on the night Wendy was murdered.

And we also discovered

he had a conviction for manslaughter in Sweden.

So, we've got here a very good suspect.

In my mind, Durkin was the man.

The big problem with Durkin is we needed evidence, hard evidence.

We didn't have fingerprints, we had no other bodily fluids,

we had no clothing. We had nothing to put Durkin at the scene

either of the disappearance or the murder,

we did not have enough to present a case.

That left the investigation ongoing.

We were back to square one.

Our main suspect was gone,

and the killer was still out there.

The police started asking me

did I have any idea where she was or where she could have gone.

As the days went by the questions became a bit more intense,

I then started feeling quite anxious and nervous,

and it soon became totally apparent that they thought I'd killed her.

The police started saying, "Look, we know you've done it."

And I was just, I didn't know what to do or say,

I just said, "Well, I didn't, simple as that."

They said, "No, she left you, you're upset, you've obviously got angry,

we believe that, you know, in a fit of anger or jealousy

you've attacked her, gone and hidden the body

and now you've blanked it out of your mind.

And you don't even know that you've done it,

so you might as well confess to it now."

There wasn't a second in anyone's mind that he could've been involved

in any way at all in harming her.

We all knew that, it was, you know, there was no way.

It was very intimidating, I actually started questioning myself, you know,

my god, have I lost my mind, have I gone and done something that,

can I blank it out of my head?

I was thinking, God, am I gonna get put away

for something I haven't done?

About three weeks after Caroline's disappearance,

I was down at the police station and there was suddenly a buzz,

people were coming into the room, police were coming,

"Have you heard, have you seen this?"

And I said, "What's going on?"

That particular day I was driving the tractor, cultivating a field.

I came across this dead body

down in a ditch.

And I realised it was a young woman.

She was hardly dressed, without any clothes on.

She just had tights on.

She was lying in about three inches of water.

On the road you couldn't see anything,

but in the field you could see her as plain as day.

If we wasn't working that particular field that day,

she would have been there for...

who knows how long.

There were one or two police officers at the scene when I arrived.

I looked down at this ditch

and there was the body of this young woman

in a foetal position

and to me I could see it was Caroline.

I realised the similarities straightaway

between the murder of Caroline and the murder of Wendy Knell.

The bludgeoning of the head by some form of blunt instrument,

the strangulation and the sexual assaults.

Really there was no doubt in my mind

that both girls had been murdered by the same killer.

All we know at the moment is she was found wearing only a pair of tights.

There wasn't a lot of evidence attached to the body.

We had officers out searching the fields for items of clothing,

maybe a handbag, anything that a girl may have been carrying.

Nothing was found.

If somebody had taken an unconscious girl there in order to rape her,

then you would have expected to find something in that area.

We found nothing.

So I felt that she'd been murdered in Tunbridge Wells

and her body was taken there merely to dump it.

The whole thing just seemed so surreal.

The sort of realisation that this is... this is your friend

who is act... you know, been murdered in the most awful,

awful way.

You lose people in life and it's natural, but not like that.

No.

NEWSREADER: "Haunting detectives all the time is the fear that they may be

hunting for a double killer. In June this year Wendy Knell was killed

and sexually assaulted at her flat

just half a mile from Caroline's home."

I did feel people weren't a 100% sure. One person actually said,

you know, "Andy, if you did do it, you really should go forwards

and confess and everything."

And that was quite heart-breaking, I was just like...

NEWSREADER: "Police now hope that the hunt for clues to Caroline Pierce's

killer will lead them to Wendy Knell's murderer as well."

They had no suspect at the time

and there was never any noise about anyone being

brought in for questioning.

NEWSREADER: "Today, police appealed for help in tracing a man

seen getting into a taxi near Caroline's home

shortly after she vanished."

I can actually recall now, at one point they were saying,

"Yeah, we don't think you did it now."

Almost in a, I don't know if it's a derogatory way or...

But I still didn't know where it was gonna go.

And all the time the killer was still out there,

and that's something that really never left me.

NEWSREADER: "Today, detectives began the macabre task of searching

the cemetery that lies at the bottom of the garden to Caroline's flat."

Of course I was under pressure, but in my view we did everything possible

in those days that we could have done

to find the killer of those two girls.

Senior detectives in this case say they're looking for a killer

or killers who's both sadistic and vicious.

As the, you know, weeks and months went on,

there's someone out there.

There's someone out there who's done this and hasn't been stopped.

17 months after the first murder and 12 months to the day

after the second murder, the inquiry is still going on."

You think what did I miss?

Did I go wrong somewhere?

I would go back over the ground we'd already covered.

NEWSREADER: "There is evidence here of 900 statements that have been

taken, 14,000 people have been interviewed."

Personally, I would have gone on forever.

NEWSREADER: "Last year there were nearly 150 officers working on

the inquiry, now it's down to a dozen.

Anyone with any information is urged to ring Tunbridge Wells..."

The inquiry was gradually wound down.

I felt that I'd failed.

And it's not just a failure on your own professional side,

it's failing people that were putting their trust in you.

Wendy Knell's family,

Caroline Pierce's family.

We hadn't succeeded in bringing someone to justice.

We had a serial killer and he was still at large.

We couldn't understand how you could do that to two people

in relatively quick succession and then there'd be nothing.

That...

You don't just do that and stop.

But we...

seemingly he had.

I was 16 years old in 1987 when Wendy and Caroline were murdered.

Just doing my GCSEs.

As a young officer, a young detective

I didn't think I'd ever work on the case.

Between 1987 and 2020 we followed every lead.

Every piece of information that came to our attention we investigated.

It was a lot of evidence to work with.

On November 16th, 2020,

we had a huge breakthrough.

And we now knew the person responsible for their deaths.

But we found we were dealing with much more

than the murders of Wendy and Caroline.

The man we'd arrested

was an electrician employed at the Tunbridge Wells hospital.

And within his role he had access to the entire premises.

And this included the mortuary.

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk