Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

A whole body in a sealed freezer.

It's shocking.

It really is.

West Midlands Police forensic lead Sonia Parkinson

has been called to investigate the discovery of a body at a waste site.

You couldn't expect anyone to visually identify them.

I mean, for one thing, it's just too harrowing for someone.

You can just see how emaciated the person is.

Almost skeletal.

Someone's died and the body has been concealed.

Who would do that?

Why?

Have they been murdered and put in there to hide them?

The death is suspicious, so we need to find out

who it was and how they've ended up

being stored in a freezer.

Forensics don't lie.

We recover evidence and the evidence tells a story.

A search of the skip yard records

shows that the freezer was dropped off by a council removal team.

Right.

With the body removed for a postmortem,

Sonia and the team can start to examine the freezer.

It smells as well. Mm.

This is going to need to be recovered.

We've got some flies from, like, from this edge, I think.

And we've still got some liquid in there, haven't we?

We need to take a sample of that.

Obviously, the freezer had defrosted,

the body had been removed

so all that is left is putrefied body...

..which would indicate that it's been there for some time.

The sample could provide a DNA profile of the deceased,

but there's a risk its DNA volume might already be lost

due to decomposition.

Everything degrades over a matter of time

and that's the same for forensic evidence, really.

Well, I know a couple of these have come from the scene

along with the freezer.

Yeah, it's there. It's the contents of these bags, I think.

The bags brought to the site with the freezer

will be examined for evidence, which may help identify the body.

Or the person who placed it in the freezer.

You want to be able to do your job to the best of your ability.

Any sort of evidence that's there, you don't want to miss it.

You want to get everything that you can to get justice for the person.

Fingerprints.

We're looking for any potential DNA -

drinks bottles,

erm, paperwork.

The problem is we've got contamination

because it's a skip yard that has rubbish delivered on a daily basis

from around the West Midlands.

There are lots of things at a scene

that probably are completely irrelevant to us.

It's got maggots all around it, like around the stitching and stuff.

We know the body's decomposed,

but we don't know how long it's been there.

Weird, isn't it? Yeah. Why's it got maggots? Why's maggots...? Yeah.

And maggots can give us an idea of time of death.

The flies lay the eggs on the body,

the eggs turn into maggots,

feed off the body cos it's full of nutrients.

They then revert back into flies and the whole cycle goes.

And depending on how many maggots we have

and what type of maggots they are,

we can normally tell what cycle it's in.

With the site search concluded, the freezer can be removed

to look for clues of who the deceased is and how they died.

Could there be fingerprints on the freezer?

Were they alive when they were put in that freezer?

If we find other people's fingerprints there, then why?

What connection have they got with that person's death?

The forensic postmortem begins with an initial examination of the body.

Certainly profoundly decomposed.

He's got a sock on his hand. Yeah.

Strange.

Forensic pathologist Dr Matt Lyall notes physical features,

which could help identify the deceased.

Over the course of my career I've undertaken a thousand or so

specifically forensic examinations.

I've never...

..seen a case quite like it before.

Certainly quite frail-looking.

The body is a very important piece of evidence.

You will often get clues as to why they have died.

The body was that of...

..an adult male, probably white.

Likely more advanced years.

The head hair appeared to be grey-white.

A greying short moustache and beard were evident.

We try to find clues as to the identity of the body.

Does he have tattoos that might assist us?

Are there scars on the body that suggest previous surgery?

It might be a little scar. It's not the best.

The body was clearly altered by decompositional change,

with widespread discolouration

of the skin's surface.

What happens with decomposition

is largely driven by bacteria.

Those bacteria are normally kept in check

because we're alive, we have an immune system

and we have defences against them.

But when you die,

the bacteria multiply and cause the body to decompose.

There are a number of very superficial...

..ovoid areas of apparent epidermal detachment.

The skin will start to degrade,

so it can go from green to a sort of darker green to black in places.

Can you take a piccy of that, Sonia, as is?

Once the initial examination is done,

Sonia can turn her attention to the man's identity.

Right, shall we have a go at these fingerprints?

Normally, we take fingerprints at postmortems by using a powder.

But this guy's fingers were so decomposed,

in the end I photographed them.

R-middle.

R-ring.

Fingerprints are one of the last things that degrade,

but obviously in this case it will be more difficult to identify

the person if they're on record.

The photographs of the man's fingerprints will be searched

against the police national database.

Police have traced the van that took the freezer to the waste site

to an address in Birmingham.

Homicide detectives join the forensic team

for a search of the flat.

We will investigate any suspicious death.

And if you've got a body in a freezer,

that looks like someone's tried to get rid of it,

then it is a murder inquiry.

Your mind is racing.

You think, "What am I going to find in here?

"What else will be here?

"Will there be a scene? Will there be blood splatter?

"Is there a possibility of finding other bodies in there?"

You just never know until you open that door.

Do you want me to go first?

Any sort of evidence that we could find in that flat

to link anyone to it, we're looking out for.

Is the power on?

No. No.

Oh, God.

So this is the cupboard where

the freezer has been.

The reality of what has actually happened is quite bleak.

That's liquid that's leaked out of the freezer.

There's dead maggots and putrefied liquid on the floor.

Whether it was here all the time,

obviously we don't know at the moment, but...

And there's no power socket in there? No.

There's no plug socket, which means when the freezer

had been sitting here for however long it had been in there for,

potentially it hadn't even been plugged in,

which would increase the decomposition.

KNOCKING ON DOOR

With confirmation that the body was in the flat,

detectives start speaking to neighbours

to find out if they noticed anything unusual.

Hello, sorry to intrude, my name's Paul Jones.

I'm a detective from the police.

We want to find out who's been living there,

what's been happening, who's been in and out,

what can we find that could help us progress our investigation.

Sorry to bother you. We're from the police.

We're not sure, we're just doing an investigation at the moment.

The smell, I reported this, right? Oh, go on, who did you report it to?

I reported it to the building administration,

which totally ignored me twice.

I said some stench and, like, really terrible smell

is coming out of the apartment. When was that?

That was back in Novemb... In December, sorry.

In December? OK.

So if there's something going on, I would like to see them. OK.

So sorry to disturb you, but you've been very helpful.

The neighbour's saying, then,

he's reported a smell in November or December.

Somebody's taken record... You know, we just need

clarification around it all.

MUFFLED SPEECH

Well, yeah. Because...but then you'd think they'd cross-reference, yeah.

If the neighbour's dates are accurate,

the man could have been dead nine months

before his body was discovered at the waste site.

Are we potentially looking at somebody who's been murdered

and put in a freezer?

Are we looking at somebody who has died of natural causes?

There could be offences of concealing a body,

preventing unlawful burial of a body.

We need to work out what's happened to this person.

Poor guy. Been bundled up in a freezer and dumped.

As police search records of who lived in the flat,

photographs of the man's fingerprints are examined

to see if he can be identified using the police national database.

So we start off by scanning one of the photographs on.

The national database holds seven million sets of fingerprints.

It's a great tool, but the limitations are

you've got to have been convicted of an offence previously.

So all I'm doing here is marking up the ridge characteristics.

With the national database, there's an algorithm that runs,

looking for those ridges, looking for those characteristics.

The first challenge is the quality of fingerprints.

All this here, because of how the skin has started to decay,

we can't actually use any of that information.

So we'll actually remove those, then mark them up myself

just to make sure they're in the correct place.

That algorithm, it's not foolproof.

How it searches is only as good

as the fingerprints that have been put in.

You can see things with your naked eye

that don't necessarily show on a computer screen.

We make sure that all that information

that's in that deceased's set of prints

is definitely in a fingerprint form.

So that's been launched.

And our results are already back.

So the system always sends back the top 15.

The computer is saying,

I think it's one of these 15 possible people.

So you've still got 15 people to check.

So this is what's called a twin loop pattern.

So it's where it loops up to the top

and then comes back down and curves back around.

We know that this is just a loop pattern

so just by that pattern alone, we can say that it's not that person.

Fingerprints isn't guesswork.

You've got to be certain.

Again, our short area here isn't in this area.

So the person that has been found,

their fingerprints are not held within the national database.

While fingerprinting has not yielded any clues to the man's identity,

detectives have been trying to track down the last resident of the flat

where the freezer was removed from.

Officers have spoken to Citizen Housing,

I think they act on behalf of Birmingham City Council,

they're the ones that own the property.

The tenancy was in the name of John Wainwright. Yep.

He was the sole occupant,

although it does say that he'd been living at the address with his son,

Damion Johnson.

I think they moved in in 2015.

A search of police records reveals that officers attended the flat

nine months ago after reports of a disturbance.

Damion Johnson opened the door.

I want to go through the bodycam,

just to get an idea of how he reacted towards officers.

He's initially quite obstructive,

but obviously they're in the flat with him now.

We know that Damion isn't actually the tenant.

We know the tenant is John.

But officers attending, they haven't seen John in the premises.

So bear in mind, I want to look for this freezer as well

as they're going around on the footage.

That's the cupboard, isn't it... On the right-hand side.

..that the freezer was found in? Yeah. But the door's closed to that.

OK. So he's talking about his dad.

That's what he calls John.

He's suggesting that John has passed away.

But obviously he hasn't reported the death of John.

What was he thinking?

He could be panicking because he knows that he's got a body

in that flat and the officers are there. Yeah.

He's worried about, "God, if they start looking around this flat,

"I'm in a lot of trouble." Yeah.

Damion has informed the officers John has passed away.

So when they've then spoken to the housing company

to inform them of this, Damion was evicted.

That happened nine months before the flat has been cleared.

We know that nobody's been in that flat since.

It could be John might be still alive,

we haven't got a death record.

But I think, based on what we know, we have got to suspect

quite strongly that that is John whose body was in the freezer.

Now detectives have a lead on the name of the deceased...

..a photograph of John Wainwright is sent to a specialist

in dental forensics to try and formally confirm his identity.

I've been supplied with some,

I think it was Facebook photos of this individual.

I've also got the CT scans from West Midlands Police,

so 3D images of the skull,

and so we could potentially do a

superimposition of the skull

over the image I've been supplied with by the police.

We do identification cases all the time from dental records,

but in the absence of any other information,

such as DNA, fingerprints

or dental information,

potentially we can use craniofacial superimposition.

It's pushing the boundaries.

This is really the sort of last resort

of trying to identify their remains.

From the images of the skull,

we can create almost like what we call a hollow volume overlay.

If you've got a three-dimensional CT scan of the skull,

it gives me a bit more leeway to position the skull

on the software into the right position

that the photograph's been taken from.

And then from that I can actually use that

to create the overlay to do the superimposition.

So we're examining the shape of the actual skull, the cranium.

We're looking at the position of the eye sockets themselves.

The nasal aperture, the hole where the nose is,

and then obviously the shape of the cheekbones.

And what we're looking at is if we can move the size

and the position of it, is that consistent with the images

that we're seeing of that individual?

You can never make an assumption

that it's definitely this individual.

So there's a bit of apprehension, thinking,

is it going to match or is it not going to match?

And if it doesn't match then, obviously, potentially,

is it somebody else?

I can confirm that with the shape of the skull,

the position of the eye sockets, the shape of the cheekbones,

it certainly fits.

Anatomically, there's consistency.

So whilst it doesn't give 100% identification,

I'm satisfied that the remains that we're looking at

are the individual that we suspect it is.

Four days after the body's discovery,

police confirm the deceased as John Wainwright.

An arrest warrant is issued for his flatmate and carer -

Damion Johnson.

John has been put in the freezer and nobody's reported that,

which is a crime.

And until we find out how John has died

we are looking at the offence of murder.

So the priority is to arrest Damion and get his account.

POLICE SIREN WAILS

Hiya, it's Brandon from Pear Tree.

Just to let you know we've got one en route from Derby

on suspicion of murder.

Through there, to the desk, please.

In the neighbouring county of Derbyshire...

Just put your arms up for us.

..homicide detectives have located key suspect Damion Johnson.

TAPE MACHINE BEEPS

Damion's admission means John Wainwright's body

was concealed in the freezer, not for nine months as police thought,

but for nearly two years.

TAPE MACHINE BEEPS

Sometimes the death of somebody close to you

could cause some kind of breakdown,

and you can understand how people

don't want to let go of their loved one.

Right, mate, you're coming with me.

But if you're evicted from somewhere and you know that your loved one

is in that flat by themselves in a freezer...

..how much was that person a loved one?

With no forensic evidence that he caused John's death,

Damion is released on bail pending further investigation.

So the interview, did he go "no comment" throughout?

Prepared statement or...? He remained silent. OK.

Nicola meets with senior investigating officer Stu

to review their next steps.

There were a few little bits that he gave, but not much at all.

So no detail about the passing away of natural causes?

No, he wouldn't answer any questions in relation

to where he'd found John, how he had found John.

And then, have we got any next of kin for Mr Wainwright?

No, we haven't.

At this moment in time we have no friends and no family identified.

So all the witnesses you're going to give me now

are friends or family of the suspect? Yeah.

They all stated the same thing, that they knew the victim

for about 20, 30 years through the suspect.

They think that the victim helped the suspect

with some kind of housing arrangements.

And finances - the flat's in Mr Wainwright's name.

Anything at all on that?

That needs further work,

but due to the age gap between victim and suspect,

which is around 20 years,

the suspect would call the victim Dad.

OK. That's interesting.

And is that because...?

I know he's 20 or 30 years older so he was, what, early 70s? Yeah.

Our victim, was he in ill health, did he need caring?

So Damion and his friends say that victim had dementia,

he was falling, he was declining.

So had the friends witnessed this themselves? Not really, no.

They would only ever see John really for fleeting moments

if they ever went to the flat.

And Damion told them when John's died,

his sister has come to take care of the funeral arrangements. Yeah.

But there was no funeral. But John's death is never registered.

Damion has given us that prepared statement...

..but he hasn't told us how John has died.

Potentially, Damion doesn't want to implicate himself in a murder.

But until we get results of the forensic postmortem,

he will still be a murder suspect.

So I just want to be 100% certain,

when he puts him into a freezer,

was he alive and suffocated in the freezer?

And is there any damage, are there any scrapings?

We need to look at that freezer

to see if John's fingerprints are on the inside.

We are reliant upon the forensics to help us

piece together what has happened to John.

OK.

Forensic technicians Kat Harold and Dani McGarry prepare to chemically

treat the freezer to search for the presence of fingerprints within it.

If the victim's fingerprints are found inside,

this could suggest he was put into the freezer alive.

This is cyanoacrylate, superglue,

that we put in here,

and this is like a hot plate.

So this will heat up, and then that will circulate the superglue around

the cabinet and it will rehydrate any fingermarks that are in there.

Cyanoacrylate reacts with our chloride irons within our sweat,

and it deposits

a white substance.

So that then is visible.

I mean, it's hard to see on a white freezer.

The hard thing with this case is

the cyanoacrylate process is a white deposit.

So the white deposit on the white freezer isn't ideal.

Which is why we've got the Basic Yellow 40,

which is a staining agent, which can stick to,

it adheres to the cyanoacrylate.

The fingermarks are more visible under fluorescent light.

And hopefully we can enhance them and go on to...

..get a proper fingerprint.

No. No.

No value, Kat.

Let's do the lid.

Yes. There's some stuff on there.

Oh, my... There's loads. It goes right across. Oh...

Yeah, they're lovely, they are.

Right. I can't believe how much has showed up now, can you?

The prints on the lid are photographed and digitally enhanced,

so that they can be analysed by the fingerprint bureau.

OK?

This is definitely a case that we won't forget.

How do you explain the fingermarks on the inside of the lid?

Are they the man that was inside of the freezer?

Were they his trying to get out?

Fingerprint expert Claire Lynch will compare the print

to those taken from John Wainwright at the postmortem.

They are not suitable enough to go into the national database,

there's just too much background information

from the lid of the freezer.

So I'm going to first check to make sure the pattern

that we've got matches the patterns that this gentleman has.

So we know whose fingerprint this is, this is from the deceased.

We don't know whose fingerprint this is.

So we want everything to match.

So if the characteristic isn't in the right place,

in the right position, then it's definitely not that person.

We call it coincident sequence.

It's just where we have the same characteristics

in the same relationship to each other, in the same placement

from one to the other.

So we're looking for...

..this ridge ending here.

We've got a ridge ending here.

And a ridge ending here.

So we know that we need to get those two above that.

It takes one characteristic to say that it's not an identification.

OK. One, two, three.

And what would be the fourth ridge would be that ridge ending.

So one, two, three.

That's not there.

We can discount the deceased for this print

just based on these two points not being in the same,

in the correct position.

None of the fingerprints that we had on the inside of the freezer lid

belonged to the deceased.

We have to assume he was put into that freezer

when he was dead.

Detectives are searching for any evidence

which might confirm Damion's statement.

So this is the recovered Facebook account

of Damion Johnson,

even though it's under his previous name - Jason Johnson.

DC Paul Jones accesses Damion's social media posts

from around the time he claims John died.

His state of mind at the interview, obviously he was very distraught.

His suggestion is that he just wasn't thinking straight.

We can see an entry made by Damion.

"Still can't come to grips with reality.

"We lived together for 21 years, and now you're not here.

"You were my world."

It seems heartfelt.

And he's made tribute to sort of how much he misses him.

"I can't believe it's a year ago today

"that you've closed your beautiful blue eyes and you've drifted away."

And the interesting thing on that is the date

on that entry of 24th of September 2019.

So Damion's saying that John's died a year previous to that,

so 24th of September 2018.

He's remembering the death of John

and he's put dates on those Facebook pages, so I can backtrack.

Now, it might be that he has got a genuine care for John

and maybe it is a relief to him to finally think,

"At least now I can get this out in the open."

But then there's a period where clearly Damion's

living in that flat...

..with somebody he's saying he cares deeply for, he loves,

in a freezer,

just next to him.

It is very, very strange.

It just makes you wonder if this emotion's genuine.

Is it calculated?

Are these the posts of a man who wanted to give the impression

of someone who was caring?

Right, I'll try to pick out anything that looks like an injury.

With no obvious cause of death,

the forensic team still have to establish how John died.

Because his death has been concealed,

is it because someone else is responsible for his death?

Or is this natural causes?

One of the things that I do

is shed a light on what could have happened here.

His poor nose has had better times, hasn't it?

It's a bit distorted.

He's definitely broken the cheekbone.

The cheekbone's bust there.

I think we need to check it out, don't we?

Despite advanced decomposition,

Dr Lyall is able to identify signs of trauma.

There looked to be signs of injury to the bones of the man's face.

If they are fractures,

have they occurred close to the time of death,

and therefore could they be linked to injuries

that have been connected to the death?

Or are these older injuries?

He's lost some teeth.

Can we do these sockets?

You know, I mean, they're all kind of distorted, and I don't know.

HE SNIFFS

I'm just wondering if he has had some sort of bash on his face.

The injuries by themselves, all they will do

is show that there has been trauma to the face.

They will not of themselves

prove necessarily how they've been caused.

Photographs of John's cheekbones and teeth are taken

for further forensic analysis.

Right, we've got thyroid times one.

Prostate times one.

Pancreas/liver.

Tissue samples of major organs will also be examined

for evidence of death by natural causes.

So we're looking at the shape of the socket

and the actual... the shape of the gum itself.

In Sheffield, Dr Kouble examines the photos of the teeth

and facial trauma

to determine whether the injuries were caused at the time of death.

So in the lower jaw, I can see that there isn't a hole there,

there's a space where the tooth was.

Certainly on the lower jaw some of the teeth have been lost

antemortem, so during life.

And we can tell that they've been lost during life

because the bone heals up and the gum heals up,

and the bone actually goes smoother so you don't have an open socket.

And then moving onto the upper jaw,

there's evidence of what?

One, two, three, four, five sockets,

or open holes, where the teeth roots

will have been in the jawbone itself.

Potentially, there's evidence there these may have been lost

either just before death

or postmortem, after death.

But there's actually a tear

and there's damage in the actual bone

that would be on the outer surface of the root.

In this case there's a clear laceration on the gum

and that's an indication that tooth hasn't just dropped out.

That's an indication that that tooth's actually been knocked out

or had some sort of trauma to it.

Had that occurred before death,

potentially that would have healed up.

And this is obviously an open wound.

It could be a punch or some sort of impact from an object

or it could be some sort of traumatic fall,

where they've knocked a tooth out.

And then in addition to this

we can see there's also fractures on the bones as well.

So the right cheekbone's been fractured

and the maxilla, the upper jaw, has been fractured as well

on the right side.

We've also got a fracture of the nasal bones as well.

We've got a number of injuries

which are probably from high-impact trauma,

trauma of sufficient force to have knocked teeth out,

to have actually broken bones.

But facial factures per se and dental injuries per se

generally wouldn't contribute to somebody's death.

It's not confirmation this individual's been murdered.

All I can comment on is this trauma's occurred

at or around the time of death.

With evidence suggesting John suffered injuries

at the time of his death...

..police bring Damion back in to question his earlier account.

So, Damion, when you were arrested

you gave a prepared statement about John.

You said that he died of natural causes. Can you explain that to us?

And how he actually died?

He just started to lose weight.

I just carried on each day as I always did.

I'd go and check on him to make sure he was washing

cos sometimes he'd just sit in the bathroom.

But he just went downhill.

It was strange.

So there's a pathologist report.

What he found is that the right side of John's cheekbone was fractured.

This fracture would have been caused by a direct force or impact.

Not by me.

He's got a fractured nose...

..just before his death.

Can you explain that? No.

He's got, erm...

..missing teeth...

..and lacerations to his lips.

So put it into our terms, it looks like somebody's...

Smacked him in the mouth.

Smacked him in the mouth, to make him lose five teeth. Yeah.

Do you remember that? I don't remember that.

Did you cause those injuries? Not as far as I know.

That's quite a vague answer - not as far as you know.

I would have no reason to hurt him.

So had there been any other incidents, any more falls or any...?

Oh, he'd pinball through his... around his room.

There was a couple of times I went in his room and...

..he didn't have a Scooby-Doo who I was,

and he'd get... He'd go for me.

And how did you react to that?

I've...

..grabbed him. I've not grabbed his... I've held his hands,

he's sat down and I've left.

I walk away from situations,

and I've come back about half an hour, 40 minutes later

and it's like it never happened.

Have you ever had to strike him? Good God, no.

I'd hurt myself first.

I'd put myself in danger first.

We'll have a little break.

Have a breather, yeah?

You can see the...

..the basic outline of the individual tissue.

The samples from John's organs are examined

for any signs that he died from natural causes.

Looking at the samples from the heart, from the lungs,

from the liver,

we can establish whether those organs are healthy

or whether they're unhealthy.

And if they're unhealthy,

is it a disease that could have caused death?

This is the lung.

There are all these holes you can see in the tissue.

Now, sometimes people with a condition called emphysema

or pulmonary emphysema,

they can have large air spaces in their lungs.

But the problem with decomposition

is that there can be a lot of gas formation,

and that gas formation can sometimes mimic emphysema.

These are small samples that I took from the heart.

And this is one of the arteries here.

And this bit here...

..is some fibrous atheroma

with calcium in it.

So normally that wall should only be this,

you know, should be like that thick.

Whereas instead, the wall here is expanded by this.

He has atheroma -

fatty accumulation that happens within arteries.

It's very common, usually as you get older,

people have got more atheroma in their arteries.

This man certainly has some coronary artery disease,

but just because he has some coronary artery disease

doesn't mean that that's why he's died.

The problem is that although we have the finding in the heart,

the degree of decomposition means that it is difficult

to exclude or confirm whether that caused death.

This man could have had high blood pressure.

He could have had diabetes.

There are some early changes of that,

but again these are kind of background findings

that are not going to explain why he's died suddenly.

So...we have a number of question marks.

We've got symptoms that potentially fit

death from some sort of natural process,

but the internal organs, like everything else, are decomposed.

So how this man has died

remains unclear.

So looking at John, he had a number of regular monthly payments

into his Barclays account for his pension,

but also from DWP.

Detectives continuing to investigate Damion's relationship with John

have now accessed details of John's finances.

You would expect post John's death that there wouldn't be any

financial transactions,

but there are quite a number.

A lot of small transactions, £15, £20, etc.

A great portion of these transactions have come from

one of the newsagents just around the corner

from where Damion would still have been living at that time.

So it would strongly suggest that Damion

had been using John's card

and fraudulently taking money out of his account.

There's a total of over £17,000.

Although Damion referred to his relationship with John

as father and son, he didn't actually have any rights

to John's money or any of his belongings.

One hypothesis around Damion's motivation

is he gains financially

by not reporting John's death.

I've just noticed something.

This is the computerised record for the purchase of the chest freezer.

The freezer was ordered

on the 25th of September.

Alarmingly, that would coincide to when the Facebook entries are made,

when Damion is saying that John's died.

I expected the freezer to have been in the property long beforehand.

But Damion Johnson has ordered the chest freezer himself.

This new evidence raises questions

about whether Damion concealed John's body for financial gain.

So between September 18 and July 20,

£17,000 is taken from John's bank account.

Did you take that money?

No.

No? No, I didn't.

You carried on claiming the Carer's Allowance for John

after he's passed away.

That's £258 a month.

And you'd probably, if we hadn't discovered John,

still be claiming that benefit now.

No comment. Oh, my God.

We'll move on now to the freezer itself.

When you placed John into the freezer,

has anybody assisted you placing him into the freezer?

No, I did that.

All by yourself?

Yes, unfortunately.

I didn't... Oh, it's vile.

I didn't expect him to go in the way he did.

His head, oh, went down.

So just going slightly back to the dental injuries, the teeth.

Could any of those injuries have been caused

as you placed him into the chest freezer?

I don't know.

I wanted it over and done with.

How long had you had that freezer before John passed away?

It was bought for food.

I saw a cheap chest freezer.

"Oh, I'll have that. Oh, that looks good."

Just...

That freezer was purchased on the 25th of September,

and that's the same day John's died.

Are you trying to tell us it's just a fluke?

It's been delivered three days later, on the 28th of September,

and you placed him into a chest freezer.

It wasn't bought for that.

Your original prepared statement you'd given,

you were overcome with grief, you're absolutely distraught

about what's happened.

I'll tell you that there's a motive for not reporting what's happened.

No... No. There is. There isn't.

I'll put it to you that the reason you haven't reported John's passing

is for your own selfish... No. ..gains. Nope.

Let's face facts.

You knew if you'd reported his death

that the flat would be taken off you.

You were living in that flat for an extra 18 months rent-free,

all the bills paid for and you still got access to John's bank account.

Is that not the case? No.

Absolutely not.

Damion doesn't seem to have any job or income.

He had a lifestyle with John.

He had his Carer's Allowance,

and he appears to have just continued in that

with the passing of John.

Our investigation shows this is a calculated decision-making process

to conceal the body.

With all forensic examinations completed,

the pathologist meets with the police forensic team

to review his conclusions on John's cause of death.

Within the limits of what we've had to work with,

very decomposed...

..adult male,

major findings of note are, he has...

..fractured right cheekbone.

He has fracturing of his nose,

more to the right side.

The further work on those show that they could be caused

by some sort of heavy fall.

In terms of natural disease he does have some atheroma,

you know, the sort of fatty deposits in blood vessels.

And he's certainly got quite a bit in the aorta,

the biggest artery in the body.

He's got some calcification and atheroma to the coronary arteries,

but the disease there doesn't strike you immediately

as an explanation for his death.

So, I think, cause of death - unascertained.

I mean, it will probably never be ascertained.

It is frustrating,

but it's not always possible to say how that person has died.

We're looking at this two years down the line,

and when there's a delay it's a lot trickier for us.

At the end of the day you can't go for a murder charge

when you haven't got the evidence in front of you.

The Crown Prosecution Service authorises charges

for Damion Johnson of three counts of fraud

and of preventing the lawful burial of John Wainwright.

Very sad story, unfortunately.

That is the one thing I'm left with,

it's an overwhelming feeling of how sad the whole thing is.

It matters to do the right thing when someone's died.

That is why I do this job.

That is part of forensics.

Forensics was critical in this case

in helping identify the deceased,

so that he is treated

with the dignity and respect

that, up until this point, he hasn't had in death.

What happened to John, it's just horrific.

It's just, you just can't do that to people.

I think that Damion kind of owed it to John to be upfront and honest

and just say what happened.

And I suppose to a degree he's done that by pleading.

People have a right to be buried,

a right to be laid to rest,

and that had been taken away from him.

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