Original subtitles

In September 2010, an 82-year-old man living in Godalming, Surrey,

mysteriously disappears.

The GP regularly saw Bill Williamson.

Unusually for him, he had missed two appointments.

This caused quite a bit of alarm.

There was just no trace of him. We don't really know what's gone on here. I had a

gut feeling that something wasn't right about this case.

Three years prior...

He had befriended a much younger woman.

She quite clearly had a temper.

The missing person team had spoken to and questioned her and she had told

them, he's gone to Ireland, I haven't seen him for ages, and she was the last

person to have seen him.

There was no record of him travelling at all.

She'd been using his cards in Sainsbury's and Godalming and she was

caught on CCTV doing that.

I thought she was lying.

I didn't know whether he was dead or alive.

He's been murdered by her. He's been murdered by somebody else.

He's had an accident. He's lying in a ditch somewhere.

If indeed something had taken place, had it happened in the house, and was Bill

still there?

Makes you think twice about people in general.

In sleepy towns, people are capable of all sorts of things.

Godalming is a historic market town located in the picturesque River Way

Valley in the southwest of Surrey.

Well, the countryside's lovely. I mean, it's nestled in the Surrey Hills.

The pubs are great.

Good golf courses, too.

Cozy pubs and lots of charity shops, and it's just a generally nice place.

People are well-to-do in respect of they've probably got quite wealthy jobs

and there's a nice school nearby.

People would say good morning to you.

It's a fairly sleepy town.

It's a pretty town. You know, it's about, I don't know, 45 minutes from

London, so a great commuter town as well.

But not a lot happens in Godalming. You know, it's the odd scuffle outside the

kebab shop on a Saturday night.

But, I mean, nothing, I wouldn't say the crime rate's particularly high.

It's a nice place. It's an affluent place.

Generally, very low-level crime, very safe.

I've always lived there, and I've never felt threatened in any way. Almost don't

lock your doors half the time.

In September 2010,

82-year-old Bill Williamson moves to Godalming from the nearby village of

Milford.

Well, Bill lived in the village of Milford, which is next door to

Godalming, which is even sleepier than Godalming, but it does have a real sense

of community. Everybody knows each other.

Bill Williamson is the local postman in Milford, which is sort of part of

Godalming, really.

He'd been in that job for 30-odd years.

He was a familiar face to most people in the village. He seemed to be a nice

character that everybody got along with and nobody had a bad word to say about.

A lot of the community knew him and was quite sort of a larger-than-life

character that was a lovely man to them.

He was known as a lovely, smiley, happy person who served the village of Milford

as a postman for all those years.

Bill had been a widow for several years, having lost his wife Mary, who he'd been

married to for many years, and he had become increasingly lonely in that time.

Mary and Bill didn't have any children, but he did have his community.

He was quite a well-known man in the community, quite a nice gentleman,

always one of the neighbours that would say hi.

The house Bill moves into is owned by his 54-year-old friend, Anne Browning,

who he met three years prior.

Bill Williamson met Anne for the first time at a historical society, a local

group that met to talk about historical things in 2007.

They were essentially from different backgrounds.

He was a postman in Milford. Anne was a cleaner.

She'd been married twice before.

She had two sons.

And of interest, there was quite a substantial age difference between them.

She was almost 30 years his junior.

From what I understood from the community, she wasn't as well-liked as

him. She quite clearly had a temper.

Had a bit of a reputation locally.

Difficult character. She had a little rouse with people.

But for Bill, she was a young woman. She was interested in him.

He was all over her.

They'd started a friendship and Bill and Anne were both looking for company. So

when they first met, it was clearly company they wanted.

There came a time when she convinced him that they should put their eggs into one

basket. and maybe move down to the Isle of Wight and live together down there.

They had separate properties.

One would have to sell both of them and move down there, and he went for it, and

he put his house on the market first.

He sold his house in the summer of 2010.

He got about a quarter of a million pounds for it, and then he pays it into

their account.

And he thinks, you know, this is the start of our wonderful life together.

The first part of the plan has worked.

We had one or two chats with him when he moved up the hill to Anne's house.

And I saw him arrive in the car with Anne and her son, and they sort of

escorted him into the house. And I was just looking out of the window, being a

nosy neighbour, of course.

And I just thought, oh, that must be Anne's dad.

I thought, oh, the father's arrived, never met him before. I just assumed he

must be a member of the family.

And occasionally, I think I saw him go for a walk once, and we had a little

chat about the weather, nothing very interesting.

But I certainly noticed his presence, because nothing really happened next

door at Anne's house.

You know, apart from the dogs, she took the dogs for a walk, but we didn't

really hear from her.

In October 2010, Bill's local GP notices a change in his behaviour.

The GP regularly saw Bill Williamson and unusually for him he had

missed, I believe, two appointments and this caused quite a bit of alarm for the

GP who then obviously reported him to the local police as a missing person.

Local police begin their investigation into Bill's disappearance by

interviewing his close friend and housemate, Anne Browning.

When you get a missing person case, you're always going to start to look at

what can support the fact that this person is still around and that no harm

has come to them, they're still alive somewhere. So you're always looking for

those opportunities to verify that that person is safe and well somewhere else.

When Anne was interviewed, she was very inconvenienced by the fact she's got to

stop and talk to people and that her head was elsewhere because her son was

getting married.

Well, the missing person team had spoken to and questioned her and she had told

them, he's gone to Ireland, I haven't seen him for ages, and she was the last

person to have seen him.

didn't have any family of his own in Ireland.

The family were actually Mary's, his deceased wife's family.

And they did stay in contact with him. He did go and visit them occasionally,

but it wasn't a regular occurrence.

Concerning that this story had come out, that he was seeing family...

over in Ireland, and nobody had really known about this family before, and he

hadn't travelled regularly because of his health, so that was quite worrying.

And there was no record of him travelling at all anywhere.

And when they'd identified the family, the family had said he just hadn't

travelled for probably about ten years.

They hadn't seen him.

They sometimes heard from him, but it wasn't a very close relationship, so it

was quite unusual for him to have said he was going to go there, and of course

he hadn't turned up.

As part of their investigations, had identified a number of worrying points

with the lady that he was supposed to be living with. Not least one of them was

that there was some CCTV of her using his card at a local

supermarket.

She'd been using his cards in Sainsbury's and Godalming, and she was

caught on CCTV doing that.

As suspicion deepens around Bill's disappearance and his connection to

Anne, police move to escalate the search in the hopes of urgently tracking down

Mr Williamson.

September 2010,

Godalming, Surrey. 82-year-old Bill Williamson disappears under suspicious

circumstances. His friend and housemate, 54-year-old Anne Browning, tells police

he travelled to Ireland, but investigators find no proof of this.

Surrey police now move to expand the search for the missing man.

I was at a team-building day.

and was asked to leave to go and look at a missing person that the Guildford

missing team had been dealing with because they weren't happy about the

circumstances of it and had some suspicions. So they'd done a lot of the

groundwork already in trying to find him, so they'd been told that he'd gone

to Ireland and had contacted the Irish relatives who claimed they hadn't seen

him. They'd done house to house and nobody had seen him. And they'd spoken

to the doctor who had reported him missing, who thought it was highly

suspicious because he never missed an appointment and he'd missed two. And she

was like, well, this is so out of character.

Something's happened to him.

And there was just no trace of him. And so they were like, we don't really know

what's gone on here.

I was the senior investigating officer appointed as such to look at this and

review it.

So I listened to everything they said and agreed to take the missing person

inquiry from them because I agreed that something didn't sit right. You know,

you have a gut feeling about things.

And I had a gut feeling that something wasn't right about this case. So I said

that we would take the case into the major crime team because we had the

resources to do it compared to a local divisional team who had done a fantastic

job up until that point.

So we took it and I then called the team in.

to brief them at headquarters to tell them about what I'd been told and what

our fast-track actions were going to be. Because at the time, he could still be

missing. We didn't know whether he had a murder or a missing person or some sort

of accident had happened to him. It could be any of those things, really.

But it was odd.

We obviously went back to visit her with detectives who were trained in

investigating cases like this to sort of ask us some questions, which they did.

They then came back to report to us that she'd basically repeated what the

missing person team had said, that she hadn't seen him since a day almost a

month ago.

Her son was getting married that coming weekend. They were having the party or

the reception in the garden, so she could really do without the

inconvenience, frankly, because she had a lot going on. So, yeah, they just turn

up and speak to her because she was the last person to see him or speak to him,

so obviously she's the person that we're going to start our inquiries with.

I didn't know whether he was...

dead or alive, and you have a number of hypotheses.

As an SIO, what might have happened to them is he's been murdered by her, he's

been murdered by somebody else, he's had an accident, he's lying in a ditch

somewhere, dead, or he's just gone off of his own accord.

I think there's about five or six different things that I was considering

could have happened to him.

I thought she was lying because of certain things that she had said.

The car that she said.

she hadn't seen was parked round the corner from hers and she'd re-registered

it in her name.

Bill had a really distinctive car that was beloved to him and everyone knew him

for driving it.

And actually, going back to the issue about the fact that it was the community

that picked up something was not right here, members of the community mentioned

the fact that Bill's car kept moving. Every couple of days, it was moving from

a different spot, making it seem like Bill was alive and still around.

And then the other thing was she'd been using his cards in Sainsbury's and

Godalming and she was caught on CCTV doing that.

A natural course of action that you would take in that investigation is to

see where a card has been used and then see if CCTV is available.

And of course you're going to look to see if he's alive and well and he's the

person making those purchases.

But when the CCTV was recovered, what we saw was Anne.

Why would you do all that if you weren't trying to hide something?

So I made the decision to arrest her on suspicion of murder, which then gave us

additional powers to get into the house to do some searching.

Anne Browning is arrested on October 9th, 2010.

She was quite calm and I authorised an immediate interview, so one without a

solicitor, because...

I thought if something's come a cropper to him and we don't know about it, we

need to find out pretty quickly. So she's been arrested now and you can do

something called an urgent interview.

So my detective did an interview with her and she basically didn't say

anything. So I then said, fine. It was quite late at night now. Let her have a

rest period and we'll go back in in the morning.

She'll have a solicitor then and we'll do a proper interview plan overnight and

then we'll interview her the next day.

This is a good way for the police to protect and preserve evidence. It also

gives the person who is perhaps suspected or even closest to a potential

victim an opportunity to seek legal support as well.

As part of the briefing, she said, we're going to go and arrest this lady and I

need... A number of teams ready, one to do the interviews.

We need the intelligence team to be doing all of the background checks and

all of the work around his banks, etc.

From my perspective, the forensic teams needed to be on standby, waiting for her

to be arrested, for them to issue that warrant so that we could get into the

property and start doing a very deep dive into what could or could not have

happened, what was left of the property, and if indeed something had taken place.

Had it happened in the house?

And was Bill still there?

The main part is this is obviously Bill's home.

Had he not been missing, he'd probably only lived there a few months. So any

DNA or anything that related to Bill showing that he'd actually moved into

the property, that he had lived within the home.

was really critical.

One of the other things that we do look for when we get into a crime scene or a

scene like this is to see if there's anything that's been disturbed and is

obviously showing that there has been either a struggle or that there's been

some kind of disturbance that isn't normal and easily

explained, if you like.

You'd be looking for things to be in perhaps not places that you would expect

to find them in. For example, if you've got a chair that's always in one

particular space, if it's been moved, you're going to have indentations in

carpet and stuff like that, and potentially something's been moved to

cover something.

In this particular case, we were looking to see if there was any signs of a

struggle, any signs of a disagreement that was physical that could mean that

Bill was incapacitated. We wanted to make sure that he wasn't in the property

and that he wasn't in need of help or support or being held to ransom.

Anne was, I believe, hosting her son's wedding.

in the garden as well so there was a lot of cleaning up and preparation for that

particular event so there was nothing really hugely obvious at

that particular point at first

view. There was nothing particular.

And this was because it was a good month, six weeks after he had first gone

missing. We were checking very low level areas to see if there was any blood

stains or any signs of, as you said, damage. If somebody's been using

weaponry, if they've hit somebody with a bat, then you might get cast off on the

ceiling.

There was some very low-level blood spots, quite close to the bathroom, and

obviously because it's by a bathroom, you're kind of thinking, well, this

could be somebody who's cut themselves with a razor.

There was a cupboard in that particular corridor, and when we went into that

cupboard, we found a baseball bat in there, so that was immediately

recovered.

The main thing was that the forensic team were in there gathering bits and

pieces that they needed to make sure that we had secured should we need to

identify Bill. Things that relate to his personal DNA, so for example,

toothbrush, hairbrush, razor, so that we could have a reference point if we were

to locate either Bill himself or a deceased person that we wanted to see if

that was him.

One of the CSIs who was doing one of the searches came across a

diary.

And on the day that we believe Bill had gone missing, because he'd never been

heard of since, she had written in that diary, RIP.

And then further down, bingo.

We were able to go back and find that on that evening she'd actually gone out

with associates and friends and had been quite chirpy.

Meanwhile, after spending the night in custody, Anne prepares for a second

interview with police, this time with her solicitor present.

The solicitor turned up. We obviously put the crime scene investigators into

the house.

to start looking at what they could find.

In the meantime, my interview team were preparing an interview. They did

disclosure to the solicitor, who then went into consultation with his client,

Anne.

The solicitor came out and said to my Tier 5 interview leader that you're

going to need a box of tissues and a spade. She's going to confess it and

tell you where he is.

And that was, you know, like, wow, because she...

Obviously tissues because she was crying and she was very upset and a spade

because she'd buried him apparently in her back garden.

With a potential confession looming, police are eager to learn how this

seemingly innocent friendship could have such a shocking and callous outcome.

The question now becomes, will Anne tell the full truth?

Godalming, Surrey.

On October 9, 2010, 54-year-old Anne Browning is arrested on suspicion of

involvement in the missing persons case of 82-year-old Bill Williamson. After

spending only one night in custody, Anne prepares to make a disturbing confession

to detectives on the case.

But will it be the full story?

I think it was a bit of a shock to all of us that she confessed so early on,

but... When you look at the interview tapes, the language that she uses is

really, really interesting.

Can you tell me everything that you know about William Williamson's

disappearance?

Yes, I confess to his murder.

OK. Tell me about that then.

He said he was going and I just lost my temper, really lost it, because he made

all these promises.

that we were going to have a nice life together.

Regretfully, in a really split rage of temper, I reached out and hit him over

the head.

I was standing in the hallway by the cupboard door that leads to the

coats and near the bathroom.

That's where I keep a bit of a baseball bat, I think, in case

I've had a burglar, I think. And it's always been sitting there by the meter.

And I just grabbed it and hit him with that.

And killed him.

She says...

She did it in a fit of rage that he was going to leave her and she absolutely

kind of saw red and reached for a bat that she kept in a cupboard by the door

because she kept it there for burglars.

You know, she lives in an incredibly safe area. Why would you need to keep a

round spout or a heavy bat to beat away burglars in the area that Anne lived?

Obviously, her son was getting married.

and she was having a reception in her back garden after the wedding that

weekend, and she told us that once all of that was out of the way, because that

was a big thing, she was going to confess to what had happened and give

herself up effectively.

Investigators immediately inform the forensics team of Anne's shocking

confession.

She drew a picture to the interview team and described as well where he was

buried. In the meantime, we then relayed that to the crime scene investigators at

the scene, who had already by that time found some low-level blood splatter and

some splatter up behind the radiator, and they then went into the garden where

she'd indicated and sort of marked off the area. And you wouldn't have known

that there was anybody buried there. You'd think there'd be like a...

A mound like a grave, but it was completely flat with weeds growing over

it. You just wouldn't have known.

Police invite specialists to assist in the extraction of Bill's body.

We're automatically now looking at the outside of the property and what

that meant for us was we needed additional support around how we were

going to do that.

Importantly, when you are looking at...

potentially people who've been buried you want to make sure that you can link

everything back together and the first port of call for me was around getting

an archaeologist out an anthropologist somebody that we could get out to the

scene who really understood the different layers of soils how

instruments made marks in those soils with our forensic scientist that we

weren't going to damage evidence by randomly digging up parts of the garden

As soon as that forensic archaeologist arrived, we started plotting with the

crime scene team around what looked to be the most recently disturbed areas of

ground and where most likely we would be looking to find Bill.

We obviously started to very carefully remove the soil.

Working very slowly, you have to gather the different layers and make sure

that... you're protecting any sort of crime marks.

So we were able to link the cuts in the sides of the grave to a spade that we

had in the shed.

It was a long, a very long recovery.

The garden was quite clayey, and because Bill had been there some time, obviously

there was some decomposition.

I'd been on holiday and I came back the day that the forensics were there and

the house, well, both the houses, because it's a semi-detached building,

were all cordoned off. I couldn't actually get into my house and there

were police everywhere.

And I asked the police, what on earth is going on? I was worried about my dad,

something's happened to him. And they said, your dad is fine, your neighbour's

fine, you can go into your house.

And then I realised that the forensics were in the next-door neighbour's, Anne

Browning's, garden, digging up the garden, wearing all their sort of

onesies, wearing all the equipment.

I went up to my old bedroom upstairs, got on top of the chest of drawers,

opened the window, and basically listened to what they were doing.

And eventually, I think it took them some time to find his body, and I could

understand why he was buried in that part of the garden.

Because it wasn't overlooked.

Because there were a lot of houses in Milton's Crescent.

But that particular corner, I had to get on top of my chest of drawers and crane

my neck to see what they were doing.

I couldn't believe the sort of depth of the hole where they found the body.

And it did make me think, how on earth could Anne have dragged that body and

dug that hole herself?

One of those points was when it became clear that Bill himself had been asked

by Anne to dig that hole ready for some planting, again,

which makes it quite vile and really quite unpleasant.

Bill had no idea this was happening, but she'd had him digging a hole in the back

garden, and the neighbour had seen him wheelbarrowing.

mountains of earth from the back to the front.

And obviously he didn't realise that the hole he was digging was going to be his

own grave.

Once forensics have done what they need to do, because I don't want to mess with

the integrity of the scene, then I would go and familiarise myself with it as an

SIO, because it gives you an overview of what you're dealing with and helps you

direct your line of inquiry as to what investigation you... you want to happen

so in this case i didn't go to the scene until later on because i wanted you know

he had to be found and dug up which took an inordinate amount of time to get him

out the ground once we found him he is evidence in his own right

and has to be examined by the forensic pathologist and you can't destroy

evidence as you're trying to dig somebody out of a

So they found him, and as they were digging, they found him sort of his feet

first, so he'd been put into this hole feet first.

I mean, it was really deep. It was over six foot deep, and whoever had dug it

had built a step into it as well, and he was face down in this hole, head first,

with his legs and his arms tied up with a leather belt behind his body.

The soil had turned like a mud clay, so it was really claggy and quite hard to

get him out, and it just took a long time. And, of course, you're only

allowed to hold people in custody for so long before you either have to release

them, charge them.

And I had asked for the superintendent's extension, which had given us 12 hours,

and I'd then gone for a warrant of further detention with the magistrate,

which had given us longer, but we were eating into custody time.

we still need to have a forensic post-mortem conducted on him.

It was quite difficult to recover him, and I know the SIO was a little

frustrated that things weren't moving quicker than they possibly could. But

actually, I think she would quite happily say that the work that was done

really helped to narrow down exactly what had happened, even down to the

point where... The archaeologist was able to say that the grave that had been

dug, probably by Bill himself, at the point when she tried to put him into

that hole, it became apparent it wasn't deep enough and she'd had to dig

a little bit deeper, which, of course, is a huge thing around premeditation and

around the callousness of the actual offence.

But her version of events was that they'd had this big row.

She'd lost her temper and just suddenly killed him. There was no premeditation.

She was obviously thinking of how she was going to play it in court from that

moment.

And I just hit... I was really, really upset.

I just hit and hit and hit out.

And I can't remember how many times I hit him.

But I know I killed him.

And then from that point, there's no going back, is there?

The language is interesting and her demeanour is interesting.

She says something along the lines of, there's a point of no return, when

actually that point of no return was in 2008 when she started stealing money

from Bill because that is the thread that starts to unravel this whole set of

incidents.

As investigators discover more about the strange relationship between Anne and

Bill, some key financial details become very important in the lead-up to Bill's

murder.

October 2010,

Godalming, Surrey.

54-year-old Anne Browning confesses to the murder of 82-year-old Bill

Williamson, but police believe she may not be telling the full truth about what

led to Bill's barbaric death.

She said he'd annoyed her the day he moved in.

She'd lost her temper with him, hit him over the head with a bat, and she had

dug a hole in the garden and buried him in it, was her story, effectively.

Which... fitted, only that we believe she'd done it for financial gain and it

was premeditated.

If you can show it's premeditated, which it was, and it was financial gain, which

it was, then she will get a harsher sentence, gives the judge more

sentencing powers.

She's clearly a danger. She'd spent years grooming this man, knowing that

she was going to kill him.

Once we start to investigate a case like this where someone goes missing and it's

clear there's been some kind of financial transactions taking place that

look dubious, we would always look at the history of any kind of official acts

that have taken place, so any changes in will, any changes in life insurance

policies, which you quite often see, and any movement from bank accounts or

unusual spending activity.

I think Anne probably caught on fairly quickly that Bill was a fairly

vulnerable individual and more importantly is that he was a vulnerable

individual with funds that was going to be able to fund her lifestyle.

They'd started a friendship, and from Bill's point of view, he was clearly

very fond of Anne.

But there were signs that came up very, very quickly. Some red flags started to

appear. Bill was paying for incidentals for Anne, things like petrol and for

dental appointments.

And then in quite a big move, which would always be a massive red flag in an

investigation.

um bill changes his will leaving the majority of his estate to ann

so they met in 2007 and by

2008 they were living separately but they did have a joint bank account and

bill suddenly noticed that 1 200 pounds was missing from that account so he

obviously checks his bank statements thinks there's only one other person

that could have taken money

from that account, who could it be? It was going to be Anne.

And he noticed that the money was going in small amounts, so it was £200 over

several weeks, amounting to £1,200.

So he challenges Anne on that, and essentially she gaslights him on that

fact and says, I absolutely haven't been taking money out of the account. It's

you, you're getting older, you must have forgotten that you've taken that amount

out.

When the financial records are checked, a part of the financial investigations

that we undertook into this case, it was clear that Anne had bought £1,000 worth

of premium bonds. So some of that money that she'd taken out of that account had

been stashed away into premium bonds for her.

He found her out and he sort of called her on it. They had a big row and his

friends were telling him, you know, that's it, you should be done with her.

You know, she's bad business.

And they did stay apart for several months, but then she came back into his

life.

There's a real telling pattern in Anne's behaviour that one source of income...

if we want to call it that for her dried up so when the relationship with bill

went sour because he thought that she was stealing from him she had to seek to

fund her lifestyle so cleaning obviously was getting her some money but not

enough to fund the lifestyle that she was looking for so she did actually try

to reconcile with her first husband in that intervening period between 2008 and

2009 but in 2009

Anne worms her way back into Bill's life.

Anne used to have two greyhounds, which Bill was very fond of and they used to

walk the greyhounds together.

And Anne, knowing...

that Bill was an empathetic person, he was clearly very kind.

One of the dogs did sadly pass away, but Anne saw that as an opportunity to

message Bill and say, one of the dogs has died, and obviously being the sort

of person that he is, he did reach out to her in order to give her some comfort

from that point and seized on that opportunity to reconcile the

relationship with him.

In the year from first reconnecting with Bill, obviously that relationship

started back on a stronger footing and Anne clearly didn't want Bill to

get away for a second time.

What she actually did the first time round, when you think about it, it was

actually very sneaky, so it's a testing.

It's a taking of small amounts of money to see if Bill was going to notice.

And obviously on that particular occasion, she pushed it too far, and

he's more astute than she probably gave him credit for.

So the second time around, I think she wanted to make sure that things were far

more formal.

And so Bill, obviously desperate for companionship and looking for someone to

be around when he's in his far-advancing years, had agreed to sell his house on

the understanding that Anne was also going to sell her house and they were

going to make a new life on the Isle of Wight.

It's very similar to a coercive-controlling relationship.

You could look at it as grooming in terms of Anne was slowly chipping away

at Bill's behaviours and his life in order to mould him into the person and

the relationship that she wanted.

And really there was no other reason for that rather than financial security and

financial gain.

So Bill sells his home in Milford that he's lived in for 30 years. It was close

to a quarter of a million pounds that he got from that sale.

Obviously, Bill's selling under the understanding that Anne is going to sell

her house, but somehow Anne manages to convince Bill that they're not going to

do that quite yet.

She convinces Bill to move in with her, which obviously he does. He doesn't own

a home anymore.

Interestingly, the money from the said of that house went straight into a joint

account for Bill and Anne.

And within days of that money going in, £140,000 of that was taken out of that

account and put into a sole account of Anne's.

I don't know whether she was thinking initially that actually because Bill was

of such advancing years that she had leased some of that.

that money in the account and you know was it a case that he was going to

become unwell and then maybe die before realizing that that money had gotten

fairly stupid move by ann because he'd noticed a much much smaller amount going

out and really the the argument that took place probably wasn't a case of the

fact that bill was going to leave and it was more a case of why have you moved

140 000 pounds out of the account

He's already caught her once for it.

He catches her a second time doing something far more aggressive in terms

of financial gain.

You've got to ask, actually, was that the trigger?

Anne essentially left her own breadcrumb trail for this case in terms of being

able to prove that this wasn't an in-the-moment act that had happened. It

was utterly brutal, but when that larger picture came to light in terms of the

fact that Anne had been pilfering money over a matter of time and that she was

clearly controlling aspects of Bill's life...

Everything led towards that motive of monetary gain rather than the fact that

she was so bereft that he was going to leave her.

A date is set for the murder trial and both parties prepare their cases.

When we spoke to the barrister who was prosecuting for us, we outlined the lies

that she told leading up to it to throw people off the trail that she'd killed

him, so she made people believe that he'd gone to Ireland.

She transferred his car into her name with a view to selling it.

She'd spent years befriending him. He had sold his house, and then she had

transferred half the money after he had been killed into her bank account. Now,

why would you do that if he was simply missing?

That and the deceit of her trying to use his...

Well, she did use his card in Godalming and Waitrose, and we'd got her on CCTV

using his card. I mean, why would you use that without trying to throw people

off the scent?

That all says to me it's premeditated and it was financial gain. You know, the

real nail in the coffin was the transfer of the sale of the house funds into her

bank account, her sole bank account, and the fact that she'd written RIP on the

day he moved in.

The trial takes place at the Guildford Crown Court in August of 2011.

She was in the court the whole time and she tried to portray a meek little old

lady. I mean, she was only in her early 50s, but, you know, she was quite a

short lady with curly grey hair and for the most time was quite quiet until the

judge sentenced her.

and then she screeched at him something like, may God have mercy on your soul,

as the judge said, take her down.

She clearly wasn't happy with the sentence because she was sentenced to 25

years.

She is a cold, narcissistic woman who is financially motivated for her own gain,

and that's the best way that I can summarise anything about her. For

somebody to spend that long...

grooming somebody and befriending them. You know, a defenceless man loved by the

community. Day moves in, she hits him over the head, kills him and takes all

his money.

It sums her up, really.

I honestly don't think she cared about him at all. I think she saw an old

gentleman who was kind, unlikely to cause her any injury.

Completely inoffensive, who was very wealthy, didn't have a close family and

was an easy target.

And it was quite simply all about the money.

She was sentenced for 25 years, but she never quite made that. In November 2025,

she died in Send Prison in Surrey and she'd only served...

a little over um 15 years but she never came out what does

she gain from this nothing she ruined her own life she ruined bill

williamson's life she ruined her children's lives her family and for what

you know quarter of a a million pounds and she ends up in prison um after all

the blunders she made as well it's just something that doesn't sit well it

really doesn't it makes you think twice about people in general in sleepy

towns that people are capable of all sorts of things the

loneliness of old age is quite apparent here and looking for that companionship

and being lured into feeling safe and loved yeah i think

that's really sad when Police officers went and spoke to the

local community, so people that he served, his friends and family, they all

reported what a lovely, kind man he was.

And from her very actions, she had no qualms at all about taking money from a

vulnerable individual who only wanted to be loved and supported.