Original subtitles

West Yorkshire Police. What's the emergency?

MAN: Hello, mate. We're a skip hire, waste management company.

We've just found human remains.

They've just found a foot, mate. A human foot?

Yep, yep. Been through a shredder.

NICOLA WALKER: With officers en route,

the call is immediately referred

to West Yorkshire Police forensic teams.

Leeds CSI, Alicia speaking.

'I've got officers at a recycling unit in Yorkshire.

'They've found a body part.'

Crime scene manager Alicia is one of two CSls on duty.

Whiskey-Romeo-nine-five?

Alicia and a police rapid response team are immediately dispatched.

All right. Thank you.

SIRENS WAIL

At the scene, the forensic team head to where

the suspected human foot has been found,

amid thousands of kilograms of rubbish.

The team are in no doubt about what they have found.

The human foot is placed into a secure evidence box.

KAREN: Right, these are all sorted.

We're just going to pop them into this other bag, aren't we?

Hiya, Pete, it's Alicia.

So, KMW2.

I'll just confirm. Wet and dry swab of left foot, right side.

OK. Ancl that was seized at 14:39.

The team now need to consider if more body parts

might be amongst the waste.

Identification of the remains is now a priority.

A specialist police search team, PolSA, have arrived

to scour this vast site.

Steve Austin is the area forensic manager

assigned to the case.

One of the challenges we're going to be met with at this recycling plant

is the vast amount of waste that goes through it.

I recognise that we could potentially have

a lot of animal waste,

a lot of food waste that will include bones and flesh.

There will be a PolSA team down there,

and it will be a case of us

working together in order to look for any body parts,

to piece the body back together as much as we can.

Once they drop stuff in there, then they'll just go back in

and scoop it up and bring it back out. OK.

The senior investigating officer

is Detective Superintendent Tony Nicholson.

I've been called about this set of circumstances,

but one thing I do know is that my best friend today,

and probably for every other type of job that I get called about,

will be the area forensic manager, who'll be able to advise me,

with significant subject matter expertise,

around the scene management, the scene preservation

and evidential recovery.

But they're also a gatekeeper

into a lot of other specialist, scientific roles,

which are going to be, I think, in this case, particularly crucial.

Minute by minute, the crime scene investigators

keep the Homicide and Major Enquiry Team informed

of every discovery on site.

Mr Nicholson. Hiya, pal. How are you doing?

Can you do me a big favour, please?

Would you mind... Review the log for us.

Give us some consideration around CCTV parameters.

We'll have a briefing when I get back.

But can you just have a look at the bin companies who've used that site,

and then we'll see what the extent of those collections are.

What's your thoughts at this stage?

Are we thinking body dumped there, or are we looking at potentially

it's been brought to the site as part of the skip deposition?

Yeah, really difficult. No idea, quite frankly, at the moment.

Remarkably, the foot remains intact.

Given its condition, it has arrived there very recently.

The primary goal now is to obtain DNA.

Identifying the difference between human remains

and flesh and bones from animals is a difficult task.

So a senior forensics anthropologist has been brought in to help.

The anthropologist will go through

all the different pieces of tissue and the bones for us.

They will identify what is human, what is non-human.

But aside from that, they can also give us

some interpretation about what we're finding.

Steve Austin and crime scene manager Gerard Sadler

are shown how the site's heavy machinery works

by Sergeant Mick McGowan.

So the process, the stuff that were dropped off Wednesday...

Yeah. ..got dumped here

and started to get processed on Friday and Saturday morning.

So, the process is that big grabber picks the stuff up,

drops it into this hopper.

The hopper does a lot of shaking about and mangling stuff up.

Ancl then it drops down onto the conveyor belt,

which then goes up, across and up here.

While the conveyor belt's been going,

that's when they've come across the foot coming across the belt.

So they've stopped all the production everywhere,

thinking that, well, somewhere along this process,

or in that pile over there,

is the rest of the body, potentially.

In terms of time, what are you thinking?

Er, at least three clays. Right.

As day one of the search concludes,

the site is secured overnight.

Senior investigating officer Tony Nicholson

recognises the immense task ahead.

Well, what do we know so far? Not a great deal.

At the moment, we know we've got a human foot.

We're hoping, obviously, to get some DNA

from the examination that we're currently doing at the moment,

and that will be fast-tracked through.

Ancl with any luck at all, we'll be able to identify

to whom that foot belongs.

The stuff that comes out the chute there,

as you say, he calls it the heavies.

Yeah. So it's the heavies and the dense stuff.

As it stands at the moment, clearly we've got a mystery.

We've got a left foot and no body associated with it.

We're hoping, through all the detailed searching

and examinations that we're doing here at the site,

that we'll be able to find some further body parts

that might be able to marry up, with regard to DNA,

to establish the identity of those parts.

NICOLA WALKER: A specialist police search team

are being briefed at a recycling plant

where a human foot has been discovered.

You know, everybody gets a chance to do a bit.

Whilst the staff were doing the recycling

at the plant yesterday morning,

they came across a human foot.

I came yesterday afternoon with the SIO and CSI,

and everybody agreed it's a foot from a human being.

But there's, potentially, the rest of the body here.

So basically, we're going to search specific areas,

searching for the rest of the human remains.

It's a shit job... Gotta be done.

...but we know we know why we're here,

we know what we've gotta do and how we're gonna it.

So, a search on a site like this is so extensive

that we have to make sure it's meticulous,

and we have to make sure that we recover

every piece of bone fragment and tissue

which could be related to our remains.

Therefore, we've started from the larger sizes of waste

and will go down to the smaller sizes,

where we will ensure that fingertip search is carried out,

so we obtain every single piece that may remain here.

This is it. Area A1 A2.

So concentrate on A1

until we've got sufficiently far back.

Any clothing that comes out, adult clothing, male and female,

needs to be put on a groundsheet

that we're going to be putting down here.

All right?

Any bones, fleshy bits,

it's on another sheet.

Ancl CSI will sort that out straight away.

Ultimately, what we'd end up doing at t'mortuary

is looking at a reconstruction, wouldn't we, of the body?

So I think I'm happy for it all to go in one. Yeah.

Ancl what you could almost look at doing is

you could literally just have it as a body bag

with all the parts going into the body bag,

and each clay... Ancl I'm just putting this out there.

...we could have it like each clay, we've got a body bag.

Any parts we find each particular clay goes in there,

zipped up, and that goes to t'mortuary.

And each day, we do that.

With the search system set up,

the hunt for any remaining body parts begins,

as does the full investigation...

focusing first on workers at the plant.

We spoke to all the staff at the recycling place,

all the employees there, all the management.

We were as satisfied as we could be,

having spoken to each and every one of them,

that they had no involvement whatsoever

in the body parts that had been found.

That's another bone. There'll be bones galore.

But we don't know whether the human or...

The team places numbered cones where human remains are found.

CSls will then photograph the area.

That's all we can see to start with, without going into t'pile.

There's another bone on t'top, but we'll get them as we go through.

Where number nine is,

there's a big lump of flesh and some bone and a bit of hair.

We've no idea what it is, but obviously, we'll take it out

and then give it to the anthropologists to have a look at.

Anything that could be human is reserved,

ready for the expert to analyse.

There's some stuff on the pile up there

that look like ribs of some description,

but I'm not to say whether it's human or not.

I'm going to put a marker on them. Photograph them in situ. OK.

Ancl then lift them. All right.

The expert forensic anthropologist drafted in for the case

is Drjulie Roberts.

The police forensics team have been to the site,

and they've confirmed that it's a human foot,

but they now require a specialist to come and assist with the search

to see if there are any more body parts at the site.

'A forensic anthropologist is someone who specialises

'in human skeletal biology and anatomy.

'So we have an in-depth knowledge,

'and we use that to estimate things like age at death,

'biological sex, the living height of an individual,

'how robust, what their body build was like.

'And we can also look at individual identifying features

'that might make that person more recognisable.'

We've got some bits already. Yeah.

Which they're just photographing in situ before we pick them off

and put them on a sheet for you to have a look at, if that's all right.

A forensic anthropologist for 25 years,

Dr Roberts is based at Liverpool john Moores University.

The foot had already been taken to the mortuary,

so I was shown a photograph of what had been found.

And actually, it proved to be a bit more than a foot.

So, it was part of the ankle and part of the lower leg.

So probably about up to here.

You couldn't see the bone.

It was fully fleshed,

and it had intact skin over the surface as well.

But the size of the foot and the ankle

indicated that it was adult-size.

Forensic teams are used to adapting to different potential crime scenes,

but Dr Roberts and the team's expertise

is being tested by the site and its unique challenges.

I was quite shocked by the size of it, actually.

It took up the full length of a road.

It was very, very dirty.

Piles and piles of waste material everywhere.

The smell was quite distinctive

just because of all the rotting vegetation, meat and waste.

A lot of animal carcasses there as well.

It really was quite bad.

After hours of searching, finally, a new discovery.

Gerard, you've got some human maxilla there.

The anthropologist is just going through

some of the bones that we've identified,

and we've got some teeth and palate

mixed up with a load of animal bones.

You're quite happy that they're human? Yeah.

So, we've got some teeth. Oh, blimey.

I don't know if you wanna fast-track that.

Yeah. Happy that they're human.

'There's a lot of useful information that you can get from teeth

'if you have the teeth of the deceased,

'which can be really helpful

'when trying to figure out the identity of the living person.'

You do, however, need something to compare that against.

So usually, if you're going to get what we call

a positive identification,

we would also need to have the dental records of that person

to compare them with the postmortem records that we had.

In this case, we had no idea who the individual is.

As the search continues, the team need to consider

if this is one human body or multiple remains.

The body parts are transported back to the mortuary,

ready for a forensic postmortem and to try and obtain a DNA profile.

This data is then interpreted by forensic scientistjames Chapman.

The individual DNA fragments we're looking at

are not especially unique or especially rare in their own right,

but the combination of all of the DNA components

makes the DNA profile unique.

Ancl one way of thinking about that

is thinking about the National Lottery

and what makes that National Lottery number that you've selected unique

is the combination of those numbers together.

We've got the almost complete DNA profile of this individual,

as determined from the swabs that were taken from the foot,

and that then allows us to see

if we can compare that DNA profile with databases

and see if there's anybody else with the same DNA profiles.

Firstly, the DNA is loaded to the national DNA database

to identify if the donor of the body parts is recorded on the system.

Investigators will then look to load the DNA profile

to the missing persons database

and then carry out searches worldwide through Interpol.

And that can then get forwarded around by Interpol to other nations,

and they can then search their databases,

and hopefully if they generate a match, they could feed that back.

Obtaining DNA and being able to search around the globe

is just an amazing opportunity for us in law enforcement.

It gives us that facility to be able to search further afield

and around the globe.

Ancl that would always be supported

from the National Crime Agency and Interpol.

At Interpol's headquarters,

they connect police forces worldwide to locate missing persons.

Interpol will be crucial in identifying

if the body is a foreign national.

Dr Susan Hitchin and Dr Francois Laurent

specialise in global missing persons cases.

Morning. DR SUSAN: Morning.

So, Interpol's primary responsibility

is to facilitate the exchange of police data

amongst our 196 member countries.

For missing persons, we can assist police in the different countries

by providing that secure network

so that we can help to locate and find missing persons

and hopefully reunite them with their families.

Where are we on the stats this week for the notices?

So, I think we've reached up to 16,000 yellow notice now.

'A yellow notice is a global police alert for missing persons.'

It will provide information on the individual

who has been reported missing,

and this can be made public at the choice of the issuing country.

Behind that notice, we can also have the police data,

so the DNA, the fingerprints and case information

that will then be used in our databases

to hopefully locate that individual.

What have you seen come through with biometrics?

In particular the DNA on the black and yellows since yesterday.

Since yesterday, we received quite a lot of DNA profiles

from biological relatives from European countries,

including Slovakia, for example.

As soon as we receive any request

on a missing person case from a country,

the biometric data will be inputted into our biometric databases

and a response will be given back to the country.

This information is stored on the Interpol database,

allowing countries to regularly check

their own missing persons cases for matches

against uploaded data, such as DNA.

Every message that comes in, we know that there is a detective

seeking our assistance to make that international link.

1,000km away in Leeds,

Detective Inspector Guy Shackleton

is struggling to narrow down the volume of bin collections

that arrived on the day human remains were discovered.

It's a daunting task, yet it's currently the only lead they have.

We can narrow down when the body or body parts

have actually gone to that location.

So, it's between 24th of October and 31st of October

that we've narrowed down.

Where it becomes a little bit difficult for yourself is

we've got 95 skip deposits at that location.

MAN: Between those dates? Between those dates.

Ancl we've got 172 vehicle deposits.

Right.

So that gives you an idea. That's quite a lot.

Yeah. Now, it gets a little bit worse

because what we then look further at is where are those pick-ups from.

Ancl what I can tell you on that

is we are looking at West, South and North Yorkshire

and potentially a little bit wider than that

because of, effectively, subcontracting as well.

How many premises are we talking from?

In a nutshell, we're talking thousands.

We're not talking hundreds, we're talking thousands. Really?

Ancl I think if we're looking at being realistic and proportionate

as to what we're trying to... what we're trying to narrow down,

I just think that's not achievable, really.

HE SIGHS

I think we can fairly safely say that this is gonna be

quite an extensive and complex investigation.

At the site, the team questions if there is more than one body,

and if so, how they ended up here.

They ramp up their efforts

to uncover any additional human remains.

This is a very resource-intensive search

because we have such a vast site,

large amount of waste to search through.

So it's pretty much all hands to the pump,

and any licensed search officers that we have, if they are available,

are being deployed to this site to assist in the search.

Dr Roberts takes Sergeant Mick McGowan

through the latest discoveries.

Oh, what, that big bit? Yeah.

Then that bit from over there. Where the foot came.

Yeah. So it's got a... got most of the thighbone,

it's got a kneecap, and it's got the...

I can see it now. Yeah.

...t0p part of the upper leg as well.

We've got bones and body parts from different areas of the body as well.

So we've got... We've got jaw, but we've got leg, we've got foot.

So, erm, it's not just from one area.

Can we have a photograph of this as well, please?

At this stage, the team is unsure if the human remains

belong to one single individual or multiple corpses.

We've managed to now locate and recover

quite a few body parts at this site,

and we have been having discussions about what's called DVI.

DVI stands for Disaster Victim Identification.

It's a process that we often use at a major disaster,

for example, a plane crash where you've got multiple casualties.

You've had a conversation regarding DVI.

Yeah, yeah, I have, from HMET.

We're asking about keeping an open mind

to whether we've got more than one deceased person here.

Ancl I said, "Well, if we start finding parts that'd suggest that,

"then we will start looking at different processes."

We're relying on our scientific experts,

our anthropologists and our pathologists,

to assist us because we still don't know

whether we have just one body in the site or multiple bodies.

In West Yorkshire,

human remains found two days ago in a recycling plant

have left investigators wondering if they're dealing with just one body

or possibly more.

So, at this moment in time,

we're gonna stick with the process we've got

with polSA doing a fingertip search

and the CSI team supporting that search.

SIO Tony Nicholson arrives for an update

as Dr Roberts receives another discovery.

So, this is the one...

This is the one that they've just brought out. Yeah.

You've got skull here.

You've got some of his head here. You what, sorry?

You've got some of his head.

Wow. Head?

That's the base of his skull.

Wow.

It's the base of his skull. Yeah.

That's the back of his neck. Back of his neck?

Yeah. And his hair. Yeah.

That's the back. And that's the base of his skull, so...

That's just the skin.

Yeah. It's quite a thick part of his skull.

'We discovered some fragments of skull

'which were attached to some soft tissue.'

So, just to show you on the diagram,

this is looking at the base of the skull

underneath here.

We've got one small fragment at the back and one at the side there.

And on this model, you can see it's just here

around the edge of the for a men magnum,

which is the hole through which the spinal column exits the brain.

They were embedded in decomposed, disrupted soft tissue,

which included the neck,

and it also included the bottom part of the scalp.

So we actually had some of the hair and the hairline at the back,

so we could see the colour of the hair and the length of the hair.

There were also some vertebrae

embedded in that soft tissue as well.

'It's very difficult to know at this stage

'in what direction the investigation is going to go.'

We're concentrating our efforts

on continuing the forensic search of the premises, of the property.

This latest discovery gives the police

another valuable clue to help with identification.

I'll turn it over in a minute, and I'll just... It's attached.

You've got a piece of arm bone here as well.

Arm? Yeah.

How can you tell by just a little bit? Jesus.

So it's all joined up.

Brilliant. Yeah.

Let's go and tell them. Yeah, aye, absolutely.

With each body part discovered, Dr Roberts is increasingly sure

that they are dealing with a single body.

Our working hypothesis was that all these body parts

were from the same individual, and that was based on the fact

that we didn't have any repeated bones or repeated joints.

They were all the same in terms of size and morphology,

in terms of size and shape.

So they all seem to look as though

they belonged to the same individual.

We also had a small number

which could actually be fitted back together again.

You couldn't be 100% certain unless you DNA tested every fragment,

but on the balance of probabilities, we can be reasonably certain

that these body parts all came from the same person.

It's very difficult to actually provide any sort of firm hypothesis

as to what might have happened to this poor individual at this stage.

The question for detectives is who might this person be?

Across Europe, Interpol is contacting police forces

to try and obtain a DNA match with the body part found in Yorkshire.

Over 30 years,

journalistjohan Romin has reported on many missing persons cases.

Now a disappearance from 20 years ago

has caught his attention,

and he believes it could be linked to the grisly discoveries in Leeds.

Mikael lvarsson was an ordinary Swedish guy, 29 years old.

He lived here in Varberg in Western Sweden.

He was an ordinary guy. He had just bought a house.

He worked as a machinist on a ferry, and he came from a loving family

with a father and mother, two brothers and a sister.

Ancl also, he had a four-year-old daughter with an ex-partner

and also an unborn child with a new girlfriend.

Mikael lvarsson was a guy who really loved motorcycles and travelling.

He had been travelling all around the world.

At one point, he went with a motorcycle

from Cape Town in South Africa all the way up here to Sweden.

That's a long trip to do,

and it says a lot about his kind of character, I think.

Ancl in 2004, he called his ex-girlfriend and told her,

"You must go and pick up our daughter immediately."

Ancl the ex-girlfriend thought it was quite strange.

Ancl then he vanished without a trace.

For the past two decades, Mikael's body has not been found.

No-one knows if he travelled overseas.

Knowing the body at the recycling plant could have come from anywhere,

police are still without a solid lead.

If we're gonna find big bits,

it's gonna be from that lot over there. Right.

The search shifts to any other items that might help with identification.

We were looking for anything

that might be on the person who's ended up here.

So that is clothing, jewellery, electricals and keys.

And then once we've collected all this material,

we then make the decision,

what's gonna take us further in the investigation?

The team have also been collecting

several mobile phones from the scene

that could hold vital information.

We're assessing the phones that we found so far

because we might have to link the phone DNA

to the DNA that we've picked up from the parts that we've found.

So if we can do that, then it gives us a chance

on the intelligence front to see what we can get from the phone

and potentially get further lines of inquiry

from the items that were found within the rubble.

Because we seize and secure those items,

it allows us to periodically, as the investigation progresses,

to review those items

to see if we've got anything that's relevant.

In Sweden,

the investigation into the disappearance of Mikael lvarsson

20 years ago continues.

Right before Mikael lvarsson disappeared,

he called his ex-partner and told her,

"You must go and pick up our daughter."

He had a four-year-old daughter.

Ancl when the mother came to pick her daughter up,

the child was doing something with a piece of jewellery,

and she asked, "What is that?"

"I got this from my daddy," the daughter said.

Ancl it was a piece of jewellery shaped as an anchor.

It's quite strange because he was working on a ship as a machinist.

I mean, it's a connection to the anchor,

but also, this is the symbol of hope.

The strange thing was that he also gave a kind of piece of jewellery

to his unborn child.

So, did Mikael lvarsson intend to disappear?

Another journalist, Par Lindqvist,

asked these questions directly to Mikael |varsson's family.

They were really worried about what happened to Mikael.

The family talk about if it was any crime or like that.

But they thought that Mikael had no enemies.

After the disappearance, it was discovered

that Mikael |varsson's car had been parked here in centralvarberg.

When I talked to the sister, she said

the sister, Linda, and Mikael was really close,

and they talk about anything.

Ancl she said that no way,

he never going to leave his daughter or children.

The ex-partner of Mikael lvarsson became very worried.

So she called the mother of Mikael lvarsson.

Ancl later on, they went to the house

to look for him and to go through his things.

Ancl they saw that all his clothes were still in the house,

and his passport was also there.

So if he had left voluntarily and left Sweden,

why would he leave his passport in the house?

It's quite strange.

There was one lead that Swedish police tracked.

A couple of clays later, they found a signal

from his mobile phone in the south of Norway.

The family thought...

At that time, he worked as an engineer in a big ferry.

Maybe he took the ferry to Norway, but they didn't know.

Ancl that's the last sign from... from Mikael.

In Yorkshire, the search of the site continues.

See, that's the knee there. That's the shin bone.

And then the top bit's the... MAN: Thigh bone.

You've got quite a good length of it.

And with this you've got, erm...

That's the back and the base of his skull.

And that's the top vertebra there, where the skull meets the head.

And then there, you've got at least three or four bones from his neck,

and then you've got some of his arm bone there.

Saying "he"? I am saying "he".

There's a lot of body hair if it's a female,

but you never know.

There's nothing definitively male yet.

But they'll get that with the DNA.

Even if they don't get an identity, they'll still find out

whether he's male or female from the DNA.

DNA expertjames Chapman is trying to determine the sex of the body.

So, this very first area here,

it's got two peaks with an X and a Y denoted against them.

That's basically telling me that's a male DNA profile

because it's got an X chromosome and a Y chromosome.

Knowing definitively that this person is male

is a massive step forward.

But there's also a major step back.

Domestically, we've searched it on the national DNA database.

Got no matches.

This means the unidentified male has no criminal record in the UK

and does not appear on the missing persons database.

All hopes lie in a lead from the international search.

Interpol, from their HQ in Lyon,

liaises with police forces in nearly 200 countries.

In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds,

and it's estimated that a quarter of missing person cases

will have a transnational dimension,

and this will require the exchange of police data

across countries' boundaries.

So, we're almost reaching 10,000 yellow notices,

which are on the public Interpol website.

We see a large increase in the requests of countries

to submit this data to other countries through Interpol.

In our experience,

we don't actually see a type of person that goes missing.

It could be male, female, different ages, young children,

and it affects all parts of the world.

So there are many reasons why a person may go missing.

It may be that a young person has decided to run away from home.

It may be that there are victims of crime

that are then gonna be unidentified.

Two decades ago, a family reported their 29-year-old son missing.

The discoveries in Yorkshire may be their last hope.

Ancl of course, the family wants to know what happened to their son,

to their brother, to their father.

In 2004, when Mikael lvarsson disappeared from Varberg,

there wasn't too much in the media about it.

Ancl then many people ask, why?

Why wasn't this covered more in the national media?

I think it was because the local police here,

they... they didn't investigate this a whole lot.

Mikael's family didn't think that the police did enough

to investigate the case.

The police said that if you are a grown-up,

you can disappear if you want

and they don't start an investigation about that case.

As it stands at the moment, we've got a timescale

where, potentially, our body has been deposited.

We've got the foot, and then we've got

another few pieces of body parts that we've recovered.

We know that the foot belongs to a male.

We've got DNA extracted from that.

But there's nothing, nothing that's gonna assist us,

on the national databases, either the national DNA database

or indeed the Misper database, as it stands at the moment.

We've also got a whole host and multitude

of different potential pick-up sites,

and that includes both industrial and indeed household.

They feed back into this main site. Yeah.

So at the moment, what else do we not know?

We can't even say if it's been a full body that's gone into the site.

Ancl then as a result of the machines, that's been taken apart,

or have we got a situation where, more sinister,

we've got body parts that have been chopped up,

at a location away from there and has been subsequently dumped there?

After human remains were discovered

at a recycling plant in West Yorkshire,

police and forensics have been tirelessly searching

for all the body parts.

With time ticking away,

the search team are feeling the pressure to deliver results.

So, the team have just found this large piece of soft tissue,

which is human skin, some decomposed muscle tissue.

All options are open, really. You could be talking about homicide.

You could be talking about an accident.

You could be talking about something,

somebody was falling asleep and just died of natural causes

in a wheelie bin, for all we know at the moment.

GUY". And we've had that before, Tony, haven't we?

It looks as though it's probably from the torso,

from the back and also from the chest area

and possibly a belly button as well, and some body hairs.

There are a couple of pieces of ends of rib

attached as well to the inside of the chest wall.

Homeless people, drunk, that have climbed into wheelie bins

to get out of the weather conditions, etc.

Ancl tragic accidents have happened.

But on the other side of it,

we can't rule out something more sinister that has taken place,

and I think that's where we've got to go with it, really, haven't we?

At the site, police search adviser Mick is exploring a new lead.

Could the body have been dismembered in the truck

that brought it to the site?

So, the process that they do is the rear of the wagon lifts up,

which is the bit that is the mechanical bit.

Once he's opened that up, then they're able to lift the wagon up

and push all the rubbish out, which you'll see now.

So this bit...

...picks all the rubbish up, tips it in,

and then there's a compressor

that pushes it down inside against that blade.

Ancl that blade then goes towards the front of the cab,

which is basically squashing it all together.

Once it arrives in the bin wagon,

it'd be very difficult unless somebody physically sees it.

That will not be discovered.

As day three of the search comes to an end,

less than a third of the body has been recovered.

I'm still hopeful in what we've got left to search,

but we will continue to find items.

Because of the process of the plant

and the machinery that they're using to recycle,

there could be quite a bit that's already left the site

prior to us getting here.

But I'm still confident,

and I will always remain confident until I finish the search.

Unexpectedly, the police then uncover a new lead.

A missing local man suddenly becomes the focus.

In the lab, forensics examine his belongings,

including a toothbrush, for DNA.

So, our research has now identified a potential missing person

who we believe could be the unidentified human remains.

So what we'll now do is we will send that toothbrush in for DNA testing.

DNA can retain on items for a set amount of time,

but factors regarding environment, how it's stored, where it's been

will have an influence as to whether

we would actually get a DNA profile from it.

Could the DNA being taken from this toothbrush

hold the key to identification?

I can't rule him in or out in relation to it being our body parts.

I think it's one of those that we've just got to keep an open mind

and we've got to make sure that we cover all avenues.

With forensics still centre stage in the investigation,

now shoes and clothing need to be analysed.

So far, all the flesh and tissue we're finding

hasn't got any clothing attached, has it? No.

We haven't been able to find any remnants

of clothing on any of the body parts.

It's hard to say whether the body was clothed or not

because of the disruption that's been caused

during the process at the recycling plant.

So, what I've been doing is doing a little composite diagram.

So the bones that are coloured in...

Yeah. ..that's what we've recovered.

OK. This drawing around is just the soft tissue, disrupted muscles.

So we've got those actual bones, and then we've got skin as well.

Here, that looks like quite a large area. That's just skin.

We don't have those bones within there.

At the forensic lab, the results from the toothbrush are in.

We've got a nice clear and complete male DNA profile.

I've compared that with the DNA profile that we obtained

from the body parts found at the skip site.

Basically, I've determined that they are not the same male.

The news is passed to the investigators.

The DNA testing has come back now,

and that result has now confirmed that it isn't...

It isn't our missing person that that those body parts relate to.

It can be frustrating,

but it's one of a number of lines of inquiry

we're undertaking at the moment.

With the investigation stalling, forensics widen their approach

in searching for matches using alternative DNA testing techniques.

We'll look at other specialist techniques that can be clone.

So, one of those is Y-STR.

So, Y-STR is where a female is XX and a male is XY.

The Y is what's passed through the male line of a family.

So father passes to son who passes to their sons, and so on.

Doing the Y-STR profile may help us to narrow down our searches.

We can also do what's called familial DNA searches

on the national database.

What that will give us, hopefully,

tell us whether there's any parents or siblings

of our unidentified male.

Following that, I will then engage further

with our forensic service providers of what other options are available,

such as genealogy, where we start to look at relatives of the person.

When a police force can't find a match on the various databases,

they reach out to Interpol and issue a black notice.

This international alert

seeks worldwide information on unidentified bodies.

Our command and coordination centre could be considered

as an international 999 call

for those countries needing international assistance

in their police investigations.

The UK police's black notice appeal may now be the final chance.

Hi, Campbell. Hey.

So, we have this pending case.

The DNA seems to indicate that it could be the same person.

So the reason why a country can send DNA profile

attached to a black notice is to alert other countries

that they have a body that they can't identify,

and they may believe that the answer

is outside of their national borders.

So they want to reach out to many countries

and see if one of the country has some police information

that could lead to the identification of the body.

And therefore, when we receive it,

the DNA profile is entered in our system,

it searches against any missing person profile.

And then if we find a potential connection,

we can alert both countries and let them know

that there is a lead that can be followed

to hopefully get to the identification of the person.

So, in the case of an unidentified body,

we have the possibility to use different primary identifiers,

such as DNA, fingerprint or face, for example, dental as well.

And so it depends on the state of degradation of the body.

Sometimes, we only find bones, for example,

and the only solution is DNA.

Without key information like body age,

the team are struggling to move the investigation forward.

A lot is resting on the DNA.

At the site, the team is frustrated.

None of the larger body parts have provided any answers.

The team is now sifting through piles

of small, tiny fragments of waste.

It's a lot more difficult now because it is so small.

So it means that we're gonna have to go through it

fingertip stroke with the actual tools

just to make sure that we're not missing anything.

Because if the process is right,

the stuff that's coming out here is a lot finer.

So it'll have been crushed up more, so it will be finer pieces.

DR MICOL: It's a collarbone. MAN: Ah, right.

So that's... That is human.

We found a clavicle, which is a collarbone.

This was really useful for us

because in terms of skeletal development,

the clavicle is the last bone

to complete its development in the body.

So what we're looking at, particularly on the clavicle,

you can see on this model, is this end here.

That fuses quite late.

So it can be any time between about 22 years and right up to 29 or 30,

depending on the individual.

When I assessed the end of the clavicle

from looking at the CT scan, I could see that it was fully fused.

So that gave me confidence

that the individual from the recycling plant

was at least 22 years of age at death.

Yet, even after five days of intensive searching,

the lack of progress on identity

leaves detectives with huge challenges.

Having meticulously combed mountains of waste,

the search has reached a standstill.

We have recovered all the human remains from the site,

but that still only adds up to approximately one third.

Therefore, the other two thirds, we can only assume,

has gone through the recycling plant and through the different processes

and taken from that site

prior to the police being alerted from staff who work there.

We were able to identify some marks

on some of the bone, which look like claw marks

from the machine that had caused the damage,

indicating that the bones

had actually been through the heavy machinery at the plant.

However, we don't know how big

that body part was originally when it went in.

It looks as though the body may have been whole

when it went through the machine,

but we couldn't say that conclusively.

As the search on the site comes to an end,

Detective Chief Inspector Damian Roebuck

is reviewing the progress so far in the case.

We've been at the waste recycling site now for the past five clays.

We've put one of our polSA search teams through there,

along with our forensics.

I'm confident that we've recovered

all the body parts that were present there,

and we're gonna be shutting the scene down.

The aim of finding the whole body is not just to identify them,

it's to identify a cause of death.

Not finding the whole remains

does limit our opportunities to identify them,

but we still have the opportunity of DNA to identify who it is.

With DNA profiles uploaded onto global databases,

investigators have the best possible chance of solving this case,

but they must wait.

Their attention now turns back to Sweden.

In 2021, Mikael lvarsson had been gone missing for 17 years,

and the family felt that maybe some other person in Sweden,

or in Varberg, here, had some more information,

so they turned to the local newspaper.

The family made an appeal for more information,

and Mikael's mother had her DNA taken by police

and uploaded to an international database.

And the hope was that if they would find a body somewhere in the world

and that DNA would match with the mother's DNA,

that would bring maybe a conclusion to this case.

It's been four months since the human foot was discovered

in a recycling plant in Yorkshire.

With missing persons databases across the globe alerted,

it's a waiting game.

In the last 24 hours, we've had a development

where we've been notified that Swedish authorities

received some notification

that there had been unidentified body parts

in the West Yorkshire area,

and those body parts are a potential match for a familial sample

that was provided by the mother of a missing person.

So, what we'll now look at is our next steps for this case

as to what we're going to do and what us next options will be

to try and identify whether, in fact, it is the same male.

This could be quite a significant development.

This might be the mother of our unidentified male.

Four months after a human foot was found

in a Yorkshire recycling plant,

the identity remains unknown.

Now, Swedish authorities have informed West Yorkshire Police

that the remains might be linked to Mikael lvarsson,

missing in Sweden for 20 years.

The next step is to obtain DNA samples

from |varsson's family to complete his profile.

In August 2021,

the Swedish authorities obtained a DNA profile from his mother,

and they provided that DNA profile to Interpol.

The DNA profile from our unidentified male

has also been provided to Interpol.

From there, Interpol have then advised the Swedish authorities

that the DNA profile they have obtained

and the DNA profile we have obtained may well be consistent

with being the mother of the male that we've located.

News has also reached detectives.

This is a massive breakthrough for the case going forward.

I think when you look at the circumstances

of we've got a missing person abroad in Sweden and it matches our DNA,

there's further work to do to confirm this,

but at this stage, yeah, it's looking promising

that we might be able to actually identify our body parts.

As the investigation progresses,

it's up to the detectives to follow the leads,

wherever they might take them.

We've got numerous things recovered by polSA,

and that's why we were so convinced we were on the right horse.

We can't conclusively say at the moment

whether our body parts are this missing person,

but it was only right that the Swedish authorities

approached the family to explain there is a potential link,

and that's all it is at this stage.

'But obviously, we've got to inform them

'because we are doing some further inquiries,

'or the Swedish police will be doing further inquiries on our behalf.'

So we had to give them the detail of what we'd found.

So potentially, their loved one has been found over here

and, unfortunately, is deceased.

UK and Swedish police are exchanging information through Interpol

to further the investigation.

DR SUSAN: So, what have we got here?

So, a very promising biological association.

So it's a pedigree with the mother of the missing person.

Ancl we found a potential match with a body.

When we do kinship matching with the DNA from relatives,

because the DNA of the missing person is not available,

it's a bit more complicated

because we're not looking at an identical profile,

but parts of the DNA which are shared

between biological relatives,

and therefore we have many advantageous matches

that can be, you know, found.

Was there any indication in the information that came in

that there could be additional biological relatives?

The family of Mikael lvarsson

is informed of the grim discoveries in Leeds.

2023, the police contact the family again

and told they had a possible DNA match

from a guy in England with Lena, Mikael's mother.

Mikael's sister, Linda,

thought, when they heard they got a match, that it was Mikael

because the police told it was a possible match.

They start to talk to friends.

"Oh, now we found Mikael, and he was in Leeds in England."

I think the family felt like, "Oh, now we got the answer.

"Now we know it was Mikael,

"and now we maybe we can go on with life and get some closure."

But there's one final hurdle

that could stand in the way of a definitive 100% identification.

Hello, it's the Interpol DNA unit.

I'm calling about a missing person case ongoing.

'So if we take, for example, two people in the same room,

'they can have some positions of the DNA which are completely identical.'

But then you look at another region of the DNA, and it's different.

So it means that these two people

can have a part of the DNA identical,

even if they're not related.

But on the last part that you will analyse,

you will see that they are not related

and it's not the right person you're looking for.

So to minimise the chance of a wrong identification,

you are supposed to look at many positions in the DNA.

With DNA results imminent,

SIO Damian Roebuck

pulls both detectives and forensic teams together

for a briefing.

All right, good afternoon, ladies and gents.

We're here to brief on Operation Pavon,

the unexplained death of an unidentified male

which occurred on the 31st of October, 2022.

I just wanna conduct with us all

to get us head round the new information that was received.

So, for those who don't know,

on Monday evening, we received an Interpol notice

with regards to a DNA match

from the DNA we recovered from some of our body parts.

That DNA match came from Sweden,

and it's identified a potential match.

What we can say is that he is a white male.

He would have been 29 years old at the time of his disappearance,

which would make him 48, 49 now.

The Swedish authorities will have obtained the DNA from the mum

as a reference sample with him going missing.

They have got that information and then provided that

to the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Sweden.

They've clone the DNA work,

so similar to what I'm doing for us now.

I'm getting our forensic department.

Our Eurofins, if you like, to do that work for us as well now.

MAN: So, it's not as if we've got his profile, then? No.

No, they haven't got his.

In some cases, we obtain the profile, don't we,

through this technique?

It's not as if it's matched to him. The match actually...

ls to Mum. It's to Mum. Yeah, yeah.

DNA expert James Chapman adds to the police's theory

that the remains could be those of Mikael lvarsson.

We've compared her DNA profile

to the DNA profile that we've obtained from our dead person,

and we can see that they share DNA components

at all of the areas that we can compare.

So we cannot exclude her

as being the mother of our deceased individual.

But there are some additional areas of DNA that we can test,

and that's what we're currently doing at the moment.

Should we actually identify that this is our man,

then I think we're gonna have to look

at some sort of press release with photographs

as best we can get them.

OK, they're gonna be from 2004,

but putting them out into the press to say,

"Right, who knows this man and what do they know him as?"

Ancl that's where we'll build the intelligence picture

to find out where he was living within the UK, all being well.

But the next steps are actually confirming it's him, of course.

The investigation reaches a critical moment.

Could the body discovered at the recycling plant

be that of Mikael lvarsson?

And could he have been murdered?

A widespread forensic search of a recycling plant

has uncovered the partial remains of a body.

DNA testing has confirmed that the body is male

and likely to be over the age of 22.

DNA taken from a foot has revealed a potential match

with the mother of a missing man in Sweden -

Mikael lvarsson.

He was last seen 20 years ago.

If this is a potential match, that's our starter for ten.

We'll have a name, we'll have a person

who we know has been living in England at some point.

Under what name, we're not sure.

We've run the name of the missing person in Sweden

through our computer systems.

He doesn't feature.

But that's not to mean he wasn't living here under an assumed name.

Investigators continue to widen their search

for any useful new leads in the case.

We're also looking at a new process

called forensic investigative genetic genealogy.

But what the FIGG actually looks at

is the direct-to-consumer DNA databases,

Ancestry.com, 23andMe.

They're worldwide.

People like me and you, everyday members of the public,

take a swab, and they send their swabs off to be loaded in.

That then looks worldwide

to see which ancestry line do they come from.

Ancl it's just a wider database, an international database,

that we can get more information from.

The forensics team continue their other inquiries,

but the final DNA results from Sweden

could take weeks or even months.

This is the first time I've come across it.

Of course, it is... You know, we can't conclusively say at the moment

whether our body parts are this missing person.

The Swedish police will be doing further enquiries on our behalf.

So potentially, their loved one has been found over here

and unfortunately is deceased.

But we can't progress that further without actually informing them

and actually taking the samples from the family

to rule him in or out, either way.

West Yorkshire Police and forensic teams

have spent a total of 12 months

trying to identify the human remains found at the recycling centre.

And a family in Sweden are waiting to see

if their loved one has been found.

It's been quite a difficult case, really,

because without an identification

and given the circumstances surrounding the discovery

of this unidentified male, it's been very difficult

for the investigation to even take off, really.

The results have arrived.

The immediate family of Mikael lvarsson,

even the boy that was unborn in 2004, has been tested.

And they have now found out that the human remains found in Leeds

has nothing to do with Mikael lvarsson.

So the family here in Sweden, they will still have the questions.

What happened to their loved one?

The final news is a blow to both the police team and to Mikael's family.

The family was told by the police and had a meeting with the police

and from one person from the National Board of Forensic,

and there, they told it wasn't Mikael.

Ancl then the family, they broke down.

You can imagine if you thought it was Mikael,

and then you get a new message that, no, it's not Mikael.

While the DNA initially had a high probability match

with Mikael's mother,

the differences in the DNA on the male side

ruled out the possibility of the remains being Mikael.

Mikael's sister, Linda, told me that if you don't have a body,

it's very hard to say a person is dead.

Ancl Mikael's mother, Lena, told me

that they think about Mikael all the time

and hope that one clay, he will return to his family.

It must be an awful feeling, not knowing what happened to him.

The family must keep on living with this uncertainty,

what happened to Mikael lvarsson?

With all the desperation, with all the despair.

At the moment, it is professionally frustrating

that we can't actually get the answers that we strive to get.

So I will now look into wider options that are available.

So going out into ancestry and genealogy DNA opportunities

which are not routinely used

or been tried and tested so much in the UK,

but we never stop.

The case will remain open. It doesn't stop now.

We will continue to strive for answers,

and for any future technology that becomes available to us,

we will look to explore it for this case.

We've had bodies recovered

which we've very quickly identified have been the result of a homicide.

This is the first one that I've had

where we've had it in a recycling plant,

an unusual area where you wouldn't necessarily find a body,

and had to start from scratch.

A genuine mystery. It's what we join policing for.

It may end up once we find out who this person is,

it is a genuine whodunnit.

Who's killed him?

However, it's actually a who is it to start with, and who is he?