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Jan. 17, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:04
Edition 606 - Steven Keogh - Murder Detective
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
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Fascinating conversation here.
It is not for the squeamish.
So if you're easily upset, please don't listen to this one because it's talking about murder with a man who was a key part of the murder investigation process in London.
Detective Inspector Steve Keogh, just retired from the Metropolitan Police, has written an amazing book.
It's called Murder Investigation Team.
And I understand from him that Scotland Yard in London solve 90% of murders, which I think should make us feel pretty reassured versus other countries.
What a book this is.
I read this book.
It's fantastically written.
Like I say, it's called Murder Investigation Team.
I'm not going to say any more about any of it right now because this is quite an absorbing conversation that appeared first on my radio show and a longer version now appearing here on the podcast.
So let's get to my conversation with Steve Keogh about murder and the book Murder Investigation Team.
It's a book about murder.
Subject we've talked about before here.
We've talked about serial killers and what motivates them.
We've talked with a former New York Times, New York Post, can't remember which, investigative journalist on murder, on the homicide squad of that newspaper.
I don't know whether you remember that one, but that was a hell of a conversation about some really chilling and brutal murders.
So we've talked about this topic before, but never with a man who was a police officer for the Metropolitan Police.
And he's got out, his name is Stephen Keogh Steve Keogh.
The book is called Murder Investigation Team.
It hasn't been out for very long.
He tells me that he's going to be on the telly with it on Tuesday.
So it's beginning to make some waves here.
And I read this book starting last night, beginning this morning as I record this.
I'm recording these words on Friday.
And I have to say, this one is a no-put-downer.
This is a book that everybody has to read because we all read details in the papers about murders and we all wonder what motivates people to do it and then how the police officers tasked with bringing those people to justice do their job.
Now, I've got to tell you, my father was a police officer for 30 years with Merseyside Police.
And he covered all sorts of things, terrible accidents where he had to be there and witness carnage in some cases and brutal murders quite often, where he would come home and he'd have his dinner and he'd be my dad.
Nevertheless, that was his job.
And we never really talked about the details, you know, even in later years after he'd retired of any of these things.
But what I knew about my dad was that he thought like a police officer.
You know, he was as good a person as you could ever find.
I never saw my dad without a smile.
I never saw him look depressed or miserable in all of my life.
And I lost my dad a few years ago.
But I had no real idea of what he did, but I knew he thought like a police officer.
You know, there was one occasion when somebody, we were out together, and tried randomly in Liverpool to take a swing at me.
My father reached his massive long arm over to this guy and said, you've been drinking.
And the guy just backed away because my dad had sussed it completely.
That's the difference between a police officer and you and me.
Okay?
My father's always going to be and was always very sad that I never joined the police and I did this.
And certainly I'd have had a lot more money if I had joined the police.
Anyway, Stephen Keogh.
Steve Keogh is online to us now from the southeast of London.
We're going to talk about his book, Murder Investigation Team.
Steve, I'm sorry I talked so much about this.
You know, when those memories come back, they don't stop.
No, it's fine, Howard.
It's quite an intro as well.
I guess you could say that for it.
But look, I've got a lot of sympathy for the police and the job that they have to do, especially today.
The job is not what it was when my dad did it.
It's a tough job these days, isn't it?
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
Funnily enough, two of my children joined.
So where you didn't follow your dad, two of mine have followed me.
So I get to see from their perspective what it's like.
And I joined in 1991 and it's changed immeasurably.
I mean, it's virtually a different job now.
You still in?
No, I left in 1st November.
I left.
Right.
So just over two months ago.
Yeah.
No, my dad always wanted me to join the Met.
He said, go to London, join the Met.
And he said, it'll be the best life that you could have.
And what did I do?
I did radio and I came to London anyway.
And it's been a pretty good life, but I always wonder what it might have been like.
But the one thing that police work teaches you, and that's going to be an awful lot about what we're going to discuss here, is the art of being methodical.
It makes you methodical, doesn't it?
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, that's what Solving Murders is about.
It's not what you see on TV.
And the actual fact is, if they made that true to life, how investigating murders really are, no one would want to watch it.
I mean, it's a bit of a cliche.
It's about crossing T's, dotting I's.
It's about getting your paperwork right.
It's about making sure you cover all your bases.
And essentially, The reason being is because murders are defended by the top barristers in the country.
And if you don't do that, they will find out and all your hard work will come to nothing when you get to court.
So, yeah, it's all about being methodical.
It's the number one thing, I think, for being a murder detective.
I was going to ask you this later.
But, you know, you obviously have worked on a lot of murders.
You'll tell me how many.
But when you get to court and a smart brief, as they say on tele, defeats your case by ducking and diving, how does that make you feel?
It stings.
I won't lie.
I won't lie.
Thankfully, it's rare.
I don't know the exact figure, but it's something like we solve about 90% of murders.
It fluctuates year to year.
And of those, about 90% are convicted at court.
So most of the time you go to court, you come away and you've got a conviction.
It probably means the times you do come away without one, it stings that a little bit more.
But I'm quite philosophical about it.
And generally, if I know that I've done my job properly, I don't come away thinking, as long as I can look myself in the eye, well, I can't look myself in the eye, but you know what I mean.
If I could look at myself and think, well, you've done a good job and they're not guilty, I can live with it.
If I was to walk away from a court thinking, I should have done this or I should have done that, that would be worse.
And thankfully, I've not had that because we do, we put everything into it and you can't win them all and you don't take it personally, really.
You can't.
I know that from my dad's example.
When you've had a case, and I'm sure you must have, where somebody's been acquitted and then they've gone on to commit a further crime, maybe even another murder, how does that make you feel?
Yeah, those ones would tend to be around gangs because they're the ones that are likely to go back out and just pick up where they left off.
And again, if it was a case of I've not done my job properly and someone's walked out, that would be really, really hard.
But we've got a system in the UK that I trust.
And if the evidence isn't quite up to scratch and the jury aren't convinced, then quite rightly they shouldn't find people guilty.
So, yeah, again, I don't take it personally.
You have to be philosophical about this.
Do you know what really shines through what you're telling me here?
Your sense of duty and commitment to the job, even though you've left it now, you know, I'm here to tell you that once a police officer, always a police officer, but you're still absolutely committed to it all.
Yeah, it's been my life, my whole adult life.
I've been a police officer.
I joined two weeks after my 20th birthday.
I was a child, essentially.
I know you don't think that at the time, but looking back, I was a child joining the police.
And it's all I've known.
And I've so the one, I think one of the reasons my children have joined, two of them have joined, is because they've only seen me talking in good terms of it.
I've not been one of these, police officers can be the most cynical people in the world.
And I'm not.
And to the day I left my job, I loved it.
And I felt like I was doing good things.
And all right, it's hard sometimes.
And sometimes the politics gets involved in the outside.
But essentially, the job hasn't changed in 30 years.
For me, when I joined, I quickly learned what was my motivation.
And that was catching bad people and trying to put them in prison.
I mean, as basic as that sounds, that's what I enjoyed doing, which is why I gravitated towards murder, because for me, there was no worst crime that someone commit by taking someone else's life.
So that's how I ended up there.
I did terrorism as well.
And so that hasn't changed.
People still commit murder.
You've got to catch them.
People are still terrorists.
You've got to catch them.
So the job hasn't changed.
It's the politics and that kind of stuff around it.
And that means, I presume, that you've always got to make a good case, but you have to be even more certain.
And you already had to be 110% certain.
You have to be even more certain when you go to court that you've got a case.
Yeah.
And also as well, there are checks before you get there.
So you have to get through the CPS first.
And if they don't believe the case has got a chance of a conviction, then it won't even reach a court.
So by the time we do get to court, you're not there on a sort of a women of prayer.
You know, you've got a good case.
Right.
Okay.
Let's get into it.
First question, why did you write this book?
There's a few things that I've done since I've left the police that I kind of stumbled into.
So when I come towards the end of my career, I was like, well, what am I going to do?
And what I didn't want to do, I didn't want to just follow the same path that other people do.
And I'm not criticizing them.
Everybody's got their own ideas about what they want to do post-job.
But I didn't want to go into security investigations or anything like that.
But I wanted to use my skills.
And so I decided that I'm going to set up a company.
I've done that where I go into businesses and I teach people the skills that we use to solve murders and how that can relate to businesses like decision making, teamwork, problem solving, etc.
So I decided to write a book that supported that.
But as I started writing it, I began to realize that what I'm writing wasn't for business.
It was for people that had an interest in how murders are investigated.
So that's how it kind of happened.
So it morphed into something it wasn't supposed to be.
Right.
I read the book, like I said, last night and into this morning as I record this, and we're recording this on Friday.
Page 107 of the book, you talk about the psychology of the killer.
Now, that is something that all of us will have given a lot of thought to.
You know, when I read details of brutal murders in the papers or in the days when I had to read them when I read the news, you don't think about it at the time, but afterwards you think to yourself, how is that possible?
How do you think it's possible?
What is the psychology, if you can boil it down into a sentence or two?
I don't know if you can.
The psychology of somebody who could do this?
So for me, I look at it quite simply.
I know people look at murder with a little bit of mystique and they try to separate it from other people's actions, but I look at it like an action.
So if you take away The legal ramifications and the moral ramifications of why someone commits a murder.
We're motivated to act as human beings by one of only three things.
That's the emotions we feel that drive us on, the emotions we want to feel that we do and act in order to feel that emotion or in order to gain something.
So the way I categorize why people kill is those three things.
So I call them push of emotion.
So when you're talking things like anger, jealousy, fear, any of those intense emotions that cause you to act, that's what's pushing you towards hurting someone, eventually killing them.
It's push of emotion.
Then you've got pull of emotion.
And that's where people do something in order to feel something.
So in terms of murder, that would be a sense of power, sense of control, or you're talking about serial killers earlier, if they're doing it for enjoyment or some sort of gratification.
So that's the pull of emotion.
In order to feel this, I have to hurt you.
That's why I'm doing it.
And then finally, gain.
And that's where you get robbery.
And in order for me to achieve something, in order to get something, I have to hurt you to do it.
So robbery is the obvious one.
But then if you're talking about terrorism, where people kill in order to further their goal, that's the gain they're looking.
If you're a gang and you're looking to enhance your gang's reputation, it's gain.
And if you were to take away murder from that and replace that with any other act, so for instance, exercising, it's the same three things that motivate us, what we feel, what we want to feel, and the benefit we're going to get from it.
And so I look at it quite simply, and I take away the emotion of murder and I boil it down to how we act as humans.
And that's how I've written about it in a book.
Okay.
I mean, that's an awful lot to think about.
You talked about terrorism.
And before we get into the meat of this discussion, there have been a lot of very famous terrorist cases here.
The case of the killing, for example, of poor Lee Rigby on the streets of London and others that we know about by people who are motivated by an ideology.
I'm presuming in your career, you must have dealt with some of those.
And what is that like?
I won't sugarcoat it.
It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.
I was on the anti-terrorist branch in, so I started in 2002, just after 9-11, and I left at the end of 2005.
So I was there for the London bombings, 7-7 bombings.
And we were on call.
So it was our thing that we respond to any kind of terror incident, which there weren't that many of.
I mean, you're on call and you know it could happen, but you don't expect it to happen.
And this was the first time in the UK that suicide bombers had ever taken place.
So we got the call.
My colleague and I were the first ones to turn up Edgware Road from the anti-tourist branch.
And we didn't leave for two weeks.
We stayed there for two weeks.
And it was our job to deal with, I call it a crime scene.
So that's essentially what it is.
That's how we treat it.
It's a crime scene.
And that involved, first off, bringing all the victims out.
So we had to take them out from the scene.
Then we had to do fingertip search from essentially about 100 yards of tunnel.
And we had to cover every inch and take everything that was there out.
So that included, obviously, bits of the train, but included body parts as well.
And that was hard.
I'm not going to lie.
And it was one of those things I was proud to do.
And I was pleased I was able to do my part for it.
But yeah, it wasn't easy.
It's hard.
My father had to do those things.
Not in terrorist cases.
We didn't have the same kind of terrorism when my father was a police officer.
We had, you know, the terrorism connected with the IRA in the UK.
But what we've seen more recently is something different.
So I suppose the question there, and I can't imagine what it's like to do that for a job.
I never understood how my dad was able to do it.
But when you're dealing with somebody, a suspect, who you know is not going to break down, is unlikely to break down and say, gee, I did it, Gov, and I'm really sorry, you know, because they're motivated by ideology.
I can't imagine what it's like to be involved in that kind of investigation where you know the person has an ideology behind them.
They're not going to break down.
They're not going to admit it.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not, but you kind of get used to it anyway in your career because in the UK, people don't rarely, they rarely talk to you in interviews anyway.
They say no comment.
The difference with terrorists is they don't talk to you at all.
So when you're interviewing even a murderer and you ask them a question, they'll say no comment in response.
Whereas a terrorist will just either sit there, stare at you or sit there, stare at the floor.
In a weird way, it actually makes it easier because you're in complete control of the interview.
But you can have an effect on them.
And we did.
And I write about one particular case in my book.
So one of the most important things you talk about when you're interviewing terrorists is their knowledge of whether there's any firearms, chemicals or explosives that could be a danger to police officers that are searching or the public.
So the very first question you ask them is this.
And periodically you revisit it.
And there was this one particular terrorist.
And if I put it into perspective, what they were doing, I'm not talking out of turn here because they've been to court, but their plans included blowing up the London Underground and flooding it, derailing a Heathrow Express so it crashed from one crashed into the path of another, stealing an oil tanker and driving it into a building, creating a dirty bomb.
And their calculations for the dirty bomb included deaths, cancer cases, defects in births.
Good lord.
Yeah, they had plans in America where they'd gone out.
And the particular person I was interviewing, so when we arrested them, their decision is way above our heads as to when we arrest.
And we arrested them very early.
Sometimes we'd follow them for a while, but we arrested them really, really early.
So we didn't have an awful lot of evidence.
And very soon, it was a document and you can read about it online.
It's called the Gas Limos Project.
And it's one of the most chilling things I've ever read in my life.
It was the hostile reconnaissance they were doing on buildings in the States, their plans that I've just outlined.
It was chilling, chilling to read.
As they were giving us more and more information and evidence coming through, the person I was interviewing, there was a video of him in New York, and he was doing his hostile reconnaissance out there, and he was filming across Hudson Bay.
And we were interviewing in 2004.
And as he was filming, they sweeped their camera across and they got to the Twin Towers and they stopped.
And we're watching this.
No one had practiced this.
We didn't know what we were watching.
And the camera stopped and you hear and it move on.
And we rewind, rewind.
And we did it.
And these were proper al-Qaeda.
These weren't idiots.
These were proper al-Qaeda terrorists and clearly knew about 9-11 beforehand.
So these are the sorts of people we're talking about.
Boy.
And so throughout the interview, so I've got a particular interview style that I use.
It's like good cop, bad cop, but it's just me.
I'm the good cop and I'm the bad cop.
So I'm kind of split personality.
And when you're with someone for two weeks, you can build up a real rapport.
So they're not going to talk to you during the interview, but in between interviews, when you're getting them their lunch or getting them out of the cells, you spend quite a lot of time with them.
And there was this one particular one.
You wouldn't interview them every day.
Sometimes you'd leave them in their cells to think on things or you didn't have a lot to put to them or something.
And the solicitor told me that when he's not been interviewed by me, he misses me.
So obviously whatever I was doing was working.
Was it a strange dynamic?
Yeah, exactly.
But what that does is, so what I would do is I'd be the nice guy, nice guy, nice guy.
And then you would get, we call it the challenge phase.
Interviews are split into different phases.
So this is the challenge phase.
This is where you bring all your evidence together and you put it to them and you say, you're guilty, aren't you?
Look at this.
You've lied here, et cetera, et cetera.
You can't do that when someone's not talking.
But I got to this stage and it's when I change, my voice changes.
I move in, my face moves towards them.
So I'm cutting down on his personal space.
When he's not looking away from me, he's like, look at me.
No, look at me when I'm talking.
And so you've changed from their friend to someone who's suddenly really putting them under pressure.
And so I started bringing this in.
So when you started out on this, you were prepared to die.
You're not going to die now.
You're going to go to prison for a long time.
How does that feel?
How are your family going to feel?
These plans you had and all just really sort of blaying in to try and make him feel, really think about what he's doing, what his future is.
And then I revisit the, do you know of any chemicals, firearms, explosives, etc.
And as I did this, and I've really got him under pressure, his feet are up.
He's almost in a fetal position.
He's brought his knees up.
He's holding onto his knees, tears in his eyes.
And he turns around to his solicitor and then looks at me.
And then he looks at his solicitor again.
I said, do you want to talk to me?
He looks at his solicitor again.
And the solicitor says, can I talk to my client?
And so, and I looked at him and I said, when I come back, I want you to answer that question.
He kind of half nodded.
Carlik and I walked out and you never get terrorists to break.
And we were outside and we were virtually high-fiving each other.
We thought, we've broken him.
We've got him.
15 minutes went by, the longest 15 minutes of my life.
We go back in and I sit down and I repeat the same question to him.
Do you know of any chemical, biological, any chemical explosive or firearm?
And he looked at me, looked at his solicitor and he said, no.
And I said, and I started talking to him again.
And then he just looked down and wouldn't say anything.
So I put him under so much pressure, he wanted to answer that question.
And it was the closest I've ever come to breaking a terrorist and making them want to talk to you.
Because of the relationship we'd built up, and because of the pressure I put him under, he felt he needed to answer.
So it was, I mean, it's kind of...
No, no, I was just going to say that this is a drama.
This is a drama that's being played up between two people.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
Hey, Steve, we're going to have to take a pause here for commercials on the radio show.
So let's just hold that thought.
We'll talk more about the detail of the book.
Talking with Steve Keogh, 30 years in the Metropolitan Police, the book is Murder Investigation Team here on The Unexplained.
Steve Keogh in Southeast London is here.
30 years in the Metropolitan Police.
We're going to talk about murder.
And Steve, you know, I wouldn't have dreamt to have stopped you when you were talking about the terrorism inquisition because I don't think we get to hear that kind of thing very often at all.
And I'm sure that my listener will have been fascinated by this.
Let's unpick the detail of the book now because we're talking about murder as a crime.
And you start with what is murder?
And you say that murder is committed where a person of sound mind and discretion unlawfully kills any reasonable creature in being under the queen's peace with malice aforethought.
That's an ancient definition by the sounds of it.
It is.
It's not one that we use particularly.
I mean, when we're investigating murder, we focus in on three parts of that, that someone unlawfully kills somebody is essentially it.
And then the intention to either kill or cause serious harm.
So all the old law speak around it isn't something we use on a daily basis.
So it's those three things, but essentially, unlawfully kills with the intention to cause death or serious harm.
Okay.
And at what stage do you submit the definition of the case put before you?
In other words, the report that somebody's made to you or however you've got to hear about it.
At what stage do you submit what you're dealing with to that test?
So first off, we as police have to be satisfied that the person we, so if you've arrested someone and you interviewed them and you suspect that they're the ones that have committed the murder, first off, we know what the test is.
so we're experienced enough to know what when they go to court what are the jury going to be asked what questions are going to be asked so we know in our minds what we need to prove then we go to the cps and the cps will the crown prosecution service will apply the same test and then when we get to court so there's no point in us we have to know that because we we know by the time we get to court those are the questions the jury are going to be asked was it unlawful did was this person
responsible for the death and what was their intention and from the very outset when you look when you're looking to gather your evidence you you're not going to get that from one source you're not going to get that from the person who's done it they're not going to turn around and say oh actually yeah i killed them and i and i meant to kill them that rarely rarely happens so you get it from witnesses cctv forensics etc but but you know the case you're building so that you look for evidence to support those points okay sounds easy sure it
isn't let's unpick it bit by bit the elements of a murder investigation you start with the crime scene um and you say that our job is to bring order and make sure all potential evidence was secured and one thing that comes out from your description of the crime scene is that people can be crime scenes themselves yeah so if you think of it like this if if there's a a place or a person or a vehicle anywhere really where
there's potential for evidence they will be treated as a crime scene and it may sound a bit perverse when when i talk about this so a victim for instance a murder victim we classify them as a crime scene and may sound callous and i don't mean to make it sound like that but they're a potential source of evidence for the case a person who committed it is a crime scene so when you see police officers and forensic officers at scenes and they're wearing the paper suits and
the gloves and the masks they're doing all that in order to protect the um integrity of forensic evidence and that's no different to if you've if you've arrested a suspect who could have traces of the victim on him or her or blood etc firearms residue so you have to treat them is exactly the same as the crime scene because if you don't you can either contaminate the evidence or you can lose it um and it's be the same if they're in a car um if
they've thrown a weapon where that weapon has landed would be a crime scene so that in a murder investigation there could be the the immediate one obviously is you you think of is where the murder happened but it could be many many different places and you know one of the other things we have to think about is those occasions and you talk about this where the murderer decides to take the body to a place to dispose of it and hopefully for them on on their side you know get get out of it and
get away with it having disposed of the body i'm thinking particularly here about a case i was on the radio that christmas when the media was covering this the awful joanna yates case in bristol uh her life terribly cut short uh in an investigation that had all kinds of twists and turns that we've read about in the newspapers and eventually a man who lived in the place that she lived in called vincent tabak was convicted of this but you know once the investigation moved to the lane near
bristol where her body was was buried in the snow then
that becomes the crime scene or a crime scene too yeah we call that a deposition site it must be pretty awful i'm looking for a word i can't find one it must be difficult in the extreme to have to go to a scene like that i don't know how you do it yes but if if you were to do it you would be going in cold for for us as detectives we start out a lot so for i said earlier i started on um in the police in 91.
So when I first joined, you're a new police officer.
You get sent to certain crimes, certain calls.
And one of those would be in the police, they call them sudden deaths.
So somebody's died suddenly, not always suspicious, mostly not.
As the new police officer, you get sent there.
So the day I joined the police, I'd never seen a dead body.
But very quickly, you see one, two, three, and you're just kind of building up your resilience, I suppose.
Then you become a detective and you're getting asked to go to scenes where potentially it could be suspicious.
Someone could have been murdered.
So as a detective, you're getting called to them.
So as I say, you're building up your resilience.
So by the time you are dealing with murder scenes, it's something you don't think about that.
So it allows you to get on professionally and do your job without the emotional side.
You can detach yourself from that.
And you have to.
If you're going to do a good job and you're going to do, especially if you've got a murder victim, you have to do right by them.
You have to find justice for them.
And if you are too emotionally attached, you're not going to be able to do that.
So you do, it does make you kind of think sometimes, have I lost a little bit of my human side?
But you have to.
And if I say, if you don't, you're not doing the best by them.
And yet you do have to take your emotions out of it.
You know, on a less intense level than you've ever worked, I know.
But, you know, it was traumatic for me.
I found my neighbor a few years ago, five or six years ago, dead in his flat.
I, you know, we all knew that there was something wrong when I went in.
Somebody had to go in.
He was dead on his bed.
It was a huge shock to me.
And of course, the police have to be called because we don't know what the circumstances are.
It was natural causes.
Of course, he'd been ill for some years.
But it was nevertheless a huge shock for me and his ex-wife who turned up.
the police officers who came the two of them were i was struck by the fact that and this wasn't a murder case but they were absolutely methodical in making sure they got the answers to the key questions while this was you know still something that was absolutely current and i was very impressed that you know they were so focused on the job.
I was focused on what a shock this was, but they were focused on the job and getting the information.
And I guess in your line of work, you've got to do that.
Yeah, I mean, it's your job.
You're a professional.
You're not paid to be emotional.
You're paid to do the job in a murder.
The job is to find the killer and bring them to justice.
And if your emotions are tied up in that, then you're not going to give it your best.
Talk to me about forensics.
Yeah, so I mean, forensics isn't our expertise as detectives.
We get experts in for that.
So the people who you see in the suits, most of them aren't going to be police officers.
They're going to be forensic scientists of some shape or form.
but we have to have a good working knowledge of it.
So it's probably one of, And the forensics is the one where if you don't get it right at the beginning, you will lose it.
So we call it the golden hour as a detective.
It's that start of a murder investigation where the evidence is there and it's where it's most abundantly available.
And that includes forensics.
And the difference between forensics and CCTV is if you don't get the CCTV right, if you don't pick it up in the first hour, well, you can go back.
They're generally there for a month.
But forensics, you get one shot at it.
So although we're not experts as in the interpretation of it, what we are, I consider ourselves experts in is being able to secure it, being able to identify it and being able to make sure that those experts, when they do come in, there's something for them there to retrieve.
It's hugely important in a murder inquiry.
And it's also where you can make the mistake.
So a lot, when you look at training and investment in detectives, probably the most training and investment goes in for those initial parts of the investigation, the crime scene and securing of the forensics and that.
Yeah, it's hugely important to a murder inquiry.
In any case where foul play is involved, in the British legal term, then there has to be a post-mortem examination, an autopsy, as they call them in America.
And police officers have to attend those, don't they?
My dad did.
He told me many times about the first time he had to do that.
Young police officers who may never have seen a dead body are required to go to a post-mortem.
They were.
Funny enough, in this day and age where people can refuse to do things, I think eventually now.
So neither of my two children that joined, they joined in the last sort of seven years, did that.
Whereas when I joined, it was part, the very first time you come out, we call it puppy walking, what we did back then.
And part of that was to go to a post-mortem and witness it.
And when I was talking earlier about resilience, it just adds to your resilience.
So if you've seen that, it takes away the shock and trauma when you see a dead body that is in a similar kind of state, if you know what I mean.
But within murder inquiries, it's hugely important in order to establish causes of death that that will take place.
They're much more thorough than a normal post-mortem and they're carried out by highly trained home office forensic pathologists.
And I can't even begin to put a figure on how many I've been to.
I find them quite interesting, actually.
Because when you get the right pathologist as well, they'll talk you through what they're doing and point out bits of the body and what this injury is and how they've come to this conclusion.
I always found them quite interesting.
In fact, you go through the various kinds of, I'm just looking for it in my notes here, but I wrote it down somewhere, as Michael Parkinson used to say, you go through the different kinds of wounds.
And I guess you get to learn about all of those things.
We have this view of forensic pathologists as people like there was a TV character called Quincy.
I don't think they show those shows anymore with Jack Klugman that was on in the 80s, I think, and 90s.
And he was a sort of swashbuckling detective type character who would sometimes be doing the autopsy and come up with something that was absolutely telling for the investigation.
Does that happen?
No.
Put it bluntly, no.
They're very important in what they do, but what they really are there is to steer the investigation.
They're not part of the investigation.
They will tell you how the person has died.
They may tell you, for instance, what kind of firearm you might be looking for, what kind of weapon you're looking for.
But beyond that, not really.
I mean, I used to watch Quincy, and he used to...
So when you used to watch Quincy, I'm sure you used to be able to narrow it down to almost the exact minute when a person died.
It's not really like that in real life.
It's very much windows of when a person may have died.
And the longer after a post-mortem takes place, the larger that window is.
So they're very good at what they do and they're very important in what they do, but it's not to that level of being part of the investigation team, though.
How often does the post-mortem provide you with something that solves the case quickly?
In other words, this wound was clearly caused by the kind of weapon that you could only obtain from this particular store in this particular place.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, never.
No, it's not like that.
So none of it's like the TV.
Sorry, I interrupted.
No, no.
So what the pathologist will tell you is it was, they may say it's a knife.
They may tell you if they can tell whether it's got a serrated edge, you know, like a kitchen knife with a jagged edge.
They may tell you that.
And they may give a rough size.
So if you imagine if someone was to stab someone with a knife and say there was a three inch wound in the body, all that tells you is the blade is at least three inches because you don't know how far the knife has gone in.
And again, with the width of the blade, a knife can move within a wound to create a bigger hole, if you like.
So what the pathologist will tell you is it's a blade of at least three inches and a width of maximum a centimeter, for instance.
And that's essentially what they're going to tell you.
And quite often we will take knives down to the post-mortem and say, look, someone's been arrested.
We've recovered this knife.
What's your opinion on whether this knife was a murder weapon?
And they're not always very committal.
They'll say that's consistent with it.
And then you're looking really more at forensic.
So as the victim's bloodies on the knife will give you better evidence than what you're going to get from a pathologist.
So it's a tapestry of evidence.
Just to remind you, some of the details, of course, we will discuss in any conversation about murder are going to be not for the squeamish.
So if this is not for you, please tune out.
Back to Steve Keogh, fascinating conversation.
His book is Murder Investigation Team.
Where should we go next with this?
The role of technology.
We talked about CCTV, Steve, but there are other things as well, aren't there, these days?
Phone records, automatic number plate recognition, ANPR.
All of those things these days are important.
Yeah, if anybody who's listening to this who has ever worked with me, if you get me on the topic of phones, you probably won't shut me up.
It's literally my favorite evidence.
And the reason being, everybody today has a phone in their pocket.
And the information that that potentially can give you is huge when it comes to who people are in contact with, where they were, their activities on a day-to-day basis.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of telephones in murder investigations.
And honestly, Howard, I could sit and talk about them for hours.
You're probably not off.
But if you've got a, so if you're talking about witness evidence, so witnesses are notoriously difficult because witnesses are human beings and they get things wrong.
Phone evidence is quite black and white.
If someone's made a phone call, they've made a phone call.
If someone's in a particular area using a cell tower, the way the phone connects to it, that phone was there.
It can tell you so much.
And especially these phones nowadays, the modern smartphones.
If I was to get hold of your phone, Howard, and look at what you were doing on a day-to-day basis, it would tell me so much about your life.
And that's no different to someone who's committed a murder.
Some of the difficulties nowadays is getting into the phone because of the security systems.
Right.
And what happens if somebody you've arrested and you are questioning says, I am not going to give you the passcode?
Yeah, that can prove difficult.
It depends on the style of phone, depends on how new it is.
But we would send them off to laboratories and a lot of the time they have ways around the passcodes, et cetera.
And once you do get in, it just opens a wealth of evidence.
Right.
And is that evidence, by the sounds of it, it is.
Is that evidence frequently absolutely crucial to resolving the case?
Yeah, I've had cases where that's hinged on phone evidence.
I had one particular case where it was a gang in South London had gone to Reading and bought a gun.
Unfortunately for them, they were under surveillance by the police.
So as soon as the gun was bought, they all got arrested.
And they had a young boy with them, 16-year-old boy, who no previous convictions before.
His role was once they'd bought the gun, they were going to stick him on a train and he would carry the gun back.
So he would carry all the risk.
If anyone was going to get arrested, it would be the boy and the gang members would be able to drive back without that pressure.
Unfortunately, obviously, it didn't work out.
But what they did was they come up with a plan that they would put the blame for the gun on the boy.
And the night before the trial was due to begin, he was the only one that got bailed because he was 16 and the rest were reminded in custody.
And they were in a prison not far from Reading.
And they hatched this plan to kill him night before the trial.
And then they could put all the blame on him.
And they lured him into a car, shot him in the back of the head and then set fire to the car.
And this was a murder that was organized on mobile phones that had been smuggled into a prison.
So the phone evidence, and so not just that as well.
So in order to lure him to where he was killed, they set up a phone.
Sometimes people might hear them as being called burner phones.
So they're not registered to anybody.
They pay as you go.
And they set up this as well.
So the phone evidence, I did the phones for this inquiry.
And I was in a box.
I would imagine if you would have added up all the hours, it would probably be about three or four solid days I was in the box at the old Bailey giving phone evidence.
But because that would have made the jurors just absolutely switched off, we broke it up over the course.
It was about a three-month trial.
So we could do that and we could drop it in now and again.
But the evidence against these people was phone evidence.
And without that, they would have got away with murder, literally.
And you said the phones involved were burners.
They were not registered to anybody and disposable.
That, of course, must make it very much more difficult.
Yeah, you say that, but people, if you've got a burner phone, you have to call people.
You have to call, and quite often they'll be calling their girlfriend, their mum.
So you look at every, even if you haven't got the phone, you can look at everybody else around that person, when calls were made, what frequency they were made with, and that gives you a patchwork.
Yeah, yeah, very much so.
Yeah.
Got you.
I understand.
And location as well.
So for instance, this one, the phones were, we could tell they were in, it's a HMP Bullingdon.
We could tell the phones were there because of the cell sites that were being used.
So the locations can be used as well.
I grew up watching, my father always used to laugh at most of them.
Apart from the bill, he loved the bill.
But most police shows, my dad used to laugh at because he'd say it's not like that.
And, you know, everybody was well too made up.
You know, they looked far too clean and well turned out to be people involved in a tough, rough, gritty investigation.
So my dad would laugh.
But there would always be a scene where the detective involved in the case, one of the main detectives, would go to a pub.
Sometimes it would be a smoky pub, and he'd hand over 50 quid to some down-at-heel-looking guy and say, all right, then, what do you know?
And the informant would say, well, Mr. So-and-so, I can tell you that he was down there on Friday night.
What is the role of intelligence these days?
Is it like that?
It's not, no.
That was open to abuse.
It wasn't carried out correctly.
So they professionalized it.
So when I first joined, any police officer could have an informant who would give them information.
You'd register them.
And if they gave you good information, that would happen.
You'd get the money and you'd pay them out.
But it was open to abuse both ways.
So they took the right in order to be able to run informants away from police officers and gave it to specialist officers who were highly trained.
And that was just that, that's their only job.
They're called a source unit.
So it's those officers that deal with the informants.
So for us as murder detectives, we would go to them.
We'll say, there's a murder occurred in this area.
It might be connected to this gang or we give them as much information as we can.
They would go off, speak to the people they have registered as informants and come back with the information for us.
We would never see them.
We would never know who it's come from.
But it is an important...
So if an informant is giving you information, you can't use that at court.
But it's a way of steering your investigation.
So you can go to look for places where you can find the evidence that supports that.
Forgive me for this question.
Do police use psychics on a regular basis?
I'm not aware of us ever in this country ever having used a psychic.
No.
Whether that happens abroad, I don't know.
But as far as I know in this country, no.
Okay, that's interesting because there are quite a few psychics who say that they have been used informally by police and they're not able to confirm that fact.
But that's interesting that you say that.
I can only talk about our investigations and in London and I'm definitely not aware of that.
Okay.
No.
Is it true that most murders are solved by routine police work?
And it's really, again, not like the fiction that suggests that in most cases there's some great Eureka moment and you discover something that's crucial and then you've got the guy or woman banged to rights.
That mostly it's like the Yorkshire Ripper, for example, Peter Sutcliffe, wasn't caught by all of the clever people doing clever things.
He was caught by a piece of routine police work.
Is that how it is?
100%.
I mean, it's funny, actually.
So when you get new detectives coming onto a murder team, in their mind, they are looking for that eureka moment.
And you can't knock them.
They're keen and they want to solve it.
But it takes them a little while to get their head around the fact that, no, the way you solve murders is by being methodical.
It's a bit of a cliche, but it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.
And you have to bring all these different pieces in and they all form a picture.
And you can't complete a jigsaw with one piece.
You need 20, 30 of them, and they all need to be there for you to see the picture.
And it might be that there's one piece of evidence that someone can come up with that does steer a case and does change a case.
And for instance, forensic.
So if you've got a case and you don't know who the person is, you've got witnesses, you've got CCTV, et cetera, but you don't know who the suspect is.
If they've left their DNA behind, that is the one piece of evidence that can completely change a case.
But again, that's just from being methodical.
That's from the forensics officers going into the scene, knowing where to look, knowing how to retrieve the evidence, following the chain of evidence until it gets to the lab, the lab doing all their mundane work.
So on the face of it, we've got this piece of brilliant evidence, but you've had to do all the work to get it there.
And if you don't, so we were talking about barristers earlier.
If you don't do that job properly, they will say, well, where's the chain of continuity on this piece of evidence, on this forensics, on this, because forensics are so sensitive as well.
It's very easy for someone to move a piece of DNA from one place to another.
Again, it's all mundane and it's all about crossing T's and dotting I's.
But if you don't do that, you won't solve a murder and you'll lose it at court.
Yeah.
You say in the book, the key elements of it all, and maybe it all boils down to this, you tell me, are three things.
Trace, interview, eliminate.
That's one particular technique of finding a suspect.
Yeah.
And for instance, so if there is a crime in a particular, say a park, and a witness sees somebody kill someone in a park, they run off.
They get a half decent description of them.
So they say it's a white man with blonde hair and they see him get into a blue Honda and drive off.
So a strategy could be you try and identify all white men, blonde hair who drive a blue Toyota Honda.
And then in theory, if you've got your list right and if you've researched it properly, your murderer will be on there.
And you go through them all one at a time until you can eliminate them or implicate them as being the murderer.
So again, it's one of those, it's not a quick win.
It's a lot of work, but it's another technique we can use to identify a murderer.
You must have come across this.
What happens when you get somebody who confesses or cuffs to a murder that they haven't done?
No, that has never happened to me.
I'm aware of it.
So I worked on the murder investigation teams for 12 years, and I'm aware of it happening to one other team once.
And that's it.
But the problem for that person is unless you're the murderer, there's not enough, you could never convince someone you've done it.
Because even if so, for instance, when we put out press appeals around a murderer, we might say a person died of multiple stab wounds.
Well, that doesn't tell you where the person was stabbed and the circumstances around it.
Um, so it's very, very easy to very, very quickly give themselves away in the end.
Yeah, yeah.
We don't use polygraphs like they do in America, should we?
No, because they're not 100% reliable.
So where does that take you?
So if you're using something that isn't reliable, how do you at the end of the day say, trust it?
I'm very much of the opinion that we are our own polygraphs.
An experienced detective spending time with somebody, asking the right questions, observing them, picking their story apart, going and checking their story against known facts, et cetera, is a much better way of establishing whether someone's telling the truth or lying than relying on a piece of technology that you can't rely on.
Understood.
Last question.
We've only got two minutes, unfortunately, and I think we could probably talk for another hour easily, but sadly, time's winged chariot and all of that stuff.
The case of which you're going to be asked this one a lot, I think, the case of which you are proudest, the conviction of which you are proudest in that 30 years.
Wow, that's a good one, actually.
That's a hard one.
Do you know what?
In actual fact, it was probably the one that I spoke about earlier, the 16-year-old boy.
And the reason being is that I took on the phones for that inquiry and it was a huge piece of work.
So I think it was something like 80,000 calls that I had to look at and bring them into some sort of order and turn those into evidence that people could understand.
And personally, I think that was the most difficult task I've had in investigating murders.
And I really, really, really got close to the family of the boy, a 16-year-old boy, never been in trouble with the police before, was manipulated by gang members.
And that meant a lot to me that I could at least look them in the eye and say, we found a person that organized yourself.
So I was going to ask you, do you keep in touch with victims' families?
Yeah, no, personally, I don't.
I think the only people who are likely to do that are family liaison officers who they do build up a really close relationship with.
Not all families, but some families.
Steve Keogh, I think it's an incredible book.
It's wonderfully written.
My dad taught me to write and use a typewriter.
And, you know, any skill that I might have in that is partly down to the people from Fleet Street on courses who taught me how to write and partly down to my dad, who was a copper who had to write reports.
This is a great book that everybody should read.
It's called Murder Investigation Team.
Steve Keogh, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Howard.
Thank you very much.
Quite a conversation.
Steve Keogh, who I'm sure you're going to be hearing on radio and seeing on TV.
I was privileged to be able to do that conversation with him.
My father worked on many of these cases, never spoke to me as a child about it.
And sometimes he would come home from these things, and like I said in that conversation, he would just be my dad.
It takes some kind of fortitude inside, I think, to be able to do that.
I lost my dad about seven years or so ago, and I miss him every day.
Anyway, thank you very much.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
Until next we meet.
I'm Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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