Murdertown - Season 1

On Valentine's Day in 2005 a young woman goes missing. Her name is Joanne Nelson. Her fiancé makes a desperate call to police, who initially are puzzled. Her car is at home but unlocked. But her work clothes and purse are missing. They scour the city, looking for clues to where she might be. Several days later, when her fiancé Paul Dyson appears on the news appealing for information, cops notice scratches on his hands. They look at Dyson's behaviour and find CCTV of him buying cleaning products on the day she disappeared. Within a few days he's arrested and charged. But he claims he can't remember where the body is. Detectives turn to a pollen expert who pieces together fragments of evidence to take cops to the scene where Joanne has been dumped. Cops then begin to explore whether the same science can resolve Hull's longest running unsolved murder – of a young boy called Christopher Laverack, killed in the 1970s. They re-open the case, and sure enough, science leads them to his killer. One missing person case turns into two solved murders.

In 1993 a sixteen-year-old girl is found dying by the side of the road. Her killer disappears into the night. Her name is Claire Tiltman, and as police investigate they learn she's a girl with no enemies, and the crime is motiveless. There's no sexual attack, and no robbery. But there is extreme violence.

Two years later, another attack is committed on a young woman. This time, locals identify the town milkman, Colin Ash Smith. Police investigate, and find a diary with details of crimes he's committed and crimes he plans to do. In his car they find half a school-tie, part of a weapon he used on an earlier crime seven years earlier. He's jailed for two attacks, but not Claire's murder. It takes over twenty years before he's finally brought to trial, following advances in forensics, and found guilty of killing Claire. Jurors hear of how he knew Claire, and even went to her funeral.

In this town, the series explores how one boy left an entire city living in fear. Aged just fifteen, Robbie Mcintosh walked into a fish and chip shop to announce that a woman had been killed on the iconic Law Hill. Locals were terrified as the news spread. And police revealed the victim had been stabbed dozens of times.

But police never imagined that the culprit was the fifteen-year-old. As cops swooped to arrest him, Mcintosh fled and reached Glasgow airport, buying a ticket to Canada when he was placed under arrest. Was Mcintosh a local youth who had committed something shocking, or a serial killer in the making, stopped in his tracks?

Dundee would find out in 2017, when Mcintosh was allowed out of prison on home leave. He lasted 5 days. Then he took a walk into nearby woods, spotted a female dog walker, and attacked her with a large heavy dumbbell.

The woman survived, and police arrested Mcintosh in his boxer shorts just an hour later. In Dundee, lightning had struck twice. And terrifyingly, Mcintosh will be eligible for release in 2022.

In 2015 a 69-year-old man is found stabbed in his own home. Cops can't understand it. There's no forced entry. And no obvious motive. He has no enemies. At the scene, forensics uncover a receipt from a nearby cashpoint. Cops think it will narrow down the time of death. But they're in for a shock. CCTV at the bank reveals a woman, using the victims card to withdraw cash. Who is she? And how does she relate to the murder? It turns out that her boyfriend, Ian Birley, is a man with a past. He's only been out of prison a year, after serving a life sentence for an almost identical murder. Back in 1995, while living on the streets in the town, Birley had killed an elderly man in his own home, for no real motive. Now lightning had struck twice.

In 2014 a local woman goes missing after a night drinking in the pubs of the town. CCTV finds her walking home, arm in arm with another local drinker. He just happens to be a former butcher. Police soon realise he has put his trade to use, by dismembering his poor victim and hiding her body parts around the town. It's a crime with no obvious motive, and one which shocked the whole community. He was a man with a past – he once set fire to his primary school, and was found by firemen sat in the middle of the blaze paying the piano. It's a dark story – that we're still unpicking. Pontypridd is labelled the murder capital of Wales for the volume of crimes there in recent years.

In1994 an evil gang kill a woman who manages a building society and tie up her husband, before robbing the building society of large sums of cash. Cops are baffled. But something doesn't quite add up. Despite making a tearful plea for help, the injured husband's story doesn't tally. Cops soon start to suspect that the ‘gang' are a hoax, and that Gordon Wardell has murdered his wife Carol in a bid to get money.

In 2000 a young woman is stabbed to death while walking her dog in a picturesque park in the town. She's a twin, a woman known in her local area. A suspect is seen running semi-naked across the M1 motorway and makes his escape. Cops initially suspect the killer of Rachel Nickel might be responsible...and it takes detectives weeks to identify the real killer is a local man called Leon Amos. They find out his family are known criminals, who have been covering Leon's tracks, and that the killer may have mistakenly carried out an act of retribution on the wrong twin.

In 2014 a sex offender called Robert Hind goes missing from a bail hostel. Cops fear he's absconded to commit crime. The town is scoured. Then cops find CCTV of the man with another ex-con called David Mitchell at the bus station. They find out the two men are friends, who live together at the hostel. Rumour has it they are in a relationship together. They fear the two men have gone to do something terrible. But then they learn that the sex offender hadn't absconded, he's been murdered, by Mitchell, the man with him on CCTV. Mitchell has killed before – murdering his wife in the 90's. Now he's killed paedophile Hind, and dumped him in the canal. It's a canal that contains many dark secrets, as we also see from the story of Tobias Minski, a student in Huddersfield who disappeared and sparked a town-wide search, before his body was found folded up in a suitcase beside the canal.

Throughout the early 90s young boys would be found dead after sniffing glue and being trapped in derelict buildings which caught fire. But when it kept happening, cops got suspicious. They soon found they were actually being systematically murdered by a man called Steven Grieveson, dubbed the Sunderland strangler in a case which still haunts the town. His is a name few will know, but he's regarded as one of the most dangerous killers in the UK.

In 2015 a man visits a tarot card reader. Within an hour she's dealt out the death card and he's confessed to a murder. When cops arrive they discover he's been living at home with his victim's body for days. Both men are a part of the spiritualist church - and have fallen out in the biggest way possible. Cops have the grim task of investigating the crime, and proving the death is a murder. This episode taps into a series of crimes with same-sex partners committing murder in the city and living with their victims, and we tell the story of a second crime, with very similar outcomes, that saw a man go on the run for a year.