00:00:13
I'm Nancy Grace, and this is "Bloodline Detectives."
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A brick flies through the air and smashes the windshield
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of a moving truck.
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Its impact does the unthinkable.
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The brick would not only devastate a family
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but empower law enforcement in a way never seen before.
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In this case, there are no obvious leads to pursue,
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and what the police experimented with
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to solve it would leave ripple effects across the world.
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In this episode, we travel across the Atlantic
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to England to the town of Surrey, not far from London.
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The year is 2003.
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The incident is shocking, and the killer is faceless.
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Is there a premeditated motive, or is this
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a completely senseless random act of violence?
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The case will end in a landmark moment,
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one of the very first cases solved
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by the bloodline detectives using a combination
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of a community swab campaign, testing relatives,
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and a new forensic science called familial DNA.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): March 21, 2003,
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police are called to a traffic incident
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on a motorway south of London.
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What they find is shocking.
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They opened up the cab and saw that the driver was dead,
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slumped to one side, still in the driver's seat.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): It's not just
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a random death, it's murder.
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Someone out there had killed him,
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and they were still walking with not a care in the world,
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really.
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It was this overwhelming feeling that you
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need to get some revenge.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): An immediate search
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for the murderer is a dead end.
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It's on a motorway.
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You know, that's not normally the place detectives work.
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They are at a dead end, which happens in these cases.
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And I honestly didn't think that they would catch anybody.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): As a last attempt
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to find the killer, investigators
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turn to a new groundbreaking DNA technology.
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This was the first case of its type
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in the world to be solved through an organized
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familial search.
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Without familial DNA, this case
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would never have been detected.
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This is the story of how police gambled
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on a revolutionary technique called familial DNA analysis,
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and how the bloodline detectives would
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use it to get a conviction for one of the very first times.
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We were an ordinary family plunged into a murder inquiry.
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[THEME MUSIC]
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Just outside London, England
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March 21, 2003, it's 3:30 AM.
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On the side of a busy freeway just south of London,
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police find the driver of a 40-ton truck
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dead behind the wheel.
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As the senior investigating officer for the major crime
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team, I'm on call.
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So I got a phone call about 5 o'clock
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in the morning that said that there'd been this incident,
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that there was a lorry that was parked on the side of the road
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or off the motorway.
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And originally they thought it was a road traffic accident.
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But on closer inspection, it seemed that there was something
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a little bit more suspicious.
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When they opened up the cab and saw that the driver was dead,
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they realized that there was something not right.
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And then they noticed that there was a smash to the windscreen,
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a hole in the windscreen.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The incident
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is particularly unusual for a quiet British town
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like Camberley, a town where people feel safe.
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Overall, Camberley was a fairly nice town to live.
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The normal sort of vehicle crime, house burglaries.
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But compared to other areas, certainly violent crime
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wasn't a massive problem.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Senior British investigating
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officers are soon involved.
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We start to document the scene with photographs.
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We start to take forensic examination.
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And then very quickly we discover
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that there is a brick, that clearly shouldn't be
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in the cab, behind the seats.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Officers identify the victim
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as 53-year-old Michael Little.
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And soon his family is waking to the news of his tragic death.
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That morning, my alarm went off, and I'm thinking,
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it's a bit strange he's not home.
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So I tried to call him.
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Couldn't get any answer.
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I tried his lorry phone, couldn't get any answer.
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I was getting more and more worried.
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And I'm going, "something's happened to him.
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I know something's happened to him."
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I was getting myself ready for work.
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And on the news, they said there had been an incident on the N3,
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and that the motorway was closed.
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And I don't know why, but something clicked.
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And we actually found out by the place it was Mike,
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and he'd been found dead in the cab.
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Later, the autopsy told us that he
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had died of a fatal heart attack caused by a blow to the chest.
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The brick was the fatal blow.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police believe
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what was the scene of an accident has now
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become the scene of a murder.
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Investigators now begin their detailed inquiries
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into the murder of Michael Little.
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So the brick looked like it's been thrown
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from a place of height, because of the way
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it went into the vehicle.
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So potentially, if someone had thrown that
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from the side of the road, it would
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have been quite difficult to get the trajectory for it
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to come in at height.
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And so the most logical thing for us
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to conclude, that the only place that you could get that height
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from would have been a footbridge that
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was about a half a mile back.
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With that, it must have been awful for a detective.
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No CCTV cameras, no idea of who might have been crossing there.
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The one thing they did know was the very likely probability
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the culprit, whoever was involved in this,
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was probably local.
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We're looking for a male between a certain ages
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to start off with.
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We were going to extend that if we didn't identify
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the person within that.
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And we had geographical areas from the crime scene,
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which we would start off with the nearer ones
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and then move out.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police know
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they have to track down the person or people responsible,
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and they must move fast.
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Mike wasn't found for four or five
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hours after the event, by which time
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the culprit is long since gone.
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So how on earth are they going to find anybody?
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We were an ordinary family plunged into a murder inquiry.
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And the bloodline detectives in England
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will exploit an extraordinary new science
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to try and bring Mike Little's family the answers they need.
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In 2003, police in England don't know it yet,
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but soon they'll be using the very latest
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science to solve a murder.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The body
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of Michael Little is found in the cab of a truck
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in the early hours, March 21.
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Police at first presume he died of natural causes.
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But a suspicious hole in the window of the cab
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and a brick found behind the driver's seat
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lead them very quickly to question
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their first conclusions.
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He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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It came through the truck window,
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hit him in the sternum, caused massive internal trauma,
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which led to his death.
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But one of the problems with this investigation
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is, it's on a motorway.
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You know, that's not normally the place detectives work.
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There's a lack of witnesses.
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And the location, it was going to be
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difficult for the investigation team to make any headway with.
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Someone out there had killed him,
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and they were still walking, enjoying their life,
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doing what they were doing, with not a care in the world,
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really.
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And I hated that thought.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): 53-year-old Michael Little
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is from Hornchurch in Essex, a county
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in the Southeast of England.
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Well, Michael Little was a family-orientated man,
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had lived in London or the east of London all of his life.
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And he was a lorry driver for Ford in Dagenham.
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He was a larger than life character.
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He had a terrific sense of humor.
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He loved his family.
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He would do anything for his family.
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Very, very proud dad.
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Very proud dad.
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Mike was very much a boy's boy.
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He ended up going into the army at 15.
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And he was in the army until he was 21.
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And it was then he got the job at Ford's.
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Obviously, he learned to drive HGV vehicles in the army.
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And it was a way of him utilizing that skill.
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And when that job offer came up, it was natural for him
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to go for it.
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And he was meticulous about driving.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Michael was loved and respected
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by all who knew him.
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He kept me in check, certainly through my teenage years.
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And I used to go out with Mike in his lorry as well.
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He used to take a route through the city of London
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every now and then.
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And it was amazing, being up that high with all the traffic.
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You sometimes wonder how he used to use
00:10:31
to get through the gaps in the traffic,
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taking that huge lorry through the streets of London.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Michael's death causes
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heartbreak for his family and friends.
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I couldn't believe he was gone.
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I thought, no, he's not.
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He's going to walk through that door any minute.
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I know he is.
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He's just going to he's going to walk through the door.
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But he didn't.
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We had to go and deliver the news to my mom.
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We told her that Mike had been killed.
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And to this day, I've not heard a scream like it.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The investigation
00:11:29
into Michael's murder is now fully active
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and centered on the British town of Camberley, about 30 miles
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from Central London.
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I wrote the strategy as a murder investigation.
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And this would have been what's called a Cat A murder, which
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means that the person that potentially committed the crime
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had no connection with the person that had
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been the victim of the crime.
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And clearly there's things that need to be done
00:11:54
early on in the investigation.
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And then as the investigation progresses and unfolds,
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you move in different directions as to where
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the evidence takes you.
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Motorway cameras confirmed it was in the early hours
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of the morning, because it sees the articulated lorry go down
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the motorway.
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And then it sort of sees it pull over to one side,
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to the left hand side.
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So we've got a rough idea when it happened.
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The next thing is, who was about when it happened.
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Police, confident that whoever was involved was local,
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set up a camp in the town center,
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where they asked for witnesses.
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They try to find people who might have just possibly been
00:12:31
in that area, somehow nearby at the time,
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to see if anybody saw anything that would have
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helped them with their inquiry.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With no immediate leads to follow,
00:12:40
investigators turn to science and began
00:12:43
to use forensic techniques.
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Our initial thoughts were, well, it's a brick.
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What can we get from a brick?
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And I remember thinking, well, you know,
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there's not going to be much forensic evidence here.
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But I think the important thing is, is that it was preserved
00:12:58
in such a way that when it went to the laboratory,
00:13:00
they were able to tell us that there was
00:13:02
some material on there that they believed
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to be skin, that they thought they
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could extract DNA profile from.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Now they
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focus on finding the original source of the brick.
00:13:16
The road that leads from Camberley down to the beginning
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of the footbridge is a long private road
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with expensive houses.
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So we centered our investigation around that long road.
00:13:29
And very quickly we were able to establish that the brick was
00:13:32
of a certain type, and that that brick
00:13:35
had come from a building site which
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was in the long private road.
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Somebody was having an extension built.
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They had particular kind of bricks that they were using,
00:13:44
so it was quite easy for us to establish that the brick had
00:13:46
come from that site.
00:13:48
And we also had a strategy which has worked
00:13:51
in the past on several investigations,
00:13:53
is to look for other crimes.
00:13:56
So you have a serious crime, but you look within the 24 hours
00:14:00
either side of that crime for other crimes.
00:14:03
And sometimes crimes connect.
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So people do one thing, and it leads
00:14:07
them on to do another thing.
00:14:08
And very quickly we were able to establish
00:14:11
that in that long private road, on the same evening,
00:14:15
someone had tried to steal a car.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The forensic analysis
00:14:22
of the brick suggests that whoever
00:14:25
threw it has recently received a cut or a wound of some sort.
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There was a sufficient amount of DNA on the brick,
00:14:33
because it came from a wound.
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So there was blood.
00:14:37
And in DNA terms, that's a lot of DNA.
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So it would be very easy to take that DNA,
00:14:43
process it, and get a profile very quickly.
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): For the DNA sample to work,
00:14:49
the suspect must be in the British National DNA Database.
00:14:54
He or she will have committed a crime from which their DNA
00:14:58
is taken and registered.
00:15:02
The DNA database existed in 2003,
00:15:05
but it was relatively small at that time.
00:15:08
And those were people that were arrested for
00:15:12
and convicted of crimes, and those profiles
00:15:14
were kept on the database.
00:15:15
So we had a pool of data against which
00:15:19
we could compare our profiles.
00:15:23
The blood is DNA typed and compared
00:15:26
to the National DNA Database.
00:15:28
There was no match.
00:15:30
Then we were in difficult territory of what do we do now?
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NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With the DNA option exhausted
00:15:37
and other leads inconclusive, the investigation
00:15:40
is rapidly reaching a dead end.
00:15:43
Police now privately admit it's unlikely they'll
00:15:47
ever find Michael's killer.
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If you have a crime that's a one off,
00:15:52
and you've never committed a crime before,
00:15:54
those are the most difficult people to find.
00:15:56
And I honestly didn't think that they would catch anybody.
00:16:00
British detectives are using tried and true
00:16:03
forensic techniques, but the results are
00:16:06
not what they're hoping for.
00:16:08
They don't yet know that they're on the verge of developing
00:16:12
a new kind of forensic science technique, a technique that
00:16:16
will be used around the world.
00:16:26
Welcome back to the "Bloodline Detectives",
00:16:28
where we look around the world at the latest
00:16:32
scientific breakthroughs police use to solve cases
00:16:36
that were once unsolvable.
00:16:41
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): 2003, British investigators
00:16:43
are running out of ideas in the death of Michael Little.
00:16:47
The 53-year-old truck driver's body
00:16:50
is discovered in the cab of his truck
00:16:53
at the side of a highway outside London in March.
00:16:57
What police first thought was a tragic accident
00:17:01
has become a murder investigation
00:17:04
when it's clear a brick thrown from a nearby bridge
00:17:08
is the cause of Michael's death.
00:17:11
Investigators retrieve a DNA sample from the brick,
00:17:16
but there is not a match in the British National DNA Database.
00:17:22
Police now fear they've reached a dead end.
00:17:28
We're a few weeks down the line now,
00:17:30
and I was under some pressure as to justify why I was still
00:17:34
investigating a crime that potentially you're not going
00:17:37
to find the person that did it.
00:17:39
We have nothing to go on other than the fact,
00:17:41
we know we're looking for a man.
00:17:43
We've got a brick.
00:17:44
We've got a bridge.
00:17:45
And we think the brick came from a building site close
00:17:49
to the bridge.
00:17:50
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Although DNA they obtained
00:17:52
from the brick has failed to yield a result,
00:17:55
police still believe it's the key to cracking the case.
00:17:59
They just need to find a match.
00:18:03
Well, pretty much every living organism contains DNA.
00:18:06
It's what makes an organism what it is.
00:18:08
It makes a dog a dog and a person a person.
00:18:11
Now, human beings have and share about 99% of the DNA in common.
00:18:18
And that 1% that is different makes us all individuals.
00:18:24
So DNA is individual to the person, apart from the case
00:18:29
of identical twins and clones.
00:18:33
So with that knowledge, you can use
00:18:36
DNA, if you can recover it from a scene of crime,
00:18:38
to potentially identify a suspect.
00:18:41
Because they had DNA from the brick, what they had to do
00:18:46
was identify an individual.
00:18:48
So they carried out what they call a mass screen, which
00:18:51
was to go from door to door, asking
00:18:55
people to contribute DNA to be compared
00:18:59
against that crime scene.
00:19:00
So now that DNA would be kept separate
00:19:01
and would be disposed of.
00:19:02
It would not go on the database.
00:19:04
So it was just for the investigation of that crime.
00:19:07
We can't swab every man in the area.
00:19:09
Let's draw up a criteria.
00:19:11
And our best guesstimate is that probably
00:19:15
at 1 o'clock in the morning, someone who's out wandering
00:19:18
about, potentially has been out for a night in Camberley,
00:19:22
and is on their way home.
00:19:24
So we're going to find everybody that lives in that area, male,
00:19:28
over the age of 16, under the age of 25,
00:19:31
and to start asking them for voluntary swabs.
00:19:35
So we had a geographical plan, where
00:19:38
we were interested in houses within certain parts
00:19:41
of one side of the motorway, the other side of the motorway.
00:19:44
And we gradually got larger in terms of our geographical area
00:19:48
as we eliminated people.
00:19:49
But the problem, of course, is mass screening wasn't
00:19:52
that common at that time.
00:19:53
It is now, but it wasn't then.
00:19:55
So we were in relatively uncharted waters.
00:19:59
Consequently when the police decided
00:20:02
to ask local people in the Camberley area
00:20:05
to come and give their DNA to rule themselves out
00:20:08
was quite an unusual request.
00:20:10
And it certainly raised some people's hackles.
00:20:12
What are the rights of the police
00:20:13
holding this information?
00:20:14
What are they going to do with it?
00:20:15
Is it just going to be used?
00:20:16
Will it be disposed of?
00:20:17
Our strategy was always ethically we had to be
00:20:21
clear about what we were doing.
00:20:22
Because when you start to do mass screenings
00:20:25
and take DNA samples from people,
00:20:28
there is a whole host of ethical issues that come to mind.
00:20:32
You know, when you start asking people about where they come
00:20:35
from, are they related to this person,
00:20:37
are they related to this person, sometimes it throws up
00:20:40
some pretty odd results.
00:20:43
So you have to be prepared for that.
00:20:44
So we were swabbing in what's called batches.
00:20:47
So every time we took 100 swabs, we would send
00:20:50
them to the lab in batches.
00:20:52
And every time, the results would come back as negative.
00:20:56
So the more swabs we sent, the more
00:20:59
we would go in through our geographical areas,
00:21:01
eliminating people.
00:21:03
As we started to eliminate people in batches,
00:21:07
it became-- the enormity of the task became clear.
00:21:11
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): While the mass screening rules out
00:21:13
thousands of people, there is still no match
00:21:16
for the DNA on the brick.
00:21:17
Well, these people were ruled out,
00:21:19
but the person they wanted to come forward
00:21:20
hadn't come forward.
00:21:21
Inevitably, he was never going to step forward.
00:21:23
People are known to live in houses not necessarily
00:21:26
there at the time you swab.
00:21:27
Some people who own houses don't live in them.
00:21:30
So you have a whole host of problems
00:21:32
with doing house-to-house investigations.
00:21:35
It's difficult.
00:21:36
It must be an appalling experience for the family
00:21:38
of a victim, waiting for something to turn up that
00:21:43
will-- it won't solve their grief, but it will certainly
00:21:46
fill a sense of justice.
00:21:47
I think we were a little bit despondent,
00:21:50
but we knew that they were doing everything they could.
00:21:53
And they were keeping-- the main thing
00:21:55
was, the police were keeping us informed every,
00:21:58
every single time something came up.
00:22:00
Surrey Police did--
00:22:03
they were doing everything they could.
00:22:06
And you always had that encouragement that they were
00:22:08
going to have a breakthrough.
00:22:10
But then you just think again, well, how on earth
00:22:14
are they going to have a break-through?
00:22:16
There's no CCTV on the bridge.
00:22:20
What chance have we got?
00:22:22
We knew it was a challenge.
00:22:23
You know, and quite rightly, people were saying, well, look,
00:22:27
you've got lots of other investigations
00:22:29
with lots of better investigative leads.
00:22:31
Why aren't you pursuing those?
00:22:34
They are at a dead end, which happens in these cases.
00:22:38
So for six months, this inquiry
00:22:40
languished, technically, without essentially kickstart that it
00:22:44
needed to find the culprit.
00:22:46
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Then lead investigator
00:22:48
Graham Hill comes across another possibility, which
00:22:52
cracks the case wide open.
00:22:55
What do we do now?
00:22:56
We've got to think a little bit out of the box.
00:22:59
We've got to be quite clever in what we do.
00:23:01
And then I remembered that I'd been to a seminar in London
00:23:06
a few months before, where they were
00:23:10
talking about this new technique of using
00:23:13
what's known as familial DNA.
00:23:15
And that it was possible to trace
00:23:17
someone through a relative that may be on the database.
00:23:21
It was totally revolutionary.
00:23:24
What we were looking to do is to take DNA for which there was
00:23:27
no match on the database, and search
00:23:30
to see if we could potentially identify
00:23:32
relatives, which could then be investigated
00:23:35
further by the police.
00:23:37
It was completely new to me, completely new.
00:23:40
And it was only when Graham explained it to me,
00:23:42
and I thought, that's brilliant.
00:23:46
You inherit 10 what's known as alleles from your mom and 10
00:23:50
alleles from your father.
00:23:53
And that you have a DNA profile that's made up of 20 alleles.
00:23:58
And that if you search for someone who's got 16 or more
00:24:03
of those alleles, if you find someone that's got 16 or more,
00:24:07
they are more likely than not to be a relative of the person
00:24:12
you're looking for.
00:24:13
Therefore if you have a database of people, say three,
00:24:16
four million people, and the DNA profile,
00:24:19
and you ask the question, are there any relatives
00:24:22
in this database, what you're actually doing is sorting
00:24:26
the whole database from the most likely to the least likely
00:24:29
to be related.
00:24:31
And that's what we did in familial searching.
00:24:35
It won't tell you who did the crime,
00:24:38
but it will definitely put you in the right area of the person
00:24:41
that did the crime.
00:24:42
And that's what we were looking for.
00:24:44
So our question to the database was, tell me everyone that's
00:24:47
on the DNA database now in 2003 that has more than 16
00:24:53
of these alleles, and that may be a relative of the person
00:24:57
we're looking for.
00:25:03
So six months after the crime, Surrey Police
00:25:06
contacted us and said, could we help with this investigation?
00:25:11
The DNA from the scene, no hit on the database.
00:25:15
Door-to-door mass screening had failed.
00:25:17
Could we do anything?
00:25:20
They assured me that the technique of familial DNA
00:25:23
was possible.
00:25:25
British detectives are getting closer to tracking down
00:25:29
Michael's killer, and a new forensic technique called
00:25:33
familial DNA is crystallizing.
00:25:36
That's next on the "Bloodline Detectives".
00:25:48
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): By mid-2003, British detectives
00:25:51
decide to try the revolutionary new method
00:25:53
of DNA familial searching to solve
00:25:56
the death of Michael Little.
00:25:58
The 53-year-old truck driver killed
00:26:01
while driving on a motorway by a brick thrown over a bridge.
00:26:07
We were not going to identify a particular suspect.
00:26:09
What we were going to do was to trawl through the database
00:26:13
and try to give them some intelligence leads, which they
00:26:16
could then take into their investigation
00:26:19
and work through in the normal policing manner.
00:26:23
The DNA profile from the brick was sent to the database,
00:26:26
and that was compared against the entire database,
00:26:29
looking for close matches.
00:26:31
And we produced a list of individuals that
00:26:34
were manageable to the force, a list of 20,
00:26:36
starting at 16 out of 20, and working our way down.
00:26:41
And the theory was that they would work
00:26:43
their way through those names.
00:26:44
And if they didn't come up with anything,
00:26:45
we could give them another list, and another list,
00:26:47
until we were fairly confident that we were
00:26:51
away from distant relatives.
00:26:52
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The match produces
00:26:54
a number of possibilities.
00:26:56
They were spread right across the United Kingdom.
00:26:59
And we said, OK, so who's the closest to the crime scene?
00:27:02
And it turned out there was a family called Harman that lived
00:27:08
very close to that crime scene.
00:27:11
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): This is the crucial lead
00:27:13
the team has been waiting for.
00:27:16
So they went, knocked on the doors,
00:27:18
talked to these individuals, who of course were innocent,
00:27:20
because they didn't match the crime scene profile,
00:27:23
and asked the question, depending on the level of DNA
00:27:26
match, do you have a brother?
00:27:29
Do you have a son?
00:27:30
Do you have a father, et cetera.
00:27:32
And where were they at this particular time?
00:27:34
Can we talk to them?
00:27:36
And would they mind providing a sample
00:27:38
for elimination purposes?
00:27:39
We were able to establish that the Harman family had a son,
00:27:44
that he lived close by, and that potentially he might be
00:27:48
the person we were looking for.
00:27:50
And we decided very quickly to send out some officers
00:27:54
to take a sample from him.
00:27:57
And that's what we did.
00:28:00
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): British police arrive
00:28:01
at the door of Craig Harman.
00:28:06
We immediately said that we had cause to ask
00:28:09
him for a voluntary sample.
00:28:11
There was some hesitation at first.
00:28:13
There was obviously a lot of stuff going through his mind.
00:28:15
But he agreed to give the sample.
00:28:18
We took a mouth swab from him and then away we went.
00:28:23
[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
00:28:33
We were told that that was the profile we were looking for.
00:28:37
His profile matched the profile found on the brick.
00:28:40
So we had some early indication that this guy, Craig Harman,
00:28:46
had been in contact with the brick.
00:28:48
So our conclusion was, well, this man needs to be spoken to.
00:28:53
And the only way to do that for a murder investigation
00:28:55
is to arrest him.
00:28:59
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The chances
00:29:00
are slim he's not their man, but investigators must establish
00:29:05
just what happened on the bridge over the highway
00:29:09
the night Michael Little died.
00:29:13
The job's only partly done.
00:29:15
You know, we've identified someone as a potential suspect,
00:29:18
but that person may come along and say,
00:29:20
yeah, I touched a brick.
00:29:21
I'm a build-- I work on a building site.
00:29:23
I work on that building site.
00:29:24
There could be a whole host of reasons
00:29:25
why someone's DNA material can be found on the brick.
00:29:29
So the job's not done.
00:29:33
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): On October 30, 2003,
00:29:35
police arrest Craig Harman and bring him in for questioning.
00:29:40
When I first heard that the police had arrested somebody,
00:29:45
it was this overwhelming feeling that we
00:29:48
need to get some revenge.
00:29:50
Couldn't praise the police enough,
00:29:52
really, for not giving up.
00:29:53
It's an interesting development,
00:29:55
but I think we were all wise enough not
00:29:58
to get too excited too early.
00:30:00
Because what you've got is someone who's touched a brick.
00:30:02
You haven't got someone that intentionally
00:30:04
threw a brick to kill a driver.
00:30:07
DNA is important, but it's not the whole story.
00:30:09
You know, there's still traditional policing techniques
00:30:12
that need to be done.
00:30:14
You know, once you've identified someone using DNA,
00:30:17
you still have to put them in the area.
00:30:18
You still have to put a circumstantial case around it.
00:30:22
And of course, you've always got the opportunity
00:30:24
then that once they're arrested, they might admit the crime.
00:30:27
Which again, would be good evidence.
00:30:29
But it would be foolish to get too excited
00:30:34
too early in the investigation.
00:30:36
But it isn't long into the interrogation
00:30:38
before Craig Harman admits what happened.
00:30:42
So why did he kill Michael Little?
00:30:45
Did he know Little, or is it just a random act?
00:30:49
The bloodline detectives are about to find out.
00:31:01
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): October 2003, police outside London,
00:31:05
England now believe they've found the killer of Michael
00:31:08
Little, a 53-year-old truck driver
00:31:11
who dies after a brick is thrown through the window of his cab
00:31:15
six months earlier.
00:31:17
Detectives use a revolutionary forensic technique,
00:31:21
familial DNA, to track down and arrest Craig Harman.
00:31:27
When explaining to police-- eventually when admitting that
00:31:29
he had committed this crime, he said it was
00:31:33
just a drunken stupid moment.
00:31:35
That may well have been the case.
00:31:36
And it's sort of the tragedy of it
00:31:38
is that if that was the case, then
00:31:40
the results were catastrophic and indeed fatal.
00:31:47
Two youths were in town drinking,
00:31:49
had consumed an amount of alcohol,
00:31:52
and were going back home.
00:31:55
And that route home took them over the bridge.
00:31:58
And for some reason, partway home,
00:32:00
they decided to try and steal a car, a Renault Clio.
00:32:09
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Harman had
00:32:10
cut his hand on broken glass while breaking into a car.
00:32:26
Picked up a brick from a nearby house
00:32:29
that was having an extension built, and took it up
00:32:32
to the bridge and threw it off.
00:32:34
And it just so happens that Michael's lorry was driving
00:32:37
by underneath at the time.
00:32:38
It came straight through the windscreen, top right
00:32:40
of the windscreen, and struck him on the chest.
00:32:51
What emerged was that Michael Little
00:32:53
had managed to avoid what could have
00:32:55
been a greater catastrophe.
00:32:57
He put on the hazard lights, despite having
00:32:58
been hit by a brick.
00:33:00
He swerved to avoid any other vehicles,
00:33:02
and managed to pull over onto the hard shoulder,
00:33:04
turn off the engine, whilst going
00:33:06
through what was obviously a very violent heart attack.
00:33:09
Almost perfectly parked on a hard shoulder
00:33:12
so perfectly the ambulances and police cars had passed it so
00:33:15
many times.
00:33:19
It's just unimaginable what he must
00:33:21
have been going through in that cab at that moment.
00:33:24
But he still managed to do that.
00:33:26
His ignition was turned off, but the hazards were left on.
00:33:30
Now, who could do that when you literally
00:33:32
would have died instantly?
00:33:34
But he did, and he obviously averted a major disaster
00:33:39
on that motorway.
00:33:40
His foot was still on the foot brake when he was found.
00:33:46
It was a very courageous and brave act that he did, to pull
00:33:50
that lorry off the motorway.
00:33:52
For me, it sums Mike up.
00:33:55
It just sums him up perfectly.
00:33:58
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): As Michael
00:33:59
Little sat dying in his truck, Craig Harman is on the bridge
00:34:04
above.
00:34:05
He must have seen my brother's vehicle stop,
00:34:08
but he walked away, walked across the bridge
00:34:11
and went home.
00:34:12
If that lorry had, for example, jackknifed,
00:34:16
then the next cars to come along, the lorries to come
00:34:19
along, could well have rammed into it
00:34:20
and caused a big accident.
00:34:21
Maybe he didn't realize how serious--
00:34:25
you know, serious damage he'd done.
00:34:27
I'm sure if he'd have been thinking straight,
00:34:29
he probably wouldn't have done what he did.
00:34:31
But unfortunately, facts are, he did.
00:34:33
He killed somebody.
00:34:35
But you're not telling me he didn't see the media as to what
00:34:37
happened, especially locally, because there was so much media
00:34:41
coverage going on within that area.
00:34:44
And they didn't come forward.
00:34:47
And they knew they'd done wrong, but they didn't come forward.
00:35:04
We were just so desperately unlucky that we lost Mike,
00:35:08
but so desperately lucky that they tried
00:35:11
to break into that vehicle.
00:35:12
Because without them breaking into the vehicle,
00:35:15
he wouldn't have cut his hand.
00:35:17
And when he picked that brick up, that blood from his hand
00:35:21
went onto the brick.
00:35:22
And without the blood on the brick,
00:35:24
we wouldn't have had any DNA.
00:35:26
So you know, desperately, tragically, unlucky.
00:35:31
But thank goodness we got something out of it.
00:35:36
He had taken Mike away from us, ruined our lives.
00:35:42
So yeah, I was really, really thankful to the place, of them
00:35:47
not giving up.
00:35:50
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Craig Harman
00:35:51
is charged with the manslaughter of Michael Little.
00:35:56
Harman's case comes to trial April 2004.
00:36:01
To be honest, our prosecution case was very simple,
00:36:04
and some murder investigations are very complex.
00:36:07
But this was relatively easy to put together, in terms of we
00:36:12
have a man who was in the right location.
00:36:15
He puts himself in that location.
00:36:17
He admits throwing the brick, and we
00:36:19
have some forensic evidence to support that he's
00:36:21
been in contact with the brick.
00:36:23
He's been interviewed by the police under caution,
00:36:25
and admitted the offense.
00:36:27
So it was pretty clear cut, as far as we were concerned.
00:36:31
And it remained to be seen when he
00:36:34
went to court, whether he pleaded guilty
00:36:35
or we went to trial.
00:36:38
The case gripped the public imagination,
00:36:40
this pointless, destructive behavior that ended with a man
00:36:45
dying shocked the British public.
00:36:48
Why would somebody stand on a bridge and push a rock over it
00:36:52
to kill someone?
00:36:53
Or to risk killing them?
00:36:55
It seems utterly banal.
00:36:57
It seemed pointless.
00:36:58
I mean, people were horrified by it.
00:37:02
I remember being sat in the old Bailey
00:37:04
in the public gallery, looking down at Craig Harman,
00:37:10
and just--
00:37:12
I think I just stared at him all the way through.
00:37:16
And I pretty much got no emotion,
00:37:24
no emotion, no remorse, regret, just very stony faced.
00:37:32
Craig Harman was charged with murder
00:37:35
but later pleaded guilty to manslaughter,
00:37:39
and was convicted of manslaughter
00:37:41
and sentenced to 6 years in prison.
00:37:43
Murder is where somebody has committed
00:37:45
to kill someone in a premeditated way, planned it.
00:37:48
Manslaughter is where generally they killed
00:37:50
someone through accident.
00:37:52
Now, in this case, it's interesting.
00:37:54
Because it's thought that the brick
00:37:56
was picked up from a building site or a house or wherever.
00:37:59
And it was thought that that was used in a premeditated way.
00:38:03
That may well be the thoughts of the family,
00:38:04
but the jury found that was manslaughter.
00:38:06
In other words, he didn't necessarily mean to kill.
00:38:09
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): To Michael's family,
00:38:11
Harman's sentence seems too lenient.
00:38:14
The defense had asked to take it down to manslaughter.
00:38:18
And the police had a good old chat with Sue and I, and said,
00:38:23
if we don't accept manslaughter, he could get away with nothing.
00:38:27
And we couldn't allow that to happen.
00:38:30
So we had to go with the manslaughter.
00:38:32
The family were obviously very disappointed
00:38:35
that Michael's life seemed to only be worth 6 years,
00:38:39
but in legal terms, that was what it was.
00:38:42
And the fact that he'd already spent a year in custody
00:38:47
meant that he only did the 2 years.
00:38:52
You know, 2 years for a whole life?
00:38:56
It's just wrong, very wrong.
00:38:58
I can never forgive that person for taking Mike away.
00:39:04
It took him away from me, from Sarah, and from all his family,
00:39:09
and his friends.
00:39:10
Because he was loved by everyone.
00:39:13
And he's now out living his life.
00:39:18
I take comfort from the fact that every day this guy thinks
00:39:23
about what he did, and he's got to live with that
00:39:26
for the rest of his life.
00:39:26
Yeah, we've got to live with the fact
00:39:29
that we've lost Mike for the rest of our lives,
00:39:32
but he's got to live with what he did.
00:39:35
My brother was such a huge, huge personality,
00:39:41
that the void he's left will never, ever be replaced.
00:39:45
Never.
00:39:46
16 and a half years on, it's still raw.
00:39:49
You think, yeah, yeah, time heals,
00:39:52
but you just never get over it.
00:39:56
Just never get over it.
00:39:57
There's always something that brings it back
00:40:00
to the forefront of your mind.
00:40:03
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): While the death of Michael Little
00:40:05
is devastating for his family and friends,
00:40:08
the case demonstrates the incredible capabilities
00:40:11
and potential of familial DNA.
00:40:16
I was pleased that the science worked.
00:40:18
I was pleased that justice had been served,
00:40:20
but somebody was dead.
00:40:22
And a family was in mourning, and somebody was
00:40:25
going to lose their liberty.
00:40:26
It's always mixed emotions in those cases.
00:40:29
This technique was used and was spectacularly successful.
00:40:32
And I still maintain today that without familial DNA,
00:40:36
this case would never have been detected.
00:40:38
We would never have identified the person
00:40:40
that threw that brick.
00:40:41
We would never have known how or why Michael Little died.
00:40:47
To this day, Michael Little's family
00:40:50
wonders whether Craig Harman got the sentence he deserved.
00:40:53
Harman, drunk at the time, made a stupid split
00:40:57
second decision that took a precious family
00:41:00
member away forever.
00:41:02
While he's out of jail now, he will live with his crime
00:41:06
for the rest of his life.
00:41:08
In the end, if it wasn't for the bloodline detectives
00:41:11
and their use of familial DNA, the Littles
00:41:14
may have never known the identity of the man
00:41:17
responsible for Michael's death.
00:41:28
[THEME MUSIC]
