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Derek Severs and his wife Eileen who are in their 60s. >> Half away from the home of Derek and
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Eileen Severs who disappeared about 3 weeks ago. >> Resumed their search for Derek and
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Eileen Severs who vanished without trace from their home in Hamilton. Despite a detailed search for a missing couple by
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police and hundreds of volunteers, it was the information found in some dirt which led police to their whereabouts.
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[Music] Derek and Eileen Severs were a wealthy retired couple who lived a life of
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English leisure in Hamilton, a small village about a 2-hour drive from London. The village sits on a narrow peninsula
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that juts out into rutland water, one of Europe's largest man-made lakes. The woods and the lake make it a popular
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vacation destination, and the severs had been living here for the past 20 years in a home known locally as the bungalow.
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Derek Severs had been retired for the past few years and was well known and well-liked among neighbors of the small
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village. Doug Clemens lived next door to the Severs. >> I'd never met a better man than Derek
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Severs. He liked a bit of horse racing and he loved a pint of beer. Derek's wife Eileene was equally wellknown not
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only as a volunteer for many local charities, but also as a kind and generous friend and neighbor.
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>> Mrs. Se was one of those people who spent all her time visiting people,
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doing things for charity. She was always seen. Everybody liked her. >> Saturday afternoon, November 13th, 1993,
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was the last time friends saw Derek Severs. He was having lunch and a few pints of
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ale here at the Finch's Arms Pub. Friends said Derek left the pub around 3:30 that afternoon, got into his car,
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and was headed straight home. Eileen Severs was last seen on that same afternoon. She left this church after
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attending a charity bazaar she helped organize. Eileen told friends she too was headed home.
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5 days later, after the severs both missed some previously scheduled appointments, friends called the police.
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This is the sort of place where if you're missing for a couple of hours, people want to know why.
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>> Police immediately drove out to the sever's home. >> The missing couple's 37year-old son,
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Roger, answered the door. >> Derek and Eileen Severs. Well, >> mom and dad are on holiday in London.
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>> Would you mind if I had a look around then? >> Police took a quick look around the
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house. >> Thank you. [Music] There's no sign of a breakin. There's no
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sign of uh anything wrong inside the house. >> By which you mean there's no sign of a
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struggle or anything? >> No, nothing at all. >> But friends weren't convinced that
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everything was all right. The severs had never gone away without first cancelling
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their scheduled appointments. >> It was not in their nature to go away without making arrangements to talk,
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telling people they were going away. They weren't the sort of couple who would disappear without telling friends.
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They would always say, "Look, we we're popping out. Look after our house."
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Because that's the sort of village that it was. >> Derek at times he did go away. He used
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to leave me in charge. He'd say, "Look after the garden." >> And neighbors said it was unusual for
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Derek and Eileen Severs to ask their son Roger to housesit. Roger was a disappointment to his parents. He was
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unemployed and had the reputation of being a con man. Once telling a girlfriend that he was a gynecologist.
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When police heard these stories, they decided to take a closer look around the Severs home.
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6 days after friends last saw Derek and Eene Severs, the police decided to make a second visit to the Severs home. This
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time in daylight, the officers noticed that the backyard had recently been excavated and there were signs of a fire
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in the garden. >> And looking through the windows, we could see this kitchen carpet was
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missing, but it didn't add up. So, we decided that we'd use the police powers
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to go into the bungalow to have a further search. >> Roger Severs told police that his
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parents left for London from the Peterbar train station. Police went to the train station armed
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with a photograph of the severs. They asked the employees and regular passengers if they had seen the couple.
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>> Mr. Seis was this very big man who walked very badly with the aid of a stick. And we thought that if anybody
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had seen them, they would rem >> But no one at the train station recalled seeing the severs. And police found no
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evidence they even made it to London. Already local newspapers ran headlines about the sever's mysterious
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disappearance. The police suspected foul play and decided to conduct a forensic search for blood inside the sever's
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home. Detectives noticed some suspicious dark stains on the side of the bathtub and performed a castle meer test. A damp
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cotton swab is used to wipe the stain and then some pheninoalene and hydrogen peroxide are added. The sample of the
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stain found on the bathtub turned a bright pink, a positive presumptive test for the presence of blood.
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>> The fact we'd found blood didn't necessarily prove conclusively that it
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come from a violent action. They could have Ro, one of them could have cut themselves in the bathroom. Anything
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could have happened. >> Police also noticed a blood smear on the back seat of Derek Sever's automobile
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and the Castlemeer test confirmed that stains on the garage door were indeed blood spatter. Police noticed something
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else that was suspicious. They found a large number of green fibers in the hallway inside the house in the trunk of
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Mr. Sever's automobile and on a pair of trousers believed to be Rogers. The fibers were an important clue
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because they did not match any items inside the house. This was an indication that the source of the fibers had
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recently been removed. >> The actual item itself was missing. So that if it as were the two severs, Mr.
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and Mrs. Severs. So logic tells you that it's gone with the two. It's part of the
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crime scene. >> The police were convinced that the severs had been the victims of foul play
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and suspected that Roger Severs knew more about his parents' whereabouts than
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he was telling them. Investigators believed that Roger Severs was involved with his parents'
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disappearance, but they had no proof that a crime had been committed and had no hard evidence suggesting where their
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bodies might be. The search for the severs began in their own backyard since it appeared that the gardens had
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recently been excavated and there had also been some kind of fire. You need a very, very big fire to dispose of
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bodies, and there's no way they could have been disposed of on there. >> The police didn't find any human
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remains, but they did find small bits of carpet and clothing in the ashes. >> It was like looking for a needle in a
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hay stack because all around there is rural. There's huge expanse of water, lots of forest, trees, woods, um, open
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fields. How on earth do you find a body there? Just when all of these searches turned
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up, no clues, police finally got a break. They learned of a strange event which occurred before the severs were even
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reported missing. A police officer on patrol recalled seeing a man in an isolated area called
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the Xton Avenue Woods. Is there something wrong, sir? >> The man matched Roger Sever's
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description. >> I just needed to relieve myself and then I decided to gather some leaf over to
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the garden. >> Well, then move along when you're ready. >> We'll do so, officer. Good night.
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>> The officer said the man acted suspiciously. >> Well, any gardener, any autoiculturist
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will tell you, you don't want leaf mold the end in November. It's not the time
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of the year you're going to collect it and certainly not half past 6 at night.
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So we we assumed something had occurred up in in the Exton Avenue woods there. So off we went to have a look.
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[Music] When they returned to the area a few days later, they found a bloody towel
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near the spot where the man was seen collecting leaves, but the police could find no evidence
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that the bodies were buried there. We uh did a fingertip search of the entire area and we never ever recovered
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any further evidence from that scene. >> The towel matched those in the Sever's
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house, but without blood samples for Mr. and Mrs. Severs, it was difficult to know to whom the blood belonged.
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>> It was challenging rather than frustrating. We we we wanted to find the
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bodies for two reasons. one evidential obviously and secondly of course we you know I think it's only right and proper
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if there's been a murder we want the bodies for the relatives and everyone else you know it's only right that we
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should be able to find them >> late one night inspector Palmer studied the photographs of the sever's
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automobile as he flipped through the photographs something unusual caught his eye something suspicious about the dirt
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and mud on Mr. Sever's car. The color of the mud just didn't look right.
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>> This staining was a lot lighter in color than you would expect from a vehicle on
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road usage. Generally speaking, a vehicle on road usage, it's a very dark black, dark gray, dirty color. This was
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a lot lighter color. >> Was it possible that an analysis of the dried mud on the car might give police
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some idea of where the car had been? To find out, detectives called in Dr. Tony Brown, a geologist at the University of
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Exit. Dr. Brown began his examination by collecting the soil, dirt, grass, and debris from the wheel wells of Derek
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Sever's automobile. Under a microscope, Dr. Brown analyzed the samples and discovered tiny bits of
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vegetation mixed in with the mud, including minute pieces of moss, leaves, and grass. There was even a small piece
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of fishing line. >> It told us that it was a mixed deciduous woodland, probably oak dominated, but
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with also what several other species. It was clearly quite uh shady. the moss could only come from a a little shaded
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woodland and there was also a fair amount of grass. Uh and at first that might seem to contradict the woodland,
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but that's likely to occur either at the edge of a clearing in a woodland or
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towards the edge of a woodland. And of course, the the fishing line suggested it was the somewhere that fishermen
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parked. >> And Dr. Brown discovered another microscopic clue. More than 20 different
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types of pollen were mixed in with the mud from the wheel well. Pollen is a fine powder-like material which is
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produced by trees and plant life. It functions as the male seed in fertilization.
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To identify the pollen, Dr. Brown needed to isolate the microscopic pollen granules from the soil. First by using a
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series of filters, and then by adding hydrofluoric acid, a chemical so powerful it can dissolve glass. The acid
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dissolves away all remaining materials, leaving just the pollen. Dr. Brown was able to identify most of the pollen in
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the sample. Oak, elm, and pollen from hawthors were easy to identify just by sight. However, he noticed one type of
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pollen he had never seen before. >> I knew that I didn't know what it was.
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And then after that, of course, we we run through the the normal process of of identifying an unknown pollen type.
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>> There are millions of different species of pollen. Dr. Brown looked closely at
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the number and placement of the tiny slits and compared them to the thousands of photographs of pollen samples in his
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library. After looking through scores of samples, Dr. Brown found a match. The pollen was from an unusual specimen from
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a tree not terribly common in England. It was pollen from a horse chestnut tree. a tree native to Asia.
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>> In my whole career of looking at samples from the East Midlands, I'd never
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actually seen horse chestnut pollen from a sample. >> And there was something else unusual
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about the pollen from the horse chestnut tree. It's a heavy pollen. And because
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of its weight, it's too heavy to travel far through the air. It tends to float
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straight down to the ground very close to the tree itself. Since Dr. Brown found horse chestnut pollen in all four
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of the rover's wheel arches, he was convinced that the car had recently been
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parked near a horse chestnut tree. Police asked Dr. Brown to identify possible locations that had horse
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chestnut trees as well as other vegetation matching the samples found in the sever's wheel wells. Dr. Brown
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identified five possible locations to search. The first woodland searched was this one, the closest to the sever's
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home, but an entire day of looking here turned up nothing. Next, they searched the second area Dr. Brown identified a
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larger woodland near the lake. Specially trained search teams worked their way down this hill. When an officer poked a
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stick into one of the mounds, he found it to be unexpectedly soft. He cleared away some leaves and loose soil to
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reveal a patch of human skin. Police slowly uncovered the bodies of Eileene and Derek Severs. Ironically, they were
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found lying on a bed of horse chestnuts. Just a few feet away stood a horse chestnut tree.
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>> They were lying side by side. Uh, and both of them were wrapped in a green
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blankets. >> Fibers in the green blanket matched the green fibers found in the Severs hallway
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and on the trousers that belonged to Roger Severs. The top layer of leaves and soil was similar to the soil found
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at the Exton Avenue woods where Roger Severs had been seen by police. Another layer of soil matched the soil in the
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Sever's backyard. There was even a layer of roof tiles to stabilize the grave.
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The tiles matched the roof tiles on the Sever's home. Roger was then tied into
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every step of the progression from the murder to the burial. >> All of the evidence pointed to the
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sever's only son, Roger, who had a history of personal and financial difficulties.
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>> He was basically penniless, certainly uh hard up and we believe that he had turned up at the bungalow and
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maybe for the first time, we don't know, had been refused help by his parents.
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What? What? What do you mean too much? >> On Saturday afternoon, November 13th,
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while his father was at the pub, Roger argued with his mother in the kitchen. He followed her to the bathroom and
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attacked, striking her eight times to the head, causing the blood spatter found on the bathtub.
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[Music] Roger then wrapped his mother's body in a green blanket, dragged her body to the
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kitchen, leaving a trail of green fibers found in the hallway and on Roger's
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trousers. [Music] Derek Severs arrived home shortly afterwards, and when he did, Roger was waiting.
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He struck his father 10 times in the head, causing the blood spatter onto the garage door.
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Roger placed his father's body into the back seat of the car, where police later
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noticed the blood smear, and he put his mother's body in the trunk, where green
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blanket fibers were later discovered. [Music] Roger drove his father's car to a
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deserted location in the woods, parked under a horse chestnut tree in an area used by fishermen, and then dragged the
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bodies into the woods. Roger wanted to limit the time he spent at the scene. So instead of digging a
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grave, he placed the bodies into a ravine and covered them with roofing tiles, fertilizer, and leaves. But the
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most important piece of evidence came as Roger was driving away. Pollen from the nearby horse chestnut
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tree flew up into the wheel wells of the automobile. Roger Severs could never have imagined that this pollen would
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lead police to his parents' grave. Roger Severs was charged in the murder of his parents and during the trial took
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the witness stand and confessed. His plea for leniency failed and he was sentenced to life in prison. The wife
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and I, we lost two good friends. And life's never been the same since. I embarked on something which I saw as
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being rather simplistic. Link this vehicle with those man-made roads. That was all I wanted. I got a lot more. A
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lot more. And hopefully that's going to help a lot of people, investigators in
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the future. >> Well, I think that the police now are certainly far more aware of the value of
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what otherwise might just be described as mud. [Music] [Applause] [Music]