00:00:04
[Music] [Music] [Music] jeur road is one of the main thoroughfares in the little enclav of
00:00:44
Brook green which sits between Hammer Smith and Shepherd's Bush Brook green which is an extremely well-to-do part of
00:00:52
West Kensington a very nice part of West London it's made up of uh wide avenu
00:00:58
treelined streets with um Victorian three-story buildings it's a very desirable place to live a popular place
00:01:06
with families it I would say it is fairly affluent the houses in the area uh particularly on deur road probably
00:01:13
one of the smartest roads in Brook green are probably worth on average 1.5 to3 [Music]
00:01:21
million on the 21st of October William swordens and Smith sets up a meeting with his personal assistant and his
00:01:29
personal assistant attends the meeting but William doesn't show his personal
00:01:33
assistant is concerned and when he can't reach him so he goes round to his property in jeur
00:01:41
road which he has keys to and it's when he lets himself into the property that
00:01:46
he finds his body in the Attic room when he discovers William's body he sees quite a lot of blood around him and
00:01:58
a injury to his head and at that point he goes out to try and find some help and he sees one of the
00:02:06
neighbors and they call 999 we were informed of this case in October of 2011 and my team was actually
00:02:16
on call for that particular week I received a call sometime after 4:00 on the 21st to say that um they had
00:02:27
received information that a male had been found in his attic bedroom the problem for us was that the
00:02:33
property although it was high in value at some in the origion of 2.3 million it was actually a very difficult un tidy
00:02:41
scene for my officers to manage your basement your ground floor your first floor and it also had an
00:02:49
artic we had to therefore decide that we were going to do certain rooms because where we felt we were likely to
00:02:56
establish where we knew that he would set up shop with his laptop top where we would eat and all those type of stuff we
00:03:02
concentrated in that area to see if we could find stuff and then we would work our way through other parts of the
00:03:09
building my understanding from the the crime scene manager was when they went into the attic room they identified uh
00:03:16
the victim line on the floor he had what appeared to be significant blunt trauma
00:03:21
injuries to his head the police were confronted with a with a a shocking uh murder scene when
00:03:28
they arrived they was certainly a fairly gruesome scene that officers were confronted by and at that point it was a
00:03:35
murder investigation a contact Direct messaged me a picture of uh some police tape uh
00:03:43
and a tent in duur road so I immediately headed down to the [Music] scene when we find ourselves in a set of
00:03:53
circumstances we're in a murder investigation the the golden hour is the the first thing we think of we want to
00:03:59
preserve this scene to make sure that the investigation is certainly on a good footing going forward this was obviously
00:04:05
a story of Interest it was in a in an affluent area it was a man seemingly attacked for no reason in a very
00:04:13
expensive house we were going to have to obviously go through his home with a fine tooth
00:04:20
comb and try and see if we could find anything that would give us some leeway even the weapon we knew could have been
00:04:26
left at the address because the home was in such an untiy state State the place was in chaos uh there
00:04:37
was rubbish everywhere Rubble forensics team um would be looking to establish the circumstances of of of the
00:04:48
attack they will be looking for any blood stains that they found in their dress because not only is there a
00:04:54
possibility the blood stains could relate to the victim they could have also related to The Suspect
00:05:01
there would have been an awful lot of opportunity for us to identify the suspect possibly the weapon and ex and
00:05:08
establish the facts as to what happened I FID to remember it because one of the officers said to the and I
00:05:16
think he was going to say they had um found the weapon or something like that the officer opened a particular bag and
00:05:23
it came across WS of cash and I said to him so are we talking1 200 and he said no thousands so
00:05:37
I said a thousand he said no [Music] thousands the extraordinary thing about Williams living situation at the time
00:05:45
was amidst all the chaos and the rubbish and the building work and the rubble there were bags of cash the police
00:05:52
clearly uh realized that this was uh a robbery uh murder in the in the course of a Breakin A burglary uh and it must
00:06:01
have been carried out by people who knew that serson Smith kept hundreds of thousands of pounds um in his in his
00:06:09
property and were determined to find the police were able in fact to find best part of a quarter of a million uh pounds
00:06:18
hidden in The Loft which the uh the murders had not found themselves they then found another £100,000 in cash in
00:06:26
uh another property in Brompton um indicating that uh this is exactly what uh serson Smith did with his money one
00:06:35
of the things I was concerned about I didn't want the finding of a significant
00:06:39
amount of cash to jeopardize the Integrity of the investigation or the Integrity of the officers concerned as
00:06:47
far as I was concerned at that moment in time we had a set process that we would
00:06:51
follow we need recover large amounts of cash so we brought the unit in for them to photograph it video the what was
00:06:58
happening take that cash away but I knew that it was going to put the investigation back by a Maybe a day
00:07:07
or two simply because we then had to go through that particular area where the cash was found to make sure there was no
00:07:15
other bags of money that were there and we had to do it meticulously so it was a
00:07:19
challenge of course the first thing I wanted to know was who was this man most occasions when you go to a SE
00:07:29
or you make inquiries with a victim you normally have family members who can give you some victimology about the
00:07:36
individual concern William saunderson Smith was somebody who lived on his own there's
00:07:43
very little background information about William sord and Smith we identified Neighbors on either side of where um the
00:07:52
victim lived he's described as a bit of a loner his neighbors describe that he's
00:07:57
outwardly very friendly to them but they know nothing about him from a very early
00:08:03
stage we were well aware that the victim was somebody who was a recluse he didn't
00:08:08
really have much contact with his family members I think what's interesting about
00:08:14
this case is the lack of information it's it's quite rare for police to go to a case where they have
00:08:22
absolutely nothing to go on in this case there's very few people who know this man and the people who do
00:08:30
know him know very little about him so it was an incredibly difficult job for the police to um put a case together so
00:08:38
it was going to now be what was recovered from the scene we retrieve correspondence so it was a question of
00:08:44
now going through those items we want to build up a picture of the victim and when we look through for papers and
00:08:52
documentation there was scant information to suggest that he had at least two properties in West London one
00:08:58
was worth at least 2.3 the other one probably as much but we also then found out that he had properties in Spain and
00:09:08
in Australia I think we need to understand just how rich this man was this man was
00:09:15
a multi-millionaire when police started investigating uh serson Smith murder the
00:09:22
really interesting aspect of this case was that he was a secret multi-millionaire so this was a man who
00:09:29
was absolutely not short of cash and was probably worth upwards of5 six million he was a wealthy man he managed to
00:09:37
contact a family member and that family member basically told us that um the victim had um his father had died when
00:09:45
he was 8 years of age and that shortly after that his mother went into a mental institution for an 8-year-old child
00:09:54
that's going to be immensely difficult there could be huge attachment issues a
00:09:59
huge uge sense of loss he lost his father but also he lost his mother and he goes to live with a
00:10:06
cousin but we can imagine that for an 8-year-old child that would have been a really scary and lonely time we could
00:10:14
hypothesize that because he didn't have his parents around he didn't have any
00:10:19
siblings and he could only rely on this cousin that he lived with and and that their family in that he began to rely on
00:10:26
himself certainly serson Smith never forgot got the kindness of the family uh who were distant uh relatives cousins
00:10:33
who had brought him up he was extremely generous to the to that family and he would support them
00:10:41
financially uh very quickly very openly and he would uh be particularly generous
00:10:46
as they would remember uh with presents for the children at Christmas [Music] it wasn't long before the gravity and
00:11:05
the the savagery uh of the crime became clear it was established that he had at least nine blunt trauma injuries to his
00:11:13
head and there were significant enough to have caused his death and the fact that it was nine blows that seems
00:11:20
excessive in some ways but it's certainly not overkilled the coroner's view was that it was more than likely a
00:11:28
heavy blunt strument possibly a hammer or some other instrument in the early stages of the
00:11:36
investigation there really was no obvious suspect there was no obvious reason why anybody would commit such a
00:11:43
Savage act against a seemingly kind gentle maybe lonely man but what on Earth had William done to deserve
00:11:56
this we established that he was a landlord stroke property developer having evicted his tenent William moved
00:12:04
into the property in Dew Hurst Road around August of that year and he was actually living in the Attic whilst the
00:12:11
extensive Renovations were going on sonis Smith was uh an enigma a very complicated complex man uh who lived a
00:12:21
life of which seemed to be just a massive contradictions on the face of it he was almost like a [ __ ] he uh uh was
00:12:29
a shambling figure he dressed shab and he lived in a in a a tiny attic bedroom um which doubled as also as his office
00:12:37
in his dining room but the fact was he was an extremely wealthy man he actually owned the building in which he lived in
00:12:44
a tiny part of um he was uh a ruthless I would say uh businessman uh and yet he had none other trappings of wealth he
00:12:54
had two significant properties in West London one which he was renovating and was living at and the other address he
00:13:01
rented out another address that he used to stay at we knew that it was going to be a
00:13:08
fingertip search of the venue and other things which would probably support us ultimately establishing what
00:13:16
happened and we recovered somewhere in the region of £335,000 worth of cash which in the time that I was on the
00:13:26
murder team or I was a police officer I had never never been involved in recovering that amount of
00:13:32
money so police were at first baffled as to why such large amounts of cash were being kept at these properties but it
00:13:39
seemed became clear that he wasn't a man that did things in an orthodox manner we
00:13:44
found this cash it doesn't necessarily mean that someone went into the address
00:13:49
to take that cash because the cash was still there so let's just park that for
00:13:54
a second and say to ourselves let's find out a bit more about the individual
00:13:59
with most investigation you want to establish the when where what why and [Music]
00:14:07
who when William started working in property in London he was described as quite an unscrupulous landlord we knew
00:14:15
from having spoken to some of his tenants that he had taken what they described as significant
00:14:24
amounts of deposit from them and that he only wanted to um be paid in cash he would choose tenants that were
00:14:37
temporary students uh foreigners who were traveling and he would give people very
00:14:44
short notice when he wanted them to leave again this could be explained in that he didn't have a need for close
00:14:51
relationships and friendships we can only assume that the way he managed his money in his businesses come comes from
00:15:00
the trauma that he suffered as a child we found a very minimal amount of Records or papers that we could find
00:15:10
about his business but that was you know easy for us to establish and say right he didn't want the tax man to be aware
00:15:19
of his income and therefore everything was done in cash it meant that the taxman was not aware of actually how
00:15:26
much he was worth I think when we understand millionaires there's many different types of millionaires and we
00:15:32
can't categorize them as as one uh identity there's millionaires who have
00:15:38
had generational wealth there's new millionaires something that we do see sometimes in new millionaires is that
00:15:46
there's a tendency to be more flamboyant with their money because it's new and
00:15:51
exciting um with wian we don't see that he is relatively new to having such wealth but he certainly doesn't flash
00:16:00
his cash serson Smith was clearly a um a very successful businessman a very astute businessman a man capable of uh
00:16:11
buying low and selling High which is the The Secret of of business success he was
00:16:17
able to convert houses update Flats um very quickly uh because he employed um cheap labor uh often e European uh labor
00:16:30
who had come to London perhaps uh under the radar uh and were skilled build Builders but prepared to work for cash
00:16:39
in hand William has found an assistant through Gumtree to help him with his business Affairs and his
00:16:46
finances he's made Millions from property that's not easy to do however despite that he makes a lot of very
00:16:56
dubious decisions he hides money he doesn't pay tax his lifestyle and his presentation and his living environments
00:17:06
don't represent a multi-millionaire but something that I find quite interesting with William is
00:17:15
that although he was obsessed with making more and more money and keeping cash he didn't seem to enjoy
00:17:22
it I think it's really interesting that he hides so much money on one hand we
00:17:28
could say it's simply to evade tax but it also presents in a way that many older people used to hide money in their
00:17:36
houses and that's because they were a generation who didn't Trust Banks it
00:17:41
feels almost like that this is a man who doesn't trust people we always had in the back of our
00:17:48
mind the question of could it have been a tenant who he upset or was it uh some other business relationship that went
00:17:57
wrong once we took a view that it was going to be a who done it and it was going to take a a a fair degree of
00:18:03
detective work to establish the facts actually it's a challenge we saw it as a
00:18:12
challenge who would have perpetrated such a terrible crime within the first 24 hours of that
00:18:20
investigation the crime scene manager would take control or responsibility for the crime scene we couldn't find the we
00:18:29
anywhere on the premises the circumstances as to um why he was attacked and who attacked him um we
00:18:35
still were no way further forward the police had to study the CCTV uh uh from that area uh first of all to
00:18:47
find out uh when this murder must have taken place uh and they were able to pin it down uh from 7:00 uh of the previous
00:18:57
night uh to w when he was uh discovered the following afternoon once they' established that time frame they
00:19:04
re-examined the CCTV looking for possible suspects in that street once we were looking at the CCTV we were able to
00:19:13
identify what I would describe as some grainy footage on the night that we believe the attack took place of a car
00:19:20
pulling up on the opposite side of the road about a 100 yards up from where the victim lived and you could see at least
00:19:27
two people leaving the vehicle and then walking onto the opposite side of the road and walking in the direction of
00:19:34
where the victim lived because it was grainy um we weren't able to establish exactly the
00:19:45
full description of the individual's concern but during the hous to house inquiries we identified Neighbors on
00:19:53
either side of where um the victim lived who said they can recall in the early hours of the morning he hearing what
00:19:59
this sounded like people shouting and what sounded like people running up and down the steps we obviously had an
00:20:07
opportunity to get hold of some expert advice they took photographs during the nighttime and they also took photographs
00:20:14
during the day and then they brought in a specialist team who were able to say right following the movements of those
00:20:21
individuals as they're heading towards what we believe is a victim's address
00:20:25
based on the photographs that were also taken we could establish Beyond doubt that they must have gone into the
00:20:32
victim's address we subsequently found footage that that vehicle was actually seen
00:20:38
driving around in the area of the victim to dress a lot earlier on in the in the
00:20:45
evening in addition to that we were also able to establish roughly the make the color and the model of the vehicle
00:20:52
concerned further CCTV footage was Unearthed which showed that the vehicle was a gold Land Rover
00:20:59
and it was circling Williams house as if they were casing the joint and even more
00:21:04
so my colleague actually established that there was a dent to the near side of the vehicle and that was very
00:21:10
significant because it meant that if and when we recover the vehicle we would be
00:21:14
able to say conclusively whether or not that was a vehicle concerned when searching officers are at
00:21:24
a crime scene particularly a murder is they're going to be trying to seek out
00:21:27
is a phone of the victim simply because there could be so much information on there that could direct the
00:21:34
investigation towards potentially the suspects and towards potentially a motive for why the murder
00:21:41
happened everyone has a mobile phone but when you have your mobile phone you leave a trace somewhere you leave an
00:21:49
information as to when you've used your phone and where you've used it and who
00:21:52
you've contacted we recovered 67 different mobile phones don't think we had any other
00:22:00
investigation when we recovered 67 phones what phones were we going to prioritize that wasn't an easy decision
00:22:07
to make so my view was we're going to have to look at every single one of those
00:22:12
phones so every single phone would need to be examined examined to see is it live is there a SIM card in it when was
00:22:20
it last used what is on it what messages photographs anything that is stored on it we couldn't not look at all of them
00:22:30
because knowing your luck sometimes the the ones you don't look at there's going
00:22:33
to be something on there this would have been a huge task and it would have been
00:22:37
down to a laboratory to go through these phones one at a time reporting back to the investigators about exactly what was
00:22:45
on it we had submitted at least 67 mobile phones for um investigations to be done
00:22:53
on [Music] them in 2011 when these phones would been seized and sent to what's known as
00:23:01
the phone laboratory what that essentially is it's a it's a room full of computers full of phone technicians
00:23:09
who will take each handset attach it to a computer and use software to download it so where we call it a laboratory
00:23:17
there's nobody in white coats but that's the technical name for it after weeks of
00:23:23
plowing through the phones and it was down to I think the the 67th phone that there was a text that was sent by the
00:23:32
victim to someone about two months previous to his death and that is the starting point of when we did the
00:23:39
inquiries to establish who that text was sent [Music] to was it relationship that he was
00:23:46
having we also knew that he he he regularly frequented gay bars in London but when we delved into it we found that
00:23:54
there was nothing to suggest that he had a partner or anything like that the only
00:23:58
question is is whether or not he had met somebody there brought them back to the
00:24:01
flat and then that individual attacked him so we had an open mind and we were looking at different possibilities as to
00:24:08
why he was killed forensics then came across a discovery that would change the course
00:24:21
of the entire investigation a fingerprint on a sash window on the ground floor of the house
00:24:30
so once the Mark had been lifted the the first thing we had to establish is that
00:24:34
it didn't belong to the victim and after the the results came back the next question had to be therefore who did it
00:24:42
actually belong to the initial mark on the window sash was identified at an early stage within
00:24:51
the first 24 hours those officers who were dealing with that part of the the forensic um analysis they're seasoned
00:24:59
campaigners and the information they provided me with at the time was that the Mark was
00:25:04
fresh because the The Ridges and everything were obvious but by the time that Mark is
00:25:11
then lifted and is then submitted to the forensic lab for analysis it's looking at Beyond 72 hours
00:25:19
before we established that it belonged to somebody called David Rymer ryar was identified as a result of a hit
00:25:32
on the police national computer database having come to the attention of police in the past that was a significant
00:25:40
identification so at that point we're thinking is David ryar a suspect or is
00:25:45
he a person of interest or is he just going to be a witness the police were able to identify
00:25:51
the phone that William sent the text to having looked at the phone data we established that the the the text that
00:25:57
was sent by the victim was actually sent David rhy So as an investigator as a detective
00:26:05
it can be hugely satisfying where suddenly all that evidence starts to come together we were then able to piece
00:26:14
together that that individual was someone who was known to the victim in terms of um working for
00:26:21
him so at that point we were thinking right we're off and running because we
00:26:26
were going to try and establish the circumstan as to why David rayar's finger marks were found on the sash
00:26:34
window on whether or not he could explain that set of [Music] circumstances the victim had an
00:26:45
assistant and he was able to impart to us certain information that he had polish Builders who he normally used and
00:26:52
he normally paid them in cash the personal assistant was aware that the builders weren't particularly Happ happy
00:26:58
because they didn't feel that he was paying them the correct [Music] amount so in relation to David ryar
00:27:08
officers were deputed to go to the address that we identified he was living at to make inquiries to see whether or
00:27:15
not they could identify whether he lived there when the officers attended that address they spoke to his girlfriend as
00:27:22
well as the landlord they established that ryar hadn't been seen at the address for a
00:27:30
week also it became apparent that he had two friends who he worked with one was called slir bugaj jeski and the other
00:27:39
was called iru Midlock it became apparent to us very quickly after that once their addresses
00:27:47
were visited that they were also not living at that point at there was address anymore and had it moved back to
00:27:55
Poland in relation to David rimar slir bugaj jeski and irin midad those individuals were known to
00:28:05
each other they had no other contact with the victim other than they were people who carried out um renovation
00:28:13
work to the properties that he had those individuals had known each other for some time and were all of Polish
00:28:20
extraction the three suspects had been Williams preferred builders for many years on his raft of properties but it
00:28:26
soon became clear that they felt under paid and undervalued and that was a potential motive for their crime even
00:28:33
though the mark on the saswi belonged to David ryar we knew that there was always
00:28:37
a possibility that he could have had legitimate access to that property when we're talking about
00:28:45
suspects what's important there is particularly the movement often what you will see in Murder investigations
00:28:52
involving a number of suspects is the phones starting to come together to the point where they're all there at the
00:28:58
crime scene at the time of a murder and then you see them leave leaving together
00:29:03
leaving the crime scene and going off in whatever Direction they're going to
00:29:09
go we obviously had the phone data know that was going to establish even more significant facts because the
00:29:15
information that we got from the phone data established that those three individuals their phones were actually
00:29:22
triangulated actually in the vicinity of the scene on the night in question we were able to establish that they had
00:29:28
visited the address with ryar they knew of the victim so the association was quite easy for us they worked as a
00:29:39
group in a case where you have multiple suspects looking at their interactions in and around when a crime was committed
00:29:45
the communications on phones is really important when you looked at their phone data there was regular communication
00:29:52
between them before the attack on the attack and even after the attack so they knew one another so rayar's phone was
00:29:59
used to phone bugaj jeski and midad shortly before and after the event with more now being known about
00:30:09
the long-term relationship between William and his Builders there was speculation that the suspects have
00:30:14
perhaps discovered the money that William was keeping in his home and that was the motivation behind their
00:30:21
crime when bukaj jesi's address was visited in Acton we established that the
00:30:28
vehicle we believe that was driving around before the attack and seen certainly positioned close to the
00:30:36
victim's address on the night that that vehicle was actually still parked outside bugaj
00:30:43
jesis although the police suspect wasn't there the gold Land Rover was we couldn't have asked for anything
00:30:52
more significant once we have established that that vehicle um was still outside the address so that was
00:30:58
vehicle was taken away for forensic examination we are then at that point what 3 weeks into the investigation and
00:31:08
we know that we are on the right [Music] track given all the information that we
00:31:17
had at this stage we had identified what I would describe as our Prime suspects David rimar slavomir bugaj jeski and
00:31:26
irin new midad were the people that we were focusing on so we were able to triangulate and get them back at the
00:31:33
address and on top of that there was also phone data to say that the mini cab had been called by by one of them and
00:31:41
that the cab then ultimately picked up bu jeski and midad and they were heading in the direction of Victoria code
00:31:51
station so essentially every time a phone connects to a cell Mast that will leave some kind of footprint what
00:31:59
sometimes criminals don't understand is that you yourself don't have to have
00:32:05
instigated that transaction between your phone and a cell tower for instance if you have apps running on your phone they
00:32:13
could be running in a background connec to a cell tower and you're completely
00:32:17
oblivious to this in this case what the police were able to identify is that after the
00:32:25
murder the suspects left the country they went to Victoria and from Victoria went to
00:32:33
Paris the fact that the suspects are in Paris makes this now an international case there's evidence located showing
00:32:41
pictures of them in Paris at the Eiffel Tower spending money on designer Goods so these are three men who have taken
00:32:50
the life of a man once they leave Paris they then flee to Poland all three were spending an awful lot of
00:33:00
cash far more cash than you would have expected from someone hardworking Builder uh to have in hand looking at
00:33:08
the behavior of the suspects it's really quite interesting they are fleeing to
00:33:13
the place that they feel safe Poland they know once they're there they will feel safe and they'll be protected where
00:33:19
they think they will never be caught they are so arrogant that they will get away with this they know this man had no
00:33:26
friends they know he was ler all we had to now do is find out conclusively where
00:33:32
they were in Poland and then consider International arrest warrants to then bring them back to the UK for them to be
00:33:45
arrested as part of of a murder team investigation you always are going to find that there are challenging moments
00:33:54
we've identified who we believe are the suspects but there are not within touching distance in terms of
00:34:01
arresting them because they've fled the country so we knew that that was therefore going to be a bit of a
00:34:06
hindrance because when you go for International arrest warrants those things take time they're very
00:34:11
bureaucratic um and therefore it could be 2 three four even longer could be could be months before we actually got
00:34:19
hold of them and brought them back to the the UK in the background we're going
00:34:23
to do something quite straightforward which is we had the telephone numbers we know the had their phones so why not
00:34:29
ring them but there's nothing stopping us from ringing them and say as we did
00:34:33
this is the Metropolitan Police there's an investigation of murder that we were investigating we'd
00:34:40
like to speak to you about it um would you be prepared to come back to the UK to have this matter resolved and that's
00:34:48
the the route that we took the first two came back um came back of their own accord we had officers who went to visit
00:34:56
the address and they were expecting us to turn up and they were arrested and brought into the police station and I
00:35:02
think the reason why they were happy to come back they were reasonably confident
00:35:07
that we would probably didn't have enough evidence to charge them with murder ryar took a bit longer we were in
00:35:15
communication with him expressed The View that he didn't have money to return
00:35:20
and we therefore facilitated it by paying for um a flight for him to return and when he got back to the UK ltin
00:35:28
airport he had a solicitor that was present he was arrested and then brought to the police station and
00:35:34
[Music] interviewed the fact that ryar agrees to return to the UK smacks of absolute
00:35:43
arrogance he wouldn't have returned unless he absolutely thought that he was
00:35:48
going to get away with it it was a smooth transition from the point of making contact with those three
00:35:55
individuals and saying look we're investigating you we're not going to stop this investigation and we're
00:36:03
going to keep ringing you and ultimately we will contact the local police and we'll do the International arrest
00:36:10
warrant and all the things that necessary to get you to come back when the vehicle was forensically
00:36:16
examined it became apparent that there was um blood stains in the vehicle and they were submitted for
00:36:25
analysis theyna that had been recovered was the victim's blood but it was a mixed profile also with David
00:36:36
rayar's the one thing that the uh The Defenders couldn't uh dispute was that
00:36:41
somehow sonis and Smith blood had ended up in baji's car which all three of them
00:36:48
were traveling in U that was beyond dispute and then there's a mixed profile
00:36:54
which would indicate that there must have been a fight or something for there to be transfer of blood between ryar and
00:37:01
our victim and therefore at that point it would be reasonably um assumed by anyone that
00:37:08
ryar would have to explain those set of circumstances all three suspects were arrested and interviewed and at the time
00:37:19
of when we're preparing for an interview we normally have an interview strategy
00:37:23
and I would have identified officers that would have um conducted that interview uh um my recollection of that
00:37:28
interview is that they didn't provide us with anything significant other than to
00:37:32
say that they they knew of the victim um but didn't actually say anything that
00:37:37
was incriminating we had all three of those individuals charged um with murder and
00:37:45
awaiting um a crown court hearing the pressure is always there but when you have three people that have
00:37:56
been ched there's another added Dimension to it because you have to make sure that you
00:38:02
get everything right as the three defendants were led into doc uh it seemed to me that they
00:38:09
had an air of self-confidence about them that they actually believed they were going to get away with this it's always
00:38:14
tense on the first day of any big murder trial particularly at the Old Bailey which is Britain's Premier courtroom um
00:38:23
but what made this particularly strange was that William being a recluse really didn't have anyone known to him uh at
00:38:31
the trial it was reporters it was detectives it was Lawyers and of course the suspects but there were no close
00:38:37
family or friends there which I found quite sad we were never able to identify what instrument was used to attack the
00:38:45
[Music] victim despite the not guilty pleas the evidence was strong the mobile phone
00:38:53
technology traced all three of the suspects fleeing to Paris and then onto Poland
00:38:58
they had to get away for a reason and the only reason that they wanted to get away is because they were the people who
00:39:04
were involved if police are trying to show a conspiracy and a joint Enterprise the
00:39:11
communications before a crime has taken place the coming together of people's
00:39:16
mobile phones and then us going off in different directions afterwards can be really powerful evidence when put in
00:39:23
front of a jury it also became known during the trial that buad was suffering from severe financial problems and it
00:39:31
doesn't take a genius to kind of put two and two together when you have a multi-millionaire reclusive uh employer
00:39:39
who's keeping large sacks of cash around the property and a down aill polish
00:39:44
builder in desperate need of cash to potentially come up with quite a strong motive for the
00:39:50
crime by the end of the trial and it's only 3 to four weeks uh that it lasted
00:39:55
uh I don't think any of uh uh my colleagues in the Press had any doubt at all that all three men would be uh
00:40:02
convicted despite having committed what really was one of the most Savage crimes
00:40:06
I've ever come across in my 10-year career as a journalist they genuinely thought that they were going to get away
00:40:12
with it but as far as I was concerned the evidence was watertight and the jury thought so too after what actually
00:40:20
seemed like an eternity but was actually only I think 3 and a half hours of deliberation the jury unanimously found
00:40:26
them guilty and they were each sent down to prison for a minimum of 30 years it was a 4-week trial and
00:40:37
ultimately they were convicted but it was a challenging case but at the end of the day I think the team would have
00:40:44
taken huge credit from the fact that from the position where we started and to ultimately get the three people who
00:40:51
we know were involved um to court and that the jury was satisfied with the evidence that we um put together so we
00:41:01
were satisfied and we felt that we were giving the victim's family some closure um and some sort of feeling that
00:41:08
Justice was served it was a feeling of Justice being done it was very satisfying and probably
00:41:18
one of the the highlights of my career to see those three brutal Killers sent to
00:41:26
Justice what what's quite sad when we look at William in relation to why he is
00:41:35
murdered many people who have wealth of course are a person of interest to people who seek to take wealth of people
00:41:43
during the attack they probably got at least £22,000 each when they went into their addess in the early hours of the
00:41:49
morning which is absolutely nothing compared to what was actually lying around in the attic and other parts of
00:41:55
their dress when you add to the fact that he was a multi-millionaire murdered in his own home uh you add the fact of
00:42:03
this intriguing character with this uh extraordinary backstory back life and lifestyle uh then this was definitely a
00:42:11
major story in London my belief is that earlier on in the day because we know that there was
00:42:18
CCTV footage that showed the victim who was leaving the address at a particular time in the evening and he went to a
00:42:24
Timber yard to get some items and that those three individuals were actually at the address doing some work
00:42:32
for him we believe that they got him to leave the address the victim because they wanted to leave they had obviously
00:42:40
found money at that point and I believe that when the victim had left the address to go to the timber yard it was
00:42:46
their opportunity to leave with a bag of money and that they then thought to themselves well if we found that there's
00:42:52
probably more here hence the reason why they came back later on in the night and
00:42:56
was D around you know casing The Joint once they've entered the address they were probably spooked by the victim
00:43:04
who was in his attic bedroom they probably didn't expect him to come down more than likely he would have realized
00:43:10
who they were and thought to thems well he's going to identify us either they
00:43:16
couldn't find any money and then then threatened him to say you need to tell
00:43:20
us where the money is because we found some already and we know you got some more stashed that was my basic inter
00:43:27
interpretation of what happened when we look at homicide one theory of homicide is that
00:43:33
people commit expressive homicides so the actual Act of homicide itself is their motivator this is people who enjoy
00:43:42
the ACT maybe it's got a sexual motivation then there's instrumental homicide where it's purely about doing
00:43:51
the homicide to get something this case Falls very much into instrumental homicide
00:43:59
side people normally say You're only as good as your last job and you're only as
00:44:03
good as the people that you have around you and those things are are significantly true but when you consider
00:44:08
from where we started with little to no evidence about um what happened little little to no information about the the
00:44:16
victim we went from Zero to Hero in a matter of five weeks so you know it's it's it's good detective work
00:44:28
[Music] with the trial now over and the suspects in prison the main question now was who
00:44:44
would be the rightful heir to William's huge Fortune a genealogist was brought
00:44:49
in and they were able to identify a cousin that ultimately received the wealth that Mr serson Smith had
00:44:57
part of the money was taken by hmrc for unpaid tax it's really quite sad that
00:45:03
they have to search for months and eventually find a distant relative for who they can leave all the
00:45:11
money that William has made over the years whilst the main motivating factor for these murderers was money I think
00:45:23
something that made it easier for them was the fact that he was such a reuse this wasn't a man that was going
00:45:30
to be all over the TV when his body was found and that's a really sad ending for
00:45:35
anybody to have when they're taken in such a cruel way [Music] [Music]