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World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode

August 17, 2021 / 44:02

This episode covers the horrific events of the Wedding Day Massacre in Dore, South Yorkshire, where Arthur Hutchinson murdered three family members and raped their daughter. Key discussions include the background of Hutchinson, his violent history, and the aftermath of the crimes.

The episode begins with the Laitner family's wedding celebration on October 23, 1983, which turned tragic when Hutchinson, a violent criminal, broke into their home. He killed Basil, Avril, and Richard Laitner, leaving their daughter Nicola as the sole survivor.

Experts discuss Hutchinson's background, including his troubled childhood, history of violence, and previous criminal behavior. His escape from police custody and subsequent taunting of authorities are highlighted, showcasing his narcissism.

The investigation following the murders is detailed, including the community's fear and the police's extensive manhunt for Hutchinson, who had become Britain's most wanted man. Nicola's traumatic experience and her role as a key witness are also examined.

The episode concludes with Hutchinson's trial, where he was convicted of multiple charges, including murder and rape. His life sentence and subsequent appeals are discussed, emphasizing his refusal to take responsibility for his actions.

TLDR

Arthur Hutchinson murdered three family members and raped their daughter during a wedding night massacre in 1983.

Episode

44:02
00:00:05
- MALE NARRATOR: 23rd of October, 1983, Dore, South Yorkshire, England, Basil Laitner, his wife, Avril,
00:00:13
and their children, Richard and Nicola, had settled in for the night. They'd been hosting their eldest daughter's wedding
00:00:20
earlier that day. Unbeknownst to them, a stranger armed with a knife had broken into their house.
00:00:29
- GEOFFREY: He creeps up the stairs and mistakenly thinks that Nicola is in the room with the
00:00:34
bridesmaid's dress on the door and goes in. He discovers that it's not Nicola, it's Richard.
00:00:42
He wastes no time in killing Richard Laitner with a series of vicious knife wounds.
00:00:49
- NARRATOR: The deadly commotion woke father Basil who went to investigate, he too was stabbed to death.
00:00:57
The killer was 42-year-old Arthur Hutchinson, a violent criminal and rapist who was on the run from the police.
00:01:05
After murdering Basil and Richard he made his way to mother Avril's bedroom, where he stabbed her
00:01:11
repeatedly. - ELIZABETH: She had 26 marks of violence on her body, it was much more violence than he needed
00:01:19
to actually end her life. - NARRATOR: The killer then made his way to 18-year-old Nicola's bedroom, he raped the teenager
00:01:27
multiple times before going on the run once again. - ALAN: You'd had this very happy occasion,
00:01:33
this big family wedding, and then 12 hours later the world's being turned on its head and poor Nicky Laitner,
00:01:39
her life changed forever. - NARRATOR: His history of violence culminated in an unthinkable attack, a sadistic rape of an
00:01:48
18-year-old girl, having just murdered her parents and elder brother in cold blood.
00:01:55
This makes Arthur Hutchinson one of the world's most evil killers. - ♪ - NARRATOR: On the morning of October the 24th, 1983
00:02:24
workmen made their way to Basil Laitner's house to dismantle the marquee in the garden, they made
00:02:31
a startling discovery. - MICHAEL: They found Nicola in a most dreadful state, totally traumatized.
00:02:40
They call the police and they realize the horrific nature of the crime. The major incident team were called out and I was
00:02:47
part of that. - He wreaked utter devastation in a matter of minutes, he took out three prominent members of the local
00:02:56
community and raped a young woman. - NARRATOR: News of the Wedding Day Massacre hit the headlines and spread fear across the whole
00:03:05
of the nation. The killer, Arthur Hutchinson, had been on the run for 26 days and quickly became Britain's most wanted man.
00:03:15
- It's only a few years after the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe for Yorkshire Ripper and you'd seen a reign of terror.
00:03:22
People remembered very quickly. And you've got a knifeman on the loose, a man who's
00:03:27
been prepared to kill three people in cold blood. So, very quickly, people changing their patterns
00:03:32
of behavior and women wouldn't go out at night unaccompanied. - NARRATOR: As fear gripped the nation, the brazen killer
00:03:39
who had a history of violent and sexual offenses, even taunted the police whilst on the run
00:03:46
and gave himself the nickname The Fox. - He wants to be recognized, he wants infamy, he wants
00:03:58
to develop a brand, he wants people to fear him. - He's sadistic, he's cruel, he has no empathy for anyone.
00:04:16
- NARRATOR: This killer's story begins on the 19th of February, 1941. Arthur Hutchinson was born in Hartlepool in the
00:04:27
northeast of England. - GEOFFREY: Arthur Hutchinson was born into an extraordinary family, in fact it was two families
00:04:35
in the end. His mother Louise had a husband called Cuthbert, with whom she had six children, but they also had
00:04:44
a lodger called Arthur Hutchinson, with whom Louise had two further children, the first of which was
00:04:50
Arthur Hutchinson, named after his father. - NARRATOR: Mother Louise eventually set up home
00:04:56
with Arthur Hutchinson, senior. For their son, Arthur, growing up wasn't easy. - His siblings didn't like him, they made fun of him,
00:05:06
he was an illegitimate child and they were legitimate children. So right from the word go, he was an outsider,
00:05:13
he was excluded, he was marginalized even within his own family. - NARRATOR: But young Hutchinson was close
00:05:21
to his mother, and would often seek comfort from her. - There's not a lot of doubt in my mind that
00:05:27
Arthur Hutchinson was Louise Reardon's favorite child. This was probably exacerbated by the fact he caught
00:05:35
meningitis as a small boy and would therefore have been extremely ill, it was a nasty disease to catch
00:05:40
as a young child. And then he rode into a lampost on his bicycle, fracturing his skull.
00:05:47
- And he was in a coma for three days, he had quite a significant injury to his head.
00:05:53
- And what happens in things like head injuries, in some cases, it weakens inhibitory controls
00:05:59
and then you act out more impulsively than you might otherwise do. - I don't think that head injury led him to become
00:06:07
a murderer, I think it might be a factor in the background. Because we can see when we study convicted killers
00:06:14
that there are higher rates of traumatic brain injury in them than there are in the general population,
00:06:20
but it's certainly not a causative reason and it's not an excuse. - NARRATOR: At school, Hutchinson struggled
00:06:27
academically and was often teased by his five sisters. - That type of bullying, and teasing, and humiliation
00:06:35
as a child stays with people, and it harbors an enormous amount of anger. They just build up so much resentment of people
00:06:44
that they want to get back at who hurt them. - Hutchinson's anger with his sisters, who were making
00:06:50
his life a misery, was to display itself very forcefully at the age of seven, when he stabbed one of them
00:06:56
with a pair of scissors. - NARRATOR: As he grew older, Hutchinson became disruptive, and his behavior towards the opposite sex
00:07:05
was disturbing. - From a very, very early age, Hutchinson was interested in sex, and he took the most
00:07:13
profound interest in it. - At age 11, he finds himself in juvenile court for indecent assault, now this is a really, really serious crime
00:07:25
for an 11-year-old to be committing. And these crimes do not just emerge out of the blue,
00:07:30
there tends to be an escalation of behavior. So this suggests to me that you have a child here
00:07:35
who doesn't care about harming other people. - He must have only just hit puberty, but I think
00:07:42
the moment he did, every kind of hormone in the young Hutchinson took off. - This is an opportunity to intervene.
00:07:53
And for somebody to be committing this serious an offense at this age tells me that they are capable
00:07:58
of much, much worse. - NARRATOR: In his late teens, he got involved in petty crime,
00:08:05
and would steal cars and switch their license plates. - He was a classic case of a bad lad gone worse,
00:08:13
you know, he started out being a bit of a handful as a boy, graduated into petty crime, got involved
00:08:19
with the police, and had an unhealthy attitude towards women. - NARRATOR: Despite his reputation as a bad boy,
00:08:25
he was popular with women. - He was obviously very attractive, he lived in a comparatively small area, his reputation must have
00:08:33
preceded him, but he was one of those ultimate bad boys that girls want to change.
00:08:38
- ALAN: I think Arthur's attitude to women was that they all fancied him, it was as simple as that.
00:08:43
He had this unquenchable belief that women wanted to be with him, wanted to be around him,
00:08:49
wanted to sleep with him. - NARRATOR: Throughout his teens, Hutchinson had 19 appearances in front of the magistrates, including
00:08:58
four charges of sexual intercourse with girls under the age of 16. After leaving school, Hutchinson joined the
00:09:06
National Coal Board as a trainee miner. - He's soon sacked from that job because he
00:09:11
breeches safety regulations. He's somebody who doesn't respect rules, he doesn't think they apply to him.
00:09:17
- He went into a number of professions, he'd worked as a farm laborer, he traveled with gypsies,
00:09:23
he worked with the circus. - These are jobs that involve him kind of going off the grid,
00:09:29
they're not regular jobs, and I think he's got that kind of proneness to boredom, that need for stimulation.
00:09:36
- NARRATOR: Eventually he did settle down, and in 1960, aged 18, he married his neighbor
00:09:42
in Hartlepool, and they had a child together. But Hutchinson quickly went back to his thieving ways,
00:09:49
and he lost his job as a milkman for stealing wages. - He was incorrigible, whatever job he took,
00:09:56
he couldn't keep, he wanted to break the law, that's the only thing he really knew about.
00:10:01
- NARRATOR: The marriage became strained and the couple split up. Not long after, he met a teenager who quickly
00:10:07
became pregnant, but again, this relationship didn't last either, and it wouldn't be long before
00:10:14
Hutchinson's deviant desires would surface. A year later, in 1963, aged 22, he was jailed
00:10:22
for unlawful sexual intercourse with an underaged girl. - There are no filters, there are no boundaries,
00:10:28
there are no moral brakes on his behavior that stand in his way. He's one of these people, when he wants to do
00:10:35
something, he will simply go and do it, when he wants to attain something, he will go and take it.
00:10:41
This is somebody who is potentially very, very dangerous. - NARRATOR: With the charges now mounting
00:10:46
against sexual predator Hutchinson, he showed no signs of stopping. The crimes he would go on to commit would be more
00:10:54
violent and soon turn deadly. After his release from prison, Hutchinson found work
00:11:02
in a chicken factory, where he met his second wife. The couple married just months later, and moved in
00:11:08
with his mother. - The second wife was only 16, and he was 27. She was rapidly pregnant, and he beat her.
00:11:19
She once said anything could provoke him no matter what. She also said that at one point, she saw him knock his mother
00:11:27
halfway across the room from her chair. - He felt that he was invincible and that he could charm
00:11:32
his way to anybody, and the other side of him, he was a very savage individual and could turn very,
00:11:39
very quickly. He had this sort of split personality that enabled him to get through his type of life.
00:11:46
- This is a person who enjoys controlling women, he enjoys having women look after him, have a roof over his head
00:11:53
and dinner on the table, and this marriage is one that is violent, it's one that's abusive, his wife describes
00:12:00
how he was promiscuous and controlling. - NARRATOR: Unsurprisingly after just three years,
00:12:06
this marriage also failed. - The day he left her, he beat her up in the street, knocked her to the ground, kicked her.
00:12:15
This was a man of violent tendency. - This is a pattern of behavior with him, this man is a parasite
00:12:22
who feeds off the women in his life, gets what he wants, and then discards them.
00:12:27
- NARRATOR: Hutchinson's appetite for sex continued, and in 1972, he was convicted of unlawful sexual intercourse
00:12:36
and received another prison sentence, this time for three and a half years. By 1978, Hutchinson was being investigated for
00:12:46
suspected Social Security fraud. He was adamant that his half-brother Dino had tipped
00:12:53
the authorities off. - He set off after his half-brother with a sawn-off shotgun determined to end his life.
00:13:02
Dino, thankfully, escaped, and Hutchinson was caught and indeed imprisoned. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson was sentenced to yet more
00:13:11
time behind bars, this time a five-year sentence in Leeds Prison for attempted murder and for carrying
00:13:18
a firearm. - Hutchinson is somebody who loves being in control. Now, when he is sentenced to a custodial term
00:13:28
that takes away a lot of his power. I think he would be feeling very resentful, he'd be
00:13:33
ruminating, he'd be fantasizing about what he was going to do when he was eventually released.
00:13:39
- NARRATOR: Alone with his thoughts, Hutchinson's deviant sexual desires were once again ignited.
00:13:46
He read in a newspaper about a woman in the north of Selby who'd recently come into money, she quickly became
00:13:53
his next target. - For some reason, he became fixated on, became obsessed with. She was divorced, she had a new boyfriend, she had
00:14:01
a lot of money, throughout the course of his day, he's looking at different people to see who he could get
00:14:06
over on, how he could go about it. - And she moved to live somewhere just north of Selby
00:14:13
in a bungalow right on the edge of a field, and Hutchinson had read this story and had made
00:14:20
drawings and sketches of what this bungalow would be like in the back of this paperback book.
00:14:25
And on his release from Leeds Prison, he was allowed to take the book with him. - NARRATOR: In September, 1982, six months after
00:14:34
his release, Hutchinson made his way to the woman's bungalow and broke in. He stole her checkbook and attempted to withdraw
00:14:43
cash from a local bank, but was refused. Penniless, he came up with another plan.
00:14:50
- And he then decided that he would follow this lady and present himself to her, and she was bound to
00:14:56
fall for his charm and want to marry him. He planned very, very carefully, he set up a hideaway
00:15:03
in a field near to the bungalow, watching the lady and her male friend. - He saw the woman in the house making love to her
00:15:13
boyfriend, he waits for the boyfriend to leave. - When the male friend left on the second night,
00:15:20
he then presented himself absolutely naked to this lady. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson made his advances, which were
00:15:28
quickly rebuked by the horrified woman. Unable to accept the rejection, Hutchinson raped her.
00:15:35
- Hutchinson is a misogynist and he feels entitled to use and abuse women. He hasn't had access to women in the time
00:15:43
that he's been in custody, so by the time his release comes around, he feels entitled to go and take
00:15:50
what he wants. - There was a struggle, and he was wearing a St. Christopher medal on a chain around his neck,
00:15:57
and that was broken. The very sensible lady advised him to take the medallion to a jeweler's shop to be repaired, and he did that.
00:16:07
And of course the first thing she did was to drive to the police station and report the horrendous attack.
00:16:13
They dispatched police officers and caught him just coming out of the jeweler's and arrested him.
00:16:18
They took him back to Selby Police Station and of course as he walked in, there she was in the
00:16:24
entrance foyer, and there was a huge battle with officers. - NARRATOR: Just months after his release, Hutchinson
00:16:32
found himself back in police custody. He was determined not to be sent to prison for the rape,
00:16:38
and decided to take action. - Hutchinson is to have appeared at Selby Magistrate's
00:16:44
Court, which is actually part of the police station, they were joined, so he's taken to it.
00:16:49
He persuades the two officers to uncuff him because he wants to go to the lavatory.
00:16:56
They make this mistake of uncuffing him, he jumps through the window, cutting himself in the process,
00:17:03
but then lands on a mesh which is protected by barbed wire. He cuts his leg really seriously on the barbed wire,
00:17:12
but doesn't stop, jumps over the barbed wire onto the pavement, and sprints off.
00:17:21
- Here's a potentially dangerous man, certainly somebody who should be under lock and key,
00:17:25
pending investigations, and he is now roaming Yorkshire free and unfettered. Nobody knows quite where he is, nobody has the first
00:17:33
clue of how to find him again, and he goes to ground, he just disappears. - The police, not surprisingly, launch a manhunt,
00:17:40
he's an extremely dangerous prisoner. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson lived rough for the next
00:17:45
three days. But with his leg badly cut, on the 2nd of October, he decided to seek help.
00:17:52
- He made his way the 19 miles to Doncaster and was treated at Doncaster Royal Infirmary.
00:17:59
- He's obviously disheveled, he's been living on dandelion roots and whatever he can forage for the last
00:18:05
three days, mud all over him because he's had to crawl along gutters, his trousers are ripped to shreds,
00:18:12
nobody in A&E thinks to say, "Well, how did all this happen?" or if they did, he had a very clever way
00:18:19
of describing it. - NARRATOR: Unaware that he was a wanted man, medical staff tended to his wound.
00:18:26
- And they treated it, dressed it, and gave him certain instructions that the dressing needs changing,
00:18:32
and you need antibiotics, you need to come back. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson returned to the hospital
00:18:38
two days later before going on the run again. During this time, he committed a number of burglaries
00:18:45
to obtain cash. - Nobody has a clue where to find him, and he's been on the run for about three and a half weeks
00:18:52
before he finally washes up in Sheffield in Dore, a suburb just to the south of the city center.
00:18:57
He would have been getting a bit desperate by this point. He's been living, almost literally, in hedge bottoms.
00:19:03
He's chanced upon this wedding party in this prosperous part of Sheffield, a large, expensive-looking house,
00:19:09
marquee tacked on the side. - NARRATOR: The owners of the house were hosting a wedding reception for their eldest daughter.
00:19:17
Hutchinson crept onto the grounds of the property and hid. - The house is owned by a local solicitor,
00:19:25
59-year-old Basil Laitner, along with his wife who is 55, Avril, she's a doctor.
00:19:30
Also attending the wedding is their son, Richard, who's 28, and their younger daughter, Nicola, who is 18
00:19:38
and is a bridesmaid at the event. - NARRATOR: Over 200 guests gathered on the 23rd of October to help celebrate what should
00:19:47
have been one of the happiest days of their life. - A lavish affair in Sheffield, a lot of champagne,
00:19:53
a lot of food, and a very, very happy day. Sort of draws to a close, it gets past seven,
00:19:58
or thereabouts, it's getting dark. Hutchinson is still hiding in the garden. Bride and groom depart for a local hotel.
00:20:07
Basil, Avril, and their son, Richard, depart for dinner with a relative not far away, but Nicola decides to stay.
00:20:16
- And at that time, unknown to everyone, of course, Hutchinson had made his way into the back garden
00:20:24
of the house, and had been observing what had taken place. And he stayed like that, in that area, for quite
00:20:31
some time because the family had returned home, probably about 11 o'clock, and then they retired to bed.
00:20:40
- NARRATOR: Under the cover of darkness, Hutchinson broke into the Laitners' house.
00:20:45
Armed with a knife, he was about to carry out the next stage in his sadistic plan.
00:20:52
- The motivation was sexual in this case. And in this particular case, he saw the young girl,
00:20:59
he became fixated on her, like he has done before, and his goal was to rape her.
00:21:05
- Hutchinson creeps up the stairs and mistakenly thinks that Nicola is in the room with the bridesmaid's dress
00:21:11
on the door and goes in. He discovers that it's not Nicola, it's Richard. - And Richard's out of bed in a flash and fights back,
00:21:23
but Hutchinson has the knife, so he prevails. - NARRATOR: Richard was stabbed multiple times
00:21:30
in the chest, the impact was so brutal that one stab wound cut through four of his ribs.
00:21:38
The commotion woke the rest of the family. - Mr. Laitner had obviously gone to investigate,
00:21:44
their bedroom was on the ground floor and the guest bedrooms were upstairs. And he was actually climbing up the stairs
00:21:51
when he was attacked. - GEOFFREY: Now you have Hutchinson who has already killed Richard, stabs Basil in the throat twice,
00:22:00
killing him, and he stabs him again in the back. Now he's only got two women in the house, and he knows it.
00:22:08
- Mrs. Laitner, hearing some noise, went out of her bedroom on the ground floor, and Hutchinson went down
00:22:15
the stairs again and attacked her. She tried to put her hands out to stop the assault
00:22:20
on her and then grabbed hold of the knife, it was a huge knife, probably one of the biggest bowie knives
00:22:25
I've ever seen. - NARRATOR: Again Hutchinson overpowered his victim and killed her.
00:22:33
- There were three dead bodies in this house, in Dore in Sheffield, and one terrified 18-year-old.
00:22:40
- You can't really imagine how it must have been in that house for those awful, awful few minutes.
00:22:47
And within a few minutes, both Nicky's parents are dead too. She's the last person alive in that house.
00:22:55
- NARRATOR: The merciless killer then made his way up the stairs once again. - He sets his sights on Nicola, she was what he wanted
00:23:03
to get to, essentially. He went into her bedroom, he put the light on, he threatened to kill her if she didn't do what he wanted
00:23:12
her to do. He marched her out to the marquee in the garden, where the family had been celebrating a wedding
00:23:19
earlier on that day, and he raped her. - Hutchinson takes her back upstairs again,
00:23:25
past the body of Basil, back into the bedroom, where he proceeds to rape her not once more, but twice more.
00:23:33
- NARRATOR: With her family lying dead around her, Nicola's survival instincts kicked in.
00:23:40
- She pretended to enjoy it when Hutchinson was raping her. Hutchinson was an incredibly narcissistic individual.
00:23:47
I think Nicola's behavior towards him and the performance that she was able to put on kind of
00:23:53
pacified him a little bit, validated him, and actually saved her own life. - NARRATOR: The heartless killer showed no signs
00:24:01
of emotion towards the deadly and bloody chaos he'd created. - After Hutchinson had murdered the family,
00:24:09
after he'd raped Nicola, he went and drank some of the family's champagne and ate some of their cheese.
00:24:15
Now, this appears to be completely bizarre behavior, somebody's gone from murder and rape one minute
00:24:22
to eating and drinking the next, but Hutchinson is somebody who simply follows his own wants
00:24:27
and his own desires. He's hungry and he's thirsty, it is as simple as that. He is so unaffected by what he's done.
00:24:36
- NARRATOR: It's almost dawn, and for some mysterious reason he ties Nicola up again, covers her
00:24:42
in the coverlet, there's blood from his knee on her bedclothes, and says, "Don't suffocate", and leaves.
00:24:50
- As the dawn broke, he made good his escape and then went on the run. - NARRATOR: The following day, workmen arrived
00:24:59
at the Laitners' house to dismantle the marquee. - They realized something was wrong, you know,
00:25:05
they could get no response, went into the house, saw signs of disturbance, came across the bodies.
00:25:12
- And then they discover Nicola. Nicola is clearly traumatized, I mean, it's been the most
00:25:19
terrible, terrible experience, there can be nothing that could have prepared any 18-year-old for that
00:25:24
sort of ordeal at the hands of a monster. - NARRATOR: The workmen call the police
00:25:31
and Michael Burdis was part of the major incident team. 18-year-old Nicola Laitner was now their key witness.
00:25:40
- She was extremely traumatized. We assigned officers to work with her, they produced
00:25:47
an artist's impression, and we used a local artist, and he produced a picture. - NARRATOR: The police now had a good idea
00:25:55
what the killer looked like. They just didn't know who he was. - At this stage, no one had actually joined the dots
00:26:02
between Selby and Sheffield. At this point, nobody was saying the man who escaped
00:26:07
from Selby three and a half weeks ago is the man who's committed these murders. - NARRATOR: The police set up an incident room
00:26:15
in the local village hall, and forensic teams quickly set about trying to gather any evidence that might
00:26:22
lead them to the killer. - We got probably 300 different people that we needed to identify to see whether they had seen
00:26:31
or heard anything that might have given us some clues as to who was responsible.
00:26:36
We discovered a champagne bottle on the kitchen table, and on that bottle, we discovered a palm print
00:26:46
and some fingerprints. And we were able to discover a fairly large piece of cheese
00:26:52
in the refrigerator which had bite marks in it, and we managed to get an impression of the teeth
00:26:59
that had made them. - NARRATOR: News of the murders hit the headlines, and the city of Sheffield was gripped by fear.
00:27:07
- Not surprisingly, the people of Yorkshire, and particularly those around Sheffield, were devastated that
00:27:14
three people should be killed on their doorstep in one night, on the evening of a wedding.
00:27:21
The tremble that would have gone through the whole community, it was literally extraordinary.
00:27:25
And what's more, the perpetrator has not been caught, there is a man on the loose.
00:27:30
- NARRATOR: Two days after the murder, the police had a major breakthrough with the help of
00:27:35
Nicola Laitner's description of the murderer. - We received a call from North Yorkshire Police,
00:27:42
from Selby, to inform me that they had experienced a man escaping from their police station, and he'd been
00:27:50
arrested and charged originally with a very serious case of rape. And it seemed to be the same type of crime that had
00:27:58
occurred in our circumstances. And we were able to compare the picture with a photograph
00:28:04
taken only a few weeks earlier by Selby Police Station, and it was almost a carbon copy,
00:28:09
it was an amazing likeness. We were able to get his fingerprints from the North Yorkshire Police, and our fingerprint experts
00:28:17
compared them and immediately said, "This is the man." So, we knew within two days that we were looking
00:28:25
for Arthur Hutchinson. - NARRATOR: Desperate to catch their man, on the 27th of October, four days after the attack,
00:28:34
the police took the unusual steps of releasing information on their number one suspect to the press.
00:28:41
- MAN: It was from Selby Magistrate's Court a month ago that Arthur Hutchinson escaped from
00:28:46
police custody. He got out through a toilet window. Hutchinson, said to be a physical fitness fanatic,
00:28:53
then climbed onto the roof of a police van which was parked in the backyard, climbed over a back wall,
00:28:58
and ran off. - It's a very rare event that the police will actually name who they're looking for.
00:29:05
But on this event, we took the decision that the public were at danger, and at risk from this man
00:29:11
being at large in the surrounding area. It was important we should say to the public,
00:29:17
"Look out for this man, but if you have seen him, keep away from him." - And those posters went up everywhere, you know,
00:29:23
they made a big, big impact. - There was a major front-page story in a Northeastern newspaper which announced that
00:29:32
Arthur Hutchinson was our number one suspect, and prime suspect, and that's who we were looking for.
00:29:40
- NARRATOR: The terrified public were keen to help the police with their search for the killer.
00:29:46
- It also brought with it additional problems. We had over 3,000 calls, 1,000 calls in the first day,
00:29:54
from members of the public thinking that they'd seen him, and some of them probably had, but a good number hadn't.
00:30:02
- NARRATOR: Hutchinson had now fled nearly 40 miles away, as far as Nottinghamshire.
00:30:08
His name and face was all over the news, so on the 30th of October, he decided to call The Yorkshire Post.
00:30:45
- He tried to put people off the scent, in fact he'd been traveling a great deal more than he let on
00:30:50
in the phone call with The Yorkshire Post. - And in these calls, this is just a narcissistic monologue,
00:30:56
this is all "me, me, me" there is no mention whatsoever about his victims, if anything, he's taken the victim role
00:31:02
for himself. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson reveled in the media spotlight. - ALAN: He started writing letters to The Yorkshire Post
00:31:13
taunting the police, that's when he gave himself the ludicrous nickname The Fox.
00:31:19
Because he could slip in and out unseen, and the police couldn't catch him. And he boasted of having been in and out of Doncaster
00:31:27
four times without being caught. - LOUIS: When you look at someone like Jack the Ripper,
00:31:32
for example, Jack the Ripper didn't give himself the name, the media gave him the name.
00:31:37
But in this case, Hutchinson gave himself the name, he's The Fox, he wants to present himself in
00:31:43
a certain way to other people, sly, cunning. - The police hired in a behavioral psychologist,
00:31:51
and she put a finger on it straight away and said, "This is a man bigging himself up, this is about him,
00:31:57
"his reputation, and his self image: the master criminal "that the police couldn't possibly catch."
00:32:04
- The context is really important here, only a few years prior to this, we'd seen the conviction of the
00:32:09
Yorkshire Ripper, and we saw the kind of celebrity status that was attached to Peter Sutcliffe.
00:32:16
And I think Arthur Hutchinson wanted a piece of that, he felt like he deserved that kind of recognition.
00:32:21
- NARRATOR: Hutchinson had now been on the run for six days since murdering three members
00:32:26
of the same family. The police had deployed all of their resources into finding him.
00:32:33
Nine forces joined in the hunt, spotter planes and helicopters scanned the Peak District, but there was no sign
00:32:40
of the deadly fugitive. - Hutchinson is intent on evading capture, he starts to alter his appearance, starts to use disguises,
00:32:49
he moves around a lot, mostly on buses. There were sightings of him at various points, particularly
00:32:55
at the end of October, about eight days after the killings, in a pub. But nothing happens.
00:33:02
- NARRATOR: The brazen killer thought he was invincible but the police were closing in on him.
00:33:08
- We were fortunate enough to know that a brooch had been manufactured specifically to give to
00:33:15
Avril Laitner, and that brooch was missing. And it was quite obvious that Hutchinson had stolen it,
00:33:23
and so we were able to circulate pictures into jewelers in surrounding towns. And we were able to trace some of his movements
00:33:30
into Nottinghamshire, Mansfield, Worksop, before he then moved further back north.
00:33:37
- NARRATOR: With the media frenzy and the killer's taunting messages, the pressure was mounting
00:33:43
to catch the killer, and the police had come up with a plan to lure Hutchinson in by leaking information about
00:33:51
the killer to the media. - Mick Burdis was aware that Hutchinson had injured his knee on a piece of barbed wire when he escaped from
00:33:59
Selby Police Station, and used this very cleverly by playing at the injury. That it might be worse than Hutchinson suggested,
00:34:09
and that he was highly likely to find he'd got an infected wound that might even turn gangrenous.
00:34:16
And he planted that thought knowing that Hutchinson would get to know about it. - NARRATOR: Michael and the team also decided
00:34:24
to exploit another of Hutchinson's weaknesses. - Well, he was close to his mother, and eventually
00:34:30
we persuaded his mother to allow us to broadcast the fact that she was seriously ill, which was true,
00:34:37
she did have a heart condition, and we arranged for her to be moved from her house by ambulance.
00:34:44
And that was well publicized, we thought that that would attract Hutchinson to the area, which it did.
00:34:50
- NARRATOR: Concerned about his mother's health, Hutchinson made his way back to Hartlepool.
00:34:56
- He knows the police are going to be keeping a watch on his mother's house, and he makes the mistake
00:35:01
of ringing her, and the police have tapped the phone. And he says, "I'm coming tonight,
00:35:07
I'll be with you at four A.M." And the police have got the information, they now
00:35:11
know the time he's going to arrive at the house, and they also crucially know the likely route
00:35:17
that he's going to take. So they flooded the area with police and tracker dogs, and waited, and waited, and waited.
00:35:26
- NARRATOR: Nearly 400 police officers and dogs lay in wait for the killer to appear.
00:35:32
- And they got a lucky break, a farmer out feeding his stock late at night came back in the house, his wife had been
00:35:39
watching him through the window, and she said, "Did you see him?" And the farmer said, "Did I see who?"
00:35:44
And she said, "Arthur Hutchinson, I'm sure that was Arthur Hutchinson." And of course it was, so they rang the police.
00:35:52
This draws the net in a little bit tighter still. - NARRATOR: Eventually, on the 5th of November,
00:35:58
Hutchinson was spotted by police aircraft near a farmhouse near Dalton Piercy, Cleveland.
00:36:05
Police dog handlers quickly closed in. - He sees them, brandishes a knife, and also wraps
00:36:12
his jacket around his arm in case the dogs bite him, and runs. He's not gonna outrun two police dogs and two
00:36:19
police officers, he realizes that and sits down holding the knife. Now, some speculated that Hutchinson was intent
00:36:26
on taking his own life at that point, he's pointing the knife towards his stomach,
00:36:31
the reality was I don't think he was. I've always believed that that was bravado, he was a coward.
00:36:37
- NARRATOR: After 39 days on the run, across nine counties, the deadly game was finally up
00:36:43
for Arthur Hutchinson. - The dog handlers were able to make that arrest, it was a long wait.
00:36:52
- NARRATOR: With Hutchinson now in custody, further evidence was discovered from during
00:36:58
his time on the run. - He made a recording on a little portable tape recorder, and he referred to himself as The Fox there,
00:37:06
and how he would overcome all the difficulties that he was experiencing, and it gave us clues as to how we might
00:37:14
use that knowledge of his mentality and his state of mind to our advantage, really.
00:37:21
- NARRATOR: The trial took place on the 4th of September, 1984 at Durham Crown Court.
00:37:28
Nicola Laitner would have to face her attacker. - The judge, Mr. Justice McNeil, decides that Nicola Laitner
00:37:36
can be identified because it was local knowledge that she had been attacked. Which meant that the Laitners were also
00:37:45
public knowledge. - NARRATOR: It was the first time in British history that they police used video footage to show
00:37:52
the crime scene. - For the first time, here were the police shooting a video moving around the house, piecing together
00:38:00
the story in the order that they understood from the forensic evidence that events had happened.
00:38:05
And the jury was shown it which was another first. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson took to the stand, but he
00:38:12
denied any role in the murders or the rape. - I remember a fairly slight figure, unkempt, but with
00:38:20
that slightly cocksure-- just the way he held himself. A man who fancies himself a bit.
00:38:25
And when he was giving evidence, almost everything he said, he was spinning a yarn.
00:38:31
- NARRATOR: As the delusional killer continued to deny any responsibilities for the murders and the rape,
00:38:38
the overwhelming evidence was presented. Blood samples that Hutchinson had left at the scene were also analyzed.
00:38:46
- Now, the police had very convincing evidence that he has a very rare blood group, one of only 50,000 in Britain,
00:38:55
and his blood group is on Nicola Laitner's bed. - NARRATOR: The police also had impressions of
00:39:02
the bite marks from the cheese left at the Laitner's house. - And we were able to link them to Hutchinson,
00:39:09
because he'd had dental treatment whilst he was in prison. So we were able to match the dental records with the
00:39:15
teeth marks in the cheese, which was quite a unique feature of any inquiry, really.
00:39:22
- It is pretty clear that they have a lot of evidence, as the police point out to him, "Look at this, and how do you
00:39:31
"explain your blood group? "And how do you explain these teeth marks? And how do you explain this palm print?"
00:39:35
Gradually he turns the story, he says, "I'd met Nicola "the night before in a pub, and she said why don't you
00:39:45
"come round after the reception and we'll have consensual sex?" It was an absolutely bizarre story.
00:39:52
- It doesn't surprise me at all that he would come up with this, a guy like Hutchinson, and any other type of
00:39:58
career criminal, all they do is lie, they don't know how to tell the truth. - NARRATOR: As the trial went on, Hutchinson
00:40:06
continued to fabricate his version of events on that fateful night. - The way he seemed to operate was that when
00:40:14
caught out in one story, he just segued into the next stories. And when this story began to unravel, he pointed to
00:40:23
a man called Mike Baron who reported with the Sunday Mirror and said, "He did this, you should
00:40:27
"ask him about these murders, he's the man who committed them." Poor Mike Baron was sitting there looking absolutely
00:40:36
dropped-on, you know, gobsmacked. - He is literally plucking stuff out of thin air at this point
00:40:42
in time, and obviously this does not stand up whatsoever. But what it does do, it creates a distraction, it creates
00:40:49
a sideshow, it diverts people's attention away from what he has actually done. - NARRATOR: On the 14th of September, the jury of
00:40:58
six men and six women took just four hours to reach their guilty verdicts for all three murder counts,
00:41:05
the rape charge, and the charge of aggravated burglary. He was given three life sentences for the murders
00:41:13
of Basil, Avril, and Richard Laitner. In addition, eight years for the rape of Nicola Laitner,
00:41:20
and another five years for aggravated burglary. - When he was first convicted, he received a minimum
00:41:26
sentence of 18 years, which was later upgraded to a whole life order by the home secretary, Liam Britain,
00:41:33
now these are not sentences that are given out just like that, they are reserved for the most
00:41:38
dangerous offenders in society. So I think this is testament to the evil things that this
00:41:45
individual did and the desire to protect the public from him. - NARRATOR: In 2008, Hutchinson appealed his
00:41:52
life tariff, claiming it was a breach of his human rights, he was the first British prisoner to do so.
00:41:59
His appeal was rejected, and subsequent appeals were also denied in 2015 and 2017.
00:42:07
- I think this determination to challenge the sentence really is testament to his character, he's not taking
00:42:15
responsibility for his actions, and for me that indicates that this is an individual who has not changed.
00:42:21
So, as far as I'm concerned, Hutchinson is exactly where he needs to be. - Hutchinson was so arrogant, so conceited, that he committed
00:42:30
a crime that never, never needed to have been committed. It was a monstrous act to take the lives of three
00:42:36
completely innocent people, in what? In the pursuit of a rape, it defies belief, it literally
00:42:43
sends a shiver down my spine. This is a man of the most deep depravity. - NARRATOR: Hutchinson was a sadistic sexual predator
00:42:52
who preyed on the vulnerable and defenseless, even trying to kill his half-brother.
00:42:57
His life as a career criminal culminated in a brutal triple murder of three members of the same family,
00:43:04
along with raping the teenage daughter at knifepoint. To this day, he has denied his guilt, and refuses to take
00:43:13
responsibility for his crimes. Undoubtedly, that makes Arthur Hutchinson one of the world's most evil killers.
00:43:21
- ♪ - [whoosh]

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 90
    Most shocking
  • 90
    Most intense
  • 85
    Most heartbreaking
  • 80
    Most dramatic

Episode Highlights

  • The Wedding Day Massacre
    A family wedding turns into a nightmare as a killer breaks in and murders three.
    “The world's being turned on its head and poor Nicky Laitner, her life changed forever.”
    @ 01m 39s
    August 17, 2021
  • Arthur Hutchinson's Violent History
    The backstory of a sadistic criminal who escalates from petty crime to murder.
    “This makes Arthur Hutchinson one of the world's most evil killers.”
    @ 01m 58s
    August 17, 2021
  • The Attack on the Laitners
    A brutal attack leaves three family members dead and one survivor, Nicola.
    “There were three dead bodies in this house, and one terrified 18-year-old.”
    @ 22m 35s
    August 17, 2021
  • The Capture of Arthur Hutchinson
    After 39 days on the run, Hutchinson was finally apprehended by police.
    “The deadly game was finally up for Arthur Hutchinson.”
    @ 36m 43s
    August 17, 2021
  • Trial and Conviction
    Hutchinson was found guilty of three murders and rape, receiving life sentences.
    “He was given three life sentences for the murders.”
    @ 41m 10s
    August 17, 2021

Episode Quotes

  • He wants to be recognized, he wants infamy, he wants people to fear him.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode
  • This is a person who enjoys controlling women.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode
  • You can't really imagine how it must have been in that house.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode
  • It was a monstrous act to take the lives of three completely innocent people.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode
  • This is a man of the most deep depravity.
    World's Most Evil Killers - Season 4, Episode 13 - Arthur Hutchinson - Full Episode

Key Moments

  • Wedding Celebration19:44
  • Brutal Attack21:30
  • Final Confrontation23:12
  • Public Fear27:04
  • Police Breakthrough27:33
  • Hutchinson's Escape28:34
  • Trial Begins37:24
  • Final Verdict41:01

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