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Steve Keogh: Murder Unpacked

Steve Keogh: Murder Unpacked

Di: Exploring how murders are investigated.
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Hosted by former Scotland Yard homicide detective Steve Keogh, Murder Unpacked explores murder investigations to understand how detectives think and work.

www.murderunpacked.comSteve Keogh Crimini reali
Episodi
  • Yorkshire Ripper: The Legacy

    Yorkshire Ripper: The Legacy
    Oct 6 2026
    Mention the Yorkshire Ripper investigation to almost anyone and several things will come to mind.Most will think first of the murders. The crimes were truly abhorrent.Others will remember the mistakes made during the investigation.But for me, as someone who investigated murders years after Sutcliffe was caught, I find myself thinking about something very different.Not what happened during the investigation.But what happened because of it.In the early hours of 30th October 1975, detectives were called to Scott Hall Road, Leeds, after the body of a woman was discovered on waste ground beside the carriageway.She had been struck repeatedly to the head before being stabbed numerous times.At that stage, there was nothing to suggest the investigation would become one of the largest murder enquiries in British history.The victim was identified as 28-year-old Wilma McCann.As detectives began building a picture of Wilma’s life, they established she was a mother of four young children who lived just a short distance away. In fact, her home could almost be seen from where her body was found.Their enquiries revealed that Wilma occasionally engaged in sex work to make ends meet. When she failed to return home, her eldest child took the younger children out to look for her. A neighbour later found them cold and distressed at a nearby bus stop.Detectives had very little forensic evidence to work with, as DNA profiling was still years away.Standing beside Wilma McCann’s body, detectives had no reason to believe they were investigating anything other than a single, brutal murder.But as further attacks occurred, detectives began to recognise disturbing similarities. The victims were attacked at night, often after being alone with the killer. He typically struck them from behind with a hammer before using a knife, and many of the women were known to engage in sex work.The consistency of the attacks left detectives in little doubt they were dealing with a serial killer.Serial murder is rare in the UK. When it does happen, it attracts enormous media attention.As the investigation grew, the media gave the unknown killer a name. Drawing comparisons with the Whitechapel murders a century earlier, they dubbed him the Yorkshire Ripper.That name, combined with the way many of the victims were portrayed in the media as sex workers, made the attacks seem as though they were happening to ‘other people’.But in June 1977, that belief was shattered.The next victim was 16-year-old Jayne MacDonald, a shop assistant who had spent the evening with friends before beginning the walk home. She never made it. Like the women before her, she was attacked from behind with a hammer before being stabbed. Her body was found the following morning in a playground. She became the seventh victim of the Yorkshire Ripper.As detectives, we often talk about public confidence and public fear. Jayne’s murder had a huge impact on both. Until then, many people believed the killer was targeting a particular group of women. That changed almost overnight. Suddenly, nobody felt quite as safe as they had before.For detectives, the similarities to the earlier murders were obvious. But there was one crucial difference. Jayne wasn’t involved in sex work. That was a significant development in the investigation.When police investigate a serial killer, they’re not just trying to catch them. They’re also trying to prevent the next murder. An apparent change in the killer’s choice of victim meant the measures already in place had to be reassessed.Over the next three years, a further six women were murdered, bringing the total number of victims to thirteen. Some were involved in sex work, others not.There were also attacks where the victim survived. These women became an invaluable source of information that might help identify the killer. How he spoke. The words he used. How he approached his victims. How he escaped. Even what he smelled like, whether he smoked, or whether he appeared familiar with the area. Individually, those details might seem insignificant. Together, they could help bring detectives closer to catching him.Importantly, if detectives developed a credible suspect, these women might be able to pick him out in an identity parade.Now, you may be asking yourself, “why hasn’t he been arrested by this stage?”There were five years between the first murder and the last.At least thirteen women were murdered, and around half as many again who survived the attacks.That meant around twenty opportunities to secure the evidence needed to catch him.All those crime scenes with the potential for clues. Countless witnesses, including some who might be able to pick the suspect out. Surely, they had opportunities to catch this killer?And it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask.The thing is, every opportunity to find that breakthrough piece of evidence also generated more information for detectives to assess, record and follow up.In many ways it’...
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    24 min
  • Jack the Ripper Part 1: Emma Smith

    Jack the Ripper Part 1: Emma Smith
    Sep 29 2026
    Jack the Ripper is probably the most famous unidentified murderer in history.More than 130 years after his crimes, books are still being written about him. Documentaries are still being made. And people still walk the streets of Whitechapel trying to work out who he was.But that’s not where I want to start.Before we get anywhere near suspects, I want to look at the crimes.That’s how I approached murder investigations during my career. The crime scene came before the suspect, not the other way around.So, over this series, I’m going to take you through the murders associated with Jack the Ripper.What happened.What the witnesses said.What the police knew.And what I make of the evidence.Who he may have been.Then you can make your own mind up.And our story doesn’t begin with one of the five women most commonly associated with Jack the Ripper.It begins four months earlier.With a woman named Emma Smith.WhitechapelTo understand what happened to Emma, and the women who followed her, you first need to understand Whitechapel.In 1888, London was the most populated city in the world and the capital of the British Empire, but those living in Whitechapel saw little benefit from that.Sitting immediately to the east of the old City of London, it was one of the poorest parts of the capital.There was a lack of housing, severe overcrowding and high unemployment.Those fortunate enough to find regular employment could expect long working days for little money.For others, work was casual. You might earn something that day, you might not.And without money, finding somewhere to sleep became another problem.For a few pence, a common lodging house provided somewhere to spend the night.Conditions varied, but at the bottom end that could mean little more than a filthy mattress, packed into a room with dozens of others.If you couldn’t afford that, there was the workhouse.Or the street.Poverty brought with it all the problems you might expect.Crime.Alcohol.Violence.Prostitution.The population was also changing. Large numbers of immigrants had settled in the East End, including Jewish families fleeing persecution in the Russian Empire.The Whitechapel of 1888 was a hard place to live.And for women like Emma Smith, it could be an incredibly dangerous one.Whitechapel is also an area I know well.Before I joined the murder teams, I spent several years policing this part of London.And although more than a century had passed, in many ways the Whitechapel I knew still had echoes of the place these women lived in.Poverty.Overcrowding.Crime.Addiction.Prostitution.I saw all of them first-hand.I also led teams investigating robberies and later rapes in the area, so I got to see a side of Whitechapel that most people never do.That experience matters when I look at these murders. I know the streets. I know the area. And I know that many of the problems we associate with Victorian Whitechapel didn’t simply disappear with time.Emma SmithWe don’t know a great deal about Emma.She was over forty and described herself as a widow.She had two children, a son and a daughter, who were living in the Finsbury Park area of London.Even those who knew Emma seem to have known little about the life she’d had before Whitechapel.She told friends that more than ten years earlier she’d left her husband and broken away from her previous life.When asked why, she apparently said that the people she’d left behind wouldn’t understand.Whatever had happened, by the spring of 1888 Emma was living at 18 George Street, a common lodging house in Whitechapel.On the evening of Easter Monday, 2 April, Emma went out.For most of that night, we don’t know where she went or what she did, but shortly after midnight, another woman from the lodging house saw her.Her name was Margaret Hayes, who saw Emma talking to a man.Margaret didn’t know who he was. All she could later say was that he was of medium height, dressed in dark clothing and wearing a white scarf around his neck.It was the last known sighting of Emma before she was attacked.And when you’re investigating a murder, the last person known to have been with the victim is someone you’re going to want to find.The man with the white scarf was never identified.There was something else about Margaret’s account that stands out. She herself had already been attacked that night.Two men had approached her. One asked her the time before another struck her in the mouth.Margaret got away.She later described there having been some “rough work” in the area that night, which gives us some idea of the streets Emma was walking through.At around 1.30 in the morning, Emma was making her way through Whitechapel.Ahead of her were two or three men.One appeared to be a youth of about nineteen.Emma crossed the road.She never explained why.Perhaps there was something about the men that worried her. Perhaps a woman alone in Whitechapel in the early hours needed no other reason. We don’t know.What we do know is that the...
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    16 min
  • Dr Crippen: The Eyes of the World

    Dr Crippen: The Eyes of the World
    Sep 22 2026
    I investigated many murders during my career, more than I can count. But very few sent ripples much further than the communities in which they took place.Occasionally, though, I found myself at the centre of the country’s biggest news story.When your investigation dominates the headlines, the pressure is unreal.Every decision is scrutinised. Every delay criticised. Every mistake magnified.That attention ratchets up another level when a killer is identified and the manhunt becomes public.Suddenly, you’re not just trying to solve a murder and bring a killer to justice. You’re in a very public race against time. Every hour that passes without an arrest, fuels more speculation, more criticism and more questions about whether you’ll ever catch the person responsible.But it isn’t the criticism itself that keeps you awake at night.Throughout my career, the people I always felt most accountable to weren’t senior officers, politicians or journalists. They were the victim’s family. They had placed their trust in us at the darkest time of their lives.What you fear is that the constant public scrutiny begins to erode that trust. That they start to wonder whether the criticism they’re reading or hearing might be true. If that relationship begins to suffer, that’s when the pressure really hits.As I read about Walter Dew’s hunt for Dr Crippen, I couldn’t help wondering whether he felt that same burden of responsibility.The more I learned about his investigation, the greater the sense of kinship I felt with him. More than a century after Dew pursued Crippen, I found myself leading an international manhunt under remarkably similar circumstances.A celebrity reported missing.Murdered by her partner.The suspect fled abroad before the full picture emerged.The most heartbreaking difference was that my investigation also involved her two young sons.In almost every other aspect, the parallels were remarkable.In January 1910, American-born music hall singer, Cora Crippen, disappeared. A friend raised her concerns with the police, but initially not much appeared to have been done to locate her. But in July of that year, after the intervention of a police superintendent who had been contacted by friends of Cora, Chief Inspector Walter Dew visited the marital home and spoke with Cora’s husband, Dr Hawley Crippen.Just over a century later, concerns around the controlling behaviour by the partner of former Eastenders actress, Sian Blake, were raised by her family. As a result, police officers visited her home and spoke with her partner, Arthur Simpson-Kent.Both men gave seemingly plausible explanations as to their partner’s whereabouts.Crippen told Dew that Cora had left him for another man and travelled to America. Simpson-Kent said Sian had taken their two sons to visit a friend in Cambridge.Both homes were searched.Neither search revealed evidence to raise suspicion that either woman had come to any harm.For Walter Dew, verifying Cora’s whereabouts would have been extremely difficult, given the technology available in 1910.In Sian’s case, nobody could contact her after a text message was sent to her sister purportedly from Sian explaining that she needed to get away from everything. Sian was then officially reported as a missing person, along with her two sons, Zachary aged 8 and Amon aged 4. An investigation that was initially conducted by local police. Several weeks later, in the first week of January, her case was referred to us as the on-call murder team. A local superintendent feared serious harm may have come to them. Sadly, he was proven to be right.As detectives, you are taught to continually question the narrative.To never become fixed on one theory.What seems certain one day can change completely the next.Although Dew had accepted the explanation given to him, something about the story seemed to bother him. However, when he returned to make further enquiries with Crippen, the man had vanished.Whatever doubts Dew had been harbouring were now being confirmed by Crippen’s disappearance. After all, if he had been telling the truth, why would he run?Fearing what may have happened to Cora, he ordered a thorough search of the home, which led to a gruesome discovery.Below the brick floor of the basement lay the dismembered remains of a woman.Dew was convinced these were Cora Crippen.When Sian’s case came into my team, none of us believed we were being handed a simple missing persons case. One of the biggest alarm bells for me was the fact Sian had advanced motor neurone disease. She could just about care for herself, let alone the two boys. Added to this, by then, Simpson-Kent had disappeared, with all attempts to contact him having failed.Colleagues revisited the family home, intent on a more thorough search. They quickly discovered evidence of a violent incident, with substantial traces of blood having been painted over, in an apparent attempt to hide a crime.Within a few days of us taking ...
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    21 min
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