Speaker 1: Sitting on the River Thames in Surrey near Sunbury Lock
Speaker 1: is Donkey Island, only accessible by a single footbridge. It's
Speaker 1: a favorite retreat for anglers. Among them forty eight year
Speaker 1: old Scott Wilkinson.
Speaker 2: Scott Wilkinson was a family man. He had been a
Speaker 2: truck driver but had had to give that up byly
Speaker 2: for health reasons. Spent a lot of his time fishing
Speaker 2: on the River Thames. He'd stay on the island every
Speaker 2: so often. I think it was a kind of a
Speaker 2: regular thing for him to go down and fish there
Speaker 2: and would kind of camp overnight, maybe a day or two.
Speaker 2: He's actually quite isolated there. Certainly were at a time
Speaker 2: a few sort of derelict buildings on the island as well.
Speaker 2: Otherwise it's just kind of overgrown to view trees, bushes,
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. Scott was engaged to Lisa Lane
Speaker 2: and she would bring him some food things like that,
Speaker 2: and a number of friends who you know, came and
Speaker 2: visited him while he was fishing, and it was just
Speaker 2: a sort of quiet place to go and fish and
Speaker 2: enjoy his hobby.
Speaker 1: But one July morning, during one of his camping trips
Speaker 1: to the island, Scott's fiancee arrived to find him missing
Speaker 1: in his campsite in disarray. She immediately called the police.
Speaker 3: When they arrived.
Speaker 4: There was blood, there was tense There was various items
Speaker 4: of a fishing missing as well, including a knife. He
Speaker 4: was chaosic, who had been turned over, Everything had been
Speaker 4: thrown everywhere.
Speaker 1: Locals also told police about a disturbance late the previous night.
Speaker 2: Witnesses living on the other side of the river reported
Speaker 2: hearing ten to fifteen seconds of shouting from the island
Speaker 2: and that was.
Speaker 1: It, with no sign of scard at the campsite. Police
Speaker 1: turn their attention to the Thames.
Speaker 5: Through attempts. Is as dangerous as to any other river
Speaker 5: in the country or in the world for that matter.
Speaker 2: Obviously, you have.
Speaker 5: The tidal section, the lower parts going through the central
Speaker 5: of London, which can be quite dangerous because you get
Speaker 5: very strong flows. But even in the non tidal parts,
Speaker 5: such as the area around Donkey Island, the flow is
Speaker 5: still very dangerous.
Speaker 3: It has eddies, it has.
Speaker 5: Wells, it's very easy to get caught up in those,
Speaker 5: and in particular where we have these weirs which bypass
Speaker 5: the locks, those weirs can be absolutely lethal. The locks
Speaker 5: themselves and the mechanisms of the locks can suck a
Speaker 5: body in as well, so it's a hazardous area for
Speaker 5: a body in the water.
Speaker 2: On average, thirty bodies a year are found in the
Speaker 2: River Thames.
Speaker 5: The majority of those, sadly, are due to suicide. Some
Speaker 5: will be due to summers getting out of their depths
Speaker 5: or getting into trouble, particularly colder weather during the winter,
Speaker 5: and some are murder victims.
Speaker 1: Fearing the worst, police called in expert teams to search
Speaker 1: the waters around the island.
Speaker 6: This particular area is part of the non tidal Thames.
Speaker 6: This means that the natural flow of the water is
Speaker 6: only going one way and that never changes. This makes
Speaker 6: it easier when working out what search patterns to use.
Speaker 6: If a body is being placed into the water and
Speaker 6: it's drifting, it's only actually going to flow in one direction,
Speaker 6: so you're working in that direction.
Speaker 1: A lack of rainfall that month also improved their chances
Speaker 1: of finding a body closer to where it might have
Speaker 1: gone into the water.
Speaker 5: July twenty sixteen saw a period of drought resilutely low rainfall,
Speaker 5: which means that the flow rates at that period would
Speaker 5: have been a little lower than one might normally expect
Speaker 5: which means that the body wouldn't have traveled very far.
Speaker 5: If you add to that, the chances are being caught
Speaker 5: up on branches, on obstructions in the water, piers, moored
Speaker 5: boats and things, and actually the chances are the body
Speaker 5: wouldn't have gone very far atall.
Speaker 1: That same afternoon, emergency teams searching the area made a
Speaker 1: discovery not far from the banks of the island.
Speaker 6: They noticed that his rather than tackle box were actually
Speaker 6: floating just nearby to where the campsite was, and very
Speaker 6: shortly after the search commenced, a body was located quite
Speaker 6: close by at the edge of the river. Even though
Speaker 6: it was midsummer and the water temperatures would have been warm,
Speaker 6: because you're only talking a matter of hours, it would
Speaker 6: have been not enough to sort of enhance decomposition in
Speaker 6: any way, and so the body would have been in
Speaker 6: very good condition.
Speaker 1: It was identified as missing fishermen Scott Wilkinson. From evidence
Speaker 1: both on his body and the island itself. Police suspected
Speaker 1: he'd been the victim of a frenzied attack.
Speaker 6: There was a large amount of blood in his tent
Speaker 6: or near his tent.
Speaker 4: They believed if they were defensive wounds on the forearms.
Speaker 4: Mister Wilkinson always had a knife with him. The police
Speaker 4: believed that mister Wilkinson's injuries through his forearms were caused
Speaker 4: by the knife.
Speaker 1: And although the body was found in the water, pathologists
Speaker 1: were keeping an open mind about the cause of death.
Speaker 7: We don't just jump in and think body in the river,
Speaker 7: it must be drowning. Everything is looked at, everything is examined.
Speaker 7: We also know with Scott Wilkinson that he had a pacemaking,
Speaker 7: so he has some natural heart disease going on as well.
Speaker 7: So that all of these possibilities that would have been
Speaker 7: examined considered, and then the final conclusions reached.
Speaker 1: Police launched an investigation. Forensic search teams were deployed on
Speaker 1: land and water. Their task to find evidence.
Speaker 4: We are the underwater search team that covers the southeast
Speaker 4: at the time, and we were mobilized and we were
Speaker 4: there probably within the hour, on scene and ready to
Speaker 4: be briefed.
Speaker 3: By the senior investigating officer.
Speaker 4: Crime scene investigators moved in search of bloods, etc.
Speaker 3: Took DNA and it went on from there.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the press speculated that this was a killing.
Speaker 2: I think it was pretty clear early on that this
Speaker 2: was a murder. Just the scale of the investigation, you
Speaker 2: had police divers cordoned off the area and for longer
Speaker 2: than they usually would in cases like this. And then,
Speaker 2: as we learned later, the condition in which the body
Speaker 2: was found, the injuries he'd sustained, and the chaos at
Speaker 2: his campsite a pretty clearly indicated that he'd been murdered.
Speaker 1: But who might have had reason to kill Scott? Police
Speaker 1: could find no obvious motive, suspect or even murder weapon.
Speaker 2: There seemed to be a lot of uncertainty about what
Speaker 2: had happened exactly to him. There is always shocked when
Speaker 2: somebody's killed, and he didn't seem like the sort of
Speaker 2: person he would be murdered.
Speaker 1: Police in Surrey are investigating after the body of fishermen
Speaker 1: Scott Wilkinson was found hidden among reeds on the shore
Speaker 1: of Donkey Island in the River Thames. Police launched an
Speaker 1: underwater search, believing vital evidence linked to the attack could
Speaker 1: have been disposed of in the river.
Speaker 4: The briefing was initially we were searching for evidence that
Speaker 4: was missing. There was a large knife that was missing.
Speaker 4: Whether it was a murder weapon or not, it was
Speaker 4: just a large knife because mister Wilkinson had quite vast injuries,
Speaker 4: including cuts to his forearms. Mister Wilkinson always had a
Speaker 4: knife with him. He would cut bait up and everything
Speaker 4: that was part of his standard fishing equipment. And there
Speaker 4: was electric drill missing because what he had actually done
Speaker 4: is drilled a tree stump with a drill with electric drill,
Speaker 4: and in that he put his rod rests and we
Speaker 4: couldn't find no sign of that.
Speaker 1: First, the dive team had to work out where to start.
Speaker 4: I remember walking around with saying, this is the most
Speaker 4: likely areas. Have to put your mind into the killer's mind.
Speaker 4: My view was that if they're going to get rid
Speaker 4: of a knife, if it was going to come out
Speaker 4: of the camping area where mister Wilkinson was camped, they're
Speaker 4: very likely to run out and throw it into the
Speaker 4: water where the boats go by, and that's one of
Speaker 4: my key focuses. We didn't need to put the equipment
Speaker 4: on the island because we chose to dive from the
Speaker 4: outside the pub.
Speaker 3: It was better for us.
Speaker 4: There's not covered in lots of undergrowth, so we could
Speaker 4: actually comfortably set our equipment up on the river bank
Speaker 4: and the other thing what you've got to think about
Speaker 4: is when you're doing this sort of search operation, you've
Speaker 4: got to have scene guard on because if you're there
Speaker 4: for two or three days, could the perpetrators come back
Speaker 4: and retrieve the evidence.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the only danger Peter and his team faced.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of hazards in the towmins, particularly
Speaker 5: at this level where we have some huge marinas. A
Speaker 5: lot of people have their small pleasure boats in this area.
Speaker 5: This is during July, when everyone's out in the water.
Speaker 4: It's very difficult to stop marine traffic going up and
Speaker 4: down on a really busy day, so each time a
Speaker 4: vessel went by, we'd have to pull the diver out.
Speaker 4: If you imagine being on the bottom, we're on a
Speaker 4: safety line. When they propeller caught our line, it could
Speaker 4: drag him to his death.
Speaker 1: With the hazards assess, Peter was ready to start the dive.
Speaker 4: And now the pressure is on me now to find
Speaker 4: this evidence.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, on the island, a full scale fingertip search was underway.
Speaker 4: They are looking for any blood spatter because the injuries
Speaker 4: to mister Wilkinson were substantial. You've got the tent, you've
Speaker 4: got clothing, you've got everything else. Anything mister Wilkinson or
Speaker 4: the other people touched. They want their prints, they want
Speaker 4: their DNA down to a cigarette butt. You know, at
Speaker 4: the end of the day, if someone's been smoking a
Speaker 4: cigarette and they've thrown it down, their DNA.
Speaker 3: Is going to be all over it.
Speaker 4: So it's vital that every single piece of evidence is
Speaker 4: looked at, and that is a slow process on anything.
Speaker 2: So they found a toothbrush and cans cigarette butts on
Speaker 2: the ground near were Scott had been camping.
Speaker 1: DNA from the items revealed Scott hadn't been alone on
Speaker 1: the island. Three other people were camping there too.
Speaker 7: The DNA evidence linking the three people is really very strong.
Speaker 7: The toothbrush, a beer can, or a ring pool can
Speaker 7: all contain sufficient material for a DNA match to be made,
Speaker 7: and so that evidence puts those people.
Speaker 3: At the scene.
Speaker 7: Doesn't say they were involved, but it puts them at
Speaker 7: the scene of the incident.
Speaker 1: The forensic results were matched with a national DNA database,
Speaker 1: giving police three names.
Speaker 2: The three suspects were already known to the police. Some
Speaker 2: of them had had minor convictions, nothing terribly serious, but
Speaker 2: they were known and one of them was a missing person,
Speaker 2: having absconded from his care home in the North. Lenny
Speaker 2: Crawt was sixteen at the time. He had grown up
Speaker 2: in car one of seven children. He had some learning difficulties.
Speaker 2: He'd fathered a child already. I believe at the age
Speaker 2: of fifteen he had been living in care in Blackpool
Speaker 2: and had run away from his home to return to
Speaker 2: his family. Shane Crowt was Lenny's older brother. He was
Speaker 2: seventeen at the time. He was a tall, fairly muscular lad,
Speaker 2: almost kind of placid, and was seen by people who
Speaker 2: as the ringleader of that group.
Speaker 1: The third person was twenty one year old Charlie Smith.
Speaker 2: Charlie Smith was Shane and Lenny's cousin. He was a
Speaker 2: little bit older at the time, but he was twenty one.
Speaker 2: The three boys did not have the best start in life.
Speaker 2: Shane and Lenny, like the siblings, grew up in care
Speaker 2: due to concerns about parental neglect. So yeah, they'd all
Speaker 2: kind of had tough, tough childhoods.
Speaker 8: I think what that speaks to is a pretty unstable upbringing,
Speaker 8: a lot of perhaps chaos in the family, lack of
Speaker 8: ability to care for these boys, and also perhaps an
Speaker 8: increasing number of behavior problems and criminal activity as they
Speaker 8: grew up. What can happen in homes where you don't
Speaker 8: have a lot of supervision or there's a lot of
Speaker 8: chaos or dysfunction, is you oftenhimes have the siblings really
Speaker 8: bond together and almost become like a unit. There's a
Speaker 8: tremendous amount of loyalty between them.
Speaker 2: The boys were on the island because they were hiding. Essentially,
Speaker 2: Lenny had absconded from his facility. They didn't want the
Speaker 2: police to find him. He was a missing person, so
Speaker 2: he and his brother and his cousin went to camp
Speaker 2: on Donkey Island and they did some fishing while they
Speaker 2: were there, but mainly it was to hide from the police.
Speaker 1: At the island, police diver Peter Folding and his team
Speaker 1: had started the painstaking task of searching for evidence on
Speaker 1: the riverbed. It was a fifty foot stretch across the
Speaker 1: Thames from the pub on one side to the island
Speaker 1: on the other.
Speaker 4: So now it's a job of we've got a line
Speaker 4: across the river and the job is to then swim
Speaker 4: the line slowly, methodically, and you're feeling around. There was
Speaker 4: very very small growing reeds on the bottom, but not
Speaker 4: enough to make our life difficult. So I had forensic
Speaker 4: gloves on, and often what I do if the water's dark.
Speaker 4: What most about diving is I close my eyes, so
Speaker 4: I immerse myself into the scene and I just literally swim
Speaker 4: along the line extremely slowly. If you're looking for a body,
Speaker 4: you can move quickly. If you're looking for evidence, it's
Speaker 4: a very very slow operation.
Speaker 1: And in this case, Peter couldn't use the traditional method
Speaker 1: of tread searching on the riverbed.
Speaker 4: The trouble is with tread search is when you walk
Speaker 4: in to do a tread with your feet, if you're
Speaker 4: looking for a knife, it's slightly to be pushed into
Speaker 4: the mud and never be found again. You've got to
Speaker 4: have hands on. And even when we're diving, we're actually
Speaker 4: laying on the water, floating just off the bottom, and
Speaker 4: we can feel around so we don't miss anything. So
Speaker 4: I'm swimming along and I'm feeling around very very slowly
Speaker 4: and moving forward slowly, and suddenly I felt a handle
Speaker 4: and I opened my eyes and then I could just
Speaker 4: sort of see something glistening, and I'm being very careful,
Speaker 4: and I could feel the blade, feel the end, and
Speaker 4: I'm going running my finger just to confirm it's a knife.
Speaker 4: It wasn't in the middle of the river. He was
Speaker 4: actually towards the bank. And then I'm asking for assistance
Speaker 4: to pull me in slowly because what I don't want
Speaker 4: to do is take the hands off this blade, because
Speaker 4: I can't risk losing it. It was rather like a
Speaker 4: kitchen devil knife, and it was I would say, a
Speaker 4: carving knife.
Speaker 3: What you would meet.
Speaker 4: With stainless steel blade, black plastic hand or.
Speaker 3: An evil looking weapon.
Speaker 4: Actually like bring my arm out the water and it's
Speaker 4: like a scaliber coming out the water.
Speaker 3: With his knife.
Speaker 4: The trouble is with any water, it's going to potentially
Speaker 4: wash evidence away. So what we would do as the
Speaker 4: knife comes out, he gets put in a tube, an
Speaker 4: evidence tube. It gets sealed up and then that gets
Speaker 4: labeled and then whisked off to the lab for the
Speaker 4: experts the other end, and that where you reduce cross contamination.
Speaker 3: Never found the drill.
Speaker 4: The key was the knife because they thought that the
Speaker 4: knife created.
Speaker 3: The wounds on the forearms.
Speaker 4: And it was a great feeling knowing that now the
Speaker 4: police have got that fight le evidence and potentially they're
Speaker 4: going to get a conviction.
Speaker 3: Out of this.
Speaker 1: Police in Surrey, England, strongly believe a knife found by
Speaker 1: expert divers in the River Thames is linked to the
Speaker 1: death of fishermen Scott Wilkinson. The knife is sent to
Speaker 1: the lab for forensic testing, but when the results come
Speaker 1: back it's bad news.
Speaker 4: Eventually it was found to have no DNA of bloods
Speaker 4: on it because it got washed off in the river.
Speaker 4: But that knife. Someone had thrown that knife into that water.
Speaker 1: It was a major setback for the investigation. The water
Speaker 1: had destroyed any remaining evidence. But by now the post
Speaker 1: mortem had revealed more detail about how House God had
Speaker 1: died and it wasn't the knife wounds that had killed him.
Speaker 7: The wounds were interesting. They show the type of weapon used.
Speaker 7: He had extensive blunt false trauma to his body.
Speaker 3: Centered around the head.
Speaker 7: There were multiple deep lacerations, some of them running parallel
Speaker 7: and were phrase we used to describe those as tramline bruises,
Speaker 7: which shows that an object a linear object has been
Speaker 7: used to cause them. When someone is being attacked, they
Speaker 7: will often raise their arm and receive blows to the
Speaker 7: outer aspect the little finger sides of the arms, as
Speaker 7: they've raised them to defend themselves, and they were present,
Speaker 7: showing that Scott was alive at the start of this incident.
Speaker 3: But there were also.
Speaker 7: Other blows fracturing his ribs and bruising the upper parts
Speaker 7: of his body, so this was a sustained beating with
Speaker 7: a blunt object of some sort. The crucial bit about
Speaker 7: the course of death here is the fracturing of the
Speaker 7: skull and the damage to the brain. Underlying that, injuries
Speaker 7: to the head are the most important thing that would
Speaker 7: have been identified and immediately triggered a proper homicide investigation.
Speaker 1: Scott's death was now confirmed as a murderer, news that
Speaker 1: shucked this usually quiet Surrey community.
Speaker 2: I think people are always surprised when they see I
Speaker 2: see headlines about people being killed there, not that many
Speaker 2: people get murdered in sorry.
Speaker 1: Thankfully police redoubled their efforts to find the actual murder weapon,
Speaker 1: but it would be no easy task.
Speaker 7: Blunt trauma can be caused by anything that is hard
Speaker 7: and firm. A brick, a plank, a punch all caused
Speaker 7: blunt trauma, which has very similar features on the body,
Speaker 7: unless the particular weapon sheds slivers of wood, say, or
Speaker 7: fragments of metal or a fingernail. It's very difficult to
Speaker 7: determine exactly what caused it.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, despite an extensive search on the river and island,
Speaker 1: the murder weapon could not be found. It was given
Speaker 1: up for lust in the river's flow.
Speaker 6: With any murder scene, you're keeping your options completely wid
Speaker 6: open when you're searching, and in this case there was
Speaker 6: mentioned of a possible murder weapon being a plank of wood.
Speaker 6: They could have thrown it into the middle where there
Speaker 6: might well have been a stronger current. Who does tend
Speaker 6: to float, It could have been carried quite a long
Speaker 6: way in a short length of time.
Speaker 1: With no murder weapon and just DNA evidence from the
Speaker 1: campsite to go on. Police brought the three suspects in
Speaker 1: for questioning, brother Shane and Lenny Krott, and their cousin
Speaker 1: Charlie Smith.
Speaker 2: And they were arrested really within a couple of days
Speaker 2: of Scott's body being found.
Speaker 1: At the police station, the three were interviewed separately, and also.
Speaker 2: It has been video recorded, so you've got the cameras in
Speaker 2: the corners to soundproof room. All three boys gave no
Speaker 2: comments answers to questions from.
Speaker 9: Six o'clock in the evening onwards last Wednesday, the twenty
Speaker 9: seventh of July, tell me where you were shamed?
Speaker 2: No comment, Lenny, were you in also upon tens on
Speaker 2: Wednesday the twenty seventh of July. No comment.
Speaker 8: When you look at the interview tapes, you just see
Speaker 8: this recurring theme of no comment, no comment, no cormet,
Speaker 8: no cormet.
Speaker 3: Have you been there since that time?
Speaker 2: What was your location? No comment?
Speaker 8: And I think that's just a very clear example, visual
Speaker 8: example of the loyalty that these three feel towards each other.
Speaker 9: I want to talk about the weapon that was used
Speaker 9: to assault and kill and murder. Scott, describe that weapon
Speaker 9: to me.
Speaker 8: All three of these offenders continue to say no comment,
Speaker 8: no matter the evidence presented to them.
Speaker 2: We believe that you were at the audience with at
Speaker 2: least two other people, Shane Cruel and of Charlie Smith.
Speaker 3: No comment.
Speaker 8: It starts making sense in a way because in their
Speaker 8: minds we are in the presence of enemies. I also
Speaker 8: think it may have a practical reason as well. The
Speaker 8: worst thing you can do is in stitching on your
Speaker 8: loved one. We know that when individuals are incarcerated, if
Speaker 8: you have told on a fellow offender. If you've told
Speaker 8: on somebody in your family, there can be practical consequences
Speaker 8: for that as well.
Speaker 1: Then, in a written statement, Charlie suddenly broke silence.
Speaker 8: He essentially threw his attorney, makes a statement that he
Speaker 8: had nothing to do with violence, that he had talked
Speaker 8: to Scott Wilkinson. They had come back to the island
Speaker 8: in their tents, and these three tents set up and
Speaker 8: they had been kind of turned over and they were
Speaker 8: in disarray. Their equipment was missing. Scott told them that
Speaker 8: he had no idea what had happened. He'd been sleeping,
Speaker 8: but he actually helped the boys locate and find their
Speaker 8: equipment and made a comment about what a nice guy
Speaker 8: that Scott Wilkinson was, but absolutely denied that there had
Speaker 8: been any violence at the time and that they all
Speaker 8: just kind of left amicably.
Speaker 2: After this point, Charlie Smith had claimed that a group
Speaker 2: of travelers had appeared and suggested that it might be
Speaker 2: them who had killed Scott. There was no such group
Speaker 2: and there was no evidence for that.
Speaker 1: Without solid proof, police had no choice but to let
Speaker 1: the three suspects go.
Speaker 2: They were released because it was still very early in
Speaker 2: the investigation, and while the police seemed sure that it
Speaker 2: was them, they still needed time to build up a
Speaker 2: watertight case against them.
Speaker 1: Next, police focused on gathering video evidence from the area.
Speaker 2: After the three boys were released, the police continued their
Speaker 2: investigation looking at CCTV trying to establish who had been
Speaker 2: on the island. And when there is a from the
Speaker 2: towpath to Donkey Island, it's the only way on or
Speaker 2: off the island and it's covered by CCTV, and that
Speaker 2: was the bridge that Elisa Lane would have used to
Speaker 2: visit Scott, so it was quite easy for the police
Speaker 2: to see who had gone on to the island, who
Speaker 2: had come off the island, and when they'd done that.
Speaker 2: So they spent hours and hours looking through CCTV to
Speaker 2: establish the three boys were the only other people on
Speaker 2: the island.
Speaker 1: CCTV from the bridge showed the group leaving the island
Speaker 1: at eleven twenty two pm on the night Scott went missing,
Speaker 1: but crucial evidence from Scott's heart rate monitor suggested he
Speaker 1: was attacked four minutes before that, when the three suspects
Speaker 1: were still present.
Speaker 7: There's an inn at about eleven eighteen on that night
Speaker 7: where his heart monitor shows a sudden increase in heart
Speaker 7: rate of the type that could be associated with fear
Speaker 7: and the release of adrenaline causing the heart rate to
Speaker 7: surge up, and that strongly suggests, together with some other
Speaker 7: evidence of shouting and a noise at about that time,
Speaker 7: that that was the time that Scott was attacked.
Speaker 1: The heart rate monitor also showed that Scott did not
Speaker 1: die immediately.
Speaker 2: The heart rate monitor showed that he was alive for
Speaker 2: a couple of hours after the attack and then at
Speaker 2: two twenty seven am we called a cardiac arrest when
Speaker 2: he died.
Speaker 7: Injuries are very commonly not immediately fatal. There takes time
Speaker 7: for the brain changes to occur and actually to cause death.
Speaker 2: The heart rate monitor allowed them to narrow down when
Speaker 2: exactly the attack happened because they have the spike in
Speaker 2: his heart rate, and then combined with CCTV evidence that
Speaker 2: showed that the boys were still on the island and
Speaker 2: he left the island very shortly after that time, gave
Speaker 2: them a stronger case against them.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't until two years later, when a final
Speaker 1: piece of evidence landed on the investigator's desk that they
Speaker 1: knew they could.
Speaker 3: Get a conviction.
Speaker 4: This we say it's quite clear that details your involvement
Speaker 4: and others in the merger of Scott will consider.
Speaker 1: In a secret recording, Charlie Smith described to a friend
Speaker 1: what his two cousins had done to Scott that fateful night.
Speaker 10: H go down into the line. Then he goes out
Speaker 10: after understand but I hadn't know what I told you
Speaker 10: now as they thought keeping a man, the man of
Speaker 10: the lovely man go so well.
Speaker 3: With the man mentioned on that to him m hm,
Speaker 3: and I used the one of the most.
Speaker 10: As I didn't tall a big first he thinks.
Speaker 2: About you know.
Speaker 10: That man didn't thought.
Speaker 1: It was damning evidence that would change the course of
Speaker 1: the entire murder investigation. M in what on Thames, Police
Speaker 1: investigating the savage murder of Scott Wilkinson on Donkey Island
Speaker 1: have received a recording that turns the case on its head.
Speaker 1: On the tape, Charlie Smith, one of the three main suspects,
Speaker 1: is heard admitting that he and his cousins were involved
Speaker 1: in fatally attacking Scott with a nail on a stick.
Speaker 1: It's the final piece of evidence police need to charge
Speaker 1: him and brothers Lenny and Shane Crott with the killing.
Speaker 2: At the start of the trial. I think there was
Speaker 2: an apprehensive atmosphere. It wasn't helped by a series of delays.
Speaker 2: The prison had failed to produce the defendants on time.
Speaker 2: I had to be pushed back, and eventually they managed
Speaker 2: to open the case in the afternoon.
Speaker 1: In court, the three defendants pleaded not guilty.
Speaker 2: There was a division between the brothers and the cousin.
Speaker 2: It is what is described as a cutthroat defense, in
Speaker 2: which a group of defendants all stopped to blame each other.
Speaker 2: Shane's case was that Charlie had killed Scott and that
Speaker 2: Lenny had been standing by their tents and hadn't been.
Speaker 3: Involved at all.
Speaker 2: Charlie's case was that Shane and Lennie had killed Scott
Speaker 2: and he'd been barely involved. Lenny didn't put up really
Speaker 2: a defense. He didn't give evidence in his own defense.
Speaker 2: His statement chimed with his brothers in that he was
Speaker 2: standing at a different part of the island and had
Speaker 2: no idea what was going on.
Speaker 1: The defense team also cast out over Scott's cause of
Speaker 1: death being his fractured skull. The post mortem showed he
Speaker 1: was still breathing when he was thrown into the Thames.
Speaker 7: We know that his heart monitor continued to work after
Speaker 7: this initial initial spike associated with fear.
Speaker 1: So could Scott have drowned?
Speaker 6: Whenever we recovered a body from the water, we would
Speaker 6: always take a couple of water samples, one from the
Speaker 6: surface of the water where the body was recovered from,
Speaker 6: and one from near the river bed. And what you're
Speaker 6: looking for there, though you'd never see it with your
Speaker 6: naked eye, are diatoms in the water? Are in on
Speaker 6: your last breath, you would be breathing in water that
Speaker 6: had diatoms in it, and in the last bit of
Speaker 6: circulation in the body that would filter around the body
Speaker 6: into the organs. Under forensic analysis as part of the investigation,
Speaker 6: if you found diatoms in the organs of the dead body,
Speaker 6: it would prove that the body was still alive and
Speaker 6: breathing when they were placed in the water.
Speaker 7: There were some features of water entering Scot's lung so
Speaker 7: that is a possibility, but the signs of drowning are
Speaker 7: quite soft. Water can get into the lungs as the
Speaker 7: heart fails and the lungs fill up with water in
Speaker 7: a sense from the inside, but of course in drowning,
Speaker 7: water can enter through the air passages and the appearances
Speaker 7: can be very similar and difficult to determine. In Scott's case,
Speaker 7: the head injuries were so severe.
Speaker 3: They were going to be fatal.
Speaker 7: Whether or not he was put in the water, there was.
Speaker 2: No way of saving him at that point, even if
Speaker 2: help had been called immediately.
Speaker 1: As the trial progressed, a picture emerged of what happened
Speaker 1: on Donkey Island in the days leading up to Scott's murder.
Speaker 2: The boys campsite was quite close to where Scott was.
Speaker 2: In fact, I think they'd camped in the place that
Speaker 2: he usually camped. They turned up before him, so he
Speaker 2: moved a little distance away, but not very far to
Speaker 2: set up on his own. One of Scott's friends remarked
Speaker 2: how much of a mess they'd made. Maybe a little
Speaker 2: bit about noise, but in general there doesn't seem to
Speaker 2: have been kind of hostile relations between Scott and the
Speaker 2: three boys. There was a strange incident mentioned during the
Speaker 2: trial in which the three boys had gone back to
Speaker 2: Shane and Lenny's parents' house for I think some food
Speaker 2: and maybe a change of clothes, and then came back
Speaker 2: and found that their fishing rods, which had belonged to Jane,
Speaker 2: Lenny's father had disappeared. There's some suggestion that maybe Scott
Speaker 2: had moved them, that they wanted to teach him a
Speaker 2: lesson for moving their fishing gear. That was one of
Speaker 2: the reasons that was advanced as a possible motive. Another
Speaker 2: was that, as well as fishing on the island, Scott
Speaker 2: would occasionally deal small amounts of cannabis, and the boys
Speaker 2: claimed that he had given some to them. The suggestion
Speaker 2: then was that on the night they had gone to
Speaker 2: see him to get more abyss and he had refused
Speaker 2: on the basis that they hadn't paid him for the
Speaker 2: stuff that he'd already supplied. Late on that night, Scott
Speaker 2: was beaten by a blunt object, probably a piece of wood,
Speaker 2: very severely. He was very badly injured. His skull was
Speaker 2: cracked and he was left in the river to die.
Speaker 8: Who knows what started at Maybe one of the people
Speaker 8: felt disrespected by something Scott Wilkinson said. Maybe one of
Speaker 8: the guys saw something he wanted that Scott Wilkinson had.
Speaker 8: I don't think it took very much and I think
Speaker 8: the minute one of those boys picked up a board
Speaker 8: and attacked Scott Wilkinson, it would have been almost impossible
Speaker 8: psychologically for one of them to intervene. I think that
Speaker 8: this was in many respects as somewhat impulsive crime. I
Speaker 8: think this crime took on a life of its own
Speaker 8: once it started, and it did become kind of a
Speaker 8: mob mentality.
Speaker 1: As well as the secret recording, the prosecution had witnesses
Speaker 1: who had encountered the group shortly after the murder.
Speaker 2: They were helped by the three boys, essentially confessing not
Speaker 2: to the police but to other people that they knew
Speaker 2: or that they met.
Speaker 8: As the three boys leave the island, they run across
Speaker 8: these three teenagers who have been intimidated by them in
Speaker 8: the past, and they continue to intimidate them as my friend.
Speaker 8: At one point, one of the kids said, as to
Speaker 8: these three teenagers, don't mess with us because we just
Speaker 8: committed murder. Why would you go and then brag about
Speaker 8: a murder that you've committed. It doesn't make any sense,
Speaker 8: except if you're in the moment and you weren't thinking
Speaker 8: about the future and your goal is to feel good
Speaker 8: about what you've done. One of the things that you
Speaker 8: see so much of the time with these young offenders
Speaker 8: is they lack judgment in a lot of respects. Their
Speaker 8: crimes can be very, very impulsive. They aren't very sophisticated
Speaker 8: in terms of hating evidence. There's this sense of, you know,
Speaker 8: we're so cool because we did this, so I'm going
Speaker 8: to brag to other people about this.
Speaker 2: The boys didn't seem particularly remorseful during the trial. They
Speaker 2: just sort of sat there listening at separate ends of
Speaker 2: the doc. You had Shane and Lenny at one end
Speaker 2: and Charlie the other with a it was called an intermediary,
Speaker 2: someone to help him understand what was what was happening
Speaker 2: in court. When the verdict was read out, the initial
Speaker 2: reaction was shocked. The first verdict to be delivered was
Speaker 2: Charlie Smith being found not guilty of murder. There were
Speaker 2: audible gasps in the courtroom, but obviously very quickly after
Speaker 2: that the foreman said that they found him guilty of mansuughter.
Speaker 2: There was less surprise when Shane and Lennie were convicted
Speaker 2: of murder. I recall the three boys showing very little emotion.
Speaker 1: Shane and Lennie both received a life sentence with a
Speaker 1: minimum term of fifteen years. Charlie Smith was jailed for
Speaker 1: thirteen years.
Speaker 2: I think It's always especially shocking when very young people
Speaker 2: commit offenses of this nature. It was a subtly strange
Speaker 2: case in that, because two years had passed since the offense,
Speaker 2: they were all technically adults, and I think that maybe
Speaker 2: slightly clouded the fact that actually Linear had only been
Speaker 2: sixteen when he did this. Shame was seventeen. But yes,
Speaker 2: I think it's still Any murder is shocking, but particularly
Speaker 2: one carried out by people who were so young.
Speaker 8: These three boys had a history ranging from ceiling to assault,
Speaker 8: so they obviously had developed a way of life that
Speaker 8: at the very least accepted criminal behavior, if not promoted
Speaker 8: that as a way to survive, a way to be tough,
Speaker 8: a way to kind of get back at the system.
Speaker 8: This was a group that was not willing to to
Speaker 8: go along with society's rules and likely saw again the
Speaker 8: world is kind of this us against them mentality.
Speaker 2: It was a tragic case, and I think more tragic
Speaker 2: because it was so senseless. Scott seemed like a perfectly
Speaker 2: nice bloke, didn't really do anything to invite this on himself,
Speaker 2: and then you've got three boys who were very young, immature,
Speaker 2: came from a difficult, difficult background, and for seemingly no
Speaker 2: real reason at all, decided to carry out a brutal
Speaker 2: attack on this man that they barely knew. I've only
Speaker 2: covered a couple of murders, and as I say, they're
Speaker 2: all tragic, but this one is particularly particularly so because
Speaker 2: there seems to be no reason behind it