The Hunt for the silver killers ITV1

[Toddlerteaplease]

Did anyone watch this? I didn’t realise it was based on a book. But taking these cases at face value, it does seem an unlikely coincidence that two similar cases should be so close together. Did some googling and there were several more cases. All in the North west. Why didn’t Cheshire police investigate the first one properly, and why are they so defensive. It’s very odd.

I just watched it. Seemed some very odd decisions from Cheshire police.
i am surprised it hasn’t led to more questions in the press.

Yes, that’s what I thought.

I did watch this. I was in agreement that there were concerns re the first case. My main things were there seemed to be a lot of violence if he actually loved his wife. It seemed a bit incongruous. As they were members of the euthanasia society I would have thought they would have found a ‘pleasanter’ painless way of death. I can think of a few. It has to be accepted it was poorly investigated but also has to be accepted that the pathologist and forensic scientist were therefore also working with limited information possibly inaccurate information.

However the idea of a serial killer was lost on me when they brought in the second case. Stephanie Davies agreed that it was very thoroughly investigated although when she saw the photo of the crime scene she knew immediately something was wrong and as it looked just like the first case and she now seems to think this proves it was a murder and committed by the same person. I think if me and my partner were going to partake in a murder suicide then dressing in my night clothes and laying in bed would be logical and not unusual situation.

Those are the only two cases investigated by Cheshire Police. Two of the others are Greater Manchester and the third Cumbria. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion they weren’t fully investigated. The Cheshire cases have been reviewed again by Cheshire Police and the NCA and didn’t find anything to suggest anything other than a murder/suicide.

I also googled Stephanie Davies as I was unclear why exactly she’d been dismissed. She seemed to try and indicate it was because someone had leaked her report to the press. The truth is she was allowed access to confidential Police information on the understanding that it only be used for a specific purpose and not shared further a field but she shared it with a number of people she had not been authorised to do so and it was not appropriately redacted (which she did accept at the tribunal) although she did try to claim whistleblower status.

It turns out she was doing a PhD at Liverpool Uni. The subject of her thesis was to study ‘equivocal deaths’ and her ex colleague brought the two Cheshire cases to her. I would be interested to know if she’s researched murder suicides in elderly couples in other areas of the country? A quick google of the London and home countries brought up six murder/suicides in elderly couples from 2010 to 2919 and those are the ones reported upon. There may be others. Did SD compare similar cases in other areas of the country or has she just concentrated on the North West? Her conclusions would be more robust if she said she’d looked at other areas of the country and there were significant differences which show the 5 Northwest cases were uniquely different from any others in the country. Or would she come to the conclusion there was a serial killer roaming the whole if the UK.

I think it could be a bit of a situation where she was looking for equivocal deaths and found them so just a case of confirmation bias. It may be that the first case is a double murder although to what end but to then pronounce there is a serial killer at large I’m so sure. SD seems to think that because she was born deaf she has some almost superhuman ability to interpret scenes (from photos. She never attended any) but whilst she may be good I’m not sure that’s the case. I haven’t read the book but I believe she does have a suspect so would be interesting to hear about the suspect. I think I’m just going to have to read the book as I wasn’t convinced by the serial killer aspect.

@StudyinBlue that’s very interesting. I certainly thought SD had been unfairly treated. But maybe not. And it hadn’t occurred to me that the other cases were all different police forces.

I had to wonder when I heard it was Cheshire police as they are the ones who are under a cloud over the Lucy letby case . The programme was convincing but as above if there’s more to the story than the programme showed then we aren’t informed enough to make a decision. However Angela Gallop and Richard Shepherd are very well respected and if they felt there were questions to answer then that’s what needs to happen irrespective of what SD did or didn’t do . I really did feel though that the methods of death so violent didn’t fit with elderly loving couples .

I watched this. I came away thinking it was possible cover up/ignored, because the couples were old. Also how many more could there be? Loving couples - I think there would be different and easier ways. However if a murder suicide, I’d want to be in my own bed.