Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX: Wednesday 4th of April 1973 at 11pm, on the porch of St Martin’s Church in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, 60-year-old homeless man, David McManus was beaten to death in an attack identical to a fictional killing in the book ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess and the controversial film by director Stanley Kubrick. But who was to blame, the book, the film or the killer?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/people/who-remembers-going-to-this-cinema-in-milton-keynes-3509624 The Daily Telegraph Wed, 4 Jul 1973 Daily Record Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Daily Mirror Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Western Daily Press Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Evening Standard Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Thu, Jul 05, 1973 Swindon Advertiser Tue, Jul 03, 1973 Daily Mirror Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Daily Record Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Evening Standard Tue, Jul 03, 1973 Norwich Evening News Tue, Jul 17, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Tue, May 08, 1973 Liverpool Echo Fri, Jan 26, 1973 https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/B/Burgess%20-%20A%20Clockwork%20Orange.pdf The Birmingham Post Mon, Aug 06, 1973 Evening Post Mon, Aug 06, 1973 The Northern Echo (Yorkshire ed.) Wed, May 09, 1973 Daily Express - Wednesday 04 July 1973 Dundee Courier - Wednesday 04 July 1973 https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/sep/01/1 Wolverhampton Express and Star - Thursday 11 December 2003 Aberdeen Press and Journal - Thursday 15 December 2005 Daily Express - Friday 06 April 1973 Wolverhampton Express and Star - Friday 06 April 1973 Daily Mirror - Friday 06 April 1973 MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. This week, I’m in Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire to unearth a brutal killing which may people think is just a myth. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 356: A Clockwork Orange Killer. Wednesday 4th of April 1973 at 11pm. As the last dregs of drunks were booted out of the bar at The Swan Hotel on Watling Street, a gang of lads – all in their teens, with one notably smaller and younger – they giggled about the latest hot topic, the controversial dystopian satire, ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Released 15 months before in London, this X-certificate film billed as “the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence” was on national release, but its screenings were being restricted and even banned in different counties for fear of public disorder. On Sunday 1st, three days before, the gang had seen it in the 900-seater Studio cinema in Bletchley, not realising that a copy-cat killing that night would play its part in the film being banned in Britain for the next 30 years. Having sank three and a half pints at The Swan, where he’d ponced several ciggies and some say had hectored those queueing at the chip shop for some spare change, 60-year-old homeless man, David McManus from Belfast sat on the porch of St Martin’s Church where he regularly slept, swigging two bottles of lemonade and munching on a pastie and chips. By all accounts, he was no bother to anyone. David was a nobody living an anonymous life, and for that, he would be viciously beaten to death. At the trial, Roger Gray QC said the killing was inspired by A Clockwork Orange, a novel written by Anthony Burgess published 11 years earlier which the film was based on. He stated “the similarity between the description on pages 14 and 15 and this case is weird… the pub …the tramp singing in the street… and the attack” by a gang of droogs; Dim, Georgie, Pete and the story’s narrator, Alex. (Mix with film audio) The extract read: “When we got outside of the Duke of New York, we viddied a burbling old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk, whatever his age might be. He was sort of flattened to the wall and his platties were a disgrace, all creased and untidy and covered mud and filth and stuff. So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing. But when Dim fisted him a few times on his filthy drunkard's rot, he shut-up singing and started to creech: 'Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it?' he cried out: 'It's a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there's no law nor order no more... It's no world for any old man any longer, and that means that I'm not one bit scared of you, my boyos, because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me, I'll be glad to be dead… So do your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans'. So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but he still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy, and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way” – that short extract inspired a copy-cat killing. The battered and broken body of David McManus was found fifty yards away, outside of what was Watson’s garage on Aylesbury Street. Detective Superintendent Brian Weight said “I’ve been to 100+ murders and this was the worst I ever saw”, and with Thames Valley Police seeking “a gang of youths”, the next day, the press were already describing this murder as “A Clockwork Orange style killing”. But who was to blame; the book, the film, or the killer? Born in 1917, Anthony Burgess was raised during the Great Depression, his mother died that year in the Influenza pandemic, and raised by his father and step-mother in Manchester’s Moss Side where he was beaten by gangs of feral youths, his tragic life was reflected in his work, especially during the blackout of 1943 when his pregnant wife Llewela was gang-raped by four drunk American deserters, a trauma he recreated in his book Beard’s Roman Women, and infamously in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Post war, he worked as a teacher of speech and drama in Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Banbury, but returning to England in the late 50s from stints in Malaya, he suddenly found himself in a climate of juvenile delinquency, an unfamiliar subculture of rebellious Teddy Boys, where identically suited and booted youths would aimlessly hang about in coffee bars, full of drink, drugs, music and knives. Those who have never read it assume that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is just a violent story crammed full of intentionally shocking scenes, but the book (and film) explores the conflict between free will and authoritarian control, whether it is better for an individual to choose to be evil rather than to be forced into artificial goodness by an oppressive state. Part one shows Alex’s ultraviolence, part two shows his imprisonment and enforced ‘re-education’, and part three is the success and failure of his redemption. Written over three weeks at his home in Hove, reaction to the novel was mixed; The Sunday Telegraph called it "entertaining, even profound", the New Statesman called it “acute” and “savage… but a great strain to read", The Sunday Times described it as "a very ordinary, brutal and psychologically shallow story", and The Times called it "a somewhat clumsy experiment into science fiction with clumsy cliches about juvenile delinquency", the violence of which they criticised as being "unconvincing in detail". It did okay, it didn’t cause any riots, and across the first 12 years of its publication, it wasn’t banned. In fact, its US publisher had the last chapter - where Alex and his gang of droogs have outgrown their violent pasts - removed as they wanted to “maintain a grittier, pessimistic ending”, which ruined the moral message. But the novel of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was only ever banned after the film’s release. So was anyone inspired by the book to commit rapes, assaults or murders? No. With modest sales, it developed a cult following mostly among students, but all that changed when the film was first seen at its world premier in New York on the 19th of December 1971 in a climate of violent and explicit films. The early 1970s marked a turning point in cinema history, as directors broke censorship boundaries to explore unprecedented levels of graphic violence, explicit sex and psychological brutality. The year before Stanley Kubrick’s film of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released, audiences had already seen Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked western ‘The Wild Bunch’, Mario Bava’s ‘A Bay of Blood’ which became the template for 1980s slashers, Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ featuring graphic torture and execution, ‘Straw Dogs’ with its disturbing double-rape sequence, as well as box office favourites like ‘Dirty Harry’, ‘The French Connection’, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Get Carter’. And in the same year that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released, the public witnessed a brutal male rape in ‘Deliverance’, the kidnap and torture of two teenagers in ‘The Last House on the Left’, followed by fast-paced blood and bone-snapping martial arts in Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter the Dragon’, and visceral violence and supernatural horror in ‘The Exorcist’. All of which would be considered tame by today’s standards, and although ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released uncut with an ‘X’ certificate, a precursor to the UK’s 18 certificate, it wasn’t created especially for the film, as the ‘X’ certificate had replaced the ‘H’ for ‘Horrific’ certificate, 21 years before in 1951. In an interview, Stanley Kubrick had described the film as a “running lecture on free will” and said his intention was “to get people thinking about whether behavioural psychology and conditioning could be weaponised by governments to turn citizens into compliant robots”. But as happens, the morally uptight focussed solely on its more salacious contents – its graphic sex and violence - and with its co-producer and distributor Warner Bros seeing this bubbling controversy as free advertising, it backfired as people were calling for it to be banned before they had seen it, creating a self-perpetuating hysteria. Three days before its London premiere on the 13th of January 1972, British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling was given an a private screening to decide whether it should be banned, as demanded by a rabid cabal of uptight morally-righteous so-called crusaders, many of whom hadn’t seen a single scene. One year later, with no riots or deaths attributed to the film, it was released nationally, and with each local authority having the right to deny a certificate to any film it disapproved of, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ could be screened in one town and banned in the next. It was banned in Ashford, Blackpool, Dorking, Hastings, Leeds, Reigate, and although The Evening Post stated “in Derby, it has already been and gone without corruption or depravity”, the neighbouring city of Nottingham asserted their own censorship. As for Bletchley, the neighbouring town to Fenny Stratford where homeless man David McManus was later murdered in a copy-cat killing, Charles Leith, the manager of the Studio cinema whose screening it is said the killer had visited, stated “we have rules to make sure that under 18s don’t see these films, but you can’t ask everyone for their birth certificate”. Yet by then the hysteria had reached fever pitch. Several crimes were blamed on the film. In May 1973, 18-year-old James Pinching went on a crime spree in Norwich, dressed in a boiler suit, braces, boots and eye make-up with a three-foot long cane similar to Alex, the lead droog in the film. He stole four shirts, a Post Office book, got £8 by deception and smashed a shop window. It wasn’t an act as depicted in the film or the book, but it was said that this young scrote had been influenced. In March 1973, the Somerset Senior Professional Cup match ended in chaos when seven youths who were dressed like droogs hurled cans, stones and bricks, hospitalising nine people. Six were convicted of causing an affray, but wasn’t this just bog-standard football hooliganism, as yobs will be yobs? July 1974, in Runcorn, two gangs of youths engaged in a street brawl with sticks and coshes. Witnesses described it as like “something from A Clockwork Orange”, only none of the gang mentioned the film. The same happened in Bolton when a gang of 30+ youths were arrested on a train with an assortment of weapons, detectives said “one theory is that they were influenced by ‘A Clockwork Orange’ which was on its third week in Bolton cinemas”, but again, it wasn’t verified if any of them had seen the film. In May 1973, the body of Frank Boulton was found battered about the face in Newton-le-Willows. No-one saw him murdered, but the Liverpool Daily Post stated “police are investigating a cult of teenage youths wearing false eyelashes and noses, heavy make up and high heeled shoes, who had killed him for kicks… the film was shown last week in Warrington, Wigan and Newton-le-Willows… police are visiting fancy dress shops to see who has purchased what”, even though his killers hadn’t been seen. The murder of David McManus was an outlier among these crimes and misdemeanours, as it was an irrefutable copycat of a scene in the film and two pages from the book, as proven in a court of law. But at least two other crimes were linked to the film. On 3rd of November 1973 at Manchester Crown Court, four youths - John Canterbury, Glynn Harrison, Kenneth Vernon and David Tetlor - were convicted of the gang-rape of a 17-year-old Dutch girl at the Heywood campsite in Lancashire. Christopher Hosker held her boyfriend hostage with a knife to his throat, while the boys took it in turns to rape her. Sources incorrectly state that they sung ‘Singing in the Rain’ during the attack, similar to a scene from the film, but the victim herself stated she had only heard them singing it in the minutes before, so it may have inspired them or been a coincidence? Canterbury was sentenced to five years, Harrison, Vernon & Tetlor to four, with Hosker to six months. But the most violent, yet least well known attacks happened in France. In the late summer of 1973, a six youths dressed as droogs went on a sadistic spree from Brittany to Cannes. The first occurred when they dragged a young couple from their car and gang-raped the woman while her husband was forced to watch. They attacked five other motorists and youths on a campsite, burgled some houses, three Finnish girls were thrown into the docks ‘for fun’, a Swedish girl was left unconscious having smashed a bottle over her head, and a ski champion was thrown over a parapet and later died of his injuries. By the 5th of July 1973, with the hysteria brewing and Britain’s self-proclaimed moral guardian, Mary Whitehouse insisting that the film be banned, it wasn’t until the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who lived in England, started receiving death threats that he pulled it from UK cinemas. As an auteur who had negotiated final cut of his film, but also had the contractual right to remove it from distribution in the UK and several other territories, it was quietly pulled from all cinemas with no fanfare or furore. It was no more graphic or violent than any other ‘X’ rated film released that year, and except for a few illicit screenings at the Scala Cinema, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was banned until Kubrick’s death in March 1999. It returned to UK cinemas on the 17th of March 2000, and the country didn’t descend into chaos. The hysteria had died decades before, and it was no longer shocking or controversial. Which begs the question, if the film or book hadn’t come out, would David McManus have lived? Oddly, on the 26th of February 1973, five weeks before his murder, using archaic words, the Western Daily Press stated “here lies the danger that the impressionable will see urban violence equated with fun and A Clockwork Orange’s influence may be registered by a sharp decline in our tramp population” Early 1973. Ted Heath was the Prime Minister, the UK had joined the European Economic Community, and the US had ended its military involvement in the Vietnam war. In the charts was Long Haired Lover from Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond, Blockbuster! by The Sweet, Cum On Feel the Noize" by Slade. Kids played with their Etch-a-Sketch or rode around on a Raleigh Chopper wearing bell-bottom cords, bright shirts with wide collars and plimsols, with a Vesta curry and Arctic Roll for tea, or if it was a special occasion, a mixed grill at the Berni Inn beginning with a prawn cocktail. And if you were posh, on your 20 inch telly, you could watch The Generation Game and Are You Being Served… in colour. Wednesday the 4th of April 1973 was an ordinary day for most, and with many factories and workshops surrounding Watling Street in Fenny Stratford, for one gang of lads, it was an excuse to go out on the lash. Not a biggie, as tomorrow was a work day, but a few pints… which would tragically end in murder. The Swan Hotel at 6 Watling Street, opposite St Martin’s Church, had been coaching house since 1472. It had seen better days, and like most pubs, it had a limited selection of Skol, Harp, Mackesons, bitter or mild. In the corner sat the lads, praising the sex and violence they’d seen at the cinema three days before in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, yet only one was ever named, as the others remained anonymous. As the smallest and youngest of the gang, Richard John Palmer was just 16 years old. Described as quiet, placid and slightly built with neck length fair hair, he worked as a pipe lagger’s mate and lived with his mum, Doreen and step-dad, Len Lawrence in a council house on Laburnum Grove, Bletchley. He was unremarkable, he wasn’t diagnosed with a mental illness, he attended Army Cadets but wasn’t obsessed by war, he didn’t excessively drink, and his friend, John Willoughby told the police, “in the six or seven years I’ve known Richard, he has never been violent. He was one who was always laughing, and he loved to play practical jokes. Because of this we nicknamed him ‘Dopey’”. He was well-read, and according to the headmaster of Bletchley Grammar, Donald Hale unfairly stated “he was addicted to sensational literature”, which wouldn’t have been an issue, if Palmer had a passion for Jane Austen. After the murder, Palmer’s step father, Len said “Richard saw the film and has the book in his bedroom and the music. He was obviously fascinated by it and has told us as much. He didn’t appear wrapped up in violence”, but everyone seemed to agree that he was “spellbound” and “excited” by the book. That night, he finished work, and went to The Swan to meet his pals. Whether he knew David McManus by name or only by sight is unknown, but the press spared as little time learning about David’s life as the locals who gave him spare change. All that was written was that he was a 60-year-old homeless man from Belfast, he had forty convictions for drunkenness and begging, he was “a nuisance but harmless”, he was in court two days prior being drunk and disorderly, and his life was summed up by the tabloids in four words; he was a tramp, a hobo and a meth’s drinker. McManus was in The Swan that night, he drank three and a half pints so wasn’t intoxicated and bought his own drinks. At some point, McManus asked for a cigarette and Palmer gave it to him, it wasn’t a problem, but as McManus started scrounging off others, Palmer politely asked him to sit down. It was then, for no clear reason, that Palmer later claimed “I found myself feeling hostile towards older people and a feeling that there was no place for them”, which is a theme from the novel. Roger Gray QC for the defence said “it seemed as if he was part modelled on the characters in the book… Palmer was compelled by a sudden gust of savagery… some terrible force driving him to commit this offence”, with odd similarities to the scene in question; an old Irish homeless drunk, and a gang of bored youths. When the investigation began, that’s what the detectives were looking for, a gang, as Len, his step-father said “it’s fantastic that one boy could do all those injuries. I can’t believe anyone could be capable of such a thing, especially alone. Others might be involved and Richard could be shielding someone. He behaved himself… though always trying to keep up with his mates”. But with the court records locked away and the witness statements going unreported, the truth may never be known… …but the similarities between the book, the film and the copy-cat killing were undeniable. As Roger Gray QC stated “the similarity between the description on pages 14 and 15 of the book, and this case is weird… the public house… the tramp singing in the streets… and the attack. The passage is so revolting, I would not read it to the court”, in case it influenced other youngsters, but he had to, “in the hope that the publicity might help stamp out rather than increase this sort of senseless brutality”. After 10:30pm the pub shut and (it is said) this gang of unnamed lads headed in different directions. McManus, it was said, “scrounged 15p from customers at the fish n chip shop”, a buying his supper of a pastie, chips and two bottles of lemonade, and headed to the porch of St Martin’s Church where he regularly slept. Palmer joined him, but with no witnesses to verify this, it’s uncertain if he was alone. To the Police he claimed “I went to rob him, he was buying drinks so I thought he had money”, but this makes no sense as Palmer lived with his parents, had a job, and all McManus had left was 1 ½p. (Add film audio) “When we got outside, we viddied a burbling old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk… so we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing”. In his confession, Palmer claimed he beat McManus over the head with the bottles “until they broke”, leaving him concussed and bleeding. But he wasn’t finished. With the book being “the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence”, seeing himself as the lead, Alex, he said he grabbed a slab on concrete left by the workmen, and beat McManus’ body, breaking several ribs, piercing a lung, fracturing his skull, breaking his jaw, eye-sockets and nose, with internal bleeding. Detective Superintendent Weight said “the tramp had by far the worst injuries I have ever seen”, and although Palmer later claimed, “I thought he was dead”, he wasn’t. Blinded, with his brain swelling, McManus staggered up Aylesbury Street trying to flee, but with a Droog wannabe in pursuit, he only made it forty yards, when outside of what was Watson’s garage, he was attacked with two half bricks. Two witnesses recalled, “I thought he had a red scarf over his head… It was like a mask which shone and has a glazed look… we didn’t realise it was blood”. They saw a young lad – described as 5 foot 7, pale, thin faced, fair hair, in a dark pullover and light coloured trousers - later identified by them as Palmer, and with the bricks “battered him again, then kicked him, and finished him off with a stick”. But Palmer didn’t run. At roughly 11:05pm, from a phone booth on Aylesbury Street, someone (of that same description) called the Police to report an attack, gave the address, but left the receiver hanging. The Police and an ambulance arrived, but McManus was already dead. Having thrown the three halfpennies he’d stolen from the homeless man away in disgust, Palmer went home, his mum Doreen said “I can’t get over how calm my Richard was when he walked into the house that night… he got a glass of water and went to bed… The next morning, he put the same clothes on. I didn’t see any bloodstains, then he went out”. And having been identified by several witnesses, 17 hours later, Police arrested him at work, astounded that they weren’t here to arrest a gang, but he admitted “there was no one else, just me” – a small, mild-mannered and well-read 16-year-old boy. Palmer admitted, “I kept thinking about the old boy as I made up lagging compound. It was like a scene from the film. We were talking about it the other night… about beating up an old boy like this one”. To assess if he was mentally competent to stand trial, Dr Leslie Ford, a consultant psychiatrist for the defence, said “Palmer was not suffering from a mental disease and he was not drunk or taking drugs”. But who was to blame; the book, the film, or the killer? (End) Richard Palmer was tried at Oxford Crown Court. In his defence, Roger Gray QC stated “the irresistible conclusion is that this book… is the only possible explanation of what this boy did”, with John Owen QC for the prosecution stating “if may have been carried out for excitement as a result of the film”. Having shown “no sense of remorse”, on Wednesday the 4th of July 1973, Justice Ashworth ordered that Richard Palmer be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for an indefinite period. The judge praised him stating “it is to your credit that you have shown sense and courage and pleaded guilty… but it will only be when you have shown to the doctors and authorities that you are fit, that you will be released”. Many blamed Palmer for his own actions, some attributed it to his unnamed friends, and although his defence counsel stated “the link between this crime and (the book) is established beyond any doubt… many people have much to answer for whether authors, directors or (distributors). They produce a canker among these impressionable youngsters which all reasonable people desire to see stopped”. But actress, Miriam Karlin, who in the film played the cat lady who is raped by a giant phallus, stated “I utterly refute the statements that the murder was a result of the picture. Any normal human being who had no evil intent or no wild desires is not going to be influenced by this film”, with Warner Bros stating “this 16 year old boy should never have seen it. It was X-certificate”, and Anthony Burgess, the author reacted to rabid calls for his book to also be banned, stating “If you ban my book, you’ve got to ban the Old testament too”, he said all while writing a book about Napoleon, “I suppose someone will one day get around to blaming me for his massacres, just because I’m writing about them”. 53 years after its release, the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ remains controversial, and by default, so is the book. On the 6th of July 2001, it was first broadcast on British television via Sky Box Office, and one year later, publicly on Channel 4. In 2005, it briefly became a buzz word for gang attacks when David Morely, a survivor of the Soho bombing was killed by yobs. And at least twice, two other killers in 1990 and 2003, were dubbed the ‘Clockwork Orange killer’ having supposedly been influenced by the film. As of today, 69-year-old Richard Palmer is no longer in prison, and is said to have lived a good life. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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