Original subtitles

December 2010

started as a perfectly ordinary month.

The thing that changed everything

was the weekend when Joanna Yeates disappeared.

She's vanished,

literally vanished into thin air.

It was an awful journey

for the family of Joanna Yeates.

In front of cameras invited to record the moment,

they went to the place where her body was found.

The press interest was immense.

Joanna Yeates.

- Joanna Yeates. - Joanna Yeates.

Are you able to give us

any detail of what it was you told them?

I'm afraid not, No.

Anything that I have said, I have said to the police,

and I'm not prepared to make any comments to the media.

The press absolutely annihilated Chris Jefferies.

It was open season.

Much to my astonishment,

I was arrested on suspicion of Jo's murder.

The police were clearly affected by

what was being written in the papers.

10,000 pounds Jefferies is your man.

How on earth can he have a fair trial?

It was just that insatiable need

to get the exclusives.

It was detracting from the hunt for Jo Yeates' killer.

This was no longer about Jo.

It was all about the story.

It was almost like she'd been forgotten,

like her death was incidental.

Go ahead, caller.

Okay, basically, I'd gone away for the weekend

and I come back to find my girlfriend's not here

when she was expected to be,

and all her important stuff is still in the flat,

such as her wallet, her keys, her phone, her glasses, everything,

and basically I've just found that now,

thinking that she'd come home late and she'd be here,

but she isn't.

And what's her name, please?

Joanna Yeates.

My name is Richard Bunston.

In 2010, I was a detective

on Avon and Somerset's major crime investigation team.

Joanna's boyfriend Greg had been in Sheffield

and was calling her and texting her repeatedly

for a couple of days with no response.

Greg came back to the flat, rang her phone,

and it was ringing in her pocket.

Her keys were there.

Her shoes were there. Her coat was there.

She's vanished, literally vanished into thin air.

Every missing person is investigated in the same way.

You look at movements, you look at phone use,

you look at friends,

you look at the last people they had contact with,

and you build a timeline, and Jo was no different.

We started inquiries to check out that

Greg had been where he said he had been.

It was very easy to ascertain

that he'd been up in Sheffield, visiting friends and family.

She and Greg had a very strong relationship.

There was never a suggestion

that they'd been having any kind of issues or anything.

We didn't know if there was mental health issues,

drugs or alcohol issues.

Unfortunately, their flat is close to

Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was a notorious

location for people to commit suicide from.

But there was absolutely nothing.

She was happy at work, was popular with her friends.

There was absolutely no reason for Jo to go missing.

The night that Jo was last seen,

we eventually pieced together the movements from CCTV.

She went from work to meet friends in Ram's bar in Bristol,

and then visited a couple of different supermarkets.

She'd gone to the shops, bought some cider,

told her friends that she was gonna be baking all weekend.

We were able to find the receipt

for items that she'd purchased that evening on her way home,

so the assumption therefore is that she's got home

and has gone missing from home.

My name is Christopher Jefferies.

I was Joanna Yeates' landlord.

My flat was on the first floor

on the other side of the building to Jo's.

When Joanna Yeates disappeared,

the first thing that her boyfriend Greg did

was to give me a ring.

Greg wanted to know whether I had any idea at all

as to where she might be.

I had met Jo once or twice

after Jo and her boyfriend moved in.

I can't claim to have known her particularly well

because she'd only been in there a month or two

at the time of her disappearance.

There was one occasion.

There was a leak into her flat from the flat above,

so I was contacted to see what could be done.

She was very, very pleasant.

She was perhaps a little bit nervous.

I say she was a little bit nervous

because she was just slightly hesitant

at letting me into the flat.

Everyone in that building

needed to be treated as a potential suspect.

I was interviewed by the police

following Jo's disappearance.

On the night that Jo disappeared,

I had arrived back in the evening at about nine o'clock.

I had been to the gym.

I went straight into my flat

and I spent the rest of the evening in the flat.

The police searched the grounds of the house.

People, they were baffled as to what had happened because

there was no sign of a break-in.

I had keys to the flat.

But there was absolutely

no evidence or clues or idea where she was.

Like any big city.

Bristol had more than its fair share of missing persons.

There are so many of those almost on a daily basis,

and not all of them end up being publicized.

Jo's disappearance was completely out of character.

We need to publicise this.

We need to try and find Jo and find out what's happened to her.

A press release from Avon and Somerset Police

arrived in our inbox, which notified us

that Joanna Yeates had been missing

after a night out in Clifton.

You engage with the media

because you need the public's help.

The dream scenario is that you engage with the media,

you get the messages out there,

and all being well, very quickly.

The person concerned is found

and they're found safe and well.

But the job of a crime reporter isn't necessarily

just to regurgitate what the police are telling them,

but actually to tell the public the whole story

as much as they possibly can.

As a local crime reporter, you go door knocking,

and I recall going up to her house down Canynge Road,

trying to speak to neighbors, just trying to piece together

if anyone had seen her, heard from her.

My flat was on the first floor.

Joanna had rented one of the garden flats

on the other side of the building.

I remember buzzing on the buzzer and Christopher answered.

He didn't come down.

He just answered on the intercom, but he didn't want speak.

I was going to avoid the press

as far as possible.

Jo's friends had set up a Facebook page

to try and find her.

This is only 15 years ago,

but the social media landscape back then wasn't a landscape,

it was a garden.

That was really one of the first instances in a major case

that we have seen people use social media as a tool to help.

But as social media was in its infancy,

the most effective way

to get those kind of messages out to people

quickly and effectively was to use the press.

On the 21st of December, Jo's mum and dad

did their first media appeal to the public.

If you've got to the stage where, quite early on,

the family are sitting in front of the cameras,

you kind of know that there are severe concerns about this

and there are big, big worries.

With missing people,

sometimes the public can become quite cynical about them.

You need to appeal to their hearts and minds,

and as much as a police officer

can stand in front of a camera

and give a perfectly good interview, when you've got parents

sitting in front of cameras in tears,

who cannot be moved by that?

Who is not gonna want to help in some way?

Jo, whatever the reason

that you have not been in touch over the last few days,

we want you to know that we love you dearly.

She's a white female.

It's powerful.

It really is powerful.

When Joanna Yeates went missing,

I was asked to go up to Bristol

to try and find out backgrounds,

to go and meet friends and family, to befriend people,

talk to them, hopefully build up some sort of trust.

Normally, you really had to

work at getting a story over Christmas.

Everything was closed. Parliament's not sitting.

There's no stories going on,

and suddenly we've got a lovely girl

with a nice job and a good background

and she's completely vanished off the face of the earth.

There's a phenomenon called missing white woman syndrome,

and that's 100% Jo.

She was young. She was engaged.

She was beautiful,

blonde,

white,

middle class.

Unfortunately, the media don't always give

the same amount of attention to people that go missing

that aren't of the same colour,

that aren't of the same socioeconomic background.

She would be someone

who our readership would be concerned about

and we'd want to follow the story.

You mentioned there that Greg tried to get in touch with her.

Where you have a distraught family

who are desperately appealing for information

about a missing member of their family,

you don't want a bun fight

that you might get at some political press conference.

We miss her so much.

Everybody's on their best behavior,

trying to be as sensitive as they can,

and it's good practice for reporters,

before the press conference starts,

to nominate one reporter to ask the questions,

and on this occasion, we chose a woman reporter to do it.

You're doing very well.

This might sound terribly sexist, but I think we felt that

her parents might respond better to a female journalist

because they were talking about their missing daughter.

Forgive me for asking this,

but when you go through all these scenarios,

you must have contemplated

that there could be a dreadful outcome.

How do you cope with that? Mrs. Yeates, I'll ask you that.

I go numb.

With all this snow around, I sometimes picture her lying.

If, for some reason, she had collapsed or had been discarded

and she was alive,

with all the snow and the cold, I just

can't bear the thought of it.

I don't cope with it.

The awful thing about these press conferences,

that as soon as somebody gets tearful,

you hear all the cameras going off, click, click click.

It looks terribly cynical.

I don't think you can avoid all that.

Images of families who are making appeals tearful and crying

are inevitably going to be the images

that will be used in the newspapers and on TV,

but you don't want the people making the appeals

to have some terrible breakdown.

This was a chance to talk to those who loved her,

who've known her since the moment she was born,

who could tell us much more about her,

and by them talking lucidly

and almost happily about the real Joanna,

it's the sort of information that might just prompt

a witness watching my program to come forward

and tell the police what might have happened to her.

She loved life.

She loved doing things with her boyfriend.

She loved doing things around the home.

She was a really loving daughter.

Her father was quite convinced in the early days

that she had been abducted and that someone was holding her.

Please let her go.

Just let her go if you've got her.

Let her go and let her come back to me

and her dad and her family.

Please.

If you have her, or if she is dead,

please tell somebody where she is.

- We want her back. - We want her back.

Forever.

It was unimaginable horror

that that family were experiencing.

I still see their faces.

Is there anything else that you feel

that we've left out that you'd like to say at this stage?

- No, I don't think so. - No.

Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you.

There were a number of mysteries surrounding the case.

One of the most high-profile ones was

the story of the pizza box.

Okay.

I have here a pizza,

which is similar in all respects to the one we believe she purchased.

Which is a Tesco's Finest tomato, mozzarella, and basil pesto pizza.

As part of the investigation, we had footage of Jo.

One of the pieces of footage we had of her was

that on her way home from the pub in Bristol,

she'd bought a pizza.

The receipt for that pizza was in her flat,

but the box, the pizza itself, and the packaging

was nowhere to be seen.

When you've got very little to go on,

you look at every possible line of inquiry.

So, if someone saw a pizza box

sticking out of a bin outside a flat somewhere,

is that the house where Jo ended up?

That would be worth following up.

I can't remember any police force

ever asking about a missing pizza.

The pizza became the subject of more media interest

than we actually had anticipated.

Britain is full of armchair detectives,

and if you throw in a bizarre clue like a pizza,

it adds interest.

If you could just hold that up again,

I'll just get a close-up.

I'm trying to hold it as steady as I can.

That's all right.

The press became absolutely obsessed with it.

Did she eat it?

And if not, well, what happened to it?

It's now a story that is getting national importance.

Christmas is a time

where people gravitate towards their loved ones.

Here is a family that had their Christmas plans

and then suddenly their beloved daughter

was nowhere to be seen.

There was this great contrast

between everybody around that area

walking around with smiles on their faces,

looking forward to Christmas,

people coming back in the fading light

at the end of the day,

laden down with bags full of Christmas shopping,

looking forward to parties,

and amidst all the happiness,

there was this looming tragedy.

Christmas Day, 2010.

I'm sat at home with my family and my young son.

We had just opened his first Christmas present

and my mobile went.

It was the control room inspector

asking me to put my shoes on and drive to Longwood Lane

because a body has been found,

and the initial feeling is that it's Jo Yeates.

I drove up to Longwood Lane

and certainly didn't want to be driving there.

I felt incredibly sad.

I felt incredibly sad.

The people walking the dogs saw a mound.

It snowed heavily in the preceding days,

but the husband spotted

what he thinks was a pair of jeans sticking out of the snow,

and he then discovered that it was, in fact, a body.

Jo was in a very shallow ditch up against the wall,

partially covered in leaves,

as if someone had maybe made a very rough attempt

to disguise the body in some way.

She was preserved by the cold.

We knew it was Jo.

She wasn't wearing any footwear.

She only had a T-shirt and jeans on.

She wasn't dressed for the weather,

and the indications were that

the killer had probably taken her there

and dumped her using a vehicle.

The wall was examined and there was evidence that

Jo had come into contact with that wall quite high up.

The working theory was that

the killer had tried to put her over that wall.

On the other side of that wall is a quarry.

Had that been the case, her body may never have been found

or certainly wouldn't have been found very quickly.

Of all the days

to have to tell a family that their loved one is deceased,

you know, not Christmas day, please.

What could possibly be worse as a parent?

On a bleak December afternoon,

it was an awful journey for the family of Joanna Yeates.

In front of cameras invited to record the moment,

they went to the place where her body was found,

I've never experienced media interest like it.

It was on every channel.

The family of Joanna Yeates.

Of Joanna Yeates.

Joanna Yeates.

This was the biggest story in the country at the time.

My phone was just red hot.

There was this insatiable demand for information.

The biggest question was, "Is this a murder inquiry?"

And we just had to keep saying,

"We've got to wait now for the outcome of the post-mortem."

"Well, when's that gonna be?"

Jo's a scene, so she needed to be dealt with forensically,

but she was frozen, so there's certain things

that needed to be done in a systematic way

before we could take swabs of her body

to see what people have come into contact with her.

The post-mortem took three days.

When Jo's body was discovered on Christmas Day,

it obviously led the TV news that day,

but for printed publications, actually,

most of them don't come out at all on Christmas Day,

and a lot of them don't come out on the 26th of December either,

which meant that they were 48 hours behind the TV news.

They had a lot of catching up to do,

and they needed to do it quick.

Newspapers really wanted the information then.

They wanted everything then,

and the police were then suddenly under pressure.

We cannot say anything until the pathologist comes forward

and gives us a cause of death.

There would've been even more pressure on journalists

to come up with the next story, a follow-up story.

What would it be? Who would it be about?

Were the police saying anything more about the body?

How did she die?

The police are keeping an open mind.

How was she killed? By what method?

It's up to the police to give tidbits to the journalists

so they can write their stories,

because if they don't do that,

then it leads to all sorts of speculation.

Between Christmas and New Year, 2010,

Bristol became wild, wild west country

in terms of media speculation.

On the morning of the 28th of December,

I had a phone call from the family liaison officer

saying Jo's family were extremely upset

by what's been printed in the national newspapers.

I got hold of the papers and I felt sick.

The papers had written that they believe

that Jo Yeates had been held captive for eight days,

had been dumped unconscious in Longwood Lane,

and had died of hypothermia.

I mean, I can only imagine

the distress caused to the family.

So I phoned one of the journalists

and said, "What on earth have you written?"

And his words have stayed with me ever since.

He said, "It was just something

that was being bandied about, so we thought we'd use it.

You weren't giving us anything."

I was speechless.

I'm almost speechless recalling it.

So I said, "We are about

to issue the post-mortem results now,

and you are gonna have an awful lot of egg on your face."

The post-mortem showed that

she certainly didn't die from hypothermia.

It was from compression of the neck or strangulation.

We'd now jumped a huge jump

from a missing person to a murder inquiry.

On the ground in Bristol at the time, it was pretty crazy.

TV trucks parked outside Joanna's flat in Canynge Road.

You had two or three reporters

for every national newspaper in the city.

There was a real frenzy

in terms of trying to contact anyone who knew Joanna.

There were photographers and reporters hanging around,

sitting in their cars, keeping warm,

waiting to talk to neighbors

or to relatives if they turned up.

Above all, we hoped that Greg Reardon,

Joanna's boyfriend, would turn up,

but anybody living within that mansion house

that was divided up into various flats, any neighbors,

we just wanted to find out more about Joanna,

talk to people who knew her.

Joanna's home was in Clifton.

Most people look to Clifton as

one of the most affluent areas in Bristol.

If this had happened in

one of the council estates in South Bristol,

they're like the rougher areas,

everyone would've known Joanna,

but you come to Clifton and you start door knocking,

a lot of people don't even know who lives next door.

Chris Jefferies, he was the landlord.

He would've known Joanna Yeates.

He'd been taking her rent,

so that would be a good starting point, really.

We became aware that Christopher Jefferies

had spoken to the police a second time.

He became an important figure for us to try and talk to.

My second statement, it was something that,

when I was interviewed by the police

following Jo's disappearance,

I'd entirely forgotten about and subsequently remembered.

The night that Jo disappeared,

as I was walking up the driveway to go into the building,

I was vaguely aware of somebody

or some people leaving the premises

by the path at the side of the building,

which led to the front door of Jo's flat.

We wanted to ask him, you know, what he'd told the police,

I was leaving the building to go and do some shopping.

That was how everything began.

You had made some comment, which was then-

He came out and he opened the gate and he walked out

and my colleague asked him what he'd told the police.

That I saw that.

I made some comment,

which was very, very, very much vaguer than that.

He seemed rather irritated, but he was prepared to speak

and we hadn't heard him talk at that point.

Are you able to give us

any detail of what it was you told them?

I'm afraid not, no.

Anything that I have said, I have said to the police,

and I'm not prepared to make any comments to the media.

So you didn't see-

I was absolutely not prepared

to give anybody any statement.

And I thought he's just gonna walk off 'cause he's annoyed

but then, as my colleague asked him again a question,

"Did you definitely see her?"

He kind of turned back

and walked back a couple of paces to the camera.

He did have a slightly strange look on his face.

He wasn't smiling, but there was a kind of sense that

he didn't mind too much the attention of the camera.

You didn't see her that evening?

I certainly cannot say that

I saw Joanna Yeates that evening, no.

Thank you very much.

He turns again and goes towards his car,

at which point a couple of photographers

just come up to him, and as he's trying to get into the car,

snapping pictures of him.

The journalists have found out that this statement has changed,

and you do have to ask, how did they know that?

As a journalist, you always protect your sources.

It must have been, at least to a degree, police-related.

Obviously, I can't prove it.

That was something that

Avon and Somerset Police vehemently denied.

I don't know this, but I think

that if this information was leaked, it was done so that

we focus more on him than we would've done otherwise

because the police were becoming suspicious about him.

I was just on the point of getting up

when I became aware that

somebody was knocking on the door of my flat.

I went to the door, asked who it was.

"It's the police, Mr. Jefferies."

Much to my astonishment,

I was arrested on suspicion of Jo's murder.

When an arrest is made, there are certain things

that we as a police force are able to say,

and there are certain things that we are not able to say,

and one of the things that we never say upon arrest only

is you do not name an individual who's been arrested.

You name an individual once they've been charged,

because we're in a country where

we assume that you're innocent until proven guilty.

We issued a statement

saying that a 65-year-old man had been arrested.

We knew Christopher Jefferies was 65.

You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that

the man arrested was Christopher Jefferies.

What the media started doing is phone police station's up,

and would say, "Just checking.

You know, is it in your custody suite

that you've got Chris Jefferies at the moment,

or is it New Bridewell station or is it Trinity Road?"

A member of staff

in the front office of one of the police stations

got kind of tricked into admitting that

Chris Jefferies was in custody at that station

at that given time and was devastated by it.

When he was arrested, the most important thing

was to assist Christopher at the police station.

When you're advising a suspect at a police station,

you obviously have the choice of

whether your client answers questions or doesn't.

If a client has already given an account,

unless there is something in addition

that he needs to speak about, there is no reason why

the client should be answering questions,

and Christopher had given two full accounts in two statements,

but Christopher was very keen to assist the police

with any further questions that they had

because that's how Christopher is.

He said he was at home.

He lived alone, so he couldn't get that validated.

He didn't have a TV, so you can't even get any timings

of what he may have been doing, watching a certain program.

There was no sign of a forced entry

and he had a set of keys to the flat.

- When Christopher was [arrested, ] - he was very naive.

He expected to attend the police station, give his account,

and almost immediately be released,

and of course that wasn't the case.

Following Chris Jefferies' arrest,

there's a whole new forensic procedure that is adopted

and his flat is subject to intense scrutiny.

There were some trainers found belonging to Jefferies in the flat

that looked like they had blood on them.

Everybody assumed that this was it.

This was the missing piece of the jigsaw.

This was gonna be Jo's blood.

During the police interviews,

they did mention this phone call.

It was made by Vincent Tabak

when he'd gone back to the Netherlands at Christmas.

Vincent Tabak was a tenant who had been living in

the other garden flat next door to Jo's.

He suggested that

Christopher Jefferies' car was facing a different way

the morning after Jo had disappeared.

And that was at odds with Chris Jefferies' account.

I pointed out to them

that there was a very good explanation

for the fact that my car had moved

because it was rather snowy.

I was going to an event that particular evening.

I wanted to reverse up the driveway,

and because it was snowy and icy, the wheels were spinning.

So I knocked on the door of Vincent Tabak's flat

to say, would he mind giving the car a push

so that I could get up the slope?

Of course, he said, "What are neighbors for?"

There would've been a lot of emphasis put on that phone call.

They took it seriously.

While I was in custody, slightly naively,

it didn't actually occur to me that

anybody might be remotely interested

in the fact that I was in custody

That morning, I had a number of telephone calls.

People were calling me to go and buy the newspapers.

I went to the shop,

purchased a pile of newspapers, and flicked through them.

Wow.

So, on the 31st of December,

the press absolutely annihilated Chris Jefferies.

I can't remember a suspect in a big case

being quite subjected to that almost vilification.

It was just appalling.

I've never had a client who has had such coverage.

It was a feeding frenzy.

Chris Jefferies was tried and convicted by the media

long before we'd ever sat down and finished questioning him.

The newspapers just tore his life apart,

turning up pupils who'd known him when he was a teacher years before,

and they were saying dreadful things about him.

I think what people vividly remember is

the image of him with blue hair.

My hair never looked like that.

I used,

at the time, a shampoo

to give the hair a very slight blue tint,

but it certainly was not anything

remotely resembling the photograph.

But that, of course, wasn't the only thing,

The worst thing I remember

were quotes from anonymous females

who were his pupils many years before,

saying how uncomfortable they felt around him,

how creeped out they felt,

and there was also somebody

who'd been a tenant in one of the flats

who accused him of being a peeping tom.

The implication was that she was a female,

and, you know, he had some unhealthy sexual interest in her,

and, again, in the context of him being identified as

the suspect for Joanna's murder,

it couldn't really be more damning.

The police were saying

there was no evidence that she'd been sexually assaulted,

but a pretty young woman murdered,

there's a kind of unspoken sexual element to it

in most people's minds.

That all added to this idea that he was a sexual deviant.

That's why he's been arrested.

The police were scratching around for a motive,

so my concern was that, what effect does this have

on the police and the investigation?

Bizarre links were being made

between him and a convicted paedophile.

There was no shred of truth whatsoever

in the allegations that were being made.

The only link that they had

was that they had both owned the same flats,

but it was years in between.

It had changed hands two or three times since.

There was no link to be made there.

They used quotes such as, "He was really creepy.

Everyone thought he was gay."

It implies that being gay makes you a paedophile,

and it does smack of massive homophobia.

The media were looking at

potential links with other unsolved murders of females,

particularly those around the same age as Joanna Yeates.

Claudia Lawrence, who'd vanished in York the year before.

There was Melanie Hall from the late '90s who'd vanished.

Perhaps the most intriguing

was the case of Glenis Carruthers,

who had vanished a few hundred yards

from where Joanna Yeates had disappeared.

If you look at the layout of the newspaper pages,

Jo's completely absent.

The pictures of Chris Jefferies are huge

and the pictures used of Jo

are either thumbnail tiny, or in some cases, not at all.

This was no longer about Jo.

This was about this man,

and it was almost like her death was incidental.

My phone again rang and said the Attorney General

is commenting on Christopher's case on Radio 4.

Dominic Grieve,

who was the attorney general at that point,

he went on the World at One on BBC Radio 4

to slap the wrist of the media, to tell them off,

to basically say, "You're going too far."

The Attorney General is

the sort of chief legal advisor

to the crown and the government.

It takes pretty bad press coverage

for the attorney general to step in.

It is highly unusual and it just goes to show

that they had not only crossed a line.

They had done some sort of hurdle over it.

Of course, it was welcomed,

but a lot of the damage had been done

by the time the attorney general had made those comments.

The coverage was extensive.

The content of some of the articles

was driving you towards thinking that

Christopher Jefferies might be guilty,

and that is potentially very problematic.

If there's lots of information in those articles

that don't actually make it into the courtroom,

then you may potentially have jurors

who remember things that they read

and they may be reaching conclusions not based

from the evidence that they're hearing in the courtroom.

How on earth can he have a fair trial

when there's been all this negative publicity about him?

There were huge pressures to come up with

big agenda-setting scoops.

Massive, massive pressure.

In 2010, the British press was just coming out of

what has been described as their worst year ever.

Circulation was dropping dramatically,

and some publications, such as The Mirror,

had actually seen a 55% decrease in circulation

over that past decade.

The advertising revenue was taking a massive plummet,

and at this point,

paginations were having to decrease because of it

and it was looking pretty bleak.

The staff were under pressure to get the story

because they know the circulation is falling.

Bad news sells.

Murder is one of the strongest,

highest news values that there is.

The proprietor would ring the editor on a Saturday night.

Wherever Rupert Murdoch was in the world,

he would call in, speak to the editor,

and if he wasn't happy,

there would just be silence on the phone.

There was huge pressure to get the story.

Don't worry how you get it.

Following Vincent Tabak's phone call from the Netherlands

on the 30th of December,

DC Thomas was sent out to interview him.

She got a really bad feeling about Tabak.

Forensic strategy for a murder,

you take samples and elimination swabs

from anybody that could assist the inquiry.

She requested that he provide

a voluntary sample of DNA, a mouth swab.

He seemed a little bit weary of that process.

When DC Thomas returned with the evidence

that she got from Tabak, I spoke to her

and I knew that she had had a bad feeling about Tabak,

and when I read the statement, I did as well.

He made comments about his movement

the night that Jo was last seen that would have put him

in proximity of the front door of Joanna's flat.

Something wasn't quite right,

but when DC Thomas presented the evidence

to certain senior officers,

it's fair to say that they didn't embrace it.

All attention was still going on Jefferies.

The press, the media, it was poison,

and it was certainly a distraction for the police,

and I think no doubt influenced

mindsets of detectives on that inquiry.

Confirmation bias means that

you pin everything on one individual being responsible

and you only seek information to confirm your suspicions

and you'll ignore or edit or miss out information

that suggests they're perhaps not guilty.

I believe confirmation bias

was prevalent in this investigation,

and it's a very dangerous mindset for an investigator to have.

At 4:00 PM on the 31st,

there was an extension granted by the magistrate's court

in order to further question and detain Christopher.

Hearing that they'd got an extension to keep holding him

did suggest that they had some credible evidence.

We'd felt that the police had got their man.

Four, three, two, one!

The media were camped outside Jo's flat,

sat in vehicles in the cold,

waiting for an opportunity to take photos of

detectives coming or police doing searches.

They were everywhere.

Everyone wanted an angle.

The Sun, The Mirror, The Express,

The Mail, The News of the World.

The pressure was on to get a splash as good as the last,

because you can't rest on your laurels in newspapers.

You need to keep feeding your readership

and the readership needed to be entertained.

No one's forcing you to pick up a tabloid paper

if you don't want to.

As a local crime correspondent, it's not fun.

You have scores of journalists

competing over the same story.

The tabloids were offering money to people

who lived inside the cordon up in Clifton

near where Jo lived,

just so they could sit in their lounges

and watch and look for any police activity.

One of Jo's friends was offered 20,000 pounds

to speak to a tabloid paper.

You have people throwing money around,

paying for interviews, paying for information,

which I didn't have.

Then I have my editor saying, "Why haven't you got this story?"

And I'm thinking, "Because it's rubbish."

Many of the comments in the papers were unsubstantiated.

They were unnamed sources.

The Sun ran a story

with a woman who didn't want to be named,

saying that Chris Jefferies had stalked her.

The story was that he had chatted to her at a local library,

and that whenever she came into the library,

he would smile at her.

He said nice things about her hair colour,

that he had chatted to her in the supermarket

about the contents of her supermarket trolley,

and that when she eventually said

that he was making her feel uncomfortable,

he'd said something like,

"What do you take me for, some kind of pervert?"

I think using the word "stalking" was perhaps unreasonable.

I wonder why the woman didn't want to be named.

An unnamed source could be

me talking to a senior police officer

and the police officer saying, "We've got our man there.

We've got our man."

An unnamed source could be

somebody who knows the person who's been arrested

and says, "I'll talk to you,

but I'll talk to you off the record."

In other words, you can't name him or her.

The journalist must always know their identity.

However, you as a journalist never have to reveal your sources,

so you will never ever have to give that name,

those details to anybody, even in a courtroom.

So,

what stops you from making it up?

Very little.

The newspapers didn't really care

whether what they were saying about Christopher was true,

because, ultimately, I think they were gambling on

him being charged and convicted of murder.

It was probably a calculated risk.

They had a look at the bottom line and thought,

"Well, we might get sued,

but look at how much we're gonna be making."

The editor of The Mirror, Richard Wallace,

said they'd been told by the police

that Chris Jefferies was their man

in an off-the-record briefing.

Had Christopher Jefferies

actually been convicted of the murder of Joanna Yeates,

from a libel perspective,

it would be very hard to start mounting a claim.

There is no such thing as defaming a murderer.

You can't lower that person's reputation

because they don't have a good reputation to start with.

The newspapers were so convinced

that he was about to be charged,

it was almost like it was open season.

Whilst Christopher was in police custody,

on occasions, he did find it difficult.

He was a person of good character,

never been in trouble before.

He would've been in a completely new environment,

somewhat intimidating, being in a cell, being handcuffed.

At the back of one's mind, one starts to feel,

well, possibly there is something that I have done

that I've forgotten about

and they have discovered some incriminating evidence.

The police were clearly affected by what was being written in the papers.

There were newspaper articles which portray Christopher

as having a bad temper.

Thereafter, in the interview,

the police are asking Christopher

as to whether he has a bad temper or not.

I was obviously very forthcoming in giving them

all sorts of details and answers to their questions

since I knew I had nothing to hide.

Christopher said

he did have a bad temper on certain occasions.

Christopher said he had a bad temper

for effect when teaching.

He could be quite critical of bad grammar,

and I'm certainly aware that he pointed out

a few inaccuracies in the interview process,

which can probably only make people

feel more prickly towards him.

They were obviously getting very frustrated

that they weren't getting anywhere.

They tried to put a bit more pressure on me.

The evidence against him was extremely flimsy.

The trainers found belonging to Jefferies

in the flat with blood on them,

it turned out to be beef blood.

- Good evening. - Within the last hour,

it's been confirmed that the landlord of Joanna Yeates

is no longer in police custody.

Christopher was released on police bail,

which means he is still a suspect.

After the three days I'd spent in the police station,

I certainly was very angry because I remember that

the first thing that I said to the solicitor was,

"Somebody has got to be sued for this."

We were very concerned for him.

The press were portraying him in a very, very bad way.

Had somebody wanted to be aggressive towards him,

threaten him, his address was public, his house distinctive.

Of course, his photographs were in all the papers.

It's just extremely dangerous.

Christopher couldn't go back to his own house,

so essentially he went back to a friend's house.

Christopher had no clothing

because they took all the clothing for forensics,

so he felt that it would be a good idea

to go to the local shopping center.

The last thing we wanted was

for somebody to either attack him, abuse him,

and put him in a worse position mentally or physically

than what he was.

We made sure that he lay low.

One of the points that I raised was

perhaps Christopher changing his appearance.

And it was arranged

that I would go

late one afternoon to the hairdresser.

Time for a change. Time for a new look.

Christopher's life was disrupted.

He has to live with what was said about him

and the way he was portrayed in the media

for the rest of his life,

and I'm sure, even now, if he's walking down the street,

someone will say,

"There's the guy that was nicked for Joanna Yeates."

When Christopher Jefferies is released,

we are then back to square one.

There's still a killer on the loose.

There is understandably always concern.

In tandem with the criminal investigation,

the police were doing

higher-profile patrols, enhanced patrols,

more officers on the streets, trying to reassure people.

A uniformed officer would turn up

to kind of deliver that reassuring message,

warning women that, you know,

there's no great danger, but just be careful,

particularly walking home at night.

The difficulty was that there didn't appear to be

any other remotely obvious suspects.

And the killer hadn't been found.

That led to criticism of the investigation.

Scrutiny then came back on the police on things

that they could have, should have done differently,

and that the relationship with the media

became more fractious at that point,

The interest was still huge.

I was still down in Bristol.

I was under pressure to do daily reports

to keep the whole Joanna Yeates story going.

The media are clamouring for their next headline,

their next update.

They want more information,

and if you can't provide it to them,

then they will look elsewhere,

and one of the things you commonly see,

you see it a lot on TV, they will bring out experts.

Messages are mixed

and even the experts are confused.

ITN took him up to the location

where Jo's body had been found to seek his expert view.

This chat raised a number of, in his professional opinion,

failings there in the Somerset Police.

He found some litter at the scene.

I would've expected to come along here

and seen absolutely nothing,

certainly nothing that DNA could be taken from.

Who is this person, first and foremost?

What gives him the credentials

and the expertise to to criticise us?

I was at the scene the day Jo's body was found,

and I know that they didn't leave a stone unturned

in terms of looking for evidence.

The upshot was that

Avon and Somerset Police were so angry,

they banned ITN from press conferences.

I think it was a brave decision to make,

and I think sometimes you do need to do things like that

because some elements of the media

do have this aura about them where they feel untouchable

and they think that they can push the boundaries

and get away with things.

I thought that was bizarre.

I thought that was petulant of the police.

The police were cutting their nose off to spite their face

because they were getting rid of the possibility

that an ITN viewer

might be the very witness that they're looking for.

The ban lasted no longer than 48 hours in the end,

and one of the reasons that it was lifted,

more than anything else, is because of the backlash.

We've got the right to ask questions.

We've got a right for this and a right for that

and freedom of the press.

That became the story,

and it was detracting from what we needed the story to be,

which was the hunt for Jo Yeates' killer.

The next day, The Sun ran a front page story

saying that Joanna Yeates was missing a ski sock

when her body was found.

Perhaps that was the murder weapon.

Maybe that's why a sock was missing,

that he'd strangled her with it,

or it had been taken as a trophy by the killer.

The trouble was, a couple of days before,

the investigation team had said that

she'd been fully clothed when she was found.

The media felt like they were withholding information.

One of Jo's socks was missing,

but there are certain things you don't always tell the media

because if an independent witness comes forward

and says something, there might be a detail

that you haven't put into the public domain,

that if they come to you with it,

you kind of think, "We've got a credible lead here."

Once it became clear that

certainly at least one element of the media knew about it,

we were gonna have to do something about this now.

I'm here this morning to talk to you about a missing sock.

We ended up buying a similar sock, putting it into a case,

and holding it up at the press conference.

The Sun often lead the rest of us on those kind of stories.

Yeah, they clearly had a good source.

How did they find out?

We didn't know where the media got that from.

I know it caused some concern to the investigation team.

The murder investigation team had a briefing room

that doubled up to brief the media.

There were some suggestions.

I wonder if the media have bugged that room.

I wonder if they're getting snippets of information

from bugging it,

but to my knowledge, none were found.

I think, from that point onwards, the relationship

between the media and the police definitely changed.

The investigation team closed ranks.

By mid-January, the relationship between

Avon and Somerset Police and the media

was not in the best of places.

It became increasingly hard

to find any new angles to the story.

The Sun offered 50,000 pounds

for information that would lead to

the successful capture of Jo's killer.

It is a little bit unusual for a newspaper organization

to put up that amount of money,

especially if you think about the financial dire straits

that the newspaper industry were in at the time.

It was a very clever way of keeping the story in the press.

There wasn't much happening

in terms of the police investigation.

Whatever work was going on

behind the scenes with forensics

was kept really tight because of the media interest.

We didn't want any more speculation,

So when we discovered

that they were going to do a reconstruction,

that was another story for me to do

to keep the Joanna Yeates story in our bulletins.

When they started filming it,

we were there filming from a distance,

and I think the police were a bit annoyed

that we discovered it.

They didn't like the idea of them losing control over it.

I remember the actress who looked remarkably like Joanna,

wearing the same white skiing jacket

that you can see in those CCTV images

of her last movements on the night.

We'd all got used to reconstructions being done a week after,

because if you do it a week after,

at the same time, you're far more likely to find people

who remember what they were doing at that time.

It seemed odd to wait a month to do that reconstruction,

and there were genuine questions about, you know,

well, where is this investigation going?

The irony was that

the reconstruction that was shot never got shown.

Police in Bristol say

that they have made a significant breakthrough

in their hunt for the killer of Joanna Yeates

after arresting a 32-year-old man.

The Avon and Somerset force

haven't named their latest suspect,

the police reacting perhaps to criticisms

following some coverage of their first suspect.

Somebody started running on their ticker tape

quite early on

that it was Vincent Tabak that had been arrested,

at which point I had a phone call from Martin Brunt.

I said, "Look, another media organisation

has named Vincent Tabak as the man who's been arrested.

Is it him?"

I would never give you the name of anybody we've arrested.

I can't help you.

If I repeat it, am I gonna be in trouble?

Am I gonna cause myself any legal problems?

If you were me, would you follow what my rivals have done?

Looking for a nudge and a wink.

We don't confirm names.

We all identified Vincent Tabak

as the man who'd been arrested.

A reporter had interviewed Vincent Tabak

before his arrest,

just as the neighbor, trying to get a bit of background,

trying to get some more colorful quotes.

He didn't raise any suspicions.

There was nothing that you could describe as

being remotely eccentric about his appearance or his manner.

Vincent Tabak was mild-mannered.

He had a decent job. He had a fiancée.

There was nothing really sinister or suspicious about him.

I was driving back to Bristol and got the news

that Vincent Tabak had been arrested,

and my immediate reaction was I think it's very likely

that the police have made another blunder.

He was a tenant who was, in many ways, ideal.

During the 18 months that I had known him,

he had given me absolutely no cause whatsoever

to suggest that he was likely at all

to be involved in all this.

It had already been agreed

that I was gonna interview the next suspect.

My passion as a detective

has always been interviewing suspects.

I sat next to him on purpose.

I wanted to feel his leg shaking against mine.

He denied all knowledge of Jo's death,

and he, in fact, stated through a prepared statement

that he'd never come into contact with her,

knew who she was, wished he could help us.

I know for a fact that the solicitor

and interpreter that we ensured was present

in case there was any suggestion

that he didn't understand questions put to him,

they were convinced that we had an innocent man in custody.

Having spent three days in the company of Vincent Tabak,

he was an extremely clever chap.

Analytical in his thinking.

Clearly not when it came to internet search history.

Why was he researching

"how long does it take for a body to decompose in the snow?"

Why was he looking at Longwood Lane in his search history

prior to Jo even being found?

Why was he researching bin collection in Clifton?

Why was he researching CCTV cameras?

Why was he researching

"can I serve my sentence in the Netherlands?"

The moment that we started to disclose evidence of forensics,

the interpreter stated to me, "I no longer want to be

left in the consultation room with that man."

They were now seeing the game that he was playing.

We found from the forensic examination of his computers

that he was a regular user of hardcore porn,

and some of that porn depicted women being strangled

the same way that Jo was killed.

There was an area on Jo's chest

that showed that he'd come into contact with her

under the back of her jeans behind the knee.

That was quite interesting, because if you were going to

lift someone out of the boot of a car,

where would you hold them?

The final nail in the coffin,

bearing in mind that he said that

he'd never had any association with her,

we found microscopic specks of blood

in the boot of his car that belonged to Jo.

We knew we had him.

I remember Tabak's trial,

the amount of media in the public gallery.

It was taken over. You couldn't get in there.

Journalists camped outside the court, taking photographs.

I wonder how many of those journalists

were the ones that blamed Chris.

During the trial, Tabak's body language was almost pleading

to people around him to give him sympathy.

Before his trial,

Vincent Tabak was held on remand in custody.

He had made this confession to the prison chaplain

that he confessed to the killing.

But in court, Tabak then entered a manslaughter plea.

He was trying to mitigate

his involvement in her death in some way,

and I was annoyed with that.

She deserved more.

His version of events was that she'd been coming home

after a night out with friends

and that she'd invited him in to her flat for a drink.

She had made a flirtatious comment to him.

I don't believe that for a moment, not for a moment.

He had gone to kiss her, but she had screamed.

So he's put his hand over her mouth because she screamed.

He's taken it away and she screamed again,

and he squeezed for about 20 seconds.

He said he hadn't meant to kill her,

but then panicked and disposed of the body.

- That's nonsense. - There was a struggle.

There were around about 43 other injuries to Jo,

including scratches to her torso, her arms,

and even a fractured nose, which showed that

there had certainly been a struggle prior to her death.

And then the prosecution believed that

he'd driven around Bristol,

visiting a supermarket with Joanna's body in the car,

before he then drove across the river

and put her body on the side of the road.

Joanna's family were distraught, listening to

the horrific detail of what happened to their daughter

at the hands of Vincent Tabak.

He knew that Greg wasn't there and gone back to Sheffield,

so she was home alone.

He knew that his girlfriend was gonna be out

'til the early hours of the morning.

It was cold, cold and calculating.

Vincent Tabak is beginning a life sentence tonight

after a jury found him guilty of

the murder of his neighbor Joanna Yeates.

Passing sentence, the judge Mr. Justice Field,

described him as wicked, deceitful, and manipulative.

You want to bring closure to the family.

Here was a clearly heartbroken family who wanted

there to be somebody brought to justice for Jo's death.

I remember Jo's dad coming to shake my hand

after I'd given evidence in court,

and he wouldn't let go of my hand, and I've never forgotten it.

"Thank you. Thank you."

The Leveson Inquiry was an investigation into

the culture and practice of the ethics of the British press.

The reputation of the British press

was quickly disappearing down the toilet, quite honestly.

The News of The World was all about

sex, drugs, and rock and roll, really.

We used to pursue those topics with vigor,

and it was right.

We needed to be tamed.

The Leveson Inquiry was born out of the phone-hacking scandal.

A variety of celebrities came forward

that had their privacy breached,

but it was in particular the press's hacking of

the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler

that really brought it into the forefront.

There really was a deep dive

into British press standards at the time,

and in order for that inquiry to have substance,

somebody like Christopher Jefferies

would be an important person to hear from.

- So may I call now Mr. - Christopher Jefferies?

I appeared at the Leveson Inquiry

to talk about my experience

of the press coverage.

The couple of months while I was still under suspicion,

without doubt,

the most difficult period I think I have spent.

Lord Leveson also took evidence from journalists.

Everybody at The Daily Mirror

is very regretful of the coverage,

and, you know, we do apologise to Mr. Jefferies

for vilifying him in such a way.

But I'd like to specify my sincere personal regrets

that my actions contributed to and exacerbated

the acute personal distress felt by Mr. Jefferies.

The Leveson Inquiry

was also intended to investigate

potentially corrupt links

between the press and the police.

Several senior officers

in the Joanna Yeates investigation,

including the senior responsible officer DCI Phil Jones

and the Chief Constable Colin Port,

gave evidence to the inquiry.

The inquiry was looking at claims that

Avon and Somerset Police had been

institutionally leaking information to the media.

The editor of The Mirror gave a statement saying that

they'd been doing off-the-record briefings

as part of the investigation.

The police do give guidance on these issues,

and if they had not indicated that they

had presumed they were on the right track,

then I don't think the journalists would've been

writing what they've been writing.

We don't give off-the-record briefings,

and to behave in a collusive manner is just abhorrent.

In the wake of Leveson,

police officers stopped talking to people like me

for a long time.

I would send texts, I'd ring my contacts,

and often they would either ignore me

or they would just say, "Look, I can't talk to you

because Leveson decreed that there should be a record of,

you know, contact between journalists and reporters,

and no police officer will want to be known

to be helping you."

After Leveson, the press were trying to behave themselves

and had cleaned up their act.

I think that's fair to say, and they needed to,

but at the end of the day, it was too late.

The genie's out of the bottle.

Social media had completely exploded.

You've got Facebook, TikTok, Instagram.

The world has suddenly become a journalist,

and people were just writing whatever they liked.

The whole media landscape has changed

and it's virtually unregulated.

This is really dangerous territory we've landed ourself in.

Take, for instance, Nicola Bulley,

who tragically slipped

into a river near her home.

There were a lot of similarities

between Joanna Yeates and Nicola Bulley.

They're both whites.

They're both middle class,

but that frenzy of interest,

back with Joanna, it was the press,

whereas with Nicola Bulley, it was social media,

but it was the same kind of hounding, relentless interest,

day after day updates, kind of stopping at nothing

to get a new sliver of information.

They were both defamatory in their own right.

We look at the level of defamation,

of false information in Nicola.

It was off the charts compared to Joanna's case.

When Jo went missing,

there were less than a billion social media users worldwide

on all platforms, but when Nicola Bulley went missing,

that had grown to five billion.

Can you imagine what it would be like

if Jo had gone missing today?

It would be across Insta, TikTok, X.

It would be explosive,

and the fate of Christopher Jefferies

on those social media platforms,

it doesn't even bear thinking about.

It was the Nicola Bulley case

that has begun to turn the tide in our relationship

to a point where police chiefs in the UK

have now drawn up a kind of new protocol

where we are beginning to talk to each other

in the way that we used to pre the Leveson report.

The funeral of murdered landscape architect Jo Yeates

took place today in the Hampshire village where she grew up.

Ms. Yeates' coffin was followed by her parents,

David and Teresa, and her brother Chris.

Greg Reardon, her boyfriend, followed them.

Jo was one of the world's good people.

She was a genuinely nice, good person.

Jo was a young woman

recently in a relationship with her boyfriend.

This was the first time

that they were going to set up house together.

She was certainly very much in love.

She was somebody with a promising career before her.

Particularly on this case, you do think of, you know,

the sadness of her lost life and her family.

They're still left with this huge empty hole in their lives.

When people ask me about my previous career in the police

and they learn about the Jo Yeates case,

they always mention Chris Jefferies.

Not Tabak.

Not Jo.

That's people's memory of this particular murder.

Perhaps they do forget that, you know,

at the heart of this story

is the awful murder of a young woman.

There's cases that stay with you.

I often drive by the scene and remember her,

and there's still flowers left there.