Original subtitles

Police have said they're treating the discovery of a man's body in Angus as

suspicious.

The discovery was made at the Canordie Nature Reserve near Kirrymuir early

yesterday morning.

I've been in the police for 26 years now and this is definitely the most violent,

sustained attack I think I've ever been involved in.

They thought they were being clever with the burning of the body, the burning of

the vehicle.

And whilst people can often lie, there's digital footprint.

It's like a key that unlocks the full truth.

I could be listening to your calls. I could be looking at your text messages.

I could be watching where you are right now, and you wouldn't know.

23,000 lines of Snapchat data.

1,980 voice notes.

That mobile phone can incriminate him.

Showing off his knife, he was 13.

There's vast amounts of data coming in.

Everyone's waiting for the analysts to come up with the goods.

You can't afford to waste a minute.

It was just chaos.

And even if you've not been told the truth, a digital footprint can't be

disputed.

It was a Thursday morning.

Up around about half past five in the morning, and I saw that there had been

an incident up in Canordie Nature Reserve, which was in Tayside.

It struck me at that time, you know, it was a really remote location.

Really remote.

A short distance out of Kirrimere, but completely off the beaten track.

You know, crimes of this type, crimes generally, don't actually happen in

Kirrimuir. You know, it's a very quiet agricultural town.

Three people who were RSPB workers had gone to the nature reserve around about

four o'clock in the morning.

They'd seen what they thought was a male body adjacent to a vehicle that had been

set on fire.

I've been a police officer for 18 years and what I saw at the crime scene at

Canardie was probably one of the most shocking scenes I've ever seen in my

career.

He had severe injuries to his face, neck, body and legs.

They were like very serious cutting injuries.

What was the motive for this?

And who is this? Who is it we're dealing with?

The identification of the deceased was challenging.

Now, ordinarily, we would go through that person's pockets, look for marks

that might lead us to identifying the owner of the vehicle.

But a lot of the material was burnt, so in a case like this, the digital team

are crucial to finding out exactly what's taking place.

Our digital detectives operate in the background.

Especially if they're able to tap into aspects of our lives that not even we

ourselves know about.

I think we all carry a small digital device that tracks your movements,

record all your communications.

As we go through digital devices, that's where the art of violence comes in,

where they start to layer all these pieces of data together to give that

complete picture.

A mobile phone is like a black box when it comes to an investigation.

So one of the initial priorities was to identify whether or not the deceased had

a phone and to locate that phone.

The hand that they had recovered had been badly burnt and we made some

attempts to try and switch it on but we couldn't get it to come alive.

Not having that, presents a real difficulty.

The car was completely destroyed.

There was no registration plate so we couldn't identify the vehicle.

So we look for other identification marks which are on the vehicle.

It wasn't so badly destroyed that we weren't able to recover an engine

number.

related to a white BMW 1M.

This vehicle was particularly rare.

Why is a person with clearly active to significant amounts of money given the

vehicle that was involved come to their demise at this strange location?

Given the level of violence and the attempts to destroy the evidence which

could have been related to organised criminal activity, some drug-related,

Kind of crime.

The vehicle's registered to Stephen Donaldson.

Stephen was a 27-year-old male who worked offshore and lived with these

parents in Argrove.

It's DVD.

Everyone used DVD.

You know?

I met Stevie Boyd about seven or eight years ago.

He was always a carry-on with Stevie.

He was just laughing and joking and taking the mickey out of each other, you

know.

He was very popular, yeah. I don't know anybody who would say a bad word against

him.

So what we still didn't know at this time was the body next to the car,

Stephen Donaldson, or was that somebody different?

One of Stephen's friends actually came to our house.

He asked if we had seen Stephen.

We said we hadn't because Stephen, he does what he wants and we just let him

get on with it.

We found out later in the day that his body had been found up in Currymuir.

And we were a bit worried because we were informed that he went up there the

night before.

We thought, no, that can't be him. Surely not.

And we just drifted through that day not really knowing what to do.

Obviously, the longer they went, the more worried we got and the more

concerned about it.

When the missing person report was taken from Stephen's family, they described

tattoos on his legs, which were identical to the tattoos on the male at

Connaughty Lock.

This is now a murder investigation.

And I can confirm that the deceased is a 27-year-old male from the Arbroath area

of Angra.

Stephen Donaldson.

The victim of a sustained and brutal attack.

So it's absolutely critical that we identify who is responsible for this.

Delivering news like that to a family and getting that confirmation that

actually he was deceased.

would have been horrific for the family.

I can't find anything out about those dates, how I got through them, what I'd

done. Anything.

It was an absolutely horrendous time and I would never wish that upon anyone.

It's tragic, it's absolutely tragic for a family.

For me, this particular investigation was one that I spent a lot of time

mulling over as I was driving home in the evenings and then, you know, waking

up in the middle of the night and thinking to myself, you know, why has

this happened?

Some investigations we just can't solve.

I didn't want this to be one of them.

A forensic pathologist who examined Mr Donaldson's body said he died after his

spinal cord was cut by repeated blows to the back of his head and neck with a

weapon like an axe or machete.

She said he'd suffered a series of other stabbing and slicing wounds and there

were signs he'd tried to defend himself, possibly as he sat in a car.

What must this person have done for the level of violence and injuries to have

engulfed his body?

I had to decide the quickest way to find me the answers of what happened to

Stephen Donaldson.

We went and spoke to Stephen's friends from Arroth to build up a bit of

victimology, understand who he was, what his lifestyle was.

Initially, at the outset of this murder inquiry, it looked like some kind of

gangland drugs-related murder.

However... Digging further into Stephen's background was looking less

and less likely.

He was a young lad, had a good job, great social circle of friends and a

lovely family and really just living his best life.

I was surprised that putting Stephen with the person who was lying up at

Canardie Lock, they didn't fit together.

That was the point that you're like, this is just bizarre.

Stephen's friend also told us that his mobile phone was broken and he visited

the Apple Store in Aberdeen to go and get his phone fixed.

And that's what took him to the Apple Store.

When I first found out about him being at the Apple Store, I was fairly

confident that they would have CCTV.

It's a fairly new all-singer, all-dancing shopping mall in Aberdeen.

I could see that Stephen came in with his friend and he hands over his Apple

phone to the member of staff.

You know, that's a flag for me because I then know that there's a chance that

Apple have downloaded his phone, which we will have access to.

That would take us to his movements during the day, who he'd been in contact

with, his text messages.

Whatsapps, you know, us obtaining that obviously opens up lots of doors.

The store assistant in the Apple store was able to tell us that Stephen had

backed up his old mobile phone to another device.

Finding that device was absolutely paramount and a high priority to get the

answers to ultimately who killed Stephen Donovan.

Then the forensics team were able to recover a backup of his iPhone data on

his laptop and it gave us details of communications that he had made up until

the day before the murder.

It was exciting to learn that we had managed to get that data after we'd lost

the phone.

The messages showed that Stephen had been in a relationship with a young girl

called Tasman.

Tasman Glass, she was a 19-year-old from Kirremuir.

She had been a student in Glasgow.

She'd also been a singer and an actress as well.

I've known Tasman since she was in a pram.

So, all her life, you know.

There's nothing I didn't like about Tasman. She was silent, nice, funny.

Just a 19-year-old laugh, I say.

They two hit it off quite quickly. He obviously bandied that, didn't he? He

was really keen on her.

So quite quickly turned into a boyfriend-girlfriend situation.

stating that she went swimming with three friends during the evening of the

6th of June, Callum Davidson, Stephen Dickey and Claire Ofston.

After swimming, the four of them went back to Callum Davidson's house at

Marywell Bray.

Later on, Tarzan was going to meet Stephen up at Peter Pan Park, which is a

local park up in Kirrimuir.

It's roughly a five-minute drive away from Connaughty Loch, a nature reserve.

She made her way up there around 11pm on the night of the murder.

When she got there, Stephen was gone, so she just went home and didn't contact

him again until the following morning when she was text done.

She told us that she was back in her house just after 11 o'clock where she

spoke to her mum before going to her bed.

You then go away and cross-check all that stuff to see if what you're being

told is the truth.

When you have a router at home, some devices are automatically set to connect

to that router.

There's a log created which gives us a time and date and allows us to narrow

down timelines.

We looked at Tasman's devices and her router at her home address and her

Apple Watch indicated that she got home just after 11 and it recorded Tasman's

heartbeat and there was no change in rhythm, so that suggests she went to

sleep.

It seemed unlikely that Tasman could have been responsible for the death of

her current partner, Stephen.

But everybody was a witness until her suspect is identified.

All we wanted to do in the really early stages is clarify that what Tasman was

telling us was the truth. And the quickest way is to speak to Stephen

Dickey, Callum Davison and Clare Ogden because they were all people that were

in Tasman's company in the hours leading up to when she was to meet Stephen

Dorson.

Their statements were very similar.

They said that they'd come back to Davidson's house, had a couple of tins

of beer and then fell asleep about half past midnight.

I reflected on what we were dealing with. We had a remote location with a

lack of CCTV and nobody coming forward to give us any indication as to what the

motive may be.

for Stephen Donaldson's murder that really did start to give me a high level

of concern.

It causes you to reflect on your own performance.

Ultimately, would we be able to get some justice for the family?

By day three, we were still no closer.

to finding who it was that killed Stephen Donaldson.

We see somewhere in the region of 15, 20 phones, phones from Stephen's friends,

Tasman Glass and others.

It's a complex bit of work, but it's the only way to work through and really

evaluate who people are and corroborate what they're saying.

Anyone is able to go and delete.

the call log or the message log on a handset but a record of that call or

message will still be recorded on your call data so if the police were to

obtain this data then there would still be a record of the call or text message

being sent or received.

As my team of digital investigators were beginning to download the information

from the phone it started to really change the course and direction of the

investigation.

Stephen Dickey's phone showed that there was no calls or messages sent or

received for about a two-week period prior to the murder.

The call data obtained from the phone company did not marry up with the data

saved on the phone, suggesting that some data had been deleted from the handset

itself.

It's one of those moments where you start to think there is something going

on here. You know, if somebody starts deleting their phone record.

You've got to start asking the questions, why is that?

The digital forensic team can get more than just text and call data from your

phone. The mobile phone logs things all the time in the background.

That could potentially be the fast track to where the answers lie.

On Apple phones, there's a setting which is called significant locations.

And if you have that on...

Your movements will appear on your significant location list.

Stephen Dickey had his significant location set up as on, on his device,

and that was quite exciting because that opened up the possibility of being able

to trace his movements more closely.

On the evening of the murder...

Both Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson stated that they were both asleep.

But significant locations for Stephen Dickey's phone registered that between

0039 hours and 0051 hours, the phone was at a location

close to the health centre in Kirrimuir.

He said he was sleeping and never left the house.

However, we had a handset that showed that that wasn't the case. So we had an

inconsistency.

What we were able to then do is task Davey Budd and his team of CCTV

coordinators to recover the CCTV near to the health centre.

Because Kerrymure is such a rural place, there's not much happening after 11 o

'clock. There isn't many people going about at all.

We did have a sighting on the CCTV of two figures. They were crossing from the

health centre.

at 12.49.

That correlated with that significant location, which gave me confidence

to say that that sighting of the two figures was Stephen Dickey

and potentially Callum Davidson.

We had to ask ourselves, why is it that Stephen Dickey would be lying about

this? After a time when they had both giving accounts that they were sleeping

within Mary Wilbray.

You know, is this something he's overlooked?

Or is he somewhere involved in the death of Stephen Donaldson?

I then start to dig deeper into their backgrounds to understand what type of

people they are.

What we found was a massive shock.

Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson were both quite violent individuals.

who threatened lots of different people in Kirremuir.

Callum Davidson's got a previous conviction for a felt severe injury, so

we know he's then got a propensity for violence.

Why would Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson have a grudge against Stephen

Donaldson?

I was asked to go and re-interview Tagman Glass as a witness.

I went to Lee's Cafe where Tasman was working.

During this time, Tasman's behaviour, I would say, was quite bizarre.

She continued to make up sandwich fillers and bread rolls and have general

chit-chat with us. Bearing in mind, this is her boyfriend.

He'd been brutally murdered and she's standing there mixing up her tuna and

onion.

And then she said she needed to tell me something.

She was in a sexual relationship with Stephen Dickey.

As far as we were aware, Stephen Donaldson believed that Tasman was his

girlfriend.

However, she was providing information to state that she was actually the ex

-girlfriend that was split up in April.

That did raise...

several red flags.

Tasman Glass was clearly leading a different life to the account that she

provided to the police.

We started to focus in on the fact that the motive could be this new

relationship between Tasman Glass and Stephen Dickey.

But pretty quickly I got the news that Callum Davidson's girlfriend Claire

Oxton was about to tell us a fuller version of events.

That was a crucial moment.

She was able to tell us that on the evening of the murder, Tasman had become

upset because she'd had a number of calls from Stephen Donaldson.

Rather than everybody staying within their dress, Stephen Dickey and Callum

Davidson left with Tasman.

She also said that they didn't return to the early hours of the morning.

Crucially to the investigation, Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson had told

Claire Augustine that they had attacked Stephen Donaldson and at the start of

that assault, Tasman Glass was present.

The statement was absolutely key to this investigation because she was the first

person that was able to properly put Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson at

the scene and involved in an altercation with the deceased.

I knew now that I was in a position to arrest Tasman Glass, Stephen Dickey and

Calvin Davidson for the murder of Stephen Donaldson.

Do you want to speak to the lawyer in private before being questioned by the

police?

The reason you've been kept in custody is an allegation of murder.

Okay. The time is now 00.06 hours on

Friday the 15th June.

You have been arrested on the suspicion

of Stephen's murder.

Okay? How did he deserve to be left in that car park with these injuries?

So we had Tasman, Callum Davidson and Stephen Dickey in the police station

under RF.

But the statement that was provided by Claire Augustine was just not enough on

its own.

I needed evidence to enable me to prove exactly what happened to Stephen

Donaldson so that we could charge him.

Now that we had this account from Claire, what could we do to corroborate

that in the next 12 to 24 hours so we could present a compelling case to

court? so that we wouldn't let them out.

We'll go through the phones very closely, and we'll look at CCTV and

movement.

OK? You understand that?

So I asked the team to dig further into what devices we had, and is there

anything we can do through location data, data sessions, anything that we

can possibly use that might... help us to tie them to the scene where Stephen

Normson was killed.

I wasn't too hopeful of that, to be fair.

It wasn't something we'd ever done in the past.

I looked at the handsets further to establish if there was any way that

could interpret the health app data.

So a health app records a variety of data, including the number of steps

taken, the distance travelled and the number of flights climbed.

But when you look at that, you're not really sure just from that data what it

means. We needed some time to work out if that corresponded with being at

our crime scene.

Is there going to be any forensic evidence linking you to the murder of

Stephen Donaldson?

Will your phone have any information on it? Any evidence or material relating to

the murder? No.

We knew that Stephen Dickey had Apple Health data on his phone.

We could see that there was activity during the night of the murder when

he said he was home in a sleeping bed.

Around 11 o'clock for a 10-minute period, 11 flights were climbed, 416

metres were travelled and 585 steps were taken.

This was a real eye-opener.

When he said he was lying sleeping in Claire Oxton's house at Marywell Bray,

his bones were showing that he was highly active.

So we knew that there was information on there, that there was activity.

but we needed some help to interpret that data to allow us to use that as

evidence.

We had officers carry out walking and running and also cycling those distances

to try and see what the results might yield in terms of using health app data

to recreate the journeys travelled.

I think we knew at this point that it was fairly groundbreaking and that

nobody else had done this work within the UK.

Reconstruction revealed that it was a similar distance between Canardie Nature

Reserve, where Stephen Donaldson's body was found, and Marywell Bray, the home

of Callum Davidson and Claire Ogden.

It was clear evidence that Stephen Dickens was involved in the murder of

Stephen Donaldson.

This provided various CCTV opportunities to be looked at for areas and times that

hadn't previously been covered, based on the Health App data.

CCTV for this investigation was a massive job. I had a team of 10 who were

just reviewing CCTV, you know, 10 hours a day.

I was in my office and it's one of the guys who came through and he said, I

think we've got Callan Davidson cycling through Kirremuir on his bike at two in

the morning.

I was like...

I thought it was a joke, like, I thought he was having me on, you know.

Were you out on the bike on the early hours of the morning?

He'd said he'd never been out.

The play, and lo and behold, here's Callum Davidson cycling through the one

-way system.

Not a care in the world on this bike.

That bike was later examined by the forensic and blood was found on the

handlebars of that bike matching Stephen Donaldson.

So... He must have had contact with Stephen for this to have happened.

It was such a moment.

That was probably one of the best moments I've had in the job.

This was a really big moment.

Clearly it implicated Callum Davidson.

At this stage, we still don't have an obvious motive for the murder of

Stephen.

Why would they want to murder Stephen? They didn't know him, they'd never met

him. The violence Stephen sustained against two males who were unknown to

him would have been hard to comprehend.

Tasman said that Stephen Dickey was present when Stephen Donaldson phoned

her. Stephen Dickey is jealous and angry at the fact that she's being contacted

by her ex-boyfriend.

We've been told that you were unhappy that Tasman was speaking to Stephen

Donaldson. Were you jealous of their relationship?

I don't know, as I told you from the start.

I think it is a bit of jealousy.

I think you're not happy that she's matching up with Stephen Donaldson and

you're speaking to him on the phone.

To take us to the next stage.

We needed evidence to show that Tasman was involved in Stephen's murder.

And that's the myth and piece in the jigsaw.

Potentially, that was going to be key in understanding the motive.

I was present at the interview with Tasman Glass.

It was led by Nicola Annan.

All I want to know is what happened to Stephen.

Do you realise how serious this is?

Because it didn't look like it to me.

Pardon me.

There's vast, vast amounts of data coming in and there's a real pressure

that you then become the bottleneck in that process.

Everyone's waiting on an iPad for the analysts to come up with the good.

It's not always easy to recover all the stuff.

We make it sound like it's all nice and simple, but it's not. Sometimes you

can't recover any deleted text.

We looked

at

Tasman's phone data, which showed a number of calls and text messages that

Tasman had made to Stephen Donaldson, to Stephen Dickey and others.

But when we looked at her device download, that information was not

there. It had been deleted.

It's a red flag for the inquiry team when only certain messages have been

deleted.

They thought they were being clever by deleting some of the data, not having

the knowledge that once it's there, it's there.

Even though you delete information from your handset, the police can still

obtain that information other ways.

When I saw what the team had uncovered on Tarzan's phone, I couldn't believe

it.

She billed you £1,000 for the car that Stephen Donaldson had given her.

Stephen had bought her a car that she'd written off and she hadn't given him all

the money back from the insurance payout.

Someone said that you were just giving £1,000.

Have you got financial difficulties?

No comment.

Still going for the money? No comment.

They told Callum that you couldn't get Stephen the money back as your bank

account had been frozen.

They'd been contacting you for a while asking for it.

According to Harry, he was hounding her for the money and she was probably on

the ropes a little bit by this point. She was in financial difficulty.

She'd also promised to turn up with the money that was outstanding to meet with

Stephen at Peter Pan Park and pay him the money that he was due.

There is absolutely a buzz of anticipation as we're starting to

formulate a picture.

We're looking at a series of text messages between them when they're

arranging to meet.

Stephen is very keen that he comes to her house to meet her.

And she's having none of that. She was so adamant that the park had to be the

location. And obviously we now know why.

I think at this stage that she is more involved in the murder of Stephen

Donaldson than we first thought.

Her demeanour, I would say, didn't really change at all.

She was still calm, collected.

Whilst people can often lie, her digital footprint can't be disputed.

The deleted text, the fact that she was involved in a new relationship, and the

money that she owed.

There was multiple reasons why Tasman Glass wouldn't have wanted Stephen

Donaldson in her life moving forward.

She is a very devious, deceitful individual.

If you listen to the community, she led a normal life, if you like, but that's

far from how I would describe her.

She set Stephen up for this to happen to him.

Horrendous. For a grand, for a thousand pounds, is that what he was worth?

A thousand pounds?

There was no doubt in my mind now that all three were responsible for the

murder of Stephen.

I knew now that I was in a position to hand it all over to the prosecutors.

And that's exactly what we did.

The time is now 03.48 hours.

In June last year, Stephen Donaldson's dead body was discovered in the car park

of this Angus Nature Reserve.

Tasman Glass was his on-off girlfriend, one of three people now on trial for

murder.

For me, the biggest part of this case is the trial.

What happens in the court is outwith my control.

Court! When we present the evidence, do we think we'll get a conviction?

Phil definitely gave me a leap of faith.

What we think happened that night is Tasman set the wheels in motion.

I think the phone was probably going constantly from Stephen Donaldson asking

to meet Tasman.

I think in Tasman's head, she'd moved on.

She started a new relationship at this point with Stephen Dickey and I think

Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson decided to take matters into their own

hands.

Tasman Glass, Callum Davidson and Stephen Dickey drove halfway up the hill

to Peter Pan Park where Stephen Donaldson has already went and he is

there waiting on Tasman Glass.

She's let Davidson and Dickey out of the car.

Part of the way up the hill and then she drove up to make sure that Stephen

Donaldson is there.

Callum Davidson and Stephen Dickey have ran up on foot the rest of the way.

He would have put his doors open and they've got in that car.

Once the attack was in progress and Stephen Donaldson was incapacitated, I

think she got in her car and left and was able to go home calmly, engage with

her mother.

And then the health app shows she was able to then go to her bed and sleep

that night.

All of the time while Stephen Donaldson was being murdered by Callum Davidson

and Stephen Dickey.

You carried out the attacks in two different locations.

Initially, you overpowered Mr Donaldson at the Peter Pan play park.

He would have been totally ambushed and...

Probably then put him in the back of the car or in the boot of the car and drove

that car out to Canorby where they've continued the attack on him.

You renewed your thoughts on him with unrestrained ferocity.

He tried to escape and to defend himself, but you cut him down without

mercy.

Dragged Stephen's body underneath the car and set it on fire to destroy any

evidence that would link to them to his murder.

They've then left and went back to Mary Welbury.

The help app data and the significant location data on Dickie's phone

corroborated this.

It was really important in terms of building the case and then presenting it

in court.

The two former friends tried to blame each other for the killing.

Dickie told their trial Davidson was the muscle who sorted people out.

Davidson said Dickie struck Stephen 12 times with a baseball bat and he had a

knife.

We were uncertain whether or not all three would be convicted or just one

or two or none.

So it was a nervous week.

He was a loved and admired young man.

He had many years of life to look forward to.

The wickedness of your crimes caused shock and outrage.

No sentence that I can impose will repair the grievous hurt and loss that

you have each caused by taking the life of this young man.

On the steps of the High Court, Stephen Donaldson's grieving family, their son's

killers. Convicted just a few minutes earlier.

The verdict was read out by the jury and Tasman Glass was convicted of culpable

homicide and Stephen Dickey and Callum Davidson were both convicted of murder.

For me, the question that remains unanswered is, you know, it's just why?

At first...

I felt that that was amazing work by the police to actually get them but deep

down it was like it doesn't really matter because I've lost

Stephen and whatever happens to them I'll never replace them

full story, the full ins and outs of it all, but all I know is my mates are

here.

That's it.

We usually go to Stephen's grave at least once a week.

We go up to Canardie Lock now and again, but on special occasions. It's birthday

and

The date of his murder, we will be up there.

We know we're never going to see him again.

I just want to remember Stephen as the kid who gave us lots of enjoyment and

great things, great memories.

He'll never be lost in our memory.

As long as I can find you.

Rescue Extreme Medics is next tonight.