Original subtitles

Ambulance emergency. Is the patient conscious and breathing?

Yes, he is, and he's been stabbed.

Okay, so he's been stabbed?

Yeah, in the back. He's actually got a chest wound.

Is he bleeding very heavily?

Yes, he is. How old is he?

He's a teenager.

And you say he's bleeding from his mouth?

He's bleeding from his mouth now, and I think he's actually going to go into

cardiac arrest.

Okay, so what we need to do is start on chest compression.

So we need to go at one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two.

I don't think the sense of shock will ever really go away, given the

nature of this case.

It's easy at times to perhaps forget that you're dealing with children.

But our role as investigators is to establish the truth.

We realised very quickly that the focus was going to be on the digital material

to fully understand how something like that could happen.

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.

Yeah, we're not too far out there.

I was driving.

You're constantly asking for more information, and there wasn't a lot

coming through.

Your brain thinks, well, how has a 13-year-old lad been stabbed in

Evergreen on a Sunday afternoon?

You have people with buggies, you have people with dog walking.

I'm seeing something that's completely normal, but then 50 yards up the road,

it was just chaos.

Cardiac arrest.

And everyone just seemed in shock.

No-one was really telling us what had happened.

One off-duty nurse came up to me and, bless her, she just had her hands like

that with blood on them and I've just dumped a load of hand gel in her hand.

That's fine, that's fine, thank you.

You guys family?

I'm the mum.

OK. OK,

bless you.

That day, Ollie was going to Bugsbottom to meet up with a girl who was a friend,

and so we weren't concerned, really, about that. It was a normal thing to

happen.

And he knew I'd want him back before it was getting dark.

He wasn't going any distance, and it was during lockdown, and so you were allowed

an hour of exercise out each day, and he wasn't at school.

I thought he'd be back quite quickly.

And he was going to meet somebody that we knew, so...

Where's

this girl? I thought he'd been stabbed.

Who is this girl? Is she OK?

Has she been injured? Has she witnessed what happened?

I was genuinely worried for her welfare.

I mean, she got on the phone, I think, to her mum to find out where she was and

to find out an address as to where we can find her.

I'll get police there now.

OK, the police will come and see you.

They're trying to save him.

Three feet further, she was meeting him here.

and that's simply we need to get hold of her as a priority.

Hello there. Do you know why we're here?

How old are you?

I'm 13.

13, okay. So we need a parent with you then, yeah? In the kitchen, yeah? Of

course, in the kitchen now.

Yeah.

OK, so you and him met up, then what happened?

We were just walking around, and then these people, I didn't see their faces.

Their face was covered.

And then there was, like, two of them, and then they just started shouting at

him. I started running off because I was scared, and then I didn't... Sorry.

I didn't know what to do.

No, it's fine. Don't be sorry, Craigie.

Can you say what to do? What happened?

I saw him get stabbed.

But you panicked at that stage, yeah?

And you started to walk away, yeah? I just went off. I don't know where I

went. I just started running.

You don't know who these other people were?

I don't know who they were.

When you ran off, did you see them run off at all? I don't know where they

went. I just carried on running.

That's completely understandable.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same thing.

Do you know if he's alive?

I still don't have any updates on his condition at all, yes. All right,

otherwise I'd tell you.

He's still being worked on, that's all I can say. They're still trying to save

him at the moment.

He was starting to drizzle and it was getting darker.

It had changed quite dramatically in a short amount of time.

It's in the update. They're probably going to take him to Oxford, probably on

the air ambulance.

It was feeling colder and your instinct was kind of like you didn't want to be

in the field any longer.

You can just tell from the demeanour of the paramedics how serious it was.

I think I made brief eye contact with one who just shook their head at me and

that said it all. I kind of knew then.

He lost an awful lot of blood. He inhaled a lot of blood, so his lungs

were full of blood.

And there's no coming back from that.

And I was begging him not to leave her.

And I grabbed his hand, and his hand was utterly lifeless and cold.

They got him onto a trolley, and CPR was still being carried out.

You've always got hope, but I understood there was no chance.

There was a certain feeling of almost, oh, just leave Ollie alone. Just leave

him alone.

He's gone.

The lady who was the surgeon, we now realise, came over and she said,

I'm ever so sorry.

This was at five o'clock.

So this was like an hour and a half after he'd left the house.

Never so sorry.

And you're just in such shock.

Such shock. And in your mind, you're thinking, why? Why has this happened?

Who could have done this to Ollie? Why would they have done this?

And I said, where's Ollie's phone?

There were so many questions, I just instinctively knew the answers would

come through on his phone.

So I checked the location of him on my phone, and the phone was... in where the

ambulance was located.

And then it started to make its journey across Reading.

And it was about 20 past nine.

Finally, the phone was at the Reading police station. I thought, good, it's

there.

We'll get the answers now. We'll find out what's happened, why this has

happened to Ollie.

Steve Stevens died on Sunday after being stabbed.

He was 13 years old.

Thames Valley Police have carried out a widespread investigation in the

surrounding area.

The natural reaction is shock.

You hear the age and you start to think, you know, really? A 13-year-old boy

being stabbed in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon in Reading?

We're now responsible for finding out what's happened.

It's really important that we try to get a sense of the victim, of who the victim

is, what their personality is, what their habits are, what's been happening

online or in his social life in the days and the hours leading up to him being

attacked.

People live their lives through their mobile phones, and clearly there was

likely to be information on Ollie's phone.

We needed to get that phone.

to the digital forensics unit to be downloaded and examined.

The reality is your phone knows you better than your partner does.

You don't have any secrets from your phone. It's a window into your soul.

With just a short period of time spent looking at the data from their phones,

you can start to see what kind of person they are, what they're interested in,

and that's where the truth is.

When you look at a victim's phone, it's emotionally very, very difficult because

you can see their messages, you can see photographs of them, and you know now

that this person's no longer alive.

Ollie was two months into being 13.

He was a whirlwind.

He one minute would want to learn German and he'd get us ordering him a German

dictionary and by the next week he would be into basketball and look into joining

a local club.

He had a diagnosis of autism.

And I think he was very good at masking with his friends.

and in school and being the life and soul, the joker.

There were worries about going to the secondary school and along with that

came a lot of sort of low self-esteem.

Ollie always had his phone on him. It was permanently on him. It went to bed,

it was with him.

Listening to his music, listening to his podcast, contacting his friends.

His phone was very private to him.

He saw that...

It was his own world. It wasn't a place where adults, and especially not

parents, were supposed to be.

You could see how his demeanour would change as things would kind of come up

and happen.

And it was taking over, really, a lot of his life. And it happened gradually, and

it just built up and built up till that was how he was filling his day.

The online world was his world.

And I think along with other children, it allowed him to create a persona of

how he wanted to be seen.

He would stay in his room a lot, you know, close the curtains.

You could tell he was troubled.

But even though you could see he looked worried and distracted, he would never

talk about that.

What Ollie's phone did give us was the conversation with the girl that he had

arranged to meet.

From Ollie's phone data, we could see he was meeting the girl to smoke some

tobacco and wasn't expecting to see anyone else there besides the girl.

Now, a number of witnesses were describing a girl being present at the

scene with a group of young males and that very much fitted the description of

the girl that Ollie had agreed to meet in the park.

We had CCTV footage that covered the south entrance to Bugs Bottom.

And that footage showed two boys dressed in dark clothing leaving the park on a

single e-scooter a couple of minutes after the ambulance had been called,

followed by another group of two boys and a girl.

You met up with them at Bugs Bottom? Just you and him?

Yeah.

You don't know who these other people were?

I don't know who they were.

When you ran off, did you see them run off at all? I don't know where they

went. I just carried on running.

She made no mention of being with anybody else.

But this girl was clearly with two boys on the CCTV.

Is she running away from the attackers because she's panicked and because she's

scared? Or actually...

Does it suggest that she's more involved than what she said and that actually

she's running away from Ollie?

We had serious questions around the girl's role.

We decided that the girl would be treated as a suspect.

We had various descriptions from people in the park who'd seen a group of young

people moving towards the location where Ollie was attacked.

Working out who it was that they'd seen was a challenge.

We were looking for a group of somewhere between three and six young people.

But later that night, we received a call from the parent of a teenage boy

who witnessed the attack and knows those people involved.

His initial account was that Ollie met the girl.

Ollie got into a fight with two boys in dark clothing, boy one and boy two.

and that shortly after that fight starts, boy one produces a knife and

stabs Ollie, at which point everybody leaves.

Now that we had this significant piece of evidence, the boys and the girl were

then arrested.

The other two boys caught on CCTV with the girl, they were arrested, then

released on bail and treated as witnesses.

The investigation into this murder by Thames Valley's major crime unit is

being described as fast-paced.

Dozens of police officers have been brought in to help.

Detectives are out collecting as much information and potential video footage

as possible.

Four schoolboys and one girl, all aged 13 or 14, have been arrested on

suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.

It's rare to have a case where you're dealing with children of this age in a

motor investigation.

You hear the age, 13, 14 year olds, and you know, the absolute human emotion

does kick in.

We're now responsible for finding out what's happened and we are working

against the clock.

And we only have so long that we can keep young people in custody.

They are asked a number of questions throughout all of their interviews.

All of the suspects provided no comment answers.

It's a really, really intensive period.

The reality is you can't afford to waste a minute during that time.

You've now got a number of addresses that need to be searched.

We recovered items from the houses that were relevant. We've got scooters, we've

got a number of knives.

We recovered a number of items of clothing.

And that went off for forensic submission.

None of the items that we got provided a forensic link back to the attack on

Ollie.

That was very disappointing.

We've got a very limited amount of time to be able to charge.

But now we're in possession of their phone.

We knew that the information that we needed was going to come from the mobile

phones and from the social media accounts.

I'm relying on the digital forensics unit and the major crime analyst to find

something in time.

Phone data is so important.

And finding those key bits of communication that can change a whole

investigation.

Phone data shows that the last person that Ollie was in contact with before he

was murdered was the girl.

The conversation started in the early hours of that Sunday.

But once we see further phones...

we were able to see that conversation had been deleted from the girl's

handset.

It was quite significant that the girl's handset didn't contain very much

information. By the extensive phone analysis, we could see that apps had

been deleted, communication had been deleted.

It was very telling.

Did she know more than she's alluding to?

And what was she trying to hide?

The girl, she had removed a number of apps in the hours after Ollie's murder.

She'd removed really significant apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook

Messenger, House Party, Boy One. He also uninstalled some apps from his

phone in the hours after the stabbing.

So the kind of apps they would be using a lot, they just weren't there.

When you remove an app, it will remove the data with it, and effectively that

data is now unrecoverable.

Once an app's been uninstalled, it's incredibly difficult or even impossible

to actually see that data again.

So that's a real problem.

If you were involved in something like this, then it doesn't surprise me one

bit that you'd try and delete material from it.

We knew that we didn't have enough digital forensic evidence.

And you have a limited amount of time because you have people in custody.

I can't get this data here, but might there be somewhere else I can still

recover this information from?

If two people are communicating and one of them chooses to uninstall the app...

You still have the possibility of recovering that conversation from the

other device because it's very much a transactional thing. I send something to

a friend who shares it with two friends and suddenly how many copies are there?

So you still have a chance of finding that evidence on another device.

We were able to recover 41 mobile phones in this investigation to find it. The

other side, we deleted a conversation.

That in itself involves quite a lot of hours, a huge amount of work.

And the data that it generates is significant.

And we knew that the information that was on these phones was going to be

critical to us.

And then we had the real breakthrough in the investigation.

With Boy One's data, we could see his friends were in contact with him.

The young person who'd been in a Snapchat conversation with Boy One.

we believed at that point that boy one was the stabber

the

cps were authorized with charges but it accepts that

there is more evidence to come before getting to trial so now you've

got to build the case

We still had a lot of evidence to gather.

No clothing had been seized that provided a forensic link to Ollie.

No murder weapon had been located.

We didn't have a motive around what had happened to Ollie.

We needed to find more evidence.

We were also conscious.

that Ali deserved to get justice.

We needed to still process quite a significant amount of handsets.

Every device leaves a digital footprint and it's our job to follow that trail

and find the key bits of information that will help progress the

investigation.

that were on the phones. They were apps that I'd simply never encountered before

in a criminal investigation, and our forensic tools offered absolutely no

support for that.

They required a lot of intervention to examine the data, and that you're having

to decode entirely new analysis work.

There's a pressure. You want to get the data to the case team as quickly as you

can. It was never out of my mind that a 13-year-old boy had been killed, but...

Understanding how an app is working and how it's storing its data can take a lot

of time. It can be very painstaking work, and there's always an element of

risk that you may misunderstand that or you may not be successful.

But you've got access to a really, really rich data set. Not only do you

get call information and SMSs, but you get all the information that's being

created by it on the phone.

All the phones we were looking at were iPhones, and they created and stored a

very, very rich set of location information.

So we were able to recover GPS coordinates together with a date and

time stamp, so we could see exactly where those phones had been at the

relevant time.

We could see from the phone location data where boy one had been. That

enabled the officers then to acquire... CCTV specifically along that route.

Through the GPS data, we'd found a CCTV that showed that boy one had basically

having gone home, changed his clothing, come out again carrying a bag.

When he returned home later that night, he didn't have the bag.

The phone data ultimately then led us to a park in Reading called Palmer Park.

Later on Sunday evening, boy one and boy two had met up with another boy and

they'd spent about 15 minutes in a particular area of Palmer Park.

We tasked the search team with to find the bag.

The park runs along the railway.

One of the search officers identified a drawstring plastic bag alongside the

railway embankment.

And within that bag there was a pair of black North Face gloves,

a pair of Nike shorts, and a

pair of black Nike jogging bottoms, all of which were consistent with clothing

worn by Boy One.

All of those items came back with Ollie's blood on them.

That provided us with that firm forensic link that made us absolutely sure that

Boy One at least was present when Ollie was attacked.

That was a significant find. That was a really significant find.

It didn't convict Boy One of murder.

It didn't prove why, but it made us absolutely sure that he was present

at the time that Ollie was attacked.

We still weren't sure exactly what happened.

From our phone data, it was clear that Ollie was exchanging WhatsApp messages

with the girl.

At the same time, the girl was in a house party call with boy two.

So we didn't know what the full contents of that communication was, but to be

having those exchanges all at the same time was important to us.

And we know that she has lied to us.

Through further phone analysis, we could also see that Ollie had been in touch

with boy one and boy two and had communicated together in chat groups.

So they were known to him.

We were then focused on Boy 2 and all the communication that he had on his

phone.

Significantly from the data, you could see that there had been some

confrontational messages between Ollie and Boy 2.

And we could see that Boy 2 was quite aggressive.

And as the investigation progressed and we seized further phones, we were able

to piece together a big puzzle.

I think, realistically, if Holly's death had occurred six months earlier, I'm not

sure that we would have had the ability to acquire all of the material that we

did.

That's how quickly technology and software is developing.

Oli, Boy One and Boy Two were members of the same Snapchat group.

In the days leading up to the attack on Oli, Boy Two had posted a video on the

Snapchat group.

That video showed a young person being slapped and punched.

Boy One had then added a series of laughing emojis.

Oli had then shared that video to family of the boy who was being humiliated in

the video.

Boy one and boy two felt that Ollie had grasped or snitched on them.

But the reality is we don't know.

Only Ollie could tell us why he chose to share that video.

So the boys, they plant all the girls to get Ollie to the park.

And for boy two and Ollie to have a fight.

It's absolutely clear to me that if Ollie thought... that boy one or boy two

were going to be present it wouldn't have happened he wouldn't have left his

house the only reason that ollie was in the park that afternoon was to meet the

girl

ollie

had no idea and that level of deceit it's just it's And I

think what I always think about is poor Ollie, that day, in his mind, thinking,

just going to meet that person, and then to be then confronted

by those two.

He would have been very alarmed in that moment when he realised what was going

on, and he probably knew what was coming.

He would have known that he had been set up, and I think that...

is so sad for me because right that moment he had no protection apart from

protect himself

five

weeks into the investigation we had a case conference with our barrister and

we reviewed all of the evidence that we had

It was quite a long, challenging case conference.

At the end of that case conference, our barrister's view was that we could

continue to charge Boy 1 with murder.

But we didn't have sufficient evidence to sustain the murder charge against the

girl and Boy 2.

That was obviously quite a disappointing position to find ourselves in.

I went away that night and I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, what are the

implications for the investigation?

Thinking, what are the implications for Thames Valley Police as an organisation,

given the profile that this case has?

Ollie's parents had released this statement saying, in his final moments,

he must have been terrified.

Fighting to get home, he had everything to live for.

What are the implications for Ollie's family when they hear that news because

that's going to have a huge impact.

We needed to find more evidence to get us to a position where boy two and the

girl could go forward with a charge of murder.

We need an explicit plan to show what was going to happen.

We had to have evidence that showed an intention to kill Ollie.

In order to convict someone of murder, you need to show an intention to kill or

to cause at least really serious harm.

We were struggling for evidence that really demonstrated clearly the role of

the girl and boy two.

We had no evidence of an explicit agreement or plan that a knife would be

involved in the attack on Ollie.

It was important to determine whether any references to the knife were

captured in the data.

We needed to fully explore what the media files were showing us.

We tend to think of Snapchat as an app where everything disappears.

And that's true if you send a snap, but it also lets you send lots of other

media, like voice messages.

I found a folder with hundreds or even thousands of images and voice recordings

in it.

But we can't see very clearly who the

sender or recipient of a message necessarily is.

Each one of those voice notes has its own puzzle that needs to be looked at

manually.

to try and understand who sent it, when they sent it.

The challenge that we had was to analyse multiple sources of communication.

In the four days alone leading up to the attack on Oli, 23,000 lines of Snapchat

data.

1,980 voice notes.

It was just huge. It was a scale the like of which I've never encountered

before.

We needed to still process quite a significant amount of voice notes.

And we were still piecing the jigs all together.

We needed to determine how much of the information had been deleted.

And if there's any bits missing, can we find it?

So we were looking at the phones.

We often think you can't recover fully deleted files, but there are some

opportunities.

Now, forensically, there's a difference here between uninstalling an app and

deleting a file.

Boy, too, he didn't uninstall apps, but what he did do was delete

individual files.

Deleting a file on an iPhone, you will imagine it all disappears and you won't

find anything.

But with the right forensic tools, we can see an entire database dedicated to

managing the metadata.

So we can see that a particular file was deleted and know exactly when it was

deleted.

And sometimes even the original photograph can be recovered.

Boy 2 certainly had this desire to cultivate this bad boy, this gangster

image. There were images from Instagram of violence and weapons of him posing

with a knife.

We now had evidence of Boy 2 deleting these images, but we still needed more.

We need an explicit agreement. We need an explicit plan to show whether Boy 2

knew that there was a knife being carried by Boy 1.

Listening to the voice notes, I did actually find it quite upsetting because

it's so personal. It becomes very real.

In this case, the way that the young people were

talking, I found quite disturbing.

It didn't sound to me like 13, 14-year-old children.

should found it was very alien to me it was like another world all of a sudden

but i do not care

delving quite deeply into the data i

realized that the files had different names in the two different databases but

one of the databases contained both names and that was the clue that allowed

me to start to link them

It did enable us to see who'd sent them, when they had been sent, and who they

were sent to.

Because I was going to set him up in it.

He comes to you, I promise you, I'll pop in a note for you.

Because basically, Ollie texted me randomly yesterday.

I was like, oh, do you want some cigarettes?

So I was like, yeah, because he wants me to set him up.

So just going to go bang him and pat him and shit.

I'm so excited you're doing the dance.

Significantly what the voice notes showed was intense.

They showed a series of snapchat communications where boy to master girl

to set all the up and That that plan was going to involve at the very least an

unlawful assault on only We

saw lots

of slang for nice being used in particular Sheffer and poke Lots and

lots of, you know, gangs to speak, really, is the best way that I can

describe it.

Most importantly for Boy 2, we uncovered a voice note sent three days before

Ollie was attacked.

I'll go to college, I'll leave my yard in ten minutes.

Bring a chef with me.

Boy 2 had asked Boy 1 to bring a knife with him.

That was a huge turning point.

So for me, that goes way beyond just trying to cultivate an image. That's

taking a knife because you have either an intention to use it or a knowledge

that it will be used if required.

Boy One was somebody who we knew had been involved in previous violent

incidents. who was probably far more likely to be the one carrying the knife.

That's why Boy 2 wanted him with him on the Sunday, so that he was there as

backup in case they needed to use it.

Within those voice notes was all of the evidence that we needed.

Boy 1, Boy 2 and the girl could go forward with a charge of murder for the

court to consider.

The girl aged 13 and the two boys aged 13 and 14.

Their identities can't be revealed because of their ages.

All three were charged with murder and all three charged with conspiring to

cause grievous bodily harm.

The teenagers were remanded into youth detention accommodation and will appear

at Reading Crown Court.

Prior to the trial, having been charged with murder and averting the course of

justice in relation to the deletion of apps, the girl offered a guilty plea to

manslaughter and averting the course of justice.

She fully admitted to setting up Ollie, so that Ollie would be ambushed and

subjected to an assault.

But she denied that she had any knowledge that a knife would be used.

Ultimately, we decided to accept that guilty plea.

Boy one and boy two both went to trial, and after a five-week trial, both were

found guilty unanimously by the jury of Ollie's murder.

Videos and photos found on the boys' mobiles were shown to the jury.

This is the younger boy showing off his knives in his bedroom. He was 13 when he

stabbed Ollie.

I just really struggle to find any way in which anybody could ever justify why

that chain of events has unfolded.

I find it really hard to understand how this has ultimately ended up in a 13

-year-old boy losing his life. I don't think I'll ever necessarily be able to

reconcile that.

With social media, we are giving the younger generation a platform to abuse

and fall out.

And it's scary because we don't really have any control over it.

Without the work of the Digital Forensics Unit, this case would have

looked very, very different.

Could the case have been done without it? I doubt it.

Because it created some very critical evidence. It's very important.

When we got an insight into what had been on Ollie's phone and what would

have been being communicated behind his back, we were really, really shocked.

It's very hard to...

unsee what had happened, the reality of it.

And to this day, that's how you feel every morning you wake up.

Don't cry every morning now, but just that awful, sickening feeling of it

wasn't a nightmare.

This is our life now forever.

You will never get those images out of your head. You will never get to hug him

or kiss him again.

You know, you can look back on it now and think he didn't have a long life and

actually what he fitted into that life was so much.

Life was an adventure and there was nothing to worry about and off he would

go.

The field where Ollie was stabbed to death is only a few hundred metres from

his home, just outside Reading.

There's a memorial tree and bench here to remember him.

We wanted to get people back into the field.

So we wanted the kids to come to that field, to not shy away from it, to go

over there and sit, have a moment and think and talk.

We never thought we would have been able to go back over there again.

It's scenically very beautiful and it's a lovely area for us to have so close to

remember him.

And I think there's so much love for Ollie and we've seen that from his

friends, from the community, people who didn't even know Ollie.

People have seen the most awful thing that's happened to him. He didn't

deserve that to happen. It was absolutely horrendous.

But there's so much love for him, and that just helped us and supported us

through all of this.

And if you've been affected by the issues raised in the programme, head to

channel4.com slash support for advice and info.

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Stream all episodes now or watch the next episode tomorrow at 9.

But the Mike Hoppers are here now.