Original subtitles

(tense music)

I'm David Wilson, emeritus professor of criminology.

And for over 30 years, I've investigated

the phenomenon of murder and what it is

that might motivate someone to kill.

Every murder case is different.

But time and again, a deadly pattern emerges

of warning signs and red flags.

In this new series, I investigate some of the UK's

most harrowing murder cases to understand how and why

these terrible crimes occur.

This is Murder UK.

(gloomy music)

Sun, sea, and the holiday lifestyle...

this is the backdrop of Sandbanks, styled as Britain's Palm Beach.

A group of young men calling themselves the Firm arrived,

ready to enjoy the excesses of this party town.

As the sun set, their revelry began.

(pounding electronic music playing)

(Ashley Costello) Typical Saturday night out,

we'd get a table in a club somewhere.

We'd start off drinking, get all the lads together

around sort of Canford Cliffs, Sandbanks, start local.

And then we'd... we'd head off into a club

and just enjoy our night, really.

(Tom Crowe) There's always stuff going on.

There's always an event.

There's always a club which has really cheap drinks.

(David) Turner, at 19, had the seemingly endless means

to fund his hedonistic ways.

He would never go out with, like, a small amount of money.

He wouldn't go out like some people go out

with, like, 40 or 50 quid.

He would go out with, like, 250...

250 quid, sometimes even 500 pounds.

Like, maybe on a very rare occasion,

he'd go out with, like, a grand or something.

He'd always be laughing, joking, talking quick.

You know, even if he wasn't on the drugs or the drink,

he'd still always be very hyper.

That's just the person that he was.

(Garth Bray) I mean, it was pretty evident that Elliot Turner

had a lot of wealth at his disposal.

And we gather from afterwards that his grandparents

were particularly kind of well off.

I guess nouveau riche is probably the word people would use.

And that meant that Elliot Turner kind of had what he wanted.

But he just seemed excessively materialistic.

He was obsessed with money and the status that it gave him.

(Ashley) He'd walk into a bar,

you know, he'd know everybody, shake everyone's hand.

He'd order... probably order a bottle.

He was just flashy.

You know, you could tell he had a lot of money.

He was well dressed, well-spoken.

Like, he'd walk into a place, and, you know,

he'd have everybody laughing.

Very confident.

Yeah, that's just... just what he was like.

(David Wilson) It was a lifestyle in part funded by selling drugs,

and one subsidised by parents who, at least when it came to money,

seemed to never say no to their son.

(Jane Monckton-Smith) He was spoiled in a material sense

rather than an emotional sense.

The parents are very disengaged from him and gave him

everything he wanted materially so that he would

appear to be happy and perhaps not be a problem for them.

(ominous music)

As far as I can see, one of the key dynamics

of the Turner family is enabling behaviour,

specifically enabling the behaviour of Elliot Turner.

They're not giving him money, material wealth out of love,

but as a means of managing his behaviour,

a means of buying his silence, a means of buying his absence.

And, of course, what that ultimately

is going to create in Elliot Turner is a feeling that money

can solve any of his problems or create any circumstance

in which he would like to control.

Say he asked his parents for, say, 15 quid.

They'd give him 20.

Or say, oh, yeah, can I have 85 pound?

So he would get 100.

He had a lot of money, but he didn't have a lot of class.

(David) I get the distinct feeling

that Elliot Turner had a real shaky sense,

insecure sense of who he was in reality.

And therefore, projecting this image of a Goodfella,

projecting this image of a gangster,

was a way of performing self that didn't necessarily

reflect Elliot Turner at all.

He carried a steel hammer around with him

and taking it out to clubs, and said that he was

going to threaten people with it.

His personality was so keen.

Like, if there was something he couldn't have,

he would try and get it.

Or the girl out... out of his league,

he wouldn't... he wouldn't just stand there and just

watch her for the whole night.

He would approach her, like, do anything means necessary,

you know, to get her back to his.

He wanted to live that kind of, like, gangster dream,

like the highest of the highest, like the Tony Soprano,

for instance, the person everyone looks up to, the person

everyone goes to ask, you know, oh, yeah,

can you help me with this? Can you help me with that?

Oh, can you sort me out? Can you get me in here?

(Jane) He lived in a world where he was

serving his own needs predominantly.

And it didn't seem to have anything to do with responsibility

or looking for work.

No sense of responsibility at all, just fun, fun, fun, as he saw it.

And it was a world where he was the centre of attention.

(David) Age 19 and wired into the local in-crowd,

Elliot Turner seemed to have nothing and nobody

stopping him from doing exactly what he wanted,

least of all his parents.

His mother, Anita, was Indonesian.

She had moved to England to marry his father, Leigh,

who owned a local jewellery store in Bournemouth.

When Elliot, who had dropped out of university, needed cash,

his dad would hire him to work.

Elliot, naturally, would boast to his friends

that he was the manager.

(Ashley) Leigh, his father, you know,

I know Leigh very well, and he is a good man.

He's a good dad and everything else.

And he has bought Elliot a lot of things.

He has gave him a lot.

(Garth) We saw how good he was at manipulating his own mother

and using that, I suppose, to hector his own father

to get what he wanted.

(David) Elliot Turner met his New Zealand girlfriend, Emily,

in a beachfront bar in Sandbanks.

Emily had settled well into England,

and Turner was never shy about approaching girls.

The two quickly became an item,

and at first, they seemed perfectly happy.

(Garth) You've got a sense of a very sophisticated young woman

who seemed to really be enjoying an adventure that she was on.

She'd had a chance to kind of create and room

the way she wanted to.

She seemed like a really nice young woman, the sort of person

that, you know, anyone would want to know and be...

have as a friend.

She was clearly an attractive, ambitious young girl.

She'd been born in Britain, but she'd moved to New Zealand

at quite a young age.

And she'd come back here to study business at a place called

Brockenhurst College, which is in the New Forest, a very leafy area

of Hampshire in southern England.

And she was living with her grandparents.

And she clearly wanted to go places.

(David) Turner had cash, lived in a beach bum's paradise,

and now he had his trophy girlfriend.

But from the start, he was possessive.

(Ashley) I think Elliot was besotted by Emily.

I think he felt that he needed to keep hold of her

because she was very attractive, very good-looking.

I think that's all he was looking for, really.

I think he was with a lot of girls,

and he wanted to find the right one.

And I think he thought he did,

and I think he thought he'd have to hold on to her no matter what.

(David) There was just one problem.

Emily didn't feel the same way.

(suspenseful music)

(David) Elliot Turner was living the high life.

At home, his parents appeared to be completely cowered

by his aggressive, dominating personality.

There appeared to be no boundaries at all from his parents.

Rather, they turned a blind eye to what he was doing,

were disengaged from his life, certainly,

and just provided the means by which he could continue,

sometimes financially, sometimes by just allowing him

to use the house as he wanted.

(David) Outside the family home,

he had surrounded himself with friends who hung on his every word.

I looked up to him as, like, kind of like an idol.

Like, oh, yeah, you know, pulls a lot of girls.

You know, Elliot gave me a lot of confidence when I went out.

(David) Of course, Turner needs more than wealth,

an image, a trophy girlfriend.

He needs an audience to accept who he is in that fantasy.

He needs validation from a group of people

who would be prepared to accept him on the terms that he would prefer.

And, of course, Tom Crowe is a kind of stooge-like character

who's going to give Turner what he demands.

He wants to be validated.

He wants to be admired.

He wants to be respected.

He wants to be something that he imagines himself to be

but actually isn't.

But by surrounding himself by these people who are unworldly,

who are naive, means that he can behave as if

he really was the character that he was playing.

The naive Tom Crowe would soon play an unwitting part

in the tragic events that were about to unfold.

But in 2011, he was just one of the guys in the Firm,

enjoying their company and always finding Elliot Turner

the life and soul of the party.

(Jane) He had to be the centre of attention.

There was the grandiosity.

Absolutely everything he did was wonderful and perfect.

He would lie constantly about his achievements and his abilities.

And this is classic of a narcissist.

They cannot really perceive of anybody else being in their world.

They are the most important thing in that world,

and everything revolves around them.

(Ashley) Yeah, he did. He did have his insecurities.

I mean, when... just from what girls sort of used to tell me,

he'd always be fishing for compliments.

He'd always want you to say, God, you're looking...

you're looking sharp tonight.

Or he'd always want girls sort of saying, you know,

you're looking well, Elliot, or I like your hair.

Just always fishing for compliments, really.

(David) That insecurity fed his intensely jealous nature.

Any lack of obedience or subservience,

particularly from his girlfriends, was not well received.

He would have been like this with all of his girlfriends.

In fact, I do believe he had a history of stalking

and harassing women before.

He's never going to change.

He was clearly a very jealous guy,

and that made him a very dangerous guy.

(suspenseful music)

Five months after they met, in spring 2011,

Emily returned home to New Zealand,

a chance for a break from a young man who, predictably,

was beginning to show his aggressive side.

There had been some kind of assault or some kind of, you know,

physical attack, and that he'd had to try and make amends for that,

that Emily had asked him, pleaded with him in writing

to please, you know, stop threatening her,

stop doing those things that did her head in,

when he grabbed her around the throat, those kinds of things.

So clearly, this was a pretty controlling

relationship even at that point.

The pair even wrote their feelings down to each other,

and Emily's notes contained messages like,

stop threatening to kill me, you know, you scare me

that you're always so aggressive.

(David) On her return, the couple resumed

their volatile relationship.

But the exuberant young Kiwi refused to toe the line

drawn by her possessive boyfriend.

(Shaun Aquilina) Elliot was keeping a very close eye on Emily

and trying to control her as much as he could.

And he found text messages from another man and realised

that they had arranged a meeting.

So Elliot actually takes a lump hammer

and goes to threaten this man at the club

where they were going to meet.

(David) Once again, Turner's friends dismissed

the lump hammer incident as him being all talk,

and they didn't believe that he'd ever take real action.

In the context of him being a self-described bullshitter,

I think a lot of people just let it go.

But perhaps they needed to just stop for a moment

and think, hang on, the stuff coming out of this guy's mouth

is pretty loathsome.

But there was no one there.

It just seems like there was absolutely no one there to...

to rein him in.

(David) Elliot began cyberstalking Emily,

hacking her Facebook and private text messages.

His infatuation was morphing into dangerous obsession,

and his lies were growing in scale.

(Shaun) He came back out from the club and said

he had murdered Emily and convinced his friend that he had.

(Tom) He was crying.

He said, oh, what have I done? What shall I do?

And I was like, no, I... (scoffs) Really?

Have you actually killed her? Show me.

And he said, oh, no, I'm not going back up there.

There's probably, like, police patrolling.

Oh, look, Tom, is that an ambulance? Is that a police car?

Until he just switched and said, no, I'm only kidding.

And then he was all happy and jovial again.

(David) It was another example of the big shot

with the big mouth.

Still not believing Turner's threats,

his friend Tom was drawn into a bizarre episode

with a chilling question.

Tom, how would I kill someone?

(ominous music)

(Jane) And the friend allowed him

to practise strangulation on him

in preparation for killing Emily.

(Tom) And so I showed him a few, like, chokeholds, sleep holds.

And we're just, like, practicing and stuff, like, you know,

horseplay, like, fighting each other.

We even started getting a bit violent.

And we start pushing each other about, just, like, wrestling.

Oh, yeah, if someone gets you, like, in this lock,

you can do this to get out of it.

(David) This isn't horseplay with Tom Crowe.

This is Elliot Turner working out a script,

engaging in the MO that he would ultimately use later.

This is him working out the limits of the violence

he might be able to use before anybody

perhaps would lose consciousness.

So this time, it might be with one of his stooges in plain sight.

But the next time, well, who knows

where this so-called horseplay might go?

But as always with Turner, his friends wrote off

his behaviour as pure fantasy.

(Ashley) Elliot talked a lot. He said a lot of stuff.

And to be honest with you, nobody took him seriously.

If you... you know, if you knew him like I knew him,

if he said something to you like he was going to kill somebody

or he was going to hit someone over the head with a hammer,

you'd just laugh it off.

(David) Tragically, that's exactly

what all of Turner's friends did.

They simply laughed off his dark idiosyncrasies.

In criminology, we have a concept of somebody who's called

an intimate handler, who can stop criminal acts

and certain behaviours occurring.

And nobody in Elliot's group,

the Firm, as they called themselves,

appeared to act in that way as a sort of moral guidance.

And no one in his life that was there to say,

mate, you're completely out of order.

And, okay, maybe that's not a problem for most people.

But I guess this was a guy who, because he had

this woman in a particularly vulnerable situation

where she was so far from home,

he was really able to do almost as he liked.

And no one pulled him up about it.

(David) On the 4th of May, 2012,

Emily was on her latest big night out,

and Turner had heard she'd be seeing another man.

When he found out that Thursday that she was going

for another drink with a bloke, he just completely lost the plot.

He would hit the steering wheel.

He would scream and shout, kind of like a baby

throwing his toys out the pram.

(Shaun) Emily was obviously worried about how violent

Elliot was getting.

She actually sent text messages to friends saying that he'd,

you know, arrived in this club and had a hissy fit

and made threats towards her.

(David) Elliot Turner has already

lied boastfully about killing Emily.

He'd been seen wielding a lump hammer around exclusive nightspots

and had been violent to former girlfriends.

Emily very publicly fell victim to his bullying too.

(Shaun) Emily and Elliot were sat together at a table,

and Elliot actually grabbed Emily's head

and smashed it into a table.

That was the kind of violence that he was dishing out to her.

(Garth) She'd returned from New Zealand.

It seemed, just from what I saw pretty clear,

that she didn't really want to have much to do

with this guy anymore.

Perhaps something in her background or her life

made it difficult for her to really

shove someone like that away.

Perhaps he was just so persuasive.

(David) Turner seemed to command compliance from those around him.

Despite being told by Emily he was no longer wanted, he persevered.

And she relented.

He would need to be the king in her eyes,

and no other man could have, at any point, come into her life.

(David) Security cameras captured Elliot at a bar

in the Canford Cliffs area of Poole.

(Garth) They kind of came to blows in a club.

She tossed a drink in his face.

She was shoved up against the wall by him at one point.

(David) When Emily throws the drink in Turner's face

at the bar, this is her final act of autonomy,

her final act of standing up to Turner,

but done in a very public setting.

And the fact it is done in a public setting

would mean for a narcissist like Turner,

he would see this as a challenge to his sense of self.

And feeling that his sense of self

has been challenged in that public way,

that is only going to lead to an escalation.

Turner tells friends he's seen Emily looking glamorous

and taunting him about seeing other men.

They both head to the Cafe Shore Bar overlooking Sandbanks,

where a confrontation escalated.

Emily is frightened enough to message her parents in New Zealand.

And on CCTV, the pair are seen leaving.

Emily goes first, and she's shortly followed by Elliot.

And Elliot's heard screaming, "She's twisted my heart out,"

you know, while he's out on the streets.

Now, somehow, Elliot convinces Emily to come back to his house,

and he gets her inside.

And a witness outside the house saw them go in together,

and he actually said to another passerby

he was scared for Emily's life.

(Tom) Got back to Elliot's house.

We all went in, just had a beer, Elliot and I.

Then Elliot said, oh, yeah, I think it's time for you to go.

So I called a cab.

And that was the last... that's the last time

I saw Elliot and saw Emily.

(ominous music)

(David) Despite the public row,

the couple head for Elliot's bedroom at the back of the house.

His parents appear to be asleep.

The next morning, the emergency ambulance services received a call

from Turner's mother, Anita.

(line ringing)

(David) At this stage, Anita Turner

continues a disturbing charade.

She knows Emily is dead, but she doesn't tell the operator.

You hear Anita Turner talking to the operator.

But she doesn't sound like someone

who has just found a teenage girl, her son's girlfriend,

dead in her house.

(David) The tape recording of Anita Turner's 999 call

is, frankly, deeply disturbing

because she's trying to plant a narrative which suggests

that this was a sudden, unexpected illness

because the girl didn't wake up.

This is, again, another feature of the enabling behaviour

that we've seen throughout Elliot Turner's life.

His parents are now becoming co-conspirators

in terms of covering up what their son has done,

as opposed to seek justice for the girl

he's just strangled to death.

(Shaun) She sounds almost calm, almost quiet.

And she tries to say that a necklace around Emily's neck

might be responsible for her not breathing.

(David) The truth was chilling.

Elliot Turner had murdered Emily using the deadly chokehold

he'd rehearsed with his friend, Tom Crowe.

If I knew for 100%... you know, 100% fact

he was going to kill her,

I'd have done something to stop it, 100%.

I would not have tolerated him going in there

and killing... you know, him killing Emily, at any means necessary.

(David) Soon after killing Emily,

Elliot wrote a note to his parents, Anita and Leigh,

which they found when they woke.

He confessed to having a physical argument with Emily,

but stopped short of confessing to murder.

Instead, he vaguely claimed she was probably in the room crying.

(suspenseful music)

(David) The exclusive Sandbanks,

Poole, and Bournemouth area of England's South Coast

woke to the news of a tragedy.

(dramatic music plays)

(Announcer) Wave 105.

It's 7:00. An investigation has been launched after a teenage girl

was found dead in Bournemouth.

A 17-year-old...

(suspenseful music)

(David) Emily had suffered asthma

and recurring chest infections since being in Britain.

With Elliot's parents insisting that they'd heard and seen

nothing amiss and no coroner's report yet complete,

the police could only collect evidence.

Could this be death by natural causes?

(Shaun) We first reported the story on the Sunday morning.

At that point, it was the tragic death of a young girl.

It was a death unexplained.

There was no indication at that point that it was murder.

(David) Turner posted pictures of himself

and Emily on Facebook, protesting he was devastated by her death.

Meanwhile, his parents made a fateful decision...

to destroy the letter they'd found.

(David) The destruction of Elliot's letter by his parents

is technically perverting the course of justice.

This isn't about them being grieving

for what their son has done

but about them deliberately manipulating evidence

so as to ensure that he wasn't going to be

arrested and charged with murder.

(suspenseful music)

After the police receive reports of Emily

being with Elliot and Tom Crowe the night before,

they arrested Turner for questioning

and visit his younger friend.

(Tom) So, Mr Crowe,

Thomas Crowe, you're under arrest of suspicion of murder.

I got arrested.

I kept my calm because I knew I hadn't...

I had done absolutely nothing wrong.

I thought it was a hoax.

(David) Tom soon realised this was no hoax.

But at first, he didn't tell the police about the couple's rows

or Turner's volatile behaviour.

I didn't believe him for a split second

that he had killed her.

I was confused.

I still couldn't get my head around that she had died.

So I didn't know what to say.

(David) He told police about the lump hammer

his friend carried into nightclubs.

And he recalled a chilling threat Elliot had made

just a week before Emily's death, triggered by information

from one of her friends.

Emily's going for a drink with someone tonight.

And he was like, what?

You know, then he just got frustrated,

called everyone together, told everyone

that he was going absolutely mad.

And, yeah, I've had it with her.

I'm going to kill her.

(David) Tom Crowe, having given police everything he knew,

was released without charge.

Elliot was also released.

With the Turners still claiming they simply found Emily dead

and no postmortem completed,

the initial days of the inquiry proved frustrating.

Well, the police went through several lines

of inquiry with this.

They looked at whether drugs had led to Emily's death,

but toxicology tests turned up nothing.

And there was a line about a stalker,

possibly Emily putting reports of a stalker on her Facebook page.

(David) That line of inquiry led nowhere.

Cause of death is a basic starting point for any murder inquiry.

In the days following Emily's death, her killer remained free.

(Ashley) I assumed he'd done nothing wrong

because I thought, well, how could he?

If he's done this, he wouldn't... he wouldn't be able to go out.

He wouldn't be able to do anything.

He'd just be... he'd be absolutely in bits, you know,

knowing that... what he's done, and obviously,

that he's going to... he'll be serving a life sentence.

So, yeah, he was...

obviously, I thought he was completely innocent.

(David) It's highly unusual for the police

to be given permission to bug a suspect's home,

requiring senior judicial approval.

But the police, awaiting the cause of death findings,

strongly suspected a deliberate coverup by Elliot and his parents.

They successfully applied to plant covert microphones

in the Turner household.

(Garth) I think something like...

200, maybe 300 hours' worth of private conversations

recorded at the family home of Elliot Turner.

(David) The microphones capture a terrifying revelation.

The entire family is covering up the truth.

Elliot Turner is in absolute command,

orchestrating the destruction of evidence

and coaching his mother on the lies that will protect him.

From the moment she finds Emily lying dead in her house,

she is on the side of Elliot.

She doesn't phone 999 straight away.

She calls her husband instead.

And through all the covert recordings,

you can hear her saying, you know, this girl has ruined your life.

What's becoming clear to the police is the manipulation

and control that Elliot has over his parents, and more alarmingly,

the bizarre relationship that he has with his mother

and the extreme lengths she'll go to protect him.

When we look at the transcript or listen to the tapes

and consider the way that Elliot is speaking to his mother,

it's quite interesting because in no way

is he asking her to defend him.

That seems to be a given.

He is absolutely confident that everybody

sees that he's the victim in this.

He is coaching her in what to say to the police

so that her story is plausible.

So she's taking a very subservient role here,

which is probably quite indicative of the way

that their relationship actually was.

You really felt like you were sitting there

listening to two or three people arguing or unburdening themselves.

And that was the real thing. They were so confessional.

Leigh Turner just honestly seemed like he was sitting there

hoping someone was hearing what he was saying.

He was just sick in his stomach and couldn't do anything

other than go along with his family.

That's honestly what I believe.

I think it's pretty clear that his wife wanted to believe their son

more than anything else and was prepared to do anything

to make sure that the rest of us believe it too.

But the stuff that you hear from Elliot Turner's mouth

is just this constant attempt to shape the world to his own ends.

(David) We sometimes use a phrase called "a folie a deux,"

a madness shared by two, a delusion that's shared by two.

Anita really does seem to believe that her son

is innocent of the crime for which he is being accused and arrested.

She actually has come to the conclusion

that Elliot didn't kill Emily, although Elliot's father

seems to be far more sceptical.

But, of course, that enabling culture that existed

within the Turner household, it's the enabling culture

that sets Turner off on a particular course of behaviour

that would ultimately lead in lethal violence.

(David) Finally, pressed by his parents,

Turner tells them, in graphic detail, exactly what he's done.

He's describing this as if he's proud of what he's done.

It's almost like he's bragging

about the way that he killed Emily.

(tense music)

(David) It was the key recording,

Elliot confessing to killing his girlfriend.

He was arrested and charged with murder.

But the strongest evidence is the taped family conversations.

There's a problem.

Will this audio material be accepted in a court of law?

In those tapes, they spent a week before any of this trial began

arguing the admissibility because I guess

the defence knew it was so damning.

(David) From his cell on remand,

Turner writes to friends in the Firm,

urging them to act as character witnesses.

He's confident that, "Once my list is finished,

"all witnesses will be called."

He says then he can begin mourning Emily.

He warns that, "If this doesn't happen,

"a miscarriage of justice will take place."

In another letter, he speaks of his post-acquittal plans.

"Nothing is impossible," he says.

"Hitler was an artist.

"Branson was dyslexic.

"I'm going on a journey of success.

"Emily would want me to be successful."

He even told Ashley Costello that the pair would have

new stage names when he got out...

Chard Diamond Rockefeller

and Martello JD Vantage.

Prosecutors worried he might be found not guilty.

Their strongest evidence was the secret tapes.

And in May 2012, a legal debate raged at Winchester Crown Court

over their admissibility.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the death of a girl

with so much to live for generated huge publicity.

It seemed pretty clear that something

nasty had happened to her.

But we didn't really get a sense of who this guy was

until the court case itself began.

And it started, I think, about a week

before the anniversary of her death.

So for quite a long time, people really didn't know

what to make of Elliot Turner.

(David) In the dock, Turner exuded his trademark confidence.

He was with a tie for the first couple of days.

He was trying to look as respectable as possible.

Groomed, carried himself off like a reasonably confident,

slightly sophisticated, or trying hard to be

sophisticated young man.

(David) Turner's defence was that they had a heated, physical fight,

and while he had held Emily down for a few seconds,

she was fine when he let her go.

And they both went to sleep,

and somehow, when he wakes up, she's dead.

(suspenseful music)

(David) The postmortem was inconclusive.

Emily had asphyxiated.

But was it due to her necklace or her existing respiratory problems?

Investigators feared Turner could put doubt in the jury's minds.

The recordings meant everything.

The prosecution knew that it was... it was so damning,

so compelling, and that anyone that listened to people speaking

in their own voices about what had happened,

they'd convict themselves.

(David) After a week of arguments, the judge

at Winchester Crown Court ruled that the secret recordings

were admissible.

Elliot's defence was almost destroyed

by the covert recordings because in those,

he's heard telling what really happened.

But pretty quickly, you got a sense of the guy

from listening to the tapes, the covert tapes,

I suppose, which were so crucial to this case.

And that presented a very, very different picture

of a fantasist, really,

a young guy who I think was completely out of his depth.

Had this sort of monstrous self-image of himself

as some kind of gangster.

Had obviously pretty much dictated every decision

that had ever been made.

(David) There was other evidence... the angry arguments

witnessed by others, the threats he'd made,

and a chilling discovery inside Turner's bedroom.

(Shaun) One of the key pieces of evidence

was a pillowcase that had an impression,

a facial mask of Emily and her makeup imprinted on it.

And they believe that was used to smother her.

(David) The prosecution evidence seemed irrefutable.

And their strongest evidence?

Turner's own words confessing to the crime.

(David) Turner was duly found guilty of murder

and given a life sentence with a minimum of 16 years to serve.

In his letters, the fantasist claimed

he would one day be out buying expensive cars

from the proceeds of a movie about a story

that the world would no doubt want to see.

The spoiled rich boy still believed he would be partying with the Firm.

He was talking about, he wants to buy a Range Rover,

wants to buy a Porsche and stuff.

And, you know, it was quite muddled, to be honest with you.

I don't think he had a clue what... what he wanted to do.

But it's things like he said he wanted to get a book deal

and maybe some... write about his life and stuff,

everything that's happened to him.

(David) Ashley Costello visited his friend only once

before stopping all contact.

Experts believe Emily's death could have been averted

if she'd gone to the police when Turner first exhibited

the warning signs, which are all too familiar

to those who study the patterns of killers.

We don't need hindsight to see that Elliot

was going to end up killing Emily.

She was very high risk for being killed.

If the man is making death threats,

that should be taken very, very seriously.

Another high-risk behaviour would be

practicing that homicide on somebody else

prior to it being done.

(David) Six months after Elliot was jailed,

his parents faced charges of perverting the course of justice.

A different jury listened to the tapes of their plotting.

(Jane) Elliot's mother appeared to be quite cold.

When she attended court, it was said by Emily's parents

that she was able to look them right in the eye with no emotion,

apparently, on her face at all.

Certainly no shame, remorse, or guilt.

And that surprised them,

but it perhaps tells us something about her as a person,

as perhaps a bit emotionally incapable.

And this would have allowed Elliot to have

a good deal of control over her.

(Garth) Anita seemed like a very indulgent parent,

someone that really would believe her son...

would refuse to believe, didn't want to believe,

she told us, that he'd committed murder,

but was prepared to sort of go to any lengths

to... to protect her son.

There was a really touching moment where Leigh Turner talked about

sitting on the bed beside the cold, dead body of Emily Longley

before the ambulance people arrived.

And just... he said he sat next to her,

he patted her cold, dead body, and said, "There, there, butterfly."

And I think that one little shred

probably meant a lot to the family.

(David) Despite Leigh Turner's apparent show of humanity,

both he and Anita were found guilty and sentenced

to two years in prison for conspiring

to pervert the course of justice.

Elliot Turner had been given everything he wanted

from his parents and received friendship

from those impressed by his drug-fuelled,

high-energy lifestyle.

He had charmed a beautiful girl who,

without family support nearby, was completely exposed

to the danger of his jealous rages.

He was a complete fantasist

who didn't seem to have any boundaries,

didn't seem to care about anyone other than himself,

only cared about other people as far as what they thought of him.

(David) We mustn't accept Elliot Turner's self-delusion.

This wasn't some organised criminal.

This wasn't some mafioso.

This wasn't some criminal mastermind.

All we have here is a spoiled child,

somebody who's desperate to be something other than he was,

which was, frankly, a pretty weak, narcissistic, self-obsessed boy.

(dramatic music)

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