Original subtitles

It became clear that there was a p of attacks on elderly people

within the South East London area...

to rape them and sexually assault them hideous crimes

Operation Minstead had gone on years and became

a subject of division as far as the police were concerned

The fact that it's elderly people.

In kind of the autumn of their lives and something like this happens to them

I can't imagine any of them...

ever came anywhere near recovering from

Colin Sutton was a Detective Chief Ins

and Senior Invastigating Officer in The Metropolitan Police

He lead the investigations

into some of the most complex and high-profile cases ever

bringing dangerous criminals to Justice

[background music, female and male voice

in this series you will take you inside

and show you how we caught these crimina using nothing but pure detective work.

This is the Real Manhunter.

It became clear we were...

dealing with an evil human being

a ruthless individual

A lot of his victims

suffered at his hands

but suffered in silence and never actually reported

them but carried it with them to their g

The Nightstalker was a clever and sophis criminal there is no doubt of that

he thought about what he was doing

He thought about how he might get caught he thought of ways to avoid getting caug

For 17 years this man had struck fear into our community

and that couldn't continue

I knew I had to do everything I could to bring that to an end

An investigation is underway following the burglary

and sexual assault in the Shirley area of Croydon last night

The Victim, an elderly woman in her 80s was woken by an intruder who had broken

Police have yet to confirm if it is linked to a series of attacks

by a man known as the Nightstalker...

During the 1990s...

there was a pattern of attacks on elderl within the South East London area

Speculation could one person be responsi

who by then had been given the nickname 'The Nightstalker'

This had been running for 17 years and there didn't seem to be

any answer as to who this man was

At that particular period in South East

there were thousands of elderly people living in fear

of this criminal he had an air of invincibility about him

The numbers were large

mainly they were incidents where a prowler had broken in at night

woken up the occupants who were always e and occasionally indecently assaulted th

but not always indecently assaulted them and on several occasions he raped them

You couldn't serve as either a uniformed or detective in South East London

and not know about Operation Minstead

I was promoted from detective sergeant to detective inspector in January 2009

I was selected to join Operation Minstea

and I had been there about 3 months and Colin appeared early summer of 2009

Up until Colin arriving I was kind of the only manager on the gr

so to have another for Colin to come as SIO was a relief to

In April 2009...

I was still the leader of my murder team

the new commander of the homicide and serious crime command...

left a message for me saying could I go and see him at Scotland Yard

just to have a chat and then he asked me what I knew about Operation Minstead

I just knew that Operation Minstead was South East London

that it was a long running investigation a series of rapes and burglaries of old

My team had been successful in other cas high profile cases

and just wanted somebody to have a look

This is Lewisham Police Station

where operation Minstead was based I'd never been here before

I was asked to come over and have a look and see if I could...

come up with any ideas this is where it was based so I came

When I met the team and realised how sma

and how difficult their task was in trying to catch this guy who...

had been committing these terrible offen for so long

it was a case that seriously needed solv

I was pleased to have the opportunity to and contribute towards that

When I first came here to take a look I

very little about the case and I was brought up to speed

by going to a meeting of all the supervi

We sat down and they were discussing the lines of inquiry

and what was going on and I made a few n

The first of them was the suspect's desc

That was based on victim statements and victim accounts

it was very very generic but it was allegedly a black male

light skinned to dark skinned

normally dressed in dark clothing from head to foot

the age range varied from the 30s to upp

quite well built average height and norm wearing a balaclava or some sort of face

And then it was obviously the offenders

which at that stage had been left at var so we were using that to eliminate peopl

in a mass DNA screening

One of our victims had said that when the perpetrator had woken her up

he was dressed in dark clothing

potentially could have been wearing a motorcycle helmet and motorcycle cloth

and then when he left, she thought she h the engine of a motorcycle

So on that basis a line of inquiry was s trace motorcycle license holders in that

It was a very large line of inquiry and it essentially was suspended

pretty soon into my tenure

When you've got lots of cases going back over many years

there's no substitute

to just looking yourself away to get a f of what they were about and what was hap

So for the first kind of couple of weeks I was a sponge I was soaking up...

the information rather than processing i thinking about it and looking at...

what it might mean and where we can go.

I got on very well with C

he was an established SIO

with a good reputation on the command

I was a brand-new detective inspector kind of finding my feet

I knew about investigation and I knew about homicide investigations

and obviously this type of investigation

He had an advantage in that he could bri with the management team of the homicide

He brought elements to the investigation

that I couldn't bring to it and obviously another perspective.

What became clear...

is that these offenses were confined to a pretty exact geographical area

If you took part of Greater London

south of the River Thames

and to the east of the A23 at Croydon

that was his hunting ground So it's like a quarter of Greater London

and one or 2 offenses just over the bord into Surrey

but mostly it was kind of outer South Ea

What came to be regarded as offense numb in the Minstead series

took place in Wickham Road in Shirley in October 1992

The police got a message that there had

a burglary in a bungalow where an 84 yea lived on her own

and when police turned up and responded to this call that was when the victim...

confided in them that not only had she been burgled and had property stolen

but that she had also been raped.

Now most...

burglars run a mile if there is somebody house they want to burgle a house when i

But in this case there was interaction between the burglar and the

It was late in the evening on the 12th of October 1992

a man with a balaclava

broke in, went down the side of this hou removed a pane of glass from the window.

He removed it whole he hadn't smashed it

he had removed the fitting and taken out the pane of glass

set it down quite sort of carefully and had gone in through the window.

At some point during his progress through the house

he had been removing light bulbs from their fittings

presumably so that if the victim woke up to switch the light on then there would

He also cut the telephone wires because when the ordeal was over

and the victim

went to try and phone for help she found her phone had been disconnected.

He went into her bedroom

and this 84-year-old lady was confronted horror of being awoken in her own bed

by a figure looming over her with a torc a dark figure

hand over her mouth telling her not to m

And her ordeal went on for something lik and during that time...

the intruder raped her before stealing some jewellery and £250 in cash.

A terrible crime a terrible ordeal for an old lady

to have to go through in her own home

you can only imagine how terrifying it must have been for her in the dark

in the house on her own she should feel it's her own home

and she's got this intruder doing these terrible things to her.

He eventually leaves her after two hours she wants to raise the alarm

and finds that her phone has been cut of she can't phone anybody.

So she walks along to where her niece li

and she asks her niece to raise the alar and the police are told

that there was a burglary an overnight b and they turn out and attend the burglar

and it's at that point that the lady rev that she had been raped

she had been raped in her own home in th of the night by this intruder.

Once he'd over-powered his victim

he used to spend considerable time in th

either going around himself or speaking to the victims themselves

and he showed caring attributes

which is very unusual for an offender.

The victim told them

that the rapist kissed her on the lips and on the cheek.

It had the investigator a little bit sor of confused and bemused

has he tried to make things right and smooth things over

and maintain a good relationship with th

Or is he trying to persuade them that th

tell the police and that they shouldn't come after him.

Almost more disturbing and confusing for the victims who were probably

not able to think straight having just b the victim of such a horrible crime.

It's just a really unusual way in which

the victim almost with sensitivity and a degree of compassion

having just inflicted the most barbaric of acts and assaults on her.

There really is no other way to investig an allegation of rape

but to subject the victim again to another intrusive

and uncomfortable experience of being me examined and forensic swabs being taken

because if you haven't got the evidence get from that examination of those swabs

you're never going to prove the case further down the line anyway.

So she's taken to the suite and she is examined and swabs are taken

and from those swabs and particularly fr clothing her pyjamas and some of the bed

there was semen and from that semen that a full male DNA profile was later distil

In 1992 the use of DNA as an investigati

was kind of in its infancy.

The database was very small

so although there was semen present from

on both the swabs and the old lady's pyj

it wasn't until some years later that th were resubmitted to the laboratory

and yielded a male DNA profile.

At first the police weren't aware that..

This was going to be part of a series obviously there had been no other...

similar offenses in the recent past and this was thought really to be...

very much a one off.

The investigation stayed with the local

it's their task for their local CID to investigate so it stayed there and...

they did investigate it and they got now didn't find the suspect and it was kind

filed as unsolved As time went on

we realised that this was a series

and that this sorts of houses and this t

semi-detached houses and bungalows

in these essentially quiet and residenti

of south east London were the hunting ground for the Nightstalker

Six years later

in September 1998 there was a significan

just outside the Met Police area in Warl in Surrey.

It's important in the story of the Night because it was in Warlingham in this roa

that the second offense took place where the suspect left DNA.

The 81 year-old victim was in bed lived alone she had mobility problems

and the suspect came along entered throu that gate down the side of the house

he had a large screwdriver and he tried to prise a window open

and then he realized there was a key han on a string on the fence by the back doo

the victim had left that for her carers and family to let themselves in if they

So he used that why bother with the screwdriver when I've got the k

But those actions of trying to break in with the screwdriver

became very important because...

every tool like this every screwdriver has a unique shape

microscopically the marks that screwdriv makes are different to other screwdriver

and what happens is the scenes of crime

will take a plaster cast from the mark that it leaves

and then that can be microscopically photographed and examined.

When there are other marks at other crim they can be compared

and the comparison of those marks can link two crime scenes

in very much the same way that as DNA profile or fingerprint might link

He was in the premises for some time

and he did make an attempt to rape the v but it wasn't successful.

He asks her for money

and she said she didn't have any.

Then he climbs on top of her and he begins to indecently assault her.

He tries to pull her legs apart he's goi to rape her he undid his trousers

but she yells out in pain from her chronic arthritis when she tried to move

then she almost feigns illness feigns that she's passed out.

And this seemed to concern him, and he s

He had so much concern it seemed that he to find a pulse to make sure she was sti

he picked up her wrists and looked at that and then he left.

The ordeal for her was over quite quickl

There was a genuine fear of a reprisal.

In this case the fear was more that the intruder would return

and so it wasn't until the following mor she spoke to her son that she reported t

He wasn't able to perform the act but in so he did ejaculate

and there was semen found on the carpet in her bedroom

From that semen...

a full male DNA profile was extracted

and it matched exactly the profile from the 1992 offense.

Now we had two rapes from the same unkno we had a series we had Operation Minstea

This then enlightened them to the prospe

that they were dealing with a serial rap

a serial sex offender targeting elderly

It wasn't long before this started filtering out to the media

and reports of sexual offenses being att

to someone we call 'The Nightstalker'.

'Nightstalker' was something invented by

the people running the investigation

in the early 2000s were not particularly happy with because...

it was felt that it accentuated the fear these people should be in.

The police didn't particularly like that term being used

but it was easy for us to describe to th this was someone who was breaking in at

Part of the strategy very much

was to try not to have...

elderly ladies in South East London having to live their lives in fear.

If you look at the media reporting of operation Minstead throughout its his

the focus is always on the sexual element of the crimes

and what this does or did was to I think, focus...

the methods of investigations that we us

onto those we used which are used for ra and sexual offenses and very much that b

The team was concentrating

their efforts on trying to get DNA swabs from suspects

compare that with DNA they had from the first two crime scenes

I'm pretty sure that those on that team

would have thought that it would be quite a quick job.

They just needed to find this guy and hi onto the database once that DNA was ther

it matches up game over job done

Sadly that is not what happened.

The DNA in itself ultimately proved to be fruitless.

They were trying to get scientists...

to do really different things

the two main scientific pieces of work t

on were around physical characteristics from the DNA profile and ancestry

the profile showed that this man was black by ethnicity

but that his skin was likely to be pale

freckled and that his hair would be ginger or very light

The ancestry said that our suspect was likely to have come from the lesser

and most likely Trinidad and Tobago.

What that caused the investigation team

take the publicity campaign about operation Minstead to Trinidad

in case somebody over there recognized the person it might be.

They wanted to go for a swim after work

a photographer from a Mail on Sunday newspaper

was on hand to catch them in their speed lying around the pool.

A rather unfortunate interpretation was put on that.

They could have been more circumspect in

what they did it resulted in an article where they were called 'The Frying Squad

It just kind of debased the gravity of the situation

and of the investigation and ultimately

something that didn't take the investigation one millimeter further

When I arrived in January 2009...

a very large mass DNA screening exercise had been in operation for about 11 years

It involved officers going to the home addresses of people we that had identifi

that might fit the description of the su

and essentially persuading them to give an elimination swab

then obviously that would then be sent to the forensic science service.

And because of the age range that was being looked at

these were black men who'd grown up in South East London

during the late 1970's and 1980's

and during that time

I think that their contact with the Met may not necessarily have been positive

You are then going around and saying 'can I have a sample of your DNA...

that we can compare with our crime scene

and no matter how many promises I made t the sample would be destroyed if it was

the mistrust had built up over

a couple of decades was still there

and it meant that co-operation was rarely given in truth.

We had eliminated 2000 people

and we had another 2000 to do so it would have taken another 11 years.

When I first went over there it just so happened that that week

they had one man

who had offered up his swab for DNA

which meant that the whole operation to try to find the Nightstalker

by DNA swabbing

was going to be fraught with difficultie

I wrote in the margin of my book on that first meeting a couple of days into my r

'what if we didn't have DNA?'

The Nightstalker operated over a very large area of London

in the South East South London and Surrey.

A total of about 2 and a half million pe

This is a typical road right in the midd of his favorite hunting grounds.

And you can see there the 1930s

houses and bungalows, semis...

you can still point out the houses that

that there's an old person that lives th the house hasn't been modernized

the garden is kept in a way and hasn't b into a driveway

and that was what he based his crime.

The typical Minstead victim

had their windows done up in the 80s the replaced by uPVC windows with external b

and he knew that so a lot of his victims

had the same sort of window that he was very expert at breaking into

and that was because they had external b

he could rip out pull the pane of glass out and he was in.

He would start a surveillance in reconna days before he committed the offense

but then he would often sit there for ho

looking to see what was going on to make sure he understood

what the habits were in that particular

It adds another...

more sinister dimension that he spent so

researching his victims watching the premises and seeing...

who was coming and going and what their behavior patterns were and just pl

how he was going to conduct his next att

The occupier went to bed

he could tell that by the lights moving from downstairs to upstairs then going o

He would look to make sure that there wa only one person living there because...

by and large he wanted to attack premise where somebody lived on their own.

One of the first things that I had to do when I went over to...

look and do the review on operation Mins was to get up to speed with the old case

The most troubling of those at that time in 1999 of an 88 year-old woman

who lived on her own in a bungalow in Or

At 3 in the morning she is awoken by...

sensing someone was in her bedroom and l up into the gloom and sees that there is

man standing at the foot of her bed.

He put a gloved hand over her mouth

and said 'I want your money'

and she sort of muttered something and he took his hand away and she said

'there is no money here in the bedroom..

If you want me to give you my money you' to get me up and take me to my living ro

and so he sort of pulled her up off the bed and ushered her through

to the living room where she found her p and handbag and she gave him to purse an

emptied the contents of the purse into h

he pulled her up from the chair she had been sitting in

placed her on the edge of the sofa

pulled up her nightdress and raped her several times

and left her battered bleeding

in such a state that when she was able t

raise the alarm by pressing her care link panic button

police attended and called an ambulance straight away she was taken straight to

She required emergency surgery

is ti closest the Nightstalker ever came to killing somebody there and then

had she not received medical help she would have died she would have bled

She never went back to her bungalow where she had been for 25 years.

She was discharged from hospital into sheltered accommodation

and although the physical injuries had h the psychological injuries never did

She took that night of terror and pain to the grave with her.

She was very weary...

very frightened really he is it ruined h in a way didn't it

there she was living in her own home and suddenly the world fell apart.

She always used to say she hoped he woul before she died she had these terrible n

so she dreaded the nights and going to b

going to sleep.

It would be very difficult

for me as a 56-year-old male to understa

what an elderly victims go through in these circumstances

these are people in twilight of their ye

it must have been absolutely terrifying and in relation to that

they were staying awake during the night

because they didn't want to become one o victims and they were sleeping during th

We saw it time and again with the victim there was this sort of stoicism

the spirit of the blitz or something lik it was that generation

and that's why they tried in some way to block it out.

They weren't complainers

they didn't like speaking to the police about what happened to them.

And we agreed that if...

the victims of the Nightstalker had been aged between...

18 and 36 rather than 58 and 96

there would have been much more publicit

and for some reason the aged victims were not as newsworthy.

You can't name victims of sexual assault

and while that's quite right and quite understandable

it meant that the suffering they endured was somehow anonymised

and the impact of his crimes I don't think were truly appreciated.

I have no doubt if it hadn't been that p generation that had been targeted

more resources would have had to been brought to bear.

In May 2009

I finally got my chance to see

one of these crime scenes for myself

I had immersed myself reading all this d from all these crimes going back

It was down in Croydon on a road called Princes Avenue

for me, it was interesting not just to s what an offense looked like

but to see how the team were responding

This bungalow was the scene of the first

Minstead Nightstalker offense that I wen person after I started to go there to do

There was a 78-year-old lady who lived h

When we came to do our investigation we found that he had gained entrance

by that gate at the side to the rear gar

he'd actually been to another garden of

and borrowed a pitchfork from their shed

and had used that to force the window open at this bungalow.

She goes to bed 9 pm

she is a frail woman she needs a frame t

she is awoken at 4 o'clock in the mornin

by this to her huge man sitting astride on her bed

It's dark and he's holding her down.

At some point while the Nightstalker was on top of her he starts caressing he

He asks her quite politely 'would you like more?'

and she equally politely declines and sa 'No thank you'.

It's another one of these cases where he a degree of concern or care for the vict

She needed to go to the toilet so she as can go fetch her walking frame and he do

and she'd also tried to find an emergenc

on the bedside table, but she didn't kno intruder had seen it first and hidden it

He's asked her about things in her house rummaged through all her drawers.

He's a bit frustrated because he can't f

The ordeal this lady suffered was only about half an hour in length

managed to find £20 or so in coins and c

and that's all that she lost.

Once he had gone she locked the back doo

kind of make sure he wouldn't come back and went to sleep and it wasn't...

until after she woke up at 9 o'clock tha the landline in the premises to raise th

When I arrived here I saw that there was the Minstead team

very busy knocking on houses doing door to door in

looking for CCTV looking for any kind of clues

evidence they might find in the locality they would do if it were a murder invest

I suppose although it was the very first I came out to

really this was sort of the seed to my t

that this comprehensive investigation of every single case

was just too resource intensive.

We were getting two sometimes three a night when he was busy.

You just cannot keep doing this kind of.

Ultimate model of investigation you use for homicides.

I still think that may have been counterproductive

to finding a strategy that would actually take him down.

Colin came in and...

by thinking outside the box by taking a fresh approach

he decided that this was someone who nee looked at as a burglar

rather than a sex offender.

Up until then we had only been

looking at offenses that involved sexual or very high Minstead indicator.

So, what we decided to do was target

every single burglary

overnight on elderly people in South Eas

In that time period there would've been many more offenses

where there was no forensic link which had been carried out by the Nights

and which the police were totally oblivious to and unaware of.

I got my intelligence team

to give me a print-out of what could have been Minstead offenses

and that was where you got to about 100

We decided to target our resources

where we could get things really quickly

and all aimed at identifying the offende

and not proving that he committed the of

All the evidence...

needed to put him in prison for a very l had already been preserved.

We didn't need to prove that he was comm

these new offenses we didn't need to get every available scrap of evidence

we could treat them as intelligence opportunities in other words

we could look at them to try and find th of the offense which might help us ident

I had a view that if we were to use crim pattern analysis and analytical minds

to try and predict what was happening and to try and understand

where this man was offending then we nee to have all the information possible.

This change in the thrust of the investi gave birth to what was called 'Minstead

I was desperate to prove that Minstead was throwing away offenses

and intelligence opportunities by leavin

crimes to be looked at and investigated by the borough

and I thought I was going to have to go years and years of crime reports to prov

But such a case fell into my lap.

By May 2009

the investigative strategy of Minstead L

was being written but hadn't officially come into play.

During that time there was an over-night burglary in Farnaby Road.

It was not an offense that we would norm

have taken on for investigation but we applied the Minstead Lite princip

and went down there and used it as a tes

The house was occupied by an elderly lady and her son

who himself was in his sixties.

It was given back to the borough to inve

He had broken in, and he'd clearly broke normal sort of way at the rear with a pa

and moved things around inside the house but hadn't actually stolen any

He wasn't there for very long and he dec that he was going to abort and leave.

When the borough CID were investigating

the son of the victim told them that the was a carton of orange juice in the kitc

which seemed to have lessened in volume as if someone had drunk from it.

He knew he hadn't, or his mother hadn't the scenes of crime officer from the bor

doing the right thing swabbed the mouth of the carton

submitted it for DNA analysis and very quickly afterwards

was presented with a full male DNA profi

which matched the other Minstead crime s

We hadn't had

a DNA hit now for about four years at th

so it was significant that we knew it was the Nightstalker

and what that meant was we could draw on further resources

it also gave us a very good break in that we had some CCTV

from a nearby house and that was pretty much one of the first occasions

in the length of the inquiry where we we that it was the actual Nightstalker.

We had the time

that the intruder left the house because the victim told us

we went to the CCTV

and we saw the bottom half of the Nights walking that way.

What we then did is look back on the sam because we thought if he is walking that

he must have walked the other way to get and he had

but what shocked us was how long before it was like 3 hours before.

He had obviously...

been at that scene for a significant amo of time and felt confident enough

to not only be in the vicinity of the Farnaby road address for three hours

he had also done a burglary 2-3 doors do around the corner on the same evening.

Very confident he wouldn't be caught.

And since he'd only spent around about h at most at this house

we know he spent in excess of about two and a half hours

sitting in that back garden, watching th

waiting for the lights to go out

waiting for his time to strike and to br

You can imagine he's just sitting there the windows waiting for is the lights to

the downstairs ones to go out and maybe

the top floor ones come on and go out and then he makes his move.

Somehow that seemed really quite siniste the thought of this man sort of sitting

unseen in the dark in a garden watching people in their own

The investigation had to change directio

We had to change tactics we had to get one step ahead of him.

The only way we were going to catch him was to catch him in the act.

And that's why we had to become a night duty burglary squad

and get out at night time.

Had the police carried on the way they w

before Colin arrived

the Nightstalker would never have been c it was as simple as that.

We were dealing with an evil human being

a ruthless individual.

Two things were certain the Nightstalker would strike again

that couldn't continue I had to do everything I could to bring

A large part of being a leader of any team is to make sure that...

those on the team below you are operatin

to the best of their ability and often that would mean

making sure they are doing the things they are good at

and you're giving the right tasks to the right people.

The proposal to go to Minstead Lite was surprisingly well received.

It depends on the situation whether you' to encounter resistance or not.

If you're going in raking over someone else's work and you tell them

you think they're not doing it properly make sure you're doing it a different wa

then that's something that is quite infl nobody likes to be in that kind of posit

I think this stage in operation Minstead

everybody was just accepting of the fact

that we weren't coping and if it carried on the way that it was going

it was going to fall over.

I think in terms of the team

they saw it as a great release for them because they were...

struggling under the burden of trying to do this high-level

complete investigation for every single one of these crimes being reported.

Each morning when I went in

there was kind of two streams of informa which might be able to tell me that ther

an incident overnight which was worthy of our attention.

The intelligence team on operation Minst had a search which ran...

overnight every night or early in the mo

to see reported crimes not just in Londo actually but in the whole home counties

to see if there were any crimes that sor our criteria so we could flag them up

and then on top of that you had the great awareness

that there was within the Met Police particularly in South East London

as to the possibility of Minstead cases.

There was an offence in June 2009

that chimed

with the team it really struck a chord w about how vulnerable these elderly peopl

There was a report of a burglary on a 93

it was in his favorite hunting ground an

given the age of the victim and the interaction between the victim a

the burglar it was clearly going to be something for Minstead to take a l

When I heard about this case I thought 'well if she is very frail and she is th

there were dangers here so I'm going to

make sure we do everything we need to do in case she takes a turn for the w

So, I went down to Shirley where she liv

she lived in a large detached house

in prime to the stock broker belt countr

And there was an elderly lady there

hadn't said anything to the initial investigating officers from the

or any of our officers until Colin arriv

This lady was...

gradually becoming more and more infirm and she'd lost the sight in one eye

and her ability was difficult.

I went in and one of the liaison officer

'this is Mr Sutton, he's the boss'

and she said 'Hello Mr Sutton'

and I told her 'you can call me Colin'

I tried to sort of talk to her and she had this lovely sort...

of cut glass accent almost she was very well spoken lady and...

even in the dire position she was she sort of maintained a dignity.

When I said hello to her she extended her hand and I took it

and it wasn't to shake hands it was to h

And whilst she was holding my hand she got her other hand

and sort of put it on top so she was sor onto my hand with both hands

and she pulled me in towards her and almost whispered to me

'he interfered with me you know'

and I realised in that second the kind o that it had taken her to make that discl

She hadn't told...

the officers that were there before it w the first time we knew she had been assa

She seemed to form a bond with Colin qui

and I know that she held his hand

and she told him, the first person that had been sexually assaulted by the offen

That really that seemed to affect Colin.

I just wanted to cry when she said that

I just felt so so sorry for her

and I kind of remembered that she was on

or a hundred or more who have been throu

It was the first time I had met a live v there and then in her own home.

She only had one living relative and she was a daughter who lived in South Af

She was unable to return at that time and this lady from that day

she essentially stopped eating.

She gave up on living really

and it was only a matter of weeks and sh

I never saw her again her daughter never saw her again.

Because of the difficulties with causati

there was never going to be any realisti prospects of charging the Nightstalker w

murder or manslaughter.

But you know he killed her he killed her as surely as if he had stabbed her or sh

It just took a little bit longer.

You've got an offender here...

who is breaking into homes in the middle of the night

waking up his victims by shining a torch into their eyes.

Sexually assaulting them it's not just terrifying for the elderly

but also terrifying for the families of elderly who'd be concerned about their m

It was really often a balance to be stru in terms with publicity about it

because you've got the idea that you're going to arouse...

public fear and make people fear crime more than they ought to

because the chances of it happening to them is quite small but they'll see..

It in the newspapers and on TV and think 'I'm going to become a victim'.

You have to balance that with the idea that you're going to...

make people more aware and that will make them take better precautions.

You've also got the fact of what is the publicity going to do in terms with the

It could make him go underground it could make him stop.

There was a pattern which emerged

that he would go off the radar

perhaps he got nervous.

There was certainly a theory that one of the Minstead appearances on BBC Crimewat

made him stop offending for a long while

999 call tape was played and it kind of

into realising what he had done.

The fact is that if people are determine

to break into a premises to a house any premises

then given enough time and equipment they probably can't.

Most of the security

that you can equip your house with is about delaying

it's things that take time and the hope

while the person who is trying to break in is spending a lot of time, then...

they might be seen

and someone will call the police and...

they might be intercepted.

But it is very difficult to make a house completely impregnable to...

a burglar, certainly many of the houses that the Nightstalker

selected as his victims had very little spent on them.

One offense that I remember quite well w that there was an offense on the 6th of

2009 in Queenhill Road which is in South

just off Selsdon High Street.

It was a Saturday afternoon in early Jun

it was the home of an 82 year old woman

she was living alone in a semi detached

she suffered quite badly from dementia

and she was having real difficulties in expressing to the officers what had happ

While we knew there had been an intruder

the lady who lived here on her own she c give us any more details beyond that

so we didn't really know if anything had

we didn't if she had been assaulted if there was any sexual assault.

It was very regular...

that he would target people who had deme

I personally think deliberately

but as you can imagine a lot of elderly do have dementia

and it makes it extremely difficult for

to get any information from them to help identify the offender.

At the time there was an extension being built on this house

in the next street it was like a buildin site there effectively

and he was able to get through there, it

into the back garden of this house

and it's from there that he removed the pane of glass and broke in.

It was roughly on this spot here that Na my DI and I had a conversation.

We had officers all around this street

investigating this break in and we didn't really know what...

had happened because the victim couldn't

They were weary they had been responding to about 2-3 offenses a night

for most of that week and we were just chasing shadows.

Almost simultaneously Nathan and I said 'we can't keep doing this...'

His offending had increased massively we had a large area of South East London

two million people live in that area

but we knew the areas he favoured and I

as did everybody else on the team

that if we had enough resources

that we would be able to target the area that he liked to offend in the most.

I'd had these sort of half ideas that re some sort of proactive operation was...

going to have to be the answer

and I also knew that I would need a lot both from those on the team below me

and indeed a lot of support from those a me if we were going to do it properly.

Everything that the operation had been d for most of these 17 years was focused o

Major plank of what they were trying to achieve was to take swabs

from as many people on the list as possi

until they took a swab from the right ma and everything would be fine.

I took the view that wasn't going to hap

So we had to do something else and that something else didn't involve..

Doing an investigation of offenses after they had happened

because quite frankly we had been doing for years and it hadn't worked.

We needed something new we needed a different approach.

A different approach had to be

Surveillance waiting for this prolific b

to come and commit an offense in front o

and catch him in the act.

When I went across to Lewisham Police St

begin my review of Operation Minstead and I really didn't know anybody at all

Nathan was the first Police officer I spoke to on Minstead

he was supremely supportive of me

and gave me his backing to everything I was trying to do really

and I tried to repay that by keeping

the pressure from above away from him so

he could get on and do his job and manag his team the way that he did.

By the kind of end of September beginning of October 2009

we were planning a very large proactive in an attempt to catch the Nightstalker

where we discussed the resources that were required

and obviously we had to get approval for the operational plan.

In the past I had been involved with a b you know when I was a PC at Tottenham.

A guy called 'Errol Dobson' he would take people's windows out.

He wasn't sophisticated

and we could just round up a dozen or tw

and sit and wait for him to commit the crime right in front of us.

The principle was the same with what we was trying to do with the Nightstalke

but he was so much cleverer he was so much more cunning

and he was doing over such a big area

that we needed to have our tactics and our resources refined

in the same way if we were going to matc

I knew that if I was going to do this su operation the way I wanted

I needed some help from all across the M

So what I did was a I booked a meeting r at Scotland Yard

to see some people

of equivalent rank to me.

I sent out an email to a dozen or so of

'can you come to a meeting at Scotland Y

When I get there, there was probably twice that number of people

and I think that was really encouraging because certainly...

my view from the time I'd been there I'd actually Minstead was a little bit of a

that people got sort of shoved into and nobody really cared about.

We went to the meeting

Colin was able to persuade them that the

looked like a good one we were essential against an open door in relation to the.

Senior echelons of...

the Met Police service.

It was just a case of 'did we have the r with the resources we wanted?'

I presented it without a...

power point presentation without graphs or whatever

I just kind of said 'this is happening now'

'we are in the midst of the most prolifi of Minstead Man's activity in 17 years'

'I've had a 93-year-old tell me he inter

'I have an 88-year-old lady who is going

'we need to stop it'

What it took was guts

because you are talking about putting huge amounts of resources

onto the streets and the cost of that would be astronomical.

Part of the operational plan

was to have surveillance teams and observation points

in areas where the Nightstalker was acti

The first step on the road to the...

surveillance operation really was to work out where we were going to do it

Colin wanted to draw up an area

which could feasibly be watched

by a dragnet operation.

Initially when the intelligence analyst started looking at this

produced the very first map and it was h

so we had to refine it.

So, we went back to the drawing board...

again and we found another area still in that Shirley Cluster

but in a smaller area

Even so, something like one in every six Minstead offenses took place in the area

and that was a smaller area we were able with we thought around about 70 officers

So that was the plan

which was hatched and that was the plan I took to the force tasking group.

As a result of that meeting a call went

across the Met all the murder teams, ask

DCs to go over and

work on the case and I volunteered to go

it was a case I wanted to get involved i

He had the backing of the commissioner Paul Stevenson at the time

And it had the backing of the senior management team.

However, if it resulted in no one being

then a huge bill for overtime being subm

and there was only one person who was go to get the blame and that would have bee

When the proactive operation began

28th of October

it was ran from a very large control roo in Vauxhall and it was called Central 30

It's an absolute state of the art facili

that its primarily used for...

very serious things like terrorist or kidnap incidents.

It is essentially a large room with lots of desk consoles with computers

telephones with radio channels on them

and a long one wall is a bank of I think is about 18 screens.

There was a surveillance control

there was operational control which eith myself or Colin were running

and there were other officers monitoring

in the control room so there is probably people in the control room at any one ti

You have a very large number of officers out on the streets

and we had Minstead officers that were g to monitor addresses that we had alarms

Everybody was static

tucked away in a place where

anybody walking or driving through the a

would have just no chance of seeing them

And to back that up apart from we had air support as well

but we had a mobile surveillance team

that was situated outside the area we were surveilling.

The reason for that was that if we stopp

four people during the course of the investigation

that weren't the Nightstalker

that word would get on the grapevine tha were doing a big operation there

and it would effectively blow the surveillance it would be no good any

The night shift would start

with a briefing at Lewisham police stati

and there would be about 70 police offic including the surveillance teams.

We'd be given an update on the case

Either myself or Colin

would brief what was expected of them

and what their roles were what to do in the event of anything happ

I was allocated

the role of being in a mobile unit in a

and I was with two other officers in the

but out of sight and to be in radio cont with the rest of the team

And then they would be sent to their operational areas

with the right communication and the right assets and resources.

And everybody goes down to Shirley

they are in their OP's by 11pm.

I'm at Central 3000 with the inside team

waiting for this prolific burglar to com commit an offense in front of our eyes.

Than the time came, started to get light thought 'well he's never going to come'

And nothing happened essentially.

Very little movement all night.

One or two vehicles passed by no pedestrians and we all go home.

First night of surveillance passed throu

we thought without an incident. Nothing Happened.

It wasn't until I got back into Lewisham the next morning

that I found out overnight there had been three burglaries

which we thought were almost certainly Nightstalker jobs.

And those...

offenses had happened just outside the boundary of our surveillance operati

The first two...

were in this road here the first of those was an attempt where.

He failed for once to get the glass out didn't manage to get in

so he tried again at another house just down the road.

Now the annoying thing about this is that this location here is literally

a hundred yards north of where our surveillance area started.

He was that close to us on the very first night and we missed him.

But there was more to it than that becau the third burglary

took place about a mile in that directio just down by the Royal Bethlem Hospital.

The only way that the Nightstalker could have got from this burglary here

to the 3rd one down there was right thro where we were doing our surveillance.

It was a vehicle must have been used. Yo walk from the second to the third burgla

And when you looked at the map

the only logical way to drive that journ would be straight down our plot.

Now there was a school that had CCTV on

and there were a couple of frames that s a vehicle going past at about the right

Although it was a very grainy shot it just showed the top of the car

we were able to show that to the experts and they were able to identify

that it was a Vauxhall Zafira and what sort of model and the colour.

They also found a man who used to work for the Metropolitan police actually.

He lived on Orchard Way and he had his own CCTV on his own cars in the drive.

There was enough to show a car parking u

adjacent to where somebody would have gone to commit the third burglary

and even at one point his footage showed

somebody walking around the car.

All of a sudden we knew what sort of car what make and model and colour

that was driven by the Nightstalker and that appeared a huge step forward

but I had to kind of temper the optimism

I'd been there before in other cases and knowing the make model and color of a ca

is a start but it can mean a whole load

beyond that to try and find that one car and to use it evidentially.

And what I did know was that if we were going to do that

we wasn't going to have time to do the s

it was kind of or the resources either a on finding the car or doing the surveill

Having worked with Colin

I knew him and trusted him and...

had faith in what he was doing and could the logic behind his thought process

and wanted it to work and believed it wo

you know that kept the whole thing going.

We're doing the surveillance that's our main choice.

After the investigation

that took place when I first joined the

was that the Nightstalker was

stealing victims cash point cards

and then going to a nearby cashpoint

and using the card to withdraw money.

When he started in 1992

all pensioners got their state pension

with a book at the post office in cash.

But then obviously technology came along people had bank cards to prevent cash be

What he did was he started taking their

and most of them were so frightened or t

by him that they gave him their PIN numb

After he had committed his rapes he went bank and withdrew money.

One of the areas we targeted

for the main surveillance operation was a cash point in Honor Oak

which was attached to an off license.

The relevance of that was that in 2007

the Nightstalker had used that cash poin with victims credit cards

to get money out of their accounts.

We were pretty certain it was him but th was no detail they weren't able to assis

It was such a disappointment

he had obviously wanted to keep himself just as secure

from any cameras around the cash point

as he did when he went in to commit the

As the 2009 proactive operation

began to gather pace we decided to

get some better quality cameras fitted

around that area in Honor Oak.

As a result of that we got some really g

of the Nightstalker when he came from

two addresses with the victims credit ca and attempted to withdraw cash.

Unfortunately we didn't see his face

but there is some excellent detail in th

his height and build which gave us really good intelligence.

A couple of nights after this

there is another attempt

to use a stolen debit card at a cash mac

The cash machine this time was at a branch of HSBC bank

that was then on the corner of Western R

The local police had been round and public appeal posters

about operation Minstead

with an e-fit on of Minstead Man

and the bank being public spirited

had put one of these posters in their wi

and the poster in the window was literal

three feet away from the cash machine.

So you've got Minstead man standing ther

trying to steal money from one of his victims accounts

and just there by his head

is an e-fit of him staring at himself.

As it turned out

previously, he didn't need to worry beca he looked nothing like the e-fit.

That's all I'm going to say about that.

That first night was

for all intents and purposes quite quiet all of us involved in the investigation.

When we went in for the second night of surveillance

it occurred to us that

the reason we hadn't been aware of these

occurring the night before is that we we monitoring the CAD messages live.

CAD is shorthand for Computer Aided Disp

essentially it's just electronic message

They get passed between police stations and police operational units

and from the center which is New Scotlan

On the second night of the new proactive there was an interesting development.

We picked up a CAD

from Lambeth and what had taken place wa

woman had been in bed when she heard wha thought was somebody going through her s

She was certain it was somebody trying to break into her house.

She dialled 999

the call was dealt with the sort of seriousness and priority

that it should had been uniformed office were dispatched to the address.

He came into her room saw her on the pho took it from her threw it away and ran.

And he ran down the road as quickly as h and a police car came out of the T junct

and they drove up towards it and he veer off down the side of a house down an all

where the car couldn't go so an officer the car young officer a fit officer

and he gave chase.

It was an incredible account he chased him for nearly two miles

through streets parks rivers and over walls and fences.

And eventually over a wall and into a carpark of a megastore

and when the officer came over the wall he couldn't see.

Where this figure he had been chasing ha

he had got away.

But we were that close that close we were ten seconds behind

Minstead Man at one point.

I remember one of my colleagues telling.

It was incredulous he couldn't believe he had gotten away

that by the time he had gotten to top of the wall he had disappeared.

You could hear a pin drop

in there it was a very very tense moment for the people

at the controls thinking any second

we might actually have him he might actu be in the custody with a police officer.

But of course it didn't happen.

From that we realised that the Nightstalker must be a very fit

man who is able to run quickly and for quite a long time.

What could happen? Well he could just stop he could go to g

he could just give up he could say to hi

'you've had a good run

you're going to get caught if you keep g

you better stop now' and he might never

Colin wanted to keep it out of the press because he didn't want to

risk the suspect

going to ground and then us losing the opportunity to actually catch him.

I had a reasonable enough relationship

with Colin to ring him up and he was at

great pains to say 'please desist from publishing this stor

There was a possibility that it could drive him undercover.

Obviously we weren't to be aware

at that point of the huge operation that had been launched by the police

to try and find him.

Immediately after the second night when

he was almost caught in Southwark

we had a two week period where there was absolutely quiet

silence no indication that he was about on the streets

no calls

no information whatsoever we were concer that he had gone to ground

which obviously gave us indication that it was him that was chased.

I was absolutely confident

that if we stayed there eventually he wo back and commit a crime right in front o

I just couldn't put a time limit on that

I was going to keep my nerve

the team were ready to keep their nerve

it was a question to me as to whether th would sanction it to keep going.

I was encouraged

by the senior management of the MPS who essentially held their nerve

and stayed with it but we were very conc that he could seriously injure or kill s

so obviously that was one of the factors that had to be taken into account.

So we kept going and so we'd now done

16 nights and from a personal point of v it was absolutely fatiguing.

In the two week period afterwards

I wasn't available I was on a course at

so Colin was running the operational sid in Central 3000 so he was on his own

So for two weeks he couldn't help me out at the control

or at Lewisham during the day

so I'm doing the briefing at 9-9.30 at L going in and doing

effectively a night duty until half 5-6 in the morning

going home for a few hours to sleep

and back in to Lewisham at 9 for the bri

The surveillance went on for a couple of

But despite the time it was taking I still had faith in Colin and that

that the operation was going to be succe

Surveillance work can be sometimes quite

boring really because for most of the time nothing happens

but you can't afford to take the chance

falling asleep you've got to be alert an We really wanted to get hands on this gu

and we were all behind Colin and support

his plans really to keep it going.

I finished my course on Friday 13th of N

I realised he was probably exhausted

so I offered to do the weekend and potentially the week after that

so I was up there on Friday the 13th in

I said well you know I'm sorted out toni

but come in on Saturday do Saturday and

and I can have two days off which would

That Saturday night I stayed at home for

and watched the football had a glass of wine or whiskey

or something and it was sort of relaxing and I need to catch up on my sleep.

We started at the normal time on the 14th of November at 11pm

and it was a pretty quiet evening from m

nothing particularly exciting happening at the cash points or the other areas.

And then in the early hours

we got a call over the radio from one of the officers from the observation poi

The Vauxhall Zafira was seen

nearby old peoples type housing

from one of the observation points and that had been put up to the whole te

Soon after that a man fitting the description of the Nightstalker

was seen running from one of these house

The suspect running towards a Vauxhall Z

was exceptionally important to us becaus we had identified prior to that night

that the Nightstalker was using a type b Vauxhall Zafira.

So as far as we were concerned, game on.

And he got in his Zafira

the lights came on and he drove off.

He drives off up Orchard way where there a lot of static observation posts.

The plan was not to stop anybody or to arrest anybody

here on the plot because if it was the w

then we would probably have details of our surveillance operation leak out.

An officer or two from the OP went to the actual address he was seen coming fr

and the information I received

back in the control room was that it loo like that address had been

attempted to be forced.

In my mind I'm thinking well he's not a resident of this address

so he is likely to be a burglar hence the Nightstalker.

The Nightstalker was driving quite quickly for some of this

he got up to nearly 60 miles per hour in

I'm convinced and so are the rest of the that he knew he was being followed

and that he essentially tried to get away by speeding.

What the surveillance team were able to do was somebody using his local knowl

took a side turning

and went on ahead of him

to slow him down which enabled the follo

surveillance team to catch up.

By now we have a convoy of about 4 polic

and one of those vehicles is equipped with covert blue lights and sirens.

He couldn't know

that when we stopped him it was because we followed him all the way from Shirley

We just wanted him to think it was a ran stop in the street so that if it was the

then we wouldn't jeopardize the surveillance operation.

You can see were on a

reasonably wide and busy main road

and that's fine because we can keep cont

but then the Zafira indicates and turns left onto a very different roa

The character of the buildings changed and suddenly

we're on a residential street.

It's very much the sort of place

where the Nightstalker would make his at

So a decision was made to stop

him there and then so he couldn't get aw get out of the vehicle and do a runner.

It became an easy decision for Nathan to

'strike now'.

It was utter confusion when he gets stop

I phoned one of the operational Minstead sergeants

and I asked him to find out what was goi

had he been spoken to, who was this man?

Get some information off of him so that we didn't make an unnecessary ar

The officer asked him a few questions th led him to believe that we had

a person who was very likely to be the N

And the officer asked him and he said his name was Kelvin Grant

the officer said 'Ok, have you got any I and he said 'no'

and he started to have a look and he saw

he could see that in the center console

there was some cards and he saw the name on there was Delroy Easton Grant.

Some of the clothing from...

I think it was in August 2009

that he wore when he approached the cash with his hood up and

gloves on etcetera

that clothing was found in his car

direct link from images found at the cas

to his arrest.

When they looked in the glove compartmen

there was sort a balaclava/woollen hat

which fitted the description given by so many victims after the crimes

when they looked in the boot there was even more evidence because

there was a grey

fleecy top, a can of petrol pair of shoes, a crowbar

and a big screwdriver.

The Nightstalker was finally stopped

and the handcuffs were put on him and we to identify him as Delroy Grant.

Delroy Grant was arrested.

About half past one, my mobile rang and

and he uttered the immortal words

'Hello Colin, I think we've got him'

to which I replied

'Are you joking?' and he said

'would I really ring you up at half past and joke about something like that?'

As far as I was concerned the descriptio

the method, the vehicle he was using

the various items that were seen through the vehicle window

prior to it being removed

we were pretty certain that he was our m so we were happy, very happy.

No I didn't feel any guilt

that I had been in the control room when the Nightstalker been arrested

and Colin wouldn't have felt none at all it was the butt of many jokes

for weeks and weeks afterwards

that I had been on a course and stepped in on that night he had been arrested.

The simple fact was there was no way I was going back to sleep

because I was just too excited and wound

by hearing the story of his arrest so

I drove into Lewisham and went into the

and that's when I was introduced to Delr

for the first time and I finally got my on Minstead Man.

One of the officers sort of said 'this i he's the boss'

and Delroy Grant shook my hand he extend shook my hand, bowed his head.

A bit of a surprise that he was so polit

so sort of differential, I never had som

who was so willing to strike up an irrelevant conversation

and to kind of prolong it as he was

it was a window to me

to the kind of Delroy Grant that people to tell us about in the coming weeks.

What struck me was how fit he was for a

and then all the scenes I've been to

some of the windows that he managed to e and I remember standing there with

Colin saying 'how did somebody get into and it all started

to come together with how wiry and muscu

and how flexible he was

and that just gave me even more reason to believe that we had got the right per

They booked him in and they took his clo from him and bagged it in case it was ev

and there was a very obscure provision in the police criminal evidence act wher

interviews can be conducted with people if there is a life at risk

without solicitors and rights and the officers said to him 'look

have you been anywhere is there an old lady lying somewhere wit

who needs medical assistance because you've been there tonight'

he was quite sort of chilling in his reply when he said

'I've not visited anybody tonight'

that was his reply, 'I've not visited an

When he was asked to give his fingerprin

he made an off the record comment to the officers doing it saying

'it's pointless you doing this you know I always wore gloves'.

A sample had been taken when he had been

which is pretty standard

that was then couriered by officers by hand to the forensic science service

the opened up their lab and by 4pm that

it was confirmed that it was him

and that he was the Nightstalker.

Delroy Grant was 53 years old

he lived in Brockley Mews in South East

with his second wife who suffered from

degenerative and progressive multiple sclerosis.

After Grant was charged

I became the family liaison officer

which is an unusual thing to happen but

the family really were victims

of his as well because

they were innocent people

who all of a sudden had their world turn upside down by what had happened.

It was obvious the police were searching the house and it didn't take long

for the local community to realise who had been arrested and where he lived.

Their lives had been made incredibly dif by what had happened.

Despite the DNA hit they still couldn't that their father was the Nightstalker.

He was a good father, he enjoyed cricket

people spoke of him well

no one really had anything bad to say on

He's such a nice guy but I just can't the shock, it's unbelievable.

You know, totally devoted to his wife an

and as I said it's just come as a shock in this small tight knit community.

He was registered as someone

that was a carer for his wife Jennifer.

Of course, the only footnote to add to it was the car he was driving

the car he was allotted on the Motabilit

for driving Jennifer around was also the he was driving out to the scenes of his

So, it really was like he was living thi

and in the early days of his incarcerati

at the police station there was an officer taking food into his cell

he said to her 'I've got a thing about t

you need to be really careful I don't want to drop anyone in it

but you do want to check my son's DNA be I understand it could be quite close to

I think it's likely that he has committe offenses not me, so you need to have a l

at that point trying to throw the suspicion off himself

which is breath-taking really.

The question that everybody wanted answe

after he was arrested

was 'was he in the system?'

and what they meant by that was did we have a file on our database

relating to Delroy Grant.

And the answer to that was yes but the start of his spree in the summer

he committed a burglary in Bromley

the local Neighbourhood Watch co-ordinat had seen a BMW car

acting suspiciously at the time of a bur and he had taken the number of that BMW.

He saw a man get out of the car

put a balaclava on, put a set of gloves on and go towards his neighbours address

What happened was that was investigated by Bromley borough

Bromley borough officer

did some courtesy police national comput checks and found tow Delroy Grants

that she thought

were likely to be the suspect one had an address in Leicester

and one had an address in Dulwich.

Not unreasonably she assumed

that the Dulwich one would be the one sh looking for because it was S.E.London

that man, that Delroy Grant was the wron

The one that lived at Brockley Mews had formally lived in Leicester

that was our Delroy Grant the one we arr the one that was in the cells.

Where it was crucial to operation Minste

was that the wrong Delroy Grant

had his DNA taken when arrested for othe

and was on the database.

When they asked for the DNA from the Minstead crime scene

to be compared to Delroy Grants DNA

they compare it to the wrong one the wrong DNA there is no match.

And that point onwards, Delroy Grant of Brockley Mews is on the Minstead comp

as eliminated by DNA.

And what's also just a salutary lesson to how these things should be checked

in 2001 somebody did phone the incident room and say

'I've seen all your publicity about Mins and I think Delroy Grant of Brockley Mew

could be your man

I think he might have done it'.

The first thing they would do is go to t

eliminate it by DNA.

Even if they had swabbed

all the 20 thousand people on their list he wasn't one of them.

So that mistake that assumption and lack of checking

by one officer poisoned it forever more and Delroy Grant

had another ten years of liberty and doz more people were victimized while he was

He pleaded not guilty

and ran what can only be described as th

incredible defense I think I've ever hea

Essentially, he said that his first wife

when they were splitting up had saved semen from when they had sex

where she had employed a 3rd person to d

around the crime scenes

it was just a fantasy defense of the fir just completely incredible.

Thanks to Tim and Kaye

we'll just break in, we've got some news

this is trial where Delroy Grant, accuse being the notorious 'Nightstalker' is ta

Delroy Grant the man accused of being the Nightstalker

has been found guilty of 29 counts

of preying on 18 elderly men and women b

and 2009.

They said that he was responsible for some of the most awful

and disturbing crimes in the history of Scotland Yard.

So that's a line just coming into us there that the police

are apologising for missed chances to st

Delroy Grant

The judge said

that he would have to serve 27 years

before he was eligible to apply for paro

from his life sentence.

And that means at the absolute youngest that Delroy Grant could be

before he is released back into the world would be 81 years old.

And were that to happen

I guess we have to think that he would b

posing little threat by that time.

The number of offenses that we had by th

that I left are that he was involved in

many of which included indecent assaults and five of which included rapes.

He was a sexual predator who

just committed the most barbaric crimes with meticulous planning

some of which we probably don't know abo

It may well be that a lot of his victims

suffered at his hands but suffered in silence and never actually reported

them but carried it with them to their g

Most of them are deceased now unfortunat

I hope the families don't think about hi

get a very small iota

of satisfaction in the fact that

he is no longer doing the same things to other people that happen to their fam

We went through an exercise with family liaison officers

of phoning and telling the victims that someone had been arrested

one of the victims said that back to her

'that's great I can go back to sleeping

I think he thought he was invincible I think he thought he would never get ca

He was arrested on the 17th day of the surveillance operation

so you had 17 years on one hand, 17 days

It was only Colin's fresh

impetus which led to Delroy Grant being

I always knew that I wanted to go to get in front of him

I believed from really early on that

we needed to ignore the DNA we needed to catch a burglar.

Everybody kept telling me 'we're not a burglary squad'

and they needed to be a burglary squad that's how we got him.