Original subtitles

She was defenceless, she was unarmed, she was on her own doorstep.

Krystal Hart was in the beginning of her life, everything to look forward to.

Until it was taken away in the most inane, pointless and brutal manner.

We saw him with the gun in his hand, we heard the shots,

and we saw him leave with the gun in his hand.

It's just wrong place, wrong time.

It's just a question of finding him. It literally was a manhunt.

Colin Sutton was a detective chief inspector

and senior investigating officer at the metropolitan police.

He led the investigations into some of the most complex, high profile cases ever,

bringing dagerous criminals to justice.

In this series, he will take you inside those cases,

and show you how he caught these criminals,

using nothing but pure detective work.

This is "The Real Manhunter".

This case came to us at Easter 2007,

it was the beginning of April, it was Good Friday,

and we were on call in the office at Putney and we had a skeleton staff

because it was a bank holiday and it was a fine, glorious day in early April.

And unusually, at 10 or so in the morning, half past 10,

we get a phone call saying, 'we need you to deploy

to a shooting in Battersea, on south area'.

At that time, we were still getting the Levi Bellfield case ready for court,

we were still investigating it to a degree,

but as we were the practitioner, we had to take our new share of new investigations,

so we were taking some new investigations and indeed we were

doing our on-call weeks, so we were on call.

I was in the office, we got a call that a young girl had been shot.

I said, 'Yeah ok, that's right, any more information?' and they said,

'The victim was a 22-year-old woman called Krystal Hart'.

I remember my first question to them being,

'Do we know if it's a gang-related case?' and they said,

'No, we think it's definitely not gang-related'.

I kind of didn't have a whole team there because you have

a minimum strength skeleton staff, so I took what officers I had

with me and one of them was , who of course was there.

I'm a retired detective, I used to work on the murder squad for 10 years.

Apparently, I wanted to join the police as soon as I could talk.

I think it was Juliette Bravo, the program that made me want to join the police,

but I always wanted to join the police.

I started in 1987 and ended it in 2017,

having spent probably 28 years as a detective.

Was somebody that I relied upon from the Levi Bellfield case,

and I was glad that she was available and there to come with me.

Belleville Road is in this safe, nice part of London,

an up-and-coming area with lots of young professionals and families.

There were so many nannies and au pairs pushing their

charges about the streets here on Wandsworth common,

that the area is known as 'Nappy Valley'.

It's possibly one of the last places you'd think

any murder would take place in London.

We arrived at this crime scene which had been cordoned off before our arrival

and we met with a colleague of ours, he basically explained

they believed at that stage it was a neighbour dispute.

When we turn out to a new inquiry, it's always tinged

with sadness, because we always know somebody has lost their life.

But when we found out the circumstances surrounding Krystal's murder,

it was just apparent what a real, absolute tragedy and

senseless waste of life this one was, it was just the

sort of tragedy that even experienced murder squad

detectives like my team, we were shocked by it.

The local DI was here, he was an ex-murder squad detective,

and he just explained that they already found out exactly what had happened.

Krystal Hart was born and grew up in Battersea, in South-West London.

She was part of quite a large extended family, and it was, in many ways,

a traditional London family with people always supporting each other,

family events, and they were very close.

She had been working as a secretary,

in fact she had been working at the office of the

then-Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, at one time.

Lived very close to her mother, had a great relationship with her family

was a typical salt-of-the-earth type family, very close,

told each other everything. Lived in a nice flat in Battersea,

just had no problems, was starting

a lovely life with her boyfriend.

Angie Brewer lived in the flat downstairs to Krystal's, so same building but she had

the ground floor of the house. Angie was considerably older than Krystal, probably

25-30 years older and she'd had a life with episodes of

addiction and difficulties with her mental health,

and I think it was fair to say that she wasn't a model neighbour

and she would complain

about virtually anything that

didn't fit in with how she wanted things to be.

Be it where the rubbish bags were put or the noise, anything

like that and she would complain not only

to the housing association but also to the local police.

The local neighbourhood police team there knew Angie Brewer very well.

Neighbourhood police officers' bread and butter is neighbour disputes.

Anybody living in close proximity with their neighbours

can have disagreements, some of these escalate and some of them,

there is no reasoning to them because certain neighbours

will have a dispute with anybody who lives next door to them.

There'd been a number of calls to the house,

most of them really when called by Angie Brewer,

they found to be groundless, but there had been conflict between Angie and.

Krystal Hart, that had been documented by police,

lawyers had got involved, and so the

the relationship between the two ladies who

lived in the flats on their own, wasn't great.

Thomas Hughes is in many ways a sad character.

He is another local, his family had

owned a house less than half a mile from

where Krystal lived, through three generations

since it was built, in Victorian times. He lived there with his mother, although

he was in his 40s, he lived there with his mother who was very aged and infirm.

I first knew of Thomas Hughes when I very first joined the police and at that time

I was stationed in Battersea. At that time Tommy Hughes was one of our

prolific subjects, somebody who would be stopped by police a lot for minor crimes,

car crime and general anti-social behaviour,

possibly burglaries, robberies, that sort of crime.

I think I described him as a wannabe gangster and I think that's

pretty accurate, he dabbled in drugs, soft drugs like cannabis, but,

he kind of sold some every now and then,

and he liked people to think he was well connected

and that he was more important in that kind of world than he really was.

He'd been convicted of putting a screwdriver in a female friend's neck

in another attack and he was given an 18-month sentence.

To my mind, that indicates someone who has a hatred of women as well

as being a wannabe gangster type, someone that wants to show off.

Angie Brewer and Thomas Hughes had a connection in their

kind of lifestyle, neither had a job,

they had a lot of time on their hands, two people who'd drifted together

and had common interests, laying about drinking, and they got on. But I think...

It was a very uneven partnership because I think.

Thomas Hughes wanted it to be a formal relationship,

where Angie Brewer just saw him as the friend who

comes round and smokes and drank with sometimes.

He'd no doubt heard, chapter and verse from Angie Brewer

about what an awful neighbour Krystal was,

and he decided the way to get into her good books,

to impress her, was to deal with it.

I can only imagine he could become entwined because Angela was

escalating it to him and probably exaggerating it to him,

'I can't stand this noise, look what I'm having

to put up with here, it's terrible here'.

And I guess it came as sort of a surprise to many that he actually had a firearm,

it's probably even more surprising that he went and used that gun,

and he went and used it to shoot and kill Krystal Hart.

Angie Brewer had made a decision I suppose in this circumstance, after this incident,

and her decision was that she was going to assist the police and

tell the police whatever she could about what went on.

So, she was the first person to give us a kind of

accurate account of the events of that morning.

Angie Brewer the neighbour, had witnessed the murder,

and she'd said her 'boyfriend' committed the murder,

so immediately we knew we had an outstanding suspect.

I became aware of the case shortly after it happened,

when the team I was working on were allocated the investigation,

so it would have been the day after she'd been murdered.

One of my colleagues was going to Witness Liaison

with Angie Brewer and sometimes I went along with her

because Angie was such a handful to deal with.

She was neighbour of Krystal Hart at the time and

played a large role in what was to very sadly unfold.

She told us that she had a boyfriend,

or friend who is a man, called 'Thomas Hughes' who lived

less than half a mile away and that he used to come round and bring

things to her and she said herself, he wasn't her boyfriend,

but she thought he had quite a soft spot for her and

probably would have liked to have been her boyfriend.

Earlier that morning, being Good Friday, he had been around,

and he had knocked on her door

at about 9 o'clock or thereafter and brought her an easter egg.

When he went he had seen a man called David,

who was Krystal Hart's boyfriend/partner who didn't live there but he was there,

and that there had been some words exchanged between Hughes and David.

David had left to go to work that morning, had,

as I recall, slammed the gate, allegedly.

Hughes had turned up with an easter egg

and they had words outside the house.

David taken down the registration number of.

Mr Hughes and maybe that had sent him over the edge.

She said Thomas Hughes had gone away, come back again about

half an hour later. She'd heard him banging on the door

that led upstairs to Krystal's flat and because he was making

such a noise banging on her door, she came to her door,

but she said that she didn't open it, she was just listening to what was going on.

She heard Krystal coming down the stairs

and open the front door and there were just a few words,

and the next thing she heard was gunshots.

She heard a couple of gunshots and she opened her front door and looked out

and saw Thomas Hughes walking away

with a revolver in his hand, going to his Volkswagen Golf car and driving away.

When he was banging on Krystal's door that morning,

Angela came to her door and opened it a crack. She actually witnessed the murder.

She basically said she was as shocked as anybody else

when he turned up with a gun and shot her. As soon as we got there,

we were pretty much aware it was over nonsense,

then we went off to meet Krystal's family to try and get some background.

Krystal's family, he mother and aunt, lived nearby and we went around to

see them at their flat nearby and her mother was obviously

completely distraught about things, but the family were

able to give us an awful lot of the background, an awful lot of

the background about what had been going on with Angie Brewer.

It kind of added a dimension to the whole case.

We attended the address which was very close to where

the incident had happened, I attended with Colin and

a Family Liaison Officer. They'd already had an inkling

because it was such a close-knit area.

I think when we actually confirmed that it was Krystal and that she'd died,

absolute devastation, how do you come to terms with that?

Just the sense of loss and the sense of permanency to it, and...

No one could really speak.

It was during that meeting, that initial meeting with Krystal's family

that we were given the bombshell, we didn't know up until that point

that Krystal had been pregnant, that she was in fact 3 months pregnant.

So, Thomas Hughes had killed not only her but her unborn child.

And then to find out that she had a baby, or was expecting a baby as well,

it was just difficult to comprehend,

that morning was a very sad morning for a lot of people.

We'd heard about the existence of the CCTV which

was going to give us a good idea of what went on.

Both families had put CCTV on the front of their properties to show

the disputes that were or were not taking place.

Krystal had put CCTV on her front garden

to show they weren't slamming the gates and there wasn't a lot of noise,

because it had sound and vision, just to prove their point,

because it wasn't going to go away.

And we went from there back to the offices in Putney

and that was where I first viewed the CCTV,

and it became so clear, we thought it was an unusual investigation where we know

exactly what happened and we knew exactly who did it.

And when we were able to retrieve the recording from that morning,

it confirmed almost exactly what Angie Brewer was telling us,

we saw the visit by Thomas Hughes, bringing her the easter egg,

we saw him leave, we saw him come back, we saw him with the gun in his hand,

we heard the shots, and we saw him leave with the gun in his hand.

The CCTV clearly shows Hughes

arriving at the house and going to the front door,

he moves out of camera range, but the microphone clearly picks up what's next,

the audio was too graphic to be broadcast, but Hughes says to Brewer,

'Is he in? Is he in? Try that doorbell now. Knock on the door'.

Angela Brewer replied, 'I can't, I can't.'

Hughes is then heard shouting at Krystal, 'Come out bitch, I've had enough'.

Brewer is then heard screaming as Hughes pulls out the gun.

Brewer says, 'No, no, my god no'. Then, there is a shot.

Three seconds later, a second shot and the CCTV shows as Hughes calmly walks away,

leaving Krystal Hart dead in her doorway.

He executed her by shooting her twice through the head, she didn't...

just senseless, absolutely senseless.

And horrific.

His actions were so grossly and obscenely disproportionate

to what the row was about, it was an innocuous row by all accounts.

Neighbour disputes, where people fall out with their

next door neighbour or downstairs neighbour or something

is very rarely settled by shooting, you might have

a fight or a bit of damage or something like that

and the police get called but for it to escalate where it's solved and resolved by

somebody shooting somebody, I hadn't come across it before.

Krystal's murder was a terrible crime because she was a completely

innocent young woman, she was pregnant and she opened the

door to him and he shot her twice at point blank range and for,

for no reason, not that there ever could be a reason for doing that.

He didn't take on her boyfriend, her boyfriend had left,

so he went back to get Krystal, who

was seen as the easy target, because he was a coward.

He needed to be arrested and the sooner the better.

The most important thing at this point, for Colin and his colleagues,

would be to track down Hughes as quickly as possible

because you've got a mad man here, armed with a revolver,

he's just shot a young woman dead for no apparent reason.

Clearly he would have been deemed a danger to the public and indeed the police.

Basically, we had a man with a gun on the loose, a very dangerous man because

he's executed one woman for no reason as far as we were concerned,

and he had nothing to lose. Once you're looking at life imprisonment,

however many murders you complete, you still can only get life imprisonment.

We know exactly what happened and exactly who did it and what his name is and

what his car registration is and what his mobile phone number is because.

Angie Brewer was giving us all of this because she had little choice to, really,

and it was just a question of finding him, it literally was a manhunt.

It was so much more serious than he's, that I know of, committed before.

The mainstay of our efforts was always going to be

his mobile phone because we quickly got the authority for

his service provider to give us live updates on where the

phone was triangulating and on which masts. So, I was happy that

the intelligence people would get up on his phone and we could

mount that part of the operation very quickly,

we then had the home address to search, we go down to Stonells Road

round the corner and there is this collapsing house.

Obviously, we knew his name immediately and

he decamped from the scene and the first place

you would look would be the home address. His home was nearby, and we went

straight round there to see if we could see his car outside of the address.

And then we had to go and try to find Thomas Hughes...

and find out where he was, and he lived with his mum didn't he?

He lived with his mum, but you would walk it virtually, couldn't you? It was so...

So close, so of course we...

We knew that he lived this close, he lived with his mother...

And it's difficult isn't it? You and I were here, and we know

we know that he's adrift with a gun, and you've just got to hope.

We were just off driving out, I think we were in the old

green Zafira, weren't we? And you just sort of hope that

it's sort of the car that a couple might drive or something like that,

and nobody is really going to know it's a police vehicle.

It was here in Stonells Road that Thomas Hughes lived.

It's a beautiful road, his house was derelict, it had sort of subsidence,

it just stood out. His mother, his very elderly mother was living there

with him in total disrepair when we arrived, our building surveyor

said no one could go upstairs and we had to have scaffolding put up outside

before we could go in and search it. The mother was living in

absolute abject poverty on her own, he popped in when he wanted.

We were genuinely frightened it was going to fall down while we were searching it.

They conducted the search, and we found his mother

in absolute squalor and we took her away eventually to somewhere

she could be cared for because he clearly didn't care for her,

and when the search was completed, the only thing found of any note

was that hidden between some loose bricks at the back of the house

was a cloth that had been used to wrap or wipe a gun and a few rounds

of ammunition which may or may not have fitted the gun that he had.

The suspect, Tommy Hughes, disappeared and went on the run and there was

various work done undercover to find out where he was.

The kind of forensic work at the scene and the ordinary stuff was taking place,

but the focus very much and the priority very much was to find this man.

It wasn't going to be difficult to prove the murder, because we had

pictures and sound of him doing it. But, it was just finding him and protecting

the public from a gunman who had just killed somebody and was still armed.

The team did some work around locating his mobile phone,

that showed us where

he was going, but any notification we had of his whereabouts was 5 minutes behind

where he actually was, so it wasn't possible to catch up with him that way.

It's a funny sort of business, chasing somebody who you know

has got a gun and has killed somebody and you haven't got a gun.

Yeah but you don't really think about that do you?

You don't, because...

Until you come face to face with it.

Yeah, you know that 99.9% of the time, things like that we will be safe and be OK

and we all sort of trusted to that didn't we? Trusted to that, it will be alright.

He moved about a great deal the rest of that day into the early hours of.

Saturday morning, and it was

a difficult thing for us to do because you have to keep

sufficient people there to respond,

to try to cut him off and to lay eyes on him

and arrest him, you've got the difficulty that you've still got a scene going on,

there's a family to be dealt with and consoled and the things we needed to do

there. So, half the team were having to do things which weren't directed towards

finding Thomas Hughes, and all the time you've got the fact that he's murdered

that he's murdered somebody with a gun,

and you don't have that gun and we haven't recovered that gun.

The pressure was huge, because he had shot and executed an unarmed woman

for what we could see as no reason. So, what was to stop him shooting anyone else?

So, intense pressure because you're trying to save other people,

you don't know what state of mind he's in, he's a dangerous man.

We couldn't be armed, and we couldn't have armed officers

with us during this search for him. Something like looking for

a man who has committed a murder with a gun of itself, alone,

isn't sufficient justification. So, it will be difficult to know

how we will get armed assistance, it really was one of

those cases where we had to suck it up and see and we had to

try to find where he was and locate him,

and then make a decision about how we approach him to take him into custody.

Until you actually know where he is, there is not enough armed response to...

to deal with where he could be, so we've got to try and find him

the same as they have got to try and find him.

Myself and Jo Brunt and the other members of the team who were hurtling around

around South London, trying to find this man who'd killed with a gun,

were armed with a stick and some CS spray, that was all.

While we were looking at Thomas Hughes' phone to try and use it to locate him

while he was on the run, what we did see was he was using it

to send text messages to Angie Brewer.

We don't know what the content of those messages were, but it's clear that

he was still communicating with her. She kind of

really washed her hads of this and said she wanted nothing to do with it.

Using technology... We were able to follow his movements

via his mobile phone, however, because he was in his car,

the movements were only being made available after a certain time period.

They were constantly catching up with him, so they'd go to one place,

his phone would ping at another place and the police would arrive

a few minutes later, and no sign of him.

So, with regards to the manhunt, when you've got a man on the loose with a gun,

obviously our priority is to find him and protect life,

there is no knowing what he could do. He was driving around,

and we were following it, several members of the team in different cars were

following it as well as they could and it took us around Wandsworth, Battersea.

Down out on the A3 towards down on the A3 towards Malden Rushett, then

across to Morden, back down the A3 to Epsom, Ewell and Hook.

And then he seemed to be stationary there for a bit

and then it was on the move again and we were told it was headng...

down round the M25 and then down the M23 towards Gatwick.

We've got a wanted man, so if you've got a dangerous, wanted man,

you put out what's called an 'all ports alert',

you let all the agencies know that you're looking for this

wanted man and obviously Gatwick would have been aware

and when he was going towards Gatwick, we would have made

them very aware to look for Thomas Hughes.

He didn't go into Gatwick, he was just circulating the area, maybe

looking for a flight, who knows? But he came away from there.

We literally just turning off the slip road of the M23 to go towards the airport,

we have another message to say 'No, it's back up towards Chessington again',

back to there and eventually it was near Hook arena, between.

Chessington and Hook, that the signal stabilised and stayed overnight, so

we then had a number of different vehicles of ours, these were people who had

been working now for 16-17 hours non stop on this, myself included.

We were all very tired, but

the adrenaline takes over and you just want to catch this man.

Most of us would like to get some sleep at some point because we know

we are going to be busy tomorrow as well, but the imperative to

find this man and find the gun, means it's all hands to the pumps.

We all spread out and drove up and down all the streets that we could find

looking for this car, but it could have been in a garage, it could...

there's always places you can hide a car. For people who don't know the area,

the locals were informed, so overnight street searches were taking place

up and down Hook, and it's a big area you have to cover and it's very

highly populated, we didn't find it and during the night, the mobile phone

powered off. So, he either turned it off or it ran out of battery,

but that means that was it's last place, it could have moved on at any time.

I think at this point you've got to put yourselves in the mind of the

actual murder squad detectives, who were not armed but were involved

in trying to track him down, they knew full well what he'd done to.

Krystal, they knew that not only was he armed but he was dangerous.

We were driving around thinking, 'Is he here?' hoping against hope that

you'd see the car before he saw you, because

however much you'd like to think you don't stand out,

police officers in suits in a car do stand out and everyone

can say, 'They're police officers', and he would

be no different to that. So, you're hoping you'd see him

before he sees you because he's got a gun and you haven't.

And it got to probably 5am and we were satisfied that we had drove

we were satisfied that we had drove up and down every single street, car park,

piece of land where that VW Golf could have been parked and we couldn't find it.

So, at that point in time we had to call it a day and go in and it was

literally a couple of hours sleep and back the next morning to carry on.

We were looking everywhere obviously for Thomas and his gun

and this pond came into the inquiry just because it's so close

to the scene and it's somewhere he could have thrown the gun.

I think it's the third time ever that I used our divers and it's the

first time they never found anything, it's a difficult thing to search

in there, its very dirty although it's shallow. Who knows, mud at the bottom,

Thomas Hughes' gun could still be there, we never recovered it.

The information we had that Thomas Hughes had a boat

on the River Thames, moored somewhere near Richmond,

kind of a little bit odd in some ways because there's some boats there that

are pretty expensive and the mooring is pretty expensive

and we kind of think that was out of Thomas Hughes' league

somewhat, but when we got there to find it, it was just really a

small dinghy with an outboard motor and canvas cover on top.

The boat in Richmond was symptomatic of his house, it was just a

ramshackle, probably not even river worthy, there is no way anybody

could have slept there, because we thought that was somewhere he

might have gone. Just a dump of a boat that was worth nothing.

And so it was kind of lunchtime the following day when.

I came to the conclusion that it was time to go public with his

name and car details, and let's try and enlist the help of

millions of Londoners to look for this car and this man.

We are a very useful tool for the police to apprehend

offenders, particularly when an offender has gone on the run

and is missing, and the police is looking to find that

person. In this instance you had a very dangerous and armed individual,

strongly suspected to have murdered a young woman,

for what would have been the most innocuous of

reasons, the most pathetic of reasons. So, the police went

public, identified him, put his face out, all and sundry.

There's certain things that have to be...

boxes to be ticked if you're going to go to the media with a name,

with a live manhunt, the most important thing is to save life.

The police knew who they were looking for, they could have

used their own resources to try and find this person but the balance they

would use was one of public safety versus one of investigative integrity,

in this instance, public safety was the most important factor.

And the second thing is, have you got the right man? Because if you

went live with the wrong person, who knows what could happen?

We were 100% certain we had the right man, we had it on CCTV,

we were also very certain we had a dangerous man on the loose.

In this case, I thought it was justified because

there was still a real risk that Thomas Hughes was

in possession of a real gun and ammunition.

So he could present a danger to members of the public.

So, there wasn't going to be a question of

identification, evidence, an ID parade or anything like that,

and so it was safe to put his name and

picture and picture of his car out to the media.

Unfortunately, you get answers from everywhere,

you've got sightings in Scotland,

you've got sightings in Ireland. So, although we need the publics help, you

need several people to say he's in Battersea, several people, because you've

got sightings all over the country and it can sometimes be more of a hindrance.

We appeared on lunchtime local news in London and within a half hour of

that going out, we had a phone call from somebody, not a million miles away

from the scene but still in Battersea, said, 'That black Golf has been outside

my fence at my house, and it's been there for the last couple of days'.

So, it looks like what Hughes had actually done, was dump the car there

and then used the train, there was a nearby rail station, all of this travel

about where we had been looking for the black Golf the night before, he'd

been on public transport. So, we were never going to find him that way.

Within a matter of hours of his details being released,

it was Hughes himself who gave himself up and walked

into Battersea Police Station. It was a very good

example of police using the media to protect the public.

Out of the blue, the incident room received a

phone call to say that Hughes had turned up at.

Battersea Police Station, said that people were

looking for him and obviously the police officers at.

Battersea were aware that he could be armed,

so they'd left him in the front counter, on the public side,

phoned us and said, 'Your man is here,

sitting here, waiting for the police to arrive'.

Walked in and said, 'I understand the police want to speak to me?'

I thought 'That's very good', so I said, 'Is he in custody?'

They said, 'Well, not exactly, no, what happened was

he came in and said that he was Thomas Hughes and we looked him up

and realised he could be armed and dangerous, so

what we've done is ask him to sit in the front office and wait for

an armed response vehicle to come, he doesn't know that

obviously and were waiting for them to come so they can arrest him'.

This man giving himself up for a murder

and than taking him into custody, they've told him,

'Can you take a seat in the waiting room please Sir?'

and then called for their armed colleagues to come and arrest him.

When I heard that he'd been arrested for the murder of Krystal Hart,

it was quite shocking to see how his criminal life progressed into that.

Everything turned out OK, he played the game and he waited in the front office

and the armed response vehicle turned up, he as arrested and delivered to us.

I would say that a very dangerous man at that point was taken off the streets.

Although we took his clothes and submitted them for analysis, that didn't give us

any evidence, but we didn't need it,

we had this film which was all the evidence we really needed.

So, he was interviewed and like most people being investigated for

serious offences, he was advised not to give any comment to anything that was put

to him, so anything that was put to him, he'd just monotone repeated, 'No comment'.

It was interesting because he didn't come up with any defence or any sort of what

he might have done and why we had the wrong man. So, it wasn't until we came

to trial at the Old Bailey that we found out what Thomas Hughes' defence might be.

He basically denied being involved in any way, shape or form.

He admitted he had attended Angela's address that morning to give

her an Easter egg, he had left and someone, looking like him,

dressed like him, had later attended and had murdered Krystal.

Hughes bizarrely tried to claim it wasn't him,

it didn't take the jury very long to see through it.

He had nothing to lose, he was looking at life imprisonment, 'I presumably

thought I'd give this a run, I'll keep saying it's not me and I might have a jury

member or few jury members who believe me, so I'm going to keep going with that

and hopefully get off'. Obviously, he didn't, thank goodness for everyone else.

He was convicted, and when sentencing him, the judge said

this amounted to, for all intents and purposes, a ruthless execution

and a truly evil act and he said that Hughes would have

to serve at least 30 years of his life sentence

before he could even apply for parole, which

makes him something like 70 years old

before he's even got a chance of being out of prison.

He's not going to be a danger by the time he comes out,

he's going to be an old man and his life is basically over.

Sentencing Hughes to life imprisonment with a minimum of 30 years,

the judge said the murder was a ruthless execution and

a truly evil act and the fact that Hughes had done it for his

girlfriend was, he said, evidence of his warped mentality.

It shows you that even at that point, when he must have

realised, woken up and seen what he'd actually done, it was

almost as if he couldn't face up to what he had done,

there was nothing brave or worthy of kudos of what he did.

There was no need whatsoever for Thomas Hughes to involve himself

in this argument, it wasn't his argument, and he took away 2 lives,

not only Krystal, but her unborn child.

It's quite interesting, just another curious thing is that.

Hughes' case came to court not very long,

just a matter of a week or two after Levi Bellfield was

sentenced to three whole life terms in my other case.

I understand he spent some time in Belmarsh Prison where he met...

My nemesis, Levi Bellfield and apparently they became

some type of friends which doesn't surprise me at all,

same type of people stick together, got nothing good to say about either of them.

Strangely enough they formed a bit of a friendship,

so much so that Bellfield was heard

talking on the phone from prison to his brother about 'his mate Tom' and

how terrible it was that he got 30 years for this crime.

In fact, Bellfield had referred to the Hughes case and Colin, Jo, Clive and

the other members of his team being involved in that, in the most disparaging

of terms. Well, if Levi Bellfield is writing something awful about you

in this context, I can only assume you are doing something correct.

Certainly, from what I've heard from his conversations with Levi Bellfield

in prison, I get the impression that Thomas Hughes feels

hard done by and that his sentence was too severe.

My view of it was that he was extremely lucky to get away with just 30 years.

He had no remorse, because he didn't admit he'd done it,

so no, totally unphased by it all.

He was an insignificant, rather weedy, scruffy

individual that had just taken someone's life for no reason,

so it's hard to think of him as anything other than that.