Original subtitles

MAN: It became clear that there was a pattern 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 derision 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 it.

MAN: I knew I had to do everything I could to bring that to an end.

NEWSCAST: It was a crime of almost breath-taking callousness.

NEWSCAST: The man who tried to kill her

will never be free to harm again.

NEWSCAST: The audio was too graphic to be broadcast.

The life sentence may provide some closure for his victims' families.

Nine men were killed when the inferno swept through the building.

..targeted young women unable to defend themselves.

NARRATOR: Colin Sutton was a detective chief inspector

and senior investigating officer in the Metropolitan Police.

He led the investigations

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

bringing dangerous criminals to justice.

NEWSCAST: He showed his cowardliness...

NEWSCAST: ..then heard screaming... NEWSCAST: The Night Stalker...

NEWSCAST: ..pulls out the gun. Another 146 victims.

NARRATOR: 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.

NEWSCAST: ..now been found guilty on all 25 of those charges.

NEWSCAST: ..the oldest victim, 89.

NEWSCAST: The officer in charge described it as a senseless tragedy.

NEWSCAST: The life sentence may provide some closure

for his victims' families.

(EERIE MUSIC)

ELDERLY WOMAN ON PHONE:

MAN:

WOMAN:

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 graves.

The Night Stalker was a clever and sophisticated criminal.

There's no doubt of that.

He thought about what he was doing.

He thought about how he might get caught

and he thought of ways to avoid getting caught.

For 17 years this man had struck fear into a community,

and that couldn't continue.

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

NEWSCAST: An investigation is underway

following a 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 in.

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

by a man known as the Night Stalker.

During the 1990s there was a pattern of attacks on elderly people

within the South East London area.

Speculation - could one person be responsible,

who by then had been given the nickname 'Night Stalker'.

This had been running for 17 years,

and there didn't seem to be any answers as to who this man was.

At that particular period in South East London,

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 elderly,

occasionally indecently assaulted them

but not always indecently assaulted them,

and on several occasions he'd 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 Minstead

and I'd been there about three months

and Colin appeared early summer of 2009.

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

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

In April 2009, I was still the leader of my murder team at Putney.

The new commander of the Homicide and Serious Crime Command

left a message for me saying could I go up and see him

at Scotland Yard just to have a chat

and then 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

into a series of rapes and burglaries of old people.

My team had been successful in other cases, high-profile cases,

and just wanted somebody to have a look at it.

(SIREN WAILS)

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.

But I met the team and realised how small it was

and how difficult their task was

in trying to catch this guy

that had been committing these terrible offences for so long.

It was a case that seriously needed solving.

I was pleased to have the opportunity to try and contribute to that.

When I first came here to take a look,

I knew very little about the case,

and I was brought up to speed

by going to a meeting of all the supervisors.

We sat down and they were discussing the lines of inquiry

and what was going on and I made a few notes.

The first one was the suspect's description.

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...upper 40s,

quite well built, average height

and normally wearing a balaclava or some sort of face covering.

And then it was obviously the offender's DNA,

which at that stage had been left at various scenes,

so we were using that to eliminate people 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 clothing,

and then when he left,

she thought she heard the engine of a motorcycle.

So on that basis, a line of inquiry was started

to trace motorcycle licence holders in that area.

It was a very large line of inquiry

and it essentially was suspended pretty soon into my tenure.

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

there's no substitute for just locking yourself away

to get a feel of what they were about and what was happening.

So, for the first kind of couple of weeks I was a sponge,

I was soaking up the information rather than sort of processing it

and thinking about it and looking at what it might mean

and where we could go.

I got on very well with Colin.

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, as well.

Colin had an advantage in that he could brief upwards

with the management team of the Homicide Command.

He brought elements in the investigation

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

What became clear

is that these offences were confined to a pretty exact geographical area.

If you took that 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 there were one or two offences just over the border into Surrey,

but mostly it was kind of outer South East London.

What came to be regarded as offence number one in the Minstead series

took place in Wickham Road in Shirley in October 1992.

The police got a message

that there'd been a burglary at a bungalow

where an 84-year-old woman 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'd also been raped.

Now, most burglars run a mile if there is somebody in the house.

They want to burgle a house that's empty.

But in this case

there was interaction between the burglar and the victim.

It was late in the evening on 12 October 1992.

A man in a balaclava broke in, went down the side of this house here,

removed a pane of glass from the window.

He'd removed it whole. He hadn't smashed it.

He'd kind of peeled away the fitting and taken out the pane of glass

and set it down quite sort of carefully

and had gone in through the window.

At some point during his progress through the house,

he'd been removing lightbulbs from their fittings,

presumably so that if the victim woke up

and tried to switch the light on then there would be no light.

He also cut the telephone wires,

because when the ordeal was over

and the victim went to try and phone for help,

she found that her phone had been disconnected.

He went into her bedroom,

and this 84-year-old lady was confronted with the horror

of being awoken in her own bed by a figure looming over her with a torch,

a dark figure,

hand over her mouth, telling her not to make a noise.

And her ordeal went on for something like two hours.

And during that time the intruder raped her

before stealing some jewellery and 250 pounds 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 that house on her own.

She should feel safe there - it's her own home,

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

He eventually leaves her after two hours

and she wants to raise the alarm and finds that her phone's been cut off -

she can't phone anybody.

So she walks along to where her niece lives nearby

and she asks her niece to raise the alarm,

and police are told that there's been a burglary,

and it's just been an overnight burglary,

and they turn out, attend the burglary,

and it's at that point that the lady reveals that she's been raped,

that she's been raped in her own home in the middle of the night

by this intruder.

Once he'd overpowered his victim,

he used to spend considerable time in the address,

either going around himself

or speaking to the actual victim themselves,

and he showed caring attributes,

which is very unusual for an offender.

The victim told them

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

It had the investigators a little bit sort of confused and bemused.

Is he trying to kind of make things right and just smooth things over

and maintain a good relationship with them?

Or is he trying to persuade them that they shouldn't tell the police

and, you know, they shouldn't come after him?

Almost more disturbing and confusing for the victims

who were probably not able to think straight,

having just been the victim of such a horrible crime.

It's just this really unusual way in which he treated 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 investigate an allegation of rape

but to subject the victim again to another intrusive

and, you know, uncomfortable experience

of being medically examined and forensic swabs being taken,

because if you haven't got the evidence

you can 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's examined and swabs are taken,

and from those swabs and particularly from her clothing,

from her pyjamas and some of the bedding here,

there was semen, and it was from that semen

that a full male DNA profile was later distilled.

COLIN SUTTON: In 1992 the use of DNA as an investigative tool

was kind of in its infancy.

The database was very small,

so although there was semen present from the rape...

on both the swabs and the old lady's pyjamas...

it wasn't until some years later

that those objects were resubmitted to the laboratory

and yielded a male DNA profile.

At first the police weren't aware

that, you know, this was gonna be part of a series.

Obviously there had been no other similar offences in the recent past,

and this was thought, really, to be very much of a one-off.

The investigation stayed with the local borough.

It's their task for the local CID to investigate it,

and so it stayed there, and they did investigate it

and they got nowhere and didn't find the suspect,

and it was kind of filed as unsolved.

As time went on, we realised that this was a series

and that these sort of houses

and this type of 1930s semi-detached houses or bungalows

in these essentially quiet and residential

parts of South East London

were the hunting ground for the Night Stalker.

Six years later, in September 1998,

there was a significant attack

just outside the Met Police area in Warlingham in Surrey.

It's important in the story of the Night Stalker

because it was in Warlingham, in this road,

that the second offence 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 through that gate, down the side of the house,

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

And then he realised there was a key

hanging on a string on the fence near the back door.

The victim had left that

for her carers and her family to let themselves in if they needed to.

So he used that -

'why bother with the screwdriver when I've got the key?'

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 that screwdriver makes

are different to other screwdrivers.

And what happens is the scenes of crime officers

will take a plaster cast from the mark that that leaves

and that can then be microscopically photographed and examined.

And when there are other marks at other crime scenes,

they can be compared,

and the comparison of those marks can link two crime scenes

in very much the same way

that a DNA profile or a fingerprint might link them.

He was in the premises for some time,

and he did make an attempt to rape the victim

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 going to rape her -

he undid his trousers,

but she yells out in pain from her chronic arthritis

as he tries to move her legs,

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

And this seemed to concern him, and he stopped.

In fact he had so much concern for her, it seems,

he then tried to find a pulse to make sure she was still alive

and he picked up her wrists and looked at that.

And he left. And the ordeal for her was over quite quickly.

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 morning when she spoke to her son

that she reported the offence.

He wasn't able to perform the act,

but in doing 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 offence.

Now we had two rapes by the same unknown person.

We had a series. We had Operation Minstead.

This then enlightened them

to the prospect that they were dealing with a serial rapist,

a serial sex offender targeting elderly people.

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

and reports of sexual offences

began being attributed to someone who we call the Night Stalker.

Night Stalker was something invented by the press.

The people running the investigation in the early 2000s

were not particularly happy with,

because it was felt that it accentuated the fear

that these people should be in.

The police didn't particularly like that phrase being used,

but it was easy for us to describe to the public

that this was someone who was breaking in at night time.

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 history,

the focus is always on the sexual element of the crimes,

and what this does, or this did,

was to, I think, focus the methods of investigation that we used

onto those which are used for rape and sexual offences,

and very much that became DNA.

The team was concentrating their efforts

on trying to get DNA swabs from suspects,

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

I'm pretty sure that those on that team in 1998

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

They just needed to find this guy -

and his DNA, we'll put in on the database,

once that DNA's there, it matches up, game over, job done.

Sadly that's not what happened.

The DNA in itself ultimately proved to be fruitless.

They were trying to get scientists to do really difficult things.

The two main scientific pieces of work that went on

were around physical characteristics from the DNA profile and ancestry.

The profile showed 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 have come from the Lesser Antilles

and most likely Trinidad and Tobago.

What that caused the investigation team to do

was to take the publicity campaign about Operation Minstead to Trinidad,

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

They wanted to go for a little swim after work.

A photographer from a Sunday newspaper was on hand

to catch them in their speedos 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 in one of the newspapers

where they're called the Frying Squad.

It just kind of debased the sort of gravity of the situation

and of the investigation,

and ultimately it was something

that didn't take the investigation 1mm further.

When I arrived in January 2009,

a very large mass DNA screening exercise had been in operation

for about 11 years.

Certainly it involved officers going to the home addresses

of people who'd been identified

that might fit the description of the suspect

and essentially persuading them to give an elimination swab.

Then obviously that would 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 1970s and the 1980s.

And during that time,

I think that their contact with the Metropolitan Police

may not necessarily have been positive.

You're 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

that that sample would be destroyed if it was not you,

the mistrust that had built up over a couple of decades was still there,

and it meant that cooperation was rarely given, in truth.

We'd eliminated 2,000 people and we had another 2,000 to do,

so that would have taken another 11 years.

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

they had had one man who had offered up his swab for DNA,

which meant that the whole operation

to try to find the Night Stalker by DNA swabbing

was going to be fraught with difficulties.

And I wrote in the margin of my book

at that first meeting a couple of days into my review,

"What if we didn't have DNA?"

The Night Stalker operated over a very large area of London

in the South East, south London and Surrey...

a total of about 2.5 million people.

Again, this is a typical road

right in the middle of his favourite hunting grounds.

And you can see there 1930s houses and bungalows, semis.

You can still point out houses

that show there's an old person that lives there.

The house hasn't been modernised,

the garden is kept in a way and hasn't been changed into a driveway.

And that was what he based his crime upon.

Your typical Minstead victim had their windows done in the '80s.

They were replaced by UPVC windows with external beading.

And he knew that, so a lot of his victims had the same sort of window

that he was very expert at breaking in through,

and that was because it had external beading he could rip out,

take the pane of glass out, and he was in.

He would start his surveillance, his sort of his reconnaissance,

days before he committed the offence,

but then he would often sit there for hours at a time

looking to see what was going on

and to make sure he understood what the habits were

in that particular address.

It adds another, more sinister dimension

that he spent so long researching his victims,

watching the premises and seeing who was coming and going

and what their behaviour patterns were

and just planning how he was going to conduct his next attack.

The occupier went to bed,

and he could tell that by the lights moving from downstairs to upstairs

and then going out.

He would look to make sure there was only one person living there,

because by and large he wanted to attack premises

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, sort of, review on Operation Minstead

was to get up to speed with the old cases.

The most troubling of those

at that time

was a case in 1999

of an 88-year-old woman who lived on her own in a bungalow in Orpington.

At 3:00 in the morning

she's awoken by sensing that there's somebody in her bedroom,

and she looks up through the gloom

and sees that there's this 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, "Look, there's no money here in the bedroom.

If you want me to give you my money,

you'll have to get me up and take me to my living room."

And so he sort of pulled her up off of the bed,

ushered her through to the living room,

where she found her purse and her handbag

and she gave him the purse,

and he emptied the contents of the purse into his pockets.

He pulled her up from a chair that she'd 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 to raise the alarm

by pressing her CareLink panic button,

police attended and called an ambulance straightaway

and she was taken straight to hospital.

She required emergency surgery.

It's the closest that the Night Stalker ever came

to killing somebody there and then.

Had she not received medical help, she would have died,

would have bled to death.

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

She was discharged from hospital into sheltered accommodation...

and although the physical injuries had healed up,

the psychological injuries never did,

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

She was very wary, very frightened, really.

You see, it ruined her life 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 would be caught before she died.

She had these terrible nightmares, so she dreaded the nights,

she dreaded going to bed

and going to sleep.

Well, it would be very difficult for me as a 56-year-old male

to understand what an elderly victim would go through

in these circumstances.

These are people in their twilight of their years.

It must have been absolutely terrifying for them.

And in relation to that,

they were staying awake during the night

'cause they didn't wanna become one of his victims,

and they were sleeping during the day.

We saw it time and again with the victims.

There was this sort of stoicism.

It's the, you know, the spirit of the Blitz or something like that.

It's kind of... 'cause it was that generation...

and that's why they tried in some ways 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 Night Stalker

had been aged between 18 and 36

rather than 58 and 96,

there would have been much more publicity

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

You can't name victims of sexual assaults,

and while that's quite right and quite understandable,

it meant that the suffering that they endured was somehow anonymised

and the impact of his crimes

I don't think was truly appreciated.

I have no doubt if it hadn't been that particular 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.

You know, I'd immersed myself

reading all this detail about all these crimes going back.

It was down in Croydon on a road called Princes Avenue.

For me, it was interesting not just to see what an offence looked like

but to see how the team were responding to it.

This bungalow was the scene of the first Minstead Night Stalker offence

that I went to in person

after I started to go over there to do my review.

There was a 78-year-old lady who lived here on her own.

When we came to do our investigation,

we found that he'd gained entrance by that gate at the side

to the rear garden.

He'd actually been into another garden of a neighbour

and borrowed a pitchfork from their shed

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

She goes to bed, 9pm.

She's a frail woman, she needs a frame to walk with.

She's awoken at 4:00 in the morning by this, to her, huge man,

sitting astride her on her bed.

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

At some point when the Night Stalker was on top of her,

he starts caressing her.

He asks her quite politely, "Would you like more,"

and she equally politely declines and said, "No, thank you."

It's another one of these cases

where he has shown a degree of concern or care for the victim.

She needed to go to the toilet,

so she asks him if he'll go and fetch her walking frame and he does,

and she'd also tried to find an emergency pendant

on the bedside table,

but she didn't know the intruder had seen it first and hidden it from her.

He's asked her about things in the house.

He's rummaged through all her drawers.

And he's a bit frustrated because he can't find any money.

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

managed to find 20 pounds or so in coins and cash.

That was all that she lost.

Once he'd gone she locked the back door again

to kind of make sure he wasn't gonna come back,

and went to sleep,

and it wasn't until after she woke up at 9:00

that she used the landline in the premises to raise the alarm.

When I arrived here, I saw what there was of the Minstead team,

very busy, knocking on houses doing door-to-door inquiries,

looking for CCTV, looking for any kind of clues,

evidence they might find in the locality,

just like they would do if it were a murder investigation.

So, I suppose, although it was the very first one I came out to,

really this was the sort of seeds to my thinking

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

that you use for homicides.

I still think that may have been counterproductive

to finding a strategy that would actually take him down.

GOOD EVENING FROM THE SEVEN

Colin came in and, by thinking outside the box,

by taking a fresh approach,

he decided that this was someone that needed to be looked at

as a burglar rather than a sex offender.

Up until then

we'd only been looking at offences that involved a sexual assault

or very high Minstead indicator.

So what we decided to do was kind of target every single burglary

overnight on elderly people in South East London.

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

where there was no forensic link

which had been carried out by the Night Stalker

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

I'd got my intelligence team to give me a print-out

of what could have been Minstead offences,

and that was where you got to about 100 offences.

We decided to just target our resources

where we could get things really quickly

and all aimed at identifying the offender,

not proving that he committed the offence.

All the evidence needed to put him in prison for a very long time

had already been preserved.

We didn't need to prove that he was committing these new offences.

We didn't need to get every available scrap of evidence

from these new offences.

We could treat them as intelligence opportunities.

In other words,

we can look at them to try and find the features of the offence

which might help us identify him.

I had a view that, if we were to use crime-pattern analysis

and sort of analytical minds to try and predict what was happening

and to understand where this man was offending,

then we needed to have all the information possible.

This change in the thrust of the investigation

gave birth to what was called Minstead Lite.

I was desperate to prove that Minstead was throwing away offences

and intelligence opportunities

by leaving crimes to be looked at and investigated by the borough,

and I thought I was gonna have to go through

years and years of crime reports to prove this.

But such a case fell into my lap.

By May 2009, the investigative strategy of Minstead Lite

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

During that time there was an overnight burglary in Farnaby Road.

It was not an offence

that we would normally have taken on an investigation,

but we applied the Minstead Lite principles

and went down there to use it as a test case.

The house was occupied by an elderly lady and her son,

who himself was in his 60s.

So it was given back to the borough to investigate.

He'd broken in, and he'd clearly broken in in the normal sort of way -

at the rear with a pane of glass -

and moved things around inside the house

but hadn't actually stolen anything.

He wasn't there for very long and decided for whatever reason

that he was gonna abort and leave, and he did.

And when the borough CID were investigating the crime,

the son of the victim told them

that there was a carton of orange juice in the kitchen

which seemed to have lessened in volume overnight,

as if somebody had drunk from it.

And he knew he hadn't, his mother hadn't,

and the scenes-of-crime officer from the borough, 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 profile

which matched the other Minstead crime scenes.

We hadn't had a DNA hit now for about four years at that stage,

so it was significant that we knew it was the Night Stalker

and what that meant was we could draw on further resource.

It also gave us a very, 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 were certain that it was the actual Night Stalker.

We had the time that the intruder left the house

because the son, the victim, told us.

We went to the CCTV and we saw the bottom half of the Night Stalker

walking that way.

What we then did was look back on the same CCTV,

because we thought, "If he's walking that way,

he must have walked the other way to get there,"

and he had, but what shocked us was how long before.

It was like three hours before.

He'd obviously been at that scene for a significant amount of time

and felt confident enough

to not only be in the vicinity of the Farnaby Road address

for three hours,

but he'd obviously done a burglary two or three doors down

and one round the corner on the same evening -

very confident that he wouldn't be caught.

And since he'd only spent around about half-an-hour at the most

in this house,

we know he spent in excess of 2.5 hours sitting in that back garden,

watching the house, waiting for the lights to go out,

waiting for his time to strike and to break in.

And you can just imagine, can't you? He's sitting watching the windows,

and what he's waiting for is for all those lights to go out,

you know, the downstairs ones to go out maybe,

the top-floor ones come on and then go out

and then makes his move.

Somehow that seemed really quite sinister to us,

the thought of this man sort of sitting unseen

in the dark in a garden, watching people in their own home.

The investigation had to change... had to change direction.

We had to change tactics.

We had to get one step ahead of him.

The only way we were going to catch him

was if we were 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 were,

before Colin arrived,

the Night Stalker would never have been caught.

It's as simple as that.

We were dealing with an evil human being, a ruthless individual.

Two things were certain - the Night Stalker would strike again.

That couldn't continue.

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

A large part of being a leader of any team

is to make sure that those on the team below you

are operating to the best of their ability,

and often that would mean

making sure they're doing the things they're 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're going to encounter resistance or not.

You know, it's... If you're going in raking over somebody else's work

and you tell them that you think they're not doing it properly

and they should be doing it a different way,

then that's something that's quite inflammatory.

Nobody likes to be in that position.

I think at this stage in Operation Minstead,

everybody was just accepting of the fact that we weren't coping,

and if it carried on in 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 sort of 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 that was being reported.

Each morning when I went in...

there was kind of two streams of information

which might be able to tell me that there'd been an incident overnight

which was worthy of our attention.

The intelligence team on Operation Minstead

had a search which ran overnight every night or early in the morning

to see reported crimes,

not just in London actually but in the whole sort of home counties,

to see if there were any crimes that fitted our criteria

so they could flag them up,

and then on top of that,

you had the great awareness that there was

within the Metropolitan 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 with the team

about how vulnerable these elderly people were.

There was a report of a burglary on a 93-year-old lady.

It was in his favourite hunting ground.

And given the age of the victim

and the interaction between the victim and the burglar,

it was clearly going to be something for Minstead to look at.

When I heard about this case,

I thought, well, if she's very frail and she's that old,

there were dangers here,

so I'm gonna go down and make sure that we do everything we need to do

in case she takes a turn for the worse.

So I went down to Shirley, where she lived.

She lived in a large detached house

in prime sort of stockbroker-belt country.

And there was an elderly lady there,

hadn't said anything to the initial investigating officers

from the borough or any of our officers until Colin arrived.

This lady was gradually becoming more and more infirm,

and she'd lost the sight in one eye and her mobility was difficult.

I went in, and one of the family liaison officers said to her,

"Oh, this is Mr Sutton. He's the boss, you see,"

so she said, "Oh, hello. Hello, Mr Sutton."

So I said, "Oh, no, you can call me Colin."

And I tried to sort of talk to her.

And she was - she had this lovely sort of cut-glass accent almost.

She was, you know, very well-spoken lady and...

even in the dire position that 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 hold hands.

While she was holding my hand,

she got her other hand and put it on top,

so she was sort of hanging 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 of courage that it had taken her to make that disclosure.

She hadn't told the officers that were there before.

It was the first time we knew she'd been indecently assaulted.

She seemed to form a bond with Colin quite quickly,

and I know that she held his hand

and she told him, the first person,

that she'd been sexually assaulted by the offender.

And that really... that seemed to affect Colin.

I just wanted to cry when she said that to me.

I just felt so, so sorry for her,

and I kind of remembered that she was one of scores,

you know, 100 or more people that had been through this.

It was the first time I had met a live victim there and then

in her own home.

She only had, I think, one living relative,

and she was a daughter who lived in South Africa.

And 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 she was dead.

And I never saw her again.

Her daughter never saw her again.

And because of the difficulties with the causation,

there was never going to be any realistic prospect

of charging the Night Stalker with her murder or manslaughter.

But you know he killed her.

He killed her just as surely as if he'd stabbed her or shot her.

It just took a little bit longer.

You've got an offender here

who's 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,

it's also terrifying for the families of the elderly

who'd be concerned about their mothers.

There's was often a balance to be struck in terms of publicity about it

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

and you're gonna make people fear crime more than they ought to,

because the chances of it happening to them are quite small

but they'll see it in the newspapers and on TV

and think, "I'm gonna become a victim."

And 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.

And you've also got the fact of what's the publicity going to do

in terms of the offender?

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

And 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 Crimewatch made him stop offending for a long while.

A 999 call tape was played,

and it kind of shamed him into realising what he'd done.

The fact is that if people are determined to break into a premises,

to a house, any premises,

then given enough time and equipment, they probably can.

Most of the security that you can equip your house with

is about delaying.

You know, it's things that will take time,

and the hope is is that while the person who's trying to break in

is spending a lot of time,

then they might be seen and somebody 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 Night Stalker selected

for his victims had had very little spent on them.

One offence that I remember quite well

is that there was an offence on 6 June 2009 in Queenhill Road,

which is South Croydon,

just off Selsdon High Street.

There was a Saturday afternoon in early June.

It was the home of an 82-year-old woman.

She was living alone in a semidetached house.

She suffered quite badly from dementia

and she was having real difficulties

in expressing to the officers what had happened.

While we knew there'd been an intruder,

the lady who lived here on her own,

she couldn't give us any more details beyond that.

So we didn't really know if anything had been stolen.

We didn't if she'd been assaulted, if there was any sexual assault.

It was very regular that he would target people who had dementia -

I personally think deliberately,

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

and it makes it extremely difficult for the police

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 building site there effectively,

and he was able to get through there - it was insecure -

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 Nathan Eason, 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 tell us. They were weary.

They'd been responding to two or three offences a night

for most of that week,

and we were just chasing shadows.

And almost simultaneously Nathan and I said, "We can't keep doing this."

His offending had increased massively.

We had a...you know, it's a large area of South East London.

Two million people live in that area,

but we knew the areas he favoured,

and I felt that, as did everybody else on the team,

that if we had enough resources

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

I'd had these sort of half ideas

that really some sort of proactive operation

was going to have to be the answer,

but I also knew that I'd need a lot of support

both from those on the team below me

and indeed a lot of support from those above me

if we were going to do it properly.

Everything that the operation had been doing

for most of its 17 years was focused on DNA.

And the major plank of what they were trying to achieve

was to take swabs from as many people on the list as possible,

until they took the swab from the right man

and everything would be fine.

I took the view that wasn't gonna happen,

so we had to do something else, and that something else

didn't involve doing an investigation of offences after they'd happened,

because quite frankly we'd been doing that 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 burglar

to come and commit an offence in front of our eyes

and catch him in the act.

When I went across to Lewisham Police Station

to 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 kind of 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 that he could get on and do his job

and manage the team in the way that he did.

By the kind of end of September, beginning of October 2009,

we were planning a very large proactive operation

in an attempt to catch the Night Stalker,

where we discussed what...you know, the resources that were required

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

In the past I'd been involved with a burglar,

when I was a PC at Tottenham.

A guy called Errol Dobson, he used take people's louvre windows out.

And he wasn't sophisticated,

and we could just round up, you know, a dozen, 20 people

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

The principle was the same,

what we were trying to do with the Night Stalker,

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

And he was doing it 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 match him.

I knew that if I was gonna do this surveillance operation

the way I wanted, I needed some help from all across the Met.

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

to see some people of equivalent rank to me.

I sent out an email to a dozen or so of them to say,

"Can you come to a meeting at Scotland Yard?"

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 sensed, actually Minstead was a little bit of a backwater

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 plan looked like a good one,

as we were essentially pushing against an open door

in relation to the senior echelons of the Metropolitan Police Service.

It was just a case of

did we have the right plan with the resources that we wanted.

I presented it, without a PowerPoint presentation

or handouts or graphs or whatever.

I just kind of said, "You know, this is happening now.

We're in the midst

of the most prolific spell of Minstead Man's activity in 17 years.

I've had a 93-year-old tell me that he interfered with her.

I've got an 88-year-old lady who's going for a HIV test.

You know, 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 Night Stalker was active.

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 huge,

and so we had to refine it.

We went back to the drawing board

and we found another area still in that Shirley cluster

but in a smaller area.

Even so, something like one in every six Minstead offences

took place in the area,

and that was a smaller area we were able to control

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 out across the Met,

to all the murder teams,

asking for DCs to go over and work on the case,

and I volunteered to go, as it was a case I wanted to get involved in.

It had the backing of the commissioner -

Paul Stevenson at the time -

and it had the backing of the senior management team at the Met.

However, if it resulted in no-one being found

and a huge bill for overtime being submitted

then there was only one person that was gonna get the blame,

and that would have been Colin.

When the proactive operation began, 28 October,

it was ran from a very large control room up in Vauxhall,

it's called Central 3000.

It's an absolute sort of state-of-the-art facility

that its primarily used for very serious things

like terrorist or kidnap incidents.

It's essentially a large room with lots of sort of desk consoles

with computers and telephones and radio channels on them

and along one wall is a bank of... I think it's 18 screens.

There was a surveillance control, there was the operational control,

which either myself or Colin were running,

and there were other officers monitoring assets

in the control room,

so there's probably about 16-20 people

in the control room at any one time.

You had a very large number of officers out on the streets,

and we had Minstead officers

that were going to monitoring addresses where we had alarms in.

Everybody was static,

tucked away in a place where anybody walking or driving through the area

would just have no chance of seeing them.

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

but we had a mobile surveillance team

that was situated outside the area that we were surveilling.

The reason for that was that if we stopped four people

during the course of the investigation

who weren't the Night Stalker,

that the word would get on the sort of grapevine

that the police were doing a big operation there,

and it would effectively blow the surveillance.

It'd be no good anymore.

The night shift would start with a briefing at Lewisham Police Station,

and there'd be about 70 officers including the surveillance teams.

We'd be given an update on the case...

Either myself or Colin would brief on what was expected of them,

what their roles were, what to do in the event of anything happening.

I was allocated the role of being in a mobile unit in a car,

and I was with two other officers, in the area but out of sight,

and to be in radio contact 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 then everybody goes down to Shirley.

They're in their OPs by 11pm.

I'm at Central 3000 with the inside team there,

waiting for this prolific burglar

to come and commit an offence in front of our eyes.

And, you know, the time came it started to get light

and we thought, "Well, he's never gonna come."

And nothing happens essentially.

Very little moves all night.

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

First night of surveillance passed through, we thought,

without any incident. Nothing happened.

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

that I found out that overnight there had been three burglaries

which we thought were almost certainly Night Stalker jobs.

And those offences had happened just outside the boundary

of our surveillance operation.

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 and 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 100 yards north

of where our surveillance area started.

He was that close to us on the very first night and we've missed it.

But there was more to it than that,

because the third burglary took place about a mile in that direction,

just down by the Royal Bethlem Hospital.

The only way that the Night Stalker could have got

from this burglary here to the third one down there

was right through the plot where we were doing our surveillance.

It was obvious a vehicle must have been used.

You couldn't walk from the second to the third burglary.

And when you looked at the map,

the only logical way to drive that journey

would be straight down our plot.

There was a school which had CCTV on Orchard Way,

and there were a couple of frames that showed a vehicle going past

at about the right time.

And although it was a very grainy shot

and it just showed the top of the car,

we were able to show that to the experts

and they were able to identify 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,

and he lived on Orchard Way

and he had his own CCTV

on his own cars on the drive.

There was enough to show a car parking up

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 was driven by the Night Stalker,

and that appeared a huge step forward,

but I had to kind of temper the optimism

because I'd been there before in other cases,

and just knowing a make, model and colour of a car is a start,

but it can mean a whole load of work 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 wouldn't going to have time to do the surveillance.

It was a kind of either/or.

The resources either had to be on finding the car

or doing the surveillance.

Having worked with Colin,

I knew him and trusted him

and had faith in what he was doing

and could understand the logic behind his thought process

and wanted it to work and believed it would work,

and, 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 team

was that the Night Stalker was stealing victims' cashpoint cards

and then going to a nearby cashpoint

and using the card to withdraw money.

When he started in 1992,

almost all pensioners got their state pension

with a book at the post office in cash.

But then obviously technology came along,

and people had bank cards to prevent cash being stolen.

What he did was he started taking their debit cards

and most of them were so frightened or terrorised by him

that they gave him the PIN numbers.

After he'd committed his rapes

he went to their bank and withdrew money.

One of the areas we targeted

for the main surveillance operation in October

was a cashpoint in Honor Oak,

which was attached to an off-licence.

The relevance of that

was is that in 2007 the Night Stalker had used that cashpoint

with victims' credit cards to get money out of their accounts.

We were pretty certain it was him,

but there was no detail, they weren't able to assist us.

It was such a disappointment.

He'd obviously wanted to keep himself just as secure

from any cameras around the cashpoint

as he did when he went in to commit the offences.

As the 2009 proactive operation began to gather pace,

we decided to get some better-quality cameras fitted

in that area around that cashpoint in Honor Oak.

As a result of that,

we got some really good images of the Night Stalker

when he came from two addresses

with the victim's credit card and attempted to withdraw cash.

Unfortunately, we didn't see his face,

but there's some excellent detail in the clothing, 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 machine.

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

that was then on the corner of West Fulham Road.

The local police had been round with kind of public appeal posters

about Operation Minstead

with an EFIT on of Minstead Man,

and the bank, being public spirited,

had put one of these posters in their window,

and the poster in the window

was literally three feet away from the cash machine.

So, you've got Minstead Man standing there,

trying to steal money from one of his victim's 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 because he looked nothing like the EFIT.

That's all I'm gonna say about that.

That first night was, for all intents and purposes,

really quite quiet for 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 offences going on the night before

was that we weren't monitoring the CAD messages live.

CAD is shorthand for:

Essentially it's just electronic messages.

They get passed between police stations

and police operational units

and from the centre, which is New Scotland Yard.

On the second night of the main proactive operation,

there was an interesting development.

We picked up a CAD from Lambeth,

and what had taken place

was that a woman had been in bed

when she heard what she thought was somebody going through her side gate.

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

She dialled 999, the call was dealt with

with the kind of seriousness and priority that it should had been.

Uniformed officers were dispatched to the address.

He came into the room, saw her on the phone,

took it from her, threw it away and ran.

And he ran down the road as quickly as he could,

and a police car came round of the T junction

and they drove up towards it

and he veered off and went down the side of a house,

down sort of an alley,

where the car couldn't go, so an officer got out of the car,

a young officer, fit officer, gave chase.

It was an incredible account. He chased him for nearly two miles

through streets parks, rivers, over walls and fences.

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

and when the officer came over the wall,

he couldn't see where this figure he'd been chasing had gone,

and he'd got away.

But we were that close. You know, he was that close.

We were ten seconds behind Minstead Man at one point.

I remember one of my colleagues telling...

you know, it was incredulous...

He just couldn't believe he'd got away.

That by the time he'd got to top of the wall, he had disappeared.

But you could hear a pin drop in there.

It was a very, very tense moment for the people at the controls,

thinking that any second we might actually have him.

He might actually be in the custody with a police officer.

But of course it didn't happen.

From that we realised that the Night Stalker 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 just go to ground.

He could just give up.

He could say to himself,

"You've had a good run. You're going to get caught if you keep going.

You better stop now." And he might not ever offend again.

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 pains, great pains, to say,

"Please desist from publishing this story."

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 then had a two-week period where it was absolutely quiet.

Silence. No indications that he was out and about on the streets.

No calls, no information whatsoever,

and we were concerned that he'd gone to ground,

which obviously gave us the indication it was him

that was chased.

I was absolutely confident that if we stayed there,

eventually he'd come back

and he'd commit a crime in front of us.

I just couldn't put a time limit on that.

I was gonna keep my nerve.

The team were ready to keep their nerve.

It was a question to me as to whether those above me

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 concerned

that he could seriously injure or kill somebody,

so obviously that was one of the factors

they had to take into account.

And so we kept going and we kept going

and we kept going and kept going. And we'd now done 16 nights,

and from a personal point of view, it was absolutely fatiguing.

In the two-week period afterwards, I wasn't available.

I was on a course at Hendon,

and so Colin was running the operational side up in Central 3000,

so he was on his own.

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

or at Lewisham during the day,

so I'm doing the briefing at 9:00, 9:30 at Lewisham,

going in and doing effectively a night duty

until half 5:30, 6:00 in the morning,

going home for a few hours sleep,

back into Lewisham again for 9:00 for the briefing.

The surveillance went on for a couple of weeks,

but despite the time that it was taking,

I still had faith in Colin

and that the operation was going to be successful.

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 of falling asleep.

You've got to be alert and awake.

We really, really wanted to get hands on this guy,

and we were all behind Colin

and supporting...his plans, really, to keep it going.

I finished my course on Friday 13 November.

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 of the evening.

I said, "Well, you know, I'm sorted out tonight,

but come in on Saturday. Do Saturday and Sunday,

and I can have two days off. That would be fantastic."

That Saturday night I...

I stayed at home for the first night for, you know, nearly three weeks

and watched the football, had a glass of wine or whiskey or something,

and it was sort of relaxing time and me to catch up on my sleep.

We started at the normal time on 14 November, about 11pm,

and it was a pretty quiet evening from my memory.

Nothing particularly exciting happening at any the cashpoints

and in any of the areas.

And then in the early hours we got a call over the radio

from one of the officers in one of the observation points.

The Vauxhall Zafira was seen nearby old people's type housing,

from one of the observation points,

and that had been put up to the whole team.

Soon after that, a man fitting the description of the Night Stalker

was seen running from one of these houses.

The suspect running towards a Vauxhall Zafira

was exceptionally important to us,

because we'd identified prior to that night

that the Night Stalker was using a type B Vauxhall Zafira.

So as far as we was concerned, game on.

And he got in the Zafira, the lights came on and he drove off.

And he drives off up Orchard Way,

where there are lots of static observation posts.

Now, the plan was not to stop anybody or to arrest anybody

here on the plot,

because if it was the wrong man,

we'd probably have the details of our surveillance operation leak out.

An officer or two from the OP went to the actual address

where he was seen coming from,

and the information I received back in the control room

was it looks like that address had been attempted to be forced.

You know, in my mind I'm thinking,

"Well, he's not a resident of this address,

so it's likely to be a burglar, hence the Night Stalker."

The Night Stalker was driving quite quickly for some of this.

He got up to nearly 60mph in parts.

I'm convinced, and so are the rest of the team

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 knowledge took a side turning

and went on ahead of him to slow him down,

which enabled the following surveillance team to catch up.

By now we have a convoy of about four police vehicles,

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'd followed him all the way from Shirley.

We just wanted him to think it was a random stop in the street,

so that if it was the wrong man,

then we wouldn't jeopardise the surveillance operation.

You can see we're on a reasonably wide and busy sort of main road,

and that's fine, because we can keep control,

but then the Zafira indicates and turns left

onto a very different road.

The character of the buildings changed.

Suddenly we're into a residential street.

It's very much the sort of place

where the Night Stalker would make his attacks.

So, a decision was made to stop him there and then,

so he couldn't get away, get out the vehicle and do a runner.

It became an easy decision for Nathan to say, "Strike now."

It was utter confusion when he gets stopped.

I phoned one of the Operation Minstead sergeants

and I asked him to find out what was going on.

Had he been spoken to? Who was this man?

Get some information off of him,

so that we didn't make an unnecessary arrest.

The officer asked him a few questions

that led him to believe

that we had a person who was very likely to be our Night Stalker.

And the officer asked him his name

and he said his name was Kelvin Grant.

The officer said, "OK, have you got any ID on you?" And he said, "No."

And they started to have a look, and he saw in that...

could see in the centre console of the car there was some cards,

and he saw the name on there was:

Some of the clothing from, I think it was in August 2009,

that he wore when he approached the cashpoint with his hood up

and gloves on etc, that clothing was found in his car -

direct link from images we had

from the cashpoint to his arrest.

When they looked in the glove compartment of the car,

there was a balaclava-ry, woollen sort of hat

which fitted with the description

given by so many of the Minstead victims after their crimes.

When they looked in the boot, there was even more sort of evidence,

because there was a grey fleecy top,

can of petrol, pair of shoes, a crowbar and a big screwdriver.

The Night Stalker was finally stopped

and the handcuffs were put on him

and we were able to identify him as Delroy Grant.

Delroy Grant was arrested.

About 1:30 my mobile rang and it was Nathan.

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 1:30 in the morning

and joke about something like that?"

As far as I was concerned, the description, the method,

the vehicle he was using,

some various items that were seen through the vehicle window

prior to it being removed,

we were pretty certain that he was our man,

so we were happy, very happy.

No, I didn't feel any guilt that I'd been in the control room

when the Night Stalker had been arrested and Colin wasn't -

I felt none at all,

and it was the butt of many jokes, as you can imagine,

for weeks and weeks afterwards

that I'd been on a course,

stepped in and that night he'd been arrested.

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

because I was just too sort of excited and wound up

by hearing the story of his arrest,

so I drove into Lewisham and went into the charge room,

and that's when I was introduced to Delroy Grant for the first time,

and I finally got my eyes on Minstead Man.

One of the officers sort of said, "This is Mr Sutton. He's the boss,"

and...

Delroy Grant shook his... shook my hand.

He extended his hand, shook hands, bowed his head.

A bit of a surprise that he was so polite

and so sort of deferential.

I've never had somebody

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 were going to tell us about

over the coming weeks.

What struck me was how fit he was for a man of his age,

and then all the scenes I'd been to...

some of the windows that he'd managed to enter,

and I remember standing there with Colin saying,

"How did somebody get into that window?"

And it all started to come together

of how wiry, muscular and how flexible he was,

and that just gave me even more reason

to believe that we'd got the right person.

They booked him in and they took his clothing from him and bagged it,

in case it was evidential,

and there's a very obscure provision

in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act

whereby 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 with injuries

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 anybody tonight."

When he was asked to give his fingerprints,

he made an off-the-record comment, if you like,

to the officers doing it, saying, "It's pointless you doing this.

You know that I always wore gloves."

A sample had been taken when he'd been arrested,

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 afternoon

it was confirmed that we...it was him, and he was the Night Stalker.

Delroy Grant was 53 years old.

He lived in Brockley Mews in South East London

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 in this case the family really were victims of his, as well,

because they were innocent people

who all of a sudden had their world turned 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, so their lives were...

made incredibly difficult by what had happened.

Despite the DNA hit, they still couldn't believe that their father

was the Night Stalker.

He was a good father.

He enjoyed cricket.

People spoke of him well.

No-one really had anything bad to say on him.

He's such a nice guy

but I just can't... The shock... It's unbelievable.

You know, totally devoted to his wife and children,

and as I said, it's just come to 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 perhaps to add to it

is that the car he was driving,

the car he was allotted on the Motability Scheme

for driving Jennifer around,

was also the car he was driving out to the scenes of his attacks.

So it really was like he was living this kind of double life,

and in the early days of his incarceration at the police station,

there was an officer taking him some food into his cell.

He said to her, "I've got a thing about this DNA, really."

He said, "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,

'cause I understand it could be quite close to mine,

and I think it's quite likely that he's committed these offences,

not me, so you need to have a look at my son,"

at that point trying to throw the suspicion off himself,

which is breath taking, really.

The question that everybody wanted answered 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 is yes.

At the start of his spree in the summer of 1999,

he committed a burglary in Bromley.

The local Neighbourhood Watch coordinator had seen a BMW car

acting suspiciously at the time of a burglary

and he'd 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 neighbour's address.

What happened - that was investigated by Bromley Borough.

Bromley Borough officer

did some cursory police national computer checks

and found two Delroy Grants

that she thought were likely to be the suspect.

One had an address in Leicester, one had an address in Dulwich.

Not unreasonably, she assumed that the Dulwich one

would be the one she was looking for,

because it was South East London.

That man, that Delroy Grant, was the wrong one.

The one that lived at Brockley Mews had formerly lived in Leicester.

That was our Delroy Grant, the one we arrested,

the one that was in the cells.

Where it was crucial to Operation Minstead

was that the wrong Delroy Grant had had his DNA taken

when arrested for other offences, and was on the database.

So when they asked for the DNA from the Minstead crime scene

to be compared to Delroy Grant's DNA,

they compare it to the wrong one, the wrong DNA - there's no match.

And from that point onwards,

Delroy Grant of Brockley Mews is on the Minstead computer

as eliminated by DNA.

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 Minstead

and I think Delroy Grant of Brockley Mews could be your man.

I think he might have done it."

The first thing they do is they go to the database - 'eliminated by DNA'.

Even if they had swabbed all the 20,000 people on their list,

he wasn't one of them.

So that mistake, that assumption and lack of checking by that one officer

poisoned it forevermore,

and Delroy Grant had another ten years of liberty

and dozens more old people were victimised while he was free.

He pleaded not guilty

and ran what can only be described as the most incredible defence

I think I've ever heard.

Essentially he said that his first wife in 1979,

when they were splitting up, had saved semen from when they'd had sex,

when she had employed a third person

to deposit it around the crime scenes.

It was just a fantasy defence of the very first order.

It was just completely incredible.

Thanks to Tim and Kaye. We'll just break in.

We've got some news coming in from Woolwich Crown Court.

This is where the trial of Delroy Grant,

accused of being the notorious Night Stalker, is taking place.

Delroy Grant, the man accused of being the Night Stalker,

has been found guilty of 29 counts

of preying on 18 elderly men and women between 1992 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 in to us there,

that the police are apologising for missed chances to stop Delroy Grant.

The judge said

that he would have to serve 27 years

before he was eligible to apply for parole from his life sentence.

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

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

And were that to happen,

I guess we have to think that he would be...

you know, he'll be posing little threat by that time.

The number of offences that we had by the time that I left

are that he was involved in 204,

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 about.

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 graves.

Most of them are deceased now unfortunately.

I hope the families don't think about him, and they're just...

they can get a very small iota of satisfaction

in the fact that he is no longer doing the same things

to other people that happened to their families.

We went through an exercise with family liaison officers

of phoning and telling the victims that somebody had been arrested,

and one of the victims said that back to her, she said,

"That's great. I can go back to sleeping at night now."

I think he thought he was invincible.

I think he thought he'd never get caught.

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

So you had 17 years on the one hand, 17 days on the other.

It was only Colin's fresh impetus

which led to Delroy Grant being caught.

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."

They needed to be a burglary squad.

That's when we got him.

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