Original subtitles

(Richard Shepherd) When a murder's committed,

it's always a race against time to find the truth,

to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer,

and to make sure that justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd,

and I've spent my entire career as a forensic pathologist,

performing nearly 23,000 autopsies.

I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth,

and they never lie.

Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim.

With the aid of a state-of-the-art laboratory,

using ground-breaking technology,

I'll be investigating a series of intriguing crimes

where from the victims' bodies

are revealed to you the truth behind these murders.

(police sirens wailing)

(phone beeping)

(Dispatcher) Emergency service.

(Richard) At the beginning of December 2012,

police in Newcastle received a tip-off

telling them that there was a body in a flat

in the west end of the city.

(beeping)

Neighbours had also been complaining about a terrible smell.

(siren wails)

And when officers got there,

they found something that was truly shocking.

(Brian Hook) Officers are dispatched to that address.

They go to a block of flats, to a flat on the eighth floor.

(elevator bell rings)

As the responding officers are actually going up in the lift,

it's obvious that something is not right.

There is an odour, a smell.

And it's one of those things as a police officer,

once you've smelt that smell, you will never forget it.

As they approach the address, they smell decomposition.

The eighth-floor flat was the home of someone called Joe Collins.

Collins opened the door.

He pointed to the bedroom and said, "He's in there."

(Brian) In the bedroom, there is a chest freezer.

They know that the next thing they've got to do

is open up that chest freezer.

(Sophie) And when they open it up, there's a body inside.

(Richard) The tenant of the flat, Joe Collins, was arrested

and taken away for questioning.

The officers now have to

go into crime scene preservation mode.

The most important time of any forensic evidence

is when it's first found.

You're working for the victim. You are the victim's voice.

If you don't get the best forensic retrieval possible,

you're losing evidence.

You lose evidence, potentially, you lose the case.

(Sophie) This would've been a really unusual crime scene for police.

Here, you have a body inside a freezer,

up in a high tower-block flat.

But they somehow have to get the body out for examination.

To get that chest freezer

into that apartment would have been an operation.

But to get that freezer out of that apartment many floors up,

with critical evidence contained within it,

must have been an extremely difficult operation.

(Brian) You're on the eighth floor.

It's got to go in the lift.

So it's going to have to go on one end.

And the danger there is even though the contents are frozen,

there may be some leakage.

It needs to be taken as quickly as possible to the mortuary

so that you are in a controlled, sterile environment

when eventually you remove the victim.

The perpetrator's actually helped you.

They have actually frozen your forensic evidence for you.

Any blood, any DNA, any fibres,

all there, still and frozen.

(Richard) Once the body's been brought to the mortuary,

the pathologist's real work can begin.

This means finding out who it was and how they died.

This body had been tightly wrapped in a blanket

and crammed into a freezer.

And of course, it was frozen solid.

(Kenny) The challenge is, for the pathologist in this case,

was the fact that the body's decomposition was such that

there was fluids frozen to the bottom of the freezer.

It was very hard for them to pinpoint exactly when he died.

(Richard) It took a long time for the body to thaw out

and reveal a white middle-aged man in his 60s.

But how had he died?

Sometimes the cause of death is immediately obvious,

but not in this case.

When I'm working on a case like this,

I always work methodically, starting at the head

and moving slowly down the body, looking everywhere

for any marks or injuries that might help me

understand the cause of death

and also if a crime had been committed.

There are a number of injuries to the head

and there was bruising to the central chest

and extensive bruising to the muscles of the back.

The question here is were they caused by an assault

or by some kind of fall?

One thing is certain, though,

is that no single injury was enough to cause death.

And that's quite intriguing.

The grim hunt for clues about the cause of death continued.

But in the meantime, detectives had identified the body.

It was local pensioner, Peter McMahon.

(Brian) The victim was a 68-year-old retired civil servant.

He retired from the Civil Service when he was 50.

(Sophie) He was a man who had done quite well for himself

in his working life.

He had two pensions from his jobs, so he was comfortably off.

(Kenny) Peter McMahon was just a lovely guy.

Anybody who knew him said the same thing:

that he always had time for people.

He was very generous.

(Sophie) He would give money to charity.

He was someone that people genuinely did like,

and I think with good reason.

(Kenny) He was a very friendly, Geordie guy

who liked nothing more than a visit to the pub

and some banter with his mates.

He was just one of those likeable guys

that nobody had a bad word to say about.

(Brian) Peter had previously been married.

He had two grown-up sons who didn't live in the local area.

They lived some distance away.

(Sophie) One had moved to London, and one had moved to New Zealand,

so he lived alone in Newcastle.

He didn't have any family around.

He didn't really have anyone to rely on,

anyone looking out for him.

So he was quite a solitary figure.

So he started to become a regular at the Metropolitan Bar

in the West End of the city.

And he'd very much became one of the locals there.

The people in the pub pretty much became like family to him.

(Richard) It's here detectives discovered

that Peter met 44-year-old Sharon Swinhoe.

(Sophie) He was attracted to her.

She was a woman much younger than he was,

and she very quickly seemed to get some kind of hold over Peter.

He was... he was very much drawn to her.

(Kenny) They met one evening,

and he was completely entranced by her.

They got on. They got on well.

And before long, they started seeing each other.

(Kevin Browne) Peter was 20 years her senior.

Now, that gap in a relationship

is usually associated not just with intimacy

but with a sense of paternal care,

that she expected him to provide like a father would...

to provide money and to have no limits to that,

to provide her with good times and good clothes, jewellery.

And that expectation led to a symbiotic relationship.

He liked to furnish her with good things

and she appreciated it.

In the beginning, it was just a friendship.

And it became more intimate the more he spent money on her.

(Sophie) A lot of Peter's friends

were concerned about this relationship.

They didn't think that what Peter believed it to be

was what it actually was.

But really, he wanted a future with her,

and he wanted to make this relationship work.

(Kenny) Peter loved Swinhoe.

He bought her an engagement ring, a very expensive engagement ring.

And he really did sort of, you know, dance to her tune.

He would do anything for her.

(Richard) Meanwhile, detectives were making inquiries

about Joe Collins,

the man who'd stored Peter's frozen body in his flat.

They made a surprising discovery.

(Sophie) Joe Collins has been infatuated with Swinhoe

for ten years.

He was besotted with her.

He wanted a relationship with her,

and he would do whatever she asked.

(Richard) In December 2012,

the frozen corpse of pensioner Peter McMahon

was found in a flat in Newcastle.

He had extensive bruising and injuries to his head

but no confirmed cause of death.

Could his body reveal any more truths

about what had happened to him?

We need to determine whether the injuries

were the result of an accident or if they were caused by an attack.

And to answer that question,

we need to look more closely at the body.

And it's the injuries to the face that are most revealing.

In this case, all of the muscles underlying the skin

of the deep soft tissues are damaged by blunt-force trauma,

and there's extensive bruising all over the face,

but it's most prominent to the left-hand side.

But more importantly, as we look deeper

into the structure of the face, when we look at the bones,

we begin to see the areas that were fractured,

indicating severe force.

Not only is the nose broken, but if you look here,

you can see the fracture of the jaw.

And in the orbital bone around the left eye,

there's another fracture.

So what we have here is a number of blows,

each with sufficient force to break bone.

This was no accident.

Peter suffered multiple injuries to his face,

most likely punches and kicks.

But these injuries are clearly very serious ones.

But even so, they're not enough to explain the death of this man.

So we still haven't answered the question...

what was it that did kill him?

The extent of Peter's injuries confirmed this was foul play.

(Kenny) The scale of the injuries to Peter were really severe.

He was black and blue, he'd been kicked in his testes,

and his body was in a terrible, terrible state.

(Richard) With the cause of death still a mystery,

police made a breakthrough in the investigation.

They discovered Joe Collins, the tenant of the flat,

knew Peter's girlfriend, Sharon Swinhoe.

(Brian) He's known her and had a relationship with her

for ten years.

He desperately wants that relationship

to be a sexual relationship, but Swinhoe doesn't allow that.

(Kenny) She always led him on.

She always let him think there might have been a chance.

He had learning difficulties. She exploited those.

(Sophie) He was known to sometimes be on the phone to her

for hours on end.

He would do anything she asked, and he was under her control.

(Brian) Once he is under her control...

there's no letting go.

You can only imagine that

Joe Collins wouldn't have liked Swinhoe having Peter in her life.

He would have been jealous.

This was essentially a love rival to him.

(Richard) But it was Peter McMahon Swinhoe had more interest in.

(Sophie) In some ways, Swinhoe probably

saw Peter as a sugar daddy.

He was someone much older than her.

He had a reasonable amount of money in the bank,

and someone that she could easily manipulate

to maybe get her hands on that money.

(Kenny) As the relationship progressed,

a few cracks began to develop.

And Peter was spending lots of money on Swinhoe

to the point that he had very little money left.

He spoke to a bank clerk and told the clerk that

his girlfriend was bleeding him dry, you know.

He could see it happening, but he somehow couldn't stop it.

(Brian) All was not sweetness and light in this relationship.

It had periods where it was quite volatile.

They would argue and it was an on-off relationship.

They would split up, and then they'd get back together again.

(Sophie) Peter was totally blind to Swinhoe's real intentions.

He was in love with her.

(Brian) The relationship would be become violent.

Peter told friends of his that at one point,

she actually came at him with a knife.

But Peter went back to her even after that,

and things started to escalate.

(Sophie) Swinhoe actually made an allegation of rape against Peter,

and he was interviewed by police about this.

We can only imagine that Peter would have been devastated

and mortified by this.

He was a kind, generous, law-abiding man.

You have to wonder why Swinhoe would

make such a serious allegation against Peter.

Was this a way to get rid of him? Did she no longer want him around?

Or was this just another way to exert control over him?

(Richard) No charges were ever brought against Peter.

But the accusation left its mark.

(Kevin) Peter was devastated.

And he attempted even to commit suicide

as a result of this allegation, which really was the first sign

that she had another side to her that saw him negatively.

(Sophie) Even after Swinhoe had

made this serious allegation of rape against Peter,

he still wanted to get back with her.

Again, his friends warned him off, warned him not to stay with her.

One of them actually went as far as to say that,

"If you stay with her, you'll end up in a box."

But Peter still wanted to be with her.

(Richard) Police still didn't know how Peter died,

but there was a clue to when he died.

One of the items of evidence

that police recovered from Peter's body was his wristwatch.

Peter's wristwatch was still set to British Summer Time.

This means that Peter was dead

before the end of the British Summer Time period,

the end of October.

(clock ticking)

(Richard) This tied in with the last-known sighting of Peter

that detectives could trace.

(Brian) On the 18th of October,

Peter takes a taxi from his home address.

He's dressed up to the nines.

He's on his way to meet Swinhoe.

(Kevin) After a short separation, he was invited to her house,

which he must have been really excited and pleased about,

thinking that it was his chance for reconciliation.

(Sophie) He even told the taxi driver

that he was going to get back together

with his much younger girlfriend.

He was clearly excited about this.

But after he was dropped off, he was never seen again.

(Richard) So what happened to Peter after he reached Swinhoe's address?

Could his frozen body, found in Collins's apartment,

yield more clues about where and when he died?

The body was surrounded by frozen liquid in the freezer,

which would suggest that decomposition had taken place

some days or weeks before.

And this could have suggested that Peter was killed somewhere else

and then taken to the flat and put into the freezer after death.

CCTV around Collins's flat,

filmed in the month after Peter's disappearance,

was to give police the breakthrough they needed.

(Sophie) CCTV shows Swinhoe, Collins,

and a third man arriving at the flat with a large suitcase.

(elevator bell rings)

(Brian) Swinhoe, for some reason,

has actually tried to disguise herself by wearing a wig.

But it is so obviously her.

(Sophie) They get in the lift,

and they go up to where Collins lived.

Collins holds the door open for them.

There's no question at all that these three are working together.

(Richard) Detectives identified the third figure in the footage

as 77-year-old Ronald Douglas,

another man romantically linked with Swinhoe.

(Kenny) Their relationship was built around a sexual relationship

that had happened a couple of times previously.

And Douglas still wanted something to happen.

He wasn't ready to give it up,

and Swinhoe wasn't remotely interested

in picking that up again.

But just like Collins, she kept Douglas hanging around,

somebody else to build into her web.

So he was just another pawn in her game.

(Kevin) What we do know about Sharon

is she was very skilled at manipulating men,

at getting men to do what she wanted them to do.

Now, that manipulativeness is a characteristic

that some personality disorders have.

(Sophie) You can see on the CCTV

that Douglas is dragging the suitcase behind him,

and it clearly contains something heavy.

Peter's blood and DNA were later found on the suitcase,

which obviously proved that that's how his body got there.

(Richard) In the light of this new evidence,

police reconsidered the tip-off that had led them to Peter's body.

It came from none other than Sharon Swinhoe.

(three dial tones beep)

(Dispatcher) Emergency service.

(Brian) On the 1st of December, the police receive a 999 call.

Nothing is said during the call.

It's silent.

And then, the receiver, whoever is making the call, is put down.

(Sophie) It's normal practise in these situations

where police get a call where no-one speaks

for officers to try and trace the address,

find out where the call is coming from,

and go to check that there's not someone in danger there.

(Brian) That call was made by Swinhoe.

When police arrive and speak to Swinhoe,

she tells them that she has information

as to where they could find Peter's body.

(Sophie) She tells police that she believes

Peter is in a flat in the West End.

But then she says she hasn't seen or heard from him for two months.

(Brian) She also tells them

that the person that lives there has been harassing her.

(Kenny) She was, there and then,

putting in the groundwork to deflect the blame to Collins,

somebody that she had manipulated for almost a decade

and somebody that I think she thought

might also take the blame for this.

(Brian) What she's actually saying to the police

as part of that deflection is, "I'm a victim here.

I'm not a suspect."

It would be fair to describe Swinhoe as a female Svengali.

She had this ability to recognise

what the men's vulnerabilities were and to actually exploit them.

She had them eating out of her hand.

(Richard) Following the CCTV find,

Swinhoe and Douglas were also arrested

and a search started immediately at Swinhoe's home.

Nothing could prepare police for what they would uncover.

(Brian) You think that you've seen everything.

And then something comes along and you just wonder

about man's inhumanity to their fellow man.

It just beggars belief.

(Richard) In Newcastle, 2012,

Peter McMahon's body revealed injuries to his head and face.

Now his remains were about to give up

more gruesome secrets about his death.

We know that Peter's body was found in the freezer

and there were extensive injuries all over his torso and his face,

but that none of these injuries were severe enough

to cause his death.

But we also know something else

about what happened in Peter's last hours

because someone had attempted to gouge out his eyes.

Now, what we see of the eyes when we look at someone

is really only a very small part of it.

In fact, the eyeball itself

is about the size of a ping-pong ball,

and it's surrounded by six muscles

that control the movements and the actions of the eye.

And then, the whole thing is encased in a bony cavity

called the eye socket that provides structure and support to the eye,

as you can see here.

And then, of course, the whole of the outside of this

is then covered by the skin of the face,

with the eyelids providing that ultimate outer protection.

So removing an eyeball is difficult.

It takes a lot of effort, and it must be a deliberate act.

What this tells us is that Peter was

subject to a long and sustained attack,

and the truth revealed by his broken body

is that he was tortured.

(Sophie) The attack on Peter was absolutely brutal

and, no doubt, would have been absolutely terrifying.

(Brian) It shows a level of callousness

where there's no understanding

of what this person might be suffering

or the pain that they may be suffering.

(Sophie) This wasn't just an attack where

someone was trying to kill someone.

It was degrading. It was humiliating.

(Brian) The sort of person that would premeditate,

plan that, and do that

would be someone with a personality disorder,

probably of an anti-social kind, antagonistic kind,

where you actually will enjoy sadism or harm or pain of others.

(Richard) Police were still questioning Peter's girlfriend,

Sharon Swinhoe, about the killing.

(Brian) To go as far as to try and gouge his eyes out

is particularly callous.

If it was Sharon, the basis of her intimacy with him was money.

And I think possibly, there was some underlying cause

that related to her hating him seeing her naked.

And she found this distasteful

and therefore, one part of the body that she wanted to attack

was that part of the body that saw her.

(Richard) But to build a case against Swinhoe

and her henchmen, Joe Collins and Ronald Douglas,

detectives needed to find the murder scene.

(Sophie) It quickly became clear to police that

Joe Collins's flat was not where Peter was attacked

and not where he died.

(Richard) So scenes of crime officers

directed their search to the place Peter was last seen alive:

going into Sharon Swinhoe's house in the east of the city.

(Brian) They look for things like blood splashes,

very minute details to give them clues

of what might have gone on.

(Richard) The search drew investigators to the bathroom.

The curtain rail was damaged,

and there were blood spatters in the bathtub itself.

(Richard) DNA analysis revealed the blood belonged to Peter,

proving this was where he died.

And there was more.

(Kenny) There was a catalogue of clues

that led to police suspecting that Swinhoe and Collins

had been guilty of this.

Collins had been in the house at the time.

And after the sustained attack,

Collins and Swinhoe then worked together

to decide what to do with Peter's body.

(birds singing)

This was Newcastle, and the ground was particularly hard.

It had been quite cold, quite frosty.

There was some talk that they were trying to dig a grave for him

in the back garden but they couldn't

because it was just too difficult to break the ground.

So they put Peter's body in a dog kennel in the backyard.

They covered it in blankets

and they put air fresheners around the body.

(Brian) His body was just discarded there.

Never mind the fact that he'd been murdered anyway.

They treated him with total disrespect and disregard.

(Sophie) Peter's body stayed there for more than a month.

(Brian) Because of the passage of time,

decomposition has set in.

And with that, as well as the changes of the body,

comes an odour.

(Kenny) A neighbour's dog was scratching the fence

next to the kennel for days and days

because all it could smell was the odours coming from that kennel.

And Peter McMahon lay in that dog kennel

for goodness knows how long.

(Brian) They now have a problem.

They have a dead body on their hands.

And somehow, they have to get rid of that body.

(Sophie) At this point, they made the decision to move the body,

and it was stored in a suitcase

and taken over to the West End of the city.

(Richard) A taxi driver told police he picked up Swinhoe

at her home a month after Peter's disappearance

with an unusually heavy suitcase.

She was dropped off to meet Ronald Douglas.

(Kenny) She told him that Peter's body was inside that suitcase,

and she needed Douglas to drive her across town to Collins' flat.

(Brian) In actually taking Peter's body to that flat,

all they've actually done is given themselves more problems.

Neighbours start to complain about the smell.

It's explained by blocked drains and toilets.

But of course, there is also infestation

with flies and maggots that are also happening at this point.

Their solution is to go and buy a chest freezer.

(Sophie) Collins bought a freezer second-hand for around £80.

He asked for it to be delivered to his home, but unusually,

once the heavy item had got there,

he didn't allow it to be taken into his flat.

He asked for it to be left in the corridor outside.

(Brian) They even moved it in themselves.

The freezer is then put into the bedroom, plugged in,

and Peter's body is put in the freezer.

(fan whirring)

(Kevin) One of the most common ways

of disposing a body is to put it in a freezer

and lock the freezer so it's out of sight, out of mind.

And there is this notion that

the freezer will keep the body cold

and that the decomposition will be less and the smell less,

which, after time, is not true.

It would begin to leak through the small spaces of the freezer

and begin to fill the room with a decomposition smell.

(Sophie) Somehow, Swinhoe managed to get such a hold over Collins

that he was willing to have this body stored at his home.

(Brian) I've seen a lot of strange things

and circumstances in my career.

But I've never come across anybody that

knows that the end of the day,

they're going to go into the bedroom to sleep

knowing that next to them is a freezer that contains...

a dead body.

And I just...

I'm at a loss for words as to how

a human being can reconcile that.

(Richard) The search at Swinhoe's home

revealed yet more about her deceit.

(Kenny) They found lots of cash hidden around the house.

There were wads of cash in drawers, £2,500 in drawers.

You know, that's cash that she had drained from Peter's bank accounts

after he had died.

(Brian) One of the functions of his death

was to access his money, as we know,

and she was financially driven.

But of course, you can only access his money

and take money from his bank accounts without suspicion

if it appeared as if he was still alive.

(Richard) Police even found evidence that

Swinhoe had broken into Peter's home.

(Kenny) Swinhoe needed to cover her tracks.

She needed to explain why Peter wasn't around.

So she packed a suitcase full of his clothes

to make out that he was about to leave town.

(Brian) She even goes to the extent

getting one of her accomplices to collect Peter's medication

so nobody's going to be alarmed,

nobody's going to worry, why is he not collecting his medication?

(Kenny) They also found wigs

and other things she used to disguise herself

as she went about her business after she'd killed Peter.

(phone buzzing)

(Sophie) When friends called Peter,

Swinhoe would answer the phone.

She would make up excuses and tell lies.

But she told people that he no longer

wanted contact with his old friends.

But this wasn't the Peter that they knew.

(Brian) And it's all to continue that deception,

her scheming, evil deception that Peter's still here

and nothing is wrong, nothing has changed.

It's all just a facade.

(Richard) But Swinhoe's worst deception was revealed

when detectives interviewed one of Peter's sons.

(Sophie) Peter had been excited about becoming a grandfather.

And when his son in New Zealand rang to tell him

that the baby had been born, Swinhoe answered the phone.

She said that Peter was asleep and simply couldn't come to the phone.

(phone buzzing)

(Richard) Peter's son continued phoning,

but his calls went unanswered.

(Sophie) Obviously by this point, he was dead.

(Kevin) She was what people would say cold-blooded.

Those are the characteristics of callousness and deceitfulness.

And she showed those after his death

in the way she manipulated his bank accounts and accessed them.

And the way that she pretended he was still alive

shows a level of just not showing any empathy

or concern for this individual at all.

And those four things,

hostility, callousness, deceitfulness, and manipulation,

would strongly suggest she had an anti-social personality disorder.

(Brian) And all of this so that she can start withdrawing money

from his bank accounts, so she can fleece him,

even though he's dead.

(Richard) With the weight of evidence against them,

Sharon Swinhoe, Joseph Collins, and Ronald Douglas

were all charged with Peter's murder.

But his body would reveal the truth

when his killers finally faced justice.

(Brian) It came as no surprise to me that during the trial,

all three defendants turned on each other.

(Richard) In Newcastle,

Sharon Swinhoe and her two accomplices,

Joseph Collins and Ronald Douglas,

had been charged with the murder of pensioner Peter McMahon.

He'd clearly been tortured.

He had extensive bruising, broken bones.

He'd even had his eyes gouged out.

That wasn't going to be enough to get a conviction for murder.

For a murder charge to stick against Swinhoe and Collins,

police needed a cause of death.

We know that the injuries Peter suffered,

although horrific, would not obviously have killed him.

The postmortem determined that Peter

had suffered a cardiac arrest.

But to convict the assailants of murder,

the prosecution had to prove that it was their actions

that had caused his heart to stop.

So can torture actually cause a cardiac arrest?

The answer lies in the autonomic nervous system,

a series of signals that automatically control

the most basic functions of the body.

Here's one part of that system, the vagus nerve,

that runs directly from the brain to the heart.

And it's electrical impulses from that nerve

that help the heart beat correctly.

But if someone jumps out and gives you a sudden fright,

it's also the autonomic system

that creates that sudden surge of adrenaline

that makes your heart beat instantly faster.

But with a sustained level of pain and fear

that Peter was experiencing,

his body was already flooded with adrenaline.

And so when the attempt was made to gouge out his eyes,

the extra terror and fear were too much for his heart to take.

And that's what killed him.

Finally, Peter's killers were brought before a court.

(Kenny) This was a trial that Newcastle Crown Court,

I don't think, had seen in a number of years,

you know, such was the severity of what had happened.

There was an awful lot of interest in that courtroom.

(Richard) Swinhoe, Collins, and Douglas

pleaded not guilty to murder.

(Kenny) They didn't flinch. They looked forward.

They didn't look at anybody. They didn't look at each other.

It was extremely interesting to see the dynamic

because we'd heard stories of this femme fatale

that had power over these two guys,

and she was stood in the middle of them in the dock.

There was a real tension.

(Richard) The prosecution outlined their victim's final hours.

(Brian) The taxi drops Peter off at Swinhoe's house.

Peter's happy.

He's under the impression that this is a reconciliation.

He's going to get back together again with his girlfriend.

And nothing could be further from the truth.

(Richard) The real motive, it seems, was to demand more money.

(Sophie) When Peter arrived at Swinhoe's home,

Swinhoe wasn't alone.

Joe Collins was waiting for him there.

(Kenny) And immediately,

Peter must have known that something wasn't right.

(Richard) Peter, it's believed, refused to stump up any more cash.

(Kenny) Swinhoe took him to the upstairs bathroom

and launched a tirade of punches and kicks.

She gouged his eyes to the point that

his eyes were almost gouged out.

It was just an unbelievable assault.

(Brian) He would have been tearful

and emotionally shocked at what she was doing.

And that may have been too much for Sharon

because she doesn't understand the concept of showing emotion,

being personality-disordered,

and therefore would have reacted in a violent way,

seeing it as a threat to her.

(Kenny) The evidence in this trial

was probably some of the most harrowing evidence

I've ever come up against, I've ever had to report on.

(Sophie) When we heard the extent of Peter's injuries,

it was just sickening.

It wasn't something that we'd ever really come across before.

(Kenny) I don't think I've been in a courtroom

before where journalists were crying as they heard evidence.

And that's exactly what happened in this case.

Peter's family were in the courtroom every day,

listening to what had happened to him.

And on one particular day

as the injuries were described to the jury,

it was just too much for his son

and he collapsed in the courtroom and he left.

(Richard) But Peter's killer, Swinhoe,

kept trying to pull strings from behind bars.

(Kenny) Collins' legal team had said that in the prison van

leaving court the previous night,

Swinhoe had been having conversations with Collins,

urging him to plead guilty to manslaughter,

telling him to take the blame.

And I think at that point,

Collins knew that this woman had never,

ever had any feelings for him,

that he was just a pawn in her game.

And Collins was infuriated by that.

(Richard) The defendants turned on each other

when they took the stand.

(Kenny) Collins did give evidence against Swinhoe

and very much tried to tell the story that

he had played no part, really, in this,

and that it was Swinhoe's responsibility.

Swinhoe, for her part, did exactly the same and blamed it on Collins.

It was dog-eat-dog.

(Richard) Swinhoe also tried

using her powers of manipulation on the jury.

(Kenny) Swinhoe alleged that Peter had raped her,

and she said that that is the type of abuse

that she had to contend with in this relationship,

that this was an act, somehow, of self-defence in a way,

that this was a woman who'd been driven to it.

(Brian) What she was saying was, "I'm the victim here.

I've got nothing to do with what happened to Peter."

And nothing could be further from the truth.

(Richard) The eye-gouging that triggered Peter's death

was finally pinned on Swinhoe

thanks to evidence from her fellow inmates.

(Brian) Swinhoe boasted in prison

about the blood that was under her fingernails

after she'd gouged out Peter's eyes.

She was the main player. She was the catalyst, undoubtedly.

(Kevin) There are a number of facts that suggest that

this was premeditated and planned:

one, that she involved two other men

and they, too, seemed to have

an affection for her that she manipulated.

And their involvement means that this was all a planned activity.

(Sophie) Swinhoe was someone who had the ability

to control and manipulate the people around her,

especially the men around her.

For some reason, she managed to attract men, often much older men,

and control them, got them to do things for her.

In fact, in court, the judge described her

as being someone who could attract men like magnets,

and then she was able to control them once she had done so.

(Richard) At the end of a gruelling six-week trial,

the jury delivered their verdict.

Sharon Swinhoe and Joseph Collins were

found guilty of Peter's murder.

(Kenny) When the verdicts came back,

there was a sense of relief among the family of Peter

and among the journalists as well

that this had come to some sort of conclusion

because we felt that justice needed to be done in this case.

(Richard) Swinhoe, the master manipulator,

was gaoled for a minimum of 25 years...

her accomplice, Collins, a minimum of 20 years.

(Kenny) Swinhoe remained the same way

that she had been throughout the trial.

She looked dead ahead. She was expressionless.

She showed no reaction and no remorse.

(Brian) Swinhoe and Collins received life imprisonment.

The judge made comment at the sentencing

that the murder was a brutal, callous, sadistic murder.

(Kenny) The judge said to Swinhoe

she loved her rats more than she loved Peter.

And that was probably one of the most

powerful summing-up statements I've ever heard,

and he nailed it, bang on.

(Richard) Ronald Douglas, though, was cleared of Peter's killing.

(Brian) Douglas received 11 years' imprisonment

for preventing the lawful burial of Peter.

The 11-year sentence was reduced to four years due to his age.

He was 77 when he was convicted.

(Richard) But justice had at last been served on Peter's killer.

(Sophie) She obviously let him believe

that this might be a relationship.

She strung him along, and she'd clearly seen a chance with Peter

to take advantage of him.

(Brian) She was only interested in people

that could serve her ends.

How can this person get me what I want?

That's what she was - cunning, manipulative.

Nothing more, nothing less.

(Sophie) From everyone we've spoken to,

Peter just seemed like a lovely man.

He didn't deserve to die,

and he definitely didn't deserve to die in this way.

And Swinhoe's never shown any remorse for that at all.

(Richard) Swinhoe didn't live out her sentence.

Eight years later in 2021,

she was struck down by COVID in prison

and later died in hospital.

But her crimes left their mark on the northeast of England.

(Sophie) Peter's murder is probably one of the most

disturbing cases that we've had in Newcastle,

just the sheer violence.

(Kenny) There's very little, I think, shocks people in Newcastle.

This crime... this crime shocked people in Newcastle.

It shocked them at the time.

It shocks them still to this day,

the brutality that happened here in their city.

That this had happened almost in broad daylight

in front of their eyes.

This just beggars belief.

(Richard) What Peter endured in the final hours of his life

must have been truly horrific.

But his body revealed the truth of what had really happened to him -

how the horrific gouging of Peter's eyes

had pushed his heart to breaking point

and led to his death.

And from that, prosecutors were able to get justice

by securing a murder conviction.

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