Original subtitles

(man) '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 justice is served.

But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim?

I'm Dr Richard Shepherd and I've spent my career

'as a forensic pathologist performing 23,000 autopsies,

including on some of the most high-profile cases of recent times.'

I've learnt that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.

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

from a state-of-the-art laboratory with ground-breaking technology

that uses digitally scanned sample bodies.

I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders'

where from the victim's bodies,

I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.'

(camera shutter clicking)

On 22nd March, 2009, a human leg severed at the hip

was found in a sport's bag on farmland.

Who did the leg belong to. Where was the rest of the body?

'Could this body part give any clues,

as to what had happened to the victim?'

(man) 'I was the on-call detective sergeant

for Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire Major Crime Team.

I received a report of what they believed to be a body part

being found in a rural location

in a village called Cottered over in East Hertfordshire.

(Richard) ' A farmer had spotted a green bag at the edge of his field.

When he looked inside he was concerned by what he found

and called 999.'

Uniform officers turned up at the scene, examine the object further

and suspected it to be some form of human body part.

The murder team were contacted and I went across to the scene.

By the time I got there, they'd moved the body part to the mortuary.

'The leg was initially examined

and it was in a green Gulliver's hold-all.

Wrapped in heavy loop polythene and wrapped with gaffer tape.'

When the leg and its wrappings are brought into the mortuary,

we're going to take off all of the wrappings very carefully.

They're crucial bits of forensic science evidence

and we don't deal with those.

What we look at is the leg. Sample leg on the digital table.

Is it an adult leg or is it a child's leg?

It's a size that's going to fit much better

with it being a male, adult left leg.

The next thing is, is it Caucasian or a different ethnic group?

And here the skin is white,

so it's likely to be a Caucasian person.

We're looking for other features,

like are there any marks that might be identifiable on the legs?

Are there any tattoos, any marks of surgery,

any evidence of implants, like knee implants,

that might actually help us to get an identity?

None of those were present.

However, there were signed of eczema.

Then we'd be looking at, are there any injuries,

are there any marks of it being tied,

any bandings, any stabbings, any shootings,

anything that would give us a clue?

And finally the one thing we'd look through is the site of amputation.

Is this something that's surgical?

Is this a clinical specimen that somebody's dumped?

'But here there's no tying off of major veins or arteries.'

So clearly this leg has been removed by an amateur.

When they were alive or dead? We simply don't know.

It was an unusual call

and so therefore it was keeping an open mind,

as to why, what was this left leg doing in Cottered?

Was it a stolen body part from a mortuary

or was it indeed some macabre murder?

We weren't to know at that stage.

The most important part of my role that night

'was to make sure that our scene was secure,

so that come first light the following morning,

our forensic teams and our crime scene managers

could get in and do a proper forensic search of the crime scene.'

(man) 'The news turned up on the wires

that a body part had been found in a field in Hertfordshire.'

Initially, we thought it might be somebody

who has died of natural causes

and perhaps their body had been spread by wildlife.

That was the first thing.

The first signs of any enquiry are the golden-hour principles.

You must secure your scene.

Looking at house-to-house enquiry.

'An appeal for witnesses.

Did anybody see the deposition of that body part?'

Were they driving past? Did anyone see anything suspicious?

Anyone loitering? Anything out of place?

'Being mindful that this was a very rural location.

So we were looking for key witnesses.'

We'd be looking for CCTV.

We'd have the whole area cordoned off,

so that our forensic team and do a fingertip search

'of the deposition site and the surrounding area.'

It was about keeping an open mind as to how did that body part,

and why did that body point arrive at that bizarre location?

(Richard) 'But the leg still had more truths to tell.'

It clearly wasn't a surgical amputation,

but it's been done by someone who has some knowledge of anatomy.

It's not simply been hacked off.

There's been dissection around the joint

to remove the leg from the rest of the body.

Often, in cases such as this,

the individual would try and saw through the thigh bone -

the femur, one of the thickest bones of the body,

and that's incredibly hard, but that's not what's happened here.

What's happened is that someone with some knowledge

has actually dissected around the joint

to remove the leg from the rest of the body.

The pathologist will take a sample, taking a sample of muscle,

so that the DNA of the leg can be analysed.

The police compared it with their own database,

but there was no match.

So the owner of this leg was not known to the police

and remained at that point unidentified.

Whoever that body was, whoever the deceased was,

had never come into contact with the police

and weren't registered on the national database.

(Richard) 'The police felt they had to treat it

as a murder enquiry,

but uncovering the truth wasn't going to be easy.'

We had a left leg. That's all we had at that stage.

We needed to identify who did that left leg belong to?

As soon as you identify your victim,

you're going to identify who the offenders are.

(Richard) 'It'd be three weeks before the body of the victim

was able to tell the truth about what had happened.'

Once the police had declared it was a murder investigation,

it took it to a new height.

This was a very big case. A real whodunnit.

An unknown person's severed leg discovered in a hedgerow

and a killer who appears to know how to take a body apart.

'In time, would the victim's body give away the truth of what had happened?'

A murder investigation was now in full swing.

We focused quite heavily on missing persons enquiries,

but all we had was a left leg.

We couldn't give the deceased an age.

We knew their ethnicity. All we knew they were probably a white male.

And interesting thing was on the left leg.

He had quite severe eczema on his left leg.

So of course that was always going to be a method,

hopefully, for us to identify our victim.

Was a missing person going to be reported

who suffered with severe eczema on their legs?

Anything like that was going to be really useful for us

to focus our investigation to identify this victim.

(Richard) 'A discovery was made which would blow open the investigation.

A week after the severed leg was found,

dog walkers uncovered a forearm in Wheathampstead.

25 miles away from the first discovery.'

And that really did catapult the investigation to the fore, really,

into the media,

and it was crucial for us to identify our victim.

'I believe that the left forearm

had to have come from the same body as the left leg,'

but you could assume nothing.

It was key we had that postmortem,

that we were able to submit again to the national DNA database.

Could we match the left forearm to the left leg?

Was it the same deceased or were we talking about two victims?

A second body part is found, a left forearm.

It's brought to the mortuary and immediately it's apparent

that it's been removed with the same skill as the left leg.

Amputating a forearm is really quite complicated,

cutting through the elbow joint.

A lot of people saw through the bone,

but this would take a long time.

However, if you have the skill to dissect through the joint,

it's much neater, quicker and simpler.

It's also clear the hand has been taken off,

presumably with an attempt to hide the identity of the individual.

The key question, though, is does it match the leg?

A sample of DNA is taken from the arm and it matches the left leg.

Both limbs are from the same person,

but the police still don't know who that person is.

The discovery of one body part was obviously sinister enough,

but the discovery of a second body part

some considerable distance away from where the first body part was,

was really concerning for us.

From that moment we felt

that, ooh, you know, this is something very, very serious.

We didn't know what we were dealing with.

Was the murderer playing games with us?

Was he trying to avoid detection?

Why these particular deposition sites?

The general sense amongst the public at the time

was that they were terrified

because at that stage they didn't know

whether this was the beginning of a serial killer.

(Ian) 'One in east Herts, the next one in central Hertfordshire.'

Where was the next going to be?

Then over 100 miles away,

a head appears in Leicestershire.

(Richard) 'Like all the other parts, the head was found in countryside.

This time by a farmer on his land in Asfordby near Melton Mowbray.'

I mean, this was a truly shocking discovery.

The killer had gone to great lengths

to make sure the victim was not identified.

A decapitated head is found, but not contained in any way.

When it was brought to the mortuary,

activity had been taking place around the skull.

The skin was missing. The tongue was missing.

Eyes, ears, nose had all been taken off,

presumably in an attempt to hide the identity of the individual.

Further examination confirmed

there was no evidence of any injury to the head or the face

that could have caused the death of this individual,

so we still don't know how or why he died.

Two teeth were missing, but that had happened a long time ago

and wasn't associated directly with the death.

Is the skull matching the arm and the leg that have already been found?

It matches very well, indeed,

because the strong eyebrow ridges and the solid bits of bone,

the mastoid processes that can be seen at the back,

all fit with this skull belonging to a male.

DNA analysis showed that the head matched the other body parts.

All of those things are fitting together.

How had it been removed?

Removing the skull by cutting through the spine

is really quite complicated.

The vertebrae aren't flat plates that just fit together.

They actually interdigitate, they fold together,

and it requires skill, care and knowledge

to be able to cut between them.

And that's what had happened here.

So the same person had removed the skull,

had removed the arm and had removed the leg.

(Ian) 'So Leicestershire contacted us

to say we've found this skull in a field,'

but it's in Leicestershire, is it going to be connected?

I believed it would be.

The rest of team were of the same vein

that how often do we find body parts

scattered around rural locations of England?

This had to be connected.

'We despatched a team up to Leicestershire

to liaise with their murder enquiry team,

and as a result of the DNA confirmation,'

that indeed the skull, the left leg and the left forearm

were all from one and the same body.

That really did throw us in the mix.

You know, why Leicestershire?

Why central Hertfordshire?

Why East Hertfordshire?

Who's doing this? What are the links to these areas?

(Anthony) 'The body parts being strewn all over

was not what you would expect of somebody'

who has gone to great lengths to kill someone and dismember them.

Usually, you would expect the body parts to be buried,

but these were very much easy to be found.

Amongst reporters, the general feeling

was that this was somebody who was almost taunting the police.

This was a person who was very proud of what they had done

and, you know, wanted the publicity.

It was very high profile in the media

and the British public, it certainly caught their attention.

I think it was more concerning for the residents

of Cottered, for Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire

and for Leicestershire.

Those local communities must have been concerned.

Why our location? What's going on here?

So we, we were mindful that the communities would be concerned,

but we hadn't identified who's our victim.

There's a victim's family that need our help,

but we couldn't identify them at that time.

(Richard) 'While identifying their victim was the main focus,

police were trying everything to solve this case.'

(Ian) 'The discovery of every body part

and every deposition site and every crime scene'

gave us potential to possibly identify who were our offenders.

So all of the wrappings that the body parts were found in,

they were submitted for DNA profiling, for fingerprinting,

so no stone was left unturned really.

(woman) 'The interesting thing about items that have been wrapped up,'

as part of the commission of the crime

is that the wrappings are often as important as the actual item.

'It's important to understand as much as you can.

You could look for who they were manufactured by

in case there are more of them.'

If you do identify a suspect's house to go and look at,

there might be more of these sacks.

'But the traces that would be on the outside,

well, it can be almost anything,'

and obviously DNA and fingerprints are really important,

but also things like textile fibres from clothing

or from other soft furnishings, from car seats, car boots,

and any other tiny particulate traces

that might turn out to be relevant in this particular case.

'And so here a lot of attention was paid to the wrappings themselves,

the blue plastic and the sticky tape.

Sticky tape is very good because it picks up things.'

They would have formed an important part of this case.

(Richard) 'No DNA or fingerprint evidence on the wrappings,

but embedded in the tape

were distinctive green and blue fibres.

Despite this, over a week into the investigation,

police weren't any closer to finding out who the perpetrator was.

The victim's story was yet to be told.'

It's often said in police investigations

that you make your own luck,

but when was our break going to come?

Our next port of call was, if we can find the hands,

were we going to identify that person via fingerprints?

(Richard) 'However, the killer had already made one crucial mistake.'

With the deposition of the head,

the offenders made their first faux pas.

They left the teeth in the skull.

Three times, body parts have been found

strewn around the English countryside

in the case known as the Jigsaw Murder.

'The more body parts that were discovered,

the more the body was able to speak its truth

about what had taken place.'

Forensics had identified the body as a white or Asian middle-aged male,

but for the police there were many questions

and the killer was still on the loose.

The coverage at the time was huge.

This was a very big case.

The body parts turning up at various locations in the countryside.

It was almost like a jigsaw.

'There was pressure on the police.'

There's always pressure on the police in a murder investigation,

but this one, people really wanted the person responsible caught.

(Richard) 'And yet more pieces of the jigsaw were about to turn up.

A week after the skull was found,

the right leg was discovered

dumped in a lay-by on the A10, near Puckeridge, Hertfordshire.'

The right leg cut in two, in the blue polythene,

identical to that of the left leg.

We were obviously hoping that the hands

would naturally follow at some point.

(Richard) 'Four days later, a farmer in nearby Standon

found a suitcase lying in a small ditch in his field.

But the police weren't going to get fingerprint identification

for this latest discovery.'

(Ian) 'Saturday, the 11th of April, 2009,'

was the discovery of the torso

and the remaining part of the left arm and right arm.

So the torso is found

and once again clearly that of an adult male

fitting together with what had gone on,

but crucially there's significant injuries in the back.

Two stab wounds to the back that had penetrated through into the lung,

a knife blade at least four inches long.

The lungs are very, very close to the skin's surface.

Just one stab wound into the lung can cause the death.

It could have resulted from a knife that was four inches long.

The victim's body had revealed the truth

and a cause of death had been established on his body.

There was no evidence of any struggle, fight or any other injury.

It looks as though two stab wounds in the back have been delivered

when the person was either lying down or simply from behind them.

So we now knew that, yes, this was murder,

that we'd recovered nearly all of our body parts other than the hands,

and that it was two stab wounds to the back.

It was crucial for us to identify exactly who that victim was

and then we had a case for murder.

(Richard) 'Three days later

and three weeks since the first body part was found,

the police made an appeal to the public.'

I need the public's help to help me identify who the victim is.

The cause of death was a stab wound to the back.

The man is believed to be of white, Asian or of mixed heritage,

between the heights of 5' 6" and 5' 10".

It was a direct result of our press appeal, from that conference,

we received a telephone call from a gentleman,

who stated that his brother had been missing for some weeks

and his brother was Jeffrey Howe.

'He fit the criteria.

He was the right age, right ethnicity, the right weight.

He had eczema and we knew that from the eczema on our left leg,

that was first discovered at Cottered.

And soon as we started making our initial enquiries into Jeffrey Howe,

we soon established that he'd been missing since March of that year,

no-one had seen him and hadn't turned up for work one day.

(Anthony) 'Jeffrey Howe was a kitchen salesman'

and his family said sometimes he did have like a little bit of a temper,

but generally everybody who knew him spoke warmly about him.

'We knew that he lived in Southgate, which is an area of north London.'

(Ian) 'He had lived in a two-bedroom flat, initially alone,'

but then we established from our sort of early enquiries

that he had a male and a female living with him,

and they'd moved in some weeks or months previously

and they were friends of his.

And the name Stephen Marshall came up in the investigation.

I was shocked because I knew of a Stephen Marshall

from my early policing days

who was a criminal,

quite a concerning character,

quite a formidable character in his own right.

I thought it can't be one of the same,

but further enquiries established

that it was the same Stephen Marshall.

(Anthony) 'Stephen Marshall was very much an imposing figure,

very much a man mountain of a character.'

And he used to boast that he had a 52-inch chest. He was so big.

And anybody who ever met him knew they were in his presence.

He was quite an intimidating character,

very imposing, very well built, very fit,

and would come across as charismatic and very friendly at first,

but I would probably describe him as a bully.

Would probably really aptly describe Stephen Marshall

as a nasty bully of the criminal fraternity.

(Richard) 'Stephen Marshall had moved into Jeffrey's flat

along with his girlfriend, Sarah Bush.'

(Anthony) 'Sarah Bush was a very petite figure.

She'd also worked as a sex worker.'

And she'd managed to meet Marshall.

Apparently, he stopped paying

and then he was very much a big imposing figure on her life

and pretty much controlled her.

Stephen and Jeffrey

had met through the kitchen business, through kitchen sales.

Both were very successful in kitchen sales.

Stephen Marshall probably had the gift of the gab and they hit it off.

'Sarah Bush and Stephen Marshall had moved into Jeffrey Howe's flat,

just for a short term, initially,

and Jeffrey, which appears to be typical of Jeffrey,

was doing them a favour, being a good friend to them.

But they exploited that friendship

and initially they were paying a peppercorn rent,

but eventually stopped paying any money to Jeffrey at all.

(Richard) 'After a week of gathering intelligence,

police decided to investigate Jeffrey Howe's address in person.'

(Ian) 'I took a team of officers to Southgate where Jeffrey Howe lived.'

(rings)

As soon as I knocked, it was answered by Stephen Marshall.

'I obviously immediately recognised Stephen.

He's quite intimidating, but he was very friendly with us.

'Invited us into the premises and we sat down at the kitchen table.

Both Stephen and Sarah portrayed themselves

as good friends of Jeffrey,'

but really couldn't offer any firm explanation

as to why he'd gone missing, just left

and not been in contact with them.

'They were very sketchy about any detail, which as a detective,

always rings the alarm bells for us.

They weren't at all concerned about him.

We asked to look around,

as we would do on a routine missing person enquiry.

'It was then that we saw the number plates for Jeffrey Howe's vehicle.'

He had a private number plate

'and those number plates were in the master bedroom,

which was unusual,'

because obviously the car wasn't outside the address.

They'd said he had taken the car the last time they'd seen him.

Nothing was ringing true. There was, there was..

There was no master bed in the bedroom.

There was a blue inflatable blow-up mattress on the floor.

Things just weren't right.

Things they were saying, explanations they were giving

about their last sightings

and about their relationship with Stephen

clearly weren't ringing true and were a pack of lies.

So I just made an excuse to leave and went outside.

I immediately phoned the Detective Superintendent.

Just explains my gut feeling, really,

and the rationale around it.

'We had options: we put them under some form of surveillance'

or were we going to let them run

and just see what happens?

But the risk was too extreme, as far as we were concerned,

'and the decision was rightly made

that we should arrest them there and then.

We took the other officers back into the flat.'

That's when I arrested Sarah Bush and Stephen Marshall

for the murder of Jeffrey Howe.

(Richard) 'This was a bold move, considering they hadn't confirmed

that it was Jeffrey Howe's body strewn across the country.

They had 24 hours to charge them or let them go.

They were both interviewed under caution.

Both had solicitors, as is their right.

(policewoman) Do you deny or confirm that is Jeffrey Howe?

No comment.

Do you recognise that person to be Jeffrey Howe?

No comment.

I believe he was a friend or an associate.

No comment.

He's allowed you to stay at his home. No comment.

(Ian) 'Stephen Marshall went "no comment" to all questions.

Now bearing in mind that he portrayed Jeffrey Howe

to be one of his best mates, that they lived together.

We were suggesting and it was our suspicion

that Stephen Marshall was responsible for his murder,

'and we were accusing Stephen Marshall of murdering Jeffrey Howe.'

Are you responsible for the killing

and the dismembering of your friend Jeffrey Howe?

If so, why did you kill and dismember Jeffrey Howe?

No comment.

You would expect him to shout from the rooftops,

that I'm an innocent man, I've not done this.

He would do everything possible to try us identify who had.

And do you feel upset by the fact someone's chosen to dismember him

and place parts of his body around the countryside?

No comment.

How does that make you feel? No comment.

But, no, Stephen Marshall refused to help us in any way.

No comment.

(Richard) 'With time not on their side, and Marshall not cooperating,

the police needed concrete evidence

or their suspects would have to be released.'

(Ian) 'While Sarah Bush and Steven Marshall

were in custody at Hatfield,

our fast-track enquiry

was to send Jeffrey Howe's dental records to an expert,

along with the teeth from the skull recovered from Leicestershire.

(Richard) 'Despite all the effort'

that had been taken to remove the nose, the ears, the tongue,

the teeth had been left in the skull.

Teeth can often be used to identify someone.

So the police asked a specialist forensic dentist,

a forensic odontologist, to come in and to have a look

in the hope that a positive identification could be made.

'If police couldn't find a match and confirm the victim was Jeffrey Howe,

they'd have to release their suspects the next morning.'

We only had them for 24 hours, so time was of the essence.

After body parts had been found strewn across the countryside,

a man called Jeffrey Howe was reported missing

'and police arrested his lodgers, Sarah Bush and Stephen Marshall.

Even dismembered the body had given the truth of what had happened

with the discovery of stab wounds in the torso.'

But the police still had to positively identify the victim.

Fortunately, they had his teeth.

(Ian) 'We had fast-tracked Jeffrey Howe's dental records to an expert,'

and also fast-tracked the dental impressions

of the recovered skull from Leicestershire.

And that dental expert was able to confirm 100%

that, yes, our victim was Jeffrey Howe

and that was the first time in the investigation

and a big breakthrough for us.

So now almost all of the body had been recovered.

The only significant things that were missing were the two hands.

The torso had given evidence of the two stab wounds to the back,

which undoubtedly were the cause of death.

One had penetrated right through into the lungs

and would have caused extensive bleeding into the chest cavity.

Interestingly, stab wounds to the chest

often don't bleed much externally.

All the bleeding is contained.

But when the body was dismembered,

when the head was cut off and the limbs were removed,

their major blood vessels would have been cut through

and blood would have leaked passively out of the body

causing extensive blood staining of the area.

(Angela) 'It is difficult to clean up a crime scene of blood,

where a lot has been shed.'

Blood spatter, because it goes everywhere,

you could easily miss tiny spots,

which forensic scientists will find with their powerful lamps

'and chemical tests and all the rest of it.'

So it is difficult to clean up.

If you try to use water or anything like that,

'sloshing it all over the place you're diluting it.'

We will be able to detect it, so it's really difficult.

(Ian) 'The flat was locked down as a crime scene,'

and our forensic team spent many, many days there

carrying out a very thorough search of the address,

and albeit that Sarah Bush and Stephen Marshall

had tried to do a very, very good clean-up job.

When we took up the carpets, the underlay,

the floorboards, the skirting boards, and so on,

we found a significant amount of blood.

(Angela) 'They found a lot of blood in the bedroom,

in the bathroom.

It's more difficult to control blood in somewhere like a bedroom

than it is in a bathroom.'

The pattern of blood staining told them what had gone on where.

The key line of enquiry was to match that blood to that of Jeffrey Howe.

'DNA analysis confirms'

that the DNA we found in significant volumes inside the flat

was a positive match, 100%, to that of the body parts

found scattered around the rural locations.

It was a result of that forensic examination

that we identified that the master bedroom

was indeed the scene of the murder,

and indeed was the scene of the dismemberment.

(Richard) 'Police could now charge Stephen Marshall and Sarah Bush

for the murder of Jeffrey Howe.'

(Anthony) 'Within days of their arrest,'

police announced that they had been charged with murder,

which was a real shock.

The two appeared in Magistrates' Court on the Saturday morning

and remanded in custody to face trial.

'There was some relief from the public.

Two people had been charged with his murder

and perhaps this was the conclusion of the case.'

There were a lot of unanswered questions

about why would somebody kill Jeffrey Howe

who had only shown kindness

by allowing these two people to stay in his flat?

(Richard) 'To build a case,

there was still a lot of investigation needed.'

For every crime it's imperative

that we prove beyond all reasonable doubt,

what is the motive for this crime?

Is it jealousy, is it greed, is it drug-related, is it crime related?

And very, very quickly we established

that in actual fact the murder of Jeffrey Howe

was simply about finances and greed.

'We established that within hours of Jeffrey Howe's murder,

Stephen Marshall had started writing cheques

from Jeffrey Howe's cheque book.'

Taking out cash and monies from Jeffrey's bank account.

They sold his car.

'They'd set up online shopping accounts,

They'd purchased takeaway pizzas.'

Basically, just as soon as they'd got rid of Jeffrey,

just plundered his assets

and plundered his bank accounts to their own ends.

Stephen Marshall had even gone to the extent

of utilising Jeffrey Howe's personalised car numberplates

'to put over the top of his numberplates on his car

to carry out a theft of petrol at a petrol station.'

The private numberplates that aren't seen in the flat

on the day of Stephen Marshall's arrest.

(Richard) 'The evidence was overwhelming

and crucially the forensics gathered from the body parts

also matched up.'

(Angela) 'The fibres evidence was particularly powerful.'

Some of the links with the house involved three mattresses

that were there.

They had this flopped surface. It's like peach skin.

'It's very soft to touch, a bit like velvet.

Some of the fibres on the wrappings and body parts

related to that, these three mattresses.'

And then there was some really powerful evidence

to link again the body parts and the wrappings

with a green polo shirt

'that belonged to Stephen Marshall, one of the defendants.

And they were two different kinds.'

So they were green polyester fibres and green cotton fibres

and so that immediately makes the evidence more powerful.

(Richard) 'A clear image finally emerged of what had happened.

Stephen Marshall entered Jeffrey Howe's bedroom,

stabbed him in the back and left him to bleed to death.

He later returned to dismember the body.'

We couldn't have had a stronger case, really.

We had our motive, the fact that...

We had evidence that Sarah Bush and Stephen Marshall

had plundered all of Jeffrey Howe's finances.

'Stephen Marshall's fingerprints were on a receipt

that he supplied to the man who'd bought Jeffrey Howe's car.'

We proved the fact that Stephen Marshall

was in that flat at the time,

and the fact that the flat was indeed the murder scene

and the scene of the dismemberment.

'We had extensive fibre evidence

to show that Stephen Marshall's T-shirts'

must have been in that room

at the time that the dismembered body parts

were being wrapped up in those sacks.

We couldn't have been in a stronger position.

(Richard) 'On 12th January, 2010,

Stephen Marshall and Sarah Bush

were tried at St Alban's Crown Court.'

What was quite interesting was Marshall and Bush,

who were sat next to each other in the dock,

barely spoke a word to each other.

Considering they were lovers,

why were they so cold towards each other?

(Ian) 'At the time of Jeffrey Howe's murder we don't believe'

that Sarah Bush was present at the flat at the time.

She had actually extracted herself away from the premises

'and gone to visit a friend.

Nevertheless, it was always our case

that Sarah Bush was complicit in everything that happens,'

was involved in the planning, the preparation

and, of course, the disposal

of all the body parts with Stephen Marshall.

(Anthony) 'Both Marshall and Bush pleaded not guilty,

despite the weight of the evidence against them.'

Stephen Marshall had admitted chopping up Jeffrey Howe's body,

but denied murder.

'The details of the case were truly grisly,

but Marshall and Bush showed absolutely no remorse, no upset.'

As the trial proceeded,

Marshall and Bush started to blame each other,

very much turning in on each other,

over who killed Jeffrey, who had dismembered him,

who'd got rid of the body parts.

It was very much the first emotion we'd seen,

literally to blame each other.

(Richard) 'But no-one was prepared for the next turn of events.'

(Anthony) 'Three weeks into the trial,'

we were called into court in the morning.

Marshall asked for the charge again and this time he pleaded guilty.

'I mean, that's really shocking.

To admit murder when you're going to get a life sentence

is like signing your life away.

It's open to different theories why he decided to plead guilty

at the very last minute.

Was this him deciding that he wanted to completely clear the slate?

Was this him playing the system,

pleading guilty at the last minute,

once he'd seen the overwhelming case against him,

knowing that he also gets a discount in his sentence?

Or was there some pressure put on him to plead guilty

by people in the criminal underworld?

(Richard) 'Then came perhaps the biggest revelation of all.'

(Anthony) 'Stephen Marshall didn't just leave it there.'

After pleading guilty he decided that he was going to get his QC

to stand up in court during the sentencing

and confess he cut up four more bodies.

'He'd worked for one of the biggest crime families in London,

the Adams family,'

and he had been disposing of people who had double-crossed them.

I mean, it was truly

a shocking revelation.

(Richard) 'On Monday 1st February, 2010,

Stephen Marshall was convicted of the murder of Jeffrey Howe

and given a life sentence.

He would have to serve at least 36 years

before he could apply for parole.

Sarah Bush was sentenced to three and a half years

for perverting the course of justice.'

It was a difficult investigation.

I'm immensely proud of not just my work,

but that of the team, because it was a team investigation

that resulted in that successful outcome.

It was certainly one of the most disturbing court cases

that I've ever covered.

So immensely proud

and so glad that we managed to get justice

for the family, really.

With the case concluded and the killer in jail,

the last piece of the puzzle was in place.

The autopsy had provided the information they needed,

the stab wound to the back, the teeth and the eczema on the leg.

'In the end, Jeffrey Howe's body had revealed the truth

and the jigsaw was complete.'

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