Original subtitles

When a murder is 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,

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.

The start of August 2019 and it was the height of summer.

In the small Cheshire village of Padgate,

Mark Bradbury is a popular figure...

but it's been a few days since anyone's seen him.

This is the kind of place where everybody knows everyone else.

It's hard to keep secrets.

So when Mark was found murdered in his flat,

police quickly realised they had a real mystery on their hands.

Would Mark's body help them to find out the truth

about what really happened?

Most murders in the UK are committed by people

who are fairly quickly identified.

It's gonna be the person responsible,

whether it's domestic or gang related.

Mark's murder was different.

That scenario, whereby somebody has not been seen for a few days

and they're found dead...

We don't know why, we don't know who they,

what their circumstances are, what their issues would be.

Where do we begin looking for a suspect?

That is really quite rare and presents a significant challenge.

Mark Bradbury was retired and lived on his own,

but he was by no means a loner.

He was very sociable, with lots of friends and a close family.

Mark was a Warrington man through and through.

He had been born here, he'd been brought up here.

You know, still in touch with school friends,

still in touch with people that he'd known for 25 years

and really grounded in this area.

He lived in a small flat right in the heart of his local community.

It was just him on his own and it was the ideal spot to be in.

Everyone that he knew and loved was all kind of around the area.

I would go there after school quite a lot.

Treated like a princess.

He would bring me my tea on a tray to sit and watch the television.

These little Polaroids are all just memories.

My dad and his brother Lee.

My dad was fun-loving, happy-going.

He loved a party. He loved travelling.

My dad used to take me away on holiday.

We went to Paris and Rome, Barcelona and Prague.

With hope that in 2021

we would go to New York for my 21st and his 60th.

This is really how I'd like to remember my dad,

walking across the beach with Barney.

Everyone trying to persuade my dad not to get Barney,

a great big golden retriever, for his tiny little flat.

He disregarded all that. That was his dog.

And that's really how I'd like to remember him.

Hopefully he is walking on a beautiful beach somewhere.

Mark's brother Lee lived on the same road

and they ended up sharing the dog.

My dad had a lovely relationship with his brother.

Lee was retired as well, so he had a bit more time on his hands.

So they just decided that when my dad was at golf

or he wanted to go to the rugby match,

that Lee would have Barney.

They'd always be up and down Station Road, swapping the dog over.

I think that was really nice for them, to have that brotherly bond.

On 1st August Mark took Barney through the underpass,

met Lee, handed Barney over,

with the agreement that Mark was coming back

to take Barney off him the next day.

But Mark never turned up.

The next day, Friday 2nd August,

Mark had a dental appointment.

Being the massive golf player that he was,

he'd cancelled playing golf that Friday

to go this dental appointment.

So the consensus of opinion amongst his golfing friends was,

"This is serious. This is a real toothache

because he would never cancel golf, for anything."

But he didn't appear at the dentist either.

On the Sunday I got in from work

and my uncle had sent me a text

just to say, you know, "Hi, Hannah, have you heard off your dad?

I've not heard off him.

He was supposed to get the dog, but he never showed up.

Let me know if you get in touch with him."

I was, "Oh, for God's sake.

He's probably off in golf and just not wanting to have the dog."

But I was due to ring my dad anyway, so I started ringing him

and I just got no answer.

I thought, "God, that's weird."

He used to sleep with his phone underneath his pillow,

so if he was asleep and I ever rang, he was always there to answer it.

So, yeah, there was no answer, so I rang again.

There was no answer.

And at this point I'm now starting to become increasingly concerned.

Lee and Mark's friend Paul,

they went round to the flat...

...and they found it locked.

The curtains were drawn and it was clear that there was...

There was nothing happening, there was no movement there.

So I went down to the vending machine, where I was living,

and I was just contemplating

all the reasons why he would not answer his phone.

Nothing was quite making sense.

So I typed in the number in the vending machine

and this bottle of pop fell to the bottom.

As it did...

...I really felt a pain that was kind of indescribable.

I raced back upstairs

and I said to my boyfriend, I said, "My dad's dead."

And he went, "Oh, Hannah, don't be so ridiculous."

I said, "I can feel it."

I said, "I can really feel that he's gone."

Mark's former wife had a spare key,

so they contacted her

and at the same time contacted the police

to say, "Look, we're worried.

We're gonna go in and see what's happening here."

Lee sent me a text, he said,

"I'm on the way now. I've got the spare key."

So, Lee got there and I waited about 40 minutes.

I said, "Jack, this is not right.

Something is really going on.

Like, I'm not there, I don't know what to do."

Officers arrived pretty much as they came out,

having found Mark, and they were traumatised.

I rang my mum and she just burst out crying.

She said they'd found him...

...on the floor.

My mum just kept on saying, "Thank God you weren't here"

because my mum was so worried that if I was back in Warrington,

it would've been me that would've seen the chaos that was left inside.

I went straight back to Warrington

to go and see, you know, what was going on

and at that point I met Sarah Oliver.

She took me into her car

and she said, "The police officers that were first at the scene

can't quite work out how this has happened

and that's why I get called out."

That's really stuck with me.

I felt, in that moment, that my life was gonna totally turn.

It was like being in a film.

I felt like I was watching this happen to me,

rather than actually living in it.

And when the police left...

Still to this day I don't know why I did it,

but I rang my dad's phone and I left him a voicemail...

...just saying, "Can you please explain to me

how this can possibly happen? And how we are going through this?"

Obviously, I was never gonna get a response,

but that's all I wanted in the moment.

Just an explanation.

When I first walked into Mark's flat,

he was lying on the floor underneath a loft hatch.

There was also some loose change lying around,

there was a TV still present.

The premises had been locked and secured.

There was no obvious sign

that this was maybe a burglary on an intruder.

There was a possibility

that he might have fallen out the loft hatch

and yes, the blood was unusual.

It was difficult to explain.

But nevertheless,

at that time it was determined as suspicious rather than homicide.

So it became apparent

that it was going to be a massive forensic undertaking.

Mark's flat is very small.

At ten o'clock on the Sunday night it was quite gloomy.

You couldn't really make much of an informed assessment

until I'd been able to get a forensic pathologist

out to the scene, in daylight, to have a look at Mark's body.

The main thing about preserving a crime scene

is that you don't let a horde of people go in there,

especially in a small space,

and that you know exactly who went in.

So, if you get, for example,

an unexplained print or mark of some kind,

or a trace of some kind, you can then go back

and get reference samples from the people who were there

and check them against them, in case it was one of them.

The next morning I went into the scene with the pathologist.

It was light, it was possible to see Mark.

It was possible to see the injuries that he had sustained.

That's when it was escalated to a murder.

An autopsy was performed,

which showed that Mark had suffered a sustained beating,

which I can show you on this sample body.

He had quite widespread blunt force trauma

to his head, his body, with lacerations to the scalp.

As a pathologist, one thing I would always look for, also,

is whether there were any injuries

that were caused when Mark tried to defend himself.

These are called defensive injuries.

In Mark's case it was possible to see that there was bruising

on the outer side of the arm,

as the hand is raised to protect the body.

The other thing we'd need to look at

is to see whether Mark had actually been delivering blows himself,

so we look at the knuckles and the backs of the hands

to see if he had been punching people.

There were no obvious marks found

and although some of the injuries could've been caused by a weapon,

no weapon was ever found.

The evidence was clear.

Someone was responsible for Mark's death.

I was hoping that there'd be no malice...

...and no ill intentions

and that it might have just been an accident.

I was now having to not only go through losing my dad...

...but it was actually somebody's fault that he was gone.

But then, two weeks into the investigation,

police discovered a crucial piece of information

that would leave Mark's family in shock.

No-one, despite what they've done,

deserves to be murdered as brutally as my dad was.

In August 2019 a quiet Cheshire village was rocked

when Mark Bradbury, a popular local man,

was found dead in his flat.

Mark had died after sustaining a brutal beating.

But detectives had no idea when this attack had happened.

They hoped that, at autopsy,

Mark's body would give them some clues

about the timeline of events.

The main problem for the investigators in this case

is actually quite simple.

Time is against them.

And as part of my role as a pathologist attending a scene,

is to begin to make the assessments as to the time of death.

We look at various features of the body.

We look at, particularly, the muscles.

We look at how stiff the muscles have become.

Rigor mortis is the process that occurs after death,

when the muscles stop receiving oxygen.

That's a change that starts immediately as someone dies

and is present in the hands and the feet at about four hours

and spreads to the whole of the muscle mass of the body

at about 12 hours.

And then stays there for another 24 hours, so 36 hours in all.

When we examine the body and we look at the arms,

we look at the legs, we look at the mouth,

we look at the jaw.

We assess the stiffness of all of these areas

to get an assessment of when that person died.

But later on other changes can occur and that happens on the skin.

Green discolouration of the skin to the abdomen

is just about the first thing to happen,

as decomposition internally changes the body.

And then other changes in the eyes.

Are they still firm and tense

or are they now beginning to get a bit cloudy and a bit soft?

That too gives us an idea of how long that person had been dead.

All of these changes are temperature dependent.

The higher the temperature

the faster these changes are going to take place.

In Mark's case, he died in the summer,

locked into his flat.

And so temperature is going to play a crucial role

in understanding what has gone on.

In the later stages of decomposition

hairs and fibres and blood stains are lost

and that just makes a difficult investigation

even more challenging.

After the postmortem it was concluded

that the murder had happened

in the hours between Thursday evening,

when Mark was last seen alive, and Friday morning.

The police still had no idea who had done it.

When Mark was first found

we were at a total loss as to who could do this to him.

He was just a guy who had a white van

and lived in a flat in a quiet part of town.

We didn't know him.

We didn't know who would want to harm him.

So, until you know him, you don't know

what the circumstances are that might have led to that situation.

So, that was kind of the first steps, really,

is to understand who is this man

and why would anybody want to kill him?

Police started examining hours of CCTV,

trying to identify anyone who'd been near Mark's flat.

It was a huge time window and, you know, who was going through?

There were hundreds and hundreds of people on CCTV,

on bikes, on foot.

So it was key to us to get in touch with people

and get them to contact us,

so we could cross reference against those people on the CCTV

and eventually be left with the one man standing.

That went on for what seems like forever.

The phone would ring

and my heart rate would just sky rocket.

"Is this gonna be the day?

Is this gonna be the police? Are we gonna find out new evidence?

Is somebody gonna be arrested?"

It was just living on the edge all the time.

And it puts a lot of pressure on your everyday life.

When is that phone call going to come?

As the weeks passed,

police gradually began to learn more about Mark's life.

There wasn't somebody here

with a long history of criminal interactions

who might have enemies and issues going on.

It took some time to build up a picture of Mark's life

and start to establish

that, actually, there's another side to Mark.

They discovered he'd been hiding a dark secret,

which came as a huge shock to his family.

In the weeks after Mark's death,

it became apparent that he used cocaine

and he took cocaine in and distributed it

to cover his own costs.

Mark had kept that below the radar.

He sold what he needed to sell to cover his own usage.

He didn't get into trouble with it,

he didn't get involved with violence.

He didn't bring attention to himself,

which is how he'd managed to stay unknown

to policing systems for so long.

He had that side of him going on, you know,

and a family that knew nothing about that

and friends who knew nothing about that.

They were shocked.

That was the hardest thing,

that immediately it went from, "Oh, poor man"

to, "Oh, well, he was a drug dealer, so that's what he deserved."

But that's not the way that I knew him

and that was really difficult,

to merge these two different men together in my mind,

that made up my dad.

They had to come to terms with not just the loss,

but also, they hadn't known him.

They'd maybe been deceived by him. Maybe...

He kept things from them.

That's hard. That's hard to deal with.

I was just in total disbelief.

I felt like I'd been lied to.

That was really difficult.

It hurts me to think that he was potentially leading a double life.

I do think that I could probably have prevented some of this,

if I knew what was going on.

But Mark's double life provided the first real breakthrough

in the investigation.

Finding out that Mark Bradbury actually supplied cocaine

and was a user himself

really changed things for the investigation team.

It was no longer likely to be random.

It was more likely to be connected to a real criminal underworld.

Desperate for clues,

police began piecing together Mark's last known movements.

At six o'clock on Thursday night

he stopped at Bargain Booze and he bought himself a case of beer

and a packet of Lambert & Butler cigarettes.

His van was tracked back to his flat,

but it never reappeared on CCTV again and neither did Mark.

As we uncovered details about Mark's drugs life,

we did start speaking to some of his customers.

One of those customers was the last person to see him alive

and gave us absolutely critical information

in relation to the layout of Mark's flat.

The fact that when she bought cocaine from him,

she'd left some cash

and there should've been some £10 and £20 notes

sitting on a coffee table and they weren't there.

The investigation team searched

for anyone else who had been buying cocaine from Mark.

They came across another customer, called Dan Shovelton.

During house to house enquiries,

officers went and visited Dan Shovelton.

It was the first time he'd come into the enquiry.

It was early doors, maybe about three days in.

It wasn't far off,

but he was very much just part of the routine house to house.

There was no expectation or understanding

that he had any issue with Mark.

They visited him, they asked him when he'd last seen Mark.

He gave what appeared to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

That he'd seen Mark about a month ago

and he'd bought some cocaine from him

and he'd paid by bank transfer.

I was quite staggered that in this day and age

cocaine is bought with a bank transfer.

A former sergeant in the British Army,

Dan was now unemployed and living less than a mile from Mark.

He'd been successful in the Army, spent about 14 years in,

and developed quite an expertise, as far as I understand it,

in telecommunications and setting up field stations

and that kind of activity.

Dan had left the forces to be at home with his daughter.

He was having counselling

and seeking treatment from a veteran's charity for PTSD.

There were reports that Dan Shovelton was depressed

at around about this time.

That he'd gone, you know, offline, that he'd disengaged.

But he'd left the army and I think, in all honesty,

he expected to be welcomed into civilian life with open arms

and given a well paid employment,

using all that skill that he'd accumulated.

And it didn't happen.

It didn't happen for a number of reasons.

One was his own...

...raging cocaine addiction.

The relationship between Mark and Dan,

I think, was fairly business-like.

There was probably envy on part of Dan.

Dan sees himself as educated, intelligent, capable.

Probably saw Mark as beneath him.

You know, wasn't as educated.

Probably didn't think he was capable.

The evidence about Dan's drug habit was that it was enormous

and it probably dictated his existence.

Three months earlier,

Dan had lost his job with a courier company

after being accused of stealing.

At the age of 40, his home had been repossessed

and he'd moved in with his parents.

At the time of the murder, Dan was really desperate.

He had lost his house. He had nothing in the bank.

He had run up debts with every other drugs supplier.

By 1st August, the day that we believe Mark was murdered...

...Dan Shovelton had amassed debts everywhere, well over £50,000.

I think, by that Thursday afternoon,

he would've done anything for cocaine.

Weeks had passed since the grim discovery

of Mark Bradbury's body in his flat in Padgate.

Police had discovered that Mark had been a small-time drug dealer.

His body revealed that he had been brutally murdered,

but gave no clue as to who the killer was.

Mark's body still had secrets to tell.

It became apparent, as we investigated the scene,

that there had been a search.

Somebody had been looking for something.

We established that Mark had probably got

a significant amount of cocaine in his property

at the time of the murder.

So we quickly reached the point that the drugs were the key.

They were probably the reason Mark had been killed

and it was probably because somebody wanted what they couldn't afford.

While detectives searched for clues,

Mark's body revealed more details about how he had died.

We know that Mark had suffered quite extensive blows

delivered to the head, but because of the decomposition,

some of the injuries to the skin and the body couldn't be seen.

But when the neck was examined,

deep internal bruising and injuries were found.

These were seen not only in the muscles or the neck,

but if those muscles are removed,

and I can do that digitally on this table,

the most important thing is revealed.

That's damage to the thyroid cartilage,

the larynx, the Adam's apple, which showed evidence of a fracture.

It has spikes sticking up and sticking down

the muscle it's attached to.

It's these that get snapped off

and that showed that Mark had been strangled as well.

But because of the decomposition,

it wasn't possible to determine

if the strangulation was manual or with a ligature.

It was quite sadistic.

It was a traumatic way to die.

But on top of that, the killer had made sure that,

had Mark, by any chance, recovered, he couldn't get out.

The property was locked.

Mark's phone was switched off

and it was hidden in the mechanism of the settee.

So it was a cruel and a sadistic killer

that had been able to do that.

You know, to kill somebody and then so calmly, coolly,

make sure that they wouldn't be found

and they'd be there for some time, just left.

Detectives didn't have forensic evidence

to link anyone to the scene of the murder,

but what they did have was a clear motive.

Dan Shovelton needed money and drugs

and he knew that Mark Bradbury had both.

Dan had told the police

he hadn't seen Mark for more than a month before the murder.

But CCTV told a different story.

We had a really good understanding of his movements

from CCTV, from his phone records.

We managed to build a picture showing that, in fact, on that day,

he was circling Mark's house.

He was going round time and time again.

I had in my mind that he had a question to answer, Dan Shovelton,

about why didn't he tell us he'd seen Mark

on the weekend of the murder?

Why did he say he hadn't seen him for a month?

Before Mark's murder, Dan Shovelton didn't have a penny.

He asked his daughter to transfer, you know, £7 or so,

so that he could withdraw a £10 note from a cash point.

But then, after the murder, he was captured on CCTV

going into a large Tesco store and, all of sudden, had money.

You know, he was buying scratch cards,

he was buying alcohol, he was buying lemonade.

He didn't appear to have the same financial constraints

that he'd had four hours before.

Five weeks after the murder,

he was arrested and brought in for an interview.

When Dan was arrested, it was pretty standard stuff.

A search of the suspect's address.

Mum and Dad went and stayed elsewhere,

kind of turfed out.

Quite devastating for them, really.

You know, they're private, proud people

whose house is now being searched by the police,

with all the neighbours watching.

His room in particular was searched through methodically

and within his clothing was found a gold ring.

Here's somebody that's having to get his daughter to send him seven quid

so that he can take £10 out of a cash machine,

but he's got a gold ring sitting in his pocket.

Mark's daughter Hannah confirmed to the police

the ring had belonged to her dad.

When I was in Paris with my dad,

we were walking up towards the Louvre, across a bridge.

A man on the street,

he was probably a little bit of a con artist,

but we give him the benefit of the doubt at the time.

He said that he had no money for his family,

so would we like this gold ring.

And my dad, not caring, really, whether it was real gold or not,

he took 20 Euros out of his wallet

and passed it to the man in exchange for the ring.

That was in 2015.

What's that about, then, Dan?

And then, you know, he tries to think on his feet

and, "Ooh, I've just been given it by Mark."

Really? A guy that has really not got any money to spare

is not gonna give you a gold ring.

And yet he's trying to put forward this story

about best mates, give him a gold ring.

"You get rid of it, you sell it. You get some money for it."

And it just didn't make sense.

Mark's last purchase was a case of beer

and a packet of Lambert & Butler cigarettes.

When we found Mark at his house...

...the case of beer was still there,

but there were two bottles missing and the cigarettes were gone.

When we had our search officers go through the suspect's home address,

Dan Shovelton has an empty box of Lambert & Butler cigarettes.

We couldn't forensically connect those cigarettes

to be the packet that Mark bought,

but it was a phenomenal coincidence.

Meanwhile, a thorough search of Dan's Internet records

revealed something telling.

Interestingly, Dan had Googled me.

Which is a first.

I've not been Googled by a suspect before, to my knowledge.

He claimed that he was just curious about the case.

But in the next breath he wasn't interested in the case

because he didn't really know Mark

and he had no reason to be interested.

He just contradicted himself.

For the next few days, after the murder,

Dan had been out on the road.

He then went on a strange journey around Warrington.

Areas of water, industrial sites.

Places where you might have industrial bins.

He nicknamed it his magical mystery tour, himself.

He never really offered a meaningful explanation for it.

Whereas the obvious one is that he was depositing

the murder weapon, clothing.

He was getting rid of stuff.

Mark's flat was a tiny studio

with a double bed, coffee table at the end of that

and then a settee.

And it was never any different.

It was as it was every day to everybody that went there.

But when we attended the scene, that night,

the coffee table wasn't between the end of the bed and the settee.

It had been moved and it was underneath the TV.

He was asked, as part of that interview,

to draw a plan of Mark's flat.

He'd been there, "Tell us what it's like.

How's everything set out?"

And he drew the double bed and he drew the settee.

He put the coffee table between the bed and the settee.

And then he changed his mind.

He said, "Oh, it's not there" and he crossed it out

and he moved it to underneath the TV.

At that point I knew I had my man and we just needed to prove it.

Detectives were closing in on the killer.

But with no concrete evidence to link Dan to the crime scene,

they were left with no choice but to let him go.

He was released on bail at that point,

with a determination that you're gonna bring them back

and they'll be charged.

And it's a worry.

What if they go and do something else?

So it was a real concern to us,

that there was a killer on the loose.

Police investigating the murder of Mark Bradbury

were certain they knew who had killed him.

Former soldier Dan Shovelton was the prime suspect.

Mark's body had shown he'd been strangled

and subjected to a brutal beating

and had also revealed when he was likely to have been killed.

But police had to piece together the evidence

to prove it was Dan Shovelton who had murdered Mark.

The murder of Mark Bradbury was no slam dunk investigation.

It was painstaking.

It was laborious.

It involved thousands of hours of police work.

Recovering some 14,000 hours of CCTV

and it involved real attention to detail,

layering up all of the evidential opportunities.

Whether it was forensic, whether it was CCTV,

whether it was sightings that were made,

whether it was strange activity.

It all had to be pieced together to just present this whole picture

because he was not gonna be convicted on one piece alone.

We know that Mark had suffered quite extensive blunt force trauma,

but trauma of that type has different effects

on different areas of the body.

For instance, the abdomen is quite soft,

so blows delivered to that area are displaced.

The bowel underneath is pushed out of the way

and there's very little bruising.

On the other hand, when you look at the skull,

which is solid bone beneath the skin,

the anvil effect of that blow splits the skin,

causing damage.

And because there are so many blood vessels,

that bit of the body bleeds rapidly

and causes quite extensive blood loss all around the place.

In Mark's flat there was a lot of blood on the floor...

...and in the blood there were over 100 impressions of footwear.

The killer had spent some time in that flat moving around

and making these footwear impressions.

It wasn't a popular brand of footwear.

It wasn't immediately recognised by our footwear expert

as a Nike or an Adidas

or, you know, one of the brands that we see quite frequently.

It was something that they'd not seen.

You've got the pattern itself,

you've got the approximate size of the shoe.

But you've also got things like the wear to the sole,

which can be really important.

People walk in different ways and wear shoes in different ways

and even more critical,

if you've got a really good print of a footwear mark,

you can actually see the tiny little nicks and cuts

and gouges created by damage.

They're picked up in just the course of everyday wear,

completely at random, that can actually identify

specifically an item of footwear to a mark

and actually give you that direct link.

It's really amazingly powerful at its best.

Of course, if it's got blood staining

and you find the mark at the scene

and you find blood on the shoe when you locate it,

blood on the shoe that matches the victim,

then that's a really lovely two-way link.

After some 43,000 records that had been cross referenced,

the Lacoste Vinale was identified as the footwear

that's left that impression.

It's been out of production now for eight, nine or more years.

But Lacoste made us a pair of those trainers

so that we could cross reference them

and show that it is the Lacoste Vinale

that's left those footwear impressions.

They now knew the exact make and model of the shoes

the killer was wearing at the murder scene.

They also knew he had most likely been searching for drugs.

It was an open secret amongst his friends

that Mark kept his valuables in a loft above his bed.

It was accessible, to somebody of a normal height,

just by standing on the bed.

You could reach up and you could open the loft hatch.

There were bloody footwear marks on the bed,

indicating that someone had stood there.

There was some blood on the loft hatch itself,

which indicated that here's somebody that

they know Mark and they know Mark in the context of his drugs.

My dad's in his own home and he had no shoes on,

so whatever he was doing, he was comfortable, in his own home,

and he'd obviously invited somebody in.

I think that was the scariest thing for me, that it could be anybody.

The killer entered the loft

and they'd searched the front and they'd searched the sides.

But what they didn't find was the cocaine was behind them.

Hunting for the shoes that would link him to the crime scene,

police search Dan Shovelton's home.

We recovered everything from his house.

We meticulously catalogued it, photographed it,

worked out what was there, what wasn't there.

Clothing fitting the description

that he was wearing on CCTV on that day was not there.

Every path we took seemed to lead to a dead end.

But there was one clue, invisible to the naked eye,

that would finally link the killer to the scene.

When we arrested Dan Shovelton,

one of the items that was seized from his address

were the keys to the car.

The car itself was also seized

and subject to meticulous forensic examination,

which revealed nothing.

The key was also subjected to forensic examination.

In the very hole in the key that the metal ring passes through,

there was a speck of Mark Bradbury's blood.

DNA analysis proved beyond doubt the speck of blood was Mark's.

That was the only tangible forensic evidence that was recovered

in the entire case.

Because there was nothing found at the house,

there was nothing found in the car.

There was a lot of blood at that house.

Daniel Shovelton would have had blood on his hands, literally,

and it wasn't to be found anywhere, except for that key.

It is extremely difficult to get rid of all traces of evidence

and I think this case is a very good example of that.

Using the chemical screening test that we have for blood,

it's perfectly possible

to test tiny little nooks and crannies on things

for the presence of blood.

Even when you can't see it,

sometimes you get a positive reaction

and sufficient to get a DNA profiling result out of it.

So, you know, it's really important

to use every kind of tool at your disposal

when you think somebody might've been trying to destroy evidence.

Months of painstaking work had finally paid off.

They had literally found the key that solved the case.

Dan was arrested for the second time.

He was absolutely dumbfounded

and it was the, probably, only point where you really saw him flounder

and he couldn't come up with an explanation.

So, he asked for a break in his interview.

When he came back, he offered an explanation

of having just put the key down and picked up a speck of blood,

in transfer, which was farcical, really.

Finally, there was enough evidence

and Dan Shovelton was charged with murder,

but in court he continued to deny it.

It was really difficult attending the trial.

You have to listen to both sides of the story

and there was no real answers

from somebody who still pleaded not guilty.

It was clear that

Dan Shovelton had barely told a word that was true,

throughout the entire investigation

and throughout the entire court case.

I think he remained committed throughout the trial

to innate belief that he'd walk away.

The jury were having none of it.

After 11 hours of deliberation, they found him guilty.

I can't really describe the emotions.

You've got this...

...wave of relief that, you know, he's been convicted,

that all of that work has paid off.

Pleased for Hannah. She'd got an outcome. You know.

It makes you feel quite glad,

but you shouldn't feel glad because somebody's been murdered

and somebody's now going to prison for years.

It was a case that had tragedy on all sides.

Dan Shovelton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

For the investigators and for Mark's family,

there was justice at last.

I will fight for him to stay in prison longer.

Why did he feel the need to...

...beat him to an extreme?

I want to know what my dad was saying in those last moments.

I can't help but think that he was just begging for his life

and that this death was truly painful.

I don't think he ever doubted for a second

that he still wasn't the best dad.

Cos he gave me everything that he could've done.

Investigating the murder of Mark Bradbury

is something that I'll always be really proud of.

Police officers, civilian staff, forensic staff, scientists,

all of them put heart and soul into this.

The effort and energy put in

by the entire investigation team was staggering.

This was clearly an enormously challenging investigation

and one that proves that it's the first hours

after the discovery of a murder that are absolutely critical.

Mark's body was able to tell the truth

about the beating and strangulation.

The brutal beating he took,

especially the blunt force trauma to the head,

meant that there was too much blood

for Dan Shovelton to be able to clean it all away.

And for Dan Shovelton,

it was the discovery of a single fleck of blood,

invisible to the naked eye, on a car key

that was to be his downfall.

That and the painstaking and determined police investigation.

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