Original subtitles

PHONE RINGING

Police, what's the emergency? Armed police officers!

NARRATOR: Elite police units created to crack the toughest of cases.

My role is investigating serious and organised crime.

This was out of the ordinary and this was a high-pressure situation.

Hey, hey.Calm yourself down.

Their task, tackle the villains...

You're locked up on suspicion of murder. All right?

..and bring them to justice.

A real who did it?

With unique access to some of Britain's most talented detectives,

we explore for the first time their investigations...

I've spent years putting together all these tiny pieces of evidence.

..their methods...

The most bizarre investigation I've been involved in.

..and the evidence that's put some of the UK's most dangerous criminals

behind bars.

They are clever. And they're dangerous.

PHONE RINGING

Police emergency.

This story really goes back to 2021. It was just a friendship.

And that friendship initially was described as platonic.

And then it slowly developed into something more.

So on the coffee table in the house, there was a note.

And on that note was his plan for the year.

One of those plans on there was to get together with Keith's partner

before Valentine's Day.

Relationships are tricky to navigate at the best of times,

but not everybody turns their passion into a deadly obsession.

He was absolutely obsessed with her and I strongly believe that he'd

gone out that night with the intention of drinking, which he did.

Building up the courage to do something and had armed himself with

a knife and was intent on killing Keith to remove him from

the equation.

Love can make you blind and sometimes turn a mind to murder.

The offence happened about

15 minutes before Valentine's Day.

It was quarter to midnight.

This was mid-February.

It was dark, cold, wet.

They actually laid in wait for him and then they brutally attacked him

using a severe degree of force with knives.

No doubt, a frenzied attack and they just left him for dead.

Keith had no chance whatsoever.

Keith Green, the victim, was a resident of Banbury,

located by the River Cherwell on the edge of the Cotswolds.

Banbury is a market town in north Oxfordshire.

It's got about 50,000 people living there.

It's still one of those places where lots of people know

everybody else.

I'm Tom Seaward.

I was a court reporter at the Oxford Mail at the time.

Banbury, like anywhere really, in the UK,

has a problem with knife crime, often drug-related knife crime.

But certainly you don't get a murder every other day.

It's not that sort of town. This was an unusual crime for Banbury.

My name is John Capps.

I'm a detective superintendent with Thames Valley Police Major

Crime Unit.

Major Crime, we investigate murders, homicides, unexplained deaths.

It's always really challenging.

No two days are ever the same.

And nothing surprises me any more in this job.

But nevertheless, this was an unusual case.

PHONE RINGING

Police emergency.

Police received 999 calls reporting someone has been attacked close to

the town centre.

Detective Superintendent John Capps and team are on call that night.

With any murder investigation in that stage, there is a lot going on

and you've got to try and get some order from the chaos and set some

priorities to get the appropriate people where they need to go very,

very quickly.

Detective Constable Chris Hatton is assigned as case officer.

I'd never been to Banbury for an offence like this before.

I'd been working in the major crime department for about five years.

When we found out the murder had come in,

instantly, you had to drop everything.

I had to go and deploy up to Banbury.

Before I set off, I'd already found out that I was going to be a case

officer for it, so I already knew roughly what to expect before

I arrived.

And then turned up, met everyone else who was up there and prepared

for a briefing.

With a potential murder on their doorstep,

Thames Valley Major Crime Unit launch Operation Inuit.

At the scene, victim Keith Green is found dead.

So we had Keith Green, who'd been stabbed to death in his back garden

outside a shed or an outbuilding.

Keith Green was a family man.

He was 40 years old.

By trade, he was a carpenter.

He also loved tinkering around in his garage.

He had two children with the partner who he lived with at that house.

The community was shocked and quite quickly people were paying tribute.

We were initially told

that his partner had gone down

there and called the ambulance

and that he was deceased at

the scene.

Because of the time of night and the location, being at a private

residence, there obviously wasn't many eyewitnesses.

The whole area was cordoned off and we had forensic teams in.

With the crime scene and house under forensic lockdown,

officers take a witness account from the victim's distraught partner,

Louise Green.

It's a delicate process.

There was quite a lot happening at the scene.

There was a lot of people living within it.

It was quite a tightly-packed family home.

We also had the dynamic of the other people in the address.

There were eight children in total who had to be moved out into a hotel

and who'd been present at the address when this had taken place.

Are any of those children witnesses?

And straight away, you know there's going to be significant partnership

involvement from social care.

And that just adds another dynamic to what you've got to consider.

Thames Valley officers Stephanie Chase and Alice Walker are the next

to join the investigative team in the sensitive role of FLO.

The FLO is a family liaison officer and the role is to provide a link

between the investigation team and the family.

We are placed within the family to build that relationship with them,

build trust with them, but our main role remains that of

an investigator.

And families often have lots of information

that's imperative to an investigation,

whether that be a victim's routine or information about

their associates.

So it's to gather that kind of information and process that, as

well, as giving them the information about the investigation and what's

happening and then supporting them through that.

So I'd come to work as normal that morning and I knew very quickly that

there had been a murder on the area that we cover in the early hours and

I was asked to pick up the role of family liaison officer.

Alice was the second FLO on this case.

This was actually my first deployment as a FLO,

so I was a bit apprehensive, but I was told that Steph Chase was going

to be the other FLO on it.

There was already somebody in place who'd had that initial contact with

the family.

We didn't know a lot at that point.

It had only been a few hours since the incident.

It's busy, you know, there's a lot going on.

So in those first moments, we're sort of just briefed and it's

working out who the family are, the family dynamic and what can we share

with them in those initial stages?

Back at the crime scene, the investigation picks up pace.

So officers who attended the scene were wearing body-worn cameras

and one of the things that was caught on body-worn is a witness

coming up to one of the officers and providing a name.

He'd seen him entering.

He provided the name Mark Widows.

This was corrected by Keith's partner and she told the officers

that the correct name was Mark Meadows.

What he told the officers at the time was that he'd seen Mark

Meadows' van parked out the front of the property,

so he hadn't seen Mark Meadows himself, but he'd seen his vehicle.

So, initially I went out to see the victim's partner and the family.

She and the children had been relocated to a nearby hotel.

She was obviously very upset.

She was trying to deal with looking after the children and trying to

work out what was going on.

It was a sort of fast-moving and emotional situation.

Louise, the partner, provides a crucial early breakthrough.

She had been at the Pepper Pot Pub, the previous evening to play bingo

and two people she knew were there, Mark Meadows and Travis Gorton.

She was quite drunk that evening

and when she came to leave the pub, Mark gave her a lift home.

And when she got home a short time later,

she became aware of something in the garden and someone telling her to

phone an ambulance and then came to find Keith on the floor in the

garden and performed CPR.

Now police have names, they need to act fast.

For a murder investigation, it really is a race against time.

That first hour after it's been reported to us is often referred to

as the golden hour. It's really important.

The sooner you get suspects into custody, the better, because you

maximise the evidence you're going to get from them.

You reduce any likelihood they're going to dispose of property or they

may be on the run.

Mark and his brother Travis were nominated as suspects for murder.

We had reason to believe both of them were in possession of knives

and had used those knives, so that immediately make them dangerous and

poses a risk to others.

Within an hour, John and the Special Ops arrest team are on the move.

So an arming authority was given to our armed response crews.

The addresses surrounding it, contained.

And effectively, they were called out of the address and arrested

at gunpoint.

A Thames Valley Police Armed Response Unit has been tasked

to apprehend two dangerous murder suspects.

Officers had got to them so quickly that one of them was barely out of

the shower.

Thames Valley Police have made two arrests for the murder of

40-year-old Keith Green.

The custody process is always really challenging.

They'll set a strategy around how they're going to approach

those interviews.

Mark, I think, was interviewed probably seven or eight times

over the course of the time he was in custody with us.

And that was a no-comment interview throughout and this may be over

simplistic, but if you haven't done it,

I think you'd be shouting from the rooftops that you hadn't done it.

And Travis gave this account where he said he'd got back into the van

after being at the pub and pretty much fallen asleep straight away.

He doesn't remember going to Keith's house.

He states he was asleep and when he woke up, he arrived at Mark's house.

Which is utter nonsense.

But we've got to disprove that.

When you have people in custody for murder,

there's a lot of pressure to make sure they don't walk out of the door

because if they do, then that creates all sorts of further issues.

With the two potential perps in custody for up to 24 hours...

..police are going through their homes and belongings.

We'll have the licensed search officers in very early and they'll

do their big search.

They get the information that they've got at the time, and know

roughly what they're looking for.

So for example, they'll have been looking for knives.

But as the investigation develops, they get fed more information,

just as we learn more, they learn it.

Having reviewed it, will go in and look for just those extra things

that might not have been found.

The searches seem to strike gold.

I took a phone call from the crime scene manager to say that we've

recovered a knife.

Just outside the property next to his van,

next to the passenger door was a knife in a grate in a storm drain.

So that was quite visible.

And then when they moved into the house,

they found a knife in a speaker.

So we say that Mark had taken the speaker apart,

unscrewed it and then hidden a knife, his trainers, which had blood

on them and then effectively put the speaker back together again.

There was evidence that they'd both taken a shower.

Again, we would say to get rid of the blood on them and their clothing

and some evidence that the washing machine had been on pretty recently.

There was a towel with blood on.

There was lots of clothing that they'd obviously worn that evening.

They were described as having blood on them.

Obviously we couldn't prove at that point it was Keith's,

but finding a knife with blood on and trainers with blood on,

it makes you think you've definitely got the right people at that point.

We did think it could be a breakthrough.

While suspicious, all the items need to be checked by

forensic specialists.

If linked to Meadows, it could make or break the case.

Keith's body also has a surprise for investigators.

When the ambulance crews were dealing with the deceased male,

they moved him and they found a mobile phone underneath him,

which we identified by sending it off to our digital forensic unit and

they did a download of the phone.

We were able to say that the phone next to Keith was Mark's,

which was a big step.

It transpired that in whatever had taken place, that the fight, the

assault, Mark Meadows had dropped his phone.

So his phone was there, underneath Keith's body,

which was really important evidence to place him there.

And it also gave a lot of his contact with various people.

We were able to look through that and see if there was any planning.

While the items discovered are forensicated,

the pathology report drops onto John Capp's desk.

The cause of death was a stab wound to the heart, which had pierced

Keith's heart.

The degree of force used was severe.

The fatal injury also broke a rib,

but there were in total eight stab wounds to his body.

The pathology report that comes through has information on the

knife wounds.

From the nature of a knife wound,

the way it cuts, it's actually quite difficult for them to get 100%

that a knife has caused a specific injury.

But what they were able to do is they were able to test the knives

and see if they would actually fit within those stab wounds.

And they were able to say on our report that one of the knives

would have been able to make all of the stab wounds, but the other

knife would have only been able to make a few of the stab wounds.

A picture of what seems to have happened the night before

Valentine's begins to emerge.

It's no love match.

What we understood to have happened was that Mark and Travis

had gained entry to the property, gone to the bottom of the garden

and effectively laid in wait for Keith, knowing full well that he

would walk down to the bottom of the garden.

And this was mid-February.

It was dark, cold, wet.

Keith would have no idea whatsoever that they were down there

and then they brutally attacked him with knives and left him for dead.

After three days in custody, police feel they have enough initial

evidence to charge the two suspects.

They were in custody in the very early hours of Monday the 14th and

we charged them both on Thursday the 17th.

It's then officers can get to work

and with the phones finally unlocked,

begin to wade through reams of data in the hopes of finding enough

evidence to connect the crime to the two men.

It takes weeks to unravel.

Phones are increasingly important in murder investigations.

They continually provide more and more information as time goes on.

I'm Portia Whiffin and I'm an intelligence analyst in Major Crime

at Thames Valley Police.

Phones are essentially like a computer now.

They hold everyone's information, so therefore they hold a wealth of

information, sometimes directly relating to an offence,

be that the planning or in the aftermath of an offence,

but also it gives a good picture as to the lifestyle of the individuals

whose phone that is.

So an intelligence analyst will look at things like cell site data,

information from a handset of a phone and pull that all together,

alongside things like the CCTV, to try and understand a timeline of

what has happened.

Because we had two suspects in custody already,

my priority was looking at where they were at the time of the murder.

So initially, we started with identifying phone numbers for those

individuals and looking at some cell site analysis.

One set of messages were a revelation.

They involved the dead man's partner, Louise.

We weren't expecting that and it was quite clear that they were in some

sort of relationship.

And those messages went back quite a significant period of time,

until at least the summer before the murder had taken place,

which was quite surprising and that was just what I could see, kind of,

immediately without delving too deep into the phone download.

So it was quite clear there was a relationship going on and we had to

consider whether she actually needed to be treated as a suspect in this

investigation, rather than a witness.

I was always concerned with her.

She was treated as a witness initially and that was the right

thing to do because we had no evidence to say she was involved.

But the dynamic had always been there between this love triangle

and that was something that she eventually told us,

was that she was having a relationship with Mark

and that Keith was aware of that and there was tension between them.

It's weeks of painstaking work, piecing it all together.

What we then found from other people's phones was the evidence

that Mark had been making plans to effectively get rid of Keith.

They just wanted rid and he hadn't taken any hints about leaving.

Also a priority when we were looking at that phone

was to look at any messaging between Mark and Travis.

We were able to identify some messages with Travis, where they

appeared to be planning a fight with Keith Green.

On the afternoon of the offence, prior to the offence taking place,

there was some messaging where Mark had said if Keith wouldn't leave,

he could make it so that he wouldn't come back.

And following those messages, he then messaged his brother,

a few minutes later, saying, "I'm in the mood to fight today."

And then there was a conversation between him and his brother

around the fact that Travis was also up for a fight.

But was it going to be a fight or an ambush?

So what we know has happened is a build-up of tension between Mark and

Keith, culminating in this kind of crescendo of incidents or feelings

from Mark Meadows, who was absolutely obsessed with her.

I strongly believe that he'd gone out that night with the intention

of drinking, which he did, building up the courage to do something

and had armed himself with a knife and was intent on killing Keith to

remove him from the equation.

Just over a month after the murder of Keith Green,

Thames Valley Major Crime Unit arrest his partner, Louise Grieve.

Murder investigations can change in scale quite rapidly.

And this one did.

It was a bit unusual that Keith's partner had become a suspect.

I'd never seen it happen like that.

She started off as the reporting party and she was being supported

by family liaison officers as a witness.

Suddenly, she's turned around and she's one of the suspects of

the investigation.

The fact that she was in a relationship with Keith and in a

relationship with Mark wasn't a surprise,

because she'd actually told us at the scene.

But the actual extent of the relationship was quite a surprise

when you looked at the phones.

It seemed clear she'd been playing Keith and Mark off against

each other.

So those messages led to her identification

as playing a central role in all of this, in her manipulation of others.

You've spent time building up trust with them, building up those lines

of communication and for them to be then a suspect,

that whole dynamic changes because they can no longer be approached in

the same way.

The victim's partner was arrested about a month after the incident

and it was then that the family were told that she'd been arrested on

suspicion of Keith's murder.

It's hard. It's a difficult conversation to have.

They weren't surprised that she was involved.

They were angry and they were, sort of, confused by the situation,

but I don't think they were surprised.

For us, we found that interesting in itself.

They'd been hearing these rumours, so I think they were shocked that

their worst fears had probably come true.

In this case, social media is an absolute nightmare.

It was actually one of our biggest challenges.

As quick as we were getting the information,

it was getting out there and people were reporting back to the family

before we were able, in minutes, everybody seemed to know everybody.

And so it was constantly this game of cat and mouse,

trying to be the first to deliver that information.

After weeks of investigation, police still need to understand

the bigger picture to present a coherent case to the CPS for court.

In this case, there was clearly some sort of premeditation and planning

that had gone into it and understanding the relationship

between Mark and Keith's partner and how it had developed over time

was really crucial.

Therefore, the timeline that I produced for this investigation

actually went back quite a long way,

to look at the times that they had been together

and previously broken up and got back together.

The dynamic of their relationship and how it developed,

because that was crucial to

her involvement and why he might

have committed the murder.

And there was other evidence found during the searches that added a

chill to the proceedings.

So on the coffee table in Mark Meadows' house, there was a note.

And on that note, it was his plan for the year.

One of those plans on there was to get together with Keith's partner

before Valentine's Day.

And this murder took place just before midnight on the 13th.

So a few minutes before Valentine's Day.

Silence in the custody suite is never helpful.

So Louise's role was more difficult to identify because a lot of that

was based on phone evidence and deletion of phone evidence as well.

So that one took a little bit more work to put together.

The phone work makes it look increasingly likely

the love triangle between Green, his partner Grieve.

and her boyfriend Meadows has played a part.

There's also messages on there where you're talking to Mark,

saying you wish to finish with Keith and you wish him to move out.

This story really goes back to 2021,

which is when Mark Meadows met Keith Green's partner

and that friendship initially was described as platonic.

It was just a friendship and then it slowly developed into

something more.

And by the summer of 2021, they were well and truly in the throes of

an affair.

And by September, the relationship between Keith Green and his partner

was really dysfunctional.

There was a moment that September where he comes back to the house

and discovers Mark Meadows in there and they have what can only

really be described as a bust up.

You did not wish to pursue a formal complaint and the matter was filed.

Alongside investigating the past through revealing text messages,

murder squad detectives focus on contemporaneous recordings by some

of the officers at the scene.

We have the benefit of watching the body-worn video.

It's interesting to look at because it's people's unfiltered reactions

and whilst it's not for me or anybody else to judge

how anybody reacts to grief or trauma, there was always concern

about her reaction to what had happened.

My opinion was she was somebody who could turn emotions on and off.

At one stage, she was breaking down in tears with the paramedics.

And then others, she seemed to be laughing and joking.

I think at one point she was captured humming or singing the

EastEnders theme tune out the window.

You kind of got the impression quite quickly that she enjoyed being the

centre of attention.

Such evasive behaviour triggers suspicion

but is very hard to use in court.

So the police continue their trawl of each location visited

by the suspects, for traces on CCTV.

As I'm building the sequence of events,

the CCTV team will provide me with a viewing log.

So we had CCTV from a number of different locations.

We had CCTV from the Pepper Pot Pub.

And from about 7pm that night, the 13th of February, Mark Travis and

others had been at the pub drinking.

Louise and Mark had basically been carrying on their

relationship there.

They were seen cuddling, kissing at various different times.

And all of this is while Keith is still back home with the kids and

none the wiser about what's going on.

So I would put the images from that into my sequence and fit them around

the messaging that was happening at the time.

At certain points you can see Keith's partner,

for example, outside on a phone.

Marry that up to see if there was any usage on the phone at the time.

And they left the pub just after 11 in Mark's van.

The van tells detectives another story.

Mark's van helpfully had a tracker in it,

so we were able to get that tracker data.

So I was able to look at the telematics and map it,

so we could see exactly where the vehicle for the suspect had been at

any point in that evening.

We tracked Mark's van back to Keith's home address.

We were able to marry up the telematics from the van with that

CCTV, to show that that was the only van travelling down the road at

the time.

There's CCTV on the street.

It showed the vehicle pulling up.

It was quite dark at that point,

so you could only really make out the vehicle clearly.

Everything else was quite difficult to make out.

And we were able to show the time that the engine was off and then

back on again.

It was a time of roughly 20 minutes and then the route that Mark takes

back to his home address is also shown.

While the route the suspects take is being mapped out,

the CCTV picture is frustratingly incomplete.

There should have been CCTV at the murder scene.

However, it appears that they unplugged the CCTV system.

You'd need to have a knowledge of the location of the site to be able

to turn it off.

Need to know where the box is for a start,

need to know where the power supply goes into the box.

Whoever had unplugged the CCTV had left behind a partial clue.

So in the shed, the CCTV was located quite high up.

On the floor was a bucket, which contained oil, and on top of the

bucket was a footprint.

And it appears that someone had stood on that bucket to turn off the

CCTV system and the footprint on there was linked back to Mark

Meadows and it was linked back to a trainer that someone had hidden in a

speaker, with a blood-covered knife and had blood on the actual trainer

itself, from Keith.

By now, some of the specialist departments had reported back

in full.

So in terms of forensic evidence, on the knife there was found to be

blood that came from Keith and on the handles of the knife.

There was also DNA, which looks like it came from both Travis and Mark.

Finding the knife with Keith's blood on and the DNA was on the handle is

quite incriminating.

But it wasn't just events on the evening itself the investigation was

interested in.

A witness came forward and notified us that Keith's partner and Mark

had actually done a trip up to Leeds.

Almost six months prior to the murder,

they'd attended a shop that sold knives up there.

So some of our officers were deployed up there and in that shop

they identified that a knife had been purchased.

We were also then later able to obtain the receipt for a blue

ghost knife.

And that knife was actually used to kill Keith.

The evidence is slowly mounting and there's a feeling of quiet

confidence in the team.

But then, from nowhere, the whole investigation feels like it's

been derailed.

The court trial coincided with the barrister strikes,

which was a logistical nightmare.

For any case like this, you can only hold people in custody for six

months generally, which is called a custody time limit.

Once that custody time limit runs out,

essentially, we don't have the power to keep anyone in custody.

So the trial was unable to start and there was no prospect of it

starting in September.

One of the options was the judge may release all of them on bail

and it's just not a position you want to be in as an SIO,

facing a real nightmare scenario

of murder defendants being out and about.

And that's what happened in this case.

This is a big news story for a local

paper like the Oxford Mail.

In a shock decision, the court orders the release of the defendants

for the murder of Keith Green.

So it's really unusual for defendants

in a murder case to be out on bail.

It's almost unheard of.

This was such a violent, horrific crime.

You know, he was brutally stabbed in his own home.

And then we're saying to the family that those people are just out there

living normal lives.

I mean, I never want to have to tell a family that again, because it was

very hard to deal with and devastating.

Really difficult conversations, but necessary conversations.

You've got the risk they pose to others.

These are people who have been charged with murder by use of

a knife.

A number of the witnesses contacted us in fear initially.

You worry that witnesses will not turn up because they've lost faith.

And the team did some brilliant work around finding witnesses

and give them confidence to give evidence.

So we had to put stuff in place to protect them and belie their fears

and their worries about it.

You can easily envisage a scenario where the whole thing just collapses

because if you don't have witnesses, then you're left with nothing.

A month late, the trial begins for the Valentine's Eve murder of

Keith Green.

And there's chaos in the courthouse.

every day, a struggle.

Usually you have defendants being brought to court from prison in a

prison van.

You see them in the dock and that's the limit of your contact with them.

It was just different because there was the suspects on the concourse

with us, and we had to be very careful with where they sat and what

we were saying, because they often sat outside the door of our rooms.

We had to manage all of that in the public arena at court,

with the family dynamic on top of that.

That's testament to what a brilliant job the team did, day in, day out.

Keeping the trial on track is a full-time job for the officers and

not without risk.

We then had to manage the family, attending court

and seeing the suspects coming to court themselves, freely,

walking around the courtroom building.

It was very challenging for me and Steph to navigate and make sure

that the family were kept away from that and not have to face them.

They didn't feel safe knowing that the people that had murdered their

loved one is right there.

It's fair to say there wasn't much sleep during that period.

As the trial plays out, there are more surprises in store.

There was this, like, strange frisson during the trial.

I remember the first time I saw the two brothers and I was kind of taken

aback because they couldn't have looked much more differently

to how they were when I'd last seen them,

six or so months earlier at the Magistrates' Court.

Mark Meadows had shaved his head.

And for a man who was known as Jesus, the man with the beard,

he'd got rid of it. Jesus had shaved his beard.

Throughout the trial, it didn't appear that they were taking it

seriously really.

They were very relaxed.

No remorse by any of them whatsoever.

And seeing their behaviour, which the jury didn't see,

but we did outside of court, laughing and joking.

We got reports from other witnesses that Mark and Louise were on the

train together and actually they were kissing on the train, which

unfortunately, was against their bail conditions.

So they weren't very careful of other people around them.

Just going about their normal lives, it appeared,

which was difficult for the family to see.

I vividly remember speaking to Keith Green's daughter

just before sentencing and talking to her about her recollections of

the trial, and for her, she saw a very, very different side to

those defendants.

She certainly felt they were laughing when the knives were being

passed around and she saw not a hint of remorse.

And then, perhaps one of the strangest moments ever

during a British criminal murder trial.

During the actual trial itself, in the dock,

Mark has gone up to Keith's partner and asked her to marry him.

I've never come across a proposal in a dock in a Crown Court before.

I don't quite know how to describe that, to be honest.

It's just staggering. They thought they were going to get away with it.

They were going to get found not guilty and they were making plans

for their new life.

Alongside the romantic interlude,

the jury listens to a lot of evidence,

but there's only one significant cross-examination.

Keith Green's partner was in the witness box for four days,

I think, which is a very long time to be cross-examined.

She certainly blamed other people for what had happened.

She didn't really seem to take any blame for herself.

Some of the evidence she gave showed that she was quite manipulative.

She didn't do herself any favours, giving the evidence that she did.

I remember her saying that she must be a magician if she was playing all

of these men against each other.

It was like playing tennis against a brick wall. Everything was hit back.

The judge later remarked that it appeared that she actually enjoyed

the attention from leading-on both men.

With Louise, Keith's partner, attempting to persuade the jury of

her innocence, the other evidence becomes ever more important.

During the trial, when Keith's family were in attendance,

I think there were things that came as a shock to them,

the extent of the planning of the murder and the deceit.

When you hear it step by step, come out in court, it's overwhelming

for families.

That realisation that actually that happened.

We identified messages where Mark implied they were ready to go

and this was going to be happening. They had a plan.

Pulling that together and showing all the phone calls around it

enabled us to show that this offence was likely premeditated.

I think there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Mark Meadows

and his stepbrother were guilty of murder,

but I think there is always a possibility

that Keith Green's partner, the woman who was playing, essentially,

two men off against each other,

couldn't be certain that it would end with the death of one of them.

The jury is then sent out to consider the evidence presented over

eight long weeks.

Most incriminating ultimately was probably the forensics,

getting Mark's phone next to Keith's body,

recovering both knives and the fact that they had blood on both of them

is really important.

This links those two and it links the addresses together, the clothing

and layered on top of that, you've got the digital evidence,

the phone downloads and also the CCTV movements.

All of us, every single one of the investigation team wanted to convict

Louise because of the central role that she played in it.

And the worry is that the jury will think there's not enough evidence

or because she hasn't physically played a part in it,

they won't understand the dynamic around murder and manslaughter.

The team hope they've made the case clear for the jurors.

You never know how long a jury are going to be out deliberating.

I've had it where it's a couple of hours.

I've had it where, in this case, it was seven or eight days.

So that sensation, that electricity that you get in a courtroom when

verdicts are read out, there's a strange energy in the courtroom.

And this murder trial was just like that.

So Mark Meadows, that was the first verdict to be read out, guilty on

two counts.

Murder and possession of the knife that killed Keith Green.

This case just kept on giving, really.

So there was a very strange moment that I've never really experienced,

certainly not in a murder trial,

where the foreman of the jury got the verdict on Travis Gorton wrong.

So, Travis Gorton, is he guilty or not guilty of murder? Not guilty.

And there was this sort of quiet hubbub in the jury box.

There was a kind of physical reaction of confusion.

And then they pronounced this guilty verdict, so, guilty of murder.

I remember him crying at that point. They were all stood up.

And I remember him crying in the dock because I think for a second or

two, he thought he was getting away with it.

It is brutal. It's absolutely brutal.

And for me, there was a slight sense of surprise with Louise's verdicts.

So, guilty of manslaughter.

A fourth defendant, who can't be named for legal reasons,

but who assisted by opening the gate,

is also found guilty of manslaughter.

Then the sentences are handed down.

So Mark was life sentence, which you always get for murder,

with a minimum term of 23 years.

Travis was, again, life term minimum of 17 years.

Keith's partner got found guilty of manslaughter

and she was sentenced to eight years.

I'm pleased that the jury decided that Louise was part of it,

because that was one of my worries that they wouldn't think that

Keith's partner had been part of the planning.

Getting the right result in court

means that the hard work has paid off,

that the family have got justice for their loved one.

I think for Louise Grieve, when she heard that verdict,

guilty of manslaughter, there was that final sinking in of what had

happened and just the sheer enormity of what she'd done.

The Valentine's murder case won't be forgotten in a hurry.

It does always stay with you.

It's my first murder case as an SIO.

And this one, for various reasons, wasn't straightforward.

I can't ask anything more than when the team are faced with that

kind of adversity and testing times that they stand up to it,

they face it down and it's all worthwhile.

I think we get that verdict and it's case closed and we move on.

But for the families, they're still living that every day.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media