RedHanded - In Conversation with Former DCI Colin Sutton

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

In this exciting bonus episode Hannah and Suruthi sit down with former DCI Colin Sutton - the Senior Investigating Officer who caught serial killer Levi Bellfield. They dig into the behind the scenes work that went into such and important investigation - but also find out a bit more. The Kray Twins even make a surprise appearance. You can buy Colin's book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07LGHWYFF/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Bonus Fridays with your red-handed fantasy life. I don't know where I was going with that. What we've got coming up for you here is an interview with Colin Sutton, the detective who put Levi Belfield behind bars. We had a great time talking to Colin.

We were in a proper studio and we actually ended up having some problems with it because of the bedroom DJs that we are. But it's mainly my voice that's the problem, but the rest of it is wonderful. So Ruthie and Colin sound fantastic. It's a really interesting interview. So please forgive us the slight sound issues that we had. They're honestly not that bad. Enjoy the interview and we'll see you next week.

Well, hello, red-handers. You're getting an extra episode this week. Aren't you lucky? As we promised yesterday in the Levi Belfield episode, we have a very special treat for you today because we are sat here with a man himself. Not Levi Belfield, but former DCI Colin Sutton. The man who, and he hates this, man-hunted Levi Belfield.

I would like to say like a round of applause, but that feels strange, so we'll just say welcome Colin. Thank you. I feel welcome.. Yeah welcome to this studio. We're in an actual studio this week not in boxes in our bedrooms as usual so we we drove quite away as did Colin. Colin beat us here because he's a detective and is better at finding places. Yeah we were worried because we were running late and we were like if Colin doesn't find it, then it destroys this good man's reputation because he couldn't find this random studio that we found for him

to come record in. Imagine if we had just made you come hang out in our bedrooms and record in the weird boxes we record in, Colin. In some ways after getting in here, I think I'd have preferred that. Well, hopefully, now that we're inside the studio, we can forget about the rather scariness outside.

Maybe it's just because we're so remote and we're not used to it. I feel like I'm just used to looking at people constantly. Thank you so much for giving us your time and for driving all the way out here. We're incredibly excited to be here. No, I am as well. You know, since we bumped into each other, as it were,

I've become a great fan of your work.'s very sweet thank you very much colin's even in our facebook group i saw i am how did you feel about the barrage of questions that um were amassed in about 24 hours after we posted that we were meeting you today i i kind of almost regret saying I'll go back and answer them because there are quite a few there. I mean, the ones like beer or gin, I can cope with that easily, but it's the tough stuff. How do you cope with this?

I don't know. I'm as weird as they are. I don't know. Well, we're going to have a deep dive, dig into that. Don't worry, because we have accumulated all of those many questions that

our listeners wrote down for you we'll just give you the really difficult ones that will make you uncomfortable i'm kidding and they're going to be asking really nice questions let's kick off we have some sort of levi belfield themed questions just because we've obviously done the research for that and we did the episode that went out yesterday for our listeners and just a couple of things sort of stood out to us immediately when we were for that and we did the episode that went out yesterday for our listeners and just a couple of things sort of stood out to us immediately when we were doing that and please feel free to elaborate on this anything else that you think is important and that people should know. Obviously one of the key things with this case is that Millie Dowler she wasn't immediately sort of

with the original group of victims that Levi Belfield was tried and convicted for. When did you first link Millie Dowler's murder with Levi Belfield? I think it's, to start with your question, really, she's not in the group because he had very defined, different sort of silos of offending. And one of those was trying to pick up women young women on the street from his car get in love i'll show you a good time and they say uh no thanks and then he gets out and whacks them and that that's kind of what we think that sort of crime but he also had this interest in young teenage girls um with his friends and the sort of mo there was that he would find one drug her and ring his mates up and say, yes, I've got one

and that girl would end up being gang raped. So they were kind of in different areas of his offending, I suppose. As to how we first linked it, well, the ironic thing is when we found Amelie de la Grange's property at Walton-on-Thames in the river, we were very, very keen to de-link it, to say this is nothing to do with Milly Dowler, because at that time we thought that was the case, and Surrey Police wanted that sort of distinction as well.

In fact, they sent along a pretty senior officer in uniform to be in the press conferences with us to say this is nothing to do with Milly Dowler, folks. What then happened was in November 2004, I was just sitting idly glancing through a huge stack of paper, which is Levi Belfield's intelligence file, and realised that he lived in Walton-on-Thames and looked at the map. I thought, God, you know, that's literally 20 yards away from the last place that she was seen. And there's no saying, you know, detectives don't like coincidences. Well, there's so much of a coincidence you've got this this guy here who we were starting to find out more and more dark really sort of scary stuff about and he's 20 yards away from when she goes missing so

that was kind of what you know first alerted me to maybe practically he did have something to do with it and why is it do you think because when we've sort of been talking about covering this case for a while people go oh yeah millie dow And why is it, do you think, because when we've sort of been talking about covering this case for a while, people go, oh yeah, Millie Dowler. Why is it that people remember her? Oh, I think because it's, you know, there are certain cases that are burned into people's memories and Millie Dowler's one of them because of the circumstances of her going missing, her age, you know, there was a huge campaign of publicity by Surrey Police. They did some very obvious and overt searching for months until she was found.

It was six months before her body was found. We always knew that. When we'd kind of linked it together and got Surrey in with us, I always knew that if we did link them up to the same trial, it would become the Millie Dowler trial. And while that was a little bit of a disservice to my victims, I didn't actually care. I just wanted him put away.

And that's the important thing. So it didn't matter. But the fact was that when we took that to the lawyers, Surrey weren't in so advanced a position as we were to go ahead with the trial. So that was sort of hived off and we had my trial, as it were. And then Surrey followed up a few years later. Okay and actually I'd love to pick up on something you said in that first point actually about how he had two very separate almost MOs or silos as you said of offending. How common is that to see an offender like Levi Belfield where when we sort of read about cases often it's that these guys have a very specific MO, they follow it, it's a fantasy to have sort of on one hand the blitz attacks that he commits on the streets with um sort of

slightly older girls and women and then i know he was um sort of involved with some of the pedophile ring stuff that you also headed up on was it operation i don't know how to pronounce it yadis yadis how common is that in terms of having two very different styles of um styles of attacking and two different mo's like that in my experience it's not very common uh and i think you know those who have have studied sort of academically this sort of thing much more than than have i would probably say the same thing you know we're used to offenders having a kind of a linear progression of offending and an escalating offending going up.

He wasn't linear. He was kind of... I drew a slide on one of the presentations I give where his head's in the middle, and despite that, there is room for other things on the slide, although it's quite a large head. And there are sort of like wagon wheel stripes coming off and all these different areas of offending wheel stripes coming off and that all these

different areas of offending that were discreet and and you know these were just two of them because he also had drug supply he'd do fraud he'd do enforcement for other people domestic violence and domestic rape uh you know awful awful things so he was just lawless he was just lawless. He was just, you know, I've never come across anybody who lived their entire life in such a way where they just had complete disrespect for not only the law, but for societal niceties and the rights of other people, especially women. Absolutely. And I think that abnormality, as you say,

with having two very different MO styles, makes it really interesting. Because then when you look at the idea that there was the probe in 2016, where they felt like a lot of people were saying because of the letters that he'd written from prison, that perhaps he'd been involved with other murders. But when you look at some of those people, I know it's the Russell murders with Lynn Russell and her daughter, that a lot of people think he was responsible for. She looks completely different to his other victims. Do you think there is a possibility then

for an even wider victim pool and higher numbers that we're just not even aware of because he was so erratic in his M.O. and victimology? I think in terms of out-and-out numbers of offences, then it's anybody's guess. I think we made as good a job as we could of making sure there weren't any outstanding murders that he might have committed.

The Russell murders, I've said many times, there is a statement from his ex-girlfriend who says she knows exactly where he was with her on that day, and if that statement is correct, if her recollection is correct, and I think it was her 25th birthday or something like that, so it's kind of something she might have remembered, then there's no way he could have committed them. Absent that, I understand why people say, yeah, he's a good suspect for the Russell murders, because it kind of fits in with the things that he would do.

And what do you think drove him to do the things he did? Like what was behind it all? No, I've really no idea. I've no idea. idea i mean he's never spoken to us he's never even you know acknowledged his guilt so we have no idea what drove him all we can say is that you know it appeared with the offenses like amelie delagrange marshall mcdonnell um kcd and and some others it was this business of of pulling up alongside, hello, love, I'll show you a good time, when they say fuck off quite rightly as they would. That's an affront to Levi Belfield.

How dare you? How dare you do that to me? And he gets out and there's the attack. That's kind of what we think was the motivation for those. But then, you know, what's the motivation for the other for the the offenses against the young girls sexual gratification i guess and control and power and all the other things that go into these things but i think you know essentially and it's a very sort of rudimentary um suggestion but he just did what he wanted to do he didn't care what the law

said he didn't care what norm said he just did what he wants to do he didn't care what the law said he didn't care what norm said he just did what he wants to do absolutely and one of the interesting things that you said when we actually heard you speak at that weird bar that we all met in hey man my dog had a great time she had the night of her life she's social media star now and um in there you said that uh when you sit opposite levi belfield he has a dead look in his eyes. Could you expand on sort of what it feels like to sit opposite? It's something that we talk a lot about true crime, we talk a lot about these offenders, but none of us and most of our listeners will never have sat across from an offender like that. What is that actually like?

No, it's I mean, just on the point about the eyes, you know, I mean, you have dark eyes, but I sit and look at them and there's a sparkle And there's a reflection And so forth You know But his are just cold black and matte There's just nothing there And he kind of has this

He has a number of sort of nervous tics He'll sort of wobble his head about a bit And he doesn't wobble it hard enough probably some would say But he kind of does this sort of thing And his eyes will blink occasionally but there's nothing there there's nothing you're not getting anything back from his face at all when you're sitting talking to him in terms of what it was like i mean in some ways it wasn't any different from any other offender that i've sat with maybe it was in the sense that quite often I've sat across the table from people and felt some sort of empathy or some sort of at least

understanding of why they did what they did because of the circumstances they were in or something like that. With him I had no idea, no understanding at all of how he could do what he did and the other thing I think that was unusual was that there was absolutely no sense of rapport with him. Even, you know, I went on and dealt with Delroy Grant, the night stalker of South East London and the rapist. And I had a conversation with him. He was kind of, he was a human being who just happened to have a sideline, a very sick, violent, horrible, twisted sideline. But nevertheless, he had a normal life. Belfield didn't have a normal life.

His whole life was built around upsetting others, harming others. Like his entire life was just in the pursuit of his criminal activities. I think it was just in the pursuit of whatever he felt he'd do next. Do you think he saw it as criminal or necessary? I think, I mean, there's certainly evidence

that after he committed the murders um for the met jobs as i say amelie and martian and so forth uh there's evidence that it affected him psychologically that he he he realized what he'd done and he's you know we had witnesses who said they were sitting in the car with him he said oh god you don't know what i've done you know i'm in fact i've i've fucked my life up and stuff like this. And he booked himself into the local sort of mental hospital or mental wing of the hospital a couple of times. So I think it did get to him at some point, but he kind of got over it quite quickly, too quickly.

There was no sense of like an inverted conscience or anything. He knew what he was doing was wrong. No, I don't think so. And I mean, the way that he treated Amelie's parents in the courtroom, as soon as the judge and the jury were out and it didn't matter, his butter wouldn't melt and the mouth

sort of facade dropped and he would be staring at them. He actually, you know, called them scum or something or, you know, actually abused them. And you sort of think, how dare you sort of think how dare you of all people say things like that and treat the parents of a girl that you killed who have acted in such a sort of dignified way for the entire the entire time because there is a lot

of that sort of irreverence for other people's feelings or for just the sanctity of human life throughout his long career in this but there is also that feeling that he seems to toy with people there's a lot of lying there's a lot of um half truths he never like you said he never admitted to anything even though he's been served a whole of life sentence what do you think is about that is it about the power of holding on to his his own kills for himself why do you think he doesn't just tell people what he did isn't there some satisfaction in that for him well i always thought it was something to do with his mother because his mother had this very sort of overbearing relationship with him and i often said you know once she dies and she was very ill

like 15 years ago and she only died relatively recently in the last year or so uh you know she's not there then you might find that he will come to terms with it but i mean he couldn't know if i told you this story but he when he was in prison he got um he got sent into segregation for a week uh for testing positive for cannabis they do sort of urine tests and because he used to ring his mother every day she's sort of thinking where's levi why hasn't he phoned me and when he eventually got back out of the sort of solitary or whatever they call it and phoned her up, she says, where have you been? Why haven't you phoned me?

And he said, oh, I got sent down the wing, mum, you know, or something, whatever. They said, oh, what was that for? He said, oh, fighting. Fighting. Somebody called me a pikey. So I had to, that's a good boy, you know, defend the honour of the family. He wouldn't. It's late 30s.

He wouldn't tell his mother that he'd been smoking a joint in prison. And he's a convicted murderer. He was on remand at this time. Oh, I see. Right, right, right. But that was the point. He's an absolutely grown man who couldn't say to his mum,

well, it's a bit boring in here. There was a bit of puff going around, so I had to stop. And I got caught. You know, he had to sort of twist it around so that she would see something good and something to be proud of in it so I thought that was I thought he might do something then he might say he hasn't I mean all he does is he just doubles down all the time and he he kind of comes up with harebrained things and he he's very good at manipulating the media and sort of you know if he's been out been out the headlines for a few months, he just likes to sort of do something or slot something in.

But it's kind of he, I suppose, was a narcissistic streak or was a narcissist. He had this inflated and wholly wrong opinion of himself. And he, you know, for example, when he was giving evidence in the trial, he was talking about his wheel clamping firm. And it sounded like he was kind of the chief exec of ICI or something, you know, that he was running this multi-million pound, multi-national business, rather than just employing half a dozen waifus and strays from the local council stake on a tenner a day, which is what it was. But he was kind of, you know, I was a businessman. I was running a business. Well, no, you weren't, Levi. You were going around extorting money out of people who happened to have left their car, you know, I was a businessman. I was running a business. No, you weren't, Levi. You were going around extorting money out of people

who happened to have left their car, you know, in someone's car park. Yeah. It does fit a lot with the narcissism of it because especially when you link it to the mother, the need for admiration from her, the fact that he can't let the shame associated with that. And maybe that's why he can't confess to these things. Yeah.

They're very boundary of my sort of psychological knowledge here but that that's that's kind of how i see it and from my experience of speaking with him yeah that's fascinating is there anything else you think obviously the levi belfield we watched um every single documentary that we could find about this i'm in most of them you are in most of them and um you know that was really fascinating to hear because in each of them they obviously asked different questions i felt like it's very comprehensively covered is there anything about levi belfield especially now sort of more recently like you said he's never out of the headlines i just googled levi belfield put it into the news tab in google and as of like last week there are

stories coming up yeah is there anything that hasn't been said about the levi belfield case um i'm not sure. I should have thought of this before I came to see you, shouldn't I? I don't think so. And I think really, you know, there must have been eight or nine documentaries done. There's been another, you know, the original book that Geoffrey Wansall wrote. There's the book I wrote. There's an awful lot there.

I think one of the things that's not, is yet to come, has not been explored fully, is his association with grooming gangs. Because there's no doubt that that existed. And in fact, Manhunt, the TV program and the book to a degree, has kind of helped with that because we've had these people coming forward. And I'm in touch now with somebody who used to work for the social services in that area and she's very keen to progress it. And, you know, there's no doubt that there were others involved in that and those others are still out there walking the streets absolutely so that's very much an ongoing thing is it still operation yadis uh no it isn't i've no idea what it's called now but i have been in touch with them how do you choose operation names i have always wanted to know this it's in the book you didn't read the book probably um oh no right myself okay what what you do is you you every year has for murder

investigation every year has a letter so that the year before that for example it was w we don't do x because there aren't enough places beginning with x it was w so i had operation Walthamstow, Whitchurch, Wormley, things like that. Yeah. The following year, 2004, it was a Y year. Well, there aren't that many places in the UK in the gazetteer beginning with Y. Yeovil. It's the only one I can think of. Yeovil, York, Yarm.

I don't know. Yeah. So there weren't enough. So they went to the American Geographic. And so that's how we end up with Yeddis. So kind of like storms and hurricanes similar idea? Yeah yeah yeah it is it is like that yeah I mean you know like the other one Dora Grant the night stalker that was Operation Minstead well Minstead's a lovely village on

the Yeddis and New Forest I'm sure they're delighted. And is it the homicide department that get towns and then a different department has because there's I've literally the only other operation name I can think of at the top of my head is Operation Fishpool, and that's nothing to do with towns. No, I think the Met thing is always towns. It depends. I mean, when I worked in West Yorkshire, I was head of intelligence up there,

and it was my responsibility to allocate these names. We had a database, and my predecessor or the DI there had been a sailor. So we had all these sailing terms, and we were running out of it. I thought, what do we do? And I know Hertfordshire police in the past did cakes which is okay but when you have operation donut and operation fairy it just doesn't work you see so so we're not doing that and i got my daughter's equine dictionary and we had all so we had like operate i don't know operation saddle and bits and reins and Stirrup and things like that. That's how that went in Yorkshire at the time in the 90s.

So it's just, the reason we do it is not, they're meant to be neutral and not to give any hint of what they're about. But the reason we do it is that it's kind of something snappy that sticks in people's minds. And they've all got a number on the home system. If you said to somebody, how are you going on operation 74059-19, they'd look at you blankly. That's true. That's what it's done. Well, thank you.

I'm sure a lot of our listeners probably didn't know that and if they want to know more about that, they should definitely read your book, Manhunt. There's a little bit in there about it, yeah. It's not a great exposition of operation naming, but it is mentioned how it's done. Well, thank you for that. And as you will have seen on the Facebook group, while people obviously want to know about the Levi Belfield case and the other cases that you've worked on,

people just kind of really want to know what it's like to be a homicide detective and get in your head a little bit. So we have compiled some of our favorite questions that just do a bit of a deep dive into the mind of a detective. If you would indulge us i'll do my very best okay this is this is the most important question i think this was the most repeat question we got do you watch any detective dramas and if so what is the best one almost all of them no really that is not the answer i was expecting yeah well i guess it's a kind of professional interest now because i kind of work on them as well so um my favorite all-time best television series i've ever was the wire fair yeah yeah and then there's a kind of a a second tier where i'd put the sopranos

and breaking bad and the shield okay okay yeah if you go into brit stuff, Prime Suspect was very good. Love Prime Suspect. Yeah. Of the current ones, I mean, you have to suspend disbelief sometimes. And, you know, working within that kind of niche

of the industry, I understand now that I'm working on one at the moment that's about surveillance. And there's limits to how many times I can say, no, we can't do that like that that just couldn't happen because you need to have the story and you're trying to

entertain you're trying to yeah i think when we made manhunt it was very different because i wanted that to be as authentic as possible because that was the tale i was trying to tell and i think we succeeded i think it was really done like that and good like that and um so yes i watch i watch most detective things um i love i love luther i love although i think it's a bit far-fetched i think luther might be my favorite how do you feel about detectives who is your favorite detective in a crime drama series that you've seen there's a good question probably nobody you've ever heard of actually i love jack reagan and

sweeney but that's before your time a long time before your time um presently i quite like um i quite like you i can't think of his blooming name what's his name what's the superintendent guy in uh line of duty oh god ted no the irish guy yeah ted i don't remember what his surname is like him i like him i loved oh this is gonna sound really bad i actually really loved life on mars i was gonna say life on mars and in some ways i preferred ashes to ashes because it was the 80s vibe it was when i started it was the music and things like that yeah so so yeah there's lots of them i i watch most of them and some of them I say are better than others. needed to stick really true to what it was but then when it you understand when it is a drama and it is fictional it's there to entertain how do you then feel about tv adaptations of major

true crime cases so it's based on reality those victims some of them may still be alive or their families how do you feel about them being turned into drama series i think it's a legitimate way of telling the story it's no different to a documentary or to a podcast if i dare say you know you it's i don't think in in making us making manhunt or manhunt 2 or or white house farm or the any of these i don't think there's you know it's another way of telling a story and like it or not people are interested in these stories and while people are interested in these stories and while people are interested in those stories then people will make drama series and documentaries and podcasts

about them yeah and all three of us will still have jobs yeah absolutely yeah you know i think it needs to be done sensitively i think it needs to be done in the way that we did it whereby we we speak not only to the victims but also to the the police officers and the other people that are involved in it and all of them and say look this is what we're doing uh you get a mention you get quite a nice mention but if you don't want your name in there we'll make something up and what we did in in manhunt and we'll do it again in a second that we are doing again in the second season is we create a composite character so in the first one there was a a young dashing rather good-looking di there called chris summers i think was the name we gave him who was the one who was always

moaning at colin oh god it's really weird writing that because i have to refer to myself in the third person when we're doing it it's a bit but yeah he was always the one moaning and making the silly suggestions everything that he said or did was done or said by somebody but so we didn't have the problem of making people look a bit sort of antsy. We just made this composite character and then nobody's feelings hurt. So, yeah, we tried. We tried really hard. We try really hard to do it in a way. And I think we really succeeded.

I mean, there were no car chases. There were no fights. There were no gunshots. It was it was paced. I mean, Ed Whitmore is a genius, I think, with the writing. And he just paces things. And we just shuffle things around. I mean, without giving too much away, the third episode,

we've got four episodes for the next one, and we've just finished the first completed draft of the third episode. And there's a piece in there which is actually something that I did that's a really good piece of television, I think. It's quite a good piece of, it's not exciting, but it's sort of tense. And Ed sort of said, it would be much better to give that to somebody else. And when I looked at it, I thought, God, it's obvious, really. Yes, that makes the story run so much better if I don't do that.

How did you feel about that? I don't mind. We're creating something, aren't we? I'm not doing it as a, you know, look at Colin, look how great Colin is. I'm doing it to tell a story as to how things are solved. You know, I said for the first one, I wanted to kind of inspire young officers. And I've had that, you know, I've had the people young. I want to be an SIO one day.

And I'd really, you know, all that sort of stuff. The second one, in some ways, the story is, I think, more compelling than Levi Belfield. With the proviso that nobody dies, or nobody dies directly as a result of what happens. But there are an awful lot of old, mostly ladies, but some men between the ages of 68 and 93, and I'm talking dozens, who were victimised by this man. And yet, if you're outside London at the time,

nobody really knows that much about it. And it's a terrible story of abuse. And somehow it was able to go on for 17 years. And, you know, I think it's a great story. We'll see. We'll see. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near LA in 1983,

there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of We'll be right back. episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness

and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts do you have a case that was just incredibly difficult the work wise we were talking in the car on the way here what was the longest time you ever had to stay awake investigating okay oh um funnily enough that's one of the ones that i'm one of the ones i've written up for this this other series I was talking to you about. It was Easter 2008, and we picked up a job at about 10 o'clock on Good Friday.

It's a lady called Crystal Hart, who was 22. She was pregnant. She was shot on her doorstep in Battersea one Good Friday morning, just by her neighbor's boyfriend, because they'd all fallen out, basically. And he wants to impress his girlfriend, so he went and shot her. Google it. It's Crystal with a K, Hart, H--a-r-t and we were just looking for him we knew who it was we were trying to find him we're trying to find trying to find him and i was out i did get home i got home at half past six and i had to pick joe brunt up again at half past seven at stains which was half an hour journey so there was no point in going to Dutton and the Doze in the chair for 10 minutes.

And I did another whole day. So I guess it's probably, I was probably up and awake for 40 odd hours that day. Wow. But yeah, I mean, you kind of got used to it. I still do sort of silly things. I do this car rally now and I don't, you know, I stay awake all night doing that.

It doesn't bother me. I'm just, I'm okay. I think there's a line actually in episode three of Madhunt 2 where my then wife says to me, even Margaret Thatcher had three hours a night or something, you know. Oh, wow. Well, you know, all of these TV dramas, if they do anything in terms of, obviously they have to create some fallacies in the storytelling. But if they do show one thing, it is how incredibly difficult the job of a detective is in terms of stress and strain and loss of sleep.

But is there, having worked so hard and obviously getting so emotionally caught up in these cases, I assume, is there a case for you in your career that really stands out? They often say, you know, the cliches like there's always a case for every detective that stays with them which is it for you oh in in terms of the amount of work and the difficulty of doing it would be bellfield but some of the cases where the victims just the circumstances were just so bloody avoidable and so senseless i think yeah there's some some of the the younger victims. The very first murder I did once I came back down south, a guy called Christopher Donovan,

I mean, it was just so utterly senseless. There's him and his brother and a friend, and they're walking along, and they've got a bit of P-Works in a pizza shop, and they've got some pizza, I think, and we're going home for a can of beer, and they're singing Champagne Supernova, and there's a load of drunken, stroke, speed-laden kids

coming from a party, same sort of age, and they have a bit of an argument. It's a Saturday night, and Christopher ends up being kicked to death. And he was 18, and you just think, you know, this is... The sad thing about it was, is we convicted three young men of his murder as well, and actually it's four lives that have gone. But I mean, the kind of postscript to that is that Chris's parents, Ray and Vi,

formed a trust in his name and deal with restorative justice and try to promote that in prisons and now in schools. And they've actually turned other kids' lives around and I'm still in touch with them. And Christopher was murdered in 2001 i think it was um but they've they've done you know they've done so much good work in his name since then and they're they're just the most amazing people because they've met the three

murderers have now been released from prison and they've met them all and sat down and said look we forgive you get on with your life you've still got it that's incredible i'd never thought of it in the in the way that you just said in that it was four four lives that were gone because they they went to prison for so long if you got like there was a 15 year old he was 16 months convicted a 17 year old 20 year old who were all convicted of murder you know and while they didn't get the longest sentences um and they're now all out again there's a savage black spot to have on your record isn't it yes yeah you know so the way that that will affect their lives and the way they affected their parents who you know and they're just i sat one of them the 16 year old he was he was wanting to go into the army at 17 when he was convicted

and i just happened to sit next to his father um in a traffic queue on the a3 one day driving home when i was in the met and i looked i wrote you and he wound the window down he was good as gold and i said oh how i won't say the name but i said how's your son I know you. And he wound the window down. He was good as gold. And I said, oh, how, I won't say the name, but I said, how's your son? You know, he says, oh, he's okay. He says he's in prison at this time. He's bearing up. He says, could be worse.

He could be in Afghanistan, couldn't he? You know, and sort of smiled at me. But you kind of look at that, how the parents of the suspects, when you've got these young kids involved in murder. And I used to do something going around to schools to try and tell kids about the dangers of joint enterprise you probably heard about joint enterprise murder and you know

the fact that if you're out with your mates and one of them pulls a knife and stabs something you're involved in the fighting you can end up going to prison and your life is gone joint enterprise is really interesting and what some people think you know controversial thing there's been some cases what do you think of it in terms of i think it's i think it's uh i don't think it's it should be abolished i think you need to have that facility in the law but i think the courts have gradually kind of made reasonably sensible decisions about kind of trying to limit it um you know i think you've got to have if you if you know that you're going out for looking for trouble you're going out to beat someone up and he dies then you're fair game aren't you you knew why you were there even if

you weren't the one who did the stabbing but if you're going out for a fist fight and somebody pulls out a gun you think shit i didn't know you had that you know and you talked about you know sort of these cases that have stuck with you that you worked on or that you were involved with. Is there an unsolved case that sticks in your mind, whether you worked on it or not? Yeah, Jack the Ripper. Sorry, Colin, you've got to go now. No, not at all. There are two, really.

There are two. One is one case which has absolutely fascinated me, which obviously didn't work out because it's an American case. He's D.B. Cooper. I love D.B. Cooper and I'd just lap it up. But it's just a real mystery. But more seriously, I think, it's no surprise. I don't suppose it would be a surprise to anyone.

I would love to see the Madeleine McCann case solved. And I'm still very frustrated, as are lots of people, that I don't think the reinvestigation in inverted commas has been what it could have been. No. Dare we ask you your thoughts on the Madeleine McCann case? From what I do know, and from what I've read and what I've seen, I'm not convinced that we know what happened. And I think assumptions are made. And those assumptions were made and influenced Operation Grange,

which is the Scotland Yard investigation. And I don't think those assumptions should have been made. Somebody once asked me, how do you do this? How do you do cold cases? And I'd never written this down, but I kind of, if you imagine like a mind map or a flow chart with nodes, you kind of have to go back to the last node where you know something happened.

And sometimes you can go down a path off of that and it comes to a dead end and you have to go back to that node. So one of the ways of looking at cold cases is to look at that dead end and say, if I can unblock that, then does that open up all sorts of other paths for us probably works better visually than in a podcast actually but there we go but i think that's that's kind of kind of the thing with with madeline mccann is i'm not sure that they went back to the node they should have gone back to i think they started halfway along and how much do you

think gut instinct comes into play versus ever like is there a balance between the two or is there one that you will you trust your gut over, obviously not over evidence, but over procedure? To a degree. I mean, to a degree, if I were asked to describe what I did, I suppose I'd say I kind of, I understood people. I understood what people did and how people thought and what they did next. And it's kind of unraveling that that's often the key to these things. So is that an instinct? I suppose it is to a degree i mean it's a good example isn't it in the in the um in the belfield case when we actually got some false information as it turned out from the mobile

phone company as to where um amelie's phone had last switched off and when i looked at the map i said no it won't be there it'll be there uh i'm going to put the divers in the river there and my intelligence person that was working with me says no no that's not where it is it's over here it can't be you can't get there there's no access it can't be there it must be here and i was stubborn i think it's probably but stubborn and right but but stubborn and right it's great to be stubborn right isn't it stubborn and wrong not so great it doesn't do so many favors for you um so yeah there's there's there's a bit of gut instinct i mean there's if i say SIOs you know what that means Senior Investigating Officers, people who lead homicide investigations

in England, Scotland, UK SIOs fall into various categories and some of those are there because they want to get the t-shirt because it's a good t-shirt to show when they go for a promotion board some are there because they quite like the idea of it and do it to the best of their ability as they think it should be done

and some do it because it's kind of a passion and they get involved with it and do it to the best of their ability as they think it should be done and some do it because it's kind of a passion and they get involved with it and do it for too long like i did maybe but the trouble is that there is a murder manual it does exist it's a it's a very thick sort of loose leaf book like that and it's very easy to go through that and say right we need to do its first day what does it say you should consider okay consider cctv search consider cell phone dump consider and there's a list of things you should do and in some ways if you do all those you'll be fine but you'll get so bogged down it will take so bloody long that what you need to be able to do is say actually we don't need that in this case we don't need that when

we can go straight to that and and sometimes people say talk about decision making in in murder investigations and i will always say the big decisions are not to do something rather than the decisions to do something very often. And they're the ones you write reams about because you think you might have to explain them at the inevitable public inquiry or something. And speaking of procedure and speaking of this murder book, throughout your career using that manual, conducting multiple homicide investigations, if there was one procedure that is in that book that you guys are taught that you could change in this country, what would that be?

Do you know, I think, and the changes around the law that I'd quite like to make, it's not so much in the murder procedures, the procedures are there, but I say the change I'd make is a big red warning on the front saying you don't really have to do every paragraph okay um but but um law law wise I I get I used to get frustrated with things that evidence that we'd found good evidence that was excluded because it was prejudicial and I'm kind of got you know and I read law and I've done jurisprudence and that sort of thing and I sort of have an idea about these things. But is there an objective truth?

Is there, you know, is there a real truth about anything? Answer to me, yes. So if we actually find something and it's true, why shouldn't the jury be allowed to see it? I'll give you an example. There's this, you know, we didn't do it. Oh, we did do it. Yes, we did do it in Manhunt. There's a scene in Manhunt from the TV and in the book the book where belfield is on surveillance 24 7 before he's arrested and he's

out with a friend in like a tow truck and they're in uxbridge and there's two 14 year old girls cousins who are standing at a bus stop and belfield gets out and he's oh you look nice and you know i are you a virgin i like virgins and all this sort of thing and they're kind of being it's quite a tense scene in the tv because they're being watched by the surveillance and i think god if he drags them into that van we're off you know we need to do something and then a bus comes along and they get on the bus and he calls them slags and something gets and drives away and what happened was the surveillance team did the right thing and somebody peeled off went with the bus when the girls got off they took their name dress said we want to come speak to you about that and we had statements from them

that wasn't allowed in evidence so we've got a man who we are saying our case is that he uses bus stops and buses as his hunting ground to pick up women and then to murder them if they turn his advances down and we've got evidence of him saying pretty foul things to 14 year olds trying to pick them up at a bus stop and we can't let the jury know that. What made that prejudicial? Why couldn't you share that? I think, do you know, the judge wanted, I mean, she was wonderful, the judge in the case, and she wanted to make sure it was appeal-proof.

She wanted to make sure that if we convinced him, it stuck, which is fine, it's her job. Yeah. There was an absolute blind panic at any time in that trial if there was the slightest hint of linking Levi Belfield with Millie Downer. I see. And I think because she went missing around a bus stop and she was that age. When we selected the jury, you had like 120 odd people in to pick the jury from. in Surrey or Middlesex and you or your partner or spouse or son or daughter or father or mother

or anybody else had ever worked for Surrey Police or the Met Police or Group 4 prisoner driving about people, then you weren't allowed to be on the jury. And that was all about stopping this leakage of the Millie Dowler case into it because they thought that would just be so prejudicial. So the point was that it was as early as the Marsha Amelie trials that people already had it linked to Millie Dowler, but just not enough evidence. And they didn't want to scupper the conviction, basically. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd known since, say, 2004. And Surrey had been working on it eventually.

We had a little bit of a problem getting them to take it seriously, but they did eventually. My father was a cop as well in the 50s and 60s. You've got three generations of coppers. Four out of five. Wow. My grandfather's, my step-grandfather, who was invalided out of the Met in 1921 because he got run over by a horse-drawn tram

outside Tottenham Police Station. I think he's saying, listen, I've got the darkest, weirdest sense of humour you could ever come across, so don't be afraid. I'll tell you a story about that in a minute. Actually, it might be an answer to a question. But yeah, so, you know, we sit down, sort of family occasions,

and you've got Dad swinging the lamp, it's known as in the police, sort of telling war stories, swinging the lamp. You've got Dad, and then me, and Joe. I said, for God's sake, how could you? Did that really happen? Yeah, that really happened. There is absolutely no doubt that the kind of culture

has moved an awful long way over the last 30 40 years well you've got to tell us now what's your best lamp swinger oh i've got my best story do you know the one that i come up it's very slightly long but you're quite like ah ready it involves a craze so that's quite good one of the craze now i have to remember which one it is that got murdered for the one that got murdered first was Reggie. Not murdered. The one that died first was Reggie. And he was buried in Chingford. And I was the crime manager at Chingford at that time. And my superintendent came down to me and said,

should we go to the funeral? So I said, well, I can borrow a black tie, but I'll just put some dark glasses on your raincoat. You'll be like a ghost there. And we were. So we went to sort of out the back of the funeral. And there was the whole kind of panoply of London underworld and bits of theatre and bits of everything were there at the funeral. And there was the whole kind of panoply of London underworld and bits of theatre and bits of everything

were there at this funeral. And when we finished, Charlie Cray, who was one of the, I think he was the older brother or younger brother, I don't know. Anyway, he's a brother, came up to us and this was, yeah, they're old Bill, they're old Bill. Yeah, officers, you see. So we took our glasses off.

And like always happens, she was more senior in rank to me, but he spoke to me because he's old school and I must be in charge because I'm a man. She couldn't possibly be, could she? You know, that's just the word. I'm sure you know all about the world being like that. So I said, yes, what can I do for you? And I knew who he was.

Mr. Clay says, someone's stolen one of the floral tributes. So I said, what? He says, and I won't say who it was, but it was a celebrity floral tribute. He said, there's an Irish fella who's a grave digger, and I saw him go away with it. So my superintendent says to me, take the details, put it in the crime book. So I get back, and I've got a very sensible old DS to investigate it. And I said, can you have a look at this, because it won't go away, will it? So he went and arrested the grave digger.

And he sat him down in the room, much like this, and said, right then, Mr. whatever his name was, it's been alleged you've been arrested for stealing a floral tribute from the gravesite. I can't cope with this. I told you it was long, but it's quite, I don't understand. So he says, he had no comment to it. Just no comment to the whole interview. And we thought, well, you know, why did he not? So Dia switches all the tapes off he said right

then mr o'flaherty this is the end of the interview he said i can't prove you stole this so we'll treat it in the met police the way we do we'll treat this as a civil dispute and the way we deal with that is this is mr cray's name and address and i'll be doing new york's thank you you're free to go the floral tribute ended up on the doorstep of The Undertaker's The Next Movie. Yeah. It goes on, but I won't go on for that. There is a punch. There's a second phase to it, but I won't do that now.

Do that next time. That's amazing. Wow. I mean, yeah, if somebody was going to give my name and address to the surviving Crow brother, I'd give back his flowers too. So you mentioned that you watched quite a lot of

the detective drama, well, all of them. Did you watch Don't Fuck With Cats? I loved it. Did you really? And not only did I love it, I think it's a really

powerful idea. It shows how powerful amateur web detectives, web sleuths, whatever you want to call them, could be. And I think for law enforcement

it probably is a bit of a wake up because because they'll say hang on you didn't treat you didn't take these people seriously at all did you and look they were right they they kind of done it well yeah i can imagine it's quite easy to sort of write people off as a keyboard warrior yeah how would you even approach deciding whether because you know everyone thinks if they google their symptoms that they've got a medical degree these days so how it must be similar i suppose in some ways in the police how would you know to take an internet sleuth seriously or whether they were just uh the sensible way of saying it would be well you look at it like it's just another form of communication so it's just like another you know when you used

to get people phoning up now you're getting people from looking at stuff on the internet and they're saying i've seen this i've seen it on the internet and and there's kind of this culture shock or shift you have to take into account that there are two worlds now there's this real world we're sitting in and there's that one in the cloud and in the ether that people inhabit and actually information from that can be just as useful so yeah and i think by and large police forces certainly in this country are trying to trying to get on with that but i mean do do you know about the genealogists solving cases in the US? Yeah, the Bear Bricks. There's a number of them.

But yeah, I'm actively trying to get certain British police officers that I know to let their force get involved in trying to do something. Because the problem is that everything is public access in the USA, and it's relatively easy to do. But the great thing I love about that is that the people that are solving it are like middle-aged women who spend all their time doing family trees because they've got the skills that are needed to use that information. And so the police departments over there are getting e-mails saying,

you want to look at these half-dozen people for that outstanding murder or that outstanding murder. Where did that come from? But then when they look into it, it's the investigation is sound. So, yeah, so don't fuck with cats. Binged it, just did it all in one go. We both did. Yeah.

Again, you surprised me, Colin. I thought you would be like, these wet sleuths, they need to chill out. What are they doing? No, it's great. You have to be open. You have to be open to it, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

You've got to be open to the way things change. I guess linked to that, maybe a few years ago, we would have seen rise of like what people called like the csi effect when people jurors juries uh the general public went from not understanding what the hell dna was to knowing exactly what they needed to to a cover up their crimes but also b we were seeing a rise of in courtrooms we didn't have any forensics yeah if you didn't have forensics yeah that was what we thought on on belfield we didn't have any forensics. Yeah, if you didn't have forensics. Yeah, that was what we thought on Belfield. We didn't have it. And a jury would have been sitting there, there'd have been DNA.

Why haven't they got DNA? I mean, bound to have left DNA. Why haven't they? If it was him, it'd have been DNA. Yeah, you can just see these conversations going on. What's been the impact of even more now, people being more criminally savvy or forensically savvy,

or at least thinking they are, what's been the impact of witnesses, jurors and potential criminals being that way? Do you have to move with them? And as I said earlier, you know, people in the police service now are of the same generation of people who are thinking these things and doing these things. So there's something there, you know. I've heard stories of very young in this service. My son said, oh, I found this missing kid.

And I said, oh said how did you do that and he said well his parents knew his password so i did uh find my iphone and we went and found where he was okay that's that's not rocket science at all but it's something you know it's it's adapting to what you see around you and what society is doing i'm more concerned with the fact that csi has i say made this expectation of scientific evidence amongst jurors. And so you actually have to physically, explicitly explain to them why you haven't got it, if you haven't. There's that.

And the other thing, which I think is shameful, but we're straying off onto a whole different shameful subject, is that we are churning out thousands and thousands of graduates in forensic science every year. There are 43 police forces. I don't know what that means as forensic science every year there are 43 police forces i don't know what that means as to how many people there are doing csi investigation but it ain't thousands and thousands a year and where do these people go what do they do with them they end up as true crime podcasters unfortunately did you say what you did i did anthropology which

is uh almost as you know that's right there's i did economics which had absolutely nothing to do with anything my wife did economics for msc and economic msc yeah same we've been talking about trying to do a podcast that people fall asleep to and maybe it's economics with sruti yeah i've got lots of thoughts on brexit i won't bring it into here we've got enough horrible things to talk about with um all these murderers and we understand that you've been listening to our work and And that the Enfield Poltergeist case was one that you listened to, which have you ever encountered anything paranormal on one of your crime

scenes? I don't think so, no. No, I listened to, I've no real interest in the paranormal, other than that particular case, because I went to school, the primary school, right opposite where the house is. I was born within half a mile of there in Enfield. So I kind of know the story and know the place.

No, I've not. The only paranormal thing that really we came across in the police was generally people dressing up in sheets in the mortuary and things like that to frighten new officers. That goes on. Oh, my God my god went on it probably doesn't now because you'd probably you know yeah that that was quite common you'd said the probationer to go do something with a sudden death at the mortuary and somebody else would

climb in that's and then of course there's a double bluff where you send somebody to do that but he doesn't know you've already put someone next and so he's lying there waiting for the probation and somebody taps him on the shoulder. I hope they still do it these days. I don't know that they do, but I hope they do. Yeah, I feel like they do. I feel like it's probably stepped itself up to another level if it's our generation involved. But it does make me think,

I think I might have told the story on the podcast before, but you said that you were in the Hertfordshire Constabulary. Is that right, for a while? No, I lived in Hertfordshire. You lived in Hertfordshire, okay. I don't remember, is Amptill in Hertfordshire Constabulary. Is that right? For a while? No, I lived in Hertfordshire. You lived in Hertfordshire. Okay. I don't remember. Is Amptill in Hertfordshire or in Buckinghamshire? It's in Bedfordshire. It's in Bedfordshire. That's the one.

Where's that? Have you ever heard of that place? Clothpill in Amptill? Amptill. Yes, I have heard of it. Remember when we were teenagers, we used to drive up there quite a lot and do a lot of weird, creepy things. Because say it's obviously like an old abandoned leper colony that's a church that's got no roof on it there's all sorts of weird things like people digging up the bodies to do weird things with so they took all the headstones out

and put them around the outside every halloween the police would be there because we would all go up there and they would never let anyone onto the site at halloween and i felt so sorry for the officers who had to come up there every Halloween and stand at the top of that mantra. I had my very first, I said I worked in Yorkshire. When I came back south, the vet didn't have space for me. I worked for two years in Surrey and it wasn't very busy. I didn't really like it.

The very first time I got called out to Surrey, I got a phone call and said, Mr. Sutton, we've got some human remains found. I said, oh, that sounds exciting. Where's that? They said, in the churchyard. I said, what? As in a cemetery graveyard. Yes, that's right.

What do you expect? It was one of these, you know, these big sort of, you have these big sort of stone boxes on top of graves, sort of ornate old Victorian graves. It's one of those. And actually the coffin's underneath, or should be. And it cracked at the top, and the vicar had gone out to push it back. And he was a really nice chap.

He was an ex-RAF chaplain or something. He was a really, really good guy. He pushed it, and he realized he could see a bone. So he pulled this piece of broken stone off. There's lots of, oh, God. And of course, it's a good place to dump things, I suppose, wouldn't it be? Yeah. Yeah?

So I get called out there. I get the local inspector who is a lovely lady who's about five foot two and we then get and then yeah and we then get the the scenes of crime lady who's about five foot one and none of them can reach so poor old sio is the one with his head in this thing and i'm chucking bones out like like i'm a dog sort of digging you know to them and it was when i got the third eye socket that I thought there's something gone wrong here they think these are all more than 100 years old these bones they did some oh okay did some uh excavations to to extend the church or something and obviously the workers had uncovered some

remains and they should have told the vicar so that he could go and put them in and say a few words but they just would just move this stone and chuck them in here because i get called out how often do exclamations happen as part of investigations i haven't you know i've never they're not very common i've never i've done the paperwork for one but i've never actually um attended it and it was quite difficult because it was in scotland and there's different law from england scotland this this lad had been buried in Scotland. They're not very common and they're also not very pleasant, so I understand, or at least the examination afterwards. Because with the best will in the world,

even if you've got the super deluxe teak hermetically sealed version rather than the kind of green wicker, they're not watertight and things happen and it's just not pleasant, apparently. I bet. Yeah. they're exhuming the summerton man this year aren't they are are they yeah they finally got the permission to exhume him so maybe watch this space um we'll have some answers on who who he was and what was going on with that that's one of my like favorite cases in like terms of just absolute bizarreness um actually speaking of that is there like a historical case so obviously you said madeline

mccann is the one that's like a cold case that you're interested in but like a historical case that if you could go back and sort of investigate with modern techniques to get the answer which one sort of uh takes your fancy yeah i don't know i I don't know. I did history A-level, but I never did anything before 1865, even for O-level or A-level. It was all modern stuff. I don't know. I've never really thought about that.

I'm sorry. I've let you down. I've let you down. I'll have to think about that. I'll put it on the Facebook group. Yes, exactly. They can wait for it. They can wait for it.

They can wait for that one. Do you have anything to plug colin before we get you get back to your your friday afternoon uh really yeah yeah of course i've got loads of things to plug um the next manhunt series manhunt 2 as it's imaginatively titled i don't think it's been officially announced by itV yet, but there's enough sort of rumour about it that I can say. It's likely to be, almost certainly will be, next January. I say we've just finished writing the third episode. Well, not finished, but we've just completed the first draft of the third episode,

so there's another one to do. We've got four hours this time, and that's hopefully going to be filming in the summer. And there will be a book that will come out by December or January about the same time as well, which, like Manhunt 1, will be what the TV programme has been based upon, but it will be a lot more detailed and a lot more sort of...

Can you tell us the case it's based on? Yeah, it's based on the case of a guy called Delroy Grant. It was known very much as either Operation Minstead or The Night Stalker. And basically it's a case where there was a rape of an old lady in her home in South East London in 1992 then another one that was DNA matched in 1998 and it went on and it went on and it went on and it went on

and then when I started looking at it and what we won't do in the TV show but will be in the book is that I think it started a long time before then and I think he may have had an accomplice as well at some point in it so it becomes quite an interesting story. So that's that I am doing a The Real Manhunter

which is going to be a series I think on Sky Crime Channel which essentially are 10 programs about cases that I did I mean I did quite a lot over the years because i did it for longer than most people do and too long really uh so it's it's a me sort of telling tales about other cases that i've done them cases that you unless you lived in the area you probably don't know about but some of them have have got real sort of a good not

necessarily good stories about the investigation sometimes it was an open and shut case but about the background of the people involved and about how it happened and took place so yeah i'm doing that and and that's actually been quite good fun but it's been really hard work uh and and then i've actually got a contract for another book as well which i've started on but will be after that um which is about three murders in the 1970s in london think are linked and it might even be that there's somebody still alive that did it so we'll look at that but that will be later in the year then that will probably won't come out till after the after next year after the other book yeah so I'm quite busy but I mean it's not like working is You know, you must know that from not having a real job.

Yes, Colin, I am quite aware. Hey, we have a facade to maintain. Very hardworking podcasters. I'm sure you are. I mean, it's just a really good example of how your life can go in really odd ways if you hold your nose and jump in and take the plunge. But yeah, it's been great. And I meet people like you and do fun things like this and it's much more fun doing this than sitting writing i have to say i'm glad we got you out of it for the afternoon exactly and we're so we honestly thank you so much for taking the time

out of your busy writing producing directing or singing or dancing, Colin Sutton, it sounds like. I know, I know. Dog walking. Exactly. Well, don't we all. Career to come. And yeah, spend a couple of hours with us on this Friday afternoon and tell us all about all these exciting things. We like, honestly, please, you're welcome back anytime. Come tell us more.

Come tell us more about your, what was it? Flagships? Lamp swings? Lamp swingers. Swinging the lamp. Dana's swinging the lamp, yeah. That's your podcast, Colin, if I ever heard it. Sw swinging the lamp doing the swinging the lamp yeah that's your podcast colin if i ever heard of the lamp yes that's a good idea isn't it yeah perhaps i might get i might find time for that eventually i can't wait and uh we will leave

links to colin's books in the episode description to this show so you guys can go check it out he's a lovely man so go support him go his books, even though he hates the titles. Manhunt. Close to Home, which is what I want you to call it. Oh. This is your moment. This is your moment. There you go.

So, yeah, thanks, guys. And we will be back, as usual, next week. With something that I don't know what it is yet. But we'll be back next week. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. Bye. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life.

You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. He was hip-hop's biggest

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