Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman’s Hour: Lesley Manville, Breast cancer drug, Blessing scams, The Kill List, Elkie Brooks

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

Why has a drug that can extend life for advanced breast cancer patients not been made available on the NHS? NICE have made the decision that Enhertu, a drug that can give around an extra six months to live on average, is too expensive. BBC Health Correspondent Cath Burns joined Anita Rani alongside Kate Wills, who has stage 4 cancer and has been campaigning for the drug to be made available.The actor Lesley Manville is currently starring alongside Mark Strong in Robert Icke’s adaptation of Oedipus. She plays Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife. Lesley joined Nuala McGovern to tell us more about the play, what it’s like being back on stage for the first time since 2020, and why she thinks women's stories are being featured more.New podcast The Kill List follows a group of journalists who discovered a page on the dark web detailing requests to have people killed, with women most likely to be the ones targeted. The investigation led to a major international police operation over four years and, at the heart of it are the real people whose lives were seemingly at huge risk. Nuala was joined by the programme's producer Caroline Thornham and Jennifer whose former husband posted a 'hit' for her on this website.Blessing scams are targeting Chinese communities in the UK. They're usually carried out by women in groups of three, approaching people asking for help in Cantonese. Tuyet van Huynh's mother was one of these victims. After she was targeted, Tuyet set out to expose this practice on social media and has since heard from other victims. She speaks to Anita about the impact the crime has had on their family.Death is a subject many people still shy away from, but one woman is determined to change that. Funeral director Inez Capps is on a mission to challenge the taboos around death and demystify an industry often shrouded in mystery. Inez talks to Nuala about how, since the age of 19, she’s been working with the deceased, and she’s using social media to give people a glimpse behind the scenes — from the care a loved one receives, to tours of the hearse and the embalming suite.Elkie Brooks is the renowned British rock, jazz and blues singer. In a career spanning six decades, she was the biggest selling female British artist and still holds the accolade of the most Top 75 albums among female artists. She began singing professionally aged 15, shared a bill with The Beatles and went on to front the group Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer, before going solo. She’s currently on her Long Farewell Tour and joined Anita in the studio to talk about her career and turning 80 next year.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Annette Wells Editor: Rebecca Myatt

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Just to say that for rights reasons, the music in the original radio broadcast has been removed for this podcast. Welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour with me, Anita Rani. In the next hour, award-winning actor Leslie Manville on her latest role as Jocasta in Oedipus in London's West End. So we get to the end of the show and we are a bit kind of rabbits in the headlights,

you know, kind of thing. But I think we're both of us actors who are quite good at walking away, and have to be once we've got to the dressing rooms we're very ready for a negroni we'll also hear about a fascinating new podcast kill list which tells the story of uncovering websites that offered hitmen for hire we'll hear from one of the women targeted also the scam targeting older Chinese women by convincing them their children are in danger and offering blessings in return for their valuables. Also, the woman demystifying the funeral industry,

you may know her from TikTok or Instagram, Inez Capps. Plus, music from the legendary rock, jazz and blues singer Elkie Brooks. Lots to get through, so grab yourself a cup of whatever you fancy and settle in for the next hour. First, more than a thousand patients with advanced breast cancer are not able to access a drug on the NHS that can keep them alive for longer. It is available in 19 countries in Europe, including Scotland, but not in the rest of the UK. The drug, called Enher2, can give patients with a specific type of incurable breast cancer an extra six months to live on average.

The health assessment body NICE is the only organisation around the world so far to say no to the drug for this condition. It says it's too expensive for the NHS to fund. I was joined by the BBC's health correspondent, Catherine Burns, and Kate Wills, one of the women who's affected by this decision. I started by asking Kath, what cancer does this target, and who are the patients being treated? So we're specifically talking about a certain kind of cancer.

It's advanced HER2 low breast cancer. As you said, it's about a thousand people, mainly women who were infected here. And they're generally average ages 50s. But I've been talking to some who are as young as in their 30s, a whole range of women. And this drug, when it was announced at a cancer conference a couple of years ago, it got a standing ovation. I spoke to one drug company exec who said, I've worked in this field for 25 years. I've seen that happen twice. So there is no argument about whether this drug works. It does. What it does is it extends life.

So like you said, an average of an extra six months. And the drug company says it's got some patients who are still alive after three years. So it can't cure them, but it can give them that extra time. Do we know why this drug has been approved in other countries but not here? Yes, it depends on who you ask on this one. So starting with those other countries, so Scotland, it's been available there since December last year. The first country to approve it in Europe was France in November 2022. Since then, 19 countries have done it. And if I could

list them, it goes on, you know, France,, Germany, Italy, Spain also places like Luxembourg, Bulgaria and Slovenia and then worldwide you've got Australia, Canada, America lots of countries have done this it doesn't mean everyone has said yes some are still negotiating but only one decision so far has been a definitive no so why well NICE which is the health assessment body that's responsible for saying, are we going to put this drug on the NHS or not? They say it comes down to price. They say it's not good value for money. And that's the decision. They've been as flexible as they can. That's not going to work for them. The drug companies, they say, this is a fair price, they argue. And because of that, you can see all these other countries that have accepted a price.

What they say is about how NICE has made the decision. And how have they? Well, they've changed it recently. So they used to have a system called end of life. And they worried that under that, diseases that weren't cancer were not getting through funding. So what they've done is they've changed it and brought in something called a severity modifier. And they can either give it no severity, in which case it doesn't get any extra weighting. If they say a condition is high severity, it gets a lot of extra weighting and therefore is more likely to get approved. In this particular case, though, they've

said it's medium severity, and that hasn't been enough to do it. Because they have to decide where they're going to put the money. Well, yeah, I mean, NICE makes the decision about which products, but it knows that the NHS has got a very finite pot of money and they are very conscious of that. I'm going to bring you in here, Kate. Can you tell us about your current situation? Because you're having treatment for stage four cancer. Yeah, I was diagnosed with primary breast cancer when I was 34,

about 13 years ago um and then in the middle of covid um I was out on a cycle ride with my kids you know the only thing you could do in winter and I got to a traffic light I put my foot down just to wait and my um my hip fell off um and at that point it was that peak covid period. There were no ambulances. It was that crazy. And my son pulled me into a taxi and dropped me at the hospital. And at that point, when I was sitting in A&E, they said, the only reason this happens like this is because you've got the cancer.

The cancer's come back so at that point I knew um the cancer had spread to my across my body so it was originally in my breast it was stage three in my lymph nodes and then it has now spread to my bones and my lung and it's in my legs my hip my ribs um and my sternum and um at that point I thought I I really I lay there and there was barely any medical staff at that point everyone was running around crazy and I just thought I was going to die in a week or two I thought that was it it was over um and then I realized that um that I could stay I could live a good life for a while with drugs, but I had only a limited number of treatment lines. I'm on my first treatment line. I've been really, really lucky.

I've got about three treatment lines and then hair two is one of them. It's probably my next one. So what's your reaction to the decision that mice are saying it's too expensive? It blows my mind. I'm lucky enough to be in a community of incredible other patients who are in a similar situation. There's about 20, 30 of us who are really fighting for this. Some of us need it right now. I've got a couple of friends who need it right now and they will die sooner without this. When you get your stage four advanced cancer diagnosis and you think you're going to die quickly, you know, you have to come to terms with it.

But what you hope for are drugs that can extend your life. And your ultimate hope, what I think we're all going for here, is that cancer becomes a chronic condition, that it doesn't mean the end like HIV AIDS. This is one of those drugs which can help us get to that stage. What would the extra time mean for you we've heard that they're saying it's it can prolong your life for six months and and kath mentioned that somebody who's had it says as isn't that three years later i know people who've been on it for two years yeah a little bit of credit here because she's the reason we did this story she and mommy and said do this story and she's put me in touch with all these women and they're so keen to make the point that this isn't going to be an extra six months lying in bed so I said okay show me show me your

lives and they sent me videos I've got Kate cooking to rap music I've got her cold water swimming skydiving you guys are living full and active lives you're bringing up children you're looking after parents more of that so tell me what yeah so what that's what would this for me mean yes i mean this we are women in our prime we are women there are women i know between the ages of 30 no younger 20 in their 20s up until the 60s i work nearly full time i've been bringing up two teenage kids i've got to do the gcse revision it's really stressful. My dad is currently dying of cancer. I need to be there for him. I've got so much to give to society. And to feel that nice at the NHS, the very system that is supposed to prolong our lives,

is actively choosing to say that we're not worth the investment that 18 months of our lives isn't worth the extra funding and then just to leave us in an abyss at the moment I've no friends who've spent their last months crowdfunding so asking you know the very time you want to be saying goodbye trying to get those last memories they're spending their time trying to raise thousands of pounds to get the drug we We discuss moving to Scotland or mortgaging our house. Tell me a bit, if you don't mind, those discussions, the conversations you've had with your husband around that. They're serious discussions.

And you sit there and you think this is insanity. How is the system getting it so wrong that this is what we're having to spend our last our last years doing instead of trying to stay well to move to Scotland it is on the table but it would mean uprooting my children me moving away from my family my network my oncologist at the very time I'm going to need them most so it's probably not a good decision on balance to use our money you know I'm not going to be around to earn money for my family for very much longer so I've literally had the conversation with my husband

where I said I think I'd rather die sooner and then you've got a bit of a backup for my kids when I'm gone so it's insane and I think I think nice no they've got it's an algorithm I think they've got it wrong. I'm going to, we did invite NICE onto the programme. They declined to be interviewed, but a spokesperson for NICE told us we were deeply disappointed that we were unable to recommend N-HER2. We know this was devastating to all those hoping for a different answer. If Daiichi Sankyo and AstraZeneca decide they are willing to drop their price

to a level that makes and her to good value for money for the taxpayer nice will consider it under its rapid review process with a decision potentially within weeks can you understand that they are strapped for cash and they can i can but i look at well i believe the government this week or last week talked about the fact we need to get there are too many sick people and we need to get people back to work and being productive. We need to build a future. These are women. These are women in their prime.

So many of us are working. We're contributing. I mean, we're paying our taxes. We're actually paying for this. NICE have said that a number of times. I went to the APPG. I sat opposite NICE and the NHS. I know the drug companies have dropped their prices

already. I believe they're offering a price cheaper than Scotland to say that I think they're playing games with us. And meanwhile, our friends are dying. Two of our friends died last week. One of our friends who's done a lot of media can't do it anymore. She hasn't got the energy. I said to Kath, we're the most inefficient campaigning group I've ever been part of because we keep dying in the middle of campaigning but and we are literally using our last energy to point out the injustice because also this isn't just about in her too this isn't just about breast cancer this is a this is a decision they've made, an algorithm they've built that will affect other drugs. Other boards of experts are saying it's the wrong decision. And I think, nice,

I don't think they've got the guts to say they've got it wrong and to go back and fix it. Kath, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has said, I'm incredibly disappointed that the manufacturers of Inheritu were unwilling to sell this life-extending drug to the NHS at a fair and reasonable price, despite the best efforts of NICE and NHS England. Yes, he's very much on the same thought of process as NICE, that this is a price issue. And NICE has looked at its severity modifier recently, and it says it is working as it's intended to and it points to that to saying you know there are diseases that weren't getting funding before like cystic fibrosis and hepatitis b and they are getting funding now and it says actually so far it feels that it's still sort of giving as many positive recommendations for cancer as not but

the drug companies will say we're worried about launching future medicines here. Can the drug companies not lower their profit margin? I've asked them that. And anything about price is confidential. So they can't tell me what they're doing on price. What I've also asked is, if you can't come to a deal with the system, can you come to a deal with these women privately? Because options for women like Kate right now, they could try and get it on a clinical trial we've talked about moving to Scotland one option is getting it privately so I've had quotes from seven and a half thousand pounds every three weeks up to thirteen and a half thousand pounds every three weeks would you be willing to pay that this that's the decision my husband and I talked about I think we would fight we'd try and get it but it would be taking money from my kids futures which feels insane but the I think we would fight, we'd try and get it, but it would be taking money from my kids' futures, which feels insane. But I think it's so short termist because we know that it takes money

to develop drugs. These are the next generation cancer drugs. These are the drugs that are going to make cancer chronic. One in two of us are going to get cancer. This country says it's a lead in health and it's making a decision which is counteracting that. They have to pay a premium for the first few years. And then we saw that with COVID, the other drugs will come in and they will be cheaper. So we will fight. Me and my other girls, the women on this group, we will carry on fighting. I have a glimmer though.

So when I asked the drug company, what could you do about this? The answer was vague of we're looking at all options, but that's one of the options that they're looking at. Catherine Burns and Kate Wills there. Now, the actor Leslie Manville is perhaps best known for her work with director Mike Lee. She's brought us characters from Princess Margaret in The Crown, Cyril Woodcock in Phantom Thread and Helene in Ghosts and now she's taking on the role of Jocasta in Richard Icke's version of Oedipus. Leslie joined Nuala this week and told her that she was excited about being back on stage. I mean what an amazing story you know

two and a half thousand years ago written by by Sophocles, updated to modern day, brilliantly by Robert Icke, our writer and director, so that it's this very, very current, potent, relevant story for our time now. But of course, it's all about love and heart and emotion and families and the dynamics of all of that. And there is something breathtaking about reminding yourself that the genesis of the play, is set in that period between the polls closing and the result being announced. And you don't know whether Oedipus is going to be the prime minister or the president or you just know he's going to be the leader.

It looks like he's going to win. It looks like it's going to be a landslide and he's going to be the leader. So with this, let's talk about Jocasta, the character that you play. How would you describe her? Well, Jocasta was married to the previous leader, Laius. So she is a very young first lady to this kind of dinosaur leader who, by Sophocles' accounts and our accounts, was not a decent guy. Then there's been 34 years of kind of coalition and compromise and a sort of non-government. And in that time, she's been married to Oedipus for 23 years and they've had a family. She's driven. She's hugely intelligent. They are such a good couple. They are everything you'd want from a marriage.

They're the greatest best of friends. They love each other deeply. They still find each other very sexy and attractive. But she's buried stuff that she hasn't even told him, which seems unlikely for a woman like her and for a relationship like theirs. But what she went through with Laius when she was 13 was deeply traumatic. She's given birth to a child that is taken away from her, and she has no idea what has happened to that child. She's presumed it's been killed. You can imagine carrying around something like that in such formative years of your life.

You might bury it. But there's this extraordinary speech about two-thirds of the way through the play when she finally talks to Oedipus about it. And this picture of this woman's life becomes very clear. And, of course, it has so many resonances with things that are happening in our world this very week yes indeed it's it's such a compelling watch from beginning to the very end yeah i won't reveal but i was wondering as i was watching the partner of this political figure who's on the cusp perhaps of leading wherever he is

and were there any real life political women or wives that you drew inspiration from for your role not directly I mean I wouldn't want to say um uh you know she I wouldn't like to say that she's Macron or that she's Hillary. Is Melania? Oh, no. No, she's definitely not. She's definitely not a Melania. But of course, I've watched those women and you can draw a lot from them. But I wouldn't want to create somebody that you could say, oh, yes, she's based it on her, because that wouldn't be right.

I mean, Jocasta says she has written books. She's her own woman as well as own momentum alongside her life as his wife. You've spoken a bit about the role of Jocasta and we can understand what drew you to it. But I mean, I came out of the theatre a little bit shell shocked. That's all I'll give away. What must it be like for you at the end of each performance yes I think Mark and I are still because we've we've done maybe 10 performances so far so we get to the end of the show and we are a bit kind of rabbits in the Headlights, you know, kind of thing. But I think we're both of us actors who are quite good at walking away. And you have to be.

You know, I've done a lot of plays that are disturbing. Ghosts, Long Day's Journey Into Night, this. You really don't want to take those home with you. I mean, and that's not to say that we're not affected. That isn't to say that when we get to the last 10 minutes of the play, that the pair of us are not really cooked up to the point where we're feeling it. But that's our jobs. You know, we do. And part of the job is to be able to tap in to this extraordinary emotional story and the cataclysmic revelation that comes at the end of Oedipus. We are there in it.

But we're also once we've got to the dressing rooms, we're very ready for a Negroni. I was wondering what the drink of choice might be afterwards. You mentioned these various roles. This one that is obviously a very intense role, for want of a better word. But this has been your career, all these different roles that you have played. And we speak to a lot of actors here and they sometimes talk about the potential challenges of getting the roles that they want as they get older. You don't seem to have that trouble at all. I know. I'm getting amazing roles to play and I don't ever

take that for granted. I'm so grateful. And I've been, but I've put in the decades, decades and decades. I mean, I started working back in the day at the Royal Court Theatre in the late 70s and the 80s, working on fantastic new plays by Carol Churchill, so many writers, directors, wonderful, rich work. So that need to do interesting work has stayed with me. You know, you put that into an early career, it feels like it's fed the rest of my career. You know, what I did in my 20s and 30s, those choices, those people who I was working with, that has continued and paid off. I also see in November on BBC One, Susan Ryland, you're coming back. Oh, yes. Anthony Horowitz's wonderful crime novels, which started with Magpie Murders. And yes, Moonflower Murders will come out on the BBC Saturday nights in November.

Yeah. Yes. What do you do in your downtime? Well, at the minute, there's not been a lot of downtime, but joyously so. I mean, a lot of people say to me, oh, you must be tired. Listen, I'm hungry for this level of work. And as long as it continues,

it's my reason for getting up in the mornings do you think you'll continue working just for as as long completely as as the interesting roles continue to come absolutely 100 yes and i can understand why when i when i watch you on stage as well but you know 16 when you started as you talk that, what do you think has been the biggest change for women who are acting in that time? I think I can feel now that there's a real interest in telling the stories of older women. And it wasn't like that when I was 16. It wasn't like that when I was in my 30s, even. What changed?

Women shouting louder, complaining more. I mean, it is extraordinary when I think of even going back to the relatively recent female history of the suffragettes. Of course, women were trying to make noises way before that. But when you think of that movement and the commitment of those women in that movement, it was awe-inspiring. But sometimes I think of that time, that movement, and think, really? We're still not being heard. We're still struggling to have a voice we're still being sidelined or potentially sidelined so it's different because we've carried on banging on and shouting and making ourselves be heard but you know you have like the series i did mom which is a story of a middle-aged woman who's lost her husband, tentatively falling in love again. She was 60.

Women want to see stories like that. They want to see themselves portrayed as life. Real life. Life going on. It isn't over because you're 60 and you've lost your husband it's sad and there's grief to be had and life will never be quite the same but to show women clinging on to wanting life still to have their story carry on and not come to a full stop the wonderful actor leslie manville speaking to na and Oedipus

is on at the Wyndham Theatre until January next year. Moonflower Murders will be on BBC One later this month. Now you might think there's a podcast for everything these days. In a busy field, it's hard to know which ones are worth your time.

Well, the podcast we're about to talk about next has certainly impressed a lot of people and has shot its way to the top, the podcast we're about to talk about next has certainly impressed a lot of people and has shot its way to the top of the podcast charts. It's called Kill List and follows the story of a group of journalists who stumbled across a page on the dark web detailing requests to have people killed. 175 requests to be exact, with women most likely to be the ones targeted. They found evidence of monetary transactions adding up to significant amounts of money. The podcast follows their investigation over four years, which involves a major international police operation,

and, at the heart of it, the real people whose lives were seemingly at huge risk. Well, Nuala spoke to the programme's producer, Caroline Thornham, and Jennifer, whose former husband posted a hit for her on the website, Caroline began by explaining what Kill List is. This whole story began for us back in 2020, when alongside the presenter, Carl Miller, our team were making a podcast about the dark web. And in the process of that, with the help of a hacker called Chris Montero,

we gained access to the back end of a site that claimed to be a hitman for hire site. So people placing orders on the internet to harm other people. And we could see the names, the addresses, all of the details that people were putting in about their intended targets and all of the payments they were placing too. And the thing that's a little bit complicated about this is that the website itself is actually a scam. So there weren't any real hitmen. They were just taking people's payments and cashing in the money. But the thing that was really concerning to us and that was such a shock, really, was the fact that the people who are paying the money and who are naming someone on this website to be potentially murdered really do have very genuine intent to do that person harm. In one case in America, they actually went on and did harm to that person themselves. So we were basically

placed in this situation where we had this information, you know, about people that we thought were really genuinely in danger. And that's what we termed the kill list. And we spent the next several years basically trying to get that to the attention of law enforcement and anyone who could do something to try and keep those victims safe. You talk about the dark web, Caroline, but what is that exactly? Can you describe it? The dark web is basically a part of the internet that you can't access via regular search engines like Google.

You have to go on a specific browser that makes it much harder for people to track where you are, your IP address, all of the identifying markers that you would normally have when you're accessing the internet. And so as a result, it's become this place where criminal activity really flourishes of all different kinds, all sorts of scams and kind of quite grim stuff on there. And these pretend hitman for hire websites are one of those things. What were people requesting of the hitmen for hire? People were really kind of horrifically imaginative, you know, in all the ways that they were writing on this site and

detailing how they wanted someone to be hurt. And so we would see orders coming in that firstly had loads of personal details in, right, people's know addresses social media profiles and then instructions of you know for example how they wanted somebody to be killed you know where they should target them you know the times of day when they were likely to be alone and so it's a really um you know disturbing set of things to be confronted with, because it was just so apparent from these messages, just how serious a lot of the people writing them were about hurting them. And did you know when you came across this site, that it was a scam immediately? It became very clear to us as we were reading the message correspondence that was coming into the site, because we began to see a pattern

very rapidly where people who were placing hit orders would come back to the site with complaints essentially saying you know this service that they're expecting hasn't been delivered nobody's been hurt and the site administrators would make up all kinds of excuses you know say oh you know the hitman got lost or um you know, they weren't able to do it on this or that day for whatever reason. And they'd always be trying to upsell them to, you know, say, if you pay another $10,000, we'll put somebody more experienced on the job. And in all the cases that we were looking at, eventually, you know, the customer gives up and resigns themselves to the fact that this hasn't happened. So from that perspective, we were pretty clear that, okay, you know, there are no hitmen here. There were no hitmen prepared to carry out these

deeds. But the intent was real of the people who were posting them, from what you could see? Absolutely. You know, people were paying really significant sums of money in some cases, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars in Bitcoin. And the messages that they were writing as well were really disturbing to read, you know, often very, very detailed descriptions of exactly what they wanted to have happen to the person. And this thing that really kind of gave us just so much kind of fear in this is the fact that prior to our investigation back in 2016, the same website there was a case in in the United States where a man had gone on the website tried to place an order to kill his wife

and then when that hadn't been delivered he went on to kill her himself and so we knew you know immediately as soon as we heard about that, that these people were dangerous. And, you know, in some cases, there might be nothing they would stop at to hurt the person. We talk about a hit man for hire, but who was posting? Was it generally men asking men to carry out crimes like these? We've come to the end of our investigation and we've seen, you know, a large number of arrests and we have an idea of who the perpetrators are. Some of the statistics that have come out of that are really interesting and quite shocking too. So for people placing the orders in the cases where we've had arrests and where we know who the people are, that's about 31 cases around the world.

58% of the perpetrators are men and 58% of the targets are women. So, you know, it's more men being the perpetrators and more women being the victims. But the statistic that I think is kind of the most striking really is that when a man is placing the order on the Hitman for Haya site, in 78% of those cases, the target is a woman. And in 85% of those cases, it's involving male to female intimate partner violence. So it's a man targeting his wife or his ex-girlfriend. And I think that's a real indictment of, you know, the kind of level of gendered violence in our society. And it was quite shocking to find that in this dark web world, it was really reflective of that. Let me turn to Jennifer.

You were listed as a target on this website by your ex-husband. And I'm sure this is something that is very difficult to speak about. Your ex-husband, he was a man called Ron. He was still your husband when this request that he put forward was posted onto the dark web. As I was listening to the podcast, Jennifer, I realised it was Caroline and her team that told you that this request to harm you was on the dark web. And I can't imagine receiving that call. What do you remember about it? Well, I remember my co-worker had actually called me

and told me that a reporter needed to talk to me ASAP because I was in danger. And when they told me about it, I was not surprised. My intuition told me that something was going on and he was trying to do something. I just wasn't quite sure what it was. But when they described the detail of the messages, it was pretty upsetting. It was a lot more, I don't even have a word for it. Yeah, it was a lot more than what I thought it would be.

What I will say, and we won't go into too much detail, but it was quite graphic with specifics on where he wanted you taken and what he wanted done to you. I found it chilling listening to it. You say you weren't surprised that he was intending to do you harm, but can you believe this was posted on the dark web? Yeah, it was interesting. I didn't even know what the dark web really was. I thought it was a site that people went on to buy illegal drugs or something like that. I didn't realize there was actually hitman sites. And I figured, you know, I figured it was a scam. I kind of knew that he was on the dark web because his mistress at the time had let me know. So I was kind of on an alert. She was scared of him as well. So it was kind of a situation where I was kind of stuck and nothing could happen until something, you know, came out of it, I guess.

Until Caroline and her team then played a key role in bringing Ron to justice. And if people are wondering why Jennifer was having conversations with the mistress, they'll have to listen to the podcast to learn more. Caroline, back to you. What happened? So our team were monitoring the Hitman for Hire site and we saw these messages come through from an account calling themselves Scar215 that turned out later on to be Ron. And we were really shocked because not only were these incredibly you know distressing messages there were also payments and you know the largest payments we'd ever seen on the site tens of

thousands of dollars and including you know things like bonuses to have um you know things happen faster by a certain deadline and so it was immediately clear to us that this was a really, really serious threat. And so that's at the point at which we reached out and tried to make contact with her, and then also to get it to law enforcement as well, so they could act on the information. This became a global operation involving police forces across the world. What did you find that process like? In general, across this investigation, it was a real struggle to begin with. We often struggled to have law enforcement take us

seriously. You know, we had some cases where we went to the police with a victim and we could literally hear the police officers laughing, you know, because it sounded so far-fetched. And one of the first things we did when we broke into the site was call the metropolitan police to try and hand this information over and you know they did take the information but passed it on to Interpol which is an international policing body because they kind of decided there weren't any UK cases it wasn't their problem and then we had this this real issue because there was such a disjoint between where the information had gone and us, we couldn't give them any updates, we had no idea whether it was being investigated properly. And so it was a real journey over the course of our investigation to find law enforcement

officers who were willing to look into this properly and deeply. And Jennifer's case was actually a real turning point for us because through reporting this, we ended up starting to work with the FBI. And that was a complete game changer for our investigation. They really, really looked into it at a much deeper level than anyone we'd worked with before. How many cases were there that were brought to justice? Over the course of a few years of investigation, we handed over 175 cases to law enforcement all around the world. And as of right now, there have been 34 arrests and I believe 28 convictions. And so, you know, there are many more that are still working their way through the justice system.

Jennifer, back to Ron. Ron was brought to justice. Did that change your life in any way? Oh, yes, for sure. It changed my life completely. He's still behind bars. Yes, yes, he is. Why did you want to speak out? I feel like if it were to help anybody, you know, that's my main purpose, I think,

is I don't think people understand the whole realm of domestic violence, especially mostly with women. I mean, I know there are men that get, you know, that go through it as well. It's not just physical. It's not just somebody, you know, beating on you. I mean, it's intimidation and threats and control. And I went through quite a bit over a few years, and I'm glad that it all came out. I didn't think it would come out like this, you know, like a national story and all over the news, but it's just, it validated so much that I went through. And I just feel like if I could help somebody else that might be going through something similar you know that's worth it to me. Caroline Thorum and Jennifer speaking to Nuala there. Kill List from Wondery and Novel is available on most podcast platforms

and if you've been affected by anything you heard in that interview or on this program you can find support on the BBC Actionline website. Still to come on the programme, the legendary singer Elkie Brooks on 60 years of performing. Also on Wednesday next week, we have a phone-in programme on special educational needs and disabilities. We want to discuss best practice, possible solutions and support mechanisms for mums of children with SEND. It may be somewhere you go, a new technique you've tried or a very simple revelation. What works for you and your child? Have you had a breakthrough or found something which has made your life or part of your day easier? You can get in touch in the usual ways. You can email us via our website or text 84844 or contact us on social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour. That's the Send Best Practice phone in on Woman's Hour on Wednesday.

And remember that you can enjoy Woman's Hour any hour of the day. If you can't join us live at 10am during the week, all you need to do is subscribe to the Daily Podcast. It's free via BBC Sounds. Now to a cruel crime that's targeting Chinese communities around the world, known as blessing scams. They're usually carried out by women in groups of three, approaching people in asking for help in Cantonese. Tuay Van Nguyen's mum was one of these victims. After she was targeted here in London,

Tuay set out on a mission to expose this practice on social media and has since heard from other victims all around the country. Well, she joined me this week and I started by asking her exactly what happens with this blessing scam. What is it that they do? Like you said, they operate in packs of three. They are of East Asian heritage, so Chinese, and they have the command of the Cantonese language. And what they do is they go to local markets across London or the UK where EC elders usually do their shopping, like groceries, you know, fish and all that stuff and they kind of target women around 40 to late 60s of Chinese heritage and one woman approaches them and kind of gains the sort of conversation in the language to see

they can communicate and they kind of like request for help saying you know I'm looking for a doctor who can speak Chinese can you help based on that very first interaction they kind of gauge can this person communicate with me and can I guess in their heads can we manipulate this person in some way and somehow they signal to a second woman who's not too far away to come over and this is another woman um around about the same age and starts communicating saying you know um I heard that like you're looking for a doctor I'm also looking for a doctor to do some healing. And it kind of concocts this story that they need this help desperately and they're asking for the help of the person, the victim that they've approached.

Once they've established that trust and engaged with a conversation, at this point it's very speculative. It's very unclear on how they've managed to, I guess, grasp the victim's attention and trust so they've got there's sort of other women involved so they they convince uh the chinese woman that they need their help so what actually happened to your mum how did you what was the mum your mum's situation that was exactly what happened she was in upton. First woman approached, asked for help. Second woman came moments later. Once they've established that communication,

they take her out of the market where there's a third woman who somehow knows what they're doing. Said, I actually know someone who can help. I know a doctor. And then they spend, I don't know, up to an hour talking about evil spirits. And then they start to instill this fear into the victim saying, actually, in my mum's case, they said, you've walked along this road where there's been a lot of deaths and an evil spirit has attached themselves to you. And it's going to cause your family harm, specifically your son. So to get rid of this, we need to perform a blessing where you have to gather all of your sort of valuables, including gold and money, and then we'll perform that ritual.

And from that, they kind of, the second woman who approached my mom went all the way to my mom's house, which is 20 minutes away by bus, went into my mother's house and instructed her to gather all of her belongings that is of value. So that's all her gold, any money she had in the house, which is all her life savings. So for those who don't know, most EC women have their life savings in the house and they don't really believe in banks. So they put that in a bag, then they lead her back out to where they first met into a quieter street and perform the blessing. Within this blessing blessing they exchange bags

and instruct they instructed my mother instruct other victims to not speak to anyone for a few days switch off your phone go home don't look in a bag don't open it for another week or two but when my mum left them I guess she kind of woke up of that whatever trance that she was under and at the bus stop she opened the bag and realized it was just two bottles of water and newspaper she ran back and they were obviously gone but it didn't really sink until two days later where she rung all of us her children and told us and we were just absolutely panicked what was your reaction I mean I've never heard my mum in that state before there was fear there was there was, there was anguish. It was really scary. Yeah, it was really horrible.

It's interesting, isn't it, that it's women coming up to women. What was it particularly about this scam that made you think this is how they got my mum? I mean I think it's the knowledge that older women hold the valuables at home and the trust of other women of the same heritage to approach and gain that trust. What sort of impact did this have on your mum? It's been devastating since so it happened late May and since then my mum you know it took her a few weeks to just eat properly because she had this overriding sense of shame sadness and loss and it took I mean even to this day like she's struggling with sleep because she keeps waking up and having all these emotions of like why did I do it why did I follow these women I can't believe I've lost all of the money I've saved over the years for my grandchildren my children so it's been a journey and very emotional to see the one woman who you know has held you for as long as you know you've been to be crippled by this heinous crime

yeah I can imagine but you didn't just sit back and let this lie did you you've taken this made it public yeah I mean it was seeing those emotions coming out from my mom and like what if this has actually happened to other people and um when i started investigating myself i well my brother actually came across an ex notification that it happened to another woman in in romford so we contacted her and then another woman contacted her because of her ex tweet. And then it kind of spiraled from that. I'm just thinking, seeing how it impacted my mum, imagine those who don't have their, they don't have children or family to support them.

So they're alone, they're scared, they're feeling shame. And I really wanted to help them as well as my mum. So I started this GoFundMe campaign to look at funding therapy for those victims. Because there's more than one bit like what you discovered is it's happening all over the world. It's all over the world all over the UK it's it's actually really crazy how big it is. So what should quickly people look out for? If anyone's approaching you to places that you frequently go and they're asking for help in Cantonese or Chinese, walk away.

If you can, take out your phone and get a picture of them so we can actually get their faces. Tuay Van Huynh speaking to me earlier in the week. Next, to a subject that many people shy away from, death. Our next guest is working to change that. Funeral director Inez Capps is on a mission to challenge the taboos around death and demystify her industry. The following conversation might be difficult for those who've recently lost a loved one. And our next guest is very aware of that too, because

since Inez was 19, she's been working with the deceased. Now she's using social media to give her 100,000 followers a glimpse behind the scenes, from the care a loved one receives to tours of the hearse and the embalming suite. Inez runs a funeral business with her parents in the East Midlands. She joined Nula earlier this week and Nula started by asking her why she decided to show more of the funeral industry to the public. I think that over the period of time when I first started in the profession that there wasn't anything that was shown about it. Some people spoke about it,

but it was very rare that anybody spoke about death. It was such a, and still can be such a taboo subject. So I just wanted to show people that behind this kind of name of funeral and conductors, that there was a human behind it and that human can be very, very approachable. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions that people have about death and funerals? I think sometimes that it is scary that's quite a misconception um it doesn't have to be scary um and the process can actually end up being something of a celebration of that person's life so I think the misconceptions are as well that it's very male dominated um and being a female in this profession has had its challenges and you, talking now about this to lots of people, they love the fact that there is a female behind the top hat.

There were figures, this is according to the National Association of Funeral Directors, that 50% of funeral directors are women. That figure did surprise me. Yeah, and it's gone up in the past couple of years. I would say maybe probably the past five years, that has definitely got a lot more, which is, for me, just brilliant. What do people want to know? Everything. There's not something that's so specific.

It's everything to do with the actual funeral. What is it that, as somebody's funeral director, what do I do? So it's actually everything to do with the funeral. They just don't know because nobody's ever opened their doors before the funeral industry has been very very closed off so some of the videos that i was watching you give a tour of the hearse for example and there was also one that that was very moving it was a gentleman i believe who whose remains had not been recovered by by any family member and you talked about what happens to those ashes and how they turn into a scatter tube I had never seen

anything like that before but I did wonder what you would say to those who say you're indulging morbid curiosity oh wow what's the question I think sometimes we put that on ourselves don't we we put that kind of barrier up ourselves and everybody kind of goes well no I'm not going to talk about it I'm not going to talk about that so my question is well why can't we talk about it so yes the morbid curiosity is there and I kind of indulge it a little bit don't I and show people and some people are like this is this is fantastic thank you so much and other people are like I didn't really want to see that well that's okay that's you're totally entitled to that so yeah maybe I am maybe I am showing that little bit of a side and kind of showing people that you can have a little bit of

curiosity. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable talking about death? I think because in generations, if you spoke about it, was it going to happen? So people used to say, no, I don't want to talk about it because they used to think if I talk about it, perhaps it would happen. And that's very, very generational. So, you know, older generations, I'm not going to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. But then the problem that happens is if we don't talk about it then your family are left not knowing what to do so some people come into our care and they sit in

front of me and they go I have no idea what I'm doing. Does that happen often that somebody hasn't left their wishes? Yeah a lot of times and it's becoming better that people are just saying their funeral wishes. I'm not talking about funeral plans or prepaying for your funeral. But just let your families know whether you want to be cremated or you'd like to have a burial or a natural burial. Just inform them of what you want, but also what you don't want. I noticed how respectful you are towards the people that you are taking care of you very much treat them and speak about them as a person but I'm wondering what that job is like how would you describe it you know somebody has died

their remains come to you you will have to dress them, perhaps makeup to make them. I suppose you're kind of comforting the family with the job that you do, too. Yeah, there's a lot to it. There is a lot to it. But for me, when I'm caring for that person, when I'm doing the makeup and everything, I'm giving them their identity back. Because sometimes it's stripped from them when they've been in the care home or the hospital. You know, they become their illness don't they but when they've gone what I can then do is is give them themselves back so just spending that little bit of time and then with that it gives the families that comfort of knowing that they've had a really nice wash and they've they've had their makeup done which they may not have done for quite some time um but the the whole kind of

job in itself um there's lots of aspects to it and yes you're caring for for the person that I've been entrusted with from the family but you have to carry the weight of these families and sometimes I can be caring for 10 families but every single one of those family members needs to feel like I've only got them. You've also received some unusual or memorable requests. My dad, he's a cyclist and a motorbike rider. So very often he will go in front of the hearse and lead the cortege out in public. And he even rode a gentleman's road bike for him. So it was actually his bike.

So, you know, what a tribute for that family. I'm wondering, and they obviously do because looking at the following that you have on social media, but it's kind of, it's not a morbid question with you. Have you made your plans? Do you know what you want for your funeral?

Yes. What is it? I've got only one request, and that is that I would like a black glitter coffin. Inez Capps enlightening us on her career. That's it from me, but on Monday, it's nearly 30 years since Kelly MacDonald made her acting debut as a 15-year-old schoolgirl

in the iconic film Trainspotting. She joins Nuala to talk about her new film, a vampire comedy horror, The Radleys, based on a book by Matt Haig. So do join Nuala at 10am on Monday. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered.

There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this?

From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now.