May 25, 2025 • 42 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
We will also be in Manchester in September and I
hope to be doing a talk at this event too.
This year, I am lucky enough to be on a
panel with Laura Richards no Less talking about coercive control
(00:46):
and cult. You can buy your tickets at crimecon dot
co dot uk and use the code cult cult at
the checkout for ten percent off your tickets. Patrons also
receive a fifteen percent discount code you can contact me
for directly. Crime Con UK, sponsored by True Crime, is
the UK's biggest true crime event, advocating for survivors, victims
(01:11):
and policy change in the UK. I really can't wait
for this weekend and I hope to see you there.
I hope you enjoy these re uploads and get in
touch let me know what you think and if you'll
be there for the weekend. Hello listeners, I'm talking to
you from Crime Con in Glasgow. I'm your speaker, Casey,
and I can't tell you how excited I am for
(01:32):
the opportunity to record live again at the UK's biggest
true crime event. Thank you for everyone involved in making
this opportunity possible and for inviting me back to showcase
my podcast, The Cult Vault in such esteemed company. And
speaking of esteemed company, I'm even more excited to be
joined for today's conversation by none other than former Detective
(01:53):
Chief Inspector and senior investigating officer in the Metropolitan Police,
Colin Sutton. Hello Colin, Hello Casey.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
What a lovely introduc should I.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'm so excited, Thank you ever agreeing to take time
out of your busy day status shut with me. I
know all of our local listeners will probably know who
Colin Sutton is, and a lot of people outside of
the UK, but for those who aren't sure. Colin, would
you like to start by introducing yourself to the listeners?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, I can try, Collin Sutton. I was a police
officer mostly in London for thirty years and not second more,
but for the last nine years of that I was
leading one of the murder teams in London and had
the misfortune it seemed at the time, but the good
fortune in the end to have two pretty high profile
(02:43):
cases before I finished, with Lefroy Belfield and deal Rod Grant.
And so now I kind of tell stories really on
television all those things like that.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, and they are very very interesting things that you
discuss on the TV shows and the various guests appearances
that you make. And you said that you were in
the Metropolitan Police for thirty years, but only nine of
those years were spent on the murder team.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, the last nine years I was at DC on
the murder teams. I'd worked on murders as a DEI
as deputy leader before that as well. I spent some
time as a head of intelligence in West Yorkshire as well,
which was a fascinating job doing sort of covert policing.
So I had a pretty sort of very career but
(03:31):
the last nine years, yeah, doing the murders and investigating
a serious criminal. That was just felt what I was
born for really, you know, Yeah, it's my niche and
I found it and I stayed in it.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You found your niche twenty one years into the force. Yeah,
So where did you? What role did you start in?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Like everybody in those days, I started as a uniform
PC walking to beat. I was at Tottenham in North
London and it was quite a culture shock really from
you know, I've been to a half decent school and
growing up in a quite quiet and nice part of
London and six miles down the road I'm wandering around
the Broadwater Farmer State in nineteen eighty one thinking what
(04:09):
the hell have I done? And it was, yeah, it was.
It was a It's a baptism of fire in one sense,
and literally, I suppose in some instances. But it was
sort of place I guess where you sink or swim,
and I kind of took to policing and somehow accidentally
became a detective. It wasn't any great ambition of mine
(04:32):
to be a detective when I started. In fact, my
father was a was a traffic cup and they don't
normally get on with detectives, and he didn't, and he
kind of tried to dissuade me from from that. But
I couldn't be a traffic cup because I had a
motorcycle and it scared me to dick bits and I
could never have done that for work, so I had
to find something else.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
And your son is now in the force as well.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, my son is is a sergeant on the Response
team in Southwest London. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Wow, so it's really like a familial thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
My great g father was at Tottenham as well, so
it's four out of five generations.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, that's pretty significant.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it's in the blood. It's the family business. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
The household name, the household name. And so what year
did you officially retire?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Twenty eleven, So I've been retired for eleven years now.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Wow, it doesn't feel like twenty eleven was like five
years ago. It wasn't. It wasn't that long ago. And
do you still get asked to come in and consult
on cases or No.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It doesn't really happen like that. I do some training days,
mostly really for forces other than the MET. I do
one or two for the MET, but not not kind
of officially sanctioned from the center, you know, it's it's
kind of individual branches or divisions of the MET who
know me will ask me to come in and talk
(05:51):
to a training day, and I do it, and you know,
I'm grateful and glad to do it. And I've got
the utmost admiration for those who still do the job
now because it's far more difficult, you know, than it
ever was in my day, and police have never been
done so much scrutiny and so much pressure and had
so few resources to deal with the things I have
to deal with. So you know, I take my hat
(06:11):
off to all of them. But no, it's it's a
bit funny like that. Once you've gone, you've gone, really, you.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Know, that surprises me. I mean, you've you've had so
much experience in working on such notable cases that when
there is a prolific criminal, I'm surprised you're not one
of the first people they call to come and advise
on things.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
As you know. Yeah, maybe, you know, if I put
myself back in that position, if i'd have i'd have
been you know, when I got say the Levi Bellfield investigation,
if somebody said, oh, there's this old old bloke who
retired five years ago, and we want him to help
you out. But taken very kindly to that, to be honest.
So yeah, I think it's the best thing serious to
move on.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I started when I when I first retired, I was
doing some sort of commentary stroke punditory work for news organizations.
And I did that for a few years, but I
kind of thought, well, you know, we got to about
five years. There's five more years of people who have
retired who are more current than me. And I don't
want to be that guy who's sort of this embittered
(07:16):
old X cop who's left twenty years ago and is
still banging the table and ranting about I.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Don't think anybody would ever describe you as that type
of person.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I just don't want to be that, you know. So,
and it's lucky because of doing you know, bits of
writing and things and how things have worked out, that
I've been able to kind of stay within the field
and take part in this amazing sort of burgeoning, ever
increasing true crime community. And to do that, but to
do that for a position where I don't have to
(07:49):
look silly by talking about things I don't know about
I suppose, Yeah, I know. I'm much more comfortable doing
what I do now than going back onto TV and
talking about, you know, being after the event to things
that have happened. It's always really difficult to second guess,
you know, I inhabit that that sewer of the world
(08:10):
called Twitter sometimes and the things that go on and
have talked about when notable things happen. And of course
everyone's everyone's a news gathering now, aren't they. Everyone's got
a phone and a camera in their pocket, and you
see little clips of videos and people saying, oh God,
that policing's awful, and you know, I just think, well,
you can't. You can't make a judgment on thirty seconds
(08:32):
of video. You can't second guess somebody who's been there
in that situation, who are fearful for their safety or
even their life, and what they've done and how they've
reacted to it. You can't second guess.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
That, you know, or even the pre events before the
reason exactly, that's true, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Because people tend not to get their phone out and
switch the video and until it gets real. So yeah,
it's you know, I'd rather not do that sort of thing.
I want to try and be so reportive, and I've
had the chance through what I do with the documentaries
now with revelation that you know, we've we've we've we've
created this sort of brand, if you like, The Real
(09:10):
Men Hunter, which I find wholly embarrassing, but it kind
of works as a title. But in that, what we
do is we talk to people who are involved, people
who've got skin in the game. I suppose you know
that they're actually they're they're either witnesses or they were victims,
or they were officers investigating it. We don't do the
sort of talking head TV, and we focus on the investigation,
(09:33):
and we focus on the victims. We don't focus on
the perpetrators.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Which I noticed actually when I was watching The Real
Man Hunter was that the episode titles are named after
the victims as opposed to the people that committed the crimes,
which I thought was a respectful touch on that. And
that leads me really nicely into my next question, which
was to ask you what you've been up to since retiring.
So we've mentioned The Real Manhunter, which is currently a
(10:01):
two series documentary which is available on Sky. I've been
watching it through now TV. What other projects have you
been involved in where you've shared your knowledge and expertise.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, I guess. I mean the whole thing started off
really because I started writing a book about the Bellfield investigation.
And I did that because I just I was so
in awe of the people that I had the honor
to lead and what they'd done, and the the talent
and the effort and the persistions that they put into it.
I wanted to it recorded. I wanted to be written
(10:33):
down somewhere, and was conscious that the books that are
going to be written about it would be about him
and about you know, there's a psychology of this serial
killer and this awful man, and I wanted to kind
of recall what that was like from the other side
and what it was like to be the people that
were investigating it. And so I started doing that and
as a result of that, you know, it's a long
story that I'll cut short and I've told before anyway,
(10:55):
But I got involved with a guy called Al Bitmore,
who I've become great friends with, who's a screenwriter, and
he encouraged me and made me finish the book and
then helped sell it to a production company and we
ended up with Manhunter, the drama with Martin Kloones, and
(11:16):
we set out to create the most authentic drama about
policing murder in London that we could and they were
wholly you know, buffalo, The producers were wholly indulgent of
me and let me have all the you know, it's
just silly things that I wanted to do, you know where.
For example, there's list a scene in one where Where
(11:36):
Where Where where we had somebody walking through the track coffee,
which is fine, but they allowed me to change it
so that actually it wasn't a tray with China cups.
It was the lid of a photocopier paper box with
styrofoam cups in because that's how we served coffee at
the Instagram. And it's the kind of thing that only
those who know would know and would notice. It was
(12:00):
just that kind of attention to detail to reality, because
I always said that if look, you know, I go
to a party or something like that, and the two
things people would ask me always when I was in
the police. They'd either talk to me about the latest
speeding ticket, which I could do for a little about,
or they'd say, do have you watched insert the name
of the latest TV cop de Arma here is it
(12:22):
really like that? And what I said to Buffalo when
we were sort of scoping out was if cops who
asked that question can say, yes, it's absolutely like that,
then cured us to us, you know, for for doing
what we did, and they allowed us to do that.
And in both series of Manhat we you know we
(12:43):
did that. And the feedback I've got from people in
the police or who'd been in the police as to
how authentic we made it, Yeah, it was really gratifying
to find the people felt that way. But also, you know,
nine million people can't be wrong, and each of these
as watched by nine million people, so it's amazing. Oh,
(13:04):
it's just you know it just yeah. And then we
got nominature for a BAFT with the last one for
Best Rung. We didn't win it, but just to be nominated.
Who would ever have thought, you know that I that
that's where it ended up. So it's just it's just
been this sort of wave that I've been rolling in
that sense, and then that led to doing the doing
the documentaries, and doing the documentaries has been I say,
(13:25):
really powerful for me because it's enabled me to I
think to position something in this true crime market which
is different to the others. And Revelation the production that
just so again so helpful with me and let me
talk to them and let me kind of have ideas.
And so we've done that. We've we're doing a third
(13:46):
series of The Real Man Hunter that will start filming
towards the end of the year. But before that, we've
got we've just finished filming a four part documentary about
some old murders in the nineteen seventies, and we're doing
another four part series on Levi Bellfield actually, but on
the side of Levi Belfield that nobody knows about so
(14:06):
not the murders, and that he's infamous for other aspects
of his life and other things that he claims to
have done and that other people claim done. And I
think it's going to be pretty powerful, and I think
people are going to be pretty shocked by you know,
we all know who he is and what he's like,
and we all think he's just one of the most vile, horrible,
(14:27):
dangerous people in a British prison, But that only stretches
the surface about him.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So plenty to keep you busy, You're not slowing down
anytime soon, you're going to continue sharing everything that you know.
It's not like working though, Liay, I suppose what you
said earlier kind of rings true with that. Though. It
keeps you current, it keeps you up to date with
things that are changing in the force, things that are
changing with laws in the country, which is something that
(14:53):
we'll talk about later on as well. So that ties
in nicely with everything. And it was an episode of
The Real Manhunter that inspired my conversation with you today.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So season two, episode one is titled Sally Lawrence, and
I wondered if you could give us a brief summary
of the case.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting in the second series because
I was I was running out of cases. Although I did,
you know, thirty odd cases as senior investigating officer, and
probably was on fifty more or more murders overall, a
lot of those don't have the message, don't have the investigation,
don't have the features that would make them a good
(15:35):
TV program. So I was running out and said to Sola,
we can probably do two series. They said, well, what
about looking at other people's cases? And I said, I'm
not really sure about that, because you know, I feel
a bit bad, but we kind of decided that if
we kept the same sort of values of only using
people who were involved and trying to focus on the
investigation and the effects on the victims, then it might
(15:56):
work with talking to those people. And so having said
we don't have talking here, I guess I've in some
ways ended up the talking head, but I'm trying to
kind of elicit the same sort of things from other people.
So in the second series, I said, well, let's try
and do three or four of those cases and see
how they run from a TV point of view. It's
worked because the same number of people watched those programs
(16:18):
and those episodes as watched the ones that were my cases.
So you know, that's quite good, and that means we
can go on and do other series with me talking
to people about their cases. Sir Lawrence is one of those.
And she was a businesswan. She had a good job,
nice car, and she was remarried to a pilot and
(16:38):
they both had quite a quick romance and things had
fallen apart and she wants to leave and I think
she'd found she had found someone else, and he knew this,
and he essentially staged a road accident to murder her.
He made her go in his old car, and he
disabled the air bag and flicked her seatbelt off at
(16:59):
the last minute and droven tree.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
He himself as the driver at fifty miles an hour
as well it headfirst collision into a tree. So there
were so many things when I watched that episode that
I was relating back to the potential for domestic violence
situation within the Lawrence household, and I was looking at
(17:21):
ways that I could link my knowledge and your knowledge together.
So despite the tragic death of Sally Lawrence and the
lasting impact that that must have on her surviving family, friends,
and her children, there were many parts of the episode
that stood out in terms of recognizable traits. Scene in
(17:41):
coultson Coercion and You retired in twenty eleven, and on
December twenty ninth, twenty fifteen, Section seventy six of the
Serious Crime Act was updated to include the coercive or
controlling behavior offense, which only extends at the moment to
acts committed within intimate partnership or family relationships. Despite being retired,
(18:04):
do you remember this being added to this? Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, I do. I mean I do, because it's an
area of of offending that you know as a as
a as a murder desective, you have to be very
aware of because a number of the cases which you
deal with or likely to deal with will be within
the family or within a relationship. Do you need to
(18:30):
be aware of it? And also just going back over
my time as like a divisional crime manager DCI before
I was on the murder squads, when when I worked
in my Shortshire, one of the things that I was
keen for us to do was to try to to
institute a process where we gave better support for victims
of domestic violently. So we were doing like a repeat
(18:52):
victimization scheme at the time for burglaries for domestic burglars
to stop people becoming revictimized. Okay, and I tried to
apply those principles to domestic violence and because we knew
and the stats were telling us that the domestic violence
is not often a one off a corenty.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And popping is a phenomenon that happens with individuals that
have been involved in coercive environments to fall very easily
back into something that maybe feels familiar or some what
comfortable in that way. So yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
There's certainly so, yeah, so I was aware of that,
and yeah, it's it's remarkable how how many victims of
coercive behavior or violent behavior in a relationship setting are
serial victims with different offenders, different culture, if you like,
each time. So, yeah, whether there's a you can't say
(19:56):
you've got a predisposition to being a domestic violence victim,
but you might have a predisposition to being in a
relate taking a part in a relationship that comes up
with a certain sort of person, or something like that.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Looking at the Sally Lawrence case and coercive or controlling
behavior offense, I just had a little bit of context
that I wanted to add to the listeners to be
able to really look at this in depth. So I
will just read this paragraph before we get into discussing
the cult like aspects of the case of Sally Lawrence.
(20:32):
Leading cult experts in the field of cultic studies, education
and recovery have been working for years to put a
spotlight on the different types of cultic environments that we
might be able to identify. For example, doctor Janiolalich has
researched a ton of material on one on one cults
and family cults and published some reports and papers, and
doctor Alexandristain has recently been part of a study that
(20:54):
took place with the Family Survival Trust and the results
of that report, which were published show us that there
is an epidemic of cult within the UK, with an
estimated two thousand active destructive cults and environments existing can
be identified, which makes me worry about the ones that
we don't know about and cannot identify in the UK alone.
(21:16):
And within that survey one hundred and five victims of
thirty six different cults found that thousands of people have
suffered sexual abuse, isolation from friends and family, financial exploitation,
and modern slavery at the hands of UK cults. Dr
Stain does called for action to take place around the
coercive or controlling behavior offense to extend to groups and movements,
(21:37):
workplaces and organizations, stating that only allowing this law to
be applied to intimate partnerships and family relationships means that
thousands of people will continue to be abused and exploited.
The Harassment and Stalking Act came into fruition in nineteen
ninety seven, so it's surprising that it took so long
to bring an Act around coercion into law. The Crown
(21:59):
Prosecution Service offers this insight into how the law was
recognizing coercive or controlling behavior. In September twenty twelve, the
government published guidance which may assist prosecutors to better understand
the nature and features of controlling or coercive behavior and
Domestic violence and abuse is defined as any incident or
pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behavior, violence
(22:23):
or abuse between those aged sixteen or over who are
or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of
gender or sexuality. This can encompass, but is not limited to,
the following types of abuse psychological, physical, sexual, financial, and emotional.
So with all of that information, although it was long winded,
I want to ask you a few of your opinions
(22:45):
on some of the cases you've worked on. And we
touched on Sally Lawrence and even though it wasn't one
of your cases, I wondered if you had any thoughts
on her estrangement to her husband, Ian Lawrence, because she
mentioned to her one of her daughters that she feared
for her life the relationship had broken down within the household,
(23:08):
and you mentioned yourself in the Real Manhunter that they
were living two separate lives under the same roof, and
she remained in that home despite her worries for around
six months or so, And I wondered if you had
any insight or indication on why she didn't leave, if
she feared so much for her life.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
I think I think it's common, sadly, that the more
you have, the more comfortable your life, the more nicer
your house, the more children you have, the more possessions
you have, the harder you sleep. You know, if you've
got nothing, then walking out the door with nothing is easier.
And I think we see this where where where the
(23:52):
the prospects of losing the lifestyle or the trappings of
your life a bigger draw than the fear of being
controlled or being abused, And that in itself is a
form of control. Ultimately, what we were trying to do
with this scheme I talked about in Yorkshire was to
(24:14):
make it easy for women. Mostly women it was who
just felt they didn't have the means, they didn't have
the wherewithal, they didn't have the supported around them to
be able to leave this abusive relationship and providing so
for example, what we were doing was we started this
sort of process of saying, we are going to arrest,
(24:35):
we're going to keep in customer, we're going to book
for the court. So that gives you some breathing space,
that gives you two or three days when he's out
of the house. They can't be there during that time.
We got sponsored mobile paysure go mobile phones given to us.
We lined up solicitors who specialized and wanted to do
the work to get injunctions and so forth, and so
that in that time that space that we could create
(24:58):
by arresting, charging and keep in custody in the background,
we could then put the situation in place to try
and solve these problems that were stopping the escape. Now,
that kind of worked, and it kind of worked in
situations where we had, you know, we had two larger
(25:18):
social housing estates on the division and they were the
source of quite a lot of our domestic advance reports,
and it was you know, where am I going to live?
Where am I? We had to involve housing, and I
think the pressure on housing, and I'm talking now about
the late nineteen nineties, so the pressure on housing were
far less than they are at the moment, and it
was possible to organize through the local authority or housing
(25:40):
association somewhere to go, you know, And it's not the
situation where you're going to a refuge where you're kind
of living in effectively bedsit shared bathroom conditions with two children,
and nobody wants to do that. You can understand. I think, well,
if that's my choice, if that's the only option I have,
then I'd rather stay and tough it out. So that
(26:01):
was what we were trying to do there. But as
I say, once you get to kind of one of
the better words with middle class people, as as in
the Lawrence case, then although they might have had she
might have had the financial means to go and book
into a hotel or to rent somewhere to live or whatever.
The maybe the kind of the jump from this, you know,
(26:22):
I've been I saw the house when we were filming.
It's a nice sort of solid dirties, big house there.
And then of course you've got children involved, and you've
got children, and you've got the father of the children
is there, and then moving away means changing schools for them,
and they's just all these literally hundreds of practical difficulties
(26:43):
that you can understand as people weigh them up and think, well, no,
I just can't do it. I can't, I can't imagine.
I'd rather I'd rather take the risk. And that was
what all those years ago we were trying to address.
And I guess you know, we had some success with it,
and then as it was always the same in policing,
and move on and do something else, and then it's
picked up and money runs out and support run. I
(27:05):
don't know what happened to it, but you know we're
still We're better, I'm sure nationally at how we deal
with domestic abuse and commercive control.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
But well, introducing or in twenty fifteen, although it's such
a difficult thing to prove, it's imperative that it exists
and that hopefully it's recognized that it needs to be
extended to groups of movements to protect people that are
being manipulated in coerced. But it's fascinating for me to
hear from your perspective and experience the things that are
(27:36):
identified in insular cult communities where people are restricted from
the outside world, they have their money taken away from them,
their passports, their means of escape. Sometimes individuals critical thinking suffers,
the dependency on the abuser or the leader grows, so
people struggle to make their own independent decisions, and that
(27:58):
those two days that you spoke about, where you get
breathing space for the victim and separation from the abuser
may introduce also a bit of the ability for critical
thinking to come back and a bit of rest and
a bit of time away from feeling constantly in fear
of the person that's harming you. So even in that case,
without offering people the physical things in terms of housing
(28:22):
and money, just that space to breathe and think and
get a good night's sleep can be the difference between
somebody staying in that abusive environment and being able to
critically remove themselves from that as well. So it's really
interesting for.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Me to hear I career. I mean, that was really
the coolners of the stretchy what I wanted to do.
And I remember because I'm a great one for kind
of analogies, I suppose and at the time probably still
I don't know what you do Officer safety training in
for physical safety for police officers, and one things you're
taught is to give yourself distance. So you've got this
(28:58):
business of doing a striking chest to push someone away,
to create that distance because it's safer, said, that's what
we need to do with these victims. Yeah, but we
need to do it in time rather than in actual
spatial distance.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And that's why a lot of the time, I suppose
you see victims of domestic violence return to those abusive relationships,
even once they've managed to walk away the dependency level.
There's sunk cost fallacy with you know, the children, all
of the things that you mentioned. Who knows what was
happening between Sally and Ian behind closed doors, really what
(29:33):
conversations were taking place in terms of emotional abuse. The
house was hers before they got married, and he was
demanding all of it, and then half of it, and
then all of it again. So perhaps Sally didn't want
to walk away and leave him with everything when it
was rightfully hers to begin with. We'll we'll never really know,
but I think there are some indications around Ian Lawrence's personality.
(29:57):
He was a charismatic man, and he was able to
be charming. He had this very high flying personal life
and social life, and he was doing really well with
his job as a as a pilot, and then it
all kind of came away from him. And we see
historically that when leaders and abuses of power no longer
(30:21):
have that complete control over individuals, they lose control and
they will go to extreme lengths to try and maintain
that power or to try and take that power back.
We've seen it with the Branch, Davidians, with David Koresh.
We saw it with Jim Jones and the People's Temple.
And I'm not saying that they are the same. I'm
(30:41):
saying that there could be similarities between Ian Lawrence's reckless
endangerment of his own life in that vehicle.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh yeah, it was a high rit strategy, high stakes
game he was playing, and you know, people have said
he was a pilot and he was used to sort
of the idea of assuming the crass position. And indeed,
you know, we spoke again and I keep on about
this being a strength of what we do in the programs,
but we've got We actually spoke to the member of
the public who was the first person on the scene
(31:13):
after the crash, you know, and he said, and also
that the paramedics and the emergency services, and he said, well,
he looks almost if he was in the brace position.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
You know, yes, consciousness of consciousness, but as.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
A part of course, he'd be quite well versed and
and well trained presumably in that. And so he's you know,
he's obviously decided that it's worth the risk that he
can pull this off, that he can do this, and
the amount of you know, I don't know if you've
ever tried, why would you, But if you've ever tried
deliberately to ram a car into something, I happen to
(31:49):
have done that because I've had to do that. It's
a really hard thing to do that, you know, to
try and keep you foot there and not put your
foot on the brake. So it's I think that the
psychology of him in deciding this was the best way
that he could murder his wife and get away with it.
It's a really really hoped But isn't there an arrogance.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Almost like a god complex?
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yes, sort of you know, I can do this, I can,
I can, You've got this, You've got this here, and
you can do this. You're you're you're invincible, you know.
So there's an arrogance here, which I think is you know,
farm of a culture that I do. But I'm sure
that that's a common feature of people who are leading
cults or culture.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Absolutely. Absolutely. It just felt to me watching the documentary
that after it was apparent to Ian Lawrence that he
was not going to maintain that power, he was not
going to get all of the things that he was
demanding from Sally Lawrence, and that she was going to
(32:49):
divorce him either way. He went to the extreme lengths
that he went to out of sheer despair, almost of.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Desperation, desperation. But but I'm sure, but you can say
there's a there's a you know, desperate times demand desperate measures.
But there's always going to be an element of weighing
up the risks and of deciding what the probabilities of
a good outcome are or whatever. And I think that
(33:20):
you're thinking on that must be kind of you know,
clouded by your determination or your desperation. But again, he's
a pilot, and you know pilots are trained and expect
dangerous situations might occur and that they that they have
a chance of surviving them. You know that that would
(33:41):
be part of what they do. And so does that
make him more likely to think he can get away
with running into a tree and killing his wife and
surviving that it would do you or right, because we
just think, no, trees are big and they don't move,
and cars fold up and it's going to be dangerous.
He spends his life, his working life, however, many hundred
(34:01):
of thousand feet off the ground, in a machine that
could crash, and has to have the confidence that he
could survive that crash if it happened, or he might
survive it. So you can kind of see how that
thinking is probably relative to his training and his profession.
But I think the you know, I always, unfortunately always
(34:23):
keep thinking back to Levy Belfield and he, you know,
he's just got so many and I'd never thought of
it until we spoke. I'd never thought of it as
him being cut. But there's a question of the way
in which he treated his partners that he lived with.
And there are a number of them, actually a surprisingly
high number of them. The number of statements I read
(34:45):
that started in such and such a time I had
a short relationship with Leviy Belford. We were kind of
looking and thinking, how why because he was charming, because
he was able to talk, he had the gift of
the gap, and he could if he was dealing with
the right individuals who were susceptible to his particular brand
of charm, then he could do that. So he had
(35:07):
a string of kind of partner's relationships, and some of
those reported the most horrible, frightening, shocking abuse that I
think I've ever heard of. You know, when you talk
to one of his one of his partners, who says
that after an argument, she was strip naked and sat
(35:27):
on a kitchen stool and told that he would kill
her if she moved, And he came back eight hours later,
and she'd sat there, and she'd wet herself on a
couple of occasions because she was too scared to get
off of that.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Well, that's his fully exercising his power of control over
an individual to see how loyal a person will be
to his instructions. I imagine it did start that way
with their relationship really quite charming, and overtimes it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
So, okay, this is how it went. You meet him,
he's charming, charms who buys you fly and chocolates and things,
and you know how, you have a laugh, he's funny,
You have a good time. And then at the third
day of something, it's give me a mobile phone. There
you go, right, he gives you a mobile. That's your
mobile phone now, yeah, but all my old numbers are
in that one, so now you don't need those numbers.
(36:16):
My numbers in the one I've given you. That's your phone. Now,
that's the only number you need. We heard a telephone
call he made from prison to one of his He
had a girlfriend, not the woman he lived with, a
younger at sixteen year old actually, and he was talking
to her from prison, recorded call and he didn't believe
(36:39):
her that she was at her parents' house. It's now
you're out with some bloke I named him. It's been
a racist way you described him, but then that was him,
because she's thoroughly horrible in all sorts of ways. And
she say, no, no, no, I'm not living. I met my
mum's I'm at my mum's house. And he said, right,
this is what you need to do. So take the phone,
walk upstairs, hold your phone over the toilet, and fly shit,
(37:01):
because I know the noise your parents' toilet makes when
it flushes, and that will prove to me you're at
home that your parents has And she went and did it.
This is the guy who's locked up on remand in
prison over the phone, and yet he's still able to
make somebody do something.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Besides, it makes me wonder, and I know that we've
run over, and I'm just kind of going to pick
you up. Your your brain's about this, this one little thing.
Cases that you've come across in your career history when
there wasn't a law around coercive and controlling behavior, where
(37:39):
partners have provided alibis, have hidden evidence, have gone to
lengths to protect their potential abuser, or where family environments
kids have been children have been coached into saying partners
have been coached into saying certain things. Do you feel
like there are cases you can identify where the coercive
(38:01):
act would have helped you in those times? Oh?
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I'm sure, because yeah, I mean and almost literally too
many cases to name or to imagine where where these
things have been have been given up with it. And
you know, in many cases I couldn't really name them
because we may not have actually proved that was the case,
but we've known that that's the case. One example I
can think of is a rape investigation where it was
(38:31):
only because the victim's sister off the record, asked to
meet me and I met her in a pub and
told me what had happened. And actually this woman was
running heroin for her partner. They've been together with some time.
He was a drug dealer and she was moving drugs
for him by secreting him inside her body.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh got key.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
And then a rival drug gang knew that's how he
moved his drugs, so they intercepted her and stole the
drugs from her. And because of they've beaten her and
she was unconscious and they'd caused various injuries to her
and too much detail, she made a credible allegation that
she'd been raped by a stranger, and we investigate it
with the full team, and oh we could. It was
(39:16):
only because her sister thought the police are wasting her
time here, so she confidentially got in touch with me
and I met him and said, now this is what happened. Wow,
she was never raped, She just had drug stolen from her.
So she was willing to do that and to go
that to those days. So it's not just creating an alibi,
this is creating a fictional victimization of herself as a
(39:37):
rape victim.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Do you feel like your four part series around Levi
Bellfield will look it into some of that coercive behavior
of his.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Absolutely will, Well, that would be really absolutely will, because
I think there's you know, to say, he's a man
that is well known for killing people, and that's shocking
and despicable enough as it is, but there are are
scores more victims who survived who have suffered abuse, either
(40:08):
mental or physical abuse at his hands, and I think
it's right two let the world know what he's really like.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Absolutely. I think it's also really important to highlight those
types of of coercive methods that viewers might be able
to identify with their own situations with family members or
loved ones, and just identify those systems that abuses have
put in place. And and so it's it's educational as
(40:39):
well as you know, putting a spotlight on it is
a monster, I.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Mean, And I think one of the ways, one of
the things I think that it will raise a question
that it's a thing to consider. Has had that partner
who was sitting on the kitchen still naked for eight tales,
had the partner that was a lot put in the
house and had to let her mother in by throwing
a key from upstairs because she couldn't unlock the door
(41:05):
from the inside. What if those partners have had access
to this legislation, might Levi Bellfield have ended up being
convicted of things before we got to.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Murder, And that was the whole point of today's conversation.
I just got I have not I'm not very good
at articulating my thoughts, but you've just said it, like
really eloquently in one sentence. So thank you so much
for that, and thank you so much for your time.
It's really interesting for me to pull everything together in
terms of the different cultic environments that exist in the world.
(41:41):
We've covered the armed forces with high demand control systems
in place. We've looked at multi level marketing. We've looked
at gang culture, and now looking at the types of
cases that the police might might be involved with that
link directly to cult like environments.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Have we looked at the true crime community?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I know I have I should probably I should probably
end the recording here, but I will just sign off
before before I do that. So thank you so so
much for all of your time and your willingness to
give your insights and experience to the rest of us
so that we can continue learning and carry your legacy
(42:19):
on for you.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I hope, so I'm not going anywhere just yet. I
hope anyway, and then look a bit peaky.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
But thank you very much, Colin taking okay cheers sakes.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Enjoyed it.
Hello listeners and or welcome to you this special re
release series of the live talks that I have recorded
at crime Con UK. As we are so close to
the event in London now on the seventh and eighth
of June twenty twenty five, I thought it would be
a great opportunity to re upload the talks that I've
done previously at this event. For those of you that
(00:22):
have been tuning in for a while, these talks might
be familiar to you, but for those who are new
to the show, here is a taste of what you
can expect from crime Con UK across the weekend in London.
We will also be in Manchester in September and I
hope to be doing a talk at this event too.
This year, I am lucky enough to be on a
panel with Laura Richards no Less talking about coercive control
(00:46):
and cult. You can buy your tickets at crimecon dot
co dot uk and use the code cult cult at
the checkout for ten percent off your tickets. Patrons also
receive a fifteen percent discount code you can contact me
for directly. Crime Con UK, sponsored by True Crime, is
the UK's biggest true crime event, advocating for survivors, victims
(01:11):
and policy change in the UK. I really can't wait
for this weekend and I hope to see you there.
I hope you enjoy these re uploads and get in
touch let me know what you think and if you'll
be there for the weekend. Hello listeners, I'm talking to
you from Crime Con in Glasgow. I'm your speaker, Casey,
and I can't tell you how excited I am for
(01:32):
the opportunity to record live again at the UK's biggest
true crime event. Thank you for everyone involved in making
this opportunity possible and for inviting me back to showcase
my podcast, The Cult Vault in such esteemed company. And
speaking of esteemed company, I'm even more excited to be
joined for today's conversation by none other than former Detective
(01:53):
Chief Inspector and senior investigating officer in the Metropolitan Police,
Colin Sutton. Hello Colin, Hello Casey.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
What a lovely introduc should I.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'm so excited, Thank you ever agreeing to take time
out of your busy day status shut with me. I
know all of our local listeners will probably know who
Colin Sutton is, and a lot of people outside of
the UK, but for those who aren't sure. Colin, would
you like to start by introducing yourself to the listeners?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Yeah, I can try, Collin Sutton. I was a police
officer mostly in London for thirty years and not second more,
but for the last nine years of that I was
leading one of the murder teams in London and had
the misfortune it seemed at the time, but the good
fortune in the end to have two pretty high profile
(02:43):
cases before I finished, with Lefroy Belfield and deal Rod Grant.
And so now I kind of tell stories really on
television all those things like that.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, and they are very very interesting things that you
discuss on the TV shows and the various guests appearances
that you make. And you said that you were in
the Metropolitan Police for thirty years, but only nine of
those years were spent on the murder team.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah, the last nine years I was at DC on
the murder teams. I'd worked on murders as a DEI
as deputy leader before that as well. I spent some
time as a head of intelligence in West Yorkshire as well,
which was a fascinating job doing sort of covert policing.
So I had a pretty sort of very career but
(03:31):
the last nine years, yeah, doing the murders and investigating
a serious criminal. That was just felt what I was
born for really, you know, Yeah, it's my niche and
I found it and I stayed in it.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You found your niche twenty one years into the force. Yeah,
So where did you? What role did you start in?
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Like everybody in those days, I started as a uniform
PC walking to beat. I was at Tottenham in North
London and it was quite a culture shock really from
you know, I've been to a half decent school and
growing up in a quite quiet and nice part of
London and six miles down the road I'm wandering around
the Broadwater Farmer State in nineteen eighty one thinking what
(04:09):
the hell have I done? And it was, yeah, it was.
It was a It's a baptism of fire in one sense,
and literally, I suppose in some instances. But it was
sort of place I guess where you sink or swim,
and I kind of took to policing and somehow accidentally
became a detective. It wasn't any great ambition of mine
(04:32):
to be a detective when I started. In fact, my
father was a was a traffic cup and they don't
normally get on with detectives, and he didn't, and he
kind of tried to dissuade me from from that. But
I couldn't be a traffic cup because I had a
motorcycle and it scared me to dick bits and I
could never have done that for work, so I had
to find something else.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
And your son is now in the force as well.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, my son is is a sergeant on the Response
team in Southwest London. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
Wow, so it's really like a familial thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
My great g father was at Tottenham as well, so
it's four out of five generations.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Yeah, that's pretty significant.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Yeah, it's in the blood. It's the family business. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
The household name, the household name. And so what year
did you officially retire?
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Twenty eleven, So I've been retired for eleven years now.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Wow, it doesn't feel like twenty eleven was like five
years ago. It wasn't. It wasn't that long ago. And
do you still get asked to come in and consult
on cases or No.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It doesn't really happen like that. I do some training days,
mostly really for forces other than the MET. I do
one or two for the MET, but not not kind
of officially sanctioned from the center, you know, it's it's
kind of individual branches or divisions of the MET who
know me will ask me to come in and talk
(05:51):
to a training day, and I do it, and you know,
I'm grateful and glad to do it. And I've got
the utmost admiration for those who still do the job
now because it's far more difficult, you know, than it
ever was in my day, and police have never been
done so much scrutiny and so much pressure and had
so few resources to deal with the things I have
to deal with. So you know, I take my hat
(06:11):
off to all of them. But no, it's it's a
bit funny like that. Once you've gone, you've gone, really, you.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Know, that surprises me. I mean, you've you've had so
much experience in working on such notable cases that when
there is a prolific criminal, I'm surprised you're not one
of the first people they call to come and advise
on things.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
As you know. Yeah, maybe, you know, if I put
myself back in that position, if i'd have i'd have
been you know, when I got say the Levi Bellfield investigation,
if somebody said, oh, there's this old old bloke who
retired five years ago, and we want him to help
you out. But taken very kindly to that, to be honest.
So yeah, I think it's the best thing serious to
move on.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You know.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
I started when I when I first retired, I was
doing some sort of commentary stroke punditory work for news organizations.
And I did that for a few years, but I
kind of thought, well, you know, we got to about
five years. There's five more years of people who have
retired who are more current than me. And I don't
want to be that guy who's sort of this embittered
(07:16):
old X cop who's left twenty years ago and is
still banging the table and ranting about I.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
Don't think anybody would ever describe you as that type
of person.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I just don't want to be that, you know. So,
and it's lucky because of doing you know, bits of
writing and things and how things have worked out, that
I've been able to kind of stay within the field
and take part in this amazing sort of burgeoning, ever
increasing true crime community. And to do that, but to
do that for a position where I don't have to
(07:49):
look silly by talking about things I don't know about
I suppose, Yeah, I know. I'm much more comfortable doing
what I do now than going back onto TV and
talking about, you know, being after the event to things
that have happened. It's always really difficult to second guess,
you know, I inhabit that that sewer of the world
(08:10):
called Twitter sometimes and the things that go on and
have talked about when notable things happen. And of course
everyone's everyone's a news gathering now, aren't they. Everyone's got
a phone and a camera in their pocket, and you
see little clips of videos and people saying, oh God,
that policing's awful, and you know, I just think, well,
you can't. You can't make a judgment on thirty seconds
(08:32):
of video. You can't second guess somebody who's been there
in that situation, who are fearful for their safety or
even their life, and what they've done and how they've
reacted to it. You can't second guess.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
That, you know, or even the pre events before the
reason exactly, that's true, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Because people tend not to get their phone out and
switch the video and until it gets real. So yeah,
it's you know, I'd rather not do that sort of thing.
I want to try and be so reportive, and I've
had the chance through what I do with the documentaries
now with revelation that you know, we've we've we've we've
created this sort of brand, if you like, The Real
(09:10):
Men Hunter, which I find wholly embarrassing, but it kind
of works as a title. But in that, what we
do is we talk to people who are involved, people
who've got skin in the game. I suppose you know
that they're actually they're they're either witnesses or they were victims,
or they were officers investigating it. We don't do the
sort of talking head TV, and we focus on the investigation,
(09:33):
and we focus on the victims. We don't focus on
the perpetrators.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
Which I noticed actually when I was watching The Real
Man Hunter was that the episode titles are named after
the victims as opposed to the people that committed the crimes,
which I thought was a respectful touch on that. And
that leads me really nicely into my next question, which
was to ask you what you've been up to since retiring.
So we've mentioned The Real Manhunter, which is currently a
(10:01):
two series documentary which is available on Sky. I've been
watching it through now TV. What other projects have you
been involved in where you've shared your knowledge and expertise.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Well, I guess. I mean the whole thing started off
really because I started writing a book about the Bellfield investigation.
And I did that because I just I was so
in awe of the people that I had the honor
to lead and what they'd done, and the the talent
and the effort and the persistions that they put into it.
I wanted to it recorded. I wanted to be written
(10:33):
down somewhere, and was conscious that the books that are
going to be written about it would be about him
and about you know, there's a psychology of this serial
killer and this awful man, and I wanted to kind
of recall what that was like from the other side
and what it was like to be the people that
were investigating it. And so I started doing that and
as a result of that, you know, it's a long
story that I'll cut short and I've told before anyway,
(10:55):
But I got involved with a guy called Al Bitmore,
who I've become great friends with, who's a screenwriter, and
he encouraged me and made me finish the book and
then helped sell it to a production company and we
ended up with Manhunter, the drama with Martin Kloones, and
(11:16):
we set out to create the most authentic drama about
policing murder in London that we could and they were
wholly you know, buffalo, The producers were wholly indulgent of
me and let me have all the you know, it's
just silly things that I wanted to do, you know where.
For example, there's list a scene in one where Where
(11:36):
Where Where where we had somebody walking through the track coffee,
which is fine, but they allowed me to change it
so that actually it wasn't a tray with China cups.
It was the lid of a photocopier paper box with
styrofoam cups in because that's how we served coffee at
the Instagram. And it's the kind of thing that only
those who know would know and would notice. It was
(12:00):
just that kind of attention to detail to reality, because
I always said that if look, you know, I go
to a party or something like that, and the two
things people would ask me always when I was in
the police. They'd either talk to me about the latest
speeding ticket, which I could do for a little about,
or they'd say, do have you watched insert the name
of the latest TV cop de Arma here is it
(12:22):
really like that? And what I said to Buffalo when
we were sort of scoping out was if cops who
asked that question can say, yes, it's absolutely like that,
then cured us to us, you know, for for doing
what we did, and they allowed us to do that.
And in both series of Manhat we you know we
(12:43):
did that. And the feedback I've got from people in
the police or who'd been in the police as to
how authentic we made it, Yeah, it was really gratifying
to find the people felt that way. But also, you know,
nine million people can't be wrong, and each of these
as watched by nine million people, so it's amazing. Oh,
(13:04):
it's just you know it just yeah. And then we
got nominature for a BAFT with the last one for
Best Rung. We didn't win it, but just to be nominated.
Who would ever have thought, you know that I that
that's where it ended up. So it's just it's just
been this sort of wave that I've been rolling in
that sense, and then that led to doing the doing
the documentaries, and doing the documentaries has been I say,
(13:25):
really powerful for me because it's enabled me to I
think to position something in this true crime market which
is different to the others. And Revelation the production that
just so again so helpful with me and let me
talk to them and let me kind of have ideas.
And so we've done that. We've we're doing a third
(13:46):
series of The Real Man Hunter that will start filming
towards the end of the year. But before that, we've
got we've just finished filming a four part documentary about
some old murders in the nineteen seventies, and we're doing
another four part series on Levi Bellfield actually, but on
the side of Levi Belfield that nobody knows about so
(14:06):
not the murders, and that he's infamous for other aspects
of his life and other things that he claims to
have done and that other people claim done. And I
think it's going to be pretty powerful, and I think
people are going to be pretty shocked by you know,
we all know who he is and what he's like,
and we all think he's just one of the most vile, horrible,
(14:27):
dangerous people in a British prison, But that only stretches
the surface about him.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So plenty to keep you busy, You're not slowing down
anytime soon, you're going to continue sharing everything that you know.
It's not like working though, Liay, I suppose what you
said earlier kind of rings true with that. Though. It
keeps you current, it keeps you up to date with
things that are changing in the force, things that are
changing with laws in the country, which is something that
(14:53):
we'll talk about later on as well. So that ties
in nicely with everything. And it was an episode of
The Real Manhunter that inspired my conversation with you today.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
So season two, episode one is titled Sally Lawrence, and
I wondered if you could give us a brief summary
of the case.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting in the second series because
I was I was running out of cases. Although I did,
you know, thirty odd cases as senior investigating officer, and
probably was on fifty more or more murders overall, a
lot of those don't have the message, don't have the investigation,
don't have the features that would make them a good
(15:35):
TV program. So I was running out and said to Sola,
we can probably do two series. They said, well, what
about looking at other people's cases? And I said, I'm
not really sure about that, because you know, I feel
a bit bad, but we kind of decided that if
we kept the same sort of values of only using
people who were involved and trying to focus on the
investigation and the effects on the victims, then it might
(15:56):
work with talking to those people. And so having said
we don't have talking here, I guess I've in some
ways ended up the talking head, but I'm trying to
kind of elicit the same sort of things from other people.
So in the second series, I said, well, let's try
and do three or four of those cases and see
how they run from a TV point of view. It's
worked because the same number of people watched those programs
(16:18):
and those episodes as watched the ones that were my cases.
So you know, that's quite good, and that means we
can go on and do other series with me talking
to people about their cases. Sir Lawrence is one of those.
And she was a businesswan. She had a good job,
nice car, and she was remarried to a pilot and
(16:38):
they both had quite a quick romance and things had
fallen apart and she wants to leave and I think
she'd found she had found someone else, and he knew this,
and he essentially staged a road accident to murder her.
He made her go in his old car, and he
disabled the air bag and flicked her seatbelt off at
(16:59):
the last minute and droven tree.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
He himself as the driver at fifty miles an hour
as well it headfirst collision into a tree. So there
were so many things when I watched that episode that
I was relating back to the potential for domestic violence
situation within the Lawrence household, and I was looking at
(17:21):
ways that I could link my knowledge and your knowledge together.
So despite the tragic death of Sally Lawrence and the
lasting impact that that must have on her surviving family, friends,
and her children, there were many parts of the episode
that stood out in terms of recognizable traits. Scene in
(17:41):
coultson Coercion and You retired in twenty eleven, and on
December twenty ninth, twenty fifteen, Section seventy six of the
Serious Crime Act was updated to include the coercive or
controlling behavior offense, which only extends at the moment to
acts committed within intimate partnership or family relationships. Despite being retired,
(18:04):
do you remember this being added to this? Oh?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
Yeah, I do. I mean I do, because it's an
area of of offending that you know as a as
a as a murder desective, you have to be very
aware of because a number of the cases which you
deal with or likely to deal with will be within
the family or within a relationship. Do you need to
(18:30):
be aware of it? And also just going back over
my time as like a divisional crime manager DCI before
I was on the murder squads, when when I worked
in my Shortshire, one of the things that I was
keen for us to do was to try to to
institute a process where we gave better support for victims
of domestic violently. So we were doing like a repeat
(18:52):
victimization scheme at the time for burglaries for domestic burglars
to stop people becoming revictimized. Okay, and I tried to
apply those principles to domestic violence and because we knew
and the stats were telling us that the domestic violence
is not often a one off a corenty.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And popping is a phenomenon that happens with individuals that
have been involved in coercive environments to fall very easily
back into something that maybe feels familiar or some what
comfortable in that way. So yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
There's certainly so, yeah, so I was aware of that,
and yeah, it's it's remarkable how how many victims of
coercive behavior or violent behavior in a relationship setting are
serial victims with different offenders, different culture, if you like,
each time. So, yeah, whether there's a you can't say
(19:56):
you've got a predisposition to being a domestic violence victim,
but you might have a predisposition to being in a
relate taking a part in a relationship that comes up
with a certain sort of person, or something like that.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Looking at the Sally Lawrence case and coercive or controlling
behavior offense, I just had a little bit of context
that I wanted to add to the listeners to be
able to really look at this in depth. So I
will just read this paragraph before we get into discussing
the cult like aspects of the case of Sally Lawrence.
(20:32):
Leading cult experts in the field of cultic studies, education
and recovery have been working for years to put a
spotlight on the different types of cultic environments that we
might be able to identify. For example, doctor Janiolalich has
researched a ton of material on one on one cults
and family cults and published some reports and papers, and
doctor Alexandristain has recently been part of a study that
(20:54):
took place with the Family Survival Trust and the results
of that report, which were published show us that there
is an epidemic of cult within the UK, with an
estimated two thousand active destructive cults and environments existing can
be identified, which makes me worry about the ones that
we don't know about and cannot identify in the UK alone.
(21:16):
And within that survey one hundred and five victims of
thirty six different cults found that thousands of people have
suffered sexual abuse, isolation from friends and family, financial exploitation,
and modern slavery at the hands of UK cults. Dr
Stain does called for action to take place around the
coercive or controlling behavior offense to extend to groups and movements,
(21:37):
workplaces and organizations, stating that only allowing this law to
be applied to intimate partnerships and family relationships means that
thousands of people will continue to be abused and exploited.
The Harassment and Stalking Act came into fruition in nineteen
ninety seven, so it's surprising that it took so long
to bring an Act around coercion into law. The Crown
(21:59):
Prosecution Service offers this insight into how the law was
recognizing coercive or controlling behavior. In September twenty twelve, the
government published guidance which may assist prosecutors to better understand
the nature and features of controlling or coercive behavior and
Domestic violence and abuse is defined as any incident or
pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behavior, violence
(22:23):
or abuse between those aged sixteen or over who are
or have been intimate partners or family members, regardless of
gender or sexuality. This can encompass, but is not limited to,
the following types of abuse psychological, physical, sexual, financial, and emotional.
So with all of that information, although it was long winded,
I want to ask you a few of your opinions
(22:45):
on some of the cases you've worked on. And we
touched on Sally Lawrence and even though it wasn't one
of your cases, I wondered if you had any thoughts
on her estrangement to her husband, Ian Lawrence, because she
mentioned to her one of her daughters that she feared
for her life the relationship had broken down within the household,
(23:08):
and you mentioned yourself in the Real Manhunter that they
were living two separate lives under the same roof, and
she remained in that home despite her worries for around
six months or so, And I wondered if you had
any insight or indication on why she didn't leave, if
she feared so much for her life.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
I think I think it's common, sadly, that the more
you have, the more comfortable your life, the more nicer
your house, the more children you have, the more possessions
you have, the harder you sleep. You know, if you've
got nothing, then walking out the door with nothing is easier.
And I think we see this where where where the
(23:52):
the prospects of losing the lifestyle or the trappings of
your life a bigger draw than the fear of being
controlled or being abused, And that in itself is a
form of control. Ultimately, what we were trying to do
with this scheme I talked about in Yorkshire was to
(24:14):
make it easy for women. Mostly women it was who
just felt they didn't have the means, they didn't have
the wherewithal, they didn't have the supported around them to
be able to leave this abusive relationship and providing so
for example, what we were doing was we started this
sort of process of saying, we are going to arrest,
(24:35):
we're going to keep in customer, we're going to book
for the court. So that gives you some breathing space,
that gives you two or three days when he's out
of the house. They can't be there during that time.
We got sponsored mobile paysure go mobile phones given to us.
We lined up solicitors who specialized and wanted to do
the work to get injunctions and so forth, and so
that in that time that space that we could create
(24:58):
by arresting, charging and keep in custody in the background,
we could then put the situation in place to try
and solve these problems that were stopping the escape. Now,
that kind of worked, and it kind of worked in
situations where we had, you know, we had two larger
(25:18):
social housing estates on the division and they were the
source of quite a lot of our domestic advance reports,
and it was you know, where am I going to live?
Where am I? We had to involve housing, and I
think the pressure on housing, and I'm talking now about
the late nineteen nineties, so the pressure on housing were
far less than they are at the moment, and it
was possible to organize through the local authority or housing
(25:40):
association somewhere to go, you know, And it's not the
situation where you're going to a refuge where you're kind
of living in effectively bedsit shared bathroom conditions with two children,
and nobody wants to do that. You can understand. I think, well,
if that's my choice, if that's the only option I have,
then I'd rather stay and tough it out. So that
(26:01):
was what we were trying to do there. But as
I say, once you get to kind of one of
the better words with middle class people, as as in
the Lawrence case, then although they might have had she
might have had the financial means to go and book
into a hotel or to rent somewhere to live or whatever.
The maybe the kind of the jump from this, you know,
(26:22):
I've been I saw the house when we were filming.
It's a nice sort of solid dirties, big house there.
And then of course you've got children involved, and you've
got children, and you've got the father of the children
is there, and then moving away means changing schools for them,
and they's just all these literally hundreds of practical difficulties
(26:43):
that you can understand as people weigh them up and think, well, no,
I just can't do it. I can't, I can't imagine.
I'd rather I'd rather take the risk. And that was
what all those years ago we were trying to address.
And I guess you know, we had some success with it,
and then as it was always the same in policing,
and move on and do something else, and then it's
picked up and money runs out and support run. I
(27:05):
don't know what happened to it, but you know we're
still We're better, I'm sure nationally at how we deal
with domestic abuse and commercive control.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
But well, introducing or in twenty fifteen, although it's such
a difficult thing to prove, it's imperative that it exists
and that hopefully it's recognized that it needs to be
extended to groups of movements to protect people that are
being manipulated in coerced. But it's fascinating for me to
hear from your perspective and experience the things that are
(27:36):
identified in insular cult communities where people are restricted from
the outside world, they have their money taken away from them,
their passports, their means of escape. Sometimes individuals critical thinking suffers,
the dependency on the abuser or the leader grows, so
people struggle to make their own independent decisions, and that
(27:58):
those two days that you spoke about, where you get
breathing space for the victim and separation from the abuser
may introduce also a bit of the ability for critical
thinking to come back and a bit of rest and
a bit of time away from feeling constantly in fear
of the person that's harming you. So even in that case,
without offering people the physical things in terms of housing
(28:22):
and money, just that space to breathe and think and
get a good night's sleep can be the difference between
somebody staying in that abusive environment and being able to
critically remove themselves from that as well. So it's really
interesting for.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Me to hear I career. I mean, that was really
the coolners of the stretchy what I wanted to do.
And I remember because I'm a great one for kind
of analogies, I suppose and at the time probably still
I don't know what you do Officer safety training in
for physical safety for police officers, and one things you're
taught is to give yourself distance. So you've got this
(28:58):
business of doing a striking chest to push someone away,
to create that distance because it's safer, said, that's what
we need to do with these victims. Yeah, but we
need to do it in time rather than in actual
spatial distance.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
And that's why a lot of the time, I suppose
you see victims of domestic violence return to those abusive relationships,
even once they've managed to walk away the dependency level.
There's sunk cost fallacy with you know, the children, all
of the things that you mentioned. Who knows what was
happening between Sally and Ian behind closed doors, really what
(29:33):
conversations were taking place in terms of emotional abuse. The
house was hers before they got married, and he was
demanding all of it, and then half of it, and
then all of it again. So perhaps Sally didn't want
to walk away and leave him with everything when it
was rightfully hers to begin with. We'll we'll never really know,
but I think there are some indications around Ian Lawrence's personality.
(29:57):
He was a charismatic man, and he was able to
be charming. He had this very high flying personal life
and social life, and he was doing really well with
his job as a as a pilot, and then it
all kind of came away from him. And we see
historically that when leaders and abuses of power no longer
(30:21):
have that complete control over individuals, they lose control and
they will go to extreme lengths to try and maintain
that power or to try and take that power back.
We've seen it with the Branch, Davidians, with David Koresh.
We saw it with Jim Jones and the People's Temple.
And I'm not saying that they are the same. I'm
(30:41):
saying that there could be similarities between Ian Lawrence's reckless
endangerment of his own life in that vehicle.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh yeah, it was a high rit strategy, high stakes
game he was playing, and you know, people have said
he was a pilot and he was used to sort
of the idea of assuming the crass position. And indeed,
you know, we spoke again and I keep on about
this being a strength of what we do in the programs,
but we've got We actually spoke to the member of
the public who was the first person on the scene
(31:13):
after the crash, you know, and he said, and also
that the paramedics and the emergency services, and he said, well,
he looks almost if he was in the brace position.
Speaker 1 (31:23):
You know, yes, consciousness of consciousness, but as.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
A part of course, he'd be quite well versed and
and well trained presumably in that. And so he's you know,
he's obviously decided that it's worth the risk that he
can pull this off, that he can do this, and
the amount of you know, I don't know if you've
ever tried, why would you, But if you've ever tried
deliberately to ram a car into something, I happen to
(31:49):
have done that because I've had to do that. It's
a really hard thing to do that, you know, to
try and keep you foot there and not put your
foot on the brake. So it's I think that the
psychology of him in deciding this was the best way
that he could murder his wife and get away with it.
It's a really really hoped But isn't there an arrogance.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Almost like a god complex?
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Yes, sort of you know, I can do this, I can,
I can, You've got this, You've got this here, and
you can do this. You're you're you're invincible, you know.
So there's an arrogance here, which I think is you know,
farm of a culture that I do. But I'm sure
that that's a common feature of people who are leading
cults or culture.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Absolutely. Absolutely. It just felt to me watching the documentary
that after it was apparent to Ian Lawrence that he
was not going to maintain that power, he was not
going to get all of the things that he was
demanding from Sally Lawrence, and that she was going to
(32:49):
divorce him either way. He went to the extreme lengths
that he went to out of sheer despair, almost of.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Desperation, desperation. But but I'm sure, but you can say
there's a there's a you know, desperate times demand desperate measures.
But there's always going to be an element of weighing
up the risks and of deciding what the probabilities of
a good outcome are or whatever. And I think that
(33:20):
you're thinking on that must be kind of you know,
clouded by your determination or your desperation. But again, he's
a pilot, and you know pilots are trained and expect
dangerous situations might occur and that they that they have
a chance of surviving them. You know that that would
(33:41):
be part of what they do. And so does that
make him more likely to think he can get away
with running into a tree and killing his wife and
surviving that it would do you or right, because we
just think, no, trees are big and they don't move,
and cars fold up and it's going to be dangerous.
He spends his life, his working life, however, many hundred
(34:01):
of thousand feet off the ground, in a machine that
could crash, and has to have the confidence that he
could survive that crash if it happened, or he might
survive it. So you can kind of see how that
thinking is probably relative to his training and his profession.
But I think the you know, I always, unfortunately always
(34:23):
keep thinking back to Levy Belfield and he, you know,
he's just got so many and I'd never thought of
it until we spoke. I'd never thought of it as
him being cut. But there's a question of the way
in which he treated his partners that he lived with.
And there are a number of them, actually a surprisingly
high number of them. The number of statements I read
(34:45):
that started in such and such a time I had
a short relationship with Leviy Belford. We were kind of
looking and thinking, how why because he was charming, because
he was able to talk, he had the gift of
the gap, and he could if he was dealing with
the right individuals who were susceptible to his particular brand
of charm, then he could do that. So he had
(35:07):
a string of kind of partner's relationships, and some of
those reported the most horrible, frightening, shocking abuse that I
think I've ever heard of. You know, when you talk
to one of his one of his partners, who says
that after an argument, she was strip naked and sat
(35:27):
on a kitchen stool and told that he would kill
her if she moved, And he came back eight hours later,
and she'd sat there, and she'd wet herself on a
couple of occasions because she was too scared to get
off of that.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Well, that's his fully exercising his power of control over
an individual to see how loyal a person will be
to his instructions. I imagine it did start that way
with their relationship really quite charming, and overtimes it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
So, okay, this is how it went. You meet him,
he's charming, charms who buys you fly and chocolates and things,
and you know how, you have a laugh, he's funny,
You have a good time. And then at the third
day of something, it's give me a mobile phone. There
you go, right, he gives you a mobile. That's your
mobile phone now, yeah, but all my old numbers are
in that one, so now you don't need those numbers.
(36:16):
My numbers in the one I've given you. That's your phone. Now,
that's the only number you need. We heard a telephone
call he made from prison to one of his He
had a girlfriend, not the woman he lived with, a
younger at sixteen year old actually, and he was talking
to her from prison, recorded call and he didn't believe
(36:39):
her that she was at her parents' house. It's now
you're out with some bloke I named him. It's been
a racist way you described him, but then that was him,
because she's thoroughly horrible in all sorts of ways. And
she say, no, no, no, I'm not living. I met my
mum's I'm at my mum's house. And he said, right,
this is what you need to do. So take the phone,
walk upstairs, hold your phone over the toilet, and fly shit,
(37:01):
because I know the noise your parents' toilet makes when
it flushes, and that will prove to me you're at
home that your parents has And she went and did it.
This is the guy who's locked up on remand in
prison over the phone, and yet he's still able to
make somebody do something.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
Besides, it makes me wonder, and I know that we've
run over, and I'm just kind of going to pick
you up. Your your brain's about this, this one little thing.
Cases that you've come across in your career history when
there wasn't a law around coercive and controlling behavior, where
(37:39):
partners have provided alibis, have hidden evidence, have gone to
lengths to protect their potential abuser, or where family environments
kids have been children have been coached into saying partners
have been coached into saying certain things. Do you feel
like there are cases you can identify where the coercive
(38:01):
act would have helped you in those times? Oh?
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I'm sure, because yeah, I mean and almost literally too
many cases to name or to imagine where where these
things have been have been given up with it. And
you know, in many cases I couldn't really name them
because we may not have actually proved that was the case,
but we've known that that's the case. One example I
can think of is a rape investigation where it was
(38:31):
only because the victim's sister off the record, asked to
meet me and I met her in a pub and
told me what had happened. And actually this woman was
running heroin for her partner. They've been together with some time.
He was a drug dealer and she was moving drugs
for him by secreting him inside her body.
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Oh got key.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
And then a rival drug gang knew that's how he
moved his drugs, so they intercepted her and stole the
drugs from her. And because of they've beaten her and
she was unconscious and they'd caused various injuries to her
and too much detail, she made a credible allegation that
she'd been raped by a stranger, and we investigate it
with the full team, and oh we could. It was
(39:16):
only because her sister thought the police are wasting her
time here, so she confidentially got in touch with me
and I met him and said, now this is what happened. Wow,
she was never raped, She just had drug stolen from her.
So she was willing to do that and to go
that to those days. So it's not just creating an alibi,
this is creating a fictional victimization of herself as a
(39:37):
rape victim.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Do you feel like your four part series around Levi
Bellfield will look it into some of that coercive behavior
of his.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Absolutely will, Well, that would be really absolutely will, because
I think there's you know, to say, he's a man
that is well known for killing people, and that's shocking
and despicable enough as it is, but there are are
scores more victims who survived who have suffered abuse, either
(40:08):
mental or physical abuse at his hands, and I think
it's right two let the world know what he's really like.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Absolutely. I think it's also really important to highlight those
types of of coercive methods that viewers might be able
to identify with their own situations with family members or
loved ones, and just identify those systems that abuses have
put in place. And and so it's it's educational as
(40:39):
well as you know, putting a spotlight on it is
a monster, I.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Mean, And I think one of the ways, one of
the things I think that it will raise a question
that it's a thing to consider. Has had that partner
who was sitting on the kitchen still naked for eight tales,
had the partner that was a lot put in the
house and had to let her mother in by throwing
a key from upstairs because she couldn't unlock the door
(41:05):
from the inside. What if those partners have had access
to this legislation, might Levi Bellfield have ended up being
convicted of things before we got to.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
Murder, And that was the whole point of today's conversation.
I just got I have not I'm not very good
at articulating my thoughts, but you've just said it, like
really eloquently in one sentence. So thank you so much
for that, and thank you so much for your time.
It's really interesting for me to pull everything together in
terms of the different cultic environments that exist in the world.
(41:41):
We've covered the armed forces with high demand control systems
in place. We've looked at multi level marketing. We've looked
at gang culture, and now looking at the types of
cases that the police might might be involved with that
link directly to cult like environments.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
Have we looked at the true crime community?
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I know I have I should probably I should probably
end the recording here, but I will just sign off
before before I do that. So thank you so so
much for all of your time and your willingness to
give your insights and experience to the rest of us
so that we can continue learning and carry your legacy
(42:19):
on for you.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I hope, so I'm not going anywhere just yet. I
hope anyway, and then look a bit peaky.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
But thank you very much, Colin taking okay cheers sakes.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Enjoyed it.
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