Encountering Evil: The Murder of Cheryl Moss | Murdered at First Sight | Forensic Files

[light music] - My sister Cheryl, was by her very nature, a very caring person. - Very bubbly, smiling, always chatting,
and I was proud to say that my daughter was a nurse, very proud. Cheryl was coming round to celebrate me birthday
and really looking forward to it. And then I've had a call to say that my daughter
has been involved in an incident. [sirens wailing] - We found that a nurse had been savagely attacked
in open air in the middle of the day. - Cheryl had 72 stab wounds, including in her back, on her arms.
One of the blows, even split her skull open. - I drove up to the hospital. My heart was racing, brain was racing.
- You have a nurse just minding her own business, looking after people, just popping out for a quick break
and then meets this terrible end. - A stranger murder is just so horrific and difficult
because there's nothing that could have been done to prevent it. - I think the shock really
of losing your daughter as badly as that. It's hard to think of anything else really.
[dramatic music] [sombre piano music] - Hornchurch is at the London end of urban Essex
and it's at the end of a tube line. So it's a commuter belt area in which its entire existence
is based on, as a London over spill. So there are nice areas of Hornchurch, but it is very much a commuter suburb.
- Life growing up in the Ewart household was say, like most people's everyday life,
just a normal everyday family. My sister Cheryl was, we had a, I would like to say a typical brother sister relationship.
You know, I loved my sister and she loved me. She was my younger sister so I was having to look out for her.
Back then, people used to play out so I'd often be sent to go and look for her. [laughs]
"Can you go and find your sister?" And I think at the time I used to find that quite annoying
but not so much now. It was a happy home. My mum was a good mum and Terry, my stepdad was a good father.
- I was so proud of her when she got a job in the hospital to be a nurse. I mean, nurses are the most wonderful people
that you can wish for really and to have her as a nurse was unbelievable. - Mother nature had gifted her that gene to care.
She had that way about her that she could bring out the best in people. Her normal day would've been
very similar to most other people's. Go to work, go home, eat, sleep, do it all again the next day.
[soft music] - It was 6th of April on my birthday. I was working delivering data tapes to banks and offices
in the city of London, and about half past nine on my way down to the van to unload,
I just opened the doors when my phone went and I picked the phone up and it was Cheryl
and she wished me happy birthday and she said, "Dad, I hope you're not doing nothing tonight
"because we want to come round for an Indian "and have a few drinks and have a nice evening for you."
I said, "That'd be great, I'm not doing nothing." She said, "Well, that'd be marvellous.
"I look forward to it." And that was about 9:30, 20 to 10:00 and then I moved on said "Tada Cheryl, I'll see you later."
- She went out to have a short walk for a breath of fresh air. - She was expecting just to have a nice normal day
and celebrate her father. She never thought for a second something this horrific and tragic would happen to her.
- It was about quarter to 11:00 when the phone went again and this time it was my office where I worked and they said,
"Terry, we just wanted to let you know "that there's been an incident at your daughter's hospital
"and we're sending a driver out with your motor "and he'll take your round over "and we want you to go
"to your daughter's hospital straight away." And as soon as he arrived I jumped in my car
and then I headed for the hospital. I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, she must have had an accident or something."
Hopefully nothing major. [sirens wailing] - The first I heard was that there's a big police operation out in Hornchurch
and we didn't know what it was at the time, but it quickly came through that a nurse had been attacked.
[suspenseful Music] [sirens wailing] - And when I pulled up at the hospital, there was a policeman in the middle of the road
and there was lots of people round by the gates. So I just pulled up, opened my window
and I said, "Excuse me, could you help me? "My name's Terry Ewart." This policewoman in plain clothes called me over
and she said, "I'm very sorry to have to tell you this." She said, "But we believe your daughter has been murdered
"She has a badge with Cheryl Moss on it "and we believe it to be your daughter."
I was so shocked, I can't actually remember anything else what she might have said to me.
[suspenseful music] - I was at work that morning and I was actually coming home.
I was on the bus when my phone went. It was my mum's partner at the time. He literally just came straight with of it.
"Oh, your sister's dead." There I am standing on a bus. Just heard that and I was,
I was just like, "What?" So I went home, grabbed the car keys and shot straight up to the hospital,
unclear in my mind what I was going to see. [sombre music] I see a few police officers, I see police tape,
and I think that's when the panic started to get a bit more real. A police officer I think came over
and I kind of walked past him and was gonna go through the tape. I started to panic and I wanted to find my sister.
I'm not sure I really believed it. I said, "Well, do you want me to identify her?"
The police officer said, "Well, we can't at the moment. "It's a crime scene." Which took me back because I thought it was something
I thought she'd fell down the stairs or something, you know? I just really didn't think of anything that bad.
[sombre music continues] Where do you even start processing something like that?
- And I left the hospital grounds and went back to my car and then I've got an eight mile drive through country lanes
and all the time I'm driving, I'm thinking about it and it hadn't hit me really.
When I got to Cheryl's mum's house, Cheryl's mum was sitting there obviously crying her eyes out.
We couldn't believe it was true. [dramatic music] - Cheryl was found very close to her workplace
in a park with her body strewn, just covered in blood. She was stabbed in the skull, the face, the back.
I mean, it was just an absolutely horrific scene. - At this stage, the early indication is that this is a stranger attack
and therefore we have to take every possible precaution and take every opportunity we can from the scene,
so the forensic examination will take some time. - Between 1985 and 2020, I worked for the Metropolitan Police
as a crime scene examiner and a crime scene manager overseeing the forensic response to critical incidents,
there's usually homicide and unexplained death. I was in the office, an office that I shared
with a number of other crime scene managers. So I was aware that the case had come in.
I was dealing with other things at the time so I didn't respond to that primary scene.
- The police roped off the murder scene and started spreading the search outwards
as far as they could and as quickly as they could. - As a crime scene manager, you are generally part of the second wave of response,
the initial police response, paramedics, that's already happened. At this stage,
we didn't know who the attacker was and so every opportunity there is for you to identify that individual is important.
- I think Hornchurch was absolutely stunned. A nurse, of all people, a most respected member of the community
to be savagely attacked in open air in the middle of the day. These sort of murders
don't happen in little commuter suburbs. - When trying to visualise a crime scene,
what you need to do would be to establish the sequence of events leading to that incident.
Who is the person that I'm dealing with? How have they died? Why are they where they are?
The person who's done this to them, did they drop anything? What weapons have they used?
It's visualising recording that scene exactly as it is as you arrive. Once that's done, you can then start to move things.
You can start to deal with parts of that scene to recover the evidence. - The detectives turned up that particular evening
and gave us a little bit more detail. [soft piano music] At the back of the hospital there's a path.
My sister Cheryl was attacked there and stabbed. There was no other sort of details
about stabbing like the quantity of stabs or anything like that. It was just stabbed.
I remember my mum saying that, "Could we go and see her?" They said, "Well, unfortunately she won't be moved.
"She'll be there for the night." I just sort of pictured her laying on a path behind the hospital,
but they said, "No, it's just forensics there." There's tents, there's this, there's that.
I've actually drove down to the hospital, although I wasn't allowed inside. I sat just outside because I wanted to be close to her.
[sombre piano music] I just felt so useless. I was her big brother and I wasn't there for her.
[sombre piano music] - Well, I had loads of family come round consoling me on me birthday when I was supposed to have been
sitting there with Cheryl having a meal and having a few drinks, you know? Just had people around all the time just consoling me.
How sorry they are. I'll never forget that birthday, honestly. Cheryl's mum was absolutely devastated.
It didn't really matter what the police said because it didn't make any difference to how you felt
because of what had happened to your daughter. So she just let them get on with what they've gotta do
and get this person. - Over a career with the police, you end up dealing with an awful lot of quite traumatic crime scenes.
This one stands out because it appeared to be a stranger attack. - A complete stranger with a knife.
How on earth does a man with a knife run amok unchecked in a public place? Someone, possibly a neighbour, is actually a murderer
and if he's not caught, he'll do it again. [suspenseful music] - This is one of my big memories.
This one is my 60th birthday and I had a fabulous time. It was a surprise party.
- Did you know she was gonna be there? - And I never knew she was gonna be there.
And course when I walked in the door and there was Cheryl, well, I was over the moon, you know?
So I was really so glad to have her there, you know? My first child, I was overwhelmed and I had tears in my eyes
and she was a beautiful little baby. She was always playing with her toys. I didn't see nothing bad in her at all.
She was the most wonderful little girl and I was so proud of her, I really was. - My sister was very, she's a very honest person.
If she liked you, she liked you. If she didn't, you would know about it and she wouldn't be afraid to tell you that.
She enjoyed family, she enjoyed visiting family. I'd just not long started a family myself and you know,
if the opportunity was there, she'd be happy to come down and visit. You always assume that
there's gonna be time to make more memories and you never assume that that will come to an end.
Yeah, one of my fondest moments was she wanted to be there for the birth of my son.
She really was so overjoyed with that experience and my guessing is that probably it's an experience
she would've liked to have had herself. Just look at that smile. - [Terry] Her wedding day.
Her wedding day sitting on my lap having a drink, like she likes a nice drink, don't she?
- She was just so happy, you know? - She'd only been married for 18 months. She was still obviously very much in love.
She had a loving family and yet she was struck down in the most brutal fashion imaginable.
- My first impression of the case was the amount of media interest. You don't get that on every case.
There are always one or two cases that seem to spark more interest than normal in the media.
This one clearly did. - The main gates to St. George's are now covered in floral tributes
from friends, family and work colleagues, the whole community still shocked at the senselessness of the murder.
Cheryl was murdered on her father's birthday. A card on a bunch of roses from him reads,
"So cruelly taken from us, will always be in our hearts." - [Terry] You know, what made you
want to do that to my little girl? Cheryl's my only child and to have her not around anymore,
it was awful. - People have often asked me, when did you last see your sister? What did you speak about?
And truthfully, I couldn't remember. I suppose you never really imagine the last conversation you're gonna have
is gonna be the last conversation you have, so why would you necessarily remember it?
- I've always kept her mobile number. I'll never ever change it. Her name's there and her phone number's there and that's it.
You know when I browse through and I look at that sometimes, but I won't, I won't take it off
'cause I can't ever forget Cheryl. - It's thought the nurse had just popped out for a cigarette.
The killer could easily have made a getaway along this path and then out into a country park.
[tense music] - The initial information that the police received was that the assailant was wearing
sunglasses, sports clothing, and what is described as an Ozzy Osbourne wig. I received a call at home that evening to alert me
about a dog walker was walking through the country park where he saw a bag on the riverbank
and he could see what looked like a wig poking out of the bag. He called the police.
Maybe this could lead us to identify the suspect? - Cheryl had been stabbed over 70 times in broad daylight
and police knew that this was probably a stranger murder. They had to find them as fast as possible
and hopefully prevent the same type of horrible thing that happened to Cheryl from happening to somebody else.
- So arriving at the scene, it was probably gone 10 o'clock at night. So it's pitch black, we're in a country park,
there's no lighting. So we had to go and find where this bag was within a cordoned area to try and stop
any people from getting in and interfering with it. So this is where it was. The undergrowth has grown considerably, the brambles,
but it was between the tree and the riverbank here. It's not just a case of turning up
and picking up the bag and taking it away to look at it somewhere warm and comfortable.
It's far more involved than that because if you pick it up and move it, you're gonna contaminate it.
[suspenseful music] You deal with this bag item by item. You take out a single item, you look at that item,
you photograph the item, and then you package the item. Once the wig had been removed and packaged carefully,
we went on to see what else was in the bag and gradually the sunglasses came out,
sports clothing, a blood stained knife, and this bag had appeared to be a direct link with the suspect.
The knife wasn't a knife you might find in your kitchen. It was a far more sinister looking knife,
which is fairly unusual in itself. Kitchen knives are far and away the most popular knife to use.
So as soon as you find something which is apparently blood stained that isn't a kitchen knife,
it has a degree of significance to it. - How could someone be so careless to leave the murder weapon in a bag
close to the crime scene? It wasn't necessarily carelessness, it was arrogance. - Was it intentional?
Had he stashed it here in order to return to it later? Or had he meant to throw it into the river
and the bag perhaps caught on a tree and didn't make it as far as the water itself?
When I was removing items from the bag, I was aware of what looked like a brown package
right at the bottom of the bag. I remember thinking perhaps it was a weight so that when the bag was thrown into the river,
it made it sink. I picked it up and it was virtually weightless. It was an empty cardboard box.
And as I picked it up and turned it over to see if anything was written on the other side of the box,
I saw that it was a parcel that had been delivered in the post and it had the name Harling on it and a local address.
[suspenseful music] - Police have the name and they have an address. I'm sure they're thinking, is this too good to be true?
That it was left right there in the murder kit so close to the crime scene. - Seeing that name and address
was probably one of the most startling things I came across throughout my entire career.
There was a realisation at that point that if this was the name and address of the man that had killed Cheryl,
then at that point there was only two people in the world who knew who'd killed Cheryl, him and me.
You can understand that there might be desire to suddenly send people around to go
and kick the door in on the address, but you can't do that. You don't know what the significance of it is.
So it's a question of just passing that information on to the murder team who carried out their inquiries.
[dramatic music] - We never done enough together as father and daughter. I just can't believe any person could do such a thing.
You know, all I wanted at the time was for him to be locked up and away from doing anything to anybody else.
[suspenseful music] - When you're dealing with a complex traumatic crime scene, it is quite difficult to switch off.
I think that you have to allow your brain a little bit of time to process what you've just been dealing with.
I think it's a question of trying to get some sleep before you go back into work,
at which point you'll receive any updates that there are. - By the next morning, the next news we heard
was that the police had arrested a suspect. - What we'd heard is just that they'd arrested somebody.
It wasn't known at that time whether she knew this person. [suspenseful music] The police kept us informed
when they had anything new to say but sometimes you just heard more in the media
than you did from the police. There was a great deal of media coverage. It was on the telly, it was in newspapers, it was on radio.
You couldn't get away from it. I had a barrage of people knocking on my door, dozens of times a day, different newspapers
wanting this, wanting that. And I really just had no interest in dealing with any of it.
- It upsets me at seeing it all and I remember watching the television, all the news programmes really,
and Cheryl's photo came up and talking about the murder. But for me, it didn't last long enough.
I felt it should have gone on a bit longer. Remembering Cheryl, you know? It's sort of murdered and then finished.
And I wanted people to realise what a lovely girl she was and she deserved more than what she got from the media.
I tried to go back to work after what had happened to Cheryl. I'd done my first day's delivery.
As soon as I walked into the office, they said how sorry they were to hear about my daughter.
After that, I couldn't go back there and do it anymore. I just walked away from it.
[sombre music] - Stuart Harling was arrested just the day after the murder occurred.
When police first searched Harling's home, they got a much better picture of who he was
and it essentially solidified in their mind that this actually was the person that committed these murders.
- Nobody looks like a Hollywood villain. They look like ordinary people in the street
and Stuart Harling was no different. He was a teenager. He was only 18 at the time.
- It was a young man, not too far away from where we lived, not known to my sister, to the best of our knowledge,
not known to anybody on the grounds. And at that time it seemed to indicate that it was a motiveless crime.
[dramatic music] - Who was Stuart Harling? We know that when he was younger he was quite academically gifted.
He went to a grammar school. His teachers spoke highly of him. He was an altar boy, he was a scout troop leader.
But unfortunately things seemed to go awry as he got a bit older. The teachers noticed that he didn't really interact
or mingle with his peers particularly well and over time he became a loner. He became preoccupied with spending time online.
He started playing violent video games often for hours or entire days at a time.
- The police told me that when they went into his house, they looked on his laptop, which he was always on,
and the last 30 pages that he visited on his laptop was all about serial killers.
And the first page he visited was, "Is there any serial killers in Essex?" To hear something like that, a young lad that he was,
wants to do what he wanted to do, it is terrible. - Stuart Harling had developed
a mad fantasy virtual world for himself in which he admired serial killers like Daniel Gonzalez and Dennis Nilsen and Colin Ireland,
almost as if they were pop stars or footballers. - He was researching what these people had done.
Similarly, he was doing combat training on his own. He was trying to become a better killer.
It was almost like planning for a vacation except he was planning a murder. - The police had Harling,
but so far all they had was circumstantial evidence, so this is why the DNA was key.
[dramatic music] - In a case like this where there's no apparent connection between the suspect and the victim,
you need to prove that contact. You need to be able to demonstrate to a court that Stuart Harling came into contact with Cheryl Moss.
If you can't do that, then it's very difficult to prove what's actually happened.
- Stuart Harling's DNA evidence was found in the bag as well as Cheryl's and that is really significant
because there's no feasible reason why the two of them would've met before. So that means it would've confirmed the police's suspicions
about him being the number one suspect. - While he initially was reluctant to confess to the crime,
that faded away very quickly and ultimately he was almost proud to admit to what he had done.
- I suppose it was a blessing from a certain perspective that it wasn't a long drawn out type of investigation.
You know, nothing makes up for the loss, you know, they catch him, don't catch him.
The loss is still there, but we take it as the only positive you can get from a very bad situation.
- I'm pleased that he got caught as early as he did because who knows how many more people
he would've done like he did to Cheryl, you know, if he hadn't been caught? - For a stranger murder,
there's an added layer of trauma because the whole thing is just so senseless. It's just so random.
It's literally a case of the victim being at the wrong place at the wrong time. [sombre piano music]
- I remember Cheryl's funeral pretty well actually. I don't think I took on board
with the amount of people that would be there. I never really realised when that car pulled in,
it was in the first car behind the hearse, all I could see was a wall of people and I was just,
I was amazed. - On the route and everything because they stopped past the hospital,
the nurses there brought out wreaths. Oh, it was so heartbreaking. I never expected that amount of people to be there.
And it broke my heart to think that she was so popular and she had all these people there supporting the funeral.
You know, it was amazing. And when we all came outside, people were coming up, you know, people I didn't even know were there,
just putting their arm around you and it's hard to say be strong after just what has happened.
Like, you know? - In the funeral I was asked if I wanted to help carry my sister and I couldn't bring myself to do it.
When you see the curtains close, it's kind of, it's real anyway, but makes it even more final,
you know? [sombre piano music] - Police had obviously arrested their suspect and it seemed that it was likely to be
a very straightforward case in terms of who had done it. Of course it then emerged that the issue
would not be who had done it, but why he did it. - In the days leading up to the killing,
he prepared a murder kit. He bought the wig and the glasses. He bought the murder weapon.
And perhaps most hauntingly, it seems like he was even practising the route of where he was gonna commit his horrific killings.
- There were other reports from other people in the preceding days to the attack on Cheryl Moss
that they'd seen somebody acting strangely in the country park wearing what was described as an Ozzy Osbourne wig.
- And he had gone off a number of sort of dry runs, walking for hours and hours in the parks of Hornchurch,
as if he was planning exactly what he was intending to do, finessing details. On the day of Cheryl's killing,
he had set out with his murder kit, obviously with the intent of finding someone to kill
and the tragedy was that it was Cheryl who crossed his path. - People often say, how do you say goodbye?
And... I think I've never said goodbye. Not sure I could. [sombre piano music] - Stuart Harling was 19 by the time he came to trial.
So he was still a very young man and it was a very, very sad tale of a very promising boy
who suddenly went off the rails in his teenage years. - We went to the Old Bailey and his mum and dad were there.
I didn't talk to them at all, but they were there as well for the same reason, to see what he had to say.
- A trial is a horrid thing to sit through and you have to go through it day in, day out.
- Harling would plead not guilty to murder, but guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
The basis of the plea was that his lawyers would be claiming that he was so mentally unstable
at the time that he committed the killing, that he was not responsible, in law, for his actions.
[suspenseful music] - Stuart Harling had a diagnosis, which is known as autistic spectrum disorder.
Autistic spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder. And people who have this condition,
they often struggle with social interactions. They might not fully understand some of society's norms and behaviours
and also they can have quite restricted interests or repetitive kind of movements.
Harling's solicitors tried to propose that he had schizoid personality disorder associated with people being
quite cold, quite distant, quite aloof. There was something quite narcissistic about Stuart Harling.
He wanted this infamy and that doesn't fit in with the characteristics of schizoid personality disorder.
People with that condition are indifferent to what others think about them. - The jury's job was to decide in basic layman's terms,
whether Stuart Harling was mad or bad. [dramatic music] - During the trial, you do,
you hear a lot of factual information delivered without any emotion, which I understand,
but it's very, very, very graphic. - They actually had the stab wounds on the screen
and they went through every single stab. It was 72 and we had to sit there listening to that
and I just had tears in my eyes to think, you know, he could do such a thing. - You run through it in your own mind
what it must have been like and I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Because my mum was too ill at the time to go,
she was fighting cancer at the time and she just couldn't make it. So to a degree I had to relay
that to her as well afterwards. So I kind of had to go through it twice. You're upset about that and you're very angry as well.
All the time, you've got police officers with you just in case you decide to do something stupid,
which is tempting, trust me. You feel that anger just build up inside you, you know?
Just... Anyway, I'll leave that to your imagination. - I remember looking at him,
the hatefulness in me was untrue, you know? But there's nothing you could do about it
because there were so many police there preventing you from doing anything. [sombre music]
- Mostly in these cases, defence lawyers decide that their client would be too unpredictable to allow to give evidence
personally from the witness box and be open to cross-examination. But Harling was different.
Harling went into the witness box and he told the court that having seen Cheryl on her phone alone, distracted,
very vulnerable because she's only a small woman of five foot one. He waited 'til she'd finished on the phone
and then launched his attack. [dramatic music] - He was asked, does he know how many times he stabbed her?
And he didn't have a clue. He just said it was quite a few times. - Standing there,
just having a little cigarette break and then someone from behind done what he did.
I know Cheryl would've fought back. - The coroner said more likelihood is that she was defending herself
and doing the best she could in that situation. He just kept going until she stopped.
- [Terry] She was a tough girl, but there wasn't much she could have done is there really?
- He spied Cheryl, lying in wait, looking for a random stranger to attack in his warped fantasy world.
Harling then headed off back to his home where he logged on his computer straightaway
to find out how the media were covering his attack, his killing that he had just performed.
- Most of us would be horrified and think, oh, the news is covering this and the police are closing in.
But that's not how it is for some of these people. They think I'm not gonna get caught,
or I don't care if I get caught. They just wanted to feel almost important and famous.
It seems strange that Stuart Harling would've wanted to pick broad daylight and a place right next to a hospital to commit a murder.
But ultimately he didn't care if there were onlookers. He didn't care if it was a nurse,
somebody who was an upstanding citizen. The only thing he cared about was his own infamy in his mind.
[sombre piano music] - The thing I recall during the trial, he was completely unemotional about what he'd done.
I think he just saw the trial was an inconvenience. - He said he was bored. Bored with his life and he wanted to do something.
Surely he could've thought of something better to do than do what he did and what he wanted to do.
Surely there's something better in life than that. - In fact, he said he was kind of surprised
when he found out that she'd actually died despite the fact he had stabbed her 72 times.
He went on to say that he wasn't bothered by the fact that he had killed Cheryl,
although it had kind of ruined his day. - He was happy what he did and if he got released,
he might do it again. That's what he said. - Bizarrely, Stuart Harling claimed that he was trying to organise a coup in Equatorial Guinea.
- He had told the jury that he needed a car as part of his role in this attempted coup
of transporting arms, thousands of miles to this African country. - That he attacked Cheryl
because she had car keys and he needed a car. - It seems impossible that the jury or a judge
would hear this story about wanting to kill someone to steal a car, to get a arms deal going on
because of a coup in Equatorial Guinea. It seems absolutely outlandish, but I think that's exactly what he was going for.
- On the surface, it seems like he was just making a last ditch, desperate attempt to appear mentally ill
and not in control of his actions. Stuart Harling was intentionally abrasive and obstructive when he was in court.
He was shouting at the judge. He was threatening the prosecution, he was throwing papers.
- [Chris] I think he was just play acting. When he got told off for that and then later on after that
he never appeared much because he said he couldn't be bothered coming because he didn't really care.
He had no interest. Yeah, so I didn't wanna see him anymore anyway, so. - The jury must have thought
not only is this an extremely dangerous person who's admitting to committing this senseless murder,
but he's also trying to manipulate us to making us think that he's crazy and he's clearly calculating,
premeditated and absolutely ruthless and dangerous. - Diminished responsibility could have been quite relevant in this case
because murder carries a mandatory life sentence. Whereas manslaughter has varying sentencing options for the judge.
- The jurors returned a verdict of guilty to murder by a 10 to one majority. - The verdict of the jury was that
Harling was not a man who was consumed by mental illness. He was in control of his actions.
He carried out these killings to fulfil his own agenda, his own desires to become this notorious serial killer.
So ultimately he was sentenced to a life sentence with a tariff of 20 years. Meaning that the minimum amount of time
he would spend in prison would be 20 years until the parole board would even consider his release.
[suspenseful music] - I dunno what I would've done if it wasn't a guilty verdict, you know?
I just dunno how I would've coped with it. Really. - It was very important that he got done for murder
'cause that's what it was at the end of the day. - I think his sentence is disgusting,
absolutely disgusting for what he did. You know, he should be serving life for life,
not coming out at the age of 38. Who stabs someone 72 times and only gets 20 years?
I just hope he don't come out while I'm still alive. - I think it would be a very crazy parole officer
that decided he was fit to enter the human race, particularly when he was adamant he was gonna continue.
I'm one of these that believes that if you take a life, you should pay the ultimate price for that.
Not that that would bring my sister back, but I just think he's a waste of space.
- The parole board obviously have to take every case seriously. They have to assess in meticulous detail
whether an individual is safe to be released into society or not. But I think in a case like this
where the murder was so random, so senseless, their threshold for releasing somebody like this
would probably be even higher. - I mean, who would've thought that it was the last time
that I was ever gonna speak to Cheryl on the day of my birthday? I would've had a lovely evening
with my little precious daughter, which I was so looking forward to, and you just don't know in life what's gonna happen.
Every time a birthday comes around, I'm at the cemetery, you know, that's where I spend my birthday.
Laying flowers for her and her mum. - [Chris] Sometimes you look back and wonder
what your life would be like if that particular event hadn't occurred. - I do believe she might have had her own children
and I would've been a grandparent, which I would've loved to have been, you know?
But it never happened. When you lose your children through illness is bad enough.
But to lose the way I lost is 10 times worse. As I say, she was only 32 and she had a lot of life left in her.
- I think if people live life the way she did, there'd be a lot more happier people in the world.
You'd rarely see her without a smile on her face. You know, even the problems, she would push her way through because she always knew
that somewhere out there there was a... some light at the end of the tunnel. [sombre music]
[dramatic music]

When nurse Cheryl Moss stepped out for her break during a long shift at the hospital, she never imagined that she’d cross paths with a wannabe serial killer. The brutality of the crime scene stuns law enforcement but when detectives learn that the perpetrator is a teenager, the suspect is quickly referred to as Britain’s most dangerous teenager. Murdered At First Sight is a true crime documentary series that tells the first-hand stories of the most complex and hard-to-solve homicide cases: murders committed by strangers.

Brief Summary

Cheryl Moss was murdered on her father's birthday, leading to the arrest and trial of her killer, Stuart Harling.

Key points

Cheryl's Tragic Attack. Cheryl was savagely attacked in broad daylight, suffering 72 stab wounds.
The Horrific News. Terry receives the devastating news of his daughter's murder from the police.
The Community's Shock. The murder of a nurse in a suburban area leaves the community stunned.
The Murder Weapon Found. A bag containing the murder weapon is discovered near the crime scene.
Arrest of the Suspect. Stuart Harling was arrested just a day after the murder.
The Crime Unfolds. Stuart Harling, a seemingly gifted young man, becomes a loner obsessed with violence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

A stranger murder is just so horrific and difficult.

Describing the nature of the attack on Cheryl.

1:13WatchSep 25, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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