Forensic Files - Season 2, Episode 2 - The Dirty Deed - (In HD) | Forensic Files

Derek Severs and his wife Eileen who are in their 60s. >> Half away from the home of Derek and
Eileen Severs who disappeared about 3 weeks ago. >> Resumed their search for Derek and
Eileen Severs who vanished without trace from their home in Hamilton. Despite a detailed search for a missing couple by
police and hundreds of volunteers, it was the information found in some dirt which led police to their whereabouts.
[Music] Derek and Eileen Severs were a wealthy retired couple who lived a life of
English leisure in Hamilton, a small village about a 2-hour drive from London. The village sits on a narrow peninsula
that juts out into rutland water, one of Europe's largest man-made lakes. The woods and the lake make it a popular
vacation destination, and the severs had been living here for the past 20 years in a home known locally as the bungalow.
Derek Severs had been retired for the past few years and was well known and well-liked among neighbors of the small
village. Doug Clemens lived next door to the Severs. >> I'd never met a better man than Derek
Severs. He liked a bit of horse racing and he loved a pint of beer. Derek's wife Eileene was equally wellknown not
only as a volunteer for many local charities, but also as a kind and generous friend and neighbor.
>> Mrs. Se was one of those people who spent all her time visiting people, doing things for charity. She was always
seen. Everybody liked her. >> Saturday afternoon, November 13th, 1993, was the last time friends saw Derek
Severs. He was having lunch and a few pints of ale here at the Finch's Arms Pub.
Friends said Derek left the pub around 3:30 that afternoon, got into his car, and was headed straight home.
Eileen Severs was last seen on that same afternoon. She left this church after attending a charity bazaar she helped
organize. Eileen told friends she too was headed home. 5 days later, after the severs both
missed some previously scheduled appointments, friends called the police. This is the sort of place where if
you're missing for a couple of hours, people want to know why. >> Police immediately drove out to the
sever's home. >> The missing couple's 37year-old son, Roger, answered the door. >> Derek and Eileen Severs. Well,
>> mom and dad are on holiday in London. >> Would you mind if I had a look around
then? >> Police took a quick look around the house. >> Thank you. [Music] There's no sign of a breakin. There's no
sign of uh anything wrong inside the house. >> By which you mean there's no sign of a
struggle or anything? >> No, nothing at all. >> But friends weren't convinced that
everything was all right. The severs had never gone away without first cancelling
their scheduled appointments. >> It was not in their nature to go away without making arrangements to talk,
telling people they were going away. They weren't the sort of couple who would disappear without telling friends.
They would always say, "Look, we we're popping out. Look after our house." Because that's the sort of village that
it was. >> Derek at times he did go away. He used to leave me in charge. He'd say, "Look
after the garden." >> And neighbors said it was unusual for Derek and Eileen Severs to ask their son
Roger to housesit. Roger was a disappointment to his parents. He was unemployed and had the reputation of
being a con man. Once telling a girlfriend that he was a gynecologist. When police heard these stories, they
decided to take a closer look around the Severs home. 6 days after friends last saw Derek and
Eene Severs, the police decided to make a second visit to the Severs home. This time in daylight, the officers noticed
that the backyard had recently been excavated and there were signs of a fire in the garden.
>> And looking through the windows, we could see this kitchen carpet was missing, but it didn't add up. So, we
decided that we'd use the police powers to go into the bungalow to have a further search.
>> Roger Severs told police that his parents left for London from the Peterbar train station.
Police went to the train station armed with a photograph of the severs. They asked the employees and regular
passengers if they had seen the couple. >> Mr. Seis was this very big man who walked very badly with the aid of a
stick. And we thought that if anybody had seen them, they would rem >> But no one at the train station recalled
seeing the severs. And police found no evidence they even made it to London. Already local newspapers ran headlines
about the sever's mysterious disappearance. The police suspected foul play and decided to conduct a forensic
search for blood inside the sever's home. Detectives noticed some suspicious dark stains on the side of the bathtub
and performed a castle meer test. A damp cotton swab is used to wipe the stain and then some pheninoalene and hydrogen
peroxide are added. The sample of the stain found on the bathtub turned a bright pink, a positive presumptive test
for the presence of blood. >> The fact we'd found blood didn't necessarily prove conclusively that it
come from a violent action. They could have Ro, one of them could have cut themselves in the bathroom. Anything
could have happened. >> Police also noticed a blood smear on the back seat of Derek Sever's automobile
and the Castlemeer test confirmed that stains on the garage door were indeed blood spatter. Police noticed something
else that was suspicious. They found a large number of green fibers in the hallway inside the house in the trunk of
Mr. Sever's automobile and on a pair of trousers believed to be Rogers. The fibers were an important clue
because they did not match any items inside the house. This was an indication that the source of the fibers had
recently been removed. >> The actual item itself was missing. So that if it as were the two severs, Mr.
and Mrs. Severs. So logic tells you that it's gone with the two. It's part of the
crime scene. >> The police were convinced that the severs had been the victims of foul play
and suspected that Roger Severs knew more about his parents' whereabouts than he was telling them.
Investigators believed that Roger Severs was involved with his parents' disappearance, but they had no proof
that a crime had been committed and had no hard evidence suggesting where their bodies might be. The search for the
severs began in their own backyard since it appeared that the gardens had recently been excavated and there had
also been some kind of fire. You need a very, very big fire to dispose of bodies, and there's no way they could
have been disposed of on there. >> The police didn't find any human remains, but they did find small bits of
carpet and clothing in the ashes. >> It was like looking for a needle in a hay stack because all around there is
rural. There's huge expanse of water, lots of forest, trees, woods, um, open fields. How on earth do you find a body
there? Just when all of these searches turned up, no clues, police finally got a
break. They learned of a strange event which occurred before the severs were even
reported missing. A police officer on patrol recalled seeing a man in an isolated area called
the Xton Avenue Woods. Is there something wrong, sir? >> The man matched Roger Sever's
description. >> I just needed to relieve myself and then I decided to gather some leaf over to
the garden. >> Well, then move along when you're ready. >> We'll do so, officer. Good night.
>> The officer said the man acted suspiciously. >> Well, any gardener, any autoiculturist
will tell you, you don't want leaf mold the end in November. It's not the time of the year you're going to collect it
and certainly not half past 6 at night. So we we assumed something had occurred up in in the Exton Avenue woods there.
So off we went to have a look. [Music] When they returned to the area a few days later, they found a bloody towel
near the spot where the man was seen collecting leaves, but the police could find no evidence
that the bodies were buried there. We uh did a fingertip search of the entire area and we never ever recovered
any further evidence from that scene. >> The towel matched those in the Sever's house, but without blood samples for Mr.
and Mrs. Severs, it was difficult to know to whom the blood belonged. >> It was challenging rather than
frustrating. We we we wanted to find the bodies for two reasons. one evidential obviously and secondly of course we you
know I think it's only right and proper if there's been a murder we want the bodies for the relatives and everyone
else you know it's only right that we should be able to find them >> late one night inspector Palmer studied
the photographs of the sever's automobile as he flipped through the photographs something unusual caught his
eye something suspicious about the dirt and mud on Mr. Sever's car. The color of
the mud just didn't look right. >> This staining was a lot lighter in color than you would expect from a vehicle on
road usage. Generally speaking, a vehicle on road usage, it's a very dark black, dark gray, dirty color. This was
a lot lighter color. >> Was it possible that an analysis of the dried mud on the car might give police
some idea of where the car had been? To find out, detectives called in Dr. Tony Brown, a geologist at the University of
Exit. Dr. Brown began his examination by collecting the soil, dirt, grass, and debris from the wheel wells of Derek
Sever's automobile. Under a microscope, Dr. Brown analyzed the samples and discovered tiny bits of
vegetation mixed in with the mud, including minute pieces of moss, leaves, and grass. There was even a small piece
of fishing line. >> It told us that it was a mixed deciduous woodland, probably oak dominated, but
with also what several other species. It was clearly quite uh shady. the moss could only come from a a little shaded
woodland and there was also a fair amount of grass. Uh and at first that might seem to contradict the woodland,
but that's likely to occur either at the edge of a clearing in a woodland or towards the edge of a woodland. And of
course, the the fishing line suggested it was the somewhere that fishermen parked.
>> And Dr. Brown discovered another microscopic clue. More than 20 different types of pollen were mixed in with the
mud from the wheel well. Pollen is a fine powder-like material which is produced by trees and plant life. It
functions as the male seed in fertilization. To identify the pollen, Dr. Brown needed
to isolate the microscopic pollen granules from the soil. First by using a series of filters, and then by adding
hydrofluoric acid, a chemical so powerful it can dissolve glass. The acid dissolves away all remaining materials,
leaving just the pollen. Dr. Brown was able to identify most of the pollen in the sample. Oak, elm, and pollen from
hawthors were easy to identify just by sight. However, he noticed one type of pollen he had never seen before.
>> I knew that I didn't know what it was. And then after that, of course, we we run through the the normal process of of
identifying an unknown pollen type. >> There are millions of different species of pollen. Dr. Brown looked closely at
the number and placement of the tiny slits and compared them to the thousands of photographs of pollen samples in his
library. After looking through scores of samples, Dr. Brown found a match. The pollen was from an unusual specimen from
a tree not terribly common in England. It was pollen from a horse chestnut tree. a tree native to Asia.
>> In my whole career of looking at samples from the East Midlands, I'd never actually seen horse chestnut pollen from
a sample. >> And there was something else unusual about the pollen from the horse chestnut
tree. It's a heavy pollen. And because of its weight, it's too heavy to travel far through the air. It tends to float
straight down to the ground very close to the tree itself. Since Dr. Brown found horse chestnut pollen in all four
of the rover's wheel arches, he was convinced that the car had recently been parked near a horse chestnut tree.
Police asked Dr. Brown to identify possible locations that had horse chestnut trees as well as other
vegetation matching the samples found in the sever's wheel wells. Dr. Brown identified five possible locations to
search. The first woodland searched was this one, the closest to the sever's home, but an entire day of looking here
turned up nothing. Next, they searched the second area Dr. Brown identified a larger woodland near the lake. Specially
trained search teams worked their way down this hill. When an officer poked a stick into one of the mounds, he found
it to be unexpectedly soft. He cleared away some leaves and loose soil to reveal a patch of human skin. Police
slowly uncovered the bodies of Eileene and Derek Severs. Ironically, they were found lying on a bed of horse chestnuts.
Just a few feet away stood a horse chestnut tree. >> They were lying side by side. Uh, and
both of them were wrapped in a green blankets. >> Fibers in the green blanket matched the
green fibers found in the Severs hallway and on the trousers that belonged to Roger Severs. The top layer of leaves
and soil was similar to the soil found at the Exton Avenue woods where Roger Severs had been seen by police. Another
layer of soil matched the soil in the Sever's backyard. There was even a layer of roof tiles to stabilize the grave.
The tiles matched the roof tiles on the Sever's home. Roger was then tied into every step of the progression from the
murder to the burial. >> All of the evidence pointed to the sever's only son, Roger, who had a
history of personal and financial difficulties. >> He was basically penniless, certainly uh hard up and we believe that
he had turned up at the bungalow and maybe for the first time, we don't know, had been refused help by his parents.
What? What? What do you mean too much? >> On Saturday afternoon, November 13th, while his father was at the pub, Roger
argued with his mother in the kitchen. He followed her to the bathroom and attacked, striking her eight times to
the head, causing the blood spatter found on the bathtub. [Music] Roger then wrapped his mother's body in
a green blanket, dragged her body to the kitchen, leaving a trail of green fibers
found in the hallway and on Roger's trousers. [Music] Derek Severs arrived home shortly
afterwards, and when he did, Roger was waiting. He struck his father 10 times in the
head, causing the blood spatter onto the garage door. Roger placed his father's body into the
back seat of the car, where police later noticed the blood smear, and he put his
mother's body in the trunk, where green blanket fibers were later discovered. [Music]
Roger drove his father's car to a deserted location in the woods, parked under a horse chestnut tree in an area
used by fishermen, and then dragged the bodies into the woods. Roger wanted to limit the time he spent
at the scene. So instead of digging a grave, he placed the bodies into a ravine and covered them with roofing
tiles, fertilizer, and leaves. But the most important piece of evidence came as Roger was driving away.
Pollen from the nearby horse chestnut tree flew up into the wheel wells of the automobile. Roger Severs could never
have imagined that this pollen would lead police to his parents' grave. Roger Severs was charged in the murder
of his parents and during the trial took the witness stand and confessed. His plea for leniency failed and he was
sentenced to life in prison. The wife and I, we lost two good friends. And life's never been the same since.
I embarked on something which I saw as being rather simplistic. Link this vehicle with those man-made roads. That
was all I wanted. I got a lot more. A lot more. And hopefully that's going to help a lot of people, investigators in
the future. >> Well, I think that the police now are certainly far more aware of the value of
what otherwise might just be described as mud. [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Eileen and Derrick Severs disappeared from their home in the small village of Hambleton in Great Britain, and police found evidence which suggested foul play. Now in HD.

Brief Summary

Derek and Eileen Severs disappeared, their son Roger was implicated, and forensic evidence led to their bodies' discovery and his conviction.

Key points

The Disappearance of Derek and Eileen Severs. Derek and Eileen Severs vanish from their home in Hamilton, sparking a massive search.
Suspicion Falls on Roger Severs. The couple's son, Roger, becomes a person of interest as police investigate their disappearance.
Discovery of the Bodies. After extensive searches, the bodies of Derek and Eileen Severs are found in the woods.
Roger Severs Charged with Murder. Roger Severs confesses to the murder of his parents during the trial and is sentenced to life in prison.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

They would always say, "Look, we’re popping out. Look after our house.".

Describing the Severs' nature of communication with friends.

3:58WatchSep 18, 2025

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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