Mark Bradbury | Truth About My Murder | FilmRise True Crime | Forensic Files

[soft dramatic music] - [Richard] When a murder's committed, it's always a race against time to find the truth,
to separate fact from fiction, to catch the killer, and to make sure that justice is served.
But what happens when the truth vanishes with the victim? I'm Dr. Richard Shepherd and I've spent my entire career
as a forensic pathologist, performing nearly 23,000 autopsies, including on some of the most high profile cases
of recent times. I've learned that the dead don't hide the truth and they never lie.
Through me, you'll be hearing directly from the victim. From a state-of-the-art laboratory
with groundbreaking technology that uses digitally scanned sample bodies, I'll be investigating a series of intriguing murders
where from the victim's bodies, I'll be revealing to you the truth behind those horrific crimes.
[camera clicking] [soft tense music] The start of August, 2019, and it was the height of summer.
In the small Cheshire village of Padgate, Mark Bradbury is a popular figure. But it's been a few days since anyone's seen him.
This is the kind of place where everybody knows everyone else and it's hard to keep secrets.
So when Mark was found murdered in his flat, police quickly realized they had a real mystery
on their hands. Would Mark's body help them to find out the truth about what really happened?
- [Sarah] Most murders in the UK are committed by people who are fairly quickly identified
as gonna be the person responsible, whether it's domestic or gang related. Mark's murder was different.
That scenario whereby somebody's not been seen for a few days and they're found dead,
we don't know why, we don't know who they are, what their circumstances are, what their issues would be,
where to even begin looking for a suspect, that is really quite rare and presents a significant challenge.
- [Richard] Mark Bradbury was retired and lived on his own, but he was by no means a loner.
He was very sociable, with lots of friends and a close family. - Mark was was a Warrington man through and through.
He had been born here, he'd been brought up here, still in touch with school friends,
still in touch with people that he'd known for 25 years and really grounded in this area.
- [Richard] He lived in a small flat right in the heart of his local community. - [Hannah] It was just him on his own
and it was the ideal spot to be in. Everyone that he knew and loved was all around the area.
I would go there after school quite a lot. Treated like a princess. He would bring me my tea on, [laughs]
on a tray to sit and watch the television. These little Polaroids are all just memories.
My dad and his brother Lee. My dad was fun loving, happy going. He loved to party, he loved traveling.
My dad used to take me away on holiday. We went to Paris and Rome, Barcelona and Prague,
with hope that in 2021 we would go to New York for my 21st and his 60th. This is really how I'd like to remember my dad,
walking across the beach with Barney. Everyone trying to persuade my dad not to get Barney,
a great big golden retriever for his tiny little flat, he disregarded all that. That was his dog.
And that's really how I'd like to remember him. Hopefully he is walking on a beautiful beach somewhere.
- [Richard] Mark's brother Lee lived on the same road and they ended up sharing the dog.
- [Hannah] My dad had a lovely relationship with his brother. Lee was retired as well,
so he had a little bit more time on his hands. So they just decided that when my dad was at golf
or he wanted to go to the rugby match, that Lee would have Barney. They'd always meet down station roads,
swapping the dog over, and I think that was really nice for them to have that brotherly bond.
- [Sarah] On the 1st of August, Mark took Barney through the underpass, met Lee, handed Barney over
with the agreement that Mark has coming back to take Barney off him the next day.
- [Richard] But Mark never turned up. - [Sarah] The next day, Friday, the 2nd of August,
Mark had a dental appointment. And being the massive golf player that he was, he'd canceled playing golf that Friday
to go to this dental appointment. So the consensus of opinion amongst his golfing friends was,
this is serious, this is a real toothache because he would never cancel golf for anything,
- [Richard] But he didn't appear at the dentist either. - [Hannah] On the Sunday, I got in from work,
and my uncle had sent me a text just to say, "Hi Hannah, have you heard off your dad?
I've not heard off him. He was supposed to get the dog, but he never showed up, and let me know if you get in touch with him."
And I was like, oh for God's sake, he's probably off in golf and just not wanting to have the dog.
But I was due to ring my dad anyway. So I started ringing him and I just got no answer.
And I thought, God, that's weird. He used to sleep with his phone underneath his pillow,
so if he was asleep and I ever rang, he was always there to answer it. So yeah, there was no answer, so I rang again.
There was no answer. And at this point I'm now starting to become increasingly concerned.
- [Sarah] Lee and Mark's friend Paul, they went round to the flat and they found it locked.
The curtains were drawn and it was clear that there was, there was nothing happening.
There was no movement there. - So I went down to the vending machine where I was living
and I was just contemplating all the reasons why he wouldn't answer his phone. Nothing was quite making sense.
So typed in the number of the vending machine and this bottle of pop fell to the bottom.
And as it did, I really felt a pain that was kind of indescribable. And I raced back upstairs and I said to my boyfriend,
I said, "My dad's dead." And he went, "Oh, Hannah, don't be so ridiculous." I said, "I can feel it."
I said, "I can really feel that he's gone." - [Sarah] Mark's former wife had a spare key.
So they contacted her and at the same time contacted the police to say, look, we're worried.
We're gonna go in and see what's happening here. - [Hannah] Lee sent me a text. He said, "I'm on the way now.
I've got the spare key." So Lee got there and I waited about 40 minutes and I said, "Jack, this is not right.
Something's really going on. I'm not there. I don't know what to do." - Officers arrived pretty much
as they came out having found Mark, and they were traumatized. - And I rang my mum and she just burst out crying
and she said they'd found him on the floor. And my mum just kept on saying, "Thank God you weren't here,"
because my mum was so worried that if I was back in Warrington, it would've been me that would've seen the chaos
that was left inside. I went straight back to Warrington to go and see what was going on.
And at that point I met Sarah Oliver. And she took me into her car and she said,
"The police officers that were first to the scene can't quite work out how this has happened,
and that's why I get called out." That's really stuck with me. I felt in that moment
that my life was gonna totally turn. It was like being in a film. I felt like I was watching this happen to me
rather than actually living in it. And when the police left, and still to this day, I don't know why I did it,
but I rang my dad's phone and I left him a voicemail just saying, "Can you please explain to me
how this can possibly happen and how we are going through this?" Obviously, I was never gonna get a response,
but that's all I wanted in the moment, just an explanation. - [Sarah] When I first walked into Mark's flat,
he was lying on the floor underneath a loft hatch. There was also some loose change lying around.
There was TV still present. The premises had been locked and secured. There was no obvious sign
that this was maybe a burglary or an intruder. There was a possibility that he might have fallen out the loft hatch.
And yes, the blood was unusual. It was difficult to explain. But nevertheless, at that time,
it was determined as suspicious rather than homicide. So it became apparent that it was going
to be a massive forensic undertaking. Mark's flat's very small, and at 10 o'clock on the Sunday night, it was quite gloomy.
You couldn't really make much of an informed assessment until I'd been able to get a forensic pathologist out
to the scene in daylight to have a look at Mark's body. - [Angela] The main thing about preserving a crime scene is
that you don't let a horde of people go in there, especially in a small space, and that you know exactly who went in.
So if you get, for example, an unexplained print or mark of some kind or trace of some kind,
you can then go back and get reference samples from the people who were there and just check 'em against them
just in case it was one of them. - [Sarah] The next morning I went into the scene
with the pathologist. It was light, it was possible to see Mark. It was possible to see the injuries that he had sustained.
And that's when it was escalated to a murder. - [Richard] An autopsy was performed,
which showed that Mark had suffered a sustained beating, which I can show you on this sample body.
He had quite widespread blunt force trauma to his head, his body, with lacerations to the scalp.
And as a pathologist, one thing I would always look for also is whether there were any injuries that were caused
where Mark tried to defend himself. These are called defensive injuries. And in Mark's case, it was possible to see
that there was bruising on the outer side of the arm as the hand is raised to protect the body.
The other thing we'd need to look at is to see whether Mark had actually been delivering blows himself.
So we look at the knuckles and the backs of the hands to see if he had been punching people.
There were no obvious marks found, and although some of the injuries could have been caused
by a weapon, no weapon was ever found. The evidence was clear, someone was responsible for Mark's death.
- [Hannah] I was hoping that there'd be no malice and no ill intentions, and that it might have just been an accident.
I was now having to not only go through losing my dad, but it was actually somebody's fault that he was gone.
- [Richard] But then two weeks into the investigation, police discovered a crucial piece of information
that would leave Mark's family in shock. - [Hannah] No one, despite what they've done,
deserves to be murdered as brutally as my dad was. [soft tense music] - [Richard] In August, 2019,
a quiet Cheshire village was rocked when Mark Bradbury, a popular local man, was found dead in his flat.
Mark had died after sustaining a brutal beating. But detectives had no idea when this attack had happened.
They hoped that at autopsy, Mark's body would give them some clues about the timeline of events.
The main problem for the investigators in this case is actually quite simple. Time is against them.
And as part of my role as a pathologist attending a scene is to begin to make the assessments as to the time of death.
And we look at various features of the body. We look at particularly the muscles,
we look at how stiff the muscles have become. So rigor mortis is the process that occurs after death
when the muscles stop receiving oxygen, and that's a change that starts immediately someone dies
and is present in the hands and the feet at about four hours and spreads the whole of the muscle mass of the body
at about 12 hours and then stays there for another 24 hours. So 36 hours in all.
And when we examine the body and we look at the arms, we look at the legs, we look at the mouth, we look at the jaw,
we assess the stiffness of all of these areas to get an assessment of when that person died.
But later on, other changes can occur and that happens on the skin. Green discoloration of the skin of the abdomen is
just about the first thing to happen as decomposition internally changes the body.
And then other changes in the eyes. Are they still firm and tense, or are they now beginning to get a bit cloudy
and a bit soft? And that too gives us an idea of how long that person has been dead.
And all of these changes are temperature dependent. The higher the temperature, the faster these changes are going to take place.
And in Mark's case, he died in the summer locked into his flat. And so temperature is going to play a crucial role
in understanding what has gone on. In the later stages of decomposition, hairs and fibers and bloodstains are lost,
and that just makes a difficult investigation even more challenging. After the post-mortem,
it was concluded that the murder had happened in the hours between Thursday evening,
when Mark was last seen alive, and Friday morning. The police still had no idea who had done it.
- [Sarah] When Mark was first found, we were at a total loss as to who could do this to him.
He was just a guy who had a white van and lived in a flat in a quiet part of town.
We didn't know him, we didn't know who would want to harm him. So until you know him,
you don't know what the circumstances are that might have led to that situation.
So that was kind of the first steps really, is to understand who is this man and why would anybody want to kill him.
- [Richard] Police started examining hours of CCTV trying to identify anyone who'd been near Mark's flat.
- [Sarah] It's a huge time window. And who was going through, there were hundreds and hundreds of people on CCTV,
on bikes, on foot. So it was key to us to get in touch with people and get them to contact us
so we could cross reference against those people on the CCTV and eventually be left with the one man standing.
- That went on for what seems like forever. The phone would ring and my heart rate would just skyrocket.
Is this gonna be the day? Is this gonna be the police? Am I gonna find out new evidence?
Is somebody gonna be arrested? It was just living on the edge all the time and it puts a lot of pressure on your everyday life.
When is that phone call going to come? - [Richard] As the weeks passed, police gradually began to learn more about Mark's life.
- [Sarah] There wasn't somebody here with a long history of criminal interactions
who might have enemies and issues going on. And it took some time to build up a picture of Mark's life
and start to establish that actually there's another side to Mark. - [Richard] They discovered he'd been hiding a dark secret,
which came as a huge shock to his family. - [Sarah] In the weeks after Mark's death,
it became apparent that he used cocaine and he took cocaine in and distributed it
to cover his own costs. Now Mark had kept that below the radar. He sold what he needed to sell to cover his own usage.
He didn't get into trouble with it, he didn't get involved with violence, he didn't bring any attention to himself,
which is how he'd managed to stay unknown to policing systems for so long. You had that side of him going on
and a family that knew nothing about that and friends who knew nothing about that.
They were shocked. - [Hannah] That was the hardest thing that immediately it went from, oh, poor man to,
oh, well, he was a drug dealer, so that's what he deserved. But that's not the way that I knew him.
And that was really difficult to merge these two different men together in my mind
that made up my dad. - [Sarah] They had to come to terms with not just the loss,
but also they hadn't known him. They'd maybe been deceived by him, maybe he kept things from them.
And that's hard, that's hard to deal with. - I was just in total disbelief. I felt like I'd been lied to.
That was really difficult. It hurts me to think that he was potentially leading a double life.
And I do think that I could probably have prevented some of this if I knew what was going on.
- [Richard] But Mark's double life provided the first real breakthrough in the investigation.
- Finding out that Mark Bradbury actually supplied cocaine and was a user himself really changed things
for the investigation team. It was no longer likely to be random. It was more likely to be connected
to a real criminal underworld. - [Richard] Desperate for clues, police began piecing together Mark's last known movements.
- [Sarah] At six o'clock on Thursday night, he stopped at Bargain Booze and he bought himself a case of beer
and a packet of Lambert & Butler cigarettes. And his van was tracked back to his flat,
but it never reappeared on CCTV again. And neither did Mark. As we uncovered details about Mark's drugs life,
we did start speaking to some of his customers. And one of those customers was the last person
to see him alive and gave us absolutely critical information in relation to the layout of Mark's flat
and the fact that when she bought cocaine from him, she'd left some cash. There should have been some 10 and 20 pound notes
sitting on a coffee table, and they weren't there. - [Richard] The investigation team searched for anyone else
who had been buying cocaine from Mark. They came across another customer called Dan Shovelton.
- During house to house inquiries, officers went and visited Dan Shovelton, and it was the first time he'd come into the inquiry.
It was early doors, maybe about three days in. It wasn't far off. But he was very much
just part of the routine house to house. There was no expectation or understanding
that he had any issue with Mark. They visited him, they asked him when he'd last seen Mark,
and he gave what appeared to be a perfectly reasonable explanation that he'd seen Mark about a month ago
and he'd bought some cocaine from him and he'd paid by bank transfer. And I was quite staggered that in this day and age,
cocaine is bought with a bank transfer. - [Richard] A former sergeant in the British army,
Dan was now unemployed and living less than a mile from Mark. - [Sarah] He'd been successful in the Army,
spent about 14 years in and developed quite an expertise as far as I understand it,
in telecommunications and setting up field stations and that kind of activity. - [Richard] Dan had left the forces
to be at home with his daughter. He was having counseling and seeking treatment from a veteran's charity for PTSD.
- [Sarah] There were reports that Dan Shovelton was depressed at a roundabout this time,
that he'd gone offline, that he'd disengaged. But he'd left the army, and I think in all honesty,
he expected to be welcomed into civilian life with open arms and given a well-paid employment using all that skill
that he'd accumulated. And it didn't happen. And it didn't happen for a number of reasons.
One was his own raging cocaine addiction. The relationship between Mark and Dan,
I think was fairly businesslike. There was probably envy on the part of Dan. Dan sees himself as educated, intelligent, capable,
probably saw Mark as beneath him, wasn't as educated, probably didn't think he was capable.
The evidence about Dan's drug habit was that it was enormous and it probably dictated his existence.
- [Richard] Three months earlier, Dan had lost his job with a courier company after being accused of stealing.
At the age of 40, his home had been repossessed and he'd moved in with his parents.
- At the time of the murder, Dan was really desperate. He had lost his house, he had nothing in the bank.
He had run up debts with every other drug supplier. By the 1st of August, the day that we believe Mark was murdered,
Dan Shovelton had amassed debts everywhere, well over 50,000 pounds. And I think by that Thursday afternoon,
he would've done anything for cocaine. [soft tense music] - [Richard] Weeks had passed
since the grim discovery of Mark Bradbury's body in his flat in Padgate. Police had discovered
that Mark had been a small time drug dealer. His body revealed that he had been brutally murdered,
but gave no clue as to who the killer was. Mark's body still had secrets to tell.
- [Sarah] It became apparent as we investigated the scene that there had been a search.
Somebody had been looking for something. We established that Mark had probably got
a significant amount of cocaine in his property at the time of the murder. So we quickly reached the point
that the drugs were the key. They were probably the reason Mark had been killed.
And it was probably because somebody wanted what they couldn't afford. - [Richard] While detectives searched for clues,
Mark's body revealed more details about how he had died. We know that Mark had suffered quite extensive blows
delivered to the head, but because of the decomposition, some of the injuries to the skin
and the body couldn't be seen. But when the neck was examined, deep internal bruising and injuries were found.
These were seen not only in the muscles of the neck, but if those muscles are removed,
and I can do that digitally on this table, the most important thing is revealed,
and that's damage to the thyroid cartilage, the larynx, the Adam's apple, which showed evidence of a fracture.
And it has spikes sticking up and sticking down the muscles attached to, and it's these that get snapped off.
And that showed that Mark had been strangled as well. But because of the decomposition,
it wasn't possible to determine if the strangulation was manual or with a ligature.
- [Sarah] It was quite sadistic. It was a traumatic way to die. But on top of that, the killer had made sure
that had Mark by any chance recovered, he couldn't get out. The property was locked and Mark's phone was switched off
and it was hidden in the mechanism of the settee. So it was a cruel and a sadistic killer
that had been able to do that, to kill somebody and then so calmly, coolly, make sure that they wouldn't be found
and they'd be there for some time just left. - [Richard] Detectives didn't have forensic evidence
to link anyone to the scene of the murder, but what they did have was a clear motive.
Dan Shovelton needed money and drugs and he knew that Mark Bradbury had both. Dan had told the police he hadn't seen Mark
for more than a month before the murder, but CCTV told a different story. - [Sarah] We had a really good understanding
of his movements from CCTV, from his phone records. We managed to build a picture showing that in fact,
on that day he was circling Mark's house. He was going round time and time again.
I had in my mind that he had a question to answer, Dan Shovelton, about why didn't he tell us he'd seen Mark
on the weekend of the murder. Why did he say he hadn't seen him for a month? Before Mark's murder, Dan Shovelton didn't have a penny.
He asked his daughter to transfer seven pounds or so, so that he could withdraw a 10 pound note from a cash point.
But then after the murder, he was captured on CCTV going into a large Tesco store
and all of a sudden had money. He was buying scratch cards, he was buying alcohol, he was buying lemonade,
and he didn't appear to have the same financial constraints that he'd had four hours before.
- [Richard] Five weeks after the murder, he was arrested and brought in for an interview.
- [Sarah] When Dan was arrested, it was pretty standard stuff, search of the suspect's address.
Mum and dad went and stayed elsewhere, turfed out. Quite devastating for them, really.
They're private, proud people whose house is now being searched by the police with all the neighbors watching.
His room in particular was searched through methodically and within his clothing was found a gold ring.
So here's somebody that's having to get his daughter to send him seven quid so that he can take 10 pounds out of the cash machine,
but he's got a gold ring sitting in his pocket. - [Richard] Mark's daughter Hannah confirmed
to the police the ring had belonged to her dad. - When I was in Paris with my dad,
we were walking up towards the Louvre, across a bridge. A man on the street, he was probably a little bit of a con artist,
but we give him the benefit of the doubt at the time, he said that he had no money for his family,
so would we like this gold ring. And my dad not caring really whether it was real gold or not,
he took 20 euros out of his wallet and passed it to the man in exchange for the ring.
That was in 2015. - What's that about then, Dan? And then he tries to think on his feet
and, oh, I've just been given it by Mark. Really? A guy that has really not got any money to spare
is not gonna give you a gold ring. And yet he's trying to put forward this story
about best mate's give him a gold ring, you get rid of it, you sell it, you get some money for it,
and it just didn't make sense. Mark's last purchase was a case of beer and a packet of Lambert & Butler cigarettes.
When we found Mark at his house, the case of beer was still there, but there were two bottles missing
and the cigarettes were gone. When we had our search officers go through the suspect's home address,
Dan Shovelton has an empty box of Lambert & Butler cigarettes. We couldn't forensically connect those cigarettes
to be the packet that Mark bought, but it was a phenomenal coincidence. - [Richard] Meanwhile,
a thorough search of Dan's internet records revealed something telling. - Interestingly, Dan had Googled me, which is a first.
I've not been Googled by a suspect before to my knowledge. He claimed that he was just curious about the case.
But in the next breath, he wasn't interested in the case because he didn't really know Mark
and he had no reason to be interested and he just contradicted himself. For the next few days after the murder,
Dan had been out on the road. He then went on a strange journey around Warrington,
areas of water, industrial sites, places where you might have industrial bins. He nicknamed it his Magical Mystery Tour himself
and he never really offered a meaningful explanation for it. Whereas the obvious one is
that he was depositing the murder weapon, clothing, he was getting rid of stuff.
Mark's flat was a tiny studio with a double bed, coffee table at the end of that and then a settee,
and it was never any different. It was as it was every day to everybody that went there.
But when we attended the scene that night, the coffee table wasn't between the end of the bed
and the settee. It had been moved and it was underneath the TV. And he was asked as part of that interview
to draw a plan of Mark's flat. He'd been there, tell us what it's like, how's everything set out.
And he drew the double bed and he drew the settee and then he put the coffee table
between the bed and the settee and he changed his mind and he said, "Oh, it's not there."
And he crossed it out and he moved it to underneath the TV. And at that point I knew I had my man
and we just needed to prove it. - [Richard] Detectives were closing in on the killer.
But with no concrete evidence to link Dan to the crime scene, they were left with no choice but to let him go.
- He was released on bail at that point with the determination that you're gonna bring them back
and they'll be charged. And it's a worry. What if they go and do something else?
So it was a real concern to us that there was a killer on the loose. [soft tense music]
- [Richard] Police investigating the murder of Mark Bradbury were certain they knew who had killed him.
Former soldier Dan Shovelton was the prime suspect. Mark's body had shown he'd been strangled
and subjected to a brutal beating and had also revealed when he was likely to have been killed.
But police had to piece together the evidence to prove it was Dan Shovelton who had murdered Mark.
- The murder of Mark Bradbury was no slam dunk investigation. It was painstaking, it was laborious.
It involved thousands of hours of police work, recovering some 14,000 hours of CCTV.
And it involved real attention to detail, layering up all of the evidential opportunities,
whether it was forensic, whether it was CCTV, whether it was sightings that were made,
whether it was strange activity, but it all to be pieced together to just present this whole picture
because he was not gonna be convicted on one piece alone. - [Richard] We know that Mark had suffered
quite extensive blunt force trauma, but trauma of that type has different effects
on different areas of the body. For instance, the abdomen is quite soft, so blows delivered to that area are displaced.
The bowel underneath is pushed out away and there's very little bruising. On the other hand, when you look at the skull,
which is solid bone beneath the skin, the anvil effect of that blow splits the skin,
causing damage. And because there are so many blood vessels, that bit of the body bleeds rapidly
and causes quite extensive blood loss all around the place. - [Sarah] In Mark's flat,
there was a lot of blood on the floor, and in the blood there were over a hundred impressions of footwear.
The killer had spent some time in that flat moving around and making these footwear impressions.
It wasn't a popular brand of footwear, it wasn't immediately recognized by our footwear expert
as a Nike or an Adidas or one of the brands that we see quite frequently. It was something that they'd not seen.
- [Angela] You've got the pattern itself, you've got the approximate size of the shoe,
but you've also got things like the wear to the sole, which can be really important
'cause people walk in different ways and wear their shoe in different ways. And even more critical,
if you've got a really good print for the footwear mark, you can actually see the tiny little nicks and cuts
and gouges created by damage that is just, they're picked up in just the course of everyday wear,
completely at random, that can actually identify specifically an item of footwear
to a mark and actually give you that direct link. It's really amazingly powerful at its best.
And of course, if it's got blood staining and you find the mark at the scene and you find blood on the shoe when you locate it,
blood on the shoe that matches the victim, then that's a really lovely two-way link.
- [Sarah] After some 43,000 records that have been cross-referenced, the Lacoste Benali was identified as the footwear
that's left that impression, and it's been out of production now for eight, nine or more years.
But Lacoste made us a pair of those trainers so that we could cross reference them
and show that it is the Lacoste Benali that's left those footwear impressions. - [Richard] They now knew the exact make
and model of the shoes the killer was wearing at the murder scene. And they also knew he had most likely been
searching for drugs. It was an open secret amongst his friends that Mark kept his valuables in a loft above his bed.
- It was accessible to somebody of a normal height just by standing on the bed. And you could reach up and you could open the loft hatch.
There were bloody footwear marks on the bed, indicating that someone had stood there,
and there was some blood on the loft hatch itself, which indicated that here's somebody that they know Mark,
and they know Mark in the context of his drugs. - My dad's in his own home and he had no shoes on.
So whatever he was doing, he was comfortable in his own home and he'd obviously invited somebody in.
And I think that was the scariest thing for me, that it could be anybody. - [Sarah] The killer entered the loft,
and they'd searched to the front and they'd searched the sides. But what they didn't find was the cocaine was behind them.
- [Richard] Hunting for the shoes that would link him to the crime scene, police searched Dan Shovelton's home.
- [Sarah] We recovered everything from his house. We meticulously cataloged it, photographed it,
worked out what was there, what wasn't there, and clothing fitting the description that he was wearing
on CCTV on that day was not there. Every path we took seemed to lead to a dead end.
- [Richard] But there was one clue invisible to the naked eye that would finally link the killer to the scene.
- [Sarah] When we arrested Dan Shovelton, one of the items that was seized from his address were the keys to the car.
The car itself was obviously also seized and subject to meticulous forensic examination,
which revealed nothing. The key was also subjected to forensic examination. And in the very hole in the key
that the metal ring passes through, there was a speck of Mark Bradbury's blood. - [Richard] DNA analysis proved beyond doubt,
the speck of blood was Mark's. - [Sarah] And that was the only tangible forensic evidence
that was recovered in the entire case. Because there was nothing found at the house,
there was nothing found in the car. And there was a lot of blood at that house. Daniel Shovelton would have had blood
on his hands literally, and it wasn't to be found anywhere except for that key. - [Angela] It is extremely difficult
to get rid of all traces of evidence, and I think this case is a very good example of that.
Using the chemical screening test that we have for blood is perfectly possible to test tiny little nooks and crannies on things
for the presence of blood. Even when you can't see it, sometimes you get a positive reaction
and sufficient to get a DNA profiling result out of it. So it's really important to use every kind of tool
at your disposal when you think somebody might have been trying to destroy evidence.
- [Richard] Months of painstaking work had finally paid off. They had literally found the key that solved the case.
- [Sarah] Dan was arrested for the second time. He was absolutely dumbfounded, and it was the probably only point
where you really saw him flounder and he couldn't come up with an explanation. So he asked for a break in his interview
and then when he came back, he offered an explanation of having just put the key down
and picked up a speck of blood in transfer, which was farcical really. - [Richard] Finally, there was enough evidence
and Dan Shovelton was charged with murder. But in court he continued to deny it.
- [Hannah] It was really difficult attending the trial. You have to listen to both sides of the story
and there was no real answers from somebody who still pleaded not guilty. - It was clear that Dan Shovelton
had barely told a word that was true throughout the entire investigation and throughout the entire court case.
I think he'd remained committed throughout the trial to innate belief that he'd walk away.
- [Richard] The jury were having none of it. After 11 hours of deliberation, they found him guilty.
- I can't really describe the emotions. You've got this wave of relief that he's been convicted,
that all of that work has paid off, pleased for Hannah she'd got an outcome. It makes you feel quite glad,
but then you shouldn't feel glad because somebody's been murdered and somebody's now going to prison for years.
It was a case that had tragedy on all sides. - [Richard] Dan Shovelton was convicted
and sentenced to life in prison. For the investigators and for Mark's family, there was justice at last.
- I will fight for him to stay in prison longer. Why did he feel the need to beat him to an extreme?
I want to know what my dad was saying in those last moments. I can't help but think that he was just begging for his life
and that this death was truly painful. I don't think he ever doubted for a second
that he still wasn't the best dad 'cause he gave me everything that he could have done.
[soft melancholic music] - [Sarah] Investigating the murder of Mark Bradbury is something that I'll always be really proud of.
Police officers, civilian staff, forensic staff, scientists, all of them put heart and soul into this.
The effort and energy put in by the entire investigation team was staggering. - [Richard] This was clearly
an enormously challenging investigation and one that proves that it's the first hours
after the discovery of a murder that are absolutely critical. Mark's body was able to tell the truth
about the beating and strangulation. And the brutal beating he took, especially the blunt force trauma to the head,
meant that there was too much blood for Dan Shovelton to be able to clean it all away.
And for Dan Shovelton, it was the discovery of a single fleck of blood invisible to the naked eye on a car key
that was to be his downfall. That and the painstaking and determined police investigation.
[soft dramatic music]

Forensic pathologist Dr. Richard Shepherd investigates the murder of Mark Bradbury by his friend Daniel Shovelton, who kills him to obtain his drugs.

In The Truth About My Murder, Dr. Richard Shepherd showcases a state-of-the-art digital autopsy table featuring digitally scanned sample bodies to investigate a series of intriguing murders where the victims' bodies help reveal the truth behind horrific crimes.

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Brief Summary

Mark Bradbury's murder investigation reveals hidden drug ties and leads to the arrest of Dan Shovelton after key forensic evidence surfaces.

Key points

The Mystery of Mark Bradbury. Mark Bradbury, a popular figure, is found murdered in his flat, leaving police puzzled.
A Shocking Discovery. Mark's family learns he was involved in drug dealing, complicating their grief.
The Investigation Deepens. As police delve into Mark's life, they uncover a dark secret that changes everything.
The Murder Investigation. The investigation into Mark Bradbury's murder revealed shocking details about his death and the suspect.
Key Evidence Found. A speck of blood on a car key linked the prime suspect to the crime scene.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The truth vanishes with the victim.

Richard discussing the challenges of solving murders.

0:20WatchFeb 9, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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