The Murder of William Saunderson-Smith | Millionaire Murders | Forensic Files

[Music] [Music] [Music] jeur road is one of the main thoroughfares in the little enclav of
Brook green which sits between Hammer Smith and Shepherd's Bush Brook green which is an extremely well-to-do part of
West Kensington a very nice part of West London it's made up of uh wide avenu treelined streets with um Victorian
three-story buildings it's a very desirable place to live a popular place with families it I would say it is
fairly affluent the houses in the area uh particularly on deur road probably one of the smartest roads in Brook green
are probably worth on average 1.5 to3 [Music] million on the 21st of October William
swordens and Smith sets up a meeting with his personal assistant and his personal assistant attends the meeting
but William doesn't show his personal assistant is concerned and when he can't reach him so
he goes round to his property in jeur road which he has keys to and it's when he lets himself into the property that
he finds his body in the Attic room when he discovers William's body he sees quite a lot of blood around him and
a injury to his head and at that point he goes out to try and find some help and he sees one of the
neighbors and they call 999 we were informed of this case in October of 2011 and my team was actually
on call for that particular week I received a call sometime after 4:00 on the 21st to say that um they had
received information that a male had been found in his attic bedroom the problem for us was that the
property although it was high in value at some in the origion of 2.3 million it was actually a very difficult un tidy
scene for my officers to manage your basement your ground floor your first floor and it also had an
artic we had to therefore decide that we were going to do certain rooms because where we felt we were likely to
establish where we knew that he would set up shop with his laptop top where we would eat and all those type of stuff we
concentrated in that area to see if we could find stuff and then we would work our way through other parts of the
building my understanding from the the crime scene manager was when they went into the attic room they identified uh
the victim line on the floor he had what appeared to be significant blunt trauma
injuries to his head the police were confronted with a with a a shocking uh murder scene when
they arrived they was certainly a fairly gruesome scene that officers were confronted by and at that point it was a
murder investigation a contact Direct messaged me a picture of uh some police tape uh
and a tent in duur road so I immediately headed down to the [Music] scene when we find ourselves in a set of
circumstances we're in a murder investigation the the golden hour is the the first thing we think of we want to
preserve this scene to make sure that the investigation is certainly on a good footing going forward this was obviously
a story of Interest it was in a in an affluent area it was a man seemingly attacked for no reason in a very
expensive house we were going to have to obviously go through his home with a fine tooth
comb and try and see if we could find anything that would give us some leeway even the weapon we knew could have been
left at the address because the home was in such an untiy state State the place was in chaos uh there
was rubbish everywhere Rubble forensics team um would be looking to establish the circumstances of of of the
attack they will be looking for any blood stains that they found in their dress because not only is there a
possibility the blood stains could relate to the victim they could have also related to The Suspect
there would have been an awful lot of opportunity for us to identify the suspect possibly the weapon and ex and
establish the facts as to what happened I FID to remember it because one of the officers said to the and I
think he was going to say they had um found the weapon or something like that the officer opened a particular bag and
it came across WS of cash and I said to him so are we talking1 200 and he said no thousands so
I said a thousand he said no [Music] thousands the extraordinary thing about Williams living situation at the time
was amidst all the chaos and the rubbish and the building work and the rubble there were bags of cash the police
clearly uh realized that this was uh a robbery uh murder in the in the course of a Breakin A burglary uh and it must
have been carried out by people who knew that serson Smith kept hundreds of thousands of pounds um in his in his
property and were determined to find the police were able in fact to find best part of a quarter of a million uh pounds
hidden in The Loft which the uh the murders had not found themselves they then found another £100,000 in cash in
uh another property in Brompton um indicating that uh this is exactly what uh serson Smith did with his money one
of the things I was concerned about I didn't want the finding of a significant amount of cash to jeopardize the
Integrity of the investigation or the Integrity of the officers concerned as far as I was concerned at that moment in
time we had a set process that we would follow we need recover large amounts of cash so we brought the unit in for them
to photograph it video the what was happening take that cash away but I knew that it was going to put
the investigation back by a Maybe a day or two simply because we then had to go through that particular area where the
cash was found to make sure there was no other bags of money that were there and
we had to do it meticulously so it was a challenge of course the first thing I wanted to know was who was this
man most occasions when you go to a SE or you make inquiries with a victim you normally have family members who can
give you some victimology about the individual concern William saunderson Smith was
somebody who lived on his own there's very little background information about William sord and Smith we identified
Neighbors on either side of where um the victim lived he's described as a bit of
a loner his neighbors describe that he's outwardly very friendly to them but they
know nothing about him from a very early stage we were well aware that the victim
was somebody who was a recluse he didn't really have much contact with his family
members I think what's interesting about this case is the lack of information it's it's quite rare for
police to go to a case where they have absolutely nothing to go on in this case there's very few people
who know this man and the people who do know him know very little about him so it was an incredibly difficult job for
the police to um put a case together so it was going to now be what was recovered from the scene we retrieve
correspondence so it was a question of now going through those items we want to build up a picture of the victim and
when we look through for papers and documentation there was scant information to suggest that he had at
least two properties in West London one was worth at least 2.3 the other one probably as much but we also then found
out that he had properties in Spain and in Australia I think we need to understand
just how rich this man was this man was a multi-millionaire when police started investigating uh serson Smith murder the
really interesting aspect of this case was that he was a secret multi-millionaire so this was a man who
was absolutely not short of cash and was probably worth upwards of5 six million he was a wealthy man he managed to
contact a family member and that family member basically told us that um the victim had um his father had died when
he was 8 years of age and that shortly after that his mother went into a mental institution for an 8-year-old child
that's going to be immensely difficult there could be huge attachment issues a huge uge sense of loss he lost his
father but also he lost his mother and he goes to live with a cousin but we can imagine that for an
8-year-old child that would have been a really scary and lonely time we could hypothesize that because he didn't have
his parents around he didn't have any siblings and he could only rely on this cousin that he lived with and and that
their family in that he began to rely on himself certainly serson Smith never forgot got the kindness of the family uh
who were distant uh relatives cousins who had brought him up he was extremely generous to the to that family and he
would support them financially uh very quickly very openly and he would uh be particularly generous
as they would remember uh with presents for the children at Christmas [Music] it wasn't long before the gravity and
the the savagery uh of the crime became clear it was established that he had at least nine blunt trauma injuries to his
head and there were significant enough to have caused his death and the fact that it was nine blows that seems
excessive in some ways but it's certainly not overkilled the coroner's view was that it was more than likely a
heavy blunt strument possibly a hammer or some other instrument in the early stages of the
investigation there really was no obvious suspect there was no obvious reason why anybody would commit such a
Savage act against a seemingly kind gentle maybe lonely man but what on Earth had William done to deserve
this we established that he was a landlord stroke property developer having evicted his tenent William moved
into the property in Dew Hurst Road around August of that year and he was actually living in the Attic whilst the
extensive Renovations were going on sonis Smith was uh an enigma a very complicated complex man uh who lived a
life of which seemed to be just a massive contradictions on the face of it he was almost like a [ __ ] he uh uh was
a shambling figure he dressed shab and he lived in a in a a tiny attic bedroom um which doubled as also as his office
in his dining room but the fact was he was an extremely wealthy man he actually owned the building in which he lived in
a tiny part of um he was uh a ruthless I would say uh businessman uh and yet he had none other trappings of wealth he
had two significant properties in West London one which he was renovating and was living at and the other address he
rented out another address that he used to stay at we knew that it was going to be a
fingertip search of the venue and other things which would probably support us ultimately establishing what
happened and we recovered somewhere in the region of £335,000 worth of cash which in the time that I was on the
murder team or I was a police officer I had never never been involved in recovering that amount of
money so police were at first baffled as to why such large amounts of cash were being kept at these properties but it
seemed became clear that he wasn't a man that did things in an orthodox manner we
found this cash it doesn't necessarily mean that someone went into the address to take that cash because the cash was
still there so let's just park that for a second and say to ourselves let's find
out a bit more about the individual with most investigation you want to establish the when where what why and
[Music] who when William started working in property in London he was described as
quite an unscrupulous landlord we knew from having spoken to some of his tenants that he had
taken what they described as significant amounts of deposit from them and that he
only wanted to um be paid in cash he would choose tenants that were temporary students uh foreigners who were
traveling and he would give people very short notice when he wanted them to leave again this could be explained in
that he didn't have a need for close relationships and friendships we can only assume that the way he managed his
money in his businesses come comes from the trauma that he suffered as a child we found a very minimal amount of
Records or papers that we could find about his business but that was you know easy for us to establish and say right
he didn't want the tax man to be aware of his income and therefore everything was done in cash it meant that the
taxman was not aware of actually how much he was worth I think when we understand millionaires there's many
different types of millionaires and we can't categorize them as as one uh identity there's millionaires who have
had generational wealth there's new millionaires something that we do see sometimes in new millionaires is that
there's a tendency to be more flamboyant with their money because it's new and exciting um with wian we don't see that
he is relatively new to having such wealth but he certainly doesn't flash his cash serson Smith was clearly a um a
very successful businessman a very astute businessman a man capable of uh buying low and selling High which is the
The Secret of of business success he was able to convert houses update Flats um very quickly uh because he employed um
cheap labor uh often e European uh labor who had come to London perhaps uh under
the radar uh and were skilled build Builders but prepared to work for cash in hand William has found an assistant
through Gumtree to help him with his business Affairs and his finances he's made Millions from
property that's not easy to do however despite that he makes a lot of very dubious decisions he hides money he
doesn't pay tax his lifestyle and his presentation and his living environments don't represent a
multi-millionaire but something that I find quite interesting with William is that although he was obsessed with
making more and more money and keeping cash he didn't seem to enjoy it I think it's really interesting that
he hides so much money on one hand we could say it's simply to evade tax but it also presents in a way that many
older people used to hide money in their houses and that's because they were a generation who didn't Trust Banks it
feels almost like that this is a man who doesn't trust people we always had in the back of our
mind the question of could it have been a tenant who he upset or was it uh some other business relationship that went
wrong once we took a view that it was going to be a who done it and it was going to take a a a fair degree of
detective work to establish the facts actually it's a challenge we saw it as a challenge who would have perpetrated
such a terrible crime within the first 24 hours of that investigation the crime scene manager
would take control or responsibility for the crime scene we couldn't find the we
anywhere on the premises the circumstances as to um why he was attacked and who attacked him um we
still were no way further forward the police had to study the CCTV uh uh from that area uh first of all to
find out uh when this murder must have taken place uh and they were able to pin it down uh from 7:00 uh of the previous
night uh to w when he was uh discovered the following afternoon once they' established that time frame they
re-examined the CCTV looking for possible suspects in that street once we were looking at the CCTV we were able to
identify what I would describe as some grainy footage on the night that we believe the attack took place of a car
pulling up on the opposite side of the road about a 100 yards up from where the victim lived and you could see at least
two people leaving the vehicle and then walking onto the opposite side of the road and walking in the direction of
where the victim lived because it was grainy um we weren't able to establish exactly the
full description of the individual's concern but during the hous to house inquiries we identified Neighbors on
either side of where um the victim lived who said they can recall in the early hours of the morning he hearing what
this sounded like people shouting and what sounded like people running up and down the steps we obviously had an
opportunity to get hold of some expert advice they took photographs during the nighttime and they also took photographs
during the day and then they brought in a specialist team who were able to say right following the movements of those
individuals as they're heading towards what we believe is a victim's address based on the photographs that were also
taken we could establish Beyond doubt that they must have gone into the victim's
address we subsequently found footage that that vehicle was actually seen driving around in the area of the victim
to dress a lot earlier on in the in the evening in addition to that we were also
able to establish roughly the make the color and the model of the vehicle concerned further CCTV footage was
Unearthed which showed that the vehicle was a gold Land Rover and it was circling Williams house as if
they were casing the joint and even more so my colleague actually established that there was a dent to the near side
of the vehicle and that was very significant because it meant that if and when we recover the vehicle we would be
able to say conclusively whether or not that was a vehicle concerned when searching officers are at
a crime scene particularly a murder is they're going to be trying to seek out is a phone of the victim simply because
there could be so much information on there that could direct the investigation towards potentially the
suspects and towards potentially a motive for why the murder happened everyone has a mobile phone but
when you have your mobile phone you leave a trace somewhere you leave an information as to when you've used your
phone and where you've used it and who you've contacted we recovered 67 different
mobile phones don't think we had any other investigation when we recovered 67 phones what phones were we going to
prioritize that wasn't an easy decision to make so my view was we're going to have to look at every single one of
those phones so every single phone would need to be examined examined to see is it
live is there a SIM card in it when was it last used what is on it what messages
photographs anything that is stored on it we couldn't not look at all of them because knowing your luck sometimes the
the ones you don't look at there's going to be something on there this would have
been a huge task and it would have been down to a laboratory to go through these
phones one at a time reporting back to the investigators about exactly what was on
it we had submitted at least 67 mobile phones for um investigations to be done on
[Music] them in 2011 when these phones would been seized and sent to what's known as
the phone laboratory what that essentially is it's a it's a room full of computers full of phone technicians
who will take each handset attach it to a computer and use software to download it so where we call it a laboratory
there's nobody in white coats but that's the technical name for it after weeks of
plowing through the phones and it was down to I think the the 67th phone that there was a text that was sent by the
victim to someone about two months previous to his death and that is the starting point of when we did the
inquiries to establish who that text was sent [Music] to was it relationship that he was
having we also knew that he he he regularly frequented gay bars in London but when we delved into it we found that
there was nothing to suggest that he had a partner or anything like that the only
question is is whether or not he had met somebody there brought them back to the
flat and then that individual attacked him so we had an open mind and we were looking at different possibilities as to
why he was killed forensics then came across a discovery that would change the course
of the entire investigation a fingerprint on a sash window on the ground floor of the house
so once the Mark had been lifted the the first thing we had to establish is that
it didn't belong to the victim and after the the results came back the next question had to be therefore who did it
actually belong to the initial mark on the window sash was identified at an early stage within
the first 24 hours those officers who were dealing with that part of the the forensic um analysis they're seasoned
campaigners and the information they provided me with at the time was that the Mark was
fresh because the The Ridges and everything were obvious but by the time that Mark is
then lifted and is then submitted to the forensic lab for analysis it's looking at Beyond 72 hours
before we established that it belonged to somebody called David Rymer ryar was identified as a result of a hit
on the police national computer database having come to the attention of police in the past that was a significant
identification so at that point we're thinking is David ryar a suspect or is he a person of interest or is he just
going to be a witness the police were able to identify the phone that William sent the text to
having looked at the phone data we established that the the the text that was sent by the victim was actually sent
David rhy So as an investigator as a detective it can be hugely satisfying where
suddenly all that evidence starts to come together we were then able to piece together that that individual was
someone who was known to the victim in terms of um working for him so at that point we were thinking
right we're off and running because we were going to try and establish the circumstan as to why David rayar's
finger marks were found on the sash window on whether or not he could explain that set of
[Music] circumstances the victim had an assistant and he was able to impart to us certain information that he had
polish Builders who he normally used and he normally paid them in cash the personal assistant was aware that the
builders weren't particularly Happ happy because they didn't feel that he was paying them the correct
[Music] amount so in relation to David ryar officers were deputed to go to the address that we identified he was living
at to make inquiries to see whether or not they could identify whether he lived there when the officers attended that
address they spoke to his girlfriend as well as the landlord they established that ryar hadn't been seen at the
address for a week also it became apparent that he had two friends who he worked with one was
called slir bugaj jeski and the other was called iru Midlock it became apparent to us very
quickly after that once their addresses were visited that they were also not living at that point at there was
address anymore and had it moved back to Poland in relation to David rimar slir bugaj jeski and irin
midad those individuals were known to each other they had no other contact with the victim other than they were
people who carried out um renovation work to the properties that he had those individuals had known each other for
some time and were all of Polish extraction the three suspects had been Williams preferred builders for many
years on his raft of properties but it soon became clear that they felt under paid and undervalued and that was a
potential motive for their crime even though the mark on the saswi belonged to David ryar we knew that there was always
a possibility that he could have had legitimate access to that property when we're talking about
suspects what's important there is particularly the movement often what you will see in Murder investigations
involving a number of suspects is the phones starting to come together to the point where they're all there at the
crime scene at the time of a murder and then you see them leave leaving together
leaving the crime scene and going off in whatever Direction they're going to go we obviously had the phone data know
that was going to establish even more significant facts because the information that we got from the phone
data established that those three individuals their phones were actually triangulated actually in the vicinity of
the scene on the night in question we were able to establish that they had visited the address with ryar they knew
of the victim so the association was quite easy for us they worked as a group in a case where you have multiple
suspects looking at their interactions in and around when a crime was committed the communications on phones is really
important when you looked at their phone data there was regular communication between them before the attack on the
attack and even after the attack so they knew one another so rayar's phone was used to phone bugaj jeski and midad
shortly before and after the event with more now being known about the long-term relationship between
William and his Builders there was speculation that the suspects have perhaps discovered the money that
William was keeping in his home and that was the motivation behind their crime when bukaj jesi's address was
visited in Acton we established that the vehicle we believe that was driving around before the attack and seen
certainly positioned close to the victim's address on the night that that vehicle was actually still parked
outside bugaj jesis although the police suspect wasn't there the gold Land Rover
was we couldn't have asked for anything more significant once we have established that that vehicle um was
still outside the address so that was vehicle was taken away for forensic examination we are then at that point
what 3 weeks into the investigation and we know that we are on the right [Music]
track given all the information that we had at this stage we had identified what
I would describe as our Prime suspects David rimar slavomir bugaj jeski and irin new midad were the people that we
were focusing on so we were able to triangulate and get them back at the address and on top of that there was
also phone data to say that the mini cab had been called by by one of them and that the cab then ultimately picked up
bu jeski and midad and they were heading in the direction of Victoria code station so essentially every time a
phone connects to a cell Mast that will leave some kind of footprint what sometimes criminals don't understand is
that you yourself don't have to have instigated that transaction between your phone and a cell tower for instance if
you have apps running on your phone they could be running in a background connec
to a cell tower and you're completely oblivious to this in this case what the police were
able to identify is that after the murder the suspects left the country they went to Victoria and from Victoria
went to Paris the fact that the suspects are in Paris makes this now an international
case there's evidence located showing pictures of them in Paris at the Eiffel Tower spending money on designer Goods
so these are three men who have taken the life of a man once they leave Paris they then flee
to Poland all three were spending an awful lot of cash far more cash than you would have
expected from someone hardworking Builder uh to have in hand looking at the behavior of the suspects it's really
quite interesting they are fleeing to the place that they feel safe Poland they know once they're there they will
feel safe and they'll be protected where they think they will never be caught they are so arrogant that they will get
away with this they know this man had no friends they know he was ler all we had
to now do is find out conclusively where they were in Poland and then consider International arrest warrants to then
bring them back to the UK for them to be arrested as part of of a murder team investigation you always are going to
find that there are challenging moments we've identified who we believe are the suspects but there are not
within touching distance in terms of arresting them because they've fled the country so we knew that that was
therefore going to be a bit of a hindrance because when you go for International arrest warrants those
things take time they're very bureaucratic um and therefore it could be 2 three four even longer could be
could be months before we actually got hold of them and brought them back to the the UK in the background we're going
to do something quite straightforward which is we had the telephone numbers we know the had their phones so why not
ring them but there's nothing stopping us from ringing them and say as we did this is the Metropolitan
Police there's an investigation of murder that we were investigating we'd like to speak to you about it um would
you be prepared to come back to the UK to have this matter resolved and that's the the route that we took the first two
came back um came back of their own accord we had officers who went to visit the address and they were expecting us
to turn up and they were arrested and brought into the police station and I think the reason why they were happy to
come back they were reasonably confident that we would probably didn't have enough evidence to charge them with
murder ryar took a bit longer we were in communication with him expressed The View that he didn't have money to return
and we therefore facilitated it by paying for um a flight for him to return and when he got back to the UK ltin
airport he had a solicitor that was present he was arrested and then brought to the police station and
[Music] interviewed the fact that ryar agrees to return to the UK smacks of absolute
arrogance he wouldn't have returned unless he absolutely thought that he was going to get away with it it was a
smooth transition from the point of making contact with those three individuals and saying look
we're investigating you we're not going to stop this investigation and we're going to keep ringing you and ultimately
we will contact the local police and we'll do the International arrest warrant and all the things that
necessary to get you to come back when the vehicle was forensically examined it became apparent that there
was um blood stains in the vehicle and they were submitted for analysis theyna that had been recovered
was the victim's blood but it was a mixed profile also with David rayar's the one thing that the uh The
Defenders couldn't uh dispute was that somehow sonis and Smith blood had ended up in baji's car which all three of them
were traveling in U that was beyond dispute and then there's a mixed profile which would indicate that there must
have been a fight or something for there to be transfer of blood between ryar and
our victim and therefore at that point it would be reasonably um assumed by anyone that
ryar would have to explain those set of circumstances all three suspects were arrested and interviewed and at the time
of when we're preparing for an interview we normally have an interview strategy and I would have identified officers
that would have um conducted that interview uh um my recollection of that interview is that they didn't provide us
with anything significant other than to say that they they knew of the victim um
but didn't actually say anything that was incriminating we had all three of those
individuals charged um with murder and awaiting um a crown court hearing the pressure is always there but
when you have three people that have been ched there's another added Dimension to it
because you have to make sure that you get everything right as the three defendants were led
into doc uh it seemed to me that they had an air of self-confidence about them that they actually believed they were
going to get away with this it's always tense on the first day of any big murder
trial particularly at the Old Bailey which is Britain's Premier courtroom um but what made this particularly strange
was that William being a recluse really didn't have anyone known to him uh at the trial it was reporters it was
detectives it was Lawyers and of course the suspects but there were no close family or friends there which I found
quite sad we were never able to identify what instrument was used to attack the [Music]
victim despite the not guilty pleas the evidence was strong the mobile phone technology traced all three of the
suspects fleeing to Paris and then onto Poland they had to get away for a reason and
the only reason that they wanted to get away is because they were the people who
were involved if police are trying to show a conspiracy and a joint Enterprise the
communications before a crime has taken place the coming together of people's mobile phones and then us going off in
different directions afterwards can be really powerful evidence when put in front of a jury it also became known
during the trial that buad was suffering from severe financial problems and it doesn't take a genius to kind of put two
and two together when you have a multi-millionaire reclusive uh employer who's keeping large sacks of cash around
the property and a down aill polish builder in desperate need of cash to potentially come up with quite a strong
motive for the crime by the end of the trial and it's only 3 to four weeks uh that it lasted
uh I don't think any of uh uh my colleagues in the Press had any doubt at all that all three men would be uh
convicted despite having committed what really was one of the most Savage crimes
I've ever come across in my 10-year career as a journalist they genuinely thought that they were going to get away
with it but as far as I was concerned the evidence was watertight and the jury thought so too after what actually
seemed like an eternity but was actually only I think 3 and a half hours of deliberation the jury unanimously found
them guilty and they were each sent down to prison for a minimum of 30 years it was a 4-week trial and
ultimately they were convicted but it was a challenging case but at the end of the day I think the team would have
taken huge credit from the fact that from the position where we started and to ultimately get the three people who
we know were involved um to court and that the jury was satisfied with the evidence that we um put together so we
were satisfied and we felt that we were giving the victim's family some closure um and some sort of feeling that
Justice was served it was a feeling of Justice being done it was very satisfying and probably
one of the the highlights of my career to see those three brutal Killers sent to
Justice what what's quite sad when we look at William in relation to why he is murdered many people who have wealth of
course are a person of interest to people who seek to take wealth of people during the attack they probably got at
least £22,000 each when they went into their addess in the early hours of the morning which is absolutely nothing
compared to what was actually lying around in the attic and other parts of their dress when you add to the fact
that he was a multi-millionaire murdered in his own home uh you add the fact of this intriguing character with this uh
extraordinary backstory back life and lifestyle uh then this was definitely a major story in
London my belief is that earlier on in the day because we know that there was CCTV footage that showed the victim who
was leaving the address at a particular time in the evening and he went to a Timber yard to get some items
and that those three individuals were actually at the address doing some work for him we believe that they got him to
leave the address the victim because they wanted to leave they had obviously found money at that point and I believe
that when the victim had left the address to go to the timber yard it was their opportunity to leave with a bag of
money and that they then thought to themselves well if we found that there's probably more here hence the reason why
they came back later on in the night and was D around you know casing The Joint once they've entered the address
they were probably spooked by the victim who was in his attic bedroom they probably didn't expect him to come down
more than likely he would have realized who they were and thought to thems well he's
going to identify us either they couldn't find any money and then then threatened him to say you need to tell
us where the money is because we found some already and we know you got some more stashed that was my basic inter
interpretation of what happened when we look at homicide one theory of homicide is that
people commit expressive homicides so the actual Act of homicide itself is their motivator this is people who enjoy
the ACT maybe it's got a sexual motivation then there's instrumental homicide where it's purely about doing
the homicide to get something this case Falls very much into instrumental homicide
side people normally say You're only as good as your last job and you're only as
good as the people that you have around you and those things are are significantly true but when you consider
from where we started with little to no evidence about um what happened little little to no information about the the
victim we went from Zero to Hero in a matter of five weeks so you know it's it's it's good detective work
[Music] with the trial now over and the suspects in prison the main question now was who
would be the rightful heir to William's huge Fortune a genealogist was brought in and they were able to identify a
cousin that ultimately received the wealth that Mr serson Smith had part of the money was taken by hmrc for
unpaid tax it's really quite sad that they have to search for months and eventually find a distant
relative for who they can leave all the money that William has made over the years whilst the main motivating factor
for these murderers was money I think something that made it easier for them was the fact that he was such a
reuse this wasn't a man that was going to be all over the TV when his body was found and that's a really sad ending for
anybody to have when they're taken in such a cruel way [Music] [Music]

In 2011, reclusive British millionaire William Saunderson-Smith was beaten by three men who hoped brute force would reveal where his money was hidden. In the end, they were convicted of murder.

Greed, jealousy, revenge, lust, anger — any and all are motives for murder. When there's cash involved, the stakes are even higher. Explore a new case in each episode of Millionaire Murders.

Brief Summary

William Saunderson Smith, a reclusive millionaire, was murdered in his attic; three builders were convicted after a complex investigation revealed their motive was robbery.

Key points

The Discovery of a Body. William's personal assistant finds his body in the attic, leading to a murder investigation.
A Shocking Crime Scene. Police arrive at a gruesome murder scene with significant blunt trauma injuries.
Hidden Wealth. Amidst chaos, police discover bags of cash, indicating a robbery gone wrong.
The Mystery Deepens. Police struggle to find leads as the victim was a recluse with little known background.
The Victim's Background. William was a secret multi-millionaire with a traumatic past, complicating the investigation.
Discovery of Fingerprint. A fingerprint on a sash window changes the course of the investigation.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was obviously a story of interest.

Describing the murder investigation's significance.

4:05WatchApr 11, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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