William Spiller | Truth About My Murder | FilmRise True Crime | Forensic Files

[dramatic music] - 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. 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 with the aid of a state-of-the-art laboratory
using groundbreaking technology, I'll be investigating a series of intriguing crimes
where, from the victim's bodies, I'll revealed to you the truth behind these murders.
[photos snapping] [soft music] [phone dialing and ringing] - [Dispatcher] Good morning Dorset police.
- On 17th of June, 2013, Dorset police pay a welfare visit to a flat in Bournemouth.
It's the home of taxi driver William Spiller, who hasn't been seen for some time.
And there they make a gruesome discovery. [beeping] [phone dialing and ringing] - Dorset police receive a phone call from a woman
who says she's concerned. She's had no contact with her boyfriend for some weeks, now.
The problem the police have in relation to a phone call like that is that they're both adults, they're both grownups.
These are not uncommon things to happen. If as an adult you don't want to contact somebody
or call them, then you're perfectly entitled to do that. It's a very difficult situation
for the police to deal with. [dramatic music] - William's girlfriend hadn't heard from him
for quite a while, and obviously she was worried, something didn't seem right, and the neighbors also alerted them.
They're reporting there are flies, dead flies, flies everywhere. Swarming and a smell.
The police or a social services type of organization must go and look 'cause you know there are welfare concerns.
- The woman had been receiving texts and messages via the phone but had never actually spoken to the boyfriend.
And that was unusual. And at that point, I think Dorset police were quite right to decide that they would go
and check on the person's welfare, which is basically you go knock on the door and say, are you okay?
[police knocking] They enter the block of flats and as they approach the front door,
they're aware of an odor, a musty smell. They force entry into the flat. [door clicking]
- The smell was coming from the bedroom and there discovered this absolutely horrific scene.
- Any experienced officer will tell you, once you've witnessed that odor of decomposition,
you will never forget it. There's a TV in the bedroom and the TV is on a makeshift table
made of four plastic boxes. And it's obvious to them because of the infestation and the smell that they contained remains of some sort.
- When the police smelt this and saw all the flies around these plastic boxes, which are clear, so they would've seen these body parts.
- A further search is made of the flat and in a filing cabinet, they find a box.
When they open up that box to see what the content is, their worst fears are realized.
They discover it's a human head, an absolutely horrific find for the officers that go there initially to find human remains
that have been dismembered. [drawer rumbling] - It must have been so traumatic for the police
to deal with in that investigation. - Imagine that the forensic scientists or the detectives that came on
after would've been very surprised by the head in the filing cabinet. So this particularly grizzly murder would've certainly
affected, you know, some of the police in terms of trauma that they may have suffered afterwards
from dealing with the case. - At this point, the officers withdraw, the flat is cordoned off,
and obviously detective branch is informed and a homicide investigation is commenced.
- [Richard] It was immediately clear from the way the body parts have been stored
that this was not typical of a murder scene. - It would be unusual for the police to find something
so ordered and something so obvious. I mean, usually, if someone is dismembering a body,
it's to conceal it not to use it as a table for the TV. So the police would've been very confused about why
has this person gone to so much time to put a body in boxes and then just to leave it there for it to discovered.
So in this case, this isn't about concealment, this is about order. [tense music]
- The evidential trail starts right away. This is actually a very complex crime scene.
Even down to some of the things that perhaps might not be obvious. Do all the body parts belong
to the same body is the first thing, or are we looking for other victims? [dramatic music]
- As a pathologist, when I'm faced with multiple body parts, the first thing I must do
is make sure they all belong to the same person. We could possibly be dealing with a serial killer,
but in this case, there is a torso, a head, arms, and legs, all neatly severed through the joints
and stacked in plastic boxes. They did all fit together and DNA testing confirmed
they all belonged to the same person. This was the body of a white man in his 40s,
who was large, he was around 20 plus stone and the cuts who the bone were not those
of an expert which suggested he'd been dismembered using some kind of saw. Certainly the cuts weren't smooth
or made with surgical tools, but who was it? - One of the most important things in a situation like this,
you have to identify the victim, that is of paramount importance. - The dismembered body was in such a state of decay.
There was very little left to identify the remains, but what we did have was his teeth.
The inner soft tissue of the tooth is covered by a layer of enamel, which is a very, very hard substance,
capable of withstanding incredibly high temperatures, and can sometimes last for hundreds of years after death.
Comparing the teeth with dental records confirmed that this was 48-year-old taxi driver William Spiller.
- William was known locally as a gentle giant. He's a fun-loving, humorous man that was known to a lot of people.
William was in a long-term relationship with a woman called Glenys. It was her that had called the police initially.
- William was a taxi driver. He seemed very popular where he lived down in Bournemouth.
He was also a doorman at one time. He loved playing snooker. He did all this sort of usual things.
He had a caravan at the beach and he'd go down there and he was also a father. [dramatic music]
- [Richard] William had a 27-year-old son, Nathan Robinson, who spent his childhood growing up in the Midlands
with his mother before moving to Bournemouth to be with his dad. - Nathan studied at Aberystwyth University.
He has a degree in mathematics and at one point he was considering doing a master's degree.
- Nathan had just finished a degree, graduated from Aberystwyth, with he'd gone and lived down in Bournemouth.
He didn't actually have a job at that time, but the two were living together. - It was fairly obvious when William was found
that nobody had been in the flat for some time. However, Nathan had lived with William for some years.
So where is Nathan now? Nathan falls into two camps. He's either in the suspect camp or the victims.
He could be either at this point. If Nathan is a suspect or a victim, what's imperative, regardless of which camp he's in,
we need to find him as a matter of urgency. [dramatic music] [dramatic music] - In a quiet cul-de-sac in Bournemouth,
police have launched a murder investigation after finding the dismembered body of taxi driver William Spiller
neatly packed in storage boxes. [dramatic music] There was a torso, a head, arms, and legs,
all neatly severed through the joints and stacked in plastic boxes. The dismembered body was in such a state of decay,
there was very little left to identify the remains, but dental records confirmed
this was 48-year-old William Spiller. William shared his flat with his 26-year-old son,
Nathan Robinson. - Nathan's not there. From the investigative perspective, why is he not there?
Nathan now has a foot in two potential boxes here. He's either a suspect, he could be a victim.
We need to find out which one he's in. - Police launched a countrywide search for William's son.
William's body was dismembered and badly decomposed. But could it still tell us something about
what had happened to him in those moments before he died, he was found to have a number of stab
and slash wounds all over his body. If we look at the torso, we can see the spine
and the ribs that protect the vital internal organs. But if we look at just the soft tissue of the torso,
we can see that the wounds are superficial. They cut through the skin and the underlying muscle only,
they go nowhere near penetrating through the ribs and into the vital organs. And that's really important
because it tells us that the weapon that used to cause these injuries is very sharp but also very shallow.
[dramatic music] - During the search of the flat, police seized a Stanley knife, a box cutter,
a saw, and a hacksaw - While the Stanley knife was the likely weapon used to inflict soft tissue wounds on William,
these injuries alone weren't enough to have caused William's death, but there was something else his body told us
about this brutal attack. Often at a post-mortem, it's not what you see, but what you don't see that can become important.
And as you look at William's arms, I can see there are no slash wounds to his lower arms
and wounds like that are caused. When someone raises their hand to defend themselves,
they're called defensive injuries, and the lack of those defensive injuries in this case
suggests to me that this was a sudden attack and that William was taken by surprise.
[dramatic music] - So there's no defensive wounds on the body and you're talking about a man as big as William
who is 20 stone and 6'4. So what you're looking at here is a surprise attack or an attack by somebody actually trusted,
and there was no time, obviously for William to defend himself. - When the police attend any homicide
in a domestic environment, one of their suspicions is an immediate family member
because unfortunately 40% of all homicides actually are domestic homicides in the home by relatives.
It's actually more common than you think and people are more at risk sometimes from people they know than strangers.
And so therefore the police would first investigate the immediate family members for a motive,
for potential harm to each other, and they would suspect that a domestic argument
that had gone too far, et cetera. However, they would've been shocked by the fact
that this body had been dismembered, and ordered into boxes, and left there in the apartment in such an ordered way
because that sort of approach to a body is very unusual in a family murder or domestic murder.
- [Richard] The police investigation continued to focus on Nathan Robinson, and detectives began to build a picture
of his relationship with his father. - When the police were searching the flat looking for evidence, one of the things
they found was an IOU note from Nathan to William, for an absolutely staggering sum, 36,000 pounds.
That is just unbelievable. Nathan doesn't have a job and William is effectively funding
Nathan's lifestyle. [dramatic music] - There seemed to be an issue of money between them.
Nathan, he was certainly seeing in his father a cash cow. He owed his father a lot of money
and if he needed anything, he would go to his father. He didn't actually have a job,
although he did have a good degree. He seemed to depend on his father for money and the relationship seemed pretty heavily biased that way.
- There were obviously problems within the relationship and a lot of this stems about money.
William lent Nathan some money so that he could go on holiday to Thailand. The understanding was that that money will be paid back
to William, but that never happened. And the problem arose because William now didn't have that money.
He was unable to pay the insurance for his taxi. It's his livelihood. That's how he makes his living.
[soft music] - Nathan wasn't in education, so the father's expectation would be that he should support himself through being employed.
And of course there would've been a disappointment for the father if that didn't happen.
So that would've created conflict. - [Richard] Police inquiries with friends and family revealed that Nathan, his father,
repeatedly clashed over money. - Do you expect me to subsidize you for the rest of your life?
Was one of the remarks that was heard by a neighbor during one of their arguments.
- Money can be a source of conflict in a relationship within a family. It certainly can be.
There was a conflict between them about money and that seemed to escalate over time.
- [Richard] As work continued on tracking Nathan down, detectives needed to establish a timeline of events
around William's death. - The time when that person might have died is paramount
because it will direct your investigation. It will also give you a window of when that person died.
You get that, you know where to start your inquiries - [Richard] Pinpointing an exact time of death
was difficult, but the hatched flies and state of decay suggested William's body
had been in the flat for around four weeks. - There was confirmation from Glenys about contact she had
and contact she then didn't have with a victim. And that period of time is narrowed down
as to when it's highly likely, most likely, that William was killed. - [Richard] A phone call from her neighbor corroborated
this timeframe. [phone dialing and ringing] - [Dispatcher] Good morning, Dorset Police.
- [Richard] The neighbor went on to say he'd heard a commotion and William calling out
to phone for an ambulance on the night of the 16th of May. [dramatic music] With a rough time of death,
the investigation could pick up speed and hone in on a potential suspect. - Part of the investigative process,
the victim is gonna be lifestyle. Where do they work? What hours do they work? Who are their friends? Where do they frequent?
Where might they be expected to be at any particular time? 'Cause that's where the paths of our victim
and our suspect or suspects may well have crossed. There's a huge amount of work to do.
We all leave a pattern wherever we go. Going into places, in buying things, you're using cards, credit cards, debit cards, even cash.
One of the main investigative strands these days, closed circuit TV, hundreds of hours of CCTV is seized and looked at.
On that CCTV, we see Nathan. Nathan is at the railway station. Nathan is seen buying a ticket to travel to Scotland.
[train rumbling] [dramatic music] - [Richard] This trip to Glasgow in Scotland happened on the 17th of May.
The day after a neighbor reported a commotion at William's flat. It made Nathan the prime suspect,
but with no criminal record, lots of friends, and no concrete evidence, he seemed an unlikely murderer.
Police continued to investigate. - Now that we know where Nathan has gone, crucial evidence is being gathered in Scotland.
We need to know his movements, where he's been, who he's seen, and what he's actually doing in Scotland.
[beeping] His friends said that he was being extravagant, he was buying the meals, he was staying in expensive hotels.
- He treats his friends, he's buying drinks. He's buying food. You see this large ask, you see
he's trying to impress his friends. He has a definite sense of, in my opinion, a definite sense of entitlement about him.
He feels this is his right. He's there showing off. - Question is, where does this money come?
- But we know that he doesn't have any money, he doesn't have a job, and his father didn't want to give him any more money.
You can only assume that he's taken his father's money. - After leaving Scotland, Nathan's spending spree continues.
He goes to see his mother. He takes her on an expensive spa weekend in a hotel. - When he goes down to Birmingham
when he takes his mother out again, look at me. I'm the business. He's the center of his world, totally egocentric,
but he wants admiration, which you always see in narcissists. - In the four weeks since leaving Bournemouth,
Nathan had spent over 8,000 pounds. [glasses clinking] - [Richard] So did Nathan murder his father for money?
- He used his father's money to an extreme, spending a lot of money in a weekend,
that may tell me that he was half expecting to be caught, and he was having a big splash before he got caught.
- Police eventually track Nathan down and they arrested him on suspicion of being involved in the murder of William.
His remark when he is arrested is, is this a joke? [dramatic music] [dramatic music]
- After William Spiller's body was discovered, carefully dismembered and neatly packed in storage boxes,
police arrested their prime suspect, his 26-year-old son, Nathan Robinson. William's body had been slashed with a knife,
but there were no defensive wounds suggesting a surprise attack by someone in the home.
Shortly after the murder, Nathan had gone on a spending spree in Scotland and Birmingham with his father's money.
- Well, it seemed that after he'd cleaned up and he'd ordered the flat in the way that he did,
that he couldn't remain there. He needed to leave the flat and go away to Scotland, to Glasgow to see friends.
And so obviously the environment of his father being there was impacting on him that he couldn't stay there the weekend.
- Police eventually tracked Nathan down and they arrest him on suspicion of being involved in the murder of William.
[handcuffs clicking] His remark when he is arrested is, is this a joke? It's a strange response for somebody that's been arrested
for such a serious offense. I've experienced silence, I've experienced anger, I've experienced confusion,
but that response is strange. I think it's the response of somebody in denial and certainly is going to be denying any involvement.
And what they now want to know is how much do the police know? In other words, how much evidence have you got
that I'm involved in this? [dramatic music] - This is classical of narcissism. They don't expect to get caught. They're very arrogant.
No way is this anything to do with me. It's very casual denial. [dramatic music]
- He wants to elicit a response from the arresting officers. He wants them to carry on talking.
He wants them to say something back, even if it's just, no, it's not a joke, mate.
He's now entered a conversation that he has started. That's the start of him trying to control.
- Nathan claimed he was innocent of his father's murder, but William's body would reveal more answers
about what happened the night he was killed. It's the job of the forensic pathologist to determine
what was the fatal injury. There were knife wounds all over William's body, but critically there were also injuries to his neck.
The neck is where there are some major blood vessels and you can see them here in red,
there's the carotid artery, which carries blood from the heart up to the brain, and the jugular veins which carry blood back to the heart.
Some of these blood vessels are protected beneath this big muscle of the neck, the sterner mastoid muscle.
But there's one blood vessel here, one branch of the jugular vein that sits on top of this muscle.
And if it's cut, it's going to bleed torrentially, and is likely to cause death very quickly,
without immediate medical assistance. William Spiller's neck was severed in this place.
An injury that would have produced a considerable amount of blood. Cutting up the body would create even more blood.
But when police first discovered William, the flat didn't look like a crime scene.
- One of the things that was noticed was that the flat was very clean. In other words, if somebody is dismembered at that flat,
you would expect there to be blood staining, blood spattering, a whole array of things.
If you dismember somebody, it's very difficult to clean up afterwards. Takes quite a considerable amount of effort.
One of the things that the police discovered afterwards was that the neighbor had complained to Nathan
that he had a pink liquid coming down the wall in his bathroom. - The neighbor came upstairs to inquire what that was,
to report it to him, and he immediately covered for that. The neighbor said he was very cool, calm, and collected.
- [Richard] Nathan claimed he had spilled red wine. - Nathan didn't bat an eyelid
and was absolutely normal in explaining why that was happening to the neighbor. - It was a pink fluid,
was probably a mixture of bleach and blood. [dramatic music] - [Richard] Armed with this information,
detectives homed in on the CCTV that captured Nathan's movements around the time of the murder.
- He goes out and he buys steam cleaning equipment. He actually buys two steam cleaners.
- There's a lot of evidence to indicate that Nathan is in fact the killer of his father.
- [Richard] And a forensic sweep of the flat revealed critical evidence that the killer hoped to have washed away.
- Just because you clean up blood doesn't mean to say it's not still there. So it might look clean, but it's not.
From the investigative process of using a liquid, be it bleach, be it soapy water
to try and get rid of blood stains. What you're actually doing is spreading it. That stain that was six inches around,
when you dilute it now becomes 12 inches, 14 inches, 24 inches. And what you're actually doing is moving the blood
into the cracks and the crevices where you may not be able to see it, but forensically we can find it.
[dramatic music] - Cuing up a body, especially in a domestic environment rather than the clinical environment,
will make a lot of mess. The systematically go through and clean that up. It shows a level of not thinking about what has happened
and just getting on with the job and thinking about it as a task, cleaning task rather than what it represents.
This was just something that had to be cleaned up and ordered, which he did meticulously and very carefully.
So obviously this, to him, was just a task that needed to be done. - So he was completely in control of what he was doing.
You know, there was no sort of lost touch with reality. He knew what he'd done, knew what he was going to do,
he was going to try and cover for himself to get away with this murder. - [Richard] Nathan also spun a web of lies to make it look
as if his father was still alive. - After William's death, Nathan goes to a huge amount of effort
to cover up the fact that he's dead. - So he didn't want that murder discovered.
He had the foresight to make sure that nobody would be calling around for a while.
[dramatic music] [notification chiming] - He pays the rent for the flat a month in advance
so nobody's gonna come knocking on the door. He actually used his father's phone to communicate
with William's girlfriend Glenys, to convince her that he's still alive. - She'd had some text messages
and those that she'd had, she didn't actually think sounded quite right because she knew that William would be in touch with her.
- He sends messages saying that William's gone to the Midlands because one of his friends is dying
and he wants to be with him. You know, a terribly cruel thing to do. - [Richard] And when Glenys first tried to report
William missing to the police, Nathan called them with his own version of events.
- He's actually explaining away why his father is not being seen and all the time he knows exactly where his father is.
Just a cold, callous, calculating thing to do. I think that Nathan is looking for excuses.
He knows the evidence that's against him gets overwhelming and he's trying every single avenue
to get out of it. - But he'd reached the end of the road. [dramatic music] On the 18th of June, 2013, Nathan Robinson was arrested
and later charged with the murder of his father, William, the unlawful disposal of human remains, and theft.
- What we understand by patricide, when a son or daughter kills a parent is that the relationship between
the son and the father is detached and possible hatred between each other. There must been level of conflict in the past
and indeed what we found in this case, that it was so extreme that he committed murder, patricide.
- There is a link and a bond that we all have with our family, which is close, and the breaking of that bond
almost feels like sacrilege. - Nathan was a very cold, calculated killer and he certainly never expected to get caught.
[dramatic music] - The evidence that's against him, to be quite frank, it's overwhelming.
[dramatic music] - [Richard] The police were confident they had their man. But in court, Nathan Robinson denied murder
on the grounds of diminished responsibility. [dramatic music] - And what that means is that he's saying to the court
and wanted to prove to the court he actually didn't know what he was doing at the time
because he had no mental faculties that enabled him to know what he was doing at all.
[knife clicking] - [Richard] But was there a reason why he did it? - During the court case,
Nathan makes an absolutely explosive claim. He'd forgotten about it and suddenly it came back to him.
[dramatic music] [dramatic music] [beeping] - When police officers carried out a welfare check on a
Bournemouth flat, they discovered the dismembered body of taxi driver William Spiller stored in plastic containers.
The postmortem showed that wounds across William's body were inflicted by a Stanley knife,
also found at the flat. William's son, Nathan was the only other person living at the flat.
Around the time of the murder, neighbors had reported a commotion. Nathan was spotted on CCTV buying cleaning products,
and then went on a spending spree with his father's money. After a nationwide search,
police arrested William's son, Nathan, and charged him with murder. [dramatic music]
- He eventually goes to court and he pleads not guilty. As part of that not guilty plea,
he's offering up a defense, a defense that is known as diminished responsibility.
[dramatic music] If you're found guilty with diminished responsibility, you cannot be given a whole life sentence.
You will be sentenced to a much lesser term of imprisonment. - There's an element of sadism almost in this
because he's making William's girlfriend and the family of his father go through the horrific details of the crime.
If he'd have pleaded guilty, none of that would've happened, but now he's got the best of both worlds.
He's trying for that, he's trying to get a reduced sentence, and he's enjoying the details of his crime coming out
and it's a kind of celebrity notoriety that you get from that as well. So I think that would have appealed to him
because I do think he wants attention. - As part of Nathan's diminished responsibility plea,
Nathan accepts that he killed his father. He accepts that he watched him die and that he didn't call an ambulance
that could have potentially saved his life. He then says he has no memory whatsoever of those events.
[dramatic music] Nathan then says the next thing he remembers is he's in the shower washing off the blood from his father.
Now, I would suggest that the cognitive thought process of realizing that you have to wash the blood off
to get rid of evidence means that there is a thought process that has been followed from the actual event
of killing his father, which he has accepted. And it's selective, is being selective in
what not to remember. - [Richard] The prosecution argued against the plea of diminished responsibility,
claiming Nathan had a clear, financial motive for murdering William. - Father of 48, supporting his son of 26 is nothing unusual
as long as that son is in higher education, and he's seen to be achieving. The arguments come when he's dropped out,
Nathan owed his father 36,000 pounds. What are you gonna do? When are you gonna get a job?
That's when the arguments come. And of course there would've been a disappointment
for the father if that didn't happen. [soft music] - In my opinion, he had a sense of entitlement.
He wanted the money, his father was fed up with giving him money. He clearly had a grudge against his father.
[soft music] - And of course the most telling thing is the fact that the way Nathan wanted to spend his time
after he'd murdered his father was to support his mother, show her a good time, go out and spend money with his mother.
And he obviously had an emotional attachment to his mother that was absent for his father
because he took his mother's surname, not his father's surname. The Id of his complex was first talked about
by Sigmund Freud and he suggested that sometimes a son competes with the father for
the attention and love of the mother, and so that the son and father are in conflict.
And in some cases this can be so extreme as to lead to violence between the father and son
and even death and homicide. - [Richard] After the prosecution rested their case,
it was the turn of Nathan's defense team. - Nathan's barrister suggested during the case
that this was an unusual crime, that it was a result of a sudden snapping that caused the killing,
and that the crime had no motive. - But did William's body support this claim? The multiple injuries on William's body would tend
to indicate a sudden explosion of violence. But the fact that Nathan watched him bleed to death
and then dismembered his body would suggest something far more calculated. We know that Nathan had used
a Stanley knife to inflict the injuries, but the police also found a couple of saws
that he'd used to dismember the body. William Spiller was a big man, he was 6'5.
That's nearly two meters tall, weighing 160 kilograms. That's about 25 stone. Dismembering him would not have been easy.
Joints are particularly complex with interlocking pieces of bone held together with tight ligaments.
Take the shoulder joint, for example, here the head of the humerus, the clavicle,
and part of the shoulder blade all are fixed together by tight fibrous bands. And then we can see how they're surrounded by muscle
and other ligaments keeping it together. Dismembering a body is never easy. It must have taken him hours and hours.
William's dismembered body revealed that this was not a moment of madness, quite the opposite.
This was a considered and determined action. [dramatic music] - There's no doubt that the son was
emotionally detached from his father. This particular individual would've been particularly
callous and not have much empathy for a victim. And to have systematically tied it up
and then stack them in boxes after dismembering the body shows a level of detachment from reality,
and that what has gone on in a room. [dramatic music] - It's so bizarre that he went to all that trouble
to dissect the body, to put it in all these plastic boxes, which to me seems like utter contempt,
utter contempt for his father, and then to build them up and to put the TV on and to use that as a stand.
I mean that really is a horror movie. When the police eventually arrived, they found that his father's head
was actually in the filing cabinet. - No matter how emotionally detached you are
from your father, you know what your father looks like. So the head represented a challenge
to the way he was trying to blank the whole thing out of his memory. And so it had to be hidden away so the son could forget
what had happened in that room. - [Richard] But was his motive really just purely financial?
- So from the veracity of the attack, from slitting his throat with a Stanley knife,
and then when his father was laying on the floor pleading for an ambulance and bleeding out
to continually stab him, means there was real hatred in the act, which suggests that it wasn't just an argument
about financial concerns and about the amount of money that his dad, as a taxi driver,
was paying for his son to sit at home. This was something else. - During the court case,
Nathan makes an absolutely explosive claim. He says that when he was 13 he was sexually abused by his father.
He'd forgotten about it and suddenly it came back to him. - Nathan tried to claim that he'd suffered from PTSD,
that he'd been abused by his father and that had a really bad childhood. If somebody has post-traumatic stress disorder
from a long period of abuse, if that had happened in childhood, then yes, I could see how a person could snap
or a child might want to get out of that situation. He seemed to kind of come out of the blue,
his defense of abuse. [soft music] - He knows it can't be proved, but also he can't be disproved as well.
- Nathan says, while I was sexually and physically abused as a child, that may well have happened.
We do know that children who have been sexually abused under the age of 10 are much more likely
to commit homicide than children who have not had that experience. But with no evidence,
the court finds it difficult because he could be making it up as a way of defending himself.
[soft music] - William is described as a caring, loving father. - His father always kept him.
He didn't have to have him at the flat. Nathan didn't have to go and live there.
He could have gone and live somewhere else, you know, after his degree course finished it.
It just doesn't wash. There's nothing there actually in his past or they had nothing there that could back up that claim.
- Nathan is easily able to manipulate William to wrap him around his little finger
to get him to do what he wants. We can speculate as to why William is happy to do that.
It could be guilt, it could be a whole host of reasons. It's up to the jury to decide
whether or not they believe him. [dramatic music] - [Richard] We'll never know exactly what happened
between William and Nathan and why their relationship broke down with such devastating consequences.
After a three week trial, the jury took just two hours to return their verdict. - Nathan was found guilty and sentenced a life imprisonment.
The judge remarked during his sentencing that this was a callous, cold-blooded, premeditated murder of William.
The motive being financial. - He believed the money was his. He had this sense of entitlement.
It was there and he would do what it took to get this money and then to cover his tracks.
- I think the only way you can look at Nathan, when you know all the circumstances,
and all the facts of this case is he was a cold, calculating person. He was driven by money.
People say that money is the root of all evil, and that's actually not correct. What is correct is the love of money
is the root of all evil. Nathan is just pure evil. [dramatic music] - It was a fatal wound to the neck
that killed William Spiller. But the lack of defense wounds proved he didn't expect
to be attacked by his own son and left to bleed to death. Nathan tried to cover his tracks,
throw the police off the scent and claim childhood abuse had triggered the assault.
But the clinical dismembering of William's body proved this was no sudden snap of anger.
It was considered and calculated. And for that reason, his body revealed the cold, hard truth about his murder.
And a dangerous killer was brought to justice. [dramatic music]

Dr Richard Shepherd investigates the murder of William Spiller, a Bournemouth taxi driver who was dismembered and stored in boxes used as a TV stand.

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

William Spiller was murdered by his son Nathan, who dismembered the body and attempted to cover his tracks before being arrested.

Key points

A Gruesome Discovery. Dorset police find the dismembered body of taxi driver William Spiller in his flat.
The Prime Suspect. Police arrest Nathan Robinson, William's son, after discovering financial motives.
A Shocking Response. Nathan's reaction to his arrest raises eyebrows among investigators.
Dismemberment and Deception. Nathan meticulously cleaned up after the murder, but evidence remained. 'Just because you clean up blood doesn't mean it's not still there.'
Explosive Claims in Court. Nathan claims he was sexually abused by his father, a shocking defense strategy. 'He'd forgotten about it and suddenly it came back to him.'
The Verdict. After a brief deliberation, Nathan was found guilty of murder. 'He was a cold, calculating person.'

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

The dead don’t hide the truth and they never lie.

Dr. Richard Shepherd introduces his perspective on forensic pathology.

0:35WatchFeb 12, 2026

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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