World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 18 - Christopher Halliwell - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Swindon, England, March 19th, 2011. At 2:53 AM, CCTV showed 22-year-old Sian O'Callaghan leaving a nightclub,
then later getting into a taxi. Little did she know her cab driver was a ruthless killer.
-It was a perfect cover for a man who wanted to kill women. What could be more innocuous than a minicab driver?
-Sian never returned home. In the days that followed, hundreds of locals joined the desperate hunt to find her.
-She could've been anyone's sister, daughter, friend. She just had that sort of look about her.
We really felt for her and her family. -But Sian had been murdered. 47-year-old Christopher Halliwell
had brutally stabbed and strangled her, then dumped her body. -His murders didn't come out of the blue.
They were a long time in the making. -It turned out the friendly cabbie had killed before.
He led a double life, prowling the streets at night to indulge his addiction to depraved sexual violence.
That makes Christopher Halliwell one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ When Sian O'Callaghan's body was found
in Uffington, Oxfordshire, on March 24th, 2011, it brought the 5-day hunt for her to a heartbreaking end.
She'd been savagely murdered by local cab driver Christopher Halliwell. It was a devastating blow for her hometown of Swindon,
as local reporter Scott D'Arcy remembers. -It struck a chord, I think, with me and people around me
because it was like, you know, this could have been a young woman I know, and I think that's why it resonated
with the rest of the town. It really, really did rock the community in a way that I haven't seen before or since.
-When Halliwell was finally arrested, he shocked the town by leading police to another body,
20 year old Becky Godden-Edwards. He'd strangled her 8 years previously, then dumped her in nearby Gloucestershire.
Now Swindon had learned they had a killer living amongst them. -The community in Wiltshire, and in Swindon in particular,
were desperately upset by the killing and certainly felt that Halliwell was a monster in their midst.
There could be no doubt about that. -He didn't look like a monster, you know? He just looked like a normal guy.
You would walk past him in the street and not think about it. He would get in his cab, and I think that's
what sticks with me really is the normality of that evil. -He was able to maintain this double life, essentially,
the devoted family man, the nice neighbor. But underneath that, he really was evil.
-This killer's story begins in 1964. Christopher Halliwell was born in Swindon but then moved north
to the Stewartry region of Scotland. His family life was not a happy one. His mother was violent and abusive.
-He endured a awful lot of abuse, a lot of beatings. So here was a young lad who was basically learning
that home is not a safe place to be. Violence was normal. Violence was expected, and this is something that we see often
in the cases of serial killers. -Time after time, that's a signal in the upbringing that points to someone who is truly disturbed,
and there's no doubt whatever that Halliwell had a very, very disturbed childhood.
-It was the abuse from his mother that seemed to hit the young Halliwell hardest.
-The most salient aspect of Halliwell's childhood is the relationship he has with his mother.
It unquestionably is the seed of his relationship with women for the rest of his life.
Halliwell's mother was a sadist. She was brutally punishing, including physically punishing,
repeatedly, over long periods of time, but more important than being brutally punishing,
she enjoyed it. What his mother would do, would press a hot iron against his hand
while looking at him and smiling. -Halliwell later claimed that his mother's sadistic punishments
had a lifelong impact on him. -What we know about sadistic mothers is that they are not bonded to their children.
They view their children as a burden. They view the duties of care as an enslavement.
They're looking for an excuse to be rid of their children who they resent for existing
because the children cramp their style. He makes a resolution to get his revenge,
and if you look at Halliwell's life and his homicides, it's a life dedicated to getting revenge for his mother,
and so his mother was the seed, the beginning and the end of his relationship with women
who, in his core, he hated for the rest of his life. -Young Halliwell built up a seething resentment towards women,
but for now, he only had defenseless insects to inflict his anger upon. -Halliwell really did take his time when he was a child
in terms of pulling the wings off butterflies and the legs off insects. He really kind of relished this.
-Long ago, it was discovered as a commonality in the history of people who commit serious violent crimes
that there is a history of torture and cruelty to animals, and I suspect that what that's all about
is that people who are victims of torture seek to be victimizers, and at some point when you're small,
the only thing smaller than you is a helpless animal. -This is something that children will often do
when they've experienced neglect, when they've experienced abuse, because there's not very much
over which they can have control. -This was a kid who was practicing as a child to be an adult sadist.
-His mother's ultimate rejection came at the age of 15 when she placed the teenage Halliwell in a foster home.
When he eventually left the care of the state, he fell into a life of crime. At 19, he had his first criminal conviction --
4 years for burglary. In prison, he had plenty of time on his hands to indulge in dark, sadistic thoughts.
-He finds himself in Her Majesty's Prison on Dartmoor. While he's there, he talks to a fellow inmate,
cellmate, about how many people you have to kill to be called a serial killer, and his fantasy about strangling a woman
while having sex with her. Whether or not that was in fact what he had in mind, we will probably never know.
-One would hope that those who've been the victim of sadism would be a part of the march against it,
not part of the continuation of it. What makes what he did horrible is that, as a victim, he knew enough to know how horrible it was.
-After leaving prison, Halliwell struggled to commit to a steady job. -Halliwell's early adult life was one of drifting,
was one of rootlessness, so he had a range of different jobs. He was a chauffeur, a window cleaner, a binman.
He didn't really stick at one thing for any particular period of time, and this is something that is quite characteristic of those
who have psychopathic traits and behaviors. They're quite kind of prone to boredom.
They have that need for stimulation, so he really was just living by his own rules.
-By this time, he's quite a tall man. He's got staring, sharp blue eyes. He's not unattractive, you know?
He's got a way with him. He's quite chatty, but he's also a villain. -Halliwell was very much a predator,
and if you look at a lot of the jobs that he did, these are jobs that involved working unsupervised,
spending periods of time on his own ruminating, fantasizing. -Halliwell realized that he needed
to keep his twisted fantasies to himself and began to develop a veneer of respectability.
-Halliwell got married and had children, so he's got this kind of facade of normality.
-After settling in Swindon with his wife and children in the year 2000 at the age of 36,
he set up his own private-hire minicab business. -So I think he realizes that being seen
as the devoted family man is something that's quite important for the way that other people perceive him.
-I specifically remember talking to neighbors, and I think this is what stuck with me,
my impression of him throughout, really, is that one of the neighbors, I remember,
describing him as a smashing bloke. You know, he used to say hello to him all the time.
He was always washing his car, you know, the kind of model of a neighbor you wouldn't think anything of them
if you saw them in the street. Another neighbor, I think, said, "I wouldn't think anything
to let my daughter get in a taxi with him." -But soon, the cracks in this facade of normal family life
began to show. He began cheating on his wife with other women. -This is incredibly revealing.
He's doing this on his own doorstep, and that shows that he's only concerned about himself
and getting what he wants and what he needs. -But extramarital affairs weren't enough for Halliwell.
He was also leading a double life out on the streets at night, searching for women willing to satisfy his darker fantasies.
-At some point, he becomes bored, and he begins having sexual liaisons with other women,
particularly prostitutes who, at his particular point in life, are the easy access to sexual gratification
outside of the marriage. And I have to say, this is not a characteristic that is particular to killers or sadists.
It's a characteristic that's fairly common in a large percentage of males in our culture,
but what we find out is, in the course of his relationship with prostitutes, he wants something more from them.
-This something more that Halliwell wanted would even sicken the prostitutes he paid.
His twisted fantasies about sex and strangulation would eventually lead him on a path to murder.
At the age of 38, Christopher Halliwell seemed the pillar of respectability. He was married with children
and ran his own minicab business, but there was another dark side to Halliwell, one who saw prostitutes to satisfy his insatiable
need for rough sadistic sex. -Halliwell's murders did not just come out of the blue.
He didn't go from being a normal, healthy, functioning individual one minute into a murderer the next.
He had a violent reputation. He was known amongst the sex workers of Swindon for this.
-Some of them were later to describe him as liking rough sex, very, very rough sex,
which some felt was creepy and weird and worrying. -It is not surprising at all that a man
with a violently sadistic mother would be violently sadistic with sex workers. In some ways, they're the safest people to be this way with.
-Halliwell had found an outlet to indulge his sadistic urges without fear of detection.
-Halliwell's treatment of sex workers was very much characteristic of his treatment
of women in general. They were there for him to use and abuse and to fulfill his wants and his needs.
So he has a reputation, but it's the idea that this reputation isn't one that's come on to the police's radar,
and I think Halliwell is very well aware of the fact that sex workers are going to be highly unlikely
to go to the police and report being abused or manhandled by one of their clients.
-Sex workers are in a very difficult position with men because what they're doing is technically illegal,
and in order for them to report a crime, an assault, they have to go to the police and, in essence,
describe themselves as regularly committing illegal acts. That's problem number one.
Problem number two -- if a sex worker in a relatively small community is reporting people to the police,
they're an unemployed sex worker very quickly. -No one in the local community suspected
that Christopher Halliwell was harboring this dark, sadistic side. -So he's somebody who's balancing this quite well.
It's something that a lot of men do, but when you look at how Christopher Halliwell
does it, it does become quite sinister. -Here you come to something I think is truly interesting about Halliwell.
He could present to the neighbor as quite a nice man. That was one Halliwell. The other Halliwell who had issues with women,
one was hiding within the other. They were two, but you didn't always see the fierce one.
-But the fierce side of Halliwell would soon rear its head with fatal consequences.
His occupation allowed him to stalk the Swindon streets at night under the radar.
-Being a taxi driver is the perfect cover for a murderer like Christopher Halliwell
because taxi drivers are not an unusual sight in the nighttime economy. They're the good guys.
They're the ones that take us home. They're the ones that look after us, but they're also the ones who see us at our most vulnerable
when we're tired, when we're intoxicated. So he would trawl the streets for victims.
-One sex worker Halliwell regularly met on the streets was 20-year-old Becky Godden-Edwards.
Becky had fallen into prostitution to support her heroin habit. -Becky was somebody who had a lot of problems.
She was a very vulnerable individual, but also, she was very self-aware. She was incredibly smart.
And she wanted to save her family the trauma of seeing her when she was addicted to drugs,
so she'd basically taken herself away from them and vowed that one day she'd get clean,
and she'd go back to them, and they'd pick up where they left off. Halliwell is well aware of her vulnerability,
and that's something that he preyed on. -But it seemed Becky was more than a prostitute
he paid for sex. She was an obsession. Halliwell was absolutely besotted with her.
-This is the fascinating thing. He doesn't want a prostitute simply to be a paid sexual partner.
He wants to actually have a relationship with the prostitutes, and what I suspect from this is something very telling,
that he hates his mother and wants revenge upon his mother. I think secretly what he really wanted is for her to love him.
-Halliwell very much saw Becky as his. He wanted to own and possess her. She was his and only his.
-On the 3rd of January, Becky had been out with friends at one of Swindon's nightclubs.
As she left in the early hours, Christopher Halliwell was waiting in his cab outside.
-It's one of the most poignant moments, for me, in her story, is the nightclub she was leaving was called Desire and Destiny,
for Becky's destiny was to be in the hands of Halliwell. -Her friends saw her arguing with a taxi driver,
then walking away, before she decided to return and get into his car. It was a decision that would seal her fate.
-Becky clearly didn't want to get into Halliwell's taxi because the two had something of an altercation
before she did get in, and I think this shows how manipulative Halliwell is, that he was able to coerce her to go with him.
-That night, Halliwell finally gave in to his darkest of fantasies. He strangled Becky to death, then dumped her body.
-Whether he attacked her sexually or not, whether he strangled her in the act of sex
in the back of his cab, we will never know because her body wasn't to be discovered for years.
-So this really is complete ownership, possession, and control. This is, "I'm going to do what I want to do to you
because I have a right to do that because I'm entitled to do that." -She was killed, ultimately, because, to him,
she was not a prostitute, and she was unprepared, unable, and didn't know that what was required of her
to be with him was to actually be a mate, and for this, she paid with her life. -Halliwell needed to hide his guilt.
He drove Becky's body 20 miles to the deepest and remotest part of the nearby Gloucestershire countryside,
Eastleach, near Cirencester. -Halliwell disposed of Becky's body. He buried it in a shallow grave in a field.
His disposal method was very...pragmatic -- simply stick the body in a hole in the ground,
cover it over, and hope nobody finds it. -Halliwell's cunning plan seemed to work.
Days became weeks, weeks became months, and months became years. No one had realized Becky was missing.
Her friends assumed she'd moved on. -She was somebody who was very much off the radar.
She was one of what we call the missing missing, and that made her very easy prey
for someone like Christopher Halliwell. -Halliwell now had a dark secret, and he seemed to relish in it.
-Halliwell would actually go back to the burial site at regular intervals. Here's somebody for whom control is very important.
He wants to make sure that this site hasn't been discovered. He wants to make sure that nobody else
knows where Becky's body is because that knowledge is a source of power to him. -So poor Becky just disappeared off the radar
as though she'd never been there, and Halliwell got away with murder. -Four years later, in 2007, after being unable to trace her,
Becky's mother contacted the National Missing Persons line. There was still no word for another 4 years,
so she launched an appeal. -One of the great tragedies of this case is that, by that time,
her daughter had been dead for 8 years, although she didn't know it. -Becky's disappearance
was never properly investigated at the time because her family believed that she was actually in Bristol,
and I think that was the impression that many people who new Becky were under, and they thought that one day she would just come back,
but unfortunately, that never happened. -Eight years had passed since Christopher Halliwell
had succumbed to his darkest fantasies, strangling 20-year-old Becky Godden-Edwards.
By 2011, he was divorced, and his minicab business had gone bust, but 47-year-old Halliwell found work with another taxi firm
to continue roaming the streets at night unnoticed. In the early hours of Saturday, March 19th,
he was on the prowl past Swindon's pubs and nightclubs. -I think he was very much in the mood
for picking up a victim this night, and he was cruising the streets, he was looking for somebody,
looking for somebody on their own, looking for somebody vulnerable. -That somebody was 22-year-old Sian O'Callaghan.
-Sian O'Callaghan was a very clever, very attractive young woman who was working as an administrator in Swindon.
Now, she'd just moved in with her boyfriend. This was very kind of exciting time of her life.
She's just starting out, and she goes out with her girlfriends on an evening out in the town center.
-Sian and her friends ended up in the town's Japanese-themed nightclub, SUJU. Just before 3:00 AM, she decided to make her excuses and leave.
CCTV showed Sian on her way out, down the nightclub stairs. Unbeknownst to Sian, killer cab driver Christopher Halliwell
was lying in wait nearby. -She leaves the club on her own. Now, Christopher Halliwell spots her,
and he essentially decides that he's going to take advantage of this opportunity.
-Sian was last seen on CCTV at 2:57 AM getting into a green Toyota Avensis taxi.
The car belonged to Christopher Halliwell. -Halliwell should have been a trustworthy citizen.
After all, he was driving a minicab, perfectly respectable thing to do, except Halliwell was not a respectable man,
and he certainly wasn't trustworthy. Halliwell may have pretended to offer a ride.
We don't quite know exactly what the subterfuge was, but what we do know is that Sian never got back to her boyfriend's.
-Once Halliwell had his second victim safely in his cab, he then drove Sian 15 miles
to the remote Savernake Forest where he sexually assaulted her and stabbed her. -Stab wounds to the scalp or any injury to the scalp
tend to bleed very heavily. There will be a lot of blood produced from those injuries.
They will be painful. -Sian was stabbed twice in the neck and in the head. -Stab wounds to the head are the sort of things
that we really see when somebody is very, very angry. They are directing their anger towards the head,
which is often a site of attack when you're angry, but to stab in the head is not an effective way to kill somebody.
It suggests that there's just an act of anger going on there. -Halliwell ended Sian's life by strangling her.
He hid her body in the forest before returning to Swindon, to the home he shared with his girlfriend.
As a local cabbie, he could keep up the pretense that he'd had a normal, uneventful night shift,
but for Sian's boyfriend, her no-show was out of character. His text messages went unanswered.
-When she doesn't appear, he immediately contacts the police, who immediately launch a manhunt.
-Kevin reported Sian missing 9:45 in the morning. News of her disappearance spread quickly through the close-knit community of Swindon.
-Sian's disappearance became a cause célèbre, particularly in Wiltshire. Everyone was anxious to find her.
She was well-liked, lots and lots of friends. -Before we knew it, there was a full-scale
missing persons investigation going on, and for me, this is really interesting in terms of the contrast with Becky's case.
-Reporter Claire Hayhurst had a press release from Wiltshire police about a missing 22-year-old woman
and immediately headed to Swindon to cover the story. -As time progressed, her family were trying her mobile phone.
It was ringing out, ringing out, and then, suddenly, it went dead. The battery had run out, and I think, for them,
that was really significant because they knew that she wouldn't have let her phone run out of battery.
-Her boyfriend made an emotional appeal for her return. -I just want to say how very worried we are about Sian.
-Desperate to find her still alive, police managed to trace her last mobile phone signal
to Savernake Forest near Marlborough. -The community in Swindon really rallied round
as soon as Sian O'Callaghan went missing, and I remember there being lots of posts up on Facebook
with people desperately trying to reunite her with her family, giving any bits of information they thought were relevant.
-Police organized a search of the area, making a public request for volunteers. More than 400 people responded.
Swindon journalist Scott D'Arcy was at the scene. -People just came out of everywhere,
really, to try and help and support. Friends were walking around putting up posters,
coachloads of people were arriving at Savernake forest to help with sort of fingertip searching
through what was a vast, vast area. So it was unprecedented, I think, for the town.
That really struck a chord with them, and they felt like they had to get out and help.
-Meanwhile, seeing the scale of the search, Halliwell panicked and returned to the murder scene at night.
-Halliwell immediately drives back to Savernake Forest and moves her body not all that far away
but a good distance away, in an effort, clearly, to conceal his crime. -Halliwell drove Sian's body
another 20 miles away to Uffington, in Oxfordshire, where he dumped her in a ditch,
but unbeknownst to Halliwell, CCTV had captured his taxi, seen circling Swindon at the time Sian left the nightclub.
The suspect had also crossed paths with a patrolling police car, and records showed this had automatically
captured the license plate. The net was closing in on the killer. -So the first thing we found out
about the person suspected of kidnap, as it was then, of kidnapping Sian O'Callaghan,
was that they were a taxi driver or a private-hire driver. Wiltshire police had put out an appeal
asking for anyone with information about a green Toyota Avensis which had been seen driving
between Swindon and the Savernake Forest, where Sian O'Callaghan's mobile phone last pinged.
-Once they ran the number plate a few times, they saw that he moved several times.
He'd gone out to Uffington. It was a bit of telephony and a bit of ANPR, which is automatic number-plate recognition cameras,
that managed, I think, to get him on the suspect list. -Within 3 days of Sian's disappearance,
police now had their prime suspect, taxi driver Christopher Halliwell. they started watching his every move.
-Once Halliwell was placed under surveillance, he was doing some rather interesting things,
which just confirmed for the police that they had their man. They just needed to collect the evidence.
-Halliwell attempted to keep up the appearance at being a concerned citizen. -In the days following Sian's murder,
Halliwell is just going through the motions. He's acting very much as normal, but he's adapting his behavior
to that heightened sense of fear in his local community. So he's putting up missing posters of Sian in his own taxi.
He's also basically trying to get rid of evidence. He's burning items from his car
out in the countryside in the middle of the night. He's removing seat covers, and he's being very systematic and very methodical.
These are not the actions of an innocent man. -He's trying to look like, you know,
a concerned member of the public who's trying to help the appeal even though he knows full well where Sian is.
-On March 24th, 5 days after Sian's disappearance, Halliwell was seen buying a huge overdose quantity of pills.
As the surveillance operation hadn't led police to Sian, they had to act now before it was too late.
-Just after 11 o'clock in the morning, the police pounce on Halliwell. They have the number plate.
They have the surveillance, and they have Halliwell now arrested on suspicion. -Halliwell was apprehended in broad daylight
in a supermarket car park by a team led by Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher.
-Because Detective Superintendent Fulcher believes that Sian might possibly be alive, he offers
Halliwell a deal -- "I won't take you to the police station if you'll show me where she is."
-They have this 9-minute face-off where Steve Fulcher is pleading with Halliwell
to, "Tell me where Sian is. Tell me where Sian is," and tries to plead to his humanity, really, to say,
"Look, you know, you where Sian is. You're the only person who knows where Sian is.
Please tell us." -The game was finally up for Halliwell, but he still had the police under his power.
Only he knew where Sian was. Now he had to decide whether to reveal his sinister secret.
Serial killer Christopher Halliwell's cover story as the friendly local cabbie was unraveling.
When Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher begged Halliwell to reveal Sian's whereabouts,
he finally broke and admitted to her murder. -Fulcher and Halliwell drive to Uffington, to the White Horse.
In the end, Fulcher persuades Halliwell to show him where Sian's body is. The poor young woman is found naked from the waist down,
facedown in the undergrowth. -DS Fulcher had gone against procedure. He hadn't taken Halliwell to the police station
to see a solicitor or read him his rights. The killer, though, had revealed his darkest secret.
Now he had another one to offer that he knew police couldn't refuse. -Christopher Halliwell is quite enjoying being in control,
and I think he wants to maintain that sense of power, that sense of control, and he's also concerned for himself at this point in time,
and he would quite like a cigarette. So he says to DS Fulcher, "Would you like another one?"
I'm going to trade some information about the whereabouts of a body for a cigarette.
-He says, "Give me another cigarette, and I'll give you another body." The coldness, the callousness of that is truly shocking.
-Steve Fulcher later said, "I had him talking. I needed to keep him talking. Here was potentially a murder that we knew nothing about,
and he was going to give it to me on a plate. I've got to take it." -And Fulcher makes another mistake,
compounds the first, and drives Halliwell to the site in which Halliwell has buried
Becky's body, some 20, 25 miles away. -DS Fulcher had uncovered another murder, but once again, he'd ignored procedure by failing to read
Halliwell his rights. He finally took his suspect back to the police station. Halliwell seemed to enjoy his newfound notoriety.
-So here's somebody who is not growing a conscience, feeling bad about the victim's family.
He's enjoying the sense of power and that being control of this whole circus, this drama, and he doesn't want that to end.
-Even if they don't feel guilty, a part of people feel burdened by the holding of a secret,
by all the tension that's around holding the secret, and so there's an element of release to confession
that doesn't have to do with salvation or God or repentance. It has to do with just being
free of the tension of the secret itself. -The town of Swindon was devastated. Now they'd learnt two young women
had been brutally slaughtered in their midst. -After Sian's body was discovered,
the outpouring of grief across Swindon was absolutely huge. I remember she was referred to as Swindon's Angel,
and there were murals painted across the city with that on them, and I also have very vivid memories
of the blanket of scented candles. Even for people who didn't know Sian, they would just stand there and look at all these tributes
because they felt so touched by her story and affected by her death. -Becky's mother, Karen,
had started a campaign to find her. Now she'd learnt the awful truth. -Here was her daughter, who she assumed
or hoped was still alive, even though she hadn't seen her for more than 8 years.
Her hope had gone, you know? Becky was never going to walk back through the door again.
-On March 28th, 2011, Halliwell finally appeared in court, charged with Sian O'Callaghan's murder.
-When Christopher Halliwell first came to court, he was brought before Swindon Magistrates' Court
charged with Sian O'Callaghan's murder, and I remember very clearly there was a huge mob of people that had turned out,
and as the police van containing Halliwell was brought in, they attacked it and shouted abuse at it,
and when he got into the Magistrates' Court, again, there was more abuse from the public gallery,
and as the police van drove away from that courtroom, people tried to chase the van down the street.
I think that illustrates the level of feeling that people had about what Halliwell had done to Sian and to Becky, as well.
-Throughout the following court hearings, Halliwell maintained his innocence, but when the case eventually reached Bristol Crown Court
on October 19th, 2012, he decided to plead guilty. Halliwell seemed to relish his time on the stand,
trying to blame Sian's death on his victim. -Christopher Halliwell's account was that Sian had been very drunk.
She'd been aggressive. It was extraordinary because this was a man who'd pleaded guilty to murder,
and it sounded like he was giving a self-defense argument, and what was very striking about Christopher Halliwell
is that he tried to maintain eye contact with members of the press. So I remember very clearly him looking directly into my eyes
as he sat there during this hearing. I found that very chilling, and I've covered
many very disturbing cases. It was a very striking moment. -Christopher Halliwell finally received a 25-year sentence
for the murder of Sian O'Callaghan, but the result for investigators and the public was bittersweet.
As DS Fulcher had failed to follow police and criminal evidence act procedure, Halliwell's confession to Becky's killing
had been ruled inadmissible, so there was no justice for his first victim. -I think many people in the town
felt that sense of injustice and were incredulous. -I remember Becky's mother, Karen,
came outside Bristol Crown Court and stood on the steps and gave a very passionate plea to the media
to help secure justice for her little girl, for Becky. -Our family's fight for justice for Becky has only just begun.
I would like to thank everyone... [Voice breaking] ...for their continued support
in striving for justice for Becky. -The failure of justice for Becky caused ructions.
DS Stephen Fulcher faced disciplinary proceedings and later resigned in 2014. Meanwhile, his force had to go back to the drawing board
to find more evidence linking Halliwell to the killing. -The police do not give up hope
on pinning Becky's murder on Halliwell. In particular, they search his house and find soil on a shovel that puts him close,
very, very close to Becky's body, which he'd buried in a shallow grave. -Forensic soil scientist Professor Lorna Dawson
was brought in to put the earth particles found on Halliwell's tools under the microscope.
-These tools were examined, and any soil that was on them was carefully recovered.
It was an interesting case because the samples were very small, so it was very challenging.
-Lorna's work helped confirm police suspicions. -The soil information showed that there was a high degree
of comparability between the soil on a couple of items found in the garden shed and the soil where Becky was recovered from.
-Police found further evidence to make their case against Halliwell watertight. A call to a roadside rescue service
placed him close to the murder scene. -On the night Halliwell murdered Becky, he ran out of fuel just maybe 6 miles away from the field
where he'd left her remains, and later that day, he went to his doctor with a hand injury,
which he said had been sustained during a fight with a customer. When police went back through his work logs,
they found that Christopher Halliwell had not been working that day, so his story about a fight with a customer did not add up.
-Killer Christopher Halliwell finally faced trial for Becky's murder a second time, on September 5th, 2016,
at Bristol Crown Court. This time, he pleaded not guilty, and he had another surprise in store.
-Halliwell sacked his defense team and set about representing himself, and there's an old saying that goes,
"Anybody who represents them self has a fool for a client," but I'd say, in this case,
they've got a narcissistic egomaniac for a client. -At the beginning, he dressed smartly,
you know, to look the part, but he began to get more and more disheveled throughout the week.
His shirt became untucked. His sleeves were rolled up. It was a performance, really.
The families said that they felt like it was a show. He was trying to manipulate them from the dock.
He was trying to get into their heads, that sort of thing. So that's what it was, really.
It was almost a show trial for him for his own ego. -As Halliwell reveled in this performance,
he even got to cross-examine his nemesis, the man who tracked him down, DS Stephen Fulcher.
-It was a gripping exchange between these two men -- the police detective who had caught Halliwell
but effectively lost his career in the process and Halliwell, who was now standing here, accused of a second murder,
with evidence that Stephen Fulcher had helped secure against him. The exchanges between the two men were fascinating to watch.
Stephen Fulcher, at one point, made reference to the fact he believed Christopher Halliwell
had killed other women, whereas, at the end of his evidence, Christopher Halliwell had to have the last word,
and he told Stephen Fulcher, "It was a pleasure ruining your career, you corrupt bastard."
♪♪ -Two weeks into the trial, Halliwell was found guilty of Becky's murder, to the relief of Swindon and his victims' families.
He was sentenced by Sir John Griffith Williams to a whole life term in prison. Halliwell's response? He laughed at Becky's relatives
from the dock before being led away. -Halliwell will never see freedom again, and I have to say, I think the world is a much safer place
without him in it. If anyone deserved a whole life term, it was certainly Halliwell.
-Christopher Halliwell is a deeply controlling man who has shown no remorse or regret for his actions.
The prosecution said that the lies just dripped off his tongue, and that's certainly impression that stayed with me.
He came across as a remarkably cold and calculating man. -Although Halliwell has never been charged
for any other murders, former Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher suspects he has more victims.
A pond connected to the killer was searched by police in 2014. They uncovered Sian's boots and Becky's cardigan
but also found other clothes belonging to unidentified women. No one can explain the 8 year gap
between Becky and Sian's killings. -Eight years passed before Halliwell killed again.
Do I really believe that? No. I believe that Halliwell committed other murders of other women in intervening years
between 2003 and 2011. I do not believe for one moment that Halliwell became a changed man.
I think he nurtured his hatred of women like a flame. -The town of Swindon was rocked
by the cold-blooded murders of two young women with their whole lives ahead of them.
They were sickened by the senseless brutality of the killings and how, through them,
the man who ended their lives enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame. This is what makes Christopher Halliwell
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Christopher Halliwell strangled a twenty-year-old woman and evaded justice for eight years until his arrest for killing another young woman. He finally got a whole life sentence in 2016.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Christopher Halliwell, a cab driver, murdered Sian O'Callaghan and Becky Godden-Edwards, shocking the Swindon community.

Key points

The Disappearance of Sian O'Callaghan. Sian O'Callaghan, a 22-year-old, disappears after getting into a taxi driven by Christopher Halliwell.
The Shocking Discovery. Sian's body is found, ending a desperate search and revealing the horror of her murder.
Halliwell's Double Life. Christopher Halliwell led a double life as a family man and a brutal killer.
Becky's Tragic Fate. Becky Godden-Edwards, a victim of Halliwell, had been missing for years before her body was discovered.
The Night of the Murder. Sian O'Callaghan is last seen getting into Halliwell's taxi, leading to her tragic fate.
Sian O'Callaghan Goes Missing. Sian's disappearance sparks a massive search effort in Swindon.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This could have been a young woman I know.

Local reporter's emotional connection to Sian's story.

2:06WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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