He Beat His Wife and Set Their Home ON FIRE

“Today, how a bright yellow cap cracks the mystery identity of a daylight robber. As I was going through the footage, right in the very corner I saw a man wearing a cap, and I thought, ‘Let’s just have a closer look at that.'”

“But first, a pair of unassuming pajamas hold the evidence that puts a husband behind bars.”

“My gut feeling at that stage was that Jack had assaulted his wife and potentially left her for dead.”

“DS Mick Curtis is about to walk into a crime scene that would haunt him forever. It was just after Christmas, very start of the new year, and I got a call around about 6:00 in the morning, something like that, and officers… I was told officers were at the scene of a house fire.”

“As I drove up the road, I could see the smoke still pouring into the sky. Um, I could see flashing blue lights from the various emergency services. I never expected it to be the weirdest thing that I’ve probably dealt with in my service.”

“On a quiet suburban street, a house fire rages.”

“Concerned neighbors dial 999. You could see the roof completely gone in. Smoke still coming out. A lot of movement of police officers, fire brigade officers at the scene. I found out that the bungalow uh belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Tully. Her name was Val. The man was Derek Tully, although that he was commonly known as Jack Tully.”

“It was explained to me that the officers had returned into the property and found Mrs. Tully laying on the floor.”

“Mrs. Tully had been apparently beaten. There was some severe injuries to the head and she had lost some blood.”

“Mr. Tully had told the officers that he’d awoken to the sound of some thudding noise um in the bungalow, and he realized that his wife was being beaten by somebody, an intruder in the property, whilst she laid alongside him in the bed. Still wearing his pajamas, Jack leaps out of bed in hot pursuit, chasing him out of the back of the property into the rear garden.”

“With dangerous intruders still on the loose in the neighborhood, the first job for DS Curtis is to hunt them down and fast.”

“We examined the rear garden to see if there was any possible points of exit. But there was no apparent point of escape. So house-to-house inquiries with neighbors was carried out to try and establish if anybody else had been disturbed by anybody or seen anything happening.”

“As police continue their inquiries, Jack’s wife, Valerie, lies in hospital fighting for her life.”

“Valerie had been taken to Worthing Hospital. I think at that stage there was some uncertainty as to whether she would actually regain consciousness. Mr. Tully was asked if he wanted to see his wife, but he said to officers that he felt he’d rather remember her the way she was. Him saying that seemed a little strange because no matter what the circumstances, no one had suggested she was dead.”

“It wasn’t the response Mick expected from a loving husband.”

“It was really quite concerning that he wouldn’t want to see his wife if it maybe were the last few minutes of her life.”

“For Mick, things just don’t feel quite right. He heads inside to examine every inch of the crime scene for clues.”

“I was taken in by the firefighters in through this door here, and the very first room on the right-hand side is a door into what is the front bedroom. Mrs. Tully would have slept on this side of the bed, Mr. Tully on that side.”

“As he looks around, there are numerous red flags that trigger his suspicions.”

“The lounge door had smashed glazing, and it had fallen to the floor onto the carpet, and the firefighters pointed out in this location here a chair which had been subject of a fire. There were further three points within that room where fires had been started. If we’d have expected this to be an ordinary house fire, we may have found one point where the fire had started, just a discarded cigarette, a faulty item, or whatever. Once we were shown that, we were fairly confident this wasn’t any accidental fire or just an occurrence. It was an arson.”

“The only version given from Mr. Tully about the fire was that it must have been set by the people that had broken into the bungalow. It doesn’t make sense.”

“To help Mick separate fact from fiction, he needs to gather as much evidence as possible. But the crime scene is literally disappearing in front of his eyes.”

“There was a chance that the ceiling could collapse at any time. We desperately needed to get our evidence out of that room. You were losing it by the minute. You were losing the the forensic evidence that we had.”

“In ideal world, we say to the fire brigade, ‘Please turn the hoses off.’ Um, but unfortunately obviously they’ve got a job to do. Our evidence is fibers. It’s blood. And at that stage, there is water dripping through onto the bed. We’ve got a soaking wet bed and floor. Looking at the bed as best we could see on a wet mattress, there was blood splatterings on the bedding and also on the headboard uh and pillow. We needed those items more than anything secured, because they may well show blood of a potential offender.”

“But then officers make a significant discovery: the possible weapon used in the attack.”

“And we found a broomstick um handle in the bedroom on the floor.”

“This is um very similar to the item that we found in the bedroom at the Tully’s house. That was identified forensically as being the item that had been used to beat Val.”

“They had the weapon, but the attacker is still at large.”

“We couldn’t discount the possibility that there had been intruders, but there were certain evidence within the property that raised our suspicions that it wasn’t quite the same as the account given to us by Mr. Tully.”

“It wasn’t the only thing Mick noticed that made him question Jack’s story.”

“There was an issue in the bedroom where there had been some nail varnish that had been spilled on the bedside cabinet. Um, Mrs. Tully was renowned apparently for having the most immaculate nails. It did raise a question as to whether there had maybe been some form of dispute within the property between the two of them.”

“Had an argument turned into something more sinister and left Valerie fighting for her life? One thing in particular is nagging at the back of Mick’s mind.”

“When Mr. Tully was taken out of the property, he was wearing a pajama top, pajama bottoms, and a pair of slippers. It was apparent visually that there was blood on his pajama top, and also there was some nail varnish on…”

“Shards of glass, which were consistent with the lounge door. Not something that he would have attracted in passing a broken window, but he would have been at that… at that location when the glass was smashed.”

“The shards on his pajamas are evidence that Jack was involved in the breakage. But now they need to prove where he was during the attack.”

“One of the forensic scientists involved in the case was an expert in blood splattering, and he felt that the account of Mr. Tully was not consistent with what he had found, and he wanted to conduct some tests uh in a laboratory setting.”

“To disprove Jack’s intruder story, Mick must examine every splatter of blood in minute detail.”

“We know that Valerie Tully was asleep on this side of the bed and that Jack Tully slept on that side of the bed. Um, in the event that Jack Tully was asleep in bed when he was awoken by the sound of his wife being battered next to him, we would have expected effectively the blood splatterings to have been all over the bedding.”

“To test their theory, the forensic team recreate the scene in the most unconventional way.”

“The scientist told us the most effective way would be to have a pig’s head which he would cope with artificial blood, and then he would hit it with a stick similar to the one believed to have been used on Valerie. A pig has the closest skin and flesh to humans.”

“It’s placed next to DS Curtis playing the role of a sleeping Jack.”

“I was laying on the bed like this, the pig’s head was here. The scientist was hitting the pig’s head, and the spray was going all over me, and you can see here much like that blood was being splattered across, leaving a pattern of of spray um from the battery.”

“What this really showed us was that if she was being hit here, bloods have splattered out this way onto the headboard, up here, and all over the body of Jack and the bedding. But in fact, the truth of the matter was Jack didn’t have a pattern of spray on him that indicated he was alongside Valerie at the time that she had been struck.”

“Could the blood splatter on the pajamas be the moment of proof Mick so desperately needs? And there’s more.”

“When I moved off of the mattress, what you could see was a clear area where there was no blood whatsoever. And yet in the bedding retrieved from the Tully’s house, what we do know is that the whole area was evenly splattered in blood.”

“This indicated to us that the account given by Jack Tully of being alongside Valerie in the bed at the time she was assaulted, when he alleges he woke up, was not true.”

“Forensics have cracked it. There’s no way Jack could have been next to Valerie on the bed during the attack. The blood splattering was that piece of the jigsaw that was missing. His account was false, and that there was no other reasonable explanation for what had happened that night.”

“It’s the Eureka moment every detective dreams about. Mick can finally prove Jack was lying, and he was the attacker.”

“The evidence that was found suggested that possibly the assault had occurred first, and that to cover up what had happened, he wanted to burn the bungalow down. And with Val inside it, he went off trying to cover these possible intruders by smashing glass within the property.”

“Mrs. Tully still had no recollection of the incident that night and was never supportive of the charges.”

“Jack Tully is put behind bars for 6 years for the attempted murder of his wife, Valerie.”

“All we ever wanted to do was know the truth of of what had happened that night. We were all of the opinion that it was the right result, and that we had got the right person.”