**Mastermind’s Fatal Mistake: Catching the $1,000,000 Jewelery Thieves**
Every day over 17,000 crimes are committed in the UK.
The demand was for 5 million pounds.
They were getting deeper and deeper into this guy’s trap.
Up against brick walls and denials, there were no leads, no evidence. This was going to be a mountain to climb.
What does it take to catch the criminals?
I knew that I had to be relentless to build my case.
An eye for detail,
“Now you can see the unique number.”
And true determination.
I wanted to fight for her to get the justice that she deserved.
It’s the uncovering of this one clue
“I have a really good, clear picture of the cap.”
that finally solves the mystery.
It’s just fantastic. Everything has come together for you, and that was the moment of proof.
Putting the criminals that affect the lives of innocent Britons behind bars.
We will find you. We will prosecute you.
Today, how an ordinary hoodie helps police take a dangerous attacker off our streets.
I had a cast-iron case now thanks to this DNA evidence.
But first, a car’s satnav reveals the mastermind behind the biggest armed robbery ever to hit Devon and Cornwall.
We know he was nearby overseeing what was going on. He’s the one that was in charge of the execution of the robbery itself.
Detective Chief Inspector Pete Found of Devon and Cornwall Police has been on the force for three decades and is a proud Cornishman.
We’re very fortunate in Devon and Cornwall that we don’t traditionally see a great deal of violence. It’s a fairly laid-back part of the country.
That peace was shattered one morning by a crime that would rock Cornwall’s biggest city to its core.
I became aware of a bit of commotion outside my door and somebody sort of came running into my office to say that there was an armed robbery in progress. My initial response was just to send officers directly down to the scene.
The robbery is taking place at a family-run jewelers in the city center.
So, the robbers ran down the street here to my right, ran down here, and ran into the store through that door there. They committed the robbery, then exited the store, and ran straight back up the street again to the getaway vehicle.
By the time the police arrive, the robbers have vanished.
Pete heads into the jewelers to inspect the crime scene. The entire shop has been left in ruins.
I could see that there was a lot of damage to property within the store. A lot of the cabinets have been smashed up, and I could see that the staff were very very distressed and upset by what had happened to them.
They gave an account of what had taken place.
Four masked men entered the jewelers. They’re shouting, forcing people to get on the floor. They’re brandishing a firearm, crowbars. It must have been terrifying.
Who are these masked robbers? Pete desperately needs clues. He starts by examining the in-store CCTV footage.
So, you see they control the staff with guns. They spray pepper spray at the manager of the shop. They utilize a lot of aggression when breaking into the back of all the cabinets. They very unceremoniously unload all of the goods into holdalls and work their way systematically around the shop. All this is actually done in about 2 minutes. So, it’s a really quick aggressive robbery.
Fortunately, no one is seriously hurt. In terms of the total value of the robbery, just under a million pounds worth of watches and jewelry were taken.
All four robbers are disguised by balaclavas. Frustratingly, there’s no other clues to their identity and nothing else to go on.
Pete turns his attention to the men’s getaway vehicle. It’s described by eyewitnesses as a red Renault Laguna.
So, over my right shoulder here, where this van is parked, is where the getaway vehicle was left. It’s left with its engine running and the hazard lights on and parked at a ridiculous angle into the road.
The vehicle was parked there because of the close proximity to the jewelers itself, probably less than 100 yd away. So, very well planned in terms of a clear getaway route back up this street.
An hour after the robbery, the thieves had disappeared into thin air.
Remember, the public came forward and said she’d seen something unusual in Garrards Wolf car park. What that turned out to be is she saw four males get out of a red Laguna, get into a blue Ford Mondeo and drive off.
Straight away, we were able to connect those dots and realize that she’d witnessed the robbers. They swapped places and swapped vehicles over in that far corner there.
Finally, Pete’s got something to go on.
It was a crucial lead for us. However, it was still a little disheartening because we had no idea where that Mondeo was and we had to cast the net really wide to try and find it as quickly as possible.
It’s 2 hours since the heist. The golden hour for cracking the crime has passed. The robbers could have already fled far and wide.
Pete can’t risk them leaving the country. His team use ANPR to track the two vehicles they know the robbers have been using.
From there, we were able to identify the registration number of the Mondeo. So, from my perspective, that was a really crucial breakthrough in the inquiry and allowed us to really focus on we need to know where that Mondeo is and we need to know who’s in it.
Pete immediately puts an alert out to colleagues across the country. With every minute that passes, our chances of catching them lessen.
Just 2 and 1/2 hours after the robbery, he gets some news. The vehicle had been spotted on the A30, which is the main arterial road in and out of Cornwall. Fortunately, the vehicle that spotted the Mondeo was one of our firearms vehicles.
And ultimately, that was our first major breakthrough in so much as both of the occupants of the vehicle were then arrested.
The two men are Lithuanian nationals. Their mobiles are seized and they’re taken into custody, but refuse to cooperate with police.
This was a well-planned operation. It was executed in a very professional way. And so, I’m starting to think particularly given their nationality, this did not appear to be a local crime committed by local people.
Pete and his team now believe they’re dealing with an international organized crime gang. The Mondeo is all they have to go on, so they track its movements before the robbery.
Some of our analytical work in identifying the Mondeo had also identified a third vehicle, which was a Ford Fiesta. We then conducted inquiries to identify the registered keeper of the vehicle. It turns out it was a hire company. We make inquiries with the hire company, and from there we were able to identify that it was hired by a male in the name of Beneficius.
Beneficius, we learned, was a Lithuanian surname. So, it reinforced the point, but is this a Lithuanian crime gang that we’re dealing with here? We now had the vehicle and a named individual, both of which I circulated widely throughout the country, various departments including ports, to be stopped at my request.
Pete and his team are now working through the night, pulling out all the stops to catch the remaining robbers before they disappear completely.
Little did Pete know that a satnav would crack this crime. 12 hours on from the robbery, at 9:00 p.m., he gets a call from Bedfordshire Police.
I was notified that a male by the name of Beneficius was due to board a flight from Luton Airport.
Crucial breakthrough that we had to respond to very, very quickly. He’d already checked in, gone through the gate. We had about 20 minutes to respond.
The plane is bound for Lithuania. For Pete and his team, it’s a race against time.
My concerns are that if he gets on that flight, trying to track him down in Lithuania or other European countries is going to be that much more difficult.
In our next case, a brutal and frenzied attack on a man in his own home. Can an ordinary hoodie help nail the mystery attacker?
Detective Constable John Whitworth of Cambridgeshire Police has been a detective for nearly 3 years. But in that short time, he’s learned to love the thrill of the chase.
Being a detective really sort of stretches the mind and there’s a real sort of logical puzzle element that I really enjoy. I’m a big fan of strategy board games. I just love being able to piece together that puzzle.
He arrives at work to be told about an emergency call that’s come in overnight.
Someone had rung 999, really distressed, really upset that they’d just been attacked in their own home. And they didn’t know the person. This person had effectively climbed in through the window and then proceeded to attack them in the most vicious way possible. And after he was beaten, this assailant had threatened him that, you know, if he was to call the police, he’d come back and kill him.
Police rushed to the victim’s home. They enter a crime scene of total devastation. Damaged items on the floor, smashed plates and crockery. The place was absolutely trashed.
And then we seen this man clutching his arm, apparently seemingly broken and in a great deal of pain. And they just were rushed to give him first aid initially before sort of trying to find out what happened to him, how he’d got these injuries.
The dazed victim gives shocking details of the brutal unprovoked attack in his own home.
The victim said that a glass bottle had been thrown at his head. The attacker had picked up his guitar and broken his guitar, hit him so hard with the guitar that the guitar smashed. And to add insult to injury, the victim who is disabled and has a crutch, the attacker had taken the crutch and has beaten him repeatedly with this long aluminum crutch and caused horrendous injuries to his arm that way.
The victim doesn’t know his attacker, but vividly recalls crucial details about the man’s appearance.
This description of this sort of 50-60 year old person with his unkempt appearance wearing a blue hoodie. So the officers knew they had to act quickly and they had to search the area.
John’s colleagues need to find this violent offender before he attacks again. Knowing that it only just happened, they realized that they were in that important golden hour. They had a very short amount of time to try and find the attacker.
They start with house-to-house inquiries.
And the cops who were on the scene originally did some really, really good proactive, old-fashioned police work because they used the description of the attacker to track down a possible suspect.
Officers soon receive a tip-off. A known offender who matches the description of the attacker lives just around the corner.
Acting on this, the officers went to the address and knocked on the door, but unfortunately, probably the first thoughts when the man came to that door was,
“Oh god, actually this doesn’t match that description after all. Maybe we’ve got the wrong address.”
And it was just as they were turning away to leave, disappointed that this was maybe a dead end, that one of them managed to spot over the shoulder of this man a jacket lying on his couch with some blood stains on it.
So, the officers decided to search the flat. They found hiding in the bedroom another man. And this man 100% matched the description the victim had given them down to a T. And as they went to peel back the covers, they saw a whole load of blood stains.
The man found in bed is 57-year-old Keith Byford. He smells of alcohol and says he can’t remember what he’s been up to.
There was really strong suspicion that this was the attacker. So, they did the right thing. They proactively arrested him at that point to allow the investigation to start properly.
So, this is a photograph of the hoodie that’s taken by the officers as they arrested him. It’s an uncomfortable picture to look at. On the face of it, it looks like blood. But, it could just equally have been paint. You know, he could have had a nosebleed. So, until we actually test it and we know that that is the victim’s blood, it is at the minute just circumstantial. It is just a red stain.
John will need more than circumstantial evidence to charge Byford. So, he sends the hoodie off to the forensics lab. But, the custody clock is already ticking.
Knowing that the threat he posed to the victim was quite high and he actually threatened to kill the victim had police gotten involved, the stakes were really high and bailing him really was the last option.
As John is about to interview his suspect, he’s handed a glimmer of hope.
I got told that they’d found fingerprints at the scene. And I was able to sort of expedite them testing that fingerprint to find out if it was a match for Byford, but I decided to go ahead with the interview and see what he had to say for himself.
Any hopes of a dramatic interview room confession are dashed. Byford answers no comment to every question.
John will have to piece the puzzle together himself.
I came away from the interview with the knowledge that now I had to find the evidence to show what happened. And look, where that point I was told, I was given the information that the fingerprint was in fact Byford’s fingerprint. So, I knew at the very least I could place him at the scene of this attack. That itself wasn’t enough, however.
Problem was that whilst that proved he was at the scene and he touched the window, it could still something that could have easily been explained away. He could have claimed that that touched it when he was out walking his dog, for example. We needed something more to actually tie the attacker to the injuries that had been caused.
The blood-stained hoodie is John’s best hope of a breakthrough. But, DNA results from the lab could take several weeks.
After 24 hours, Byford is released on bail.
It almost felt a betrayal that I was actually bailing him. And I really wish that there was a way that we could have sped up that DNA process. There was a very sort of real threat there that he was going to go back and attack that victim again and carry out his threat of killing the victim.
Byford’s bail was set with strict conditions to safeguard the victim.
John’s frustrations at the lack of evidence prompt his next move. He gets the victim to attend an identity parade.
This is a really quite powerful and useful piece of evidence because if he’s able to pick out his attacker, it’s a really strong indicator that the victim’s account is accurate and can be relied upon and that we’ve got the right person.
And it’s another win for John. The victim picked out Byford. So, that was a really pivotal moment that not only are we able to place Byford at the scene from his fingerprint, we now had the victim saying,
“That is the man that attacked me. That is the man that did this to me.”
The jigsaw is gradually coming together. But, frustratingly, none of it is enough to charge Byford. Everything rests on the hoodie.
I waited and waited for the results to come back from the forensic examiner. It was quite stressful, sort of like keeping the victim updated as best I could, because I don’t always know what the time scale’s going to be.
It’s an agonizing wait. Until one morning, an email appears in John’s inbox.
So, as I was reading through the results, I was reading through the email, and I realized it was to do with this case. The blood that was on Byford’s blue hoodie, that was the victim’s blood. And reading that email, when they sent the results through, it quickly became apparent that, you know, I now had that moment of proof. And that I was now able to take this case all the way to court.
I had a cast-iron case now, thanks to this DNA evidence.
It’s checkmate for John. The bloods are a perfect match.
I was able to finally put this case to bed. I know that I now had everything I needed to get a conviction without any chance of Byford being able to really explain these blood stains away.
The evidence is overwhelming, and Byford pleads guilty, but offers no motive for the senseless attack. He’s jailed for 7 and 1/2 years.
I’m incredibly happy to have this dangerous offender off the streets. The victim of the attack was incredibly relieved to hear that this ordeal was finally over.
There was no doubt in his mind that he was still at risk of getting attacked again. So, to finally hear that this person had been put in jail, and he was sort of actually safe to walk the streets again. You know, that was a real relief to him.
Back in Truro, four masked robbers have escaped with a million pounds worth of jewelry after an aggressive armed raid.
DCI Pete Found has already caught two suspects, but at least two more are still on the run. Now it’s a race against time to stop a third man, Andreas Banevicius, boarding a flight at Luton Airport.
Luckily, they were able to intercept Banevicius before he got on the plane.
This was absolutely crucial. Had he got on that plane, I don’t honestly know whether we’d have ever caught him.
It’s just 12 hours since the million pound heist, and Pete’s got three men in custody. Even though Banevicius is connected to the robbers, his exact role remains a mystery.
He’s quite distinctive in how he looks, even in terms of his build. He’s quite well-built individual, and he really just didn’t fit the description of the suspects we had going into the jewelers. So, I’m really at this point starting to think that he may be our main leader.
Banevicius denies involvement in the crime. His mobile phone and satnav are sent for analysis, but as it stands, there’s no evidence to connect him to the robbery.
Pete gets his team to widen their CCTV search.
This is a really labor-intensive, but really incredibly fruitful line of inquiry, gentlemen.
From a nearby hotel, we get CCTV footage which shows all of the four suspects before they actually go and complete the robbery. So, when we reviewed the footage, that’s when we got our first breakthrough and had our first facial image of one of our suspects.
The robber caught on camera is not one of the three men who’ve been arrested. This man is still at large along with one other.
So, at that point, we’re really right back at the beginning.
It’s 36 hours since the heist. The two robbers could be thousands of miles away.
After exhausting all sources of CCTV, the team’s hope of the breakthrough lies with the mobile phones seized from the three men in custody.
Now, mobile phones can be a treasure trove of information to the police. It’s painstaking work.
And then, we get the moment where we really narrow down the location of two further suspects in the Bristol area and to a fairly specific location in Bristol.
At Pete’s order, local police swoop on the two suspects. They are also Lithuanian and in their pockets, they both have a can of pepper spray similar to that used in the robbery.
What that meant for us was that the local officers could just arrest them on that basis.
The two men deny knowing the others who are already in custody.
Pete’s got a mountain to climb if all five are to be charged within 24 hours.
This literally is a race against the clock. Can we present enough evidence to CPS to secure charges against them before their custody clock runs out?
Pete casts his net even wider. He desperately needs one clue to link the five men.
Our inquiries led us to Bristol Airport, which is where we believe they flew into the country. Hopefully for us, this is all on CCTV.
What we see here are two suspects coming through the airport and leaving the airport. Now, you’ll recall that these two don’t know each other, apparently. They then get into a vehicle, which is the Fiesta, driven by Benevicius.
He has the clue to link the men. He now needs a clue to link them to the robbery.
Could this satnav hold the key?
We were able to download the data from it, and from that, we were able to demonstrate that the satnav, and therefore Benevicius, had traveled to Truro on two previous occasions. It had done repeated loops around the block in front of Michael Spiers.
So, that’s why in this case the satnav was the moment of the proof. We now understand that that was conducting reconnaissance of Michael Spiers to plan for the jewelry heist. This had been an event that was a long time in the planning.
It’s Pete’s breakthrough moment. Just 48 hours on from the heist, the satnav confirms his suspicions that Benevicius was the mastermind of the entire operation.
Whilst he wasn’t directly part of the robbery, we know he was nearby, probably overseeing what was going on, was in charge of the execution of the robbery itself.
The million-pound heist is the biggest armed robbery in Devon and Cornwall’s history. Pete’s dossier of evidence has cracked the case.
The gang are jailed for a combined total of 64 years.
We are really proud of the fact that we were able to deal with what was presented to us on that day. We were able to deal with it quickly, and robustly, and professionally. And hopefully that sends a message out that whilst we don’t have crime in Cornwall to this extent very often at all, if it does happen, we’re in a really good place to deal with it.
