The Midlands Ripper: How this Monster killed nearly 200 Women
Homicide investigation is one of the most challenging investigations that you’ll ever deal with. And to think that you come off the other end of the conveyor belt at the conclusion of the case without scars, without the need for some counsel in support is totally inaccurate.
When the call comes through, your mind runs riot. You don’t know what you’ve got. You don’t know how you’re going to deal with it until you get there. There was nothing in terms of forensic opportunities. She was virtually naked. You can see there’s no houses. There’s no house to house inquiry. There’s no CCTV.
It’s a nightmare in terms of starting a murder investigation at a scene like this. It’s one of the most serious cases and one of the most challenging cases that I’ve been involved in. It’s not really usual thing to deal with a suspect who you class as a serial killer. All these years later, it reminds me really what a horrific event really it is that someone was abducted and murdered and then driven and dumped in this isolated location.
And it’s a horrible way for anyone’s life to end. In March 1997 in Leicester, England, police received new evidence about two cold murder cases. They reopened them in the hope of catching a serial killer. Mitt Creden was the detective in charge. I remember most of my investigations, the big investigations quite well, but this was a particular one because these were outstanding inquiries from three or four years earlier that had gone undetected and remained undetected.
So that one stays with me as does the kind of national nature of it. Most inquiries tend to be locally focused. This one wasn’t. The first of the cold cases Mick reopened was a murder from 1993. Police had received a call stating that the body of an unknown woman had been found in a ditch in Leicster. It was a particularly cold, wet, snowy December time.
And we believe the body had lain there for maybe three weeks, three and a half weeks. The woman was riding a horse and she was looking maybe from eight feet high that could she she could see down and see the body. And I think she’s at first thought it was a mannequin. Uh because who would expect to see a body in a location like this? Had it not been for the lady on the horseback, she could have stayed there for many more weeks.
Orlando Elmhurst was the forensic officer sent to the scene at the time. It is always incredibly sad to see young life snuffed out. It’s just human nature just to feel not only for them but you know that there are other people involved as well. There are the parents, there are potentially the siblings, there are other children.
It’s not just a oneperson event. It has a knock-on effect throughout a whole community. The body was sort of in a ditch and 3/4 of the body was out of the water. It didn’t look like a necessarily a clever killer. It just looked like someone who was trying to get rid of a bit of evidence and in the same way that someone might throw out a packet out of a car window and just rolled the body out of a vehicle and then just left it there.
It’s a nightmare in terms of starting a murder investigation at a scene like this. Normally, you will get something. Add to no forensic evidence, no CCTV, no telefan, no number plate recognition system, no witnesses, and it becomes really difficult. Add that no house to house inquiries when you can start gathering intelligence, no community to talk to, and it really is hard.
She’d been there for quite some time. She was in a ditch in freezing cold water. So her body was actually frozen. And this meant that there was no evidence on the body. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, nothing. So the only thing they have to then go on in terms of the investigation is the victim herself.
It was just really the state and the bedraggledness of the body. And also there were bits of twigs and bits of uh grass which would obviously been washed over it. There was obviously the possibility that there would be a loss of evidence and it was our role to try and prevent a loss of anymore. There was as far as we could see nothing terribly obvious.
Position of the body was just head down in a ditch. So we really couldn’t see any of the face or anything. So that had to wait for us to uh actually extradite the body and get it to the postmortem. We were going to have to be a little bit more delayed when it came to identifying who this deceased was. It transpired that the deceased was Samo Paul who was from the West Midlands.
In December 1993, 20-year-old Samo Paul was reported missing from the Bals Heath area of Birmingham, 35 mi away. She was a working prostitute working at Borsal Heath and she was last seen in that location. She was dumped in a ditch near a place called Swimford just outside Lutworth. Same went missing at the start of December.
She was found at the end of December, some 4 weeks later. And when her body was found, there’d already been publicity in the West Midlands Police Are in Birmingham about the fact she was missing. And I think within 24 hours, it was established who she was. She was young, she was small, she was petite, she was vulnerable. Clearly, she’s at high risk.
She had a little child at the time. She went out that night expecting to effectively work for a few hours and then never came home. when I reviewed the investigation back in 98 came out with Orlando and we reviewed the scene and came back and then I can remember having the same feel as I have now which is just firstly meant sadness that someone’s life could end a scene like this uh and then secondly looking at the complications of the investigation and any murder scene is is something which stays with you but this is a scene
really where there she was so a girl at the start of her life I find it chilling and very very sad in truth In this case, in some ways, all the work of the investigation had already been done in the 93 West Midlands case. So, it’s about gradually pulling the evidence out, then seeking out a whole load of fresh evidence.
As soon as you have a murder, you know that the responsibility is on you is to get it resolved and try and detect who did it. You can’t help that person, but you can certainly help other people as well. I mean it’s either the relatives kin and kith or other people who might be next on the list for the killer to kill. Often the murder victim will know their killer.
So it’s quite right to start at the center and work outwards. The danger sometimes with investigation into a bad murder is you immediately start looking at bad people of which there are many. West Mids police did quite understandably look at the movements of the boyfriend, look at whether he could be involved in the murder and seek to eliminate him from the inquiry, which of course in the end he was.
The other thing you’d be looking to do is examine those who use services of street workers, prostitutes in the Bolath area of Birmingham. But that, as you can imagine, is a really difficult job because these people are quite hard to track down. So the West Mage Police will be looking very widely at that area and clearly you start looking at vehicles etc that might be seen.
This is a really quiet part of South Leicester. The local village about a mile away has a a couple of pubs um probably 100 or so houses. Little or nothing happens here. It’s not an area the police would go to very often. The A14 is just over there where there was a huge site at the time. was being developed with an awful lot of workers there clearly who formed part of the investigation.
A lot of young men there. The potential could have been one of them could be a suspect, but that was really a needle in a haystack part of the investigation. In December 1993, with no evidence on the body and no information about Samo’s last movements, West Midland’s police had nowhere to go. The case remained unsolved.
But just 3 months later, another body was discovered three miles away. It’s about 3rd of March. We then got a call that another body had been found. And uh a little bit to my surprise, it was down again to the south of the county. The body was found nearly naked and strangled on a lane near Nutterworth. Both went missing.
Both were found murdered some weeks later in Leicester. Both were stripped naked or virtually naked and all their possessions were stolen. So big similarities. In 1997, Detective Mick Creeden was investigating two cold murder cases. Samo Paul from 1993 and Tracy Turner from March 1994. [Music] Tracy went missing from somewhere services.
Unlike Samo, she was found the very next day. She wasn’t missing for weeks on end. And she was found dumped again, murdered by the side of road in South Leicester, not far from where Samo had been recovered. Tracy wasn’t reported missing. She was profoundly deaf, didn’t have a wide range of associates, and so the fact of her missing went unnoticed completely.
For two weeks, Lester police investigated the death of someone who they didn’t know who it was. In 1994, forensic officer Orlando Elmhurst had again been first on the scene of the unidentified body. When I first arrived, it was quite strange because it’s a small little country road, as you can see.
I had sort of a niggling feeling that I’d almost been here before. It was the only time really I’ve had this sort of deja vu effect um because it was quite similar to something I dealt with a couple of months before and uh that doesn’t happen very often when you talk about major investigations. The body was laying fully naked on her back and effectively she was looking up to the sky.
It appeared that there were no drag marks. Uh so it it appeared that she wasn’t dragged to that position. There was absolutely nothing on the body, no personal items with her at all, which is pretty unusual, but um it made it difficult for identification purposes. The perpetrator we knew had been there. And what we then had to do was to make absolutely sure that they hadn’t dropped anything.
So that then required us to do a fingertip search of the whole area. And and when I mean finger, I do actually mean fingertips. It it’s not a matter of just uh proddding it, moving it around like that. You are having to go down and you are absolutely looking for absolutely anything. And it is a very very long and painstaking process and anything that you find has to get exposed, photographed, recorded, and then recovered.
Our initial interpretation of the scene was that she’d been brought here. She hadn’t walked here on her own. So, how would she get here? The most likely mode would have been by car. So, that was our her first hypothesis. This was also backed up by the fact that there were track marks leading onto and off the grass verge.
We then had to do the the standard procedure which was taping the body. It was obvious that there were some fibers there and we’d also saw some little flexcks of yellow paint. The yellow paint was quite interesting because that yellow paint could mean all sorts of things. One of the aspects was that the A14 link road was being built.
Plant machinery is yellow. So we thought, no, perhaps there’s something happening here. You build up lots of theories. You then test them and then they break down. In terms of difficult cases to solve, this is one of the most difficult. First of all, it’s a stranger case and they are always much more complex to solve than when there is a link between the victim and the perpetrator.
In the case of Tracy, all we had was effectively the scene of the body deposition. So there was a lot of work done around identification and it was 2 weeks before someone came forward and I believe it was Tracy’s mother and that was done through national publicity in the media. My daughter was on her own when she died and I’ I’d like anybody that knows anything to come forward.
There’s definitely the potential that both Samo and Tracy were working prostitutes. They were different. Tracy would sometimes go off for several days. She’d get with a lorry driver and sex would be given. She would spend some time with that lorry driver traveling. But they were both working prostitutes. And I think there’s a potential that that was one reason why there wasn’t a huge public awareness and consciousness of it.
Certainly attitudes at the time around those kind of things were were still judging the victim more. I’d like to think that we didn’t do that. But in those days, the police were far more reliant on the media. And whilst there was a lot of coverage, it didn’t tend to get national coverage. In the 80s and ‘9s, for example, when women were killed or when there was a serial killer or rapist on the loose, we definitely found like the general attitude was that it didn’t matter.
There was no urgency from the police to investigate the crimes. women that came forward to give evidence or be witness were told to go away. Uh they weren’t interested in what women had to say and they were not taken seriously. I think as a society, particularly at the time that these murders took place, had less empathy for victims who were sex workers as they would somebody that was like themselves.
In the ‘9s, people didn’t understand it. They were so different to them. So therefore, it was almost a sense of, well, you do that job, you put yourself in danger, therefore I don’t feel sorry for you. At the time of the original investigations, similarities were noted between Tracy Turner’s case and that of Samo Paul just three months earlier.
Back in 9394 the decision was made that they weren’t linked because the chief constables and the senior detectives didn’t think there were enough similar factors and they are very similar but they’re also different. So both both were working girls both were from the West Mids area but on the other hand there were differences I was taken from the city center was from the motorway service station.
on the initial investigation did inquires at Helen Park. They found a witness who saw Tracy Turner getting into a car. The particular guy took the registration number of the vehicle and this vehicle was um connected to a Ford garage in Glasgow. The guy who was using the vehicle, he’d stopped at the services and the witness was convinced that he saw Tracy Turner or a lady fitting her description getting into the vehicle belonging to this delivery driver.
Subsequently, he became their number one suspect. The witness that saw Tracy Turner talking to a man at the service station. That kind of information is crucial because the police need to know who she was seen communicating with. Who was the last person that saw her alive? That person could be the perpetrator.
[Music] He was arrested in Glasgow and brought down to Leicester to be interviewed. He verminently denied not only murdering Tracy Turner, but also having sex with her and saying she didn’t get into his car. There was no evidence to connect him and after exhausting that line of inquiry, he was released. They didn’t really have any other main prime suspects.
In 1994, with no further leads, all hope of finding Tracy Turner’s killer rested on the postmortem examination. Tracy was strong girl and there was some evidence that she struggled and there was knee marks in the back of her her neck where clearly um he struggled with her but there was no DNA found under Tracy’s fingernails.
Often you might get people make defensive actions to try and stop their attacker and it’s not unusual for the victim to scratch and scrape. We were able to establish that there was DNA present inside her and that is always very useful. Although you don’t necessarily know that that DNA comes from the killer, it at least gives you a lead.
And really at that stage investigation, you want as many leads as possible that are sort of useful as opposed to lots of blind alleys. Probably one of the best forensic advances in my service has been DNA and the DNA database which is the best in the world by a mile. By 94 there was an emerging database. It’s by no means advanced as it is now but that database held crime scenes and suspect samples.
The DNA sample that was then submitted to the DNA database and came back as uh no no hits. So, it was left on there as a possible crime stain, awaiting uh anyone else who might come onto the the database at later days. Tracy Turner’s case went cold with the hope that the DNA found on her may in the future provide a link to her killer.
The interesting thing with Samo and Tracy, when I look at them now and look at what was available at the time, it was clear to me that the likelihood is it was the same killer. They should have been dealt with as a link series. They should have been investigated jointly. We were looking at a murderer, a potential serial murderer.
[Music] In 1996, 3 years after the murders of Samo Paul and Tracy Turner, both cases remained cold, but they were joined by further unsolved murders. There was a series of cases in the Midlands and linking even into sex worker murders in Muryside. There was circa 207 cases. They were sex workers or ladies who could have been mistaken as sex workers at the time of the attack.
Very few killers are actually coal calculating murderers who set out and they hunt down a victim and they kill that victim. So your your pre-planned murder and your serial murder is a rare event. Serial killers, of course, are sometimes the hardest to deal with because the serial murderer tends to be a stranger. The increasing number of unexplained prostitute deaths sparked a nationwide operation called Enigma to hunt for a potential serial killer.
They say Operation Enigma will work in support of investigating officers. We will pull together information from throughout the country. With Enigma, it was very difficult. We ran briefings. We explained what it was all about. We just didn’t know how many um murders that we had linked at that time. That’s what Enigma was all about.
Not just linking one or two or three or four murders. Tracy Turner and Samo Paul were in the original clutch of homicides where the questions were raised, do we have another ripper on the loose? Operation Enigma meant forces were on high alert for any crimes that could connect any of the murders to a suspect. And in 1997 in Western Superare, AA and Somerset police received a report of a serious sexual assault that did just that.
In December 97, in a hostel, a bed and breakfast place, there’s a lady who had some domestic problems and she’d gone to the hostel really for some some peace from the world she was in. The only other person in the guest house was Alan Kite. Kite befriended this lady and I think he took her out for a drink um and locally and they got on okay.
Alan Kite had got quite a lot of charm about him. He went out drinking with the victim. Uh they went out, they were out late, they went clubbing and they would return back to the home where he subjected her to a horrifying attack. Really, it was dreadful. Which included rape, almost every offense you can imagine that can be committed sexually.
Told her he was going to take her to London and kill her. Clearly, this was terrifying for this victim who had the presence of mind to escape when he fell asleep briefly because he’d been drinking quite heavily and she escaped and um she contacted the police and A and Somerset police to their credit responded really quickly both to her as a victim and when they got to the to the guest house they caught him. He was very manipulative.
He tried to dominate the interview with the officers. Alan Kite’s DNA was taken when he was arrested and compared with the national DNA database of past cases. The first thing we knew is uh I I had a phone call from one of our uh uh our administrators in in my senior office who uh said that they’d got uh a hit come through via fax and saw who it was and what it was.
And I knew straight away to get a DNA hit on a murder that was a number of years old was hugely hugely interesting and and and problematical as well because how do you deal with this? Alan Kite’s DNA was a match to that found on Tracy Turner’s body 3 years earlier in 1994. The sample that hit was a vaginal swab which had semen upon it which showed that he had actually ejaculated inside her.
Not that necessarily killed her, but they’ obviously had intimate contact with each other. Wonderful thing about the DNA hits is they have on them probabilities. So you know the strength of it. Had it come back as a one in five that would have been a oh well this is this is quite interesting. But this came back in the billions.
You know this is really really really strong evidence. I felt this case was so important that I went directly over to the senior investigating C branch personally with it and handed it over to um one of the superintendents there, Michael Cedon. As a senior investigator, when you deal with a problem, you kind of look at what the problem is, then you break it down into bite-sized chunks, and you work out your priorities of what you need to do.
We clearly had strong evidence that suggested it was Kite, and that he was already locked up, so I could relax about that. Kite was in custody for the rape charge when the cases of the murders of Tracy Turner and Samo Paul were reopened for a new investigation. In the case of Tracy and Samo and carrying out a cold case review, the evidence is already years old.
So, it’s about going back over the evidence bit by bit by bit by bit. But elements of it were complicated. The process was quite difficult because, you know, for both these families, it had been years where there’d be no closure. One of the risks of any murder investigation is that you start to have your own hypothesis.
And there’s a real risk that sometimes you can even make the evidence fit your hypothesis. The the nature of an investigation should be really with an open mind. The investigative mindset should be to try and gather the evidence and and work out what’s happened. There was then a little cell created within Leicester police force to deal with it.
Then started getting information. There was two approaches. One was the C approach that Mr was dealing with and that was going to be about the interview techniques and the interview strategy. There was also the potential of we were still interested in these fibers and this yellow paint because DNA on its own isn’t really good enough for an absolute conviction because that just tells you they had contact.
It doesn’t necessarily that he was the killer. A bit of work was then done trying to establish where Allan had lived previously up in Staferture and a number of residences were pinpointed. We would then do a minute forensic sweep of the houses to see if we could find any fibers or paint flakes that were similar.
We were there up in Staffordshire for a couple of days examining everything down to the smallest detail. And we didn’t find any yellow paint unfortunately, all the fibers. So we were left with DNA as our primary evidence. And we then had hope we got some really good C um questioning to actually pull the case through. When we reopened the case for Turner and Samo Paul because of the DNA hit, we were confident that he was our man, but you’ve got to be openminded and objective.
We knew it was going to be difficult because Tracy Turner was a prostitute. We obviously believed that both the Tracy Turner murder and the same Opal murder were connected. So because they were only 3 months apart, they were found in very very close proximity, we believed that he would actually talk. He had answer questions.
The most important part of a police interview is the planning stage. It’s in the training that every police officer undertakes that in order to do an successful interview, you need to plan. You need to plan the evidence you’ve got. You need to plan what you know about the perpetrator. You need to think about how you think they will react.
So that prep stage is crucial. If you get that wrong, it’s likely the interview will go wrong. [Music] The key bit with Tracy Turner was the DNA evidence, which we didn’t disclose because if we had disclosed this before the interview, clearly one of the lines of defense he could have used was, “Well, guys, I I use prostitutes.
I can’t remember five years ago, four years ago. So what’s it got to do with me? And we decided we would ask him first for him to tell us his story. We start asking about his life, his movements, his associates, where he frequenced, does he use prostitutes? Does he come to Leicester? Um all of which he denied.
He denied time and time again using prostitutes. He denied time and time again involvement in either murder. He denied coming to Leicester. He’d been a bit of a loner, wasn’t very popular, had a very clear dislike of women. He had a a history of petty thefts. Um, he had been to prison for these. He also did a variety of jobs. He used to do people’s cars up for them, a job mechanic, and sometimes when he did the cars up, he would then use them for a week or so, effectively steal them from the people he was working for.
And this was pivotal to the investigation in actual fact around both murders and the cars that he was using at that time. There were a lot of other prostitute murders and there was Operation Enigma that was trying to see if they could be pulled together and whether there was sufficient reason for pulling them together.
We suspected him of doing a number of other murders which we never detected, which we’d love to detect, but it’s very difficult because they were over a period of time, we believe, and you’ve got to have the evidence that connects him to them. Any experienced detective would say, you don’t commit one horrendous sexual homicide and then finish your career.
The baseline was we didn’t know how many murders were linked. [Music] In 1997, following the DNA link with murder victim Tracy Turner, Detective Mccriededen was determined to prove that Alan Kite, who was in custody for rape, was also a killer. Conventionally with a murder investigation, you know, the events happened, there’s media interest, there’s maybe uh huge family pressure, community pressure, uh and you’re having to work fast time to gather the evidence quickly.
In the case of Tracy and Samo and carrying out a cold case review, you can do a bit more slow time. We had a small team of experienced detectives. We had the privilege of time which a lot of police officers don’t get to actually sit down and analyze everything that we got both on the previous investigations and also the rape investigation.
So we had time to think about that and also I think things were changing in the way we were doing things. We were doing things more scientifically. My inclination would be that Kite knew this area. It’s actually easy to get to. We don’t know that he had associates here. We don’t know that he committed crime here.
We don’t know whether he ever worked around here. He might have, but it’s some 4550 mi from where the offenses took place and where both girls went missing. So, it’s a long way to bring a body. There’s an awful lot of places in between the West Midlands and here that he could have gone to. Kite traveled a lot for work. So Mick and his team began to investigate his movements in connection with other crimes.
Majority of serial rapists are long-distance delivery drivers. You’ve got that mobility in the country. What you’ve got is the sex workers being very mobile and at the same time you’ve got the perpetrators being very mobile as well. Shortly after the murder of Tracy, there was another attack on a prostitute in Birmingham.
It wasn’t dealt with through the courts for a number of reasons, but she escaped at a time he was going to kill her. In the same period of 9394, there was another woman who escaped. At that time, I think there were four or five murders that were we were looking at and there was a ground swell of opinion that these four or five could be linked.
Kite was forensically linked to the murder of Tracy Turner through his DNA, but not to any of the other killings. Samo Paul’s murder had been very similar to Tracy’s. So, the team concentrated on her case, previously investigated by West Midlands Police. It’s very unusual for a senior investigator from one force to take on the lead for another force’s investigation.
So we took that on from the West Midlands and I don’t think West Mids found out very easily. As I come back here now all these years later, it reminds me really what a horrific event really it is that someone was abducted and murdered probably in the West Midlands um kept for some time and then driven and dumped in this isolated location.
And it’s a horrible way for anyone’s life to end. And it reminds me again how calculating kite will have been was been um in terms of what he did. [Music] We read all the paperwork. We looked at all the evidence that been gathered and then we revisited the witnesses. The remarkable story around this was a mile back in the village in the first week in December.
There was a lady was walking one afternoon, December afternoon, cold day, and she saw a brown Ford car come through the village with a certain suffix plate and a badge on the back being driven by a man with a girl sitting in the seat behind the driver. She believed she was dead which kind of quite naturally um caused a concern.
She spoke to her family and there was nothing in the media that night about it whatsoever. So they kind of left it and it was when Samo was actually found on December the 31st and then there was publicity around it that straight away she said that’s the girl. It’s very difficult for police officers, particularly in high-profile murder investigations, because they do get witnesses that call in with lots of information, and it can be information overload, and sometimes that information is not very valid. Sometimes there’s
malicious people who give information, and sometimes within that, of course, there’s going to be crucial information. the witness who saw what they thought was a dead woman in the back of a car. They had worked in a pathology office. They were used to seeing dead bodies and that should have been therefore taken really seriously.
The inquiry first time round by the West Midlands, the inquiry by Leicter first time round, opportunities missed, you know, which is always the case with every single major investigation. The benefit of hindsight’s wonderful when you can look back and see we might have done that, we could have done that. I have no doubt that she did see Alan Kite in that car.
I have no doubt that’s a car he was using at the time. And I have no doubt that was Samo’s body being transferred from somewhere in the West Midlands to this site. [Music] That suggests that at some stage in broad daylight Alan Kiter potentially driven from the West Midlands to this isolated part of South Lisha with a dead body in the car.
He is one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever interviewed throughout my career. I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed anybody who I suspected of committing so many murders. He had to be interviewed and he had to be dealt with in a certain way. A careful thought and consideration had to be put into the planning of dealing with Alan Kite.
You’re seeking the truth and you’re not being personal. You’re just asking questions. And subsequently, if he fails in this case to explain why his seaman was in Tracy Turner, then ultimately he was always going to be charged with the offense of murder. We decided that we would ask a lot of open questions for him to give us information about his movements around the time of the two murders, which were obviously only 3 months apart.
Fortunately, the plan worked. He was quite happy to talk to us about everything he’d done jobwise, about all the cars he’d owned, about where he’d lived. And although he denied both murders called committing both murders, he told us an awful lot about his lifestyle and the vehicles he owned. And the key bit of evidence in connection to say Paul was the vehicle.
It was a brown Sierra, the one that the witness remembered seeing, which Kite admitted he actually owned at the time of the murder. We felt that we got enough evidence to charge On Monday the 28th of February 2000, Alan Kite faced trial in Nottingham Crown Court charged with the murders of Samo Paul and Tracy Turner. He pleaded not guilty to both.
My memory is that Crown Court um at the last moment he he tried to use the defense is me. It’s my it’s my DNA in there, but I use prostitutes. He was trying to say that he wasn’t the murderer, but he was actually a punter for prostitutes because the inference was there. He had all the opportunity to say it when he was being interviewed.
It obviously went against him and the the jury didn’t believe him. He got life sentence for both murders and there was a recommendation that he’d serve at least 25 years. I do remember going to court when the convictions came through and a huge huge huge emotion from Samo’s mother and sister and from Tracy’s family and you can only imagine the closure they got 5 years later.
It was a difficult case, but one where I think the satisfaction really was bringing to an end the family’s grief and suffering and at the same time stopping this man who clearly was a high high risk to the public. [Music] I believe that just has been served for the victims. Kite was convicted for the maximum he could have been convicted for.
When you’re considering parole, there’s a lot of factors come into play. Kite’s never admitted officially to committing the offenses. You I’d like to think that that would be held against him, and I’d like to think that would stop him from being released, but we know that the authorities are under pressure to release people.
It remains a real concern to me that um Kite could be eligible for parole. I will be the last person to advocate locking everyone up and throwing away the key. I really have dubious thoughts about the value of prison in many cases. But in the case of someone who presents such a danger to the public, I think then the risk remains and for him to come out having served maybe 27 years at the age he will be um I think there’s still a high level of risk and let me put it blunt.
I wouldn’t want to be on the pole board and make that decision to release a serial killer. After his trial, Leicester police revealed that Kite was potentially implicated in several other unsolved murders going back to the 1980s. These were reinvestigated under Operation Enigma. At the time we restarted the inquiry, Enigma was still gathering its evidence.
It looked at well over 200 murders all around the country. And we talked about the difficulty of forensics with abandoned abducted bodies. And there was never anything that forensically linked any of the enigma offenses to either kite or to Turner and Paul. But what we do know is that um kite certainly was local to many of the offenses when they took place.
There were times kite was traveling around the country when there were offenses which still remain undetected to this day. [Music] I think Alan Kite, Alan Kite’s a um an interesting individual. Um I don’t think he’s ever confronted offending. I don’t think he’s ever come to terms with the fact um that he’s a serial killer, that he hates women.
Um, and I think there was something about the whole relationship which was very much uh brut brutality and power and and and dominance and and obviously within it hatred. [Music] For all those involved across the seven years it took to bring Kite to justice, the case has stayed with them. To think that you can be so cold as to deal with a murder investigation and then at the end of it once the the case has gone through the crown court that that’s it onto the next.
Everyone must take a scar off the investigation and the murder inquiry. When you go back to the station then obviously that that’s when it starts hitting you the enormity of what you have just dealt with. Um, invariably what we tended to do is uh we would then go down to the uh the bar and have a few drinks because really just to talk about it is the best way we found of actually getting out of your system.
It was a great great result. A lot of work and brilliant to to get a result like that. I think the biggest frustration with it is we’d like to have investigated the rest of them. It’s one of the most serious cases and one of the most challenging cases that I’ve been involved in. It’s not really usual thing to deal with a suspect who you class as a serial killer.
We’re now some 25 years on from offenses. It’s generational. It’s a lifetime on. He’s been in prison for 22 years at least. And I would make the obvious appeal to him to deal with his offending and come forward. And I’d actually say to him, tell us exactly what happened with Tracy and Samo. Um, he will have his story to tell.
Something obviously clicked in his brain that led to the murders. And then I’d be saying, “We need to deal with other offending.” Uh, because that needs to be concluded. When that’s concluded, only then can you move forward. Wow.
