For Anita Rani, a perfect Sunday is binge watching Agatha Christie’s Poirot and occasionally dozing off in between episodes.
But the TV presenter knows all too well that when true crime happens on your doorstep it is a far cry from the cosy - if slightly dangerous - worlds of Miss Marple and Poirot.
As a youngster, the darkness left behind by the Yorkshire Ripper plagued her hometown.
The serial killer who was convicted of murdering 13 women and the attempted murder of seven was born in Bingley in Yorkshire - just over six miles from Anita’s hometown, Bradford.
Anita says “I grew up in West Yorkshire in Bradford and when I was young, the story around was about the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. The ripples of that even though he was before my time, I was quite little but absolutely growing up his name reverberated around my area and around the whole of the city, really. In fact, the whole of Yorkshire.
“It was a national news story, but living right there, near where he lived, he was a big feature. Everyone knew his name. It was terrifying.
“We’re fascinated by why people can do this, how they can do this and also there’s something about watching these programmes in the safety of our own homes, knowing that we’re safe, but wanting to know what has happened to other people.”
This fascination has led Anita Rani to her new documentary on Crime and Investigation’s Murdertown.
Anita visits towns including Wakefield, Wigan, Milton Keynes, Bath, Wishaw, Oxford, Leicester, Whitby, Lichfield and Southampton which like her hometown, have been rocked by tragic murders and horror crimes.
In the first episode, Anita walks through the streets of Milton Keynes and follows in the footsteps of Rachel Manning who was just 19 when she was strangled and dumped at a golf course in 2000. The teenager was left disfigured after being attacked with a steering wheel lock and Anita stands metres away from where Rachel’s body was found as she details the tragedy.
Rachel was murdered after enjoying a night out with her boyfriend Barri White. As Barri was the last person to see her before she went missing, he immediately became the prime suspect.
Barri met his friend Keith Hyatt that night to help him find Rachel after they lost contact as they went their separate ways but their efforts were in vain.
Barri was convicted of murder in 2002 and his friend Keith of perverting the course of justice. The evidence presented to the jury suggested that Barri killed Rachel and Keith helped him to move the body.
A BBC Rough Justice documentary examined the case and found time discrepancies, flaws in the prosecution’s evidence and new forensic evidence that supported Barri and Keith’s innocence. Their convictions were overturned in 2007 by the Court of Appeal.
Barri says, “I feel like they didn’t do an investigation. I feel like the police were just looking at me. Instead of building the evidence and putting me in the middle, they put me in the middle and then built the evidence around me. As soon as they found the body, I was arrested a few hours later.
“I was speechless, I was thinking, ‘this is a joke’. I was waiting for hidden cameras to come and jump out on me. It just didn’t feel real.
“It kept coming up on the news ‘Barri White charged with killing teenage girlfriend’ and when people hear that in jail, they want to fight you.
“I’d hear footsteps walking down the landing and I’d think, they were coming to let me out, they’re coming to my cell to say ‘‘we made a mistake Barri, you’re free to go.’ Then they’d just walk straight past my cell and that was quite hard to deal with.”
Reflecting on his life nearly 21 years since the murder, Barry says, “I’ve not been able to hold down a relationship. Not been able to hold down jobs. I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. I don’t like going anywhere on my own, just in case anything happens like it again so I can say I have witnesses now.
“It has ruined my life. The hardest part of this is trying to get my life back on track again. It gets easier with time but I would have proposed to her, I would have had kids with her, I would have married her but he took it all away from me.”
The entire community in Milton Keynes was impacted by this murder. The tight-knit community found themselves at odds with each other as some sided with Barri and Keith, and others with the police.
With the case going unsolved for so long, the acquittal of Barri and Keith meant that the real murderer had not been brought to justice and was free to potentially target another victim. Some members of the community started to wonder if there was no smoke without fire and remained suspicious of the two young men whilst others lived in fear and wondered when the killer would strike again.
Mark Daly, an investigative reporter at the BBC who worked tirelessly to prove Barri and Keith’s innocence said: “When Rachel’s body was found, it sent shockwaves through Milton Keynes. She’d been strangled, she’d been mutilated. This had been a senseless murder of a young woman and the town was really in shock.”
Reflecting on the case, Anita said: “The first episode in Milton Keynes stood out because there was a miscarriage of justice. Her boyfriend and his friend were convicted of the crime, even though they had nothing to do with it and that’s really tragic but then advancements in DNA technology meant that the real perpetrator was brought to justice.
“Sadly, their lives will never be the same because they’ve had to spend time in prison and they were totally innocent so that really affected me.”
The real perpetrator Shahidul Ahmed, 50, was convicted for the murder aged 41 after his DNA was linked to the case over a decade later. He was sentenced to 17 years.
Ahmed was arrested for sexual assault in 2010 and it was only then that his DNA was put on to the national database and then matched to a hair sample found on the steering wheel lock that was used to bater Rachel.
This series offers a 360 look at these cases. Viewers hear testimonies from the victim’s families, the police, forensic scientists, local people and witnesses. All of whom add to the overall picture of these horrific murders.
Moving away from Yorkshire and to London in her late teens to chase her dreams, Anita’s experiences were still marked by the fear of violence against women - something which many will be able to empathise with.
Today through her work on Murdertown and her own lived experiences, Anita still knows all too well the fear that is felt when women are vulnerable in dark areas, the early hours of the morning or unfamiliar territory.
“I think generally as women we all know that we have to be on our guard. I definitely was when I first moved to London. When I went to university, we were given rape alarms in our welcome packs at uni. My God, I still run under the underpass, not that I take underpasses anymore. Night buses, you know, pretending I’m on my telephone at night.
“If I’m walking home late at night and it’s a quiet road. I’ll still always have my phone in one hand and my keys tragically in the other, like a weapon. Do you know what I mean? What is that about? I wouldn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t know but I still have my keys in my hand.”
Later in the series Anita visits Wakefield where 51-year-old Wendy Speakes was killed and sexually assaulted by Christopher Farrow in 1994.
A generally peaceful area that saw little more than the odd pub fight, Wakefield residents were left shocked and stunned by the brutal attack on local mum Wendy.
Wendy’s daughter Tracey Millington-Jones says, “My Mum was one of those people that had that extra special kindness about her. Everybody loved her. Work colleagues, neighbours, family, friends, nobody had a bad word to say about my Mum. She was just a lovely person.”
Farrow, now 66, found his way into Wendy’s home and she was fatally stabbed several times.
Christopher Farrow remained at large for six years and during this time, other women reported near misses with the killer.
“He did shake fear into this community,” says journalist Margaret Emsley who is familiar with the case and appears in the episode, “there was a fear that once he’d gotten over the pleasure that he’d got from this horrific murder that he would seek that gratification again.
“That was very scary. It wasn’t that he was looking for women of a particular age or of a particular background, the police were keen to stress that this man was targeting women who appeared vulnerable because they were on their own. That had women looking over their shoulders.”
“This guy was going to attack again and it meant someone else’s family was going to suffer the way we had,” says Tracey, “The local Wakefield community, they’d never seen a murder like this, in broad daylight on an innocent woman on a busy road, and it petrified everyone. They didn’t know if he was going to strike again, they didn’t know when. Was Wakefield his killing ground? Have we got the next Yorkshire Ripper here?”
Farrow was finally arrested in March 2000 after his fingerprints were found at the scene. He explained that he had had an argument with his partner on the day of the murder and chillingly said in a statement to the police: “I’m a rapist who kills, not a murderer who rapes.”
Farrow was eventually sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison and Wendy’s daughter Tracey continues to campaign for him to be kept behind bars.
Tracey says: “18 years isn’t long enough. I’m convinced that he has murdered again, but I think he’s gotten away with it. I don’t think for one minute, he stopped, and I don’t think for a minute he would have stopped if he hadn’t been arrested and I’m convinced he’ll do it again if he’s ever let out.
“She was 51 years old when he killed her. That’s no life and he took that all away from her because he had a bad day.
“The next parole hearing will be in 2022. So I’ve only got a few more months to not worry, then I have to start preparing for the next one. I don’t get closure. Now every two years, it’s like an open wound, you know, it’s never going to heal because he’s always applying to come out.
“Until we get some more forensic evidence or we get some more people coming forward, then he’ll get life without parole, no doubt, he’ll never come out, then I can live my life, or he’s dead. They’re my only two options, life without parole, or he dies.”
Farrow has since been moved to an open prison.
Later the Murdertown series travels to Bath to chronicle the case of 17-year-old Melanie Road who was sexually assaulted and stabbed 26 times on the way home from a nightclub in 1984.
Viewers will also see eight other cases such as the murder of 51-year old Julie Davison who was left dead on her kitchen floor with head injuries in Whitby after James Allen attacked her whilst already on the run for the murder of pensioner Colin Dunford.
All of the cases in this series have female victims, something that has been at the forefront of the news in particular since the death of Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old woman from South London who went missing in March this year. Sarah’s body was later found in Kent and Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens has since pleaded guilty to her kidnap, murder and rape.
“I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently because I knew I was doing this programme but also I think post Sarah Everard, a horrible, horrible murder” says Rani, “I think women generally are having this conversation now. Why should we feel in fear of our lives, 24/7?”
The communities Anita visits for the series show that even the most tight-knit of communities act as home to some of Britain’s most brutal murderers. No two victims are same but each of them leave behind a family and a community who must grieve their loss.
