This intriguing documentary is now scheduled for next Tuesday (12 Feb) at 9pm on BBC4. Dark Son: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is a 90-minute look into one of the most appalling and unsolved serial killer cases in British history. In 1964-65 a kerb-crawler murdered six women in west…
Murder by the Sea – John Cooper
John Cooper was a man with a powerful streak of badness in him. A bully, a psychopath and a vicious killer, he terrorised an area of Pembrokeshire for two decades. He is the subject of a forthcoming episode of CBS Reality’s Murder by the Sea (Tuesday, 29 January, 10pm). As…
The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh
Joseph Wambaugh, former LA cop, has had an interesting writing career, spanning fiction and non-fiction. I’ve read several of his books and just finished this true-crime title from 1973. It recounts events from 1963 when two LAPD officers stopped a pair of small-time but dangerous characters. Greg Powell and Jimmy…
Dark Son now on BBC iPlayer
Dark Son: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is now available to view on BBC iPlayer. I have been talking about this documentary for a while now. It was almost a year ago that I got involved with filming some sequences for this re-examination of the unsolved Hammersmith Nude Murders….
Dark Son: The Hunt for a Serial Killer on BBC
Here’s the trailer for the documentary I’ve been talking about for several months. Dark Son will go out on BBC Wales on 12 January and on BBC4 on 22 January. The revelations will be ‘astonishing’, according to Professor David Wilson, the leading criminologist who presents the film. It is remarkable…
Voice of a Killer – January 3
This new series about how police question suspected killers begins on CBS Reality on Thursday 3 January. I am a contributor to it and had to do a lot of research on the six cases included. Watching or listening to lengthy questioning sessions was tedious at times. Unlike TV dramas,…
Guesswork and the release of murderer Harold Jones
Thanks goodness deference to authority largely gets the middle finger today. This means we can give short shrift to claptrap like this: ‘Sadistic crime is probably more rare in England than in any other country in the world. Curiously enough, even the few known exponents in our English records are…
Final day shooting on Dark Son
Originally posted on robinjarossi.com 2 9 18 Last Tuesday saw the conclusion of evidence being presented and filmed for Dark Son, the forthcoming BBC documentary about 1960s serial killer Jack the Stripper. It a was a big day’s filming: for me 12 hours long, but for the Monster Films’ team…
Secrets of ghostwriting
First posted on robinjarossi.com 8 11 17 Andrew Crofts and Mark McCrum spoke entertainingly about their specialism, ghostwriting, at a Society of Authors talk in Piccadilly last week. They have written a huge variety of autobiographies and memoirs on behalf of people with stories to tell, from pop stars to…
Murder in Soho: Who Killed Freddie Mills?
Originally posted on robinjarossi.com 31 7 18 ‘To this day, the case has puzzled me.’ These are the words of Professor Brian J Ford during BBC4’s Murder in Soho: Who Killed Freddie Mills? And the death of Britain’s former boxing hero has certainly attracted rumour, legend and some wacky theories…