My guest today is former detective superintendent, Julie Mackay, who with my friend, broadcast journalist Robert Murphy, co-authored the best-selling true crime book, ‘To Hunt a Killer’.
During our talk we manage to cover everything from stories of crime, the importance of intuition, changes in policing, cold cases, media and the police, to period poverty!
A retired detective superintendent, Julia shares her experiences working in the police, as a female, and how she overcame it all, because of her passion for solving crime, and loving being a police officer.
She talks about the case at the centre of her award-winning book which she led a team who finally found the killer of Melanie Road who was murdered in Bath in 1984. Her murder led to Britain’s biggest man hunt at the time. At that time, I was iin Bath, a teenager myself, about to start my degree at Bath Spa University. We were all scared and, as the Bath Rapist, was also active at that time we worried about every dark corner, every late night walk.
Julie talks about how incredibly hard it is to work a serious crime case, even after 20 years, due to the amount of paperwork, forensic and digital evidence, including DNA, and the fact that there are still witnesses who have information they want to share. Often buried within that mountain of work, there can be key facts or nuggets of information which get missed. Yet it was ground-breaking DNA work which led to Melanie’s killer being finally brought to justice.
You will be totally riveted listening to this episode.
Julie can be found here https://juliemackay.co.uk/
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