Most of us can’t really consider quite how we would react after having killed someone. It’s just such a grotesque and alien concept.
Taking someone’s life carries such weight and gravity with it that us reasonable folk would likely be incapable of doing anything other than immediately handing ourselves into the nearest police station, confessing all and praying for a lifetime of prison and a chance at some form of repentance or redemption in later life.
Stone cold killers don’t think like the rest of us, though. Especially the kind that commit premeditated murders. After they kill a person, their first thoughts aren’t as ours might be. They don’t cry, break down or confess. They tidy up. They dismember their victims and bury them. They create an alibi. Sometimes - and here’s where things get somewhat disconcerting - they even order chow mein and stick the telly on....
In What the Killer Did Next, actor Philip Glenister explores the often strange and shocking actions of murderers in the immediate aftermath of their crimes.
The first half of the series brought us the cold and calculating Iain Stewart, a man who callously killed his fiancée, successful children’s authorHelen Bailey. After he did so, he booked a doctor’s appointment, visited a bowls club and ordered - and ate - a Chinese takeaway.
Starting Monday 10th of June from 9pm on C+I, What the Killer Did Next returns with four more fascinatingly grim cases for us to investigate. Some of which we’ll touch upon here in our own look at some of the more strange things that killers did next...
Murderer: The arrogant and abusive Adrian Prout.Victim: Kate Prout, Adrian’s wife.What the killer did next: Drank whisky and shot pheasants.
On the evening of the 5th of November 2007, wealthy businessman Adrian Prout drained a tumbler of Scotch and prepared to meet his friends down the local village pub, as he so often did. Just an hour earlier he had strangled his wife Kate to death at their multi-million pound farmhouse in the Gloucestershire countryside.
As he drank and laughed with pals over drinks, Kate’s body lie in the back of Adrian’s Land Rover, wrapped in a shower curtain. Later that night he would bury her on his land. The next day, as his wife lay dead under foot, Prout ran a pheasant shoot, blasting game birds out of the sky.
It was a death-filled 24 hours for Prout, who is now serving a life sentence for Kate’s murder.
Murderer: Cowardly drug addict Gareth Dack.Victim: ‘Supermum’ fosterer of more than 50 children, 79 year-old Norma Bell.What the killer did next: Watched pornography and called sex lines.
At nearly 80 years of age, Hartlepool resident Norma Bell had lived some life. A dedicated foster parent, she had taken in and raised over 50 local kids. It’s not a stretch to say that Norma was about as close to being an angel as us human beings can get.
On March the 26th 2016, she happily lent £10 to 33 year-old Gareth Dack, a friend of one of her former foster children. A chronic drug user and petty criminal, he returned to Norma’s house a few days later. But not to pay her back. Instead, he beat and strangled her to death, then robbed the house of some £700 in cash.
Dack didn’t flee, though. He left Norma, dead, for a short time while he scored an evening’s worth of lager, cocaine and cannabis. He then returned to drink, snort and smoke the night away as she lay there, bruised and lifeless. Dack then settled in to watch adult television and make explicit phone calls to sex lines. The body of poor Norma Bell was barely cold.
Dack will serve a minimum of 33 years in prison for his truly despicable crime.
Murderer: Vicious thief Glynn Williams.Victim: Mother-of-one Sian Roberts.What the killer did next: Befriended his victim’s boyfriend after staging the murder to appear like a sex game gone wrong.
We end on a killer that seemed to behave extremely oddly after his crime, but - on closer inspection - was actually plotting his escape. Glynn Williams’ actions after stabbing his ‘friend’ Sian Roberts to death in her Salford home after a party may appear odd, but there was logic to them. Albeit somewhat flawed logic.
Not content with stealing Sian’s jewellery from her and bludgeoning her to death, Williams decided to stage a quite unique scene. One intended to clear his name and humiliate his victim. Placing the knife in her hand and a pair of handcuffs and a sex aid nearby, it was his intention to make the murder look like some kind of twisted sex game gone awry.
The very next day Williams attempted to befriend Sian's boyfriend David Morgan, asking him numerous questions about Sian in a bid to arm himself with information with which to implicate Morgan for the murder. He was unsuccessful. Police saw through his ruse with some ease.
Williams, who already had a level of notoriety for being one of the infamous Strangeways rioters, was found guilty of murdering 36 year-old Sian Roberts and will serve at least 21 years in another high security prison.
