Smoking Gun

Episode 18: The Toilet Tissue

When Colette Aram went missing after setting off on the short walk to her boyfriends house there was immediate alarm. Detectives and her family searched through the night. But when morning came, and a body was discovered a short distance away, it was immediately obvious that there was a killer in the community. For decades, detectives searched for that man - spurred on by a DNA profile which they thought could belong to the killer. But it would take an extraordinary sequence of events to finally provide the clue which identified the most unlikely of murderers.
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In every murder investigation, there's one key item that could bring a killer to justice.
But finding it....and knowing what evidence it contains....well that's the challenge. Because the smoking gun could be anything. A bouquet of flowers...a Chinese meal...a mosquito.
In this series we tell the remarkable true stories of how everyday items such as these have been the key to unlocking a criminal case. And we unpack the science - revealing the cutting edge techniques and the disciplines mastered over decades, which allow specialist forensic scientists to find this evidence.
Hosted by actor Romola Garai, and the UK's most prominent forensic scientist Tracy Alexander.