James Walton

Candid camera?

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Channel 4’s fine documentary about the Wind in the Willows murder calls into question the trade-offs involved in making such programmes</span></p>

issue 15 July 2017

Channel 4’s Catching a Killer offered the rare TV spectacle these days of a middle-aged white male copper leading a murder inquiry. Then again, it was a documentary rather than a drama. In its resolutely sober way, it also proved a riveting one, if at times piercingly sad.

The programme followed the Thames Valley police as they investigated the killing of Adrian Greenwood in April 2016. The fact that Greenwood was an Oxford historian and book-dealer, and that the motive was the theft of a first edition of The Wind in the Willows, led one detective to suggest early on that ‘It’s like an episode of Morse.’ In the event, it proved a lot more straightforward, and a lot grimmer, than that.

Greenwood was found stabbed around 30 times in the blood-splattered hallway of his house, with the handle of a knife — although not the blade — close to his body.

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