Whodunnit that disappears down a rabbit-hole: ITV1's The Playboy Bunny Murder reviewed

Perhaps unfairly, Marcel Theroux does rather bring to mind Dannii Minogue. Not only does he look very similar to his more famous sibling, but when not writing (pretty good) novels, he’s in the same line of work: like Louis, he makes TV documentaries that feature much brow-furrowing.

His latest was a neat fit for ITV1’s continuing obsession with true crime. As it transpired, The Playboy Bunny Murder was an over-simple title for an extremely tangled tale. Nonetheless, the programme did start with the killing of bunny girl Eve Stratford who, in March 1975, had her throat cut at her Leyton home. In those pre-DNA testing days, the police did what they could – which is to say they arrested and soon released Eve’s musician boyfriend, and then hoped for something to turn up.

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For the next four years, not much did. But in 1979, Lynda Farrow – a croupier at another West End club – was murdered in her home in the same way. So, wondered Theroux, were the Met detectives right to believe these crimes were committed by the same man? As he would for much of both episodes, he investigated his own question with possibly excessive thoroughness before coming up with a firm ‘no’. And with that, he moved on to the testimony of Lynda’s mother: that her daughter had learned who Eve’s killer was and been silenced by an accomplice. Much assiduous sleuthing later, Theroux duly decided that she hadn’t.

But then came an especially baffling twist. Once DNA profiling entered the scene, a match was established between Eve’s murderer and that of 16-year-old Lynne Weedon in Hounslow in September 1975. This came even though the crimes were very different: Lynne was hit with a blunt instrument, raped and left for dead as she walked home from a night out – quite different to Eve’s murder in her home.