Number three. The murder of George Sidney Miles.
On November 2nd, 1952, 19 year old Derek Bentley and 16 year old Christopher Craig broke into a warehouse in London, England.
A girl saw the young men climb up one of the warehouses drainpipes and she told her parents.
Her father called the police and Detective Constable Frederick Fairfax arrived a few minutes later.
Fairfax was able to corner the young men on the roof, and he told them to surrender.
Craig was defiant and he refused to give up.
Fairfax ran at the young men, and he grabbed Bentley, who was closest to him.
Bentley managed to break free, and then he apparently yelled, "Let him have it, Chris!"
Chris then pulled out a gun and shot at Fairfax.
The bullet grazed Fairfax' his shoulder and he wasn't too badly injured.
After shooting at the officer, Craig ran and hid.
Fairfax was able to arrest Bentley, and he put Bentley, who was handcuffed, into the back of his police car.
As Bentley sat in the back of the police car, more officers arrived to help arrest Craig.
42 year old police constable, George Sidney Miles, got the keys from the owner of the warehouse
so he made his way through the warehouse up to the roof.
Once Miles walked out onto the roof, he was shot in the head, and he was dead within minutes.
Craig was arrested after he ran out of ammunition
Then he was interviewed at the police station, and he apparently confessed.
This is an excerpt that is  supposedly a verbatim transcription of what Bentley said.
When we came to the place where he found me,  Chris looked in the window.
There was a little iron gate at the side.
Chris then jumped over and I followed.
Chris then climbed up the drainpipe to the roof and I followed..
Up to then, Chris had not said anything.
We both got out onto the flat roof at the top.
Then someone in the garden on the opposite side showed a torch up towards us.
Chris said: "It's a copper, hide behind here."
We hid behind a shelter arrangement on the roof.
We were there waiting for about ten minutes. I did not know he was going to use the gun.
A plainclothes man climbed up the drainpipe and onto the roof.
The man said: "I'm a police officer. The place is surrounded."
He caught hold of me as we walked away. Chris fired. There was nobody else there at the time
Craig, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, couldn't be sentenced to death because he was a minor.
However, since Bentley was 19, he could be sentenced to death.
The prosecutors argued that Bentley knew that Chris was carrying a gun because he said THE gun instead of A gun in his confession.
When Detective Constable Fairfax tried to arrest them, Bentley supposedly yelled, "Let him have it, Chris,"
which the police took to mean that Craig should use his gun.
Therefore, Bentley was the ringleader of the robbery, making him responsible for the death of Miles.
He was found guilty and he was sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, Craig, who pulled the trigger, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Bentley's death sentence was immediately unpopular
because while it seemed like a slam-dunk case, there were actually several major problems with it.
The first is that Bentley never touched the murder weapon and he was handcuffed in the back seat of a police car when Miles was killed.
Secondly, Bentley only had an IQ of 77,
so even though he was 19 he had the mental capacity of an 11 year old.
Being that 16 year old Craig was more likely the ringleader in the robbery.
Also, there was a problem with Bentley's supposed orders to shoot at Fairfax that demonstrated that he was the ringleader in the shooting.
Bentley supposedly yelled, "Let him have it, Chris."
The defense argue that the sentence is ambiguous.
The police understood it as Bentley ordering Craig to shoot.
However, it could have also meant that Bentley was telling Craig to hand over his gun.
Both Bentley and Craig deny this sentence was ever yelled.
Bentley swore he didn't even know that Craig had a gun until he shot Detective Constable Fairfax.
Despite the problems with the case, three police officers swore under oath that Bentley confessed
and the confession was transcribed verbatim, so there was no way for Bentley to appeal his death sentence
Bentley swore he never confessed to knowing about the gun.
The case was so controversial that three hundred people gathered outside the house of parliament
To protest the execution on the day that Bentley was supposed to be executed.
Their protests fell on deaf ears.
On January 28th 1953, three months after the shooting,
19-year old Derek Bentley was hanged.
Christopher Craig, who pulled the trigger,
Served his ten years, and he has been a law-abiding citizen ever since.
He has always told the same version of events as Bentley.
He brought the gun to the robbery and Bentley didn't know about it.
Bentley's parents relentlessly advocated for decades to have their son's name cleared.
in 1993, 40 years after Bentley was hanged, he was given a royal pardon for his death sentence.
However, he was still considered a murderer in the eyes of the law.
In 1998, Bentley's case went back to court and to prove that the confession was false,
Bentley's parents had forensic linguistics professor Malcolm Coulthard analyze it.
He noted several irregularities.
The main problem was that the three police officers swore that the confession was what Bentley said verbatim.
They claimed he said everything unprompted and they did not interject during his monologue.
Coulthard found evidence this wasn't true.
In the confession Coulthard found several examples of narrative justifications.
An example of a narrative justification would be, let's say you were telling a story about retrieving your phone from your backyard
and you encountered an aggressive raccoon.
Would you say: I walked outside. No one else was there. I picked up my phone, a raccoon ran at me, so I ran back inside.
Or are you more likely to say: I walked outside. I picked up my phone. A raccoon ran at me so I ran back inside.
Mentioning that no one else was in the backyard is an example of narrative justification.
When telling a story like that, most people would not mention that no one else was in the backyard,
Because that is a foregone conclusion.
The only reason someone would volunteer that information is if they were asked.
When telling the story about the aggressive raccoon you would only mention that no one else was in the backyard
if someone listening to your story
Asked if someone else was in the backyard when you went outside.
an example of a narrative justification and the confession is:
Chris then climbed up the drainpipe to the roof and I followed.
Up to then, Chris had not said anything.
We both got out onto the flat roof at the top.
In this case, the sentence "Up to then Chris had not said anything" is the narrative justification.
Bentley would not have mentioned that Chris hadn't said anything
unless an officer asked him something to the effect of: "Had Chris said anything."
Another example is: "The policeman caught hold of me and as I walked away Chris fired.
There was no one else there at the time.
The policeman and I then went around the corner by a door.
Bentley wouldn't have said that no one else was there unless he was asked if someone else was there.
Finally, there's the statement that was most damning at his trial.
Bentley supposedly said: "We hid behind a shelter arrangement on the roof.
We were there waiting for about 10 minutes.
I did not know he was going to use the gun.
Bentley saying "the" gun instead of "a" gun
Convinced the original judge that Bentley knew about the gun going into the robbery.
If he didn't know about the gun, he would have said "I did not know he was going to use a gun."
Instead of "I did not know he was going to use the gun."
But this is an example of narrative justification.
Bentley saying "I did not know he was going to use the gun," is a response to the question:
"Did you know that Christopher Craig was going to use the gun?"
That strongly suggests that the police asked Bentley questions and didn't record the questions in the transcript.
Therefore, Bentley's statement that three police officers swore was transcribed verbatim was not, in fact, verbatim.
Besides the narrative justifications, Coulthard, also has a problem with the way that the word "Then" was used in the confession.
When people talk and use the word "then", they usually use it at the beginning of a sentence.
For example, most people would say: "I went outside to get my phone,
Then I saw raccoon, who ran at me, so I ran back inside."
As opposed to saying: "I went outside to get my phone. I then saw a raccoon who ran at me so I ran inside."
In Bentley's confession, "then" doesn't appear often at the beginning of a sentence.
Instead, "then" is used after the subject of the sentence.
For example, Bentley supposedly said "My Mother told me that they had called and I then ran out after them."
He also supposedly said: "Chris then jumped over and I followed."
"Chris then climbed up the drainpipe to the roof and I followed."
The use of the word then after the subject is not common among people who speak English.
In the court transcripts, Bentley does not do this once.
The use of the word "then" after the subject is quite common in a specific type of writing:
English police statements.
This suggests that police officers wrote at least parts of the confession and said Bentley saying those words.
Coulthard's testimony helped clear Derick Bentley's name.
In 1998, Bentley was finally granted a posthumous pardon
Forty-five years after he was hanged.
His case was one of the first examples of forensic linguistics being used in a criminal case, but it wouldn't be the last.
Number two. The murder of Jenny Nicoll.
In June of 2005,
Jenny Nicoll was 19 years old and she was living with her family in Richmond, North Yorkshire, England
She worked at a grocery store, and she played guitar in a local band.
On June 30th Nicoll collected some of her belongings and stuffed them into her rucksack.
She told her parents that she was going camping and that she wasn't going to come home that night.
On July 4th, her parents still had not heard from her and they became worried.
They found her car parked in the parking lot of a nearby pub.
They decided that it would be best a file missing persons report.
On July 8th, the police interviewed 45 year-old David Hodgson, an unemployed husband and a father of two.
David said that he had never met Nicoll, and he had no idea where she was.
The police were certain that he was lying.
Nicoll had attended high school with David's two daughters.
There were rumors that Nicole and David had been in a sexual relationship since Nicoll was 14 years old.
The rumor first emerged when Nicoll was in high school
and led to a group of girls at the school harassing her, and one girl even physically assaulted her.
The rumors also resulted in David moving out of his family's home for a brief time.
The day after the police interviewed David, two text messages were sent from Nicoll's phone.
The phone was 65 miles north of Nicoll's home when they were sent, and they were sent to two of her friends.
The first text to her friend, also named Jen, reads:
"Hi, Jen. Tell Jack I am okay. Know everyone's gonna be mad.Tall them I am sorry.
"Living in Scotland with  my boyfriend.
"...myself. dad's gonna kill me. Mum doesn't give a ...
"Hope Nick didn't grass me up.
"Keeping phone off
"Tell dad car jumps out of gear and stalls. Put it back in auction.
"Tell him I am sorry."
The second text message, sent to a different friend, reads: "thought you were grassing me up.
"Might be in trouble with dad. Told mom I was leaving. Didn't give a...
"Been to Kessick camping. Was great. Have to go. See ya."
Then five days later, her father received a text message from her phone.
This message was sent when the phone was over 400 miles away in Jedburgh Scotland and it reads:
"Why do you hate me? I know mum does.
"Told her I was going. I ain't coming back and the pigs won't find me. I am happy living up here.
"Everyone hates me in Rich. Only mate I got is Jack.
"Text you a couple weeks. Tell pigs I am nearly 20. Ain't coming back. They can ... off.
"She got me in this ... It's her fault not mine. get blamed for everything.
"I am sorry, okay?
"Just had to leave she's a ... No food in  and always searching me room and eating me sweets. Have to go. Okay. I am very sorry."
The text messages prompted searches the area where the phone was and where they were sent
But no trace of Jenny Nicoll was found.
The police continued to interview David Hudson, and he admitted that he did have a sexual relationship with Nicoll.
He said it started when she was 16, and they only had sex five times.
In July, David was arrested for perverting justice
And he was really shortly afterwards.
Three days later, David attempted suicide but survived.
After the three text messages, Nicoll's phone stopped sending out text messages.
The police thought that they weren't written by Nicoll.
The most logical explanation for the text messages was that Nicoll had been killed and her killer wrote the text messages to throw off the police
by making it look like she was still alive and chose to disappear.
In November, the police upgraded the case to a murder investigation.
They had forensic linguistics professor, Malcom Coulthard, who helped exonerate Derek Bentley, look at the text messages.
He compared the three text messages that were sent after Nicoll disappeared
To 11 text messages that were written by her, and a hundred text messages that were written by David,
along with two suicide notes that he wrote.
Coulthard found that the person who wrote the text messages misspelled the word "off".
They left out the second "f".
The writer of the text messages also spelled the word might: M-I-T-E
Instead of: M-I-G-H-T.
Also, instead of writing "myself", the author of the tax wrote "meself".
Finally, the person writing the texts spell their contractions like "ain't" and "didn't" without apostrophes.
Nicoll didn't make those errors when she wrote, but those same errors appeared in the samples written by David Hodgson.
The police also found out that the day the text messages were sent,
David had hired a car and the trips were long enough to get him to the areas where the text messages were sent.
The police also discovered that David and his older brother, Robert, had constructed makeshift cabins in the moors.
In one of the cabins the police found Nicoll's DNA,
Along with a CD player and a teddy bear that belonged to her.
The police learned the weeks leading up to her disappearance,
Nicoll had developed a relationship with David's older brother, Robert.
Robert was unaware that David and Nicoll had a relationship.
In May 2007, nearly two years after Jenny Nicholl disappeared, both David and Robert were arrested.
Robert was eventually released and cleared, and David was charged with her murder.
David denied killing her.
The police didn't have any evidence that David killed Nicoll, like the murder weapon.
In fact, at the time of this video, her body has yet to be found.
What the police do know is that David became very jealous whenever he saw Nicoll talking to another man.
The police think now the night that Nicoll disappeared, she went to spend the night with David in his makeshift cabin.
During the night, David found out about her relationship with his brother and he snapped.
He probably killed her on the night that she was last seen, or early the next morning.
He disposed of her body somewhere, possibly the moors.
When he realized that the police were onto him,
he hired a car to drive him to the areas where he sent the text messages
to make it look like Nicoll was still alive.
A jury found David Hodgeson guilty of murder and he was sentenced to serve a minimum of 18 years in prison.
He has always maintained his innocence.
Jenny Nichols parents are hoping that he'll admit to what he did and reveal the location of their daughter's remains.
Number one. The murder of the Colemans.
On November 14 2008, Joyce Meyer Ministries based out of Fenton, Missouri received a disturbing email.
The writer said that televangelist Joyce Meyer should stop preaching.
Then, instead of threatening Meyer or her family, the writer threatened to kill the family of Meyer's chief bodyguard, Chris Coleman.
This email was a first in a series of emails that threatened Chris and his family,
Which consisted of his wife, Sheri, and his two young sons, Garett and Gavin, and they lived in Columbus, Illinois.
About two months later, on January 9th 2009, Chris went to the police in Columbus.
He told them that his family found a threatening letter in their mailbox.
Four months later, on April 27th, Chris went to the police about another threatening letter.
Neither letters had postmarks on them, meaning they were hand-delivered.
Both letters told Chris' wife, Sheri, to stop her religious work or she'd experienced her worst nightmare.
A week later, just before 7:00 a.m. on March 5th 2009, Chris called a neighbor, who was a police officer.
Chris said he had just been at the gym, and he was heading home
He tried calling Sheri at home but no one was answering the phone.
The neighbor, who was aware of the threats against the family, called for backup and a uniformed officer arrived minutes later.
They looked around the outside of the house, and in the back they found an open window with the screen cut out.
They crawled through the window and they could smell the distinct scent a spray paint.
When they got into the kitchen, they saw the message: "I am always watching." spray painted on one of the walls.
As they walk towards the stairs, they found more messages scrawled in red spray paint.
Several of the  vulgar messages started with the F word,
and then there were words like "punished", and messages like:
"You have paid" spray painted on the walls and the stairs.
Upstairs, they found the bodies of 31 year old Sheri, 11 year old Garret, and nine year old Gavin.
They were all in their beds.
They had been strangled to death, most likely with some type of wire.
11 year old Garrett had a bed sheet covering his body.
The killer has spray-painted: "... you." on the bed sheet.
The killer tried to write something on the bed sheet that covered Gavin, but he ran out of spray paint.
About five minutes after the police arrived, Chris returned home.
Another officer, who arrived on the scene just before Chris, had him wait outside.
Chris was then informed that his family was dead, and he started sobbing in the driveway.
The police brought Chris in for questioning and they thought his behavior was odd.
Notably, he didn't ask how his family died and he didn't ask to see their bodies.
Later that same day, a woman named Tara Lintz got in touch with the police.
She was a high school friend of Shari's.
She said that she had been having an affair with Chris since November 2008.
Around the time that Joyce Meyer Ministries got the first threatening email.
She told them that the family was killed on the same day that Chris said that he planned to file for divorce.
The police concluded that Chris started to plan his family's murder six months earlier, when he started having the affair,
The reason he killed them instead of divorcing Sheri is because Joyce Meyer didn't want any of her bodyguards to be divorced.
If he got divorced he would lose his six-figure yearly salary, and he would have to pay Sheri for child support.
He sent the threatening messages himself,
and spray painted the walls to make it look like the murders were committed by people
with a vendetta against Joyce Meyer Ministries.
While Chris had motive to kill his family, there wasn't much evidence tying him to the murderers.
The murder weapon was never found and Chris's DNA wasn't found in any incriminating places.
What they did know was that the threatening emails were sent from Chris's laptop,
but they couldn't prove that his laptop hadn't been hacked.
Meaning there was no evidence that Chris wrote the emails.
This raised the possibility of reasonable doubt.
The district attorney then asked Robert Leonard, a professor of forensic linguistics,
To compare emails that Chris had written to the graffiti found at the crime scene and the threatening letters and emails.
Leonard worked with FBI forensic linguist James Fitzgerald,
Who was instrumental in the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
Leonard and Fitzgerald developed the Communicated Threat Assessment Database.
The Communicated Threat Assessment Database has more than 4,000 criminally oriented communications,
containing more than a million words.
With the database, they can identify certain patterns in written threats.
They discovered that the writing in the threatening letters and emails and the graffiti
Were very similar and most likely written by the same person.
Meaning the person who wrote the threatening emails and letters, he's most likely the killer.
The first similarity they found between the threats and the graffiti was the F word.
It was the first word and many of the spray-painted sentences,
and many of the spray-painted sentences and many of the sentences and the emails and letters start off with that word as well.
Swear words in threatening letters in common,
but according to the Communicated Threat Assessment Database,
it's very rare for sentences to start off with the F word in threatening letters.
That word usually appears later in the sentence.
The graffiti and the threatening emails and letters were also similar to the way that Chris wrote.
In the emails, letters, and the graffiti the killer spelled you
using the letter "U" instead of writing out the word "you".
Native English speakers commonly spell "you" that way in text messages,
But it's not common for people to spell it that way and emails and letters.
Chris often used the letter "U" instead of writing out the word in all forms of written communication.
Secondly, the killer put the apostrophes in the wrong place in contractions like "doesn't" and "can't".
the killer put the apostrophes after the t's
instead of before them. And in one case, there was a space between the apostrophe and the last letter in the word.
In his emails, Chris also put apostrophes in the wrong place when he wrote contractions.
He also put them at the end of the word instead before the "T".
Leonard concluded that Chris most likely wrote the emails letters and graffiti,
Meaning he was the one who killed his family.
The amount of circumstantial evidence,
including Dr. Leonard's testimony about forensic linguistics,
was enough to convince a jury that Chris Coleman was guilty of killing his entire family.
He was spared the death penalty and he was given three life sentences.
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