A former Met Police detective who has worked on some of the country’s biggest crimes is pulling back the curtain to show what it really takes to solve murders.
Steve Keogh investigated homicide cases in London for 12 years, beginning with a stabbing in a drug deal gone wrong and ending with the shooting of Sgt Matt Ratana in a Croydon custody suite.
He is now sharing some of those experiences in a new documentary series premiering this Wednesday on TRUE CRIME, ‘Secrets of a Murder Detective’.
In it, Steve takes viewers behind the scenes of an investigation, walking them from the early inquiries through to the breakthrough which brought the killer to justice – and all the challenges in between.
The first episode centres on one of his own cases, the horrific murders of former Eastenders actress Sian Blake and her two young sons at the hands of their father Arthur Simpson-Kent in December 2015.
Steve sat down with Metro to discuss the series, the brutal triple-killing and the one thing about it that still ‘gives me the chills’.
‘When I look back at my career, the crimes, the murder investigations that always affected me the most were undoubtedly when it came to children,’ he says.
‘So, the way Sian and her boys were murdered at the hands of their father is probably the one murder investigation I’ve had that has affected me the most and I will always carry with me.’
Missing persons case
Sian’s successful acting career included the role of singer Frankie Pierre in Eastenders for a year between 1996 and 1997. She also did voiceover work and deaf language interpretation.
She had two sons with Simpson-Kent, eight-year-old Zachary and four-year-old Amon, but the relationship was not healthy.
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Sian was also very weak and unable to walk unaided by the time of her death due to a degenerative motor neurone disease.
The Old Bailey would eventually hear that Sian was planning to move on with her life, without Simpson-Kent.
She went to visit her mum on December 13, 2015, where they are thought to have discussed the possibility of her and the boys moving in, and she vanished soon after.
Police received a concern for welfare call three days later when Zachary and Amon failed to show up at school.
Officers were sent to their home in Erith, southeast London, and were met by Simpson-Kent, who told them Sian and the boys had gone to visit a friend in Cambridge.
When they returned hours later he was gone and the house was deserted.
‘Red flags all over the place’
The case came to Steve’s team after being passed up to the Met’s homicide and serious crime command in early January.
‘Everything was pointing to this being more than just a missing person case,’ he recalls.
‘There were red flags all over the place, none more so than the fact Sian really wasn’t in a position health-wise to look after herself and the two boys.
‘Then you have the situation where the dad had gone missing having spoken to uniformed officers at the time.
‘So, it all came together very, very quickly, and within the space of a couple of days we had identified what was likely to have happened.’
A closer look at the inside of the house would reveal attempts had been made to paint over bloodstains.
Text messages from Sian’s phone suggesting she had left and moved elsewhere were also shown to have been sent from her home address.
‘A real low point in my career’
The discovery of Sian’s car in Bethnal Green refocused the search effort on the house and on January 5, 2016, an excavation of the back garden unearthed a grave with the mum and children buried inside.
‘Even though you’re pretty convinced the worst has happened, you always hold on to that hope that maybe we’re wrong, maybe she has run away, maybe he’s got them somewhere, maybe they are alive – even if it’s not Sian herself but the boys – and he’s put them with family members,’ Steve says.
‘I was in the office, and when it fed back from the scene that actually no, it’s a grave and there’s three of them in there, that was a real low point in my career. It was just a very sad moment for the whole team.’
Post mortem examinations would reveal all three suffered serious head injuries before being stabbed in the neck to ensure they died.
‘The fact Zachary had defensive injuries gives me the chills,’ Steve says. ‘The fact he wasn’t asleep, and he saw it coming – that’s one of the things that will always sit with me.’
The chase and the challenges
‘One of the things about investigating murders is, you see some of the worst things that can happen, but you have this sense that at least I can do something about it,’ Steve says.
‘We were doubly determined then that we were going to find Simpson-Kent and we were going to do everything we could to get him back so he faced the justice that we knew he deserved.’
His team quickly established the killer had taken a bus from Victoria up to Glasgow to catch a flight he had asked a friend to book for him to Ghana.
‘Trying to find somebody in this country is difficult enough. Finding them abroad is even more difficult,’ Steve goes on.
‘Another challenge we had was that we can’t just jump on a plane, get off and then go and do police work.
‘We had to get everything authorised – and at quite a high level. It takes a lot of time.’
While publicity largely helps in major cases like this one, it did pose some added difficulties too.
There was a BBC crew in Africa ‘essentially following the same information’, while one of the leading tabloid newspapers here in the UK was telling its readers the investigation was being ‘bungled’.
Another worry was why Simpson-Kent fled to Ghana in the first place.
Although he was born there, he had not been since he was a child and had no close links in the country.
‘My fear was that when you have these family annihilation-type cases quite often the dad will also take his own life,’ Steve says.
‘So, the last thing I wanted was either to not get to him quick enough and he kills himself, not get to him at all, or for the BBC crew to get to him first.’
As it transpired, local police tracked him down a few days later to a beach where they found him sipping from a coconut.
‘The chances are we’ll never know why he did it’
Months later, in June 2016, Simpson-Kent pleaded guilty to the three murders and was handed a rare whole life sentence.
There was evidence that he was controlling and abusive towards Sian, along with messages pointing to some kind of mercy killing and statements to psychiatrists suggesting he intended to take his own life.
‘Looking back, we don’t know 100% why he did it,’ Steve says. ‘The degenerative disease Sian had meant that she didn’t have a long life left.
‘There was no mercy in what he was doing. The injuries were horrific. It was cruel. It was wicked. It was barbaric.
‘It was a controlling relationship. There was no suggestion of violence, but definitely he was a very sort of controlling, coercive-type person.
‘If there was suggestion that she wanted to leave him, then what I know for a fact is that women are much more vulnerable at the stage when they’re looking to separate.
‘So, it would make sense if she said to him that “I’m leaving you” and that’s why he did it, but we don’t know for sure.
‘How can you get yourself in the mind of someone as evil as that?
‘A long time ago I realised you can’t put yourself in the mind of these people because they don’t think or act in the way that we would.’
‘Secrets of a Murder Detective’
Since hanging up his notepad, Steve has written two books – one looking at how Scotland Yard really catches killers and the other casting a modern eye over the infamous Jack the Ripper investigation.
Despite never being much of a fan of crime programmes, he was offered the chance of fronting one of his own after appearing at the CrimeCon event in Glasgow.
‘When I left [the Met], I started to realise that a lot of what I was watching would superficially tell the story, which is great, but there is a lot more going on behind the scenes,’ he says.
‘For instance, if there’s a high profile murder, you might see a senior officer making an appeal at the beginning and then you might not hear anything from them again until the trial is finished.
‘But so much goes on in between those times, and it’s not plain sailing.
‘It’s really difficult to investigate murders, both professionally – the evidence you have to achieve to reach the point of charge, to get a conviction – and it has a toll on those doing the investigations, dealing with people’s trauma all the time and being around people who have just lost a loved one.
‘It’s hard work. So, I just wanted to give an idea of what it’s actually like from the perspective of those investigators when you’re investigating the murder.
‘What are the challenges they have to overcome? And how were they feeling at the beginning? Because quite often early on in your murder career, you might be thinking how on earth are we going to solve this? We’ve got no chance.
‘But things can turn very, very quickly, and it can just be one bit of information, one witness, a telephone call, that could be the one little thing that turns an investigation and then everything then starts to come together.’
‘Secrets of a Murder Detective’ premieres on TRUE CRIME this Wednesday, March 20, at 10pm, with new episodes airing weekly through to July. It will also be available to stream on Watch Free UK.
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