Featuring testimony from friends, neighbours, journalists and detectives at the heart of the search for Shannon Matthews, this is the inside story of a case that became a defining moment in British public life, a missing child caught in the middle of a media frenzy, and a case that sparked debates that still resonate today. This two-part series explores how truth, trust and community unravelled under the weight of suspicion and scrutiny.
Jeremy Vine
Self
Karen Matthews
Self (archive)
Michael Donovan
Self (archive)
Julie Bushby
Self
Petra Jamieson
Self
Detective Constable Christine Freeman
Self
Featuring testimony from friends, neighbours, journalists and detectives at the heart of the search for Shannon Matthews, this is the inside story of a case that became a defining moment in British public life, a missing child caught in the middle of a media frenzy, and a case that sparked debates that still resonate today. This two-part series explores how truth, trust and community unravelled under the weight of suspicion and scrutiny.
In 1994 a 13-year-old boy disappeared without a trace from his home in San Antonio, Texas. Three-and-a-half years later he is found alive thousands of miles away in a village in southern Spain with a horrifying story of kidnap and torture. His family is overjoyed to bring him home. But all is not quite as it seems.
Yorkshire, 1974. Fear, mistrust and institutionalised police corruption are running riot. Rookie journalist Eddie Dunford is determined to search for the truth in an increasingly complex maze of lies and deceit surrounding the police investigation into a series of child abductions. When young Clare Kemplay goes missing, Eddie and his colleague, Barry, persuade their editor to let them investigate links with two similar abductions that draw them into a deadly world of secrecy, intimidation, shocking revelations and police brutality.
When 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist dares to ask his cruel taskmaster, Mr. Bumble, for a second serving of gruel, he's hired out as an apprentice. Escaping that dismal fate, young Oliver falls in with the street urchin known as the Artful Dodger and his criminal mentor, Fagin. When kindly Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver in, Fagin's evil henchman Bill Sikes plots to kidnap the boy.
In 1860, Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard is sent to rural Wiltshire to investigate the murder of the three-year-old boy Saville Kent, who was snatched from his bed at night and murdered.
Los Angeles, 1928. When single mother Christine Collins leaves for work, her son vanishes without a trace. Five months later, the police reunite mother and son. But when Christine suspects that the boy returned to her isn't her child, her quest for truth exposes a world of corruption.
Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson is forced to remember the very similar disappearance of Clare Kemplay, who was found dead in 1974, and the subsequent imprisonment of local boy Michael Myshkin. Washed-up local solicitor John Piggott becomes convinced of Myshkin's innocence and begins to fight on his behalf, unwittingly providing a catalyst for Jobson to start to right some wrongs.
Elizabeth Smart's harrowing abduction at 14 from her family's Utah home unfolds through her own words and never-before-seen material in this documentary.
A burned-out British police detective finally snaps while interrogating a suspected child molester.