At just before three in the morning on Saturday the 19th of March 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Sian O'Callaghan left a nightclub in the centre of Swindon, Wiltshire, and began the 800-metre walk home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend. She never arrived. Within days, Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher of Wiltshire Police had identified a suspect. Within a week, he had made a decision that would save one family from years of wondering, deliver another family a second set of remains that had been missing for eight years, and destroy his own career in the process. Fulcher took the suspect, a local taxi driver named Christopher Halliwell, to an Iron Age hill fort north of Swindon. He deliberately broke the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to interrogate him. And there, without a solicitor present, Halliwell led him first to Sian O'Callaghan's shallow grave in an Oxfordshire field, and then, on the drive back to the police station, offered him a second body. This is the story of two young women who died eight years apart, the detective who broke the rules to find them, and the spade in a Swindon shed that eventually put their killer behind bars for the rest of his life.
","author_name":"Jack Laurence"}