Storyline for In the Footsteps of Killers

The subject matter is cold cases, where someone was abducted or killed but the perpetrators were never caught.

The first series – of three programs, this second series comprises six – covered the 1967 murder of 19-year-old servicewoman Rita Ellis along with the 1986 disappearances of Patrick Warren and David Spencer – “the Milk Carton Kids” – and Suzy Lamplugh.

As with the new series, they are investigated – if that is the word – by criminology professor David Wilson, whose MO seems to be to recap the events, tut over what could have been done better, bemoan the lack of forensic technology in the past and identify the prime suspect as someone the police interviewed at the time but never had enough evidence to prosecute. 

Emilia Fox is there, too, to react to the recapping and bemoaning, ask tortuously scripted questions and look suitably tragic about the whole abducted children/murdered women thing, and because she plays a forensic psychologist in the long-running drama Silent Witness.

Episodes of In the Footsteps of Killers

In the opening episode of the new series, it is the turn of the Templeton Woods murders to be re-examined

Efforts are made to gloss it as a chance to jog people’s memories or to encourage witnesses to come forward, as if the chance of this happening were not so infinitesimal as to be nonexistent.

In 1979 and 1980, the bodies of two women were found in Templeton Woods.

Dundee: Carol Lannen, a young single mother who had been in the care system and who was last seen getting into a man’s car on a street known to be used by men looking for paid sex.

Elizabeth McCabe who was a nursery nurse who lived at home with her parents and vanished after being separated from her friend on a night out.

Snowfall destroyed any clues the killers might have left. Or was it – as the press was particularly keen that it should be – a single killer?