The sad but brutal murder of Lucy McHugh – Murder Documentary UK

 A dog walker discovers the body of a girl lying in woodland. 13-year-old Lucy McHugh has been stabbed 27 times in a brutal, calculated attack

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A man is walking his dog through the woods he spots what he thinks is a young girl sleeping to his horror he realizes she’s dead the unknown girl has multiple stab wounds but despite a fingertip search of the crime scene forensic officers find no other obvious evidence Can the police

Track down the killer before he strikes again the police are faced with a mystery but before they can try and solve this gruesome murder they first have to discover who the poor girl is and hope that our lifestyle and background will lead them to the killer catching a killer requires conclusive forensic

Evidence from Clues at the scene of the crime to minute examination in the forensics lab from the cold reality of the pathologist table to DNA sampling digital analysis each piece of killer evidence brings the murderer closer to Justice a teenage girl is found dead in the woods with multiple stab rooms the police rush to the crime scene and search for Clues which will help a identify the killer the most important and crucial piece of evidence is the dead body itself which the police hope will reveal exactly how she was

Killed detective superintendent Paul Barton is the man in charge of the investigation I received a call probably about 8:30 qu to 9 that morning from the on call Senior investigating officer notifying me exactly what’s what’s taking place and at that point um I ensure that they had sufficient resources to deal with that

Investigation detective superintendent Barton receives his first report describing the crime scene so one officers arrived at the scene they were directed into some undergrowth within the sports center just off the the natural sort of footpath that walks from the city center into the sports center and what they saw

Was a young female fully clo lying face down almost in the recovery position with apparent blood coming from around her neck area officers must cordon off the area to preserve the evidence the best thing that the first officers on the scene can do is to step back establish cordin make sure that

They’ve got enough of their own staff and Personnel to be able to man that Cordon appropriately and then hopefully the forensic investigation team will be there as quickly as they possibly Can first thing I’m asking myself is is that the deposition site you know has the the victim been murdered in one location and deposited in that particular location so you’re considering other scenes so you’d be looking for things like drag marks for example you know is there anything

To suggest that the body has been moved to where it’s now being located another clue can be found by examining how far the blood has spread and the pattern it forms so in a blood stain pattern sense one of the ways that we will address that is whether or not the patterns of

Blood at the crime scene are indicative of assault so patterns that you might see at a kill site or an assault site might include things like impact spatter that’s where I’ve delivered blows into wet blood so if I’ve blood Jin someone that might create an impact pattern at a

Deposition s side then those activities are not synonymous with that action but then more likely to produce blood stains such as pooling or staining that is indicative of them having just simply being deposited there rather than violently assaulted there and it’s that difference between the patterns an a

Attack site and a deposition site that can help you to steer the police in identifying which one they’re looking up blood is found on the leaves surrounding the girl’s body which indicates this was the attack site there’s a lot of foliage within that particular scene so you

Could see at that particular crime scene there was a lot of blood spattering around leaves and trees investigators Now look for a murder weapon so we believe a knife was used there was no knife found at the scene but that’s not surprising a knife is

Quite an easy item to dispose of in most homicide investigations we would look at the location of where the assult was taking place and it’d be quite common for us to lift up a lot of drains and see what’s in there and you’d be surprised how many knives we come across

When we’re searching drains but they never really linked to the the actual murder that you’re looking at further searches of the site provide scant evidence as to the Killer’s identity but the detectives are convinced of one thing the location for me was really significant for me this showed this was

Somebody who eventually had local knowledge because they were confident enough to carry out this this horrendous crime in a very public place albe it it was hidden from normal view on the on the foot paath but it’s somebody who knew this area quite well and so again

You start to build up a picture as to who may be responsible for this the postmortem finds 27 stab wounds some indicate the girl put up a fight so when you have wounds to hands and arms that often indicates that the victim has put up a fight so wounds the

The front of the arms or the back of the arms will often be because someone has tried to stop the blade coming at them so it would indicate that she um put up a fight to try and protect herself but ultimately the other wounds which were

Fatal would have overcome her so you can only imagine what this victim was going through it must have been horrendous with this attacker coming at her with a knife and she’s trying to defend herself the fatal wound severed an artery in the girl’s neck often that

Will cause blood to spurt from the neck that will then um cover the person who is causing the attack in blood now sometimes that might be a lot of blood or sometimes it may just be spots of blood but that would be very important for the police because they will want to

Use the DNA from that blood to link the attacker to the deceased so the clothing in that particular case would have been at the Forefront of the investigation because if we have projected blood stains impact patterns any sort of contact transfer stains then that demonstrates that the wearer has been intimately involved with

That person as and after they’ve been injured the defense might say that the reason there’s blood on the asent clothing is because they discovered them like that and therefore that’s caused blood transfer however if the clothing shows that there’s an arterial spray pattern of blood being expelled from the

Victim’s body then that can only be caused because the as salent was there at the time that the injuries were caused therefore the asent caused those injuries the girl wasn’t carrying any form of ID so the team of detectives check the reports of missing persons and

Sure enough in the last 24 hours Lucy McHugh had been reporting missing by her mother the clothing that was described the age and the Bill of the the color of hair we were fairly confident at that point that our victim was Lucy McHugh and so we then have the unable task of

Then sending offices to Lucy’s parents address to pass on that extremely sad news that we found her daughter but unfortunately her daughter’s been murdered the evidence suggests that 13-year-old Lucy knew the person who killed her but what the injury showed me was this was very personalized towards

The victim and and it suggests that she probably knew her attacker for that person to lure her to that particular location in itself there was no suggestion that she’d been dragged into that location um so this was somebody who knew her very few murders in this country are committed by strangers they are

Committed by people we know so in inevitably when you come across a victim you’re going to say well first of all who does she know you know who possibly could have committed this and in the case of the female victim you’re going to say what male because in most

Instances it’s a male offender in this instance the type of attack indicates it was a intimate violent Act and the location of the attack further corroborates that because this was a location where she was unlikely to wander by accident this was a location where clearly she’d been invited to or

Was there by Arrangement and of course arrangements are made between friends between Associates between lovers between partners so in this instance everything pointed to the fact that this tragic victim knew the perpetrator knew her murderer with her parents’ permission family liaison officers search Lucy’s bedroom they find Lucy’s

Diary and then the family’s tablet which she may have used just before her disappearance when we opened up the diary the contents of that gu were extremely disturbing and what it showed was that she had been sexually abused by M called Steven Nicholson a former tattoo artist with a troubled past 23-year-old Steven

Nicholson is a close family friend he was a ner with them up until a week before Lucy was discovered in the woods and so by now you start to think well this is extremely strange you know we’ve got this person who has allegedly been sexually abusing Lucy he’s now

Vanished from the family home a week before with Lucy sleeping just meters away from him Nicholson has the perfect opportunity to manipulate and abuse her it’s a profoundly sad and tragic situation we know from Reading Lucy’s diaries that she believed that she was in relationship with Nicholson she told

Her friends in school this clearly this is perverse and it’s illegal Lucy would have been quite impressionable and I do wonder whether compared to her peers of her own age Nicholson would have stood out he would have probably appeared quite elucid and quite mysterious which leaves her to be

Quite vulnerable and it leaves him the perfect opportunity to try and manipulate her the diary is crucial evidence it shows that less than a month after moving in Nicholson had sex with Lucy who was then just 12 years old it would have been quite obvious to anybody who’s following Lucy’s life that

Something profound is happening something dark is happening in the background she recedes from being a bubbly character in something who’s introverted somebody who’s living on the edge who is suffering anxiety and I think it’s quite clear that she herself knew that something incredibly UNT and wrong was happening

And she writes in her diary I think it’s very prophetic she says whatever this is it has to end when the police dig into Nicholson’s background they find more disturbing events so when he was 13 years of age he was in a children’s home and he got into

An altercation with the staff there where he barricaded himself in the room set fire to the building and actually threatened a member of Staff with a knife and then set off in their car so again this is really starting to build up a concerning picture of this

Individual this is somebody who’s got an unhealthy interest in children but also he used in using knives we know that Nicholson was brought up in care and that around 2/3 of children in this situation suffer some form of physical or sexual abuse and victims of physical abuse often become quite violent themselves and

That’s for a couple of reasons first of all they tend to emulate or mimic patterns that they’ve seen and they think it’s a healthy way of conflict resolution but also because they believe that there has to be this this power Dynamic this struggle in relationships

That they want to be the one that’s in control and the one that’s dominating the police released some information about the murder to the media on the day Lucy disappeared Nicholson had texted her mom now he calls her stepdad who took him in as a

Lodger and you know he sort of said oh I’ve just heard about it on the radio you know is there anything I could do I I you know I hear they may have seen somebody on a bike down by the sports center and it was really interesting because he was giving them information

That we hadn’t actually put out to the media at that point so only he could have known about that so again that raised our suspicion Nicholson is now an official suspect all the evidence against him is circumstantial the police are desperate to arrest and interrogate him before he destroys any crucial forensic evidence

That might prove he murdered Lucy a 13-year-old girl Lucy McHugh is dead murdered in a frenzy knife attack Lucy’s diary revealed she was being sexually abused in the runup to her death police suspect she messaged her killer just hours earlier the police are confident that the Killer is a family

Friend a lodger who moved out just a week before she died now they want them in custody as they hunt crucial forensic evidence the lead detective has sent his team to question Steven Nicholson’s Associates fortunately within 24 hours Nicholson was located at nearby milbrook railway station where he was arrested

Without incident and brought into custody the police are surprised when Nicholson cooperates he explained to us what his movements were leading up to his arrest which was really really useful because obviously what we then have is an account that he’s stuck to that we can then either confirm or

Disprove the clock is now ticking Barton and his team have four days in which the to charge Nicholson or release him in this country there are significant protections for the defendant in custody you only have 96 hours 4 days to interview the potential perpetrator the suspect after which you have to release

Them that gives you a very limited time to gather the evidence the evidence that needs to be gathered in that window else it might be destroyed and particularly forensic evidence or other digital evidence at the time of Lucy’s murder Nicholson had cold and sick from work he

Claims he went to visit an elderly man he sometimes cared for at around 9:00 a.m. roughly the time Lucy left home and what was chilling for me was that this old boy lived you know within a stone throw of Southampton Sports Center so by now he’s actually putting

Himself in that area and you think well maybe he’s trying to be clever because if somebody has has spotted him quite distinctive he has tattoos on his face Nicholson claims he stayed at the man’s house for a few hours before cycling home if his account can be verified it

Will rule him out as Lucy’s killer first we can do is is is knock on that address and speak to the old boy now sadly that person has all sorts of health issues and their site isn’t particularly good their hearing isn’t particularly good and they also have um

Dementia and so it would be very tricky to get a true account from that individual and and quite someone who’s quite easy to influence I would suggest and so we spoke to that individual they confirmed that Nicholson had been there that day and and couldn’t really add anything extra to that so far

Nicholson’s Alibi is holding up meanwhile police analyze a vast troll of available CCTV in the area they’re determined to see who Lucy met that morning but it’s a daunting task there’s more than 11,000 hours of footage to Wade through the role of CCTV is such an important role in any investigation I

Would suggest nowadays but it’s also a gutty role you know it’s spending hours and hours locked almost in the dark room you know looking at monitors training your eye to try and pick up any particular detail you know you cannot afford to take your eye off the ball in this particular

Situation the CCTV evidence is now crucial in piecing Lucy’s day together the first sighting of her is soon after she left home the morning of her murder within a couple of minutes from 9:00 that morning we do pick up Lucy from a residential CCTV camera very close to

Her home address and she’s walking in the direction the natural direction of the suggest up copford road towards the sports center the analysts notice how quickly Lucy is walking she was walking with purpose we would say and it interesting because when we found Lucy she was wearing a

Fairly cheap wrist watch and what we established was that she’d actually borrowed that from her brother that morning um because she didn’t have her phone her mother actually taken her mobile phone off of her as a as a form of punishment I think Lucy had been playing up and obviously most teenagers

Use their phones as their their clocks their watches and for me that that suggested that Lucy wanted to know what the time was because she needed to be somewhere at a particular time and so from having that start Point officers can then start working their way up through CCTV camera

And sure enough we pick her up on various cameras it’s a warm summer’s day and the analysts are momentarily thrown off the scent when Lucy removes her jacket this causes some problems for the officers because they’re very trained on looking this particular image that they’ve seen of Lucy that’s got this

Kind of black and white vcity jacket on and then suddenly her appearance has changed slightly so they have to almost retrain their eye and their brain to look for a different image but sure enough they find her again their final sighting is of Lucy outside a shop near

The sight of her murder but they don’t see her with anyone else with Nicholson’s custody deadline approaching the pressure is on to find the evidence to charge him so Nicholson effectively said that he had been to this address from about 9:00 that morning through till about 11:00 I

Popped out to the Tesco Express just after 9:00 to get the old boy some biscuits and some tobacco um it’s probably on CCTV you’ll find that there so sure enough that’s what we do the CCTV is again crucial evidence detectives use it to check Nicholson’s Alibi and actually in that CCTV what’s

Particularly chilling is it’s the same camera that picks up Lucy only 28 minutes later but what you see is Nicholson inside the store with a large Tesco bag for life where he’s bought these goodies for this old boy and he was very confident you know he said you

Can ask the old boy he’ll confirm that I was there check my phone I know you can do that it it will show that my phone hasn’t moved so I’ve been there Nicholson is playing a clever game he knows his phone was at the elderly man’s

House at the time of Lucy’s murder and this gives the impression he was there too the police now want to analyze his handset and I think that’s when he makes his first mistake because he says I don’t have my phone anymore and we’re like well why not and he explains that

On his way home he actually drops it and it smashes and instead of taking it in repair he decides to throw it so again you ask the question why would you do that and he’s he came up with some excuse to say oh there there’ll be some

Of my drug dealers are on there you know and I don’t want get them into trouble and I I’ll get harmed find out who they are so it was easier to throw the phone and we’re thinking this is just ridiculous why are you saying that but even without the physical handset

Detectives can obtain his call and message logs from his service provider this new piece of evidence can indicate whether he is with the phone at the elderly man’s house so the call data records literally only contain data about the connection to the the network so it’s the date and time the telephone

Number is involved and the type of connection whether it’s data or voice the detectives use this information to compare Nicholson’s normal call and messaging habits against the period he claims he was at the man’s house if suspects are forensically aware there’s a few techniques that they might use

They might turn the phone off or leave it in a different location but by looking at pattern of life activity on the phone we can see we might be able to draw conclusions that you know during a particular point in time that would normally have a reasonable amount of

Activity if there’s no activity we can spot that that Gap in pattern of life or change in pattern of Life the modern handsets and phones they’re window into all of our Lives who we’re calling how we’re living a life you know are actually daily movements even you know our heartbeat so by

Throwing your mobile phone away that’s not throwing away the data the data is still with the service provider you know when you’re phoning who you’re phoning you know where you are where you’re traveling to so the modern phone literally is the best spyware police could ever have on an individual and to

Think that by merely throwing away you’re going to deter the police from their invest tigations well you’d be very wrong in Nicholson’s case the phone data throws his Alibi into doubt we could show that over a period of time on average if he received a text message he

Would respond within 7 minutes on this particular occasion he received text messages and I think some phone calls and there was no response over that 3-hour period so for me that suggests he’s not with his phone his phone is that address that he’s elsewhere it’s a breakthrough but nowhere near enough

They need to put him at the scene of the crime they turn again to the CCTV to see if they can spot him can we pick him up on his bike which is what he sees on sure enough we do and he’s on the route that explains going toward the old boy’s

House and then on the way back he gives us a route and again we pick him up his clothes appear clean but a plastic bag could contain any Blood Stained items analysts also notice he disappears from the cameras before re appearing further along the Route and for me that’s highly

Suspicious because it suggests that he’s taken a diversion from the route that he’s told us or there’s something wrong with CCTV why is he not appearing on it it’s suspicious but again it’s not hard evidence and soon they’ll have to release him digital forensics officers have now examined the tablet found in

Luc’s bedroom they confirm she had been using it the night before she disappeared and when we could see that she’d been on Facebook Messenger the night before and we believe she was trying to contact Nicholson but worryingly the conversation from Lucy’s side had been completely erased and so

We were left wondering what were the contents of that you know was she contacting Nicholson were they arranging to meet Nicholson tells the officers she demanded a meeting with him saying she was pregnant but he dismissed it as a Teenage infatuation and blocked her police ask Nicholson for his Facebook

Password so they can access the conversation from his side and that was the first time in his interview where he closed up he did not want to give us his password he refused to do so and for me again that starts ringing alarm Bells because up until now

He was confident he was happy to tell us his movements what he was doing check my phone check CCTV when we say can we check your Facebook account he says no Nicholson’s confidence begins to wne as the evidence against him grows Lucy’s diary shows he was abusing her he was

Near the murder scene that morning data from his phone cast out on his Alibi and he appears to have lied about his root home it all amounts to important circumstantial evidence but it’s not enough to charge him the clock is ticking timeing is against us he’s

Given an account he’s told us where he was we can’t dis prove that at this particular stage so I’m starting to panic now I’m thinking I’m confident he’s responsible for the murder of Lucy but I can’t prove it at the moment and the last thing I

Want to do is let him back out on the streets where he’s endangered to other people the police are desperate for a breakthrough they need to keep Nicholson under lock and key amid growing frustration one of the intelligence team comes up with a novel idea can an unrelated piece of legislation helped

Them by crucial time police have detained a suspect for the brutal murder of Lucy McHugh Lucy’s diary deleted Facebook messages and CCTV evidence suggest she was hurrying to meet Steven Nicholson Nicholson was in the area and his phone records have cast doubt on his Alibi but the evidence is

Circumstantial and there’s just hours to go before the police must release detectives have asked murder suspect Steven Nicholson to provide them with his Facebook Messenger password but he’s refused that refusal is about to help the police in an unexpected way so I start looking at what I can do

To try and get access to Facebook so I make inquiries through the FBI and um the Department of Justice in the US to say look this is the problem we have this is the serious events we’re dealing with can you assist me in getting into Facebook and Facebook were actually as

Helpful as they could be but they’re an American company that have different laws to us and you can’t just write an authority and get access there’s various hurdles you have to go through and these things can take weeks if not months and we didn’t have weeks or months you know

We had hours left on the clock and so at this point we’re now starting to think outside of the box what can we do to keep him in custody because I do not want to Nicholson out on the streets and it’s at that point we have

This kind of light bulb moment where my my colleague comes in he’s my tactical interview manager and he says boss have you heard of Ripper section 49 so he explained to me that this is a particular piece of legislation mainly used in Terrorist offenses but also for online grooming offenses with Peter

Files where police are Keen to access somebody’s account using their password and if they refuse to give that password they actually commit a criminal offense under the Ripper legislation so desperate is Nicholson to keep his Facebook messages hidden that he pleads guilty to the section 49

Offense and is sentenced to 14 months in jail and that was just fantastic for us because it took the pressure of us that gives us enough time to start waiting for the fic evidence to come in start looking further inquiries that we can do try him put him

In the same location as Lucy at that particular crime scene the team turned their attention again to the CCTV they’ve seen Nicholson cycling with a Tesco bag then the cameras lose him before he reappears further along the road crucially they spot something different about the

Bag and when we pick him up at a later camera we look closely at the image again and we would say that the contents whatever that was that was in in his Tesco bag for life was a lot lighter than when we last saw him the detectives now suspect Nicholson

Has dumped his blood soak clothes somewhere out of sight of the CCTV cameras location data on his phone might show where he went but Nicholson claims to have thrown it away we were scratching our heads thinking what are we going to do you know this is a real real team effort and

One of our members of our intelligence unit came for and said look I’ve just been on a course and I’ve learned that if you don’t have a handset you can still mirror a handset you get the identical one and you can download all the contents from the cloud onto that

Handset why don’t we try and do that you can buy a replacement phone and just like a home user transitioning from one phone to another you synchronize the new phone to the online data stored uh under that user’s account if one of the apps is a fitness tracking app it might

Reveal where Nicholson went so just like the GPS in your car your satellite navigation system GPS in Mobile phones will use the same technology they receive a signal from the satellites and they calculate their position based on that for the plan to work detectives need Nicholson’s App Store password this

Time they’re in luck we spoke to Richard Elms who was Lucy’s stepdad who was very good friends with Nicholson and obviously put him up in the house and they were gamess together they would often you know go on gaming and um and play against each other and fortunately

For us he knew Nicholson’s Google password so he was able to provide us with that which allowed us access to the cloud and download the data Nicholson did have a fitness app and it provides police with key evidence the data showed he’d headed towards Woodland for a short time on his

Way home but his exact route was still unclear in GPS apps uh terrain is uh and environment is very important because if you haven’t got sight of the satellites the phone can’t pin itself can’t identify where it is so it will try and Hazard a guess until it receives a

Signal again but over a period of time that will get less and less accurate without an exact location detective superintendent Barton will need a large search team and it’s going to take something like 14 officers working two ships a day over 80 days to search that area and it’s going to be

Expensive he’s about to take a huge risk if he puts together a team to search the Woodland and they come up with nothing he could soon run out of resources to catch Lucy’s killer I think people are under the real misconception that an investigation like this as traumatic as

This as important as this will have unlimited resources they have to prioritize Manpower budgets and resources and in a case of complex of that these decisions can be the difference between getting their man and not encouraged by the location data retriev from Nicholson’s fitness app detective superintendent Barton decides

To press ahead with the search for Nicholson’s clothing and so you know I I took a deep breath spoke to my big bosses and said look we’ve got to do this and we agreed to to authorize the search of that area dozens of officers get to work with a painstaking fingertip

Search of the area their efforts bring the total area searched in the hunt for Lucy killer to more than 30,000 square m finally they get their breakthrough we found a blue Russell Athletic hoodie that had apparent Blood on the outside of the the Garment inside the pockets were some

Blue latex gloves that had apparent blood on no if the forensic tests prove the blood is Lucy’s and also find traces of Nicholson’s on the clothing it’s compelling evidence that he killed her the key to this is DNA DNA profiling has huge advantages so particularly in terms

Of attacks where there is blood spilled potentially you’ve got a huge source of biometric identification material the only fear is whether the evidence has deteriorated what you got to remember is this is some 9 weeks after Lucy’s body was found but we’ve now found these items and so you’ve got the weather to

Contend with you know has it been damaged through through rain has there been animal interference you know have foxes got out there have they got to some of the those items and potentially damage some of that forensic evidence that we might be recovering while they’re waiting for the

Analysis the team press on with more old fashioned ways to prove the link it’s not good enough for an officer just to go through the usual runs to go through the forensic runs to knock on the usual doors they have to think laterally they have to kind of consider what defenses

What ideas what even Preposterous suggestions a defendant might come up and they’ve got to anticipate that and deflect that so A good detective has to anticipate what the defense were playing a good detective has to anticipate even something the ludicrous alibi a defendant might suggest and that’s the

Kind of thinking which a modern detective has required the search team also found tracksuit bottoms with the hoodie in the woods we had some black and white patterned tracksuit bottoms um which again have the apparent blood on them now when we did some searches on Nicholson’s social media we came across

A photograph of him posing with a a young child we think probably a relative and sure enough these tracksuit bottoms match the ones that we had recovered and I’m thinking this is brilliant the hoodie is harder to link to Nicholson the detectives used the batch number on

The label to ask the manufacturer where they were sold and to my surprise what we established was that only two had been sold in Hampshire and we actually were able to get the credit card numbers of the people that purchased those so that we can make some inquiries with those

Individuals and the first call we made made to the first purchaser they said oh yeah I remember buying that for my husband um he still got it you’re welcome to come and see him if you need to and we no that’s fine thank you very much the next person we spoke to was

Really interesting because what she said was oh yeah i’ bought that for my boyfriend um but I haven’t seen it for a while I think he left it at this old boy’s address in Southampton where Nicholson had been looking after and there was a connection there

And so by now we’re thinking this is this is great you know this now links this item to that address where Nicholson says he was sometime the biggest breakthroughs in a case are simply through oldfashioned police work it’s a following the thread of a clue to its ultimate conclusion and by linking a

Batch number of a hoodie to a friend of Nicholson’s classic that’s keyw work doesn’t get you across the line but it makes a difference added that to forensics good forensic work and then you might have cracked the case placing the blue hoodie at the flat Nicholson says he visited on the morning

Of Lucy’s murder is another strong piece of evidence a stepping stone in securing a conviction and putting him behind bars the evidence against Nicholson is building he dumped apparently blood so clothing in a woodland close to the time when Lucy was murdered it might be enough to convict but without detailed

Forensic analysis link in ing the clothing to Lucy’s blood the case might still fall apart police are convinced they know who killed 13-year-old Lucy McHugh evidence from her diary deleted messages CCV and phone records all point to Steven Nicholson as the murderer phone tracking data has led police into Woodland where they found

Bloodstained clothes they sure are his now the waiting for the results back from the lab it’s the detective’s first chance to prove that Lucy’s blood is on Nicholson’s discarded clothes without this crucial forensic evidence the defense team may be able to sew a little bit of doubt in the minds of the

Jury the success of the entire case is now in the balance it’s by no means certain the DNA evidence on the clothing will have survived in the damp Woodland DNA can be quite robust but it depends very much on the the circumstances that occur to it after its deposition so in

This case we’re thinking about blood on an item of clothing blood on an item of clothing that dries very quickly and is then unaffected by other environmental factors we’ll probably stay there with with a good chance of getting a wonderful DNA profile from it for an indefinite period I would suggest blood

On an item of clothing that’s damp and then exposed to temperature changes so if it warms up for a bit you’re encouraging the opportunity for bacteria to start to to feed if you like on the blood and then to replicate themselves and every time something like that happens they’re

Actually ingesting uh the blood and and breaking down the potential for you to to be able to find a profile from the DNA molecules that are within the blood itself consequently there are quite a few variables that will affect the likelihood of getting a DNA profile from

Something after an amount of time days later the results of the forensic tests come in we get the phone call that we’ve all been waiting for and that’s from the lab and that’s to give us the news that actually there is a forensic link between that clothing Steven Nicholson

And Lucy M and that is fantastic only one person’s DNA is recovered from the latex gloves found in the pocket of the hoodie scientists calculate it’s a billion times more likely that it came from Steven nichelson than anyone else they bring Nicholson from prison where he’s serving 14 months for refusing to give

Them his Facebook password so when we then presting with that evidence his face is a picture in his jaw literally drops to the ground because he thought he’ literally got away with murder it didn’t think that we would find those items but we did and forensically we can

Link into those items he is then charged with Lucy’s murder and other Associated offenses relating to Lucy and he’s then uh sent for trial which is the Crown Court police go public with the murder charge against Nicholson his name was all over the local papers and the local TV saying he

Being charged with Nu’s murder and what happened as a result of that is that somebody also came forward knowing Nicholson and they disclosed to us that they too have been sexually abused by him when they were 14 years of age now what’s quite chilling about this particular allegation is that she too

Had had a relationship with Nicholson and he had met her in the same location up at Southampton Sport Center where they’d have cons seexual sex together orbe it she was 14 years of age and then certainly any similarities with what she was telling us to what we believe Lucy

Gone through that we were able to convince the crime prosecution service that he should ALS Al be charged with sexual activity with child against that particular victim and he was and we have to wonder what kind of person is attracted to young girls like this sometimes it’s actual pedophiles

Who are only sexually attracted to young children and they tend to be loners they tend to live at the fringes of society or sometimes it’s people who are just generally sexually promiscuous and they prey on young girls simply because they see them as easy targets they’re quite easy to potentially manipulate or to

Impress It’s Not Unusual that somebody who commits a crime of sexual abuse goes on to re repeat and reoffend and it appears that he had a pattern of behavior so for the police uh in this investigation they knew they were battling a number of challenges one they

Had to get Justice for Lucy’s family but two they liked they knew there were other victims out there and three they knew if they didn’t get a conviction like this then somebody like Nicholson could very well will go on to murder again on the first day of the trial

Prosecutors are finally granted access to Nicholson’s Facebook log they hoped to finally discover what Lucy was writing to him the night before she was murdered but Nicholson had also deleted his end of the conversation before he was first arrested now police can only speculate we know from Reading Lucy’s

Diary entries that as far as she was concerned she was in a relationship with Nicholson she was in love with him we even had her practicing her new signature Lucy Nicholson she believed she was going to get married to him which is really really sad when you

Think about it and Obie Nicholson didn’t want this he didn’t want this attention to show that he’d been abusing this child over a period of time in the family home and we believe that he she actually threatened him to say you know if he don’t continue to see me I want to

Tell my m mom what you’ve been doing and you’ll going to get in trouble with the police she threatened Nicholson that unless he continued the relationship she would tell her mother which would invoke obviously trouble from the police now that in anyone’s terms is a clear motive for Murder this murder was planned there is no doubt about that in my mind Nicholson knew what he was going to do on that day he contacted Lucy the night before he lured her to that particular location it’s a location he knows very well he has a change of clothing with him as

Well because again he knows that it’s going to be pretty obvious if he’s seen cycling away from the scene and he’s got Blood Stained clothing on him all of this builds up a picture of somebody who’s very cold and calculated who’s decided that he’s going to silence Lucy and silence lucely

Properly when we look at the the horrific nature stab wounds on the face of the victim I think that really tells us a lot about the Mind state of Nicholson at the time this was a chaotic and frenzied attack he must have had so much vital and Scorn and hatred towards

His victim at the time even without the Facebook messages the forensic evidence is strong enough to convince a jury he killed Lucy so after the lengthy trial Nicholson was found guilty by a jury of Lucy’s murder he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum turn of 33

Years Nicholson was also convicted of raping Lucy and for sexual activity with another child for these offenses he was sentenced to 51 years and 9 months to run Concurrently the commitment and lateral thinking of the entire investigation put Nicholson in the dock for murder but it was the killer evidence from the blood soaked clothing that sent him down for me this was a case um that was purely down to the forensic evidence linking Nicholson with Lucy’s murder when you

Look at the crime scene itself there was very little we could get from it there wasn’t your usual sort of lines of enquir that you could do like house to house in that particular area there was no CCTV covering the area so it really had to go back to good old fashy

Detected work finding out kind of what the links are between Nicholson and viy but most importantly and as far as the jewy were concerned it was the forensic evidence that secured the conviction of Steph Nicholson V new Murder by throwing away his mobile phone and refusing to hand over his password

Nicholson thought he’d gotten away with murder but with dedicated Endeavor the police found the killer evidence the judge described the investigation as groundbreaking and inspired that means a murderer will spend the rest of his life Behind Bars