The most chilling TV murder hunt you’ll ever watch because it's real
Natalie was savagely killed hours after a date with her new boyfriend. Tonight, in a groundbreaking documentary, you can watch every gripping moment of the search for, and trial of, her murderer
THE last images of Natalie hemming show the young mother-of-three glowing with happiness. She is hand-in-hand with her new lover, Simon Dennis — a colleague at the Mercedes dealership where she works.
They’ve just spent their first romantic night together in a hotel. CCTV cameras capture them on Sunday May 1, 2016 as they check out. Natalie, 31, tilts her face up and gives Simon a radiant smile. Outside, they kiss and say goodbye.
Natalie hopes for a future with Simon, but it’s complicated. She still shares a home with her ex-partner, carpet salesman Paul hemming, 42, and her children aged 12, six and three. Natalie recently ended their ten-year relationship, but he does not know about her date.
At 13.55 on Sunday Natalie, sends this message to Simon’s mobile: ‘Thank you so much baby. That was the most amazing night I’ve ever had. You were gentle, kind and caring and that meant the world to me.’ At 13.58 she adds: ‘I fell in love with you even more last night.’
At 00:12 Monday, Simon texts her: ‘I’m missing you like crazy, just got into bed and I’m wishing you were in my arms. Keep thinking about last night and I just want to kiss you more. Night babe.’ She does not reply, nor to his next message at 10.10am Monday which reads: ‘Are you OK? Just need to know that and I’ll leave you be?’
Natalie never sees those messages. She is already dead. her naked body is lying face down, hidden behind a tree in woodland. her right temple is fractured; her left arm is broken and there are bruises to her right, injuries sustained as she defended herself from blows aimed at her head.
It is Natalie’s mother Margaret hammond, 73, who reports her missing to Thames Valley Police on Tuesday, May 3. ‘I’ve just been to Milton Keynes to the house she shares with her partner and he says he doesn’t know where she is. It’s worrying me because it’s just not like her,’ she says.
‘What is your specific concern that’s caused you to call the police?’ the call handler asks. ‘him,’ replies Margaret.
So begins one of the most chilling crime stories you’ll ever watch on television — and the first time a murder case has been filmed from start to finish.
FOR six months last year, documentary maker Anna hall shadowed the Thames Valley detectives investigating the disappearance of Natalie hemming from the moment of that 999 call.
The result is the remarkable film, Catching A Killer. Some might question using real-life tragedy as TV entertainment but the 90minute documentary offers a rare insight into the workings of a major crime unit, the twisted mind of a killer and gives a shocking portrayal of an abusive relationship.
every twist and turn in the investigation is captured, as detectives — led by Superintendent Simon Steel — painstakingly unravel a complicated web of lies to convict Natalie’s murderer.
After Margaret hammond’s initial frantic phone call, police are seen waking up her daughter’s partner, Paul hemming.
Slight and softly-spoken, he looks bewildered as he sinks into a leather sofa in the lounge and insists he has no idea where Natalie is. hemming reluctantly lets officers search a downstairs cupboard, but won’t allow them upstairs, saying it will wake the children. he won’t hand over his mobile either, saying: ‘ What if Natalie calls me?’
he’s arrested at 6.15am the following day due to his ‘ evasive behaviour’ and the house is searched. Back at the station, hemming wipes tears away with the cuff of his grey sweatshirt.
he tells detectives Natalie was upset before she vanished, saying to him: ‘I didn’t enjoy last night. Something happened.’
he claims she told him she’d been coerced into sex on her date and ‘gave in’. he uses the word ‘raped’.
‘She’d been flirting with a guy from work, which I knew about anyway, and I said: “It doesn’t matter. We’ll put it all in the past and start afresh.”
‘She said: “I just need to go away.” I said: “Fine, that’s fine with me. If you need to do that, don’t worry about the kids.” I woke up in the morning and Natalie’s not there.’
As family liaison officers talk to Natalie’s distraught family, a rather more disturbing picture of the hemmings’ volatile relationship begins to emerge. The youngest of five children, Natalie was a 21-yearold single mum when she was swept off her feet by Paul hemming, 11 years her senior.
A former nursery nurse with a ‘kind and caring’ nature, Natalie was also divorced. her 18-month marriage had collapsed after the birth of her daughter, as she battled severe post-natal depression.
hemming was successful and sophisticated. Dazzling her with his flash car and house, he offered Natalie the love and security she craved. But his charm concealed a controlling, violent streak. She called him ‘Jekyll and hyde’.
Police records reveal a complaint from a previous girlfriend. She said hemming spat in her face and humiliated her in front of friends. Once he drove her to remote woods and elbowed her in the face, breaking her nose.
he warned: ‘The only way you’ll leave me is in your grave.’
But to begin with, hemming was Natalie’s Mr Perfect, proposing marriage with a £2,500 engagement ring. They set a date and booked the church and reception venue, but hemming secretly cancelled it behind Natalie’s back.
Why she didn’t leave him then, her family will never know, but she loved him. She took his surname regardless and they had two children together. Yet — as with the cancelled wedding — the Daily Mail has learned that hemming failed to attend their christenings at the last minute, without any explanation. hemming’s violent temper terrified Natalie, the programme tells us.
Once, when an ex-boyfriend sent Natalie a birthday message, hemming ripped the phone out of her hand and threw it at her head.
Injured and soaked in blood, she begged him to call an ambulance but he refused, putting his hand around her throat and squeezing to frighten her further.
When he finally agreed to drive her to A&e, he warned: ‘Do not tell them what I’ve done to you or I will kill you.’ In a police statement dated July 26, 2013, Natalie said: ‘I am really scared of this man.’ But she later withdrew her complaint.
Many times Natalie tried to leave him, but hemming always won her back with tears and empty promises that he would change.
‘I don’t know how many times I told her to walk away,’ Natalie’s older sister Jo told the Daily Mail. In December 2013, Jo offered Natalie and her children sanctuary
in her Yorkshire home. ‘Then suddenly he started turning up at my house at weekends. I remember saying to my husband: “He’s working his way back in again.”
‘I said: “Please Natalie, if he wants to see the children, I’ll deal with it, just stay away from him. You’ve made the move, you’ve done it, don’t be pulled back in again.”
‘He turned up on the doorstep out of the blue. He was in my living room crying: “I can’t live without her. If I can’t have her no one can.” I told him: “You’re not good for each other, you fight constantly, you just do not work.” Natalie was constantly upset and he was constantly angry.’
In March 2014, poor Natalie returned to Hemming after he promised to move to Yorkshire for a fresh start.
But the day before they were due to exchange contracts on a new house, Hemming pulled out of the purchase and promised her a smart, detached new-build in Milton Keynes instead. Her sister Jo weeps: ‘I feel really guilty about this now, but I sent her a text message and said: “When all this goes wrong, which it will, don’t ring me and ask me for help again because I’ve tried and you slapped me in the face.”
‘I can remember saying to her: “When you dance with the devil, you’re going to get burnt.” ’
Natalie endured two more abusive years with Hemming before she decided to leave him, the documentary says. She was enjoying her new full-time job and had struck up a flirtatious friendship with van technician Simon Dennis.
On April 24, 2016, Natalie sent a text message to a friend saying: ‘I’m ending it with Paul. Today.’ She confided she was going on a first secret date with Simon. Her friend urged caution.
But Natalie told her family the break-up was amicable. Hemming was sleeping on the sofa until they could rent out the house and sort out separate accommodation.
Jo remembers that Natalie had her ‘mojo’ back and was impatient to ‘move on’. Natalie told Hemming she was taking the children to stay at her mother’s overnight.
‘Simon took her to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant. That’s the first time they’d been out together. She looked so happy, bless her,’ says Margaret, who babysat the children. Hemming, suspicious, turned up at Margaret’s house and demanded to know where Natalie was.
Margaret cries: ‘I wasn’t going to lie,’ and says she told him her daughter was on a date.
‘I do feel guilty. Should I have sent her home [to him] knowing what he was like?
‘I just said to her: “Don’t be frightened of him. Just tell him the truth.” ’
Day two of the investigation, and specially trained officers interview the Hemmings’ six-year-old son.
‘I want you to tell me the last time you saw Mummy?’ asks the female officer. ‘Quite a long time ago. She left our house at night. She was sick.’
The boy then gives a harrowing account of that night when he was woken by a sound ‘like thunder’.
‘How do you know she was sick?’ the officer asks him. ‘Dad told us . . . I heard her. I wondered what it was. I looked downstairs and then I peeked through a little hole and I saw sick in the bowl.’
REFERRING to the loud noise he heard, he says: ‘I thought it was glass smashing, but it wasn’t. Mum was laying down. We took the red rug to Daddy’s work so it can have a wash.’
‘No comment,’ says a dry-eyed Hemming, when this is put to him. He also has nothing to say about the road cameras which captured his black ford S-Max driving around Hertfordshire at 22.16 and 00.06 on the night she vanished.
Nor can he explain the splashes of Natalie’s blood found on the coffee table and in the car boot, along with red carpet fibres.
The hotel CCTV images and Natalie and Simon’s mobile phone messages to each other expose as a lie Hemming’s claim she’d been ‘raped’. Natalie had also sent a girlfriend this text message: ‘ Oh My god, amazing, we had sex three times.’
Hemming sticks to his story, telling detectives: ‘ In my heart I know she’s not dead. In my heart, I know that. I wish Natalie would walk through the door, but I cannot make miracles happen.’
Three weeks after Natalie’s disappearance there is a breakthrough. A man mowing grass near woodland at Chandler’s Cross, Hertfordshire, finds her body. Still, Hemming does not confess, but the evidence is strong enough to charge him.
He only changes his story on the first day of his trial in November. Admitting manslaughter, he claims he accidentally killed Natalie after throwing a replica jade faberge egg during a row.
The jury convict him of murder. This ‘cold and calculating’ killer was jailed for life with a minimum term of 20 years. The film ends with Natalie’s family outside the court, crying with relief that justice has been done.
MARGARET says: ‘If it had been an accident and he’d called an ambulance, I think I could have forgiven him, but to strip her body, dump her naked and leave the children alone for hours?
‘I never expected he was capable of murder. I knew he had a violent temper and split personality, but I never thought he’d go that far.’
Today, Natalie’s three children are being brought up her sisters, Jo and Kerry, in Yorkshire.
Jo says: ‘ The youngest is only four, so we’ve told her Mummy is an angel now in heaven, watching over her. We don’t really discuss Daddy, because it’s too complex.
‘The little boy is seven and it’s difficult for him because he idolises his dad, like most boys do. I don’t think he actually understands what he saw that night, that he probably saw his mum dead on the sofa.
‘When he realises what his dad did, that’s a horrendous thing to have to deal with.’
After taking advice from experts, Natalie’s elder daughter, now aged 13, was allowed to watch the documentary with her family.
Jo says it has been therapeutic for them all and they hope Natalie’s story will help other domestic violence victims escape from abusive relatioships.
‘He’s going to spend 20 years in prison, but it’s not going to bring my sister back. These children have lost both parents. They’ve lost everything,’ says Jo.
‘All we can do is guide them and give them what they need to become the young adults we know they’re capable of becoming without his interference.
‘That has to be our one goal and beyond that, we can’t determine what their relationship with him will be in the future. They’ll be old enough to make their own decision when he’s out.’
As for Natalie’s ill-fated love affair, her family take strange comfort from those hotel CCTV images. ‘I’d like to thank Simon for making her last night a good night,’ says Jo. ‘She was happy.’ Catching A Killer is on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight.