trap decision
ONE OF THE ’90S’ MOST CONTROVERSIAL CASES RE-OPENS IN DECEIT…
In 1992, Rachel Nickell was murdered on Wimbledon Common. With no forensic evidence or concrete leads, SIO Keith Pedder turned to criminal psychologist Paul Britton, whose profiling flagged up a prime suspect in Colin Stagg. Sadie Byrne was recruited for an undercover honeytrap as ‘Lizzie James’ to secure a confession, but the case collapsed, taking careers and reputations with it. The stars of new four-part drama Deceit explain why the story had to be told.
Where does Sadie end and Lizzie begin? NIAMH ALGAR (SADIE BYRNE):
They become entwined, and that’s when it gets messy and you make mistakes. For a woman to be even considered to go undercover on such a high-calibre case, with the press putting such pressure on the police... anyone would have jumped at the chance, but she gets lost in it.
What did you make of Pedder? HARRY TREADAWAY (KEITH PEDDER):
My job is to not judge him. He was young, ambitious and he’d been promoted at a young age. I tapped into the pressure he’s under, with this operation basically a last throw of the dice made with the best intentions. But that desperation is what did it for them.
What went wrong for Britton? EDDIE MARSAN (PAUL BRITTON):
I read his book, The Jigsaw Man. He went from working on the James Bulger
murder to Rachel Nickell and then on to Fred and Rose West, but while it must have been traumatising, he’s an honourable man who wanted to help. A mistake was made, but I’m loath to demonise him. I make mistakes at work all the time, but someone still goes and gets me a coffee.
Did you attempt to contact the people you’re portraying? NA:
Not even over email, which is good because it means I’m protecting her identity [‘Sadie’ is subject to a whole-life anonymity court order]. Parts have been dramatised, so I’m able to bring fictional elements to the character – the idea of where she is mentally, how she’s reacting to the work, how far she’s willing to push herself and how far the police are being pushed.
HT: No, but I read Pedder’s book, which gave me a psychological blueprint of what he was thinking throughout the case.
What does the case tell us about Britain then and now?
HT: The media isn’t any less quick to rush to judgment, and that’s globally amplified now. How does that pressure affect how we live our lives? It’s a fascinating, sad story but one people can hopefully learn from.
EM: Whenever we have a new technology, we become very binary about it. It becomes the be-all and end-all, then it fails to live up to our expectations and we throw the baby out with the bathwater. That was the case with Paul Britton and criminal profiling. And it’s interesting how mistakes were made because of the culture of the time: the remnants of a Victorian attitude to sexual preference as regards Colin, and how Lizzie was used as a pawn by men.
NA: We constantly repeat ourselves: we’re still labelling people as monsters. The way in which the press represents people dehumanises them, and by doing that we separate ourselves from them. Gabriel Tate
DECEIT IS CURRENTLY SHOWING ON CHANNEL 4 AND ALL 4.