Deep in the English countryside,
two teenagers on a journey to murder.
They would never have become involved
had it not been for the persuasive powers
of Thelma Purchase.
Thelma Purchase, a mother,
a carer, a lover.
When I heard her say that she loved Mr. Baker,
it completely made me squirm inside.
Thelma's was a world of men,
some innocent, some gullible, others in her sights.
She had previously asked some local criminals
to kill someone for her.
A story of contract killings
and hired assassins was developing
deep in the English countryside.
What part did Thelma Purchase play
in the death of Greg Baker?
One comes back to that telling phrase of Greg,
why are you trying to kill me?
-
On the canal boat where he lives,
Kelvin Amos reminisces about the woman
that he fell in love with.
He called her Yvonne.
Full name Thelma Yvonne Purchase.
I met her like through the children
when she moved in close by.
We got knowing the kids through taking them to karate
and stuff and that's how we become
then the relationship started.
Both had been married before and were parents.
Kelvin then had enough money
to own a pleasant house in Staffordshire.
After a while, the couple moved into Kelvin's place.
Everybody got on.
It just seemed the right thing to do, you know.
Instead of paying for, like, two places
and spent most of the time in one of them,
it's just inevitable that we moved in together.
Amongst the extended family,
Thelma Yvonne's son, Lance, and his younger brother.
They were just boys, I think.
Lance is more into, like, war games
or stuff like that.
But yeah, they all just seemed normal.
Thelma was working as a carer
whilst sharing her life with Kelvin.
She was looking after this man, Greg Baker.
He already had two nurses
to help him get on with his daily routines.
Christopher Hotton is a prosecuting barrister
destined to discover much about Greg Baker.
As a child, he had the misfortune to contract polio,
which left him quite significantly disabled.
And then, later in life,
he contracted muscular dystrophy.
So by the time he was in his 50s and early 60s,
he was very significantly disabled.
Roberta Babb is a psychologist
and relationship expert who has considered the events
and people surrounding the life of Greg Baker.
Living with a rare, progressive, muscle-wasting condition
like muscular dystrophy is likely to have been
very challenging for Greg.
Either in terms of his psychological
and emotional wellbeing,
but also his sense of independence,
his sense of self,
and the sense of his future.
For all that he was physically disabled,
he was intellectually all there.
He was a bright man,
an intelligent man,
an interesting man.
One of the ways in which he'd earned money over the years
was to give private tutoring lessons.
Making a living by tutoring maths
and living in a house that he had inherited,
Greg's life appeared comfortable.
His disability did not mean a sex life
was out of the question.
Having polio, having muscle wasting,
does not mean that your normal urges go away.
It has no impact on your hormones.
And Greg Baker was able to perform sexually.
It was around 2005,
whilst setting up home with Kelvin Amos,
that Thelma Yvonne Purchase entered the life of Greg Baker.
For a number of years,
Thelma Purchase worked for a care agency.
And so she, along with a number of other people,
became a client of his.
She came in regularly to see him and to care for him.
When we think about a carer,
the sort of person that usually goes into this profession
is someone who wants to help others,
who understands the impact of physical and mental illness
upon one's sense of self,
their self-esteem,
their ability to do things,
and is someone that is nurturing and caring
and usually genuinely wants to help.
Some of Greg's closest friends,
mostly drawn from the church community in Alton,
provided him with contact.
People like Andrea Stafford.
I didn't meet her very often,
but I always felt uneasy around Yvonne.
And I didn't know why I got this uneasy feeling, really,
but I just knew that there's something not right.
Quite what the true nature of that relationship was
is a matter of speculation.
Thelma described her relationship with Greg
as being that of a father-daughter.
Other witnesses paint a very different picture.
Two of the other carers recalled seeing occasions
when Thelma was sitting on the lap of Greg,
cuddling him and kissing him.
And there was a strong inference
that there was rather more than the father and daughter
sort of affection between them.
So it's not remotely surprising
that his sexual urges and his sexual desires
became fixated on the one object of his affection.
The one person that he could realistically fantasize
about having a relationship with.
I couldn't understand why Greg was getting involved with her
because she just wasn't his type at all.
And I know opposites attract,
which is, you know, a fact,
but they wouldn't have anything in common
to talk about because he was such an intellectual.
Greg was soon spending lavishly on Thelma.
He demonstrated the way he felt for her
by giving her a large number of gifts.
He provided her with a significant sum of money,
which enabled her to purchase
the small Citroen Saxo motor car.
And that's why I didn't say anything
because I didn't want to burst his bubble
if he was in love with her.
I mean, I hadn't actually cottoned on to the fact that he was in love with her,
but other people seem to think he was.
I know he was very close to her
and he thought a lot about her and he bought her that car.
He used to give her money, and he used to help her out.
We used to make food for her and all sorts.
She used to take food home.
He would help out her son, Lance, too.
Greg offered Thelma's son a maths tuition.
And she would often come round to his house
for a social visit rather than in the line of care and duties.
Greg was in a vulnerable position.
However, he obviously felt quite warm feelings to Thelma.
He wanted to have her in his life
in some shape or form in the future,
and marriage seemed to be an option for him
that he wanted to progress.
Meanwhile, back home,
Kelvin thought nothing of the relationship
between Thelma and Greg.
Yeah, I thought she was his carer
or whatever and she used to go over.
And he was a teacher, you know, extra lessons or whatever.
Just a good friend of hers,
you know, that was all I thought he was.
By 2006,
Lance had become a troublesome teenager.
It led to big family rows for Thelma and Kelvin
over Lance's drug use.
He got caught at school smoking cannabis and stuff.
He got expelled from school.
And he just seemed to go worse and worse.
The argument started through Lance,
but then she just seemed to want me out the house,
if you know what I mean. And it was just...
it just got to where it's not very nice.
The couple decided to separate.
Arguments broke out over who should get what.
And when Thelma didn't get her way,
she would call the police,
claiming falsely that Kelvin had abused her.
I think I got arrested a couple of times.
It was just over things what she'd said,
and there was no truth in it,
and I just felt like, oh, I don't know.
It was an horrible time, actually,
'cause I was feeling like I was losing my house.
If I hadn't had got my son with me,
I'd have been out,
and she would have had the house.
The mother of three had been short of money when she met
and moved into Kelvin's house.
The end of the relationship and moving set her back to square one.
She wasn't in great financial shape
and was probably in need of some money from somewhere.
Ken Raper was the senior investigating officer
who would one day discover
that Thelma Purchase was ready to take drastic action
to get her way when it came to ending her relationship
with Kelvin Amos.
There's one particular individual
who we knew quite well, she was a well-known criminal,
who came forward,
provided us with some evidence in relation to Thelma
trying to have someone...
offering to pay people to kill her former boyfriend.
The issue was around insurance.
That if he died, she'd be benefiting from the insurance.
Kelvin had no idea that Thelma wanted
to put out a contract on his life.
Luckily for him, Thelma found nobody willing to carry out the killing.
But this was the woman caring for Greg Baker,
a vulnerable man falling more
under the spell of Thelma Yvonne Purchase.
The two carers who gave firsthand eye witness evidence
of witnessing an intimate...
degree of intimacy between Greg and Thelma
was given at court.
Those two ladies came to court.
They repeated their account of what they'd seen.
What dangers lay ahead for the vulnerable Greg Baker?
Greg Baker and Thelma Purchase
lived in two very different worlds.
Greg Baker lived in a community
where he felt safe enough
to leave his doors open at night,
and Thelma lived in a community where murder was an option
in terms of getting ahead and getting what she needed.
And how would Kelvin Amos avoid death
at the hands of a contract killer?
I phoned the police and I says,
"I think you're gonna get a phone call saying...
Just saying, you know,
that she's claiming I was assaulting her
and what have you.
Living alone, but receiving regular visits from carers and friends,
by 2005, Greg Baker was growing fonder of Thelma Purchase.
I realized, as it went along,
that it was a little bit more that Greg felt
than just this getting to know his care worker really well.
It was affecting his emotions,
and he was getting tied up with it.
There's no doubt at all
that Greg had deep feelings of affection towards Thelma.
He liked her.
He may have loved her.
He gave her what he could, which was money,
and he assisted her in every way.
He bought presents for her, and he trusted her.
She said that, "I love Mr. Baker."
Firstly, I believe that if she did love him,
she would have called him Greg and not Mr. Baker
because it's a bit informal.
But when I heard her say that she loved Mr. Baker,
it completely made me squirm inside.
For Andrea and others
in Greg's church community,
any affection from Thelma was motivated by just one thing.
I believe that Yvonne didn't love Greg
for himself as a person.
She loved him for his money
and what she could get out of him.
Thelma had a considerable taste for money.
One thing we know is that some little time before Greg died,
Thelma had received eight and a half thousand pounds
in back-pay from the job that she was doing.
She'd got through that money pretty rapidly.
And one of the people who visited her house
after she was arrested
described her council houses looking like a show home.
So, she undoubtedly had a taste for money.
Her son, Lance, said that his mother was greedy.
By 2006, around the time
her relationship with Kelvin was failing,
Thelma decided to get a better paid job,
but she didn't cut Greg out of her life.
She continued to keep visiting Mr. Baker at his home.
and there were various sort of rumors circulating
in the village about that relationship.
Each visit, she would get a cash present from Greg.
We were informed by family members
and people local to Mr. Baker, who did know Mr. Baker,
that there were occasions when money had changed hands.
I don't think anybody could really prove
the amount of money or the frequency of that money,
but it was something that everybody was aware of.
She was using Greg, using the development of what he thought
was a sort of romantic relationship
to take advantage of him.
Around this time, Greg made a fateful decision,
one born out of a desire to show gratitude to his friends.
He included them in his last will and testament.
In the will, there was two main beneficiaries.
One of whom was Thelma Purchase.
She was the principle beneficiary,
so when he died, she stood to make a very substantial
sum of money out of his death.
Greg actually told us about the will,
and on one of the few occasions
that we were both at his house...
Greg actually told us both at the same time
that he said he was so grateful to us
that he wanted to thank us
by leaving us something in his will.
Thelma Purchase would complain
to Kelvin Amos that she wanted more money.
She had teenage sons, a home to run.
Without a partner, cash was in short supply.
But now she stood to gain up to 75,000 pounds,
if only Greg Baker was to die.
I was actually amazed when he said this to us,
that he was going to leave something in his will.
I was just blessed and amazed by his generosity.
But I was also concerned about
why he was giving something to her
because he hadn't known her very long.
June 15th, 2007.
Thelma Purchase's birthday,
something Greg knew.
He'd given one of his carers a sum of money
to go and buy perfume for Thelma as a birthday present.
In contrast to Greg planning
a surprise gift for Thelma,
she had other plans.
Being the greedy woman that she was,
she didn't want to wait for Greg to die of natural causes.
Who knew how long that might be?
It might be very many years.
And who knew what might happen in those years?
The relationship between them might come to an end.
There might be some other person whom he felt affection for
and chose to change his will and cut her out.
Thelma had been short of cash.
She was struggling financially.
She knew she was in the will belonging to Mr. Baker.
So as a greedy woman, her thought was,
I need to strike now and make sure I get the money
before this will changes.
That evening and weekend,
Greg and his carers went about their usual routine.
Greg had gone to bed as usual,
and the carers had settled him in and left for the night.
When you have a physical disability,
particularly when you are housebound,
routine becomes everything.
Because if you can't rely on waking up
to get a glass of water
or going to your purse to get out money to pay somebody,
then you need everything to be set up in advance
and Greg Baker was no exception.
He absolutely had a routine which would have given him
enormous security and comfort.
Every Friday, by arrangement,
his carers would take 500 pounds out of the bank for him,
which they would give to him
and which he would keep in the top pocket of his pajamas.
And this was quite well known.
And he would use that money to pay his carers,
in order to give them money to buy food
and other things for him.
There was another element to Greg's routine.
Greg Baker often left his doors open, especially at night.
And this was so carers could actually access
and attend to him in emergency
if anything happened during the night.
Greg Baker was really demonstrating
that he believed the people around him
had his best interests at heart.
And this is information that Thelma would have known
and seemingly used to her advantage.
Greg, prone and in bed,
cash in his pajama pocket,
and the door to his home open.
Thelma Purchase put her plans into action.
She clearly did not want to commit the crime herself.
She didn't want to be the person who actually killed Greg,
so she cast around for people to help her.
And the person she approached, first of all,
was her son, Lance.
Lance knew Greg.
He might be able to kill him, or perhaps it would be too big an ask.
If so, did he know somebody else who could kill Greg?
And she encouraged him to ask around amongst his friends
for somebody who would be prepared to kill for money.
Thelma may have gone to her son,
because he was someone that she trusted.
She may have also gone to him
because actually he was someone
that was in need of money himself.
She may have actually gone to him
because it was convenient.
He was in the same space as she was,
and she had easy access to him,
who then he had access to a friend.
A number of his friends remembered him saying,
"Is there anybody here who would be prepared
to kill for money?"
And Shane Edge was the only person to say,
"Yes, I'll do it."
Shane Edge seemed to be his best mate at the time.
A couple of days before the murder took place,
witnesses remembered Thelma coming over to a barbecue,
bringing some food for those who were there,
and calling over to Shane and speaking to him in her car.
And that's obviously the point at which the plot,
the final details of the plot were hatched.
And, between them, she probably briefed the pair of them.
She arranged to pick them up and they planned
going out to Alton.
Her son and Shane were two teenage lads.
They would never have become involved
in something of this nature had it not been for
the persuasive powers of Thelma Purchase
and her promise that they would each receive 8,000 pounds
once she inherited the estate from Greg.
She was the driving force
because she stood to get the lion's share of the money.
Lance was at Stoke City football ground
attending a local league award ceremony.
Shane Edge was on the housing estate where they all lived.
The last part of the plan was to decide
how they were actually going to get to Alton,
where Greg lived.
And Thelma decided that she would drive her car,
pick up Shane, drive him to Alton,
where he would commit the murder.
And then she would drive him back again.
Those were the bare bones of the plan that she hatched
with her son and his friend.
In a twisted irony,
the three could not have set off
without the help of Greg Baker himself.
Thelma drove to Greg's house in a car that Greg had bought.
It is one thing planning a murder.
It's another thing to do it.
A little before midnight, Greg, asleep in bed.
His three potential assassins on route from Stoke to Alton.
You didn't need to break a window or force a door.
You could just walk in.
Somebody who knew on a Friday night,
there would be the 500 pounds
in the top pajama pocket,
which represented an added bonus for the killer.
And somebody who knew that Greg
was not going to be in any position to resist.
Thelma Purchase, a mother,
was driving her son and his friend to Greg's house,
intent on killing Greg Baker.
In the early hours of the morning,
Thelma drove alone from her house to pick up Shane Edge
from the house in which he was staying.
She picked up Shane Edge and her son, Lance
out to a place called Blythe Bridge,
which is on route to Alton.
And then from there, out to Cheadle,
and then out Alton itself.
Logic would suggest that when she and Shane arrived
in the vicinity of Alton and Corner Cottage,
that she would have first driven past the house
in order to show Shane where the house was
and to explain how he would get in.
One can assume that she then parked quite near by
so that Shane would be able to walk
from where she had parked
to the house and then back again.
There was no mobile telephone communication
between the two of them.
So he must have know where she was going to be.
And he was in a position to go back there afterwards.
Shane then went to the front door.
He went in.
He went up the stairs and into the bedroom
where Greg was lying.
We don't know whether Greg was asleep or awake.
So far as Lance is concerned, there was a direct connection
between him and Greg
because Greg had actually tutored Lance in mathematics
when Lance was still at school.
She stayed in the car.
Lance and Shane Edge went into the bedroom
where Mr. Baker was lying, and they took the pillow
from behind Mr. Baker.
Shane took the pillow,
placed it over his face and head.
And then sat on the body,
sat on Mr. Baker's body,
to try and expel the air from his lungs.
And pressed down on the face
with as much strength as he could muster.
It was quite a callous way to kill someone.
It's likely that Greg woke up.
After this was all over,
Shane Edge was to tell one of his friends
that during the events that then unfolded,
Greg had said to him,
"Why are you trying to kill me?"
Suffocation is a horrible thing.
Anybody who has got stuck underwater
and realized they can't breathe
because they are gonna get water in their mouths
will understand a little bit of what it feels like.
Only it's just that bit more than that.
Physically, your adrenaline floods through you.
Your mouth and your nose are covered.
The oxygen levels in your blood drop really quickly.
The carbon dioxide levels rise.
Even if you weren't awake,
you would be as soon as you realized
that you couldn't breathe.
Greg's murder had been brutal
at the hands of Shane Edge.
He was exhausted from the murder.
Afterwards, he was to tell somebody
that his arms ached with the physical act
of suffocating this man to death.
And he maintained that pressure until Greg was dead.
After Greg was dead,
he removed the pillow from his face.
He took the 500 pounds from the top pocket of the pajamas.
He went downstairs,
taking the pillow with him,
and he walked back to the car
where Thelma was waiting for him.
They then drove back to Longton,
where Thelma dropped him off.
When she dropped him off,
she took from him the pillow.
She took his shirt, his top, and she took his trainers.
Those were obviously the three items
which she thought might incriminate him and her
if they were subject to scientific examination
and took them home.
And, at some point in the hours that followed,
she burnt them in her garden.
As for Shane, went back to the house where he was staying.
He was bare chested.
He had no trainers on his feet
and he told the people in the house,
"I've done it. I've killed him."
The next day, Greg's morning carer
arrived at his home.
On discovering that Greg was dead,
she did not immediately think he had been killed.
It wasn't that he was expected to die,
but it wouldn't have been expected to be unusual
for someone in his position.
He was quite ill.
He was under a considerable amount of care.
The carers had initially alerted the police.
Police had attended.
And from there, it was decided that it may well be
just natural causes.
Word began to spread around Alton.
Greg had been found dead in his bed
and by his carer, who had gone round on his morning visit.
And so we just assumed
that he'd died naturally in his sleep.
There was nothing really suspicious.
There was no cause for anybody to be alarmed
by his death, really.
But anomalies were beginning to be discovered by police.
As the morning progressed,
what became apparent was that a pillow,
which Mr. Baker normally had,
it was quite a significant part of his bedding,
really, was missing.
Couldn't account for where it could be.
Later on that morning,
there was a pullover handed to the police officers
at the scene, which had been found down the road.
It transpired that what had happened was the milkman
had gone past the house in the early hours of the morning.
He'd picked up the pullover off the road side,
taken it to a post nearby and hung it on the post
for somebody to pick up.
That pullover was then examined by next of kin of Mr. Baker,
who identified it as probably being belonging to Mr. Baker.
So questions started to be asked, how has that got there?
And what of Greg's money?
The 500 pounds that he kept in his pajama pocket.
That too was missing.
This death was highly suspicious.
The missing pillow,
the missing money,
and obvious signs of asphyxiation.
So we started to think, has something happened here
which really is out of the ordinary?
Far from being a death by natural causes,
Greg Baker's appeared more sinister.
We needed to establish a cause of death
so I liaised with the local coroner
and he was sufficiently suspicious,
as I was, that we needed to have a post-mortem.
The pathologist identified the cause of death
as being asphyxiation,
which then started the alarm bells ringing, of course.
And we put into place a major investigation.
Greg Baker's death had been officially
categorized as murder,
but what would the motive have been?
Was it a botched burglary?
A theory quickly dismissed.
The events that took place clearly demonstrated
that the murder was carried out
by somebody or some people who had
intimate knowledge of Greg.
Somebody who knew, for example,
that he left his door open at night.
Somebody simply breaking in to steal whatever they could
would not have killed Greg.
Somebody simply breaking in to steal his television
or his Hi-Fi or any money or jewelry
they could find lying about
wouldn't have killed him.
This was not a random burglary.
This was a targeted killing.
The only person who needed to break in and kill Greg
was somebody who stood to benefit from his death.
If not a random burglary,
then it was likely Mr. Baker knew his killer.
Well, one of the first things you need to establish
around sort of death is, you know, why?
Why does somebody want somebody dead?
You're looking at the motive.
And one of the key things we had to look at
was who would benefit from his death.
So very quickly, we started to establish
who his family were,
who his close friends were,
and what background had Mr. Baker?
We looked at his financial background,
his social background.
And we were just trying to establish, obviously,
who might be a beneficiary in his death.
Amongst those who had to be ruled out
of their investigation,
Greg's close friends.
Yeah, I remember when the detectives,
the police knocked on my door
to ask me about the murder.
It was quite traumatic for me
because I knew that Greg had told me some time ago,
probably about a year before,
or at least a year before, about his will.
And I knew I was a beneficiary in his will.
So I didn't know what implications that would have.
And obviously that's why I had to be questioned
to be eliminated from the inquiries.
She was, and quickly.
There was another main beneficiary of his will.
The other one was a closer person
and it was someone who we knew
had some years ago been a carer for Mr. Baker.
So we started to take a serious look
at that person's situation.
Thelma Purchase, Greg's sometime carer,
sometime friend, possibly sometime lover.
We looked at Thelma Purchase's situation.
She was living, she'd been living with a man for a while.
That had split up and she'd gone back
into some accommodation in a place called Meir,
which is a part of Stoke-on-Trent.
We looked at her situation financially.
She wasn't in great financial shape
and was probably in need of some money from somewhere.
But how could the slight-framed Thelma Purchase
have committed a murder which needed brute strength?
There was much to be investigated
before she could be charged with murder.
A team of detectives came back and started to talk to us
about someone they'd spoken to who was telling us something
which started to indicate clearly
that Thelma had involved her son in something
from which they'd benefited financially.
But it was enough to make us focus on her son as well.
A working theory was developing.
Thelma had recruited two young men to kill Greg,
gain up to 75,000 pounds from Greg's will,
and then pay off her fellow assassins.
But could that be proved?
Within 48 hours of the murder of Greg Baker,
senior investigating officer, Ken Raper, and his team
were homing in on Thelma Purchase
as somebody central to their inquiries.
A tip from the community had suggested her son,
Lance Rudge, was also involved.
He was just a normal sort of young man in that area.
He was living in a part of Longton,
which is just down the road from where Thelma was living
in a place called Kendrick Street.
He was basically, I mean,
the locals used to call it dotting,
with his mates in a house
and there's a number of them there.
And he was liaising closely with a guy called Shane Edge.
All three of them denied being involved in the murder,
but there's a lot of evidence that tied them
to the scene of the crime on the night it happened.
We arrested them, and they were all obviously interviewed separately.
They weren't really telling us anything,
but it was clear they had slightly different stories.
And, over a period of a number of interviews,
it was clear that something was different between them all,
which started to, again, cause us alarm.
When Thelma was interviewed by the police,
she denied that she had any idea that she was a beneficiary
of Greg's will.
But that clearly wasn't true.
Digital analysis followed
of camera images, of phones.
This was to be a painstaking investigation.
We obtained during that interview process
details of mobile telephones and locations
and who they were with at particular times.
And we were able to focus on quite a short period of time.
So we were able to really expose
that they were telling lies.
She told a whole series of lies.
Her first story to the police was this.
She said that "My car, my mobile telephone,
"and myself never left Longton that night.
"I was always at home with my car in the driveway
"and my mobile phone in my possession."
Well, the police went away
and conducted further investigations
and they very quickly realized
that the closed circuit television evidence demonstrated
that her car had not remained on Thelma's drive
during the night.
And that the mobile telephone evidence demonstrated
that neither had her phone.
As we did investigate the mobile phone technology,
or the mobile phones belonging to the three suspects,
it became apparent that we could show
that they'd been out to Alton.
Officers were able to track the mobile phones
and the car on a journey that night
from Stoke and onto Alton.
Hours of CCTV footage was painstakingly gathered
from road cameras.
As Ken Raper's team were looking for
the blue Citroen ^USaxo that^U Greg had bought for Thelma.
The car had two distinctive stickers in the rear window.
And you could see those on a number of the CCTV images.
We identified the car that Thelma drove
was a Citroen ^USaxo.^U
And we were able to pick it up on the night in question.
We knew she'd been down to Stoke City Football Club
to Lance's football team's sort of local do.
They had an awards night.
It left there and we picked it up on CCTV.
And from there, we were able to then fully examine the route
out to where she picked up Shane Edge
out to a place called Blythe Bridge,
which is on route to Alton.
And then from there, out to Cheadle
and then out to Alton itself.
Security footage later that morning
showed Lance Rudge, Purchase's son,
and Shane Edge spending money at an all-night store.
They were buying alcohol.
Shane appeared to be wearing no shoes.
Initially, we think they came back into Meir
where we believe they disposed of the pillow
and probably Shane Edge's shoes.
Because when they got back to Kendrick Street,
we had evidence to suggest
that Shane walked into the house with no shoes on.
And we didn't know where they were.
Raper and his team could now show
that the three suspects had been together in a car
which had traveled to Alton at exactly the time
Greg Baker was murdered.
Later, two of them had been seen spending lavishly.
Detectives visited Thelma's home
and made remarkable discoveries.
They had yet to find the pillow missing from Greg's home.
One of the detectives in the team
had noticed at the edge of one of the blocks of the paving,
there was a little burn area.
And we decided, once we had that information,
that we'd lift the paving and look underneath
in the belief that they probably had burnt the pillow.
The debris appeared to consist largely of burnt material.
And this was obviously the area in which Thelma had burnt
the pillow, the top, and the trainers.
But there was a tiny, very small piece of cotton
with something which appeared to be
a feather attached to it.
We had a look at it forensically,
and we were sort of struggling a little bit.
We wanted to know what that thing
attached to the cotton was.
Was it actually a feather?
We liaised with an expert
at the Natural History Museum in London.
We took it down to him and he was very confident
in saying to us, that is a feather.
And he actually indicated to us
that you might want to go and look
at some of the manufacturers of pillows
in the East Midlands, which we did.
And they were able to say it was a part of a pillow
because of the machining of the sample that we've got.
So we were very happy to say that was part of the pillow.
And that was, again, a somewhat crucial piece of evidence.
The evidence had stacked up
to a point that detectives were prepared
to charge all three.
At which point, Thelma Purchase decided
to put her son and his friend in the frame,
painting herself as an innocent.
Thelma told a different story,
but no less of a lie.
And much more devious and wicked.
It was this time she was to tell the police,
"Yes, it's true that I didn't have my car.
"It's true I didn't have my phone.
"My son, Lance, and Shane Edge came to me
"during the course of the evening.
"And they said, 'Could we borrow your car
"'so that we can go and buy some drugs?'
"I lent them the car.
"And, by accident, I happened to leave my mobile phone
"in the door of the car.
"When I got up in the morning,
"my car was back on the drive
"and I found my mobile telephone
"lying on the front door mat.
"It obviously had been posted through my letterbox
"during the night."
That she thought would explain why her car
and her mobile phone were in Alton,
but she had not been present.
When you take a moment to think about it,
the wickedness of that lie
was that she was prepared to sacrifice her own son
to save her skin.
She was prepared to leave the police
to think that it must be her son and Shane Edge
who alone were responsible for this murder,
which would enable Thelma to escape her responsibility
for her own part.
There can be no greater betrayal of a mother
of her son than to frame him in that way
in order to exculpate herself.
It was a story she stuck to in court,
where a jury was asked to review the evidence.
Shane Edge gave evidence and denied
that he had been involved.
Lance Rudge chose not to give any evidence to the jury.
But having heard all the evidence,
the jury deliberated for some
significant period of time.
And at the end of it,
all the defendants were convicted.
There was a clear, compelling,
logical inference that all of them were involved
in what had been a ruthless plan to execute
the unfortunate Greg Baker for money.
Purchase had Promised her son and his friend
8,000 pounds to kill Greg,
money they never received because Purchase herself
did not inherit what Greg had left her in his will.
Instead, as she sat in the car outside his house,
the two teenage young men had killed Greg
for a share of 500 pounds.
I was just sitting on the bed
and the rain was just falling down the window outside.
And I thought it was just like,
just almost like God crying.
But I know that's just a simile,
but it was just like the tears of my heart crying
for justice for Greg,
for all the injustice that had gone on
and the manipulation that had gone on
against his generosity and kindness.
And I was just so upset about all that.
And, you know, he would have forgiven Yvonne.
We know he would have forgiven Yvonne.
The court also heard of the contract
that Thelma Purchase had taken out
on her former partner, Kelvin Amos.
The first time he'd heard about that
was just a few weeks before the case.
I had two police officers knocking on my door
and they were asking, do I own a black car?
Well, at the time I did.
And that's when he started saying
that it was trying to get somebody
to knock me off or something.
So yeah, that was a bit of a shock.
Thelma Purchase was a lover to Kelvin Amos
and almost certainly a lover to Greg Baker.
One she had tried to kill.
The other, she had killed,
co-opting two young men for the task.
She was convicted of murder in 2008.
She will serve a minimum term of 30 years.
Shane Edge received a life sentence
with a minimum term of 20 years.
Lance Rudge was also given a life sentence
with a minimum term of 18 years.