Since I joined the police and became a detective,
I wanted to investigate murders.
I'm motivated by results.
I'm motivated by the need to give people answers.
I was the covering SIO for the weekend
and I was awoken to a text message.
There's a murder in Ormskirk.
There'd been a largescale fight.
At least a dozen people involved.
A passing police vehicle had arrived really, really quickly
and everybody ran off in different directions.
Some of this group had made off onto Moorgate...
...where one of them collapsed.
He was bleeding profusely from an injury to his head.
He'd also had a stab wound to his chest.
He was beginning to struggle with his breathing.
Officers arrived and tried to comfort him,
keep him warm and calm and stem the flow of the bleeding.
There was another two males.
They could see that one of these males...
...had a stab wound to his back.
They indicated they were friends of the male on the floor
and that he lived with his family locally.
It was a Friday night. We were in bed and I get a call.
They say we've got to get to the hospital.
Matthew's been hurt.
I had to have a double take.
I didn't understand what was going on,
because I was still half asleep.
We were running round like lunatics.
I wonder what's happened, you know, what,
what's happened to him? Has he been in a car accident?
What's happened?
We arrive at the hospital.
They take us to a room.
We're sitting there and we're,
just waiting and next thing, a doctor and two,
maybe three nurses come in.
They tell us that Matthew's gone.
Matthew had died.
Complete devastation.
He was really loving.
He was really affectionate.
I knew Matthew loved me...
Sorry.
All I wanted to do was just cuddle him. I just wanted to have a hug.
Couldn't touch him,
I couldn't hold him
because a police investigation was under way.
I need to get my head round this
to understand what's happened
and how we're going to progress this investigation.
Really, really, really chaotic first few hours.
It is just,
to get in the zone
and to remain calm, to remain methodical.
He seemed to be an ordinary, everyday lad
and there didn't seem to really be any motive
behind what happened to him.
Who has murdered this young person?
Who's done this?
We were shown straight away
the CCTV that had been recovered overnight.
I watch it. It was very brief.
Really chaotic and confusing.
Very difficult to decipher who was who.
The camera that actually records that
is over 100 metres away.
It isn't really of ID quality when you look at it on its own.
That footage, it's utter chaos.
Who are them 13 people?
The killer is within that CCTV.
It's about identifying which person is responsible.
Two of Matthew's friends had been arrested on suspicion
of affray, which is a public order offence.
It was clear to the officers they had been involved.
One of these males had a stab wound to his back,
clearly sustained during the incident.
But they weren't talking to us.
They weren't telling us anything.
They weren't telling us what was going on.
I was in bed, half asleep,
when I got the call from the boss, saying,
"There's a really, really tricky job."
The first thing that I ask is, "Where are the phones?"
We identified Matthew's phone.
Getting into this phone would give us
a better idea of who is involved and who's responsible.
Police have software that allows us to get access to a phone.
But on this occasion,
we've not been able to get into that phone
and the family didn't know the PIN.
We just couldn't get into it.
With no phones, we had to focus our attention on the CCTV.
My main objective is to find out who killed Matthew,
but in doing that,
I need to understand what had been going on that night.
There's an old saying in the police that burglars can't fly.
People just don't parachute into the middle of nowhere
and then beam me out.
So we start with piecing it together, frame by frame.
There's various fights going on,
there's various people interacting with each other.
There's a male with a blue jacket.
He's fighting in the middle of the street.
You could see a coat flying around.
You can see almost a jousting movement,
and you can also see Matthew put a hand to his chest.
A second person comes running in.
You could see the weapon in his hand.
Clearly, he was going to be a suspect,
but the male in the blue jacket stood out to me.
I could see that he was central to everything.
Internally, you're worried that this is going to be really difficult
to solve and the pressure is on.
It's usually important to go to the scene location,
to gain an understanding of what it's like.
To speak directly to the people
that are processing that scene.
I'm keen to impart on them the pace and urgency,
the standards that's required.
I've never been to Ormskirk before.
Quiet.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nestled between Merseyside and Lancashire.
It was really unusual to have a case in Ormskirk,
particularly a murder.
We can see where the incident took place.
How close that is to the local bars and restaurants, shops.
It's a little bit eerie
because it's all closed off with the police tape.
I always try and put myself in the mind of the person that's been there
and what would I do if I was in their shoes
after that violent altercation?
The crime scene investigators through the night had put
a number of markers next to things
that were considered to be important.
I could see a sports sock lying in the road,
well, just off the pavement.
I could see that there was a trail of blood
leading away from Railway Road, in the direction
of where Matthew Daulby was later found collapsed.
I receive a call whilst I'm actually at the scene,
that tells me that a member of the public had reported seeing
a knife not far from the scene itself.
She had got out of her car and gone to work and noticed
a knife practically in the middle of this small yard.
It was described as a small knife with the blade still extended.
It's not hidden in any way.
It's just in the middle of a path.
It has to be then forensically recovered.
We couldn't jump to conclusions that
that knife had been involved, because it may not have been.
I didn't know how many weapons had been involved.
But equally, there's the glimmer of hope.
It's an urgent priority to identify all the people
that are present at that scene.
I utilise Open Source to see what's being said
in the community,
to see if there is any information that is being discussed.
Open Source is a tactic that the police use
and it pretty much is monitoring social media accounts.
The reason why it's called Open Source is
because it's open to the public.
We were monitoring as much as possible any press releases
and any comments under those press releases.
We do press appeals.
We publicise it in social media.
They often can provide us with clues,
sometimes evidence, sometimes witnesses.
We're starting to see a couple of names appearing
from a variety of different sources.
They are known to the police.
Thomas Dures and Henry Houghton.
Getting those names is a big step in the inquiry,
but we don't know if they really are anything to do
with what's happened.
I'm a great believer in, there is always a camera watching you.
Now, from the moment you leave your front door.
The beginning of the investigation, there are hundreds of hours
of CCTV that has been collated.
While I'm reviewing the CCTV,
I'm working very closely with Kristina
and what Kristina's giving me is information on people's whereabouts.
Focused on Thomas Dures.
Where does he go? Who does he interact with?
We know what phone Thomas Dures is using.
We're able to track that from his cell side.
We can see his incoming calls.
We have been able to match the call data to the CCTV.
So, I've access to some quite detailed mapping software.
One of the first things I do
is to map where each location has a CCTV camera
and then overlay that with what we've actually seized.
I'm able to review the CCTV and show that Thomas Dures
and Henry Houghton had met in a nearby alleyway.
I'm able then to track them on CCTV to a bar round the corner.
They leave, they go back to Railway Road.
And that bar is literally metres from the scene of the stabbing.
That CCTV footage gave us an excellent image
of Thomas Dures and Henry Houghton.
Thomas Dures was wearing a really distinctive blue jacket,
which is very similar to the blue jacket worn by the person
in the centre of the incident.
Given the fact that more than one source of information
has told us that these people are responsible
and given that they match the description
of the people that are involved,
took the decision to raise them as suspects
for the murder of Matthew Daulby.
They are now wanted.
We know that we need to get Henry Houghton
and Thomas Dures into custody.
And so we dispatch the team to go and arrest them.
Get that nervous feeling, are they going to be there?
Are they destroying evidence?
Are they getting rid of weapons, are they getting rid of phones?
In the early hours of the morning,
officers attended at the home address of Henry Houghton
and Thomas Dures in order to arrest them
and to execute search warrants.
Neither Thomas Dures nor Henry Houghton were at home.
The next day, we were contacting their friends,
family, knocking on doors,
and putting officers on the street to try and find them,
to try and see where they are.
Who was helping them?
Where were they hiding?
I naturally worry about how difficult it will be to find them.
And then out of the blue,
Henry Houghton walks into a local convenience store
and tells the shopkeeper that he is wanted.
Henry Houghton is arrested on suspicion of murder.
His behaviour is challenging.
He is under the influence of drugs.
He has damaged a police cell.
He has been violent and abusive to the custody staff.
We're entitled to keep someone in police custody
for 24 hours in the initial period,
with a further 12 hours with a superintendent's authority.
That time goes extremely quickly.
We have to be mindful of what we tell Henry Houghton.
A lot of careful decisions have to be made
around what we're disclosing and when.
But it's important that we ask Henry Houghton around his movements,
what he did, who he was with.
He has been interviewed on more than one occasion
and remains silent.
We were very much towards the back end of the clock
that we're entitled to.
I'm running out of time.
We get the result from the postmortem.
The cause of death was a single stab wound to the chest
which had perforated Matthew's heart,
but the pathologist also documented other injuries.
A laceration to the left-hand side of his head,
which would be disorientating
and consistent with having been struck by a makeshift weapon.
It wasn't until his very last interview with very, very little
time left on the custody clock, that he began to talk.
He places himself at the scene.
He says he removes his sock, selects a stone,
places it in, and uses it as a weapon to hit somebody
and that he's acting in the defence of a friend.
It had to be considered that this was part of Matthew's murder.
The forensic results on the sock reveals two DNA profiles.
On one end of the sock,
we get the DNA that matches Matthew Daulby,
and on the other end of the sock,
we get DNA that matches Henry Houghton.
That was the icing on the cake
and we knew that we had sealed the case for Henry Houghton.
We got the authority from the Crown Prosecution Service
to charge Henry Houghton with the offence
in the murder of Matthew Daulby.
However, that is not the end of the investigation
and the search for Thomas Dures continues.
He really is our priority.
On the face of it, he has just disappeared.
There is no trace of him whatsoever.
Digital is rightfully important to any investigation.
For a homicide investigation, it gives us
an array of investigative opportunities in terms
of someone's movements, who they're communicating with,
what they're looking at.
We can identify that it's Thomas Dures on CCTV.
After the fight, it shows Thomas Dures running off,
and I'm able to watch further footage,
shows him running down St Helens Road.
He arrives into a park area known locally as Triangle Park.
The next time we see him after Triangle Park,
he's discarded the jacket.
He's no longer wearing the blue jacket.
That critical piece of evidence,
that jacket, could contain Matthew Daulby's DNA.
But we can't find it.
We can't find it anywhere and we've searched high and low.
So, now my CCTV review objectives change.
I'm tracking a lad with a black Boss T-shirt on.
I'm able to then track him back to the scene,
tracking past some of the pubs
that he'd been in earlier on in the night,
but more importantly, I can track him to the Stiles car park
where the weapon was found.
We had Thomas Dures to the south side,
walking after the incident
and we can see on CCTV that he's on the phone.
We were tracking his movements.
It took us towards the graveyard.
Kristina can show who he's on the phone to at the time.
I overlay that with my CCTV.
And actually, that CCTV camera has audio.
I can hear him saying, "Somebody's been stabbed up."
This is moments after the incident had occurred.
From his mobile data,
we know that he's moving towards his home address.
Once he gets to his home address,
we can see that he's using Snapchat.
He is logging in and out.
The picture's of him,
but it's quite blurry and there's a bit of blood on him.
He then uses a different phone to log into his Snapchat account.
We believe that is because he's trying to evade police.
He's consistently using an iPhone 7 at the time.
He then starts to use an iPhone 6.
But after that, it all goes dark.
We can't find him anywhere. Nobody knows where he is.
This will not finish until he is brought to justice.
What would lead somebody to use that level of violence?
There must be a reason, there must be a back story.
We have two friends of the victim in custody,
but they weren't talking to us.
They're not telling us who's murdered their friend.
But one of Matthew's friends who'd been arrested on the night,
he was searched and he had car keys on him.
Ormskirk town centre was searched and a black Audi Q5 was located.
The vehicle was searched
and within that vehicle, there were a number of mobile phones.
We found two phones
and they belonged to two of Matthew's friends.
Because one of those friends had been arrested,
they'd never gone back to that car
and they'd never had the opportunity to destroy any of the evidence,
to delete any of the messages
and so these were two phones that had never been touched
since the incident.
I'm champing at the bit
to understand what's on these phones,
and that a digital media investigator could go through
the data and could hopefully tell me what on earth has happened.
Unfortunately, these phones are PIN locked,
so at the beginning,
I'm thinking am I going to be able to get into these phones?
We cracked the code.
As soon as I opened that phone,
I can see there the activities on the night,
and immediately I'm drawn into it
because there's quite a lot of messages.
There's a lot of activity there.
Brilliant for us.
I find a Snapchat group that Matthew Daulby's part of.
It seems to be a lot of friends that are just chatting
about normal stuff.
Going out, having fun,
anything that anybody would see on a normal group chat.
On the 28th in the evening,
I can see that one of Matthew's friends gets assaulted.
Following the assault, this male had posted a video,
a series of videos, onto the group...
...which told the story of how he'd been assaulted by Thomas Dures.
That led to some angry comment from the group.
And you can see that the tension is rising.
People are talking about going to Ormskirk
and almost avenging their friend.
You can see that Matthew Daulby is participating in this group chat,
so he's active.
It was clear that their intention was to travel to Ormskirk
to sort it out.
The mood of that group changes
and they go from a group of lads who are enjoying a night out,
to a group of lads who almost become vigilantes.
They're coming to Ormskirk for a reason.
Matthew Daulby has his girlfriend there,
so his girlfriend's saying, "Don't go, I don't want you to go."
And you can see that Matthew's torn,
and on CCTV, he comes backwards and forwards.
Doesn't really want to leave her, although he does in the end
and it's a really sad moment.
That is probably him walking to his death.
Pack mentality kicked in.
A large group of up to ten then travelled from
the Maghull area into Ormskirk
and that was the group that Matthew was part of.
They park on the outskirts of town
and a group of ten lads, they walk up the street.
They walk straight towards Railway Road.
They stopped,
there was interaction with a male and whilst they were talking,
their attention was drawn to this male.
Thomas Dures approached them from behind.
Before any fighting started,
Matthew was hit on the head with a rock in a sock
and then fatally stabbed.
Matthew didn't fight anyone before he was attacked.
The Snapchat message confirms as to why this group,
including Matthew,
had arranged to come down to Ormskirk.
They were clearly angry.
There was mention of Thomas Dures assaulting
one of their friends.
Again, placing Thomas Dures in Ormskirk town centre
at or around the time of the murder.
Thomas Dures' phone was used
a few days after Matthew Daulby's death,
but after that, it all goes dark.
Thomas Dures is nowhere to be found.
We still don't understand where he's gone
and it was really frustrating.
Somebody that is so young,
I imagine that they are spending a lot of their time on the phone.
We're trying to find Netflix, Amazon, UberEATS,
Deliveroo or anything that anybody in their 20s would be using.
We looked at Thomas' bank accounts
to see whether they had been used anywhere that we could trace.
Maybe it would be an online transaction.
If that transaction was then linked to a phone number
that he might be using,
or an email address, or social media handle,
and that would give us a clue as to where he was.
But his bank accounts hadn't been used since the day of the murder.
We couldn't identify the digital footprint
for Thomas Dures at all.
The weeks and months had passed.
The traditional means that we would utilise
to find someone had been fruitless.
He was still at large.
We get the results back around the DNA testing on the knife,
and there's a mixed profile from the blade.
A mixed profile would be explainable because that knife had been used
to stab different people,
so you would expect to have four or five different profiles
contained within it.
Thomas Dures had sustained a bleeding injury from his nose.
On the CCTV,
you could se him wiping his nose with his hand.
It was reasonable to conclude that some of the DNA profile
may indeed belong to Thomas Dures.
However, Thomas Dures' DNA profile was not contained within
the National DNA Database.
We don't know where Thomas Dures is.
We can't find him, so we obtain a warrant,
we go to Thomas Dures' house
and we seize a number of items that we believe will have
Thomas Dures' DNA on.
So, we get an inhaler that he uses
and a retainer, and we load them up to the database
and there's a hit.
We were confidently able to say that Thomas Dures' DNA
was on the handle of the knife.
The next consideration was,
had that knife been used to stab anybody?
And you would naturally consider that Matthew Daulby's DNA
should be on the blade of that knife.
But the initial testing showed that there was no forensic link
between that knife and Matthew.
How could it be that if that knife had been used,
there was no forensic trace?
We need to maximise our evidential opportunities.
So, I was aware from the CCTV that Thomas Dures was on that evening
wearing a really distinctive blue jacket.
And we also knew from the CCTV that he had discarded it
at some point during the evening.
This jacket is really significant.
He's wearing it when he stabs Matthew.
It could contain Matthew's DNA.
It could provide us
with that vital evidence that would convict Thomas Dures,
but we can't find it.
We're a month into the investigation.
I go on a family holiday.
I'm laying on my sun lounger when I receive a call.
This gentleman who was out walking his dog had found
a blue jacket.
He'd retained it at his house for a month.
This jacket was forensically recovered.
There was blood on the sleeve of the jacket.
That blood belonged to Matthew Daulby.
Significantly, the forensic scientist was able
to interpret that staining
to show that it was airborne blood,
which indicated that the wearer of that jacket
had been in close proximity to Matthew Daulby
at the point he was bleeding.
But we can't understand,
why is Matthew's blood not on this knife?
Matthew's friend who was arrested had been stabbed last.
We asked the forensic scientists to consider examining
the area around the stab cut.
The clothing may act as a cleaning tool
and the results that came back showed that
Matthew's DNA was indeed recovered.
The weapon had been wiped clean as it had gone into the next victim.
The same knife had been used to stab Matthew
and then his friend.
That same knife,
there was a forensic link with Thomas Dures.
It's a significant moment and naturally, we're really pleased.
The significance of that DNA is understood.
And is supportive of other forensics.
And the CCTV evidence
that Thomas Dures had stabbed Matthew Daulby.
So, provides the incident room with a real lift.
We've got the right person.
But I don't know where he is.
It's so upsetting
because you know the person that murdered your son,
who inflicted the knife wound to your son, is fleeing.
We are grieving, trying to grieve.
All we wanted for our son was get justice.
And you're just waiting for him
to either hand himself in, or police to find him.
This man was at large.
This man was wanted on suspicion of a murder.
As the days and weeks passed by,
we had to face the prospect that Thomas Dures
had actually fled the country.
Months have passed.
Got no significant leads,
in relation to where Thomas Dures may be.
It's clear that it's now time to change tactic
and consider other ways of identifying where he is.
We can try something different,
in terms of how we're managing the media.
CRIMEWATCH THEME PLAYS
What this family has been through is utterly devastating.
Somebody knows where Thomas Dures is.
Please do the right thing.
We were able to utilise an interview that had been conducted
with Matthew's parents, Gary and Angela,
to really publicise the devastation,
and how things had impacted upon them.
For them, on a personal level,
to appeal to Thomas Dures directly
and anybody who may know where he was.
To really provide a human story
around how this had impacted them.
As private people, that was something that, you know,
we really didn't want to do,
but we felt like we had no choice,
because, you know, we needed to find him,
and we needed to bring him to justice.
Please, please help us get justice for Matthew.
That's the last thing we can do for him now.
We made that decision to go on TV,
to speak to the press,
and to try and do our part i-in capturing...
And helping the police.
...in helping the police capture Thomas Dures.
Within a few weeks, I'm starting to receive information that
Thomas Dures may have been hiding in Europe.
With the assistance of the National Crime Agency,
Interpol, Crimestoppers,
we launched a cohesive media strategy
to get his face plastered
all over the Internet.
We turned to social media to really target certain areas
where we thought he may be.
The power of social media today
is that there is no limit to the reach that it has.
This is now a 20, 21-year-old.
They're on social media all the time.
And by targeting the social media,
we're inadvertently targeting his age group.
And Thomas Dures would have had to live his life.
Couldn't hole himself up in a house for 12, 18 months.
He would've had to go about his daily business.
The objective was to make life as uncomfortable as we possibly could
for a man on the run,
and that social media would've made him extremely uncomfortable.
He was trying to hide from people,
he was trying to hide from the police.
You must be continuously looking over your shoulder.
At times, it felt like we were not getting anywhere,
because it was so difficult for us to identify any links
to Thomas Dures.
We needed to smoke him out,
make him do something different.
Really, really wrench up the pressure.
We are trying constantly to identify a new social media profile,
a number that he's using, because we are trying to find him.
Even on my social media platforms,
I was seeing the appeal coming back from people
in different countries.
Some of the areas that we targeted
were traditional tourist spots for UK travellers.
He would never be able to be settled, confident, relaxed.
How is he living his life in somewhere where he didn't know?
I need to keep the investigation moving.
I need to keep driving it forward.
We're the police.
We can never give up,
and I have to maximise the pressure
to bring Thomas Dures out of his current hiding location.
I was driving home from work and...
...I get a call from DCI Fallows.
He said, "I'm coming to see you."
He said, "We've got him.
"H-He's given himself up.
"I'll start the extradition and get him back.
"You'll be able to get the justice you want now."
For the best part of 18 months,
me and my team have been looking for Thomas Dures.
I was told that he'd handed himself in,
in a police station in Athens.
I almost didn't believe it.
Yeah?
This didn't need to happen.
It was bravado gone wrong.
Because of the pack mentality,
because of social media,
that Matthew's group of friends riled themselves up...
...leading to such terrible consequences.
But the obvious thing is,
why was Thomas Dures carrying a knife?
Didn't need to.
And time and time, and time again,
we are finding young men committing grave crimes
simply because they're in possession of a knife.
What an utter waste of life,
and it's impacted on so many people.
The Daulby family will never be the same again.
It's senseless.
A parent shouldn't bury their child.
It's not how it should be.
And that yearning to just hug Matthew
and just have one last conversation with him...
...or just hear him say that he loved you again,
so I could tell him... it's really difficult.
The night that Matthew went to Ormskirk, he hesitated,
so it was very much like a sliding doors moment.
I-I wish I could...
I could go back in time and...
...and try and guide them in some way,
to make better decisions.
The Matthew Daulby Foundation is there to educate young people
on the dangers of violent altercations
and knife crime.
So, we've decided as a family to launch a project
about immersive reasoning.
To get them to think about the decisions they're making,
and the consequences.
And this will be aimed at Year 8s in every senior school.
It could happen to anybody.
If we can prevent one more family
going through what we've been through,
it will be worth it.
Matthew was kind, funny, loving.
He would've been a really good person
for the world to have.
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