Murder Case: The Digital Detectives, review: a horrifying window into Britain’s knife-crime epidemic
You will struggle to find a more depressing window into life in Britain than this week’s episode of Murder Case: The Digital Detectives (Channel 4). A 17-year-old boy, Lyrico Steede, died on a stranger’s doorstep in Nottingham. He had been chased there and stabbed 18 times, including six knife wounds to the face.
This series, which covers a different case each week, sets out to show how digital technology is crucial in solving crimes. Here, it was mobile phone data which helped to identify the killers and track their movements. One of the gang members switched off his phone shortly before the attack, believing that would prevent police from placing him at the scene. But, as the senior investigating officer pointed out, someone who has not switched their phone off for years but does so only in the minutes surrounding a murder is giving himself away.
Why was Steede killed? A rivalry between young men from different postcodes, escalated via drill videos in which masked gang members rapped about their victim getting “Rambo’d”. One of the investigators summed it up: “These weren’t organised gangsters. They were kids who wanted to pretend to be gangsters.” It is both horrific and pathetic.
CCTV also played a key role in the investigation. The teenage girl who had lured Steede to the park, where he was confronted by his killers, was caught on a bus camera hiding from passing police cars, and clearly holding the iPad she falsely claimed had been stolen by the attackers.
And, despite the digital selling point of this series, the key evidence in the case came from old-fashioned methods: public appeals prompted people to come forward with names of the suspects. A taxi driver handed in a phone that one of the killers had left in his cab. Really, the title of this series is a red herring, designed to make it stand out – it’s a standard police investigation, and the documentary is a solid, no-frills account.
Steede had only been in the UK for three years. His mother moved him here from Bermuda because she thought he would have better opportunities. She hoped he would go to university. The poor woman now spends her time campaigning against knife crime, telling people what it’s like to be the mother of a murdered child.
