3 years ? ago. Scotland. Cyclist went missing. Anyone familiar with this ?

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Slick

Guru
The brother was convicted of murder and sexual assault yesterday.

Ah apologies, last I saw the judge was still summing up and I'm travelling again this week. What about the other weirdo, did they convict him?
 

Drago

Legendary Member
I don’t know the details of how they did it but the police deserve appreciation for persevering with what must have been a very difficult investigation.

I would guess the start came with ANPR data, a lot of laborious cross referencing, and much coffee.

Unless you're on the moon anyone using a car during the commission of a crime won't get very far without pinging something, particularly if they're daft enough to use the real plates and the car is registered t the offender. If you know the area and the time frame it's just a case of sweating it. I say "just", but the effort involved is immense.
 

glasgowcyclist

Charming but somewhat feckless
Location
Scotland
Ah apologies, last I saw the judge was still summing up and I'm travelling again this week. What about the other weirdo, did they convict him?



Yes, guilty of interfering with Amber’s body. The judge told him, "You came across a young girl who had been strangled to death and was naked. Instead of alerting the authorities, you handled her body and your DNA told the story. Be under no illusion what is also coming your way."

Edited to correct a BBC typo! (altering/alerting)
 
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I would guess the start came with ANPR data, a lot of laborious cross referencing, and much coffee.

Unless you're on the moon anyone using a car during the commission of a crime won't get very far without pinging something, particularly if they're daft enough to use the real plates and the car is registered t the offender. If you know the area and the time frame it's just a case of sweating it. I say "just", but the effort involved is immense.

Apparently there's a few hundred ANPR cameras in Scotland.

There's thousands in England.

So it's possible they didn't ping any cameras in this case ?
 

glasgowcyclist

Charming but somewhat feckless
Location
Scotland
I would guess the start came with ANPR data, a lot of laborious cross referencing, and much coffee.

Unless you're on the moon anyone using a car during the commission of a crime won't get very far without pinging something, particularly if they're daft enough to use the real plates and the car is registered t the offender. If you know the area and the time frame it's just a case of sweating it. I say "just", but the effort involved is immense.

I know the road and the area well, it is mostly farms and countryside and not well covered by CCTV or ANPR.

The only ANPR I know of is beyond the collision site at edge of Tyndrum as you head for Crianlarich. There’s average speed cameras only between those two points on the A82. In the 44 miles between Fort William and the locus there are just two petrol stations, one of which recorded the cyclist passing in Glencoe village, with the usual grainy CCTV.

I know these cases turn on a lot of hard detective work, and often the stupidity of most culprits, but I’m still impressed with not only the identification of the accused but the conviction.
 

T4tomo

Legendary Member
I don’t know the details of how they did it but the police deserve appreciation for persevering with what must have been a very difficult investigation.

Well the body was found 3/4 years later wasn't it, which is normally as a result of a tip off to the police, not continuous arduous investigative work..

Police probably had suspicions all along but its hard to bring a murder / homicide etc charge with no body....once they found the body they pretty much immediately arrested the pair of them.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
Apparently there's a few hundred ANPR cameras in Scotland.

There's thousands in England.

So it's possible they didn't ping any cameras in this case ?

I really don't know. Its possible they didn't ping, but with no known witnesses (none appeared in court to give such evidence), and I presume they weren't daft enougn to leave their wallet at the scene (though it happens!), or other avenues of investigation I would speculate through my own knowledge of such investigations that there was ping somewhere.

Even leaving aside actual dedicated ANPR cameras, simple video footage from regular CCTV, typically carncil footage, can either be used live or fed through ANPR retrospectively through a system called BOF, and they'd have been like worker ants identifying and seizing such footage. Incident rooms are generally dealing with laborious stuff writ large and hoping for a break. They'll seize tens of thousands of hours of footage and watch it manually and feed it through BOF.
 

glasgowcyclist

Charming but somewhat feckless
Location
Scotland
Well the body was found 3/4 years later wasn't it, which is normally as a result of a tip off to the police, not continuous arduous investigative work..

Police probably had suspicions all along but its hard to bring a murder / homicide etc charge with no body....once they found the body they pretty much immediately arrested the pair of them.

The police will still have collated as much evidence as possible, interviewed drivers, farmers, businesses along the route, gathered cctv footage, telephone records and so on. I doubt they sat on their arses for three years and then scrabbled about looking for evidence in retrospect, as by then it would already have been lost.

Suspicions are easy but establishing sufficient evidence for a conviction is a damn sight different.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
Yeah, I've done a few incident rooms over the years and the volume of info coming in can be immense.

Sometimes a case might break after 2 or 3 years because of the sheer volume of material gathered and it simply took that long to work their way though to it.

The nugget that made the case might have been collected early on, but with nothing to indicate the best line of enquiry you have to plug through it laboriously an item at a time and that take an age. I've spent 3 weeks in a room watching CCTV with two other officers and we didnt make a dent in it between us. A single Ring doorbell produces three officer-shifts of footage every single day all on its own, a mere two days is more than a weeks viewing for a single officer. Even when I retired in 2017 the prevalence of digital home CCTV meant a single street can easily produce more footage than an officer can view in a year of 40 hour weeks...
 
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glasgowcyclist

Charming but somewhat feckless
Location
Scotland
Yeah, I've done a few incident rooms over the years and the volume of info coming in can be immense.

Sometimes a case might break after 2 or 3 years because of the sheer volume of material gathered and it simply took that long to work their way though to it.

The nugget that made the case might have been collected early on, but with nothing to indicate the best line of enquiry you have to plug through it laboriously an item at a time and that take an age. I've spent 3 weeks in a room watching CCTV with two other officers and we didnt make a dent in it between us. A single Ring doorbell produces three officer-shifts of footage every single day all on its own, a mere two days is more than a weeks viewing for a single officer. Even when I retired in 2017 the prevalence of digital home CCTV meant a single street can easily produce more footage than an officer can view in a year of 40 hour weeks...

I’ve seen a suggestion on social media that one of the accused confessed to his fiancée who (good on her) went straight to the police. This may have been the catalyst in December 2021 that led to the discovery of Mr Parson’s body.

This part 👇 of the report of the trial must have been horrific for the victim’s family. It shows that Mr Parsons wasn’t killed immediately in the collision but remained badly injured until the two accused dragged him and his bike into another vehicle before abandoning him to die in some remote spot where he’d never be found in time.

There’s a level of callousness here that I hope is punished severely at sentencing.

Knowing Mr Parsons was then badly hurt, he failed to get any medical help for the victim in what was described as “reckless disregard for the consequences” of his actions.
The cyclist was said to have been abandoned at the side of the road in the dark and remote area in “inclement weather”.
 

Drago

Legendary Member
Aye, nothing like a bit of insider knowledge to speed things along. Such a confession itself would be heresy, but the information therein may indeed have been sufficient to find something evidential and then it all unravels from there.

Either way, a horrible thing to do.to.anotjer human being.
 

brommieinkorea

Well-Known Member
I’ve seen a suggestion on social media that one of the accused confessed to his fiancée who (good on her) went straight to the police. This may have been the catalyst in December 2021 that led to the discovery of Mr Parson’s body.

This part 👇 of the report of the trial must have been horrific for the victim’s family. It shows that Mr Parsons wasn’t killed immediately in the collision but remained badly injured until the two accused dragged him and his bike into another vehicle before abandoning him to die in some remote spot where he’d never be found in time.

There’s a level of callousness here that I hope is punished severely at sentencing.

Knowing Mr Parsons was then badly hurt, he failed to get any medical help for the victim in what was described as “reckless disregard for the consequences” of his actions.
The cyclist was said to have been abandoned at the side of the road in the dark and remote area in “inclement weather”.

This makes it murder. Sad that they get away with it because the injury was caused by car, and they copped to some much lesser crime.
 
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