‘What an embarrassment’: 24 Hours in Police Custody viewers left ‘raging’ by brutal ‘heartbreaking’ murdered pensioner case
'I am astounded'
24 Hours in Police Custody viewers have been left “gobsmacked” by the show’s return, with new episodes focusing on Una Crown, an elderly woman who was stabbed, set on fire, and killed.
The new two-part Channel 4 documentary, The Cold Case Murder, takes a deep dive into Crown’s murder. She died in 2013, at the age of 86, and police initially treated her death as non-suspicious.
However, Detective Superintendent Iain Moor and the Major Crime Unit later reopened the case, discovering “flawed decisions” in the original investigation.
This eventually led officers to her killer. However, viewers have been struggling to look past the police’s decisions in the immediate wake of Crown’s murder.
Why 24 Hours in Police Custody viewers are “confused” by Una Crown case
Officers found Crown face down, surrounded by blood, with severe stab wounds and burns on her body.
As the documentary explains, investigators reopened the case to use new technology and scientific techniques to find Crown’s killer. So, why couldn’t they find him in the first place?
“There were some failings around the attendance of the original officers over the first couple of days. There were no obvious signs of a disturbance and the initial assessment concluded that it would be treated as a normal sudden death,” an officer tells his colleagues.
We get even more detail from Mark Cossey, one of the officers who attended the scene.
Don't miss a single story! Add us as a Preferred Source in Google for all your television news
They believed her cooker was faulty, which led to her clothing catching fire. As she tried to put it out, they believed she panicked and suffered from heart failure, and was dead “before she hit the floor”.
What about the stab wounds? “We thought what had happened was, she was wearing a neckerchief and it was knotted quite tightly,” he explained.
“If it is heart failure and she’s just gone straight down… she’s 86, she’s very frail. The skin would be tight, the neckerchief would cause this injury to the throat.”
The first episode also includes an interview with Karl Bowden, an assistant chief fire officer who was also involved in the investigation.
Bowden believed it would have immediately been treated as a crime scene. He also disagreed with the police officers’ theory about Crown’s death, arguing that it looked like a deliberate fire and was “textbook arson”.
‘They should be sacked’
While Crown’s killer has since been found, charged, and put behind bars, the mistakes of the initial investigation have angered viewers.
“What an embarrassment for the police first on scene!!! That guy should be ashamed of himself,” one user wrote on social media.
“How can such a vast error be made?” another viewer asked. “This episode has me and my mum raging, I hope the officer never worked homicide again,” a third commented.
“Not a great advert for encouraging people to have trust and faith in the police. How did the idiots who investigated the case in 2013 and their superiors get away with not treating it as an obvious murder case and sacked for gross incompetence,” a fourth complained.
“I am astounded. Inept and incompetent. They should be sacked,” a fifth wrote.
Cossey appears later in the first episode. “I do think about it often,” he said, expressing regret and hope that the culprit would be found.
Moor also admitted “mistakes were made” and said Cambridgeshire Police had apologised to her family.
“Once again, we acknowledge those errors and apologise it has taken this long for Una’s family to get justice,” he added.
