WOMAN ON PHONE: Hello? Police Emergency. What's your emergency?
(KNOCKING)
Is it possible to get away with murder?
What does a killer do
after committing the most heinous of crimes?
It's absolutely horrific.
The murderer spent so much time in the address.
Do they carry on as normal
and hide in plain sight?
Or go on the run?
WOMAN: Forensics officers
were continuing to examine the house and nearby area.
How do the actions of a killer, after their crime,
influence the police investigation.
The offender could cover their tracks.
His intention was to destroy the crime scene.
By focusing on the aftermath,
we unpick the mindset of a killer...
..understand the motive
and reveal
what the killer did next.
(BIRDS CHIRP)
79-year-old Norma Bell
set up home with husband John in this red-brick terrace house 30 years ago.
After his death in 2010, she remained in the home
where she'd raised her three children and cared for many others.
She'd fostered 50 children
over the time that her and her husband, John, were foster parents.
So she was a remarkable woman who looked after all these kids
and gave them the best start that she could in life.
Norma and her husband, John, bought the house after we moved in.
Met some of her kids then, was friends with her kids,
still friends with some of them now.
She was just always pleasant.
Didn't mess about with her.
She was firm but fair
and just genuinely a lovely lady.
Norma was well liked in the community
and known as someone who always had time for a friendly chat
and would open her door to anyone.
But it seemed this friendliness
would ultimately lead to Norma's untimely and horrific death.
What shocked the community the most
was that it actually happened on their doorstep
to somebody who they all knew, somebody they loved.
This was the day PCSO Graeme Handley
decided to do his rounds of neighbour visits to residents in the community.
Hello! You alright?
On the Saturday morning, when I got up to Norma's address here,
her relatives were just pulling up in a car outside.
Told me, "Well, can you have a word with me mam?
She always leaves the door open behind her.
She always opens it to people,"
at which point Norma's come to the door.
I've had a conversation with her regarding,
"Don't leave your door open, don't answer it to strangers.
Make sure you know who they are before you open the door."
But it appears Norma didn't heed the warning.
(SIREN WAILS)
Natalie Wing from Cleveland Police was just starting her shift.
On Sunday 3 April 2016,
I was at work
and got a call to say that there'd been a report of a fire
at an address in Hartlepool.
So at that point, my team made our way to the scene.
(SIREN WAILS)
Emergency services respond to the call
and head to the home of 79-year-old Norma Bell.
But it seems as though the first responders are, on this occasion,
a little too late.
They found a deceased female in the address, who'd been brought outside.
It was made clear to me at that time that that was a suspicious fire,
as the female had a ligature tied around her neck.
Norma was dead before the fire started.
A fire started,
a woman's body found,
a ligature around her neck.
This isn't an accident - this is a murder.
The news filters through the community.
WOMAN: Police have revealed
that an elderly woman discovered in a Hartlepool house fire
had been murdered.
The victim has been named as 79-year-old Norma Bell.
It's such a horrific crime.
It's not the sort of thing that we cover all the time, by any means.
It was a really rare event.
An investigation begins and immediately, police have a clue.
Norma's trousers had been pulled down
and her tights and her knickers had been sort of cut from her...
from her naval, sort of, down to her crutch.
Was there a sexual motive to this murder?
The discovery sends shockwaves through the community.
Personally, I'd describe it as horrific.
How anybody could do something like that to a little old lady,
somebody's grandmother, is beyond me, to be honest.
The murder investigation gathers pace.
The golden hour of opportunity
for police to collect vital evidence begins.
But a killer is still free.
Are they living a normal life?
Are they covering their tracks?
Or are they panicking as the net closes in around them?
What does a killer do next?
You're doing the investigation to catch a killer
but you very firmly feel
that you're doing the investigation on behalf of the family
who need to know that their mother's killer will be caught.
Norma's burned-out house has been made safe and is being forensically
examined by scene-of-crime officers desperate for any evidence
which might reveal crucial clues.
So, one of my priorities when we actually go in there
is identifying things that stand out
as potentially being fast-track items
that we can send away to get a result,
to actually see if we can identify an offender from that address.
The results of the post-mortem come in
and turn the focus of the investigation on its head.
There was no evidence of any sexual assault and no trace of any semen.
The attacker might have thought about a sexual assault
but might not have gone through with it.
There was some kind of sexual motive.
It might not have been to assault her
but there was some premeditation about humiliation,
removing dignity and having power over her body,
and that says something very scary about her killer.
Police look at the cause of death
in the hope it reveals clues to the identity of the killer.
So, Norma had a number of broken ribs and some bruising to her back.
And the pathologist was able to tell us that the attacker
would have been kneeling on Norma at the time of putting
his or her hands around Norma's neck to strangle her.
So we were able to conclusively determine
that Norma was dead before the fire started.
He may have been kneeling on her chest
to make sure that he strangled her
and to keep her still.
Having ruled out a sexual motive,
police now have to ascertain why Norma was targeted
and who was behind the murder.
There's a concept known as the 'golden hour',
which reflects the fact
that actually, in the early stages of investigation,
it's possible to lose evidence that you'll never get back again.
So some of the early decisions are critical to make sure that,
you know, you're doing things in the right order.
An example of that is the forensic examination of the house.
He thought the best way to destroy all of the evidence
was to set fire to the house,
and he lit fires in two different places.
The police would have put a lot of resources into this.
Norma knew a lot of people
so, in those first and early stages,
there would have been a lot of people to consider
as possible suspects.
Scene-of-crime manager Natalie Wing's role is to access the scene
and process the evidence.
We were carrying out assessments
of what areas would be useful for DNA recovery.
What seemed very clear to me
was that Mrs Bell was a very tidy and organised lady
but there were certain items that stood out as being unusual
and that seemed out of place.
There was a number of mobile phones
that appeared to have been dismantled.
There were some batteries and the backs of phones
kind of scattered underneath the TV cabinet,
which was placed in the corner of the kitchen.
We recovered some evidence from those to send away.
With police awaiting forensic results from DNA found at the property,
it's Norma's bedroom, which throws up their next clue.
We had information from the family
that there'd been a significant amount of cash being kept
within the address by Mrs Bell.
Norma's family revealed that she kept cash in a briefcase
inside an ottoman at the end of her bed.
Norma's bedroom had been ransacked
so there was paperwork all over the bedroom.
You know, and a briefcase that had been in an ottoman,
sort of, next to Norma's bed had been taken out.
Norma was of an age where she might have been targeted
by a burglar that was seeking to do a distraction burglary
to gain entry to the house to try and steal from her.
You know, she was a vulnerable victim.
You know, she would have been easy to overpower.
The motive appears to be money.
Then police discover something else missing from the house.
A new 49-inch television.
Neighbourhood enquiries intensify.
We had to go to every single house, visit every single person,
obviously go through the day-to-day stuff.
"Did you see this? Did you see that?
Anything unusual?"
And that built a massive amount of intelligence,
which the murder inquiry team were delving through.
You know, we got a really, really good response from the community.
People from all walks of life wanted to help the investigation,
wanted to help us catch Norma Bell's killer.
And it's not long before they have a lead.
Because we're community officers and people see us all the time,
they trust us and they give us information.
She'd been visiting an elderly gentleman,
driving her car just off Cornwall Street out the back.
She'd remembered seeing this lad
coming out of the top of Westbourne Road carrying a TV.
Could this be Norma Bell's killer? Who is he?
Police turn to the public for help.
I went into the media appeal.
I went on TV
and asked the public to come forward with any information about this TV.
I would like to take this opportunity
to appeal to anyone living in the local area
who may have seen or heard anything suspicious
from late evening on Saturday
to early morning on Sunday.
The investigation is gaining momentum
but there is one mystery which threatens to scupper the hunt.
How did the killer get in...
there was no sign of forced entry.
How did the offender get into the property?
Have they climbed over the rear to get into the rear yard
and come through the back?
Or have they potentially been let into the property by the victim?
Another hypothesis that we looked at at the time
was that the attacker was known to Norma
and that she opened the door to her attacker
because she knew him or her at the time.
The new findings throw the focus of the investigation
firmly on the local community.
If there was no forced entry, Norma Bell opened the door to her killer.
Police now know Norma's murderer was probably known to her.
The fact that there was no forced entry
kind of turned the investigation in onto people that Norma would know.
And we do know that when these type of murders happen,
especially when women are killed,
it's usually, statistically speaking,
going to be somebody that they know.
I feel sick about it.
It's an eerie feeling, actually.
It was such a shock, I suppose.
People just couldn't believe it had happened.
Everybody knew her, would speak to her going up and down the street.
The murder investigation now has a focus.
Police don't yet have a killer,
but when DNA results come in,
the chase is on.
We will catch the murderer.
Police now have the name of someone who had visited Norma recently
and need to speak to him
to establish if they can rule him out of their enquiries.
He was somebody that, clearly, we wanted to speak to...
we wanted to speak to to understand about that.
We wanted to understand when the last time he'd seen Norma was,
you know, what he was doing in the relevant time window.
With detectives looking to track down Gareth Dack,
in Westbourne Road, Graeme Handley is making headway
speaking with the local community.
So, everything goes in an officer's report,
so the slightest conversation,
you should put in as an officer's report.
So everything that happens around a major enquiry like that
could be very, very key.
And it wasn't long before he received some interesting information.
Got some intelligence, unconfirmed intelligence,
that, having previously been, sort of, in debt to drug dealers,
Gareth Dack had suddenly come into a little bit of money, you know,
and potentially been seen carrying a TV around.
And we knew that Norma was missing a TV from her front room.
Police focus turns even further towards Gareth Dack.
And then, DNA results come in.
That Gareth Dack's DNA had been found on the phones
that had been taken apart in the living area in the house.
You know, at that point, Gareth Dack became a suspect in my eyes
'cause there was no reason for his DNA to be on those phones,
as far as I could see, unless he'd been involved in the offence.
It isn't long before further DNA evidence links Dack to heinous crime.
Some of the key things
that we actually recovered from Mrs Bell herself were the ligature.
We were able to then achieve a DNA result,
which came back to Mr Dack
to say that he was represented within the profile on the ligature.
And we were able to then obtain a DNA profile
from the waistband of Mrs Bell's underwear and knickers,
which then came back as a match to Gareth Dack.
That was another piece of the evidential chain
that really pointed to the fact that Gareth Dack
was the murderer of Norma Bell.
Suddenly, police have a number-one suspect.
But where is Gareth Dack?
During the course of the day, our detectives initially phoned him
just to arrange, you know, an interview, a chat with him
about his knowledge of Norma
and his knowledge about what might have happened.
And he'd explained that he was in Liverpool
and would be coming back later that evening.
Police now believe there's a killer on the loose.
But what lay behind this brutal murder?
And despite the killer's attempts at burning the evidence,
how had everything he had done next led police right to his door?
(TAPE WHIRRS)
(SIREN WAILS)
The body of foster mother and grandmother Norma Bell
has been pulled from her burning home.
But the truth behind her death is shocking.
On the night of 2 April,
this man entered Norma Bell's home,
strangled her with his bare hands
and tied a ligature tightly around her neck.
He cut her clothing and underwear,
making it look as if there was a sexual motive.
Then he ransacked her house for money.
This man is Gareth Dack.
This man is Norma Bell's murderer.
And we are about to discover what this killer did next.
Having killed Norma,
Gareth ransacks the home looking for anything he can sell.
He obviously had financial problems, he was in debt.
He was a small-time drug dealer and cocaine user,
so he'd run up some debts and he was well-known
for going around trying to borrow money from local people.
Dack settles on a new television.
He was seen carrying a large TV out of the top of Westbourne Road.
And he's later sold that that night for 60 quid,
to a friend or an associate.
Dack is an opportunistic killer.
He isn't somebody who's really planned what he's going to do next.
But, after he's killed Norma Bell,
he recognises that there are opportunities around him.
There's a television, for example, that he can go and sell.
And his drugs motivate him more than his sense,
so he picks it up and he carries it through the streets
and people see him with that item.
But Dack needs to get his hands on more cash.
From that point on, I think Gareth Dack was a man who was driven,
firstly, still by a desire to get a fix for his drug addiction.
You know, and that was driving his initial decisions to take the telly
and take it up the road and sell it to somebody and access some drugs.
But following that,
I think he had to come back to the address
and he had to think about what he was gonna do next.
Dack trawls through Norma's house,
seemingly unaffected by the horrific crime he's just committed.
Norma had round about 700 pounds in cash.
We know from the family members
that money is likely to be in a briefcase,
which was in an ottoman at the bottom of Norma's bed.
It could only have been found
by somebody that was ransacking Norma's address
and we know that, you know, that's what Gareth Dack did.
But still, Dack doesn't leave Norma's house.
And what he does next is chilling.
He's rung sex lines from her landline
that were advertised on Babestation channel.
As she's dead or dying, he's made those phone calls.
So, he was using her phone to phone sex lines.
Why was he thinking about sex at this particular time?
That shows his callousness.
That shows how he wasn't feeling
any remorse or shame from what he'd done.
Dack phones the sex chat line more than once throughout the night
and early hours of the morning before deciding to visit a friend
and buy more drugs with the money he's stolen from his victim.
He then left the address around about half-past midnight.
He's taken some more drugs
and he's picked up his car and he's driven it back to Westbourne Road.
And returned, probably...
well, the next phone call to the chat line
was about 1:50 in the morning.
Dack parks his car along Norma's road,
unaware it will be picked up on CCTV cameras.
Then Dack returns to Norma's house and sits by her body,
continuing to call the chat lines.
He wants to escape.
He's murdered a defenceless old lady
and the recognition of that is so powerful
that now he wants to take himself away.
And being driven by drugs
means that his instinct and compulsion, sexually,
are probably high level, as well.
It was really unusual
that the murderer spent so much time in the address
throughout the course of the night,
rather than potentially committing the murder
and then looking to distance himself as quickly as possible
from the scene.
Sunrise.
Having spent a considerable amount of time at Norma's home,
Gareth Dack decides to try to cover his tracks.
His aim - to get away with murder.
His plan - to burn down her house.
He tried to destroy the scene of the crime by blowing up the house.
He'd left the back door open. He set the gas off.
These fires that had been set at this property
were so the offender could cover their tracks
and destroy some of the evidence at that scene.
If he'd shut the back door after he left,
the build-up of gas would have destroyed
not only Norma's house but our house and next door, as well.
I don't think burning down the house
was probably what he was thinking of doing at first.
And it was at the end of the night that he decided,
"I think I'm just gonna set a fire and destroy all of the evidence.
Nobody will ever know that Norma's clothes were cut.
Nobody will ever know that I had been there."
Having turned on the gas and struck a match,
Dack knows he needs to escape unseen.
He jumps over a wheelie bin into a side alley.
And he knows exactly where to hide out to watch the unfolding drama...
just doors away at his parents' home.
He's gone back down the road to where his mum and dad live
and he seems to have hid in the garage for awhile.
He didn't have a key to his parents' house
but he was able to access the garage.
He hid himself away in his parents' garage
because he probably needed to get his head straight
and he needed to get his story straight,
because somebody at some point was gonna come and talk to him.
And being able to take some time and get his story straight
was probably quite important.
(PHONE RINGS)
WOMAN: Emergency. Which service?
MAN: Fire brigade, please, and police.
At 8.23am, with Gareth Dack hiding yards away,
police and fire crews arrive at the scene.
They're about to discover Norma Bell's dead body.
The body of an elderly woman,
who I can now confirm to be 79-year-old Norma Bell,
was found inside the property.
Norma was the mother of three biological children
and a foster mother to more than 50 foster children.
She'd lived on Westbourne Road in Hartlepool for 27 years
and would have celebrated her 80th birthday in May.
Dack lies low in his parents' garage for several hours.
He's thinking hard
about how to escape from Westbourne Road unnoticed.
But there's a problem.
His car is now within the police cordon and he cannot access it.
He makes a call to his girlfriend.
He asked her to arrange a taxi for him to get back to his home address.
She did that and I think he arrived home that afternoon
and spent the rest of the Sunday with his partner.
Now in the comfort of his own home,
Dack has time to rest and think through his next plan of action
on how to get away with murder.
Norma's house is still a crime scene
and police are on the hunt for a killer.
Dack knows he needs to lay low,
but first, he makes a risky move.
He heads back to Westbourne Road.
He attended, with his girlfriend,
to come and pick up his car from Westbourne Road.
So he got a taxi back to Westbourne Road
and he got his silver VW Bora car, you know, and he took that away
and he also was making arrangements with associates to go on a trip.
Having got his car, Dack decides to leave Hartlepool,
stopping for supplies at a local service station with a friend.
For many people, the idea that you could murder someone
and then get on about your business might seem completely strange.
But you have to remember
Dack is recognising that he needs some kind of alibi,
some kind of cover-up. The more normal he can seem,
the less he will believe that people can connect him with the crime.
He goes away from the Hartlepool area and he turns up in Liverpool.
He went with friends to Liverpool. His friends were visiting relatives.
In the days after the murder,
what he's trying to do is just act normally -
not attract any suspicion to himself.
And he didn't seem to have a lot of difficulty doing that.
He didn't seem to be worried
or concerned
or emotionally disturbed
by what he'd done.
In Liverpool, Dack and his friends enjoy some drinks in a pub.
He's unaware that the investigation into Norma Bell's murder
is gaining momentum....
and he is now suspect number one.
So, I knew after making Gareth Dack a suspect
that I wanted to arrest him at the earliest opportunity.
I also knew at the time that he was in Liverpool.
As Gareth Dack makes his way home to Hartlepool,
something is playing on his mind.
From returning from Liverpool, Gareth Dack had accessed his phone
and he'd Googled, "Hartlepool, Gareth Dack,"
I believe, in an attempt to see if there was any news already out there
that suggested that he was being looked for
as a suspect in the offence.
At this point it's clear that for Dack
reality is starting to settle in.
He's realising that the likelihood is
that he's going to be incriminated in some way.
Whether he's checking information
to see whether he's being considered as a guilty party
or whether he's hoping
that potentially other people are gonna be implicated
and he can get away with just being a witness, who knows?
What we do know is his mind is directed to that worry.
When Dack returns to Hartlepool, the police pounce.
(UNCLEAR)
WOMAN: Right.
Dack's movements have bought him three days of freedom,
but this is all about to come to an abrupt end.
WOMAN: A man's been arrested on suspicion of murder
in connection with the death of an elderly woman in Hartlepool
at the weekend.
I'm just gonna have to cuff you, alright?
Gareth's name was getting spread round pretty quick
and then everybody started to text again,
"Guess who's been arrested for that?"
"Guess who's been arrested for this?" And what have you.
Sunday 3 April 2016,
the day life on Westbourne Road changed forever...
a much-loved grandma and foster parent found dead in her home,
a fire set to cover the killer's tracks,
a former neighbour arrested on suspicion of murder.
But what led to this father of four
carrying out the most horrific crime possible?
Gareth Dack was a hardworking father
but ill health had led to time off work as an asbestos lagger,
which in turn led to a spiralling drug habit and debts.
In the couple of weeks prior to the attack,
he'd been contacting a number of people to try and borrow money.
We'd established that he was a drug user
and that he was, you know, using money to buy drugs.
On Saturday 26 March 2016,
33-year-old Gareth Dack asked to borrow 20 pounds
from his childhood neighbour, Norma Bell.
I saw Gareth Dack approach the property,
knock on her door and go in.
I told Norma on numerous occasions not to let anybody into her house.
She normally listened but because she knew Gareth,
he was a friend of one of the sons, she let him in.
He gave an explanation that he needed to borrow some money
because he needed to go and visit his parents in their caravan.
That they had his bank cards
and he needed the money for petrol to get there.
So Norma invited him in.
Norma went to her handbag and gave him ten pounds.
He'd asked for 20 pounds but she wasn't particularly comfortable.
She'd shielded her handbag while she gave him the money
and she gave him ten pounds.
Having borrowed the money,
Dack needed to pay it back the following week.
But while he did visit Norma again, it wasn't to repay her.
He'd been at home with his partner.
I think they'd been out for a family day out with the kids.
And about half 8:30, he seemed to have some kind of row with her.
He left home and sometime that evening,
he turned up at Norma Bell's house.
He went to Norma's address that night
because he was desperate for drugs
and he'd run out of cash and run out of sources of credit.
She was a strong lady and she would have had no difficulty saying,
"No, I'm not lending you the money."
And I think Gareth Dack lost his temper at that point
and that led directly into
the attack that ultimately would have caused Norma's death.
He murdered Norma and that was because he wanted money.
I don't think that Dack planned for a lot of the things
that happened that night.
Things, as in the rest of his life,
got out of his control.
Having arrested Gareth Dack for the murder of Norma Bell,
police bring him in for questioning
and get a warrant to search his home and car.
So, in the car, we found 405 pounds in notes
and we know that Norma potentially had around about 700 pounds in cash
in the house.
My theory is that the cash that was in Gareth Dack's VW Bora
was the cash that he stole from Norma's house.
It could only have been found
by somebody that was ransacking Norma's address
and we know that, you know, that's what Gareth Dack did.
Police were also able to put together the final piece of the jigsaw.
Forensic officers had discovered a vital clue
as to how the killer had left Norma's property after setting it alight.
So, this is the alleyway that leads to the rear of Norma's address.
Now, we know that the last time that Gareth Dack left that address,
after he'd set the fire, he must have come out the rear
because he snapped the key in the back of the front door lock
and then exited using the wheelie bin
over the gate with the barbed wire.
There was a footprint on a wheelie bin.
Once Gareth Dack had been arrested,
there was a search carried out at his property
where there was a pair of trainers recovered.
We were then able to send those trainers and the footwear mark
away to a scientist,
who was then able to provide us with extremely strong support
that those trainers that belonged to Mr Dack,
the pad left that mark on the top of the wheelie bin.
With all the evidence compiled,
it was now for the courts to decide Dack's fate.
(THUNDER CLAPS)
NEWSCAST: A man's appeared in court
to deny murdering a Hartlepool grandmother
who looked after dozens of foster children.
On 12 January 2017,
the trial into the murder of 79-year-old Norma Bell
begins at Teesside Crown Court.
Journalist Tom Wilkinson was there every day of the trial.
So, for every part of the prosecution case,
he tried to give an innocent explanation for why it was there.
He was quite assured in his story. He stuck to it.
He was quite arrogant in the way he said it.
The jury heard DNA evidence
was overwhelming...
and the chance of it belonging to someone other than Dack
was one in one billion.
But Dack had an answer for everything.
He accounted for the DNA on the phones
by saying that when he'd been in Norma's house -
and he professed to be a friend of Norma -
he professed to see Norma quite regularly
to do sort of jobs around the house for her,
to be a bit of a helping hand.
There was DNA found on some spent matches
where he's struck a match and tried to blow the house up.
He said, "Oh, no, when I was there the other night,
I was trying to light a fire for her."
We were able to make a mockery of that, really.
We were able to take statements from the family
that showed that Gareth Dack was not a friend of Norma.
On 1 February 2017, the jury came to a conclusion.
In a unanimous verdict,
they found Gareth Dack guilty of murdering Norma Bell.
He was sentenced to a minimum of 33 years before parole.
Gareth Dack has never shown an ounce of remorse
and, considering the horrific nature of the acts he's committed,
I find that incredible, really.
But he's never...never accepted responsibility for what he's done.
After the verdict, Norma's emotional family face the public.
Norma Bell was our confidant, our friend,
our crutch to lean on and, not least, she was out mam.
Our mother dedicated her adult life
to fostering and looking after needy children.
Our mam had a heart as big as a lion.
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