NARRATOR: A sexual predator is prowling the streets of East London.
You have a violent male on the loose.
Detectives believe the same man
who attacked and killed Michelle is also responsible
for at least two serious sexual assaults in the same area.
These offences have taken place, almost to the day, a month apart.
Are we then expecting another attack?
You can see the offender getting more and more confident
in the crimes, the crimes becoming even more brutal.
You have to use everything in your armoury to try and find that person.
The crime scene will unlock the case.
The body becomes its own crime scene.
DNA evidence can be very powerful.
We don't know who's done this.
Look at your neighbour or somebody you work with and think, you know,
could this person be here?
I know she's up there, and she's gonna help everyone trace this man.
Science has yet again proved who the killer is.
One of the most violent, dangerous people that London has ever seen.
East London at dawn.
A dog walker calls police to a playground.
The officers who attended discovered that there was a female
in the child's playground, lying on her back,
she was mostly naked.
And what they could see was a lot of blood,
a lot of bruising.
It was quite clear that that person had unfortunately deceased.
A victim of what would appear to be a very, very brutal attack.
The officers, then, their main focus is to get that scene preserved
ready for those specialists to come in and start the forensic analysis.
The body becomes its own crime scene.
The best method, really, would be to get a pathologist.
I would immediately have been thinking around
picking samples from the body in situ,
trying to look at any trace evidence
that might be on her body.
The team observed injuries to the woman's face and neck.
There is significant bruising, scratching, blood on her hands,
blood close by. They've been beaten quite severely.
And almost, you could see then that within the hands,
that they're trying to scrape away and trying to protect themselves.
ID found on the woman leads police to believe
she's 35-year-old Michelle Samaraweera.
Cos it was my daughter's birthday the following week,
I was making daisy chains, like, out of coloured bits of paper,
like, pastel colours.
And I was doing this till the early hours of the morning,
and then I went to sleep and then... I got a phone call.
On the line is Ann and Michelle's older sister.
It was like, "We need to get to Mum's.
"The police want to see us."
And I was, like, "Oh, my God, it's Michelle, isn't it?
"What's happened?"
Then she said, "She's dead, she's been murdered."
I was shaking.
It's devastating news to give to a family,
you know, it never gets easier,
but you're there to work for that family
as hard as you can to... to find justice for that person.
At the scene, the body is sent to the mortuary for postmortem.
The pathologist indicated there had been some interference
with the normal course of breathing.
This may well have been done by the offender from behind.
Was she trying to remove, maybe, a ligature round her neck,
or a pair of hands round her neck?
So, is there a mixture of DNA under those fingernails?
One of the things that you must consider straightaway
is that there may have been some sort of sexual assault taking place.
Movement of the body could disturb forensic evidence that you have,
and some of this forensic evidence could be very minute
and not very visible to the naked eye.
If there's been some kind of sexual contact,
intimate swabs would be fast-tracked to the forensic service provider
who would analyse them for DNA.
Officers go door to door.
A number of witnesses had heard maybe three screams
around about 1:30 in the morning.
And that's very, very significant.
Obviously, they might be something else,
but based on what you can see at the crime scene,
those things are more than likely linked.
And of course, then that starts to help you formulate your timeline.
Why has she been attacked in this particular area?
Quite often with offences like this,
you might have an area where the offender has been sat
crouched in a bush, waiting for someone to come past,
so you might have footprints.
You'd be looking for any items that have been dropped.
In the playground near the body,
there was two bags of shopping found.
These shopping bags may well have come from the victim, but also,
they could be completely irrelevant, but you have to keep an open mind.
Sometimes you can do joint examination on a bag,
so you can cut the handles off and submit those for DNA,
but also fingerprint the plastic itself.
The bags contain groceries and a receipt from a petrol station
close to the crime scene.
The receipt shows a financial transaction,
and so there are opportunities there in shops to find CCTV.
That is what you call a really quick win,
that you can do things straightaway
to try and identify that person's movements,
and then try and watch them on CCTV.
The team pieced together Michelle's final movements.
Widowed young, she's in a new relationship.
On the night of the murder, she was staying at her boyfriend's.
She had been to see her mother that evening,
and then had gone on to her boyfriend's afterwards.
When they got back to his flat,
a couple of his friends were just outside,
and they said, "Can we stay here tonight?"
They had one drink with this couple,
and then they went to bed, and Michelle was just like,
thinking about this pair,
"I'd better go to the shop to get some stuff for the morning."
Michelle was very caring and thoughtful.
Her partner had fallen asleep.
She took a lot of her jewellery off and put it on the windowsill,
which she did often.
Police follow up on the petrol station receipt
and recover the CCTV.
Fortunately, it has working CCTV,
and Michelle can be seen going in at 1:00am.
She makes various purchases, nothing stands out,
some sweets and other groceries that she needs.
She looked very calm, made her purchases and then left.
She left the door on the latch, which indicated, you know,
she was going back.
She never returned. Never returned.
Your timeline now is starting to take shape, hearing those screams,
you want to know if there's any cameras
or any witnesses in that particular area
going up towards the park.
At the mortuary, Ann is asked to formally identify her sister.
It's awful because she was still being forensically examined.
You could see that she'd had cuts on her face,
but she just looked so peaceful, but it was like,
"That's something I've got to do, I've got to identify her."
It's very unusual to be murdered by a stranger.
You need to understand who surrounds them in their life,
and so you look at the family and-and friends,
and you want to naturally eliminate anybody that knows her,
in particular looking at boyfriends.
He would have to be eliminated from that inquiry,
along with the other friends who were staying at that premises.
At the lab, swabs from the scene are fast-tracked.
When the internal swabs are examined,
they found evidence that Michelle had been raped.
They find a full male profile.
We were able then to eliminate a number of people, friends, family,
everybody that you have... had been told about
that is part of Michelle's life.
The profile was loaded onto the national DNA database,
and it didn't fit against a name.
You are literally looking at somebody
who is a complete stranger to the authorities.
That's incredibly hard to take as an investigation team.
It's very unusual to see somebody go from nothing
to this level of violence,
so officers would be looking at crimes that have taken place
in that area.
Going back, you know, as many months and even years sometimes...
What became apparent straightaway
was that there were two other very, very violent sexual assaults
that had taken place within a stone's throw of that park.
So there's a great worry that would start to surface
within the investigation team that-that we need to be,
you know, very, very quick in getting this person off the streets.
Her body was found in this children's play area.
Police believe she lay here undiscovered for several hours.
Detectives now strongly believe the same man
who attacked and killed Michelle is also responsible
for at least two other serious sexual assaults in the same area.
NARRATOR: Police investigating the murder
of 35-year-old Michelle Samaraweera
fear there is a violent serial rapist
attacking lone women in East London.
It's a very, very disturbing scenario.
There has been two very, very violent rapes,
where extreme physical force and beatings have taken place,
and, you know, very close to where Michelle was found.
And so there are similarities, and that's a great worry for everybody.
It starts to give you an indication
of the person you might be looking for.
Highly dangerous, doesn't really care.
You have to get more evidence to actually say,
"This is the same person."
Horrendous crimes have been committed.
Those rape scenes would have been fully examined
and processed by a CSI.
The victim would be taken to a SARC centre,
which is a sexual assault referral centre,
and the victim would be examined by a force medical examiner.
The first attack took place two months before Michelle's murder.
A 59-year-old female had been followed from a shop,
showing similarities to that of Michelle's movements on that day,
and she'd been followed to her home where, you know,
a terrible attack took place.
In that offence, that level of violence,
and also going to somebody's house,
shows that that person is incredibly dangerous.
If the offender's forced his way into the house,
then there's a huge amount of forensic evidence
that might be on the front door.
What has he touched inside the bedroom?
Or what has he touched inside the house?
In this case, the victim's shirt was ripped off,
and CSIs were able to find a button on the floor of the bedroom.
What became evident then is that person had taken that shirt away.
This person is brazen enough to burst into somebody's home,
commit this incredibly serious offence,
and then take something away as a trophy.
If you're able to find the shirt with the offender,
then you're able to link the buttons back to that shirt,
then you can obviously identify
that that shirt has come from that crime scene.
Almost exactly a month later, there's another attack close by.
Another incredibly violent attack on a lone female.
The person approached her, had a flick knife on them,
threatened her and took her to a nearby alleyway,
where she was subjected to the most horrific sexual assaults.
There is every possibility that the same method was used,
where Michelle could have been threatened with a knife.
When it had finished, the offender, having ejaculated,
wiped himself on the victim's knickers and left them there.
You know, this is offending of the highest, highest order.
Stranger rape is extremely rare,
and rape outside in a dark alleyway
is even rarer than that -
about 9% of rapes occur in those circumstances.
The underwear and swabs taken from both women are fast-tracked.
When the swabs are examined, they found a full male profile.
The profile was loaded onto the national DNA database,
and it didn't hit against a name.
The team compares the unknown profile
to the DNA recovered from Michelle.
It's a hit.
What we would call in the police a scene-to-scene hit.
You don't know who the offender is,
but you've got two or three scenes that are linked,
so clearly, looking at the DNA profile,
we have a serial rapist, so he's not forensically aware.
Either that or he doesn't care.
He wiped himself on her knickers and threw them on the ground,
like, he literally is providing evidence there.
There's obviously quite a lot of risk-taking behaviour here,
feeling that he's potentially not gonna get caught by the police.
These offences have taken place, almost to the day, a month apart.
And if you are looking at something like this,
well, are we then expecting another attack to follow on
a month from Michelle's murder?
Having connected the offences by DNA,
family liaison officers update Michelle's family.
Wow.
It's like, what a pig, you don't just suddenly start doing that.
Wow.
Who is this person?
All the attacks have taken place within a half-a-mile radius.
They are all very, very close together,
and it's well-known within policing,
when you look at suspects who do the sorts of things
that the safe haven is to get home as quickly as possible,
and so offences are often committed quite close to that person's house.
You are focusing down into that area
to think they're probably very, very close
to where these attacks have taken place.
He's looking for his victims late at night
or in the early hours of the morning, he's following them,
he's clearly worked out that there are places without CCTV,
he's looking at an alleyway, he's looking at a playground,
all areas that are sort of deserted, are dark,
and are kind of slightly out of the way of the public view.
Women by themselves in quite a vulnerable way,
women who are older than him who are potentially a bit more defenceless.
Michelle was in a really bad place after her husband died of cancer.
She was a grown woman, but still living in her teenage years.
She had posters of old pop stars,
she was very innocent and childlike.
Michelle and Ann grew up in Woodford, East London,
with their parents and two older sisters.
We were the only Asian family, even at our school, for years,
and it was a very affluent area.
Michelle and I were... There was 18 months between us,
and we were so close, we were like twins.
My mum used to dress us up in the same clothes all the time.
We had a nice life, erm, at home.
Erm... Well, what appeared to be a nice life.
We didn't know how other people lived
cos we weren't allowed to go anywhere,
or we weren't allowed to have friends over.
My mum was really strict.
We didn't really talk to other people about it.
From a young age, Michelle battled with her mental health.
Michelle got married in '89 in Sri Lanka.
She got married at 16.
She was very young. It was very quick.
She'd never even had a boyfriend before.
It wasn't an arranged marriage or anything.
If you look at the picture of Michelle on her wedding day,
she didn't look particularly happy...
to me - not like a woman that's getting married.
Everything changed when she got married.
The marriage is volatile.
She became quite introvert,
she wasn't the fun girl that she used to be.
She never got to live her life, she was still stuck at 16, I'd say.
Her story was tragic, her life was tragic.
Determined Michelle's family will see justice,
and fearful of further attacks, police ask the survivors
for detailed descriptions of their attacker.
The biggest source of information you can get about an attack
is from the victim themselves,
those that were obviously lucky to survive the attacks that took place.
And they described their attacker
as a male of Asian appearance in his 30s, and around about 5'9".
Working with the women, police create an e-fit of their suspect.
An e-fit image is done by a specialist officer
who is essentially an artist who can then...
And is trained in getting that information out of the victim,
and of course, you are looking at that e-fit
within the context of the area from where it is.
There is such an urgency to get that e-fit out to the public
as quickly as possible.
The e-fit is released to the media.
The e-fit image, unfortunately, is not successful
in terms of identifying the suspect
in those early stages of the investigation.
It's not unusual because members of the public sometimes can go,
"Well, it looks like that person,
"but I don't want to cause them any problem by calling the police,"
and this can put pressure on an SIO and the team
because, you know, you want to do the right thing
and get this person off the streets.
You have a DNA sample which is unknown one,
we don't know who it is,
and so there are other things available to an SIO
to decide upon at that stage.
One of them is what is called mass screening.
The team decides to try and collect DNA
from all men fitting the attacker's description
in a one-mile radius of the crime scenes.
Mass screens can be a huge task,
and a mass screen is also a voluntary thing,
so you're relying on your Asian males
coming forward to provide a DNA sample.
There were some 9,000 males fitting that description
available to screen and take DNA samples from.
This is resource-intensive.
Obviously, when you have victims of this nature, you know,
all that sort of thing is irrelevant to you.
You have a violent male on the loose,
you have to use everything in your armoury to try and find that person.
With the mass screen underway,
Michelle's loved ones insist on laying her to rest.
Police were saying, "She could be in a freezer or in a mortuary
"for months until we catch him,"
and I'm like, "Hold on, what if you never do?
"You're gonna have to be able to release her body
"so we can give her a proper Catholic funeral."
But her funeral was beautiful.
It was a celebration of her life,
and, you know, Michelle had her wedding ring on,
and her engagement ring, and she was in her wedding dress.
You don't realise how many people, like, it touches.
It was really heart-wrenching.
Michelle's family are determined to get justice.
This man was just walking the streets.
I thought, "You know what, someone's gotta do something in the family."
Because it's often effective.
I know she's up there, she's up there
and she's gonna help everyone trace this man,
because that's the sort of thing Michelle would have done.
She would have anything to help anyone who was in a situation,
and I know she's gonna help put this man behind bars.
Two weeks after the appeal, a woman calls police.
This female, who was 32 at the time,
had been found by members of the public in a churchyard,
unclothed in the lower part of her body,
so badly beaten, her jaw was broken in a number of places.
The level of violence was horrendous.
She was unconscious,
and people were very fearful for her life at that stage.
She was taken into hospital
and remained unconscious for quite a long time.
The attack took place a month before Michelle's murder,
and the woman spent several weeks in hospital recovering.
She had no memory of the sexual assault,
or even the beating that took place.
That would indicate the level of violence was immediate on her,
that he rendered her almost unconscious straightaway.
The only thing she could remember before an attack
was that she was being followed by an Asian man.
NARRATOR: After seeing media appeals
about the murder of Michelle Samaraweera,
a woman has bravely contacted the police.
She thinks she's attacked by the same man,
less than 500 metres from the murder scene.
The team looks for a forensic link.
There's a window of opportunity for collecting potential evidence
from a rape victim.
When someone's really been seriously injured
and potentially sexually assaulted,
and they're unconscious, you really do need to get their permission
to be able to take samples from them.
With the woman too injured to consent, CSIs are undeterred.
They were very quick-thinking and recovered the blanket
used to protect her when she was recovered in the ambulance.
The blanket is fast-tracked to the lab.
They were able to find a full DNA male profile
from some semen that was on the blanket.
The DNA is put through the database.
A DNA profile is obtained for one-in-one-billion match
to the DNA profile found from the victim Michelle.
So this is clearly the same offender,
so you've now got four scenes that match,
but you don't know who the offender is.
There's a clear escalation of violence,
so a clear indication that this offender is continuing
and getting worse and worse.
We can see the offender getting more and more confident in the crimes,
the crimes becoming even more brutal than before.
There's obviously quite a lot of risk-taking behaviour here,
feeling that he's potentially not gonna get caught by the police.
They're escalating because he's evading justice at this point.
The media starts calling the offender the "E17 Night Stalker".
These sensational headlines
spark enormous fear in women and girls
to walk around that particular area,
knowing this person is still at large.
We don't know who's done this, and therefore,
this could be a person within your community.
These attacks have taken place in a very condensed area,
which would indicate quite often in these cases
that the person lives locally.
And, you know, it's not uncommon, isn't it,
to look at your neighbour or somebody you work with and think,
you know, "Could this person be here?"
And it's terrifying to think that.
This is an extremely rare occurrence,
and I think because it's something that's picked up in the media...
And of course, this has a really detrimental effect
on women in local communities,
who are worried about walking the streets late at night,
who are worried about being outside,
and worried about men approaching them.
A defiant group of 100 residents take to the streets of Walthamstow.
They walked Michelle's route that she had taken, you know,
the last known steps that she had taken in support of her, her family.
It was quite nerve-wracking, walking through the streets of Walthamstow
to that final place, and when we got there, I thought,
"I'm not alone."
Michelle's memory, Michelle's spirit left the world here.
Seeing all these women I'd never met before, it was overwhelming,
but it's like... people will always come together.
Police advise women to be vigilant as they flood the area.
The different things in your toolbox will be an over-presence,
when you can see police officers
giving reassurance to members of the public.
The mass screening of people as well,
and the publicity that would go around that.
But sitting behind that is the covert world of policing,
where, in this particular case, the covert officers,
ones that you can't see,
ones that are potentially positioned in houses or cars or buildings
to try and find this suspect.
Three months on from Michelle's murder,
police have collected DNA from 1,100 local men.
None match the unknown one profile.
But despite fears the attacker could strike at any time,
he appears to have vanished.
After the attack and murder of Michelle, the offending stopped.
There were no more of these brutal sexual offences on lone females.
There was no murders that were linked to it,
and of course, as an SIO and as an investigation team,
you would think, well, potentially that person has gone somewhere,
or they're leaving it for a considerable amount of time
until police activity slows down before they start again.
I didn't think he was ever gonna get caught, ever.
You just have to get on with it. Get on with it, as hard as it is.
Murders in London, if they're unsolved,
are reviewed on a regular basis.
Having that review in place is really important
because it helps you have somebody else over your shoulder
looking at things that potentially you might have missed
as an investigation team.
Or also, looking at things that perhaps you hadn't thought about
in terms of forensics or CCTV,
and this review system goes on forever.
18 months on from the attacks,
the team revisit CCTV of Michelle's final movements.
We know that Michelle was inside that petrol station shop at 1:00am,
and we know she left at 1:12am,
and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
When that was reviewed, what you could see at 1:06am
is an Asian male enter the shop behind her.
He only stayed there for a matter of minutes,
didn't purchase anything, and then left.
And obviously, that's something which is-is highly significant.
He's seen going into the shop on CCTV,
checking Michelle's whereabouts.
The fact that he's stalking his victim
shows that he has very little respect.
He was watching Michelle.
He was in the petrol station at the same time,
but it was archived, and I'm like, "Why was that archived?"
The investigation team who were dealing with Michelle's murder
clearly overlooked the fact
that there could be somebody else inside that shop
who may be the suspect.
You can't shy away from that, but now,
what you potentially have is your suspect on CCTV.
There is an image of an Asian male who fits the description,
so that image is then put out to 60,000 residents.
A call then comes in to the police
from a person that owns a dry cleaning store in that area.
He believes that he can identify the person in the CCTV,
wearing quite a distinctive jacket, is one of his ex-employees.
When a call comes in like that to your inquiry,
then you naturally become very excited
in a way that you think, "Well, could we finally get him?"
The man names him as 24-year-old Aman Vyas,
a university graduate from Delhi, India.
It's then, "Everybody up, and out we go,
"and let's try and find this person."
Using intelligence, they track Vyas's movements.
The investigation team discovered that this person had left the UK
on the 1st of July, 2009, on a one-way ticket to India.
At that particular time,
there was a considerable amount of press interest
in this particular case.
There's no coincidence that, you know,
days later, that person's fled the country.
Police look up Aman Vyas on the DNA database.
Aman Vyas was not on the database, and that would be good news
because there is the potential that he could be unknown one.
And so everything they could do to find him now
would be their priority.
Police ask the caller to provide a witness statement at the station.
What he does tell the police is this person no longer works for him,
but he still employs the brother of this person.
He also seizes an opportunity to help the police,
and this is where he sees the brother of the potential suspect
drink out of a bottle in the work premises.
He seizes that bottle and gives it to the police.
And this is such an incredible piece of work by that person
to help the police, and this is sometimes the luck that you need.
What that means for an investigation team
is that you have your crime scene sample,
which, as we know, is called unknown one,
and you need to try and find who unknown one is,
and the route you can take that is through familial DNA.
You take a DNA sample from a person and put it into the DNA database.
This gives you two lists.
One list is a potential parent and child of that sample,
and one is a sibling.
The team gets clearance to test the water bottle
from Aman Vyas's brother's DNA
and compare it to the DNA from the crime scene.
A water bottle can give you a lot of evidence.
You can get fingerprint evidence from where it's been handled,
but also, round the lip of the water bottle,
you could get very good DNA evidence.
Because especially if the water bottle's got a lid on it,
that would protect the DNA around the lip,
so there is quite a good area, a rough area,
that would collect quite good DNA.
Also, the fact that it's plastic,
the DNA doesn't get absorbed into the surface,
so therefore it's easier to swab.
Scientists recover a full male profile.
It's confirmed as belonging to Vyas's brother.
Forensic scientists were able to ascertain
that there is some kind of link
between the DNA sample from the water bottle and the DNA,
the full DNA profile that's been obtained from Michelle.
It's not a match, but it's very similar.
When you're in that position, where you know who your suspect is,
you have him named, everything fits for that person being responsible,
you want to get them as quickly as possible.
And it's incredibly frustrating
when your suspect is not in the country
and you cannot get your hands on them.
You know, and in Vyas's case, you know,
we see that he is travelling all round the world in different places,
New Zealand and Singapore.
How do the victims feel,
the living victims who've been viciously attacked,
and the police know who the offender is,
but they can't bring the offender to justice?
They'll be in a position where they just can't move on.
They don't know where he is,
they don't know if he's continuing to offend,
what type of life he's having.
Meanwhile, we know that these women have had to try
and put their lives back together,
and at the same time, we have a family who've lost a loved one.
I suffered, I started, erm... I started to have anxiety attacks.
My kids were so young, and I had to be strong for them.
My mind was kind of all over the place.
It's like you're up and down.
One minute, you're like, "I wanna fight the world,
"I want to save every..." You know, and then the other times,
I'm like... "I can't do it."
Police keep Michelle's family and the other women Vyas attacked
updated on any sightings.
I said to them, "Please, for my mental health, I don't want updates
"unless you tell me
"that he's gonna be brought back and landed on British soil."
And the... Whoever was in charge then gave the order,
"I want everyone in his family tree to be put on Interpol red alert."
More than three years after Michelle's murder,
Vyas is still on the run.
My dad died on the 21st of June,
and his funeral was the on 4th of July,
and the night before, I was like, "God, Dad, please show us a sign."
It was hours later I listened to my voicemails,
and it was our liaison officer saying, "Ann, we've caught him."
And I was like, "Oh, my God!"
NARRATOR: After two years on the run,
Aman Vyas is taken into custody in Delhi.
He went through passport control, flagged up.
He was sitting at the boarding gates
ready to get on that flight, and that's where he got arrested.
And I just think, "Wow," you know,
that's something that you rarely hear of,
but he could have slipped through the net.
Police request a DNA sample from Vyas.
You need their sample to directly compare against unknown one,
to take that before a jury, before a court.
Well, of course, in India, we can't force him to do that kind of thing,
so it was voluntary, and Aman Vyas did not consent to give his DNA.
The team needs him back in the UK. They apply for an extradition.
There are so many excuses that are given by his defence team
and himself to avoid being subject to this extradition,
such as he's insane, somebody's on holiday,
the-the legal proceedings within extradition hadn't been followed.
And of course, you know, this is extremely frustrating.
Forget about the police for a second,
but how frustrating is that for the victim's family
to hear that something which you think
would be very, very straightforward has taken such a long time?
I think he had about 50 hearings in the space of that time.
People over here, our prime ministers,
I think we'd had three in that time.
For years, Vyas evades justice.
Worryingly, and quite upsetting for many people,
was that Aman Vyas, whilst in those eight years,
was actually on bail,
so he was allowed to go about his normal business,
when all these families were captured by the grief
that they have over what happened to their loved ones.
Seven years ago, Michelle Samaraweera
was raped and murdered just round the corner,
and her attacker has never been brought to justice.
The community remains determined Michelle will not be forgotten.
You keep faithful, as hard as that is.
It's, erm...
I think it's probably how I've always coped with a lot of things.
The police never stopped going.
No-one was ever gonna stop until they could bring him back to the UK,
and so, eight years later, finally, the extradition was granted.
On the 4th of October, 2019,
ten years after the attacks on those women,
Aman Vyas was brought back to the UK and booked in to custody.
Now, he's particularly unremarkable-looking.
You might be expecting to see this monster of a person,
but what I've learned over the years,
it's what's behind the eyes, not in front of them,
and I think that's when you can see evil,
when you come face-to-face with these people.
This person is beyond evil.
You know, looks can be very deceiving sometimes.
At the station, Vyas is booked in and his DNA collected.
The DNA sample that he provided was loaded onto the DNA database.
I can guarantee that people were waiting for that result.
Everyone would have been on standby to match that
against the unknown one profile from ten years before.
This DNA sample that was taken from him
is a one-in-a-billion match.
The reason why scientists give that figure of one in a billion
is because people can't comprehend a number higher.
In fact, it's almost impossible that somebody would share that DNA
with you, and it's never happened before,
so when you have that match, you know statistically, legally,
that you have that person in custody, and the right person.
Police charge Vyas for Michelle's rape and murder,
the violent attacks on the woman in her home,
and the woman in the graveyard.
But police need more
to charge him for the assault on the woman in the alleyway.
The fact that his DNA's on her underwear
doesn't necessarily prove the rape.
It's really important to try and get her internal swabs,
her intimate swabs to try and find if there's any DNA on there.
11 years ago, when the rape took place,
swabs failed to return a DNA profile.
The officers will then look at the enhancements in DNA
that have taken place during those ten years.
DNA moves very, very quickly,
and the sensitivity that you can employ on DNA now
is vastly different to what it was back then.
When the offences were committed,
we were looking at ten regions of the DNA,
and then, when he was arrested and actually charged,
we were then looking at 17 regions of the DNA profile,
so we were able to rework this sample.
And it came back as a much better identification of one in 70,000,
which means one in 70,000 people may have that same DNA profile,
which isn't as good as a one-in-a-billion,
but it's good supporting evidence,
particularly when you've got the DNA on her knickers as well.
DNA evidence can be very powerful, especially in a court.
Vyas is charged with a third count of rape.
But despite the forensics,
at his hearing, he pleads not guilty on all charges.
He's denying that these crimes were rape.
He's still claiming that these were consensual acts,
and he seems to show very limited remorse right through until the end.
Each victim sustained such a beating, you know,
to a level of violence which, you know,
for three people, only fell short of killing them,
is a very difficult thing for people to believe
that anything in these acts was consensual.
To look at him,
you would not think that he would be capable
of committing those kind of violent crimes.
He doesn't care.
He really thought he was gonna get found not guilty.
I seen him at the trial every day.
Seen him on the stand, lying,
heinous lies about these women.
How disgusting. Awful.
The jury delivers their verdict.
This is a very emotionally charged time for a family,
and the police also want that more than anything else,
they want the right decision to be made,
and you want to make sure that, when that time comes,
the jury have gone out, that you have done everything you can.
It was nerve-racking, but I'd had my eyes shut for ages,
and I was shaking, and it was guilty, guilty, guilty,
and then I just... I don't know even what happened,
I think I had an out-of-body experience.
Vyas is sentenced to a minimum of 37 years behind bars.
It's a real sense of relief.
Science has yet again proved who the killer is in the crime scene.
Michelle has made a difference.
She was the guardian angel for all the other victims.
Cos a lot of rape victims, you know, the conviction rate is so low,
all of the other victims were really brave.
The courage they showed when they gave evidence,
you know, is so admirable. There's no word to describe.
They did it with one common purpose, and that is to put Vyas behind bars,
one of the most violent, dangerous people that London has ever seen.
Since the trial, I've been in limbo, cos I'm like...
I'm lost, I feel lost.
The futility of it all, he's sitting in a prison,
being fed and watered.
So he's got a privilege, you know, after all the things that he's done.
It's the people left behind that suffer. He's not suffering.
A lot of the women are angry,
why should a woman not be able to walk down a road,
whether she's vulnerable or not?
It's a crime against women in general
cos it's making women feel
that they can't be safe in their communities.
This has come to the forefront in the most recent of years,
but obviously, this shows you in 2009,
the same thing had happened.
This has been going on for such a long time.
Women should be able to walk the streets anywhere.
Michelle was just so innocent.
She was very genuine and caring and loving.
She was like an angel, really.
My mum died, I mean, she died in 2018.
I would have liked to have seen him get justice while she was alive,
but they're all up there now and they're all together.