NARRATOR: Police in London make a grim discovery.
SIMON HARDING: It's very difficult for those forensic officers
to work in such small and disturbing conditions.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of time
and a lot of muscle to be able to dig a grave.
Especially if you're trying to do it covertly
without other people noticing.
You need to try and understand
you know, who could do that kind of thing.
The crime scene will reveal the killer's secrets.
Offenders don't often admit to crimes,
so a lot of it is down to us proving
who was there and when they were there.
He thinks he's cleverer than the police.
He thinks he's got all of this forensic knowledge.
He almost thought he could get away with trying to lie to us
and we would believe him.
But obviously, we don't rely on things like that.
We look at the facts.
He didn't read the room
because psychopaths very often can't read the room.
If someone's been at a scene,
we will prove that they've been there.
A woman calls police, concerned about the welfare of her friend.
She hadn't arrived for work on the Monday,
and then she hadn't arrived for work on the Tuesday.
Ancl so there was obviously extreme concern from her family and friends
and work colleagues as to where she was.
After getting no response and seeing her dogs inside,
officers force entry to her ground-floor flat.
The clogs were alone, and she was nowhere to be found.
The clogs were kind of subdued, and so they went in,
and they saw lots of boxes lying around.
These boxes are ones you would pack when you're moving house.
34-year-old Laureline Garcia-Bertaux has been missing for five days.
This was out of character for Laureline.
She would always be in contact with her friends.
She was constantly texting and messaging them.
Ancl obviously, the circumstances of seeing all this stuff ready to go
but Laureline not there, the clogs there,
was a great concern and suspicious in its own right.
The search moves into the rear garden.
The detectives are looking in the garden by torchlight.
Very small garden, very tidy.
There is a spade and there's other tools up against the fence,
and there's a bag of compost.
There's some flowerbeds on the left-hand side.
Ancl one particular flowerbed was newly laid soil.
One officer starts to move the soil back slightly,
and straight away, under a few centimetres of soil,
appeared to be a human foot.
That officer would never have dealt with something like that before.
Obviously, he's already thinking about contaminating a crime scene.
Naturally, you start to think,
"Well, this is probably the person that's missing."
But you need more than that to be absolutely sure.
Laureline's home is cordoned off.
The police need to determine if it's her body in the garden.
She'd been living in the UK for over ten years.
She was very talented in her work, working as a film producer.
She'd worked with some very famous people on different films.
She was a very well-liked person in her set of family and friends.
No-one had a bad word to say about her.
Ancl we couldn't really see any major problems with her life.
So there was very little to help us in the very early stages
to identify why she was missing.
Was this a burglary? Has she been harmed by somebody she knows?
Has she been harmed by a stranger?
Ancl has she just left, and this isn't her?
All these things go through your mind.
This scene is secured until forensic recovery can begin in daylight.
Having been called to the scene,
I can see that the address has a police officer on the front,
and the crime scene manager comes out,
and we have a chat about what they've found
inside the scene and in the garden.
They are in charge of that scene.
They decide who goes in, who goes out.
Ancl the retrieval of exhibits,
they are a hugely important part in that scene.
From my forensic perspective,
if I just see a foot protruding from the soil,
my immediate thoughts are, "ls it a whole body?
"|s there more than one body, or is it a body part?"
Sarah Thirkell is an expert in crime scene management.
If it's a really narrow garden,
there's a lot of issues around how many CSls
you can get into the scene,
how are you going to actually excavate the body?
Ancl also, in a garden, you don't really know what's relevant.
So, for example, a bag of compost
is quite a normal thing to have in a garden,
whereas if you've had a body buried,
has that compost been used to cover the body over?
It is very important for me as a crime scene manager
to make sure that we recover the body as well as we can.
My main aim would be to get
a forensic archaeologist at the scene.
They can tell you a huge amount about a scene,
and also, potentially, about the offender as well.
Deborah Ryder is a specialist
in assisting police with the excavation of clandestine burials.
It's very hard to dig a grave, and it's very time-consuming.
Especially if you're trying to do it covertly
without other people noticing.
And it takes a lot of energy and a lot of time and a lot of muscle.
It's evident on arrival to the scene that there's a shallow burial.
In some respects, it's easier to excavate
because you've got less oil overlying the body,
but on the flip side, you've got less information.
You've got less room to move,
and it's gonna be harder to glean that information
from things like tool marks on the side of the grave
or footprints in that grave.
Carefully removing the soil, the team finds a single female body,
placed inside a deflated, cut-open air bed and rubble sacks.
The process of identification is quite a long process.
The only thing you would say at a scene if you're 100% sure
is male or female victim.
You'd never go any further than that on a crime scene.
The weather adds further complexity.
It was incredibly windy.
Everything blowing around,
the police tape was blowing across the main road,
bags and paper were flying down the road,
and it was very difficult for officers to work
in that kind of environment.
With the weather worsening and light fading,
the team need to recover the body before vital evidence is lost.
The forensic team collects fibre and DNA tapings
before sending the body to the mortuary,
still wrapped in the rubble sacks and air bed.
It's very windy,
so it's much better to get the body out of the packaging
in a very controlled environment.
Now, these harsh environments during an examination
can exacerbate and make the job so much more complex.
Especially with high winds or rain.
You've got extra things to think about
in terms of the examination
and how to preserve that essential forensic evidence.
Soil samples are taken for different reasons.
One of the reasons would be
to identify any alien material in that soil
that could indicate where it's been brought in from elsewhere.
And another reason
is to take a control sample of that particular area
that can then be compared to any tools
or suspects' clothing or footwear
that might be recovered at a later date.
As the body starts to be exhumed from that very shallow grave,
you see that there is cables
wrapped around the arms and the neck.
With the body recovered,
the forensic archaeologist reports their findings
to senior investigating officer, DCI Simon Harding.
How has this person come to be in this shallow grave?
Was this a burglary? Has she been harmed by a stranger?
Has she been harmed by somebody she knows?
Where she's been buried, it's very tidy.
This person has tried to make it look normal
so that people don't understand that she's in there.
Ancl gives them time to get away.
When somebody is murdered, and you don't have the suspect in custody,
then there is a race against time
because you're always concerned that something else could happen.
You don't know what they're capable of.
Police in London
searching for missing person Laureline Garcia-Bertaux
have found an unidentified female body,
wrapped in rubble sacks and a deflated air bed,
buried in a shallow grave.
Police still need the postmortem
to determine if it's Laureline's body they've found.
The woman's neck, hands and feet
have been bound with electrical cable.
Normal household white extension cable
and also some quite heavy tape,
what's known as duct tape or gaffer tape.
The scene of a burial is not normally
where the murder's actually happened.
I would instruct the CSls searching the house
to look for any electrical equipment that had a cable missing.
To prevent contaminating evidence,
a different team of CSls enter Laureline's flat
to search for clues to her whereabouts.
The house is very tidy.
There didn't seem to be any areas of disturbance.
There were items that had been boxed up.
You can see all these boxes packed up,
some still open with things sticking out the top.
There was beds dismantled, ready to go.
There was a mattress.
All sorts of things where somebody's moving house.
It didn't really make sense to us.
And we needed to understand more
about what she planned on doing and where she planned to go.
Though no evidence of a struggle,
police have a hunch the killer has been here.
Laureline was well-known as having these two big clogs.
One of the things that you see was that there was loads of food,
almost as if a huge bag had been emptied,
and my thoughts around that, initially, were,
"Well, as long as they're eating, they're not gonna disturb anyone."
Ancl for as long as that could be
before they started to become hungry and create the alarm.
If it was a burglary that had gone wrong,
I think burying the victim would not have happened.
They probably would have tried to get out of that place
as quickly as possible.
So you're looking at somebody, maybe,
who's comfortable being in that place,
comfortable to spend time there.
CSls look for forensic traces left behind by the killer.
It can be quite frustrating when you're hoping to get DNA,
fingerprint evidence on it, and there's no evidence.
But there's several reasons why there may be no evidence on there.
Maybe the offender has been forensically aware.
But in Laureline's bedroom, CSls notice something odd.
Everything was packed away in boxes,
and this extension cable was just left on the floor,
and it had part of the flex missing.
So immediately, that would kind of ring alarm bells to me.
It's really important to then ascertain
the cable that's round our victim's neck,
is that the cable that's missing
from this extension lead in the house?
And there's a number of tests that we can do
to try and link those two items together.
The extension lead is swabbed for DNA
and sent for forensic testing to see if it matches the ligature.
Further searches reveal Laureline's phone is missing.
One of the items that you want to find is a mobile phone.
Ancl when you don't find it, then that leads you to believe
that somebody's taken that phone away with them.
I didn't have Laureline's phone, but I could get the data from it,
but this always takes a number of clays.
Ancl it's quite frustrating that you want to see that straight away.
Laureline's data is requested from her network provider,
and the team brings in a digital forensic expert.
When I explain to people the kind of data that we can get from cell site,
people are staggered.
There's so much data being stored outside the phone
that we can really build up quite a comprehensive picture
of what you've been up to.
It's possible to get cloud data from apps that were used
and email as well as cell site data.
In this case, it's possible to tell that it was connected to the Wi-Fi.
This is because we can access the routers,
and the router log will give us information
about what devices were connected and when they were last seen.
Outside, officers go door to door,
hoping to find out who has been at Laureline's home.
My officers start to arrive on scene,
and they start to be deployed to speak to people in these houses.
At the same time, you're starting to look for CCTV
because CCTV has grown immensely in recent years,
and now CCTV is present on people's houses
and also doorbells as much as it is on businesses.
A lot of people want to help as well.
They want to give you information,
but it's very, very difficult to start to...
dissect that information
about what's relevant and what isn't relevant.
While officers continue to look for clues left by the killer,
an update from the mortuary confirms Laureline's family's worst fears.
It's very shocking.
You can't imagine what a family have to go through at that point.
Specialist trained officers are with the family,
those that live in this country, and friends as well.
Because her actual family, her close family, live in France.
Ancl so getting that information to them through help,
through international colleagues, was very important.
Laureline was 34, in the prime of her life.
She was looking to build a future,
more so in her career, wanted to progress that.
She was already very well thought of.
So it shocked a lot of people.
The autopsy finds Laureline has been strangled
with the electrical flex found around her neck.
At the postmortem, the pathologist stated
that he'd never seen such a severe sign of asphyxia,
and it was almost like something had fallen on her chest.
The cause of death appeared to be the ligature
that was around her neck.
It's really important, when you're a CSI,
to try and put yourself in the killer's mindset.
If I was going to cut this cable, where would I hold it?
Because then if you can work out how you would hold it,
then that, potentially, would be where the offender would hold it,
and those are the areas that you would swab or fingerprint.
Forensic scientists still need to determine
if the flex came from extension lead recovered by CSls
in Laureline's bedroom.
That item would be packaged very carefully
and fast-tracked for an urgent submission
to a forensic service provider for a comparison to be made.
It's really important to see if the cable round the victim's neck
matches the cable that's been found in the victim's house.
One way that this could be clone
is where the cable round the neck of the victim is taken,
and the cut end is then matched
against the cut end of the extension cable part
that's found in the house.
Scientists would look really closely at the cut ends
to see if there's any similarities,
almost like two sections of a jigsaw that can be pieced together.
Ancl this is a process called physical fit.
The flex and extension lead are found to be a direct physical match.
As the SIO, I was satisfied
that Laureline had been killed inside the premises
and then taken out and buried in the garden.
You need to try and understand, you know,
who could do that kind of thing?
To do that took a lot of time and a lot of planning,
so who could have got away
with being in that flat for all that time, unnoticed,
that didn't have to break in.
One of the hypothesis was that potentially,
it's somebody that knows her or she felt comfortable with.
If you've got a tidy crime scene
where it looks as if somebody is forensically aware,
and they are trying to clean up everything about themselves
so that the police aren't going to catch them, that person...
...is probably calm.
That person is comfortable being in the scene.
That person probably is quite comfortable being with the body.
This is somebody who knows the victim.
The vast majority of women know their killers.
It's much more unusual for women to be murdered by a stranger.
Most of them, and when I say most,
over 80, 90% of them, will be planned.
You need to understand as much as you can about that victim.
You need to delve deep into their history, their relationships.
Who they know, any people they have arguments with.
Anybody that they fall out with,
whether they're family or friends or just colleagues
or just somebody they don't know.
The door-to-door enquiries tell police
about recent sightings of Laureline.
People described people with her.
One was a particularly scruffy man,
somebody else had seen her with another man,
but they couldn't really describe him particularly.
So you're still trying to identify,
"Well, is any one of these people that she's with,
"are any of them suspicious to us?"
It was quite and noisy flat
because the two very big clogs, barking quite a lot.
Sometimes, she was heard to argue with somebody.
Ancl this was quite close to the time that she was reported missing,
and that's very significant to hear that
because I want to know straight away who that is.
Swabs taken from the extension lead in Laureline's bedroom
return a full male DNA profile.
In almost all circumstances, when an offender commits a crime,
they will leave some sort of trace.
So if a killer's wearing gloves to commit an offence,
it doesn't mean to say
that they're still not going to leave DNA at that scene.
All it takes is for a killer to have latex gloves on
and touch their face,
and immediately, they have DNA on the outside of the gloves.
If someone's been at a scene,
we will prove that they've been there.
He thinks he's cleverer than the police.
He thinks that he's got all of this forensic knowledge.
But I really think big, big mistake,
not nearly as clever as he thinks he is.
A male DNA profile has been recovered from an extension lead
used to murder film producer Laureline Garcia-Bertaux.
It's run through the police database.
If you get a full DNA profile, the statistics are...
they quote something like one in a billion chance,
so that means one person in one billion people
may have the same DNA profile,
which is pretty unheard-of, really.
In this particular case, we didn't know who that sample belonged to.
It's one of those frustrating ones
where you have something you think is significant,
but you don't know who's left it there.
You want a match as quickly as possible,
so that you can focus all your attention on that person.
Getting a DNA profile on something
doesn't necessarily mean that that is the offender.
The DNA could have been on there
for months prior to the offence occurring.
So although we might find forensic results,
it's then time lining and being able to apply those results
to the situation they've been found in
and the circumstances around what item we've got
and how the DNA might have got on there.
Police are convinced Laureline's killer was known to her.
They begin to build a detailed picture of her life.
In order to establish where Laureline might have gone,
we start looking at her finance as well in the background,
speaking to the banks where she had accounts with
to understand if she's had any transactions locally
that might be able to help us give that timeline
as to where she was and where she was before.
She was clue to move house.
that should have taken place
on the Saturday or, potentially, the Sunday morning.
But it hadn't taken place.
She'd booked a removal company,
and we can see the evidence from the company
that she cancelled that booking.
The landlord expects her to have moved out, and she hasn't.
So what's happened? What has stopped her from moving?
We wanted to know more about that, what were the circumstances?
Where was she going?
Because obviously, that was one of the first places
I would send an officer to,
the address that she was clue to go to.
No-one knew where this house was.
we needed to speak to those very, very close to her
to understand much, much more.
If you look at the crime scene we've got,
it suggests very strongly
that it's actually someone that she knows.
It suggests that it's somebody
who's been into the property before,
who's not worried about being seen in the property
cos he's spending time there.
That would suggest a partner or an ex-partner.
Having spoken to family and friends,
it was clear that Laureline was single.
She had been in a relationship for a while,
but that had finished, and in the current stage of her life,
she was starting to look at dating apps.
But it wasn't something that she had really told a lot of people about.
Ancl so that was a line of inquiry for us.
Ancl officers were deployed to speak to the companies
that own that particular dating app to say,
"Well, can you help us out with anybody that she might have met?"
We need to start to build a timeline
of who she was with when she was last seen.
La u re li ne's transactions show
she paid for a meal at a restaurant in Richmond on Friday evening,
four days before her body was found.
This led us to the first kind of trail in her CCTV.
Ancl what you could see was Laureline sitting on a table with a man.
You can see a glass of prosecco or Champagne on the table,
so this was a kind of friendly meeting.
You would think that, potentially, this is a date.
We can then see on CCTV that she gets a bus from Richmond to Kew.
Ancl she's with him on the bus.
He's got his hand on her leg,
so there is a kind of intimacy there between the two of them.
Where is this person? Who are they?
Police show the CCTV to Laureline's friends and family.
They instantly recognise the man as her ex-boyfriend,
Kirill Belorusov.
Kirill Belorusov and Laureline had met
whilst he was working in bars and clubs.
You know, we understood that she was told he was a stuntman in Hollywood,
had clone various films with people like Brad Pitt
and was travelling the world to do these things.
Ancl of course, you know, she was excited
to be with somebody like that.
This was a person that she had been in a relationship with
since around 2009.
And then it had ended around 2017.
Ancl then, it had been on and off since that time,
right up until the point where she went missing.
Ancl so he became a significant person
for me and the team almost immediately.
As police looked deeper into Laureline and Kirill's relationship,
her call data is released by the phone company.
When the phone data for Laureline's phone was interrogated,
we see messages to friends and family in the UK and abroad.
On the Sunday,
all these messages were being sent out in French to France,
that she had met this "fit vet".
The way that the messages were put were not in the kind of language
that Laureline would use with her friends,
so they became a little bit wary about those messages.
In this case, there's a potential that her activity
was being spoofed by someone else.
There are various ways that we can tell.
This might be how the phone's used,
the length of time that apps are used
or even the kind of language that's used.
On her phone, Google Translate was being used.
Now, why would a French person who's getting French messages
need to use Google Translate?
Ancl of course, that is hugely significant for us
because it identifies somebody is using her phone.
Laureline's family are quick to tell police
who they think is behind the messages.
Laureline's relationship with Kirill
was quite normal in its first few years,
but as it started to get towards the end of that relationship,
he became quite abusive to her.
Not just... I'm not talking about physical, but the emotional abuse.
He would target her about her weight,
call her a slob, and friends could see that as well.
It was being clone quite openly.
Ancl so they didn't feel that this relationship
was very healthy for her at all.
And Laureline also understood that and felt that she needed to move on
and was gonna say to him,
"Look, Kirill, this is the end now, I'm gonna move on."
The relationship wasn't running as she wanted it to,
and her friends and family probably saw changes in her.
She went from very confident and outgoing and bubbly -
which is how people described her -
probably to being a lot more reluctant
and a lot quieter and dressing differently.
Cos he would've insisted on that kind of thing.
And they probably were not happy about the relationship.
The single biggest trigger for a homicide of a partner
is separation, an attempt to separate
or an imagined separation.
That's in most cases.
Probably over 90% of cases, that will be the trigger.
Police discover Laureline had loaned Kirill thousands of pounds.
She didn't have an awful lot of money,
and she needed money to move as well,
and so she would tell, especially her close friends in the UK,
that, you know, the person that had her money wasn't giving it back.
And the reason was because he had said that he had cancer
and that he needed money for treatment.
Between Kirill Belorusov and Laureline,
you see messages where he talks about his illnesses,
and you can see that the sympathies are there from Laureline,
all the time.
Naturally, in a relationship, she feels that she can lend him money,
but this has gone on for such a long time,
and he's never paid her back.
He's never made an effort to pay her back,
ancl this has put her in quite significant financial difficulty.
She had literally nothing left.
She gave it all to him.
So she obviously felt invested in this relationship with him.
And she fully believed that she was gonna get that money back.
Messages show Belorusov has recently promised to pay Laureline back.
He was the one that was organising where she would move to.
When Laureline is having conversations with her friends,
she's saying, "|'m clue to move,
"but Kirill's found me this amazing house somewhere,
"but I don't know where it is yet."
And, of course, that...
Even more for us, raised suspicions
that he was involved in her disappearance.
I assigned an officer to find out exactly what they could
around this alleged cancer that he had
and if he was ever treated in this country.
It's quite a significant inquiry to undertake
with the amount of hospitals and private clinics there are around.
It's very difficult to move a dead body in any state of health.
If he was, from what he was saying,
in a very, very poor state of health and having chemotherapy,
I think it would have been quite difficult for him to move a body
but not impossible.
Laureline's bank statements detailed recent transactions
at her local shops.
You can see on the Saturday that they are shopping together.
They go into a big Pets At Home store
and buy dog food and dog toys.
The couple also visit the supermarket next door.
This is the last time Laureline is seen alive.
Later on that evening,
we can see that McDonald's is being bought online to be delivered.
That's about 10:30 in the evening.
But that's when, really, for us,
we don't know what happens after that point.
Police need to know more about Kirill Belorusov.
It was very, very difficult to find out a lot about him.
One of our enquiries was to go to |MDb
to find out had they ever heard of him.
We looked in the films, and there was nothing to link him to anything.
No-one had ever heard of him.
Police also look at Kirill Belorusov's bank transactions
to track his movements.
The day after shopping with Laureline,
he is captured alone in a DIY store.
He is in a big Homebase store, buying rubble sacks,
soil, garden shoes.
He then is seen to buy tape,
this similar tape that has been used
to bind the hands of Laureline inside that grave.
He then goes to another convenience store
where he buys more of that tape,
and now it's an extra-strong version of that tape, also.
Obviously, that's huge evidence
to say that those items that appeared on Laureline's body
were being purchased.
So the rubble sacks, the bin bags, the duct tape,
all those items were identical.
What you can also see on that CCTV
is that he looks to have gloves on, rubber gloves.
Fairly unusual behaviour.
It's really difficult, when you first examine a crime scene,
to know what's relevant and what's not relevant
to the investigation.
Innocent items in a garden, like bags of compost and a spade
could potentially become really relevant.
We then see that on the Monday and the Tuesday,
he moves between different train stations in London,
and then by the Wednesday morning, he's purchased a ticket,
and we get him on CCTV at Luton Airport
flying out to Estonia.
Ancl it was very clear
that everything points to him being involved.
He became more than a person of interest for me.
I declared him as a suspect straight away.
Kirill Belorusov is wanted for the murder of Laureline Garcia-Bertaux.
CCTV shows him buying items found on her body
before fleeing the country.
Using intelligence, DCI Simon Harding and the team
track him down to an address in Estonia and arrange a phone call.
He was saying that he left her safe and well
and doesn't know where she is.
Ancl officers were trying to convince him to come back to help us.
And, of course, one of the obvious questions you are asking is,
"Where is this house?
"What is the address of it that you had arranged for her to live in?"
And he gave several different answers,
with roads that didn't exist, kept changing it,
kept saying he'll get back to people.
Ancl eventually, it was obvious
that he was doing everything he could
to avoid coming back to the UK.
He almost thought that he could get away with trying to tell lies to us
and that we would believe him
as he had clone to Laureline throughout their relationship,
but obviously, we don't rely on things like that.
We look at the facts.
The facts show Belorusov has not only lied to Laureline
about his career as a movie stuntman.
There was nothing at all that we could find anywhere in the UK
or even abroad that he had sought any kind of cancer treatment.
He would disappear from Laureline for five clays
saying he was going into a hospital in London for tests,
but actually, in those five clays,
he was starting to stay with somebody else.
He even went as far as to shave his head
to try and give the impression that he was undergoing chemotherapy.
What was very clear was that he is just a fraudster.
I think it's very clear
that Laureline was in a situation of coercive control.
Coercive control is quite a new concept, I suppose,
in the way that we talk about domestic abuse.
It's been criminalised
because it is an incredibly dangerous pattern of behaviour.
In fact, it's the single biggest predictor for a relationship
that might end in serious harm or homicide.
Laureline was somebody who was a resource for him.
She would give him money, she would give him a place to stay,
she would give him attention and love
or whatever it was he wanted.
She was a resource,
and he would have considered that he owned that resource.
He took her for everything that she had.
Ancl that's a significant motive there that Belorusov thinks,
"My money source has stopped,
"and I don't want anyone else to have her either."
The team still needs forensic evidence
that puts Belorusov at the crime scene.
Till we're able to arrest an offender and take a DNA sample,
this outstanding DNA profile is an outstanding male DNA profile
that could be innocently left on a piece of electrical cable.
Although we may think it's the offender,
until we're actually able to obtain a DNA sample
from the offender, we can't confirm either way.
To arrest Belorusov and get his DNA,
the team need him back on British soil.
If you identify a suspect for a murder,
it's very frustrating that you can't get them straight away.
Ancl it's obviously more complex
when they're not even in this country either.
I've got to get him back as quickly as possible.
And that's when we move onto the next stages,
is to obtain an arrest warrant, a European arrest warrant,
to try and bring him back.
But it's very difficult for us
because when you instigate a European arrest warrant,
you cannot then interview him about what happened.
You need to be very, very confident
that you have enough evidence to take somebody into a courtroom.
Unable to get a DNA sample from Belorusov,
police still need to link him to the crime scene
to get him extradited.
Digital forensic experts think Laureline's Wi-Fi router
holds vital evidence.
We can look at the router logs
in terms of what websites were accessed
through that home Wi-Fi connection.
We can also look at synced accounts such as your Google
which will give us your website history.
So we want to understand anyone that had connected to the home Wi-Fi
during that significant period of that Friday
through to the time that the body was discovered.
Using phone data and the findings from the postmortem,
police believe Laureline was killed
in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Between midnight and 5am,
two devices are connected to Laureline's Wi-Fi.
Her phone and a phone registered to Kirill Belorusov.
He was there at the time that Laureline was dead.
What we can see is that Belorusov
is looking at pornography on his own phone.
At the same time,
he is sending and using Google Translate
for the messages to Laureline's family and friends.
That kind of tells you what sort of person he is.
When you look at somebody like Belorusov,
and you look at the emotions that he is showing,
we tend to think, you know,
"That's not what I would do, that's inappropriate."
Everything he does is inappropriate. He has to learn what's appropriate.
But to secure the European arrest warrant,
the team need to prove beyond any doubt
that Belorusov has been accessing Laureline's Wi-Fi
from inside her home.
It's quite believable that the Wi-Fi could have been accessed
from the street in this case.
It would depend on where the router is
and where that is in relation to the street
and the type of building.
Officers test Laureline's Wi-Fi
from every possible position in the street.
The router only connects from inside the building.
The team can now prove that Belorusov was at the crime scene.
Ancl that's when I started to reach out to the Estonian authorities.
Estonian police arrest Belorusov in Tallinn.
He's transported to Heathrow,
where Met Police charge him with Laureline's murder.
When you're told that we actually have him back on UK soil,
it's a really important thing, not just for your investigation,
but incredibly important for her family as well
to know that somebody is going to face justice.
In police custody,
Belorusov has his fingerprints and DNA collected.
The DNA sample is compared to the male profile
recovered from the cut extension cable
found in Laureline's bedroom.
It's a match.
It's a little bit odd that the offender,
despite being very clean and tidy,
has left a vital piece of evidence at that scene.
Whether he feels that there would be no forensic evidence on there,
for example, if he's worn gloves or whatever,
but that is a really, really vital piece of evidence
that he's left for us to find.
But Belorusov insists he didn't kill Laureline.
Six months after his extradition, the case is heard in court.
He takes the stand.
He basically said, "|t wasn't me. I didn't do it.
"I left her, she was fine.
"Yeah, we had a rocky relationship sometimes,
"but, you know, she was overweight, she was this, she was that.
"She kind of deserved everything."
You know, never once really showed any form of love or emotion
for somebody that he'd been in a relationship with for,
you know, nearly ten years.
The defence argue that despite looking like a Bond villain
and admitting to abusing Laureline, Belorusov is no killer.
The person that can tell you exactly what happened is no longer with us.
They've lost their life.
And what you've got is a liar
actually directing and constructing the narrative for us.
And he thinks he's this big stuntman,
and he thinks he's almost this,
what he's been called, ajames Bond villain.
And he thought that if he could just get into the minds
of everybody in the court, he'd be able to manipulate them.
But he didn't read the room
because psychopaths very often can't read the room.
After being presented with all the evidence,
it takes just over two hours for the jury to reach a verdict.
Belorusov is found guilty.
You have clone what you set out to do,
but equally, the family have got the justice that they need.
Offenders don't often admit to crimes,
so a lot of it is down to us proving who was there
and when they were there.
That is a really, really vital piece of evidence
that he's left for us to find.
Belorusov is sentenced to life with a minimum term of 24 years.
People think, "Well, how can somebody
"you're in a relationship with get to that stage
"where they cause you such serious harm
"that you lose your life?"
Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour
designed to trap someone in a relationship.
They will learn what makes you tick.
Belorusov would've learned how to make Laureline cry.
How to make her laugh, how to make her feel loved,
and he would've been pulling the strings
of every emotion that she had.
The signs of coercive control
are quite difficult for us to see on the outside.
And sometimes, the victim is ashamed, embarrassed,
is just hoping that things will get better.
Something big happened.
Something really big happened where Laureline finally thought,
"What am I doing? I've got to get rid of this man."
That's where the countdown to her murder started.
You speak to the family,
and they can see there is something at the end of this,
something where you can hold a light against Laureline and say,
"Well, look, how is she gonna change things?"
Ancl it's important for them to see
that people look at this relationship,
look at what happened and identify those red flags.
So they identify that coercive and controlling behaviour,
and hopefully, people will see that
and learn from it and question, sometimes,
the relationship they're in themselves.