NARRATOR: It's the evening rush hour in London.
A woman has been savagely attacked on her way home.
It was a perfect attack site. Somebody had thought about this.
ls there some kind of symbolic reason
why this hand's been severed?
Was it some kind of ritualistic attack?
Whoever did this,
they wanted to finish Geeta completely.
The crime scene holds the secrets to unlocking the case.
You cannot attack somebody so viciously
with such a large weapon and not have blood on your clothing.
There's a huge number of challenges that the police are faced with
when they've got to search a canal.
But if the murder weapon's there, we will find it.
There was a huge amount of blood at the scene,
and it appears that it's been a very frenzied attack.
The right hand was completely severed off,
with the exception of a small bit of skin.
That was all her hand was held on by.
Ancl all her mandibles had been cut through,
so this is a vicious, severe attack.
For members of the public, to come across
a severely injured female covered in blood on the street
is clearly not the normal thing to see on a commute home
on a busy November evening.
A horrendous incident to come across.
So their first thoughts would be preservation of life.
The woman is rushed to Charing Cross Hospital,
and police cordon off the street.
Forensic trainer Sarah Thirkell has worked as a crime scene manager
on hundreds of murder cases.
There appears to be a huge amount of blood on the pavement
but also directional blood up the wall of a house,
which in my mind suggests
that she was potentially attacked in sit...
This wall was a bricked wall,
so the interpretation of the blood spatter
might be a little bit more challenging
because obviously the brick would soak up a lot of the blood.
I would consider at that scene calling out a blood spatter expert.
The crime scene manager works closely
with senior investigating officer DCI Howard Groves.
From the dispersal of blood,
we're reasonably satisfied that where she had fallen
was more than likely the place where she was attacked.
My initial thoughts was, "Was this a stranger attack?
"Was this premeditated?
"Or was that person in the wrong place at the wrong time?
"Was there any CCTV that we could use
"that would give us an advantage into what actually happened?"
Detective inspector john Finch is brought in
to run the investigation on the ground.
When I got to the crime scene, lthought
"This is a great place for somebody to be attacked."
There's a brick wall there, it's poorly lit,
it's on the corner of a road with a gable end of a house,
not many people overlooking the scene.
It was a good choice of an attack. Somebody had thought about this.
Foremost in our mind
would be to identify the victim's next of kin.
None of the woman's belongings are missing,
ruling out robbery.
Officers recover work ID,
naming her as 28-year-old mother of two Geeta Aulakh.
From the first time I met the family,
you could see that they were just completely grief-stricken.
Geeta was a loved daughter, sister, mother.
Ancl she worked hard at Sunrise Radio
trying to bring up her two boys as best she could.
In the early hours of the next morning,
Geeta succumbs to her injuries.
This was the murder of a loving mother of two boys.
This was... was outrageous...
and the most barbaric way of killing somebody.
Now a murder investigation,
CSls look for traces left behind by the killer.
An attack site like this,
the offender may not leave very much forensic evidence.
If they've attacked her with a knife,
they will probably have taken the knife or weapon away with them.
When there's been such a ferocious attack,
there may well be trace evidence on the victim from the offender.
They might have scratched the offender's face,
or there might be fibres caught in their fingernails.
Not having the victim in situ
is forensically quite a difficult situation to cope with
because a lot of evidence that might be on that victim
has been taken to hospital.
And obviously, with the preservation of life
being the paramount importance,
hospital staff and ambulance staff aren't thinking about trace evidence
that might be on her clothes.
Any hairs or fibres
or any other blood from a potential offender.
Meanwhile, officers on the ground
narrow down the time Geeta was attacked.
We send a team to knock on the doors
to find out who was there at the time,
whether they heard anything, whether they saw anything,
whether they can help us in any other way.
We were told very early in the investigation
that a child had heard a scream and told their parents,
and this was useful to us.
It gave us an exact time, really, of when Geeta had been attacked.
Between the time 18:55 to roughly about seven o'clock,
she was attacked.
Apart from the witness who heard the screams,
we were not able to identify any other witnesses.
CCTV enquiries also draw a blank.
That was surprising, bearing in mind it was a built-up area.
It may just be that it was a blind spot.
On occasion, sometimes you don't get all of those things falling in a row
for you as an investigating officer, you have to run with what you have.
What we did not have is the weapon,
and that was crucial to the investigation going forward.
We knew that we were going to have to get that eureka moment
at some point to progress the investigation.
The team are convinced Geeta was the intended target.
What struck me about the attack
was the ferocious nature of the assault.
Ancl the thing that was going through my mind at that point,
along with my colleagues, was why?
Why was she attacked so viciously?
She was a doting mother.
She was loved by her family and her friends.
Ancl she was somebody who was happy-go-lucky, gregarious.
So it didn't fit the mould
to say why someone would want to have killed her.
The way it happened,
it looked like whoever did this,
they wanted to finish Geeta completely.
We're then looking basely at something called victimology.
If you look at Geeta, find out how she lived her life,
then we might stand a better chance of actually solving this murder.
NARRATOR: 28-year-old Geeta Aulakh has been killed
on a quiet London street
in what appears to be a targeted attack.
As well as catastrophic head injuries,
Geeta's right hand has been mutilated.
ls there some kind of symbolic reason
why this hand's been severed?
Was it some kind of ritualistic attack?
Was it some other reason why her hand been severed,
or actually, was it defence injuries?
That's something that's really important for us
to try and ascertain
cos that may then lead us to the offender.
An update from the mortuary informs police
that Geeta was attacked from behind.
Pathology report suggested that it was one attacker
and one weapon had been used.
We knew it wasn't a blunt instrument.
We knew it had to be a sword or a machete or a large knife.
So that meant that we could hone in on what we were looking for
because we would've also conducted searches close to the scene
to see if we could establish
whether or not a weapon was still in the area.
Cause of death is serious head injuries.
The pathologist indicated that the injury to her right hand
was actually a defence injury,
which then changes the perspective of the police investigation
in so far as it's not some kind of ritualistic kind of attack.
Although Geeta's hand injuries don't appear to be intentional,
the ferocity of the attack
leads police to suspect it was personal.
Early on, we've concluded the door-to-door investigations.
It didn't really give us the smoking gun that we were looking for.
I need to bit about Geeta.
Who would wanna do this? What's their motivation for it?
Is it from mistaken identity?
Has somebody got a grudge against Geeta,
and if so, who's that?
Particularly for us, there was an acrimonious relationship
between her and her estranged husband.
Geeta and Harpreet Aulakh, known as Sunny,
met at a bus stop in 1999.
It was a relationship based on love.
Geeta's family were not that approving of Sunny.
They were from different faiths.
Sunny was a very proud and religious Sikh man,
and Geeta was Hindu.
Ancl to have the merging of these two faiths
was quite unusual,
and it wasn't well-received within the friendship groups.
Ancl as a couple, they had eloped to the continent,
where Geeta had... got pregnant.
They had two boys together.
They came back to the UK to live in the UK.
Because Geeta's marriage was,
someone would argue, a loved marriage,
something that she chose herself,
it's frowned upon in that community at that time.
As a female, you're born into a lot of pressure to conform,
to behave a certain way, to act a certain way.
So you don't have that opportunity to just be your true self.
Choosing somebody, moving away from where you belonged,
must've been a lot of pressure on Geeta's shoulders.
Police gather intelligence on Sunny Aulakh.
Sunny saw himself as a real big fish in the Southall community.
He would help sponsor the students and the young men
coming across from the Punjab into the UK.
And he'd provide them with bed and board,
he'd provide them with some jobs, and he saw himself
as a bit of a fixer within the Southall community.
Then as time went by,
Sunny was carrying out small-time criminal actions,
dealing drugs, and doing various things
in the Southall community.
Ancl Geeta, frankly, had had enough of this.
Geeta wanted to have a loving family.
She didn't want this for her boys.
Police records show Sunny has previous convictions
for burglary, drink-driving, and assaulting a police officer.
Further digging also reveals that the marriage was failing.
Sunny was a very controlling man, and he was convinced
that Geeta was having an affair with people at Sunrise Radio.
He used to call her on her lunch break.
He used to stand outside Sunrise Radio.
He used to stalk his own wife.
We never had anything to suggest that she was having an affair,
but Sunny had it in his mind that she was having an affair
because nine or ten months before, Geeta had decided,
"I don't want to be married to you any more."
She wanted to separate from Sunny.
It's difficult for South Asian women to leave any sort of relationship
because you come into the relationship
maintaining, holding the honour of the family.
So there's additional things to think about
because you're not just leaving a relationship, you're leaving...
You're breaking two families apart.
After nearly ten years of marriage,
Geeta has ended her relationship with Sunny,
moving out with her two sons and filing for divorce.
That would be a huge challenge to his power,
and another layer on top of that is, "What would people think?
"What would the community think? What would people in India think?"
He has a lot to lose reputation-wise,
so that's a complete blow to his entire identity.
With his history of violence...
you could see that...
the fingers would be pointing towards him.
Police urgently need to speak to Sunny Aulakh.
Intelligence finds him at a friend's house in Hounslow.
He's arrested on suspicion of murder and brought in for questioning.
The team found him quite arrogant, cocky.
He didn't seem concerned about the welfare of Geeta,
which my colleagues found quite surprising at the time.
As far as he was concerned, they were in a loving relationship,
and the relationship had its ups and downs,
but they were working through it.
Police ask Sunny what he was doing at the time Geeta was attacked.
He gives us a watertight alibi.
He tells us that the night his wife was killed,
he was at a pub up the road.
We actually visited the pub.
We were able to look at the CCTV,
and it confirmed that he was in the pub with friends,
playing pool and buying drinks at the bar.
He started arguing with the barman, he'd even paid on a credit card
that he'd never used before as well.
So for me, his alibi that he thought was very good...
For me, this alibi was just... It was too watertight.
And based on us being able to prove conclusively
that he was not the person who carried out the attack,
or that he was present during the attack,
he was bailed pending further inquiries.
The team begin to piece together Geeta's final movements.
From the limited information in the beginning,
it looked like something that was targeted.
Nothing was stolen from Geeta, so it looked deliberate,
like whatever happened, they were on a mission to kill/murder Geeta.
At approximately 6pm on the day she was killed,
Geeta left Sunrise Radio, where she worked as a receptionist.
We got the CCTV footage.
Geeta had taken a bus
from Sunrise Radio round to the Greenford Road,
got off the bus and walked a short distance, five-minute walk,
and she was on her way to the childminder to pick up her two boys.
She never made it.
Geeta gets off 105 bus, roughly here.
She walks up a very short distance and then turns left.
She carries on in the direction of Braund Avenue,
and we know that that's the route that she would normally have taken,
and there's nothing to suggest otherwise.
She carries on down, and at some point,
she then ends up on the right-hand side of the road.
Er, she's found by witnesses nearby,
so we are surmising that the person to carry out the attack
was somewhere waiting on her before attacking her.
But there was no information or evidence at that point
to suggest that she knew who her attacker was.
This as a mother makes me feel quite upset.
For her to be killed within a few metres of where her children were
is quite an upsetting incident.
With the crime scene harvest complete,
police are no closer to identifying the killer.
Very early on in the investigation,
the decision was made to have a press conference with her family
to keep Geeta's profile and her murder...
in the public eye and ask the public to help us.
We need a local community to be on board with us,
and we need them to understand that we were taking this serious.
They was really appalled by this murder.
The family, particularly the father,
were very, very well respected within the local community.
The press conference
was gonna be really, really hard for the family to do.
But they stood tall, and throughout their grief,
they still managed to push on and deal with this press conference.
Geeta had the biggest smile that mended everyone's hearts,
and she was cruelly taken away,
leaving two gorgeous little boys who are without their mummy.
Listening to them asking for their mummy breaks our hearts...
...and finding the words to tell them that their mother is no more.
We want justice for Geeta.
You know, the police are doing a great job,
but we need more people to come forward and help.
A few days after the emotional appeal from Geeta's family,
a 30-year-old man contacts the police.
And we get a phone call saying thatjaswant Singh Dhillon
has walked into Southall Police Station,
and he's told the station officer there, "I was there last night.
"I know what happened. I can help you."
Could be a very nice, well-meaning member of the public,
and most people are.
But there's always that thought in the back of your mind,
"What's in it for them?"
It's not likely from someone from...
a community that values their reputation, their honour so much
to walk into a police station.
It's not normal, so that would have been a red flag in itself.
jaswant tells police that on the night of the murder,
he was helping collect a debt near the crime scene
with two other people he says he doesn't know.
He was driven to the area where the attack took place
with two people.
The person who wasn't the driver got out the vehicle, walked off,
and as far as he was concerned, he'd gone somewhere.
He didn't know where he'd gone.
Ancl within two to three minutes, he jumped into the vehicle,
and he basically was out of breath,
and he said something along the lines of,
"I've killed a sister bitch."
Ancl he then noticed that he had a large weapon with him.
He said that he didn't know who carried out the attack,
who this individual was.
But police have their suspicions.
Sunny was in a...
difficult period in a relationship with Geeta.
She had filed divorce proceedings against him.
Ancl if there was anybody who had a motive... to kill Geeta,
it was more than likely going to be Sunny.
Sunny's view that they were working through their marriage
and it was an amicable split,
we knew that was just him trying to paint a picture
that he wasn't thinking about something like that.
But we know from evidence
that we got from friends and from Geeta's sister
that he had actually threatened her.
Police askjaswant if he knows Sunny Aulakh.
He told us they were just business acquaintances, hardly ever spoke.
Naturally, myself and the rest of the team were quite suspicious.
He presented himself as someone who had been duped
to go on an errand to try and recover a debt.
Ancl that he was not aware that somebody was going to be attacked,
even more so a female.
And therefore that was the reason
why he was coming to the police station to clear his name.
Jaswant took my officers on a journey of exactly where they went,
where the car was at the time of the murder.
"And I'm happy to help the police," that was his rationale.
He wanted to come across
as a helpful, genuine member of the public.
But this isn't something I'd seen before.
jaswant leads officers 13 miles west of the crime scene to Slough,
where he says the attacker dumped evidence.
The journey to get there was a real labyrinth through a housing estate.
Somebody needed to have some local knowledge
cos you would never normally find that canal.
You wouldn't just drive by, see if there's a canal,
"|'m gonna throw something into it."
You had to know it was there, you had to know it was quiet.
He was adamant that they ended up at a canal
and that the attacker...
left the vehicle, took off his jacket...
...threw it into the canal along with what he thought was a machete.
Proof in the pudding
was going to be when we did put divers into the canal,
"Do we end up retrieving the jacket and the machete?"
It's quite time critical for us
because if we got to it quickly enough,
there might be some forensic evidence,
whether it's blood, hair, fingerprints.
Whatever there might be on that machete,
we had to get to that pretty quickly.
There's a huge number of challenges that the police are faced with
when they've got to search a canal,
but if the murder weapon's there, we will find it.
NARRATOR: Acting on a tip-off from BO-year-oldjaswant Singh Dhillon,
police divers look for a machete
said to have been used to kill mother-of-two Geeta Aulakh.
The question that threw up for myself was,
"How much could we believe what he was saying?"
One of the things which I certainly had,
and along with my colleagues, was,
"Why has he attended the police station
"to provide us with this information?"
It put him in the vicinity of where the attack took place,
so we knew that there had to be some credence to what he was saying.
But we weren't sure of his ulterior motives.
And it's as though he wants to tell us what's happened
before somebody else tells us what's happened.
It's the ABC of the detective world.
"You accept nothing, you believe nobody,
"and you challenge everything."
The offender might say it's been thrown in here, but actually,
they've got it wrong or they've misled the police,
so you have to search a massive area.
If you imagine how long
fingertip searches might take searching a field,
underwater would take probably twice as long
because you've got the issue of the depth of the water.
Ancl also the visibility, so they're effectively searching blind.
jaswant also takes officers
to another dump site on the M4 motorway.
They then pull into the hard shoulder,
they attack her again, got out the vehicle
and threw his training shoes up on the verge of the motorway.
And then they got back in the vehicle
and headed back towards London.
How do you search that area and recover, potentially,
items there whilst also being safe
and allowing the traffic to flow freely on the motorway?
So, challenges would be, "Are you gonna close the motorway?
"Are you gonna close lanes one and two?"
Ancl also, on a motorway embankment,
there is a lot of other discarded items.
People throw so much stuff out of vehicles,
so, again, it's what is relevant and what isn't relevant.
Police close all lanes of the M4, allowing CSls to comb the area.
jaswant directs them to a pair of black trainers
he insists were dumped by the killer.
We were reasonably confident at that stage
that he was providing us with useful information.
The motive behind it was still an issue for us,
but we didn't want to get hoodwinked.
We didn't want him to be slowing down the investigation.
Back at the canal,
police divers are still searching for the possible murder weapon.
It's hugely frustrating when we are told a machete is in one place,
it's in a canal, and we can't find it.
Divers search the canal for over two days without success.
But police are not prepared to give up.
The canal was drained to a certain degree, allowing a better search.
And eventually, the murder weapon, a machete,
was found wrapped in a jacket
and weighted down in the bottom of the canal.
The exhibits are sent for forensic testing.
The machete, in terms of size,
was roughly the size of my elbow to the end of my fingertips.
Quite large and is not something
that you would normally expect someone to have walking around.
If an item has been within a water environment,
there's different chemicals that you can use to enhance any fingerprints.
You would still search it for DNA that might be on there,
but evidence doesn't normally like water.
The fact that the machete was wrapped in a jacket
may well have preserved forensic evidence on the actual knife.
So, take the handle apart, the wooden handle,
and look underneath and swab underneath
for any blood, hairs, fibres, whatever might be there.
Sadly, in this case, we didn't harvest any DNA from that.
There might be several reasons
as to why there was no forensic evidence on that knife.
That may either be because the water had got rid of the evidence,
but also, it might be that the knife had been cleaned.
It can be quite frustrating when you've got the murder weapon
that you can't actually, potentially,
tie that murder weapon back to the offender.
But it's still good evidence,
it's still corroborative evidence that you've found it.
The machete is consistent with Geeta's injuries.
The machete was sharp to the touch.
Had you run your fingers along it,
you would have undoubtedly cut your fingers.
It had clearly been sharpened.
You could see that there were almost marks
where an angle grinder had been used to try and sharpen the blade.
There was scratch marks all over the blade of the machete.
It was quite a rough, unprofessional job that had been clone.
With jaswant insisting he doesn't know the killer's name,
officers focus on tracking down where the machete was purchased
and by who.
This was brand-new, it still had a label on it.
The label said "Tramontina. Made in Brazil."
Ancl they told us straightaway,
we have one importer into the UK based in Cumbria.
So we spoke to this importer, we said,
"How many of these machetes have you sold in the London area?"
Ancl they gave us a list of about 20 shops in London
that had bought machetes in the previous six months.
One of these shops stood out for us straightaway,
it was a shop called Weststar, it was in Hounslow.
It was about two-and-a-half miles from where the murder took place.
I thought perhaps there might be some CCTV there
that might help lead us to whoever's carried out this murder.
Officers are sent to speak to the shop owner,
while forensic scientists examine the trainers
and the jacket the machete was wrapped in.
There may well be wearer's DNA around the cuffs and the neck area,
maybe the pockets of the jacket,
which should be able to ascertain
who may have been wearing that jacket.
This was a very targeted attack with a huge amount of force,
so your offender is going to have blood on them.
You cannot attack somebody so viciously with such a large weapon
and not have blood on your clothing.
The trainers are also found to have no DNA evidence on them.
Ancl you're hoping to get DNA, and there's no evidence.
That can be sometimes quite frustrating and quite disappointing.
Forensics turn their attention to the jacket.
Forensic scientists were able to locate some head hairs on the jacket
and also some blood staining.
The hairs were very long and quite thick and black hairs,
so visually, these hairs match the hairs from Geeta.
DNA profiling of their blood staining and their head hairs
come back and confirm that both of these belong to Geeta.
So even though the knife's got evidence on it,
the item that it's wrapped in
is a really good source of forensic evidence.
With the informantjaswant Singh Dhillon's story adding up,
forensic scientists look for wearer DNA on the jacket
that could reveal the killer's identity.
You then want to make the links between the clothing to someone,
the weapon to the attacker, and then more importantly,
is to link who we believe was,
if I use the expression "el numero uno",
the number-one suspect being Sunny -
we wanted to link him into all of that.
The forensic scientists were able to find wearer DNA on it.
A full DNA profile, and it matched a male.
This profile would then have been loaded to the DNA database
to see if it matched against any known offenders.
The DNA profile gets a hit.
19-year-old Indian national Sher Singh.
For me, that was it. That was a eureka moment.
Sher Singh had come into the UK a few months earlier
on a Tier 4 student visa to come and do a college course.
Our inquiries very early found out
that he was sponsored to come to the UK.
We'd also found out that he had only been in college
for the first clay to register, but he'd never gone back again.
So it was only a matter of about four months
after Sher Singh landed in the UK that Geeta was killed.
We knew that he did not know the victim,
so there was no need for her DNA to be anywhere near him.
So that, for us, was cast-iron
in terms of linking him to the victim, to the attack.
A pressing issue for me was,
why would a 19-year-old carry out such a vicious attack?
That was a priority for us, to try and find him as soon as possible.
As long as he was at large,
there was always a possibility for evidence to be lost.
A manhunt for Sher Singh begins.
The team still need to conclusively link the machete
recovered from the canal to Geeta's murder.
It's quite difficult for anyone to be 100% certain
that that's the murder weapon,
particularly if there's no forensic evidence on the knife.
So pathologists will be able to say,
"|t's very similar, but not necessarily that is the knife
"that's made those injuries on the deceased."
Unless there's any particular nuances around the knife,
any specific areas have damaged that has been replicated
in the injuries on the victim.
Whoever sharpened the knife clearly wanted to use it
to injure somebody quite severely,
so that adds to the police case
around the intent to murder somebody.
In our culture, this is more of a physical,
common sort of weapon to use than a gun, for example.
And a gun, I suppose, leaves a trace.
I think it's more cleaner, in a sense, and more personal,
knowing that the machete was sharpened for that task to kill.
It wasn't a warning.
Geeta was at the point of separation,
she filed the divorce papers.
She was at the highest risk possible for a homicide to occur.
Police still haven't identified a clear motive
for Sher Singh to attack Geeta.
Sher Singh had no relationship with Gee-ta,
so there was no reason for him to attack her.
They follow up on who may have purchased the murder weapon.
Officers report back that the shop has only sold three machetes,
like the one used to kill Geeta.
Weststar provide us with CCTV evidence
of the purchase of all three machetes
in the weeks leading up to Geeta's murder.
Two of the people we identify very quickly and we traced.
Ancl they provide us statements,
and they showed us the machetes they'd bought
and gave us a reasonable reason for having these machetes.
The third person, we couldn't quite find.
When we looked at the CCTV,
one of the most pivotal moments,
not only in the investigation, but in my career...
...that's Sunny, that's the husband.
You can see Sunny holding the machete,
sort of moving it around.
Ancl this all looked a bit odd.
It was only when we spoke to the man who sold the machete,
he told us that Sunny was asking about how to sharpen the machete.
The machete we'd recovered had clearly been sharpened.
You've got the husband on CCTV
buying a machete nine clays before the murder's carried out.
Gotcha.
Talk your way out of that.
So, for us...
it's manna from heaven.
We're now thinking we can now link him
not to the attack on the day in question,
but we can link him to the weapon that were used
to carry out the attack.
For Sunny to go into a shop
to buy the murder weapon,
to even ask the shop owner, "How do you sharpen this?"
goes to show his arrogance, his...
the way he was confident, the premeditation, the planning.
The fact that... the entitlement that,
"I could do this to another human being."
My view at that point of the investigation
was the motive for Sher Singh carrying out the attack
was solely because he had been asked by Sunny to do so.
The term that's used on a killing,
that is something that we had in the forefront of our mind.
We knew that it's something that had happened
many a time in this country.
Honour-based abuse happens in multiple communities,
from Traveller communities to African communities,
but statistically happens mostly in South Asian communities
and Middle Eastern communities.
But there is no religion on this Earth that allows that to happen.
One of the main reason behind it will be to uphold or maintain
control and honour around the family's name in the community.
Whoever used the machete
went out to make a point that Geeta was dish on our able.
It points to the fact that it could be a so-called honour killing.
NARRATOR: Geeta Aulakh's husband has been caught on camera
buying a machete, linking him to her murder,
and he didn't act alone.
DNA has put 19-year-old Sher Singh at the crime scene.
Police suspect they are dealing with a so-called honour killing.
In honour-based crimes,
the honour is a collective honour.
It's not an individual's reputation, an individual's shame,
an individual's pride,
it's a collective honour that you're trying to maintain,
and this is why, in honour-based abuse cases,
you will find multiple perpetrators.
Police need to work out how Sunny Aulakh and Sher Singh are connected.
Our family liaison officer did a great job.
She recovered a load of photographs from Geeta's family,
and when we looked at those photographs
there was clearly there, there was Sunny, the husband,
and Sher Singh in the same photograph dancing at a wedding.
In Sunny's alpha male world, Geeta disrespected him by leaving him,
so Sunny at that point, I say, brought Sher Singh across to the UK,
a friend from his community, to carry out the murder of Geeta.
The significant hold that I believe Sunny had over Sher Singh
was loyalty.
They had grown up together in the Punjab,
they had obviously formed a good bond between them,
and in many ways, I felt that Sunny abused that friendship.
My officers' view of Sher Singh was an impressionable individual
and was just somebody who Sunny could use to do errands for him,
and this errand was to kill Geeta.
In our culture, you respect your elders.
For someone as young as him, knowing honour was in the mix,
he would have thought, "This is my duty, I must do this."
So it would have been very easy to groom an 18-year-old from Punjab
to commit such a horrific crime.
Using cell site evidence,
police work out who was involved in the hit on Geeta.
It showed that there was a distinct and ongoing relationship
between Sher Singh, Sunny Aulakh andjaswant Singh Dhillon.
They'd been speaking to each other for weeks.
It also showed that there'd been a dry run, if you like,
the week before Geeta was killed,
where we think, in hindsight, they just missed her.
The week later, she was killed.
What the phone forensics also corroborated for us,
that when Sunny is in the pub,
on CCTV, he's on the phone, and we can link that phone
showing that he's phoning Jaswant Singh Dhillon
to make sure the murder is happening.
We subsequently took the view that he was the enforcer,
that he had much more of an involvement
than he was leading us to believe.
Phone data reveals a fourth man as the getaway driver.
We were able to establish the driver as Harpreet Singh.
That individual's phone details was injaswanfs phone,
so subsequently we did further analysis of that data,
and we were able to establish exactly where that individual lived.
Harpreet Singh lives in Slough,
close to where the machete was recovered.
When an offender's going to dump evidence,
it's normally in an area that they've either frequented
or that they live near.
Because humans are creatures of habit,
so they will know an area where they can throw items away
and not be found.
The four men are arrested and charged with Geeta's murder.
When we interviewed Sunny for the second time,
he was putting on a show. He was laughing, he was joking.
He was being charged with his wife's murder,
and if he's convicted, he's gonna go to prison for life.
We had CCTV in the custody suite, and he was laughing and grinning.
He couldn't care less.
He didn't believe he'd done anything wrong. He didn't care.
You have DNA evidence linking one of the offenders to the jacket,
and Geeta's hair and blood are also on the jacket,
so there's quite a lot of forensic evidence
that can be used in court against these offenders.
Despite the evidence linking the men to the crime scene,
they all plead not guilty and the case goes to trial.
In court, Sunny didn't show any remorse.
There were occasions when he was blowing kisses up to the gallery,
he was just showing a complete disregard for human life
and for the suffering that the family were going through.
He must've felt he was indestructible.
He must have felt that he could have got away with this.
After hearing the forensic evidence, the jury makes their decision.
Harpreet Sunny Aulakh, Sher Singh,
jaswant Singh Dhillon and Harpreet Singh
are found guilty of murder.
Aulakh is sentenced to a minimum term of 28 years.
The others, 22.
A lot depended on the forensic work that we did, and it was crucial.
Without the forensic retrievals of those items,
they would not have been convicted.
You know, he couldn't bear the idea
that she was going to get on with her life
with her children, and probably find happiness with someone else,
and he felt that he had to make sure that that didn't happen.
It was Sunny's reputation, his identity, everything on the line,
and his level of entitlement that he could do that,
and the recruiting other members, the collective,
the team he had to commit the crime,
he didn't do it alone,
shows the hallmarks of a so-called honour killing.
He was preplanning it, he wanted to do it,
it doesn't matter how long it took,
he would have clone it one way or the other.
I feel that the sentence of a minimum of 28 years was appropriate.
However, other events that have unfolded subsequently
has changed my view.
Eight years after their convictions, Sunny Aulakh, Sher Singh
andjaswant Singh Dhillon make an application to the Home Office
to spend the remainder of their sentences in their home country.
In August 2018, the three men are deported to India.
My first thought was, one, how can this be true, and secondly,
why would he do that, what's in it for him?
A few months later, Geeta's family called DI Finch.
He's out and about.
There's Facebook pages showing Harpreet, Sher Singh,
jaswant Singh Dhillon all out and about in India,
access to mobile phones, socialising.
I was flabbergasted. it just made no sense.
They were supposed to be serving time in prison for murder,
and here there were doing what they wanted.
It doesn't surprise me that they're welcomed back in Punjab
even though they're murderers,
because the level of victim blaming in these communities
and the fact that you have ownership amongst the women in your life,
he's probably justified it and the community has accepted it.
Ancl this is why we still have honour killings
and honour-based abuse today.
I do believe culture, societal norms, gender inequality,
all did play a part in giving him the confidence to...
to do such a horrific crime.
The death of Geeta has obviously broken that family in many regards.
It'll never be the same.
I can't for the life of me
even think of what they may be going through,
but they are going through an awful lot of hardship.
I'm aware that they are obviously taking steps
to see if that can be changed,
and I will support them in any way in the future.
This was my first murder investigation.
It was a very complex investigation.
I have the utmost respect for the family,
the dignity in which they've conducted themselves throughout.
It's a very, very sad matter, and there's no winners.