By Gary Murray
With the success of podcasts such as Serial and many dramas and documentaries, the true-crime genre is extremely popular right now.
The ‘Makings of a Murderer 2’ tour, very much designed to appeal to that audience, arrived at the Royal Hippodrome in Eastbourne last night for one performance.
Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, a former Metropolitan Police detective, served as senior investigating officer on several high-profile serial killer cases including those of Levi Bellfield and Delroy Grant.
Bellfield is serving a whole life sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Milly Dowler, who went missing from Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 2002. He was also convicted of murdering Marsha McDonnell and Amelie Delagrange, and of the attempted murder of Kate Sheedy, and will never be considered for parole.
Grant, known as The Night Stalker, carried out a series of sex attacks on elderly people over a period of 17 years. He was jailed for a minimum of 27 years in 2011 after being found guilty of 29 offences, but officers suspected he was involved in as many as 600 attacks.
Colin Sutton talks us through these cases, as well as a couple of others from his long career.
The danger is, of course, that this becomes a kind of fairground attraction where we are invited to gawk at the horrific details of the crimes committed. And in other hands that might have been the case.
But Sutton has such a personable style and the material is presented in such a way that there is no suggestion of that here.
This tale is told by a detective who was at the heart of the action
and the height of his powers
The stage is simply a screen for slides and four boards of the kind used in police incident rooms to display various photos and documents.
He talks us through how he and his team caught these killers, with some fascinating insights. The two cases in the first half are less well known.
In the second we move on to the crimes of Bellfield and Grant. Having been at the very heart of these investigations, Colin Sutton gives us some insights into less well-known aspects of the cases, as well as those with which we are more familiar.
The emphasis is on the victims of these crimes and not in glorifying the men who committed them. As he says at the end, it wasn’t just about putting these men behind bars but about saving the lives of hundreds of their potential victims.
Colin Sutton is a very engaging speaker. There were a couple of technical shortcomings at the Hippodrome last night – a recalcitrant battery in the slide remote control and a tendency to lose some words in delivery – but this tale is told by a detective who was at the heart of the action and the height of his powers. And you can’t get more authentic than that.
:: The reviewer paid for their own ticket
