The Detective's Dilemma - Episode 1

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Speaker 1 Hi, it's Casey here. As you know, Casefile will be back in 2026 for our 10th year with all new episodes.

Speaker 1 Earlier this year, you might have noticed that we released the first episodes of some of the CaseFile Presents shows we've produced in the Casefile feed.

Speaker 1 The decision to do this came after I learnt something surprising while talking to people at our live events.

Speaker 1 Many Casefile listeners had no idea that we produce other shows outside of Casefile, and some had never even heard of Case File Presents.

Speaker 1 It dawned on me that if someone is a big enough supporter of our show to come to a live event, but hasn't heard of our production company, then clearly we need to do a better job of highlighting the other stories we've put so much care and work into.

Speaker 1 For those who don't know, Casefile Presents is our broader production platform. While Casefile is our flagship show, we've also created a number of other podcasts under the CaseFile Presents banner.

Speaker 1 Our level of involvement differs from project to project, but we've played a direct role in all of them, and I even narrate a few myself.

Speaker 1 Today, we're sharing another one of those shows, The Detective's Dilemma, which is narrated by me.

Speaker 1 The Detective's Dilemma was originally released as a Spotify exclusive, meaning you could only listen to it on that platform.

Speaker 1 But now, for the first time, the entire series is available everywhere for free, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 When 22-year-old Sharno Callaghan went missing, Detective Steve Fulcher arrested a suspect who offered to lead him to her body.

Speaker 1 When the suspect then asked, do you want another one? It set in motion one of the most significant and controversial investigations in recent UK history.

Speaker 1 The detective's Detective's Dilemma explores the complex questions it raised about the justice system, police procedure and the cost of doing what you believe is right.

Speaker 1 It's a story that leaves you asking, what would you have done in the same situation?

Speaker 1 We're releasing the first episode here on the case file feed. You can find the full series by searching for The Detective's Dilemma wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, here's episode 1.

Speaker 1 We covered the disappearance of Shano Callaghan and the subsequent investigation back on episode 35 of Case File.

Speaker 1 It's one of those episodes that has just stayed with me.

Speaker 1 It's an extraordinary story, which shows better than almost any other, the gravity of the decisions a senior detective must make in the heat of a fast-moving investigation and the very fine line a modern investigator must walk to balance operational effectiveness with today's increasingly stringent procedures.

Speaker 1 With exclusive access to the key characters in this story, including family members and lead investigator Steve Fulcher, we will go behind the scenes to unravel how the investigation unfolded and the minefield of legal and ethical dilemmas that distinguish this case so starkly from the norm.

Speaker 1 And we will leave you to ponder the fundamental question at the heart of this perplexing tale. If it had been your loved one that Steve Fulcher was looking for, what would you have wanted him to do?

Speaker 1 And at the same time, try and step into his shoes and ask yourself,

Speaker 1 what would you have done?

Speaker 1 When Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher of Wiltshire Police first heard of the disappearance of Sharn O'Callaghan, he had no idea this case would change his life forever.

Speaker 2 Sean was a 22-year-old girl, very attractive. She She was an office worker.
She lived locally in Swindon. Her family was local.
She was in a loving relationship with her boyfriend Kevin.

Speaker 2 She had a close-knit family, mother Elaine, a brother and two sisters, and was just enjoying a night out in Swindon on that particular Friday night into Saturday morning.

Speaker 1 Sean O'Callaghan's mother, Elaine Pickford, says her daughter could light up a room.

Speaker 3 Sean

Speaker 3 was

Speaker 3 a very vibrant person,

Speaker 3 always happy, smiling, fun-loving, sociable,

Speaker 3 you know, one of those people that would walk in a room and did light the room up. I know people say that a lot about people, but in Sean's case, it's definitely true.

Speaker 3 Atmospheres would change if Sean was around.

Speaker 3 You know, everybody liked Sean, loads of friends,

Speaker 3 sociable, outgoing, bubbly, yeah, and

Speaker 3 never really gave me any hassles growing up particularly, you know, all the usual stuff, but nothing out of the ordinary, yeah.

Speaker 1 Swindon is a large town in the county of Wiltshire, southwest England, about 126 kilometers west of London.

Speaker 1 With a population of about 185,000 people, it has one of the lower crime rates in the country.

Speaker 1 On the evening of Friday the 18th of March 2011, Shano Callaghan had a night night out with some friends in the Old Town area of Swindon.

Speaker 1 They went out for dinner before visiting two bars, The Spot and Baker Street, after which they went to a nightclub called Suju.

Speaker 1 Sean left the Suju nightclub alone in the early hours of the morning of Saturday the 19th of March.

Speaker 1 The flat she shared with her boyfriend Kevin was only 800 meters away from the club.

Speaker 1 But she didn't make it home that night.

Speaker 1 Concerned by the fact Sean hadn't returned back to their flat, Kevin sent her a text message at 3.24 a.m. to check if she was okay.

Speaker 1 Sean didn't respond.

Speaker 2 First contact was from Kevin Reap, Shana Callaghan's boyfriend. They'd been together about 18 months.
He contacted the police on the morning of Saturday the 19th of March 2011.

Speaker 2 He was concerned about Sian

Speaker 2 because she hadn't been in contact with him. All he knew was that at 3.24 he'd sent a text to her saying worried with a kiss and it hadn't been responded to.

Speaker 2 He'd been desperately trying to phone her phone, phone friends, family to find out where she was.

Speaker 2 Now

Speaker 2 Sean had gone out for a night out in Swindon Old Town with a couple of female friends and they'd gone to various pubs and clubs.

Speaker 2 And that was as much as Kevin could tell us at that particular point in time.

Speaker 1 Sian's mother, Elaine, wasn't overly worried at first.

Speaker 3 We just thought maybe she'd gone off, you know, to mate's house afterwards, decided to stay over at a friend's and that she would be in touch.

Speaker 1 It's easy to understand. Sean was 22.
The last thing her mother Elaine wanted to do was panic.

Speaker 3 Even by late morning, I was just thinking, well, if she's been out to the early hours, she won't be up yet, you know, and if she is at a friend's.

Speaker 3 And then also you're thinking, well, hold on, there could be an explanation for this. Even if she's woken up, her phone might be...
out of charge.

Speaker 3 So you're kind of running through the logical explanations for it for quite some time really.

Speaker 3 By the time I got home back in,

Speaker 3 I would say that was was early afternoon, there were police officers at the house when I arrived back home.

Speaker 3 So that then was quite an immediate concern that already the police were starting

Speaker 3 escalating it by the Saturday afternoon.

Speaker 1 After taking the initial report from Sian's boyfriend, Kevin, Swindon police immediately questioned the friends Sean was out with.

Speaker 1 They couldn't offer any useful information. They hadn't run into any issues throughout the night, and there were no incidents or suspicious people in the club.

Speaker 1 CCTV footage from the Suju Nightclub showed Sean leaving the club alone at 2.52 a.m.

Speaker 1 Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher had done a colleague a favour and swapped his encore weekend.

Speaker 2 So I was on call and at home, always remain in the county and in close proximity when on call. Funnily enough, it wasn't my on-call weekend.

Speaker 2 I'd agreed to swap with a colleague because he'd been working so many hours on a different case. Yeah, but for that,

Speaker 2 I'd have not picked up the Sharn O'Callaghan kidnap at all.

Speaker 2 At about six o'clock on Saturday, the 19th of March, I was called by officers from Swindon Police Station.

Speaker 2 They were increasingly concerned regarding the safety and welfare of Shana Callaghan, who they'd been investigating as a missing person.

Speaker 2 They'd spent the day doing the obvious checks of hospitals, check of their home address and so on.

Speaker 2 They decided at that time to escalate the issue to me as the on-call senior investigating officer for the force. So of course

Speaker 2 I picked that issue up.

Speaker 2 I took a briefing over the telephone, obviously shared the concerns of the officers that had been investigating to that point and dropped everything and ran up to Swindon to see things first-hand, get a first-hand account and work out precisely what was known and what lines of inquiry we should be instigating with what level of resource and what urgency.

Speaker 2 The first call to the police came from Kevin Reap at about 9.40 in the morning. I got the call from my colleagues at about six o'clock in the evening.

Speaker 2 So during that intervening period of time, they'd have taken an account from the close associates of Shan O'Callaghan, pieced together what could be established about her movements from the night before, and some basic telephony.

Speaker 1 One of the first things investigators did was check Sharn's mobile phone records. The text message sent by Kevin at 3.24 a.m.

Speaker 1 pinged off a tower that put the location of Sean's phone in the area of Savanak Forest at the time.

Speaker 1 The exact location of Sharan's phone could not be identified. It could only be narrowed down to a six and a half mile radius around the phone tower.

Speaker 1 For Steve Fulcher, that was the starting point of the investigation.

Speaker 2 The location of the phone at the time of last contact had moved from

Speaker 2 Holdtown in Swindon to somewhere in the Savanack Forest, a distance of some some 20 miles.

Speaker 2 And that had happened between last known sightings of Sian at about 10 to 3 in the morning till the last contact when her phone was in Savernak Forest at 3.24.

Speaker 2 So within a half hour period, Sian, or at least her phone, had moved from Old Town in Swindon to somewhere in the Savanak Forest with no obvious explanation. And that was...

Speaker 2 a primary cause of concern. The instinct is critical and makes the difference between the ability to save somebody's life or otherwise.

Speaker 2 And I'd set three hypotheses, three possible answers to why her phone is suddenly in Savanak Forest at 3.24 and in the middle of the night.

Speaker 2 The first was, well, she could have gone off with somebody she met in

Speaker 2 Suju's nightclub. She could have had her phone stolen.
and that could be in the middle of Savanak Forest, whereas she is somewhere else yet to be determined.

Speaker 2 Or, the most worrying of all, of course, is that she she has been taken there. And the question then for Kevin Reap and for the family is, why would she

Speaker 2 go to the middle of Sabernac Forest at 3.24 in the morning? Is that within character? Is there any reason why she would have visited somebody there that was known?

Speaker 1 How Sean or her phone suddenly moved from Swindon 20 miles to the Sabernack Forest was not the only concern.

Speaker 1 If someone had taken Sean,

Speaker 1 the statistics were grim.

Speaker 2 The statistics indicate that if a party is abducted with criminal intent, that they live an average of six hours on average.

Speaker 2 Of course, I would argue that no case is average and that every case must be taken on its merits, but the reality is that that form of criminality results in a very high proportion of cases in in the murder of the abducted party.

Speaker 2 Now, I didn't

Speaker 2 work on the assumption that she was dead. I had her abduction as one of a number of hypotheses that I was working to.

Speaker 2 And because of the nature of that hypothesis and what I know about kidnap and survivability, I had to move with every resource and every ounce of energy and effort that I could muster.

Speaker 2 If I assumed she was dead, then she would be dead. because there is no other cavalry that's coming.
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Speaker 1 Fulcher made a decision, an important decision, to immediately escalate the investigation.

Speaker 1 He designated it as a category A crime in action, the most serious category.

Speaker 1 It means it is a major investigation of significant concern where any member of the public is at risk, the offender is unknown, and the investigation and securing of evidence requires the allocation of significant resources.

Speaker 1 Journalist Steve Brody covered the case for the BBC at the time.

Speaker 2 I think that the police and certainly Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher knew knew that at the very least she'd been abducted and I think that's why they took it seriously.

Speaker 2 They took it very seriously very early on.

Speaker 1 As a journalist, Brodie got the sense right away that there was something different about this case.

Speaker 2 You get missing persons today. The police will put out a message saying we're looking for so-and-so.
By the afternoon they've turned up.

Speaker 1 or even next day.

Speaker 2 The vast majority of missing persons generally turn up.

Speaker 2 And this wasn't one of those. I think the people got the feeling, there was a feeling that this was pretty awful and that something would have to be done.

Speaker 1 Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher could feel it too.

Speaker 1 A young woman who didn't come home and her phone pinging in a forest 20 miles from where she was last seen.

Speaker 1 His grave concern for the welfare of Shano Callahan was the top priority.

Speaker 2 Information that supported my

Speaker 2 concern was the fact that the family had been desperately trying to get hold of Sean

Speaker 2 throughout the morning of Saturday the 19th

Speaker 2 and she hadn't responded to anybody. That's completely out of character.
So her phone is in the middle of a remote rural area and she hasn't responded to her mother, to her boyfriend or anybody.

Speaker 2 So working on the hypothesis that she's been abducted from the last seen location in Swindon Old Town,

Speaker 2 I conducted this investigation as a crime in action. And what that means is that one prioritises very clearly

Speaker 2 the life of the hostage or the victim in this case, Shan O'Callahan. Everything else is subordinate to the notion of finding Sean, finding her as swiftly as possible.
and seeking to save her life.

Speaker 2 I've got search teams both in the immediate vicinity of Suju's, got house-to-house inquiries going. I'm looking for more CCTV evidence of where Sean went.

Speaker 2 I've got telephony inquiries going on simultaneously because what else can telephony tell me?

Speaker 2 Simultaneously conducting inquiries with known associates, witnesses at the time, everybody that was in Suju's nightclub, for instance, looking at the family cohort.

Speaker 2 looking at any known associates and movements on that night. And it all needs to be done fast time and simultaneously.

Speaker 1 As the senior investigating officer or SIO, Steve's decision to escalate the case to a category A crime in action had a number of impacts on how the investigation was conducted further down the line, which we will explore in detail later.

Speaker 1 For now, It was a huge escalation in gravity, speed and resourcing, with major knock-on impacts for his police department. It was something he knew he would have to justify to his bosses.

Speaker 2 I would suggest that even if we found Sian within a number of hours, it would have been a worthwhile response because you don't know what you don't know at that given point in time.

Speaker 2 So that was the first thing. Second thing was that in terms of categorisation,

Speaker 2 particularly after my initial lines of inquiry established that clearly the first two hypotheses were unlikely and the most likely was the most concerning of all, i.e., she hasn't willingly gone to the middle of the Sabernack Forest of her own volition and therefore was most likely to have been abducted,

Speaker 2 justified my categorising as a category A inquiry. Now, inquiries are categorised according to the impact it would have on the rest of policing, the public, and budget and finance.

Speaker 2 So I saw this as a crime crime in action that required as much resource as the police force could find to as swiftly and professionally find Sharn in the shortest period of time possible.

Speaker 2 If she was found live and well and she'd gone off with a friend, well, so be it. But actually I had called it right, as had my colleagues in Swindon.

Speaker 2 A great number of police forces and police responses would never have actually got into a position of dealing with this as a crime in action in the time scale in which we did.

Speaker 2 It would have been a missing person inquiry, you'd have had a 24-hour period of checking hospitals, you'd have had major crime teams oftentimes claiming that they only deal with homicide, therefore they want to see a body before they take it on.

Speaker 2 So your dedicated detectives around homicide wouldn't necessarily join in.

Speaker 2 I mean that's a, I talk in general terms and it's certainly not generally the case, but it comes down to individual SIO decision making. What are we going to do here?

Speaker 2 How much resource are we going to put in? How much effort we're going to instigate to ensure that we prioritize the most important important thing?

Speaker 2 I mean, instinct is honed over many, many years of experience, usually bitter experience of cases that one has dealt with.

Speaker 2 So I'd been a police officer for 28 years, dealt with many crimes in action, kidnap and homicides, and of course a whole raft of other offences as well. I was a professional detective.

Speaker 2 That's what I did for a living.

Speaker 2 From the accounts of the girls that she was with that evening, they'd left her in Suju's. So we knew that we wanted to get the footage from Suju's nightclub, which we gathered.

Speaker 2 We could see that she was shown on the cameras in the backyard of that premises, socialising with people. So of course, the question is asked, who are those people?

Speaker 2 Do they have any involvement in her disappearance?

Speaker 1 By late Saturday night, Fulcher was still no closer to locating Sian.

Speaker 1 and the investigation continued into Sunday morning, by which point Shan had been missing for over 24 hours. It was time for Fulcher to retrace the steps of the missing woman and also her abductor.

Speaker 2 On Sunday morning, I went to Old Town, to Suju's nightclub, retraced the steps. This is all about trying to put yourself back into the position, both of Sean and potentially of Sean's abductor.

Speaker 2 What's happened here? What can I sense? What can I see? What's out of place? Where could she have gone? I mean, simple things like the layout of that Old Town.

Speaker 2 There's derelict buildings, there's recreation grounds, there's whole rafts of places that could potentially be

Speaker 2 searched for Sean. She could have been dragged off into bushes in this location.
We'd better put a search team in there and so on.

Speaker 2 So getting a feeling for the size of the task in terms of searching for Sean physically, but also putting yourself back into the mindset of

Speaker 2 both Sean and the other party to this. If she has been abducted, how did he pick her out? What would he have seen? What would his mode of approach been?

Speaker 2 So those kind of things are standard, but useful.

Speaker 1 When an examination of CCTV footage showed Sean only at the nightclub and gave no clues to her whereabouts, it was time for Steve Fulchar to follow Sean's phone into the forest.

Speaker 2 I had no knowledge of where she'd gone. The last sighting was on that CCTV footage at Suju's.

Speaker 2 So obviously it was a search parameter within the immediate environs of Swindon Old Town in the vicinity of Suju's. But I knew that her phone at least is somewhere in the Savanak Forest.

Speaker 2 Now it's a six and a half kilometer radius area, which is huge.

Speaker 2 And the first thing I did was get traffic officers to do the drive, how long would it take physically to get between those two points and to send the helicopter up on that evening with heat-seeking equipment to see whether they could find any traces with a flyover.

Speaker 1 The Severnak Forest is the stuff of fairy tales. Giant oaks with names like Big Belly and Sleeping Dragon twist themselves into agonized shapes.
In winter, they are dark and bare, covered in snow.

Speaker 1 In autumn, they shine like gold.

Speaker 1 On Sunday, the 20th of March, 2011, the early morning fog cast a pall over the forest. There was a chill in the air and the temperature hovered around 8 degrees Celsius for most of the day.

Speaker 1 It was here that the electronic tracking systems that operate between phones and towers sent the police.

Speaker 2 The mobile telephony system works on the basis of signals being passed between fixed points, masts, which relay the signal.

Speaker 2 and you can get a reading off the relevant mast that the signals bounced off. So we can be definitively clear that her phone at least was in Swindon Old Town at

Speaker 2 10 to 3, but her phone at least was in the middle of Savanak Forest half an hour later. The difficulty with the Savanak Forest is that because it's such a rural remote location, there's only one mast.

Speaker 2 And what we would generally do is triangulate the signals to get a closer geographic fix on where the phone or the individual is. With only one mast in Savanak Forest, that wasn't possible.

Speaker 2 So of course it gave it left a huge potential search area of six and a half kilometer radius within which Sean or at least her phone had to be.

Speaker 2 But clearly the priority or all I knew at that stage was that her phone at least is in that Savanak Forest somewhere and that's got to be searched. We've got to try and find them.

Speaker 2 We've got to do it urgently.

Speaker 2 You know, a significant proportion of resource was put into that because you're talking about a colossal area if you're going to do a formal line search.

Speaker 2 A line search is a police technique where you, as it suggests, walk in a line, but you're within arm's breadth of each other.

Speaker 2 So you can imagine what resource commitment that would require if you were going to do that. Obviously, the helicopter is useful in terms of heat-seeking.

Speaker 2 Dogs as well, so we sent the dogs out to see whether they could get a trace.

Speaker 1 one of the many early strategies in the investigation was to try and utilize both traditional media and social media opportunities in order to support the investigation

Speaker 1 if they could inform the public perhaps that could lead to a crucial witness coming forward

Speaker 1 but something unexpected happened

Speaker 1 BBC journalist Steve Brody explains how the public were quick to respond to the story of the missing young woman.

Speaker 2 I think it may have been on the Sunday or the Monday when the public began to get aware of this. And I have to say, there was instant rapport between the public and the police, and indeed the media.

Speaker 2 It became one of those stories, you'll never know why a story gets to the heart of the public. There's no great thing about it.
Why does it happen? Why doesn't it happen?

Speaker 2 This was one of those stories where people wanted to find this young girl.

Speaker 1 The huge public response took Steve Fulcher by surprise as well. Thousands of people converged on the forest to look for Sharn.

Speaker 2 It was the most extraordinary reaction. Even if I'd wanted to set a different press strategy, I couldn't because social media was alive to the fact that Sian had gone missing.

Speaker 2 amongst her friends and family.

Speaker 2 People were turning up in Savanak Forest to physically search for her in the hope that she was recoverable, that she'd perhaps been left somewhere and was injured and could be saved.

Speaker 2 So it's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever come across, actually, in which by the Sunday and certainly the Monday, over 10,000 people from Swindon, voluntarily, unasked for by me, unbidden, had given up their time, their work, their weekend to

Speaker 2 look for Sharma Gallan.

Speaker 1 Steve Brody watched the response from the newsroom.

Speaker 2 And it was quite extraordinary. I was in the newsroom in Bristol and I saw these pictures come in of hundreds of people turned up.

Speaker 2 Not scores, hundreds of people turned up, all passionately wanting to help the police find Sean. An unprecedented public response.

Speaker 2 In fact, there were so many members of the public turned up that the police didn't have enough officers to direct them properly.

Speaker 1 Sean's brother Liam was awed by the community response for his missing sister.

Speaker 1 Not only did it it help his family to know there were so many people searching for Sean, but it allowed them to stay at home together and wait for news, as advised by their family liaison officer, FLO for short.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I was very surprised that they're taken aback and also proud as well, you know, to think that the community sort of rallied like that.

Speaker 5 I remember, yeah, sort of seeing on the media, coaches turning up and people actually getting into coaches and actually going to Savanak in hordes and obviously going out searching and

Speaker 5 watching the police sort of coordinate it as well, being very impressed that you're living around people that are prepared to do that. Being an older brother, you kind of want to

Speaker 5 get involved.

Speaker 5 You kind of want to get involved in the searches and I had people around me sort of saying that maybe it's best we just sort of stay in our kind of bubble that we had formed in the house and that it wasn't a good idea to be going out.

Speaker 5 And actually, I think it was one of the family liaison officers actually advised that it probably wasn't the best use of my time.

Speaker 5 But then to see, obviously, on the media that there was all these people in Swindon actually going out, actively trying to find Sean,

Speaker 3 sort of relaxed my own

Speaker 5 sort of need to want to go out and hand out posters and sort of try and find Sean.

Speaker 1 And once the public became involved in droves, it spurred the police to go to even greater lengths.

Speaker 1 Steve Fulcher explains this flow-on effect.

Speaker 2 What was striking about this entire inquiry, the professionalism of the police force, not just Wiltshire Police, but in surrounding forces as well. Officers were, I couldn't send them off duty.

Speaker 2 They would not leave duty because they were so committed to this notion of finding Sean.

Speaker 2 You know, my role was to ensure that we had the right hypothesis and the right resources and the right sense of direction. so everybody had a proper role to perform.

Speaker 2 You can see how many things you need to do simultaneously. I always talk about 24 simultaneous strands that if you drop one of them, you'll be criticized later or the inquiry will fail.

Speaker 2 So of course I want intelligence experts there, I want forensic experts there, I want telephony experts. And these guys come round in one concerted effort.

Speaker 2 It is the moment in policing which is most gratifying when you've got such a professional team. working to a clear direction so effectively.

Speaker 2 And what we did, what we did in this short period of time is probably, I'm not going to say it's unprecedented because I'm sure there's lots of other good examples, but what we did was extraordinary and all dedicated to this one end.

Speaker 2 We will find Sean.

Speaker 1 On the next episode of The Detective's Dilemma.

Speaker 6 I just want to say how very worried we are about Sean.

Speaker 2 The footage from the CCTV camera was quite a breakthrough on that Monday morning.

Speaker 3 It's blatantly obvious that she got in that cart.

Speaker 2 Whoever had taken her had done it for criminal purposes.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening. If you'd like to hear the rest of The Detective's Dilemma, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

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