The Dirty Deed

Derek Severs and his wife Eileen, who are in their 60s.

Despite a detailed search for a missing couple by police and hundreds of volunteers, it was the information found in some dirt which led police to their whereabouts.

Derek and Eileen Severs were a wealthy retired couple who lived a life of English leisure in Hambleton, a small village about a two-hour drive from London.

The village sits on a narrow peninsula that juts out into Rutland Water, one of Europe's largest man-made lakes.

The woods and the lake make it a popular vacation destination and the Severs had been living here for the past 20 years in a home known locally as the bungalow.

Derek Severs had been retired for the past few years and was well known and well liked among neighbors of the small village.

Doug Clements lived next door to the Severs.

I've never met a better man than Derek Severs.

He liked a bit of horse racing and he loved a pint of beer.

Derek's wife Eileen was equally well known, not only as a volunteer for many local charities, but also as a kind and generous friend and neighbor.

Mrs.

Severs

was one of those people who spent all her time visiting people, doing things for charity.

She was always seen, everybody liked her.

Saturday afternoon, November 13th, 1993, was the last time friends saw Derek Severs.

He was having lunch and a few pints of ale here at the Finch's Arms pub.

Friends said Derek left the pub around 3.30 that afternoon, got into his car, and was headed straight home.

Eileen Severs was last seen on that same afternoon.

She left this church after attending a charity bazaar she helped organize.

Eileen told friends she too was headed home.

Five days later, after the Severs both missed some previously scheduled appointments, friends called the police.

This is the sort of place where if you're missing for a couple of hours, people want to know why.

Police immediately drove out to the Severs' home.

The missing couple's 37-year-old son, Roger,

answered the door.

Derek and Eileen Severs?

Mom and I are on holiday

Police took a quick look around the house.

Thank you.

There's no sign of a break-in.

There's no sign of anything wrong inside the house.

By which you mean there's no sign of a struggle anyway.

No, nothing at all.

But friends weren't convinced that everything was all right.

The Severs had never gone away without first cancelling their scheduled appointments.

They weren't the sort of couple who would disappear without telling friends.

They would always say, well, look, we're popping out, look after our house.

Because that's the sort of village that it was.

He used to leave me in charge.

He'd say, look after the garden.

And neighbors said it was unusual for Derek and Eileen Severs to ask their son Roger to house sit.

Roger was a disappointment to his parents.

He was unemployed and had the reputation of being a con man, once telling a girlfriend that he was a gynecologist.

When police heard these stories, they decided to take a closer look around the Severs home.

Six days after friends last saw Derek and Eileen Severs, the police decided to make a second visit to the Sever's home, this time in daylight.

The officers noticed that the backyard had recently been excavated and there were signs of a fire in the garden.

And looking through the windows we could see this kitchen carpet was missing, but it didn't add up.

So we decided that we'd use the police powers to go into the bungalow to have a further search.

Roger Severs told police that his parents left for London from the Peterborough train station.

Police went to the train station with a photograph of the Severs.

They asked the employees and regular passengers if they had seen the couple.

Mr.

Severs was this very big man who walked very badly with the aid of a stick, and we thought that if anybody had seen them, they would remember them.

But no one at the train station recalled seeing the Severs, and police found no evidence they even made it to London.

Already local newspapers ran headlines about the Severs' mysterious disappearance.

The police suspected foul play and decided to conduct a forensic search for blood inside the Sever's home.

Detectives noticed some suspicious dark stains on the side of the bathtub and performed a Castle-Meyer test.

A damp cotton swab is used to wipe the stain, and then some phenothaline and hydrogen peroxide are added.

The sample of the stain found on the bathtub turned a bright pink, a positive, presumptive test for the presence of blood.

The fact we'd found blood didn't necessarily prove conclusively that it come from a violent action.

One of them could have cut themselves in the bathroom.

Anything could have happened.

Police also noticed a blood smear on the back seat of Derek Sever's automobile, and the Castlemeyer test confirmed that stains on the garage door were indeed blood spatter.

Police noticed noticed something else that was suspicious.

They found a large number of green fibers in the hallway inside the house, in the trunk of Mr.

Sever's automobile, and on a pair of trousers believed to be Rogers.

The fibers were an important clue because they did not match any items inside the house.

This was an indication that the source of the fibers had recently been removed.

The actual item itself was missing, so that if it,

as were the two Severs, Mr.

and Mrs.

Severs, so logic tells you that it's gone with the two, it's part of the crime scene.

The police were convinced that the Severs had been the victims of foul play and suspected that Roger Severs knew more about his parents' whereabouts than he was telling them.

Investigators believed that Roger Severs was involved with his parents' disappearance, but they had no proof that a crime had been committed and had no hard evidence suggesting where their bodies might be.

The search for the Severs began in their own backyard, since it appeared that the gardens had recently been excavated and there had also been some kind of fire.

You'd need a very very big fire to dispose of bodies and there's no way they could have been disposed of on there.

The police didn't find any human remains but they did find small bits of carpet and clothing in the ashes.

It was like looking for a needle in a haystack because all around there it is rural.

There's a huge expanse of water, lots of forests, trees, woods,

open fields.

How on earth earth do you find a body there?

Just when all of these searches turned up no clues, police finally got a break.

They learned of a strange event which occurred before the Severs were even reported missing.

A police officer on patrol recalled seeing a man in an isolated area called the Exton Avenue Woods.

There's something wrong, sir.

The man matched Roger Sever's description.

I just needed to relieve myself, and then I decided to gather some leaf molds.

The officer said the man acted suspiciously.

Well, any gardener, any horticulturist will tell you you don't want leaf mold

in November.

It's not the time of the year you're going to collect it, and certainly not half past six at night.

So we assumed something had occurred up in the Exton Avenue woods there, so off we went to have a look.

When they returned to the area a few days later, they found a bloody towel near the spot where the man was seen collecting leaves.

But the police could find no evidence that the bodies were buried there.

We did a fingertip search of the entire area, and we never ever recovered any further evidence from that scene.

The towel matched those in the Severs house.

But without blood samples from Mr.

and Mrs.

Severs, it was difficult to know to whom the blood belonged.

It was challenging rather than frustrating.

We wanted to find the bodies for two reasons.

One, evidential, obviously.

And secondly, of course,

I think it's only right and proper if there's been a murder, we want the bodies for the relatives and everyone else.

Late one night, Inspector Palmer studied the photographs of the Sever's automobile.

As he flipped through the photographs, something unusual caught his eye.

Something suspicious about the dirt and mud on Mr.

Sever's car.

The color of the mud just didn't look right.

This staining was a lot lighter in color than you would expect from a vehicle on road usage.

Generally speaking, a vehicle on road usage, it's a very dark black, dark grey, dirty color.

This was a lot lighter color.

Was it possible?

that an analysis of the dried mud on the car might give police some idea of where the car had been?

To find out, detectives called in Dr.

Tony Brown, a geologist at the University of Exeter.

Dr.

Brown began his examination by collecting the soil, dirt, grass, and debris from the wheel wells of Derek Sever's automobile.

Under a microscope, Dr.

Brown analyzed the samples and discovered tiny bits of vegetation mixed in with the mud, including minute pieces of moss, leaves, and grass.

There was even a small piece of fishing line.

It told us that it was a mixed deciduous woodland, probably oak-dominated, but with also several other species.

It was clearly quite shady.

The moss could only come from a little shaded woodland.

And there was also a fair amount of grass.

And at first, that might seem to contradict the woodland, but that's likely to occur either at the edge of a clearing in a woodland or towards the edge of a woodland.

And of course the fishing line suggested it was somewhere that fishermen parked.

And Dr.

Brown discovered another microscopic clue.

More than 20 different types of pollen were mixed in with the mud from the wheel well.

To identify the pollen, Dr.

Brown needed to isolate the microscopic pollen granules from the soil.

First, by using a series of filters, and then by adding hydrofluoric acid, a chemical so powerful it can dissolve glass.

The acid dissolves away all remaining materials, leaving just the pollen.

Dr.

Brown was able to identify most of the pollen in the sample.

Oak, elm, and pollen from hawthorns were easy to identify just by sight.

However, he noticed one type of pollen he had never seen before.

I knew that I didn't know what it was.

And then after that, of course, we run through the normal process of identifying an unknown pollen type.

There are millions of different species of pollen.

Dr.

Brown looked closely at the number and placement of the tiny slits and compared them to the thousands of photographs of pollen samples in his library.

Dr.

Brown found a match.

The pollen was from an unusual specimen, from a tree not terribly common in England.

It was pollen from a horse chestnut tree, a tree native to Asia.

In my whole career of looking at samples from the East Midlands, I'd never actually seen horse chestnut pollen from a sample.

And there was something else unusual about the pollen from the horse chestnut tree.

It's a heavy pollen, and because of its weight, it's too heavy to travel far through the air.

It tends to float straight down to the ground, very close to the tree itself.

Since Dr.

Brown found horse chestnut pollen in all four of the rover's wheel arches, he was convinced that the car had recently been parked near a horse chestnut tree.

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Police asked Dr.

Brown to identify possible locations that had horse chestnut trees, as well as other vegetation matching the samples found in the Sever's wheel wells.

Dr.

Brown identified five possible locations to search.

The first woodland searched was this one, the closest to the Sever's home, but an entire day of looking here turned up nothing.

Next, they searched the second area Dr.

Brown identified, a larger woodland near the lake.

Specially trained search teams worked their way down this hill.

When an officer poked a stick into one of the mounds, He found it to be unexpectedly soft.

He cleared away some leaves and loose soil to reveal a patch of human skin.

Police slowly uncovered the bodies of Eileen and Derek Severs.

Ironically, they were found lying on a bed of horse chestnuts.

Just a few feet away stood a horse chestnut tree.

They were lying side by side.

and both of them were wrapped in

green blankets.

Fibers in the green blanket matched the green fibers found in the Sever's hallway and on the trousers that belonged to Roger Severs.

The top layer of leaves and soil was similar to the soil found at the Exton Avenue Woods, where Roger Severs had been seen by police.

Another layer of soil matched the soil in the Sever's backyard.

There was even a layer of roof tiles to stabilize the grave.

The tiles matched the roof tiles on the Severs' home.

Roger was then tied into every step of the progression from the murder to the burial.

All of the evidence pointed to the Sever's only son, Roger, who had a history of personal and financial difficulties.

He was basically penniless,

certainly

hard up.

We believe that he had turned up at the bungalow and maybe for the first time, we don't know, had been refused help by his parents.

On Saturday afternoon, November 13th, while his father was at the pub, Roger argued with his mother in the kitchen.

He followed her to the bathroom and attacked, striking her eight times to the head, causing the blood spatter found on the bathtub.

Roger then wrapped his mother's body in a green blanket, dragged her body to the kitchen, leaving a trail of green fibers found in the hallway and on Roger's trousers.

Derek Severs arrived home shortly afterwards, and when he did, Roger was waiting.

He struck his father ten times in the head, causing the blood spatter onto the garage door.

Roger placed his father's body into the back seat of the car, where police later noticed the blood smear.

And he put his mother's body in the trunk, where green blanket fibers were later discovered.

Roger drove his father's car to a deserted location in the woods, parked under a horse chestnut tree in an area used by fishermen, and then dragged the bodies into into the woods.

Roger wanted to limit the time he spent at the scene.

So instead of digging a grave, he placed the bodies into a ravine and covered them with roofing tiles, fertilizer, and leaves.

But the most important piece of evidence came as Roger was driving away.

Pollen from the nearby horse chestnut tree flew up into the wheel wells of the automobile.

Roger Severs could never have imagined that this pollen would lead police to his parents' grave.

Roger Severs was charged in the murder of his parents and during the trial, took the witness stand and confessed.

His plea for leniency failed, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

The wife and I, we lost two good friends

and life's never been the same since.

I embarked on something which I saw as being rather simplistic.

Link this vehicle with those man-made roads.

That was all I wanted.

I got a lot more.

A lot more.

And hopefully that's going to help a lot of people, investigators, in the future.

Well, I think that the police now are certainly far more aware of the value of what otherwise might just be described as mud.