# 26: Which Neighbour Killed Joanna Yeates?

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 13 Jul 2023, 1 h 00 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880319/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851568-44100-2-c057791a644bbeb8.mp3

Today's episode is on Joanna Yeates, a 25 year old woman that disappeared and was later found murdered in Bristol, England, UK. This case was originally published on YouTube in September 2019. Trigger Warning: disappearance, strangulation Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discussed triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] So today's video is going to be another solved true crime case.
[0:42] Today we're going to be talking about the case of Joanna Yates.
[0:45] Quickly before I get into it, I just want to give my usual
[0:48] disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:50] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:52] This video is for educational purposes and everything that I'm
[0:55] about to say is just information that I have found on the
[0:58] Internet and I'm compiling into one video.
[1:01] S Joanna Claire Yates was a 25 year old woman born on April
[1:05] 19th 1985 in Hampshire in England.
[1:08] Her parents David and Teresa, gave Joanna everything they
[1:13] possibly could as she was growing up to give the best
[1:15] possible upbringing. She was put through private
[1:18] school her whole life and then she eventually graduated
[1:21] university with a degree in landscape architecture.
[1:25] Soon after graduating, Joanna quickly got a job within that
[1:28] field, within landscape architecture.
[1:30] And it was there at that place she worked that she met 25 year
[1:34] old Greg Reardon. And Joanna and Greg met at work.
[1:37] They got they realized they had a lot in common.
[1:41] They started spending time together outside of work and
[1:43] eventually became a couple. Joanna and Greg seemed so happy
[1:48] together. And Joanna's parents were
[1:49] convinced that this was it for Joe.
[1:52] Like she'd found the person that she was going to grow old with.
[1:55] And in general, Joanna was a very positive, very bubbly, very
[1:58] outgoing, lively person. She was the life of every party.
[2:02] She was very popular among her Co workers and she was known to
[2:06] be very caring, very sensitive, very nurturing, especially
[2:10] towards her mother and her mother.
[2:11] Teresa describes her relationship with Joe less like
[2:15] a mother and a daughter, but more just like best friends.
[2:18] They used to do everything together.
[2:20] She describes Joe as very spontaneous, very adventurous,
[2:23] very just not afraid to put herself out there.
[2:26] She had a real lust for life and she said her daughter really
[2:30] inspired her to be the same. In 2009, 2010 kind of time, this
[2:36] architectural firm that Joanna and Greg worked for decided to
[2:40] relocate to Bristol. And Joanna and Greg loved their
[2:44] jobs and they didn't want to give them up.
[2:46] And the two of them were at a point in their relationship
[2:49] where they were going to move in together eventually anyway.
[2:52] So why not follow their job to Bristol and get a place together
[2:56] in Bristol and move in together? And that's exactly what they
[2:58] did. And Joe's parents remember Joe
[3:01] being so excited about the whole thing about living in a new
[3:05] city, about having her own space.
[3:08] She was so excited about buying all these new furniture and
[3:10] decorations for the flats and just taking the next step in her
[3:14] relationship. So this flat was in a huge
[3:17] building, but they were on the ground floor and they had kind
[3:20] of like an outside door. So they never had to go in this
[3:23] building. They would just walk around the
[3:25] side of the building and they had a door there.
[3:26] So it was like they just had a house pretty much.
[3:29] So the two of them, Joe and Greg, stayed working for this
[3:32] architectural firm that they both met at for a while.
[3:35] And then Joe got an offer from a different architectural firm and
[3:40] she decided to take that and so she moved jobs.
[3:42] Now, this case takes place in December of 2010, so it's
[3:47] Christmas time. There was a lot of snow on this
[3:50] particular year. So this throughout this whole
[3:52] case, there's a lot of snow on the ground.
[3:55] That seems like a weird fact, but it'll of course come in
[3:58] later. And with it being Christmas
[4:00] time, it's really, really busy. There's a lot of parties, a lot
[4:03] of meetings, a lot of seeing family members just tying up
[4:07] loose ends before Christmas. And on this particular day,
[4:10] December 17th 2010, Greg Reardon was going to go to Sheffield for
[4:15] the weekend because that's where his family originally was from,
[4:18] that's where they all were. So he was going to Sheffield for
[4:21] the weekend just to see the mall before Christmas and then he
[4:24] would come back and spend Christmas with Joe.
[4:27] So Greg sets off to Sheffield and Joanna has work as normal
[4:31] and her Co workers remember her expressing that she was a little
[4:35] bit anxious about the weekend. This was the first weekend
[4:39] without Greg, the first weekend in Bristol alone, her first full
[4:42] weekend in this flat alone. And it's not like she was
[4:46] scared, but she was just a little bit, you know, off about
[4:50] spending the whole weekend by herself.
[4:52] But her Co workers reassured her and they were like look, do you
[4:56] want to go out for a drink tonight and just kind of spend
[4:58] the evening with us? Maybe that'll make you feel
[5:00] better. And they did.
[5:02] So they went straight from work to a pub.
[5:04] And as always, Joanna was the life of the party and she was
[5:09] there for a few hours speaking, having fun with her friends and
[5:13] then she decided to set off home.
[5:15] She said her goodbyes and then walked out of the pub and set
[5:18] off to walk home. Meanwhile, Greg Reardon has
[5:21] arrived in Sheffield, he's with his family and everything, and
[5:24] he texts his girlfriend Joanna, just letting her know that he'd
[5:28] arrived there safe, just asking how her day has been,
[5:31] everything. But he didn't receive a reply,
[5:34] and he just kind of assumed that Joe was busy or her phone was
[5:37] out of charge, maybe she'd already gone to bed, who knows,
[5:40] and so he didn't think much of it.
[5:41] He went to bed and woke up the next morning, but she still
[5:45] hadn't replied. So he rang her again that
[5:47] morning, and again, she didn't pick up, but he just kind of
[5:51] assumed maybe she was still asleep.
[5:53] Maybe she'd left her phone at work.
[5:54] Maybe that's why she wasn't responding, because this wasn't
[5:58] like her. And so we kept trying her at
[6:00] regular intervals throughout the whole weekend.
[6:02] But she wasn't responding to a single text, a single call, a
[6:05] single voicemail. And Joanna was normally pretty
[6:08] good at keeping up with her phone, especially when she's by
[6:11] herself for the weekend and she's nervous.
[6:14] And so Greg was obviously rather concerned.
[6:17] But at the same time, Joanna is a grown woman.
[6:20] If she doesn't want to answer her phone, if she wants to just
[6:22] put it away for the weekend, she can.
[6:24] But when Greg returned home after his weekend away in
[6:27] Sheffield, he came back to the flat and the flat door was
[6:31] unlocked and he walked inside, but no one was in there.
[6:35] Joanna wasn't home. And so he started to panic at
[6:38] this point. And so he got out his phone and
[6:41] decided to call her one last time before he started like
[6:44] running around trying to find her, calling everyone they knew.
[6:47] And so he tried her phone one last time, but then he heard it
[6:51] ringing in the flat. So he followed the noise and
[6:55] followed it all the way to her coat, hanging up.
[6:58] Her phone was in her coat pocket hanging up in the flat, but
[7:03] Joanna wasn't there. And then when he looked inside
[7:05] the other coat pockets, he found that her keys, her purse, all,
[7:09] all her belongings that she would normally take out with her
[7:11] on a daily basis were in this court.
[7:15] And that really worried Greg because Joanna, like most
[7:18] people, wouldn't go out without those kind of things.
[7:21] And so he called her parents and just said, have you heard from
[7:25] her? Have you seen her?
[7:25] Is she there with you? And her parents said, no, they
[7:29] hadn't heard from her all weekend either.
[7:31] All three of them, Greg, Joanna's mother and her father,
[7:34] all decided then and there on the phone that something was
[7:37] wrong. This was not in Joanna's
[7:40] character at all. She'd never done anything like
[7:42] this before. And so when that phone call
[7:45] ended, Greg called the police and reported his girlfriend as
[7:49] missing. And her mother and father got in
[7:51] the car in the middle of the night and drove to Bristol.
[7:54] So police arrived, Joanna's parents arrived and police were
[7:58] speaking with Greg as Joanna's parents were kind of looking
[8:00] around the flat, anything for any sign that Joanna had been
[8:05] there. And that was when her mother
[8:07] found a receipt for an oven pizza from Tesco.
[8:11] And this pizza was bought at 20 to 9:00 PM on the night that
[8:15] Joanna was last seen. So the immediate theory was that
[8:18] Joanna had returned home safely on Friday evening and probably
[8:23] gone missing since then. However, as they all continued
[8:26] looking around this flat, looking for any more evidence
[8:29] that she'd been back, none of them found any evidence of this
[8:33] pizza. It wasn't in the fridge.
[8:35] There wasn't leftovers. There wasn't the box in the bin.
[8:38] Like there wasn't even a dirty tray or anything like that.
[8:41] And it wasn't like she'd eaten it and then put the box in the
[8:44] bin and then emptied the bin because the bin hadn't been
[8:47] emptied. Police didn't quite know what
[8:49] that meant. But something isn't right about
[8:51] that, is it? The fact that Joanna made it
[8:53] home, all her belongings made it home, but the pizza that she
[8:57] bought that night wasn't there. So Greg and the police stayed at
[9:02] the flat and continued searching while Joanna's parents went out
[9:05] just looking for her. They were looking for anything,
[9:07] any sign of Joanna, any of her clothes, maybe even this pizza
[9:12] box. Joanna's mother was banging on
[9:14] car doors and on car boots just in case her daughter had been
[9:18] abducted and locked in a car. That's how desperate and worried
[9:22] everyone was straight away. And when Joanna's parents
[9:26] returned back to Joe's flat, they noticed 2 sets of
[9:30] footprints in the snow on the grass outside.
[9:33] So they kind of stood there looking at them for a while,
[9:35] analyzing them, thinking whose they could be.
[9:38] And that was when they looked up and saw two figures walking back
[9:42] over these footprints. So they just assumed they were
[9:45] the people that made them in the first place.
[9:46] Everything was fine. And so they walked back to Joe's
[9:49] flat. But as they were walking back to
[9:51] the flat, these two figures were going the same way.
[9:55] They were following them back, back in the direction of Joe's
[9:57] flat. And so when her parents got back
[9:59] to the door, they decided to stay there for a while.
[10:01] They didn't want to go in. They wanted to know who these
[10:03] two people were. And that was when these two
[10:06] figures, well, one of the two approached them.
[10:09] It was a man and a woman. And it turned out to be Joe's
[10:12] neighbors, literally next door neighbors.
[10:14] They were another outdoor flat literally next to Joe's.
[10:18] It was a couple named Vincent Tabak and his girlfriend, Tanya.
[10:22] And Vincent stayed back as Tanya came and spoke to Joe's parents.
[10:27] She just kind of asked what was going on because obviously there
[10:30] were police cars there and everything.
[10:31] And Joe's parents told a very brief summary of the situation.
[10:36] And Tanya seemed very concerned and she said, well, if you need
[10:39] me, I'm here if you need any help.
[10:41] Meanwhile, police back at the station were kind of assessing
[10:45] the situation, assessing how serious it was.
[10:48] And they quickly came to the conclusion that it was very
[10:51] unlikely that Joanna had left of her own accord that night.
[10:55] Like I said, she'd never done anything like this before.
[10:58] She was generally happy in her life, with her job, with her
[11:02] boyfriend, with her new house. She didn't have any history of
[11:06] like, mental health issues, depression, anything like that
[11:09] that might make her want to escape or run away.
[11:13] And besides, she'd left all of her belongings at home, all her
[11:16] money and everything. So even if she was to run away,
[11:19] she couldn't afford to get anywhere or stay anywhere.
[11:22] And she'd even made plans on the last day that she was seen to
[11:26] meet up with one of her friends on Christmas Eve.
[11:28] And if you're planning on running away or planning on
[11:32] going missing, you probably wouldn't make plans like that.
[11:35] It just seemed like whatever did happen to Joanna Yates that
[11:38] night, it wasn't voluntary. She didn't leave of her own
[11:42] accord. And something to note is that
[11:45] there didn't seem to be any signs of forced entry, no kind
[11:48] of smashed windows. The flat was nice and clean and
[11:51] tidy. It wasn't ransacked.
[11:53] It didn't seem like it was a robbery gone wrong.
[11:55] So it was likely that if Joanna was abducted, she probably knew
[12:00] her abductor well enough to let them in or for them to let
[12:03] themselves in. However, still, at this point,
[12:06] it was very, very early and police couldn't be certain of
[12:09] the abduction theory, even though it did seem rather
[12:11] likely. They've got to look into every
[12:14] single possibility. And so everyone was making
[12:16] posters and social media posts and police and her parents and
[12:20] Greg were all doing TV appeals, and all of this was going on as
[12:25] police back at the station were trying to establish Joe's last
[12:28] known movements. So police spoke with her
[12:31] coworkers who confirmed that she did go to work that day and that
[12:35] they all went to the pub afterwards.
[12:37] However, they said that she walked home alone and none of
[12:40] them had heard from her since. So that was the last confirmed
[12:43] sighting of Joanna Years the last time anyone ever saw her in
[12:47] person. And so police thought that their
[12:49] best bet of of being able to track Joanna's movements after
[12:53] the pub was through CCTV footage.
[12:56] So they got footage from the pub, it was confirmed that she
[12:59] was in there. And then they got the footage
[13:01] from the outside of the pub catching her leaving.
[13:03] And police had to collect hundreds of hours of CCTV
[13:08] footage because it was only like on the outside of buildings and
[13:12] she will have only been on each camera for a few seconds as she
[13:15] was walking past each shop. So police had to go around every
[13:18] single shop on her route home, her whole route home and ask for
[13:23] the CCTV footage from that night.
[13:25] And they successfully managed to follow Joanna through CCTV for
[13:30] most of her route home. So she sets off walking outside
[13:33] of the pub and she goes into a Waitrose.
[13:36] However she doesn't buy anything in there and then she leaves
[13:39] shortly after. She then goes to like a corner
[13:42] shop, like a bargain booze type thing and buys 2 bottles of
[13:46] cider. And once she leaves there at
[13:48] about 8:30, twenty to 9:00-ish, she enters a Tesco and buys an
[13:53] oven pizza. And obviously police recovered
[13:56] the receipt for that from her flat.
[13:58] And then after she leaves Tesco, she sets off back in the
[14:01] direction of her flat. But somewhere between Tesco and
[14:05] her flat, they lose her on CCTV. Obviously in more kind of like
[14:09] housing areas, they don't have as much CCTV because businesses
[14:14] only have it to kind of protect themselves.
[14:16] Houses don't have CCTV on the front like businesses do.
[14:19] So as she started walking along different streets, they managed
[14:22] to lose her. However, they do think that she
[14:26] returned home safely that night because her coat was there,
[14:28] everything was there and those 2 bottles of cider that she bought
[14:31] on her way home. Police didn't think much of them
[14:34] when they were searching the flat because obviously they
[14:36] could have been there from whenever.
[14:38] So when they returned to the flat, they found that the
[14:40] bottles of cider were still there, but one of them was
[14:44] partially consumed. So whether that was by Joanna or
[14:48] the same person that took the pizza, police didn't know.
[14:58] So police continue to ask around like Joanna's friends and
[15:02] family, Co workers, everyone if Joanna had anyone that might
[15:06] benefit from her going missing. However everyone that knew her
[15:10] said that she didn't have any enemies or anything like that,
[15:14] she was just a nice person. Police also decided to speak to
[15:18] all of her neighbors in this big building, including that couple
[15:22] that spoke with Joe's parents that night, Vincent Tabak and
[15:25] his girlfriend, Tanya. And just like before, Tanya,
[15:28] because the more kind of hands on, cooperative, helpful kind of
[15:32] person, she was speaking with police.
[15:34] And again, Vincent was more standoffish.
[15:38] I'm not sure if that's the right word to use, but he was just a
[15:40] little bit quieter. And maybe that was probably just
[15:43] because Tanya was constantly talking.
[15:45] He couldn't get a word in. Tanya told police that on the
[15:48] night that Joanna was last seen, the night that she was presumed
[15:51] to have gone missing, she was actually out of town and she was
[15:54] at a Christmas party, a work Christmas party in a different
[15:58] city. However, Vincent Tabak was home
[16:00] alone that night and he was going to come and pick Tanya up
[16:03] from this party wherever she was late at night, so he was just at
[16:07] home waiting. However, Vincent told police
[16:09] that he didn't see or hear anything weird that night, and
[16:12] he'd never actually met Joanna before.
[16:15] Police did a quick routine search of their apartment and
[16:18] every other apartment in the building, just just to double
[16:21] check that nothing was there and nothing was there.
[16:25] There was nothing of interest in any of the apartments, although
[16:28] the kids took a turn for the worst eight days later on
[16:31] Christmas Day of 2010, when a couple was out walking their dog
[16:36] on Christmas morning. They were walking down a quiet
[16:38] little path named Longwood Lane and there was snow everywhere,
[16:42] like I said, and it was quite built up at this point, so there
[16:46] were loads of different mounds of it.
[16:47] And this couple walked all the way along this street, didn't
[16:50] think twice about any of these kind of mounds of snow.
[16:54] However, when they were walking back to go home, they spotted
[16:58] something sticking out of one of these mounds of snow.
[17:01] They thought it looked like blue denim, like blue denim jeans or
[17:05] something. And they knew that a woman had
[17:08] gone missing in the area. And immediately they felt like
[17:12] something was wrong. And so they called police.
[17:14] So police came down and brushed away the snow, and there they
[17:18] found a human body, a female human body.
[17:23] And of course, like I said, Joanna was the only missing
[17:26] woman in the area at the time. And where this body was found
[17:30] was just three miles away from her flat.
[17:33] And so before she was even fully identified, police felt like it
[17:37] was very, very likely that this was her.
[17:39] And so they called Joanna's parents to come down to the
[17:42] police station. And on Christmas morning of
[17:45] 2010, the body was identified as that of Joanna Yates.
[17:49] And Joanna's family described feeling at that point a kind of
[17:53] sense of relief. Obviously it was very painful
[17:56] news for them to hear. But by that point it had been
[17:59] over a week since she was last seen.
[18:02] They said it was nice just to be able to put her to rest rather
[18:05] than living their whole lives not knowing where she was or
[18:08] what happened to their daughter. So now the investigation stepped
[18:12] up from a missing persons case to a murder inquiry.
[18:16] And police reappealed all over again because now a lot of
[18:20] information had changed in the case and they were receiving
[18:23] hundreds of phone calls. Police were working 24/7 to try
[18:28] and chase every single lead that was coming in.
[18:30] They had to watch hundreds of hours of CCTV footage.
[18:34] They had to search through over 293 tons of rubbish from the
[18:40] area, so like people's bins and things like that, just in case
[18:43] they discarded any information, tried to get rid of any
[18:46] evidence. Crime Stoppers offered a £10,000
[18:49] reward for anyone that could bring any information that led
[18:53] to a conviction of Joanna's killer.
[18:56] And then The Sun newspaper later upped that amount to 50,000 lbs.
[19:01] But not only that, police were appealing on TV for people to
[19:05] lock their doors at night and to walk home in groups, never to
[19:09] walk alone in the dark. And that was because they feared
[19:12] that whoever had done this to Joanna might strike again,
[19:16] because they didn't seem to have a reason to do this.
[19:19] So Joanna's body was taken for autopsy, and her cause of death
[19:23] was found to be strangulation. However, she didn't have very
[19:28] deep dark marks on her neck, as someone that had been strangled
[19:33] might usually have. And this means that Joanna
[19:36] suffered a very slow and painful death.
[19:40] Whoever was doing this to her tightened their hands gradually,
[19:43] really slowly, instead of just killing her instantly.
[19:46] There didn't seem to be any sign of sexual assault on Joanna body
[19:50] and her body was found fully clothed.
[19:53] So we can assume that this wasn't a sexually motivated
[19:56] attack. It might have had sexual themes
[20:00] to it, like it was probably a man going after a woman.
[20:03] However, they didn't do anything sexual to Joanna body.
[20:07] And an interesting thing that came out of this whole autopsy
[20:11] was that Joanna didn't ingest any of that pizza.
[20:15] So she bought the pizza, she took it back to her house, and
[20:18] then it went missing and. And she didn't eat it.
[20:20] It wasn't in her stomach. It was pretty hard to tell
[20:23] exactly when Joanna was killed because obviously she'd been
[20:27] missing for eight days, so it could have been anywhere within
[20:30] that 8 days. And because it was snowing
[20:33] outside and it was so cold, her body was almost perfectly
[20:37] preserved. There was barely any
[20:39] decomposition because decomposition is very, very slow
[20:43] in cold temperatures. However, from certain things
[20:47] that only a really skilled pathology would know, they could
[20:50] tell that she was probably killed on the night that she was
[20:54] last seen. So police also assumed from
[20:57] these two pieces of information that there was number pizza in
[21:00] her stomach and that she was probably killed on the night
[21:02] that she was last seen. They assumed that her killer had
[21:05] taken that pizza from her flat for whatever reason.
[21:08] And so it was very unlikely that they were going to be able to
[21:11] find it at this point because it had been 8 days.
[21:13] So like I said, the investigation stepped up from a
[21:17] missing person's case to a murder inquiry.
[21:20] So everyone that had already been questioned in relation to
[21:24] this case had to be re questioned.
[21:26] Obviously there's different questions that you ask people
[21:28] when someone is missing versus when a body has been found.
[21:32] So literally everyone, Greg, her parents or all her friends,
[21:35] coworkers, everyone that was living in that building,
[21:38] everyone was really questioned. And a few neighbors, not from
[21:42] her building, but from the roads around where she lived, a few of
[21:47] them said that they might have heard things.
[21:51] One of them thought they might have heard two separate screams
[21:55] on the night that she went missing.
[21:56] And another person thought they heard someone shout help me,
[22:00] although neither of these neighbors could pinpoint what
[22:03] time they heard these. And it was a Friday night.
[22:06] And like I say, in cases like these, it could easily be
[22:10] someone drunk. It was around the Christmas
[22:12] period. Everyone's going to Christmas
[22:13] parties. People are walking home drunk.
[22:16] So it could have just been a loud drunk person.
[22:19] And also at this point, it was eight days after that night, and
[22:23] I don't know about you guys, but I can't remember sounds that I
[22:27] heard eight days ago. You know, if someone was to come
[22:30] and knock on my door and say, did you hear anything on this
[22:32] day? I'd be like, I'm sorry, I
[22:34] couldn't tell you. So that's not me trying to
[22:36] downplay these people's kind of witness testimonies.
[22:41] Is it a witness testimony? But at the same time, we can't
[22:44] be too sure that those are accurate.
[22:46] Along with the re questioning, a lot of reappeals were made
[22:49] because obviously everything had changed in the case.
[22:52] So there was a new poster made and her parents went back back
[22:56] on TV with police to reappeal. For anyone that might know who
[23:00] did this, one thing that police really pushed in these reappeals
[23:04] was, like I said, Joanna was found fully closed.
[23:07] However, this was without one sock.
[23:11] She was wearing grey kind of knee high ski socks and one of
[23:15] them was missing. And so they really pushed that
[23:18] in the reappeals. They were scared that the killer
[23:20] had probably taken it back with them, like maybe as some kind of
[23:23] sick trophy, or maybe they didn't realize they had it on
[23:27] them. Maybe it was in their pocket or
[23:28] something. And then they discarded it on
[23:30] their way home, and that might leave them elsewhere.
[23:33] So they were just really pushing people to look for this sock.
[23:36] So yeah, her body was found fully clothed without the sock
[23:39] and without shoes. However, Greg confirmed that the
[23:42] shoes that she was wearing that morning when she left for work
[23:46] were in the apartment, so it's not believed that her body was
[23:50] even taken there with shoes on. Again, that also suggests that
[23:53] she was probably killed in her own apartment and her body was
[23:57] taken out because she wasn't wearing shoes.
[24:00] So it's not like she was on a walk or even outside the
[24:04] apartment, even taking the bins out or something because she
[24:07] wasn't wearing shoes. I keep stressing the fact that
[24:09] Joe was probably killed in her own apartment and she probably
[24:13] let in her abductor or her killer because there was number
[24:17] signs of forced entry, no smashed windows, no sign of a
[24:21] struggle in the whole flat. So the two explanations there
[24:24] were that either the killer was let in by Joe so she knew them,
[24:29] or the killer had their own keys to the flat.
[24:32] Naturally, police looked straight to Greg Reardon, Joanna
[24:36] boyfriend, as they do in cases like these.
[24:39] Because unfortunately it is quite a common explanation for
[24:43] cases like this that it was like a domestic dispute and a
[24:47] domestic murder. He had a key to the flat.
[24:50] He knew exactly where she was going to be that night and if he
[24:53] was inside the flat, she wouldn't scream or anything like
[24:58] that. She wouldn't raise any alarms.
[25:00] So police seized a lot of Greg's possessions, his computer, his
[25:04] phone, things like that, so that they could look through
[25:06] searching histories and everything, But they found
[25:09] absolutely nothing. And they were satisfied from
[25:13] speaking to Greg's family that he was probably on his way, if
[25:16] not already in Sheffield at the point when Joanna was killed.
[25:21] So he was ruled out pretty quickly.
[25:23] The only other person other than Joe and Greg that had a key to
[25:27] that flat was their landlord, Christopher Jeffries, who also
[25:32] happened to live in the same building.
[25:34] Jeffries was a 65 year old retired college teacher and he
[25:38] was known As, for lack of a better word, weird, eccentric,
[25:44] but also just kind of not creepy, but he made people feel
[25:50] uncomfortable unintentionally. He generally kept to himself in
[25:54] his own little apartment upstairs.
[25:56] However, when he would speak to people like tenants and people
[26:00] in shops and things that would come away from the interaction
[26:04] feeling a little bit uncomfortable.
[26:05] I think he just wasn't very good at social interaction.
[26:09] And so he was immediately a little bit of a person of
[26:13] interest. He was very freshly retired,
[26:16] like he'd only just retired from being a college teacher.
[26:19] And so he, he wasn't doing much of anything, but he had a couple
[26:23] of properties that he owned and he kind of managed them and
[26:27] rented them out and things. He owned his own property that
[26:30] he lived in and then two others in that same building, Joe and
[26:34] Greg's obviously, and Vincent Tabak's and his girlfriend Tanya
[26:38] that lived next door. And that's just how Christopher
[26:41] Jeffries spent his days, just in his own flats, managing the
[26:45] other ones, talking to his tenants, just reading books,
[26:50] watching old VHS tips. Like, I don't think he had many
[26:53] friends or family or anything, anyone that he saw on the
[26:57] regular anywhere. I don't even think he had like a
[26:59] TV in his apartment. He just had like a little
[27:01] monitor that he would watch VHS tips on.
[27:05] He would listen to records, he would read.
[27:08] He just kind of lived in his own little world up in that flat.
[27:12] So police went to speak with him and they found that the only
[27:16] alibi that Christopher Jeffries could give about where he was
[27:19] and what he was doing on the night that Joanna was killed was
[27:22] that he was in his flat alone, reading books.
[27:26] So he was in the same building as Joanna when she was killed.
[27:30] He was alone so no one could confirm his story and he didn't
[27:35] hear or see anything. Greg also confirmed with police
[27:39] that he'd actually spoken to Christopher Jeffries on the
[27:42] morning that he left for Sheffield.
[27:44] So on the morning that Joe would eventually be killed and Greg
[27:48] just mentioned to Christopher Jeffries just impassing that he
[27:51] was going to Sheffield for the weekend to see his family before
[27:54] Christmas. And so that means that Jeffries
[27:57] knew that Joanna would be alone in the flat all weekend.
[28:01] So at this point in the case, the media somehow got wind of
[28:05] the fact that police were looking into Christopher
[28:07] Jeffries as a potential suspect. At the time, he was just a
[28:11] person of interest. And this man was absolutely
[28:15] hounded by reporters. Of course, they knew where he
[28:18] lived. So they were outside that
[28:20] building every morning until night.
[28:23] They were there pretty much 24/7.
[28:25] They would follow him to and from his car, to and from shops,
[28:28] to and from the building. They would not leave him alone.
[28:31] Cameras, microphones, at least like 5 people there at a time
[28:35] shouting at him, asking for questions, even calling him
[28:39] homophobic slurs. And you'll hear a bit later on
[28:42] in this case about just how bad the media were with Christopher
[28:45] Jeffries. But they'd already branded him
[28:47] as guilty and he wasn't even a suspect.
[28:50] They were putting him on the front of newspapers saying that
[28:53] he was a sexual predator and that he was this and that and
[28:55] that he was a danger to the public.
[28:57] But he hadn't even been arrested.
[29:00] They had already branded this man as guilty because he was an
[29:04] easy target. He was an old man.
[29:06] He seemed very weird. He kept himself up in his flat.
[29:09] He did nothing all day. And when he would talk to the
[29:13] reporters and they would get him talking on camera and put it on
[29:17] the news, everything he was saying just came off rather
[29:20] sarcastic or ingenuine. And that's not because he was
[29:24] trying to be that way. That's just how he spoke.
[29:28] And obviously, no one knew Christopher Jeffries.
[29:30] So no one knew that no one knew. That's just how he is as a
[29:33] person. And because of all of this,
[29:35] because he had a key to the flat, he was acting very
[29:39] strange. He had a very weak alibi.
[29:42] Police decided that they had grounds to arrest this man.
[29:46] And so on December 30th, 2010, police went to his flat at 7:00
[29:51] AM and arrested Chris for Jeffries on suspicion of the
[29:54] murder of Joanna. So Jeffries was taken to the
[29:57] police station while other officers began searching his
[30:01] flat. And they kind of seized
[30:03] different things. But like I said, he didn't have
[30:05] any electronics, no computer, no phone or anything.
[30:08] So they were just kind of looking at his books and pieces
[30:12] of clothing and things. They were just hoping that they
[30:14] might find anything. And it was in the news within
[30:18] the hour that he was arrested. It was being reported everywhere
[30:22] that police police had their first suspect in the case.
[30:31] Meanwhile, meanwhile, all this was going on in England.
[30:35] Vincent Tabak and Tanya Joe and Gregs neighbors were actually in
[30:38] Holland because that is where Vincent was originally from and
[30:42] they were over there for the new year and Vincent Tabak was
[30:45] keeping up with the news. Obviously.
[30:47] His neighbor had just been found murdered in her own apartment,
[30:52] which was right next door to his.
[30:54] So he was constantly updating these news sites while they were
[30:57] away in Holland. And as soon as he read that
[31:00] Christopher Jeffries had been arrested in connection with her
[31:03] murder, this sparked a memory in Vincent's head and he rang the
[31:08] police back in Bristol straightaway.
[31:10] Vincent Tabak told police that he recalled looking out of the
[31:14] window on the night of Joanna's disappearance and just seeing
[31:18] Christopher Jeffries car in its normal car parking spot, as it
[31:21] always was. And then he went about his
[31:23] business a little bit and then he went back to the window and
[31:26] looked out again later on in the night.
[31:29] And Christopher Jeffries car had turned around.
[31:32] So like it had been out. And then he just parked it again
[31:35] the opposite way around. And Vincent didn't think much of
[31:39] it. He just thought his landlord had
[31:41] been out at the time. But now he knew he was
[31:43] potentially connected to the case.
[31:46] Vincent thought it was important to let police know.
[31:49] So of course this did not look good.
[31:51] It looked as if Christopher Jeffries probably put Joanna
[31:56] body in his car, took it out and dumped it and then brought his
[31:59] car back. And so police also seized
[32:02] Christopher Jeffries car and they began doing like forensic
[32:05] tests in there looking for any sign of Joanna DNA, hair, blood,
[32:10] anything. They found absolutely nothing.
[32:13] And that was a running theme with Christopher Jeffries.
[32:15] No matter how hard police tried to find evidence against him,
[32:20] they just couldn't find any physical evidence.
[32:23] So 48 hours had passed since Christopher Jeffries was
[32:27] originally arrested. And in the UK, there is a law
[32:30] that police can only hold a person of interest or a suspect
[32:34] for 24 hours. And if at the end of that 24
[32:38] hours, they can't charge them with anything, if they don't
[32:40] have such evidence to say that they are guilty, then they have
[32:44] to let them go. Or if it seems likely that they
[32:48] might find evidence, but they just need a little bit more
[32:51] time, they can appeal for an extra 24 hours, which gives them
[32:55] a full extra day to go and find some evidence against
[32:58] Christopher Jeffries. And that is exactly what they
[33:01] did. And the courts granted them an
[33:02] extra day to keep him in police custody.
[33:06] And at this point, police were getting pretty desperate,
[33:08] obviously, because they needed to get this evidence within this
[33:11] 24 hours. And so they decided to take a
[33:14] different route to try and say that Christopher Jeffries was
[33:17] guilty. They looked at Joanna's murder
[33:20] and said whoever did this did it very, very well.
[33:24] There was no sign of a struggle. There was no DNA anywhere.
[33:26] No one heard anything. No one saw anything.
[33:29] So whoever had done this, they'd done it so well that it almost
[33:34] seemed as though they'd done it before.
[33:36] And so police feared that if it was Jeffries, he might have had
[33:40] other victims. 3 unsolved disappearances stood out to
[33:43] police in particular, the first of which was the disappearance
[33:47] of Claudia Lawrence. And I've done a full video on
[33:50] that, which I'll link up there. But basically, she was a young
[33:53] woman around Joe's age. She was attractive, and she went
[33:57] missing when she was alone in her own home, very much like
[34:01] Joanna. The second similar case happened
[34:03] back in 1974, so a long time before Joanna's.
[34:08] However, it was in the same area.
[34:10] And because it was so long before, that would have meant
[34:13] that Christopher Jeffries was around 30 years old.
[34:16] He was a lot younger, a lot more agile because right at this
[34:19] time, he was quite a frail old man.
[34:21] But yeah, this second case was a woman named Glennis Crothers
[34:25] that left a party late at night and was strangled to death, very
[34:29] much like Joanna. And the third similar case was
[34:32] the disappearance of a woman named Melanie Hall in 1996.
[34:36] And that one took place in Bath, which is a little bit away from
[34:40] Bristol but still relatively close.
[34:42] Once again, she was an attractive woman around Joe's
[34:46] age, and she went on a night out with her boyfriend and her and
[34:50] her boyfriend fell out during this night out and he went home
[34:52] alone and left her at the club. And she was last seen at the
[34:56] club. She's never been seen since.
[34:58] So police tried their best to connect Christopher Jeffries to
[35:02] one of these three cases so that they could say that it was very
[35:05] similar to Jaws. However, just like with Joanna's
[35:08] case, they couldn't find any evidence.
[35:12] And because of this, after the extended 24 hours, police still
[35:16] had no evidence to charge Christopher Jeffries with her
[35:19] murder. And so they just had to let him
[35:22] go. And I just want to mention one
[35:24] little thing about the police work in this case.
[35:27] While Christopher Jeffries was being held in custody, being
[35:30] questioned and interrogated and everything, police were kind of
[35:36] making him confess to this, even though he was innocent.
[35:40] Well, they were trying to make him confess to it, but
[35:42] Christopher Jeffries was not going to confess to something
[35:45] that he hadn't done. And the ethics of that are
[35:47] horrendous because imagine kind of a mentally unstable, anxious
[35:53] person going into police custody and being told over and over
[35:57] again, you're guilty, just admit it, you're guilty.
[36:00] You're guilty. That person might then start to
[36:03] think that they are guilty, or they might even just confess to
[36:06] it just to get the kind of interrogation to stop.
[36:10] We learned about that in GCSE psychology.
[36:12] And this is a quote from Christopher Jeffries himself.
[36:15] At the time, it felt as if the police were deliberately playing
[36:18] a game, promising that the ordeal would soon be over and
[36:21] then finding it necessary to prolong the wait.
[36:24] It was a form of psychological torture.
[36:27] At such times, the man plays tricks, and one starts to
[36:29] believe that perhaps one is criminal without knowing it.
[36:33] So he just basically said what I said, but in more posh words,
[36:36] like the police will tell you over and over again, like,
[36:39] you're gonna go down for this, like, you guilty.
[36:41] Like, you might as well just confess.
[36:43] And someone might start thinking that they are a criminal and
[36:46] that they might as well just confess.
[36:48] I just thought it was something important to mention because of
[36:51] how Christopher Jeffries was treated during this case, both
[36:55] by the media and by police. Police are supposed to be
[36:58] objective at all times. In the media, he was portrayed
[37:02] as this kind of sexual predator college teacher that creeped out
[37:06] all of his students and like the media, turned the whole of
[37:10] Bristol against this man. All because he was an easy
[37:13] target. He was a 65 year old frail
[37:16] eccentric old man with like long white hair that never left his
[37:20] flat and he seemed like such a character and so everyone just
[37:25] assumed he was guilty and the media played into that just
[37:29] because they wanted stories. They didn't care how it would
[37:32] affect this man or the rest of his life.
[37:35] But one of the UK tabloids ever cared what is true or not.
[37:38] They just print what they want to print and don't care who it
[37:40] affects anyway. Christopher Jeffries was
[37:42] released from police custody. Although police weren't
[37:45] convinced that he was innocent, they were still trying to find
[37:49] evidence to re arrest him and actually charge him.
[37:53] But also because they hadn't found anything for 72 hours,
[37:56] they decided to look into other possibilities as well, other
[38:00] people. And so they started thinking
[38:02] like who else could have done this?
[38:03] Like who seems a little bit suspicious in this
[38:06] investigation? And that is when they remembered
[38:09] Vincent Tabak. Vincent only remembered he'd
[38:11] seen that car change directions once he knew that Christopher
[38:15] Jeff was arrested. Why hadn't he remembered it in
[38:18] the two weeks before that? It was almost as if he was
[38:21] trying to pin false evidence on someone else to frame them.
[38:26] So the police force in Bristol sent an officer all the way to
[38:30] Holland to go and question Vincent Tabak.
[38:32] And as part of this questioning, as with any other person of
[38:36] interest in an investigation like this, they asked to take a
[38:40] DNA sample. It's standard procedure.
[38:42] It's just a quick swab of the inside of each just to get some
[38:46] skin cells so then they can test it against like DNA evidence.
[38:50] However, Vincent was very reluctant to give a DNA sample.
[38:55] So reluctant in fact that officer in Holland phoned the
[38:59] police back in Bristol to let them know how reluctant he was
[39:03] being because it was bordering on very suspicious.
[39:06] He was also very interested in the forensic work going on in
[39:10] the investigation, like when they started it, what they were
[39:14] testing, how long they'd been testing things for.
[39:17] Anyway, he did eventually give that DNA sample and it was sent
[39:21] and tested against everything that they'd found at the crime
[39:24] scene. But before we carry on with the
[39:26] information on him, I just want to give you a little bit of a
[39:29] background on Vincent Tabak. Like I said, he was full Dutch.
[39:32] He was born in the Netherlands in 1978 and he was raised there
[39:37] until he eventually moved to England when he was like an
[39:40] adult in 2007. He was known back at home in
[39:45] Holland as very shy, very introverted, very to himself.
[39:50] He didn't have many friends growing up.
[39:51] He was a little bit of a loner. He would spend a lot of time on
[39:55] his computer and in his bedroom. It's not like he didn't have any
[39:59] friends or he couldn't make friends.
[40:01] He just kind of chose. Not so, he just preferred being
[40:05] by himself in his bedroom. But he was very, very, very
[40:08] intelligent. He went to university and
[40:11] graduated. I don't know with what kind of
[40:13] degree, some form of engineering degree.
[40:15] Shortly after he moved to the UK.
[40:17] I believe he originally moved to Bath, which is not too far from
[40:21] Bristol, where he ended up next to Joanna.
[40:24] And while he was living in Bath, shortly after he arrived and got
[40:27] settled and everything, he met his girlfriend Tanya on a dating
[40:31] website. He had a promising career in
[40:33] this very specific type of engineering that I don't really
[40:36] understand, but I'm going to try and explain it.
[40:38] But basically this very specific type of engineering was in very
[40:43] high demand in the UK. So Holland had pretty much
[40:46] mastered it and everything. However, the UK was paying good
[40:49] money for people to come over and help them with this specific
[40:54] thing. And so that's why Vincent ended
[40:56] up moving to the UK to kind of pursue a career in this.
[40:59] So he was a people flow analyst and he basically examined and
[41:03] analyzed the way that people move around in public spaces.
[41:08] So like airports and sports stadiums, supermarkets and
[41:12] things. He kind of analyzes it and
[41:15] optimizes the space. So if in like a shopping centre,
[41:18] a certain area gets congested over and over again every single
[41:22] day, they'd know to make that bit wider.
[41:25] And Vincent was the person that kind of analyzed how people
[41:29] behaved and moved around these places.
[41:31] Although something to note about Vincent Tabak is that he is
[41:35] described very differently by the different people that know
[41:38] him from different places. So at home, like I said, to like
[41:42] his friends and family, he was known as very shy, very
[41:44] introverted. However, to his work friends in
[41:48] the UK, he was known as very outgoing, very fiery almost.
[41:53] He was just a very dynamic person.
[41:55] He would put on different masks for different people.
[41:58] Like I said right at the beginning of the video, kind of.
[42:01] Vincent and Joanna had never actually met before in the whole
[42:06] two months that Joanna was living next door to him.
[42:08] They'd just never crossed paths. But anyway, back to the
[42:11] timeline. Police have just acquired this
[42:14] DNA sample from Vincent Tabak and it has been sent off to a
[42:18] lab to be tested against every piece of evidence that they
[42:22] collected. Meanwhile, as all of this was
[42:25] going on with Vincent, other police officers had been working
[42:28] with this UK TV show called Crime Watch.
[42:32] It used to be like a news channel that was on was it every
[42:35] day? And they would just talk about
[42:37] crime across the country, like missing people wanted people.
[42:42] I don't think they do it anymore.
[42:43] But they were planning to run a segment about the night that
[42:47] Joanna disappeared, the night that she was murdered.
[42:50] They were going to kind of reconstruct her steps with a
[42:53] look alike and video it all her going to all these different
[42:57] shops in hopes that it would jog someone's memory that might have
[43:00] seen her that night. This reconstruction was done.
[43:03] It was fully edited and it was due to air on January 26th.
[43:07] However, it never got chance to air because on January 20th, 6
[43:12] days earlier, police had the breakthrough that they were
[43:16] waiting for. The DNA results came back and
[43:19] Vincent Tabak's DNA was found on several pieces of evidence.
[43:23] However, these samples were so small that specialists couldn't
[43:27] say whether it was saliva or semen or just from touch, like,
[43:32] you know, sweat glands and stuff.
[43:34] They didn't know what it was. They knew that it was a one in a
[43:39] million chance that it wasn't Vincent Tabak.
[43:42] So it was. His DNA was found on the backs
[43:46] of her knees, on her jeans, suggesting that her legs had
[43:50] been dripping over his arm. Which you know, is consistent
[43:53] with how you would probably carry a body to your car and out
[43:57] of your car. I can't imagine an easier way to
[44:00] do that, like a fully grown woman.
[44:03] Don't really want to imagine it, but that is how police believe.
[44:06] He carried her to and from his car.
[44:08] They also on Joanna's clothes found a bunch of fibres from his
[44:13] coat and his car. So on the morning of January
[44:17] 20th 2011, police arrived at the flat of Vincent Tabak and
[44:22] arrested him on suspicion of the murder of Joanna Yates.
[44:25] So he was taken to the police station for questioning while
[44:28] his flat was forensically searched.
[44:31] A bunch of his belongings were seized, computers, phones,
[44:34] everything like that. Meanwhile, in Holland, back
[44:37] where his family and friends are, there was, I don't want to
[44:41] say outrage, but no one believed it.
[44:43] They knew that police had messed up once in this investigation,
[44:47] arresting Christopher Jeffries, posting so much about it in the
[44:50] media and stuff when he was actually innocent.
[44:53] And so Vincents family believed that he was innocent too.
[44:57] And police were just trying to pin this on anyone just to say
[45:00] that they solved it. And Christopher Jeffries himself
[45:04] defended Vincent Tabak, thinking that they were doing the same to
[45:07] him. Obviously he'd gone through it
[45:09] first hand and he knew he was innocent that whole time and he
[45:13] was watching this from the other side now.
[45:16] But when police looked through Vincent Tabak's laptop, the
[45:20] evidence only mounted against him six days before Joanna's
[45:24] body was eventually found on Longwood Lane.
[45:27] Vincent Tabak had typed it in on Google Maps and looked at it on
[45:31] Street View and that was two days after Joanna actually died.
[45:34] So it's believed that she her body was there that same night.
[45:38] So this is 2 days after that. So perhaps that is someone that
[45:41] is paranoid that the body might be found.
[45:44] Police also found countless searches of Joanna Yates and the
[45:48] Joanna Yates case updates, news, everything like that while he
[45:52] was in Holland. There's a difference between
[45:54] staying up to date with a case of your murdered neighbor.
[45:58] Anyone would want to stay up to date with that.
[46:00] However, Vincent was searching this far too often for it to be
[46:04] a normal kind of interest, if that makes sense.
[46:09] On top of that, police also found a lot of violent
[46:13] pornography on Vincent's computer, which doesn't say he's
[46:17] guilty of anything. However, one of these particular
[46:20] scenes seemed to mirror the exact way that Joe's body was
[46:24] found. So the way that this woman's
[46:26] clothes in this pornographic film, the way her clothes were
[46:30] arranged and her body was laid was the exact same way that Joe
[46:34] was found. And in many of these
[46:36] pornographic films, these women were choked and strangled.
[46:40] And it's just very eerie because Joanna was strangled to death.
[46:44] So it's unsure whether he did that all very consciously and he
[46:48] watched these films and wanted to kind of recreate them in real
[46:52] life but take it too far, or whether that was just like a
[46:56] subconscious thing, like he'd seen it before, but he wasn't
[46:59] consciously reenacting it. Meanwhile, back at the station,
[47:09] Vincent was being questioned, however he decided to plead the
[47:12] 5th, which is where you answer no comment to every single
[47:16] question. Lawyers will often advise their
[47:18] clients to do this and answer no comment to every single question
[47:23] if they're scared that the client will incriminate
[47:25] themselves if they answer any questions.
[47:27] And let's be honest, at this point it was not looking good
[47:30] for Vincent Tabak. So however, when people do go
[47:33] down this route, this can no comment route, they still have
[47:36] to write out a full like written statement to say whether they're
[47:39] guilty or not guilty and their version of events.
[47:43] And so Vincent sat and wrote this written statement with his
[47:46] lawyer that said he had nothing to do with Joanna's murder.
[47:51] However, he did give police an alibi as to where he was on the
[47:56] night that Joanna was murdered. Before he said he was home alone
[48:00] all night, but now he said that he went to the supermarket at
[48:04] around half past 10 that night. And he said he had both a
[48:08] receipt of the things that he bought in the supermarket and a
[48:11] text that he sent to his girlfriend Tanya to prove that
[48:14] he was there. So police checked the CCTV of
[48:17] this particular supermarket that Vincent said he went to and he
[48:21] was there at 10:30 that night. But police weren't convinced he
[48:25] was innocent. So think of it like this.
[48:28] Vincent Tabak was a people flow analyst which also deals with
[48:33] where to put CCTV cameras in buildings because they know
[48:38] where people are going to be at certain points, you know, so he
[48:41] knows exactly where the main CCTV cameras are in a
[48:45] supermarket and that is in the kind of front entrance because
[48:49] you get everyone leaving and everyone coming in.
[48:52] If he did kill Joanna and then he was trying to give himself
[48:55] like a fake alibi, he knows that he has to be caught on these
[48:59] cameras in the supermarket multiple times so that he can
[49:02] say, look, I was there. So at around 10:30 PM that
[49:06] night, Vincent Tabak walks into the supermarket and then he
[49:10] walks back out again for seemingly no reason, doesn't buy
[49:13] anything, absolutely nothing and then he walks back in again.
[49:17] So he has made sure he's gone past that camera 3 times, but
[49:21] for what reason? He then went and bought 3 items
[49:24] from this shop and then positioned himself right in
[49:28] front of one of those main cameras so that he could text
[49:31] Tanya letting her know that he had just gone to the
[49:34] supermarket. So now when he says to police,
[49:37] oh I stopped in the main entrance to text Tanya, you'll
[49:40] probably get me on CCTV doing that.
[49:43] Of course they did get him doing that and also this was an hour
[49:47] and a half after Joanna was believed to have gotten home and
[49:50] been killed. So that's plenty of time for him
[49:53] to kill Joanna, dispose of her body and then go to the
[49:57] supermarket. So yes, he was caught in the
[50:00] supermarket, but he could have also done both things that
[50:04] night. It just seemed like he was
[50:05] really overdoing it with the cameras, like kind of when
[50:08] you're lying and you get overly defensive, it's kind of like
[50:12] that, but with cameras. Does that make sense?
[50:14] That was a really bad analogy. He didn't need to stop under
[50:18] that camera to text someone. When do you ever stop in the
[50:21] main entrance of a supermarket to reply to a text?
[50:24] If you go in back to your car, you would just wait until you
[50:26] got back to your car so you could sit down and reply to it
[50:29] or wait until you get home to reply to it.
[50:31] When do you ever make sure that you stop in the entrance of a
[50:35] supermarket? Especially to text your
[50:38] girlfriend who is at a party, might I add.
[50:41] She's at a work party. Why would you randomly text her?
[50:45] This wasn't part of a conversation.
[50:47] He just randomly texted her to let her know that he had gone to
[50:51] the supermarket and then he was like have a good night or
[50:54] something like that. When do people ever do that?
[50:56] But if all that wasn't enough, the absolute slam dunk piece of
[51:01] evidence that police found right after that was when they seized
[51:05] Vincent's car and found Joanna's blood in the boot.
[51:09] So this is police's theory as to what happened that night because
[51:13] Vincent has never admitted the exact sequence of events.
[51:18] So police have just kind of pieced together the night and
[51:21] this is what they think happened.
[51:23] They believe that Joanna returned home safely.
[51:25] She got inside the flat and whatever she put her coat down,
[51:29] put the pizza down and within minutes of her walking in the
[51:32] door, Vincent also walked in before she had chance to lock it
[51:36] behind her. They believed that he pinned her
[51:39] down by her wrists. Vincent was over a foot taller
[51:42] than Joanna, by the way, so this will have been quite easy for
[51:45] him to overpower her. They believed that he just
[51:48] pinned her down by a wrist and then began strangling her.
[51:51] They don't know for what reason. They believe it has some kind of
[51:55] sexual motive to it. Whether he intended to rape her
[51:59] or sexually assault her but then decided not to go through with
[52:03] it, or whether he just wanted to kill a woman just for the
[52:07] satisfaction of it, I don't know.
[52:09] But yeah, throughout this whole ordeal, this whole attack,
[52:13] Joanna sustained 43 separate injuries to her head, her torso,
[52:19] arms, neck, mostly like bruises and cuts and scratches and
[52:23] things, but also a fractured nose.
[52:26] And like I said earlier, pathologists could tell by the
[52:29] marks on her neck, like how light they were, that this had
[52:32] been a gradual, slow, painful death.
[52:36] Police then theorized that Vincent carried Joanna's body to
[52:40] his car, put her in the boot, locked his car and then ran back
[52:44] to her flat and just made sure that nothing was amiss, that
[52:48] nothing was knocked over and that the door was shut behind
[52:51] him. They then believed that he drove
[52:53] to the supermarket with Joanna still in his car, parked the car
[52:58] and then walked in and out and in again to make sure that he
[53:02] was caught on CCTV. He bought a couple of items to
[53:05] make sure he had a receipt and then he walked back out again.
[53:08] Sent that text in the main entrance of the supermarket and
[53:12] then went back to his car that had a dead body in it.
[53:16] They then believed that he drove to Longwood Lane and dumped
[53:20] Joanna's body next to a quarry and then just drove home like
[53:25] nothing ever happened. Later picked up his girlfriend
[53:27] Tanya from this party and just acted like everything was
[53:30] normal. On January 22nd, 2 days after he
[53:34] was originally arrested, Vincent Tabak was charged with the
[53:38] murder of Joanna Yates. Although he still maintained his
[53:41] innocence and back in Holland, all of his friends and family
[53:44] were saying the same thing, that he was innocent and that police
[53:48] were trying to set him up just because they'd done a rubbish
[53:50] job so far. They just needed someone, anyone
[53:53] to pin it on. And Vincent was just unlucky and
[53:57] he happened to be the one. And so his friends and family
[54:00] back in Holland were actually fundraising and getting money
[54:03] together to pay for his court expenses in the UK while Vincent
[54:08] was in police custody. Like a way in his trial,
[54:11] awaiting his sentence and everything, he was actually put
[54:14] on suicide watch and moved prisons for his own safety
[54:18] because police felt like he needed monitoring 24/7.
[54:23] For weeks, Vincent maintained that obviously he was innocent
[54:27] and that the DNA that they'd found on Joanna and the DNA of
[54:31] Joanna's that they found in his car was all set up and put
[54:36] there. It was fake, and it was all done
[54:38] by corrupt police officers. But three weeks after Vincent
[54:42] was arrested and he was being held in police custody, he
[54:45] decided to go and talk to the prison chaplain, which is kind
[54:49] of like a religious figure in the prison that inmates can go
[54:53] and talk to. And it was there where Vincent
[54:56] Tabak confessed to this prison chaplain that he killed Joanna
[55:00] Yates and that he was going to plead guilty in his trial
[55:03] notice. I said that he confessed to
[55:05] killing her, not murdering her. And that was a very clever trick
[55:11] he pulled because Vincent's laptop search history from the
[55:15] week after Joanna's murder revealed that he had been
[55:18] searching the difference between manslaughter and murder and the
[55:22] difference in trials sentences between them, how long you would
[55:27] get for each thing. Manslaughter, of course, is when
[55:30] someone dies at your hands, but you didn't intend to kill them.
[55:34] So maybe you're having a fight and the other person dies.
[55:39] But you weren't meaning to kill them, you were just meaning to
[55:41] harm them. And murder, of course, is taking
[55:44] someone's life with intent. Like when you shoot someone in
[55:47] the head, you mean to kill them doing that.
[55:49] So Vincent kind of knew at this point that he wasn't going to
[55:52] fully get away with this. So now he decided to try and get
[55:56] away with a lesser sentence by saying that he did kill Joanna,
[56:01] but he didn't mean to. And that's exactly what he did.
[56:03] On May 5th, 2011, Vincent Tabak stood up in court and pled
[56:08] guilty to manslaughter. So his version of events goes
[56:12] like this. He said that he walked past her
[56:15] flat because they were on the outside of the building.
[56:18] So he was walking down the side of the building.
[56:20] He was about to go out and that was when he saw Joe in her
[56:24] kitchen window and she waved to him and then kind of like
[56:28] beckoned for him to come inside, like come to the door.
[56:31] Like I said, the two of them had never met before.
[56:33] So Vincent said that the two of them had a kind of like get to
[56:37] know each other conversation in the kitchen for 10 minutes.
[56:41] And then Joanna started getting a little bit flirtatious and
[56:46] Vincent said that he took Joanna's flirtatious comments to
[56:51] mean that she wanted to get with him and so he leaned in and
[56:55] tried to kiss her. He then says that Joanna took
[56:58] this the wrong way and she didn't want to kiss him and she
[57:01] was really offended by this interaction and so she started
[57:04] screaming. So Vincent said he put his hand
[57:07] over her mouth to stop her from screaming and he was trying to
[57:11] like calm her down and say like stop screaming.
[57:13] And then when he took his hand away, she started screaming
[57:17] again. And so that is when he pinned
[57:19] her down and tried to cover her mouth again but accidentally
[57:24] strangled her. This story just does not make
[57:27] sense. Who accidentally strangles
[57:30] someone and pins them down when they're trying to quiet them?
[57:34] And Joanna would not be screaming if it was as innocent
[57:38] as Vincent claims it was. If he'd just leaned over for a
[57:41] kiss just during conversation, she wouldn't have started
[57:45] screaming. So if she did scream, it's
[57:47] because he did something to scare her.
[57:49] Anyway, after 2 1/2 days the jury came back from deliberation
[57:54] and rejected Vincent Tabak's plea of guilty to manslaughter.
[57:59] And they said that he was in fact guilty of murder.
[58:03] And I am still rather confused that that was not a majority
[58:07] decision. So there was 10 that thought he
[58:10] was guilty and two that thought he was innocent.
[58:14] Vincent Tabak was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of
[58:17] 20 years. But it's very unlikely that he
[58:20] will ever be out because police believe and the judge believed
[58:25] that this was probably going to be the start of a serial killer
[58:29] had he not been caught now during this investigation.
[58:32] Just kind of a little side note to kind of end the video off.
[58:35] I said that far too excited for what it actually is.
[58:38] It's actually disgusting. As police were going through
[58:41] Vincent Tabak's laptop, they actually found over 100 indecent
[58:47] images of children. I'm not too sure why he wasn't
[58:50] put on trial for that at the time, like when he was put on
[58:53] trial for murder. I don't know why they didn't do
[58:55] the same, both of them at the same time.
[58:57] Anyway, he was eventually put on trial for that, for those
[59:01] images, and he was given a further 10 months in prison,
[59:04] although that was pretty much just for the principle of it.
[59:07] They just wanted to like be seen to trial him and everything
[59:11] because he'll never be out of prison anyway. 10 months doesn't
[59:14] matter, but it's just the point of taking him to court to find
[59:18] him guilty of that. Thank you so much for listening
[59:24] to usual disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[59:27] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[59:29] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[59:32] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[59:36] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
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[59:42] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[59:44] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[59:48] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[59:51] production. See you next time.

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