# 45: The Tragic Murder of Schoolgirl Heather Tell

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 19 Sep 2023, 33 min.

Audio: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/APO1489929524.mp3

Today's episode is on the tragic murder of Heather Tell Trigger Warning: attempted sex crimes 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 discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] Today we're going to be talking about a case from Tamworth in
[0:41] Staffordshire, England. Staffordshire is a seemingly
[0:44] safe, friendly, quite a large town, or at least it was safe
[0:49] and friendly in the year 2000, which is when this case takes
[0:52] place. There'd actually been no murders
[0:55] in Tamworth for almost 3 decades, but of course nowhere
[1:00] is ever 100% safe. But before we jump into this
[1:03] case, I would just like to give my usual disclaimer that I mean
[1:05] absolutely no disrespect to anyone that I talk about in
[1:08] this. This video is for educational
[1:10] purposes and everything that I'm about to say is just information
[1:13] that I have found on the Internet and I'm compiling into
[1:16] one video. Quick warning before we do get
[1:18] into this video, this case does involve attempted sex crimes.
[1:23] So like I said, today's video takes place in Tamworth, a
[1:26] pretty big town in Staffordshire, just north of
[1:29] Birmingham in the West Midlands of England.
[1:31] Heather Tell was a 17 year old schoolgirl from the area, known
[1:35] for her beautiful smile and long flowing blonde hair.
[1:38] But beyond her looks, Heather was one of those just really
[1:41] happy, smiley, positive people. She was kind of known for this
[1:45] really positive, kind energy that she had.
[1:49] She was just one of those really bright people and she was known
[1:52] for just making others happy just by her presence.
[1:55] She was a very nice, normal girl with a nice normal group of
[1:59] friends. She was well behaved.
[2:01] She was just very like girl next door kind of character.
[2:04] She had a huge passion for dancing and she was really good
[2:08] at it as well. She spent a lot of nights a week
[2:10] practicing dance at her local dance studio.
[2:13] She was actually studying dance in college at the time of this
[2:16] case. She went to Sutton Coldfield
[2:18] College and eventually she wanted to make it her career
[2:22] somehow. And once thing she was known for
[2:24] in her dance group was her ability to put emotion into her
[2:29] dance. So whether it was like a serious
[2:32] peace or like just her smiling and bringing a lot of energy to
[2:37] her routines. And at the time of this case,
[2:39] she wasn't far off her 18th birthday and 18 is always a big
[2:44] one in England, so her and her friends have been planning it
[2:46] for ages. They wanted to go to London and
[2:49] have like a big shopping spree on August 25th 2000 and 17 year
[2:54] old Heather Tell was planning to meet up with a friend at the
[2:58] local dance studio and then go to the cinema to watch a film
[3:01] together. This was the same dance studio
[3:03] that she used to go to multiple times a week for dance practice
[3:07] and she walked there every single time.
[3:10] And she was a very responsible, sensible girl and so her parents
[3:14] trusted her to do that walk alone.
[3:16] She'd done it plenty of times before and she was fine.
[3:19] She planned to meet her friend Laura at Belgrave Dance Studio,
[3:22] which wasn't very far from Tamworth town centre, at around
[3:26] 8:30 PM that night. However, Heather failed to turn
[3:30] up. Laura was waiting outside the
[3:32] dance studio for ages and Heather was nowhere to be seen.
[3:36] And so she started calling her, but there was no answer on her
[3:39] phone. So she was thinking, well, maybe
[3:41] she ditched her or maybe she was ill and she decided to stay at
[3:44] home or something. And so Laura called Heather's
[3:48] home phone. Heather's father picked up and
[3:50] Laura explained to him that Heather hadn't turned up up and
[3:53] he said Oh well that's strange because she set off a while ago
[3:57] so she should be there by now. The Tel family were rightly
[4:00] concerned and so they started calling Heather's phone but
[4:04] there was no answer and so they decided to go out and look for
[4:08] her, go out and walk the path that she would have taken to get
[4:12] to the dance studio to see if they could find her.
[4:15] So her immediate family set off from the house and they took the
[4:19] exact same route to Belgrave Dance Studio that Heather would
[4:22] have taken. But they didn't see Heather
[4:25] anywhere along the route. And as times going on, it's
[4:28] getting darker outside. More and more family members are
[4:32] joining the search because the family is getting more and more
[4:34] worried. But still no sign of Heather.
[4:37] And then by 10:00 PM, the family had been looking for about an
[4:41] hour at this point and it was getting dark outside.
[4:44] It was pretty much dark. And the family knew that they
[4:47] couldn't do this by themselves. And so they called the police
[4:50] and reported Heather as missing. So police came out to interview
[4:54] the tell family and just get a description of Heather, maybe
[4:57] some pictures, some kind of idea of what she was doing that
[5:00] night, what her life was like on the normal day-to-day routine
[5:04] that she had. Meanwhile, other officers had
[5:06] formed a search party with Heather's more kind of extended
[5:10] family, her friends, some volunteers from the town.
[5:14] And they were just going out walking manually searching for
[5:18] Heather. And because of the severity of
[5:20] this case, a minor missing in the middle of the night when
[5:23] it's dark, they were pulling out all the stops.
[5:26] There were even sniffer dogs brought to the initial search.
[5:29] And that's not done often. Dogs are normally brought in a
[5:32] little bit later when they can't find people in the initial
[5:35] search, but due to how serious this was, they brought the dogs
[5:39] in right away. The main focus of the search was
[5:42] the route that Heather would have taken that night to get to
[5:45] the dance studio. So from her house there were a
[5:48] few streets that she would walk down, and then the last bit of
[5:52] her walk was through a park. She took a shortcut through this
[5:56] kind of very overgrown grassy tree area.
[6:01] This park that she walked through was called Kettlebrook
[6:04] Linear Park, but I think a lot of people, a lot of locals
[6:08] called it Belgrave Park because it was near Belgrave Dance
[6:12] Studios. So a lot of the search was
[6:13] taking place in that park and on that path.
[6:17] But of course, other officers and other volunteers were
[6:20] searching pretty much the whole of Tamworth at this point
[6:23] because it had been over an hour since she was last seen, over 2
[6:27] hours since she was last seen at this point.
[6:29] So she might not still be on that route.
[6:31] A lot of the search took place in that park because there was a
[6:35] lot to search. Like I said, it was very
[6:38] overgrown. There were a lot of bushes, a
[6:39] lot of trees, and you know, there were a lot of kind of
[6:42] hidden places that needed looking through.
[6:45] So that was where a lot of the searches were.
[6:48] This continued through the night and into the early hours of the
[6:52] morning. Of course, volunteers and people
[6:54] like that were leaving to go to bed, so the numbers of the
[6:58] search party got less and less through the night.
[7:01] But the next morning when everyone woke up, there was
[7:03] still no sign of Heather Tell. She hadn't got in contact with
[7:07] anyone, no one had seen her. So now it was very concerning.
[7:11] On the morning of the 26th, a family friend of the Tell family
[7:15] was cycling through that same park that Heather would have
[7:19] walked through when he saw something in the bushes.
[7:23] So he got off his bike and walked into the bushes to get a
[7:26] closer look. And that was when he saw a naked
[7:30] human body lying there in the undergrowth.
[7:33] And as he got even closer, he saw the long blonde hair and he
[7:37] saw the face. And that was when he realized
[7:40] that this was the dead body of Heather Tell.
[7:43] He called for police to come straight to the body and the
[7:47] area was cordoned off immediately as this case had now
[7:50] turned from a missing persons case to a homicide
[7:54] investigation. It was raining pretty badly on
[7:57] the morning that Heather Tells body was found and it had been
[8:00] through the night. And so there were immediate
[8:03] fears that maybe this rain had washed away a critical pieces of
[8:06] evidence like DNA, saliva, blood fibres, anything like that on
[8:11] the body. But there's nothing they can
[8:13] really do about that. They put up a tent immediately
[8:15] to prevent any further damage from the rain.
[8:18] But what was done was already done.
[8:20] And so they just had to do tests on the body as well as they
[8:24] possibly could. And bear in mind this was 2000,
[8:27] and so tests were nowhere near as good as they were now, 20
[8:31] years later. They were still quite basic back
[8:34] then, but luckily Heather's body was found, like I said, in lots
[8:38] of undergrowth under a few trees.
[8:40] The damage to any like evidence or anything like that had been
[8:43] minimised because the body had been protected by all these
[8:47] trees. So detectives got to work
[8:49] looking at the crime scene and right from the off they can
[8:52] already tell that this murder was probably sexually motivated.
[8:57] If it wasn't sexually motivated then there would be little need
[9:00] for her killer to take off her clothes.
[9:02] And Heather was found naked. I couldn't actually find if her
[9:06] clothes were found at the crime scene.
[9:08] I know her underwear was found close to her body and some
[9:12] sources say that her knickers were even stuffed in her mouth.
[9:15] However, I did only read that on a couple of sources so I can't
[9:18] really say that as fact. But she was naked.
[9:21] She had her clothes taken from her body, so this seemed to be
[9:25] sexually motivated. Why else would someone do that
[9:28] to her? Police could also tell just from
[9:31] looking at the body that Heather's cause of death had
[9:34] most likely been strengthened. You know, this wasn't done with
[9:38] someone's bare hands. This was done with an item.
[9:41] And it seemed to be very thin because the line on her neck was
[9:44] very thin. So it was like shoelace or rope
[9:48] or something. As the crime scene investigators
[9:51] were working inside the tent by the body on the crime scene,
[9:54] other officers were searching the rest of the park, so all the
[9:58] other different bushes and things to see if anything had
[10:00] been discarded, maybe a weapon. A team of divers was brought in
[10:04] because there was a river that ran and from one end of the park
[10:07] all the way to the other. And this was a linear park.
[10:09] So if you don't know what one of those is, it's one that's more
[10:12] long than it is wide. So it ran all the way from the
[10:15] top all the way to the bottom. It was a big job, and it ran
[10:18] right by where Heather's body was found.
[10:21] So it was very possible that her killer might have discarded of a
[10:25] weapon in there or, you know, anything, any kind of evidence
[10:29] that could identify them. Heather's earrings were found
[10:33] relatively close to her body, so it seems as though they'd either
[10:36] been ripped out or maybe came out in a struggle.
[10:39] Her mobile phone was actually found in the grass on the
[10:42] opposite side of the path, so it seemed as though that had maybe
[10:45] been thrown there. Some sources said that the phone
[10:48] was broken, some say it was broken in 2.
[10:52] So I don't actually know how broken the phone was, if it was
[10:54] smashed at all. And on a search of Heather's
[10:56] mobile phone records, it actually shows that she was
[10:59] trying to call her house phone around the time that police
[11:03] believed that she died. So it's very be possible that
[11:06] maybe she was being followed for a while by her attacker, or
[11:09] maybe she saw them in the bushes or something and went to call
[11:13] her house and then the attacker ambushed her and threw her phone
[11:17] into the bushes, which is how it could have broken if it was
[11:21] broken. So as all of these searches were
[11:23] going on at the crime scene and her body was being tested for
[11:26] any kind of DNA evidence, police elsewhere were also questioning
[11:31] her family, her friends, people that she knew, just to see what
[11:35] Heather's life was like, if there was anyone that maybe
[11:39] didn't like her, anyone that might want to hurt her.
[11:42] But like I said, Heather was a very positive, very happy,
[11:45] smiley girl. She was very well liked.
[11:47] And her family and friends couldn't think of anyone that
[11:50] might want to do this to her at all.
[11:52] She didn't have any revengeful exes.
[11:55] She didn't have anyone that she'd really fallen out with.
[11:57] So this seemed like it was more than likely a crime of
[12:02] opportunity. It seems as though Heather had
[12:04] just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and someone was
[12:08] there looking to hurt another human being, and Heather just
[12:13] happened to be the first one that they saw.
[12:14] As the news of Heather's murder began circulating around
[12:18] Tamworth, the streets pretty much deserted.
[12:22] And this was a place where a lot of teenagers used to hang about
[12:25] on the streets. Kids would just go to the park
[12:28] alone and meet up with their friends, and all of that
[12:31] stopped. Everyone was too scared to go
[12:33] outside. Of course, there's an
[12:34] opportunistic murderer on the loose and the possibility of
[12:38] them striking again is very high.
[12:40] So all of a sudden everyone started locking their doors
[12:43] while they were still inside. They started travelling in
[12:46] groups. They wouldn't let their children
[12:48] walk to and from school anymore. So pretty early on in the case,
[12:51] police theorized that the killer could have been local to the
[12:55] park or more than likely was local to the park because this
[12:59] was a very secluded area, somewhere that you would
[13:03] probably only know exists if you lived in in that town.
[13:06] It's not like it's a known park in Staffordshire.
[13:10] It's like if you live in Tamworth, you know of it.
[13:13] It seemed as though this killer knew exactly where they could
[13:17] kill and hide A body without being seen or heard.
[13:21] So police were now looking at this case and wondering how they
[13:25] were going to go about it. How do you go about finding a
[13:28] murderer when you have absolutely no leads?
[13:31] There was no one that they could look at, no one suspicious, and
[13:35] they had a body that probably didn't have any evidence on it.
[13:38] They did appeal to the news and in newspapers and things like
[13:41] that. But in the meantime, while
[13:44] you're waiting for calls to come in, what else is there to do?
[13:46] So they began looking at past similar crimes from that area,
[13:52] so sexual crimes within the last kind of year in Tamworth.
[13:57] Because the likelihood is, is that if someone can kill another
[14:00] human being in a sexually motivated way, then they're
[14:03] probably capable of doing other things and they probably have
[14:07] done other things. It's normally an escalation with
[14:10] crimes like these. It's never normally someone's
[14:13] first crime, murder. So police looked through a lot
[14:16] of reports of indecent exposure, recent reports of indecent
[14:20] exposure, which is like getting naked in public, like revealing
[14:26] your body in public. And there were a lot of reports
[14:30] to go through from Tamworth. There were about 150 indecent
[14:33] exposure cases within the last year.
[14:36] Interestingly enough, the autopsy of Heather tells body
[14:40] revealed that she hadn't actually been raped or sexually
[14:44] assaulted from what they could tell from her body.
[14:47] Even though the crime scene of this murder pointed towards this
[14:50] being a sex crime with Heather being found naked, it didn't
[14:55] seem to be 1. But that doesn't mean it wasn't
[14:58] sexually motivated. Maybe the killer was planning on
[15:01] sexually assaulting or raping Heather, and maybe they killed
[15:04] her by accident 1st and then freaked out and ran away.
[15:09] Maybe they sexually assaulted her in ways that wouldn't show
[15:12] up on the body, if you know what I mean.
[15:15] Penetration isn't the only way that someone can be sexually
[15:20] assaulted. Or maybe this was a sexually
[15:22] motivated crime, but they never intended on sexually assaulting
[15:27] them, so they could have got some level of sexual
[15:30] gratification from this without actually doing anything to
[15:34] Heather. Although she was found naked,
[15:36] like I said, her underwear was found near her body.
[15:39] So despite the rain and everything, the crime scene
[15:43] investigators were really hoping that maybe some DNA had got
[15:46] caught or lodged in her underwear and then maybe that
[15:50] could be one of the things that leads to a killer being charged.
[16:01] Through the inspection of the crime scene, it was discovered
[16:04] that the murder weapon used to strangle Heather Tell had
[16:07] actually been her own shoelace, and it seemed as though the
[16:12] killer had taken their time with this.
[16:14] So like I said, tests were being done on her body and on the
[16:18] clothing found near her body to see if any DNA could be
[16:21] identified. But while that was going on,
[16:24] other police officers continued investigating other avenues of
[16:29] this case. They set about creating a
[16:31] suspect profile, which is a set of characteristics that police
[16:35] believe that the murderer might have based on how they carried
[16:39] out the crime. I hope that made sense.
[16:41] So things like they believe this was a sexually motivated crime
[16:45] and because it was against a teenage girl, that makes police
[16:49] believe that this was an older man that carried out the crime.
[16:53] They also believe that the murderer probably has a criminal
[16:56] history, particularly in sex crimes, because like I said,
[17:00] it's very unusual for murder to be someone's first crime.
[17:04] They normally kind of work their way up.
[17:06] So they're looking for people that have indecent exposure
[17:09] charges, maybe sexual assault charges, possibly even rape
[17:13] charges. And again, like I said, closer
[17:15] to the beginning of the video, they believe that the murderer
[17:18] probably lives within about 5 miles of the park.
[17:22] For them to know that that would be kind of like a good place to
[17:26] commit a crime like this. So now that they had this
[17:29] suspect profile, they were using that in the appeals on like news
[17:33] channels and in newspapers. They were saying that they
[17:36] believed the murderer had these characteristics.
[17:39] And if anyone had a feeling that they knew who had done this,
[17:44] then they need to get in contact with police.
[17:45] So by now, this case was national news.
[17:49] It was being shown on news channels up and down the
[17:51] country. It was on every single newspaper
[17:54] and I think just a lot of the country really empathized with
[17:59] Heather and her family. She was a very normal teenage
[18:02] girl, a child going about her normal life when she was
[18:06] viciously attacked and her life was savagely taken away from
[18:09] her. And this really showed when it
[18:11] came to Heather's funeral, which actually had a turn out of over
[18:14] 2000 people, 2000 people. People were pouring out of the
[18:19] church. People were queuing down the
[18:21] pavement along the road, watching the cars go up to the
[18:24] church. It was very clear that this
[18:26] murder had touched a lot of people and a lot of people were
[18:29] in support of Heather and her family to get her justice.
[18:33] It could have been anyone. It could have been anyone's
[18:35] daughter, anyone's sister, anyone's friend.
[18:38] It really hit the community hard and police kind of played on
[18:42] that relatability in their public appeals.
[18:46] I actually have a quote from from one of the newspaper
[18:48] appeals here that says there must be someone out there who,
[18:51] for reasons of misguided loyalty, is shielding someone
[18:54] that they have suspicions about. I would hate to think that
[18:57] anyone could look at a photograph of this gentle, kind
[19:00] hearted teenager and knowingly harbour her killer.
[19:03] And as these appeals started airing in the newspapers and
[19:06] things, people started coming forward.
[19:09] People were calling, giving potential leads that they
[19:12] thought they had. One of the first leads that
[19:14] police received was from a young man who who was riding his bike
[19:18] in that same park that Heather was murdered in on the night
[19:21] that she was murdered. And he said that on this bike
[19:24] ride, he'd seen the same man multiple times, this suspicious
[19:29] looking man who seemed to be in his 30s or 40s, which bear in
[19:34] mind is the kind of age bracket that the suspect profile was
[19:37] putting the killer at or estimating the killer to be at.
[19:41] This cyclist's name was Johannes Prince, and he'd been cycling to
[19:46] a friend's house that night when he rode past a middle-aged man
[19:50] hiding in a Bush in that park, Which of course sounds weird
[19:55] right from the off, but there are potential explanations for
[19:59] that. You know, maybe he lost
[20:01] something in the Bush, maybe he was looking for something, I
[20:03] don't know. As Prince got closer on his
[20:06] bike, this man in the Bush spotted him cycling by, and this
[20:11] man lifts his hands and covers his face until Prince has cycled
[20:16] past. So.
[20:17] He could have easily made it look less suspicious that he was
[20:20] hiding in this Bush, but no, he covered his face and fully made
[20:24] it look like he was hiding. But, you know, Prince didn't
[20:27] think anything of it. He didn't know that anyone had
[20:29] been murdered or attacked in that area.
[20:31] So, you know, you just think it's someone being weird in a
[20:34] Bush. However, he went to this
[20:36] friend's house. He was there for about an hour,
[20:39] and then he began cycling back home.
[20:41] He was cycling just along by Belgrave Dance Studio, which was
[20:45] where Heather was supposed to be meeting her friend that night.
[20:48] When he cycled into that same man again, this man got right in
[20:52] his path and forced Prince to like halt his bike.
[20:56] And because he stopped when this man was right in front of him,
[21:00] this meant that Prince got a really good look at this man's
[21:03] face, a really good look at his features.
[21:05] And he was able to describe this man in a lot of detail to
[21:08] police, even down to like the shape of the belt buckle he was
[21:12] wearing. Apparently he was wearing like
[21:14] all royal blue. And the timing of this encounter
[21:17] lines up perfectly with just after Heather's murder.
[21:23] So police believe that Heather was murdered anytime between
[21:26] 8:00 and 8:30, and Prince ran into this guy just after 8:30,
[21:32] so it could well be Heather's murderer.
[21:35] Another tip that police received from the public actually
[21:38] included a name. So this was their first proper
[21:41] lead, their first proper person of interest.
[21:44] And this lead came from a group of Co workers at a stationary
[21:49] store in Tamworth. A young 19 year old girl that
[21:53] worked at this stationary store had confided in her Co workers
[21:57] that she had a bad feeling about her father in relation to this
[22:02] case. Of course this girl is hesitant
[22:05] to come forward about her own father, I think anyone would be.
[22:08] But she knew that she kind of hacked her because this was very
[22:12] serious, but she was just very scared to.
[22:15] So her first step was confiding in her work friends.
[22:19] She told her Co workers that her father had a history of sex
[22:24] crimes when she was very young. He spent two years in prison for
[22:28] an attempted rape. And on the night of Heather
[22:30] tells murder, he didn't come home.
[22:33] And when he finally came home the next morning, he was soaking
[22:36] wet. He was very dishevelled, very
[22:39] messy, very seemingly exhausted. He was tired and he didn't have
[22:44] an excuse as to where he'd been last night or where he'd been
[22:47] all morning. And so she was very suspicious
[22:51] and after confiding in her Co workers that she believed her
[22:55] father might be responsible, they knew that they had to go to
[22:58] the police. They couldn't keep this
[23:00] information and just wait for their friend to kind of do it on
[23:04] her own. This was a very serious matter
[23:06] and this was a very dangerous man on the loose.
[23:09] And so they went to the police themselves.
[23:11] This young girl was 19 year old Lindsay Chidji, accusing her 45
[23:16] year old father, Michael Chidji, a coach driver from Tamworth.
[23:20] And so police began looking into their first suspect, Michael
[23:24] Chidji. And when they looked at his past
[23:27] criminal history, they realized that he'd done way more than
[23:30] just that one attempted rape that his daughter knew of.
[23:34] He had a long history of sex crimes, mainly when he was
[23:39] younger. He actually hadn't done anything
[23:42] criminal for around 17 years. His first charge was when he was
[23:46] just 16 years old, and that was for indecent exposure.
[23:50] And there are nine other indecent exposure charges on his
[23:54] record, one of which actually took place at the same park
[23:59] where Heather Tell was murdered. But of course, the main charge
[24:03] on his record that was causing the most concern was that
[24:06] attempted rape from 17 years prior.
[24:09] This particular incident happened one day when he was
[24:12] driving in his car and he noticed that a woman on that
[24:16] same Rd. had broken down. So he pulled over and walked
[24:20] over and and offered his help and this woman in her very
[24:24] vulnerable state, she was rather desperate for help.
[24:27] She let him help and he took advantage of that and when the
[24:32] course was clear he attacked her and tried to rape her.
[24:35] Luckily she managed to fight him off before he could do any major
[24:39] harm to her and he ran back to his car and drove away, but not
[24:43] before she managed to jot down his license plate so she could
[24:48] report him to the police. Like I said, he served two years
[24:51] in prison and for that attempted rape.
[24:53] And then once he left prison, there was nothing else on his
[24:56] record. So whether he had tried to
[24:59] commit a crime and it just wasn't reported, I don't know.
[25:02] But it seems from that point on that the prison time had
[25:05] deterred him from committing similar crimes.
[25:08] So Michael Chigi was brought into the police station for
[25:10] questioning and he denied all involvement in Heather Tells
[25:15] Murder. And nothing really came of this
[25:17] questioning. And because they had no evidence
[25:20] against him, they had to let him go.
[25:22] Police thought that their best bet in this case would be DNA
[25:27] evidence, but of course due to the rain on the morning that
[25:30] Heather tells body was found, it was going to be hard to find any
[25:34] DNA of a perpetrator on her body.
[25:37] They had to use a relatively new technique called DNA profiling.
[25:41] Now I don't fully understand this, but I'll try and explain
[25:45] it to the best of my ability. Basically, a DNA profile isn't
[25:49] quite as specific as a DNA sample.
[25:52] So each human in the world has a specific unique DNA sample, but
[25:58] multiple people will have similar DNA profiles.
[26:03] So a DNA sample has more information in it.
[26:06] A DNA profile is a more kind of watered down version of your DNA
[26:11] sample, which takes out a lot of the specifics, which means that
[26:15] it would then fit a lot of people.
[26:18] Does that make sense? Basically, it's hard to come
[26:20] across someone with your same DNA profile or a similar DNA
[26:25] profile. It can happen, but it's
[26:28] unlikely. And that's what they're looking
[26:29] for here. A DNA profile, because this was
[26:32] in the year 2000. Technology wasn't amazing.
[26:35] That was the best they could do really.
[26:36] So basically, if the DNA profile was a match to Michael Chiji, it
[26:41] wasn't exact evidence that it was his DNA, but it was pretty
[26:45] likely that it was his DNA because there's A1 in 70 million
[26:50] chance that someone else has the same DNA profile.
[26:53] So, you know, it pretty much is. So Michael's DNA was taken with
[26:58] a little swab on his cheek and it was sent off to the lab to
[27:01] test against anything that they could find on Heather, tell on
[27:05] her, on her underwear, on anything, on anything.
[27:09] And it was very unlikely that they were going to find
[27:11] something large enough to test against Michael's DNA because of
[27:15] the rain. But they did find something, a
[27:18] small sample on her underwear, and it was tested against
[27:21] Michael Chigi's DNA. And it was a match.
[27:23] And this DNA match was enough evidence for police to arrest
[27:28] Michael, but maybe not enough for them to convict him because,
[27:33] like I say, it was a profile, not an exact sample match.
[27:37] But they were going to worry about that later.
[27:38] Right now, they just needed to focus on arresting Michael
[27:42] Chigi. If he had committed this murder,
[27:45] he was a danger. He was dangerous to have out on
[27:48] the street so police immediately went and arrested him and took
[27:52] him to the police station. Tiji was questioned once again
[27:55] now that they have this new evidence and he was asked how is
[27:59] your DNA on? Heather tells Underwear.
[28:02] And he explained how his DNA was on her underwear by saying that
[28:06] he liked to go into women's underwear shops and fondle the
[28:13] underwear when it was still on. The coat hanger still on the
[28:16] rack touched these woman's underwear before they'd even
[28:19] been bought. And he just kind of liked that
[28:22] he got off on the fact that he'd touched these woman's underwear
[28:26] and then they were going to be bought and worn by women one
[28:28] day. Like he that was like his thing.
[28:31] And so he tried to tell police that maybe he'd been into an
[28:35] underwear store, touched this bra, and then Heather had been
[28:39] in maybe that same day or the next day and bought one of the
[28:43] bras that he fondled in the store.
[28:47] And that is how his DNA got on Heather's bra.
[28:50] It sounds ridiculous, It really does.
[28:52] But at the same time, police have to look into it.
[28:56] They can't not. And so they got in contact with
[28:59] this specific underwear company. It was quite a big brand, I
[29:03] don't know what brand. They got in touch with that
[29:06] company and they got a representative round to come and
[29:09] look at the bra. Basically, if this professional
[29:12] from the brand said that this bra looked in relatively new
[29:16] condition, then Michael's story could be true.
[29:20] But if this representative from the brand said no, this bra
[29:23] looks worn. It looks like it's been washed a
[29:26] few times, like it's deteriorating a bit.
[29:29] There's no possible way that he could have touched it in the
[29:32] store. And that DNA has still been on
[29:34] it on the day of her murder. So he must have touched it
[29:38] around the day of her murder. And what do you know?
[29:40] This representative comes, they look at the bra and they say,
[29:43] no, this has definitely been washed.
[29:44] A lot of times the stitching was kind of coming away.
[29:48] This was a relatively old bra of Heathers.
[29:52] And that shows that Michael Chigi must have touched the bra
[29:56] around the time of Heather's murder.
[29:58] At this point, they had a pretty solid case against Michael Chigi
[30:01] being the killer. However, the police just wanted
[30:05] as much evidence as they possibly could just to make sure
[30:07] that they could get this man behind bars.
[30:10] And so police decided to call back in Prince, that cyclist
[30:14] that had seen the suspicious looking man twice on the night
[30:17] of Heather's murder. Who actually saw this man close
[30:22] up and knew what he looked like? They put Chiji and a bunch of
[30:25] other kind of similar looking men in a police lineup, an
[30:29] identity parade, and they brought Prince in and they said,
[30:32] right, okay, are any of these men the one that you saw on that
[30:36] night? And he picked out Chigi.
[30:39] He actually said that it was Chigi without a doubt.
[30:42] So he was pretty confident about that.
[30:44] So that was it for police. That was enough evidence for
[30:46] them to charge Michael Chigi with the murder of Heather Tell
[30:51] and for this whole thing to go to trial.
[30:53] So the trial began in December of 2001, a year and a half after
[30:58] the murder took place. And they had all kinds of
[31:01] witnesses. They had Prince the cyclist,
[31:03] they had Michael Chigi's own wife or his daughter, I don't
[31:08] know which one. Could have been both, of course,
[31:10] because he hadn't come home that night and when he came home the
[31:13] next morning, he was soaking wet and dirty.
[31:16] So they needed to testify that they had the representative from
[31:20] the underwear company as well as the physical evidence of the DNA
[31:24] profile match because even though it wasn't a specific
[31:28] sample match, there was still a one in 70 million chance that
[31:33] this was not Michael Chidji's DNA, which is, you know, big
[31:38] enough for them to use it as evidence.
[31:40] So the jury went to deliberate and they came back with a
[31:43] majority verdict, 11 to one that Michael Chidji was guilty of the
[31:49] murder of Heather Tell. He was sentenced to life in
[31:52] prison as the judge deemed him a danger to women.
[31:55] That must never be free again. Thank you so much for listening
[32:03] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[32:05] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[32:08] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[32:11] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[32:14] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
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[32:20] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[32:23] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[32:26] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[32:29] production. See you next time.

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