Description
Becky Watts' killers, Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare, will be the centre of a brand-new ITV documentary tonight.
Becky Watts: The Police Tapes sees Susanna Reid gain unprecedented access to police interview room footage to reveal the strategy and skill involved in catching Becky's killers.
There is also first-person testimony from some of the officers, and Susanna talks to Becky's family about the impact of this appalling crime.
Becky, 16, was brutally killed in what was described as a sexually-motivated attack before her body was then dismembered and dumped in a shed.
Matthews, 29, was found guilty of murder and jailed for life with a 33-year minimum term, while Hoare, 22, was convicted of manslaughter and jailed for 17 years.
Both were convicted of conspiracy to kidnap, perverting the course of justice, preventing a lawful burial and possessing two stun guns.
Nathan Matthews and Shauna Hoare were both found guilty of the killing of 16-year-old Becky two years ago, at Bristol Crown Court.
Matthews, Becky's stepbrother, was found guilty of murder while his girlfriend Hoare was found guilty of manslaughter , after the pair planned to kidnap the 16-year-old before she was murdered and her body cut up into eight parts.
A jury found the pair guilty of conspiring to kidnap Becky before she was suffocated to death while at her Crown Hill home on February 19, 2015.
Hoare was also found guilty of perverting the course of justice, prevention of an unlawful burial and possession of a stun.
Matthews, who was aged 29 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum 33-year term.
He launched an appeal against his conviction and sentence which was rejected in 2016.
Although unable to find legal representation to help him appeal his conviction - he ended up submitting grounds of appeal he had written himself - he was represented by Adam Vaitlingham QC over his sentence.
The barrister said that, while Becky's killing was 'obviously a terrible offence', the judge set too high a minimum term.
Matthews and Hoare, who lived together in housing association terraced house in Bristol, had exchanged intimate messages about kidnapping girls.
The pair went to Becky's home armed with a “kidnap kit” including handcuffs and two stun guns, the jury was told during a five-week trial.
Matthews admitted killing Watts, but denied committing murder, instead claimed manslaughter, telling the court that he had tried to kidnap Watts as a way of scaring her into changing what he perceived as her bad behaviour, but the plan went wrong and he accidentally killed her.
Matthews insisted the killing took place while Hoare was in the garden, and that she was not involved.
Hoare, who also denied murder, said she had no knowledge of or involvement in Watts' death, describing text messages she had exchanged with Matthews about kidnapping schoolgirls in the months before as "unfortunate" and "sarcastic".
The prosecution claimed that the text messages between the two, as well as other content found at their home, suggested "a shared unnatural interest in attractive teenage females".
On 11 November 2015, after three hours and 27 minutes of deliberations, the jury found Matthews guilty of murder and Hoare guilty of manslaughter.
Both were also convicted of conspiracy to kidnap Watts, perverting the course of justice, preventing a lawful burial by dismembering and hiding her body, and possession of two stun guns.
Two men, James Ireland and Donovan Demetrius, were cleared of assisting an offender, which related to the moving and storing of packages containing Watts' body parts.
Donovan's brother Karl Demetrius and his girlfriend Jaydene Parsons, who owned the shed where her remains were stored, had admitted the same charge at an earlier pre-trial hearing, though both insisted they did not know the true contents of the packages.