Welcome to Crime Conversations. The True Crime Podcast brought to you by CrimeCon UK, the ultimate true crime weekend. In the lead up to CrimeCon in London on September 25th and 26th, each week we're bringing two of our favorite podcasts together to find out more about their fascination with true crime. Each conversation will explore subjects including how they got involved in true crime, the cases that have stuck in their mind, the process behind their podcast, and what they think makes a great true crime show.
We'd also like to say a big thank you to all those true crime fans who said questions to ask our guests to find out who will be featuring on the podcast across the season and for more information on our London event, check crimecon.co.uk or visit our Instagram page at CrimeCon underscore UK. Let's find out who's on this episode. Hi, my name is John Elor. I'm the host of All Killed Theresa, which is a podcast about unsolved murders in the province of Quebec, Canada.
Hi, I'm John. And I'm Sally. We are the host of True Crime Investigators UK Podcast. We both have a career in law enforcement and we bring our knowledge and experience to our true crime podcast.
I want to start with a question. When did you first realize you had an interest in crime and what triggered the interest? Well, both of us have a background in law enforcement. We were both police officers.
John, you did 30 years, didn't you? And I did 12. So our background really is crime. And then I went on to be a criminal lawyer.
And so the interest continued. And when we both retired, we started reading lots of crime and it led on from there because you started listening to podcasts, didn't you John? Yeah, and of course we met in the police, didn't we? In the same force?
I believe we met in a fight in a car park. Very true. And that was many, many, many years ago. And as Sally said, I did 30 years in various departments in the police, I joined to be a dog handler actually.
And I love the dogs. And of course, like all these occupations, until you actually join and see what happens. And this is one of the things in our podcast enquiries we make is that a lot of the public don't know exactly what the police do. They see a uniformed officer walking or in a car to get anywhere you are.
But behind it is a mass of other departments. And of course I went from wanting to be a dog handler within weeks thinking, I didn't know the CID did that and I didn't know they did this. And it changed my outlook completely. And out of my 30 years, 25 approximately, we're in the CID or various CID departments like the drug squad sector.
So certainly my interest in crime is all my life really. When we started to think about what we were going to do in our retirement. And we started looking at crime writing and reading crime. That's when we got into the podcast and started listening to what was out there on the podcast scene.
From my knowledge of you John is that that's completely different as far as you're concerned. So I'm the other side of the equation. I'm the crime victim. So I had my approaches from victimology.
My sister Teresa was an unsolved murder going on 43 years now in Quebec, Canada, the province of Quebec. Getting interested in it. I'm kind of like the last guy who knew that he was a part of this world. Although I was fascinated by true crime.
So I was reading a lot of true crime, but not knowing that my sister had been murdered. And I think I was thinking about this today in the mid 90s, I was living in Los Angeles and had a habit of like going to trophy sites like where the Black Dahlia was found or I mean, OJ was everywhere there. So I was going to Gretna Green late at night. And, you know, skulking around.
And one day I went to a reading by the crime noir, our author James Elroy. And he was there promoting his book about the unsolved murder of his mother's case, my dark places. I got there early. So he was alone at a table.
So I had the opportunity to speak with James Elroy before he kind of showed his public face that day. And the more he talked, the more I realized that I was, you know, it took longer than this, but I was slowly, slowly the light came on that I was a member of this club. I would say that. But the jumping off point was certainly reading Elroy's book, my dark places.
You know, what follows for both of us is the question, so you have an interest in true crime. So what led to the podcast? From our point of view, it was after I retired and Sally was still working and subsequently retired, we'd looked at, I read, well, both of us read True Crime was sat in our little studio, which is a library surrounded by true crime books and espionage books, which is in other interests. And we said we were going to have a go at writing, and Sally did a few writing courses and time went by.
And I literally heard of a crime podcast or read in a newspaper. I thought, I wonder what that's about. And followed it from there. Listen to several and obviously Americans podcasts.
There's a lot of them on crime, you know, before UK and other parts of the world took off on that sort of genre. And I said to Sally one day when she came and I said, listen to this and we listened and I said, I think we could do that and sort of put a different twist on it as from an investigative point of view, rather than sort of a scripted story, which is fine. And obviously very popular, but we've come at it from a slightly different angle. And that was literally as it happened and we then made phone calls to people and tried to get involved with podcasts and groups and that's how we actually took off to do it.
And yourself, John, you understand where an author type of interest that's developed into podcasts, is that right? Yeah, it grew out of the fact that I was, I had been blogging, I've been blogging. I don't even know if they call it blogging anymore. But I had a website and I had been writing, I guess close to 20 years now.
I was born out of a frustration that even even, you know, in the late mid 2000s, investigative journalism was drying up, particularly this kind of investigative journalist. So it evolved from me, you know, writing, commenting on newspaper stories or the lack of stories and then slowly kind of going, okay, nobody is paying attention but that's kind of derivative. And then it began to evolve into doing a lot of investigative research and I sort of got really good at finding, you know, source documents and things like that and writing long research pieces about unsolved Quebec crimes. And in particular, the ones, you know, people often will say to me, I never heard of that case.
And that's the point. Not only, I mean, obviously somebody from outside Quebec probably has not heard of the turf I've covered, but even within Quebec, it was always to shine a light on things that you may think you're hardcore, you know, crime culture, but I bet you don't know this one. And then over the years, the writing has been an experiment in touching different audiences. Obviously, you have a dual language province.
So there's been times where I've been very Anglo and it connects the people from the rest of Canada and the Anglo from Montreal population, but not the Francophone. So then I began a period of writing in French and engaged the French population for a while. And the podcast was born out of a desire to connect with it quite deliberately in American audience and make this terrain more accessible. It caught on in the UK, which I didn't think it would.
And in fact, the whole, I mean, when I got into it, it was really, you know, a gorilla situation in that I just bought like a blue snowball mic. I had a Mac computer that had, you know, garage band on it and I kind of hacked together how to do this and uploaded it through SoundCloud. And I was like, that's it. You can really do this.
And so it was directly, as you say, you know, unscripted messages that first season I did was completely from my heart out on the airwaves, talking in those days about specifically my sister's case, which is quite as involved complex case involving other cases as well. It evolved from there, something you mentioned. I'm particularly good at doing research on my own. I'm a document research guy.
I am not particularly good at having guests on my program or interviewing. It's not in my comfort zone. But I would imagine both of you being former law enforcement. That's kind of in your wheelhouse.
Exactly. And, you know, for both of us, but certainly in my case, for my working career, that was a daily event, really. If you weren't interviewing people, you're talking to witnesses, criminal suspects in interview room situations, and you were researching as well. It's all come together with our podcast, really, because it replicates police work.
You know, you get leads, you get tip offs, you get bits of information, you have to find out if it's correct, is the more to it's the research side. And a bit I enjoy both of us enjoy is actually talking to people, which is basic police work. That's the angle we've come from on our podcast and we've interviewed murderers, we've interviewed victims, family members, all those sort of people to try and sort of give a rounded picture of what actually happened. But when I've actually listened to your podcast, John, it's almost as if you're just having a chat with a friend.
There was one that I listened to that was about three years ago, and you started up by saying, I wasn't going to record anything today. I wasn't, I wasn't intending to do anything with the podcast today. However, I've done so much research that I've got lots of questions and you kind of started going through those questions. And I thought that was a really interesting and different approach to a podcast in that you were almost having a conversation with someone else or with yourself.
And we were just listening into to your thought process. Yeah, that has been, you know, that's intentional. Took me a while to find, okay, what's your focal point and how are you going to pitch that? And so it is, it is kind of designed, I mean, I never discuss it, but it's kind of designed to be a conversation going on in my own head, which gets translated over into the listeners head.
And a lot of times questions aren't answered. It's not like I come in at the end and sort of answer every I quite intentionally often leave things hanging. Maybe they'll get it answered later. But it's to have a psychological effect on the listener.
It's also to engage them. It's like, why didn't you answer this question? It's like, well, because it's kind of self evident and you're kind of spoken about it. And it's just to answer it yourself, if that makes sense.
I wanted to know what cases impacted you the most and it doesn't have to be, it may be one that you haven't covered yet. Well, in my case, it's a podcast we've already produced and it's on our site is to do with a murder of a man called Michael Pritchard in 1997. The basics of it are that he was a delivery driver and he was delivering parcels and somebody saw his van left with the door open engine running and three lads had never been caught. We suspect that they were just on the lookout for anything they could get involved in, saw it.
And one of the guys started to drive this delivery drivers van away, Michael Pritchard. And of course, he sees it happening and goes into the road and stands in front of it, trying to stop it. And eventually, this guy just runs him over and kills him, makes good escape and all three make good the escape. And, you know, one of the jobs we do in the police is, you know, we got to support the victims and the widow of Michael, his name is Hillary, and the son Jonathan, we're completely, she can imagine devastated.
And through the years we keep in contact, cold case reviewing them and all the rest of it. When we're retired, I thought, it's so sad that Hillary hasn't had the closure of the case, but like yourself in your situation, John. And it was on our list of podcasts to try and broadcast the circumstances and the facts and who knows, bring information forward. And that really we've achieved.
And Hillary did very well in the interview and very powerful because it has ruined the rest of her life. And sadly, to this day, hadn't been caught, but we live in hope. That was my favourite one, Sally, isn't it? I think that's the most impactful.
Yeah, because that kind of affected John because he was working on that case when it originally happened back in 1997. And he was what we would now call the family liaison officer. So he obviously had a lot to do with Hillary and the son Jonathan. And a lot of people think that policemen just shut the door and leave it.
But in some cases, you just cannot do that. And even 23 years after the tragic death of Michael, John and I still talking about it and still looking at what we can do to bring the matter back into the public awareness and try to get further along in the investigation so that we leave in no stone unturned and we do everything that we can for that family. After we'd done the podcast, we were approached by a radio producer who said, would we like to be involved in a one-hour documentary? Of course, we said yes, because that still keeps it in the public domain.
So we did do that and that has been released and that has gone out onto lots of community radio stations up and down the country. So I think impactful was the job and impactful has been our response to it. I think that's right, Sally. We've done many others and our objective is to cover not just murder cases as important as they are obviously, but all areas of crime, be it drugs, fraud, terrorism, you name it.
We're sort of trying to broaden our base. But in respect to you, John, obviously your sister Theresa was a victim and your family were involved. And I know that must be your main interest in that particular case. But I know you've investigated and put together many serial murders in the North America area, haven't you?
I mean, ground zero for me is always going to be the unsolved murder of my sister, but I mean, you alluded to it and corrode a book on it. But I'm kind of done with that story. And I do say story kind of deliberately, some people don't like that term, we're like, no, this is my reality and I get that. But nevertheless, we are in the business of somewhat packaging these narratives into compelling the justable ways within an hour or something.
So there's an element of storytelling. I'm always most interested in the case I'm currently working on. So right now I'm looking at a 51-year-old cold case in 1960. The murder of a 14-year-old girl also named Theresa Theresa Martin in Montreal, North part of the island in Montreal, who was found asphyxiated.
And it's a multi-part podcast, which I've never done this way before. I think when I started, I said, well, maybe one episode, maybe three. Now it's five. It's definitely going to be eight episodes because there's so much to say about the cultural and political elements of Quebec in that era and the world in that era in 1969 that a lot of people have forgotten and need to be considered when you present the whole arena of possibilities of what could have happened to this young girl and the podcast is called Who Killed Theresa?
So it is about what are the social and political and law enforcement elements that lead to these outcomes. So for me, it's always the one I'm currently working on. The other interesting thing, John, is that obviously I'm a UK police officer, but when you look at other law enforcement agencies throughout the world, you notice quite a lot of differences in how they go about major crime. And certainly in your sister's case, going back to the late 70s, that's when I joined the police and it's completely different to how they dealt with it.
And like my role with Michael Pritchard still goes on and we seem to treat it a lot differently if that's the right way to put it. And I think you found that as well, didn't you? Definitely. I mean, and that's a lot of it is for me not hunting killers or serial killers, but it's more making connections in criminal investigative failures and seeing the commonalities and seeing how they're different.
And just to John to address your question, one of the most fundamental things I found was in the case of a series of Quebec murders in the 70s and others, all the physical evidence to these cases had been destroyed, either systemically by order or through accident or a negligence, I would argue systemically, since it's across agency and it's not only the police agency destroying say a piece of clothing, it's also the laboratory destroying DNA samples or things like this. Obviously evidence gets lost, that's not what I'm saying, but if you paint that picture to a detective in the United States, it's unheard of. If you ask them, when does evidence in a murder case get destroyed? The answer is going to be it never gets destroyed until the case is solved.
And that's not the situation in Quebec. I'll just eat more and more of speaking to yourself and reading on those subjects that there is such a disparity in procedures throughout the whole world, I think. One of the other things that strikes me in that is as things progress, so you mentioned DNA and how techniques have improved over the years. We've known cases in the past whereby you've had a piece of evidence from a particular crime, and the technology at that time is if we do something with this piece of evidence, we will destroy it.
And therefore, if there are any techniques that are improved in the future, we won't have that piece of physical evidence to be able to test it. So what we're going to do is we're going to hang on to it until our techniques improve, and then we can probably get something better out of this piece of evidence, if actually we leave it for a few years, and the techniques improve. Right, and I would say that's the gold standard, that's the way it should be, unfortunately it's not. What has to be considered for you to, in order to produce a podcast on a case?
What are the elements you look for and what is just as an O-Got? That's an interesting question, John, because when we started and the ones we've done so far are all the investigative journalist type investigations, and what we look for is obviously seriousness of the case. We've covered two murders so far, and also the add-ons for Ozart is the people that we can trace an interview and obviously record for our podcast that are willing to take part. And we've been very lucky so far that the ones we have highlighted, they're willing to take part.
And in one case it was a chap who was convicted of a murder, spent a long time in prison, then subsequently the Court of Appeal released him saying it was unsafe, not that he hadn't committed it, and we interviewed him and his sister and family members. So we look for that type of... He'd been a prison for 27 years, haven't he? So it was a big interest case, but I think the way that sometimes we come at it is we don't look at the crime or the criminal in their own discreet place.
We look at everything as a whole, so we do look at the crime, we do look at the criminal and where that takes us. But we also look at the victim or the victim's family, and we also look at procedural things. Has that case been part of a change in future procedures or future legislation? So it's kind of spreading the net wide.
And I think initially what we said was we wouldn't do cases that were, you know, sort of years and years ago, because we wanted to be able to interview people who had first-hand knowledge. Obviously we do get into our website, we do get information on cases, and we have a lot of cases that are lined up ready for us to look at. The whole world is your oyster these days with the technology we've got. Like we are speaking in different countries and recording it, and it gives us the opportunity to involve other countries.
And our next one that's coming out in a few months time involves... What I was going to say, it takes place in the West Coast of United States. Yeah, the lady in question who was murdered, the victim came from California. She married a very wealthy Englishman, and he murdered her in the UK, and has a big American and Australian connection.
And we've actually got a podcaster in Australia to cover, like jointly with our podcast there, the investigation in Australia, and it'll sort of all be linked together. So as well as what we outlined about the nature of the crime, the witnesses, it's also, as you say, telling a story, which is if you involve a bigger audience base, it becomes more interesting. And like your crimes, obviously, are in Canada, North America, likewise, they'll be interesting to many people all over the world. What gets your interest, John?
What makes you take a case on board? I imagine, you know, I kind of have a reputation for being victim-centric, but that's not necessarily the case. I will cover a murderer or a serial killer. If there's a compelling reason to do that, I've spent an awful lot of time on the Montreal murderer, William Fife, and there's been a lot of podcasts on William Fife in Canada.
But that's because I felt that an element had been missed. There was a period earlier in his life before he murdered where he was known as the Plumber Rapist in downtown Montreal, very much like Albert De Selvo, going door to door pretending to be a handyman like the Boston Strangler. So there was an element that was missing that I thought, okay, I can contribute here. I'm not going to do, like, I'm not going to weigh in on the serial killer du jour.
I have nothing to say about Ted Bundy. I have nothing to offer about Charlie Manson or anything like that. Looking right now at 51-year-old case. And one of the reasons I chose it is that I find it really interesting when you're dealing with the frontiers of memory.
You're right on the brink. People are dying. People aren't around anymore. People no longer remember it.
Or if they remember it, their memory of it is distorted. And, you know, not to be trusted. And all of that, I find to be really rich terrain if it's not particularly fruitful if your desire is to solve a crime. But it is if you have a different outcome in mind, which is for me is to show, again, as I say, the linkage, the continual criminal investigative failure element in the province of Quebec with policing.
There's a serial killer in Canada known as Wayne Bowden, and he's sometimes referred to as, I think, a vampire killer. And he's been done to death in podcasts. He's an obvious choice to do. And although I've never done a podcast on Wayne Bowden, I keep referring to the Wayne Bowden case.
Because he was active in 69 and 70. And he's one of the last true door to door serial killers, meaning you're data woman, you follow her home, almost like Michael Powell, even Tom. You're data, you follow her home, you murder, you leave the apartment, you close the door. And so, and he was not responsible for Theresa Martin's murder, but it was occurring at the same time.
And then that era kind of ends, and then we transition into the automobile murderer. I mean, obviously there were cases where it happened before, but one of the reasons I was so interested in in the Yorkshire River case was because it was so clearly a penalty. So clearly a parallel between the person who I thought was, I believe, my sister, somebody who was trolling the land in an auto, picking up victims and disposing their bodies in different sites, which is a very different, you know, it's a very different profile from Wayne Bowden. So these things, if there's a compelling reason, as you say, to bring it up, there's no reason to be sort of Catholic about the terrain you cut, I guess.
Yeah, and historically, we're finding more and more about serial killers. There's lots of programs in the UK, psychologists, criminologists, analyzing cases and linking them more than we ever realized there were so many serial killers. And of course, the United States would be a huge place, a lot more population. There was no end of them, wasn't there?
And you've uncovered some of those that we've just discussed. And I think the programs on the television and documentaries have really highlighted the vast nature of the crime and the way they travel not only in the country, but outside as well. What's your favourite true crime book, documentary, series, anything? I think as far as true crime goes, we would watch anything that, again, peaks that interest, the fiction things tend to be, and this will make everybody smile.
Life on Mars, I don't know if you have life on Mars in the US, and the Sweeney and New Tricks, and I think all of those things, all of those series say something about our age than anything else. They are interesting, and I think they have a place, but they're the ones that we would watch, but in fairness, we don't watch a lot of television at all. I mean, for me, the true crime one for me is the Yorkshire Ripper. I was at the training school at Wakefield, which is a West Yorkshire, and he had to go to a detective training school before he went on the CID.
And it was early 80s when I was there, and the Yorkshire Ripper hadn't been caught. And the beauty of that type of training course, you did the theory, the law, all that sort of thing. But to sort of bring home the reality, you had lectures by senior officers who were involved in major crime. And of course, at that time, there was only one crime in West Yorkshire that was called the whole of the UK that people were talking about was the Yorkshire Ripper.
And of course, we got lectures from George O'Field, who led the inquiry and many others. And we've not talked to the Yorkshire Ripper, we as a podcast, because it likely says there's so much been done on certain areas that we couldn't really add a lot. We mentioned in one of our podcasts, in our first three episodes, the Wendy Sawl murder, because that's still too all intents and purposes, an undetected murder. The guy that was convicted and subsequently had his conviction quashed, he spent 27 years in prison.
So then you start thinking about Wendy Sawl. Well, if Stephen Damning didn't kill her, the guy who spent 27 years in prison, then who did? And then you start thinking along the lines of, is it somebody she knew? Is it somebody she arranged to meet?
Or is it a complete stranger? And then you kind of have to think about Peter Sutcliffe. And we do discuss that in the third episode, don't we? And I think that's the only time that probably we are going to touch on Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, because I suppose there's always a possibility that she may have been one of his unknown victims.
Because we know now that he travelled a lot more extensively than the police believed in the late 70s, early 80s. So he should be known as the UK Ripper. Yeah, it was a mistake to call him the Yorkshire Ripper, because that made him in one area, and there's no doubt he was active well outside Yorkshire. And it comes back to the time, late 70s, 80s, or the ones people going before we've mentioned is that how life in general has changed.
Like we're now speaking live across the world. And of course the villains used to travel, and of course they were very hard to keep up with. Things have changed dramatically now with technology, mobile phones, tracing, etc. And a lot of the crimes that happened then would have been very quickly caught today.
And sadly they didn't in a series then sort of evolves. And it goes on and on, like your case is over there where they kill one, move on to another, move on to another, move from one state or country to another. And the communications at that time didn't allow for all this information to be crossed across. Today we're in a different place.
It's interesting how history is developed. And just thinking about the crime series and the documentaries, what do you watch or listen to? Right now I'm watching The Terror, which is an AMC program about the Franklin, the Lost Franklin Expedition, which is one of a true crime mystery. I really like that.
But I think the one that I would point to that people probably don't know about, it's a Canadian document drama from 1981 called Just Another Missing Kid. It was produced by the CBC program, The Fifth Estate, and you can find it on YouTube and that's why I bring it up. It won the Academy Award for Documentary in 1982. And it's about this kid, Eric Wilson, who in 1978, July 1978, goes on and he gets in Volkswagen bus and drives from Ottawa, Canada, bound for Boulder, Colorado, on a voyage of discovery, and goes missing.
And the family cannot get any help from the authorities. You can imagine the cross-jurisdictional nightmare that unfolds, not unlike probably the case you're currently looking at in California, where the Americans say, well, he's Canadian, it's your problem, the Canadians are saying, well, this is missing in the United States, it's your problem. They're saying, well, we don't know where he went missing, this kind of thing. But it turned out that he was murdered by a drifter.
And it's just an absolute, it's a great document of the failure of the justice system at that time. Interesting, because it's seven, July 78, so you are in Yorkshire, Ripper territory. It's sort of set the table. It's months before my sister disappeared in November, 78.
So it's rich, fertile territory that has been forgotten. And in terms of documentary, true crime documentary, it's one of the first and it's often over the most. There's lots out there, isn't there? Certainly on the television at the moment, every time you switch it on, there's a crime drama or crime documentary.
Obviously, we only see the ones that are in the UK mainly, but it's a very, very popular subject. And I think that's why crime podcasting is so popular, it's caught up with the American interest in it, and now it's sort of finding its reason with the crime con event in London, hopefully, we'll meet lots of people and it'll become even more popular. We should say that. And thank you, John, for bringing it up.
The whole nexus for this is, which I think, by the way, is a brilliant idea, this podcast bringing two podcasters together. Someone should clone this. Our hope, our intention is to actually meet in September at CrimeCon in London. And I am looking forward to it.
CrimeCon UK is going to be a whole lot of fun. Yes, we can't wait, can we, Sally? No, we're really looking forward to it. It brings home the technology now as a young cop in 77 when I joined.
You said that this will be possible. We hadn't even got computers there. Mobile phones. People would have laughed if they said you'd be able to sit in a room in one country and talk to people all over the world.
And the police and all the security services now cooperate far more than we ever have because we can in real time. It's great for us as podcasters and authors and what we do. But in the real world of true crime investigation, it's brought a different period of it all, hasn't it? Yeah, but nothing beats as being able to go down to London and to walk in that big room and see John and say, hello?
You can't beat that. That's going to be a good day. Since you've bright up, John, the lightning fast advances in technology, do you think a podcast can solve a crime? When we first started looking at podcasts, I immediately said to Sally, I said, for cases that the police investigation has run its course, which they all do, like the one that said Michael Criches where I was involved, there comes a point when you've done all you can, and there's nothing more you can do.
And of course, it's all boxed up and kept. And then if any information comes in or cold case reviews like new tricks as a program, I'll tell you, which basically sort of in reality does happen like that. It sort of gathers dust with this technology now and the movement, I mean, take the COVID year away from it. Most people can live anywhere in the world, travel anywhere in the world.
And historically, they could be sat there listening to a podcast and think, God, I did know something about that and I should have said it or they fell out with somebody and now they're willing to come forward when they haven't before. And I know obviously a lot of the criminals return to go, that's the work I did. Mom had crime watching the UK, which similar is all over the world. They would watch it looking and trying to find clues that they could name somebody, be it for a reward or whatever.
And podcasts, because it's so accessible all over the world, I genuinely think that there is a place for it. The only problem we've got is that the UK justice system doesn't lend itself to being too open, like the USA system where Jorah speak to the press, the witnesses speak, the judge speaks, everybody speaks about what's gone off. Whereas here, obviously, until it's been tried before at Graham Court, if it's a serious matter, it's sub-judice, really, and obviously comments can't be made. And then afterwards, you can't get access to the Jorah, you can't get the legal system involved to a great extent.
So we've been very careful with the one we've produced to make sure that what we've put in the podcast is generally speaking in the public domain already. So we're not letting out anything that could be criticized later. But I genuinely think, and Sally will agree, that there is a place for it. Yeah, I mean, certainly, we've talked about this at great length, that there is a place for podcasts.
The only thing regarding UK matters, you have to be careful what you said, as John said, because if you say something that hasn't been in the public domain previously, you are in danger of prejudice in a trial in the future. And that is the last thing that you want to do. If you're doing a podcast to be able to help a particular case, the last thing you want to do is have the complete opposite effect. But yeah, we've talked long and hard about it, haven't we, about how we think that podcasts definitely have a place?
What are your thoughts on that, John, about podcasts and being used in that way? Well, yeah, I think there's the potential there to elevate to something that hasn't been daylighted, that it's always good to provoke and challenge police agencies to force them to be more transparent, that all of that is good. And that there is a place for it. I mean, I just noticed just within this week, I've gone to the French Canadian newspaper with the Theresa Martin case and said, look, I've taken this as far as I can.
I would like you to, as I say, daylighted in French, and I have that ability. I've gone to the Quebec police and said, can I talk to you about it, this case? And they've allowed, they've granted me an interview, which I normally under certain circumstances they wouldn't get if I didn't have the influence. And then a CPC reporter contacted me this week, who's working on a story on other cold cases and wanted my advice on it off the record.
She said, I'm not going to quote you in. I said, you can quote me or not. I don't care. I just want to help.
So I think these things, as I say, help to challenge, to provoke, to further conversation and that can't be bad. And the other thing is it also sends out the message to the criminal fraternity that we're not leaving these things alone. It's interesting that Peter Blacksley, who was an undercover cop in the UK, has written a book on one of his cases that he's still hunting the man called Kevin Powell. And when you listen to, he does a podcast and he was going to be coming to the crime conference.
I don't think I make it at the moment. But the interesting quote that I thought was really good that he made was, the world is now getting a smaller place. And that's true, because we can broadcast all over the world. And if you mention this guy's name, which he has, people who know him, perhaps you.
And if it's so inclined, ringing and saying he's actually in hiding in and out of Mongolia or wherever it may be, Peter Blacksley's quote, and it doesn't sound like the world is getting a smaller place for all the criminals, really. Thanks for listening to this special episode. I'll be at CrimeCon in London on September 25th and 26th. If you'd like to come, tickets are on sale now.
Go to crimecon.co.uk and use the ticket code WKT. We have 10% off.