‘How I caught a serial killer – and lost

my career in the police’

When DS Steve Fulcher arrested Christopher
Halliwell over the disappearance of 22-year-old Sian
O’Callaghan, it was the start of his own downfall. He
tells Tim Lewis why he’d do it again
Tim Lewis • Sun 25 Jun 2017 08.00 BST

‘I did these things because they were the right things to do. In fact, they were the only things to
doʼ: Steve Fulcher. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Whenever Steve Fulcher is asked to explain his actions during four

excruciatingly tense hours on Thursday 24 March 2011 – which he often is by
former police colleagues, official enquiries and now journalists – he always
turns the question round. “If you were in my position, what would you do?” he
asks. It’s a decent point. Same situation, what would you do?

Sian O’Callaghan, a popular 22-year-old from Swindon, had been reported

missing the previous Saturday, five days earlier. She went out for the night and
never came home. Fulcher, then a senior investigating officer for Wiltshire
police, was put in charge. It would soon involve five force areas and 1,000
police officers, not to mention many hundreds of friends and locals who
scoured the Savernake Forest, close to the last mast her mobile phone had
pinged.

Ultimately, suspicion fell on a 47-year-old taxi driver called Christopher

Halliwell, who had picked up Sian during the early hours of Saturday morning,
outside a pub. But there was no body and only circumstantial evidence to
connect him to her disappearance. After all, couldn’t he have just picked up
and dropped her off as he did with paying fares dozens of times every day?

Fulcher didn’t think so and when Halliwell was seen under surveillance buying
an overdose-quantity of pills on the morning of 24 March, he ordered his
arrest. Halliwell was formally charged in an Asda car park with the kidnap of
Sian, and declined to make any comment. So far, so police procedural. But
here’s where Fulcher tossed away the script. Instead of bringing Halliwell back
to Gablecross police station in Swindon, Fulcher told his officers to take him to
Barbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort on the Ridgeway route.

There were two reasons for this unconventional order. If Sian was alive, Fulcher
believed that immediate further questioning was the best – indeed only – way
to protect her life. This, he felt, was the directive of Article 2 of the Human
Rights Act: the victim’s life came first. And there was a second, more nebulous
justification. Fulcher had never met Halliwell and he wanted to look him in the
eye. After 28 years in the force, he still believed there was a place in
investigations for the policeman’s “gut”.

Life lost: Sian OʼCallaghan, 22, was murdered by Christopher Halliwell in 2011. Photograph:
Wiltshire Police/PA

What happened next sounds like it was lifted from a TV drama. “It was
probably the most intense four hours I’ve ever experienced,” recalls Fulcher,
“or I am ever likely to experience.” Under clear blue skies, Halliwell and Fulcher
smoked cigarettes, and slowly some kind of connection formed between the
detective and the accused. Repeatedly, Halliwell refused to be drawn, but
Fulcher chipped away, telling him that if he didn’t co-operate, he would be
vilified. The press could be relentless, he warned; just look at the innocent
Christopher Jefferies, who had become a front-page punchbag after the Joanna
Yeates murder a couple of months before.

Fulcher admits he was only seconds from giving up, but suddenly Halliwell
cracked and offered to take him to where he’d dumped Sian’s body. This led
them to the prehistoric White Horse in Uffington, further up the Ridgeway in
Oxfordshire. Here, as the pair sat in the sunshine, almost on the tail of the
chalk horse, Halliwell exhaled smoke and said flatly: “Do you want another
one?”

In many ways, it was virtuoso policing. Fulcher had elicited a confession from a
cold-blooded murderer who had evaded police scrutiny for decades – a serial
killer who studied forensics so he would be better able to cover his tracks. It
was work that would see Fulcher nominated for the Queen’s police medal.

But, even as Halliwell was leading Fulcher to where he had dumped the body of
Sian O’Callaghan and then to a field where in 2003 he had buried Becky
Godden, a 20-year-old sex worker, the policeman knew there was trouble
ahead. “Our bond had the flavour now of mutual assured destruction,” writes
Fulcher in his new book, Catching a Serial Killer. “We’d both put ourselves into a
position where we were sacrificing our lives.”

What Fulcher already knew was that his informal chat with Halliwell was
breaching Code C of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace), which was
instituted in the early 1980s in the aftermath of the Brixton riots. Code C
specifically protects the rights of an individual against the police with regard to
questioning and detention.

Becky Godden, 20, was killed by Christopher Halliwell in 2003 but her body lay undiscovered
for eight years. Photograph: Wiltshire Police/PA

Although Halliwell had already been cautioned twice, Fulcher should have
done it again. He should also have reiterated the fact that Halliwell had the
right to speak to a solicitor. So why didn’t he? “Because I’m holding him on a
knife edge,” says Fulcher now. “He never said: ‘Right I’m going to tell you
exactly where she is and what I’ve done, etc.’ That isn’t how it worked. All he
said was: ‘Have you got a car? We’ll go.’

“It’s a simple moral issue,” he continues. “I did these things because they were
the right things to do in these circumstances. In fact, they were the only things
to do.”

It would prove to be a costly decision for Fulcher. In 2014, the Independent

Police Complaints Commission described his actions as “catastrophic” and he
was found guilty of gross misconduct. In court, Halliwell’s barrister, Richard
Latham QC, argued that Fulcher had “gone back to the 70s” style of policing.
Halliwell claimed that the police officer had threatened his family, so his
confession was elicited under duress. The evidence Fulcher obtained about
Becky Godden’s disappearance was ruled inadmissible in court.

Although not technically fired, the stress led Fulcher to take leave from work
and he began taking antidepressants and sleeping pills. He received strong
backing from the families of Sian O’Callaghan and Becky Godden – the latter’s
mother, Karen Edwards, launched a petition to have Pace changed to offer
greater protection for police officers, such as Fulcher. But in 2014, Fulcher
resigned from the service. He has since been, in his words, “unemployable in
the UK”.

So it’s a fair question: what would you do if you were in Fulcher’s shoes that
day? “But for my intervention, Christopher Halliwell would be walking the
streets now,” says Fulcher. “And whatever the public thinks about it – and I’m
as liberal as the next person – there’s a very good chance he’d have killed other
women in the meantime.”

Hunting the killer: police search the area where Sian OʼCallaghanʼs body was found.
Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Fulcher was a lifer in the police force. He joined aged 21 and ascended smoothly
through the ranks: constable to sergeant to inspector and then, in 2007, to
detective superintendent, the highest rank for a boots-on-the-ground police
officer. When we meet for a hot dog and beer in London, I ask Fulcher if he had
ever been professionally reprimanded before the Halliwell episode. “No,” he
replies, “all I’ve ever been is commended. I’ve more commendations than you
can shake a large stick at.”

This bears out: Fulcher had received three crown court recommendations and
one chief constable’s commendation; there had been no previous findings of
misconduct. When a trio of chief constables met to decide his fate, they
acknowledged: “His record to date has been unblemished.”

Still, there is something raffish about Fulcher, who is now 50, that doesn’t
entirely fit with the picture of the by-the-book copper. He used to drive to
work in a gunmetal grey Alfa Romeo Spider with a flashy red leather interior.
Some police officers would head to the gym when their shift finished; Fulcher
preferred to watch rugby with a couple of pints. “I’ve been described as a
maverick,” he sighs, “which I reject, actually.”

How so? “There are two tracks in policing,” says Fulcher. “There’s the track
that takes you through to chief constable level and to do that you need to
avoid being a detective for any length of time, certainly avoid cases like this.
Theresa May, who was a disaster as a home secretary, absolutely loathed the
police, but particularly chief constables. There’s a good reason for that,
because they are self-serving and hopeless – generally speaking.”

Hell, it appears, hath no fury like a police officer scorned. Much of this ire has
to do with the limbo he was left in while the IPCC decided his fate. “It had a
devastating effect on my family, as I was in a dark place for a long time,” he
admits. “It’s been a horrendous experience, and I really feel for people like Paul
Gambaccini [the BBC radio presenter wrongly arrested during Operation
Yewtree, the investigation into historic sex offences]. And actually I think that
I’d be a far better police officer now understanding the pain, because when we
arrest people we might have them on bail for a period of time and they go
through sheer hell.”

Mug shot: Christopher Halliwell had evaded police scrutiny for decades. Photograph: Wiltshire
Police/PA

Fulcher is currently employed by a private company in Mogadishu, Somalia, as

a consultant, subcontracted to deliver aid from Foreign Office and DFID
programmes outside the green zone. It’s precarious work, but Fulcher was not
exactly inundated with job offers. He says, “I had people phoning me to offer
me a job and when they do due diligence, which only consists of Googling me
at the end of the day, not unreasonably they say: ‘Look, I’m sorry, but we’re not
going to take this on. Why would we?’”

In 2016, a judge, Sir John Griffith Williams, decided that the evidence collected
by Fulcher about Becky Godden could and should be heard in court. As a result,
Halliwell was found guilty by a jury and his sentence increased to life
imprisonment, meaning that he will never be released.

Writing Catching a Serial Killer has been cathartic and also allows Fulcher to set
out his thought processes methodically and furthermore to clear his name.
With its microscopic analysis of a single crime, the book has the gripping allure
of long-form podcasts, such as Serial.

Beyond his personal circumstances, though, Fulcher is furious about what he

sees as regrettable and avoidable problems with British policing. Perhaps his
biggest complaint is the failure to investigate further crimes that Halliwell may
have committed. Police discovered in excess of 60 items of women’s clothing
buried in woodland near Marlborough, including Sian’s brown New Look boots
and Becky’s cardigan.

“If I’m right, he had a propensity for killing on average once a year,” says
Fulcher. “If I’m right, well I take comfort from the fact that he hasn’t been able
to do that since 2011. So he definitely killed Sian in March 2011, he definitely
killed Becky early 2003. You’re seriously telling me there’s nothing in between
or either side? It doesn’t even sound true. Why would this not be the biggest,
most protracted, most vigorous investigation in the history of British
policing?” he exclaims. “It isn’t and it hasn’t been. Can you have a police force
that simply ignores a serial killer?”

Night out: Sian OʼCallaghan, 22, with her boyfriend Kevin Reape. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

Fulcher would also like to see amendments made to Pace that take into
account exceptional positions that investigators sometimes find themselves
in. “What I do accept is that you cannot have a situation in which every police
officer feels that he can breach Pace and point to me and say: ‘Well, Steve
Fulcher did it.’ But these are very explicit circumstances, recorded in detail at
the time and presented fully, transparently and accurately by me to a court,
laying myself open to what did happen to me, which is dismissal.”

Although he is adamant he is not bitter, Fulcher does struggle to keep his

emotions in check. And he has a warning. “At some point somebody is going to
have to explain to the public what they can expect from the police service
when their daughter goes missing,” he says. “And in general, right now, we will
not get your daughter back.”

Fulcher wearily shakes his head, “We won’t get your daughter back.”

Catching a Serial Killer by Stephen Fulcher is published by Ebury at £7.99. To

order a copy for £6.79, go tobookshop.theguardian.com