麻豆社

At 9.27am on a Monday morning, a call handler at West Mercia Police receives one of the most chilling calls of her career. A man named Chris Hemming calmly reports that he has just stabbed his ex-partner Cheryl McKenna to death at their shared home in Redditch. Officers arrive within minutes, arrest Hemming at the door and find 44-year-old Cheryl dead upstairs. Her 18-year-old daughter, who was also in the house, is unharmed.

DCI Gareth Lougher leads Operation Trool with a team of 30 detectives. The killing itself is not in dispute; Hemming confessed on the call. However, detectives must establish exactly what happened, and why, as this could be critical to the charge he faces and the length of sentence he ultimately receives.

Hemming gives no comment at his interview and refuses to hand over the PIN to his phone. But the evidence builds against him. Cheryl's daughter describes a household where tensions had been rising for two years, with arguments over money, the breakdown of the relationship and Hemming's jealousy over Cheryl's new partner. She recalls Hemming saying he felt like killing Cheryl.

Body-worn camera footage from a domestic incident four months earlier shows Hemming already aware the relationship had ended and fixated on Cheryl's friendship with another man. When forensic specialist software gains access to his phone, detectives uncover a note written just six hours before the murder. In it, Hemming describes his rage and writes that losing Cheryl would have been easier if she had simply died.

The discovery of what might be a tracking device raises further questions about whether he has been monitoring Cheryl鈥檚 movements in the weeks before he killed her.