i remember the senior investigating officer from the metropolitan police new scotland yard he got hold of me and he said we reckon there's probably about 30 victims i went now i said 500 victims i said that's probably what it's more like [Music] i think when i initially joined the police service i probably did what a lot of young people wanted to do was drive fast cars on blue lights and then i quickly realized actually that that whilst that was fun for a short period of time it wasn't really where i wanted to be i wanted
to become a detective and i wanted to investigate major crime and that is where i went in two years i was in the divisional control room answering the phones assigning units and that gives you a great opportunity because what it teaches you is about managing uh developing cases stories as they happen incidents and then quickly after that i moved into a vulnerable unit which was looking after the most vulnerable in society in our area which was young children and then moved into uh child protection and then on to cid why did you why did you
leave the place i got to a point where i'd done everything i wanted to do i dealt with a very serious crimes child abuse horrific offenses against children murders i worked across the family ladies and officers for many many murders and it took its toll i think i'd got to a position where i either stayed in the police service for the rest of my life my career or i took a challenge and did something else and i moved on from being a police officer to being an investigator which is what i do now what's the
difference between being a police officer and being an investigator working in a private capacity well the massive difference between being a police officer and being an investigator is i can't arrest people but as a police officer of course you have certain powers i don't have any powers now my biggest power i have now is the power of persuasion in my mouth and being able to communicate with people and in fact a lot of the cases i do now i have to get to a point where i get enough evidence i give it back to the
police and then say look please investigate please take this on to another level but there is an advantage of being an investigator is that some people do not like talking to the police and therefore sometimes people will tell me things that they wouldn't tell the police all these horrible things have taken their toll with what you said why then did you decide to keep investigating in your private life you know i'm passionate about what i do i wake up every morning driven in the job that i do to go and try and get people answers
try and solve cases but i'm clever about how i do it as well you know i use little tricks that perhaps i couldn't get away with in the police service there are things that i do that would be not criminal but certainly wouldn't be ethical i'm always on the right side of the law but very close to it we'll often put listening devices into people's houses and listen to them to to in order to hear what's going on that might be may might even make a phone call to them sometimes we'll we'll put a listing
device into a house we'll then put a call into the house uh generate some kind of discussion so it may well be that we phone up saying i want to talk to such and such in relation to a murder that will obviously generate a conversation once we put the phone down within the house and then we can listen to what's being discussed we'll often use couriers so we'll send couriers to houses and couriers will then enable us to get a forwarding address because people are often not suspicious you know amazon parcel turns up to mr
jones at a certain address and the person opens the door and says oh he's not here anymore he lives at such and such brilliant the other things we do is sometimes put trackers in parcels so it may well be that we send a parcel to an address but we know that that person's not going to tell them where they are now but they will go and see that person particularly if they're on the run or want it so that tracker then goes in the car with them and then we can see where they take that
parcel to the individual and then we've got them that way we do a lot of surveillance on people so we'll watch them we'll film them we'll we'll follow them on foot following people on foot is always very interesting i always say to people if we're doing surveillance and it's perhaps it's somebody that hasn't done much surveillance before just be normal they are not suspicious of you it's amazing what people do what was the probably the biggest case yeah so i'm traveling back from leon and i speak to my producer i was over there filming and
he said have you ever heard anything about jimmy savile as being a predatory pedophile and i went no i said he's weird i said he's really weird but i've never heard that he said well he was investigated by the police so i said okay well i'll have a look at it and see jimmy savile in his time was probably the most well-known famous individual as far as television goes in the country at the time of his height there was only two broadcasters there was itv and bbc and he was massive he was untouchable and so
the fear that existed around him still remained even though he died he had a legacy about him and so they were incredibly nervous particularly nervous about trying to do something about someone who dead he wasn't able to defend himself and i totally understand that anyway i established that he was investigated by the police by surrey police which was actually my force but it was after i left otherwise i'd known about it but it was after i left anyway it gets to a position where bbc newsnight decided that they were going to make a program and
that's who i've been filming with because i used to do reports for them and they then decided that they weren't going to do it and quite simply because they decided that the police had carried out their investigation correctly there wasn't any criticism to be applied to them that they knew of and therefore there wasn't a story in it and i immediately thought what are you on about of course the story is not that whether the police did the investigation or how they did it but the jimmy savile is a paedophile that's the story so i
said can i run with it so i went to uh itv and i said look i've got this story and and of course their response was yeah how on earth are you going to tell that and um and i said listen it needs to be told and and at this point he just died and and i said listen let's i there's something here there is definitely something here and and the exec producer at the time said what's him up why don't you give it a run have a look at it and i very quickly started
to realize that actually there's a lot of people out there who'd been talking about him online so i started to speak to these people track these people down and they tell me information and one of the things about being an investigator is that talk to everybody and when you talk to them say is there anybody else i need to talk to and then follow up on them and then before you know it you've started with three or four people and you've now suddenly got 14 or 15 people go to them ask them and and that's
what we did we started to track down all these people talk to them and slowly we started to build up a picture that he had sexually abused quite a number of children and obviously they were now adults we went back to itv and said this and itv again incredibly nervous and i totally understand why but as the evidence started to build up and it got stronger and stronger and stronger we said listen this has to be we have to we have to get this out there we have to let the public decide what did it
feel like to be investigating something like that this this jimmy savile yeah hung out with the prime minister yeah yeah and you're finding out these things and you're going i know that this man's a pedophile and he's still held up as this thing yeah i think whilst i started investigating in the early days my mum phoned me up and she said mark do you really think you should be doing this there was a big story on the bbc bbc leads covered it and talked about me doing this program and there was a phone in and
i listened to the phone in and people were being really horrible about me how did they dare i say something about this man he's died he can't defend himself i remember i'm saying mark do you really want to take this on and i've had an incendiary device sent to me somebody sent me an incendiary device which was sent to myself at itv in birmingham which is where all the post goes and i remember getting a phone call one day saying mark there's an incendiary device that's been sent to you i think remember things were right
okay what does that mean and they got the police out there they got the fire brigade and they'd worked out that it it was capable of causing some quite significant damage we never know who we don't know who sent that we don't know where they'd come from but anybody that knows me knows that i just you give me something that's that's difficult to do you tell me i can't do something and i'll do it and i'll do it and i get a result and i remember being so determined to do it even when it was
difficult we had real challenge to get it commissioned itv were amazing but it was really difficult and i remember staying saying to my producer on the tube we can't let this go we have to get this out there i remember at one stage i was thinking do you know what if i can't get the broadcaster to go with it can we finance it can we get a rich person to finance it so we can get it out there it really was we we put our our lives into it and i i remember saying to her
and to a number of other people is if we get this right then it will make it make a massive change in difference but if we get it wrong and people don't believe us we'll never work in telly again we'll we'll just be ostracized from everything that we do and on the day of broadcast it was a defining moment and it was a defining moment that's been related to by many um commentators since is that it changed really the outlook of television of current affairs and it was probably the biggest change title change changes occurred
by revealing that this man who was untouchable was quite clearly a predatory pedophile and and the accolades that we received the following morning from the press was was phenomenal it then resulted in a huge police investigation i remember the senior investigating officer from the metropolitan police new scotland yard he got hold of me and he said we reckon there's probably about 30 victims oh and no i said 500 victims i said that's probably what it's more like i don't think i've been investigating savile now for a year and he went gosh he said well okay
he said i i i can't challenge that mark he said you've obviously been working on it let's see fast forward 12 months over 500 victims came forward and it sat on the front pages the national front pages for 41 consecutive days it led to the director general of the bbc resigning it led to my program and myself being mentioned in the house of commons in relation to the impact of the programme and it subsequently changed the way the police the prosecution service children's services work in the uk it gave a voice to so many people
and it not didn't just lead to maine you know significant other personality celebrities being arrested and prosecuted the likes of rolf harris max clifford but it also resulted in a tidal wave effect up and down the country and indeed around the world there were people who came forward and talked about it and led to the local builder teacher scout master up and down the country being arrested and i firmly believe that it had a massive impact moving forward in generating a view of confidence in victims to talk that ultimately finally brought down weinstein and epstein
you must be immensely proud yeah i am you know people say to me you know what you did was incredible and my response to that is i just did what i do i don't think i did anything special i just worked hard to get it the people that created the title effect for savile which which has knocked on round the world are those five brave women who allowed me to tell their story and if it wasn't for them i wouldn't be here now telling you about savile and i genuinely believe that savile would never have
been exposed [Music] every time they arrest you they have to question you they have to say something like you you are not under arrest for this um you do not have to say anything but if you fail to say something that you later rely on court then this may harm your defense because i was charged with 80 different crimes because they basically made like each hack a different crime they were supposed to arrest me 80 times but they could they only finished arresting me about 40 times because they could only keep me in custody for
24 hours
