Modern tech might sometimes feel like the bane of our lives but the latest everyday gadgets are also helping cops to catch killers.
New Quest Red and Discovery+ show Deadliest Families, starting on Saturday (March 16), will reveal how an Alexa helped to snare a man who murdered his wife.
Here James Moore reveals how the device was crucial in bringing him to justice – and the other gizmos that have been pivotal in cracking some of the most notorious murder cases…
READ MORE: Hospital security caught out by own bodycams after hitting patient 46 times on head
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ALEXA
On October 22, 2022, police found Angie White dead at her home in Swansea, Wales – the 45-year-old had been strangled and her throat slit with a Stanley knife.
Her 36-year-old husband Daniel White – out on license from prison at the time – had bashed down a locked bedroom door to kill Angie after an argument on WhatsApp.
He then fled the scene. Stored voice commands from them on the home’s Amazon Alexa would prove vital in helping police piece together a timeline of the murder and establishing a 13-minute window in which he carried out the brutal crime.
White was later jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 20 years and 10 months after pleading guilty to murder.
DOORBELL
Smart doorbells are all the rage and now they’re helping police solve heinous homicides. The heinous murder of Sarah Everard in March 2021 by Met police constable Wayne Couzens shocked the nation.
It emerged that he had kidnapped her while she was walking through South London by using his police warrant card and handcuffs to lure her into her car during lockdown.
Vital to establishing the 33-year-old’s last movements and her fake arrest by the killer cop were bus CCTV, as well as images from a doorbell camera on one of the streets she passed.
Couzens would rape and strangle Sarah, then burn her body. He later pleaded guilty to her murder and, in September 2021, was sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.
APPLE WATCH
Detectives investigating the murder of police community support officer Julia James in Kent in April 2021 had little CCTV to go on.
She’d been out walking with her dog in the countryside when bludgeoned over the head and left with fatal head injuries.
But using her Apple Watch police were able to identify the moment when her heart rate soared as she tried to escape her attacker and plot the route she’d taken that day.
This – and a photo taken by a local gamekeeper of a man in the area – helped identify and convict 22-year-old Callum Wheeler of murder. He was later sentenced to 37 years behind bars.
FITBIT
In December 2015 Connie Dabate was found dead with gunshot wounds in the basement of her home in Connecticut in the US.
Her husband, Richard Dabate, found tied to a chair, said that she’d been shot by a masked intruder. But she was wearing a Fitbit at the time and police later found that the electronic activity tracker contradicted his version of events.
It revealed that she had been moving around an hour later than the time he said she’d been killed. The cops arrested him in 2017 and the evidence later helped them convict the 46-year-old of his wife’s killing.
His mistress was pregnant at the time. Dabate was sentenced to 65 years behind bars.
DASH-CAM
Tragic mum-of-two Kerry Woolley, 38 was stabbed 54 times by her partner Ian Bennett at her flat in Solihull, West Midlands, in 2020 after he falsely accused her of sleeping with another woman.
His mum Lynda then helped him plot to conceal the crime, driving him to a canal bridge to dispose of knives used in the murder.
But Bennett was caught when police discovered that dash-cam footage from her car had caught him in the act. In 2021 the 38-year-old was found guilty of murder at Birmingham Crown Court, while his mother was sentenced to three years for assisting an offender and perverting the course of justice.
IPHONE
Sick pharmacist Mitesh Patel planned to kill his wife Jessica, cash in a £2million insurance policy on her life and flee to Australia to live with a gay lover.
In 2018 he suffocated the 34-year-old with a Tesco bag then strangled her at the couple’s home in Middlesbrough. Then Patel attempted to make it look like she had been killed during a break-in. But data from a health app on his iPhone and hers, would prove it was sham.
His showed frantic activity as he ran around pretending their home had been ransacked. Hers showed she had last moved when he left the house to create a fake alibi and that it remained motionless outside the property during the time he said she was still alive. That December the 37-year-old was sentenced to life and ordered to spend 30 years in prison.
*Deadliest Families’ airs on Quest Red on Saturdays at 9pm. Also available to stream on discovery+.
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