The Profiler with Kerry Daynes

Oxford, April 1991. English student Rachel McLean vanishes from the house she shares with friends, mid-way through a weekend of exam revision. Her tutor calls 999. Her boyfriend — a British-born New Zealander named John Tanner — tells detectives he last saw her at Oxford station chatting to a mystery stranger. He gives a detailed description. He fronts a televised appeal. He plays the grieving boy...

In November 2015, schoolgirl Kayleigh Haywood told her parents she was going to stay at a friend’s house. She wasn’t. For the previous two weeks the fifteen-year-old had been groomed online by Luke Harlow, a man twelve years her senior. He had bombarded her with over a thousand Facebook messages persuading her to come to his flat in Ibstock, Leicestershire. After she finally agreed, he plied her w...

Three months after Helen Bailey vanished, a search team lowered themselves into a hidden cesspit beneath her luxury home. What they found there ended a twelve-week missing-person search — and led to Ian Stewart being exposed  as a calculating, money-driven killer who had drugged his fiancée with his own sleeping tablets, dumped her body, and then spun a defence about phantom blackmailers...

In April 2016, the bestselling children's author Helen Bailey vanished from her £1.4 million home. Her fiancé Ian Stewart called the police, then wrote an open letter begging her to return. But, behind the public grief, he was hiding a terrible secret. Forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes traces how 51-year-old Helen fell for a quiet, unassuming father of two she met on a Facebook bereavement group...

On Easter Sunday 2023, retired couple Stephen and Carol Baxter were found dead in the conservatory of their home on Mersea Island, off the Essex coast. Initially their deaths were - until toxicology revealed both had been poisoned with the powerful opioid fentanyl. Suspicion fell on Luke D’Wit, the unassuming IT consultant who had spent a decade quietly embedding himself in the Baxters’ lives as f...

By the summer of 1997, eight-year-old Jamie Lavis had been missing for nearly a month — and the Manchester bus driver who killed him, Darren Vickers, had vanished too. Tracked down to a North Wales fairground, where he was strapping children in and out of rides, Vickers was arrested, then released for lack of evidence, and welcomed back to the Lavis family home with a celebration party. In Part 2,...

In June 1997, eight-year-old Jamie Lavis vanished on his way home in Manchester. As his family launched a desperate search, a local bus driver — Darren Vickers — led appeals, comforted Jamie's mother, and walked the same streets where, days earlier, he had killed the boy. Forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes profiles a manipulative predator who weaponises trust and proximity to deflect suspicion: a...

Behind every murder is a motive. From revenge to jealousy, from greed to control, identifying what drives people to kill is essential in bringing them to justice. For thirty years, Consultant Forensic Psychologist Kerry Daynes has unravelled the minds behind the darkest crimes. Now, in The Profiler, she takes you inside some of Britain’s most disturbing murder cases, presenting the full stories wi...