Totalcrime

This is the second part of my interview with Thomas Herdman, the Canadian businessman who has been waiting for more than five years to go on trial in France accused of setting up Sky ECC to help organised criminals do their deals in secret. He tells me the real reason why the FBI wanted to close down Sky ECC and tells me why France's legal establishment has cast him as the digital bogeyman an...

In this episode I have an exclusive interview with Thomas Herdman, who is awaiting trial in France four years after he was arrested and accused of being behind an international criminal enterprise at the encrypted app Sky ECC. Herdman tells me he is innocent and is the victim of France's war against privacy. During the French Revolution, Cardinal Richelieu said: "If you give me six lines...

Last week Jamie Varley was given a whole life sentence for the murder of Preston Davey, a 13-month-old boy he was in the process of adopting with his boyfriend John McGowan-Fazakerley. I covered the trial, which heard shocking evidence that the little boy was sexually abused for weeks or months prior to his death. In this episode I tell you the full story, including the moving words of Preston&apo...

This is an exclusive interview with Zac Law, from Yorkshire, who tells me how he discovered one day that one of his American friends on the app Discord, Travis Dyer (pictured), had killed himself and then later found out that three other people he knew on the app - including "Jimmy" - had played an active part in encouraging Travis to shoot himself and had even watched it on a videocall....

I have been following the machinations of the Turkish and Kurdish underworld in London for almost a quarter of a century and this seems like the perfect time to tell the story. The reason I am doing this episode now is because of the conviction (on Friday 5 June) of Beytullah Gunduz, one of the leaders of the Hackney Turks - one of two violent feuding gangs in London. The other being the Tottenham...

Nicola Tallant, top Irish crime journalist and author of Groomed: Coercion, Control and a Cold-blooded Murder, joins me to discuss the horrific murder of Katie Simpson, a 21-year-old showjumper in Northern Ireland who fell into the clutches of Jonathan Cresswell, a horse trainer (pictured) who was also her brother-in-law. This is the government review she mentions in the episode: https://www.justi...

Polly Rippon, a former court reporter with the Sheffield Star who now teaches journalism at Sheffield University, joins me to discuss the art of court reporting and why it is so important. We talk about why trials are covered differently than they were in the past, why it can be dangerous for untrained people to cover cases, and some of the social issues which have only been unearthed by court rep...

In this episode I am joined by Loukas Ntanos, a criminologist from Birmingham City University and an expert on murderabilia - which is the collection of items related to homicide cases. Yes, believe it or not, there are people out there who collect and trade in ghastly souvenirs of serial killers such as Frederick Deeming (pictured) and infamous crimes. It's a fascinating subject which Loukas...

In Episode 13 of the Totalcrime podcast my special guest is Adam Lloyd, the host of the UK True Crime podcast, which has been going for almost 10 years. We talk mainly about the murder of Robert "Fox" Powell in June 2020 and the amazing criminal career of Nana Oppong (pictured), a drug dealer who beat three separate murder raps before finally being convicted of killing Fox. I was in cour...

Daniel Kinahan - the alleged head of the Kinahan drugs cartel - was arrested in Dubai on 17 April. But why has it taken nearly a decade to arrest a man who had been hiding in plain sight in Dubai for a decade and had put his head above the parapet in 2020 to facilitate a world title fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua? In this episode I go into detail about Kinahan's activities - star...

I speak to Sir Ivan Lawrence KC, who as a barrister in the 1960s and 70s specialised in proving that police officers were liars. He represented numerous gangsters, including the Kray brothers – twins Ronnie and Reggie, and also their less famous sibling Charlie. Among his other clients were “Mad” Frankie Fraser, Joey Pyle, serial killer Dennis Nilsen, and Babes in the Wood murderer Russell Bishop...

Michael O'Brien spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit. His case, the Cardiff Newsagent Three, was one of several with a "common thread" - a vulnerable person being cajoled into a confession upon which South Wales Police built a flawed case. In this special episode I interview him at length about the case and about how he coped in prison and upon his release. He...

In today's episode I have an exclusive interview with John Burke-Monerville who has the unwanted distinction of being the father of three sons who were all murdered - in 1994, 2013 and 2019 - in London. But as if John's story was not tragic and shocking enough, it has emerged in recent years that he and his family were spied on for years by undercover officers. 

In today's episode I visit the Metropolitan Police Museum, where they have artefacts from 150 years of crime. I interview Dr Clare Smith, the museum's curator, about the collection and focus on "The Brides in the Bath" case in 1915, which involved a bigamous serial killer who managed to turn bathtubs into murder weapons. The interview took place in the same room as an exhibitio...

Tommy Silverstein - one of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang in the United States - killed three men behind bars in the space of two years, one of whom was a prison guard. The federal Bureau of Prisons reacted by locking him up in solitary for decades. 20 years ago I wrote to Silverstein in a supermax prison. Find out what happened next in this episode, in which I tell the full stor...

In today's episode I interview Lee Marvin Hitchman, who was born in a prison and taken into care as a baby. He explains the terrible reputation of his birth father Eric Rogers - which includes supposedly taking part in the killing of PC Keith Blakelock in the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985 - and recounts how his dad had bragged about forcing women into taking drugs and going on the game. We go...

In January 2002 Jacqueline Nyeko, 24, went missing, leaving behind a young daughter, Lexi. Three days later her body was found - with horrific injuries - in a bin store on an estate in Kennington, south London. All these years later the case is still unsolved. I recently interviewed Jacqueline's uncle, Samuel Olara, about her and why he believes her murder can still be solved. This is his fir...

This is the first episode of my podcast Totalcrime. In May 2006 Nisha Patel-Nasri, a hairdresser and part-time special constable in the Metropolitan Police, was stabbed to death outside her home in London. It initially appeared as if she had been killed while disturbing a burglar or car thief. But the real motive for her killing would only emerge later and it would involve a cheating husband and a...

When Thomas Campbell was tortured and stabbed to death at his home in Manchester in July 2022 his ex-wife, and mother of his children, Coleen, posted on Facebook that he had been: "The best dad anyone could wish for." But her grief was fake and in this episode I will explain how Coleen had secretly helped Thomas's killers, one of whom later fled to South America, and how the police...

Fifty years ago a couple in their 50s were sitting in their council flat, not far from London's West End, watching an episode of Kojak when four armed IRA desperadoes burst in. It would turn into a six-day siege - which was broadcast on the nation's television screens - one of the most dramatic events of The Troubles. In this episode I explain who the Balcombe Street gang was and what ro...

Lola Doll is a sexy and popular singer and influencer in Guyana, so why was she shot in September 2025? Today's episode is all about drugs, corruption and politics in Guyana, a former British colony on the Caribbean coast of South America. Spoiler alert - Lola Doll survived the shooting and at the end of the episode she points the finger at the man she believes was behind it.  

I am Chris Summers, a veteran crime reporter who has covered some of the biggest trials in recent British criminal history. I have been writing a Substack blog for two years and now I am launching a podcast. This is a trailer for my Totalcrime podcast which I am launching in March 2026.