Kent Murders (Sutton True Crime History)

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In 2017, Stone’s legal team – who admit in the documentary that at this stage they had reached a “dead end” – received a letter from a prisoner who said Levi Bellfield had confessed to the Russell murders. The Kent family lived in the peaceful village of Road in Wiltshire. Their home, known as Road House Hill, was an elegant setting for the family of nine and their three servants. Kent Police’s only contribution – other than historic clips and comments from former employees – is merely a submitted statement at the end of the programme insisting that Stone has been tried and found guilty on two occasions.

The 33-year-old from Latvia was meant to be flying to Egypt with her husband and children and police enquiries showed she arrived at the airport. The only physical evidence connecting Constance to the crime was a missing nightdress — that Whicher believed Constance was wearing when she killed the child. However, the programme features an interview with an anonymous former cellmate of Daley’s – apparently filmed in Folkestone – who claims Daley admitted lying in the Stone case. “He looked me in the eye,” says the former con, “and said it was all lies. You can’t get any clearer.”Ashley Dighton was last seen at Sainsbury's Bybrook in Simone Weil Avenue, Ashford on June 11, 2007. Stone says leading up his first trial, he was so fed up with people claiming he had admitted to the murders, that by the time he was moved to Canterbury Prison he’d asked to be put in an isolated cell. But ultimately, the programme drills down to a closer examination of the case against Stone. It is, clearly, far from convinced. Stone, himself, features heavily – heard in telephone conversations with his long-time barrister, Mark McDonald, with whom he speaks “every day”. And it is the long-held anxiety over the strength of evidence which convicted him which has prompted the latest TV documentary on the case.

Still, amateur sleuths following the case were convinced a woman had committed the crime. As Harper’s Weekly explained, “It was generally agreed that a girl or woman must have been concerned in the affair, because after the blanket in which the child’s body was wrapped … [it] had been folded down with a neatness and care that a man was unlikely to exhibit.” Her dog was found on its own in Minnis Bay by officers on Wednesday. Her car, a silver Suzuki, was found parked in the village of Saint Nicholas-at-Wade, where she is believed to have walked from.Hulton Archive/Getty Images Detectives initially did not suspect Constance Kent of killing her brother — attention focused on the nanny and the boy’s father.

But despite repeated efforts to overturn his conviction, it is only in the last few years any real opportunity for any case to be presented to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has emerged.When I came out of the appeals court the media were there,” says Stone, “and they shouted out ‘Michael’. I shouted out, right at the top of my voice ‘I’m an innocent man’ to reach the media. And if you look at my face [in still photographs] it looks like I’m going psychopathic or something – but I’m actually shouting ‘I’m an innocent man’.