This episode contains distressing themes, profanity and descriptions of violence.

This podcast is intended for a mature audience. Listener caution is advised.

Are you kidding?

That was Robert Rhodes' response when police officers arrived at his cottage in Devon on the morning of July 4th, 2024.

He shouldn't have been surprised.

He knew what he'd done, but he convinced himself that he'd been cunning enough to get away

with it.

But what shocked Rhodes was that someone had finally told the truth, and that someone was the

person he'd cruelly manipulated into keeping his secret for nearly a decade. There was a great deal of concern 20 years ago.

People were getting away with murder.

So the law was changed.

You can be tried twice if the Court of Appeal is persuaded

that there is new and compelling evidence.

It really is very unusual for a witness to come forward

and say, what I said at the original trial was wrong, this is the truth.

Welcome to Season 11, Episode 9 of They Walk Among Us, a podcast dedicated to UK true crime.

To understand why Robert Rhodes was taken aback that morning, we need to look back on an evening in Surrey eight years earlier.

It was shortly after 7.30pm on Thursday, June 2nd, 2016, when officers from Surrey police pulled up outside a semi-detached house on Windbourne Avenue

in South Ellswood, Red Hill. They'd been dispatched to the usually quiet housing estate just

off Hawley Road after a 999 call came in reporting an attack. An officer stepped out of his patrol car under the pulsating blue lights of his vehicle.

His eyes firmly fixed on the person waving frantically from a front window.

PC Simon Richmond entered the property, heading towards the open-planned kitchen and dining area at the back of the home.

...