Operation Misty: The Undercover Sting That Caught a Serial Killer
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In October 1997, the body of Samantha Class, a 29-year-old mother of three, was discovered partially submerged in the muddy foreshore of the River Humber near North Ferriby, England. DNA evidence pointed directly at suspect Gary Arthur Allen, but in a 2000 trial at Sheffield Crown Court, Allen walked free. Twenty-one years later, in 2018, Alena Grlakova, a 38-year-old mother of four from Slovakia, vanished from Rotherham. Her body was found months later in a nearby stream, strangled and discarded just like Samantha had been. What followed was one of the most elaborate undercover police operations in British history, a two-year deep-cover sting involving seven officers building a fake criminal world around one man. Gary Allen's own mouth finally did what twenty-four years of investigations couldn't. This is a story about what happens when the system sees a monster coming from miles away and still can't stop him in time, and about two women whose families never stopped waiting for answers.
#TrueCrime #GaryAllen #HumberMurders #SamanthaClass #AlenaGrlakova #OperationMisty #DoubleJeopardy
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gary Allen was eight years old when professionals started writing alarming things about him in official files. He was acquitted of murder at 26. He was convicted of two murders at 47. Everything in between is the story you're about to hear. There's a version of this story where Gary Arthur Allen gets stopped early. |
| 0:45.4 | When someone in a position of authority looks at the file, looks at the boy, |
| 0:49.2 | and makes a decision that changes what happens to two women decades later. |
| 0:53.7 | That version of the story does not exist. |
| 0:57.1 | This one does. Hull, England, 1981. Gary is eight years old, and the professionals around him |
| 1:04.1 | are already alarmed enough to put his name into an official file. He has been referred to |
| 1:10.2 | psychiatric evaluation, not because of a single bad incident |
| 1:14.1 | or a rough patch at home, but because of a consistent and documented pattern of extreme, |
| 1:20.9 | unprovoked aggression toward his younger siblings. |
| 1:23.9 | Again, Gary is eight years old. |
| 1:27.0 | It's the kind of behavior that worries people whose entire job is to stay calm around difficult children. |
| 1:33.3 | Social workers who worked with Gary used the phrase split personality, and they meant it like a clinical observation. |
| 1:40.3 | He could appear cooperative and completely well-behaved one moment, |
| 1:44.6 | and then become somebody else entirely unrecognizable the next. |
| 1:48.6 | Between 1982 and 83, he spent two terms at a residential home called Bainard House. |
| 1:54.9 | Even in a structured, supervised setting with trained staff, |
| 1:58.8 | the other, Gary kept showing up. By 14, the trajectory had |
| 2:03.7 | steepened considerably. He attacked his mother with a clothes prop while she was bedridden |
| 2:08.5 | and recovering from surgery unable to defend herself. And before you ask me, a clothes prop |
| 2:13.0 | is a piece of wood or metal that props up a clothesline to keep it from sagging. |
| 2:18.3 | I didn't already know that, I had to look it up. |
| 2:20.3 | That same year, he grabbed a schoolgirl by the throat on the street and struck her in the head, |
... |
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