What makes a killer contains graphic details of sexual assault and violence and is not intended for all audiences.

Listener discretion is strongly advised.

It's Saturday, July 1, 2000, and an eight-year-old schoolgirl is playing in a field outside of her grandparents' house at Little Hampton in West Sussex.

As she plays with her older siblings, she trips and scrapes her knee.

She runs back toward the house through some bushes and trees, and her older brother notices her from across the field and follows.

But when her brother exits the field, the young girl is nowhere to be found, not on the road, not in the house.

The little girl had vanished in a matter of seconds.

For the next two weeks, the public was captivated as police desperately searched for the missing girl.

Everybody wants to find that child, because a missing child is every parent's worst nightmare.

But she would never be found. She had been abducted and murdered by a stranger.

One local police officer already had a suspect in mind, a man known to the police who was a convicted pedophile.

This was a girl he didn't know who fell into the hands of what could only be described as a monster.

But with no evidence against him, police had no choice but to let the man remain free, knowing he could strike again at any time.

I mean, I had nightmares about it. I literally had nightmares. Over the first few weeks, what happens if he takes the third child?

This is what makes a killer, a series that chronicles the lives and crimes of the world's most notorious killers.

I'm your host, Jennifer Natoso. In every episode, we'll trace a killer's origins, examine their behavior, and follow their path to bloodshed.

In this episode, we'll discuss Roy Whiting.

Roy Whiting was born on January 26, 1959 in Horsham in West Sussex. He grew up in nearby Crawley.

Whiting's life did not start out as a happy one. Criminologist Dr. Elizabeth Yardley elaborates.

It was a family that was beset by quite a lot of tragedy, so there were six children and three of them died in infancy, so an awful lot of trauma to cope with quite early on in his life.

As he got older, life didn't get any easier. Whiting's parents, George and Pamela, got divorced when he was a teenager.

Whiting also struggled socially, says Elizabeth Yardley and Sky News anchor Jeremy Thompson.

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