From fingerprints left on a weapon to CCTV that appears to place a person at the location, there are plenty of clear-cut ways a killer can be identified.
However, according to a criminal lawyer with decades in the field, one far less obvious misstep can put suspicion on someone almost straight away — and it isn’t about forensic traces.
Julian Hayes, a criminal lawyer and High Court advocate who has handled more than 30 murder cases, says the quickest way a suspect’s account can fall apart is surprisingly simple: contradictions in what they say happened.
Speaking exclusively to VT.co, Hayes said: “Inconsistencies in their story about what they were doing at the time, whether it was an alibi, or whether it is, ‘I was there, but I wasn’t involved’. So there are a lot of inconsistencies in what they’re saying.”
He stressed that no two investigations are the same, but said mistakes around timings regularly stand out as early warning signs.
“Things like timings, things like people who they were with or not with,” he explained. “They might actually say, ‘Well, a certain television programme was on at that time, or a particular event was on’, and it might not actually have been on.”
On the surface, those kinds of details can seem trivial. But they’re exactly the sort of specifics detectives test, because once part of a timeline doesn’t match up, other elements of the narrative can quickly start to look unreliable too.
Hayes also highlighted another modern factor that can be difficult for suspects to explain away: mobile phone records, which can either support an account or directly contradict it.
“The other big giveaway is once you get the telephone evidence from the police,” he said.
“When they’ve had a look at the telephone evidence, and they discover that your client’s telephone was actually somewhere different from where your client says he was , so cell site evidence is one of the biggest giveaways.”
Cell site data looks at which phone masts a device connected to at particular moments, helping investigators map movements and compare them with what a person says they were doing.
As a result, this type of analysis has become a key feature of murder and serious assault investigations — and it can be especially persuasive when it conflicts with a suspect’s version of events.