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New Scotland Yard, synonymous with excellence in crime solving, recognised as a world leader in murder investigation. Every year, New Scotland Yard's experienced detectives unravel the twisted truth from the tragedies that unfold across the bustling capital city of London. Uncovering evidence that nails the guilty beyond all reasonable doubt takes time, dedication and a forensic attention to detail. This is New Scotland Yard Files.
A teenage girl disappears. A vicious predator slips through the net. In the biggest search since the 7-7 bombings, New Scotland Yard uncover the terrifying truth. On the 28th of August 2014, at one o'clock in the afternoon, Alice Gross left her family home. She used to like to go for power walks by the water and told her parents she'd be back by 6pm. But Alice never returned home. At 7pm, her worried parents reported her missing and a police search soon began.
The senior detective assigned to the case was New Scotland Yard's Carl Metter. It was my first day back at work after three weeks holiday and I was the on-call detective superintendent. From the beginning I feared the worst. About 100,000 children every year go missing. Most come home very, very quickly. The inquiries that have been conducted by the local police hadn't identified where Alice was. Outside her school here in Hanwell and across much of West London, there are posters urging Alice Gross to come home or just simply to get in touch.
Missing children are a policeman's worst nightmare. You have to get answers. Alice was last sighted on CCTV along the Grand Union Canal at 4.26pm on the 28th of August at Trumpers Way. She texted her dad to say she was coming home and never arrived. I had four hypotheses. She's simply gone missing. She's been abducted and held somewhere. She had committed suicide. Or indeed, someone had caused her harm. The fact that she had been missing for so many days, she was a potentially vulnerable young girl, 14 years of age, I started to get concerned.
Because experience tells me the longer that a person, particularly young and vulnerable people, are missing, the more likely it is that they are going to be coming to some harm. So it was vitally important to act as quickly as possible. Alice's disappearance was completely out of character. There was nothing out of the ordinary in terms of Alice and her life. I mean, she was a perfectly normal girl. She had a good social circle of friends. Her life principally revolved around her school, her friendship groups and her family.
She was very close to her family. She had an older sister who doted upon her, as did both her father and mother. Her not being here, it's like there's a great big hole in the family and we really miss her and we really love her and we're worried about whatever it is that she might be feeling and we just want her to be safe and we just want her to come home. It's hard because I miss her and I just really hope that she knows that we really, love her and we really need her back.
She's just, she's a lover. Sorry. That very first interview with the family, I remember how brave they were. I mean, inside you can imagine they were absolutely falling apart. They were desperately worried about Alice, but at the same time knew they needed to get this appeal going. They painted Ealing completely with yellow ribbons and Alice's poster. Everyone wanted to get involved. If you saw a yellow ribbon at that time, you knew what it meant. It meant, find Alice, bring Alice home.
I decided to take a big step to escalate this into a major inquiry from a local inquiry. The Homicide and Major Crime Command would take over responsibility for that investigation. The different lines of inquiry that needed to take place required a response on a massive scale. Police procedure at this point is to sweep. everything meticulously this wasn't one line of inquiry that everyone focuses in these are a multitude of lines of investigation because you cannot exclude you cannot go down one line to the exclusion of others because you're going to miss a trick 600 officers dogs and divers
swooped across ealing to scour track and search nine square miles of woodland and nearly three and a half square miles of waterways police really were pushing everything into finding alice it was an incredible search they were searching the canals they were searching the woods there were fingertip searches there were dogs the helicopters were involved this was the biggest search since the 7-7 bombings they were leaving nothing to chance searching like this takes a lot of time and a lot of money You must leave no stone unturned. We know from what her parents told us that she regularly went down to the River Brent. So the starting point for any searches was that area. And that is a very heavily wooded area with the river.
And the river itself there is very silted. As soon as you start moving in it, the silt is being disturbed and visibility is almost non-existent. The searches that were being undertaken by the dive teams. were largely by touch. Finding evidence in muddy water is hard. You can't see more than a centimetre in front of your face. A week in, neither the woods nor the water searches were bearing fruit.
The family made another plea for information. We miss you, we love you, we're desperate to know that you're safe and we really want you to come home. And if anyone else knows anything about your whereabouts, please can they get in touch with the police? Alice was a missing person, but there were reasons that weren't in the public domain why she may have gone missing. The police were aware that Alice had problems with depression and with anorexia. There was a concern from the family itself that she was suffering. A level of depression, which they were seeking help for.
Suicide was a real possibility. When the Yard's detectives and search teams were presented with such a large search area, including over three and a half square miles of waterways, there was the very real fear that Alice could have jumped in. When it comes to drowning yourself, it can be quite easy depending on some different factors. If we're talking about somebody who. chooses to drown themselves by jumping into some water, for example, the depth of the water will make it easier to drown, and the temperature of the water, because it can cause the body to go into shock. They stiffen up, and that makes conscious movement really difficult.
This was a girl who seemed to have vanished without trace. In this part of the river, with its cold flowing water, There was a chance that Alice had drowned from either a jump, a fall or a push. It was two whole days on the ground before the homicide team uncovered their first lead. Along the footpath by the River Brent, we found Alice's rucksack. That was really a big moment. The bag provided us. with a focus for the search. The rucksack that Alice had been carrying when she went missing a week ago, found just along.
.side this footpath. It gives them some certainty at least that she was here or somewhere near here when she went missing. A week after the disappearance of Alice Gross, the biggest search undertaken by New Scotland Yard since the 7-7 bombings is underway. A 600-strong crime squad swarms across Ealing to try and find Alice. The only trace of her is a rucksack. Found on the banks of the River Brent.
We knew that it was Alice's bag because her parents had told us. And also found her trainers, as well as some of her personal possessions. That's a breakthrough that's filled with emotion for the family. You can imagine it fills you full of hope. You think that will lead to Alice. But at the same time it fills you with dread. Because you know this is a bag she went nowhere without. What was very disappointing was that we didn't find Alice's mobile phone and that was absolutely key for us to try and find.
Alice's phone had given the investigation one thing. She texted her dad on the day of her disappearance to say that she was on her way home. Cell site analysis put her by this stretch of water. So the detective in charge, Carl Metter, issued the order. To search the River Brent once again. Only this time, they weren't looking for Alice's body. They were going to search for three miles to try and find her phone. At this point, the story that underlies Alice's disappearance is still unknown.
We don't know if we're dealing with a suicide. We don't know if we're dealing with her simply going missing with friends. It could be an abduction or it could be a murder. The family were absolutely beside themselves with worry, but also the public were on tenterhooks. This is a story that was on the front pages every single day. But Alice's community did not give up hope of her return, and as the days passed with no body, suicide seemed less likely. So once a body goes into the water, it will sink.
Straight after death, the body will start to decompose. That provides a large amount of bacteria, which causes gas to be formed within the body. This then inflates the body, so the body, after about five days, will tend to box of water. Ten days into the investigation, the police had drawn a blank. If Alice had fallen in or been pushed. or had harmed herself, then surely by now the police would have found something.
For the general public and for Alice's family, no body meant there was hope that Alice was still alive. When a vulnerable young girl goes missing in central London in broad daylight, the police feel. an incredible sense of responsibility. Ten days in, having made so little progress despite intensive efforts, the police would be starting to feel incredibly frustrated and incredibly desperate. The family had played their role. They'd gone through that agonising interview and appeal to find Alice. The public had played their role.
They'd helped to put up posters. They'd gone looking for clues for the bag, for the phone. What the detective's role in all this was, was to find Alice and ten days afterwards she hadn't been found and the public started to lose faith and I think the media then plays its role by asking the questions why haven't you done what you are supposed to do? Big pressure on us was from the media. In policing we say is that you get your first ten days for free from the media and then thereafter There's criticism. To get answers for the family, that was absolutely key.
As well as pressure from the media, detectives know that if Alice has been murdered and her body was in the water, as each day passes, evidence gets harder to find. There's two things that can possibly happen here. One is certain forensic evidence may be lost. The sheer action of the water crossing the body will wash away certain. forensic evidence, including DNA material. And secondly, evidence may be added from the water onto the body. The longer the body is in the water, potentially, The more detrimental effect it will have on the forensic science and make that job of finding significant evidence that much harder.
A week and a half after Alice disappears, police make an arrest. New Scotland Yard had a tip-off from the public. Someone close to where Alice was found had equipment in his car that could have handled a body. They found a shovel. Some rope and some sacks in the back of his vehicle. Were they implements for burying a body or concealing a body? The spade would potentially be of interest, particularly if it's got soil on it. The provenance of that soil could be established to decide if or not she is buried somewhere.
The rope may be of interest in that it could possibly even be used to tie Alice Gross up, keep her prisoner somewhere. The sacks will. They're possibly of interest. They may have held items of Alice Gross' clothing or whatever. It's just the combination of the three that would cause a bit of interest, at least cause some examinations to be performed. The suspect would not cooperate with New Scotland Yard. He wouldn't confirm what the tools in his car were for. He was very evasive, and officers' suspicions and respect of his Potential involvement in Alice's
disappearance grew to the extent that he was arrested. The investigation took a new twist over the weekend with the arrest on suspicion of murder, but the police are still stressing at the moment this remains a missing persons inquiry. If something terrible has been done, the one thing everyone wants to know is that justice will be served. And this arrest gave everyone that feeling that, OK, we are moving forward with this investigation. And someone is going to be held to account. But no action was to be taken against the suspect police had in custody. It was time to go back to the drawing board. As part of this investigation, there were a huge number of people we were looking at as potential suspects for Alice's disappearance.
Within a stone's throw of where Alice's bag was found. There's Ealing Hospital and they had a sex offenders unit within that as well as a mental health unit. When you're looking at a 14-year-old girl, you have to consider as motivation for this is a sex offence. The stereotypical view that these kinds of predators only seek their targets in the middle of the night is not accurate. A sexual predator is always on the lookout for potential victims. There is something about Alice as a victim, her vulnerability, her fragility, youth.
She is the potential prey of a sexual predator. Two weeks into the investigation, Carl goes back over old ground. In a case like this, you have to be prepared to revisit early intelligence, see if new evidence throws any light on it. That old ground was the missing person list for the local area, and the team discovered someone had gone missing a few days after Alice, a 41-year-old man. Arnis Selkins was reported missing to the police by his partner on the 4th of September 2014. He had gone to work that morning but had not returned home.
A young 14-year-old girl goes missing. There's a large-scale police investigation and suddenly this 41-year-old goes missing. Arnest Alcans disappeared a week after Alice was reported missing. Police were now able to picture match him to canal side footage. He was on the towpath the same day that Alice was last seen. We identified CCTV of Alice Gross walking across a bridge at Brentford Lock. And 15 minutes behind her, traveling in the same direction, we identified Arnis
Salkins on a pedal cycle returning home from work. That was a significant moment, given he was on his bicycle, she was walking. The chances are that they were going to encounter each other. So the police now have another missing persons case which may or may not be connected. What is suspicious from a police perspective is that Zalkans goes missing after 600 officers have been pounding the beat searching for any trace of Alice.
It appears that. He may have encountered her that day and that is what the senior detective is thinking about. His gut is telling him there must be a connection. The camera which captured that CCTV footage is here at Brentford Log. It would only have taken a few minutes before the builder caught up with the schoolgirl further down this towpath. The police now had a missing teenage girl and a missing man with no obvious connection, other than they were both on the towpath that day, and he was likely to have passed her on his bike.
Detectives had nothing more to go on until Arnis Zalkans was identified on different CCTV footage from the same day. He was leaving the towpath, but police noticed something odd about the time he'd taken to cycle from when he was caught on camera at Brentford Lock. He was seen to emerge onto the Uxbridge Road from that footpath by the River Brent approximately 45 minutes later than we would have expected him to have emerged. That was very suspicious. Different CCTV in a shop showed Zalkans with rolled-up trousers. Was this for cycling, or could there be a more sinister reason, like avoiding water or mud? At 9.30pm that night, Zalkans was on CCTV again, joining the towpath from the Uxbridge Road.
When he re-emerges about an hour later, he is wearing different clothing to when he went in. He returned the following morning on his way to work. He is seen on CCTV to enter again the footpath and spent some time there. Senior Detective Karl Metter sent a massive forensics team to search Zalkan's home in Ealing. He was now a person of very great interest.
A very detailed and thorough. searches commenced at his home address. That included digging up his garden. They were searching for a connection between him and Alice in the form of DNA or potentially her belongings. Police now appealed for information about Arnis Zalkans, a Latvian national who had been living in Iling for the past seven years. So on the 16th. of September, I named Arnis Zelkens as a person of interest that we were seeking and looking for. And I did a witness appeal seeking information about his whereabouts. There's nothing to suggest that either Alice or Arnis knew each other, but it is clear that the route taken by Arnis,
or the regular route taken by Arnis to and from work, May have brought him into either contact or passing, and he may therefore have vital information. Meanwhile, the family and the community reached out again. On the 25th of September, the family made an emotional plea. An actress walked the same route that Alice would have taken the day she disappeared. If you were on the Canal Toe Pass during that time. And you saw Alice, whether you were walking, on a bike, perhaps on a barge. Police come forward and speak to the police now.
The message is more urgent the longer Alice has been missing, the more worried and concerned that we feel. Today is four weeks since Alice's disappearance. Today we are doing a. reconstruction in order to jog people's memories, visually jog people's memories about what Alice looked like and how she was walking in that particular day. We're looking forward to being back as a family again and doing all the usual things that families do. Alice is a very, she's a very lively, funny girl, she's quirky, you have all the little family jokes and family routines.
and we're really looking forward to having those again. Every day without her causes us new heartache, new anguish. I empathise with their suffering. When they were putting on the face of, we're coping, underneath they were totally crushed. Such a hole in the family, and every day I pass their door, bedroom door. I expect her to be in there and she's not there so, you know, Alice you really need to come home and Whoever you're with She needs to be home. This is the place that she needs to be. She needs to be looked after And that's the right place for her
when we started To look into Arnis Zalkins through Interpol about his history in Latvia, we establish that he had been convicted of murdering his wife in Latvia. So Alice had been followed on the towpath that day by a convicted killer. This was a massive shock, not just to the family, but even the investigating officers were stunned. Here was a man. He had a very violent past. He had a murder conviction. He'd been allowed into the UK unchecked. How on earth did this happen without anyone knowing he was here? And how in heaven's name was he allowed to slip through the net?
With Zalkan's nowhere to be found and no opportunity to question him, the police went to Latvia, to where he may have fled. We expanded the search for him both in the UK as well as across Europe, including his home country of Latvia. He'd been reported missing on the 4th of September. He hadn't been seen since then. Had he fled the country? Was he still hiding somewhere in the UK? We simply didn't know what had happened to him. But New Scotland Yard wanted to hear what this man had to say.
Why did he leave Ealing? And what were the circumstances surrounding the murder of his wife? He did this in quite a brutal fashion. He lured her to some woods near their home, bludgeoned her over the head, stabbed her, and then put her body, concealed her body in a shallow grave, which he had earlier dug. So this was clearly a premeditated murder. How can a human being do something like that to another person, she says. He was her first man, her first love, everything was the first.
My understanding of criminal law in Latvia is that the minimum sentence for murder is five years and the maximum sentence is 15 years, which is incredibly short. In this country, it is a mandatory life sentence for murder. He was sentenced with such short time for a planned murder. Everything was prepared already, she says. The prosecutor demanded 12 years. He was sentenced to eight, but he spent only six years in jail. Is that justice? It's not.
Zalkans was not a remorseful man. At the time, he showed police where he'd buried his wife and he told them that he'd drunk vodka while he did it. When you look at the way in which he murdered his wife, the digging of the grave in advance is an eerie detail there. It's a detail that really distinguishes that offence from most other spousal murders. The events in Latvia unleashed an uncontrolled predator, disdainful, aggressive, brutal. .component of his personality. This is an absolutely pivotal turning point in Arnus' story because from that point on, this hidden part of his identity can no longer be denied.
A troubling aspect of this case was the lack of an obvious motive. Even if Zalkans had become a monster, why Alice? Physical resemblance between the two was a possibility. Zalkans ex-wife and Alice were both similar in appearance. For senior detective Carl Metter, Zalkans was now the prime suspect because of his violent past and suspicious activity at the time of Alice's disappearance. I believe that Arnis Zalkans was making efforts to conceal Alice's body. Scotland Yard were now five weeks into the search for Alice.
Divers had been doing slow, detailed searches for a mobile phone. And then they found something strange. The officers came across a pile of logs. Buried within the silt of the river was a bicycle wheel attached to black bin liners. When that was recovered, we found Alice's body. The details of how Alice was concealed couldn't be any worse. She was wrapped in a bin bag. That was attached to the wheel of a bicycle. Then that was weighed down with bricks, embedded into the side of the river, and logs used to keep it in place.
I mean, everything possible had been done. to conceal that body. The police have confirmed the body they found is that of 14-year-old Alice Gross. A murder hunt has been launched. A family and the community that supported them have been left devastated. The cause of death in this case was asphyxiation, but we would call this mechanical asphyxiation. So asphyxia really occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen.
Mechanical asphyxiation is anything that restricts the chest and stops a person being able to breathe. A boa constrictor, for example, kills by mechanical asphyxiation. The pathologist has said it is the effect of the heavy weight of some person laying Alice's body. Bear in mind she was 40 kilograms for just over six stone in weight. She was a slight individual. Alice resembles physically Arnis' wife. What we see when this kind of switch is thrown in the head of an attacker's narrative is that they start to see all women as potential victims, but they start to see them in a very
objectified way. Zalkans was the prime suspect, but police did not have enough evidence to convict him, and they couldn't even find him. This is now a murder investigation and I need the public's help to find out whoever is responsible. I would urge anyone who may know something to come forward. Even if you have not yet spoken out, it is not too late to tell us what you know. Alice Gross had been found bound and buried at the bottom of the River Brent.
The police were now on a manhunt for a cold-blooded killer. who'd wrapped her in bin bags, weighed her down with a bicycle wheel and covered her body in logs so that she sank into the silt. The prime suspect, Arnis Zalkans. But he was nowhere to be found after being reported missing a month prior to the discovery of Alice's body. It's clear that the cause of death was suffocation from. a heavy object on top of Alice. Now, it's possible that her death occurred during the sexual attack because Arnis was completely oblivious to her.
His focus was on the sexual attack and not on directly murdering her. But no matter how compelling, the investigation needed proof. Would a cunning killer like Zalkans make the kind of mistakes that would secure a conviction. To assume that we're dealing with a super intelligent, psychopathic mentality here is not entirely accurate. We're dealing with somebody who was supremely arrogant, who was supremely egocentric, who was used to succeeding in life.
He knows how to bury things. He's a builder. He knows how to handle women. He knows how to win at life in general. He doesn't have to worry about CCTV. This is a man with an arrogance that the ordinary person, I don't think, could even begin to understand. The police had to hope and pray that if Zalkans had murdered Alice, he left a trail behind. Forensic evidence had been discovered on Alice's shoes and on a cigarette butt near the crime scene. Tests revealed it carried Zalkans' DNA.
DNA on the victim's shoes. From the suspect means that it's likely he would have touched those shoes. There are other reasons. It could have been saliva or other body fluids, but it's likely to be touching of the shoes. Now, this may have been where he took the shoes off the body before or after death. But this DNA evidence on its own was not enough to secure a conviction. Arnis Salkins was the prime suspect. We know that he was following Alice along that towpath and we know that he returned to the same spot at the canal.
The pieces of the.were finally starting to come together. The investigation needed more. It needed a direct, unquestionable link between Alice and Arnis Zalkans that suggested a fatal attack took place and then a breakthrough from forensics. Underneath the patio area in his back garden, the cover. for Alice's mobile phone was discovered. So that provided a direct link, and there's only one explanation for how her mobile phone cover ended up in Arnest Selkin's address, and that is he took it from her at the time he attacked her. It's all about bringing this man to justice.
Alice is dead. He's still missing. This is the only thing that you can give the family. As the community struggled to come to terms with Alice's death, the hunt continued for Zalkans. Some five weeks after Alice went missing, New Scotland Yard found him. He was dead. During the course of the wider searches in Boston Manor Park, about four days after Alice's body was found, searches found in some wooded area. Arnest Zalkins. It would appear that he didn't want to be found even dead because the location was a very secluded area with thick shrubs and bushes where his body was found hanging from a tree.
The discovery of Zalkins' body meant that the police, the community, and Alice's devastated family were all denied that most important thing. Justice. When the Crown Prosecution decides to charge someone for a murder like this, they have two tests. First, is it in the public interest to prosecute? And second, is there enough evidence to prosecute? In this case, it was obviously in the interest of the public to go for the murder conviction, but you can't prosecute somebody who isn't here.
You can't prosecute a dead man. At the inquest, it was established that Arnis Zalkans had committed suicide. There's a sense in which we see Arnis thinking of himself in some way or another as the victim of this whole scenario as well. The suicide is a classic indication of somebody who sees themself as partly the victim of what's happened, of an unfolding set of events. And the suicide is the clearest indicator of all. That is how Arnis saw what happened. There were a number of pieces of evidence, both circumstantial and direct evidence linking Arnis Elkins to Alice's murder.
We had that evidence analysed by the CPS to establish whether, given the evidence, would they have authorised a charge of murder. They already had evidence of association between him and the deceased. You'd have the CCTV, you'd have the forensic evidence, together with evidence of his previous convictions, and that cumulatively would have presented an overwhelming case. Had Arnis Zalkins been alive, he would have been charged with murder. We'll never know why Zalkins murdered Alice Gross. But having committed one murder, that of his wife, he'd already broken the normal human barriers.
I think we're dealing with somebody who became increasingly egocentric, non-empathetic, absorbed in his own unfolding storyline. From the moment that Arnis killed his wife, he was a lethally dangerous man. The horrific tragedy of Alice was one that was waiting to happen. And had Arnis not committed suicide, this narrative would have simply escalated further and we would have seen more victims, I'm certain of that. The wicked crime that was the murder of Alice Gross should never have happened. A free man seven years after killing his wife, Zalkan started a new life in Ealing, West London. On his way to work.
He had a chance encounter with Alice. There, by the River Brent, he assaulted and suffocated her. And over the next 30 hours, returned to the scene to bury her in the silt. With the homicide squad on a highly publicised hunt for Zalkans, he realised there was no way out. So he did the cowardly thing and hung himself. Murder detectives had been looking for a man who was already dead. I think one of the tragedies of this particular case. is that Alice's family never saw justice being delivered. They never saw the man responsible for Alice's murder face justice, appear in court, answer for his crime, and find out why.
They will never know that because he robbed them of that justice. And that's. Uh, tragic. If anything has come out of this that is positive, it is that procedures for reviewing the background checks of people coming in and out of this country have now been reviewed and have been improved, which is certainly something in the right direction and a positive step. Alice's family found the courage to voice their grief publicly. It's difficult. It's an enormous void. It's something that can't be repaired.
I can't see how it can never be healed, really. I don't think that you ever really recover from a bereavement like this, but perhaps you learn to manage the feelings of loss in slightly different ways. They have this void. Which they probably still have to this day, where it will never ever be filled. And they've got to live with that appalling detail of how Alice was killed. You become more used to feeling so rubbish and so lost, but I still think about Alice every day. On the 23rd of October, three weeks after her body had been discovered, Alice Gross was finally laid to rest.
It had been a harrowing crime for everyone, but for her family, it'll be a tragedy that they will never forget. Thank you.
