Episode 28: Isabella Skelton

Episode 28: Isabella Skelton

On the morning of Friday the 6th of June 1969, thirty-five-year-old Isabella Skelton left her home on Lidiard Street in Crumpsall, Manchester, and was never seen again. Her husband told their children she had gone away for work. One of her sons was in hospital with a broken leg. Her daughter's fifteenth birthday was a fortnight away. Nobody reported her missing for fifty years. Isabella was a Glasgow-born typist - petite, dark-haired, known as Izzy - who had moved to Manchester in the early 1960s with her husband Lewis and their three children. What her daughter Lynda remembers of her is small but specific: a trip to C&A to buy a dress for the Whit Walks. A mother who looked after the family. A woman whose world, outside the home, was narrow. In 2019, Lynda walked into a police station and reported her mother missing. Greater Manchester Police launched an investigation and reclassified the case as murder. They excavated the family's former home for twelve weeks. They found nothing. One man was interviewed under caution. No charges were brought. In 2024, Isabella's husband Lewis Skelton - by then ninety-one - was jailed for four years for historic child cruelty offences committed in the 1970s and 1980s. He has never spoken publicly about his wife's disappearance. The murder investigation remains open. This episode tells the story of a woman known almost entirely through her absence - and of a daughter who has spent more than fifty years refusing to stop looking.

Episode 27: Mohanad Goobe

On the afternoon of Monday the 15th of September 2025, fifteen-year-old Mohanad Abdullaahi Goobe was stabbed to death on a street in Moss Side, Manchester. He had left Whitworth Park with two friends, believing a confrontation was over. It had only just begun. Mohanad was the youngest of three children - funny, loyal, loved. His death came at the end of an escalating conflict that began with an argument on TikTok, moved through a series of arranged fights in public parks, and ended with a planned ambush carried out by a group of more than twenty boys, some of them still in school uniform. Three teenagers were convicted following a trial at Bolton Crown Court in April 2026. Two were found guilty of murder. One was found guilty of manslaughter. All three were juveniles and could not be named. This episode tells the story of who Mohanad was, how the conflict developed, and what the evidence presented at trial and sentencing reveals about the forces of social media, wounded pride, the easy availability of knives - that converged on an ordinary Monday afternoon to take his life. It also carries the words of his mother, Amaley, who stood in court and asked the question that his death demands: why has it become normal for children to carry knives?

Episode 26: The Murders at Stepping Hill Hospital

In the summer of 2011, patients began dying on the acute medical wards of Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. A nurse noticed that several patients had blood sugar levels that made no clinical sense. When the saline supplies were tested, contamination was confirmed. What followed was one of the largest murder investigations in Greater Manchester Police's history. Victorino Chua was a Filipino-born nurse who had worked night shifts on wards A1 and A3 since 2009. He had, it emerged, a past he had kept carefully out of sight. He had written, twelve months before the first patient died, of being an angel who had turned into a devil. This is the story of Tracey Arden, Derek Weaver, and the other patients on those wards - of Rebecca Leighton, a young nurse arrested, charged, and imprisoned for crimes she did not commit - and of a three-and-a-half-year investigation that ended in a Manchester Crown Court jury deliberating for eleven days. Victorino Chua is currently serving a life sentence with a minimum term of thirty-five years.

Episode 25: Mohammed Isa

On the evening of 1 August 2025, nineteen-year-old Mohammed Isa Afzal was driven away from a car park in Bury, bleeding and saying his prayers. He died at the side of a road shortly before ten o'clock. What led him to that car park - a dispute, a decision to turn a car around, a baseball bat taken from a Jaguar - and what happened in the few seconds that followed, would be examined at Manchester Crown Court for weeks. Abbas Hussain was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to seven years. Two other defendants were acquitted entirely. This episode tells the story of Isa's death, the trial that followed, and the family left behind.

Episode 24: The Moors Murders - The Ones Left Behind

The Moors Murders - committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965 - are among the most documented crimes in British history. This episode is not about the crimes themselves. It is about the radius of destruction that spread outward from five murders and continued for more than sixty years: the families of Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans; the people caught in the wreckage around the killers; the communities that absorbed the weight of what happened; and a case that, in 2026, remains formally open. Keith Bennett has never been found.