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He Texted 'Bored' After She Was Dead: The Joanna Yeates Night · True Nightmare Stories

0:03
Speaker 1: She was found on Christmas morning a country lane in Thailand,
0:07
Speaker 1: three miles from her front door, partially undressed, partially covered
0:11
Speaker 1: in snow, and the man who put her there had
0:14
Speaker 1: spent the previous night buying crisps and rock salt at
0:17
Speaker 1: a supermarket while her body was in the boot of
0:20
Speaker 1: his car. There is something in this case that I
0:22
Speaker 1: kept returning to long after I thought I understood it.
0:26
Speaker 1: Not the violence, not the verdict, the texts, the once
0:30
Speaker 1: he sent her that same night telling her he was bored.
0:33
Speaker 1: Joanna Yates was twenty five years old. She was a
0:36
Speaker 1: landscape architect from Hampshire, and in October two thousand ten
0:39
Speaker 1: she moved into a flat Unkenning Road in Clifton, Bristol.
0:43
Speaker 1: Not alone. Her boyfriend Greg twenty seven, moved with her.
0:46
Speaker 1: They worked at the same firm. It was the first
0:49
Speaker 1: time they had lived together. Clifton is one of those
0:52
Speaker 1: places that earns its reputation George and Terrace's a suspension
0:56
Speaker 1: bridge visible from the end of the road, the kind
0:59
Speaker 1: of neighborhood where a young professional couple might feel they
1:02
Speaker 1: had arrived somewhere good. The flat itself sat in a
1:05
Speaker 1: divided Victorian house Stone steps, a heavy shared door, the
1:09
Speaker 1: smell of old timber on cold evenings. Joanna had only
1:12
Speaker 1: been there two months. The landlord was Christopher Jeffreys, retired
1:16
Speaker 1: English teacher, eccentric in the way that retired English teachers
1:20
Speaker 1: sometimes are particular about his books, particular about his privacy.
1:24
Speaker 1: He lived in the building too, and he had another
1:27
Speaker 1: tenant in the flat above Joanna's, a Dutch engineer named
1:30
Speaker 1: Vincent Tabac thirty two, who had moved in the previous June.
1:35
Speaker 1: Tabac held a doctorate. He worked at Bureau Appleed in Bath.
1:39
Speaker 1: He had a long term girl friend. By every observable measure,
1:43
Speaker 1: he was unremarkable. That detail matters, not because unremarkability is
1:47
Speaker 1: evidence of anything, but because what happened inside that building
1:51
Speaker 1: on the evening of the seventeenth of December two thousand
1:54
Speaker 1: ten happened in plain sight of everything. Ordinary. Gregg had
1:58
Speaker 1: left that morning for Sheffield a family visit. Joanna stayed behind.
2:03
Speaker 1: The plan was a quiet night, pizza, cider, a night in.
2:07
Speaker 1: At around eight in the evening, she walked to a
2:09
Speaker 1: nearby supermarket, browsed, bought nothing, then two shops, pizza from one,
2:16
Speaker 1: cider from another. At twenty minutes to nine. She was
2:19
Speaker 1: back at Canage Road at twenty past eight. She had
2:22
Speaker 1: been just another young woman doing her Friday shopping in
2:24
Speaker 1: the rain. At around ten minutes to nine, a couple
2:27
Speaker 1: near by heard a woman's scream twice. There is no
2:31
Speaker 1: gentle way to lay down what follows. What the evidence
2:34
Speaker 1: would later establish through DNA, through phone records, through the
2:38
Speaker 1: contents of a hard drive is that Tabac came to
2:41
Speaker 1: Joanna's flat that night, that he made advances that she refused.
2:46
Speaker 1: That within minutes of those two screams, she was dead
2:49
Speaker 1: forty three injuries to the head and neck manual strangulation.
2:54
Speaker 1: The pizza she bought that night was never found. Its
2:57
Speaker 1: receipt was in the flat, The pizza itself was gone.
3:00
Speaker 1: Where it went has never been explained, and nobody has
3:03
Speaker 1: ever answered that question satisfactorily. What happened next is where
3:07
Speaker 1: this story becomes something harder to put down. Within minutes
3:11
Speaker 1: of Joanna's death, ta Back sent his girl friend a
3:14
Speaker 1: text message, then another one. Just after half past ten,
3:18
Speaker 1: He told her he was bored. At that point, Joanna's
3:21
Speaker 1: body was already in the boot of his Renaut. Again,
3:23
Speaker 1: he drove her three miles out to a country lane
3:26
Speaker 1: in Thailand, beside a stone wall near a quarry, and
3:29
Speaker 1: left her there, covered in leaves and snow. Then he
3:32
Speaker 1: stopped at and asked a supermarket. The CCTV recorded him
3:36
Speaker 1: at the check out. He bought Crisps, beer and rock salt.
3:40
Speaker 1: He returned home after one thirty in the morning. He
3:43
Speaker 1: drove out again to collect his girlfriend from her work party.
3:46
Speaker 1: Gregg came back two days later. Joanna's keys were on
3:49
Speaker 1: the table, her purse, her phone, two ciders, still and drunk.
3:54
Speaker 1: He called for her. He waited. At four fifteen in
3:57
Speaker 1: the morning. On the nineteenth of December, he called nine
4:00
Speaker 1: nine nine. Police knocked on Tavik's door that same morning.
4:04
Speaker 1: He said he had not seen her. On Christmas Day,
4:07
Speaker 1: two dog walkers found Joanna's body at around nine in
4:10
Speaker 1: the morning. She lay beside the stone wall in Thailand Lane,
4:13
Speaker 1: partially undressed, the snow thin over her shoulders. She'd been
4:17
Speaker 1: there for eight days. The investigation that followed would arrest
4:21
Speaker 1: the wrong man, missed the right one twice and only
4:24
Speaker 1: close when forensic evidence made denial impossible. But the detail
4:28
Speaker 1: that never quite leaves the one that landed differently every
4:32
Speaker 1: time the case returned to public attention. Is that text
4:35
Speaker 1: message sent after she was already dead. The word he
4:38
Speaker 1: chose was bored. Greg returned to Bristol on the nineteenth
4:41
Speaker 1: of December. He'd been in Sheffield for two days. He
4:44
Speaker 1: came home expecting dinner, expecting Joanna. What he found instead
4:49
Speaker 1: were keys on the hook, her purse on the side,
4:52
Speaker 1: her phone sitting silent on the counter, two siders still sealed, untouched.
4:57
Speaker 1: No pizza, no packaging, No Joanna. He called her phone,
5:02
Speaker 1: he called friends, he called her parents. Then, at four
5:06
Speaker 1: fifteen in the morning on the twentieth, he called nine
5:09
Speaker 1: nine nine. Police arrived within the hour. They knocked on
5:12
Speaker 1: doors along Cannage Road. One of those doors belonged to Vincent.
5:16
Speaker 1: To bac he answered calmly. He said he hadn't seen her.
5:20
Speaker 1: He said he didn't know anything. The officers noted nothing unusual.
5:24
Speaker 1: They moved on. That was the first time the rational
5:27
Speaker 1: explanation stopped working, though no one knew it yet, the
5:30
Speaker 1: investigation treated this as a missing person case. Joanna was
5:34
Speaker 1: twenty five, new to the city, first time living away
5:37
Speaker 1: from family. The working theory she'd gone out, something had
5:42
Speaker 1: happened she'd turn up. Police searched local areas. They issued
5:46
Speaker 1: public appeals. They asked residents along Cannon Road to check
5:50
Speaker 1: their CCTV. Neighbors were co operative to back told officers
5:54
Speaker 1: he might have footage. He handed over a hard drive.
5:58
Speaker 1: Investigators found nothing relevant it, or so they believed. On
6:02
Speaker 1: the twenty third of December, police executed a search of
6:05
Speaker 1: Tabac's flat. They were looking for anything connected to Joanna's disappearance.
6:10
Speaker 1: They found nothing, no blood, no signs of struggle, no
6:14
Speaker 1: trace of her. The flat was clean, ordered, unremarkable, a
6:18
Speaker 1: quiet man's quiet home. Two days later, on Christmas morning,
6:23
Speaker 1: two people walking their dog along a country lane in
6:25
Speaker 1: Thailand found her. She was lying beside a stone wall,
6:29
Speaker 1: three miles from the flat she'd never left, partially undressed,
6:33
Speaker 1: partially covered in snow. The temperature had held below freezing
6:37
Speaker 1: since the seventeenth She had been there the entire time.
6:41
Speaker 1: The post mortem confirmed manual strangulation, forty three separate injuries
6:46
Speaker 1: to her head and neck. The pathologist's report described pressure
6:49
Speaker 1: applied not for seconds, but for a sustained, deliberate duration.
6:54
Speaker 1: Whatever had happened in that flat on the seventeenth, it
6:57
Speaker 1: was not quick, and it was not accidental. At least
7:00
Speaker 1: now had a murder inquiry, and the man they focused
7:03
Speaker 1: on first was not vincent. To Back, Christopher Jeffreys was
7:06
Speaker 1: Joanna's landlord in Tabak's landlord. He was sixty five, retired, bookish,
7:12
Speaker 1: and unusual in the way that particular kind of English
7:15
Speaker 1: eccentric tends to be unusual. Vivid vocabulary, strong opinions, hair
7:20
Speaker 1: that attracted comments. Former pupils from his teaching days described
7:24
Speaker 1: him as demanding but fair. His neighbors found him odd.
7:28
Speaker 1: The tabloid press, once his name surfaced, found him irresistible.
7:32
Speaker 1: He was arrested on the thirtieth of December. The arrest
7:36
Speaker 1: made headlines within hours. The media ran photographs, ran phrases
7:40
Speaker 1: from old students, ran suggestions. Nothing in print was stated
7:44
Speaker 1: as fact. All of it was framed as implication. Here
7:48
Speaker 1: as what was also true. On the thirtieth of December.
7:51
Speaker 1: To Back was watching the news coverage from his flat,
7:54
Speaker 1: the same flat police had searched a week earlier, the
7:57
Speaker 1: same flat where seven nights before, when A Yates had died.
8:01
Speaker 1: At some point during the Jeffreys media storm, Tabek called
8:05
Speaker 1: the police. He offered an additional detail, he said he'd
8:08
Speaker 1: seen Joanna talking to Jeffreys in the hallway on the
8:11
Speaker 1: evening of the seventeenth. He volunteered this unprompted. Police logged
8:15
Speaker 1: it as a witness statement. It was a lie, every
8:18
Speaker 1: word of it. Jeffreys was released on bail on the
8:21
Speaker 1: first of January. The case against him was already collapsing.
8:25
Speaker 1: There was no forensic evidence, no witness placing him with Joanna,
8:29
Speaker 1: nothing beyond suspicion dressed his suggestion. He was formally cleared
8:32
Speaker 1: on the fourth of March. Meanwhile, on the thirty first
8:35
Speaker 1: of December, a detective flew to Amsterdam to interview Tobek,
8:39
Speaker 1: who had traveled there for the holidays. The interview lasted
8:42
Speaker 1: approximately six hours. To Back's account shifted twice during that session.
8:47
Speaker 1: In his first version, he hadn't seen Joanna at all
8:50
Speaker 1: on the seventeenth. In his second, he'd glimpsed her briefly
8:53
Speaker 1: but hadn't spoken to her. He was calm throughout, cooperative.
8:57
Speaker 1: He voluntarily provided a DNA swab and his fingerprints. That
9:02
Speaker 1: detail the voluntary DNA swab was the move of someone
9:05
Speaker 1: who believed they were untouchable, or someone who had made
9:09
Speaker 1: a catastrophic miscalculation. On the twentieth of January twenty eleven,
9:13
Speaker 1: to Back was arrested. The DNA from the swab matched
9:17
Speaker 1: saliva found on Joanna's body. Traces of her blood were
9:20
Speaker 1: discovered in his renaum again the car he had driven
9:23
Speaker 1: to Thailand, the car he had parked outside Asda at
9:26
Speaker 1: approximately ten thirty on the night she died while she
9:29
Speaker 1: was in the boot, while he bought Crisps beer and
9:32
Speaker 1: rock salt, while the CCTV above the entrance recorded his face.
9:36
Speaker 1: The rational explanation quiet neighbor, cooperative witness, voluntary DNA donor
9:42
Speaker 1: stopped working entirely. There is a moment in this case
9:45
Speaker 1: that has no parallel, not in the evidence, not in
9:48
Speaker 1: a testimony, not in the years of coverage that followed.
9:51
Speaker 1: It happened in court on the twenty eighth of October
9:54
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. Tobac's defence team had constructed an argument around
9:58
Speaker 1: a single word, manslaughter. Their position was that he had
10:01
Speaker 1: grabbed Joanna impulsively, that the strangulation had lasted no longer
10:05
Speaker 1: than twenty seconds, that he had not intended to kill
10:08
Speaker 1: her twenty seconds. That was the claim the defense asked
10:12
Speaker 1: to back to demonstrate, to stand in the dark and
10:15
Speaker 1: replicate physically what he said had happened. Twenty seconds of
10:18
Speaker 1: pressure applied to a person's throat. The court room counted.
10:22
Speaker 1: Twenty seconds is longer than it sounds when you are
10:24
Speaker 1: in a room waiting for it to end. People in
10:27
Speaker 1: the public gallery counted sivently. Journalists counted, the jury counted.
10:32
Speaker 1: The judge counted forty three injuries to the head and
10:35
Speaker 1: neck sustained pressure consistent with prolonged, deliberate force. A pathologist
10:40
Speaker 1: who had testified that the force applied could not, under
10:43
Speaker 1: any reading of the forensic evidence, be characterized as brief.
10:47
Speaker 1: When the twenty seconds ended, no one spoke immediately. The
10:50
Speaker 1: silence held what the prosecution had already established, and what
10:54
Speaker 1: the silence confirmed for every one present, was this the
10:58
Speaker 1: story Tabok was telling you could not coexist with the
11:01
Speaker 1: body that had been found. One of them was true,
11:04
Speaker 1: the other was performance. Then there were the computers for
11:08
Speaker 1: insicators examining tabac Sea's devices found something that the jury
11:12
Speaker 1: heard described in clinical, precise language, language designed to keep
11:16
Speaker 1: the court room from fracturing under what it was being told.
11:19
Speaker 1: Among the material on those computers were pornographic images featuring
11:23
Speaker 1: a blond woman, her top lifted, positioned in a manner
11:26
Speaker 1: that mirrored exactly how Joanna's body had been found beside
11:29
Speaker 1: the stone wall in Thailand. Partially undressed, specific deliberate. The
11:35
Speaker 1: image had not been downloaded after the murder. It pre
11:38
Speaker 1: dated the seventeenth of December. There is no version of
11:41
Speaker 1: this story where everything makes sense, and this detail is
11:44
Speaker 1: where that becomes undeniable. What the investigators had found was
11:48
Speaker 1: not evidence of a man who had acted impulsively under
11:50
Speaker 1: stress and then panicked. It was evidence of a man
11:54
Speaker 1: who had been constructing something privately for a long time,
11:57
Speaker 1: and who, on the evening of the seventeenth, with his
12:00
Speaker 1: girlfriend at a party and his neighbor alone and her
12:03
Speaker 1: boyfriend two hundred miles away, had decided to act. The
12:07
Speaker 1: same devices also held internet searches not conducted in the
12:10
Speaker 1: days before the murder, conducted the night of it, searches
12:14
Speaker 1: comparing murder and manslaughter sentences, searches on body decomposition, time lines,
12:19
Speaker 1: legal research, specific and methodical. Run from his own flat
12:23
Speaker 1: while Joanna's body was cooling, he knew exactly what he
12:26
Speaker 1: had done. He knew exactly what he was doing next.
12:30
Speaker 1: Eight weeks after his arrest, on the eighth of February
12:33
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, Tabac confessed to a prison chaplain. He framed
12:37
Speaker 1: it as manslaughter, described it as an accident, a moment
12:41
Speaker 1: of lost control. The chaplain was not a police officer,
12:44
Speaker 1: and the conversation was pastoral. Tobac knew this. He chose
12:48
Speaker 1: his audience carefully, as he had chosen everything carefully. When
12:52
Speaker 1: the jury returned its verdict on the twenty eighth of October,
12:55
Speaker 1: after four days of deliberation, it was unanimous, not manslaughter murder.
13:01
Speaker 1: What the trial could not fully answer, and what the
13:04
Speaker 1: sentence could only partially address, was the question of what
13:07
Speaker 1: Tabac actually was. He had no prior convictions, no documented
13:12
Speaker 1: history of violence, no identified moment in his childhood or
13:16
Speaker 1: adolescence that explained what he became. He had a pH d,
13:20
Speaker 1: a career, a girlfriend whose family trusted him enough to
13:23
Speaker 1: fund his legal defense. They withdrew that support only after
13:27
Speaker 1: his arrest, when the full picture began to emerge. The judge,
13:31
Speaker 1: Mister Justice Field, sentenced him to life with a minimum
13:34
Speaker 1: of twenty years. In his remarks, he cited four factors.
13:38
Speaker 1: The sexual element of the offense, the extreme danger tabot posed,
13:42
Speaker 1: the deliberate deceit he had employed throughout the investigation, and
13:45
Speaker 1: his sustained manipulation of everyone around him. Four factors, each
13:49
Speaker 1: one earned through evidence, none of them visible to the
13:52
Speaker 1: people who had lived alongside him in Clifton. In March
13:55
Speaker 1: of twenty fifteen, a separate charge was brought to Back
13:59
Speaker 1: had been found to possess over one hundred forty indecent
14:02
Speaker 1: images of children. An additional ten months was added to
14:05
Speaker 1: his sentence. He remains at HMP long Lartin. The question
14:09
Speaker 1: that sits beneath all of this is not whether he
14:11
Speaker 1: was guilty. That was settled in two thousand eleven. The
14:14
Speaker 1: question is how a man can present one face to
14:17
Speaker 1: the world with complete consistency for years while maintaining something
14:21
Speaker 1: else entirely in the spaces no one was permitted to see.
14:25
Speaker 1: His girlfriend did not know, his colleagues, did not know.
14:29
Speaker 1: The police who searched his flat on the twenty third
14:31
Speaker 1: of December and found nothing, did not know. The pizza
14:34
Speaker 1: Johanna bought that evening was never recovered. The receipt was
14:38
Speaker 1: in the flat, as ciders were unopened on the counter.
14:41
Speaker 1: The packaging was gone. There is no explanation for that
14:45
Speaker 1: in the trial record. It is simply absent. The way
14:48
Speaker 1: some details and cases like this go unresolved not because
14:52
Speaker 1: investigators failed, but because the person who knows the answer
14:56
Speaker 1: has decided not to speak. What Taybac chose to keep
14:59
Speaker 1: and what he he chose to discard tells you something,
15:02
Speaker 1: not everything, but something vincent. To Back was convicted of
15:06
Speaker 1: murder on the twenty eighth of October two thousand eleven.
15:09
Speaker 1: A jury deliberated for four days. When the verdict was read,
15:13
Speaker 1: it was unanimous. Judge Field did not describe it as
15:16
Speaker 1: a crime of passion or a moment of lost control.
15:19
Speaker 1: He named it plainly a killing with a sexual element,
15:23
Speaker 1: carried out by a man of extreme danger, who then
15:26
Speaker 1: spent weeks deceiving the people around him and the police
15:30
Speaker 1: investigating his neighbor's disappearance. The minimum term set was twenty years.
15:35
Speaker 1: There was a second reckoning, quieter but no less significant.
15:39
Speaker 1: In March twenty fifteen, to Back was additionally charged with
15:42
Speaker 1: possessing more than one hundred forty in decent images of children.
15:46
Speaker 1: Ten months were added to his sentence. The man who
15:48
Speaker 1: had presented himself to the world as a reserved professional
15:52
Speaker 1: neighbor had been carrying in life far larger and far
15:55
Speaker 1: darker than the trial had revealed. He remains at HMP
15:59
Speaker 1: long Larden. Christopher Jeffreys received two apologies, one from the police,
16:04
Speaker 1: one from the newspapers that had savaged his reputation. During
16:07
Speaker 1: the ten days between his arrest and his clearance, several
16:10
Speaker 1: tabloids paid him substantial damages. The press coverage of his
16:13
Speaker 1: arrest was so egregious that it became the subject of
16:16
Speaker 1: independent review and contributed directly to the Levison inquiry into
16:20
Speaker 1: British press standards. The retired teacher, who had simply rented
16:24
Speaker 1: a flat to two young professionals, became the clearest example
16:27
Speaker 1: in a generation of what unchecked media speculation does to
16:30
Speaker 1: an innocent person. Gregg had come home on the nineteenth
16:33
Speaker 1: of December expecting to find Joanna. He found her keys
16:37
Speaker 1: on the hook, her phone on the table, two unopened
16:40
Speaker 1: ciders in the kitchen, and silence. That detail two ciders
16:45
Speaker 1: bought for a quiet evening in never opened does not
16:49
Speaker 1: appear in any legal document as evidence. It is simply
16:52
Speaker 1: what was left when asked by the prosecution about Joanna's character.
16:56
Speaker 1: Her colleagues described someone in noticed things, a l landscape
17:00
Speaker 1: architect who thought carefully about how spaces made people feel.
17:04
Speaker 1: She had been in Bristol for less than three months
17:06
Speaker 1: when she died. The pizzas she bought on the evening
17:09
Speaker 1: of the seventeenth was never found. The receipt was there,
17:13
Speaker 1: the packaging was not. Whatever happened to it in those
17:16
Speaker 1: final minutes inside the flat. No one has accounted for it.
17:19
Speaker 1: The trial ended without an explanation. It remains the one
17:23
Speaker 1: detail the record cannot close. There is a version of
17:26
Speaker 1: this story that should have ended differently, not a trial,
17:29
Speaker 1: but weeks earlier. When a detective stood at Tabac's door
17:32
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth of December and Tabac said he had
17:35
Speaker 1: not seen Joanna. The detective moved on. The search continued.
17:40
Speaker 1: Jeffreys was arrested to back, watched the news coverage from
17:43
Speaker 1: his flat, and then picked up the phone to add
17:46
Speaker 1: a false detail to the investigation, placing Joanna in the
17:49
Speaker 1: hallway with Jeffreys on the night she died. He made
17:52
Speaker 1: that call knowing exactly where she was. Some things about
17:56
Speaker 1: how a person can function after committing an act like
17:58
Speaker 1: this going back to collect a girl friend from a
18:01
Speaker 1: party buying rock salt at a twenty four hour supermarket
18:04
Speaker 1: with a body in the boot, texting the word board
18:07
Speaker 1: resist any framework that makes ordinary sense. The psychology unit
18:11
Speaker 1: at the trial examined his Internet searches, his pornographic material,
18:16
Speaker 1: his behavior in the weeks that followed. None of it
18:19
Speaker 1: pointed to remorse. All of it pointed to management. He
18:22
Speaker 1: was managing the situation the way he managed everything else,
18:26
Speaker 1: methodically and with an eye on outcomes. The last confirmed
18:29
Speaker 1: image of Joanna Yates is from CCTV footage outside a
18:33
Speaker 1: shop on Clifton's Christmas Steps at around eight thirty in
18:36
Speaker 1: the evening on the seventeenth of December two thousand and ten.
18:40
Speaker 1: She is carrying a pizza box and a bag with
18:42
Speaker 1: two bottles of cider. She turns toward home the footage ends.
18:46
Speaker 1: She was twenty five years old. She had lived in
18:49
Speaker 1: that flat for less than three months. She never got
18:51
Speaker 1: to open the ciders. This show is made by Obomedia.