Shocking evidence of police incompetence in the arrest of serial rapist John Worboys will be laid bare in new Channel 5 documentary, Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist, which airs tonight.
The doc features harrowing interviews with victims of Worboys, who sexually assaulted over 100 victims between 2000 and 2008. Plus, it includes interviews with policemen on the case and those who were associates of Worboys before he was convicted.
Worboys conducted his crimes by giving unsuspecting women drugs, usually in a drink, before raping them. He often pretended he had just won the lottery, or bagged a prize at the casino, encouraging them to drink on his behalf to celebrate, seeing as he was driving.
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Check out the trailer below:
From the very first time that one of Worboys' victims went forward to police, an account from Tim Grattan-Kane, senior investigating officer on the case, revealed shocking negligence.
"When she was dropped at Holloway police station, no-one had taken the details of the cab or the driver, if the details of Worboys had been taken at the time, there would have been an investigative route," he said in an interview for the doc.
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"However, the mindset of the officers would probably have been 'well it's a license plate cab driver, they're highly respected and she is drunk' - and she was not treated as a victim of drug facilitated sexual assault, they got it wrong".
Discussing how she felt during her interrogation, the anonymous woman said: "The police made me feel that I'd made it all up. I felt it was my fault, and then i started to think, I've made it up it didn't happen, and then i started having suicidal thoughts."
This mistake was a big one, not only scarring the woman in question but allowing Warboys to get away and rape many more victims.
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It wasn't until his 79th victim came forward that the police heard any more about the cab driver.
This victim was a student at the time, and in the doc she harrowingly explains how the London cabbie forcibly made her swallow a pill in order to drug her, back in 2007.
"This was the first time in my life where I had been in a situation where I was vulnerable and taken advantage of. I felt really upset about the whole situation. It was a very emotional time," she said at the time, adding that she's still never told a single loved one about the harrowing incident.
Discussing her statement to the police, the woman said she was further traumatised by how they spoke to her, asking if she described herself as a "woman who would wear red nail polish and red lipstick," and repeatedly questioning how much she had drank that night.
"The way they were behaving was as if anything that had happened that night was my fault and I deserved it," she said.
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It is only after the police were pushed to look at CCTV from the night of the rape that they realised her cab was driven by John Worboys.
To make matters worse, police still didn't seem concerned about Worboys, knocking on his door and leaving a note when he wasn't home, which allowed him to get rid of incriminating evidence and think up what it was he was going to say before he voluntarily appearing at the police station.
The interview in question is perhaps the most damning piece of evidence in the case against the police's handling of the whole ordeal, as laid out in the documentary.
The never-before-seen footage shows just how casual the coppers were as they chatted to the suspected rapist, seemingly still acting on the assumption that because he was a 'credible' black cab driver he wasn't guilty.
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In it, viewers will hear that the officer failed to question Worboys on the multiple discrepancies between his account of events and the CCTV they had ascertained, or the reports of his victims.
Instead they appeared to blindly believe him when he claimed: "I never touched her or anything," and shamed her for being "drunk".
The officer also failed to question Worboys on the timeline of the crime, for which he gave a completely different account to the one they already had, falsely claiming he didn't pick the victim up until around 4am, when it was actually 2am.
At the end of the interview, the officer even seems to feed him an alibi, as she can be heard saying "forgive me for asking, but is it a case that she engaged in sexual activity with you to pay for the fare?"
At the time, Worboys denied such a claim, but had he accepted the leading question, this could have freed him of all rape charges.
"Did she offer to pay you in a sexual way?", Worboys was further asked - but he again denied.
Having listened back to the interview, NBV (the name given to the anonymous victim) said listening to his police interview was "traumatic" and "difficult".
In this instance, Worboys went on to be released on bail. It wasn't until multiple rape allegations happened between 2007 and 2008 that were grouped together by police that Worboys was put back in the mix, after a member of staff at a sexual health referral unit remembered the case from 2007, for which he had been a suspect.
Finally, police investigated Worboys properly, and found a "rape kit" in the boot of of his car, filled with mini champagne bottles, plastic gloves, a torch, vibrators and condoms.
They also found sleeping tablets and an ashtray, which he had been using to crush drugs, and a notebook which included notes of answers he had pre-prepared to give to police following his arrest.
The police also eventually found a semen stain on one woman's underwear which matched Worboys, alongside a string of other forensic evidence relating to other victims.
In 2009, Worboys was locked up indefinitely, and given a minimum term of eight years in jail, after being found guilty of 19 sex offences against 12 women between 2006 and 2008 (though the true number of assaults is thought to be in the hundreds).
In January 2018, the Parole Board said Worboys would be freed after serving 10 years. However, victims successfully challenged this decision and he was re-sentenced in 2019.
Predator: Catching The Black Cab Rapist tonight at 9pm, Channel 5
Featured Image Credit: ShutterstockTopics:ย Channel 5