What makes a criminal? What drives a person to ignore the laws and conventions of normal society and pushes them to perform truly dark acts?

Sex? Money? Revenge? Love? Humiliation?

Are criminals born bad or are they a creation of their circumstances?

How can detectives catch people who are intent on causing truly dreadful harm to others? What happens when that criminal has done a brilliant job covering their tracks?

‘Behind the Crimes’ - the newsletter and podcast - explore some of our biggest crime stories - and some of the lesser-known, fascinating cases which deserve a better understanding.

I have reported on several hundred homicides in my twenty-five years as a TV correspondent.

In every case, I’ve looked at the man or woman in the dock and wondered: how did you get there?

And I’ve seen the families of the victims and thought how their lives have been changed irrevocably by the actions of the accused.

Some of the inquiries have been true mysteries at the beginning. How detectives have solved the cases has taken ingenuity and incredible hard work.

It is only when you hear the voices of the very people involved in these cases that you get an understanding of why crimes happened, the impact on victims, how detectives solved each case and what we can learn to make society safer.