Serial Killer Documentary - Adrian Prout： Narcissist Who Thought He’d Never Get Caught

0:06 On the 5th of November 2007, in the rural village of Red Marley in Gloucestershire, England, 55-year-old Kate Prout vanished. Her husband, Adrian, claimed she'd walked out on him.

0:21 At first, you know, people's hearts went out to him. He'd been abandoned.

0:26 Even though we'd come by, you had no concern about her well-being then?

0:31 Well, I did, but I thought if.

0:33 things weren't good, someone would have rang me or assumed she was okay.

0:38 He feels that he can just carry on and he can just keep diverting and just keep saying the right things and this will eventually go away.

0:48 Despite no body being found, the friendly farmer was convicted of Kate's murder. The entire community were shocked.

0:58 He goes to prison.

0:59 He maintains his innocence in the way that he has all the way through this.

1:03 The missing piece of that jigsaw is we've still got a missing body.

1:10 The trail went cold. An army of supporters campaigned to overturn this supposed miscarriage of justice until 2010, when Prout himself completed the puzzle.

1:25 To be perfectly honest, I just thought I was going to be sick. I'm sat opposite him in prison, and he's just confessed that he's killed his wife.

1:34 After years of pleading his innocence, the mask had finally slipped. Adrian Prout had revealed himself as one of the world's most evil killers. For four years after his wife disappeared, farmer Adrian Prout claimed that Kate was actually alive and well and in hiding. It was a lie, but it was one so convincingly told it reeled in Prout's friends, family, and the rural community in which the couple lived.

2:31 He said that was her plan. That was her plan to disappear. and to get him done for murder, so he said it was all set up. Obviously, we believed his lies, and we were drawn into whoever lies we never knew were lies.

2:49 People lie to the police all the time. That's what they do. There is a difference here. He's created a narrative, and he has to live and breathe that narrative. Then he has to build on it and layer it, and every time he has an interaction with another individual or friends and family, that narrative has to stand scrutiny.

3:09 Coercive men like Proud, they are incredibly accomplished. They have a way of actually reeling you in, of convincing you that everything that they're saying is true.

3:19 The seemingly friendly and helpful local farmer was difficult to connect to the image of the manipulative killer he'd been proven to be.

3:29 It's a dichotomy in my mind, because there is this gentle being nature, but now look at his hands and think he'd just taken another person's life. The outward appearance doesn't come across as what's really going on internally. This is a calculating murderer.

3:46 This killer's story begins in the village of Coley, Gloucestershire. Adrian Michael Prout was born on the 14th of June, 1962.

3:58 He was the second youngest of four siblings. His mother... Jeanette died shortly after the birth of her fourth child.

4:12 Pratt was two years old when his mother passed away, so this is something that is lacking in his life. He doesn't have that relationship with a mother that is going to be the basis on which he forms relationships with other women.

4:26 Both Adrian's father and grandfather were farmers, and he grew up helping out on the family farms. His dream was to one day have a farm of his own.

4:39 Prout grew into a man who really did have quite a lot of ambition. He wanted to be successful. He wanted to be seen to be successful.

4:49 He was a hardworking individual. He was always around farming. He'd had connections locally. He'd worked for people. They were always very impressed with the sort of things that he did. an engaging and hardworking individual. He'd had quite a successful pipeline business.

5:08 In 1999, after a couple of failed relationships, 37-year-old Adrian Prout met Kate Wakefield. Kate was a teacher and, like Prout, came from a farming family.

5:21 Kate was the sister of a friend of his. At this point in his life, Prout was having a bit of a difficult time, and Kate's brother... offered to put him up in a property whilst he got back on his feet. And I think this is quite a significant thing because Prout had that friendship with her brother. He comes pre-vetted, essentially.

5:42 Kate Wakefield is pretty nearly ten years older than Adrian Prout. A wise woman, hard-working, thoughtful, but is, I think the phrase would be, bowled over by Adrian Prout.

5:59 They were married within the space of a year, and this is an incredibly accelerated relationship. The pace of it is incredibly fast.

6:09 Initially, they were seen as the perfect couple. They'd gone on really well.

6:13 I think friends and family would describe them, personality-wise, that they were quite different, so that old adage that opposites attract.

6:22 In 2004, Prout and Kate buy a farm. It's called Redhill Farm. It's near Red Marley in Gloucestershire. She can afford it because she's inherited a cottage which she's sold and she's contributing to the house.

6:41 This is quite an extensive, quite an impressive property. And in this part of the country, agriculture is quite a significant industry and farmers have some status. They have a lot of land, they have a lot of property. Essentially, Kate was, for him, the vehicle that allowed him to reach this ambition, and the things that she had were very attractive for him.

7:03 At the age of 41, Adrian Prout had achieved his lifelong goal of owning his own farm.

7:12 He's going to run pheasant shoots, and she's going to cater for them at Red Marley. He's still got the pipe-blowing business. And as far as anyone can tell, This is a perfectly happy, stable relationship. And so it remains.

7:32 The couple ran successful pheasant shoots over the next two years. But in 2006, there were signs that suggested their honeymoon period had come to an end.

7:45 There were some public interactions and spats between the pair of them. There was starting to be that glimmer of things that were not quite as people would thought initially.

7:56 On Boxing Day 2006, things reached ahead during an argument over the family's dinner plans.

8:05 It starts in the kitchen and goes outside. And it's the first time we see real evidence of the violence that was beneath the surface. in this apparently stable marriage. Proud pushes Kate against the Land Rover that they have with such force that it actually dents the car.

8:34 She's frightened.

8:37 The cracks in the relationship became even more apparent two months later, in February 2007.

8:46 Plates had been thrown right across the kitchen. There'd been a full-blown confrontation.

8:53 Once again, the argument continued outside.

8:58 He had grabbed her by the neck and held her over an empty swimming pool. The police had been called. I think he'd actually been arrested.

9:07 She was to say later, he went mad. I really thought I'd had it. There was no controlling him.

9:15 This shows me that he's changing tactics at this point in time. I think up until this point, he's been using charm and manipulation to get control and to get his own way, but that is no longer working. And with men like Prout, when those techniques no longer work, they resort to physical violence.

9:33 In November 2007, after months of living with a volatile and violent husband, Kate went to see her solicitor about divorcing Adrian Prout.

9:45 The farm by now is valued at £ 1. 3 million. Adrian is intent on hanging on to it. Offers Kate 600,000 pounds to go. Kate consults a solicitor and says, no, I want 800,000.

10:00 A settlement of that size meant one thing. Redhill Farm would have to be sold.

10:10 We know that that farm was always Adrian Prout's dream. To own a farm, to run it like that was always his dream. There was a moment then... the dawn of realization that he was going to lose the farm.

10:23 He was going to lose everything.

10:25 He feels entitled to that farm. He feels that that farm is his. He's very much about ownership and possession of things, and now he's got a barrier in between the farm and him, and that barrier is Kate.

10:40 Adrian Prout had no intention of giving up the farm, but before any settlement could be finalized, there was a development.

10:49 Kate went missing.

10:54 Hundreds and hundreds of people daily get reported to the police as missing, but it was the circumstances, really, around Kate's disappearance that was the concern.

11:04 It had taken 45-year-old Prout five days to report Kate's disappearance to the police, and he didn't appear to be a worried husband.

11:14 And you weren't, even though weeks had gone by, you had no concerns. about her well-being?

11:21 Well, I did, but I thought if things weren't good, someone would have rang me or, you know, I assumed she was OK.

11:31 If someone's lost a loved one, it's a powerful emotion. That's what you need to see. And if they're not displaying that, then immediately your suspicions are up, you're worried and you need to be looking into it a little bit more.

11:45 Prout freely admitted that he was not concerned by his wife's disappearance.

11:50 He was suggesting she'd gone off on her own. It was something she wanted. He wasn't concerned. She'd done it before.

11:59 At least some of the locals are convinced that Kate had just had enough and left to start a new life. It made sense to them. This wasn't a happy couple anymore.

12:13 Pratt was able to draw upon this victim status that he'd stepped into. My wife has left me. She's going to take me to the cleaners. Poor me. And he used this to his advantage in this situation because he's going to be saying things like, why would I be in contact with her? Why would I want to know where she is? She's making my life such a misery.

12:35 It does sound feasible, but when you build into that, that none of the family had heard from.

12:40 Her at all, She doesn't go to her niece's 18th birthday party. She doesn't contact anyone. As far as anyone can tell, she's disappeared into a puff of smoke.

12:53 She might be wishing to split from her partner, but you're still going to make social contact, and you're still going to have an interaction with your family.

12:59 None of that was happening.

13:02 From the minute Adrian Prout reported her missing, investigators had been working through the possible reasons for Kate's disappearance.

13:11 And there's been no contact from Kate since you last saw her around lunchtime on Monday?

13:19 No.

13:21 Three things likely to have happened.

13:23 She's either had an accident somewhere and she's fallen off a horse or whatever it might be and she's out in the fields or wherever. She has gone off her own fruition. She doesn't want to be found and hasn't contacted anybody and wants to be on her own. Or something more sinister.

13:39 She's been murdered. Simple as that. You were aware that a car had been left behind. Were you aware of any other things that had been left behind that she'd normally have with her? No, I couldn't find her car keys, which was strange.

13:57 They always put in the drawer in the kitchen and they weren't there.

14:00 So I assumed she had her car keys with her.

14:04 If she goes out, what stuff would she normally take with her of a personal nature?

14:08 Credit cards, purse, things like that? Yeah, phones.

14:13 All of those things that are part of people's daily lives that they never let go of, all that was at the house. She'd gone with nothing apart from, in effect, the clothes that she was wearing. That's your starting point. That doesn't stack up at all. That's not normal behavior for people.

14:32 Early investigations revealed only one trace of Kate after Prout purported to have seen her.

14:39 The last third-party contact that she'd had with anybody else was to ring her bank on the late afternoon of that Monday on that 5th of November. From that Monday afternoon, she'd literally dropped off the radar. She wasn't seen from or heard from again.

15:07 Believing from the outset that it was unlikely that Kate had, as Adrian Proud claimed, walked out on her husband, investigators were left with two hypotheses.

15:19 Either they want to go and kill themselves, it's suicide, or chances are something more sinister in the circumstances.

15:25 So the police are exploring.

15:26 What exists in the background that would mean that someone wouldn't want her to be around anymore. And the information very quickly reveals that there was trouble in their marriage, that Kate was seeking a divorce, and she'd been to see a divorce lawyer, and he's going to lose the thing that he's worked all his life for.

15:49 In the background, we know that not.

15:51 Only are things not well in that marriage, but there is a known level of violence, and the police had been called previously.

16:00 By the 27th of November 2007, the finger of suspicion was clearly pointing in one direction. Adrian Prout is arrested on suspicion of Kate's murder. Prout maintained his story, and an initial search at Redhill Farm proved fruitless.

16:21 He'd given her his version of events, they'd found nothing, and as a consequence of that, he leaves the police station.

16:29 Convinced that there was a sinister truth behind Prout's claims of being the jilted husband, investigators began an intensive search of the farm.

16:39 There's a very good chance, based on his ability to work heavy machinery and his pipeline business, that the body is probably on the site. Why would you need to take her anywhere else if that's the case? When you've got 250 acres, you can't just search the whole lot. So you have to be clever and smart in the way that you approach it. You use tactics like ground-penetrating radar, dogs that are used to finding bodies and can smell that.

17:03 That's your location, that's where you start.

17:07 The search team were hopeful of an early lead when one of the dogs had a reaction inside the couple's home.

17:14 It got quite excited, as these things do, around a sofa in the house, but when the full forensic team went in and looked, there was no evidence there whatsoever.

17:27 The searches around the.

17:28 Rest of the house and the land that sat around it went on for an eye on five weeks. There was no physical evidence of a disturbance, a fight, a murder, homicide, or indeed the moving of a body. There was nothing there.

17:45 Detectives were confident that Prout was a killer, but with no sign of Kate, they were facing a so-called no-body murder case. which is notoriously hard to prove.

17:58 With a body comes a huge wealth of forensic evidence to help you unpick how they've died and who potentially has killed them. Here, you've got no body, so you really are up against it.

18:15 By Christmas, Kate had been missing for eight weeks, but life for Adrian Prout appeared to continue unaffected. Debbie Garlick encountered him in a local pub.

18:27 I was with my friend, and Adrian walked in with somebody we knew. If he was in the pub by himself, we wouldn't have had a conversation with him, but because he was with people that we knew really, really well, and sometimes people would come back to my house for a drink with the pub closed and everything else, so that's what we did. As we walked out, the landlord just said, be careful to me and my friend.

18:50 I was like, oh, okay. As soon as we got back, he said, do you know who I am? And then he told us the story.

19:01 Later that night, Debbie did some research on the man she'd just met.

19:06 We just googled everything then. He was under suspicion of murder. One of our friends said there's no way that he would have done anything like that.

19:16 No way.

19:17 Everyone just thought she'd disappeared.

19:20 The police disagreed, and on the 4th of January 2008, they publicly announced their belief that Kate was dead. Two weeks later, Adrian Prout was arrested for the second time.

19:36 They're hoping that he's going to confess to doing what they think he's done.

19:42 There was no confession.

19:45 Adrian Prout maintained that Kate had left of her own accord with the intention of stitching him up.

19:52 There is no firm evidence. It is all circumstantial. So he'd have to go out on police bail. You can't just hold someone or charge someone without evidence. That's when a challenging, difficult and protracted police investigation takes place.

20:10 And there is no easy answer to that.

20:13 Investigators began focusing on proof of life.

20:18 It's a common phrase within policing and legal terms. Ultimately, it's about establishing that somebody lives their life in a certain way, interacting with banks, financial institutions, friends and family, etc. And in a moment in time, it all stops. There's no more interaction. Now, that's unusual. The only reasonable conclusion that you can reach is that person is no longer alive.

20:48 The police began the process of proving not only that Kate Prout was dead, but that she'd been murdered. In May, Debbie Garlick had another chance meeting with Prout in the pub.

21:04 By the next morning, he'd put a note through my letterbox saying, with his telephone number on and said, if you want, give me a call. We went out the following day and took a picnic, and then he said that he wouldn't have a relationship with anybody because it wasn't the right time.

21:21 But two days later, Debbie heard from him again.

21:24 He phoned me, and from the Wednesday onwards, we just started our relationship full on from there.

21:31 It had been six months since his wife disappeared, but Prout had a seemingly plausible explanation for her prolonged absence.

21:40 She had gone off before and gone.

21:44 On holiday with one of her sisters or something, or sister-in-law, and hadn't told him then where she was going. So he just thought that they were hiding her away. He didn't want to be part of his life. It wasn't a big thing about where she was, if you get what I mean.

22:01 As part of the ongoing investigation into Kate's disappearance, detectives had discovered she kept a diary. This told a very different story to the one that Adrian Prout was spinning.

22:14 She explains on over a number of entries over a period of weeks and months what's been happening in her life, the tension with Adrian, the fact that she's worried and concerned.

22:24 There are constant references to her being frightened of Adrian Prout, references to the fact that he lost it with me. If you like, it's the clearest evidence so far of the true nature of the marriage between Adrian and Kate Prout.

22:45 All of that is good evidence, as if it's almost like Kate's voice. That's the importance of it. This is Kate talking through her diary.

22:55 Despite the mounting evidence suggesting Prout was weaving a web of lies, in January 2009, he was told he was no longer a suspect and released from bail.

23:08 That was the news that we obviously were hoping for. And that's when we all moved up to the farm together.

23:15 The cloud of suspicion appeared to have lifted. Debbie and her two children moved into Redhill Farm with Prout.

23:24 They've reached a stage where we're told him he's no longer a suspect. I suspect that was to try and trigger some conversation with friends and family of him. He might not confess it to the police, but he might confess it to a good mate, or he might confess it to Debbie Garlick.

23:39 I think Prout feels incredibly victorious at this point in time. He feels like he has very successfully pulled the wool over everybody's eyes, and this is a problem that has just gone away.

23:52 In the background, that investigation is continuing and they've gone to the Crown Prosecution Service around charging.

24:01 A month after moving in together, the couple's world was turned upside down. On the 10th of March, Debbie was home alone with her children.

24:11 We were sleeping bad and we just heard shouting and so we all just got out and wondered what the hell was going on and we walked into all these police in the house.

24:23 They asked me not to phone Adrian, but I did.

24:29 When Prout returned home, he didn't seem concerned by the unfolding events.

24:35 I think he said something like, here we go again, lads, or something. And then they charged him with murder in front of us all and handcuffed him and took him away. We thought they must have found something then. They must have found something for him to be charged with murder.

24:57 Debbie was left assuming that Kate's body had been found, but she was wrong.

25:04 The police have been really active in progressing the inquiries, and they've gone to the Crown Prosecution Service, so they are going to be explaining what they've got, the circumstantial evidence, and they would be having to seek a decision to charge him. Once you've reached that stage... There wouldn't be a need for any continuation of bail or anything of that nature.

25:21 He's coming in.

25:25 Adrian Prout appeared later that day at Cheltenham Crown Court, charged with the murder of his wife, Kate. After a month in prison, he was released on bail, awaiting trial.

25:38 He was saying, I can't believe I've been in prison and I can't believe that they thought I've done it.

25:43 I'm innocent. So we were all like.

25:47 few men with the police thinking that they have to put him in prison for a month for no reason.

25:56 Out on bail, life returned to normality, and the couple celebrated some happy news. Debbie and Prout were engaged to be married.

26:06 I think a few people had made a comment thinking maybe that was a wrong decision that we made, especially for Adrian's part because, He's still got a wife, really.

26:20 We see this similar pattern happening again, the accelerated pace of a relationship, the need for that early commitment. And this is something that happens frequently with men like Proud.

26:33 We had the engagement party and found out I was pregnant with my daughter, which was a nice surprise. And then we found out the court case was going to be January the 11th, the same day that she was due.

26:48 Debbie was induced a week early so that the birth of their daughter wouldn't coincide with the trial.

26:56 He loved having a baby, yeah. He fed her, changed her, got up in the night.

27:03 He was a hands-on dad. And then she was a week old when the court case started.

27:08 The evidence presented to the jury over the course of three weeks was entirely circumstantial.

27:18 There is no forensic evidence.

27:20 There is nothing to suggest, more importantly, physically, if you like, evidentially, forensically, that Kate has been killed.

27:29 That's why it took so long.

27:31 That's why this proof of life as the expression, which is a bit of a nuance, really, because you're proving that someone's died rather than that they're alive.

27:39 That's why it's so important.

27:42 I didn't go to court for the first three weeks, but.

27:45 I went every day for the fourth week because Adrian was convinced he'd be found not guilty. So he wanted us to walk out the court together to move on with the rest of our lives.

27:56 Unusually, in this case, there were only 11 members of the jury and they retired to consider their verdict.

28:05 And then rumours were going around that it was nine people together and two people weren't. And a commembrant said to me, oh, I can't believe two people think that I've done it. So he's thinking now that nine people think he's innocent and two people think he's guilty.

28:21 The jury were clear ultimately that Kate was alive on the 5th of November and within five days later, she wasn't alive.

28:31 Adrian could only have been the person that killed her ultimately. So he had all of.

28:35 The motivation there, sure that she wasn't around because she wasn't going to get that money. That's what's presented to the jury. That's what they thought, well, actually, there's only one conclusion we can reasonably make here.

28:49 The verdict came that he was guilty. I just burst into tears. Of course, he goes straight to prison then, but we went home without him that day, which is really hard, and our baby was four weeks old.

29:07 Having never believed that he would be found guilty, Proud's family had to face a harsh reality.

29:15 I went down to the post office to get every single paper that.

29:20 I could get.

29:21 All the papers were killer Adrian Pratt, Adrian Pratt's killed his wife, no body, and even the chap who owned the shop at the precise time came out and he put his arms around me and went, it's so wrong, what's happened to him?

29:35 He said, you don't know. You'll get him out.' Because that's what everyone was like. It wasn't just me. It was everybody.

29:43 On the 8th of February, 2010, Prout was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison, but the convicted murderer maintained his innocence.

29:54 Ultimately, what you've got is you've got a guy that was charged with murder, been convicted, and he's gone to prison. The missing piece of that jigsaw is we've still got a missing body somewhere. We still think that Kate is out there somewhere and we want to find her ultimately. So that will always remain open. But you're gonna need some information before you can do anything else.

30:18 I did have doubts then. I went to see him.

30:20 I asked him to swear on our daughter's life that if he has not killed Kate and he swore on her life and said he hasn't killed her. And then I got upset then because I thought, that was bad for me to have doubt that he might have done something. He might have killed her, so I felt really bad in myself then.

30:41 Prout knows exactly what buttons to push with Debbie. He knows exactly the kind of things to say to make her feel bad for even raising the question. So I think that shows how manipulative he really is.

30:55 Believing an innocent man had been jailed Prout's supporters were determined to prove that Kate Prout was alive.

31:04 The only thing we could do was to prove he was innocent, that the crime had not been committed. And then obviously we started searching for Kate. We put out a reward that if anyone had any information on the whereabouts of Kate Prout, then obviously they would claim the reward. And that's when it all started to begin, the campaign to get him out of prison.

31:24 Debbie's campaign caught the attention of veteran reporter Tom Hendry.

31:30 Here was a woman who still believed, even though he was in jail, that he was innocent, and she launched a huge crusade to try and find Kate. And as a result, I realized there was potential for a really great story.

31:49 Tom became Debbie's media advisor and assisted with the appeal for information on Kate's true whereabouts.

31:57 We had a number of sightings. One was in Cork, in Southern Ireland.

32:03 Somebody got in touch.

32:05 They said it looked like Kate, and she was a tutor, and Kate was a teacher.

32:10 We actually thought we'd got her.

32:12 We went over to Ireland. The news agency sent a photographer. I didn't go personally. And Debbie was joking, you know, as to if Kate had turned up, there would have been a film made, and who would have played her?

32:28 Every single member of Adrian's family and my family came up, and we waited for the telephone call to say that it was Kate, but the telephone call come through to say that it obviously wasn't Kate.

32:39 So we were all devastated about that.

32:41 And then we had a sighting in Scarborough, and that wasn't her either. We did articles on the news, we did articles in the paper for any information, and the website to do with the miscarriage of justice, they were looking into that for us.

32:58 Prout is going along with this, but the outcome that he wants is to get out of prison, and he will be using people to his advantage. He won't be feeling bad about it. He doesn't see his family and friends in the way that most people do. Other people exist in terms of what they can do for him. So he was simply surrounded by useful people at this point in time.

33:20 Desperate to prove that there had been a miscarriage of justice, Prout's supporters were running out of options until journalist Tom Hendry had an unconventional idea.

33:33 It had gone on for so long, they thought, if this guy Prout took a lie detector test, That would prove, maybe, once and for all, if he was telling the truth or not. And Debbie agreed.

33:46 I was like, couldn't wait for the headline to be, Adrian Pratt is innocent, he's just passed the lie detector test.

33:53 Debbie and Tom visited Pratt in Bristol Prison.

33:57 We asked Adrian if he'd do a lie detector test, and Adrian agreed straight away.

34:00 I didn't have any suspicions about him. He was very calm, very controlled. And therefore, you know, I didn't smell any kind of rat at all.

34:13 Don Cargill, one of the UK's leading polygraph experts, arranged to conduct a test on Adrian in prison.

34:22 Bear in mind, this Adrian who was wanting the test, I thought he would have, great, this is my day of, you know, the truthful out, and I'll be proven to be a non-killer and wrongly convicted. But the reality was, it was a frozen reaction. He didn't really want to do this, which really, that did take me by surprise.

34:43 I left him alone for about 20 minutes, went back, and he said, I suppose I'd better do it. I suppose I'd better do it for Debbie's sake. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Do it for your own sake.

34:56 The questions put to Adrian Prout during the test were very straightforward.

35:02 Did he kill his wife, Kate Prout? Did he pay someone else to do it? And did he know where the body was? He said no to all three questions. So when we did the test three times, I looked at the results and quite clearly he had murdered his wife. And I did say to him, I'm sorry, but I'm looking at a murderer. And he just went, well, are you saying my test is wrong? And he said, no, your test is not wrong.

35:31 Don Cargill phoned me up. And just said, Debbie, you're engaged to a murderer. And that was Don's words.

35:43 It was just so emotional.

35:45 I didn't want to believe it. And of course, my plans have all gone out the window now. Because obviously the plan was it was going to pass. The plan was we were going to go to the papers. Agent Pranks passed. But everything stopped. There was no further forward now.

36:01 Maybe he was so arrogant, proud, that he thought he could beat this test, and clearly he couldn't.

36:11 My sister said to me that if he'd done it, you'd have gone to the papers, you'd have believed it, so really you should believe in it, that he's failed it, that he has done it, he is a murderer, because you can't believe one way and not the other.

36:28 When Debbie visited Prout, he was adamant that the polygraph had been rigged and professed his innocence.

36:35 Here, he brings back that victim persona. Poor me. Everybody's against me. Everybody's out to get me.

36:43 For the next couple of months, it was strained between us both. The phone calls were strained. I think he knew that failing that, however much he tried to deny it, had changed all our minds.

36:59 My thoughts now have gone to Kate's family.

37:02 So we're protesting his innocence, and these poor people now have lost Kate. And for the last year, I've never thought about their feelings. So I wanted to find out the truth for their sake and for Kate's sake. That was my plan now. The plan had changed. I just knew we would get to the bottom of it, but I didn't know when.

37:27 In November 2011, three months after the failed polygraph test, Debbie visited Adrian Prout, determined to get an answer once and for all.

37:39 I went there with my sister, and I did say that I'd stick by him, but then I didn't always think I'd get the answer that I did. I said, if you have killed Kate, I will stand by you, but you need to tell me the truth so we can give Kate a proper funeral. and he just said, she's had one. Well, I knew then he'd killed her.

38:03 I just, I don't think me and my sister knew what to say. We just sat there because I think we, to be perfectly honest, I just thought I was going to be sick.

38:12 Now the floodgates had finally been opened, Prout did not hold back.

38:19 He said that they argued and she upped the money that she wanted. And they started arguing and he strangled her. He went to the pub and then got back and buried her in the woods. He said he dug a hole by hand and he had a shoot the next day and carried on as normal. And the police never found one bit of evidence of that.

38:47 One of the detectives came in and said, we've just had Adrian's girlfriend come to the police station and say... that Adrian has confessed that he's killed Kate Pratt. There's the potential that we've got that final piece of the jigsaw. So within 24 hours, we've got police officers at the prison talking to him. And he may well have said, no, I didn't say that, made it all up, but he didn't.

39:13 This morning, I'm going to read you a prepared statement in relation to why we are here.

39:19 The statement goes.

39:20 Yesterday morning, we received some new and significant information in relation to the murder of Kate Prout.

39:28 Prout agreed to show police where he'd buried his wife.

39:33 From his prison cell, handcuffed to a policeman, the convicted killer and now confessed murderer, Adrian Prout, returns to the farm where he committed his crime.

39:44 He took us to a location on a hill, which was quite an extensive piece of woodland, probably a bit bigger than a football pitch. There was no X marks to spot, for sure. So where he'd initially pointed out, we dug, and unsuccessfully, so we couldn't find Kate. And what we brought in then were Godiva dogs, so sniffing dogs to see if we could find a body, and they did the usual dog thing of sniffing places, and that was unsuccessful. And then we used ground penetrating radar as well. And that didn't help either. And day one, day two, after that, could only be described that initial excitement, really, that actually we might solve this and we could do this really quickly now and move it on, that wasn't happening.

40:31 The media had taken over the chocolate box village of Red Marley and expectations were high.

40:39 Pressure's massive. The pressure was huge, waiting for something to happen.

40:45 Finally, on day four, the search team made the grim discovery.

40:50 At 1 o'clock this afternoon, we have found human remains close to the location Adrian Prout identified as the place he buried his wife.

41:02 I just cried for her family, and it must have been horrendous for them. I thought they were hiding her, so I thought they knew where she was, but for them... They knew that she was dead.

41:14 Because she would have been in contact with them.

41:17 They had to live all that time knowing that she's just been buried somewhere and concealed and would they ever get her back?

41:24 But when I say it, I don't think they thought they would.

41:30 Kate's family were finally able to lay her to rest in January 2012, more than four years after she'd been killed.

41:41 That information came from Debbie at that moment in time. If it hadn't then, Adrian may well have served his sentence, life moves on. It may never have come out.

41:54 Adrian Prout will be eligible to apply for parole in 2028.

42:01 As an individual, I struggle with the concept of being able to harm someone in the way that he has, but not just to do that. but to harm so many other people around him as a consequence. That's not normal human behavior.

42:17 Everybody was fooled by him. Lie detector test proved that I was among them, but he was a very convincing liar.

42:27 Scars remain for those who were burned by Prout's lies.

42:32 He took away the family that we all were going to have together.

42:38 You don't expect things like that to happen to your family.

42:43 My daughter, I think that's the hardest part because she's always had to be grown up knowing that her dad's in prison and he's a murderer.

42:58 Prout was a master manipulator whose selfishness knew no limits. He killed his wife just to avoid having to give her what was rightfully hers. Then he played the jilted husband and cruelly pulled others into his web of lies. He never had a thought for anyone but himself, making Adrian Prout one of Britain's most evil killers.