Veteran newsreader Dermot Murnaghan is back on our screens presenting true crime series Killer Britain, which explores how ordinary events can lead to ‘extraordinary murders’
The harrowing tale of a 31-year-old mother who was knifed to death by her estranged husband in a fit of jealousy is just one account of “extraordinary awfulness” being told by Dermot Murnaghan.
The 67-year-old former newsreader left Sky News in February 2023 and is now fronting a new true-crime documentary series, Killer Britain, which starts on Monday. Dermot says he was struck by “how ordinary a lot of these events are, until they lead to the extraordinary awfulness of the murder.”
Andrew Parsons, 38, attacked Janee Parsons, 31, in their Bicester home in front of their young son on December 1, 2012. He was caught after the murder was recorded on a dictation machine he had hidden under a bed to spy on his wife, which captured their young son’s screams and Janee mumbling words of prayer before she died.
She was heard saying: “Oh my God, no, no, dear God forgive me for my sins.” Dermot told the Mirror: “Everyone knows people who are in deteriorating or inappropriate relationships. A lot of the stories in this series are about really nice human beings who trusted someone else utterly, and they were turned upon and paid for it with their lives. Like Michaela, everyone could see was in an abusive relationship and was being sucked in but couldn’t talk her out of it.
“The case of Janee Parsons particularly stuck in my mind. Again, it is a common scenario, the breakdown of a relationship, a jealous partner obsessed with the other who is trying to build a new life.
“Her murder was recorded by the boyfriend’s own dictation machine, which was what ultimately caught him, that was the chilling, extraordinary thing about the case.”
Many of the murders were stories Dermot remembers covering during his 30-year career presenting news on ITV, BBC and Sky. “That’s why in this series I talk more about my own involvement,” he said. “But it’s not about me, it’s first and foremost about the victim, and about their family and friends, so that people can hear their stories.”
The show, now in its fifth run, delves into some of Britain’s most chilling murder cases, with first-hand accounts from detectives as well as the heartrending testimony of victims’ families. Another case covered in the ten-part series on the Crime + Investigation channel includes the 2021 murder of Michaela Hall, 49, a former airline flight attendant who was stabbed through the eye by her violent boyfriend Lee Kendall, after he had constantly abused her for two years.
While most of us are no longer hearing Dermot’s familiar voice when the evening TV news comes on, his family certainly are, according to the veteran newsreader. He says he now throws his shoes and screams at the TV screen whenever he sees a politician managing to get off lightly in an interview. And don’t even get him started on the adverts.
He says it’s “incredibly frustrating” to just be a normal TV viewer and not in the interviewer’s seat. “I’m throwing soft shoes at the television screen and knocking the radio over when I hear it, because that’s my obsession, I can’t give it up.
“If I hear another politician say ‘nothing’s off the table’ or ‘we’re doing this for the national interest”, I’m just screaming, ‘Of course you are, but what are you doing?! What the heckity-heck does that mean?’”
Not that he thinks he was any better at on-air grilling. He adds: “There are some brilliant people operating, way, way better than me. But I think the politicians have got way more adept at side-stepping questions.”
But he doesn’t hold back on seeing his former colleagues flogging gold sovereigns during the ad breaks. Dermot says he’s not “naming names”, but he’s clearly referring to former fellow newsreaders Michael Burke and Nicholas Owen, who have both appeared in commercials selling gold coins for Hattons of London.
“When you’re a live newsreader you’re banned by Ofcom from advertising anything, because you have a degree of credibility. But once you stop, you can, and some of my former colleagues do. Some of the things they advertise, well, I’m going to leave it there, I wouldn’t.”
But he doesn’t leave it there: “I may be cutting off a lucrative revenue stream for myself, but gold sovereigns at four times the price that they actually do cost, yeah, I wouldn’t do that.
“Let me say to anyone who sees this, you can get gold sovereigns, if you want them – I don’t have any, but just look up the price – cheaper than those being pumped towards you by some former news people.”
Dermot was destined to become a historian after completing a history degree and masters, but turned to journalism, working on local newspapers in the 80s before joining Channel 4 as a researcher, where he also got his first opportunities in front of the camera.
Presenting the biggest news programmes on all three terrestrial channels, he became one of the most trusted faces on TV and covered the biggest stories, including breaking the news of the death of Princess Diana and the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.
He finally signed off Sky News after 16 years with a quote from newsreader movie Anchorman, throwing his news notes from his desk with the words: “You stay classy, planet Earth. Goodbye.”
But despite his frustration with now having to watch the news from his sofa, Dermot insists he doesn’t miss breaking it. “Not at all, really, really not,” he says. “I’ve done my innings, I hope I was decent at it, at least semi- coherent, but you can’t be there forever.
“It was just hectic. I mean, I don’t think I ever went on a holiday when I didn’t expect to be called back from it. Now I get to chill, grow a beard, do things I’ve always wanted to. I did a big tour of Vietnam and Singapore, absolutely untrammelled by the idea that something might happen to cut it short.”
His wife of 36 years, Maria Keegan, on the other hand, has taken more convincing, he says. “It’s the first time I haven’t been employed by a big organisation. Suddenly I was at home a lot more and there was a sense of, ‘Oh OK, we’ll have to get used to this then, this is different’. I think the same as before would have suited her I expect.
“But we’ve got our own friends, we do our own things, I got out on my bike, I go away on breaks with my mates.”
Making their north London home even more crowded are two of Dermot’s four adult children – three daughters and two sons, aged between 23 and 33 – who have recently moved back in. He says: “Like a lot of families, they’re following different paths but accommodation is very expensive and as for buying anything… young people these days have no chance.
“One’s an environmentalist, another is in something I don’t understand, metaverse marketing or something, one’s a football coach and another’s in PR.”
There are no grandfather duties expected soon, but Dermot says: “I’ve no comment to make on that. They’re fully grown adults and their plans for the future are obviously up to them. But you know, if I could drop a gentle hint to them, it would be ‘Get a crack on lad, whenever you want’.”
In the meantime, though, the veteran newsman has got several big projects of his own. He’s finally getting round to writing his memoirs, and also hints that he’s following in the footsteps of other former TV journalists and will soon be launching a podcast.
He says: “The memoir is one of the things I’m tinkering at. Every now and again I pull some of my notes out and think, ‘oh my goodness, I interviewed that person’. Another extraordinary moment that came to mind the other day was on the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I was lucky enough to interview the woman who was the closest to ground zero.
“So many people were vaporised and she wasn’t far away, but survived and had horrible cancers. I remember sitting in a park with tears pouring down my cheeks as she expressed forgiveness, after all that had happened to her. She made me an origami crane, which I found the other day upstairs in the attic with the rest of the dusty memories.”
Yet another is his infamous interview with then Labour minister Peter Mandelson, who resigned from the cabinet in 1999 after Dermot questioned him over the way he had filled out a mortgage application, and exchange which won him the Royal Television Society Interviewer of the Year award.
But as he watches the news unfold on his living room TV, isn’t he secretly itching to grill the new famous faces of today’s international events?
Dermot admits he’d like to use his well-known no-nonsense interviewing skils on Donald Trump. “I think because you really have got someone who doesn’t know what is true and what isn’t, what is real and what’s not,” he says. “Yes I’d like to interview him, but I’d also like to nail jelly to a wall. And if I did I’m sure I’d then get barred from the United States forevermore, and get a huge on air telling off.”
- The new series of Killer Britain, presented by Dermot Murnaghan starts Monday 12th May on the Crime + Investigation channel
