Murder Investigation Team

Must-read: Look no further for a vivid and highly readable account of how murders are solved and criminals brought to justice, written by an experienced murder detective.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Apr 30, 2026

 

Steven Keogh, Murder Investigation Team: How Scotland Yard Really Catches Killers (Steven Keogh, 2021)

Connoisseurs of the average Anglophone murder-mystery will be well acquainted with how ‘heroic’ detectives are portrayed on film and television. Whether it be Agatha Christie’s prim and proper Hercule Poirot, shambling Columbo in his long raincoat, straight-talking Karen Pirie, or double-acts such as Starsky and Hutch, the detectives are the ‘face’ of the murder investigation – central to everything that happens, and single-handedly responsible for bringing the evil killers to justice. The detectives are in at ground-zero of every case, traipsing around crime scenes, looking for clues, spotting and bagging key pieces of evidence, interviewing suspects, ruling individuals in and out, and finally front and centre of the tense finale, when the killer or killers are unmasked.¹ 

Steven Keogh’s forensic, clear, and thoroughly readable account of how Murder Investigation Teams (MITs) actually function, provides a welcome antidote to this representation of murder investigations. The book is based on Keogh’s thirty-year career with the Metropolitan Police, including twelve years in its Murder Investigation Team, where he was involved in trying to solve upwards of 100 murders, of all different kinds. Keogh’s experience is vital in generating a plethora of insider insights into what happens on the ground, that help we outsiders grasp the scale and complexity of the modern murder investigation. Crucially, Keogh decentres the detectives of television fame by showing how the most terrible of crimes require huge team efforts, not the idiosyncratic brilliance of one mind alone. Through the book, Keogh pauses to knock down a range of ‘myths’ that have arisen about murder investigations, and to help those of us unfamiliar with police and judicial practices to get a sharper sense of what really goes on behind the blue cordons.

This is not to downgrade the detective’s role or input, merely to give a more realistic picture of how they function in larger investigative ecosystems, working to standard operating procedures. In this regard, Keogh helpfully explains how murder investigations have radically altered with the advent of more powerful computer systems, widespread CCTV footage, mobile phone data, and advances in the technology for recovering DNA from victims, suspects and crime scenes. What, however, has never changed over time, he suggests, is the police’s desire to deliver justice for murder victims, their families and their loved ones, because ‘The loss of a loved one at any time is hard, but to lose someone through an act of violence is even more difficult’ (p15).

As I read through the book, I came more and more to the view that detective shows simply cannot capture the scale of the average murder investigation, not to mention the time and resources it can take to bring killers to justice. As Keogh observes, murders are not solved by one brilliant mind in isolation. Likewise: ‘Murders aren’t solved on one piece of evidence or quickly’ (p.63). It is understandable that crime fiction and screen dramas reduce investigations to their bare bones, because viewers need to stay engaged via a pacy plot. Lengthier box-set extravaganzas aside, the average murder-mystery, enjoyed by millions of viewers the world over, unfolds over one or two hours at most. When time is of the essence, things have to move fast. There cannot be too many suspects or characterisation would suffer. Murder mysteries cannot show detectives waiting weeks for forensic pathologists to write their reports. CCTV and mobile phone records have to be ready on demand, not stuck in a backlog, holding up the investigation for days on end. Bureaucratic realities thus make the job of the detective rather more prosaic than the average murder mystery narrative can ever convey.

Keogh also reminds us that no two murders, and therefore the make-up of murder investigation teams, are the same (Chapter 1). Resources available to the police on any given investigation are shaped by both the category of murder (p.233), as well as the public and media reaction, with some investigations demanding greater resources because of the identity of the victim and/or higher political and other sensitivities around the case. The police who investigated my father’s 1991 murder told me it was a pretty standard murder case, by all accounts, with the senior investigating officer more than happy with the size of the human and other resources made available to him by his superiors. Nonetheless, the police still spoke to some 400-500 people across a two-month period, showing the scale of the task at hand, before we consider cases with multiple victims and dozens of potential suspects. The requirement to speak to as many people as possible comes from the foundational insight that Keogh keeps coming back to – “Learn how someone lived and you will learn how they died” (p73). This was certainly true of my father’s case.  

After explaining how investigation teams are put together and the investigation set in motion, Keogh takes us step-by-step through the processes the police go through. Key markers include: how crime scenes are dealt with, using forensic analysis (Chapter 2); how investigators form hypotheses and make decisions on how to proceed, who to charge, who to release, and the role of the Family Liaison Officer; public appeals; information-gathering; and criminal profiling, which Keogh asserts is of limited use and rarely used, certainly compared to the number of television shows about it. One thing I spotted that does connect murder-mystery fiction with the real life murder investigation is that, ‘In most murders, the suspect doesn’t give an account of what happened. Even when they do, you can’t trust what they are telling you’. The police have to painstakingly gather all different kinds of evidence (physical clues along with witness testimony), to help investigators sift truth from lie, to help prosecution barristers paint a credible picture of what went on when the case goes to court.

This brings the book to its final stages (Part 3), where the killers are either charged with a view to standing trial (if they deny the charges put to them), or go straight to sentencing by a judge (if they admit/s the charges). Heavily leaning towards the legal side of things, this is the part of the process with which I was the least familiar, despite having sat through much of my father’s weeks-long murder trial in 1993. I learnt a lot about the police decisions around arresting suspects, interviewing them, and the conversations they have with the Crown Prosecution Service, about whether or not to bring charges with a view to achieving a safe and reliable conviction. Unsafe and/or unreliable convictions only degrade public trust in the entire judicial process.

Part 4 takes readers through the court trial proper, including: the types of evidence that gets presented in court; how witnesses and defendants give testimony; the role of the jury; verdicts; and some useful words on appeal processes. The trial is noticeable only by its absence from most murder mystery dramas,2 which end with the killer being led away in handcuffs. Yet, Keogh points out, the trial stage is where the police’s hard work really begins. I found it valuable to understand more about how the police work with the appointed barristers throughout lengthy court proceedings, which make huge demands on police, as well as the legal teams, across complex, sometimes weeks-long events. Overall, I learnt that, at the heart of any given murder trial, is a battle to convince a jury that the Crown’s narrative of what is likely to have occurred is more convincing than the defendants’ account.  

I cannot recommend this book highly enough, hence its five-star rating. It will not diminish your enjoyment of murder mystery dramas. However, through its painstaking analysis of the actual ways in which the police investigate murders, the book will furnish you with a comprehensive and critical insight into what police do in real life to solve murders. Keogh shows how police investigators officers have a difficult juggling act to perform in bringing killers to justice, when resources are finite and information about what occurred may be in short supply, when not being actively concealed by perpetrators and their accomplices altogether. Creating justice for victims and their families is nowhere near as straightforward as the cop-shows would have you believe, but it is no less fascinating for it–read this book and you will find out why.  

 

Footnotes

 ^{1. ‘Columbo’ is slightly different from the usual murder-mystery because it shows the murder happening at the beginning. The joy is in watching Columbo make the perpetrator squirm like a fish caught on a line, as he reels them in through their own lies. Yet, even in this genre-subverting format, the detective remains the focal point for the show.}  

 ^{2. An exception might be television offerings such as ‘Law and Order’, where the courtroom drama is the focal point for the story.} 

 

Photos: author's own.