Primary Sources in True Crime Writing I

This blog reflects on the importance of primary sources in writing true crime. It ends with a call on the government to keep these vital documents longer to promote informed crime writing and robust investigative reporting in a healthy democracy. In human terms, these records may be the only record the families have left to help them understand how a victim lived and died.

By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Jun 05, 2026

Factually accurate, contextually rich, and humane true crime writing – whether serious crime journalism or book-length projects – usually assembles a wide range of primary sources to tell the story. With a background in academia, this is the kind of true crime writing that most appeals to me, and which I am trying to emulate in my book about the 1991 murder of my father, Terry Daddow. A timelyexample is Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent 2026 book London Falling, about the mysterious death of 19-year old Zak Brettler (reviewed on this website). It is replete with interview material taken from hours of conversations Keefe held over a two-year period with Zak’s parents, Rachelle and Matthew along with Zak’s older brother Joe, as they tried, individually and collectively, to unravel his mysterious death. Keefe also spoke to several members of Zak’s wider family, as well as people who knew Zak from school, plus acquaintances and some of the duplicitous criminals who moved in Zak’s business and social circles toward the end of his life.

Some of the interviewees, notably Akbar Shamji, Verinder Sharma (gangland’s notorious enforcer ‘Indian Dave’), and Sharma’s daughter Dominique, held the key to the case. They were with Zak at the fifth-floor Riverwalk apartment in the hours and minutes directly before his fatal jump from the balcony into the River Thames in November 2019. These dubious characters never did give up the secret of what happened (spoiler alert) in the luxury Riverwalk flat 504 in the early hours that morning. Nonetheless, from what they did (and often did not) say, Keefe fleshes out different hypotheses by putting their accounts alongside information taken from his interviews, criminal trials past and present, and proceedings of the coroner’s inquests into Zak’s and Sharma senior’s death. The latter supposedly committed suicide not long afterwards in the same flat. Rachelle and Matthew also gave Keefe access to myriad phone records and other raw data they were handed by the Metropolitan Police, as their concerns grew about the Met’s handling of the investigation. This wealth of primary source material enables Keefe to tell a multidimensional story rooted in the most credible elements from a multiplicity accounts about the main characters' contacts, decisions, motives, movements and so on, in the days and hours preceding Zak going over the balcony. 

In his Note on Sources at the end of the book, Keefe points out that it is important in a healthy democracy that government and powerful institutions can be held to account when necessary. In cases such as Zak’s, court and other relevant information needs to be stored securely and made available to those with apppropriate clearance and interest in the case. However, Keefe writes (p330), “Obtaining court documents in the UK is unreasonably difficult”. Transcripts of legal proceedings (the gold standard for this form of writing it seems to me, when people speak at length under oath) get assiduously prepared but “there is no tradition of preserving these records or making them readily available to the public. In fact, once a case is fully adjudicated, they are often destroyed”. As Keefe observes, it is detrimental to the quality of true crime writing and a stain on UK democracy that more court materials are not made more accessible more responsively.

Keefe’s remarks strongly resonated with me as I wade through the research for my dad’s case. He was shot many years ago (1991) and I have spent the past year trying to assemble as many original sources as I can to piece together the events leading to his murder, to flesh out the motivations and actions taken by the leading characters, including my father himself, and to tell the unabridged story of how the twisting, turning police investigation unfolded. As the police are fond of saying, to understand how someone died, it is important to interpret how they lived. I have conducted interviews with the police investigators, journalists and members of the public who lived in and around where we grew up, and in the East Sussex village not far away, where Terry Daddow died.

To illustrate the importance of having access to this kind of material, the Courts of Appeal have sent me the judges' rulings on the two appeals made in 1995 (one against her conviction, one against the sentence) by the Black Widow Jean Daddow. Both appeals were rejected. Intriguingly, in fact, the judges felt the original sentence for conspiracy to murder was, if anything, too lenient, yet the appeals were largely ignored by the press, which already had its narrative about my 'abusive' father, which the perpetrators spread liberally around the courtroom in an attempt to justify shooting him at point-blank range. These are vital primary records which shed much needed light on tired narratives about this murder.   

Other legal documents have proved harder to retrieve. I have been promised, as a direct relative of the victim, access to the case files which, I am told I can view at the Ministry of Justice in Westminster. It has been a rather grudging, patience-testing process. I least heard from the Records and Retentions team in July 2026, when it was still waiting for the documents to arrive from an unspecified location elsewhere in London. Things on the trial side have been even more infuriating. We attended many days of the seven-week murder trial at Lewes Crown Court in spring 1993, as well as the three culprits’ Old Bailey sentencing (Jean Daddow along with her son Roger Blackman and the hitman Robert Bell) shortly afterwards. But it was over thirty years ago now and my memory is vague at best. I have some scattered notes my mum jotted down from our many hours in the public gallery, but there is nothing beyond that in the family archive.

In October 2025 I set about unearthing the full trial transcripts to aid my memory. Following a prolonged game of email tennis with the court clerks, and much form-filling (the dreaded EX107), I was delighted in February 2026 to be granted approval by a Judge Laing to see the transcripts, and to be told that material therein could feature in the book, as so much time had now passed. However, just a few days later, I was informed by the court services team that the transcripts did not, in fact, exist: “We are sorry to inform you that we are unable to supply any transcripts in the above case, because the audio was destroyed some time ago. The Crown Court reporting Contract in force at that time required that audio and records be stored for a period of five years from the date of the hearing, after which time they were to be securely destroyed.” It is safe to say that this came as devastating news. It also seemed rather illogical and a waste of everyone’s valuable time: why not check to see if the audio exists before I had to fill out the forms and the Judge had to make a decision? With hindsight, both tasks were an unnecessary extravagance. 

The travails of the Kafka-esque bureaucracy surrounding such applications aside, the government should keep these records for much longer to enable the media, authors and the public to gain readier access to the valuable information they contain. I stand corrected, but as I understand it such records are now kept for seven years. This is barely sufficient, surely. Thirty or even fifty years would not be unreasonable, to give family members or other parties who wish to revisit a historic case the opportunity to see what was said in court, and how the trial unfolded over the piece. In cases of a potential miscarriage of justice, or accusation of police incompetence (as in Zak Brettler's case), the imperative to have access to trial and other official records is stronger still. The same can be said of  judges’ sentencing remarks, which also did not survive the cull in my dad’s case.

Some of the limitations imposed by the lack of trial material can be circumvented with a bit of creativity. Regarding the trial proceedings, I have been able to piece together a lot of the key fragments of testimony using the fine work of journalists who covered proceedings for local newspapers such as the Hastings and St Leonards Observer. This said, the press tended to focus on a few salacious pieces of evidence from the conspirators that, usually, painted my father in an unwarrantedly bad light, skewing the coverage in the murderers’ favour. Furthermore, what might have appeared unimportant to journalists at the time (and therefore excluded from the coverage) may appear much more significant to a family member writing about the case from a totally different vantage point many years later, in light of subsequent revelations. I also have the benefit of a 32-page letter by the Black Widow rehearsing her defence (effectively her trial 'script'), which she posted in 1992 before her impending arrest, to a fresh-faced Guardian journalist by the name of Jay Rayner, with whom I have been in contact since the book was initially conceived, and who kindly sent me the original letter.

This blog therefore ends with a plea to government on behalf of serious crime victims, non-fiction crime writers and investigative reporters: please retain trial and related transcripts for longer than seven years. These records may not seem important to you, but to those of us who have lost family members to murder or other violent crime, it is the only way we have of recovering something of the memories we have of the victims, and to tell their life stories, good or bad.

Image credits:
1.    Getty Images. 
2.    Author’s own.