Primary Sources in True Crime Writing II: Breakthrough Update

This blog reflects on a transformative breakthrough relating to an unexpected primary source I have been able to track down for the book's research.

By: Oliver Daddow | Published: Aug 05, 2026

This is an update to the exasperated blog I wrote in June 2026 about primary sources being germane to informed true crime writing, and the challenges I was facing in recovering original trial records to use in the book about the murder of my father, Terry Daddow, in November 1991. I wrote that blog on the back of receiving the news that a judge had approved my request to see the full trial transcripts. However, almost immediately after that ‘up’ came a sharp ‘down’ when the court told me the transcripts had, in fact, been destroyed. My heart sank. Undeterred, I continued the research into the murder using the other sources at my disposal, including interviews. I was confident I could still build a rounded enough picture of events.

As the blog further explained, after a protracted game of email tennis, the likes of which Franz Kafka would have been proud, I had at least been able to extract from the Court of Appeal its November 1995 judgement in the case brought before it by the main instigator of dad's murder: his then wife Jean Daddow. She was appealing the length of her prison sentence for her part in the conspiracy to have him shot. The Black Widow had previously attempted to overturn her conviction altogether, but was denied leave to do so: there was no new evidence to bring to the table to justify a retrial.

The judges’ verdict on Jean Daddow's second appeal reviewed her centrality to the plot that led to Terry Daddow's shooting. The judges noted her lack of remorse and her continued denial of involvement in the murder. Her life sentence, they concluded, was "entirely appropriate". They did not go so far as to say it, but I got the sense the judges felt the appeal was a colossal waste of legal aid and taxpayers money. Then again, Jean Daddow always did make a habit of using other people's cash to feather her own nest. An appellant, they said, who refuses to accept responsibility for a crime for which they are found guilty cannot later plead diminished responsibility, for the simple fact that one cannot diminish something that does not exist. Her appeal was refused because it was "devoid of merit". 

All that new material was in just five pages of text. It made it all the more frustrating that the 1993 trial transcripts had been eliminated from the record. Within a fortnight of venting about that decision, however, another email from the Courts of Appeal landed in my inbox. They said more documents had been discovered: nearly 300 pages of transcribed material relating to Terry Daddow’s case. What could this be, I wondered? It was all a bit vague because it sounded distinctly appeal-related and the email came from the Courts of Appeal, so it would stand to reason. That said, if the documents were anything like as informative as the appeal documents I had already seen, the £200 I had to shell out to get this fresh batch of records would be well worth it.  

When I opened the weighty package that arrived at my door a few days later, the contents were infinitely more valuable than I had anticipated: unredacted transcripts of the trial judge, Mr Justice Hidden’s, four-day summing up before the jury retired to consider its verdict. Summaries have been described as "the most important step that a judge takes in a trial, prior to sentence". Justice Hidden's keenly structured account moves through the directions of law, including the precise definitions of the crimes with with which the defendants had been charged; how to interpret the defendants' evidence when forming a view on their respective guilt or innocence; and every relevant piece of information from the many witnesses who took to the stand under oath at Hove Crown Court. One by one, the judge covers the testimony of first attenders, police officers, neighbours, friends, partners, work colleagues, even to the builders who worked on their house. He recaps the lengthy defendant testimony and the cross-examinations and records of phone calls between the conspirators. 

That vital evidence is supplemented by letters, read out in full, written by my father to his GP, worrying about his declining mental health in his final months alive. We now know his slow mental collapse was caused by Jean Daddow, the wife he described in a tragic irony, as an “excellent nurse”, who was secretly slipping cocktails of narcotics into his food and cups of tea. The drugs were supplied by her dealer son (see below) and delivered by the hitman disguised as a badger conservationist (no joke). When this ruse did not see my dad to an early grave, and he began making plans to move to Cornwall to recover nearer his mother and family, Jean Daddow saw the money she was desperateto inherit through his death disappearing over the horizon. She immediately accelerated her plan to have him assassinated, having convinced him to amend his will so she inherited his estate, including, crucially, the expensive house they shared.  

The judge's summary of the evidence is, variously shocking, stomach-churning, and addictive. It is a compelling read, a page-turner all of its own that would be awarded a five-star review on this website. I was transported back to a period of turmoil in my life, from ages 17 to 19, that never for one moment did I think I would be reliving thirty yearslater. Memories of sitting in the public gallery watching the seven-week trial in April 1993, long since suppressed or forgotten, came flooding back in fractured, fractious rivulets. My sporadic grasp of the case's detail was partly because we attended court only on the days when the ‘stars’ of the show were on stage, as advised by our police contacts. I never saw some of the witnesses in the summary speak under oath. In any case, my brain was too addled to process what they were saying effectively.

One of the most important of those gaps concerns Jean Daddow’s son, Roger Blackman, who was in his early twenties at the time of the murder. He hated my father for breaking up his parents' marriage, as if his mother was not to blame. In fact they were both married with children at the time their affair began in 1985, divorcing their former partners to get married and start a new life together. Jean Daddow liberally fanned the flames of Blackman's hatred for my father, bending it to effect her malicious design. For reasons best known to his defence team, however, Blackman did not take the witness stand at the trial. However, helpfully for the jury, and now for me, the judge recapped the headlines from everything he told the police under caution in interviews through January and March 1992. Although Blackman's words have to be interpreted with the caveat that he was not speaking under oath, and he could not be cross-examined, the records speak  to the various techniques criminals use to evade suspicion: denial, obfuscation, ambiguity, feigned memory loss, and faux outrage/surprise at being treated as a suspect. Without realising it, Blackman gave the police the information they needed to develop and test the hypothesis that this murder was the product of three familiar crime narratives: love, hate, and greed.

This is why true crime writers need primary source material created by the courts system. It helps fill gaps in our knowledge and assemble the pivotal facts we need to  tell robust accounts of how a crime was committed. Trial transcripts, along with the judge's summing up, help us flesh out the leading characters, their personality types, their myriad motivations, their thought processes, and their actions leading to a crime. Primary sources also show, in fine detail, how criminals attempt to control the narrative once apprehended, by manipulating stories about what happened to claim innocence or elicit our sympathy. 

If these records help us deepen and/or revise tired stereotypes about the perpetrators of serious crime, they also work in support of better informed stories about their victims. As I trawled the judge’s summary I arrived at the view that my father was assassinated in person on 26 November 1991, and then his character was assassinated a second time in court. Most of the media at the time, as my book will show, swallowed the criminals' partial narrative hook, line and sinker. Yet Terry Daddow was executed without the opportunity to defend himself or tell his side of the story. In the days before Victim Impact Statements were commonplace in the judicial process, his family was also denied the opportunity to speak on his behalf. In cases such as this, where criminals get to play victims, and victims are denied victimhood in the court of public opinion, some rebalancing is clearly in order.  

In conclusion, Justice Hidden's trial summary will radically transform the structure and content of my book, and I am currently revising both in light of the document. This crime was far, far more sinister, even than is currently recognised in the secondary commentary about it. The shot was fired on a man who, while no saint, was a far, far better person than his murderers naturally wanted everyone in court to believe. To peel back the layers of criminal propaganda we have to patiently unravel their motives, methods and narrative contortions stitch by stitch. This can only be done to the degree necessary using original source material. As research breakthroughs go, this transcript is, quite simply, a 'Hidden gem'.    

Image credits: author’s own.