A GP raises the alarm about one of his patients, 82-year-old Bill Williamson. He failed to keep a couple of medical appointments. So, social services reported missing to the police. Where is Bill? Is he safe? Has he just fallen and hurt himself or actually something more untoward has has occurred? The police need to investigate where he is.
So initially it’s almost like a fear for welfare. Bill Williamson lived in Milford village for a very long time. He was a retired postman which would have allowed him to get to know people their names etc. We all know our postman. He’d been married to Mary who sadly passed away in 2004. Police speak to Bill’s friends and neighbors.
Bill was reported as being a quiet gentleman, probably quite lonely because he’d recently lost his wife, but friendly and quite a nice chap. He used to go to church with his wife. She was a very quiet Irish lady who died a few years ago. They didn’t have any children, but would occasionally visit family in Ireland.
He was a cheerful man who loved his gardening. He kept himself to himself a lot of the time, but he was really friendly. He came around for Christmas dinner. He would take my bins out for me. He was a lovely man, but he was lonely and vulnerable. He hadn’t been seen for about a month by residents in the area. Many of them would have seen him coming and going around the village.
As time went on, they become more and more worried about him. This was out of character for Bill. He wouldn’t go missing for days on end. The community in Milford were really concerned for Bill’s welfare. So they started a Facebook campaign, which was a real drive to try and help the police and help identify where Bill was.
Bill might be somewhere of his own valition and he’s alive and well. He might be ill. He might not be able to contact people. Time is critical. Police find Bill hasn’t been seen for 4 weeks before missing his doctor’s appointment. His last sighting is the 10th of September, the day he sold his house. Bill had formed a relationship with a younger woman by the name of Anne Brown in they’ met a few years earlier and had some greyhounds and they would go walking them together and and they obviously started to form a bond.
They were spending a lot of time together. She was adopting caring responsibilities towards him, cooking, cleaning, looking after him. They made a decision they were going to move in with each other. So, Bill decided he was going to sell his house. I think for Bill’s point of view, it was that Anne could look after him in his later life.
The police really needed to speak to Anne Browning and find out what she knew about Bill’s location. Police find Anne at the couple’s home in the village and ask her if she knows where Bill is. Uniform officers attended Anne’s house and she told them about 3 weeks before he’d gone to a funeral in Ireland. It was an 82y old man.
The funeral was on the other side of Ireland. For somebody of his age, for him to take that trip, it just didn’t add up. And the police weren’t happy with Anne Browning’s account. What the police can’t do is assume that harm has come to him. People go missing in the UK every every day. Not all of them come to harm.
Not all of them are at risk. So what they’ll be doing is trying to find him and in an ideal world, find him alive and well somewhere. Bill is not a typical victim of crime at all. Most victims of crime are actually young men, not the sort of stereotypical visions of of an elderly person, an old an old man or an old woman. As a result of the Facebook campaign, police received information that potentially could show that Bill was alive and well.
One of those was that friends of his had received birthday cards purportedly signed by Bill and also his car was seen moving around the village. Either that was Bill and he was alive and well or it wasn’t and someone was doing acts to try and make it look like he was alive. So what they would have been doing is try to look for proof of life.
Whenever we go about our daily business, we leave a footprint. be it the credit cards we use when we use our mobile phones, talking to friends. So that’s what they would be looking for Bill. Is there anything we can find to show that he’s still alive, to show that he’s out there somewhere and we can find him? So they started to look into his bank details in his card usage.
There’s a different time pressure if it’s a missing person inquiry because that missing person may still be alive. They may potentially have been kidnapped or they may be kept in a in a really difficult situation. So, it’s almost like more time pressured to find the evidence to try and find out where this missing person is.
He would be considered high-risisk because of his age and because when they started to talk to people, he was feeling lonely after his wife passed away. I think you could probably consider him as quite vulnerable, somebody that could potentially be prayed upon. Police would be looking for inconsistencies within somebody’s story, within their account.
And that’s exactly what they found with Anne Browning. Police made inquiries with the relatives in Ireland and they hadn’t seen Bill. They hadn’t heard from him for at least a few weeks. Officers find further holes in Anne’s account. She had told police that Bill’s car had been scrapped. His car is found in the village and taken to a forensic garage for analysis.
Bill’s car was alleged to have been moved every couple of days post his disappearance. So, who’s been driving the car? Is it Bill and he’s safe and sound or is it somebody else? So, that could then be an additional crime scene. So, CSIs would search the vehicle. They would also fingerprint it and look for any evidence of the vehicle being used or anything that might look a little bit untowards in that vehicle and particularly trying to find out who’s been driving it.
So, fingerprinting, the doors, the windows, rear view mirror, that kind of thing. So all these factors taken together that would have really raised the concerns of the police which would then have led them on to forming a number of hypotheses around him. There would have been a spotlight now on Anne Browning if as it seemed more likely that some harm had come to Bill.
She was really the person in frame for that. Officers following Bill’s financial trail confirmed the team’s fears that Bill has come to harm. What they discovered that Bill’s bank card was being used, but not where and Browning said he was. It wasn’t in Ireland. It was in and around Milford Village. Police in Surrey are investigating the disappearance of pensioner Bill Williamson.
Since going missing, his bank cards have been used in a local supermarket. 95% of shops have CCTV. So, what CCTV is there? Um, either on the checkout or on the entrance and exits to that shop to try and locate who’s been using Bill’s bank account. In an ideal world, Bill still alive and well and using his cards.
But it wasn’t Bill that it was Anne Browning. What police saw is that she was behaving quite normally. She was just getting on with her life. She didn’t seem concerned for Bill and his whereabouts. Nobody had seen or heard of Bill. By now, they would be really concerned that the worst had happened to him. It’s possible when Anne using his card that she was trying to throw the police off the trail.
It’s possible that her relationship with Bill was based on her plans to extort him or to deceive him. This kind of fraudulent and deceptive behavior is something that we do see associated with with female offending. She’s lied to police about where where Bill is. She’s using his credit card. Police really only had one choice.
They had to arrest Anne Browning on suspicion of the murder of Bill Williamson. Anne Browning is taken into custody. That’s a really brave decision to arrest somebody on suspicion of murder when you haven’t got a body and it’s not clear as to whether he’s alive or dead. But the SIO making that decision has opened up further scenes that can be searched.
The police have the power to be able to search their home address and search their vehicles or any other place of work or any other property linked to them. Bill’s car provides no further leads. CSIs enter an and Bill’s home. When the police search your property, you would normally have a forensic search and then they’re searched by licensed search officers.
In a domestic situation, forensic evidence can be quite limited. If the couple live together, then any fingerprint evidence or DNA evidence is quite legitimately within those premises. So the forensic examination would be more around is there any evidence to suggest that there’s been some kind of assault in the scene or anything that might link to where he’s gone missing too.
What they found was just a normal home. There was no sign of disturbance and Browning was a clean and everything was clean. They went in the back garden and there was nothing untoward there. One strange thing though is that Bill was supposed to have moved in with an and none of his property was there. There were none of his possessions there.
Nothing linking back to Bill Bar one item which was a stamp collection. It’s very unusual if someone’s going to move in to live with somebody that there’s no clothes, no underwear, no shoes, no nothing at the address. That would have been a concern for the police. Well, if Bill was living here, why are there no signs of that? It’s really important to do an in-depth search.
Sometimes there might be things within the property that you wouldn’t see on first glance. There might have been a cleanup operation. There may be, you know, spots of blood on a cushion or on bed sheets or on a doorway that on first glance you don’t see. At the station, Browning is questioned. When M. Browning was first interviewed by police, she made no comments or questions. That isn’t actually unusual.
Most people that are arrested and interviewed for murder do the same. So quite often people would think of that as frustrating. It’s really something that police come to expect. So it wouldn’t have been a surprise to them. At Browning’s spotless home, CSIs find a speck of potential evidence. CSIs did find a really small amount of blood that was located behind a radiator.
Most police forces use a test called the Castle Mayor test or a KM test. This is a color changing test and effectively it uses two different chemicals and there’s a color change to confirm that it’s blood. Finding the blood spatter isn’t necessarily a breakthrough moment, but it might help with the investigation. It may not be linked to Bill.
It may be linked to someone completely different. So, it’s really important to do a DNA examination of that blood to ascertain who does that blood belong to. The swabs are sent to the lab. When the blood is sent away, it’s linked to Bill. You would hypothesize around, you know, what might have happened within this scene.
How has the blood got behind the radiator and has something quite serious happened in that location and there’s been a cleanup? And those small blood spatters might have just been missed by somebody. So, the police will pull up carpets, they’ll pull up floorboards and lino um and just see if there’s any blood that’s seeped through under the carpet or under the lino um onto the floorboards beneath.
There’s a chemical that can be used as well called luminal and that actually works really well on very weak blood stains and it will flues bright blue under ultraviolet light. They’re able to see that there has been a cleanup and there is more blood. This then indicates that actually this may be the sign of an attack site and something quite serious may well have happened to Bill, but there’s no blood trail leading through the house.
That tends to suggest to me then that the body might have been wrapped in something and then removed the body from the house without allowing that body to bleed any any further. A violent incident had taken place there. If there were any doubts as to whether harm had come to Bill, I think now those have gone. The team prepared to confront Browning with the forensic evidence.
You need to keep an open mind and hypothesize about the fact that maybe she wasn’t there at the time of the attack. We need to make sure that we can link her back to the actual attack. It’s quite difficult to question somebody about a murder when you haven’t found the deceased person. You don’t even know if they have been murdered.
You’ve got no examination of the body to determine exactly what’s happened. The mindset of the officers that morning would have been an expectation of a no comment interview. Anne Browning had a consultation with her solicitor that morning. Afterwards, the solicitor told police that Anne was ready to speak to them. They went into the interview and things had changed.
She was no longer making no comment. So, what I’d say to you to open up the interview is, can you tell me everything that you know about Williamson’s disappearance? Yes, I confess to his murder. Those officers, their adrenaline would have suddenly been running. They wouldn’t have been expecting this and they would have been keen to get as much information from a man at that time.
Okay, you’re confessing to his murder, but tell us where Bill is. We have very very few women in our prisons in England and Wales that are there for murder. The vast majority of of murder is committed by men to 93%. So really you can find that about 7% of of murder is committed by women.
Female killers are extremely rare. Can’t remember how many times I hit him, but I know I killed him. And then from that point there’s no going back. When you’re thinking about women confessing to crimes, you know, we know from from research that women are more likely to confess to crimes that they didn’t commit in order to to get things out of the way or to move on or to protect somebody else.
In this case, it seems that an has spent a night in the cell, you know, has been thinking about what’s going on and actually has decided that she she’s ready to confess. What strikes me is this feeling, this lack of remorse and this kind of almost robotic behavior. And it doesn’t really strike me as as being the feelings of someone who has just lost a really really close partner, someone that they shared a lot of time with, someone that they were caring for.
I took all his clothes off because of the blood everywhere. kept my head to calm and I wrapped his body in a shower curtain so that I could drag it outside and that is what I did. She said that she’d buried him in the garden. Obviously the crime scene then moved from being inside the house to the garden and an excavation of certain areas of the garden to try and find where the body was buried.
As a crime scene manager, you would probably look at using a different team of CSIs in the garden. You’ve got one team of CSIs working in the house. So there’s no cross transfer of evidence between the two crime scenes. I dumped his body. I made the hole bigger. Dug it a bit, made it bigger, and I dumped his body. When the police officers do a house search, they will always search the house, any vehicles, and also the garden.
Then the search would be anything that might lead to the disappearance of Bill. Obviously, if there was an area in the garden that was very obvious, it’ been freshly dug, then that would be highlighted to the crime scene manager. But in this case, there was no obvious area where um it appeared that her body had been buried. [Music] The best plan really is to get all your specialists there at the scene to have almost like a strategy meeting to decide how you’re going to approach the scene.
Just because someone has said that there is a body buried in a specific location, it might still be a negative job. It’s essential to have the right specialists on site such as a forensic archaeologist. As soon as you come onto that scene, things are going to start changing. If these jobs are done incorrectly or use incorrect people, the job might be compromised and you might lose essential evidence.
Browning directs police to a flower bed. There’s only one opportunity to get this right. So with careful trolling and recording, it will be a painstaking time to actually go through this and excavate and record properly. They discovered that there was a human foot within this grave. This is actually now a murder scene.
Once we’ve got the body, it’s much easier to investigate the crime. From my forensic perspective, I’m really concerned about how am I going to excavate the grave? How deep is the grave? What’s been used to commit the crime? And how are we going to recover that evidence? The forensic team have to work with dense clay soil.
Throughout the country, wherever you are in different places, the soil type will be different. So when human remains are buried in clay, it makes it much much harder in order to excavate. So clay is a very hard material um but it can also be very heavy if it’s um got a high water content.
It is going to affect the way that body decomposes in the ground. Therefore, the excavation process will be much harder and take much more time. An experienced archaeologist will actually be able to tell the difference between the compact of the soil by the way that that soil or that clay feels as they’re excavating with that trail.
The CSI’s role then is more around the photography side. So they will assist the forensic archaeologists and take photographs of the different stages. So it’s a very very systematic recovery of her body because you don’t know what evidence might be within the different layers of soil. After several hours, the team fully uncover the grave.
What they discovered was a mal 5′ tall. He was naked and he’d had his legs tied together using a leather belt. For the officers at that time, a really upsetting moment. The man is buried head first 3 ft in the ground. It can be incredibly difficult and complicated to recover um a body from a grave and obviously trying your best not to damage any evidence.
The deeper the grave is, the more difficult it is going to be to lift and recover that body. Bodies are heavy, so it would need quite a few people to lift the body out of the grave while still preserving any potential forensic evidence on that body. The onduty forensic pathologist is Robert Chapman. The body uh was, as you might expect, coming out of a soilbased grave.
There’s a lot of mud which had to be removed um within the morttery itself before we could actually really see properly the body surface. Uh and then the body was uh decomposing quite significantly decomposing. There were maggots and these of course can be useful evidence in terms of trying to establish the minimum period in which the body’s within the grave site.
[Music] We were obviously a leather belt which was tied quite tightly around the area of the lower thighs, the knee area of the body, passed through the the usual metal buckle, but then tied in a knot rather than the usual way in which you’d fasten a belt. This fastened the the legs together, the thighs and knees together.
In the past, in cases where I found this, it’s been to make the body smaller and more compact um to enable that body to fit into a smaller space. That belt would not be removed at that scene. It would be photographed and recorded in situ whilst in the grave. But that’s evidence that we would relay and wait for the pathologists and the crime scene investigators at the morttery to investigate and look at.
It could of course contain some significant uh information, some significant evidence of somebody, somebody who’s touched it, for example. Maybe someone else’s DNA is there on it. And that would of course be very useful for the investigation. There are going to be preconceptions about the identity of that body in the ground, but it’s incredibly important that that identification process is conducted formally and by the right individuals to make sure that there’s no misinformation being spread around.
So, as soon as that body has been recovered from the ground, it’s really important to get that body to the morttery as soon as possible so the forensic pathologist can examine that body. So that information regarding the identification of the deceased can be provided to the police and the families. With the identification of the body, there are various ways you can do it.
You can look at the teeth. You can you can take DNA. Um you could even sometimes do do fingerprints. Those are the three major ways in which which bodies are identified. The body is sent to the morttery for urgent examination. Usually postmortm started at 11:00 at night and that was because of police procedure.
There was a need to get answers the identification of the body. There were good reasons for it in this case. In this instance, sadly, it was Bill’s body. When something like this has happened, it’s sometimes it’s quite difficult to not get emotionally involved. He’s a lovely upstanding member of the community. This was the healthy elderly man.
when you examine someone older and that’s relatively rare in forensic pathology uh elderly victims usually something has happened to them which is completely beyond their control and so that’s a different kind of I suppose an emotional response [Music] the whole time all right she’s confessing to his murder she may change her mind there may be different circumstances we may be having a trial at some point in the future police have to prove how it happened what were the circumstance stances.
There’s always a motive behind a murder. You don’t just kill a person for no reason. Milford is a small village in Surrey. It’s the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. Not a lot of crime goes on there. So, when something like this happened, it was completely unusual. This was a callous murder.
And the way he was dealt with afterwards just showed a complete lack of respect. 54year-old Anne Browning has made a shocking confession, murdering and burying her partner, Bill Williamson, in the garden. Can you tell me everything that you know about Williamson’s disappearance? Yes, I confess to his murder. Why would somebody murder such a lovely, nice, innocent man? Browning tells police the couple argued.
He said he was going and I just lost my temper. Really lost because he made all these promises that we were going to have a nice life together. and in regretfully in a really split rage of temper I reached out and hit him over the head. She said it was complete unplanned attack and it was a crime of passion.
Um so from a policing perspective we need to look at this hypothesis and see if this scene actually tells us whether this is true or not. What the police disputed is the reasons behind it. Browning told police that she tied Bill’s legs together and had to stand on him to get him into the grave. The word that I keep thinking about is just callous.
She’s trying to downplay what happened because overnight she’s thinking they’re searching my house. They’re going to find the body. They’re going to find blood. Whatever it is, I need to put across an account that’s going to minimize whatever sentence I get. My kind of overarching take-home view is that Anne seems to show very little remorse and I think this is quite unusual considering that she did have some type of domestic partnership with Bill. There was a relationship there.
She was his carer and again when you think about sort of the context in which many murders are taking place normally they are sort of crimes of passion or they are conducted within the heat of the moment. It definitely feels like it was premeditated where she’s murdered someone in a domestic context who trusts her very much.
I cannot stress enough how rare this particular crime is. It jars against womanhood. Crime scene investigators and crime scene managers are impartial. We search the crime scenes for forensic evidence to prove or disprove something. We’re there to find the facts. At the scene, CSIs look for evidence to corroborate Browning’s account.
I was standing in the hallway by the cupboard door that leads to the coats and near the bathroom. And there, that’s where I keep um it’s a bit of a baseball bat. I think I just grabbed it and hit him with that. During the house search, there was a rounder’s bat that was found in the cupboard.
On this rounders bat, there was some blood. Has this been used as a weapon? I have in the past attended numerous crime scenes where bats have been involved. I’ve seen the effects of this. A victim can have horrendous head injuries from being hit with a bat. If there is any DNA on that bat, may well link to an offender rather than the victim.
Not only may there be blood on it, there might be fibers. Depending on how hard he’s been hit, there might be hair. There may well have been some blood spatter which would indicate the direction of the force. And there may also be maybe bone fragments on there which again would it help to indicate the level of force that’s been used in the attack.
The bat is fasttracked to the lab. You’re also looking at the body. There’s a huge amount of forensic potential that is on that body. If he’s put up a fight, there may be hairs and trace evidence under his fingernails. Sometimes when a body’s really decomposed, um it’s a lot more difficult to get some of the trace evidence, but we would always always search for every type of evidence on a on a body.
We’re looking for any defense injuries on the victim. Is there a lot of injuries on that body which would corroborate her story or actually blow her story out of the water? and were able to prove that, you know, there was more intent to this offense. Investigators need to know how Bill died and when he was buried. The condition of the body was consistent with death having occurred some weeks prior to the discovery of the body and him being brought to the morttery.
It was a difficult examination because of the level of decomposition present. So, differentiating between injuries which have occurred before death and after death can be very difficult. Examining the body, I could see areas of damage to the soft tissue of the of the scalp. There was no damage to the skull. I found multiple blows to the head, front, side, and back, and probably seven or eight blows consistent with a um a violent attack.
These are all blunt injuries. No evidence they were being there were cuts. They were actual splitting injuries or lacerations caused by impact from a blunt object. Pathologists can give the police some idea as to what might have caused these sorts of injuries. The results of forensic analysis of the rounders bat are in the forensic examinations of the blood on the rounders back showed that that belonged to Bill Williamson.
A number of injuries on the back of the head where there were about four parallel injuries lined up similarly orientated. One explanation might be that he was struck from behind before he saw any attack coming. That’s certainly a possibility. The fact that there were a number there and they’re all lined up in the same sort of plane suggests to me that had been caused in a fairly rapid sequence one after the other before there was any real movement between the weapon and the victim. So potentially at that point he
was already on the floor trapped in some way or unconscious. He was completely unaware and the first he would known about it was the first blow. From the beginning of their relationship, there was a power imbalance in the sense that Bill was always paying an as his carer, you know, to cook, to clean for him.
Anne was originally in Bill’s will due to the close relationship that they had formed over quite a short period of time. Bill and Anne Browning had been close, but there was a falling out after Bill had believed she’d been stealing money from him. But a few years later, after the death of one of Anne’s dogs, they become close again.
Officers looking into the couple’s relationship discover that a few months ago, Browning stole £1,200 from Bill. One of the most important elements, and it may seem small, is the £1,200 that was stolen from Bill. So, what this shows is that and has already stolen money from him. It’s possible that her relationship with Bill was based on her plans to extort him or to deceive him.
I think as a consequence of that, you know, she was getting used to being paid and it may well be that it’s just it just went too far. But to prove this theory in court, the team needs to find further evidence that Browning was after Bill’s money. As police continue to follow the financial trail, forensic specialists at the scene examine the grave.
Although there’s been a confession, you still need to make sure that you can preserve any evidence that is at that scene. The majority of clandestine burials in this country tend to be quite shallow burials uh where the perpetrators have just dug a grave big enough to bury that individual. But we do come across deeper graves from time to time.
Um and it’s all about following that science down as you’re excavating. You’d be looking for presence of things like leaf litter in the grave. You’d be looking for the presence of broken roots or anything else in terms of broken flowers that might determine when these cuts were put into the ground.
Most people, if they’re digging a grave for a body, tend to dig quite a shallow grave, mainly because it’s really difficult to dig a grave. This has taken several days to dig. Digging is hard work, especially a grave of this size and this depth. It would have taken an awful lot of exertion in order to dig a grave this big. Inside the grave, the team make another chilling discovery.
It appears that there’s almost a step within the grave. So, there’s a ledge that’s been dug and then the grave has been dug deeper than that ledge. That could be purposely dug in by the perpetrator to allow easier access um to get in and out of the grave whilst digging it or it might have been there as an access issue to try and get the body into the grave.
This points towards premeditation. They realize the graves are really deep. How are they going to get the body in into the grave? Forensic evidence indicated that the Browning has potentially dug the grave prior to killing Bill Williamson. She’s premeditated and thought about how she’s going to get the body into the ground.
And investigators doubt she acted alone. I know how hard it is to carry a dead body. So, for a a slim woman to be able to kill somebody, wrap their body up, dig a grave, and put the body in the grave, that’s quite a task for someone to do by themselves. It seems to me that a a woman of her age, of her build, would find it very difficult to commit this crime totally alone.
So, did she have an accomplice? Anne Browning has made a shocking confession, killing and burying her partner, pensioner Bill Williamson, in a crime of passion. He said he was going and I just lost my temper. Really lost because he made all these promises that we were going to have a nice life together. And in in a regretfully in a really split rage of temper, I reached out and hit him over the head.
I can’t remember how many times I hit him, but I know I killed him. And then from that point, there’s no going back, is it? Despite Browning’s claim that she killed him in a moment of madness, the evidence points to premeditated murder. The way that she’s so calm in her demeanor, quite resigned to what’s happening and and saying something along the lines of there’s no going back now, it feels very different to a much more emotive crime.
And the team have doubts she acted alone. The fact that she’s killed Bill using a round bat and then wrapped his body up in the shower curtain. Wrapping the body would aid the movement of it. So, she potentially could have dragged the body outside. But that’s a huge task for a single person to be able to do and a female who potentially isn’t that strong.
As CSIs look for evidence that Browning had help, officers investigating the couple’s finances are convinced of her motive. On the 10th of September 2010, Bill’s house was sold and a few days later, £246,000 was deposited into a joint post office account held with Bill and Browning. Then a few days after that, £140,000 was taken from that account and put into a sole account of Anne Browning.
She’s already gone out of her way to take money from him, so why not again? One strange thing that police found was a diary belonging to Anne Browning. On the 10th of September 2010, the day that Bill Williamson’s house was sold, there was an entry. It simply read, “RIP.” That’s quite chilling. Browning has planned this.
She’s thought about the financial gain. She’s potentially been in contact with others. She’s thought about how she’s going to commit the act and then what she’s going to do afterwards. I took all his clothes off because of blood everywhere. And I dumped his body. I made the hole bigger. Dug it a bit, made it bigger, and I dumped his body.
The fact that she then continued post murder to live her life, to use Bill’s credit card, to spend the money out of his account. This clearly isn’t an accident. She meant to do this. The sentence hearing begins. When police went to court, there would have been what was known as a Newton hearing.
And what this is is it’s a it’s it’s a bit like a trial, but not the same because it’s not in front of a jury. The person making the decision is the judge. And what they’re making the decision on isn’t whether or not the murder took place. It’s the circumstances around it. The judge said, “Taking all her lies and the cumulative effect of them makes me sure that she did plan his murder.
The crown has made me sure that she planned to kill him, whether to benefit herself alone or give financial support to others. This was therefore a wicked murder of a vulnerable old man done for financial gain. Given the horror of what had happened, it reveals calculated thinking on her part. Ultimately, the judge sided with the police and agreed that this was not a spontaneous murder and planned this and she did it purely for money.
Browning is sentenced to life with a minimum term of 25 years for the murder of Bill Williamson. It’s extremely rare for women to be given a very long sentence. Only 10% of the female prison population are there for for life or for indeterminant sentences. Most women in prison are going to find themselves there for a very short period of time.
The average being about 14 months. During the course of my research with women offenders, many women who are caught up in the criminal justice net are there for petty crimes. And so for a woman to to be committing a very serious violent offense of this nature is extremely rare. Of course, we don’t know what happened.
She’s never actually confessed to the involvement of anybody else in this crime, but it feels like it’s something that she would have had an accomplice. Investigators find no evidence anyone else was involved. The actions of Anne Browning were callous were pre-planned. And I believe if you’ve formed a bond with somebody and you’ve got that close and someone as sweet as Bill Williamson, if you can kill them in this way, as far as I’m concerned, you’re capable of anything.
One of the reasons why female crime is seen as so unusual and has such a massive appeal to to the public is because when a woman commits a crime and in particular a really serious or violent crime it jars with our understandings of motherhood of femininity of women’s place in the domestic sphere.
It’s something that you know members of the public that the judiciary that society as a whole is something that we really find very difficult to understand. [Music] Justice has been done in this case. Anne Browning has been given a substantial prison sentence for what she did, but of course it will never bring Bill back. And for Bill’s friends and family, this will be a life sentence for them, too.
It’s such a terrible thing to think that such a nice man died in such an awful way. It was a very sad ending as he loved life, loved his garden, and loved his flowers. When I look at this case and I see someone as sweet as Bill Williamson clearly was, having put his trust into the wrong person who took everything from him, including his life.
For me, the whole case is just heartbreaking.
