How UK’s ‘worst sex offender’ got away with murder — and was finally caught

Dubbed the UK’s “worst sex offender,” Scottish rapist and murderer Iain Packer is currently serving the second-longest prison term in the nation’s history.

But he very nearly got away with it.

That was, until investigative journalist Sam Poling began a relentless investigation — now a podcast and documentary — into the 2005 unsolved murder of Glasgow woman Emma Caldwell, whose naked body was discovered in isolated woods.

While Packer had been on the police radar since the beginning, Poling says officers were initially shut down when they named him as a suspect.

“The police officers were shouting quietly that it was Iain Packer back in 2005,” she tells Gary Jubelin on this week’s episode of his podcast, I Catch Killers.

“And then Iain Packer … just goes on offending.”

It wasn’t until 2018, when Packer contacted Poling – a multi-award-winning reporter with the BBC known for her impactful documentaries on programmes like Panorama and Disclosure – with a request to try to “clear his name” after media reports in 2015 linked him to the case.

Poling agreed to meet Packer for a coffee.

“He came with his girlfriend,” she says, “he was strange. He was very nervous. He was very anxious. I have never been in the presence of somebody who has been so angry, constantly. [There was] just this seething rage that would sit underneath, and he would stare at me. I just remember looking at him and just thinking, God, you know, you’re a strange man. But he was open.”

Poling quickly began communicating with Packer in order to understand his story.

“I would sit there and spend hours with him,” she explains.

“I’m into motorbikes and he’s into motorbikes, so we would go off for half an hour talking about motorbikes or dogs and we’d talk about stuff.”

Over time, however, Poling describes that in the process of trying to “clear his name,” Packer had in fact incriminated himself in Emma’s murder.

“I’ll never forget sitting there, looking at this stuff and reading about his jewelry, and reading the location and reading things that he was describing to the police that I knew because I’d spoken to the women involved,” she says.

“I had all the pieces of the jigsaw at that point. And I just remember sitting there in utter disbelief, thinking. You have been lying to me this whole time.”

“It was Iain Packer who’d raped Emma in the months before she was missing. I then realised that this man was also responsible for a number of rapes of women. I then realised he was also responsible for a number of abductions of women, he was responsible for a number of women being taken to a remote, wooded location, which sounded very similar to the one where Emma’s body was found, and then I discovered in fact that he had taken Emma to those very same woods on six occasions prior to her murder.”

“In a split moment,” Poling continues, “I realised that the man that I’d been meeting for months was a violent, aggressive man who had raped and murdered Emma Caldwell. And that’s a moment that you don’t forget.”

It was a filmed confrontation between Poling and Packer – while making a documentary on the murder – that eventually brought about the killer’s downfall.

Poling, who had at this stage maintained a civil relationship with Packer, had been planning to confront him over her realizations about his guilt.

“He had been away on holiday,” she recalls.

“I got a text on Christmas Day saying, ‘Merry Christmas, sweetie. I hope you get all you wish for.’ I started to realise there was a bit of a fascination that he had with me.”

“I met him outside the building and I said, ‘are you OK?’ And he said, ‘yeah, I’m so excited, I can’t wait to hear what you found out.’ I took him into the room, sat him down, and I just said: ‘you’ve not been telling me the truth. I think you’re a violent man. I think you’re a sexually violent man and I think you’re a rapist. I think you killed Emma.’ And in that moment, the oxygen just left the room.”

As a result of the documentary airing, a number of other women came forward to report attacks at Packer’s hands. Ultimately, after a six-week trial in which Poling was one of the star witneses, Iain Packer was convicted of 33 charges against 22 women, including the murder of Emma Caldwell, and 11 counts of rape, spanning a period of over 25 years.

His pattern of sexual violence was described by the sentencing judge as an “extraordinary campaign” carried out in a “single-minded pursuit of your sexual desires,” leaving “no room for the wishes or wellbeing of the women.”

And while she says she is relieved to see Packer behind bars, and Emma’s murder solved, the weight of responsibility still sits heavily on Poling.

“I knew all the women,” Poling says.

“I mean, you don’t just get to know women. You really get to know the women. I knew their families, I knew their kids’ names, their kids’ birthdays. I would drop off Easter eggs. I would take them to go and pick up hospital appointments. And you just really invest. You’ve got a duty of care for all of these women. And so that was such a weight of responsibility that I felt that if this case failed and if he didn’t get a guilty verdict, even on one of the charges, that would be on me. And the reason I felt that was because throughout the trial, my name came up over and over and over.”

“Not [every woman who came forward] got a guilty verdict for their charges, and that’s on me,” says Poling.

“One of the women who I was incredibly close with, who was amazing, she took part. She’s Yvonne in the documentary, she’s just absolutely incredible. Me coming into her life and asking her to tell me her story has destroyed her. She slept the night before giving evidence in a car park because she’s now homeless. And she’d got her life together. She had a little boy, you know, and she’s lost everything, and to know that’s on me… that’s a really difficult place to sit here today. And that’s why I don’t like talking about this case because I feel the weight of everybody’s lives and the damage that they’re going through.”