From the outside, it looked like the sort of happy family home a child might draw. Red brick, surrounded by rolling countryside, in Curdridge, near Winchester. Here lived the true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee, with his second wife, Tracey Dee, and their two young daughters, Zoe and Sasha, in the early 1990s.
Inside, it was a house of horrors, full of murder memorabilia. In a wardrobe were the clothes a nine-year-old girl had been murdered in. One afternoon, Zoe was playing when she found them.
The now 38-year-old council worker from Romsey says she remembers “putting it all on … going downstairs and everyone being absolutely traumatised”. Later, another gruesome memento was added to the collection: the Austin Metro that convicted murderer Michael Sams had used to transport a body in 1991. Bloodied sections of the seatbelts had been cut out for forensic tests.
Berry-Dee was the serial killer man. He wrote to convicted murderers in jail and befriended them. They told him everything.
Through them he saw the terror in their victims’ eyes, watched their anguished death throes, heard their final screams. He listened to tapes of their confessions in his study. Zoe grew used to hearing them echo through the house.
With total sales of nearly 1m, Berry-Dee is the UK’s bestselling true crime author since records began, according to NielsenIQ BookData; a self-styled “investigative criminologist” who routinely appears on TV documentaries and podcasts, and at true crime conferences. His fascination with serial killers is underpinned, he says, by a profound sympathy with their victims. They say he is a violent abuser of women and children, a man with criminal convictions, who has been reported to the police multiple times for child sexual abuse.
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