27/02/2017 Inside Out East Midlands

Was it suicide or murder? of a Nottinghamshire mum

Retired detective, Tony Blockley, discovers some astonishing

new evidence in the case of Claire Martin.

Looking at this, if I was briefing a senior

investigating officer at this

autopsy, I would be suggesting that you need to go and find the

Also tonight, the postman who looked like Jamie Vardy -

The irony of a lookalike, it's like a fraud, isn't it, really?

He's not who he looks like, he's someone else.

Also tonight, as HS2 gets the go-ahead

will our wildlife reserves pay a price?

We're at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire to bring

you the stories that matter, closer to home.

This is Inside Out for the East Midlands.

This week marks five years since the sudden and brutal death

The 30-year-old mother from Nottinghamshire died

from multiple stab wounds to the neck.

An Italian judge decided she'd killed herself.

But now the British authorities want the case re-opened.

We asked former detective Tony Blockley to investigate

She'd found love with her Italian partner Diego when they worked

We got introduced after what, three or four months.

She was fluent Italian, she was also fluent in Napolese,

And I used to go on a more regular basis to see her than Ray, but yes,

Then Diego returned to Germany for work.

Claire was on the brink of joining him there

Just gone three o'clock in the morning I got the telephone

call from Diego to say come quick, come quick, Claire is dead.

have come to meet Pat and Roy at home. This is where some of the

anomalies have come from. Talking from them, you can feel not

only their grief but also the frustration at how the case was

handled. It has caused such lasting effects that I do not know whether

we will ever get over everything that has caused it. I am sorry.

5 years on, I do not wear any further forward than the day after.

I think five years on, I don't think they are any

It just wants starting from the very beginning and working right through.

You need resources to put into it and you need time and effort

I'm now a criminology lecturer at the University of Derby.

Its International Policing and Justice Institute has

the biggest concentration of criminal investigation expertise

I'm hoping to use some of that expertise to look at Claire's case.

Pat and Ray have given me the files from their solicitor.

On the morning of March 1st 2012, Claire had been at a house

in rural southern Italy rented by Diego's parents.

When Diego's brother left the house, Claire is said to have asked him

A short time later Claire set off for work, leaving her one-year-old

Claire's car was reached by an external flight of stairs.

Within a few minutes Diego's mother says she heard screams

and Claire came back upstairs clutching her neck.

When asked what had happened Claire had said, "It was a man,"

and gestured towards land behind the house.

As well as these witness statements, the pictures of the crime scene also

have strong indications that Claire had been attacked.

For example, the car key and where the car key is deposited.

It's almost as if she has been dragged backwards

Pat and Ray talked about the knife being wiped and when you look

at the pictures of the knife the blade is still covered in blood.

Arguably it's the handle that's been wiped.

If somebody wanted to commit suicide why would they do that?!"

Out of the three knives, this one would

be the best replica of the one that was used.

For me, the key evidence in Claire's case are the stab

I've asked the university's forensics department to take a look.

When I used to work for the police in London, we quite often did tests

The Italian authorities placed a great emphasis on the lack

If we can go through it and we can say this doesn't add up,

this doesn't appear right, ask them why they did this,

at least it will give them some right of reply.

You know, if we're not careful we just accept what's happened

without questioning it and where do families like this go?

Every year, an average of 80 Brits die abroad

20 years ago, Eve Henderson's husband was killed in Paris.

She runs the support group Murdered Abroad.

the University of Derby with a new organisation -

Justice for All - which I hope will offer practical

From that devastation at the beginning when they're

on their knees, they start getting it together and then they're

in fighting mode, but you can't do that at the beginning.

And that is when you need the assistance, that's when you need

In Claire's case, I'm hoping a Home Office

Dr Stuart Hamilton is also an advisor to the BBC television

Simple fact is that stabbing one's self in the neck is a very, very,

There are no obvious defensive injuries on the hands or forearms

where somebody sort of warded off or grasped at an assailant,

but if you're taken by surprise or overcome from behind then

you wouldn't necessarily expect to see them.

There is so many unanswered questions for them.

This just looks wrong and there's a smell

just to close the case and say it was suicide

is clearly not true and

therefore I think we have to do all in our power to challenge that

I feel we are going to the next step of a very large staircase.

That next step is to ask the Italian authorities to reopen the case.

If they don't, we'll consider asking the European Court

In an age of celebrity and selfies, just being the double of someone

Last series we caught up with Lee Chapman,

a Jamie Vardy lookalike, who was having a crazy time

after Leicester City won the Premier League.

But just as the club's league form has crashed this season,

Lee's also been left picking up the pieces following his

In this age of celebrity and selfies, being the double

At the height of the Leicester City story last season you could be

forgiven for thinking there were two Jamie Vardys.

The man who shot the Foxes to the most unlikely

of sporting triumphs turned out to have a lookalike.

And the day after the premier league title was confirmed Lee Chapman's

life changed when he got pulled onto the team coach.

They were all laughing, like jeering and cheering,

The next day he was on a tour of TV studios.

So there's the front page of The Sun, there he is,

The next day he was The on a tour of TV studios.

So there's the front page of The Sun, there he is,

there's the front page of The Star, the front page of The Mirror,

so Jamie Vardy, the striker the superstar, and here's

you Lee Chapman, a postman, and you look exactly like him,

you've been a Leicester fan all your life, does life

I don't know, err, umm, I'm lost for words.

Look, we've got the photographers, there's your agent with

But within weeks it turned sour for Lee.

And he holds one man responsible for that.

I am Lee's agent, yes, celebrity agent.

It was a ride but at the same time looking back it was only a ride

because he was driving it the way he wanted to drive it.

Well, this is a story of a Jamie Vardy lookalike,

and a David Beckham lookalike getting conned -

and it was uncovered thanks to a young George Best.

I've never come out and said I look like Vardy, I've never

I was out all day like this and I didn't realise that he's

Lee has his own trophy cabinet, full of mementoes from a crazy summer.

I think all Leicester fans have got one after last year,

And when you look at it does it bring back lots of happy memories?

Inside Out first caught up with Lee at last year's Ladies Day

Behind it all, pulling the strings, was his agent.

Yes, it's James Austin - and it's A-U-S-T-I-N.

We've got over a thousand lookalikes on our books who work all over

the world and it's absolutely brilliant, we go to some

fantastic jobs and we've got a TV show as well.

That agency and TV show are real, but they're owned

First into the den is Andy Harmer from Eastbourne.

Will he secure the ?100,000 investment he's asking for.

Andy Harmer has spent years earning a living

from his resemblance to David Beckham.

Andy Harmer says Austin just looked after the social media

We've seen numerous emails sent by Austin where he claims to be

a director and owner of the Lookalikes agency

Unfortunately for Lee Chapman, the misrepresentation

For every booking, Lee should've received 80% of the fee,

pretty standard for this kind of work.

The agency gets 20%, but Andy Harmer says he agreed

Austin could receive half of that for any bookings secured

Here's an invoice for the Lookalikes Agency correctly

submitted by Austin, with Andy Harmer's

But we've seen numerous emails where Austin began bypassing that

system and getting money paid into an account that

For example, take that job at Leicester Racecourse.

Emails show Austin billed the course ?420 up front,

to be paid into the account HE controlled, with the rest

Lee says he only received a total of around ?100.

And this happened time and time again.

But for Lee the real problem was what happened

I don't really give two monkeys about the money.

Whenever you associate me with Vardy, everyone always

asks the same question - he blocked you, didn't he?

There's a lot of people blocked on my Twitter for various reasons

Jamie Vardy and his wife had become fed up of the way their names

were being linked to Lee's Twitter and Instagram accounts

Lee says that wasn't him - it was his agent.

And to make matters worse, when the Vardys blocked

the accounts, Austin sold it as a story.

I've seen the invoice, he has sold that story himself

behind my back and got the money for it.

What we can say is we don't know what we've done.

Austin pocketed ?750 for the story, in spite of the damage it did

Lee only realised he'd been duped thanks to another

Mark O'Hare sometimes works as a young George Best.

Lee had asked me about payment for doing lookalike gigs.

He had said he hadn't received any payment or he'd received very little

so that baffled me obviously seeing the PR and the press that Lee had

Mark worked for Andy Harmer's Lookalikes agency

Austin told me that he was a co-owner of Lookalikes

and that he ran it with Andy Harmer, now he mustn't have known that

Andy Harmer is a friend of mine outside the lookalike business.

You know for him to be doing all this work and not getting paid

for it and to be totally duped the way he has been

So it's a bit of a whacky world being a lookalike,

people expect you to be good at football or living a bit

of a high lifestyle, have a lot of money,

The irony of a lookalike, it's like a fraud isn't it really.

He's not who he looks like, he's someone else.

In fact Austin was more of a fraud than Lee could have imagined.

take a look online for Jamie Austin and his criminal past becomes clear.

In 2008, he admitted using his own grandparents's identities to commit

fraud totalling tens of thousands of pounds to help gambling debts. In

2011, he was arrested passing fake notes at Royal Ascot. When convicted

in 2012 on a number of different offences he committed were brought

together, Austin was jailed for 2 years.

Lee and his family are still feeling the fallout. He has had abuse on

social media. Someone needs to start that Vardy lookalike. You need to

stab me because I look like someone? When he split from Boston, he

threatened to publish photos of lay with the drugs. I went to the police

regarding this and did a professional drugs test and am

completely clear. And the repeated use of 1 word

online has had a direct impact. He struggled to take gyms to the

parking days there was any bad comments of him being a paedophile.

I have seen their hatred that he has got. All the negative side that was

created as the last thing that is going to be accepted. I don't want

that. This fraud of an agent that has billed this guy up, but he is

also the guy that has brought him down.

Plans for HS2 phase one between Euston and Birmingham is due to get

the green light from Parliament any day now.

-- has just been given the green light.

And if things go to plan work on this multi-billion pound project

could start later this year with phase two in the East Midlands

But many environmentalists are saying the preferred

route through our region is detrimental to wildlife.

Naturalist and broadcaster Mike Dilger has been

to North West Leicestershire to investigate.

This disused line in Leicestershire was one of hundreds of railways

It was part of a new and exciting transport network.

But even back then, building new lines caused controversy.

Way back in 1893 protestors managed to get the proposed route

from London to Leicester diverted to save the city's roman wall.

Today another proposed route is dividing opinion round here.

The route of HS2 is kind of Y shaped.

You've got London down here, Birmingham in the middle

and from here the route splits up to Manchester on the eastern section

Phase one, linking London and Birmingham, gets going this year and

as many as 63 ancient woodlands will be affected. The Woodland Trust has

identified another 35 ancient woodlands, which may be lost or

adversely affected in phase two. The roots to Manchester and Leeds.

Richard Briers lost land back in the 1990s when the then newly

constructed A42 sliced through his family's property. He is no stranger

to large-scale infrastructure projects. I understand why HS2 has

to be built, and for you would like to see it tucked in alongside the

model as close as possible, because the impact on the Woods will be

less. It is possible to do that, but it comes out quite a few hundred

yards away and that just cut off a whole chunk woods.

You're worried about the environmental concerns? This is the

last year and wildlife. Any time you put a major thing through, we have

already had the A42 in my lifetime, another major infrastructure project

only 20, 30 years later is very devastating for the woods.

The turn ancient woodland relates to any site that has had continual

wooded cover for at least 400 years, in effect dating back but nowadays,

sites like this cover only about 2% of the entire British Isles. Behind

does, there is a wood which will disappear underneath HS2 and behind

that is a much smaller would, which was completely missed by HS2, why?

We do not know. Natural England crashed into survey forwards smaller

than two hectares and they said they had but one of our volunteers found

that and several other woodlands that they had completely missed and

have now been added to the ancient woodland inventory.

In this village, people say high-speed rail will bring them know

benefits and plenty of cost. Well, it is going to be a slice of bread

through the National Forest. Therefore I do not see how it is

going to enhance the local environment. Wear on what is called

the Eastern Lake, each as to be. I am also concerned about our

environment more wildly. We live in nice countryside, we are a rural

village and are about to be trapped between a motorway and an HS2 line.

So, is the environmental pain worse the economic game? Nigel Harris, a

magazine editor, thinks it is. With double the number of passengers

since the last day 1.8 million people travel, we are going to have

10 million more people in the next 20 years and everybody wants to

move. Parts of the network are already filled to bursting and other

parts will be soon. We have to get ahead of that demand curve.

And fortunately for people and nature reserves in the way, it is a

question of like it or lump it? Not necessarily. If you keep pushing,

there are amendments that can be had but there will be one or two losers.

When age as one where build we moved one or two houses in their entirety,

but there were always be a few people unhappy on a big project like

this, I am afraid. When it comes to the environment,

opinions on HS2 are not just evading communities, they are debating the

government as well. We are walking along this line, where the tracks

will be. This MP has been a vocal opponent of the whole project. I met

him on the planned route near the village of Worthington in his

constituency. You are conservative member of Parliament, it is an

initiative pushed through by this government, does this make you sit

uncomfortably? Speak and act as a biologist, you know that if you

compartmentalise habitats, you're going to reduce the brooding

populations, that will have a huge impact on the weightless because

effectively you're building a wall Street with a to go straight to

ecosystems and disrupt all those patterns. I voted against HS2 of a

tenant has been on the floor of the House of Commons. It is a white

elephant project and will have a huge impact on my seat. We are

taking all of the paper none of the game. It is stopping noteworthy as

and I will continue to oppose the project for the business case, the

environmental case and the effect on the local area.

We contacted HS2 and any statement, they said...

Going forward, we will continue to refine the design, including the

development of appropriate environmental mitigation measures.

I'm ending at one of the most northerly nature reserves

in the East Midlands - Carr Vale near Bolsover.

The Derbyshire Wildlife Trust says the planned route will to put

it bluntly ruin parts of this wetland reserve.

And what's more how HS2 went about assessing the least

environmentally-damaging route right across England was flawed.

If you look out beyond the water bodies, from the maps we have got so

far it would appear that it will come right to the back of the

reserve and we are concerned that some of the water bodies will

disappear completely. Do you feel they are taking the environment or

concerns and mitigation seriously enough? The route selection is a

major problem and we do believe the government is not listening

seriously enough the wildlife trusts and other organisations raising

massive concerns about the impact on the hundreds of wildlife sites

throughout England. We think the government has got to do a lot more

to really, seriously look at the impact on wildlife and the natural

world with this mega infrastructure project.

HS2 say "the current proposals in the East Midlands

provide the best balance between engineering requirements,

cost, and the desire to minimise impact on people

environmental organisations are anxious about the planned route.

So surely we need to listen to their concerns as lines just

like this one will shape our local landscape for generations to come.

Well, from Derbyshire, that is it from us for another week. I do hope

you can join us next week. Next time, the miracle babies who are

beating the odds, but we should doctors draw the line? I think we

are probably around the limit of where we are going to get with the

Hello, I'm Riz Lateef with your 90-second update.