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For eight months, he spied on her,
fitted an electronic tracker to her car,
assaulted her, and had broken into her home.
MAN: Shana Grice, 19.
She's gone to police, asking for protection.
But she'd been left to defend herself.
Shana Grice was fined £90 for wasting police time,
when she was the victim.
In this programme, the secret audio tape.
Shana's desperate plea to her stalker.
This is a murder taking place in slow motion.
And the moment the killer ran out of excuses.
Reconstructing official testimony,
court records, and speaking to people close to the case,
this is the story of a young woman terrorised to her death...
This was a step too far.
Something had to be done.
...and a system that failed her.
So, overall, she was let down, yes.
(SEAGULLS CALLING)
MAN: It was the hottest day of the year.
Beautiful day, crowds on the beach.
The kind of day that makes Brighton and Hove the place it is.
The upcoming bank holiday weekend is set to be the busiest of the summer.
WOMAN: It was packed, lots of holiday makers.
Lots of people enjoying ice creams.
But then, an emergency call comes in.
(SIRENS WAILING)
We got word that there were, um, police cars
at an address in Mile Oak in Portslade,
at the western-- northwestern end of Brighton and Hove.
You went from happy seafront with lots of people,
and the atmosphere just changed, really.
I went up into a residential estate
to police cordons, neighbours visibly upset.
Neighbours had reported seeing smoke rising from a house.
MAN: I pulled up just at the bottom of the road,
and as soon as I got here,
the place was completely cordoned off by tape.
Um, there are police forensic teams up and down the road,
and residents just outside their homes,
obviously in shock, and some even in tears.
There is absolute chaos,
police all over the streets,
and that's really when I knew that,
you know, something bad had happened.
Inside, the body of a 19-year-old woman is discovered.
Her name, Shana Grice.
FLORA: A knife, a kitchen knife was missing from the kitchen.
Well, after speaking to one of Shana's friends,
she told me that Shana had her throat slit
and her body set on fire.
And the word had got around on the street as well.
This is a very, very quiet village,
so something of this magnitude happening is completely unheard of.
Um, in fact, I actually grew up a stone's throw away.
Local suspicions pointed to one man.
FLORA: Shana Grice had been bothered by someone
neighbours were labelling immediately as a stalker
for-- for some time.
Michael Lane was arrested within hours,
held in the cells overnight
and questioned the next day.
As detectives began to build their case against Lane,
they quickly realised that there would also be difficult questions
for their own colleagues in Sussex Police.
Shana's case is not an isolated case,
and I am sick of hearing about women
who have made complaints to the police,
and they've not been listened to, they've not been believed,
and then they've ended up being killed
by the person that they've made complaints against.
FRANK: Shana Grice sounded, like a charming and vivacious
um, you know, bright young teenager.
Shana was raised by her mother and stepfather as an only child
in Hove, near Brighton.
She attended a local school and left aged 16.
Her social media profile reflects a normal, fun-loving teenage girl
who loves TV reality shows, boy bands, birthday parties
and shared photographs with her group of friends and cousins.
FLORA: Friends described her
as the kind of mama bear of the friend circle,
so, always looking out for everyone, helping each other,
and, just seemed to be a very fun-loving, friendly young girl.
In summer 2015, Shana started work at this fire alarm firm.
The receptionist, whose friendly face greeted customers.
Soon, she attracted the attention of the company mechanic, Michael Lane.
FLORA: Michael Lane was a few years older than Shana Grice,
and they seemed to become friendly quite early on.
But few knew the truth about Michael Lane.
He was close to a breakdown.
He spoke to his local priest.
Michael was quite a-- a sort of a blokish guy.
He was quite a big, stocky fella,
and he had a very sort of deep, booming voice.
Um... and, yet there was a real gentleness to him,
as far as I was concerned.
Um, I-- I kind of understood
that most of the issues he had were through grief.
He'd lost members of his family, and I think his granddad dying
had been very, very impactful on his-- on his life.
Um, and he talked about how to cope with those kind of grief emotions.
I was obviously concerned, initially, about him.
I was told he'd tried to take his own life.
Um, I did check that he was receiving
medical attention, medical treatment,
and he said he was speaking to his GP regularly,
so I thought, "That's great, that's the--
"You know, the issues there are being dealt with medically."
There was no hint of the obsessive nature
that Lane was now showing towards Shana.
He would pay her a lot of attention at work,
and I think to many, uh, including Shana, from what we've learned,
that it was something that was fairly innocent,
but, um, maybe perhaps a bit more persistent than she had hoped.
His persistence was not unusual.
It actually came out that he had stalked and harassed
12 other young women between 2006 and 2016.
Ellie May was one of those young women targeted by Michael Lane.
He'd send me pictures of my bedroom window,
um, as if he's, you know, sitting outside my house,
and he'd send me a picture and say, "I can see you,"
and I'd look out my window and he'd be there
sat outside in his van.
I'd shut all my blinds. I'd make sure my doors were locked.
One of the messages I did get from Mike
was asking me if I'd stay in a hotel with him for a night
if he booked a room and he paid me £500.
He would-- that if I would let him do what he wanted to do to me,
which was probably one of the most--
scariest messages I'd had from him,
because if I-- if I'd have gone, and met him,
I don't know what could have happened.
And that's the most chilling part of it all,
because it could have been her, and there's been--
there's 11 other girls just like her
who have probably got the same experiences,
and, you know, it could very well have been them.
There's a pattern of behaviour towards women
who he was in a relationship with,
or perceived himself to be in a relationship with,
um... and so I think there's a--
there's a time when you have to say,
"Was this behaviour always going to culminate
"in this destructiveness that it culminated in?"
That's somebody-- A young girl's life was taken, um,
because of somebody who couldn't accept no,
or couldn't accept rejection.
None of this was known publicly at the time.
Against an obsessive stalker, Shana Grice would be on her own.
At a local fire alarm company, the receptionist, Shana Grice, 18,
has been secretly dating the office mechanic, Michael Lane, aged 26.
It's the start of a series of events that will end in Shana's murder.
Forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes advises the government and agencies
on how to tackle stalking,
and has closely studied the Shana Grice case.
KERRY: We've got Shana, she's starting out in life,
she's got her first job,
she's moved in with some friends who she's sharing her home with,
and this is the beginning of her life, isn't it?
But she hasn't got a lot of life experience,
and so she would look at somebody like Michael Lane and think
that actually he is somebody that she could possibly learn from.
From the start, Michael Lane pressured Shana
to finish with her long-term boyfriend,
and started to buy her gifts.
So we've got somebody who is much older than Shana,
so he's eight years older.
That means a lot when Shana's only 18.
And he is pursuing her,
and I'm sure that she felt that this was very romantic,
but it's the beginning of somebody
actually trying to control you and coerce you.
Secretly they dated over the next few months,
but after a Christmas party in 2015,
Shana called off the relationship.
He would become jealous easily.
They were rowing a lot.
FRANK: Once she began to try to extricate herself
from that relationship with him,
he began a pattern of behaviour
which could only be described as stalking, obsessive.
It was Shana's 19th birthday, and the start of her torment.
Though Shana had returned to her long-term boyfriend,
she received a birthday bouquet from Michael Lane.
He knew that these flowers were unwanted,
and the important thing is that she felt threatened by it.
So she is putting those flowers together
with other parts of Michael Lane's behaviour
that she finds disturbing.
She's joining the dots.
So what seems like an innocuous, really innocent,
maybe even pleasant bunch of flowers
is something far more sinister.
They didn't change Shana's mind.
She was staying with her boyfriend, Ashley Cooke.
Then things turned more serious.
FRANK: Michael Lane would let down Shana Grice's tyres,
uh, or slash her tyres,
and then present himself as her white knight,
coming to replace the tyre for her, replace the wheel for her
uh, to try to put himself in a good light.
Lane had already targeted Ashley Cooke's car.
FRANK: Michael Lane vandalised the car.
He also left a message telling him that
"Shana will always cheat on you."
(SEAGULLS CALLING)
Now, Shana made her first complaint about Michael Lane to Sussex Police.
I don't really know how to start this conversation,
but I think I'm being stalked.
The police call handler, named as Ms A in an official review,
said she could feel Shana's fear.
But she just wanted Lane to be warned off.
She didn't want anyone to lose their job over this,
and she just wanted him spoken to.
She just wanted him to leave her alone
and not to contact her again.
Ms A telephoned Lane and warned him to keep away from Shana.
One month later, an office party.
Shana left early.
Later, her two flatmates headed home, taking Michael Lane with them.
FLORA: Shana wasn't at all happy
about the fact that he'd come back to the house,
so she decided to leave,
and he followed her out of the house and up the road,
and they began to argue again.
FRANK: He tried to snatch her phone from her hand
to see who she'd been messaging.
FLORA: Lane became very angry,
and he pulled the phone away from her head.
FRANK: And in the course of trying to grab her phone, uh, hit her.
KERRY: Now, at this point, we can see
that we've got the beginnings of violence.
This is an assault, it's a common assault,
and she's well within her rights to make a complaint, as she does.
Shana had been texting her boyfriend Ashley.
She ran to his house.
Seeing her panic-stricken, Ashley's parents persuaded Shana
the police should be called.
PC Trevor Godfrey took a statement from Shana
in front of Ashley and his parents.
She confirmed what had happened,
but did not mention her on-off relationship with Michael Lane.
Lane admitted the assault, but then gave PC Godfrey a fuller story.
KERRY: He says, "Oh, no, no, just a minute.
"Myself and Shana are in a relationship,"
and he shows him a series of text messages between the two.
And it's clear from the text messages
that yes, there has been a relationship between them,
and the police just assume, then, that this is a lover's tiff.
What they don't do is they don't acknowledge
that you can be in an on and off relationship with somebody
and still feel frightened, and still be the victim of stalking.
PC Godfrey's evidence to an internal disciplinary hearing
revealed his thinking about Shana.
She had wasted my time, and that is what the inspector said.
She cannot get away with wasting police time.
Shana had totally misled me and told me lies.
I really don't comprehend
why the police assumed that Shana was a liar -
because she hadn't lied, she'd simply admitted part of the truth -
and why they took Lane at face value.
Tom Milsom investigated PC Godfrey's actions
for the Independent Office of Police Conduct, the IOPC.
I was a little bit shocked around the approach this officer took
in interview with us.
We often have officers who actually
don't want to say very much to us at all about the incident,
um, and others will, you know, approach it in a--
in a more, uh, balanced way
to explain what they thought was the situation,
and perhaps reflect on potential mistakes they've made.
But not with-- Not PC Godfrey.
She had been in an active relationship with Lane
for six months.
`There was nothing there to make me think
she was in any type of danger whatsoever.
If I had any worry that Shana was in any danger,
I would have given her safety advice.
He was very defensive, his attitude was one of,
"Absolutely not, I got it right, she lied to me.
"That was wasting police's time."
It's a very minor assault. And then you bring in the fact
that the witness is actual fact proven to be a liar.
The incident as a whole is basically,
she has portrayed a completely misleading account to police,
which has been fully investigated.
He hadn't thought of it as a serious incident.
He saw it as a minor assault,
and not enough pattern of ongoing behaviour, which it was.
And precisely where and how PC Godfrey
had interviewed Shana was criticised.
He went and took the statement
in front of a current boyfriend and his family,
and-- and that really isn't good practice at all.
You know, she was describing some,
you know, very personal matters to him,
and I think Shana found herself in quite an embarrassing situation.
Uh, so that statement, um, ended up being a problem,
because the officer went away from there with a particular view
that wasn't, uh, a view that...
Perhaps Shana, if she'd been interviewed alone
would perhaps have been more forthcoming
around some of the detail
that would have perhaps raised more concerns for the officer.
He then interviewed, um, Lane himself,
and decided that what Lane said to him was persuasive when it wasn't.
What we've got here is Michael Lane
has got no previous convictions, no criminal history.
We've got the girl who has made allegations
in which she's been found to be lying all the way through.
TOM: It was a shocking element of the case.
I was quite surprised by his, um, you know, uh, belligerence
at not considering whether he could have perhaps made a mistake
or done things better.
KERRY: And the police just assumed, then, that this is a lovers' tiff.
What they don't do is they don't acknowledge
that you can be in an on and off relationship with somebody
and still feel frightened and still be the victim of stalking.
And, in actual fact, the fact that a relationship
had previously existed between the two
makes the level of risk greater.
This is not harassment.
It was a smoke screen to disguise her affair.
Anybody who is in the police force
should know how intense relationships can get.
And intense relationships are the relationships
that are more likely to result in violence in the future.
So I would say was this a girl who was placating Lane on occasions
because she was frightened of him?
Was it a girl who was just simply out of her depth?
Was it a girl that actually didn't know what she wanted,
because she's got this man who is coming at her with such force?
She will be signing her texts with five kisses.
The text messages really aren't the important thing.
The important thing is what Shana
was saying to the police at that time,
and she was saying that she felt threatened, she felt scared,
she felt she was being stalked, and she was asking for help.
Really, that's the only thing
that should have been foremost in the office's mind at that time.
The judgement made by PC Godfrey and his superiors was emphatic.
Michael Lane escaped with a caution.
Shana received a fixed penalty notice.
Shana Grice was fined £90 for wasting police time,
when she was the victim.
Shana told me that she was fined
and accused of wasting police time in regards to the incident.
She said to me that no one believed her.
But it did happen.
And because of the history of everything,
it looked like she was lying.
Shana also said that she could not believe that she'd got fined,
when she was the one that got hurt when Michael Lane pulled her hair.
Oi. Who you talking to?
Gimme the phone. Gimme the phone!
KERRY: They've made a moral judgement about her,
which is completely unfair.
Lane, meanwhile, spoke about the outcome
to his local priest, Andrew Birks,
who, coincidentally, is a former policeman.
When he told me that she'd been done for wasting police time,
there was a sense there
that he was just simply relieved it was all over.
There was no bravado about the fact he'd won that,
or there was no--
there was no sense that he was sorry about that or anything,
it was just this real calm...
I got the sense he was just pleased it had ended that way,
and, you know, that it was all over for him.
Um, and, of course, you know, when you're told
somebody's been given a ticket for wasting police time,
you-- you-- you assume that there's been a proper assessment
of why she was given that ticket.
I think this totally and utterly dented her confidence
in being able to go to the police with her problems,
and gave Michael Lane the confidence to--
to carry on his appalling behaviour.
Claudia Ortiz represents an organisation
supporting victims of stalking.
She also sat on Brighton Council's Domestic and Homicide Review,
and is critical of the police's action against Shana.
CLAUDIA: I think they should have been more careful
before making that decision,
and tried to understand if there was something that they didn't know
that had motivated Shana to withhold that information,
before passing a fine on to someone,
uh, for contacting the police,
which is never an easy decision to make for victims of any crime.
Um...
There should have been more robust conversations
as to what was actually going on for her,
and trying to-- to view it from the perspective of a 19-year-old.
I think it would have completely eroded all confidence,
because she didn't think that the police
were going to take her seriously.
Shana Grice, aged 19, has twice complained to police
that a stalker is troubling her.
But Sussex Police have fined Shana £90 for wasting their time,
because she didn't disclose her on-off relationship
with the accused man, work colleague Michael Lane.
He escapes with a caution.
KERRY: What they're missing is,
stalking, by its very definition, is underpinned by obsession,
so if somebody is obsessed with somebody,
do you think that not even a slap on the wrist,
but a quick "Don't do it again" is really going to make a difference?
Of course it's not.
Days later, Shana quit her job
at the place where her stalker continued to work.
FRANK: I think she struggled to cope.
I think she struggled to know how to deal with him.
And I think-- I don't mean it unkindly
when I say I think that she didn't have the, if you like,
the maturity or the confidence,
and certainly not in the police,
to work out a way, a satisfactory way forward.
In fact, within a few weeks, as another sign of her confusion,
Shana finished with her long-term boyfriend
and resumed her relationship with Michael Lane.
This very dysfunctional and very abusive relationship
is continuing in a very sporadic way.
FLORA: But that didn't last very long.
Um, it turned volatile very quickly,
and that escalated, and eventually led to her deciding
that she needed to break up with him.
Then Michael Lane's behaviour became more terrifying.
First, he stole the back door key
to the house Shana shared with two friends.
Next, he broke in.
KERRY: And he stands over her while he thinks that she's sleeping.
Can you imagine that?
All that she heard was very heavy male breathing,
and she hides underneath the duvet and pretends to be asleep.
The fear that she must have been feeling at that point
is just indescribable.
She must be thinking, "Am I gonna to be murdered in my bed here?
"Is something terrible going to happen to me?"
When she realises that she's alone again,
she looks out of her window
and she sees Michael Lane leaving the property,
so she knows that it's him.
So she's got to be thinking at this point,
"How am I ever gonna get free of this person?
"How am I ever gonna extricate myself from this relationship?"
I have to ask myself, is this the point at which
he's thinking that he's going to kill her?
Stalking is very often referred to as murder in slow motion.
You can see the risk getting higher and higher and higher,
and this is exactly what we've got here.
This is a murder taking place in slow motion.
Desperate to prove Lane was stalking her,
Shana gathered the evidence herself.
She secretly recorded her phone call.
This is the actual conversation.
And he is contrite,
and he's acknowledging that he's got problems,
and he's not right in the head.
She's actually confronting this fantasy that he's got
that these two are meant to be together,
and that he is entitled to this relationship,
and you can hear his voice crack.
Shana gave the recording to the police
and tried to explain her complex friendship with Michael Lane.
I didn't want to be in a proper relationship,
but he kept asking until eventually, I gave in.
But within hours, Shana discovered
Lane was again being treated leniently.
FRANK: They spoke to Michael Lane.
He was cautioned for the theft of her back door key.
A caution. It blows my mind.
It blows my mind that this was not taken more seriously.
It is incomprehensible to me.
It was another Sussex Police decision
that would be strongly criticised by the IOPC,
because Lane's pattern of behaviour was missed.
TOM: This was a course of behaviour that had stepped up.
They chose, really, to look at-- to focus on the theft of a key,
and didn't really think through,
"Well, wait a minute. Why was he in that room?
"What was he trying to do and achieve?
"And is there a risk there going forward?"
So again, that-- that sort of course of conduct,
um, that repeated pattern of concerning behaviour
wasn't picked up by that investigating officer
in relation to, um, that investigation,
uh, and the explanations that Michael Lane gave in interview
seemed to be accepted, um, you know, without challenge.
Michael Lane is interviewed for 12 minutes, that's all.
12 whole minutes, and he's given a caution.
This is wholly inappropriate.
Anybody-- anybody looking at this must surely realise
that this is a man with deep psychological problems,
this is a man who is dangerous,
it's somebody whose behaviour is escalating,
it's becoming more and more fixated,
more and more obsessive,
more and more moving towards something tragic.
The next day, Shana called Sussex Police again
with a new complaint about Michael Lane.
She'd received seven heavy breathing calls from a withheld number.
I'm really scared. I'm actually really scared.
(HEAVY BREATHING ON RECORDING)
Sussex Police noted the details,
but continued to treat Lane as a low risk.
Next, Shana spotted Lane following her.
FRANK: Michael Lane placed a tracker on Shana Grice's car,
and it was connected to his phone.
And she'd be driving along sometimes
and she would be able to see him in her mirror.
Again, no further action was taken.
And then Shana received a letter from Sussex Police
informing her the case was closed.
KERRY: There are opportunities right from the very beginning
to intervene and save Shana's life,
and the police don't take those opportunities.
(SEABIRDS CALLING)
The start of five days of events
that would reach a tragic conclusion.
First, Michael Lane told a female friend he'd been dumped by Shana.
FLORA: And as they hugged goodbye, he whispered to her,
"She'll pay for what she's done."
Lane asked Shana to see him one last time.
The prosecution would later claim this was a form of blackmail.
KERRY: Lane persuades Shana to go to a hotel with him,
and he does this by saying,
"Look, this will be our final encounter, if you like,
"this will be the end to our relationship.
"I will think of it as closure."
FRANK: He's got material on his phone,
uh, that, yeah, would mess up her relationship with Ashley Cooke,
who she was now seeing again.
I think he put her in a corner, really, and made--
you know, made her feel like she had little other choice,
but actually, if she did what he said, he would be out of her life.
Now, you might think, "How on Earth would she be prepared to do this?"
but you've got to appreciate how ground down she is
by this situation at this point.
And you've got to appreciate how she might want to placate him,
and she might really believe that,
"If I do this for him, he might just leave me alone."
So she probably goes out of desperation.
FRANK: Michael Lane had bought petrol
from a local supermarket forecourt,
and had gone to the house.
Lane took a knife from Shana's kitchen,
entered her bedroom and slit her throat.
He used the petrol to start a fire to destroy any evidence.
Shortly afterwards, local priest Andrew Birks
was standing outside his church.
ANDREW: And I looked and saw Michael Lane,
and he turned and looked towards me,
caught my eye, put his head down, and literally sort of sped up
and sort of, effectively, walked really quickly off.
And I just remember thinking, "Well, that's a bit weird."
He sort of was, effectively, I thought,
"Pretend you hadn't seen me."
Later came the explanation.
Somebody had messaged me and said, oh, had I seen him?
And I said, "I did briefly see him this morning."
And then they sort of text...
they text back saying, "Oh, he's wanted for murder,
"the police are looking for him."
(LAUGHS) "What?"
And, um, I said, "When did that happen?"
They said, "This morning."
The next day, Michael Lane was questioned.
KERRY: When you reflect on the entirety of this story,
what is so tragic about it
is how preventable Shana's death was.
After Shana Grice was found murdered,
police arrested Michael Lane immediately.
FRANK: He feigns ignorance.
"Absolutely nothing to do with me,
"Don't know anything about it, wasn't there."
But Lane hadn't thought about CCTV.
Supermarket cameras had captured him filling up a can of petrol
the day before Shana died.
FRANK: The buses in Brighton all have CCTV on.
They filmed him close to Shana's house the next morning.
He left a-- a trail of evidence.
After murdering Shana,
Lane used her bank card to draw £60 from her account.
He changed his shirt and shorts.
In his bag, the clothes stained with Shana's blood.
Found at the scene, a bloody footprint.
In nearby bushes, Lane's trainers.
And under Shana's car, the tracking device Lane had secretly fitted.
Eight days after Shana's murder,
Michael Lane's seventh police interview,
the evidence against him overwhelming.
He completely changes his story,
because he has to because of the evidence against him.
And he comes up with something that is so ridiculous.
He saw her dead and he panicked,
and so he didn't check her vital signs,
he didn't call 999.
Michael Lane's not guilty plea
would mean more agony for Shana's family
when the case reached the Crown Court.
I think the family could be forgiven for thinking
that Shana Grice was on trial,
for her choices,
for having had her head turned by Michael Lane,
for not knowing how to extricate herself
from a-- a very toxic relationship.
After a two-week trial,
the jury took just over two hours
to convict Michael Lane of murder.
Michael Lane, the jury has found you guilty
of the murder of Shana Grice.
You killed Shana by slitting her throat.
You set fire to her room, intending her body
and the scene of the crime to be burned beyond recognition.
There is only one sentence that, in law,
I am allowed to impose upon you,
and that is imprisonment for life.
The judge also criticised the actions of Sussex Police.
The police jumped to conclusions,
and Shana was stereotyped.
Michael Lane felt that, if he continued
with his obsessive stalking behaviour,
it was most unlikely the police would do anything to stop him.
And he did continue.
Outside court, Shana's family handed a statement to reporters.
MAN: We are very relieved
that the man who killed our precious Shana,
our only child, will serve a long and deserved prison sentence.
Michael Lane is a dangerous and obsessive man.
We firmly believe Shana would be alive today
if Sussex Police had acted to protect Shana
on the many occasions she complained about Lane,
rather than issue her with a fine for wasting police time.
The actions of 14 police officers and staff were investigated.
The most serious finding, gross misconduct,
was upheld against PC John Mills,
who gave Michael Lane a caution for theft of a key
after he broke into Shana's bedroom.
TOM: The panel found that he had
misconducted himself to the gross level,
and had it been that he had not resigned from the police
uh, a month or two previous,
he would have been dismissed from the police.
Gross misconduct was also put to PC Trevor Godfrey,
whose decision led to Shana's £90 fine for wasting police time.
What I can clearly say is that he wasn't victim-focused enough.
You know, he was not thinking through
what it means to be at the end of a coercive relationship,
and in someone who was pursuing her without encouragement.
At his hearing, Trevor Godfrey continued to insist
his actions had been correct.
She had wasted my time, and that is what the inspector said.
She cannot get away with wasting police time.
Shana had totally misled me and told me lies.
While the disciplinary panel said no blame should be attributed to Shana,
it ruled this was a case of misconduct by the officer,
not gross misconduct.
The panel felt that whilst the failings were serious, um,
there were some mitigating circumstances
around, uh, why he did some of his actions
or why he didn't do other of his actions.
Shana's family issued an angry statement after the hearings.
MAN: We can barely believe what we've witnessed
these past two days.
The panel allowed a wholesale character assassination
of our daughter, who's obviously not here to defend herself.
The misconduct charge is a joke and the hearing a sham.
Sussex Police apologised, and held a thorough review
of how officers deal with complaints of stalking and harassment.
For Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner Katy Bourne,
Shana's death showed change was urgently needed.
KATY: For me, it was just-- this was a step too far.
Some-- something had to be done.
She asked for help and, um-- and the help wasn't there.
And she wasn't heard, and her case wasn't looked at.
And when you look at some of the incidents
that have been reported that happened in her case,
on their own, isolated, they don't seem very important,
but when you join them up, you see the pattern.
Oh, my goodness, um, it's all there laid out.
I sat down with the Chief Constable
and with the Heads of Public Protection,
and we talked through, actually, what do they need to do
to make the response to stalking better?
Sussex Police was instructed
to have new stalking training and improved processes
to better protect victims from repeat offences.
And after Shana,
police officers across the country have now been told
not to hand out fines in stalking and harassment cases.
KERRY: When you reflect on the entirety of this story,
what is so tragic about it
is how preventable Shana's death was.
There were so many times when somebody
could have intervened to change the outcome.
There are so many times when responsibility
should have been put on Michael Lane's toes, not on Shana's toes,
for what he was doing and what he was putting her through.
Somebody asked me if I felt sorry for him,
and I-- I just feel tremendously sad for the whole situation.
For Shana's family,
for Michael's family, who still live in the community,
uh, and-- and yeah, you know, for Michael himself,
because I just-- I just-- I just wished he had talked to me
about some of the issues,
that I might have been able to see the trigger signs.
I might have been able, you know, given my background,
to have seen how he was coping with, actually, the relationship.
Or if he'd just spoken to somebody about it,
we might not be doing this interview now,
he might not be spending time,
but he might actually be receiving treatment
for how he deals with his emotions.
I've got two children.
One of them's a daughter Shana's age,
and I've found myself wondering
how she would cope in the same situation.
Whether she would have the confidence
to confide in her friends, family,
the police, particularly if, like Shana,
she'd been given a fixed penalty notice for wasting police time,
merely for trying to report something terrible
that was happening in her life and--
and reaching out for help.
TOM: I mean, this was a terrible tragedy, you know,
for the family of Shana Grice,
and they, you know, conducted themselves with fantastic dignity
throughout what was a horrific murder trial.
There were significant system and training failures by Sussex Police.
There seemed to be a lack of awareness
among many officers we interviewed
around the difference between a spat between two individuals
and actually moving on to it being harassing behaviour.
You need to, as investigators, not to make assumptions
uh, about what's in front of you,
uh, and to take the time to properly investigate matters,
and you really need to listen to the victim,
and I don't think, um, that happened to Shana.
So, overall, she was let down, yes.
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