BBC One
For three weeks in the Spring of 2008 West Yorkshire Police, aided by hundreds of volunteers, searched for missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews, who had disappeared from her home on an estate in Dewsbury.
Against all the statistical odds Shannon was found alive, and over the following days a remarkable story emerged that allegedly implicated her mother in the abduction.
Through a series of interviews with family members police established that Shannon’s mum, Karen Matthews had known all along where her little girl really was.
Through footage of police interviews with key suspects, the story of Shannon’s three-weeks as Britain’s highest-profile missing person slowly unravels on screen. We see Shannon’s mother Karen undergoing her first interview simply as witness, but as more and more detail emerges, her next interview is conducted under caution, before she eventually confesses that she knew where Shannon was all along.
With exclusive access to West Yorkshire Police’s Homicide and Major Enquiry Team, and an exclusive interview with Sir Norman Bettison, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, this film tells the story of how the truth about what really happened to Shannon was pieced together and how her family were implicated in her disappearance.