I consider myself a true-crime connoisseur – from trashy classics like Forensic Files to heartrending epics like Making a Murderer , people doing awful things to each other is my go-to TV genre. But it’s been a long time since a film gripped me quite like Sky’s stylish and surprising The Body Next Door . When a body wrapped in 41 layers of plastic was found in the garden of a block of flats in 2015, the sleepy former mining village of Beddau was shaken.
Unable to discern who the dead person was or where they’d come from, leading investigator DCI Gareth Morgan said, “It was like a body had just fallen out of the sky”. Already very weird – but like all the best mysteries, this one was only getting weirder. With the death being investigated as a murder, the film luxuriated in setting the scene for its perplexing central crime.
Hearing from locals as well as police officers, every talking head came with a delightfully Cluedo -esque on-screen descriptor – “Rhian Lee: The Friend”; “Mary West: The Pastor” – making it easy to feel au-fait with a community who clearly knew each other inside out. As their overlapping testimonies began to take shape, an elderly woman called Leigh Sabine emerged at the heart of the puzzle. Although she had died about a month before the body was discovered, locals recalled her talking about the package it was found in, which she’d often asked for help moving.
According to her, it contained a “medical skeleton”. Clearly, she.