Christopher Berry-Dee is the UK’s all-time bestselling true crime author. Is he also a violent abuser of women and children?
The British writer is known for his unique ability to get inside the heads of serial killers. But a Guardian investigation reveals multiple accusations of assault and child sexual abuse. What is the truth about the man described by his own daughter as ‘absolute evil’?
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.
