BBC - Great Crimes and Trials Series 3 Set 1 (1995) Part 11 Roy Fontaine The Deadly Butler

Stabbings, shootings, genocide, torture, abduction, robbery, serial killing and mass suicide are just a few of the horrific crimes explored in Great Crimes and Trials. True stories carefully researched and reconstructed with actual archive footage. Cases which have become almost legendary in the annals of crime and detection. Serial killers, gangsters, assassins and war criminals - Great Crimes and Trials sheds light on crimes that shocked the world, bringing back memories of some of the most notorious cases of the twentieth century. The murders of John Lennon and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, the unsolved Zodiac murders and the treasonous crimes of Lord Haw-Haw are all covered here in exacting detail, alongside other shocking stories of murder and mayhem. From the violent mob rule of the thirties to the fairly recent phenomenon of the serial killer, the motives, behavior patterns and killing techniques of some of the world's most evil felons are explored. Their detection, capture and trials are examined to give a complete picture of how crine and justice have evolved through the twentieth century. Narrated by Robert Powell, Great Crimes and Trials combines new and archive interviews to reconstruct each story, analysing the individual and his motive, explaining how the crime was committed and showing breakthroughs in investigations alongside details of the trial. With its researchers gaining unprecedented access to picture libraries and over 250,000 hours of archive footage, these are the definitive accounts of these appalling murders.

Part 11 Roy Fontaine The Deadly Butler

The story of the murdering butler of Kensington. He could have stepped out of a cruel comedy, but Roy Fontaine, the killer butler, was no joke. Most of Fontaine’s life had been a sham. Despite the cut-glass accent, Fontaine lad been born Archibald Hall, son of a post office worker, in a grimy tenement on Glasgow's South Side in 1924. Archibald Thomson Hall, or 'Roy Fontaine' as he called himself following his release from his first jail sentence, had begun his criminal career at the young age of 15. During this first sentence, Hall trained himself to blend in with the British aristocracy as a butler in order to rob them. Now elegant, cultured, well-spoken and with perfect manners, he was straight from the pages of Jeeves and Wooster. Few would have guessed that under that facade of breeding lurked a cunning and devious crook who had spent half his life in jail. Fewer still would have believed that in the later summer of 1977 Fontaine, the phoney aristocrat, would turn killer, eventually murdering five people and burying their bodies in the Scottish countryside. A series of events would lead to him committing the murders, and it was ultimately a superstition of Hall's that would lead to his capture.

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