Read the Books
— Retired Detective Inspector

Richard Powell

Thirty years in South Wales CID. The institutional record others can only read about, Powell lived from the inside.

Overhead close study of an open manila case file on a worn wooden desk — handwritten notes in the margins, a ruled notebook alongside, a black ballpoint pen resting on the page, cool tungsten archive lighting raking across the paper surface, no faces or legible names visible
Overhead close study of an open manila case file on a worn wooden desk — handwritten notes in the margins, a ruled notebook alongside, a black ballpoint pen resting on the page, cool tungsten archive lighting raking across the paper surface, no faces or legible names visible
/ Central CID Cardiff

Three decades at the centre of it

Richard Powell joined South Wales Police in the early 1980s and spent the bulk of his career at Central CID Cardiff, rising to Detective Inspector. He worked major crime, wrongful conviction cases, and cold case reviews across the most consequential decades in Welsh criminal history.

He read the original files before they went cold. He attended scenes before they were catalogued. His knowledge of South Wales casework is not reconstructed from archives — it is the archive.

Retirement brought the question every serious investigator eventually faces: what happens to the record when the detective walks away? Powell chose to write it down — rigorously, without embellishment, and without the institutional silences that shaped the official versions.

Justice, truth, and the duty of the record

Wrongful convictions do not happen in darkness. They happen in rooms Powell sat in, with files he held. The official record does not document its own failures. That is precisely what these books are for.

South Wales crime has been reduced to headlines and verdicts. Powell writes what existed between them — the procedural choices, the overlooked evidence, and the human cost that no court summary captures.

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For readers and researchers

Firsthand accounts drawn from active investigative experience, not retrospective reconstruction. Case details sourced from original files, contemporaneous notes, and direct institutional memory.

What these books deliver

Rigorous source discipline throughout — every procedural claim substantiated, every gap in the record named as a gap rather than papered over. British true crime written with the weight the cases deserve.