The digital trail

Every phone call pings a mast; every journey passes a camera; every search is logged. As that infrastructure spread, it began to appear in courtrooms — not as a single dramatic clue, but as a timeline the accused could not talk their way out of.

Two of the cases here, Danielle Jones and Jenny Nicholl, ended in murder convictions with no body ever found, built substantially on what mobile phones had recorded. In others, cameras traced a route, or a defendant's own searches undid a cover story.

The evidence is mundane by design. That is precisely what makes it hard to fake and hard to dispute.