Cold Case Detectives investigates 60-year-old murder of six-year-old Carol Ann Stephens

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed at least some viewers, it’s a true-crime series.

At the moment the schedules are full of them these days, and their quality is as varied as their subjects.

At their worst, they can be ghoulish and voyeuristic, designed merely to peek at real people’s suffering in the name of entertainment; at their best however they can be a driving force for good, leading to unsafe convictions being overturned or to unsolved cases being finally closed once and for all.

The podcast Serial, which arguably kickstarted the current obsession with the topic, proves this: its first season investigated the 1999 Killing of Hae Min Lee, and following its conclusion in 2014 there was a great deal of renewed interest in the case.

The conviction of Adnan Syed for the murder was ultimately vacated and Syed – with all charges against him dropped – was finally released after 23 years.

This new ITV three-part series of true-crime documentary films would appear to belong to the latter camp of such programmes, revisiting cases from the past that have unanswered questions hanging over them which continue to elude many of the investigators.

However the question is: can a team assembled by ITV succeed where others have failed?

The programme begins its investigations with the now 60-year-old murder of six-year-old Carol Ann Stephens. It was – and remains – a harrowing crime, which began with the disappearance of Carol from the street outside her Cardiff home in 1959.

Carol had only just been home to drop off cigarettes for her mother (this was a different time, remember, when children could buy tobacco for their parents), before going back outside to play.

It was the last time her family saw her, and it would be weeks before her body was actually found.

Here, more than six decades on, the latest developments in forensic science are employed in a bid to uncover new evidence.

Meanwhile the team revisit some of the key scenes in the case, interview some new witnesses, and re-examine crucial existing pieces of evidence in the case.

The series is executive produced by Jonathan Hill and Matthew Tune, the duo behind the remarkable 2021 documentary The Pembrokeshire Murders: Catching the Gameshow Killer, which detailed the unusual manner by which serial killer John Cooper was brought to justice (ultimately, his downfall came when he was recognised while appearing on an episode of Bullseye).

Hill and Tune, then, are well versed in the varied and often very unexpected ways in which breaks in a case can suddenly appear. Series producer and director Helen Llewelyn meanwhile is also a true-crime and current affairs veteran, having been nominated for an RTS Cymru 2022 award for her ITV1 documentary No Body Recovered.

Could this very rigorously researched programme be the thing that finally solves an horrific and long-unanswered case, and bring peace to a family and community once and for all?

We’ll have to watch and wait...fingers crossed!