I also found it striking how unguarded she was, how honest she was, how she just spoke about this is the extreme version. This goes into neglect. This goes into assault. But other than that, it seems if you strip that away, it's a mother talking about the reality of motherhood. And she's so much more judged for the fact that she's open about these things, which I friend really... It's really hard to listen to these tapes. Is it a tangent to the real problem trying to figure out who killed him, that the police are latching onto this neglect?

I think it's really hard to explain why they decided so early on that it was Ruth, because it isn't unusual for parents to kill their children, sadly, when they're not coping. But it would be very unusual for a parent to kill a child in the way that Ricky was murdered. I think there's a kind of willful blindness there where they determined that it was her.

Do you think

her class was used against her or her lack of financial resources, her also maybe being a single mom? The

thing that we discovered when we made this series was that where scientific evidence did not support the police case that Ruth had killed her son, it was ignored. And that shocked me. And I think that's probably much more important than any of these other questions that we'll never probably get to the bottom of. So do I personally think that her social class made her a kind of throwaway person in the eyes of a lot of other people? Well, yes, I do. Could I prove that? No, I couldn't. But what I can tell you with certainty because we interviewed the forensic scientists in this case is that scientific evidence, that pointed away from Ruth and away from the police theories of how she had killed her son, it was not pursued. So, for example, a soil expert found soil on the raised ridges of Ricky's shoes, that showed that he had walked into the woods and been killed in the woods because, as he says, the shoes walked into the woods, but they never walked out again. But police brought to court a case that Ruth had murdered Ricky at home when that was not the scientific story that you could take from the shoes.