Mark Williams-Thomas


Mark Alan Williams-Thomas is an English investigative journalist and former police officer. He is best known for exposing Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in ', a television documentary he presented and as the presenter and investigator of ' in the ITV and Netflix crime series.

Background

He was born in Billericay and was educated at Amesbury School and then Pierrepoint and then in 1989 joined Surrey Police. During his time with Surrey Police he was a specialist in major crime and child abuse. He left in 2000.
Williams-Thomas completed his MA in criminology from Birmingham City University in 2007.
In 2013 Williams-Thomas was awarded a Post Graduate Diploma and master's degree in Criminology at Birmingham City University.

Career

Williams-Thomas was a detective and family liaison officer with Surrey Police from 1989 to 2000.
On 27 November 1995, school girl Ruth Wilson aged 16 years went missing from her home in from Betchworth, near Dorking Surrey, England. Williams-Thomas was the family liaison officer for Wilson's case, stated that extensive searches across Box Hill had yielded no evidence to suggest she was killed or committed suicide. He also stated that he was sure Wilson was not abducted by a stranger. Williams-Thomas also stated that "From the experience I have had, I would suggest one of two things occurred. She either went up there to meet someone and has subsequently gone away, or she went there and died in some way."
In August 1997 Williams-Thomas was in charge of the child abuse investigation into school teacher Adrian Stark, the director of music at St John's School, Leatherhead, Surrey. Three days after his charges relating to indecent photographs of children Mr Stark's partly-clad body was found in the sea off Beachy Head, Sussex.
Between 2001 and 2002, Williams-Thomas was the marketing manager and a director of GumFighters, a "national chewing gum removal specialist". The company were hired by various councils to clean their streets.
In 2003 Mark Williams-Thomas was charged with blackmailing a funeral home director, after alleging that there were multiple bodies buried in unmarked graves. An article ran in a national Sunday paper describing the mass burials. He was subsequently acquitted.
In 2005, he set up WT Associates, an independent child protection consultancy firm.
In September 2013 MP Tim Loughton made a statement to parliament in which he praised Mr Williams-Thomas for his 'modest but game changing ITV documentary that exposed Jimmy Savile.

Television

From 2003, due to his past in the police force, Williams-Thomas began script advising for various television crime dramas which included : BBC series Waking The Dead, BBC series Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Ch5 series Murder Prevention, ITV series Identity and BBC series The Silence.
In 2011 Mark created and presented a new series on ITV called On the Run, the premise of the series was to track down and confront offenders on the run from the police. The series ran over three seasons, Series 1 was broadcast on 24 October 2011. Series 2 was broadcast on 11 December 2012 and Mark was joined by co-presenter Nicky Campbell. Series 3 was broadcast on 29 October 2013 and Mark was joined by co-presenter Natasha Kaplinsky. In series three Mark and his team pursued a convicted child sex offender on the run in Spain.
On 9 August 2012, ITV News broadcast an exclusive interview Williams-Thomas undertook with Stuart Hazell who was the last person to see missing 12-year-old schoolgirl Tia Sharp. Hazell went missing the day after this interview and was arrested later the same day on suspicion of Tia Sharps's murder. He was later charged and on 14 May 2013 was jailed after changing his plea. The judge ordered that he serve a minimum of 38 years.
On 3 October 2012, almost a year after Jimmy Savile's death, Williams-Thomas presented a documentary 'The Other Side of Jimmy Savile' on ITV. The expose of Jimmy Savile examined claims of child sexual abuse against Savile and led to extensive media coverage, including 41 days on the front pages and the Metropolitan Police launching a criminal investigation into allegations of child sex, Operation Yewtree. The Other Side of Jimmy Savile and Exposure: Banaz: An Honour Killing won the 2012 Peabody Award which was broadcast on 3 October 2012.
In the Exposure documentary, several women claimed that they had been sexually abused by Savile as teenagers. In 2013, Williams-Thomas won two Royal Television Society awards and the London Press Awards Scoop of the Year for the film. The episode and Exposure: Banaz: An Honour Killing won a 2012 George Foster Peabody Award.
Williams-Thomas is a regular reporter on This Morning, Channel 4 News, as well as long form current affairs documentaries for Exposure.
His undercover work in Cambodia led to the arrest in 2013 of a person suspected of offering under-age girls for sex and the rescue of two girls, aged 13 and 14.
In 2014, Williams-Thomas covered the verdict of Oscar Pistorius and was the only British journalist to meet with Pistorius during his trial, writing an exclusive report for UK national newspaper Daily Mirror. On 24 June 2016, ITV broadcast Oscar Pistorius: The Interview in which the former Paralympian spoke in a world exclusive to Williams-Thomas, in his first television interview about the night he shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp in 2013. It was broadcast in Pistorius's home country of South Africa immediately after the ITV programme finished.
On 11 November 2014, This Morning broadcast an exclusive interview with Jo Westwood, the ex-wife of jailed sex offender Max Clifford.
In 2015, Williams-Thomas investigated the unsolved murder of BBC presenter Jill Dando. Writing in the Daily Mirror he theorized that she was murdered by the London underworld for her work on Crimewatch.
Williams-Thomas was the reporter for ITV's crime series The Investigator: A British Crime Story, produced by Simon Cowell's Syco. The series re-examined a 30 year old previously 'closed' murder case, the murder of Carole Packman, whose body has never been found. The series was broadcast over four consecutive weeks on ITV, from 14 July 2016. Dorset Police subsequently confirmed that the case remained open and that they would be examining new evidence presented by Williams-Thomas.
Series 2 of Williams-Thomas's crime series returned to ITV in April 2018 in a three-part series.
In 2019 Williams-Thomas started investigating for a new crime series the unsolved murder of teenage mum Nicola Payne.  Nicola Payne, aged 18, who was from Coventry and had a 6 month old son at the time, went missing on the 14 December 1991. She was on her way to her parents' home. Her body has never been found and remains one of the country's biggest unsolved murder investigations.
In Feb 2020 Williams-Thomas joined the Channel 4 series Hunted, as the Head of Special Operations

Filmography

Transworld Publishing has acquired the UK and Commonwealth Rights from Furniss Lawton to Williams-Thomas's book 'Hunting Killers' which was published on 27 June 2019.