This is the second half of our two-part series into Kevin Pokuta’s murder: an exclusive inside story of one of the biggest investigations undertaken by South Yorkshire Police. The first part is available here.
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With Hallows on the run, the police began to reconstruct how he had got away. After making enquiries they knew who they needed to speak to: Paris Askew.
Askew was Hallows’ long-term girlfriend, who worked in customer service for Northern Rail. They lived together in Upperthorpe. Two weeks after Hallows had boarded a flight to Dubai, police called around for a chat.
They originally interviewed her simply as a witness. She told them that Hallows had gone on holiday, and that this wasn’t an uncommon thing for him to do. Police asked if they could see her phone. She handed it over willingly.
But Askew made a critical mistake. She hadn’t realised that deleting messages off a phone isn’t enough to clear them entirely. When police took the device back to Swan House, they set about retrieving the missing files.
What they uncovered was a huge tranche of messages between Askew and Hallows in the two weeks since Pokuta was shot. It very quickly became clear that Hallows’ trip to Dubai was anything but a holiday.
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