Mark Williams-Thomas

Mark Alan Williams-Thomas (born 9 January 1970) is an English investigative journalist, sexual abuse victim advocate, and former police officer.

He is a regular reporter on This Morning and Channel 4 News, as well as the ITV series Exposure and the ITV and Netflix crime series The Investigator: A British Crime Story.

Williams-Thomas was a detective and family liaison officer with Surrey Police from 1989 to 2000.

In August 1997 Williams-Thomas was part of an investigation into child pornography found in the possession of school teacher Adrian Stark, the director of music at St John's School, Leatherhead, Surrey, who committed suicide shortly after his arrest.

Williams-Thomas worked on an investigation into child abuse by Jonathan King, leading to King's successful conviction.

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, 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.

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 (2007-2011), BBC series Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2007), Channel 5 series Murder Prevention (2004), ITV series Identity and BBC series The Silence.

In 2005, Williams-Thomas set up WT Associates, an independent child protection consultancy firm.

Williams-Thomas was awarded an MA in criminology from Birmingham City University in 2007.

Williams-Thomas began investigating the Jimmy Savile case in late 2011, after being informed that Savile was investigated by Surrey police amid the 2007 Jersey child abuse investigation.

As a child-protection specialist, Williams-Thomas exposed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, a television documentary he presented in 2012 as part of the Exposure series, which received numerous awards and led to the Operation Yewtree police investigation that resulted in the convictions of Rolf Harris and Max Clifford.

He also investigated several other high-profile cases, including the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the PPE Medpro scandal surrounding Michelle Mone.

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 Sharp's murder.

On 3 October 2012, Williams-Thomas presented the Exposure documentary The Other Side of Jimmy Savile on ITV, in which five women stated that they had been sexually abused by Savile as teenagers.

By late October 2012, the scandal had resulted in inquiries or reviews at the BBC, within the National Health Service, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Department of Health.

The exposure of Savile as a paedophile led to extensive media coverage, including 41 days on the front pages.

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 2013 Williams-Thomas presented an ITV program called On the Run.

Williams-Thomas and his team pursued a convicted child sex offender on the run in Spain.

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.

In 2013, Williams-Thomas won two Royal Television Society awards and the London Press Awards Scoop of the Year for the film.

In September 2013, MP Tim Loughton made a statement to Parliament in which he praised Williams-Thomas for his "modest but game-changing ITV documentary that exposed Jimmy Savile".

Following the success of the Jimmy Savile documentary, Williams-Thomas presented two further Exposure documentaries; Exposure: Predators Abroad and Exposure: Inside the Diplomatic Bag.

His undercover work in Cambodia led to the arrest in 2013 of a person suspected of offering underage girls for sex and the rescue of two girls, aged 13 and 14.

In June 2014, investigations into Savile's activities at 28 NHS hospitals, including Leeds General Infirmary and Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, concluded that he had sexually assaulted staff and patients aged between 5 and 75 over several decades.

In response to the documentary, the Metropolitan police launched the Operation Yewtree police investigation, which led to the convictions of high-profile celebrities (including Rolf Harris, Max Clifford, and Gary Glitter).

Williams-Thomas presented the follow-up documentary The Jimmy Savile Investigation later that year.

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 11 November 2014, This Morning broadcast an exclusive interview with Jo Westwood, the ex-wife of 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.

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.