Returning: Silent Witness

A new season of British crime series Silent Witness returns to ABC1 next month.

There are 10 episodes in Season 14 which premiered in the UK in January. It kicks off with the first in a two-part story “A Guilty Mind.”

Forensic pathologists Professor Leo Dalton (William Gaminara), Dr Harry Cunningham (Tom Ward) and Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox) return for another series of Silent Witness.

Every body tells a story: who they were, how they lived, and most importantly, how they died. Their history is there to be discovered and the body is the key to unlocking the story.

When three patients die unexpectedly on the same ward at a London hospital, Leo and Harry investigate the deaths and deduce that the patients were in fact murdered.

Suspicion falls on Professor Nigel Silverlake whose name appears in Night Sister Ying McCoy’s ward notes from the night before. When Silverlake winds up dead in an apparent ‘suicide by cop’ incident, Nikki is pressured by his daughter Naomi to find a physical cause for the old man’s breakdown.

The police investigation is further hampered when Ying McCoy disappears mysteriously.

Meanwhile, Nikki is embroiled in an investigation into James Bodle, suspected of raping and killing a young girl. She’s finding it a very difficult case personally, and can’t seem to stop imagining the girl’s final, gruesome moments. Bodle’s life was saved by Silverlake, and Nikki speculates that guilt at saving the murderer’s life may have driven Silverlake to breaking point.

When Bodle is declared mentally unfit for trial, an increasingly disturbed Nikki becomes obsessed with proving an underlying reason for the professor’s suicide. And just as the police enquiries seem to be getting nowhere, Ying McCoy is found; in a storeroom – hanged.

It returns 8:30pm Friday July 15 on ABC1.