The writer of Luther has told a chilling tale of how he was convinced for years that he'd committed a crime that had never actually taken place. Neil Cross, who penned the Idris Elba-fronted detective series, explained that he believed he had murdered a homeless man during a drunken night out.
The incident never actually took place, but Neil shared that he'd had "no sense of it being a dream" when he woke up the morning after the night out. Ahead of his much-anticipated new drama The Sister, which will air on ITV, Neil told the story to a digital press event.
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"I was very young, I was 16 or 17 and I was out of my head on rough cider in Bristol… we used to drink rough cider in gallon containers because it was 32p a pint," the 51-year-old recalled. I was making my way back to my sister's house and there was a shortcut and you could either walk around a very long road - this huge sprawling council estate - or you could take a shortcut through the woods, through [to] these concrete steps through the woods. I woke up with a very, very clear memory of coming across a homeless man asleep on the steps who I randomly stabbed to death. I woke up the next morning and there was no sense of it being a dream, I just remembered doing it. To the extent, I lived in degrees of fear certainly for the next week."
He added: "For years and years - I genuinely find this difficult to talk about - even now there is one per cent of me which is troubled by the memory of it. When the Internet was invented one of the first things I did, when I became aware of what search engines were, was search the old newspapers. So yeah that was the inspiration. I didn’t do it if anybody’s wondering."
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The Sister airs later this month, starring Russell Tovey, and is largely based on Neil's haunting "memory."
