David Morrissey joins Eve Myles in Gone as headteacher Michael Polly; david morrissey plays the prime suspect
Eve Myles will lead the six-part crime drama Gone as Detective Annie Cassidy, with david morrissey cast as Michael Polly, an upstanding headteacher who becomes the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. The series is being billed now because it draws directly on a real cold-case investigation that helped bring a killer to justice decades after the crime.
Casting and characters: Eve Myles as Det Annie Cassidy, David Morrissey as Michael Polly
Welsh actress Eve Myles plays Det Annie Cassidy, a “super-bright, gutsy” investigator at the centre of the drama. david morrissey, best known for work including Sherwood, plays Michael Polly, an upstanding private school headmaster whose wife Sarah goes missing and who slowly becomes the prime suspect in that disappearance. The series follows Cassidy as she attempts to solve the mysterious case of a missing woman.
How a real cold case shaped the drama: Julie MacKay and To Hunt a Killer
The creative impetus for the fictional series came in part from the book To Hunt a Killer, written by crime correspondent Rob Murphy about Det Supt Julie MacKay's cold-case work. The book chronicles MacKay's 2009 reopening of the 1984 murder of 17-year-old Melanie Road, who was killed as she walked home from a nightclub in Bath. That reopening came 32 years after the killing.
Investigation details: the Melanie Road case, DNA leads and Christopher Hampton
Det Supt MacKay, recently transferred to Avon and Somerset's cold case review team when she reopened the inquiry in 2009, pledged to Melanie's mum that she would not stop until the killer was found. The review took six years of piecing together primitive evidence and extracting more modern DNA samples. In 2015 a young woman — who was not even born at the time of the murder — was arrested after a row with her boyfriend in which she broke his necklace; her DNA was taken and led investigators to her father. In 2016 Christopher Hampton, from Fishponds in Bristol, changed his plea to guilty at the start of his trial. He was jailed for life and must serve at least 22 years.
From case file to screen: consultants, fiction and setting
Both Julie MacKay and Rob Murphy served as consultants on the TV production, even though the first series’s fictional case is said to be nothing like the Melanie Road investigation. A production spokesperson described the show’s backdrop as a prestigious private school, a foreboding forest and the quiet sprawl of Bristol, setting the scene for a “compulsive game of cat and mouse” as Annie Cassidy chips away at Michael Polly's veneer.
Filming, broadcast timing and Myles’s perspective
Gone was filmed in and around Bristol last year and is set in the city; it is scheduled to reach viewers in early March. Eve Myles, who is best known for roles in Broadchurch and Keeping Faith, has said she’d once considered quitting acting because of a lack of quality roles for women, a view she shared at the Wales Screen Summit in October. The series positions her character as a strong, female detective inspired by the career of Det Supt MacKay.
Genre and tone: a fictional mystery rooted in real work
The six-part drama is presented as a fictional mystery that nonetheless draws on the painstaking police work of a long-running cold-case review. While the plotline about Michael Polly and his missing wife Sarah is invented, the series explicitly channels the procedural diligence and DNA breakthroughs that underpinned the real-life hunt for Melanie Road's killer.
