Murder in the Badlands

A new series examining the stories behind the unsolved murders of four women across four decades in Northern Ireland. Arlene Arkinson, Lisa Dorrian, Marian Beattie and Inga Maria Hauser are all names that have dominated the headlines in Northern Ireland for all the wrong reasons. Four women whose lives were brutally cut short at the hands of merciless killers.

This programme tells the inside story of the murder and disappearance of Lisa Dorrian in 2005, and contains powerful testimony from her sister and victims' rights campaigner, Joanne Dorrian.

The inside story of the murder of German schoolgirl Inga Maria Hauser, with powerful testimony from her surviving family. In 1988, the body of the 18-year-old backpacker was found at the end of a dark track within the most remote part of Ballypatrick Forest.

The inside story of 15-year-old Arlene Arkinson who disappeared in 1994. Arlene left a housing estate in Castlederg to attend a disco in Bundoran. Her older sister Kathleen waved her goodbye but would never see her again. Her remains are undiscovered but presumed to have been buried in one of the vast swathes of bogland or forestry on the Irish border.

This series will revisit these horrendous, cold case murders to take the audience on a journey across the badlands of Ulster in the four decades between 1973 and 2005. Behind each story is the bubbling context of the Northern Ireland of the time, a place engulfed in sectarian conflict.

Episode four tells the inside story of the murder of Marian Beattie. In 1973, the Portadown teenager had travelled with her brother and friend to attend a charity dance in Aughnacloy. The body of the 18-year-old girl was found at the foot of a cliff in a quarry along a narrow country road.