Luther creator believed for years that he’d murdered homeless man while drunk

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.

"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 round 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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