With dawning horror, they realised he might be responsible for more than one killing.
Geez, how can homicide cops ever view anything with ‘dawning horror’, most likely this is a journalistic cliche. The cops may have been (a) amused and (b) really interested that they had a real live one in their net and solution of high profile crimes might follow, with rewards and promotions as well. Real veteran cops are not the sanctimonius, sawdust figures from Criminal Minds, if they do their job, and often they don’t, they are tough, cynical opportunists who fully understand the public tolerates but does’t like them and the tax payer wants them to control the rabble.
No, dawning horror is right. My grandad was a firefighter covering the same are at the time and he was acquainted with a lot of police officers, including ones involved with the case. They most definitely were not in any way amused or excited about having to deal with it. Nor was my own friend, a former police officer who was on site in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing.
My grandad also had to pull the dead bodies of children from fire sites on a semi regular basis too. Even though he saw plenty of them he never became totally hardened to it. It is an awful thing to have yo deal with dead children, especially ones that have died in horrific circumstances. If you are normal that is.