Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-NINE:
Sunday 9th of October 1983, at around noon, roughly 75 yards north of the Coventry Canal, homeless man, George Cunningham was shuffling up the Old Leicester Road, when he discovered the body of 30-year-old wife and mother-of-three Lalitaben Ladva of Rugby. She had been strangled, beaten with a hammer, and her body dumped. It seemed like a motiveless crime, but a series of lies and deceptions by her killer would unearth the selfish reason for her murder.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. This week, I’m in Rugby, Warwickshire to explore a senseless murder and the series of deceptions used to disguise it. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 359: Buried Under Lies. Sunday 9th of October 1983. The summer was fading, a breeze kept the nights cool, and Britain was in its usual turmoil of highs and lows, as Cecil Parkinson had resigned from Thatcher’s cabinet having had a dirty dalliance with his secretary and Richard Nobel had broken the land speed record of 634mph. At around noon, one and a half miles north of Rugby train station - far from the shops, people or flats - and roughly 75 yards north of the Coventry Canal which was in a sorry state of disrepair, George Cunningham who the press unfairly labelled as ‘a well-known tramp’ was shuffling up the Old Leicester Road, a largely disused road through an old industrial part of the town, mostly used as a cut-through. Said to be dressed in a tatty donkey jacket and a creased camouflage hat, George’s eyes were scanning the weeds, thorns and withered trees which bathed this desolate lane in shadows, being a good spot to hunt for trash to make some cash; as builders used it to fly-tip, taxi drivers emptied their ashtrays of part-smoked rollies, sex workers often bought their clients here so coins and notes could be found on the ground, and the Corona van would give him 10p for every one of their pop bottles he returned. He was no harm to anyone, he kept to himself, and was known as a bit of a local character. On a short stretch between the Brownsover Road (leading to the Brownsover estate) but nearer the small bridge which – back then – spanned the canal, in the tall grass near an electricity sub-station, he spotted a black pair of women’s shoes. Small, neat, flat and clean, with no mud on the soles but scuff marks on the back. They were used, but if he could sell them for 50p, they’d help secure him a bed for the night. But as he got nearer, that’s when he saw the rest of her; the legs, the body, and the head. George called the Police, and detectives had the scene cordoned off within the hour. The investigation was led by Detective Superintendent Stan Moreton, and upon initial viewing, several details became clear. With faint tyre marks embedded in the mud of this layby, she had been driven here. Dumped in the long grass, her killer didn’t want her to be found, but didn’t hang around long enough to be seen, hence she wasn’t buried. And with no signs of a struggle, a spatter and pooling of blood where her head lay, showed that she’d been bludgeoned to death, when she was almost dead. Just two years earlier, The Yorkshire Ripper had been arrested, and since then, every time the body of sex-worker was found battered and dumped, the press slavered over a potential copy-cat killing. Only she was not a prostitute, that much was clear, as DS Moreton knew almost every girl on the game and her make-up and clothes told him everything he needed to know. Her skirt and brown cardigan was neat but not stylish, if anything it was motherly. The intricate henna tattoos on her hands implied she was Hindu, the bindi on her forehead and the red powder in her hair showed that she was married, and with Sunday being the tenth day of the Hindu festival of Navratri, they knew where she had been. She had dressed especially for this important date in her faith’s calendar, and although her purple sari was still lightly draped around her head, the loose end was tied tightly around her neck, and with no defensive wounds, her killer had strangled her, securing it in a double knot. But she didn’t (or couldn’t) put up a fight, so as she lay there, silent and still, he’d fractured her face and skull with a blunt object. In the Birmingham Evening Mail, an appeal was launched, stating “detectives hunting the brutal killer of a young Asian mother-of-three in Rugby appealed for anyone who may have been in the vicinity of the murder to come forward. Detective Superintendent Stan Moreton said “we would like to hear from anyone who was in the Old Leicester Road between 10pm on Saturday night and 12:30am on Sunday”, as the pathologist confirmed she was dead at least 12 hours, they knew she had been driven there “as it was unlikely she would have walked that way, or got into a car with a stranger”, and with no robbery or sexual assault, he said “at this stage there appears to be no motive for this brutal killing”. Yet he knew who she was, as In her handbag, her ID matched that of a loving wife, devoted mother and factory worker who had been reported missing by her distraught husband just 11 hours before. But who had murdered her, and why? She was born in India in 1953 as Latitaben Jivan Dhana Majevadia. Latitaben comes from the Sanskrit Latita meaning playful, beautiful or charming with the suffix ben, a respectful Gujarati term for sister. During her childhood, her family moved to Kenya, as many Indians from the Gujerat did, but in 1963, when this East African country won its independence from Britain, this should have been a boom-time for all, but with its native majority government enacting many "Africanisation" laws which favoured native born Kenyans, many of these ‘double migrants’ moved to Britain having their duel citizenship. In 1972, 19-year-old Latitaben moved with her parents to Newham, East London and lived on Romford Road with the parents of her fiancé, Dhirajlal, whose name means ‘a beloved son who is calm and composed’. As arranged, they married in April 1973, and keen to start a family, the following July their first son Alkesh was born, followed in April 1978 by a daughter Alka, and a final son, Amar in July 1982. With the West Midlands town of Rugby experiencing economic growth, in 1978, they relocated, and in 1979, moved into a three-bedroomed council-house at 20 Whernside in Brownsover. As a full-time mother, Latitaben also worked as a press operator at the GEC factory, she was taking language courses at college, and alongside her husband, being religious yet westernised, they kept to themselves as two of the roughly 1200 Hindus who were living in Rugby at that time in a town with a population of 87,000. Many Kenyan Asians spoke of the shock they experienced in 1970s and 80s Britain, being relegated from professional jobs to low-paid manual labour, the rise of racist attacks by far-right groups like the National Front and everyday discrimination by uneducated morons who start every sentence with “I’m not a racist, but…”, and even though, through persistence and hard work, many set up businesses and became a vital part of the community, it was a time of hostility, unfair laws, racist abuse and attacks. With Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech fuelling tensions, and 1981 exploding in three days of violence in the Handsworth Riots, like many Hindus, their temple became their place of sanctuary, and their faith became the values around which their lives revolved. Hinduism has two core concepts: Dharma, their duty and righteous way of living, and Karma, the universal law of cause and effect. A Hindu’s life is observed by the five Yamas, morals rules to help them avoid causing harm to others; so, they mustn’t be violent, lie, steal, be possessive or greedy, and unfaithful in their relationships. With the five Niyamas to help them live a clean and happy life; being pure in body, mind and speech, content with what you have, patience and discipline, studying texts, praying, and a devotion to God. But was Latitaben racially attacked? The Police didn’t think so. Saturday 8th of October 1983 was an important day in the Hindu faith, as this was Navratri, a ten-day, nine-night festival dedicated to worshipping the mother goddess, Durga and her many manifestations, commemorating the Goddess' epic battle and triumph of good over evil, observed by fasting, prayers, and reflection to shed negative energies and awaken divine qualities in a riot of colour and dance. Her day had begun like any other being a wife and mother-of three children aged 9, 5 and 15 months. She had cleaned the house, done the washing, made the dinner, bathed their youngest, put them to bed, and taking it in turns with her husband, Dhirajlal, which day they’d attend the festival, Saturday was hers, so he would stay home to watch the children. With her make-up done – black eyeliner, red bindi, and Henna tattoos – and wearing a neat brown cardigan, flat black shoes, black skirt and a purple sari, at 6:50pm, Dhirajlal drove his wife to the venue at Benn Hall, a local space, and returned home. Arriving at 7pm, when she needed a lift home, as she didn’t feel safe on the buses and wouldn’t ask for a lift from the 200+ friends and strangers at the festival, being two miles away, using the pay-phone at Benn Hall, Latitaben would call the home phone around 10:45pm, and Dhirajlal would pick her up. Organised by Bharat Sevak Semaj Indian Association, Latitaben enjoyed the festival, and as her friends and associates recalled, she was happy, had a good time and felt rejuvenated, she didn’t meet anyone strange, she didn’t seem harassed or upset, and at around 10:45pm, she was seen leaving, as planned. Dhirajlal told the Police that he expected a phone call from her, but it never came. Growing concerned, he called her friends and family, and with her nowhere to be seen which was unusual for this loyal wife and devoted mother-of-three, at 1am, he went to Rugby police station and reported her missing. 11 hours later, her body was found – strangled and beaten – in the long grass of Old Leicester Road. 40 officers were assigned to the case, with a murder inquiry set-up, an incident room at the Police Station, and Rugby 62210 being a dedicated phone number for any witnesses. As lead investigator, DS Stan Moreton had the road sealed off, forensics processed the scene and sniffer dogs searched the area, as trained officers carried out a ‘scythe and sickle’ search of the overgrown surroundings. It didn’t resemble like a racially motivated attack, as any far-right group would have daubed any fascist graffiti nearby, or left their mark on her body in a way to insult her faith, but this hadn’t happened. It was unlikely to be a grudge attack, as Latitaben and her family kept to themselves and had no rivals, or enemies. And although her attack was described as “savage”, to the police, it was also “motiveless”. She hadn’t been raped and she hadn’t been robbed, but her killing was “clearly motivated by anger”. Having discovered her body, homeless man, George Cunningham was questioned, but released, as with him being in a hostel the night before, he had a cast iron alibi, verified by several reliable sources. With her home being two miles away, and unsure how she got from Benn Hall to where she had died, DS Moreton hypothesised that maybe she was kidnapped, as “it is doubtful she would have entered a vehicle voluntarily with someone she didn’t know… and unlikely she’d have walked that way home”. Questioning everyone who attended the festival, one detail didn’t seem to fit the timeline, as with her husband, Dhirajlal, stating that he stayed in with the kids awaiting her call, the pay-phone at Benn Hall had been used at roughly 10:45pm to call their home phone, he was seen leaving 20 Whernside shortly after, and several witnesses saw him, just after 11pm, at Benn Hall, leaving with his wife, in their car. Going against his faith, Dhirajlal had blatantly lied, but he said he did it to protect his children… …as what he said happened wasn’t a murder, but an accident. In the police interrogation room, he admitted that she had called as planned, that he had driven to Benn Hall as agreed, that he had entered the venue, and that they had got into the car in the car park. They drove home, the usual route; north up Newbold Road, a very residential street, they turned right onto Leicester Road which is more remote but leads to their home in Brownsover, they took a left up the Old Leicester Road, a rural road surrounded by factories, and over a bridge at the Coventry Canal. He admitted that he was driving too fast, “around 40 to 50 miles per hour”, and when he took a sharp right hand bend, losing control, he was forced to brake, and not wearing a seatbelt as it had only been made mandatory earlier that year, Latitaben was thrown against the dashboard and hit her head hard. Dhirajlal stated “I stopped the car, and put her head back on the seat”. Her lower jaw was fractured, and the front of her face had received severe crush injuries. He said he was in shock as it all happened so fast, “her body was cold, and I thought she was dead. I was going to take her home”, but one fear, he said, had overridden his commonsense, “I thought about the children”. With their mum dead, and their dad likely arrested and suspected of her murder, he did his best to cover up this tragic accident. Or so he claimed… …but the evidence didn’t match his version of events; as he claimed “her body was cold and I thought she was dead”, but it takes a human body 12 hours to feel cold to the touch, not minutes; her facial injuries didn’t match a flat plastic dashboard but a hard blunt object like a hammer, and with her cause of death being “head injuries and ligature strangulation”, how and why was she strangled by her sari? The Police had just one suspect, her husband. But what was his motive? When they dug deeper, detectives discovered that, like Dhirajlal, Latitaben had a life insurance policy worth £15,000 (roughly £60,000 today) payable to her next of kin. With a 95% mortgage on their ex-council house, her death could wipe out two-thirds of it, but with so many debtors who would be paid first, the policy would pay-out if she was found murdered, but not to him, if he was the culprit. Money wasn’t his motive, as a single call made from his home phone that night would prove. One hour after her death, as Dhirajlal drove home with her blood on his hands, when he entered their home quietly for fear of waking their motherless children, when he made a series of phone calls to her friends and family telling them how distraught he was that she was missing, he made another call. Douglas Draycott QC for the Prosecution stated in court, “their relationship was deteriorating, though whether that was the motive, I know not”. Their marriage was collapsing, but not due to the stresses of their lives, “but it seems he had formed a passionate attachment for a white lady in Birmingham”. Marriage is sacred to Hindus and intended for life, but being forward-thinking, the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 made divorce possible by mutual consent on the grounds of adultery, cruelty and desertion, so it wouldn’t have been a sin for them to break their bonds, but it was a sin as he had been unfaithful. Just a few weeks before, Dhirajlal had met Gloria Gardner, an unmarried mother-of-five from Shirley in Birmingham, while she was staying with her Aunt in Meadow Road in nearby Newbold, they met in a pub, had sex, and with her staying several more nights, this fling turned into something more serious. At the end of September 1983, barely two weeks before Latitaben’s murder, they booked into a B&B in the seaside town of Great Yarmouth having passionate sex while his wife was at home with the kids. He also checked them both in under the alias of Mrs & Mrs Ladva - his and his wife’s married names. Infidelity is a sin in Hinduism as it breaks the sacred bond of marriage, and by creating ‘bad karma’, this universal cause and effect creates a deep spiritual harm to both parties, guilty and innocent… …and although this should have guided him to righteousness, all he cared about was himself. When questioned further in the interrogation room of Rugby police station, Dhirajlal’s sordid tale that his wife died having hit her head when he braked too hard was proven as a lie. But what was the truth? As far as we know, Saturday 8th of October 1983 began like any other for this wife and mother; she cleaned, washed, cooked, bathed, read her babies a bedtime story, and having dressed for the festival (in a way which was in-keeping with her faith and denoted her devotion to her husband and family), at 6:50pm, Dhirajlal drove his wife the 2 miles to Benn Hall, and he returned home to their children. With no witnesses, it is said that he stayed in and watched television, but we can’t confirm this. Latitaben enjoyed the festival, she didn’t seem worried or concerned, at around 10:45pm as planned, she used the pay-phone at Benn Hall to call here husband, and at 11pm, he entered the venue, picked her up, as seen, and the two briefly sat together in the car park, but what was said, could not be heard. Nobody heard them argue, saw them fight and with one of these two later being murdered, the truth of what happened cannot be verified. But in court, Dhirajlal stuck to his story in the face of evidence. He told the detectives, that night, he had received an anonymous telephone call from a man he didn’t know or recognise the voice, who said that, at the festival, he had been cuddling and kissing his wife. In the car, Dhirajlal claimed “I asked her about the call, and she said it was nothing to do with me”, if indeed, this even happened at all. “I said I wanted to know what was going on and she said she would not tell me”. But as Latitaben is dead, and Dhirajlal had lied twice to the Police, the truth is illusive. Out of anger, he said “I punched her in the face. When I punched her, she just went unconscious and I saw blood coming from her nose. I got frightened and started to drive home”, as she sat, slumped in the passenger’s seat, silent and - possibly - still, for fear of angering him further. It was here in his tale that he added the unnecessary detail that having taken a sharp right hand bend too quickly, he braked and she hit her head, hard against the dashboard, even though, his dashboard wasn’t damaged at all. Home Office Pathologist, Derek Barrowcliff told the court “she would have been dazed, unconscious or maybe even paralysed with fear”, she wasn’t dead, and although her last thoughts would have been of her children, “she wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight”, hence she had no defensive wounds. Not being blessed with brains, his lies weaved back-and-forth as wildly as his erratic driving, and even though he would falsely claim that when he hit her, “her body was cold and I thought she was dead”, which is medically impossible in under ten minutes, it would later be proven that she was still alive. With his selfish needs on his mind, rather than driving her to a hospital, calling an ambulance, or as he claimed “I thought she was dead. I was going to take her home”, instead of driving the quickest route, he took a detour up the Old Leicester Road, which was dark, quiet, isolated, and thick with bushes. At around 11:15pm, he pulled over in a makeshift layby, leaving a set of tyre marks near an electricity substation between the canal and the Brownsover Road, he got out leaving his shoe marks and - rather than carrying her semi-conscious body and hiding it amongst the tall grass, thorns and weeds – he tied her purple sari around her neck, and used that to drag her from the car to a patch of waste ground. That was not the actions of a husband who still loved his wife, had accidentally killed her in a car crash, and told a few lies as he was fearful of being caught and ruining the lives of his three children forever, this was a selfish man with lustful needs, as he then strangled her, and tied it with a double knot. She was alive, but unconscious when he strangled her, as her painted fingernails were long and unbroken. But he wasn’t finished. In his defence, he would claim “I tried to make it look like someone else did it” - maybe a racist attack or a serial killer, but definitely not her supposedly ‘loving and faithful husband’ – so like a bloody cherry on a hideous cake, “I went back to the car”, and (pre-meditated or not) “I saw a (lump) hammer on the floor, went back to the body. I hit her once on the head”, breaking her skull and caving in her face. Said to have been ‘viscously beaten’, he didn’t do this to make the Police believe she was fatally injured in an accident, or murdered by a random killer who happened to be giving free lifts to Hindu women, he did this out of anger, not at what she had done to him, but what he had done to her and their kids. Sometime around midnight, he arrived home, creeping in, so as not to awaken the children who would ask “where’s mum?”. He washed his hands, his clothes, and later his car, inside and out. He rehearsed his words and called their friends and relatives like a worried husband to provide himself an alibi, even thought he must have already known that he had been seen leaving with her at Benn Hall, possibly arguing in the car park, and then – most baffling of all – using his home phone, he called his mistress. When he spun Gloria the same lie that his wife was ‘missing’, doing the decent thing, she said she told him “I said we should finish it, so that he could get back with his wife”, but Dhirajlal wasn’t happy. At 1am, having falsified his alibi, he reported Latitaben as a ‘missing person’, but with the detectives trained to spot lies and liars, his edifice came crashing down, and being the police’s primary (and only) suspect, his house was searched, and in a cupboard, the bloody lump hammer was found. (End). Dhirajlal Ladva was arrested on Tuesday the 11th of October 1983, just two days after her murder. On Wednesday 4th of April 1984, he was tried at Birmingham Crown Court before Mr Justice McCowan. As expected, he pleaded ‘not guilty’ to murder, and across the five-day trial, he tried to blame his dead wife. When he testified, he claimed that “she had associations with other men… I hoped she would stop when I started seeing Gloria (Gardner)”, even though her so-called ‘other men’ he couldn’t name and none could be found to give evidence. He also said, “every night she used to get calls from them”, and that once, “I arrived home to find her lying naked on the carpet with a pornographic stack of cards” – which her family denied, and which he had invented to besmirch her name and reputation. In truth, he killed her, because he was having an affair, not her. Found guilty by a unanimous jury, on Tuesday 10th of April 1984, Justice McCowan summed-up “I pass upon you the sentence I am required to pass by law, that you go to prison for life”. But the damage was done, as with Latitaben dead and Dhirajlal in prison (and/or) on licence for life, their children ended up being the real victims in this sordid tale, as Alkesh, Alka and Amar were effectively orphaned. Being stuck in a legal tussle between their aunt & uncle in Birmingham and Latitaben’s elderly parents in London, the last time this case was reported, it was said that their custody was being assessed by social workers, with it likely that “the oldest child live in Birmingham and the younger ones in London”. And with it said by their aunt, “they do not often mention their parents. I don’t think the younger ones know what has happened”, let us hope that (above their father’s selfishness) they finally found peace. But for him, as in the Hindu faith, murder results in bad karma, with it said to “trap the killer in a cycle of rebirth”, even if he is free, he may be cursed to relive the memory of his crime in every life he lives. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT: This is Part 2 of 2 of Evil Little Droog.
From 1976 to 2003, Peter Allan Foster of Bridlington committed a string of vicious and brutal attacks on his girlfriends and wives, including holding them hostage, kidnapping them at knifepoint, strangling, beating, shooting, coercion, and two counts of murder. But how did he evade justice for so long, and what has any of this got to do with his obsession – the 1973 film, A Clockwork Orange.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of Tuesday the 18th July 1989, 33-year-old Peter Foster walked into Bridlington Police Station stating that his girlfriend, 38-year-old Linda Grimm had died in her sleep. Living his life like Alex DeLarge in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, the next scene in his violent tale should have played out like this. Inside a Police cell, having been beaten bloody by corrupt officers, Alex professes his innocence to his probation officer, Mr Deltoid, whose revelation is about to make this little thug famous. Alex “It wasn’t me brother Sir, I’m not so bad, I was led on by the treachery of others, Sir. It was one of my stinking droogs, get them before they get away. It was all their idea. They forced me to do it. I’m innocent”. Deltoid laughs “you’re now a murderer little Alex, a murderer”, Alex “it’s not true Sir. It was only a slight tolchock, she were breathing I swear it”, Deltoid “I’ve just come from the hospital, your victim has died”. And with that, Alex is convicted of murder, and unwittingly becomes a martyr to the state. Alex DeLarge is rehabilitated using a revolutionary technique, which makes him physically sick when he even thinks about committing a crime, and conforming him against his free will to society’s norms. In Foster’s mind, it’s possible that he also believed that his crimes were not his fault, and that his brutal assault, torture and trauma of his ex-wives Lindy & Margaret Foster, and ex-girlfriends Kathryn Portelli & Julie Dixon to name a few, that he was led to commit them by a higher power, whether God or fate. But Foster wasn’t arrested or questioned, as with the pathologist Dr Lloyd Denmark unable to state if Linda’s injuries (said to be “extreme” and “akin to a car crash”) not being listed as suspicious, with her four times over the drink-drive limit, her death was blamed on her alcoholism, and Foster walked free. This deranged and dangerous man would go on to physically and mentally torture more many more women, and another would end up dead. But did this violent film turn a man into a monster… …or was the monster merely using this violent film as an excuse for his crimes? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 358: Evil Little Droog – Part 2 of 2. It’s hard to pin down who Peter Allan Foster really was, as by the mid to late 1980s, he was so obsessed with ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – reciting the lines, wearing the clothes and re-enacting the violence with his fists, feet or a sharpened umbrella tip – he so inhabited the persona of the film’s narrator and (so called) “hero”, that it was hard to tell where the real Peter Foster began, and Alex DeLarge ended. Given his wanton cruelty, some may suggest that he was mentally ill? One week before Linda Grimm’s death, Foster told his doctor he was prone to banging his head against walls and fearing he may harm someone. In 1973, after ‘A Clockwork Orange’s release, reports show that he had tried to kill himself. July, inside a cell at Bridlington Police Station, he tried to strangle himself with a handkerchief, having made what was described as “a half-hearted attempt to slit his wrists”. He later claimed he was ‘just mucking about’ but was this so he could receive the same fictional medical treatment as Alex DeLarge? That August, he attacked Derek Sharman, the new man dating his ex-girlfriend, Denise O’Conell, with a carving fork. Foster lunged at him, Derek fell over a sofa and the fork pierced his leg, and as seen, Foster was a coward when confronted by a man. When Police arrived, it was said “he was clawing at self-inflicted razor wounds on his wrists”, but tried at Bridlington Magistrates Court, it was concluded “he’s not a lunatic with suicidal tendencies, Foster was childish and immature. He was unable to accept rejection… it was a suicidal gesture… and there was no real danger that any harm would come to him”. In the film, feeling that his free will had been taken from him, Alex DeLarge throws himself out of the window of the hospital. Quote: “Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps, and then, sleep for ever, and ever and ever”. But Foster’s was just an act. It was like when he listened to Beethoven’s 9th symphony to get himself pumped up for a dash of the old ‘ultraviolence’ as Alex would say, “Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!”. But was this an alibi? Peter Foster spoke of love, but like Alex DeLarge, he didn’t know what love was. On the 18th of July 1989, he murdered Linda Grimm. Four months later, he re-married. Amanda Thorne was his third wife, they wed in November 1989 in Bridlington, and although they remained together for six years, that would imply that their life together was heaven, when it was the epitome of hell. Tried at Hull Crown Court in February 1995, he was described him as “an evil stepfather who would drink a bottle of sherry” - his version of milk-plus, Alex’s drug of choice – “and get angry with his kids”. In his eyes, “I had little to do with the children… we all seemed to get on pretty well. I played with all the children and they used to come and watch me do gardening and repairing the motorcycles”. But finally finding the courage to flee his fear, Amanda told the court, “I was sick of his brutality”. He beat her, he abused her, he stalked her, and threatened to hit her kids if she ever went to the Police. These were not idle threats, as he didn’t just attack and torture women, he beat children too. Retold in court, her 9-year-old son said he was smacked in the face with a brush, her 7-year-old he kicked in the groin with his steel-capped boots, one son he handcuffed to the stairs and threatened “I will saw your toes off”, and banged her 18-month old son’s head against the wall, as well as attacking Amanda. Found guilty of two counts of cruelty to children and ABH against the 7-year-old, but found not guilty of assaulting his wife and cruelty to her three year old son, Foster was sentenced to just 18 months. Amanda later stated during his 2003 trial for a brutal double murder, that Foster - perhaps as a threat to ensure this terrified woman never left him - he told her “I am not afraid to kill” and that “I beat Linda Grimm to death with a heavy electric guitar, because she was ill and she wanted to die”… …it wasn’t entirely the truth, but what had it got to do with ‘A Clockwork Orange’? Everything about Peter Foster was pathetic, he was weak, insecure, cowardly, and - dressing like Alex DeLarge - he was little more than a boy pretending to be Action Man, only this was a grown-up in his 20s, 30s and into his 40s. To him, he was the hero of his own film, and everyone else was a bit player. As Alex did, Foster saw his parents and grandparents who raised him through distant and cynical eyes, Alex "Pee and em in their bedroom next door had learnt not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them", and being little more than a cash-cow, in January 1975, Foster stole a £5 social security cheque from his grandfather, one of many thefts from his loved ones. He quoted The Bible and went to midnight mass, but like Alex states in the film, “I didn't so much like the latter part of The Book - which is more like all preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out. I like the parts where these old yahoodies tolchok each other and then drink their Hebrew vino and getting onto the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going”. He was religious for effect. Several times he crashed his car or scooter, driving too fast, unlicenced and disqualified, maybe while racing down the back streets of Bridlington like Alex and his droogs in a stolen car. Alex: “the Durango 95 purred away real horrorshow, a nice, warm vibraty feeling all through your guttiwuts. Soon it was trees and dark my brothers, with real country dark. We fillied around for a while with other fellow travellers of the night playing hogs of the road. Then we headed west, what we were after now was the old surprise visit, that was a real kick and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultra violent”. The problem was, Foster said he was acrophobic, and he didn’t have a gang, it was just himself. In his version of the Korova Milkbar, Foster went to the pub to get pissed, but also wasted many hours getting high as “this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence”. He took LSD, magic mushrooms and cannabis, and drank up to two bottles of sherry and neat whiskey a day. “Many people knew not to visit him after noon because of his temper”, like Alex after a milk-plus. Only Foster’s life wasn’t a thrilling two-hour epic filmed in glorious technicolour, but the sad existence of a violent alcoholic living off benefits, and dispensing his abuse and bullshit on terrified women. The author, Anthony Burgess stated that the title is a metaphor, if Alex “can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice, but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil”. But did the film make Foster into a monster, or did the monster make the film his scapegoat? Linda Doris Wardill was born locally on the 31st of May 1957, and had lived in Bridlington for most of her life. They first met when she was 16, and said to be ‘childhood sweethearts’, he briefly dated her in late 1981 between divorcing Margaret and dating Kathryn. But like Clive, the father of his first wife, Lindy Derham, Linda Wardill’s father took an instant dislike to him and banned her from seeing him. Heeding his wise words, Linda later married a man called John, and together they had several children; Tom, Ben, Ellen and Cheri. She lived a good life, but as life is sent to test us all, 1994 had begun badly. On the 19th of January 1994, the Hull Daily Mail reported that she had fled her home with her children, as fire engulfed the upper floor. Christmas had only just ended, but with Tom & Ben being curious boys, “it is believed the fire started by the two youngster playing with matches, it destroyed most of their possessions”, including their clothes, bedding, carpets and presents, “but Linda was not insured”. It caused unnecessary stress, and fractures a difficult marriage, but worse was to come. In the summer of 1996, Ellen later recalled “It’s strange but I was only 12 and I must have known something was going on. I remember I was with my friends in the street one day and I saw Peter drive past. I ran all the way home to warn my family he was out of prison”, having served 18 months for attacking his stepson. It’s uncertain why, as although Foster was an “evil and cruel stepfather” and was later charged with child pornography offences, Linda moved in with him, and Tom, Ben & Cheri stayed with their father. As had become routine, at first he was said to be charming, and as Ellen recalled “they seemed happy”, but as the months turned into years, soon her ‘happy, pretty and confident’ mother became a shadow of her former self; sullen, bruised and broken. “They would take great pleasure in telling everyone how much they loved each other”, but as with the others, this was just an alibi to mask the awful truth. Neighbours regularly saw her covered in bruises. Ellen recalled “she started getting black eyes, bruises and cuts, which she would say happened when she fell off ladders, slipped or walked into doors”. It’s hard to protect a loved one when they refuse, or are too terrified to see the truth, “I knew what was going on, but in the end I stopped asking because I got sick of the same old lies. One day I went round to visit her and when she put her head around the door her face was totally bruised and she didn’t have any front teeth. I asked her what happened, and she said the dentist had taken them out”. Several times, Linda tried to flee from Foster’s vice-like grip, but she always came back to him. Ellen said “It was something powerful, but I don’t know whether it was love or fear in the end”, and although he said to her friend, Sandra, “one day I might kill her”, something kept them together for seven years. But the pain and the lies would never end. On the 2nd of September 2002, three months before her death, being treated for an unexplained injury at Bridlington hospital, x-rays found an air-rifle pellet in her shoulder. Telling Dr Hamida “I shot myself by accident”, although this was almost impossible, unwilling to blame Foster, it was taken no further. In the weeks prior, Albert Copsey, a driver she’d worked with at First Line Taxis recalled, “I picked her up to drive her to Beverly… her eyes were full as if she’d been crying, she walked very slowly”, and each time the car hit a bump “she grabbed her chest and winced” as if something inside her was broke. One week before, Linda fled Foster for a final time. Arriving on her 19-year-old daughter’s doorstep having been beaten with a pan, Ellen said “she kept saying she was ‘sick of it, sick of all the beatings’, so I called him and asked him why he had done it. He said it was because he loved her. It was then he threatened to kill her. I put the phone down and thought it was an empty threat, but he called back later, and my mum spoke to him. She asked me for my exact address and soon after a taxi arrived. My last words to my mum were ‘you know where I am if you need me, but if this carries on, the next time I see you, you’ll be in a coffin’. She didn’t even look back as she got into the taxi. I never saw her again”. Monday the 9th of December 2002 was Linda Wardill’s last full day alive. Like Linda Grimm, the pain Linda Wardill felt was excruciating, it was something she would describe as “worse than child birth”, when she called NHS Direct and spoke to Sally-Anne Smith. Diagnosing it by phone, all she had to go on was Linda’s claim that she had food poisoning from eating pork faggots, but couldn’t see that her teeth were smashed, her eyes swollen, her face was a patchwork of old and new bruises, blacks, blues and yellows, with her body riddled with cuts, welts, burns and drag marks. Unable to stand and struggling to breathe, the nurse said “I’m going to call you an ambulance”, but Linda begged “no, no, no, no, I don’t want that”, as in the background, Foster could be heard hissing “you are going to get us in trouble”. The nurse asked “what did he mean by that?”, and out of panic, Linda replied “eating pork”. The nurse urged her to call her GP, and said she’d ring back an hour later, but – being controlled, body and mind, by Peter Foster – these lies and excuses she told were to save her from a fate worse than death, but her death had already begun days, months and years before. When the nurse called back, Linda said he hadn’t been able to get through, so took painkillers, but in the background, Foster could be heard shouting “tell her the truth. We had a really heavy night on the booze”, only that wasn’t why she was screaming and writhing in excruciating agony. When her GP, Dr David Hickson arrived, she told him the same lie, so he gave her pain killers and anti-sickness injection. That night, she went to sleep, and she never woke up. Foster said they drank 3 to 4 bottles of sherry or spirits a day between them, so his memory was hazy. He said he got her some medicine, she went to bed at 5:50pm, he went watching a DVD, and the next morning she wasn’t moving. Foster said “from that time I realised something was seriously wrong. I rang 999, and had been giving her mouth-to-mouth and heart massage, but she would no respond”. Within minutes of his call, an ambulance crew found Linda dead, she was cold, rigor mortis had set in, and although he claimed he was trying to revive her when they arrived, she’d been dead four hours. Like Linda Grimm, the death of Linda Wardill could easily have been brushed off by an uncaring society as just another sad story of two alcoholics, trapped in a cycle of benefits and abuse, who being prone to falls, self-harm and arguments had taken a tumble during an argument, and died due to poor health. But the crew reported this as a ‘suspicious’ death, and Detective Chief Superintendent Christine Kelk took charge. Dr Hickson certified her as dead, the pathologist found her 38 bruises to her arms, back, chest and - more significantly - to her abdomen, and a bruise to her arm in the shape of a man’s shoe. Peter Foster was arrested, charged with two counts of ABH, and was bailed to a hostel in Sculthorpe. During his trial, the senior investigating officer said: “Foster is an evil, vicious man who terrorised women for years… he chose to force these women to give evidence against him. He sought to hide behind a cloak of silence when he was interviewed by the police”. But in court, he was full of excuses. He said she was staggering and slumped on the floor. Out of frustration, he kicked her as if to say ‘get up you drunken sod’ stating “I didn’t know I had hurt her, I loved that woman”. He said he truly believed she had food poisoning, he said he was shattered when he found out she was dead, and said “If I had realised it was that bad, if I had even an inkling, I certainly would have done something more”. He would claim “it was an accident. We were both very drunk. I stamped on Linda, not knowing I had hurt her”, but a post-mortem showed a catalogue violent wounds, both fresh and sustained over time. She had several fractures to her ribs from a few days before, two of which had refractured. Numerous bruises of different colours and sizes which patchworked across her body like a sickly rainbow. And having been subjected to a sickening and severe assault in the hours before her death, he had beaten her with a broom and stamped on her abdomen so hard, he had ruptured her bowel, her stomach was completely split in two and she bled internally with injuries “consistent with a high speed car crash”. He had beaten her to death in a similar way to how Alex and his droogs attacked the homeless man in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, kicking and beating the drunk with his feet and cane, yet, Foster was a drunk. (Quote): “When we got outside of the Duke of New York, we viddied a burbling old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts… So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but he still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy, and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way”. In the early hours of the 26th of January 2003, Foster was charged with Linda Wardill’s murder… …but this wasn’t the end of the investigation. Three weeks before, Humberside Police had already began re-investigating the death, 13 years earlier of Foster’s former girlfriend, Linda Grimm, a death that the pathologist, Dr Lloyd Denmark hadn’t listed as ‘suspicious’. But there were too many eerie similarities between both deaths; the man, his crimes, his crocodile tears, his dressing up as Alex DeLarge, and speaking of droogs, milk plus and devotchkas. Police appealed for any former girlfriends and ex-wives of Peter Foster to come forward to help paint a picture of his personality and peculiarities. If it hadn’t been for the strength and bravery of these five women - Lindy & Margaret Foster, Kathryn Portelli, Julie Dixon & Amanda Thorne - Detective Superintendent Colin Andrews stated “we would never have snared this horrific double murderer”. Pathologist Dr Lloyd Denmark was asked to examine the evidence from the autopsy of Linda Grimm, as conducted by him 13 years before, but with her body cremated, all they had to go on was paperwork and memory. He stated “I believed she may have suffered a spontaneous rupture of the renal vein”, resulting from a build-up of pressure from an operation she’d had four years before. But he agreed that her death was not natural and her ruptured kidney had resulted from a trauma, possibly a kick. Because those details hadn’t been listed as a cause of death, and weren’t prominent in the findings, Foster was never suspected of Linda’s murder, he was never questioned about her injuries, and as Detective Superintendent Colin Andrews would state “he had literally got away with murder." The Judge agreed with the detective’s hypothesis that, as a violent man who modelled himself on Alex DeLarge and was obsessed with the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’, the murder of Linda Grimm had been a savage recreation of the killing of the cat lady – a crime which made Alex infamous as a murderer. But instead of beating the cat lady to death with a statue of a phallus, Foster had attacked Linda Grimm with his guitar, bursting her kidneys. It was a crime which changed Alex’s fictional life, led him to prison, and meant he was engaged in the Ludavico treatment, where he was programmed by the state not to be evil. So did Foster believe he was forced to be bad by a higher power, or was this an alibi? On the 30th of January 2003, Foster was charged with the murder of Linda Grimm and Linda Wardill, and with Andrew Campbell QC for the Prosecution choosing “nine sample charges from what could have been hundreds arising from Foster’s violence towards six women”, he was would also be tried for the wounding with intent to do her grievous bodily harm to Lindy Foster, two charges of the false imprisonment and the assault of Margaret Foster, the kidnap of Kathryn Portelli, assault occasioning ABH to Julie Dixon, and the additional charge of the possession of indecent images of young children. In December 2003, at Hull Crown Court, Peter Allan Foster was tried before Judge Justice Henriques. He denied both counts of murder and all charges against Lindy, Margaret, Kathryn & Julie. He admitted he was “an angry man with an interest in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and that he had been violent to all the women, not in the way it was alleged” with his solicitor stating that some of their stories had been exaggerated or fabricated. He denied that the film made him feel violent, he denied sharpening the tip of an umbrella like it was a sword cane, but Foster did send a letter to the judge admitting that he was “a miserable excuse for a human being”, whose issues were down to drinking and mental health. Under cross-examination, and weighed down by the wealth of evidence, when asked if he assaulted Linda Wardill, he said “yes sir, I did”, asked if he assaulted Linda Grimm, he said “no sir, I did not”. The prosecution called his remorse “humbug and hypocrisy”, and that “Mr Foster’s regret was like a schoolboy apologising for scrumping apples, when in reality he was facing a double murder... this is a case about persistent, terrifying violence… unprovoked, and sustained without any hint of remorse”. But in his closing speech, Gary Burrell QC for the Defence said that Foster admitted he was a violent bully, “but the prosecution have failed to provide evidence of a sustained attack on Linda Wardill, or of a mental intention to kill Linda Grimm. This is not a case of domestic violence, this is much worse, this was a case about a man with a problem who had been dangerous and out of control in the past and who did not know he had a problem… he is a bully, a coward and by his own admission has done terrible things… but if you cannot be sure, it will be your duty to return a verdict of manslaughter”, as hid defence rested on one phrase - “were these the actions of a man who really wanted to kill?” (END) At the end of this 13-day trial, the jury deliberated for three-and-a-half-hours, and returned with a unanimous verdict. Of the ABH of Julie Dixon? “Guilty”. Of the kidnap of Kathryn Portelli? “Guilty”. Of the assault and false imprisonment of Margaret Foster? “Guilty”. Of wounding with intend to do GBH of Lindy Foster? “Guilty” and the murders of Linda Wardill and 13 years before, Linda Grimm? “Guilty”. For his crimes against Lindy, Margaret, Kathryn and Julie, he was sentenced 22 years in prison. And for the murders of Linda Wardill and Linda Grimm he was given two life sentences. Justice Henriques told Foster “you are a very dangerous man to women of any age. Beginning in 1976 and ending 26 years later, you have mercilessly terrorised women who made the dreadful mistake of agreeing to live with you. You took the lives of two of them, you terrorised those who survived so that they fled for their lives. This case has focussed on just six women who suffered the most brutal, cruel, bullying conduct at your hands…”, the Judge thanked the women for their courage and strength, he described the horror inflicted upon them as “having gone to hell and back”, and said to Foster and he stood with his head bowed, “your survivors are entitled to know you will remain in prison for very many years”. When Foster was led away, in his hand he held The Bible, just like Alex DeLarge when he was led away to the cells in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. In 2007, he appealed his sentence, but the judges rejected this. Meril, Linda Grimm’s sister said “after 14 years of uncertainty, the British justice system has finally succeeded in bringing Peter Foster to justice”. And Ellen, Linda Wardill’s daughter said “this verdict is both right and proper, and should ensure that the person responsible for these evil acts be put away from society for the remainder of his life… I hope Peter Foster is never released. He killed my mum, but where he is now, he can’t hurt anybody else, or their families, the way he hurt us all”. Aged 70, Peter Foster will be eligible for parole in 2028, and if he is, he will remain on licence for life. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SEVEN: This is Part 1 of 2 of Evil Little Droog.
From 1976 to 2003, Peter Allan Foster of Bridlington committed a string of vicious and brutal attacks on his girlfriends and wives, including holding them hostage, kidnapping them at knifepoint, strangling, beating, shooting, coercion, and two counts of murder. But how did he evade justice for so long, and what has any of this got to do with his obsession – the 1973 film, A Clockwork Orange.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. Following last week’s case, we examine whether a different double murderer was inspired by ‘A Clockwork Orange’. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 357: Evil Little Droog – Part 1 of 2. (Cue intro to film) “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence”. And with that, the 1972 film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ opens with a stark close-up of the story’s unblinking narrator and “hero”, Alex DeLarge, sat staring directly at us as if he’s daring us to fight. Dressed in a set of overalls, braces, boots and a bowler hat, his attitude is writ-large by his fashion; white overalls implies a blank canvas onto which society imprints its rules and conventions upon the youths, braces and bowler hats to mock the establishment, black combat boots to unite the gang as a rebellious army, a codpiece on the outside of their trousers giving a threat of sexual violence, and (for Alex) a single eyelash to his right eye giving him an eerie doll-like look, and a three-foot cane concealing a blade. Like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Alex DeLarge became a 1970s icon for many maladjusted youths, who like him; dressed to cause an outrage, spoke in a slang only they understood, partook in a era’s drug of choice, and rebelled against society’s stifling control. Hanging around with a gang of undesirable droogs - Dim, Georgie and Pete – Alex’s psychotic motives “being the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence” reflect every parents fear of each generation’s youths being subverted by something they don’t understand, whether junk food, drugs, hip-hop, horror movies or computer games. Yet, although Alex’s crimes are the epitome of extreme, he proved to be a character who was weirdly aspirational for many youths. But did this violent film turn a man into a monster… …or was the monster merely using this violent film as an excuse for his crimes? By 1974, society had made up its mind about the film, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which was sporadically banned by draconian local councils who – like fascists burning books - had censored what the people could and couldn’t see, thus eradicating any free will in an ironic nod to the moral of the book itself. A wealth of crimes were unfairly blamed on ‘A Clockwork Orange’, as if the innocent were corrupted to become evil having seen the film, when even if they had copied its style, evil will always be evil. In 1973, five youths were convicted of gang-raping a 17-year-old Dutch girl in Lancashire, it was said they had sung ‘Singing in the Rain’ in a nod to the gang’s rape of the author’s wife. Six youths also went on a crime spree speeding across France like the droogs do in a Durango 95; beating, burgling and committing copy-cat crimes directly lifted and mimicked from scenes in the film which culminated in a murder. And as explored in last week’s episode, 60-year-old homeless man David McManus being beaten to death by Richard Palmer, a horrific recreation of the infamous ‘tramp’ scene in both sources. With the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick receiving death threats, each had sealed its fate for the next three decades, being banned in the UK until Kubrick’s death in 1999. But by banning it, that only made the hype to see it more dangerous and thrilling, and cemented its place in history as a censored film. But there was another, less well-known ‘Clockwork Orange Killer’ who was inspired by the film. On the 27th of March 1956 in Germany, Peter Allan Foster was born. Few concrete details exist about his upbringing, so it’s hard to pin down who he really was, before he began mimicking Alex DeLarge. Nothing was written about his mother and his father (Ronnie) struggled to care for this anxious youth, so as a toddler, he was sent to live with his grandparents (Mr & Mrs Emmerson of Harrington Road) in the seaside town of Bridlington, East Yorkshire. But proving to be “more than a handful”, Foster spent many of his formative years in care homes and an approved school for behavioural problems. Like Alex DeLarge, he had little respect for his guardians, his education was broken by truancy, he held down part-time jobs as a mechanic at a fairground and a doorman at Scarborough caravan park, and although he was never diagnosed as mentally unwell, like Alex, he also had two sides to his personality. As a 6 foot, 14 stone muscular youth with a Dennis Nilsen-like vibe, it was said he was charming but admitted “I was an angry young man, insecure and frightened… incapable of controlling my violence”. Like Alex, his violence was vicious and unprovoked, with the beatings he meted-out being so severe, his victims were too scared to speak out, but whereas Alex was a full formed psychopath, Foster’s early crimes were pathetic in comparison, yet it’s clear that the film had a big impact on his motives. Foster’s known offences go back to 1968 when he was 12, but in 1973, aged 16 he saw ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at the cinema, and that same year - as a coincidence or maybe down to drink or hormones - his violent offending increased. And although the film was banned in UK cinemas, available in Europe, pirate copies on VHS and Betamax were sold cheaply in pubs, shops, in car boots or by mail order. Foster was said to be obsessed with the film which he watched religiously and could quote verbatim, as well as another 1972 X certificate film, Bruce Lee’s violent martial arts actioner ‘Enter the Dragon’. In 1977, Foster was described by his solicitor as a ‘paper tiger’, “someone who appears powerful and threatening, but is weak, ineffectual and unable to withstand a challenge”. With 63 convictions to his name, many were minor; like driving his scooter without insurance and while disqualified, a drink drive ban for crashing his Skoda into a hedge, and in 1986, he was given a six-month suspended sentence for tampering with his electricity meter and damaging the front door of his former girlfriend’s flat. But with his actions grounded in rage, his violence grew more psychotic, later being convicted of GBH, ABH, weapons offences, stabbing, torture, false imprisonment, child pornography and the assault and cruelty to a 6-year-old boy. Yet the most brutal and violent crimes he committed were against all of his wives and girlfriends, often mimicking ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and culminating in a double murder. Fear was his weapon of choice. At his trial, having overcome their terror of giving evidence against him, Andrew Campbell QC for the Prosecution stated to Foster: “you have four partners that leave you because of the threat of violence and flee because they are terrified of what might happen. And you have two partners that don’t flee… …and they end up dead in your bed”. Lindy Derham was born in Oldham, they met in 1974 when she was 16, he was 18, and he chatted her up while he was working on the dodgems. Like many other girlfriends, he was said to be handsome and charming, he played the guitar, could quote Shakespeare, and spoke to her of astrology and love. But her father, Clive, saw through his facade. In April 1974, Clive was convicted of assaulting Foster repeatedly punching him in the face, stating “I lost my temper and went for him (because of) what I had heard about his relationship with another girl”, it was unclear what this was, but seen as “an act of desperation… for his daughter’s welfare”, Clive was fined just £25 at Bridlington Magistrates Court. Like other relatives of Foster’s ex-partners, Clive would do anything to protect his loved ones, but with Lindy moving into a flat with Foster in Bridlington’s Old Town and marrying him in June 1975, either she believed that she loved him, or – with the abuse having already begun - she was too afraid to flee. Always carrying a knife in his Doc Martin boots, he regularly beat her and threatened to cut her from ear to ear. Once when she’d angered him, he burned all of her clothes in the bath. Like his other hero, Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’ he often left her face and body black-and-blue having been attacked with kicks and chops, and he once punched her so hard in the stomach, that their baby miscarried. Believing he was Alex DeLarge, the leader of the droogs who the law didn’t apply to, she often saw him standing in front of the mirror dressed in overalls, boots, braces, a bowler hat and a single eyelash, and she would recall “he would play the soundtrack of the film”, whether the William Tell Overture or Beethoven’s 9th symphony, “and his eyes would change into a menacing look” and spew a violent rage. By 1976, having endured three years of pain, Lindy tried to flee, but with Foster working alongside her at the arcade, following her wherever she went, and threatening to kill her when she went back to her father’s house, later claiming that he had seen her embrace another man, he planned to hurt her in an identical way to how Alex had attacked Dim, the Droog who’d deceived him in A Clockwork Orange. In the famous scene where Alex and the droogs walk along the docks, feeling double-crossed by his subordinate Dim, Alex beats him, knocks him into the water, and when Alex extends a seemingly sympathetic hand to Dim, from his cane, he pulls out a concealed blade and slashes Dim's hand open. That Christmas Eve, as Lindy was walking with Foster to midnight mass, perhaps quoting: “For being a bastard with no manners and not a dook of an idea how to comport yourself public-wise, my brother”, Foster pulled out an umbrella with a sharpened tip, stabbed her in the torso, and like a coward, fled. Bleeding profusely, Foster returned to take her to intensive care, not to ensure she survived, but to secure his alibi by getting her to tell the nurses that she’d fallen on a set of railing, and although he’d stabbed his wife and risked her life, with his crime unspoken, Foster wasn’t charged nor questioned. Having fled his grasp, one year later on the 17th of December 1977, Foster was dragged kicking and yelling and smashing from Lindy’s solicitor’s office, having begun divorce proceedings against him. As the two male officers manhandled him, they found strapped to his back, a set of rice-flails known as nun-chucks as used in ‘Enter the Dragon’. Stopped before he hurt someone else, Foster was fined £20, bound over for a year, and the magistrate “seriously considered sending him to prison”. But didn’t. All of his wives and girlfriends lived with “an over-riding fear of him which stopped them from making complaints”, but Foster would never hurt Lindy again, as although he was unable to accept that the marriage was over, his solicitor stated “while he was in custody, he had received a letter from his wife, which made him realise there is no chance of reconciliation”. Lindy never saw him again, and she lived. In Foster’s eyes, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ wasn’t just a film, it was a way of life. The violence he slavered over on-screen was nothing compared to reality, as Alex DeLarge said “oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh... and you could viddy it was real... not like a film, but a terrible, terrible real thing", as blood thrilled him, as much as recreating scenes from the film did. In October 1978, it was reported in the Hull Daily News “police and firemen were called to a woman’s house in Bridlington after her grandson went berserk with a guitar”. Like the narrator of his own story, he stated “I’d had a few drinks and was keyed-up mentally. I had a brainstorm, I picked up a guitar she had bought me and smashed it on the floor. I then took it into the bedroom and smashed it through the window”, and having barricaded himself in the bathroom, he threatened to set the house on fire. Foster said he was depressed, and blamed it on his divorce. Almost a year later, while still living at his gran’s house on Medforth Road, being blind drunk, Foster was sent to prison for three months for the assault of a Policeman having been stopped for riding a suspected stolen bicycle. Throughout Bridlington, Peter Foster was – to the outside world – a nothing, a nobody, a ‘paper tiger’… …but as his violence against women was unreported, nobody saw this powder keg was ready to erupt. In 1979, released from prison and working as a doorman at a caravan park in Scarborough, Foster met Margaret Manningham who was on a weeklong family holiday. Having fallen in love with him, within weeks they had moved in together to a flat on Trinity Road, and in July 1980, they married. It was far from the dream she must have imagined, as his abusive control had begun within those first weeks. Many ex’s stated he’d undermine them, making them feel inferior without him “he’d say that my body had gone, that it was all flabby and unattractive” and threaten “‘no-one could have you after me’”. For him, women were there for sex, as Alex DeLarge says “the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I'd like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage”, they were nothing but “young ptitsas on their bolshies, very starry-eyed” who adored him like a rock star or God. Everything he did was to control her; he beat her when she displeased him, he humiliated her so she felt worthless, held her hostage in her wardrobe to prove that he owned her, even chaining her to the radiator like she was his possession, and owning her free will, he’d strangle her until she blacked out. On their one-year anniversary, Margaret recalled “I realised if I didn’t get out, something awful would happen”, so as they toasted their marriage in the pub, she pretended to go to the toilet, but hid on the fire escape until the pub had shut, then fled 300 miles to Bournemouth, and filed for a divorce. Margaret never saw him again, and she lived. Andrew Campbell QC said “Foster had a consistent pattern of domineering behaviour”, all of his wives and girlfriends were terrified, “and believed he would kill them if they did not do as they were told”. In early 1982, he met 17-year-old secretarial student Kathryn Portelli, when he was 26. As before, it began with a façade, she said “he was very nice, intelligent. He’d quote Shakespeare, I was impressed”, and having moved into a flat in Little Beck Road, his charm gave way to abuse, coercion and violence. Kathryn said “I wasn’t allowed to have a mind of my own”, she wasn’t allowed to see her friends, and she was beaten and kicked, once while she was pregnant. She wasn’t a person, but his little play thing. One day, the lodger, Paul Jepson found Kathryn outside their flat, tied to the drainpipe. “She started crying. I went to untie her… Peter came out, and told me not to, He said ‘it’s better that I do that than hit her’”, as in his words “she’s doing my head in”. Foster eventually untied her, and it was forgotten. One night, having displeased him, he punched her, kicked her and dragged her to the bedroom. Tying her hands behind her back with a belt, he ripped out a lamp, and having wound the bare electric wires around her neck, he threatened to flick the switch, and electrocute her if she moved an inch. Kathryn said “I really thought I might die that night. His demeanour was very aggressive. His teeth were gritted. He was talking strange”. He left her tied up, shaking and terrified on the floor, and having placed lit candles around the bed, “he laid with his arms across his chest, sleeping all night”, like he was a deity. Kathryn recalled “I thought he was going to kill me”, and not for the first time. One time, at his father’s house near Leeds, Foster threatened Kathryn with a samurai sword, chasing her around the house, until Foster’s father (Ronnie) stopped him and drove her to her mother’s house. But Foster had followed her. At her door, he pleaded, professing that he loved her and that he would make everything right, but as she stepped outside, “he put my arm up my back and put a knife to my throat”, and frog-marched the pregnant women, at knifepoint, back to their flat. Tied up with rope to her hands and her feet, “I was terrified”. He kept her on a small camp bed in the corner of the room “for the rest of the night, all the next day and half the day after. He only untied me to go to the toilet”. And for the next few days after, with a knife in his pocket, going shopping, he had her handcuffed with a jacket over them, Kathyrn said “people thought we were courting. I was too scared to ask for help”. He controlled her mind, her body and her being… but her hope wasn’t entirely sapped. On Sundays, when he was at the pub, she secretly smuggled clothes out of the house, and having made arrangements with a women’s hostel, and while attending an ante-natal class, she fled. “I never saw Peter Foster again. I changed my name. Only my mother, my father and my priest knew. I feared if anyone else knew where I was, he would kill me”. Kathryn never saw him again, and she lived. In court, Foster denied attacking her with a sword, making her sleep on a camp bed, putting a knife to her throat, making her wear handcuffs and he said he only tied her up for “half an hour”. He admitted punching and kicking her, but claimed in his defence, “I was inexperienced. I should not have been in a relationship”, even though he was 26, had been married twice, and may have had several children. By 1984, Foster was dangerous, deranged, and on the hunt for another girlfriend. Julie Dixon was 18-years-old, Foster was 28, as being a coward, he needed these girls to be young and impressionable, lured in by his charm and easily broken by his abuse, coercion and delusions. Being drunk, day-in, day-out, he worked very little, and they lived in a commune where many druggies lived. Julie said “He was aggressive, strange, often when the music of A Clockwork Orange was playing, the aggression would start… his eyes would change and he would have a menacing look”. But not only did he break her face and body with his fists, as like so many others, he also broke her spirit. “Early in our relationship, he said he had been possessed by a priest… he spoke a lot in Latin, a language I didn’t understand” and would recite Bible verses in reverse under a pentagram he had drawn in the kitchen. As silly as it may seem to those of us who weren’t been broken by his mind-control, “Peter claimed he could astrally project himself… he said he could leave his body at any time and find me using his psychic powers. I believed him. It made me feel like I would never be able to escape, as long as I lived”. And when his beatings and coercions waned, to keep her under his boot, he resorted to deadly threats. With a modified Colt revolver, he forcedher to play ‘Russian Roulette’. With one bullet in the six-shot cylinder, “Peter went first, spun the chamber and chose to point the gun at me. I think it was at my head. I thought I could die. When he pulled the trigger, it was empty, it just clicked”. With five shots left, when it was Julie’s turn, “I thought, if I pointed it at him, I would be responsible for his murder… but if I pointed it at myself, then I would be dead”. With the gun aimed at her head, “I pulled the trigger. It clicked”. It did this four more times, as with the revolver having never been loaded, Foster didn’t want her to die, what he wanted to see was the terror in her eyes, as her life lay in his hands. Sometimes his threats were deliberately theatrical, and other times, they were brutally simple. From the second-floor window of their bedsit on Marlborough Terrace, holding her by just her throat, “he was strangling me. If he had let go, he would have dropped me. I would have fallen to the steps below”. Julie made several attempts to flee, later stating “I was totally afraid of Peter, but when you are with someone like that, you don’t provoke them”, so having secretly smuggled money, clothes and her passport out of the flat in binbags, she paid the shopkeeper downstairs to put them into a taxi to her parent’s house, “and I got as far away from him as I could”. Julie never saw him again, and she lived… …but not all of his girlfriends would be so lucky. When the Detectives later appealed for witnesses to his abuse, several brave women – his ex-wives Lindy and Margaret Foster, and ex-girlfriends Kathryn Portelli and Julie Dixon - set their trauma aside, came out of hiding, and often using their new or real names, they faced him in court. Their truth would put an evil man behind bars, but for three other girlfriends, his arrest and trial would come too late. Linda Moreen Chapman Peacock was born on 2nd of December 1950 in Bridlington, one of four sisters and a brother to Stuart & Iris. Described by her sister, Meril, as “beautiful, lively, lovely and talented”, she met her husband, Robert Grimm at a studio in London in 1970 when he was a professional guitar player for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. They married a few years later, lived in Bridlington, and moved to America with their three daughters – Athena, Beth and Lyra, but separating in 1988, Linda Grimm (as she was now known) returned to her hometown of Bridlington, where she met Peter Foster. He lived in the flat opposite her on Midway Avenue, she was charmed by him, in June 1989 they moved in together, and said “Linda was bright, intelligent, artistic, and good fun, everything you could want. I loved her”, but like so many other girlfriends and wives, she was seen with black eyes and bruising. To one of her friends, while drunk, he admitted “I hit her, cos I lost it”, but to everyone else, as they both had a drink problem, this was his excuse of choice, stating “she was a staggering wreck around the flat. Many times I put my arms around her to stop her hitting herself”, this also became his alibi. On Monday the 17th July 1989, Foster claimed they went for a walk at Bempton, a 400-foot high series of cliffs overlooking the sea. They were both drunk, she fell over a stile, and falling hard, she bruised her head, face, torso and thigh. They returned home to Midway Avenue, and she fell asleep, comatose. The next morning, at around 6am, Foster woke, and found Linda dead. (End) Hungover and rambling, Peter Foster entered Bridlington Police Station stinking of drink. He told them about her accident on the stile, and how 38-year-old Linda Grimm had died in her sleep. Without any witnesses to any argument between them, with no signs of a struggle in the flat, and as he hadn’t a criminal record for assaulting his ex-wives or girlfriends, the Police accepted his version of events. As an unexplained death, an autopsy was conducted by Dr Lloyd Denmark, who noted she had died of “shock and haemorrhage due to a rupture to her renal vein and right kidney which had split in half, an extreme trauma only seen in road accidents”. He also noted she had 21 other (unexplained) bruises to her chest and groin, and six broken ribs. But with her blood test showing she had “320 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood”, meaning she was “four times over the legal drink-drive limit, it was agreed that because of her alcoholism”, her injuries and distended organs could have been caused by a “forceful blow by someone dropping their full weight on the abdomen”, or she fell off the sofa. With the autopsy unable to conclude whether she had died of natural or unnatural causes, and with any reference to “significant trauma caused to her” being less prominent in the report, it was easily glossed over by those who needed to see it, and Foster was released by the Police without questioning. As a trained pathologist hadn’t listed her death as ‘suspicious’, in August 1989, her body was cremated at Scarborough Crematorium, and any evidence of the murder of Linda Grimm was lost forever. She had died in agony, having been sadistically beaten and abused by this violent thug for months, and in a scene, reminiscent of the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’, he had deliberately attacked and killed her. The murderer of Linda Grimm walked free, like Alex DeLarge, Foster’s hero in his favourite film having murdered the ‘cat lady’ by beating her to death for his own pleasure. Quote: “and the very next day, your friend and humble narrator was a free man”. But what connected these two killings? The Police wouldn’t know for another 13 years, when Foster killed again, being inspired by ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Part Two, the final part of Evil Little Droog continues next week. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of. 
Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-FIFTY:
On Wednesday 8th of January 1988, at 3:25pm, expelled pupil 16-year-old Darren Fowler entered the Ferrers School in the town of Higham Ferrers with two knives, 25 cartridges and a shotgun. He had written a suicide note, and planned to get revenge on those who had wronged him. By 3:37pm, it was over. But unlike the Dunblane massacre, it is largely forgotten, and why, like the Dormers Wells school shooting did it not lead for stricter gun control? This was the UK’s penultimate school shooting.
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. This week, I’m in Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire exploring a crime which, due to strict laws, is rare in this country. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 355: The UK’s Penultimate School Shooting. School shootings are synonymous with countries where constitutions are fawned over like the word of God. In America, which averages 40 to 60 school shootings annually, this kind of crime against innocent children is so common, they’ve had to implement a school shooting database. In 2021, there were 257 school shootings. In 2023, 308. 2024, 352. 336 in 2025, and at time of recording, 235 in 2026. This century in the United Kingdom, we’ve had none. School shootings are incredibly rare. Why? Because when the innocent die at the hands gun-toting idiots, we learn from our mistakes and we implement laws to make the country safer for everyone, even if it upsets some so-called hunters. The case you’re about to hear was the penultimate school shooting in the United Kingdom, but it isn’t retold to glorify its perpetrator or glamourise the violence, but to re-iterate that the way to make our schools safer isn’t through the use of bag-checks, metal detectors or armed security (which effectively turns it into a prison), but a focus education, mental health, bullying, and how this school remained professional and did everything right to protect their staff and students, which they continue today. Wednesday the 8th of January 1988. As was typical of a post-British Christmas, that week it rained as this was about to be one of the wettest January’s on record. Comic Relief had been launched, Margaret Thatcher was then Britain’s longest serving Prime Minister, and at the top of the charts were the Pet Shop Boys with ‘Always on my Mind’. Monday was a ‘teacher training day’, so Wednesday was the second day of the school term. By 3pm – across Higham Ferrers, a small historic town, and neighbouring Rushden, a larger industrial town in East Northamptonshire, with then a combined population of 27,500 - the pavements were filling with prams and the streets with cars as parents prepared to pick up their kids after a dull and ordinary day. Just shy of 3pm, 16-year-old Darren Fowler left his parent’s home on Westfields Street in Higham Ferrers. Taking 10 minutes, his walk up Westfields Avenue, High Street and right into Queensway towards his local school was a route he had made hundreds of times, only three months ago, he was expelled. As he approached the end of this residential street, and entered the open gates of The Ferrers School, a modern comprehensive opened just eight years earlier, no-one noticed him but then they never did. Slightly built and spotty with neck-length brown hair covering his left eye, Fowler was a loner, isolated, a boy who struggled to make friends, and being dressed in black trousers, a black jumper, a crumpled checked shirt, an uneven tie and a donkey jacket with an imitation wolf’s tail, his clothes reflected this. At 3:28pm, with lessons ending, some of the 760 pupils were already exiting the classrooms and milling about before heading home, so being just another student, no-one really noticed Fowler as he entered the administration block, or spotted what he was carrying; two combat knives, one tied to his leg with a six inch blade and a one a nine-inch blade strapped to his hip; a length of nylon rope, twine and matches, an ammunition belt with 25 cartridges, and across his back, a single barrel 12 bore shotgun. Darren Fowler was here to kill, he wouldn’t stop until every shot was spent, and having left a suicide note, the last life he would take would be his own, just like his hero – Michael Ryan – only now Fowler had a captive audience of those who had expelled him, bullied him, or had stolen the girl that he loved. At 3:29pm, the first shot rang out… followed by eight minutes of terror. So, why is the Ferrers School shooting barely known in the UK, and even in Higham Ferrers itself? The same was said of the UK’s antepenultimate school shooting at Dormer’s Wells High in Southall, West London, occurring two months before The Ferrers School, and again is almost entirely forgotten. Some don’t regard it as a school shooting, as it happened late in the evening when the pupils were at home and the sports hall was being used for a religious event. On Wednesday 11th of November 1987, controversial guru Mahraz Darshan Das was preaching when two Sikh extremists - Rajinder Singh Batth & Mangit Singh Sunder – opened fire with a sawn-off shotgun, a 22 handgun and a 38 Smith & Wesson. The attack lasted 16 seconds. Mahraz Darshan Das was killed instantly, Joga Singh a Psalm writer and Satwant Panesar an engineer were killed in the crossfire, and another was injured but survived. The shooters were disarmed, arrested and convicted of murder and manslaughter, and got life sentences. As the third from last UK school shooting, Dormer’s Wells is largely forgotten as the dead were adults, some argue because they were Asian, and it was a politically and religiously motivated assassination. It barely made the newspapers, and as emotion drives change, it brought about no new gun laws. Gun laws in the UK have evolved with changes in society, and as a reaction to high-profile shootings. Before 1900, most British citizens could carry a gun. In 1903, the Government restricted which guns a teenager or child (yes, a child) could own. After World War One, seeing a spike in gun-crime, the 1920 Firearms Act introduced the first modern licensing system which required certificates for rifles, pistols and ammunition, shifting gun ownership from being an unrestricted activity to a licensed privilege. In 1936, a ‘safe storage’ policy was introduced to stop guns falling into the wrong hands, and all short-barrelled shotguns and fully automatic weapons were outlawed, as these were not hunting weapons, but weapons of murder. In 1946, the police deemed ‘self-defence’ no longer a good enough reason to own a gun. In 1953, carrying a firearm outside permitted areas was made illegal. And after the murder of 3 policeman in Shepherd’s Bush, the 1968 Firearms Act required all shotguns to have certificates. In 1988, after lone gunman Michael Ryan went on a killing spree and murdered 16 people in the town of Hungerford, the 1988 Firearms (Amendment) Act saw the banning of semi-automatic, pump-action rifles and explosive ammunition, and increased how they are storage and its certification procedures. His guns were legally owned, but by implementing even stricter laws, our country became safer… …but the legislation we needed came too late for the last school shooting in the United Kingdom, a crime so shocking and callous that it changed our gun laws forever. It was of course, Dunblane, when on the 13th of March 1996 in this small Scottish town, Thomas Hamilton, a former Scout leader who had been blacklisted having committed sex-crimes against minors, opened fire inside of Dunblane Primary School. 15 were wounded, and 16 pupils aged 5 and 6 were killed, alongside their teacher. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history. Outraged by this senseless massacre, the people spoke and Parliament was forced to eradicate the last pointless piece of the puzzle. The private ownership of handguns and semi-automatic weapons was effectively banned in the UK, leading to some of the strictest firearms regulations in the world. Since then, almost 30 years ago, the UK hasn’t had a single school shootings… …so why was the Ferrer’s School shooting forgotten? The shooter, Darren Lloyd Fowler was born in 1972, as the eldest of four boys to Gerald, a forklift truck driver and Sandra, a housewife. Little was reported about his upbringing, but with no known criminal record, being described as having a “relatively good character”, he didn’t seem a ‘danger to society’. As a pupil at the Ferrers School, he was often truant, disruptive in class, and had a history of being abusive to teachers, but he was never violent. He had a bad academic record even though he was an avid reader, but with his interests limited to guns and war, his only friend was 16-year-old Simon Bates. With those skills, he could have joined the Army or become a military researcher, but didn’t. Being 16, he should have been preparing for his exams, but having got expelled, instead he went on a rampage. But why? The state of his mental health was never reported in the press, and his motive is lost, he told it to no-one and 38 years since the attack, most of the alleged facts are wrapped in myths and rumours. One possible motive was bullying. Graham Buchanan for the Prosecution said “he constantly suffered taunts by other pupils over his personal hygiene… they nicknamed him ‘smelly’ and ‘gypsy’”, and although all children bully and tease, “he remembered all the insults, and the times he had threatened to hit back, but little did his classmates realise when he vowed to ‘grease them’, that he meant to kill”. Another was his expulsion. The previous summer he had been suspended owing to his bad behaviour in Mr Lever’s science class, but was later re-instated after appealing to the Board of Governors. The school tried to give him counselling to put him back on track, with headmistress Barbara Smith stating “we did everything to help the boy, but he failed to respond. When his behaviour went beyond what the school could tolerate, he was expelled”, placed under the supervision of the EBD (the emotional and behavioural difficulties service) in October 1987, and was sent to a ‘special school’ in Rushden. He wasn’t a danger, he was just disruptive. He wasn’t violent, he was just deluded. A third possible motive was jealousy. In September 1987, one month before he was expelled, and four months before the attack, his friend, Simon started dating Karen Arnold, who Fowler told a psychiatrist “she was the first girl I cared for… for the first time, I realised that a relationship with someone gave a new meaning to life. Before that I didn’t think I needed anyone”. But this wasn’t love, it was obsession. When Simon broke up with Karen that December, Fowler fancied himself as her new boyfriend. As the Prosecution said “he became infatuated and jealous if anyone expressed interest in her”. He pestered her, followed her, and hung out at her part-time job. Karen said “he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But there was no way I’d have gone out with him. He was a strange lad”. And as Karen’s father recalled “he once pulled a knife on me. I just took it off him and threw it in the bushes, as easy as that”. But now the figure of Fowler’s hatred wasn’t Karen, or Simon, but her Karen’s boyfriend - Jason Williams. And then there was a fourth possible motive. On the 19th of August 1987, Michael Ryan shot and killed sixteen people in Hungerford, including his own mother, an unarmed police officer, and then himself. Across the autumn of 1987, everyone knew his name and his crimes, but his motive remains a mystery. Detective Superintendent David Johnson said “Fowler had studied (the Hungerford Massacre) closely. He could discuss the details with great authority”, with the Prosecution stating “he had indicated he had in mind to do something similar in the area of the school or his home town”, which would bring him the fame and notoriety he possibly craved, and getting revenge on those who had wronged him. But we shall never know the truth, as he never mentioned his motive to the Police and he didn’t write it in his suicide note. So, maybe he kept it to himself, maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t care? Wednesday the 8th of January 1988. It was cold, breezy and soon to be one the wettest January’s on record, it had started to rain. Unwilling to engage with the help he’d been given, Fowler had gone absent from his ‘special school’. Back home, he was visited by a worker from the Emotional & Behavioural Department. At 12:30pm, Fowler and his pal, Simon watched Critters - a 1986 comedy horror in which a group of vicious aliens are pursued to Earth by two shape-shifting bounty hunters, which (being just 2 years after the ‘video nasties’ era) the press tried to blame this as his reason for the school shooting – but this doesn’t seem to ring true. It is then said, that he walked with Simon back to the Ferrers School, and when Fowler was asked by his pal why he was winking, reports state that he said “I’m going to grease someone”, meaning to kill. He was a loner and a fantasist who was desperate for attention, so why would anyone believe him? It seems likely that his killing spree was a last minute decision, as everything about its execution was sloppy and disorganised, as if he had imagined it in his head, but hadn’t realised that reality is different. Instead of wearing light-weight clothes to make him mobile, with it being barely 5 degrees, he dressed for the cold in a baggy jumper, unbuttoned shirt, untied tie, a donkey jacket with too many straps, zips and pockets, and a pair of woollen gloves which kept his hands warm, but tended to block the trigger. In his bedroom, he wrote his Last Will and Testament in the back of an exercise book, and across those four lines, he left all of his possessions to his friend, Simon, he gave no details about his motive and implied that he was set to take his own life. And also planning to flee, he packed a survival kit of twine and matches to catch and cook rabbits, as not being committed, he said “in case I change my mind”. As a combat fanatic, he tied his legally owned sheath knives to his hip and left thigh, he packed into his pocket a length of nylon rope (possibly to tie someone up, or maybe hang himself), and knowing where his dad kept the key to the cupboard in which was held his unloaded, un-cocked, legally owned 12-bore single-barrel shotgun, he strapped the case to his back, and loaded 25 cartridges into the belt. Darren Fowler was ready to kill, and in a confined space like a school, this would be a massacre. There was just one problem - beyond his lack of skill, courage and grasp on reality – as although he had read about and was fascinated by weapons, according to Fowler, “I had never fired a gun before”. Armed to the teeth with weapons and ammo’, but thankfully lacking the skill to be a real killer, Fowler walked his usual 10 minute route from Westfields Street to Queensway in Higham Ferrers, mingling among the distracted mums and disinterested dads, many of whom may have thought that this boy was pretending to be Action Man and carrying plastic bullets, toy knives and an imitation gun. That said, this was the 1980s, so in any fishing shop, market or Army & Navy Store, there were no rules or laws to stop a teenager from legally buying any of the following; a combat knife (unrestricted until 1997), a black widow catapult (still unrestricted), nun chucks (never banned), a deactivated grenade, or semi-lethal weapons like an air rifle, which were only made illegal for the under 18s to buy in 2004. Thinking he was Stallone in Rambo or Schwarzenegger in Commando, he arrived at The Ferrers School at 3:25pm. By 3:28pm, as many of the lessons were ending, he entered the administration block. And by 3:29pm, surrounded by 100s of pupils, parents and teachers, the first shot rang out… …followed by eight minutes of terror. With no plan, his attack was as muddled as his mind and his motive, and as stated in court, “he was fascinated by the power (that weapons) gave those who used them”, but stating “I did it because it was something I’d always wanted to do”, the first shot he fired wasn’t at someone he hated or was hunting, but the ground-floor staff room window, and with the glass shattered by 12-bore pellets, the sharp shards showered the face of school teacher Jane Lucas, but diving onto the floor, she survived. An average 12-bore shotgun has a muzzle energy of 3000 ft-lbs, and with 270 lead pellets per cartridge, this shotgun was used for hunting small game and clay pigeons as at 30 to 45 metres it can be lethal, but only when aimed accurately, but as will be seen, many of his shots that day, were indiscriminate. Fowler said he was here to kill, but was he? If his motive was to get revenge on his bullies, he had picked the right moment, as being home-time, lessons were ending, students were milling about in the Quadrangle, and having heard a bang, many like Stuart Wood said “I thought it was fireworks being let off”, so he could easily have picked them off one-by-one as they panicked and screamed, but he didn’t, instead Fowler mingled among them. When questioned, he told the Police that when he saw Jason Williams, the boy he claimed (but Karen) denied was now her new boyfriend, “I wanted to shoot him”. Chasing Jason into the Science Block, some reports stated that he fired and missed, but Fowler recalled “my finger jammed. I could not do it, there were lots of kids”, so in frustration, “I went outside and fired into the air and at the walls”. Did he coward out, did he never intend to kill, or had the reality of taking a life hit home? After this, witnesses said they saw him muttering to himself about how he hated the science teacher, Ken Lever, who he blamed for his expulsion, but never found him as he randomly fired at the walls. Some pupils spoke of chaos and confusion, with Mark Dickenson recalling “the teacher told us to hit the floor”, as many hid under tables fearing for their lives. Others didn’t realise what was going on, as Peter Britchford said “I asked him what he was doing. He just turned around and told me to run”. Yet, for others, it was all a bit of a laugh, and some excitement, as Northampton Chronicle & Echo reports some pupils “egged him on”, following him and giving him the attention this bullied boy had craved. But nobody really seemed to be his target, as so far, the worst hurt except Miss Lucas was a window and a few walls. This shotgun could have been lethal in trained hands, but firing indiscriminately, no-one was hit by direct shots, but ricochetted pellets and flying glass; like 12 year-olds Ronnie Sherratt who had two pellets removed from his cheek, and Simon Druce, who had glass splinters to his left eye. This shooting could have been chaos had it not been for the professionalism of the staff, everyone did their bit from the headteacher to the part-time cleaner, as when science teacher Sue Deacon saw the gunman, “I was in the playground. I shouted for everyone to go inside. There was a tremendous bang. I was only feet away”, but through all of their quick-reactions, many lives were potentially saved. As many had, Michael Cousins, a 38-year-old English teacher, deputy head and father-of-two thought the bangs were an exhaust backfiring. Having left a mobile classroom, he told a colleague “I walked through the quadrangle, came down the stairs and literally walked into it. I realised something was going on because I heard girls screaming, but didn’t know what”, until a shot was fired from 45 feet. Fowler claimed “I meant to shoot to the side of Mr Cousins, to frighten him off. He was one of the few teachers I liked”. Hit by a glancing blow, 12 pellets embedded into his face, neck and upper body, and “at first, I didn’t realise I had been shot”, with his only concern being for the other staff and pupils, Mr Cousins covered his face to avoid distressing the students any further, and headed to the staff room. Linda Wooten, a 42-year-old part time cleaner who had a son at the school had arrived when the first shots were fired. “Mr Cousins was standing covered in blood. He had been shot in the face… they had gone through his nose and mouth and were particularly bad around his right eye”, and as a first-aider, she did the best she could until the ambulance and Police arrived, none of whom would be armed. But guns don’t bring peace, only more violence. Needing this to come to an end, 31-year-old PE teacher, Paul Greenall said “when the boy was moving around the playground, I followed him from inside the school, waiting to make a move. I saw him fire a number of shots”, and as the shotgun only fired one cartridge at a time, being a professional rugby player, Mr Greenall waiting for Fowler to reload, dashed 15 yards, and slammed hard into his back. Martin Redwood, a disabled parent who was waiting for his two daughters, knocked the shotgun out of Fowler’s reach, stripped him of his knives and with him pinned to the floor until the Police arrived, Fowler was arrested on site. Detective Superintendent David Johnson said “Mr Greenall is clearly a courageous man who acted with great calmness and presence of mind in what was a very volatile and dangerous situation. We shall never know what may have happened had it not been for his actions”. At 3:29pm, the first shot rang out. Eight minutes later, by 3:37pm, it was over. Seven shots were fired, two pupils (Ronnie Sherratt & Simon Druce) were discharged from hospital that night, two teachers (Miss Lucas and Mr Cousins) were injured but recovered well, and thankfully no-one had been killed. But if Darren Fowler had been gun-trained, if our strict laws hadn’t limited his unauthorised access to legal weapons and hadn’t banned semi-automatics, pump-action rifles and explosive ammunition, this could have been a bloody massacre. Instead, it became a footnote in history, and is largely forgotten. Mr Cousins spent four nights at Kettering General and made a good recovery. 10 pellets were removed from his face, two later from his skull and he retained the sight in his eye. On the 6th of June, six months later, he returned to work, stating “I’m back at school and my return emphasises my belief in Ferrers School… to categorise our experience as an example of violence in schools is a misrepresentation. I believe the incident was more a gesture against society than against the school. We need to appreciate that in today’s society, young people are subjected to a range of negative and violent influences…”. Like Ronnie Sherratt & Simon Druce, their mothers, both called Christine said they were “still afraid of loud noises”, and to aid the psychological recovery of at least 40 of the pupils, the school brought in ‘Service Six’, a counselling group to help them deal with emotions of guilt, anger and helplessness. Taken to Wellingborough Police Station, Darren Fowler was interviewed with his parents present. No drugs or alcohol was found in his system, he confessed but unable to give a coherent motive, and seen by a psychiatrist prior to his trial, he was described him as “unstable and potentially dangerous”. Tried at Oxford Crown Court, Darren Fowler pleaded guilty and was convicted of GBH with intent of Ronnie Sherratt, ABH of Simon Druce & Jane Lucas, possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life, and unlawfully wounding Mr Cousins, with the attempted murder charge left on file. On Friday 24th of June 1988, Justice Tucker summed up “I regard you as a dangerous young man”, and under Section 53 of the 1933 Child & Young Person Act, he was held at Her Majesty’s Pleasure on a hospital order. (End) Many were shocked by the severity of Fowler’s sentence, but the Judge’s consideration was the safety of the public. The following year the school received a “glowing report by Government inspectors” and exam results were up, as headmistress Barbara Smith praised the people of the town for their support, stating “this has been a major factor in enabling the staff and pupils to return to normal life”. As for its place in the pantheon of school shootings, like Stand Farm School in 1947, Dundee in 1967 and Dormer’s Wells in 1987, Ferrers was overshadowed by the Hungerford Massacre one year before, and Dunblane in 1996, but it did play its part in changes to gun legislation for shotguns and air rifles, and a gun amnesty that September lead to 25000 legally and illegally held weapons being handed in. As happens, on the 31st of July 1988, the Conservative gun lobby in the House of Lords defeated the new changes as many Lords “rely on income from overseas visitors who come to Britain to shoot”, but with so many young children being murdered at the Dunblane Massacre, the law-makers had to relent. As for the heroes, Linda Wootten was awarded the Red Cross Special Service Cross, Paul Greenall and Martin Redwood were commended by the judge for their bravery, with Paul Greenall being awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct. But everyone was a hero that day and in the days that followed because how they dealt with the shock and the trauma. Barbara Smith later said “the school returned to normal surprisingly quickly, lessons took place the next day and school life continued”, as having learned from the incident, and never seeking to dwell on what if, it was quickly forgotten. As of today, the Ferrers School remains a strong and vibrant part of the community, and thanks to the professionalism of its staff and the laws there to protect us all, it wasn’t remembered as a tragedy. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SIX: Wednesday 4th of April 1973 at 11pm, on the porch of St Martin’s Church in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, 60-year-old homeless man, David McManus was beaten to death in an attack identical to a fictional killing in the book ‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess and the controversial film by director Stanley Kubrick. But who was to blame, the book, the film or the killer?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
https://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/news/people/who-remembers-going-to-this-cinema-in-milton-keynes-3509624 The Daily Telegraph Wed, 4 Jul 1973 Daily Record Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Daily Mirror Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Western Daily Press Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Evening Standard Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Thu, Jul 05, 1973 Swindon Advertiser Tue, Jul 03, 1973 Daily Mirror Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Daily Record Wed, Jul 04, 1973 Evening Standard Tue, Jul 03, 1973 Norwich Evening News Tue, Jul 17, 1973 Liverpool Daily Post (Merseyside ed.) Tue, May 08, 1973 Liverpool Echo Fri, Jan 26, 1973 https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/EB/B/Burgess%20-%20A%20Clockwork%20Orange.pdf The Birmingham Post Mon, Aug 06, 1973 Evening Post Mon, Aug 06, 1973 The Northern Echo (Yorkshire ed.) Wed, May 09, 1973 Daily Express - Wednesday 04 July 1973 Dundee Courier - Wednesday 04 July 1973 https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/sep/01/1 Wolverhampton Express and Star - Thursday 11 December 2003 Aberdeen Press and Journal - Thursday 15 December 2005 Daily Express - Friday 06 April 1973 Wolverhampton Express and Star - Friday 06 April 1973 Daily Mirror - Friday 06 April 1973 MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. This week, I’m in Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire to unearth a brutal killing which may people think is just a myth. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 356: A Clockwork Orange Killer. Wednesday 4th of April 1973 at 11pm. As the last dregs of drunks were booted out of the bar at The Swan Hotel on Watling Street, a gang of lads – all in their teens, with one notably smaller and younger – they giggled about the latest hot topic, the controversial dystopian satire, ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Released 15 months before in London, this X-certificate film billed as “the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence” was on national release, but its screenings were being restricted and even banned in different counties for fear of public disorder. On Sunday 1st, three days before, the gang had seen it in the 900-seater Studio cinema in Bletchley, not realising that a copy-cat killing that night would play its part in the film being banned in Britain for the next 30 years. Having sank three and a half pints at The Swan, where he’d ponced several ciggies and some say had hectored those queueing at the chip shop for some spare change, 60-year-old homeless man, David McManus from Belfast sat on the porch of St Martin’s Church where he regularly slept, swigging two bottles of lemonade and munching on a pastie and chips. By all accounts, he was no bother to anyone. David was a nobody living an anonymous life, and for that, he would be viciously beaten to death. At the trial, Roger Gray QC said the killing was inspired by A Clockwork Orange, a novel written by Anthony Burgess published 11 years earlier which the film was based on. He stated “the similarity between the description on pages 14 and 15 and this case is weird… the pub …the tramp singing in the street… and the attack” by a gang of droogs; Dim, Georgie, Pete and the story’s narrator, Alex. (Mix with film audio) The extract read: “When we got outside of the Duke of New York, we viddied a burbling old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk, whatever his age might be. He was sort of flattened to the wall and his platties were a disgrace, all creased and untidy and covered mud and filth and stuff. So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing. But when Dim fisted him a few times on his filthy drunkard's rot, he shut-up singing and started to creech: 'Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don't want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.' I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: 'Oh. And what's stinking about it?' he cried out: 'It's a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you done, and there's no law nor order no more... It's no world for any old man any longer, and that means that I'm not one bit scared of you, my boyos, because I'm too drunk to feel the pain if you hit me, and if you kill me, I'll be glad to be dead… So do your worst you may do, you filthy cowardly hooligans'. So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but he still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy, and a bucketload of beer-vomit came whooshing out. That was disgusting so we gave him the boot, one go each, and then it was blood, not song nor vomit, that came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on our way” – that short extract inspired a copy-cat killing. The battered and broken body of David McManus was found fifty yards away, outside of what was Watson’s garage on Aylesbury Street. Detective Superintendent Brian Weight said “I’ve been to 100+ murders and this was the worst I ever saw”, and with Thames Valley Police seeking “a gang of youths”, the next day, the press were already describing this murder as “A Clockwork Orange style killing”. But who was to blame; the book, the film, or the killer? Born in 1917, Anthony Burgess was raised during the Great Depression, his mother died that year in the Influenza pandemic, and raised by his father and step-mother in Manchester’s Moss Side where he was beaten by gangs of feral youths, his tragic life was reflected in his work, especially during the blackout of 1943 when his pregnant wife Llewela was gang-raped by four drunk American deserters, a trauma he recreated in his book Beard’s Roman Women, and infamously in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Post war, he worked as a teacher of speech and drama in Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Banbury, but returning to England in the late 50s from stints in Malaya, he suddenly found himself in a climate of juvenile delinquency, an unfamiliar subculture of rebellious Teddy Boys, where identically suited and booted youths would aimlessly hang about in coffee bars, full of drink, drugs, music and knives. Those who have never read it assume that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is just a violent story crammed full of intentionally shocking scenes, but the book (and film) explores the conflict between free will and authoritarian control, whether it is better for an individual to choose to be evil rather than to be forced into artificial goodness by an oppressive state. Part one shows Alex’s ultraviolence, part two shows his imprisonment and enforced ‘re-education’, and part three is the success and failure of his redemption. Written over three weeks at his home in Hove, reaction to the novel was mixed; The Sunday Telegraph called it "entertaining, even profound", the New Statesman called it “acute” and “savage… but a great strain to read", The Sunday Times described it as "a very ordinary, brutal and psychologically shallow story", and The Times called it "a somewhat clumsy experiment into science fiction with clumsy cliches about juvenile delinquency", the violence of which they criticised as being "unconvincing in detail". It did okay, it didn’t cause any riots, and across the first 12 years of its publication, it wasn’t banned. In fact, its US publisher had the last chapter - where Alex and his gang of droogs have outgrown their violent pasts - removed as they wanted to “maintain a grittier, pessimistic ending”, which ruined the moral message. But the novel of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was only ever banned after the film’s release. So was anyone inspired by the book to commit rapes, assaults or murders? No. With modest sales, it developed a cult following mostly among students, but all that changed when the film was first seen at its world premier in New York on the 19th of December 1971 in a climate of violent and explicit films. The early 1970s marked a turning point in cinema history, as directors broke censorship boundaries to explore unprecedented levels of graphic violence, explicit sex and psychological brutality. The year before Stanley Kubrick’s film of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released, audiences had already seen Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked western ‘The Wild Bunch’, Mario Bava’s ‘A Bay of Blood’ which became the template for 1980s slashers, Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ featuring graphic torture and execution, ‘Straw Dogs’ with its disturbing double-rape sequence, as well as box office favourites like ‘Dirty Harry’, ‘The French Connection’, ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Get Carter’. And in the same year that ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released, the public witnessed a brutal male rape in ‘Deliverance’, the kidnap and torture of two teenagers in ‘The Last House on the Left’, followed by fast-paced blood and bone-snapping martial arts in Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter the Dragon’, and visceral violence and supernatural horror in ‘The Exorcist’. All of which would be considered tame by today’s standards, and although ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was released uncut with an ‘X’ certificate, a precursor to the UK’s 18 certificate, it wasn’t created especially for the film, as the ‘X’ certificate had replaced the ‘H’ for ‘Horrific’ certificate, 21 years before in 1951. In an interview, Stanley Kubrick had described the film as a “running lecture on free will” and said his intention was “to get people thinking about whether behavioural psychology and conditioning could be weaponised by governments to turn citizens into compliant robots”. But as happens, the morally uptight focussed solely on its more salacious contents – its graphic sex and violence - and with its co-producer and distributor Warner Bros seeing this bubbling controversy as free advertising, it backfired as people were calling for it to be banned before they had seen it, creating a self-perpetuating hysteria. Three days before its London premiere on the 13th of January 1972, British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling was given an a private screening to decide whether it should be banned, as demanded by a rabid cabal of uptight morally-righteous so-called crusaders, many of whom hadn’t seen a single scene. One year later, with no riots or deaths attributed to the film, it was released nationally, and with each local authority having the right to deny a certificate to any film it disapproved of, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ could be screened in one town and banned in the next. It was banned in Ashford, Blackpool, Dorking, Hastings, Leeds, Reigate, and although The Evening Post stated “in Derby, it has already been and gone without corruption or depravity”, the neighbouring city of Nottingham asserted their own censorship. As for Bletchley, the neighbouring town to Fenny Stratford where homeless man David McManus was later murdered in a copy-cat killing, Charles Leith, the manager of the Studio cinema whose screening it is said the killer had visited, stated “we have rules to make sure that under 18s don’t see these films, but you can’t ask everyone for their birth certificate”. Yet by then the hysteria had reached fever pitch. Several crimes were blamed on the film. In May 1973, 18-year-old James Pinching went on a crime spree in Norwich, dressed in a boiler suit, braces, boots and eye make-up with a three-foot long cane similar to Alex, the lead droog in the film. He stole four shirts, a Post Office book, got £8 by deception and smashed a shop window. It wasn’t an act as depicted in the film or the book, but it was said that this young scrote had been influenced. In March 1973, the Somerset Senior Professional Cup match ended in chaos when seven youths who were dressed like droogs hurled cans, stones and bricks, hospitalising nine people. Six were convicted of causing an affray, but wasn’t this just bog-standard football hooliganism, as yobs will be yobs? July 1974, in Runcorn, two gangs of youths engaged in a street brawl with sticks and coshes. Witnesses described it as like “something from A Clockwork Orange”, only none of the gang mentioned the film. The same happened in Bolton when a gang of 30+ youths were arrested on a train with an assortment of weapons, detectives said “one theory is that they were influenced by ‘A Clockwork Orange’ which was on its third week in Bolton cinemas”, but again, it wasn’t verified if any of them had seen the film. In May 1973, the body of Frank Boulton was found battered about the face in Newton-le-Willows. No-one saw him murdered, but the Liverpool Daily Post stated “police are investigating a cult of teenage youths wearing false eyelashes and noses, heavy make up and high heeled shoes, who had killed him for kicks… the film was shown last week in Warrington, Wigan and Newton-le-Willows… police are visiting fancy dress shops to see who has purchased what”, even though his killers hadn’t been seen. The murder of David McManus was an outlier among these crimes and misdemeanours, as it was an irrefutable copycat of a scene in the film and two pages from the book, as proven in a court of law. But at least two other crimes were linked to the film. On 3rd of November 1973 at Manchester Crown Court, four youths - John Canterbury, Glynn Harrison, Kenneth Vernon and David Tetlor - were convicted of the gang-rape of a 17-year-old Dutch girl at the Heywood campsite in Lancashire. Christopher Hosker held her boyfriend hostage with a knife to his throat, while the boys took it in turns to rape her. Sources incorrectly state that they sung ‘Singing in the Rain’ during the attack, similar to a scene from the film, but the victim herself stated she had only heard them singing it in the minutes before, so it may have inspired them or been a coincidence? Canterbury was sentenced to five years, Harrison, Vernon & Tetlor to four, with Hosker to six months. But the most violent, yet least well known attacks happened in France. In the late summer of 1973, a six youths dressed as droogs went on a sadistic spree from Brittany to Cannes. The first occurred when they dragged a young couple from their car and gang-raped the woman while her husband was forced to watch. They attacked five other motorists and youths on a campsite, burgled some houses, three Finnish girls were thrown into the docks ‘for fun’, a Swedish girl was left unconscious having smashed a bottle over her head, and a ski champion was thrown over a parapet and later died of his injuries. By the 5th of July 1973, with the hysteria brewing and Britain’s self-proclaimed moral guardian, Mary Whitehouse insisting that the film be banned, it wasn’t until the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, who lived in England, started receiving death threats that he pulled it from UK cinemas. As an auteur who had negotiated final cut of his film, but also had the contractual right to remove it from distribution in the UK and several other territories, it was quietly pulled from all cinemas with no fanfare or furore. It was no more graphic or violent than any other ‘X’ rated film released that year, and except for a few illicit screenings at the Scala Cinema, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was banned until Kubrick’s death in March 1999. It returned to UK cinemas on the 17th of March 2000, and the country didn’t descend into chaos. The hysteria had died decades before, and it was no longer shocking or controversial. Which begs the question, if the film or book hadn’t come out, would David McManus have lived? Oddly, on the 26th of February 1973, five weeks before his murder, using archaic words, the Western Daily Press stated “here lies the danger that the impressionable will see urban violence equated with fun and A Clockwork Orange’s influence may be registered by a sharp decline in our tramp population” Early 1973. Ted Heath was the Prime Minister, the UK had joined the European Economic Community, and the US had ended its military involvement in the Vietnam war. In the charts was Long Haired Lover from Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond, Blockbuster! by The Sweet, Cum On Feel the Noize" by Slade. Kids played with their Etch-a-Sketch or rode around on a Raleigh Chopper wearing bell-bottom cords, bright shirts with wide collars and plimsols, with a Vesta curry and Arctic Roll for tea, or if it was a special occasion, a mixed grill at the Berni Inn beginning with a prawn cocktail. And if you were posh, on your 20 inch telly, you could watch The Generation Game and Are You Being Served… in colour. Wednesday the 4th of April 1973 was an ordinary day for most, and with many factories and workshops surrounding Watling Street in Fenny Stratford, for one gang of lads, it was an excuse to go out on the lash. Not a biggie, as tomorrow was a work day, but a few pints… which would tragically end in murder. The Swan Hotel at 6 Watling Street, opposite St Martin’s Church, had been coaching house since 1472. It had seen better days, and like most pubs, it had a limited selection of Skol, Harp, Mackesons, bitter or mild. In the corner sat the lads, praising the sex and violence they’d seen at the cinema three days before in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, yet only one was ever named, as the others remained anonymous. As the smallest and youngest of the gang, Richard John Palmer was just 16 years old. Described as quiet, placid and slightly built with neck length fair hair, he worked as a pipe lagger’s mate and lived with his mum, Doreen and step-dad, Len Lawrence in a council house on Laburnum Grove, Bletchley. He was unremarkable, he wasn’t diagnosed with a mental illness, he attended Army Cadets but wasn’t obsessed by war, he didn’t excessively drink, and his friend, John Willoughby told the police, “in the six or seven years I’ve known Richard, he has never been violent. He was one who was always laughing, and he loved to play practical jokes. Because of this we nicknamed him ‘Dopey’”. He was well-read, and according to the headmaster of Bletchley Grammar, Donald Hale unfairly stated “he was addicted to sensational literature”, which wouldn’t have been an issue, if Palmer had a passion for Jane Austen. After the murder, Palmer’s step father, Len said “Richard saw the film and has the book in his bedroom and the music. He was obviously fascinated by it and has told us as much. He didn’t appear wrapped up in violence”, but everyone seemed to agree that he was “spellbound” and “excited” by the book. That night, he finished work, and went to The Swan to meet his pals. Whether he knew David McManus by name or only by sight is unknown, but the press spared as little time learning about David’s life as the locals who gave him spare change. All that was written was that he was a 60-year-old homeless man from Belfast, he had forty convictions for drunkenness and begging, he was “a nuisance but harmless”, he was in court two days prior being drunk and disorderly, and his life was summed up by the tabloids in four words; he was a tramp, a hobo and a meth’s drinker. McManus was in The Swan that night, he drank three and a half pints so wasn’t intoxicated and bought his own drinks. At some point, McManus asked for a cigarette and Palmer gave it to him, it wasn’t a problem, but as McManus started scrounging off others, Palmer politely asked him to sit down. It was then, for no clear reason, that Palmer later claimed “I found myself feeling hostile towards older people and a feeling that there was no place for them”, which is a theme from the novel. Roger Gray QC for the defence said “it seemed as if he was part modelled on the characters in the book… Palmer was compelled by a sudden gust of savagery… some terrible force driving him to commit this offence”, with odd similarities to the scene in question; an old Irish homeless drunk, and a gang of bored youths. When the investigation began, that’s what the detectives were looking for, a gang, as Len, his step-father said “it’s fantastic that one boy could do all those injuries. I can’t believe anyone could be capable of such a thing, especially alone. Others might be involved and Richard could be shielding someone. He behaved himself… though always trying to keep up with his mates”. But with the court records locked away and the witness statements going unreported, the truth may never be known… …but the similarities between the book, the film and the copy-cat killing were undeniable. As Roger Gray QC stated “the similarity between the description on pages 14 and 15 of the book, and this case is weird… the public house… the tramp singing in the streets… and the attack. The passage is so revolting, I would not read it to the court”, in case it influenced other youngsters, but he had to, “in the hope that the publicity might help stamp out rather than increase this sort of senseless brutality”. After 10:30pm the pub shut and (it is said) this gang of unnamed lads headed in different directions. McManus, it was said, “scrounged 15p from customers at the fish n chip shop”, a buying his supper of a pastie, chips and two bottles of lemonade, and headed to the porch of St Martin’s Church where he regularly slept. Palmer joined him, but with no witnesses to verify this, it’s uncertain if he was alone. To the Police he claimed “I went to rob him, he was buying drinks so I thought he had money”, but this makes no sense as Palmer lived with his parents, had a job, and all McManus had left was 1 ½p. (Add film audio) “When we got outside, we viddied a burbling old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blerp blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see a moodge all filthy and rolling and burping and drunk… so we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing”. In his confession, Palmer claimed he beat McManus over the head with the bottles “until they broke”, leaving him concussed and bleeding. But he wasn’t finished. With the book being “the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence”, seeing himself as the lead, Alex, he said he grabbed a slab on concrete left by the workmen, and beat McManus’ body, breaking several ribs, piercing a lung, fracturing his skull, breaking his jaw, eye-sockets and nose, with internal bleeding. Detective Superintendent Weight said “the tramp had by far the worst injuries I have ever seen”, and although Palmer later claimed, “I thought he was dead”, he wasn’t. Blinded, with his brain swelling, McManus staggered up Aylesbury Street trying to flee, but with a Droog wannabe in pursuit, he only made it forty yards, when outside of what was Watson’s garage, he was attacked with two half bricks. Two witnesses recalled, “I thought he had a red scarf over his head… It was like a mask which shone and has a glazed look… we didn’t realise it was blood”. They saw a young lad – described as 5 foot 7, pale, thin faced, fair hair, in a dark pullover and light coloured trousers - later identified by them as Palmer, and with the bricks “battered him again, then kicked him, and finished him off with a stick”. But Palmer didn’t run. At roughly 11:05pm, from a phone booth on Aylesbury Street, someone (of that same description) called the Police to report an attack, gave the address, but left the receiver hanging. The Police and an ambulance arrived, but McManus was already dead. Having thrown the three halfpennies he’d stolen from the homeless man away in disgust, Palmer went home, his mum Doreen said “I can’t get over how calm my Richard was when he walked into the house that night… he got a glass of water and went to bed… The next morning, he put the same clothes on. I didn’t see any bloodstains, then he went out”. And having been identified by several witnesses, 17 hours later, Police arrested him at work, astounded that they weren’t here to arrest a gang, but he admitted “there was no one else, just me” – a small, mild-mannered and well-read 16-year-old boy. Palmer admitted, “I kept thinking about the old boy as I made up lagging compound. It was like a scene from the film. We were talking about it the other night… about beating up an old boy like this one”. To assess if he was mentally competent to stand trial, Dr Leslie Ford, a consultant psychiatrist for the defence, said “Palmer was not suffering from a mental disease and he was not drunk or taking drugs”. But who was to blame; the book, the film, or the killer? (End) Richard Palmer was tried at Oxford Crown Court. In his defence, Roger Gray QC stated “the irresistible conclusion is that this book… is the only possible explanation of what this boy did”, with John Owen QC for the prosecution stating “if may have been carried out for excitement as a result of the film”. Having shown “no sense of remorse”, on Wednesday the 4th of July 1973, Justice Ashworth ordered that Richard Palmer be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for an indefinite period. The judge praised him stating “it is to your credit that you have shown sense and courage and pleaded guilty… but it will only be when you have shown to the doctors and authorities that you are fit, that you will be released”. Many blamed Palmer for his own actions, some attributed it to his unnamed friends, and although his defence counsel stated “the link between this crime and (the book) is established beyond any doubt… many people have much to answer for whether authors, directors or (distributors). They produce a canker among these impressionable youngsters which all reasonable people desire to see stopped”. But actress, Miriam Karlin, who in the film played the cat lady who is raped by a giant phallus, stated “I utterly refute the statements that the murder was a result of the picture. Any normal human being who had no evil intent or no wild desires is not going to be influenced by this film”, with Warner Bros stating “this 16 year old boy should never have seen it. It was X-certificate”, and Anthony Burgess, the author reacted to rabid calls for his book to also be banned, stating “If you ban my book, you’ve got to ban the Old testament too”, he said all while writing a book about Napoleon, “I suppose someone will one day get around to blaming me for his massacres, just because I’m writing about them”. 53 years after its release, the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ remains controversial, and by default, so is the book. On the 6th of July 2001, it was first broadcast on British television via Sky Box Office, and one year later, publicly on Channel 4. In 2005, it briefly became a buzz word for gang attacks when David Morely, a survivor of the Soho bombing was killed by yobs. And at least twice, two other killers in 1990 and 2003, were dubbed the ‘Clockwork Orange killer’ having supposedly been influenced by the film. As of today, 69-year-old Richard Palmer is no longer in prison, and is said to have lived a good life. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of. |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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