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.
Barbara PInder's flat - Prince of Wales Mansions, 77 Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea @googlemaps2026 Sept2024
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-THREE: On the Saturday the 27th of October 1984, 76-year-old widow Barbara Pinder was brutally murdered in her own flat on Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea by an unknown man with a lot of hatred for her. One year later, on Saturday 27th of October 1985, 86-year-old widow Henrietta Osbourne was also stabbed and attacked frenziedly in an attack which had similar hallmarks. It went unsolved for two years… then out of the blue, a petty burglar confessed to both murders. Evidence proved it was him, he confessed, he was convicted. But why did he confess, when he had got away with murder?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
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UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Why would a serial killer confess to a sadistic spate of brutal murders? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Prince of Wales Drive in Battersea, SW1; three streets east of Peter Bryan’s failed suicide bid having killed Nisha Sheth, two streets south of the first of the infamous taxi driver murders, and two streets west of the lost fingers of the tortured artist - coming soon to Murder Mile. Prince of Wales Drive is a very exclusive part of town. Consisting of five-and-six storey red-and-white brick mansions blocks stretching the road’s length, these multi-million pound serviced flats have stunning views overlooking Battersea Park and the River Thames, being strictly for those with money. Accessed by a secure communal door, this isn’t the kind of place you’d find fat dole-scrounging slob watching TOWIE in his pants scoffing chips from the bag. Oh no, here you’d find a rotund investment banker watching Downton Abbey in his diamond encrusted g-string as a butler feeds him beer-battered chips made by Gordon Ramsey from a Louis Vitton bag – it’s all a very different thing, indeed. And yet, a senseless and brutal murder in one of these exclusive flats, its exact number never reported, marked a sadistic killing spree by a psychopath who was clearly disturbed and dangerous, but it also helped to unmask a suspected serial killer who couldn’t help but confess to many, many murders. He was a killer who wanted to be caught – but why? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 343: The Blabbermouth – Part 1 of 2. His first victim was an elderly widow by the name of Barbara Anne Pinder. Born on the 17th of July 1908, Barbara Anne Wilson (as she once was) was raised in the comfortable and calm splendour of the seaside parish of Selsey in Sussex, a place whose name means ‘Holy Island’. With her father being the town’s rector, they lived in The Rectory with her mother and two siblings, Helen & Wilfred, and being middle-class, they were educated at private schools, and had their every want catered for by a nurse, a maid and two servants. In 1921, when her father became the rector of nearby Cuckfield, the family moved into the vicarage, and this was where Barbara met her husband. Walter Archibald Pinder was born in Bishop’s Stortford and raised with all the benefits that money can buy. In June 1929, as a couple in their early 20s, they married at Cuckfield and had a son called Simon. By 1935, they were living in the poshest parts of West London, being Kensington and Chelsea, and for many years, her sister Helen lived with them at Rectory Chambers. With Walter being an aeronautical engineer he was often busy, especially as the war loomed large, but again, having two servants and a governess, this gave Barbara the rare chance – unlike many women of that era – to pursue a career. For many years, Barbara was an aeronautical journalist and the former editor of Flight magazine, but her true passion was music. In her youth, she had been the main understudy for the principal singers for Ivor Novello, one of Britain’s most popular entertainers in the first half of the 20th century, and as a professional pianist, she was instrumental in his hit West End play Perchance to Dream which played at London’s Hippodrome from 1945 to 1948, and as a heartfelt thank you, Ivor Novello gave her the original manuscript to the show’s biggest hit ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’ – something she always cherished. On the 20th of March 1980, Walter died, and although this loss of her husband of 41 years could have broken her, described as “a widow of great charm and distinction who seemed young for her years”, she kept herself busy as a writer and an artist, she was active in the church, and liked a good long walk. By 1984, living alone, Barbara moved into a small self-contained flat on the third floor of Prince of Wales Mansions in Battersea; it was safe and secure as many of the occupants were elderly and well-off, and even though she was a petite 76-year-old lady who was immaculately-dressed and always had neatly coiffured hair, said to be “young at heart”, she had the drive and stamina to last beyond a 100. The day before had been unremarkable, she had received no odd phone calls or visitors, she wasn’t worried, and the only difference to every resident’s day was the workmen who trudged about the flats due to a recent fire which led to a partial collapse to the roof, hence the communal door was left open. No-one knows the exact time she was attacked on the morning of Saturday the 27th of October 1984, but as an early-bird and a creature of habit, she had failed to pick up her newspaper from the shop. With no witnesses, only the evidence can paint a picture of what had happened to Barbara Pinder. It’s unlikely that she knew her attacker, as being a private person, her door was rarely open to others. With no sign of any break-in, either he knocked (possibly posing as one of the many builders on site), but with her son, Simon, noting “she was wearing her walking shoes, she always took them off when she got home” leaving them on the mat by the door, it was more likely that someone had followed her in. Behind her locked door, although she was only tiny, with every ounce of her strength, she put up a brave fight to get this stranger out of her home, as with furniture knocked and crockery smashed as he tossed her like a ragdoll, but as Detective Superintendent Kemp stated “she didn’t stand a chance”. Towering over her, her attacker was large and powerfully built, as bruises proved that with one hand he strangled her, squeezing her windpipe and fracturing the bones in her throat, as with the other, he beat her about her face and skull with a hard (undetermined) blunt object, breaking her jaw, her teeth, fracturing her cheek bone, and although she was barely conscious, his attack was far from finished. As she lay, slumped and broken on the carpet, he repeatedly kicked her in the head as if it was a ball, as if she was a sport, which caused cuts, bruises, bleeding and brain damage. But this wasn’t the end. With her own knitting needle, he stabbed her in her neck to torture her and leaving it embedded, in a psychotic level of sadism which detectives later felt was a trademark of his killings. But even that was not the end, as with a knife, believed to be a 6-inch stiletto blade, he frenziedly stabbed her 45 times in the chest with a level of ferocity, the pathologist stated “most of her vital organs were in shreds”, as he had stabbed her heart, liver and stomach, as well as severing the breast bone and several ribs. The murder of 76-year-old widow Barbara Pinder was a massacre, and yet, it had no obvious motive; a stranger attack on a wealthy woman where nothing was stolen; her handbag lay open, £30 was left untouched, as were her antiques, pieces of jewellery, and the valuable manuscript by Ivor Novello. She was viciously attack, but hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and its unlikely she knew her attacker. The next day, Sunday 28th of October, Simon, Barbara’s son rang her as he always did. Getting no reply, he drove from Avon, found her door locked, and with the police breaking it down, inside, they found her mutilated body. Recalling the horror, Simon said of the scene “he must have been a madman”. With her brutal murder reported in detail in the local (and some national) newspapers, the barbarism of her injuries sickened and shocked the community, many demanded the reintroduction of the death penalty, and lead detective DS John Kemp stated “this is one of the most savage and senseless killings I have come across”, but it would prove impossible to solve without a single witness to her murder. Fingerprints were found at the scene but they didn’t match any known felon, the Police hadn’t a single suspect, and having taken 390 statements and interviewed 75 people, they were no clearer to a name or a motive “as it seems likely that it was someone who had come here to kill, not to steal or assault”. A service took place for Barbara at Chelsea Old Church on 6th of December 1984. At the inquest almost a year later, coroner, Dr Paul Knappman asked DS Kemp “is an arrest imminent?”, but he had to admit “not in the immediate future”. Detectives warned any pensioners living alone in Battersea to take all precautions and to not let any strangers into their homes, as they were sure he would attack again… …and almost exactly a year later, he did. Little is known about her early life, even her birth name or her hometown, but 86-year-old widow Henrietta Osbourne, known as ’Peggy’ was the epitome of this particular attacker’s perfect victim. Like Barbara, she was small, but being frail, partially-blind and almost totally deaf, she was housebound, she had few visitors beyond a social worker, and spent many hours a day sitting in an armchair, beside the fire, listening to her music played too loud, and again, this meant that there were no witnesses. Again, as with Barbara, she had received no strange visitors or calls prior, she wasn’t worried and living in the Lumley Flats, part of the Ebury Estate on Passmore Street in Chelsea – a mile north of Barbara’s - inside she felt safe and secure in a tastefully decorated, modestly wealthy flat, surrounded by others. Henrietta was quiet, unassuming and private, just an old frail lady whiling away her final years alive. Again, no-one knows exactly when she was attacked on Saturday 27th of October 1985, as the last time she was seen alive was at noon on her doorstep as she collected her milk, bread and papers. With no sign of a break in, it’s likely her door was accidentally left unlocked, hence why it was chosen. We also know she didn’t let anyone in, as being deaf she never heard the doorbell, and she was already in bed. Neighbours stated they heard a bang at around 2am, but thought nothing of it. The room was lightly ransacked; with a few pound notes scattered on the floor and ornaments and furniture knocked over (possibly as the attacker fled), but burglary seemed uncertain, as roughly £1000 in cash (£4000 today) was found in the flat, untouched, and yet, a 10-inch Japanese earthenware vase from the 1920s was stolen, and even though it was rare, it was only worth £50. But the killer may not have known that? What seemed strange was that the burglary of her sitting room was brief and chaotic, yet he spent an inordinate amount of time in her bedroom, torturing Henrietta, out of sadism, hatred, or maybe both? As before, with one hand, he strangled her, as with the other, possibly using his fist, he kept battering this helpless and disabled old lady until her face was bruised, bloody and a swollen pulp. Again, with her slumped to the ground and barely conscious, he repeatedly kicked her, and even stamped on her to the point where one of the vertebrae of her spine had cracked. But he still wasn’t finished with her. As he had with Barbara using a knitting needle, in a sadistic detail deliberately left out of the press to trap her killer, into her neck he had stabbed a ball point pen, and left it embedded within. Then, to terrorise and cause her immense pain, either a thin knife or a chopstick had been rammed between her eyelid and her eyeball – perhaps to make her tell him where he money was, or maybe just for fun? For minutes, or possibly hours, she endured a prolonged excruciating agony and terror, never knowing if he would let her live. But even that wasn’t the end. On her bed, he vaginally raped this 86-year-old widow, then turned her over and anally raped her. And while she was still face down and bleeding, he repeatedly stabbed her through both lungs so she couldn’t breathe or scream, and set fire to the bed. Her murder was yet another massacre of a frail old lady by a maniac, who vanished without a trace. At 8am the next morning, a neighbour noticed smoke coming from the ventilator grille above the front door of Henrietta’s flat, the caretaker called the fire brigade, and in her bedroom, her body was found; still smouldering after several hours, the lower half of her body – her legs, anus and genitals – were destroyed by fire, taking with it much of the evidence, but with multiple stab wounds to her chest and at least two of the weapons used to torture her still in her neck and face, detectives were called in. As before, the most sensational details of the case were reported by the press, some were deliberately left out (those only the killer would know), and with this being “potentially linked” by detectives to the murder of Barbara Pinder, the tabloid papers had dubbed him ‘The Saturday Night Slaughterer’. This investigation was headed-up by Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Carnie, but as before, it looked unlikely to be solved; as the murder weapon (a 6 inch knife) was missing, no-one was seen entering or leaving her flat, a set of fingerprints were found but never connected to a known felon, and even as a nationwide murder hunt was launched and the case garnered mainstream coverage, DCS Carnie stated “we are taking it very seriously the possibility that they could all be connected”… …as in the intervening weeks, four other women were attacked on neighbouring streets. Several elderly women on the Lillington Gardens estate had been beaten, stabbed and robbed, with random outbreaks of arson at several homes of lone women across the previous year. On the Sunday before Henrietta’s killing, an unnamed female pensioner was attacked on her doorstep by a stockily-built man in his 30s, who asked to be let in to “watch her television”. She escaped with just bruises. Yet, on Tuesday 30th of July 1985, on Warwick Way in Pimlico, Eileen McCarthy, a 60 year old cleaner was approached by a man – aged 35 to 40, 5 foot 10, straight black hair, stocky build, round face, wearing a white sleeveless denim jacket, a light blue shirt and a dark coat – at 5:45pm near the junction of Belgrave Road, with no premeditation and having never seen him before, in a swift and frenzied attack, he stabbed three times in the face. Not slashing, not cutting, but stabbing her with such ferocity, detectives described it as “plunging the knife in, and literally ripping it apart, until it broke the back of her skull”. She screamed, he fled, and taken to hospital, she slowly made a good recovery. At Westminster Coroner’s Court, Dr Paul Knapman declared that Henrietta’s murder was “particularly macabre… no motive is apparent and it is most disturbing that no one has been caught or convicted of this crime. It would have been far preferable if it had not had an inquest, but a murder trial instead”. And as the case stalled, the killings of Henrietta Osbourne and Barbara Pinder remained unsolved... …until a killer who wanted to be caught, confessed. But why? One year after Henrietta’s murder, on 30th of June 1986, Police in Pimlico arrested a man who’d broken into the flats of two elderly neighbours on nearby Page Street, and for no reason, set fire to their beds. 32-year-old David McKenzie had lived in London for years, but was born in 1954 in the Scottish city of Inverness, and raised in Dundee. Described as stocky and powerfully built, McKenzie’s education was limited, as being diagnosed aged 6 with a non-specific personality disorder, since 1976, he had been asking doctors “I want to be somewhere not in the community… in prison or a hospital”, as with no control over his actions, he told one psychiatrist about his sexual deviancy and his hatred of women. In his teens and twenties, he had worked in hotels and as a hospital porter, but unemployed at the time of his arrest, he was known as a prolific (if unskilled and unremarkable) burglar. For the last few years, McKenzie had lived at Dukes House, a council run tenement block on Vincent Road in Pimlico in the shadow of Big Ben and at the back of the houses where he had set fire to two old lady’s beds. He wasn’t a suspect in either killing, as being mentally unwell, his arrest resulted in him being put on a ‘hospital order’ (so instead of serving prison time, he’d be held at a psychiatric hospital) as he was deemed ‘a danger to the public’, as on 26th of June 1986 (three months before Henrietta’s killing), in his flat, this a self confessed paedophile indecently assaulted, raped and buggered a 14-year-old girl. Charged with rape, when later questioned about the fires, on the 16th of August 1986, McKenzie spent hours saying nothing, not even replying ‘no comment’ to the detectives questions, as the balding, 17 stone hulk sat there, staring. But it was as he was asked (possibly jokingly) “do you have anything else to say in your defence?”, that overpowered with the weight of guilt, he made a startling confession. He said “I want to tell you about the old lady”, and unaided, this blabbermouth confessed to Barbara Pinder’s murder and according to detectives “he revealed details only the killer could have known”. On the 29th of August 1986, David McKenzie was charged at Horseferry Road Magistrates Court, and while held on remand, again to the detectives he said “I want to tell you about the other old lady”. He confessed to the killing of Henrietta Osbourne, and on the 14th of November 1986, he was charged. A killer was caught, two murders were solved, the elderly women in Battersea and Pimlico were safe from a monster, and even though he never said why he did it, it concluded because he felt ashamed. In his interviews with the detectives, finally talking, the blabbermouth was open and frank about his heinous crimes, which he recounted unemotionally as if he was reading a set of instructions, yet his head hung low in shame and his eyes were etched in guilt. When asked, he couldn’t give any motive, and although his recollection was accurate and proved he was there, he had some glaring errors in his memory, but maybe this was caused by drink or drugs, fear or shame, or his limited mental capacity. But the paedophile, sadist and double-killer David McKenzie wouldn’t immediately go on trial, as being sent to Broadmoor Psychiatric Prison to be assessed, as a psychopathic paranoid schizophrenic, he wasn’t deemed mentally fit to plead for three years. His confession was worth its weight in gold, but as six psychiatrists gave differing opinions on whether he actually knew the difference between reality or fantasy, fact or fiction, as in his mind, all of the details blurred into one, even in his own retelling. While confessing to killing Henrietta, McKenzie said “I’ve spoken to my brother, Danny, and he asked me if I did it alone, I said ‘no’”. He then named his accomplice - a fellow burglar, a friend and an old flatmate – who was later arrested, but released without charge, as there was no evidence against him. In his statement, McKenzie said “I intended to steal, I never meant her any harm”, but as she opened the door to him, so he claimed “I pushed her back, put my hand over her face, at this time I had a knife in my hand”, and with his supposed accomplice “we argued about what to do with her… it was him, he took the knife out of my hand and hit the old lady with it. We started looking about the flat… then we both raped her”, although that evidence was all destroyed by fire. But was McKenzie a psychopath who only cared about himself and was hoping to reduce his charge by blaming his friend, or a fantasist who couldn’t tell the truth from a dream, and the facts about his heinous crimes were lost in his mind? On 12th of January 1990, the trial for both arson attacks, the 14-year-old’s rape and the murders of Barbara Pinder & Henrietta Osbourne began at the Old Bailey, before Judge Kenneth Richardson QC. With Robin Grey QC as his defence, McKenzie pleaded ‘guilty’ to arson and five counts of unlawful sex with a child, but ‘not guilty’ to both murders. Given his mental state, much of the evidence was based around whether he calculatedly killed both women, or whether he was not mentally responsible. In his opening statement, John Bevan QC said “the facts you are about to hear are, without exception, unpleasant and abhorrent. It’s a most distressing case. It is essential that you put emotion entirely to one side and steel yourself to consider the evidence coldly and dispassionately. There is no doubt that he is a strange person. Sometimes what he says may not be true. He has his own motives for making things up and telling lies. As the prosecution, we accept he has a personality disorder. He is suggestible, and imagines things to be true when they are not. That does not prevent him from being a murderer”. Whereas his defence counsel stated “there was not one shred of evidence besides the confession to link him to the killings”, but McKenzie himself was never in court, except to give his evidence, stating “I find it upsetting to be here. It makes me feel guilty”, so he stayed inside his cell at Brixton Prison. Hearing the evidence, a jury of seven women and five men found him ‘not guilty’ of the murders of Barbara Pinder and Henrietta Osbourne, but ‘guilty’ of manslaughter by diminished responsibility. Summing up, Judge Kenneth Richardson QC described McKenzie as “one of Britain’s most dangerous killers… you have been found guilty of two of the most appalling killings I can recall. I am quite certain you are a frighteningly dangerous man”. Sentenced on the 30th of March 1990, Judge Richardson said “You will remain at Rampton High Security Hospital until such time that it’s absolutely clear to those responsible for your care and release that you are no longer a danger to the public”. Held under Sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983, David McKenzie remains there today after 36 years. (False end) But those weren’t the only crimes he confessed to. Having told detectives about the two ‘old ladies’ he had murdered – being born and bred in Scotland, struggling with psychopathic schizophrenia, being a sadist, an arsonist, a rapist and a paedophile with a hatred of women – as he had with Barbara & Henrietta, before the detectives, once again, the blabbermouth began to speak. In a scattergun retelling, like his fractured memory was grasping at fragments of clues lost in the foggy mists of his mind, he confessed to a wealth of other unsolved murders, retelling them in full detail. He had murdered a 27-year-old man in Hertfordshire, a 79-year-old woman in Shropshire, an 11-year-old girl on Scottish border, a five year old girl in Edinburgh, and with two stabbings of victims who – like 60-year-old Eileen McCarthy, the cleaner who was randomly stabbed in the face in an unprovoked attack in Pimlico – had survived, a senior detective stated “he may, some day, give us the information we want to close the files on these dreadful events which have haunted so many people for so long”. Guilt can be a strange thing, as with two brutal unsolved murders, what began with a silent man sitting passively in an interrogation room, guilty of rape and arson but saying nothing, led detectives to a self-confessed serial killer and a series of unsolved murders across the UK, totalling ten or even twelve. Part two of two of The Blabbermouth concludes 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.
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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.
Woodchester Square, London, W2
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-SIX: On Monday the 24th of September 2018, an unnamed couple parked-up outside of Princethorpe House in Woodchester Square in Paddington, W2. The man was kidnapped, driven across London, and then in an unspecified bathroom on Fulham Palace Road, he was tortured using acid. But how did acid become the weapon of choice for many London gangs? Find out on Murder Mile.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: How did acid become the weapon of choice for many London gangs? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Woodchester Square in Paddington, W2; two streets west of the decapitated head of the alleged Algerian lover, two streets north of the second killing by London’s forgotten gay slayer, 100 yards from where Marta Ligman’s body was found in a suitcase floating in the canal, and the same square as the son who killed his parents to protect his dogs - coming soon to Murder Mile. Completed in 1962 as part of the post-war regeneration of London’s decimated housing, Woodchester Square prominently features two 21-story, 200 foot tall, residential tower blocks between the Grand Union Canal at Little Venice and the A404 Westway, a very busy carriageway. Covered in silver panels, concrete and glass, on the architects page it was probably hailed as ‘a vision of the future’, but now with tacky shell-suits hanging off the balconies, rusty satellite dishes only able to pick up Sputnik, and a line of 1990s hot-hatches blasting out drum n bass, it looks like ‘a blurry hangover from the past’. Comprising of 127 flats, it is home for hundreds of people, but for one couple in particular, it was the scene of a terrifying experience, which left them mentally scarred and one, physically injured for life. In 2018, Woodchester Square was one of far too many public places in London where criminal gangs used acid as a weapon, leaving their intended victims either disfigured, disabled and dead. And even though it seems like a modern affectation in their arsenal of hate, it has a long and troubling history. But why is it used, how did we make it easier for those who abuse it, and what can be done to stop it? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 346: Vitriol – The London Acid Attacks. On Monday the 24th of September 2018, while Britain was seething about Putin owing to the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, bickering over Theresa May’s failed ‘Chequer’s plan’ over Brexit, and sweating having endured the ‘hottest summer on record’ (now since beaten), it was a long hot night in this side of the city, and all that could be heard was the rush of traffic and the hum of basic air-conditioning. That evening, a couple (unnamed for safety reasons) had gone out for dinner, they’d had a pleasant night, and being a few months pregnant, they were eagerly awaiting the arrival of their child. Driving home, all they had on their minds was the essentials of their new life; cots, cribs, nappies and rattles. At exactly 9pm, they pulled up in their parking spot in the concrete car park outside of Princethorpe House in Woodchester Square, where the pregnant woman lived. Like all homes, she felt safe as they got out of the car and her boyfriend began to walk her to her flat, as he had done many times before… …but safety is only an illusion. We don’t know why they were targeted - as fearing reprisals on themselves, their family and friends, the couple never gave a statement to the Police and never identified any of the suspects – but it wasn’t believed to be personal or business, just profit, as they drove a nice car and wore expensive jewellery. From a parked van, the doors slid open, and a gang of five men wearing balaclavas burst out. Muffling the mouths of this terrified couple with their gloved-hands, as both were dragged kicking and trying to scream into the van, the pregnant woman broke free and managed to flee, but with her boyfriend being the main target of their pointless little heist, roaring swiftly away, within seconds, he was gone… …but taken by who, where to, and why? Whether the plan had gone awry having only kidnapped one of them is uncertain, but with him bound and blindfolded in the back of the van, being beaten black and blue, he was driven across West London for more than four hours; never knowing where he was, where he was going, or if he would even live to see his baby born, and although this must have absolutely terrified him, the worst was yet to come. The gang were five pointless, petty thieves who had made a life for themselves by bringing misery to many, and although, they gave a wealth of excuses about why they’d turned to crime, such as austerity or abandonment (hardships which millions navigate without being leeches on the backside of society), this wasn’t a crime to feed their family, but their drug habits, fragile egos and dreams of a thug life. They were 36-year-old Aston Rochester of Chaplin Road in Harrow, his 31-year-old brother Denzil, 23-year-old Jamal Gordon-Harris of Dart Street in Kilburn, 27-year-old Rennell Rutty of Creighton Close in White City, and 40-year-old Bradley Evans of Fulham Palace Road - five friends with criminal records. Back in 2007, when he was tried at Southwark Crown Court, Denzil Rochester was described by the Harrow Times, his local paper as part of “a gang of drug-addicted robbers”, off-their-faces on cocaine. With 15 others, in a four-month spree in which they targeted five branches of Ladbrokes betting shops a day anywhere from Yorkshire to Devon, they would swarm around a Cash Quest gambling machine, split the cover on the terminal and fool it into printing vouchers which could be exchanged for cash. In total, they stole £55,000, and if even one of them had bothered to get a GSCE in maths, they’d have worked out that the haul divided by 16 only adds up to £3500 each, and with the job having taken 120 days, that earns them £30 a day, not including the cost of fuel, food and hotels. Their time would have been better spent sitting on their arses, watching telly, earning £15 a day in unemployment benefits. But with the average cocaine addict spending £120 a day, their frazzled brains didn’t think that way. All 16 were arrested, with Denzil Rochester jailed for a year, and the others; Mark Riley, Stephen Koya, Christopher Melim, Ashley Hutchinson, Shane McCleod, Lee Johnston, David Carey and Sean Murphy, serving anywhere up-to 12 months in prison, a community order or put on a drug treatment program. But did this stop them from committing further crimes? No, as the law is ineffective and slow to react. They all had prior convictions, being petty criminals who plagued the streets for their own selfish gain – like in 2014, when Rennell Rutty was stopped by police and four wraps of crack cocaine fell from his trouser leg, when searched six more fell out, and like a crap Santa, while in custody, several more fell from his body like his arse was a drug dispenser – and although he was convicted of intent to supply Class A drugs such as crack and heroin, sentenced to two years in prison, even though PC Nick Lee said “I am pleased that a drug dealer has been taken off the streets of Brent”, did it stop him for good? No, as too often the law is merely a minor obstacle for criminals for a brief period of time. The same is said of the weapons they use; sometimes it’s guns, sometimes it’s knives, and sometimes it’s acid. Three years before the kidnapping at Woodchester Square, a similar attack occurred which had all the hallmarks of the other; kidnap, extortion and violence, but as the culprits were never caught, it can’t be determined if this heinous crime was committed by the same gang, or some of the same members. In early April 2015, 20-year-old Economics student Motaz Zaid was involved in a minor collision while driving his car, and instead of exchanging insurance details, the other driver threatened him with violence if he didn’t pay him £400, which he did – this was little more than a ‘crash for cash’ scam. A week later, on the 10th of April, while out with his friend at 12:40am at St Marks Close, West London, his friend was stabbed, and being dragged to a silver Mercedes C220 Estate, Motaz was blindfolded, bound and driven around the city for hours to disorientate him. Pulling up at Beverley Way in Kingston, they tortured him for money; they beat him, they pulled his ears with pliers, they made him swallow ammonia, and they sprayed his face with acid. Minutes later, a passing police patrol saw the car with the boot open, they gave chase and lost to target vehicle, but Motaz was found and taken to hospital. Motaz was placed in intensive care, given police protection, and was in a coma owing to his pain and infected skin. His father Azz said ”We don't know if his vision is affected. Doctors say it is very serious. He woke up today but he cannot speak, his throat is very damaged. He can only point. My heart is broken when I see my son like that. I can't believe anyone could do that to another human being". Only these weren’t humans who attacked Motaz… …but animals, and sadly, they were never caught. This has become a phenomenon, “as the UK has one of the highest rates of acid attacks per capita in the world” according to Acid Survivors Trust International, with recorded attacks increasing nearly three-fold from 228 in 2012 to 601 in 2016, with 2017 being the worst ever year so far for acid attacks. “Unlike in other countries, where 80 per cent of acid attacks are against women, in the UK most victims are men”, ASTI says. Gang disputes are said to be behind the rise, with half of all UK attacks in London. Dr Simon Harding of Middlesex University said “acid was once a weapon of last resort, but may now be the first”, with many gang members swapping guns and knives for acid as it’s hard to monitor. Back in 2018, gun owners were required to have thorough background, criminal and medical checks, a 5-year licence, a "good reason" to own a gun (such as sport or farming), with handguns largely banned. Knives require the owner to have a valid ID and a registered address for legal online purchases, but in 2018, there were no ID checks or age restrictions on the sale of acid; a child could buy sulphuric acid, as long as it wasn’t stronger than a 15% solution, which could still disfigure, disable and kill. We made these weapons simple and easy for gangs and any wannabe killer to buy, they have a devastating impact on the victims, but (unlike other weapon) had no ramifications for someone caught carrying it. Anyone illegally possessing of a knife in the UK may receive an unlimited fine, a training order for youths, or up to four years in prison. Illegally possessing a gun carries a mandatory five-year minimum sentence with a maximum of seven. Whereas acid had no specific legislation on its sale, or its impact. The same year as the kidnap in Woodchester Square, three months before on the 13th of July 2018, a devasting spree of acid attacks across East London was committed not by a dangerous criminal gang… …but by one boy. 17-year-old Derryck John was the passenger on a moped which trawled Stratford, Hackney, Shoreditch and Upper Clapton (an East London street given the dubious monicker of the ‘Murder Mile’), and in a 90-minute spree, they stole two mopeds and attempted to take another four, using acid as a weapon. At 9:30pm, at the junction of Penny Brookes Street and De Coubertin Street in Stratford, he threw acid in the face of a 69-year-old moped rider, and after a terrifying foot chase, she managed to get away. At 10:25pm, on the corner of Queensbridge Road and Hackney Road, 32-year-old Jabed Hussain, an Uber food delivery driver had acid, possibly ammonia, thrown through the open visor of his helmet. His bike was stolen, he suffered severe facial burns and breathing problems after he was attacked, and unable to return to work and provide for his family, Jabed said he became “a totally different man". And even though Jabed was left writhing in pain, the acid attackers didn’t stop their spree. 24 minutes later at 10:49pm, a 44-year-old was sprayed with acid on St Paul's Road in Islington, but nothing was stolen. At 11:05pm on Shoreditch High Street, a 52-year-old man was splashed, but they failed to steal his bike. At 11:18pm on Cazenove Road in Upper Clapton, 24-year-old Bruno Goncalves was sprayed, and at 11:37pm, on Chatsworth Road in Lower Clapton, a 33-year-old man was attacked. All were injured, physically and mentally, with one of the victims was left with "life-changing injuries". Giving evidence, Bruno Goncalves said he was stopped at a red light in Upper Clapton Road. He didn’t see it happen, but felt it splash as Derryck John sprayed acid in his face and eyes from an Evian bottle. Like cowards, they fled when he fought back, and although an ambulance was called, he was treated at a specialist hospital, but with his eye having turned black as 70% of the cells had been burnt, being left in excruciating pain, even though his sight returned, he couldn’t afford the £150 it cost every fortnight in painkillers and medication to heal him, so he had to give up his job as a food delivery rider. Oddly, even though Derryck John had no compassion for any of his victims, as he went to buy £5 worth of fuel at the Texaco petrol station on Mare Street in Hackney, he obeyed the law which said you mustn’t wear a helmet inside of a petrol station, and the CCTV caught an image of his face and clothes. Tried at Wood Green Crown Court in January 2018, found guilty of six counts of throwing a corrosive liquid with intent to “disable, burn, maim, disfigure or cause grievous bodily harm”, with two counts of robbery and four counts of attempted robbery, Judge Noel Lucas said “if you had been an adult, you would have received a sentence of 22 years”. Instead, he was jailed for 10 and a half, with three in a young offenders institute “and half your sentence in custody, then you will be released on licence”. It’s likely he is out already, and his unidentified associate who drove the bike remains at large. But it’s not just career criminals who use acid as an easy and readily-available weapon. As examples across just 2017: on the 1st of April, Arthur Collins threw acid at 20 people in a nightclub called Mangle E8. Leaving many with permeant scars, he claimed it was the date rape drug, GHB (as if that’s any better), and although he professes his innocence, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. On the 27th of July, Katie Leong scarred her boyfriend, 31-year-old Daniel Rotariu for life and left him blind, as having rejected her sexual advances, while he slept, she poured acid into his face and eyes. She was convicted of his attempted murder and was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the attack. Legislation is always slow to catch up. If some people get hurt, there’s a chance that the issue will be raised in parliament, but it may only become law when enough people die and society demands it. In September 2015, 29-year-old Dutch engineer Mark van Dongen was left blinded and paralysed from the neck down as well as losing his left leg, eye and an ear, when his ex-lover Berlinah Wallace hurled concentrated sulphuric acid in his face as he slept in Bristol. Having begged doctors to end his life, on the 2nd of January 2017, having chosen to die at a euthanasia clinic in Belgium, in a landmark case, his attacker was found guilty of throwing a corrosive substance with intent, and sentenced to 12 years. But still the law which legislates against the sale and use of acid as a weapon… … isn’t a modern issue we’re facing for the first time, but a very old one. Vitriol, it’s a word we all understand, meaning ‘bitter criticism or malice’, but it’s origins stem back to the archaic word for sulphuric acid, first produced on an industrial scale in England in the 1740s. For centuries, Vitriol was used as a common bleach and cleaning agent, but being so easy to obtain, during the labour disputes of the industrial revolution in the 1820s and 30s, acid was increasingly common as a weapon used by workers against their managers, with The Glasgow Herald in 1834 describing the crime as "throwing vitriol" and becoming so common that it was "a stain on the national character". This came off the back of another case, when in February that year, a man called Hugh Kennedy was hung for “throwing vitriol wilfully and maliciously” on the face of a fellow servant as he slept. The man awoke in agony with “one of his eyes being literally burned out!” The people demanded change, and said “no punishment could be too severe… we would have their arms cut off by the shoulders, and send them to roam as outcasts from society, without the power of throwing vitriol again”, and even though some laws were changed, it was ineffective and would remain so for almost another 200 years. Still today, the term vitriolage means to throw acid or a corrosive substance into the face of another person to disfigure, maim or kill, and yet, even in 2018, the laws around it were equally as archaic. So, what has this got to do with the kidnap on the couple at Woodchester Square? On the night of Monday the 24th of September 2018, at exactly 9pm, a nameless couple (their bellies full of food and a baby) pulled up in their usual spot in the concrete car park outside of the 21-storey tower block at Princethorpe House. They got out, he locked up and pocketed the key, and being easily 30 feet from the communal doors of the flats, they felt safe, but then again, safety is only an illusion. From a parked van, four of the gang of five wearing balaclavas grabbed the couple, she kicked off and fled, and with the man dragged into the back, in a plume of dusty gravel, the van was gone in seconds. Bound, blindfolded and terrified, the man was kept pinned down by Aston Rochester, Jamal Gordon-Harris, Rennell Rutty and Bradley Evans, as Denzil Rochester drove the van across the city for the next four hours; the man never knowing if he’d live or die, breathe his last, or be buried whole or in pieces. At some point, somewhere, he was bundled into the rear footwell of a car where again, he was beaten, the van was set alight, and the car was driven by Evans to his home in Fulham Palace Road by 1:15am. Whether they knew him or not was irrelevant, as this wasn’t about hatred or revenge, all what they wanted was his money. They may not even have known how much he was worth, or whether they simply assumed he was minted because he drove a flash car, wore designer clothes and flashy jewellery, but inside this unidentified flat on Fulham Palace Road, they would make him beg for them to stop. Across the next 12 hours, with his wrists and ankles bound and his mouth gagged with tape, they took it in turns to beat and strangle him to the point of death, and then, having dragged him to the bath, they poured acid upon the bare exposed flesh of his naked body, it fizzing as it ate through the layers. Acid is a horrible weapon; when poured on exposed skin, initially the skin fights off the acid by causing a numbness, but that is only temporary, as being so caustic, acids like sulphuric can penetrate all the layers of the skin causing second and third-degree burns. With skin being 64% water, when acid hits it, a strong exothermic reaction occurs generating heat and thermal burns causing the skin to redden, blister, peel and with the acid causing coagulation necrosis (also known as tissue death) resulting in a dark brown or greeny-black scab, this masks the depth of the underlying damage caused by the acid. But acid burns aren’t just cosmetic resulting in permanent scarring, they can also cause tissue damage, muscle loss, restricted movement, ulcers, chronic inflammation, a high risk of infection, organ failure, paralysis, blindness and irreversible damage to other senses as well as coma and death owing to shock. Gangs use it as a weapon, as not only is it cheap to buy and unregulated (unlike guns and knives), but it causes excruciating pain, distress and terror across a very long and lingering torture. It leaves scars, which are a reminder for the victim and a warning to others. And although the man was hideously burned by the acid, he either couldn’t or wouldn’t give up his money, so the gang took it s step further. On a burner phone, they called his mother and demanded money. He was in pain, he was screaming, he told her that he feared for his life, and although she transferred £6000, roughly £1200 each to his five hapless captors, having demanded a second payment but with no more money to send, they had his mother leave his gold Rolex watch on the tyre of his car still parked where the attack took place. Evans drove to Woodchester Square, Gordon-Harris grabbed the watch and they sped away. As agreed they dumped the man (with his skin blistered and bubbling) on the roadside, and spotted by a passerby he was taken to hospital, where his condition was listed as critical, but lived, his outcome is unknown. The gang thought they had planned the perfect heist, but criminals gangs aren’t the smartest. They abducted a rich man who wasn’t rich, for an amount of money which for each of them added up to less than the minimum monthly wage. Having threatened them, neither the man nor his girlfriend gave a statement for fear of reprisals, and although the robbers wore balaclavas and burned out the car and the van destroying any fingerprints and DNA, meaning the acid-strewn flat and bathtub at Fulham Palace Road couldn’t be found. But… as Jamal Gordon-Harris collected the Rolex from the car’s tyre, it was captured on CCTV, as was his face, and the car, and the car’s driver being Evans, and even though the licence plate was false, identifying those two led to their other known associates. (End) Jamal Gordon-Harris & Rennell Rutty were arrested after grabbing the Rolex, Denzil & Aston Rochester were arrested at home that same day, with Bradley Evans arrested weeks later on the 31st of October. Following a six-week trial at Harrow Crown Court, with evidence provided by the Met Police’s Modern Slavery and Kidnap Unit, all five of the gang denied the charge of conspiracy to kidnap, but on Friday the 12th of July 2019, they were all found guilty. Aston Rochester to 11 years and 3 months, his brother Denzil and Rennell Rutty to 9 years and 9 months, Jamal Gordon-Harris to 10 years and 3 months, and Bradley Evans to 10 years and 9 months. With it costing £53,000 a year to prison them, it will cost the UK tax-payer £2.75 million excluding legal fees, and all because these idiots stole £6000 and a watch. In 2017, one year before, Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the Tory Party Conference: “acid attacks are revolting. You have all seen the pictures of victims that never fully recover. Endless surgeries. Lives ruined. We are going to stop people carrying acid in public if they don’t have a good reason”. With the introduction of the Offensive Weapons Act 2019, this made it “illegal to carry a corrosive substance in a public place in the UK without good reason or lawful authority”. This law brought acid in line with the possession of knives in a public place and anyone caught “could be imprisoned for up to 4 years”. An age restriction of 18 has been set on all corrosive products, police have powers to stop and search anyone suspected of unlawfully carrying acid without a good reason (such a being a plumber), and sulphuric acid at a concentration above 15% requires a Home Office licence. And the use of acid as a weapon can lead to severe charges, such as GBH with intent, which can result in a life sentence. Initially, the Offensive Weapons Act 2019 saw a 70% decrease of acid attacks in the UK from 2019 to 2021, which may partially have been down to the pandemic, but 2022 showed a 70% increase in cases with a further increase of 75% in 2023. As it was 200 years ago, the laws around “throwing vitriol” are as archaic and ineffective as before, the use of corrosive substances isn’t as regulated as it needs to be, so acid remains the weapon of choice of many London gangs. And it will be until the law changes. 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.
The Marriott at 134 George Street in Marylebone / Paddington @Googlemaps Sept2022
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO: On Sunday 28th of March 2004 at 8.20pm, Police were called to either Room 701 or 703 at The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street near Marble Arch, London, W1. Concerned for the guest, he was found naked, in the bath, in what looked like it could have been an accident or a suicide. It had all the hallmarks of a professional hit by experienced assassins of the Russian Mafia who were hired to whack-out a rival for the sake of money, revenge or respect. Yet it ended with a cataclysmic cock-up which showed these hitmen to be truly incompetent.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: What’s the stupidest mistake that professional assassins could make? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street, Marble Arch, W1; a few doors down from the senseless killing of artist Harry Michaelson, two streets north of the failed assassination of the ex-Iraqi Prime Minister Abd ar-Razzaq Said al-Naif, two streets south of The Blackout Ripper’s first official killing, and a short walk from the green-fingered maniac - coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated on the corner of George Street and Forset Street, a discrete side-street at the back of Edgware Road, The Marriott is a 4-star 13-floored hotel, as used by businessmen, tourists and a wealth of utter numpties who are in town to blow their dole money at the casinos. All dressed in a shiny gold suits (courtesy of Primark), they toss their £5 chips onto the table like it’s a cool million, evil eye their pie-eyed opponent (a bin man called Clive) like he’s an evil agent of Spectre, and hug two octogenarians honeys called Enid and Nora like they’re Bond Girls (obviously, not the most beautiful Bond girl, sigh). So, it makes no sense that the victim, an inveterate gambler who lived and died here, booked himself into this venue, being one of several large hotels in the area which didn’t have a casino – but he did. This was a cruel murder which initially baffled the police. It had all the hallmarks of a professional hit by experienced assassins who were hired to whack-out a rival for the sake of money, revenge or respect. Yet it ended with a cataclysmic cock-up which showed these hitmen to be truly incompetent. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 342: The S-Hitmen. The day was Sunday, the date was the 28th of March 2004 and the time was 8.20pm. The newspapers were slim, as the main stories were Hurricane Catarina hitting Brazil and resulting in no casualties, the Hamas leader declaring war on the USA again, and the death of actor Peter Ustinov at the age of 82. Having been contacted by their colleagues at Kent Police, a patrol had arrived at The Marriott to do a ‘welfare check’ on one of the guests, unaware of what they would find. Staff had knocked on his door, but they got no reply. The room’s phone was rang, but again, nothing. And to preserve any forensics should a crime have been committed, the door to either Room 701 or 703 (depending on which source reported this story) was only opened by the manager with a pass key in the presence of the Police. There were no signs of a break-in, and the hotel’s key-card system confirmed he had entered his room earlier that morning at 9:54am, and that was the last time the key-card used, and he was seen alive. Inside, the room was a standard double, spacious and comfortable; the light and TV had been left on, the red and yellow sheets on the King sized bed were crumpled as if they had recently been slept in, but the duvet was empty and the suitcase was open and partially unpacked. The room was messy, which could have implied there had been a struggle, or as all hoteliers know, some customers are pigs. Across the pillow was patches of blood, as if the occupant had a severe nosebleed, and struggling to stem the flow, he had stumbled to the bathroom, stepping in his spilled fluids, and that was where he was found; naked, in the bath, up to his neck in a slightly pinkish water, stone cold and decidedly dead. 98,000 people die each year in hotel rooms across the world, with many 200 room hotels experiencing one or two deaths annually whether by sickness, accident, suicide, poisoning and very occasionally a murder, and although drowning due to an embolism was mooted, with this deemed ‘suspicious’ as his cause of death was uncertain, the room was forensically examined and an autopsy was ordered. The unidentified victim, a male in his mid 40s of Eastern European or Middle Eastern origin, bald with short greying hair, had been dead at the time his body was found for just over 12 hours. With blood and bath water in his airway, it was obvious he was alive when he bled, but close to dying by the time he had got into the bath, which made no sense at all, as how did he get there and how did he undress? The hot water of the bath had caused his skin to swell and redden, which had masked a series of faint bruises; some looked as if he had been grabbed, dragged, and others like he had been beaten by fists. With his blood and saliva found on the pillow’s underside, it was clear that he had been smothered, and manually strangled by possibly one or two people, and although by putting him in a hot bath, that had eradicated many of the forensic clues, four partial lines of ripped out hairs at the wrists and ankles and faint traces of adhesive suggested that he had bound with duct tape, removed after his death. The Pathologist concluded “he had not died by natural causes”, and with no witnesses to the killing or clue to his killers, Police determined this was a ‘professional hit’, most likely a mafia or gangland killing. And what baffled them further was the victim’s identity; as he had checked in using a Greek passport, he had an Israeli passport under the name of Yermia Yunataev and a Russian one under Simion Turkov. His identity was so confusing, his death was registered by the Westminster coroner twice under both names, but with his blood matching a profile on the DNA Database, his true ID was later confirmed. This was Simion Turkov. Born on the 17th of March 1958 in Russia, Simion Turkov known as Simon was raised in Cold War era Moscow, right through to the beginning of the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s and the slow dissolving of Soviet State in 1991 when democracy mistakenly seemed to have change Russia for good. Little is known about his early life, being raised by his father Ram and his mother Zinayda, we know he was university educated and had a smart business brain, but as one of 750,000 Russian Jews who fled the USSR as it collapsed, in 1989, he emigrated to Tel Aviv in Israel, set his parents up in a well-appointed flat in an industrial city 8 miles north-east of Tel Aviv, and descended back into criminality. On the surface, Turkov came across as charming, sociable, quick witted and flashy, a businessman who loved to gamble. But underneath, he was a prominent member of the émigré Russian mafia in Israel, who an intelligence source stated “he was very much a big player”. And yet he also lived a double life. Prior to fleeing Russia, in the mid to late 1980s, “Turkov had ambitions to break into London through his mafia contacts”, and keen to keep himself low-profile, he adopted the unassuming identity of a hardworking man. In the mid-1980s, he met Maureen McShane. In June 1987, they had daughter called Danielle, in April 1989 they married, and in February 1991, a second daughter called Mishka. With two loving children, a softly-spoken wife, a three-bedroomed semi detached stone-clad house at 15 Palmerston Road (a quiet residential street in Upton), driving an unremarkable Vauxhall Cavalier and earning a living as a doorman at the Victoria Sporting Club casino in Bournemouth, he seemed like any other émigré who’d come to England to make a better life for himself, living legally and honestly… …but although Poole, a pleasant coastal town in Dorset is famous for its stunning scenery across the English Channel, it is a port town equally as famous for its long history of piracy and smuggling. Turkov was a man with big plans who lived beyond his means, and having lost his job as a doorman at the casino, in 1991 at Bournemouth Crown Court, he was given a 12 months suspended sentence for two years for falsely obtaining over £18,000 worth of credit from Barclay’s, Club 24 and Allied Trust. Some he spent on a BMW, a TV and jewellery, but most was to pay off his ever escalating gambling debts. The Judge, Jeremy Gibbons said “gambling was his Achilles’ heel”, but so was money and crime. On the 14th of May 1996, having boarded the ferry at Cherbourg, Turkov and his friend, Brian Lawence, a market trader from Cosham, arrived at Poole ferry terminal having smuggled in the petrol tank of a Luxemburg registered Ford Scorpio, 26 kilos of cannabis resin worth £75,000 (or £154,000 today). At the same time, his friend, Alan Mohsen and a French colleague were driving a similar saloon and were stopped at the French/Spanish border with 31.5 kilos of resin – totalling £200,000 (£410,000 today). They were caught at a spot-check by a keen-eyed customs official who said “two men in a large saloon is very suspicious and saloon petrol tanks are popular with smugglers”. All four men were arrested and tried at Bournemouth Crown Court, but as would become his habit, on the 19th of February 1997, the last day of his trial, when his co-smugglers were sentenced to six years in prison, Turkov fled the court, and phoned his solicitor to say “I’m abroad. I’m not coming back. I can’t face a prison sentence”. Convicted in absentia, he fled to Tel-Aviv using a fake Israeli passport in the name of Yermia Yunataev, and abandoned his wife and children. But as a selfish greedy thief, Israel was where the money was. In the years leading up to the ‘second intifada’, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict beginning in September 2000, Israel had become a hot spot of organised crime, as with country ripped apart from car bombs, civil unrest and war, “the Israeli police had lost control of the country's organised criminals, who are making millions from gambling, prostitution and drugs”. Ex-Israeli police chief, Asaf Heretz, claimed $2.5bn in "dirty money" had had flooded into Israel, as where there’s war, there’s profit to be made. Turkov set up a fake Israeli company called BMD Ltd, which vaguely claimed to “import and export products and merchandise”, which wasn’t a lie just as it wasn’t strictly the truth, as according to the Evening Standard “he exported cocaine and heroin to Europe and Britain” and young women for sex. According to an informer, “(Turkov) brought in prostitutes from all over the world”, mostly from Eastern Russia and the Ukraine. He smuggled them in, gave them fake papers to “prove” their Jewish ancestry, he paid his suppliers £35,000 for each girl, and controlled four brothels with around 40 girls. Turkov was a greedy thief who only cared about himself… and although he was already married with two children, he bigamously married Denise Makdona, set her up in the flat he had arranged for his parents through his ill-gotten gains of drugs and sexual slavery, and made her the other Mrs Turkov. But time would soon run out for this cowardly narcissist. In 2001, as if he hadn’t brought enough misery to the world, Turkov tried smuggling 100,000 ecstasy tablets into Israel from Egypt, but cocking up, the cargo was seized, Turkov was sentenced to eight years at Tzalmon, the largest prison in Israel, and with the shipment owned by the Russian mafia having been destroyed, Turkov would be in debt to them until it was paid back with money or his life. He would be dead if he returned to Russia, tortured if he returned to Israel, and although a wanted man in Britain for drugs smuggling, in 2003, two years into his sentence, being allowed a home visit, this time abandoning his second wife, Denise, using his fake Greek passport, he fled back to England. According to an unnamed Israeli intelligence source: “London is seen as being safe (for criminals)… it is one of the organised crime centres of the world; Russian mafia, Albanian, Greek Cypriot, Columbian, and Israeli, who with the Russians are among the nastiest of the lot. In my view, Turkov had hoped to base himself in London and to restart his criminal career, well away from his old cronies in Tel Aviv”. One week after his birthday, on the St Partrick’s Day of 2004, using his fake Greek passport, Simion Turkov booked into The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street in Marylebone, W1. He was meant to be keeping a low profile, but as a “big player on the London casino scene… he was very well known”. And again, as a selfish greedy pariah and a bloodsucking leech who sucked all the goodness and joy out of life’s heart – having abandoned his wife, his children, his parents and his bigamous wife – like a cartoon gangster, he lived with his Russian mistress in the hotels of Belgravia, he planned to bring his vile brothels to London, and he laid as low as he could as the Russian mafia wanted his head. Every day, he looked over his shoulder, expecting but never knowing if someone had been sent to kill him. But oddly, it wasn’t the gangsters, the pimps or the drug dealers who ordered his death… …but a rival gambler from Belgium called ‘Misha’, who he owed £200,000. As with all professional hitmen, almost nothing is known about them, as - unlike Turkov, the attention seeking champagne-swilling playboy gambler - their job is to stay off the radar and remain anonymous. The first was 31-year-old Andrei Melnikov, who looked more like a surfer than an assassin, and only appeared in the press twice in his early years; in 1993, when as an English teacher, he chaperoned a group of Russian school children on a 40-day placement in New Jersey, and in 1995, when as a hotdog vendor in Moscow, he spoke to the press about his disinterest in voting at the upcoming ‘free’ election. As for the second, 53-year-old Michael Antoneli, a businessman from Antwerp in Belgium, nothing is known about his life or his crimes, but both men were suspected (not proven) of being Russian mafia. On Saturday 27th of March 2004, a few hours before the killing, using fake but perfect passports, the hired assassins, Melnikov & Antoneli entered Britain via the ferry port at Dover, just before midnight. Their entry would go unnoticed by customs, they would deliberately break no laws (such as speeding) so as to not arouse any attention, and having murdered Turkov as agreed, they would head back to Calais in less than 24 hours, and using a non-descript day return ticket, they would vanish into Europe. They would be fast, efficient and low-key, they would meet him, and already knowing him, they would greet him as a friend, and under the guise of a business meeting, they’d kill him, making it look natural. That was their mantra; get in, get the job done, get out and be long gone before the body was found. In a phone box outside of The Marriott hotel, Melnikov called Turkov's mobile. Moments layer, Turkov arrived in a taxi, and according to the driver, he looked “anxious and agitated”. The CCTV captured the men meeting, and (to make him feel comfortable but maybe also for the cameras) they embraced him warmly like a friend, and the three of them went into The Pickled Hen, the hotel’s bar, where they sat drinking coffee and whiskey, reminiscing about old times, and generally having a very pleasant chat. As the night headed into the wee small hours of Sunday of 28th of March 2004, the three men headed to The Gloucester, a Grosvenor Casino inside the Millennium Hotel on Harrington Gardens in South Kensington, and being seen on CCTV walking together along Gloucester Road at 3:45am, this aroused no suspicion, as London can be a 24-hour city if you know where to look, and for many tourists, it is. Melnikov & Antoneli made Turkov feel comfortable, they got him drunk and they made sure he had a good night as a false sense of security, as if a hit hadn’t been placed on his head. They drank, but never to excess. They chatted but were never loud. They dressed down, and were never flashy. And only placing small bets, they were polite but forgettable to the casino staff, having blended into the crowd. At 9:05am, Turkov travelled back to The Marriott alone, the black ComCab arrived at 9.05am, and as he sat alone in the hotel lobby drinking coffee, at 9:50am, he took the lift to his room on the 7th floor… …and moments later, with no witnesses hearing a sound, Simion Turkov was murdered. With no damage to the door and with so many guests checking out at that hour, as no-one saw his assassins enter his room, either they had knocked and been invited in, or they’d acquired a spare key. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Worker who headed up the investigation, initially said "It was a very professional job and will be difficult to solve". In a public appeal, he stated "We are trying to piece together his last movements… (and) to trace the man seen walking with him along Gloucester Road in the early hours of Sunday morning. I am seeking a black Comcab driver who dropped Mr Turkov at the hotel at 9.05am. If you're a cab driver and were working in the area, do you recognise the two men? Did you pick them up? Even in the early hours of a Sunday, this is a busy part of London and I'm confident there are people who can help", as so far, they had done everything to remain anonymous. To solve the case, the detectives worked with local, national and international police forces, whether in Dorset, France or Israel, and although the killing of Simion Turkov had been ruthlessly planned to perfection, what aided the investigation most was a few simples mistakes by these half-witted hitmen. Inside of the room, Turkov was gagged, so nobody heard him scream. Having pinned him to the bed, with his ankles and wrists bound with duct tape, he couldn’t fight back, flee or knock anything over to alert the neighbours. And with the TV turned up to a moderate level, nothing seemed suspicious. As punishment for reneging on the £200,000 debt he owed ‘Misha’ in Belgium, he was beaten about the body in parts where the bruises wouldn’t be as obvious, and possibly tortured to give up the site of his money, but whether he did or whether he had any left is unknown, and for that, he was killed. One of his assassins held the pillow over his face so he couldn’t breathe. To ensure he would die, the other strangled him with his hand, pressing their thumb into his windpipe so as to not leave an obvious bruise of four fingers and a thumb. And with him bleeding and barely breathing, they stripped him of his blood-stained jeans, Versace belt and jacket, dragged his limp and lifeless body to the bath as he bled, and being barely conscious and unable to hold his head up straight, into the hot water, he sunk. Anyone who would have found him – lying there, maybe with a glass of whiskey, cocaine in his night-bag, bleeding from the nose and with no clear bruises – would assume that he’d overdosed and died. It was a textbook hit, which gave the assassins enough time to flee, as with it initially seen as suspicious but likely a suicide, the Police wouldn’t be looking for a killer. But several questions were unanswered by the crime scene; if he was unconscious, how did he get from the bed to the bath; why was his blood and saliva on the underside of the pillow; why did he have adhesive tape glue on his wrists and ankles; and – more bafflingly, given then fact that it looked as if he had a nose bleed and had drowned in the bath – why did he remove the hotel’s stationery from the room, how did he get in using the room key and where was it now, and how did he undress before entering the bath, and where were his clothes? Dead men don’t go to laundrettes… they also don’t dispose of their own rubbish. But these were small mistakes, innocent little slip-ups, which no-one would notice for hours, and by which time, with the unseen anonymous assassins already heading back to the Dover ferry port to catch their pre-arranged return trip back to Calais, and then into Europe, there they would vanish. Their escape was perfect. They left The Marriott at different times via separate exits, no later than an hour after the murder. Meeting at a pre-determined spot, far from any cameras, they drove away in a Mercedes they had rented for the day, and at a legal speed, they drove towards the ferry terminus. It was precision personified… and then, they made a massive cock-up. At the Tollgate service station near Gillingham in Kent, a small but serviceable petrol station on the A2 at Gravesend Road, Michael Runter was busy washing his car, when a Mercedes pulled up beside him, and in broad daylight, two men talking in Russian (which for many is odd enough) opened the car boot, and with one wearing bright yellow Marigold gloves on his hands (as if he had just been washing his dishes), he pulled out a yellow carrier bag, dumped it into the wheelie bin, and then they drove away. Hmm, either he was a germophobe with some rubbish to dispose of, or this was something sinister? Uncertain, Michael peeped inside the bin and spotting some bloodstained towels, he called the Police. Underneath the towels (used to clean-up the crime scene), forensics found a real treasure-trove of evidence, such as; Simion Turkov’s bloody clothes, a receipt for the hotel bar where they had shared a drink, a set of complimentary stationery, and – bafflingly of all – the key-card to the murder scene. As planned, the hitmen drove to Dover, hopped the ferry to Calais, and again, going their separate ways - with Antoneli heading to Antwerp and Melnikov to Tel-Aviv – they believed they had vanished… …but at 8:20pm, that evening, officers arrived at The Marriot, concerned for Simion Turkov. DCI Worker initially stated "It was a very professional job and will be difficult to solve", but with access to the room, the key-card and the hotel’s CCTV, even though they had no idea who the victim was, with CCTV of the assassins dumping their rubbish, they worked backwards to link them to the hotel, forwards to find out where they had fled to, and soon enough, the assassins were identified. (End) In co-ordination with Interpol, Europol and the Israeli Police, Melnikov & Antoneli thought they were safe in their countries under the Mafia’s protection for a job well done, but while the investigation was hotting up and evidence was being procured, they were both kept under surveillance. On the 13th of April 2004, barely two weeks after the murder, in a co-ordinated swoop, both men were arrested; Antoneli at his work place in Antwerp, Melnikov on a street in Tel-Aviv, and being held on international arrest warrants until they could be extradited to Britain, they were later questioned by British Police. Charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, false imprisonment, conspiracy to murder and murder, 53-year-old Michael Antoneli & 31-year-old Andrei Melnikov were tried at the Old Bailey. Richard Whittam for the prosecution stated to Judge Richard Hone QC, “this is an extraordinary trial. It is only before you because of the vigilance of a member of the public who witnessed the disposal of evidence which allowed police to detect Mr Turkov far earlier than they would have done”. And even though Melnikov & Antoneli denied murder, both being found guilty, on the 25th of July 2005, they were both sentenced to life terms, for a minimum of 20-years, and to be deported upon release. As far as we know, the Russian Mafia never successfully launched a hit on Simion Turkov’s life, and it is said, that the £200,000 he owed belonged to Michael Antoneli, although this cannot be verified. As of today, Andrei Melnikov remains in a British prison, although he is eligible for parole. But having served 17 years of his 20 year sentence, on the 9th of February 2021 at HMP Long Lartin, a maximum security prison, Michael Antoneli (who was then 69) contracted Covid-19 and he died six days later. Had they been better as hired hitmen, it’s likely that Melnikov & Antoneli may have evaded capture, but having made such a colossal cock-up, it’s only fitting that they are known as ‘the s-Hitmen’. 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 FORTY-ONE: From the 31st of January 1980 to the 1st of August 1983, on neighbouring streets across the London postcodes of W2, SW6, with two in SW1 and two in SW10, six gay men were murdered - Henry Carr, Dr Richard Mercy, Carlos Mery-Squella, Anthony Bird, Harry Williams and Peter Arne. They were linked by detectives as they had all been sadistically stabbed, battered, and sometimes posed and set alight. But who was the slayer of gay men in London’s West End?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
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UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Did an unknown serial killer of gay men once stalk 1980s West London? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of Bentley Court in Bayswater, W2; three streets north-east of the torture of Vincent Keighrey, two streets east of the German tourist slain by the Beast of Banffshire, one street north of the Vice Girl Killer, and a short walk from the big red hand - coming soon to Murder Mile. Bentley Court at 72-74 Kensington Gardens Square is an erroneous six-storey block of flats. Set among tasteful Georgian and Victorian townhouses with grand doric columns, elegant tall windows with artistic architraves and intricately designed wrought iron railings, they are the kind of homes you’d expect great writers to live, but in comparison, Bentley Court looks like a doss house for deadbeats. It’s flat, dull, vague, and looks like the architect woke up after a boozy lunch, and with ten minutes till he had to hand in the designs, thought “meh, that’ll do”, before napping, and realising he’d forgotten to add any internal doors, stairs, floors, walls, or even a roof. But maybe being forgettable is a bonus? On Tuesday the 3rd of June 1980, this was the scene of (until-recently) an unsolved murder. It was one of several brutal and sadistic murders of gay men in the 1970s, and all within streets of each other. Its conclusion came about not by technical advancement, but by chance when after 41 years, the killer gave themselves up. For decades, the detectives believed that all six of these killings attributed to a West End ‘Gay Slayer’ were connected, but does that mean that he is ready to confess to more? My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 341: London’s Forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’. When the murder of gay men in London is mooted, several names sidle into the frame, but we know this isn’t their unreported crimes; Dennis Nilsen was the right era but the wrong method, Colin Ireland wouldn’t emerge for a decade, Michael Lupo wouldn’t start killing until three years after our last, and the Twilight Sex Killer’s mini-spree had some odd similarities, but he had ceased twenty years before. To explore this tawdry story, we shall begin at the end. On Wednesday the 5th of May 2021 at 9:38am, at Hammersmith police station on 226 Shepherds Bush Road, W6, 61-year-old John Paul, a local man whose tough life had been blighted by prison stints and petty theft, approached the desk officer; “I want to report a crime”, “what happened?”, “murder”, the officer asked “who murdered someone?”, to which John Paul calmly replied “me”. He wasn’t drunk, unwell, and this wasn’t a prank, he was a man for whom the burden of guilt weighed heavy upon him. “You murdered someone, did you? When did this happen?”, and although after 41 years of silence his details were a little sketchy, stating “1980, April, a man, when I’d just left borstal”, he never knew his name, but by 11:34am, detectives had flagged up an unsolved murder “worth a look”, and by 3:35pm, with his fingerprints matching those found at the scene, he was arrested on suspicion of the murder. He was formerly charged on the 27th of May 2021, and was committed to trial at the Old Bailey. This was one of six suspicious murders of gay men (Henry Carr, Dr Richard Mercy, Carlos Mery-Squella, Anthony Bird, Harry Williams and Peter Arne), on neighbouring streets and postcodes (W2, SW6, with two in SW1 and two in SW10), between the 31st of January 1980 to 1st of August 1983, and linked by detectives as they had all been sadistically stabbed, battered, and sometimes posed and set alight. But who was the slayer of gay men in London’s West End? His most infamous killing was the murder of the MI6 operative and suspected Soviet spy, Henry Carr. Born on the 25th of May 1929, Henry was raised in an era where government departments mistakenly believed that anyone who went to Eton, Harrow or Oxbridge must be a ‘jolly good egg’, and incapable of anything “as beastly as treason, what-what?”. Being bright and educated at the almost-as-posh Dulwich College, during his National Service in the Royal Navy, he specialised in ciphers and codes, and speaking fluent Russian and Arabic, in 1955, he joined MI6 under the guise of the Foreign Office. As a diplomat, he was Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Jeddah and Beirut in 1956 and 57, then Second Secretary in Beirut for a decade (where he helped build ‘SIS’ - the Secret Intelligence Service network - in the Middle East), and by 1969 was promoted to First Secretary at the Foreign Office, but his whole career came crashing down owing to his connections to one of Britain’s most infamous spies. In Beirut, he shared a flat with Kim Philby; one of The Cambridge Five, a spy ring (who along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt & John Cairncross) was a high-ranking British intelligence officer who lead Mi6’s anti-Soviet counter-intelligence unit, while working as double agent for the Russians. In 1963, he defected to Moscow, where he lived until his death as a hero of the Soviet Union. Suspicion had already fallen on Henry Carr, not only because of his close friendship with Philby, but as at least two of the Cambridge Five were alcoholics (as Henry was), with two being gay and one a bisexual (like Henry), before his 40th birthday in 1969, he was dismissed due to “character weakness”. By 1974, divorced from his wife and with his two teenage sons living in Italy, he was as an administrator for the Institute of Civil Engineers, but his health was bad as he spent roughly £100 a week (£1400 today) on alcohol, he lived in a series of cheap and shoddy lodgings, and being lonely, he was a familiar face in the public toilets of Piccadilly, and brought a slew of anonymous rent boys back to his flat. On the 31st of January 1981, with his broken arm in a cast, 51-year-old Henry moved into the top floor flat of a five-storey brown-bricked end-terraced house at 52 Cathcart Road in Kensington, SW10. He was described as quiet and urbane, he kept to himself, rarely had friends, and never spoke of his life. On Thursday 25th of February 1981 at 4pm, he made an odd phone call to his only friend, Clive Clissold, who said “I knew he was desperate, because he gave me his phone number, which he was obsessively secret about. His actual words to me were ‘I have some big problems’”, but he never said what. Clive agreed to meet him, as they both worked together at the ICE, but three days later, Henry was dead. At 8pm, on Saturday 28th of February, firefighters were called to a blaze in Henry’s bedroom, believed to have been started by an overturned electric fire. Inside, his semi-clad body was badly charred, but the second they spotted the tell-tale signs of multiple stab wounds, they knew that this was a murder. Detective Superintendent Sargent found no evidence of forced entry, but he was last seen returning home alone at 5pm, and no-one was seen or heard leaving. Nothing was stolen, he was dressed in just his pants and vest, no sex had taken place, but in what was described as ‘a sustained assault’, although 6 foot 1 and heavily built, “he appears not to have defended himself”. Pathologist Dr Ian West stated “he was partially strangled, slashed across the face”, and with his own kitchen knife, he was repeatedly stabbed in the chest and the abdomen, causing severe wounds to the heart, liver, lungs and intestines. DS Sergent said “this was clearly a brutal and vicious murder, but its motive is a complete mystery”. Many people saw this suspicious death of a ‘suspected spy’ as an assassination by Mi6 or the KBG, but Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office said “we have ruled out any intelligence motives”. 40 rent boys were interviewed, but none were charged. A suspect was hunted – white, 5 foot 8, early 20s, slim, blonde hair with a dark complexion, wearing tight jeans and high heeled boots” – but never found. In truth, compared to many others, his murder was unremarkable; a depressed alcoholic with a secret sex life who was down on his luck. If he hadn’t worked for MI6, his death would barely have made the papers, and the conspiracy theorists who love ‘plot twists’ wouldn’t have got so hot under the collar. But Detectives stated “we believe he was the victim of a vicious killer who selected his targets from London’s homosexual community… some of the wounds suggest a link with an earlier knife murder of another homosexual”, as his sadistic killing wasn’t the first by London’s Forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’… …and it wouldn’t be the last. Dr Richard Peter Mercy was born on the 5th of May 1943 in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, to his father Derryck and his mother Madge, and having trained as a dental surgeon, he was wealthy and successful. In July 1978, 18 months prior, he sold his dental practice at Cadogan Place to Dr Robert Hammer for £30,000, so he could focus on being a property developer. He owned a cottage in Chichester, and two flats at 34 Eaton Place in Belgravia, an exclusive residence beautifully decorated with intricate arts and pricey antiques. The fourth floor flat worth £50,000 he had rented out, but Flat 5 on the fifth was his. Like Henry, he was quiet, kind, he kept to himself, and being 6 foot tall and dressed in sharp pin-stripe suits, as Detective Superintendent Snape stated “by day, he was a respectable member of society. But at night, he would go round toilets on Hampstead Heath frequented by known homosexuals… and took them back to his flat. His direction of sexual desire was sinking lower all the time. He was getting into tendencies of wanting more and more bizarre physical acts”, what was referred to as rough trade. On Tuesday 29th of January 1980 at 7pm, 38-year-old Richard bought from a King’s Road off licence 20 Marlboro and a four pack of Carlsberg, which was odd as he didn’t drink. He was seen standing outside of a house on Oakley Street, then possibly went clubbing. But this was the last time he was seen alive. A neighbour later said that, some time after midnight, “I heard screams coming from the flat, but I’ve no idea what it was about”, as many put it down to him having “many visitors and led a gay social life”. On Thursday 31st of January 1980, just after noon, Mrs Winifred Ryan, his cleaner for 10 years, noticed his front door was only partially locked from the outside. She noticed spots of blood on the stairs carpet, “I went into the bedroom. The door was wide open. I went in and I saw him on the floor. He was naked and there as a scarf wound round his neck. There was blood on the bed and all over the room”. His body had lain there for 44 hours, among a scene in which his blood had spattered every wall, door and surface. He was naked, with the ligature around his neck implying “bizarre sexual activities”, but with no evidence of any sex and the only items stolen from his flat being his watch, keys and Mercedes, robbery didn’t seem to be his killer’s main motive, as first he was strangled, then as pathologist Dr Ian West suggested, either he’d been attacked with a blunt instrument, or someone “had inflicted severe injuries consistent with someone having stamped on his head”, fracturing his face and his neck. The Police were certain they’d find his killer “as his assailant would have been heavily bloodstained… (being) in an uncontrollable frenzy committing this murder and lost control”. Detectives at Rochester Row police station interviewed 3000 people and took 2000 statements to determine his whereabouts prior to his death, and although they found his bloodstained clothes inside his other car, a white Ford Capri, every angle dried up and the inquest concluded it as “an unlawful killing by persons unknown”. All the Police knew was that “we are satisfied that his homosexuality led to his death”… …and like the murder of Henry Carr, it was also linked to Carlos Mery-Squella. Like the others, Carlos had no connection to Henry or Richard, they didn’t seem to be acquainted, and the only connection they had was that their deaths were linked to London’s Forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’. Carlos Mery-Squella came from Santiago, Chile, where he had trained as a lawyer, and came to Britain in 1970. As a 40-year-old administrator at the external degrees department of the Faculty of Medicine at London University, he was well liked, respected, “a quiet and kind man who abhorred violence and coarse company”. He spoke fluent English with hardly a trace of an accent, and was living with a male dancer of the Modern Ballet Company in Flat 2 on the ground floor of 22 Gunter Grove, a red-brick four-story terraced house in West Brompton in Kensington, SW10 – two streets away from Henry Carr. With his boyfriend on tour in Europe, he was last seen alive entering his flat at 5:45pm on Sunday the 12th of October 1980. He was alone, no sounds were heard, and no-one was seen leaving his flat. On the Monday, his boss phoned as he had failed to turn up to work, which was unusual. On Tuesday, they notified the Chilean Embassy. On Wednesday, at 7pm, the Police broke in, and found his body. Carlos was found in bed, partially dressed, with his throat slashed with a knife five times. His exposed chest and abdomen had been severely mutilated, he had been stabbed forcefully though the heart, and with many of the killing’s more sinister details deliberately left out of the press to trap the killer, they stated the body was “decorated in a macabre way… it was an obscene, vicious murder. Whoever did it must have a warped mind with a macabre sense of humour, and he might very well kill again”. Again, his homosexuality was listed as “leading to his death” and attributed to London’s ‘Gay Slayer’… …but no-one knew who his killer was, and as far as they knew, had never shown his face or left a print. On 2nd of August 1981, a year later, having extradited a man in his 20s via Interpol, DCS Ronald Hardy interviewed an unnamed suspect about the murders of Henry Carr, Dr Richard Mercy and Carlos Mery-Squella. The report was submitted to the DPP, but the suspect was never named, tried or convicted. Three men were dead, with no-one arrested for their bizarre and motiveless murders… …and yet, just three months before Carlos’ killing, another gay man was slain in the West End. New Zealand born Anthony Jackson Bird was a 42-year-old barman at the Railway Tap in Bayswater, a porter at Paddington Station and an attendant at Porchester Hall swimming baths, close to his flat. On the night of Tuesday the 3rd of June 1980, he was seen on Queensway looking for a man he could have sex with, and told his friends “I’ve got my eye on a black lad" and he was never seen alive again. As with Carlos, having missed work, at 3pm on Friday the 6th, three days later, as Anthony was reported missing but with no reply from his flat, officers broke the door down with a sledgehammer, and found his body. “The door was securely locked (from the outside)… the curtains were fully drawn… the room was in a state as if it had been ransacked. There was a sideboard with nothing on it, though they noted that there were patterns in the dust marks which indicated that objects... had recently been moved”. Bottles of alcohol and some inexpensive electrical items had been stolen. But was it a robbery? Anthony was naked, lying on his side, his knees tucked up to his chest with his hands and ankles tied with a black cord. He had been manually strangled, resulting in his neck being fractured, and Dr Rufus Crompton stated that using two short planks of wood, Anthony was beaten unconscious, leaving deep bruises to his head, jaw, chest, thighs and the base of his penis. And like the others, neighbours heard screams but put it down to rough sex, and although it looked like it, he hadn’t been sexually assaulted. No-one was arrested or convicted, it remained unsolved, and was linked to the four previous murders. The same was said of 63-year-old Harry Williams, a retired former boy’s school teacher from Surrey, who lived alone, was a quiet man who was said to be “a bit of a loner”, who picked up gay men in the pubs of Fulham, and given his all-too-obvious gingery wig was known in gay circles as ‘Harry the Hair’. On the afternoon of Sunday the 24th of October 1982, having drank at the Queen’s Head, a gay pub on Tryon Street in Chelsea, he met a young man – white, 25-ish, 5 foot 10, slim, with black greasy hair, in a blue denim jacket and cream flared trousers – they left at 2:15pm, and drove off in Harry’s car. Like Carlos, 12 hours later, at 3:40am, his death was only discovered when firefighters attended a blaze at his flat at Bagley’s Lane in Fulham, SW6, just streets from Carlos’ flat. In an oddly similar way, he was naked but hadn’t been raped, he had been sadistically battered, and with a steak knife taken from his kitchen, his chest, neck and abdomen had been stabbed and savagely mutilated. DCS Mike O’Leary of Fulham CID described it as “a vicious and brutal crime”, but with no suspects seen and a £560 Sony Betamax recorder missing, his homosexuality was seen as the motive, not robbery. And then there was one final murder, again connected to the others, and attributed to the ‘Gay Slayer’. 64 year old Peter Arne was an actor who had appeared in over 50 films and TV series, like The Return of the Pink Panther, The Cockleshell Heroes, Straw Dogs, Secret Army and Triangle. Like the others, he was described as “inoffensive and lonely”, and “a man of great charm”, who often invited men back to his flat, and had a fondness for “youngish men who looked like they were down on their luck”. On Monday 1st of August 1983, Peter attended a costume fitting at the BBC, having achieved his life’s ambition by securing the role of Range, a colonist leader in series 21 of Dr Who opposite Peter Davison. And with a week before shooting was to begin, the next day he was to head to Plymouth for a break. Just shy of 11pm, hearing a violent quarrel, his neighbour at 54 Hans Place in Kensington, SW1, found Peter slumped in the hall of his ground floor flat. His door was open, but not broken. His flat wasn’t ransacked. His wallet, watch and ring were untouched. And having been beaten, strangled, stabbed, and viciously attacked with a log taken from the fire and a wooden stool while wearing his pyjamas, his blood had spurted up the walls of the communal stairwell, and he died of severe head injuries. A photofit of a young man seen loitering nearby and eating a jar of honey was published in the local papers, and with an entry for the 8th of August in Peter’s diary reading “meet Guiseppe” leading to no-one, his brutal murder was linked to five unsolved killings – Henry, Carlos, Anthony, Richard and Harry – “who frequented gay haunts in London’s twilight world… (and fitted) a pattern of sadistic murders”. Six dead men, all gay, all stabbed and strangled with strong hints of sadism to their deaths. They either knew or trusted their killer, but none of them knew each other. They were murdered inside their own homes, but the killer hadn’t broken in, in fact, each of them had let him in. Sex seemed to have been the victim’s motive to invite them back, but no sex had taken place, and they hadn’t been molested. So, who was London’s Forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’? On Wednesday 5th of May 2021 at 9:38am, at Hammersmith police station, 61-year-old John Paul told the desk officer “I want to report a crime… a murder”, “who murdered someone?”, he replied “me”. As a former resident of Ladbroke Grove in Kensington, he admitted that on the night of Tuesday the 3rd of June 1980, he was in the Queensway area, and was propositioned by a 42-year-old barman called Anthony Jackson Bird. Being a thief, recently released from borstal and looking for something to steal and sell, he told detectives, "he talked me into having sex with him. He took me back to his place... I tied him with a black cord… his ankles, hands, arms, on the bed naked. There was a piece of wood... I used it to batter him”, and having taken anything worth any value, he remained silent about the killing for 41 years, until – with the weight of guilt bearing down on his soul – he confessed to the detectives. On Monday the 24th of October 2022, at the Old Bailey, although he denied any intent to do Anthony Bird any serious harm, having pleaded guilty to manslaughter by provocation, John Paul was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to life with a minimum term of 19 years. He may never see freedom. So, with one of these six murder conclusively solved, attributed to a convicted killer, and all linked by detectives owing to their sadistic similarities, does that mean we have found London’s forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’, a crazed maniac on par with the likes of Dennis Nilsen, Colin Ireland and Michael Lupo? No. As happens with everything in life, as humans we naturally seek out patterns and connections to keep ourselves safe and sane, even when their aren’t any. In the case of London’s Forgotten ‘Gay Slayer’, six men, all gay, all quiet, all with secrets, and all living a few streets apart were murdered in a similar way, in their own homes, and brutalised in a way with as many similarities as there are dissimilarities. But it’s easier to believe that they are somehow linked, even though life is full of coincidences. Each victim was murdered using something stolen from their home, but isn’t that what killers do when they’re driven by emotion? Each victim lured their killer back for sex, even though they may not have been gay, but was this to gain access to their most valuable items behind the locked door of their flat? Did they tie them up, beat and stab them out of sadism, or to silence the only witness to their crime? All could have been psychopaths, or merely drunk, on drugs, unstable, or fuelled by a grudge? All the victims were “quiet and lonely”, but who isn’t? Three were over 6 foot tall, two were known as Harry and two were beaten with wood, but does that link to a killer or a coincidence? It’s unlikely to be one man, as all the suspects were white but physically different, and Anthony Bird’s killer was black. Of the six men whose deaths were initially linked to a sadistic killer, John Paul was proven (without a shred of doubt) to be Anthony Bird’s murderer. And although Harry ‘the Hair’ Williams and Henry Carr, the spy’s deaths remain unsolved, the other three would proven to the maximum level of the law. The killer of Carlos Mery-Squella was Nadine El Ghazal, a waiter from Tangiers, who had strong feelings for Carlos, was jealous of his relationship, and was convicted on the 9th of October 1992, 12 years after the murder, having previously confessed to his wife, only for her to tell the police when they split-up. On the 30th of March 1986, six years after the murder of Dr Richard Mercy, a new team of detectives found evidence linking it to 27-year-old Brian Kirkpatrick Williamson of Tottenham. He was arrested, charged and remanded but with the prosecution unable to prove his undeniable guilt, he was released. As for Peter Arne, three key pieces of evidence solved the case in three days. With Peter liking young men who were ‘down on their luck’, a bearded homeless man was seen by his flat “eating honey” prior to the murder, in Peter’s diary he had written “meet Guiseppe”, and on 4th of August 1983, three days after the murder, the body of 32 year old Italian teacher, Giuseppe Perusi, was found drowned in the River Thames at Wandsworth. Although he wasn’t gay, his ex-girlfriend said he was a “good boy inclined to be over anxious who’d lost his trust in women and hoped to find men more understanding”. Fingerprints and saliva found at Peter’s flat proved it was him, and at Westminster Coroner's Court in 1983, DCI Lander stated “everything points towards Guiseppe killing Peter… he was a depressed man, he had talked of suicide, and having performed a brutal murder, then his mind would have turned to killing himself”. The verdict was murder and suicide, although some sources still report it as unsolved. So, with at least four of the six murders attributed to four (if not six) different men rather than a ‘gay slayer’, this begs the question, did London’s Forgotten Gay Slayer exist, was he merely concocted due to a homosexual bias by the police, or unable to solve each crime and to attribute it to a fictional serial killer, did they take the easy route in a time of corruption and pin them on its most likely suspects? 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. 
Five 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.
The dates and places of the robberies:
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Who was the most corrupt officer in the Met’ and the City of London Police? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of Great Ormond Street Hospital in Bloomsbury, WC1; three streets north of Kyu Soo Kim the sadistic Korean landlord who tortured his tenants, two streets north-east of the killing of Jean Stafford, the same building where the Camden Ripper was arrested, and the street where a blotto Russian spy blabbed a little too much about his “secret” - coming soon to Murder Mile. If you hate the sound of kids crying because the stupid snot-covered little git’s got something stuck up their nose, ear, eye, arsehole, or any available orifice not currently being blocked with a toy, a jelly-tot or a car key, then avoid Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. Yes, they do amazing work for sick children, but where there’s misery and grief, there’s always someone who is there to exploit it. I’m talking about ‘chuggers’, charity muggers, those bored students who pester you into donating £20 a month via direct debit, even though only part of what you pay, if any, actually goes to the charity. On 19th of November 1993, 64-year-old Commander Hugh Moore, the third most senior officer in the City of London Police challenged a bogus ‘chugger’ who claimed he was raising funds for the hospital. Commander Moore was assaulted and fought back sustaining abrasions to his face, arms and legs, although he survived the attack, eleven days later, he died of heart failure exacerbated by the assault. Commander Hugh Moore, a respected officer of 38 years service and recipient of the Queen’s Police Medal, was buried at Bells Hill Burial Ground in Chipping Barnet, around the time he was due to retire. But when Hugh’s overworked heart finally gave out, it was that unprovoked act of violence by a greedy conman which ensured that one of the biggest secrets in the Police’s history would vanish forever. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 340: The Real ‘H’. In 2012, the BBC launched the TV drama series ‘Line of Duty’, a police procedural following the exploits of AC12 (Anti-Corruption Unit 12), based on the Metropolitan Police’s A10, established in 1971 to root out corruption within the force. Currently filming, this seventh series of ‘Line of Duty’ will unravel the conundrum of who is ‘H’, the Police’s highest ranking corrupt officer, who many believe was fictional… …but he wasn’t, he was real. Across the mid-1970s, security vans were being successfully robbed in the Met’ and the City of London at a rate of 1 every 11 days, and being well organised and professional, few of the felons were caught. On Monday 3rd of May 1976, as they did every week, on the third floor, deep within of the Daily Express newspaper offices on Fleet Street, two guards for Securicor unloaded 8 sacks containing the weekly payroll of £175,000 (£1.7 million today) behind the secure doors of the cashier’s office. It was signed for, and the 12 workers within were ready to dole it out, being in an era when many were paid in cash. The delivery was as routine as it had been so many times before, until a second set of guards arrived. Wearing identical dark blue overalls, black boots, crash helmets with the Securicor logo and their faces obscured by realistic beards and wigs, brandishing shotguns and pistols, the fake security guards burst into the payroll office, shouted “it’s a raid”, and ushered the staff to raise their hands, as they grabbed the cash. Two real guards barricaded themselves in a conference room with a £20,000 bag, but the fake team weren’t here to haggle, and within seconds, they calmly walked out with seven full bags. The raiders were fast and professional, they each had a job to do, they executed it with precision, and escaped the same way they had got in by ‘walking with purpose’ down the maze of corridors to the back entrance (avoiding every locked door or guard), with no-one stopping them as they blended in. On Shoe Lane, they hoped into a transit van and sped north, switched to a faster getaway car which were both later burnt out, and although shotgun cartridges were found and two detectives from the ‘Flying Squad’ reported they were chasing them through London, they all got away. The money was never found, no-one was arrested and it was so well planned, detectives assumed it was an inside job. But who? Someone at the newspaper, a security guard, or a cashier? They stole a fortune, but it wasn’t a one-off robbery. 16 months later, on Tuesday 27th of September 1977, just after 11am, a Securicor van was pulling into Birchin Lane, EC3, a narrow side street off Lombard Street in City’s of London’s banking district. Having just left the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street, two guards for Securicor were delivering £520,000 (over £5 million today) to the rear entrance of Williams & Glyn's Bank at 67 Lombard Street. As before, arriving in a similar transit van to not arouse suspicion, this robbery had been planned to perfection, but executed by a different gang of men in balaclavas for whom patience wasn’t a virtue, what began as a professional heist by experienced robbers, soon descended into a series of cock ups. In the struggle, they shot one of the security guards in the leg. As he began to bleed out, they could only grab half of the money in the van, as their driver panicked and fled. Seeing their getaway vehicle speeding down Birchin Lane and leaving some of the robbers behind, witnesses were stunned as three masked men gave chase to their own transit van, dropping money, cartridges and revolvers in pursuit. Only, the second the robbers caught up with the van, leaving a flurry of notes swirling behind, typically their Transit van got snarled up in the London traffic, and after just 50 yards, the gang split. One half into a Cortina, the others in another Transit, firing shots as they fled, and drawing a lot of attention. With the Police nowhere to be seen, having been alerted to the attack, a passing Securicor van gave chase, rammed the Cortina with its bull-bars, and with it buckled and broken, the raiders (one who was hanging out of the rear doors and bleeding heavily) fled, leaving their cut of the money behind. With everyone in every building on Moorgate hearing the shots and watching this calamity unfold, the gang hijacked a chauffeur driver Mercedes outside the Fuji bank, and as they fled again – shooting as the Securicor van kept ramming them, and spilling more cash across the street – their new getaway car made its way over Southwark Bridge, and abandoning it under the railway arches, they hijacked a taxi at gunpoint, and the robbers finally vanished into thin air, just not as rich as they could have been. With fingerprints, eyewitnesses, bloodstains, smashed cars and bullet holes littering the streets, and security cameras at Williams & Glyn’s Bank having filmed part of the attack, ‘Flying Squad’ detectives reeled in all the usual suspects, and six men were arrested for assault, weapons and armed robbery. In court, it was the detectives’ duty to object to the robbers being given bail rather than being held on remand in prison, but they didn’t. And one by one, all six of the suspects were released without charge. Witnesses were discredited, evidence fell apart, and although it looked as if the investigation had been bungled by the detectives, suspicion had been growing that the gang had been tipped off by the police. But who? A bad apple, or a whole bushel? For years, rumours had been circulating that the Met’ and City of London Police was a criminal gang in its own right, a firm within a firm, where bent coppers gave robbers bail, evidence vanished, charges were quashed, the innocent were ‘fitted up’ for crimes, and junior officers were baptised into the bad practices of their corrupt seniors by taking “a drink” – £50, cash in hand, to do as they were told. Former City of London detective Lew Tassell said, that when his commanding officer, DCI Phil Cuthbert handed him £50 (£350 today) he said “‘I’ve got a drink for you, Lew’… It was expected of me to accept it. It was part of the culture… the higher you went, the bigger the drink”. Corruption was endemic. Word was that it went right to the very top. But who was ‘H’? Since 1972, the A10 anti-corruption unit had been rooting out bent coppers in two key departments in the Police; the ‘Flying Squad’ who tackled armed robbery and CID who handled drugs, murder, fraud and organised crime, with both having a fearsome reputation for brutality by operating above the law. They knew how to fabricate evidence, silence witnesses and corruption existed in a culture of silence. Like the mafia, any copper who ratted-out a bent officer to A10 would find themselves shunned by their pals, demoted by the boss, maimed by masked hoodlums, or taking a swim in a ‘cement raincoat’. ‘Operation Countryman’ was a slow, fragmented and politically sensitive internal investigation, which many resented, but in the early days, it had aided to the successful conviction of three bad apples. Detective Chief Superintendent Kenneth Drury, head of the Met’ Police’s ‘Flying Squad’ was convicted on 7th of July 1977 of five counts of corruption and sentenced to eight years in prison. Living lavishly, far beyond his meagre salary, he regularly took ‘BIG drinks’ from Jimmy Humphries, ‘Soho’s Caesar of porn’ – whether money, holidays, cars – in return for protecting his gang or influencing investigations. He was the Met’s most senior officer jailed for corruption – and along with Commander Wally Virgo and Detective Chief Superintendent Bill Moody of the Obscene Publications Squad who pocketed £53,000 between them in 16 months – it proved corruption wasn’t at street-level, it went to the top. Twelve other officers were convicted and many more resigned. But he wasn’t ‘H’, so who was? Someone at the top was pulling strings and could destabilise any investigation, so a decision was made to move it away from A10, the Met’s own anti-corruption unit, and with the City of London Police (a small force of a few 100 officers tasked with protecting London’s financial district) not having their own anti-corruption unit, in 1973, seasoned detectives from regional forces like Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall (with no connections to the Met, the ‘Flying Squad’ or CID) were drafted in to investigate. It had begun as a rumour, not just from criminal informants, but lawyers, journalists and officers, and with political pressure mounting, ‘Operation Countryman’ needed enough evidence to arrest the king maker in this corrupt house of cards, so others would fall, and it would be seen as just a whitewash. There was no respect by the Met’ or City of London Police for the detectives at Operation Countryman, as in a piss-take to the crime drama ‘The Sweeney’, referencing their country bumpkin roots, they had been nicknamed ‘The Swede-y’. In retort, these rural plods wore a squad tie which summed up their attitude - a small country mouse flicking a mid-digit to a hovering eagle, the Flying Squad’s symbol. The officers of ‘Operation Countryman’ weren’t here to make friends, but arrests… …and although the bent detectives of CID and Flying Squad thought little of the bribes they were taking as these armed payroll robberies were insured, it came crashing down when blood was on their hands. On Wednesday the 31st of May 1978, at the offices of the Daily Mirror newspaper at 33 Holborn Circus, EC1, an eleven-storey tower containing both their news offices and their printing presses, the weekly payroll of £197,500 (£2 million) was being delivered by the green and yellow van of ‘Security Express’. At 11am, as always, as the massive steel shutters were opened, 38-year-old Antonio Castro known as ‘Tony’ drove it into the loading bay, the shutters were closed and padlocked behind them, and inside, Tony and his colleague Mark oversaw its transfer in a wooden box to two Mirror Group security men. It was safe, secure and out of sight, or so they thought. In advance, two of the raiders had already got into the building, and being dressed in printer’s overalls, they blended in. At 11:06am, as the last bag was unloaded from the van, they walked to the shutters, broke the padlocks with bolt cutters, opened them up, and as a stolen Mercedes roared inside, the security manager recalled “all hell broke loose”. The walls echoed with shouting, shotguns were waved, and as the Mercedes skidded into position, the boiler-suited bandits started hurling bags of cash into the boot. It began calmly enough, with hands held high and the guards doing as they were told in this heist which lasted just three minutes, but as the Mirror’s guards fought back, and slammed one of the robber’s wrists in the box, it turned to chaos. Tony rushed forward, and as the robber spun, he was shot at point blank range, just below his heart. With the boot full, the Mercedes roared into Hatton Garden, and with the traffic light and not one single constable anywhere to be seen, as the alarms wailed in this area where several newspapers and banks had been robbed of a fortune in the last three years, they vanished into the distance. They dumped the Mecedes on Dorrington Street, wiped it clean, and switched to a Rover 3500 parked in Leopards Court, later found burnt out, with both stolen weeks before and hidden in the interim. The raid was professional and well-planned having gained entry to this secure building, they knew the timings of the delivery, and to ensure that their guns were small enough to hide in their overalls, but with maximum force, they’d modified long-barrelled 45 calibre revolvers to shoot shotgun cartridges. The security guards gave excellent descriptions of the raiders, as printed in the Daily Mirror, alongside their photofits and offering a £5000 reward for information. The newspaper wanted names and blood. The next day, across their front page was splashed photos of the robbery and a mock-up of one of the robber’s tattoos on his left arm, “3 ½ inches long of a smiling sailor in a red hat and a red stripe across his chest”, as seen by Alistair Scott, whose lorry blocked their path as he was making a delivery, and when the driver shouted “get that f**king motor out of the way”, Alistair went to give him a mouthful, but seeing their guns, he reversed his lorry back, and the Mercedes roared out of Brooke’s Market. It would have been - at this point - that with the robbers having got away Scott free, if they had been arrested by an enterprising young officer with a name to make, the bent coppers could have leant on the witness, fabricated any evidence, and – for a sizeable fee of about £50,000 – if they had ended in court, the dodgy detectives could have ensured they were bailed with the charges dropped. But with a murder charge hanging over them, that’s a lot harder to do. One detective said “this was a cold blooded murder, no more, no less. It was as simple as that. A bastard horrible murder”. 38-year-old Antonio Castro, ‘Tony’ to his pals was a former Spanish soldier who came from Carballo in the north-west of Spain. In 1965, he and his wife Carmen came to the UK with a plan to stay for a year, but as Carmen later said “we liked England from the beginning, we thought the land was like magic”. With his wife working as domestic staff whilst training to be a nurse, Tony worked an orderly at East Grinstead hospital, but always feeling he wanted his life to have meaning and excitement, in 1974, he joined ‘Security Express’ as an armoured van guard and driver. It was a job he truly loved, and as Carmen said, “that job was what he had been looking for all his life”, but he knew it was dangerous. In 1976, two years before, Tony was shot in the ankle during a bank raid, his friends and family asked him to quit, but as Mark, his fellow guard in the Daily Mirror robbery said “he was one of the best… Tony loved the danger. He was a brave man who could never stand by”, even on a pitiful wage of just 84p an hour. He’d been a security guard for four years, and with Carmen now working as a nurse at St Bart’s Hospital, six weeks before, they had just moved into their new terraced home in Wandsworth. It was to St Bart’s that Tony was taken when he was shot, and where he died. Carmen was so shocked and distraught that she had to be sedated, with a friend stating “Tony and his wife knew that this day might come. We told him he should become a waiter, but he wouldn’t listen. It was his job, his life”. A week later, feeling the pressure from the people, the politicians and the newspapers to catch these criminals who always seemed to evade justice, on the 5th of June 1978, Police arrested William Tobin of Albion Street in Rotherhithe, the next day Anthony White of Aragon Towers in Deptford, and found a lock-up full of wigs, masks, overalls, helmets, cutting tools, two pistols and six sawn-off shotguns. On the 11th of June, three men (one who was already out on bail for armed robbery at the time of the heist) were charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, an investigation into murder was opened, and bail was refused. The detectives had everything they needed to convict all three for their crimes. But being leaned on from above, the ID parades proved fruitless, evidence was misplaced, paperwork went missing, and although they had been charged, all three were subsequently bailed, and released. But who had the power to derail an investigation, and to reroute constables on a beat? It is said, that on the day of the Daily Mirror robbery, the officers who should have been guarding the financial district at that time had been sent to Wood Green police station, seven miles north for a forensics course. At around noon, being handed a note reporting the robbery, the officer hosting the course beamed a broad smile – he was the third highest ranking officer in the City of London Police and a respected veteran who had been awarded the Queen’s Police Medal - Commander Hugh Moore. ‘Operation Countryman’ were investigating allegations against 84 Met’ officers and 29 from the City of London, accused of bribery, planting evidence and conspiring with robbers and facilitating false bail. But how could they get to him? What they needed was a senior detective who was ready to crumble. Detective Chief Inspector Phillip Cuthbert was the commanding officer of the CID in the City of London Police. Based out of Bishopsgate Police station, the epicentre of the financial square mile’s corruption which was ran by Commander Hugh Moore, Cuthbert openly spoke about how “taking a drink was a way of life”, with officers helping themselves to confiscated goods and making a fortune out of crime. Cuthbert also dealt with Alf Shepherd, a seemingly respectable shopkeeper who acted as the middle man between the coppers and the criminals, who covertly in a café near to Bishopsgate Police station, passed a lot of dirty money back-and-forth to ensure that dangerous men walked free from justice. DCI Cuthbert was cocky, brash, and heavily indoctrinated into the ways that being a bent copper was a good money-making wheeze, in 1978, he tried to bribe DCI John Simmonds, the new Head of CID for the City of London Police, who was formerly part of Metropolitan Police's A10 anti-corruption unit. John was clean as a whistle, honest as a nun, and as they say, “once A10, always A10”. He loved his job, he despised the corruption within, but with Cuthbert as his supposed friend, he got him to talk… …but he needed it on tape. On the 27th of September 1978, DCI Simmonds invited DCI Cuthbert to the pubs for a few pints to chat about the job, the cases and the investigation but mostly grumble about their bosses. Across the next three hours, Cuthbert thought John was a sympathetic ear, but having been fitted with a microphone, he expertly steered the conversation to the corruption, and recorded a wealth of damning evidence. Cuthbert said “CID received silly £50s… all the fucking evidence we gave was bent… I tell you, big drinks came in the robbery squad when they nicked Roberts”, who they released for the Williams & Glyn job. “We told them to give him a straight run”, meaning to drop charges, and with corruption starting at the top of the tree, Operation Countryman was getting nearer to ‘H’, and Cuthbert was nervous. On the tape, Cuthbert said he feared that “Commander Moore was trying to make me the ’patsy’, I’ve been set up”, and that Moore was “the greatest unhung villain” in London and “a greedy bastard”. Cuthbert blabbed about everyone; ‘Ginger’ Dixon, head of Scotland Yard’s robbery squad, “I used to bung Roy Yorke and it’d go up the fucking top of the tree to the ACs (assistant commissioners)”. As for the robberies; “Moore did the Daily Express job, and I know what he copped on it”, in the William’s & Glyn job “he told the City force not to fabricate verbal admissions against them, but to give them a straight run”, and that “Moore received £20,000 for allowing bail during the Express investigation”. Cuthbert stated “Hughie’s run Bishopsgate and half the City Police for years and years and years”, and when pressed on how much money he’d made, Cuthbert said “I heard word of sixty to ninety grand”. With a confession on tape, DCI Cuthbert was suspended awaiting trial and with Operation Countryman expanded, their ultimate prize wasn’t the detective sergeant and the three detective constables they had so far charged, but the big boss at the top who was controlling all of the Police’s corruption – ‘H’. It was then that it all started to collapse. Some blamed the fact that ‘Countryman’ was ran by inexperienced regional detectives not used to big city ways. Others blamed the fact that the Met’ obstructed their investigation at every turn. On the 18th of February 1980, the Director of Public Prosecutions offered no evidence against DCI Cuthbert and he walked free, they denied immunity for any officers who had cooperated in the investigation, and ‘Countryman’ was handed to CIB2, Scotland Yard’s anti-corruption team, formerly known as A10. The investigation was wound down, convictions were quashed, and even though Sir Peter Matthews, Chief Constable of Surrey resigned in protest as CIB2 was not holding an independent investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Patrick Kavanagh of the Met’ stated “corruption in the police is unfounded”. All the witness statements were seized, and in 1982, following the trial of DCI Phillip Cuthbert and ex- Detective Sergeant John Goldbourn, in a ‘show’ trial which many claimed was little more an excuse to lay the blame on the two officers - as if they were lone bad apples - Goldbourn was sentenced to two years in prison, Cuthbert to three years, and with that ‘Operation Countryman’ ceased to exist. (End) James Miskin QC, said at the trial, “Justice in England has been for countless years the admiration of the free world, and corruption by police officers strikes at its very roots”, but across this six-week trial, he was accused of selling bail to the six men arrested in the Williams and Glyn robbery for £10,000 a head and a similar deal for the Daily Mirror robbery, and although the secret recording had painted Commander Hugh Moore as a criminal, he was questioned, but no charges were brought against him. DCI Cuthbert was hailed as an efficient ‘thief-taker’ and as an unscrupulous officer who liked to trade with criminals and “made no secret of his ambition to get very rich and retire early”. No other officers were convicted, none of the robbers were tried, and the investigation was sealed and filed away. That year, after 27 years of dedicated service to CID and A10, DCI John Simmonds retired having been “hounded out by Commander Hugh Moore”. Moore remained in the Police for 10 more years, being awarded the Queen's Police Medal in the 1992 New Year's Honours, and across his career, he received eleven commendations. He remains a respected, highly lauded officer in the history of British policing. On the 19th of November 1993, having confronted a bogus charity worker outside of Great Ormond Street Hospital, this vicious attack by a conman had left him with several cuts, but with his heart unable to cope, he died 11 days later. Owen Kelly, the City of London Police Commissioner said “he was a modest man. He would be the last to mention his achievements. His death is a great loss to the force and he will be sadly missed… Commander Moore was one of the most accomplished officers ever”. No evidence has ever been put forward to prove that Commander Hugh Moore was ‘H’, a senior high-ranking officer who oversaw corruption in the Police, and no officers testified against him, even after his death. As for the investigation itself, those Home office papers will remain sealed until 2067, so the truth of what happened has died with Commander Moore. Ironically, the unnamed man who had violently attacked him, denied any wrongdoing, he was later released on bail and was never convicted. 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.
Five 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.
2A Kingsgate Road, KIlburn @Googlemaps August2008
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINE: Wednesday the 6th of February 2008, the body of Lakhdar Ouyahia was found by the bins on Kingsgate Place in KIlburn, wrapped in a duvet. Someone had attempted to cut off his limbs and had decapitated his head. But who had killed this good and decent man, why had his neighbour vanished, and why had an innocent woman been tortured for 14 hours?
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: How far would one man go to prove his ‘devotion’ to the woman he ‘loved’? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing beside the Regent’s Canal in Little Venice, Maida Vale, W9; one street east of the killing of pensioner Samuel Bragg, one street south of the double suicide of the Mercy Murderess, one street north of ‘The Saviour’, several boat lengths from the suitcase of Marta Ligman’s body, and close to a brothel inspected (all too vigorously) by ten dedicated policeman - coming soon to Murder Mile. It’s a bit of a joke, as with the real Venice having as many as 472 bridges and 177 canals across its 2.9 square miles, Little Venice, also known as Browning’s Pool is just a triangular basin measuring a measly 120 by 170 yards (or a standard football pitch); with one canal, three bridges, a coffee shop, a lot of litter, ten homeless tents, a dead dog floating in an oil slick, and a sea of tourists grumbling “is this is?” On the northern leg of the Regent’s Canal heading to Camden is the entrance to the Maida Hill tunnel. At 249 yards long, it scoots under the Edgware Road, and if you’re sitting in Laville, an excellent Italian restaurant situated above, you can munch on a marvellous margarita and sup a sumptuous espresso as you watch the canal boats chug by. Just don’t look too closely at what lies underneath the water. On the afternoon of Sunday the 10th of February 2008, Police divers scoured the murky depths of this part of the canal searching for the final bizarre piece of the puzzle in this macabre murder. It began as a sordid love triangle of sorts, and it had ended with torture, mutilation and 24 hours of pure hell. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 339: Headless. Wednesday the 6th of February 2008 began as an ordinary late-winter’s day on the Kilburn High Road. In this part of North West London, world events (like Hillary Clinton & Barrack Obama’s Super Tuesday race for the Democratic nomination, Prime Minister Gordon Brown negotiating a military escalation in Afghanistan, and Kylie Minogue’s costumes on display at the V&A) were of insignificance, as the locals were heading to work, to school, to the dole office, or awaiting a call on their immigration status. Kilburn High Road is an odd place, as where once it was very English middleclass neighbourhood, and in parts it still is, it then established an Irish area, then a Jewish one, until it became a world microcosm and a melting pot of every nationality, language and culture usually concentrated in a small part of a street; whether an Eritrean enclave, or a Somalia section, with one part being dubbed as ‘Little Beirut’. For foodies, it’s a tantalising assault on the senses, and although an area rich in cultural diversity, with many immigrants being temporarily housed here and struggling to cope on limited incomes while their status is being reviewed, it has become littered with discount stores, and unfortunately, a lot of crime. At 142 Kilburn High Road stood Somerfield, a handy supermarket. At its rear was Kingsgate Place, an unlit side-alley tucked behind the shops, and the kind of place you wouldn’t go to, unless you had to. At 7:10am, 15 minutes before dawn, when the store opened and delivery trucks rolled up, a homeless man in his 50s was ferreting through the rancid bins at the back of Somerfield, starving. The night had been cruelly cold, his makeshift bed in a doorway was made sodden by the rain, and with a familiar grumble from his empty belly, he ripped open the bags of food, too old to sell, but barely okay to eat. The milk was off, but only just ‘on the turn’. The bread was limp and soggy. Too many items he couldn’t take as he had no way to cook them, or dry them out. But it was as his attention was drawn to a silver coloured roller cage, as used by shops to move stock, that he saw something which drew his eye. In the cage was a duvet, used but clean and almost dry. He tried to lift it, but it was too heavy. And it was as he tore away the gaffer tape, wound around the knotted lip to seal it shut, that he saw within… …something unspeakable. Police sealed off the street and forensics erected a tent as detectives went door-to-door. With no CCTV at the back of Kingsgate House where the cage sat, and no witnesses to what happened, the locals were unsurprised to learn that a dead body had been dumped there, having campaigned for years to have the building demolished, the alley covered by cameras and the security beefed up. Local, Cliff Aherne said: “Until they deal with these alleys, there will be problems. You don’t see people here but you know they are because of what they leave behind, needles and human mess”. Ade Abame said: “I walked past this morning with my children. How long was this poor person lying there? It's terrible”. And Homayon Mahgerefteh bemoaned the recent spate of gang and drug-related killings, stating “This is, I think, the fifth person killed in this area in the last four years. It's not a safe place". With the murder squad headed up by Detective Chief Inspector Jessica Wadsworth, it was only as the duvet was opened fully in St Pancras hospital’s mortuary, that they saw what they were dealing with. The duvet was used but bloodless, proving that he hadn’t died in bed. The gaffer tape was generic and couldn’t be identified to any brand or store. Fingerprints were found on the tape, DNA on the duvet, and both sets of DNA and fingerprints were in the process of being checked. And with his body clean and free of any needle marks, scars or tattoos, he wasn’t homeless, a drug user, or killed by a gang. Stripped of any ID or clothes, all they knew was that he was an adult male in his 40s of indeterminate ethnic origin, possibly Middle Eastern or North African, and that he had died 24 to 36 hours before. And yet, even with a fresh corpse before them, the pathologist couldn’t determine a cause of death, as having been murdered in a fast brutal away which resulted in no defensive wounds, someone in the grip of panic or mania had crudely attempted to severe both arms, and fully decapitated his head… …only that was missing, as was the weapon and the culprit. Detectives admitted “we don’t know what we’re dealing with”, as it wasn’t a professional hit, it lacked the cruelty of a revenge killing and it was too calculated to be by someone who was mentally unhinged. As was standard practice, the detectives set up a temporary headquarters at the Quex Road Methodist Church at 3 Kingsgate Road, overlooking the junction of Kingsgate Place where the body was found - a decision which proved to be ironic and prophetic – as with the victim’s fingerprints being found on the Home Office’s database, it turned out that he lived in a flat directly opposite at 2a Kingsgate Road. His name was Lakhdar Ouyahia. Born in 1964 in an unspecified part of the north-African country of Algeria, it was unreported when or why 43-year-old Lakhdar came to Britain, but the Algerian Civil War – known as the Black Decade – was being fought from 1992 to 2002 between the Algerian government and the Islamic rebel groups. For westerners, the 7/7 bombings and 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks were epoch-making moments in our lives, but for the people of Algeria during this ‘dirty war’, these kinds of atrocities were weekly or daily events. With the GIA (the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) being backed by Al-Qaida, innocent civilians were indiscriminately slaughtered in beheadings, lynchings and suicide bombings, with acts of extreme violence and brutality which saw children widely being used as both terrorists and targets. Desperate to be seen as a terrifying force willing to undertake the most barbaric acts to gain power and the maximum of exposure on the world stage, they killed and executed over 70 journalists, 100 foreign nationals, and with the death toll rising so quickly it was impossible for human rights groups to keep tally, it is estimate that the number of fatalities was at least 44,000, up to as many as 200,000. With so many massacres rampaging across the country, including the Oued Bouaicha massacre where 47 villagers (27 of which were children) were hacked to death with knives and axes, the West didn’t pay much attention until a GIA terror plot was foiled at the 1998 World Cup in France; and although they had planned to kill 1000s of players and fans in a grenade attack, with a bomb under the England team’s bench and their hotel, it was overshadowed by so-called England fans who ran riot like thugs. Like so many of his countrymen, Lakhdar sought freedom from persecution and a better life in Britain, where freedom of speech and a right to live in peace is something that, sadly, we all take for granted. Everyone who knew him said he was hardworking and polite, a kind and decent man who earned a modest wage as a meter reader for the electricity board, and although quiet, as the sort of chap who kept to himself and was a skilled electrician and handyman, if you needed a job done, he was there. A few years before, he had moved into the upstairs flat at 2a Kingsgate Road; a slapdash two-storey house built on the cheap, with several cars on a weed-infested drive behind a five-foot tall iron gate with ‘2A’ hastily daubed in white paint, crammed into a filthy gap between a dingy spot called Leith Yard, a warehouse on Kingsgate Place, and the back of Rak’s newsagents and Tim’s café on Quex Road. Provided by Camden Council, it was cheap, but he made it his own, and although he got on well with his downstairs neighbour, a fellow Algerian, he didn’t cause any problems and had no criminal record. Within a day of his decapitated body being found just 80 feet away, when they searched his flat, they found no signs of any struggle, break-in or robbery, and nothing which suggested his life was anything but innocent; no drugs, no guns, no cruel ideologies, no bloodstains, and his duvet was still on his bed. Lakhdar had lived a quiet life, and for no clear reason, someone had murdered him… …but a bizarre piece of the puzzle in this macabre murder was still missing. On the afternoon of Sunday 10th of February 2008, on Blomfield Road, a residential street which skirts the Regent’s Canal, just south of Little Venice at the gaping mouth of Maida Hill tunnel, Police divers were searching the murky depths of these dark cold waters. On the path, handcuffed to a detective, a big man with a freshly shaven head pointed at a spot, where he told them he had thrown something. Across the oil-slicked surface, an occasional bubble of air popped as the diver exhaled, and then, with a steady hand, he raised aloft an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag, 9lbs in weight and football shaped. Inside lay the crudely hacked-apart remains of Lakhdar’s head… …as pointed to by his neighbour, Mohamed. Like Lakhdar, 46-year-old Mohamed Boudjenane was an Algerian who came to Britain during the Black Decade seeking sanctuary from persecution, but whereas Lakhdar obeyed the law and paid his taxes, Mohamed’s life was either deliberately criminal, a litany of lies, or due to his declining mental state. He arrived illegally in the UK in 1996, having purchased a fake French ID card in Spain. Across the next two years, he lived under the radar and worked cash in cash as a nobody who technically didn’t exist. In 1998, with UK immigration after him, he pleaded asylum claiming that he and his business partner had been threatened by GIA, the Al-Qaida backed terrorists. Every claim had to be checked, but with no proof that he had even been approached, by 2001, after five years in London, he was scheduled to be deported, but appealed. By 2003, when his asylum was rejected for the final time, he had already worked several jobs (as a handyman at a golf club), and now, his reason to stay had escalated further. In 2001, he had begun claiming unemployment benefits. In 2002, unable to work, he claimed sickness and incapacity benefits. And in 2004, being at risk of homelessness, he was provided a council flat on the ground floor of 2a Kingsgate Road in Kilburn, with his deportation in limbo owing to his health issues. Under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, “courts can block removal (of a person to their home country), if returning would cause a rapid and irreversible decline in their health, due to intense suffering". Physically he was fine, overweight yet healthy, but mentally, he said he was not. In 2003, possibly exacerbated by his looming deportation, Mohamed went to his GP complaining of depression. He was prescribed Sertraline, a common antidepressant, and yet, at a follow-up with his psychiatrist at St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, it was decided “he had no symptoms of depression”. That April, he fraudulently filled out a disabled person’s freedom pass, giving him unlimited free travel across London having claimed he was under the Mental Health Act (which he wasn’t, as he had never been sectioned), and again, he stated he’d been diagnosed with a personality disorder ten years prior. In August 2005, again with his immigration status being investigated, he told a psychiatrist at the Royal Free Hospital that he was hearing strange voices in his head and had suicidal thoughts. The psychiatrist concluded “he did not have any psychiatric illness”, and being treated over a year at an outpatients’ clinic, his record states “his mood was improved being prescribed a tranquilliser and anti-psychotics”. Since the day he was arrested, just one day after Lakhdar’s decapitated body was found, he claimed to be mentally unwell, which prosecutor William Boyce QC refuted stating “he has been trying to make himself look odd. He has faked illness previously to get economic advantages like a flat and benefits”. Of the voices in his head, Mohamed claimed "I feel as if I'm getting an electric shock in my brain… I lose control. I cannot concentrate". Of the heinous crimes he had done, through an interpreter, he claimed to have amnesia and pleaded his innocence as he couldn’t remember committing the murder. And when asked by Orlando Pownall QC, his tax-payer funded lawyer, "what do you think it was that made you depressed?" – which he claimed led him to kill – Mohamed said "Religion. Sharia, Islam". Only to then claim he went on naked midnight walks, denied that he was feigning any illness, stating that he’d been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and saying "I cannot specify what I suffer from mentally". In court, his psychiatric history was a mess… …as was his memory, or so he stated. It began four months before, when Mohamed went to a party held at the Quex Road Methodist Church directly opposite, and met a woman whose name shall remain a secret. She was a 42-year-old Filipino nanny from Oxford and a married mother of four, who was a regular church goer and choral singer. They chatted, she was polite, he became obsessed with her, and she rejected his advances. In the last week of January 2008, one week before the brutal murder, having claimed in court that he had been in a relationship with her (which he wasn’t), and stated “I used a ladder and climbed it and saw them”, the woman and his neighbour, Lakhdar – who didn’t know each other – having sex in the upstairs flat, “I ran away and tried to cool myself down. I was very angry”. But did that even happen? On Sunday 3rd of February 2008, just shy of 3pm, as the nanny headed to choir practice at the church, she bumped into Mohamed outside of Rak’s newsagents on Quex Road. They argued, he grabbed her phone, and having ran to his ground floor flat at 2a Kingsgate Road, she followed him to get it back. He double locked the door, she then realised that she was trapped, and that’s when her horror began. With the street noisy, no neighbours either side and Lakhdar not in, no-one heard her screams. Using shoes laces, he tightly bound her wrists and ankles, and recalled “I told her to tell me the truth about the man upstairs”, her supposed lover (who she had never met) who he described as his "best enemy". She denied it, and every time she did, he slapped her until her face was a patchwork of black and blue bruises. Seeing her words as nothing but lies, he threatened to slit her throat with a kitchen knife and a Samurai sword. And with this woman who he called a “whore” having supposedly cheated on him, boiling a kettle, he kept splashing the scolding liquid perilously close, until she confessed to the affair. She couldn’t, as she hadn’t, and although these mental tortures were cruel, worse was yet to come. He told her “you need to drink, it’s your last day today”, as knowing he had murder on his mind, across every second of her 14-hour ordeal, she thought of her four children and how they could be orphaned. In court, with her hair having never grown back fully, she gave an emotional testimony wearing a black wig, as he had shaved her head with an electric razor, telling her “you won’t need hair in heaven”. And with her telling the jury “he kept shouting at me to take off my clothes. Because I was scared, I did so. I was naked. He took off his as well. I said to him I will do what ever you want me to but don’t kill me”. He raped her three times, forced her o degrade herself, and then in court claimed it was consensual. Across the afternoon, evening and well into the night, her subjected her to a terrifying ordeal, as being naked, she was repeatedly threatened, beaten and raped, with her only way of escape being to “tell the truth”, but if she told Mohamed what he wanted to hear, what would her punishment be for that? She had no way to win, and every way to lose. DCI Wadsworth said of her bravery, “I find it hard to imagine the trauma, the fear she experienced while being beaten, tied up, raped… she fully expected to meet her death… throughout it all she has shown amazing strength”, and although exhausted and terrified, it was around 5am, 14 hours after her abduction, that – having agreed that she would to convert to Islam and marry him – he let her go. She fled back to Oxford, and as far as we know, being traumatised, she told no-one about her ordeal. Miraculously, she had escaped with her life, but Lakhdar (her alleged lover) wouldn’t be so lucky. Hours later, when Lakhdar returned from work, knowing that he would never turn down a neighbour in need, Mohamed knocked on his door, told him that his electrics had gone out, Lakhdar grabbed his tools and went into the darkness of the ground floor flat where the circuit breakers had been tripped. With no argument or struggle, Mohamed whacked Lakhdar over the head with a claw hammer, caving in his skull and exposing his brain, as he slumped to the floor, unaware of his death or the accusation. Stripped of his clothes and ID; everything was burned, the weapon was destroyed, and living in a busy part of the city where many shops are open 24 hours, to dispose of the body, Mohamed headed to a discount shop on Kilburn High Road and with Lakhdar being tall, he bought the large suitcase they had. With a meat cleaver from his kitchen, he clumsily hacked away at the back of the neck, taking several attempts to severe the cervical spine between C2, C3 and C4, and with the blood having coagulated, there was no pooling or spray, as the 9lb skull came away from the neck and lolloped on the linoleum. To fit him into the case, next-up for dismemberment was his limbs, but it wasn’t as easy as it seemed, even with a butcher’s blade, and having hacked and slashed at his arms and legs, ultimately giving up exhausted, although Lakhdar was slim, he was still too tall to fit into the suitcase, even without a head. At 8pm, security cameras in Sainsbury’s at 90 Kilburn High Road caught him buying bleach and a mop. The next night, Tuesday the 5th, at the Quex Road stop, he boarded the N98 bus using his freedom pass, carrying an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag with a football-sized object within, and with Lakhdar’s head on his lap, he quietly sat for 20 minutes, as the bus wendled its merry way towards Little Venice. Getting off at the Maida Hill tunnel, he tossed it into the canal, later denying to his lawyer any memory of the death, dissection or disposal. “Do you accept that you must have taken the head on the bus and threw it into the canal?”, “No”, “Who else could it have been if it wasn’t you?”, “I can’t remember”. ”Did you use a cleaver to cut his head off?”, “I don’t know”. But the evidence would prove that it was. In the early hours of Wednesday 6th, with it too difficult to chop up and too heavy to carry, Mohamed wheeled a silver coloured roller cage to his flat, wrapped the body in a duvet, bound it in gaffer tape, wheeled it towards the supermarket’s bins, and believed it would be disposed of with the rubbish… …only for it to be found a few hours later by a hungry homeless man. Mohamed fled three hours north to Alvaston in Derbyshire to stay with a girlfriend, and although he shaved his head in a hope of disguising his identity, the next day, he was spotted and arrested. (End) When interviewed, his answers were vague and translated through an Arabic interpreter. From the day of his arrest, he claimed he was suffering from schizophrenia and amnesia during his crimes. Tried at the Old Bailey in November 2008 before Judge Christopher Moss QC, he pleaded ‘not guilty’ to two counts of rape, false imprisonment and murder, but ‘guilty’ to manslaughter by diminished responsibility. The Prosecution refuted his claim stating “sexual jealousy led him to punish the woman, then it was the man’s turn, but he wasn’t going to be allowed to live. This was premeditated murder”. Found ‘guilty’ of all charges and with the diminished responsibility claim dismissed (having never been sectioned, or diagnosed as mentally unwell), on the 6th of November 2008, 46-year-old Mohamed Boudjenane was sentenced to 15 years for rape and false imprisonment, a life sentence for murder, and ordered to serve a minimum term of 22 years in prison. He was not eligible for parole until 2030. Summing up, Judge Christopher Moss said “you brutalised your victim… imprisoned her… and raped her three times because you were obsessed with her… you murdered the man you wrongly perceived to be your rival… thereafter, you insulted his dead body by mutilation. You disposed of the head and body in an attempt to avoid capture. You are, it seems to me, a very dangerous individual, and it will be for others to decide whether it will ever be safe to release you”. And with that, his sentence began. But on the 28th of December 2011, at the Court of Appeal, with it decided by Judge Peter Beaumont QC that the trial judge had misdirected the jury on the psychiatric evidence, or lack of, the murder conviction was quashed, he accepted a plea of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, and had six years cut from his minimum sentence. Mohamed Boudjenane became eligible for parole in 2024, but with the Appeal Judge stating “the protection and the elimination of risk to the public is paramount”, so whether he will be released on parole or not is dependant on his current mental state. 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.
As I travel around the country's waterways in my little narrowboat, here's a few true crime cases I stumble across in the villages and towns I visit. Some may be known, but some are unknown.
CASE ONE: Ezra & Frances Miller, 101 High Street, Berkhamsted
Today, at 101 High Street in Berkhamsted is the Rex Cinema, but back in 1901, this was an ironmongers with buildings similar to these. CORRECTION: the street was renumbered, 101 High Street still exists and is opposite the church.
On the evening of 20th of June 1901, Ezra Miller shut up his shop for the day. His relationship with his wife (Frances)had been had for years, but that night, their fighting reached a crescendo. Later telling the police, “she was always nagging at me, she gave me no peace”, as they sat at the dinner table, he pulled out a rifle, and intending to kill her, shot her in the left hand side of the head, below her eye. Hearing the shot, Police arrived at the scene, Ezra was blunt about his guilt, stating “take me, I have done it, she got what he deserved”, and as he was led away, he grinned “I hope she is dead”, and smiled as he was led to the police station, telling everyone “I shot her… I wish the old bitch would just die”. Only she didn’t. Miraculously, Frances survived, she testified to the police, but when Ezra was tried at St Alban’s court, they could only charge him with unlawful wounding, and he was sentenced to a pitiful nine months in prison. CASE TWO: Daniel East, The Crooked Billet pub at Gossoms End, Berkhamsted
Today this is Majestic Wines, but back in 1877, this was the Crooked Billet pub.
On Saturday the 10th of March 1877, travelling salesman and father of five children, Daniel East entering the Crooked Billet pub at Gossoms End, Berkhamsted with two of his children, one being aged three and the other eight months. As an alcoholic, he sat alone, weeping and drank, as he had applied to the financial board for assistance, but was rejected. And with no food for his children, he made a deadly decision. To save his three elder children, he decided to murder the youngest two. The landlord saw him walking away from the pub at closing time, looking dejected. He carried them to Ponds Meadow nearby, and with a draw shave (his woodworking knife), he brutally stabbed both of his children, and almost severed their heads from their necks. The next day, he gave himself up at Ivinghoe police station, their remains were found, and brought back to the Crooked Billet pub (right here), where the inquest would take place. Daniel East was found guilty of their wilful murder, and although it’s likely he was either committed to an asylum or executed, his outcome remains unknown. CASE THREE: John Tawell & Sarah Hart, The Red House, 113 High Street, Berkhamsted
This is The Red House, at 113 High Street in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.
Back in 1845, this was the home of John Tawell who was a Quaker, a historically Christian group founded in 17th-century England who believe in Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. To many of the outside, he seemed like a respectable business man, when in truth, he was not. Years earlier, he had been convicted of forgery and transported to Australia, where he prospered as a chemist before returning wealthy to England, alongside his secret mistress who bore him children. When she asked for financial support, fearing that a court order would expose his adultery and ruin his reputation, on New Year’s Day 1845, he visited her in Slough and poisoned her drink with arsenic. With a neighbour finding her dying, John Tawell fled by train but with the newly invented telegraph alerting the police ahead of him, he was arrested at Paddington Station before the the train had stopped. It became the first British case in which the telegraph helped capture a murder suspect. The jury found him guilty, and in March 1845, having confessed, John Tawell was hanged for his crimes.
As I travel around the country, there will be more cases to come. If you're looking for a podcast to listen to, check out this episode of Murder Mile UK True Crime:
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.
Eagle Street in Holborn @Googlemaps2026 July2023
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHT: From the end of October to the start of December 2001, an unspecified two-roomed second-floor flat on Eagle Street in Holborn was a warm and welcoming guesthouse rented out to two Korean students exploring London. As strangers in a notoriously dangerous city, they did everything right to ensure their safety, as London isn’t for the faint hearted. And although they stayed within confines of their tight-knit community, their sadistic killer was hiding in plain sight.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Is anyone safe behind the locked door of a London Guesthouse? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on Eagle Street in Holborn, WC2; three streets north-east of the mysterious falling man, two streets east of the slaughtered spinster, two streets south of Jean Stafford, possibly one of Reg’ Christie’s victims, and one street from the mad axe-wielding baker - coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated just off High Holborn and above a pub called The Bountiful Cow sits ‘Beckley’, a non-descript six-storey block of flats on the corner of 47-51 Eagle Street with a side entrance on Dane Street. Built to fit a gap on a side road full of offices, it’s a communal building where neighbours communicate only by a grunt in the hallway, an awkward silence in the lift, a bang on the ceiling if the music gets too loud, and they only learn each other’s names on a summons for stealing each other Amazon parcels. And like so many city-centre flats, one was rented to tourists to help to the owner cover the costs. From the end of October to the start of December 2001, an unspecified two-roomed, second-floor flat was a warm and welcoming guesthouse with its bedroom rented out at different times to two female Korean students exploring London’s history, culture and art. As strangers in a notoriously dangerous city, they did everything right to ensure their safety, as London isn’t for the faint hearted. And although they stayed within confines of their tight-knit community, their sadistic killer was hiding in plain sight. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 338: Death by Gilbert & George. Hyun-Han Jin, names which mean virtuous and precious, was a 21-year-old South Korean woman who was raised with her brother, Yong-Hee, by her doting parents in a village 40 miles south of the capital city of Seoul. Comprising of farmland and small industry, from an early age, Hyun-Han always wanted to see the world, even if being tiny at 4 foot 11 tall and fresh-faced, she was often mistaken for a child. Just shy of the new millennium, having gained her mother’s permission which was something Hyun-Han always did as a well-mannered and diligent daughter, she flew to the University of Lyon in France to study French, and knowing they would worry about her, she kept in regular contact with her family. By the half-term of October 2001, with a few days to spare to see the sights of London, Hyun-Han got approval from her mother who said “wherever you go, make sure you enjoy it, don’t have any regrets”, as every experience would make her daughter a better woman, only this was one she would regret. On Friday 26th of October, she got the Eurostar from Paris at St Pancras, within 6 hours, Hyun-Han was wheeling her rigid grey and silver suitcase onto the Piccadilly Line tube, and with her case 50cm wide by 29cm thick by 72cm high, she’d packed 3 days worth of clothes and planned to be back by Sunday. Of her brief glimpse of London, she told her friends, the city was “overwhelming”, and often described as a culture shock to outsiders – as it is awash with both the new and the ancient, clean and filthy, and every site is obsessed with its dark history of war, death, disease, torture and executions – as a small lone girl in a big bad city, she wisely stayed within the bubble of London’s South Korean community. At 7pm, she exited Holborn tube, took a 7-minute well-lit walk down High Holborn, and passing a string of Korean restaurants and shops full of familiar faces and smells, on Eagle Street, she checked into a guesthouse at ‘Beckley’. It was recommended by her friends, as 100s of Korean students had stayed before, and with Hyun-Han in the spare bedroom, the landlord 29-year-old Kyu, a student from Seoul had the other room which he used to share with his girlfriend, Mariko, who often stayed over. It was small, clean and safe. The communal door was opened by a keypad and the flat had its own key, as did her bedroom, and with Kyu being friendly and helpful by showing her the sights, she had drawn up a list of places to visit, and had emailed her mother to reassure her “I have met a kind, new friend”. She wasn’t in England long enough to have made an enemy. As far as we know, as her death wouldn’t be discovered for weeks and the crime scene wouldn’t be uncovered for months; there were no signs of a break in, no threats against her, no stalker, no strange calls, and she hadn’t spoken of any worries to friends or family, and with no other lodgers, it was mostly just Hyun-Han and Kyu in the guesthouse. She had done everything right to ensure her safety… or so she thought. Nothing was seen, heard and there were no witnesses to what happened, except the evidence itself. At an unspecified hour, unwittingly Hyun-Han unlocked her bedroom door from the inside to let her killer in. Dressed in just jeans, a t-shirt, her underwear and a pair of socks but no trainers, she wasn’t ready for bed but neither was she going out, and it was likely to be late as she wasn’t a night owl. Neighbours heard no shouts, screams and nothing suspicious was seen, so we can’t pin an exact time or day to her murder, and as a dot of a woman who was easily overpowered, she sustained no cuts, there were no signs of struggle, but her bruises may have been obscured by the severe decomposition. Months later, when this crime scene was finally unearthed, even after several students had stayed over and the room (as expected) was thoroughly cleaned after every use, forensic scientist Sarah Gray found a faint spatter of Hyun-Han’s blood by the door and a white wooden desk, staining the brown carpet, the white skirting board and the dark blue wall. Stating "I concluded the presence of spots of blood… which gives strong support that she had been bleeding freely whilst on the floor of that room (possibly) deposited on different occasions (was) from contact with bloodstained surfaces like a hand". With no marks, it’s likely she had bled from her nose having been punched to render her unconscious. But it wasn’t this which took her life, as her cruel killer’s plan was far more dark, and sadistic, and evil. While she was unconscious, he stripped her of all but her bra, and yet sex didn’t seem to be his motive as her autopsy confirmed she wasn’t raped or molested, this was about degradation and humiliation. With a thick reel of dark blue packing tape emblazoned with a brightly-coloured cartoon of two men’s faces, he tightly bound her wrists and ankles so that no matter what she couldn’t flee or resist. As she came to, he stuffed her socks into her mouth, not only to silence her, but having also wound the tape around her head to hold the gag in place, he stretched it over her nostrils, so that she couldn’t breathe. Gasping for air and pleading with terrified eyes as a faint squeak squealed from her throat; with the tape on, she would slowly suffocate; with it off, she gasped great gasps of air; and whether she lived or died was dictated by him. Dangling the prospect of death before her, over a protracted torture, he extracted her PIN number, went to the Sainsbury’s ATM by Holborn tube and withdrew the daily limit of the limited funds she had. But as Jonathan Laidlaw QC for the Prosecution stated: "Was there a sexual motive? Was it simply about money? Or a more sinister possibility is that he achieved a sadistic form of pleasure from the slow deliberate form of killing and sex, and money was simply incidental?". She believed she had given him what he wanted – money, but what he wanted was to humiliate and degrade this tiny helpless woman, and watch her die, slowly and in great pain, as he had commanded. Without a fresh supply of oxygen in her bloodstream, she would have lost consciousness in five-to-ten seconds, her face and lips would have turned a hideous purply-blue, and as seizures riddled her body, oxygen deprivation would have resulted in brain damage in two minutes and her death within four… …that’s only if this sadist took her to the brink of death, just once. As a small and slender woman, still bound and gagged, he folded her tiny body in a foetal position, he stuffed her inside of her own grey and silver suitcase which he’d stripped of any ID or possessions, and hid it inside the sliding wardrobe, flat on the floor, so the rubber supports left little marks in the carpet. Hiring a Peugeot 406 from Avis car rental a few streets over, he pulled up outside of the flat, and as if he was on holiday, he loaded the suitcase into the boot, and drove 202 miles north; up the M1, passed Sheffield and Leeds, and taking the A64 nearly to York, just south of the village of Askham Richard, on an isolated unnamed country road surrounded by nothing but fields, he dumped it in a hedge and left. And there it sat for two weeks, in the shadow of the Bilborough TV mast and Stockhill Cottages, but as a slew of cars and dogwalkers passed, everyone assumed – as her killer thought – it was just rubbish. One day prior, on Monday 29th of October, her classmates thought it odd that she hadn’t returned to university, and with no contact with her friends or family, her brother Yong-Hee posted appeals for sightings amongst the 20,000 strong Korean community in London, and officially reported her missing. Seeing this, her killer initially told her distraught mother that she was spotted on the 17th of November at London’s Victoria Coach Station heading to York with three friends, and cruelly giving her hope, he gave Hyun-Han’s bank card to a friend who was heading to Paris, and told them to drain the account. Everything would point to Hyun-Han fleeing abroad and wanting to be left alone… …until her badly decomposed body was discovered. On Sunday 18th of November, just after 4pm, a local heading to a pub spotted the suitcase in a hedge, and with fluid leaking out, a foul smell emanating and with it too heavy to lift, he contacted the Police. Examined in the mortuary of York Hospital, the body was in an advanced state of decay; the skin had begun to slough off and the muscles to liquify, bloated and infested with maggots, the blackened skin made it impossible to see any bruising, but with her wrists and ankles still bound by a colourful parcel tape wrapped from her chin to just under her red and protruding eyes, it was clear this was a murder. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Ankers appealed for information based on the vague details they had; “she was a woman of Asian or Oriental origin, 4 foot 11 ½ inches tall, aged 20 and 40. She was slender, with brown eyes and shoulder-length dark hair, pierced ears but wasn’t wearing studs, wore contact lenses”, but with had no tattoos, scars or ID, and with her fingerprints not on the Police or Immigration databases, it was highly unlikely they would ever identify her, having been dumped so far from home. Pathologist Professor Christopher Milroy stated of the way she had been bound and asphyxiated, “I’ve only seen that once, during a professional presentation”, so it couldn’t be linked to any British killer. One witness stated how he saw a man, on a date near to when the body was dumped, 15 metres from the suitcase and 20 metres from the junction of York Road where a dark-coloured saloon was parked, he saw a man in the middle of the road, "I found it strange that someone was in that lane at that time of the morning”. He described him as “white, late 30s to early 40s, 6 foot tall, with dark brown scruffy hair and a heavy stubble, wearing a black ski-type jacket, dark jeans or trousers, and black gloves”. It was an excellent description of Hyun-Han’s killer… with one key exception, he wasn’t white. As for the brightly coloured parcel tape used to bind and gag her, that was from a limited edition set of 850 rolls, produced exclusively for the Tate Gallery shops in London, Liverpool and Cornwall. It was a reproduction of a piece called ‘Death, Hope, Life and Fear’ by conceptual artists Gilbert & George. It was something so unique, it should have snared her killer within days, but with many months having passed, most transactions by cash and the CCTV long since erased, the case was crumbling, and all they knew was that she was an unknown woman from somewhere who died somehow by someone… …the evidence had reached a dead end, and what they needed was a bit of luck. Superintendent Lin Byong Ho was a South Korean police officer who was studying criminal justice at Leeds University; having read the report of the body in the suitcase, the appeal by Hyun-Han’s brother, and with every South Korean required to provide their fingerprints for their social security cards, by the 2nd of January 2002, 45 days after the body was found, she was identified as Hyun-Han Jin. With her name, they had her bank details, and except for an erroneous transaction in Paris, which had occurred days after the pathology confirmed she was already dead, her phone data concluded it was switched off on Saturday the 27th of October, and it had been pinging the cell masts around Holborn. Keen to trace her movements, DCI Ankers came to London with the aim of catching her killer… …unaware that another body was lying motionless, bound and cold. Similar to Hyun-Han, In-Hea Song, a name meaning ‘grace’ and ‘longevity’, was a 22-year-old South Korean woman who had come to London to study hotel management at Guildhall University. As one of two children to a doting mother and a retired policeman, she was outgoing, popular and described as a model daughter, but having struggled financially, she’d quit her course and was looking for work. Again, staying within the safety of her community, in late November, she stayed at a recommended guesthouse owned by a close friend on Eagle Street in Holborn, the same room where Hyun-Han had been brutally murdered three weeks before, but needing somewhere cheaper to stay, the landlord offered his friend a spare room at the property where his girlfriend lived, a maisonette on the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, East London. Hyun-Han & In-Hea never knew each other, and they had never met… …but they would cross paths in a very deadly way. Kyu Soo Kim, his first name which bizarrely means ‘model citizen’ was a 29-year-old South Korean man who had come to England one year before to study English at the Callam Language School on Oxford Street. Kyu was well-liked, popular, kind and charming, and having a fairly conventional middle-class upbringing with his father running a herbal medicine shop in Seoul, having divorced his wife, Kyu had travelled across Europe, south-east Asia, Canada, and for the last year at least, he had lived in London. Being smart, he had funded himself by subletting his spare rooms, one on Eagle Street in Holborn and Augusta Street in Poplar to South Korean students, and being cheap, clean and safe, it proved popular. Every tenant who stayed at his guesthouse said he was “handsome”, “charming”, “very helpful”, and as strangers in a city full of danger, he was the person they knew they could rely on. But even though he had no criminal record in the UK, Kyu was not what he seemed. He professed to be generous to a fault, when in truth he was broke having amassed £17,000 in debt in a single year. He also gave the impression to the girls who stayed with him that he was un-threatening, with In-Hea telling her friends “we were like brother and sister”, but all the while, his head was riddled with his deadly addiction. It wasn’t drink or drugs, but porn; hardcore porn involving bondage, sadomasochism, strangulation, pain and the degradation and humiliation of women, and an obsession with their long lingering deaths. By day, he was charm personified. By night, a perverted danger to women. By September 2001, barely a few months after they had got together, Mariko, his girlfriend split with, just weeks before his killings began, she packed her bags and left the guesthouse in Poplar, leaving behind a half-used roll of parcel tape; limited edition and brightly-coloured made for the Tate Gallery shops by artists Gilbert & George. It became a key part of his cruel fantasy, and a crucial piece of the evidence. As before, with no witnesses and the crime scene undiscovered for months, all we have is the evidence itself. In-Hea Song had stayed at his guesthouse on the Lansbury Estate for a little over a week, it was quiet, cheap and the kind of six-storey block of 1960s flats where everyone minded their own business. Nobody saw her move in, nobody knew her name, few people knew him, and nobody saw her leave. Saturday 8th of December 2001 would have been a typical evening for In-Hea, as being short on cash, she wasn’t dressed to go out. There would be no sign of a break-in as her killer had his own key being her landlord; she willingly let him in, as being a close friend, her bedroom door was always open; and as someone she trusted, he overpowered her in a single punch, knocking her cold, and out of the blue. As before, being semi-clad, he bound her wrists and ankles with the packing tape so she couldn’t flee. Stuffing her socks into her mouth, she couldn’t cry or scream. And winding the tape around her head, so tight her eyes bulged out, with a flap over her nostrils, only he could decree if she lived or died. Living out his dark fantasy for a second time, having tortured her to obtain her PIN number, and leaving her bound and barely able to breathe as he drained her account at the nearest ATM, she must have had a faint hope that he may let her live having given him what he wanted – money, but as the tape cut into her flesh and a bloody froth gasped around the air holes, he watched as he subjected her to long lingering death. It is uncertain how long it lasted, but for her sake, let’s hope her death was quick. Unlike Hyun-Han, as a free spirit who had lived in London for almost two years, In-Hea’s family were used to hearing from her intermittently, and no longer being at university, she wasn’t reported missing for ten days. As before, her empty bank account and switched off phone told a story of a woman who had fled and didn’t want to be found by anyone. Kyu told her friends the believable tale that she had gone on a hotel management course, but didn’t say where. And having told the same lie to her mother, he gave her a false hope that her daughter was alive and well, when he knew she was cold and dead. With the body of Hyun-Han found in a suitcase three weeks before, knowing it wouldn’t be long before detectives found the one thing which connected them – the guesthouses – Kyu used her credit card at a travel agents, and on Thursday 13th of December 2001, at Heathrow Airport he fled to Toronto… …and there, as someone who for many years had lived off-grid and anonymously, making a living by cash in hand and blending in amongst the Korean community overseas, he may never be found. With Hyun-Han’s fingerprints leading to her identification, DCI Anker of North Yorkshire Police came to London, and having met with his Met Police counterpart, DCI Vic Ray, they unearthed an unnerving parallel; Hyun-Han Jin, a young female South Korean student had vanished without trace, her phone off, her bank account emptied and a trail of clues suggesting she had fled overseas, which proved to be false when her body was found, bound, gagged and suffocated. DCI Ray had been handed a missing persons inquiry into In-Hea Song, a young female South Korean student who vanished in a similar way. But were they connected? Escalated to the Met Police’s Murder Command, Detective Superintendent Peter Ship would oversea both inquiries, and together with North Yorkshire Police, on the 8th of January 2002, they established a joint investigation into the murder of Hyun-Han Jin and the disappearance of In-Hea Song, stating "we identified him early on, as he was the main link between the girls, and both stayed at Eagle Street" His phone records showed he had travelled to and from the village of Askham Richard where the body was dumped on the night he dumped it. Tracing his bank account, a Peugeot 406 had been hired from Avis, the log book matched the distance, Hyun-Han’s blood was found in the boot having leaked from her suitcase, and the rubber supports on its underside matched those which marked the boot’s carpet. Establishing that he had left the country just five days before In-Hea was reported missing, both of his guesthouses were searched. At the maisonette on the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, her DNA and traces of her blood was found, and although none of her possessions remained, on a black metal shelf, the roll of Gilbert & George tape was found with Kyu’s fingerprints and In-Hea’s blood. Indisputable proof. But where was her body? He hadn’t hired another car, he hadn’t travelled outside of London, no-one had seen him wheeling a suitcase out of the flat, and forensics checked the flat twice. It wasn’t there. In the Eagle Street flat, although an extensive clean-up had taken place and several students had lived there in the three months since, her blood was found on the skirting board and the same rubber marks on the wardrobe’s carpet where the body in the suitcase sat, while Kyu worked out where to dump it. But where was the other body? It had vanished without a trace. On Thursday 17th of January 2002, for reasons only Kyu knows, with detectives searching for him, he flew back to London Heathrow, and with a warrant issued for his arrest, his passport pinged up on the Police radar, they tracked him to an internet café on Oxford Street, and that day, he was arrested. Interviewed at West End Central police station, he was described as cold, calculating and even when faced with the evidence against him, via an interpreter, the only words he said was “no comment”. They charged him with the murder of Hyun-Han Jin, and suspicion of the murder of In-Hea Song, but without her body, in the same way he had tortured these girls for his own sexual gratification, he got pleasure by denying In-Hea’s family a chance to grieve their dead daughter and bury her with dignity. But sometimes, evidence will only emerge at its own speed. On Friday the 15th of March 2002, three months after her murder, with the maisonette on the Lansbury Estate in Poplar sold to new owners, a builder was renovating the flat and he spotted a familiar hum, as a swarm of bluebottles (one of the first insects to be attracted by the smell of decaying flesh into which it lays its eggs, and maggots feed) coming from a wooden panel underneath the bath. Removing it, he couldn’t see anything, but saw that they were coming from a hole, where a foul odour emanated. The Police had searched the flat twice, but it was only as the spring temperatures caused the maggots to feast and the eggs to hatch as their winter hibernation ended, that the body could be found. Beside the front door, in a small unused cavity wall space made of bricks and breeze blocks, Kyu had dumped her semi-clad and bound body, wrapping it in a duvet, covering it in her clothes and possessions, and replacing the partition wall, using a masking gun, he had sealed it up so the smell wouldn’t permeate… …at least until Spring. She was positively identified as In-Hea Song, and finally her family had peace. (End) Committed for trial on the 25th of March 2002, one week after his further arrest for double murder, on Tuesday 4th of March 2003 before Judge Jeremy Roberts, Kyu Soo Kim was tried at the Old Bailey. On the first day, he denied all charges of murder. On the second, he confessed to killing Hyun-Han, yet he claimed that In-Hea’s death was due to the lesser charge of manslaughter owing to a sex-game gone wrong. But as Jonathan Laidlaw QC for the Prosecution stated “there were some circumstances where we would accept a manslaughter plea. This is not one of those cases", and the judge agreed. Giving no evidence at his own trial, Kyu’s motive could only be guessed – was it about money, sex, or the humiliation and degradation of women – and with the deliberation delayed as one of the jury felt sick at hearing the evidence, on Tuesday 25th of March 2003, they reached a verdict on the murders. ‘Guilty’. Handed two life sentences with a minimum of 25 years, he will be eligible for parole next year. Summing up, Judge Roberts described his crimes as "exceptionally wicked… you snuffed out the lives of two innocent young girls who trusted you and believed you were their friend. You did that in a way which must have been exceptionally distressing to them and caused untold misery and anxiety to their families". And although a sadistic and perverted killer was locked up, another mystery remained. Having travelled extensively across Europe, south-east Asia and Canada for the last decade, Kyu Soo Kim only came to the UK in September 2000. He had lived here for just one year, and in that time, he had committed two brutal and horrific murders. So, why did he start, and were these his first murders? Detective Superintendent Ship stated "my concern is that he has committed two offences, very similar in nature, within a fairly short period time. I am fairly confident he has not claimed other lives in the UK… I cannot rule out that he hasn’t committed offences elsewhere… it is a concern, and we have linked with other law enforcement agencies, but it is not for us to say how far those investigations go" Kyu Soo Kim has never given a statement as to whether he has committed any further murders. 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.
As I travel around the country's waterways in my little narrowboat, here's a few true crime cases I stumble across in the villages and towns I visit. Some may be known, but some are unknown.
CASE ONE: Peter Thomas Jackson & Stanley Christopher Payne
In the early hours of Thursday 22nd March 1950, by the bus stop outside of the Britannia pub (105 Western Road, now a private house), the body of 21st year old Peter Thomas Jackson found. He had extensive gunshot wounds to his left hand side and chest. 100 yards away at the Duckmore Lane allotments, his former flat-mate and ex-RAF buddy 22-year-old Stanley Christopher Payne was found, almost dead, a bullet wound to his head, and a gun by his side. He survived his suicide. Back at their shared room, a note was found in which Stanley wrote “Although I had every cause to hate him, I still have pangs of affection”, and asked that the two men be buried together. Found guilty but insane, Stanley was convicted of his murder.
CASE TWO: Matilda Bryan & William Harold Ashton
On the 23rd of September 1897, the inquest into the death of Matilda Bryan, wife of Dr John Bryan was held at the Royal Hotel in Tring. Nearby, the body of Matilda had been found on the trainline, badly mutilated, her legs, arms and head cut off, and scattered along the track. A few months before, Dr Bryan had invited 22 year old William Harold Ashton, a Fleet Street journalist to his house, his young wife had become smitten with the young man, they had fallen in love, and scandalously, she absconded with him to London. Knowing their love affair couldn’t last, William kissed Matilda goodbye at London Euston, paid for her to return to her husband, and although everyone denied that she had any suicidal thoughts, it is said, she threw herself from the carriage, and her body was hit by at least seven passing trains.
CASE THREE: Clive Porter & Sylwester Krajewski
At 63 High Street stands Tring Police Station, the oldest and smallest operational police station in Hertfordshire. For 30 years this was the workplace of Clive Porter a “quiet” man described as “"one of the good guys". In 2008, he retired from the job he loved, but still wanting to give something back, he began working as an enforcement officer for the Canal & River Trust who manage Britain’s waterways. On the 26th April 2021, seeing a canalboat which had overstayed its permitted time in nearby Aylesbury, as he put an enforcement notice on the boat, an argument erupted with its owner, and Clive’s body was later found, beaten to death in a bush. The boat’s owner gave his name as Daniel Wisnewski, in truth he was Sylwester Krajewski, a double murderer who had fled Poland in 2005, having tortured and murdered a couple.
CASE FOUR: Ada & Jesse Theed, 46 Frogmore Street, Tring,
This is 46 Frogmore Street in Tring, Hertfordshire.
Back in 1929, this was the former home of 44-year-old Ada Theed, her husband 40-year-old Jesse, and their 9-year-old son Donald. For several months Ada & Jesse had been separated on the grounds of cruelty, as he husband Jesse was cruel, abusive and on many occasions the police had been called as he had tried to strangle her. She had asked him for maintenance payments to help keep their son clothed and fed, and although a skilled labourer, unable to hold down a steady job, owing to his profound deafness, dizzy spells and headaches having been ran over by a cart, Jesse said no. On the afternoon of Thursday 17th of January 1929, at around 3pm, 9-year-old Donald returned home from school, and found the door to the flat locked. A constable broke down the door, and inside, they found his mother, dead, her head having been brutally bashed in, and three bloodied flannels in the sink, where her killer had attempted to clean the blood up. But the culprit was obvious. That morning, Jesse was seen walking away from Frogmore Street, his overalls covered in blood. Tried at Berkhamsted Magistrates Court, Jesse Theed pleaded his innocence, claiming “I have not done it, If it had, I would own up to it”, but with the evidence stacked against, Jesse was found guilty but temporarily insane of her wilful murder, rather than being executed, as he was found to be mentally unwell and of a low IQ, he was detained at his Majesty’s Pleasure. Poor Donald, his mother was dead, his father locked up for life, and his life was ruined forever.
As I travel around the country, there will be more cases to come. If you're looking for a podcast to listen to, check out this episode of Murder Mile UK True Crime:
Five 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.
New Compton Street @LondonPIctureArchive
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN: On the 8th or 9th of December 1913, William & Eliza, now in their late 60s or early 70s were curled up in front of the fire in their small lodging on New Compton Street in St Giles in Holborn, London. Their life had been an unbearable tragedy which had tested every ounce of their love and strength, and yet, one more punishment was yet to come for this couple who deserved to die a dignified death. This a story about grief and how we all cope with it in our own way
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Can a broken heart ever be cured? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing on New Compton Street in St Giles, WC2; one street north of the body of Norah Upchurch in the empty shop, one street west of the killing of Diego Pineiro-Villar by a Satan-loving paedophile, the same street as where Georgia Antoniou was given some ‘deadly soap’ for a backstreet abortion, and just shy of the rabid Nazi who could never fight back - coming soon to Murder Mile. New Compton Street currently connects St Giles High Street on the western side of Holborn, and now nothing, as whereas once it was a logical extension of Old Compton Street in Soho, just after Charing Cross Road, some council plonker put a massive pointless office building in its place, and that was that. Forgotten by tourists and locals alike, New Compton Street is a joyless chasm devoid of any sun, being full of council flats and the backs of office buildings, it’s where workers nip out for a crafty ciggie, the binmen divvy up their half-inched haul and where the drunks have a widdle, but no-one willingly goes. Back in the early 1900s, the same was said. Littered with factories which swathed this unlit street in a caustic blanket of choking fumes, in a basement room in an unrecorded flat, an elderly couple shared a last moment. Their life had been an unbearable tragedy which had tested every ounce of their love and strength, but a punishment was yet to come for this couple who deserved to die a dignified death. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 337: Everything is broken. It is said that “life is there to test you”, but whoever set the rules was clearly flawed, as some people seem to breeze through life with barely a wrinkle on their brow and their worries hardly worth a second thought, yet others like the Smith’s were undeservedly punished to live in pain and purgatory. William Smith was born on an undocumented date in the late 1840s in and around Clement St Danes, where Covent Garden sits. As the second or third son of several siblings to William James, a grocer, with his mother dying in his teens, he was never allowed to wallow in grief, as with his father having remarried a good woman, William was raised to feel loved and protected within this solid family unit. They weren’t well off, far from it. In fact, as a small market-stall holder whose seasonal products were often blighted by mites, storms, frosts, thefts, lost stock, bad handling, high seas and con merchants, when something bad blocked their way, they didn’t grumble and gripe, they adapted and coped. With William educated before the Elementary Education Act 1870 which made school compulsory for the under 10s, everything he knew he had learned from his parents who were exemplary role models. Every day, except Sunday worship, they worked from dawn till dusk, breaking their backs and never taking hand-outs. When times got tough, they didn’t steal, they diversified; the bruised stock became stews, pickles and jams; sometimes they sold loaves, knitted scarves and hats; if they had to, mum made cat meat and dad did repairs, as working together, they knew that love would see them through. William Jnr was like his dad; tall, strong, bushy bearded and barrel chested with a big heart, so when something tickled his fancy, his garrulous laugh could be heard on the next street, and when he cried, he wept buckets. Like his family, William had done everything right and he deserved to live a good life. The woman he would marry and love for the rest of his life was Elizabeth Kelly, known as Eliza. It is said, they had known each other since their earliest days being nearly neighbours, but with William being at least six or seven years her senior, they barely even acknowledged each other being children of very different ages, but in their late teens and early twenties, a romance had begun to blossom. From the start, Eliza’s life was always hard, being one of at least three daughters born into a festering family or drunks and deadbeats, pickpockets and petty criminals. For them; jail time was a way of life, everything was there to be nicked and they spent the best (and worst) part of their lives fighting. They had a reputation for dishonesty, and although they were only small-fry, they had no shame or morals. Eliza’s life could have been short and miserable, but it was her hard start which made her the woman she was; a strong-willed and formidable woman, who with ‘that’ walk and ‘that’ look, that was what William loved about her, as rejecting her old life and embracing the new, she was the family glue. William & Eliza married as soon as they could, a solid bond made by two lovers who made each other happy, who kept each other straight, and when one of them was down, they picked the other one up. Like his parents, William & Eliza ran a small market stall, side by side, always with a sense of pride in a daily grind which was barely enough to cover their costs, but it was theirs, it was hard, but it was legal. As happens to all of us, they experienced the same struggle and strife we all do, dealing with disease and death, poverty and plight, and like so many others, their desire to be a family was sadly hindered. Of those we know, their first babies never made it to full term. The first that did, a boy named William Jnr died as his lungs were too weak to breathe his first breath. The second, a girl called Eliza, made it to be a toddler until she was taken by a hacking bout of influenza. Showing their persistence, love and resilience, a third and fourth survived with these also called William Jnr and Eliza, and growing up to be healthy and strong, they were swiftly followed by another, a blossom-cheeked cherub named Jane. They never forgot their babies who never made it, and knowing they were blessed to have three who had survived, they bestowed upon them every ounce of love to ensure they lived good, happy lives… …yet, William & Eliza were about to confront of one of life’s most harrowing tests. The winter of 1878 was interminably bleak, as hours before the dawn, the Smith family left their tiny two-roomed lodging and trudged the icy cobblestoned streets to market, their woollen clothes made even heavier by the wet sludge which in turn froze, as their ladened hands burned red with chilblains. Together, William & Eliza pushed their battered old hand cart of produce while wrangling a trifecta of brats which scurried around them; William Jnr, aged about 10, had been awoken from a warm bed so was grumbling and scuffing his feet; Eliza Jnr, about 5, was naughtiness personified as she tested the boundaries of her parent’s patience; whereas Jane, who was barely 3, was asleep on her mother’s hip. It had been a hard start to the day, as with the coal wet, the kindling damp and the logs sodden, their lodging’s fire had gone out hours earlier, so no-one was in the mood to spend the next twelve hours selling their wares on a poorly populated market to earn a pittance just to survive, but they had to. That year had seen a series bad harvests owing to early frosts, soggy summers and a pinprick of sun. The usually reliable winter vegetables like carrots, turnips and potatoes looked as bruised as a boxer’s nose, many of the summer fruits like plums and gooseberries which were turned into jams had soured, with the wheat harvest bad bread was too pricey to produce except at scale, a higher sheep mortality meant less wool, and by the winter, with onions and chestnuts in excess supply, everyone was selling the same goods at a discount. Only those with overseas fruits like oranges made any actual money. Their market stall looked pitiful, hardly a radiance of nature’s bloom, so sales were sluggish. With most customers milling around the roast chestnut stall simply to keep warm, William & Eliza worked harder than usual to drum up trade, and with no money for a baby-sitter, they only had one eye on their kids. A few hours in, 5-year-old Eliza was having a tantrum, as with her brother William having slipped on a patch of ice, with a microscopic graze, he was wailing and getting the attention that his sister wanted. Father saw to son while serving a miser who was prodding the potatoes with displeasure, mother saw to daughter while reassembling the stock that the mardy little tyke had knocked over out of petulance, and as their eyes were distracted for a split second, this gave way to every parent’s worst nightmare. Eliza noticed first, seeing the little dot was missing from her side. She asked “where’s Jane?”, but she wasn’t there. William barked “Jane?!” across a sea of mingling adults, it impossible to spot their two-foot-tall daughter who could have gone in any direction. It was then that panic set in, “Jane?”, replaced by terror, “Jane?”, and as they grabbed and pulled at every child of the right height only to have their hopes dashed, “Jane?”, every second gone was another she would vanish further into the distance. A constable was called for, but what could one man do in a cross-crossing crowd of hundreds. Sobbing and frantic, by the time this family of now four were taken to Vine Street police station to make a report, valuable hours had passed, and no-one had seen three-year-old Jane, and they never would… …at least not alive. Three days later, washed-up on the half frozen shoreline of the River Thames, not far from the recently erected Cleopatra’s Needle, a tiny body was dragged from the water. It was limp and lifeless. Laid on the pavement; her once rosy skin was now a pale and sickly blue, her eyes were open but motionless, and although her doll-like frame was caked in a thick mud, it was unmistakeably her, as the sweater she was wearing had been knitted by her mother and, still attached to it, was one of the mittens. William & Eliza howled when they identified her, as with her missing there was hope, but with her body found, there was none. As an unnatural death, an autopsy was performed, and although a verdict of “accidental drowning” was listed at the inquest, several details were never explained; her clothes were torn (possibly in the fall), she had bruises and scratch marks (possibly having been rolled against the river bed as ships passed over), and what was said to be “a faint ligature mark” around her neck, it couldn’t be ruled out that the body had got caught in river’s detritus like old ropes and fishing nets. The case was closed and in a small grave paid for by the heartbroken locals, her body was buried. As the small plain box was lowered, Eliza wept as a very literal piece of herself had died, and her children clung to her hips having blamed themselves for the family tragedy, but William was unusually quiet. The death of their youngest posed so many questions, but it left so few answers. Always a fighter and the family glue, Eliza gave herself a gap to grieve, but with two youngsters who needed her more than ever, she brought their lives back to the familiar warmth of normality as fast as she could to ensure they lived the life that Jane never would - she had to live, so they could live. But William was broken, in his heart, in his mind, and in his soul. The big-hearted barrel-chested bellow laughing man was gone, replaced by a lolloping lump who couldn’t function. When he laid in bed, all he did was cry. When they sat at the dinner table, all he did was stare at her empty seat. And unable to return to the market stall, Eliza tried to run their business alone, as all he did was sit and wallow. Everyone deals with grief in different ways; some cry, some shout, some lash-out, some like Eliza use their pain to rebuild the shattered fragments of their lives, and whereas others, like William, collapse. He was going through what we know to be the seven stages of grief; shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance. The numbness had hit them both hard, an intolerable pain which left her with an empty void, but him frozen like every ounce of his being had been ripped out whole. Next came the blame. He blamed himself, cursing himself for being a bad parent and scolding his total failure for not keeping an eye on his child every second of every day that she was alive, especially then. Then he blamed Eliza his wife, as Jane was barely a foot from her side when she vanished, so why didn’t she grab her, why didn’t she stop her, and why didn’t she see whoever had taken their baby? Then he blamed the children, uncharacteristically chastising them both for their innocent acts, such as William Jnr slipping on the ice and Eliza’s tantrum which distracted both parents for a brief second. And as he shouted, they cried, but the moment he saw sense, he wept a heartfelt apology as they all knew it wasn’t true. Then, he blamed everything else; the market, the street, the weather, the harvest, the fruit, the icy cobbles, the wet coal on the fire, the bad sleep they’d had the night before, and then God. As a devout Christian, how could God be benevolent yet let his daughter die? If he had been so faithful, why was God punishing them? And if – as his priest pleaded – if everything was part of God’s big plan, why did he decide to test of his faith by letting his baby possibly be murdered by bad men? What kind of a God would do that? William was angry, and he needed someone to blame, as this didn’t just happen by accident. With the case closed, the Police wouldn’t be investigating further, but something didn’t sit right. They said there was no hint of any foul play, no suspicion that she had been taken, and no suspects to lay the blame on, but how did this three-year-old girl make it two miles south to the river by herself? Jane hadn’t wondered away by herself, she never would, as wherever they went, she either held his hand tight, clung to her mother’s hip or was carried. She never ran away, was never out of their sight, and would happily play by their sides, rarely distracted by the sights and sounds of the bustling city. No-one was arrested, no-one was suspected, and having heard that several children had gone missing recently, why wasn’t Jane’s disappearance being linked to those, as surely they were connected? William’s decline began simply enough, as whenever William (who Eliza had lured back to the market to work) served a man whether he knew him or not, William always seemed to be eyeing them up as if this was the filthy beast who – he believed – had kidnapped Jane, all those weeks before. It wasn’t, but for as long as he didn’t sleep or breathe, he believed someone had done this, and they would pay. Everyone in his eyes was a suspect; whether a friend, a neighbour, a customer or a stranger. Although many knew he was struggling, he said too many unpleasant things and lost some of his closest pals. He accused random men of being responsible, many of whom wouldn’t and couldn’t have done it. He would scour the newspapers looking for any cases or suspects who were (even fleetingly) similar. And having begun to drink heavily, several pubs he was barred from and he often returned home bruised. He couldn’t let go, he wouldn’t let go, for Jane’s sake, as someone had to be blamed for her murder, even though it was never proven to be a murder, and the only person who thought it was, was William. With no suspects, as often happens, when the locals gossiped, William listened. One name which kept cropping up was ‘Odd Fred’; a sinister weirdo and a dirty vagrant who was blamed for everything just because he didn’t fit in; he was homeless, disfigured, he limped, he never blinked, and if he did speak, he left unnaturally long gaps after every other word. He had been blamed for every theft or assault since the dawn of time; whether stolen washing, a dead cat, or off milk, but never proven to be guilty. The Police refused to arrest ‘Odd Fred’ with no evidence except William’s suspicions, so having plucked up enough courage to confront this former war-veteran who was struggling himself, after too many pints, William (a usually placid man with no ill will against anyone) landed his fist in ‘Odd Fred’s face. Arrested on the charge of assault, it was only then that William realised how far he had sunk, a good and moral man having descended to the gutter as an angry paranoid drunk with a criminal conviction. That should have been his wake up call, but months later, he was still gripped by grief’s seven stages… …and next was depression. Over these months and years, the tall, strong, bushy bearded and barrel chested man with a big heart was gone. He spoke rarely and smiled never, as he was ashamed at his failure; as a father (whose own children, now in their teens, had become distant), as a husband (unable to provide, as he should, for his wife), and as a businessman (as lacking drive, Eliza, as the backbone and the glue, stopped the total collapse of this family which risked them all being sent to the workhouse, where they would be split). In the late 1880s, a decade after Jane’s death, William, now in late 40s or early 50s, had ploughed on with the vagaries of a working class life guided by Eliza who never left his side. Like an automaton, he worked, he washed, he lived and existed, but becoming ever sicker and weaker, shedding weight and with his skin hanging off his bones like the soggy woollen sweater which sagged from Jane’s corpse, it was clear that his body was going through the motions, but his mind was elsewhere, and far away. One bitter winter’s evening, with William & Eliza now greying and wrinkled, their children long having since left, as Eliza made dinner, William wheeled their hand cart into their cellar, and a while later, that’s where she found him, slumped on the floor by a box of mouldy potatoes; in one hand, a rope, in the other, Jane’s mitten, in his eyes a bursting levy of tears, and even though his failed attempt was a travesty against his God, his morals and would have made Eliza a widow, with an unbearable pain in his heart, he cried out “everything is broken”. All he wanted to do was die, but for wife, he couldn’t. From the late 1880s to the mid-1890s, William was a frequent visitor, voluntary, at the local asylums. They gave him a chance to breathe, to speak and be listened to, but it was Eliza who repaired his heart. Nearing the end of the century, with an aged (and equally grief stricken) Queen Victoria in her final years, this couple who had been married for thirty-plus years learned to live again, love again, and to grieve together. They rebuilt their stall, a smaller version, just a few yards from where their whole life had collapsed, every day as they passed the wall where Jane was last seen, they would both plant a little kiss, and on the anniversary of her disappearance, they’d lay a flower and say a player, together. The man he once was would never return, but the man he was now was okay for Eliza. Neither could repair the pain they would feel, but together, they learned to live again. Occasionally he smiled a little, and once he even laughed, well almost. But it was no longer about his personal pain, it was their pain and their sorrow, so together they cried and commiserated, but for the rest of their days, they lived. As familiar faces in this part of town, as they approached their sixties, William & Eliza Smith would be seen together, walking the same streets, seeing the same people, and holding each other’s hand. It was sweet, but perhaps still traumatised by Jane’s disappearance, were they too afraid to let go? It had been a tragedy which had broken them, but slowly, they were on the mend… …only their tragedy was far from over. In 1903, William Jnr, a bearded, barrel-chested doppelganger of the man his dad once was, was struck by an omnibus as he crossed the street, and he died of his injuries several days later. He never spoke of his sister, or how he had blamed himself for her disappearance, and being described as ‘distracted’, his death was ruled as an ‘accident’, but local gossips wondered if it was a suicide, or a coincidence. Eliza Jnr, hadn’t found a career as her brother had, instead she found solace in drunk, drugs, and some said prostitution. Where she ended up is uncertain, as having fallen in with a bad crowd, once in every blue moon William & Eliza thought they recognised a ragged and huddled mass begging for change on the street, but as they approached her, she fled into the night, never seen or heard from again. (End) By the winter of 1913, now in their mid-to-late 60s, William & Eliza were seeing out their final days in a basement room in a cheap but unrecorded lodging house on New Compton Street, the air thick with the caustic whiff of tanneries, and their sleep often sullied by the nightly thrum of hard machinery. As a small, basic room, they had a horsehair bed, two armchairs, a washstand, a log fire for warmth, and on the mantlepiece were reminders of their children, at least four or possibly five who had died. On maybe the 8th or 9th of December 1913, William & Eliza were sat in front of a fire in their armchairs, side-by-side, their hands touching as always. For long hours they sat, as with William’s body ravaged by chronic arthritis, he was too weak to totter to their bed and struggled to breathe when he lay down, and with Eliza unsteady on her feet, and just getting over the flu, the two spent their nights there. Their life had been an unbearable tragedy which had tested every ounce of their love and strength, and yet, one more punishment was yet to come for this couple who deserved to die a dignified death. Their last moment came as William slept. With Eliza still coughing, but not wanting to wake him, it was said, as she got up to fetch a jug of water, her legs buckled, she stumbled, she fell, she hit her head on the mantlepiece, and knocked out cold, she fell into the fire, and began to burn; everything was alight, her nightdress, her hair, her skin, and without her to help him up, all William could do was sit and see. Later alerted to the smoke, also the smell, when the door was broken down and the fire extinguished, both William & Eliza were found dead. Eliza was barely recognisable, a half-burned and blackened shadow of the strong woman she once was, it unlikely she knew she was on fire as he skull was been broken by the impact. As for William, somehow he had found the strength to get up, unaided, he had fallen to his feet, and having crawled across the cold floor to reach the woman he loved, he knew he couldn’t save her, but he knew where he had to be, by her side - it was said he died holding her hand. 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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