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.
This series explores the killings he confessed to, and which he committed.
PART D of Murder Mile covers the murder of Leslie Goodman:
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PART 4 of True Crime Enthusiast covers the trial of Patrick MacKay:
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: “I killed eleven people” Patrick MacKay confessed, with three for certain. But of the eight killings he’d confessed to, was suspected of, and later retracted his confession for; the first, Heidi Mnilk, was well-documented but he got key details wrong and there was no proof he was there; second, Mary Hynds, was typical of his robberies and killing of old lone ladies attacked in their homes, and although charged with her murder, he had to be coerced by detectives to get the basic facts right and it was ‘left on file’. Third and fourth, Stephanie Britton and Christopher Martin, had all the hallmarks of a MacKay robbery gone wrong, but again, there was no evidence he was there, and he flatly denied killing both. Fifth, an unnamed vagrant he supposedly threw off Hungerford Bridge and drowned in the River Thames, but no body was ever found. Whereas sixth, Isabella Griffiths, his first confirmed kill was a crime scene so awash with hard evidence and his testimony so undeniable, that only he could have been her killer. And then there was Leslie Goodman, the seventh killing in his confession of eleven. Like Mary Hynds (as only two of the additional eight confessed or suspected killings strong enough to charge him with) the proof was so strong, the Director of Public Prosecutions brought it to the Old Bailey. But not wanting to sully a faultless prosecution - with evidence so overwhelming that MacKay’s defence didn’t even dispute his killing of Adele Price, Isabella Griffiths and Father Crean - that it was also ‘left on file’. But how strong was the evidence against MacKay in Leslie Goodman’s murder? It was firm. With no coercion, detectives could prove he had committed the robbery, they could link to the murder weapon to his home, and on an unspecified date in May 1975, MacKay willingly took detectives to the former St Marylebone Cemetery in East Finchley, and having hidden it almost one year prior, behind an old and faded headstone, MacKay unearthed a pair of his old worn boots, spattered with human blood. In this case, MacKay was a good as guilty. Yet, as with all of the eleven murders, something odd sits in his confession, as interviewed by DS John Bland at Brixton Prison, MacKay admitted to the robbery of Leslie Goodman’s shop, which puts him there when he was murdered, but again, he denied the killing. But why? Why would a verified serial-killer present evidence of a murder, only to then deny it? Title: Patrick MacKay: Two Sides of a Psychopath – Part D. By January 1974, MacKay had lived in London for just two years, and he’d achieved nothing; he drifted, got drunk, was often sacked, and the crimes he’d committed (by that point) were petty and pointless, as if he was aimlessly wandering through life with no skills, no family, no friends, and no future. After the brutal double murder of Stephanie Britton and Christopher Martin on the 11th of January, from the 14th to the 25th he lasted just 11 days as a groundsman at the Tudor Sports Ground, one mile from ‘The Mercer’s, and on the 25th he began his longest stint of paid work as a patrolling ‘trustee’ at Monken Hadley Common, a 30 second walk from the last murder scene, which could be a coincidence. From February to an unspecified date in May, he spent many hours alone with his thoughts, sweeping up leaves and picking up litter, and having fallen out with Reverend Brack, he moved into a lodging at 29 Cedar Lawn Avenue in Barnet; a pleasant two-storey family home on a residential street owned by Mr & Mrs Whittington, who described him as “quiet and polite, no problem, he paid his rent on time”. From the January to the June, he committed very few offences, he was rarely drunk, and once he tried to kill himself, as a typical depressive reaction to his rage-filled killing of Isabella Griffiths in February. Like his life, his crimes were inconsistent; as he often stole nothing, he attacked without reason, he targeted anyone, he was so unprepared that even his confirmed killings look more like mistakes as none of them had any hint of premeditation beyond robbery, and – as a nobody who achieved nothing - he lacked commitment to any real goal. The way he was going, he would be as forgotten as his father. From the age of eleven, psychiatrists described him as a ‘psychopath’, a ‘maniac’ and a ‘monster’, but how was a boy meant to become anything but that, when that was all society thought he was worth? He was bright but bored, passive and volatile, and unloved by anyone, he was bounced from prisons to mental institutions, and with just bad role models, his only way to get the attention he needed was to lash out, get drunk, be cruel to animals and act as if he was a committed Fascist or Nazi. It all seemed aimless, as if he didn’t know where it was heading, or why. But if that first killing of Isabella Griffiths was really a robbery which went wrong (as many of his attacks on the elderly could have become), did this ‘accidental killing’ in the grip of a rage ignite a potential goal for this hopeless and forgotten boy? Fame is fickle, everyone wants their ‘five minutes’, but not everyone is willing to put in the hours to earn it. It takes years to learn to be a painter, to play the guitar, to write a novel, or to score the winner at Wembley. But anyone can kill, especially if they’re drunk, on drugs, and prone to violent outbursts. Cinema, history and crime books had been a staple of MacKay’s life since his childhood, it gave him an escape from the horrors of his upbringing, and in the same way his drunken father told him war stories of all the soldiers he had killed and the rotting bodies he had seen, MacKay had darker role models.
Sadistic killings were big business at the cinemas in the early 1970s; Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film ‘Frenzy’ was released in May 1972, being loosely based on the ‘Hammersmith nude’ murders; an unnamed killer of at least eight women who infamously stalked West London between 1959 and 1965. And released in January 1972, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was withdrawn from UK cinemas in 1973 due to copy-cat attacks; as a 16-year-old boy beat a homeless man to death, a 14-year old had mimicked it in his classmate’s manslaughter, and a Dutch girl was gangraped as youths sang ‘singing in the rain’. Fiction or fact, sensationalist killings were headline news and turned each perpetrator into household names. They were heralded and hated (like the Moors murderers), feared and studied (like the Zodiac killer), and with the conviction of Edmund Kemper: The ‘Co-ed Killer’ in November 1973, a new era of world-famous serial-killers like Bundy & Dahmer was beginning, being achievable in MacKay’s lifetime. Only by then, MacKay was a nothing, a nobody, who gave no reason for his petty and pointless attacks. So how could he create a legacy? Jack the Ripper had his anonymity. The Zodiac had left puzzles. Haigh had his horrific vats of acid. Hindley & Brady’s mugshots became iconic. And Christie had a famous book, film and play written about him. But so far, Patrick MacKay had done nothing of any substance… …yet, all that was about to change. Born on the 15th of September 1911, Leslie Frank Goodman had lived in the borough of Islington, north London as man and boy. Like Stephanie Britton, his whole world was boiled down to just a few houses on neighbouring streets, where every key moment in his life had existed; from his birth, his schooling, his marriage to his wife, the arrival of his son, David, his work, his friends, his happiness, and his death. As an upper working-class neighbourhood, Finsbury Park was a chaotic mix of commercial, residential and industrial; as long lines of crumbling Victorian terraces sat amongst the dense smog of belching chimneys, handwashed laundry is dried beside the sooty cut of train tracks, and the children played in what remained of the burned-out shells and bomb craters which had pockmarked it during the Blitz. To the side of Finsbury Park station, being a main train and tube route into the city, stood Rock Street. Originally called Grange Road, it was built in the 1920s to ease the congestion of buses at the busy bus stop on Station Place, and being little more than a cut-through between Blackstock Road and St Thomas’s Road comprising of a one-way street and two lines of two-storey terraces, it wasn’t pretty, but where there’s buses, there’s people, and seeing an opportunity, several shops were built on the ground floors; including a pub, a café, a tailors and a sweet-shop and tobacconists called ‘L Goodman’. Leslie Goodman, proprietor of ‘L Goodman’ was a gentleman, with old-fashioned manners and morals being the kind of man the locals had no qualms about serving their kids liquorice and dolly mixtures, as he’d happily put aside a newspaper if they asked him to, and as a popular tobacconist, he sold cheap bog-standard cigarettes like Embassy, John Player and B&H, as well as British brands of rolling tobacco like Old Holborn, Drum and Samson, but for the more discerning ‘Avant Garde’ kind of customer or the arty types living in squats, he imported niche French brands like Gauloise, Gitanes and Disque Bleu. Said to be “sweet, well-liked and respected”, Leslie’s warmth greeted every customer; as he had a soft smile, large eyebrows which mirrored the small crown of hair over his ears and arched quizzically all the way up to his bald head, and with neat moustache, he had the demeanour of a kindly grandfather. And even though his shop was hidden away on a back street, it was a popular and known to the locals, being surrounded by houses, shops, the Blackthorn pub, a bus garage, a train and tube station, the local Top Rank bingo hall, and – often mistaken for Jewish, having the surname of Goodman – it was a regular haunt for local Jewish families, as the Finsbury Park Synagogue was just a few streets away. By 1974, aged 64, approaching retirement but not willing to give up his business, Leslie was enjoying a well-earned and more leisurely life. That June, his beloved wife had gone on holiday with her mother, his son David (then 27) had moved out, so with no-one too look after but their cats, that week, Leslie wasn’t planning to work too hard, as his eyes and ears were a little distracted by his real love – football. Thursday 13th of June 1974, six months after Stephanie Britton & Christopher Martin’s double murder, 64-year-old Leslie opened his shop on Rock Street at just shy of 7am. As had been his routine for years, being security conscious, he popped the padlock and rolled up the shutters on the door, he unlocked the deadbolt and the Yale lock, he slid the side curtains up, put the lights on, and turned the sign from ‘closed’ to ‘open’. As a shopkeeper, he’d been robbed before, so caution was always the best option. The day was typical, as being a cool wet summer with a light drizzle and being barely 13 degrees, he wasn’t busy, and even with Shabbat approaching, his Jewish customers had made very few purchases. Normally, he would have shut-up the shop at 8:30pm, but the World Cup was on the telly. Unlike in 1966, eight years before when England romped to victory by beating West Germany 4 to 2 in the final – not that we ever mention it – this time, England had failed to qualify. But as a diehard footie fan, Leslie had planned to close-up just before 5pm, and watch it on the box around at a friend’s house. It was only a small 14 inch black and white telly, and the match (the opening game between Brazil and Yugoslavia, neither of whom made it out of Group 2) would end in a thrill-free game of no-goals each, and worse, the winners of the World Cup would be West Germany, only Leslie would never know that. At just ten minutes before 5pm, as Leslie placed his white shopkeeper’s overcoat on the counter, and started his usual routine of locking up, his last customer of the day - and his life - entered the shop… …but was it Patrick MacKay? In a written statement, MacKay admitted to robbing the shop, just as he’d confessed to three provable murders and 23+ robberies, but with several additional killings – one it was unlikely he had committed, one he confessed to under coercion, and two which he flatly refuted - this one, he also denied. Of his three confirmed kills - which by that point he‘d murdered his first, Isabella Griffiths – all victims were elderly and isolated. Two were female, being Adele and Isabella, but Father Crean was male, and he’d targeted women of all ages (such as his mother and sister) as well as young boys. And although this murder didn’t occur within the privacy of a house, he had burgled a grocer’s shop in Dartford for three tins of ham, and early in 1973, he’d broken into a tobacconists in Greenhithe to steal money and cigarettes. Patrick and Leslie were strangers, so if this wasn’t pre-meditated murder, was it a robbery which went wrong, owing to MacKay’s lack of planning, his twisted morals and a short burst of rage? These early attacks were ad-hoc and inconsistent, as he was yet to discover that his perfect victims were old lone ladies in a hunting ground of the wealthy areas of Chelsea and Belgravia, if this killing was by MacKay, was it a mistake, like Heidi’s, like Mary’s, like Stephanie’s and even Christopher’s too? With no transcript of MacKay’s confession, and no quotes by MacKay about his motive, his emotions, or what words (if any) were shared between the two, we can only go by what the evidence can prove. Scuffmarks and scattered sweets show a struggle ensued, as Leslie tried to fend off the robber, and if this was MacKay, Leslie would have been outmatched being three times his age and half a foot shorter. As a proven coward, MacKay always struck fast to disable his victim’s screams and flailing fists, only (if it was him) he didn’t use the knife he said he carried, but bludgeoned Leslie using a foot-long lead pipe ending with a heavy knuckle joint, the kind used by engineers in homes to fix gas or water pipes. Leslie’s beating was frenzied and said to be “the work of a maniac”, as with 14 swift blows, this half kilo pipe caved in his skull, until – as Detective Chief Superintendent Frank McGuinness stated – “his head was practically obliterated by blows”, and looking visibly shocked as he told the press, “this is the most brutal murder I’ve ever seen”, with it continuing long after Leslie was unconscious or dead. The body was dragged from behind the counter to just out of view of the windows, leaving a long trail of blood, but with Leslie’s feet sticking out, his killer had covered them with his shopkeeper’s overcoat. The robbery (if that’s what this is) was perfunctory, as if Leslie’s assailant had killed him in a burst of rage and stole only what came to hand; as he rifled the till, but only took some notes but no coins, and just enough packs of Disque Blue cigarettes to fit into a single man’s pockets, but nothing more. A lot was left behind, so perhaps, in a state of panic, Leslie’s killer had frantically fled? No. As DCS McGuinness clarified, “he spent a lot of time locking up Mr Goodman’s shop”. In fact, his killer calmly put out the lights, slid the side curtains up, turned the sign from ‘open’ to ‘closed’, rolled down the shutters, locked the deadbolt, the Yale and the shutter’s padlock, then calmly walked away with the keys. DCS McGuinness stated “I feel that someone would have seen him”, but nobody did. It was 5pm, on a week day, in a busy city street. The kids were out, rush hour had begun, the shop was near to a train and a tube station, a bus stop, a bingo hall, a few doors down from a pub and a café, as well as two rows of terraced houses where families were sitting down to dinner, or to watch the footie. With nobody home but his cats, Leslie’s body lay there from the Thursday night until Monday morning, when his wife returned from her holiday to find milk bottles piled up, and the cats meowing to be fed. Police were called, and in the darkness, threw the windows, they saw blood. Detectives made public appeals to locals and passing commuters, and one possible sighting by an eye-witness was reported days later. The Islington Gazette stated an elderly widow had gone to buy toffees and saw ‘a tall, black man’ in the shop. “He was acting suspiciously and Leslie was ‘quiet and behaving nervously’. I thought to myself at the time ‘doesn’t he seem frightened’? When he spoke to me, he had to kind-of lean forward towards me”. MacKay was tall, not black, but he was part Guyanese, and although Police investigated it further, it proved to be a dead end. But then all witnesses have motives. As a high traffic area, no fingerprints were found, but three clues gave DCS McGuinness a hint at who this killer might be; as cash and cigarettes were stolen but nothing else, the lead pipe used to bludgeon Leslie to death had been casually tossed just feet from the body, and said to have been “covered in blood” in this frenzied attack, the killer had stood in a pool of Leslie’s blood, but hadn’t cleaned it up. If MacKay - as was suspected with the murder of Heidi Mnilk that he had recalled some but not all of the details as her killing was heavily reported in the newspapers - similar to Mary Hynd’s murder, this attack was barely reported, and several vital details were incorrect or omitted; as some stated he was killed by a “killer” or “killers”, many said the murder weapon was “an iron bar”, almost no-one of them mentioned the theft of cigarettes, and Police deliberately kept from the press, the bloody footprint. So, was this MacKay? As with Mary Hynds and Stephanie Britton, it had many of the hallmarks of a MacKay killing, but it was the similarities with Father Crean’s murder, just nine months later, which drew the detective’s eye. Both were men in their early sixties and grey-haired. Both lived in places MacKay didn’t belong. And although he knew Father Crean but not Leslie Goodman, he wasn’t averse to commuting for crime. Both were grabbed, had struggled, were repeatedly punched, and attacked frenziedly – with the priest brutalised with an axe found by MacKay in the vicarage, whereas Leslie’s killer carried a lead pipe. Both sustained horrific wounds, in an attack detectives stated was “violent and sadistic”, beyond the realms of self-defence or a personal grudge, as both killers were pure evil with hatred in their hearts. In both cases, the bodies was repositioned away from the sight of the attack, their faces or feet were covered over, the curtains were closed, the lights were switched off, the doors were locked, the keys were taken, the murder weapon was left behind but hadn’t been wiped clean, and little if nothing of any value was stolen, with the ransacking described as “superficial” as if to obfuscate the true motive. In the priest’s killing, MacKay recalled each bloodcurdling aspect of it vividly, yet with the court records locked away for another 40 years, we have no idea how much of the tobacconist’s murder he recalled, or – when he was questioned about this robbery he confessed to – whether he was led or coerced. Neither do we know what he said when they drove him in the police van to Rock Street to identify the shop, as - being a drunk, drug-abuser whose recall was clouded by an alleged ‘white mist’, as Justice Milmo stated, was subject to “eruptions of violence followed by deep depressions which wiped from his mind any memories of what had happened” – it was his calm callousness which was most chilling. We don’t know what he did after Leslie’s killing, if indeed it was him, but having slain Father Crean, he then collected a roast chicken from his mother, watched The Man with the Golden Gun at the cinema, at Hungerford Bridge he threw one of his bloody knives into the River Thames, and in a coin-operated booth at a train station, he posed for four infamous photos; one shows him feverishly ripping apart a cooked chicken leg with his teeth like a rabid cannibal, another as he swallows the delicious flesh, one shows him pained as if he was possessed by a demon, and the last shows him gripped with pure rage. Even when he was arrested at the Cowdrey’s home on 23rd of March 1975 for Father Crean’s killing, with three confirmed kills under his belt, he wasn’t flustered or panicked, as seconds before the cops came knocking, he was sat on the sofa, hungover, wearing a fur collar coat and a trilby hat, and when the Cowdrey’s asked “what you up to today?”, MacKay replied “dunno, probably get pissed again”. But was he calm because he was arrogant, cruel and lacked empathy… …or as a nobody who “would amount to nothing”, he was now officially a serial killer? Leslie’s murder was thoroughly investigated, but with no witnesses, no fingerprints, and no suspect to match the bloody footprint to, two months later with no-one arrested or suspected the case stalled. David’s son, who was 27 at the time, believed that anti-Semitism could have been a factor; “as police told me they found a huge swastika in his home”, and even though they weren’t Jewish “the shop was in a Jewish area and Goodman is a Jewish name”. As a supposed Fascist, MacKay hero-worshipped the Nazis, he wore a homemade SS uniform, he falsely claimed he was ‘pure Aryan’, and it is said he goose-stepped down Dartford High Street giving a ‘Sieg Heil’ salute – all of which could have been for show? But while admittedly so drunk he was found unconscious, MacKay was arrested 11 months before for attacking a vagrant with a four-foot long metal pole, hurling bricks into a pedestrian subway, and was said to have been heard shouting that he wanted to ‘kill all Jewish bastards’, which he later denied. On 25th of June 1975, MacKay was charged with Leslie’s murder, having confessed “I killed eleven people”, and with this killing similar to his confirmed kills, the evidence against him was firm. (Out) On the night of Leslie Goodman’s murder, the Cowdrey’s (his surrogate parents) recalled him coming back to their home late, and although he’d been unemployed for a month, “his pockets were bulging with money… and packets of Disque Blue cigarettes”, the same niche French brand which was stolen. At Mr & Mrs Whittington’s house at 29 Cedar Lawn Avenue in Barnet where MacKay was lodging, they stated that their pipework was being repaired at the time, and – although not unique – lead pipes with a heavy knuckle joint had been used, but after a year, they couldn’t recall if any had gone missing. And when questioned, during his week-long confession to DS Bland, MacKay stated “something was praying on my mind, a bloody footprint I had left behind” – a detail which (again) detectives said they hadn’t leaked to the press, spoken about with MacKay, or shown him any crime scene photos of (like Mary Hynd’s back door or the stocking in her mouth) – but he recalled he’d discarded his bloodied boots behind a gravestone, one year before, at the former St Marylebone Cemetery in East Finchley, On an unspecified date in mid-May, MacKay led police to the cemetery and his bloodied boots. Tests confirmed two types of blood; one unidentifiable as weather and time had decayed the sample, and a speck of ‘human blood’. But with it too old to group, its providence and source remains uncertain. Tried at the Old Bailey, as with Mary Hynds’ murder, the killing of Leslie Goodman was ‘left on file’. But why did MacKay lead detectives to the boots, yet he denied killing the man he had robbed? In his memoir, MacKay wrote cryptically, “the truth about this strange case may, in thirty years or so, unfold. Only then will you have your man. This, by the way, will not be me. I am not responsible. But you will be surprised (very much so) when you find out, as they say in detective stories, who done it”. It was an odd denouement to his so-called confession, but with lines like those later quoted, verbatim and unchecked, by the Sunday People, and those four infamous (yet clearly staged) photos of MacKay looking like a maniac to such an extent that Michael, Mary’s nephew, said “I think Mackay was mad. Look at the photos of him, you can almost see it in him”, was this all part of his desire to leave a legacy? Part E, the penultimate part of ‘Patrick MacKay: Two Sides of a Psychopath’ continues next week, with Part 1 of 4 now available in full (covering the killings of Father Crean, Isabella Griffith and Adele Price, as well as MacKay’s life, crimes and trial) available now via as part of this cross-over series with the True Crime Enthusiast podcast. Just search ‘Patrick MacKay: Two Sides of a Psychopath’, or click on the link in the show-notes. 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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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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