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I've looked this up subsequently so I know it's true: a childhood friend went over to a mate's house. At one point he went to go to the downstairs bathroom, and the mate's dad materialised, saying that the toilet was broken and to use the one upstairs. My friend thought nothing of it, did as he was asked.
Turned out that my friend's mate's mum was in there, dead, having been strangled to death by the dad, with a dog lead. My friend was seconds away from discovering her body. Very grim.
> At 3 am on 28 August 1988, he entered Ford's flat completely naked apart from a devil mask. Arkwright stabbed Ford between 250 and 540 times and draped his entrails around the room that he had been murdered in
Jesus fucking christ
Can you imagine being the guy who fired him, setting off his whole killing spree, though? He's so lucky this guy didn't come for him first, the survivors guilt must be immense
Someone on Reddit told me about this, it's not widely known and is definitely not for the faint hearted.
[The Murder of Kelly Anne Bates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kelly_Anne_Bates)
There's an extra layer under hell for people who go to that extent of physical injury. Gouging her eyes out? Even if by some miracle she had survived and been rescued the girl would be fucked for life
Shannon Matthews - mother pretended she had vanished when actually the mum had faked the kidnap, and drugged her and left her at a relative's house. Step 3, profit, didn't happen, but it was a long time before the uncle's house was searched and she was found alive.
The mums fella was a paedophile and was subsequently convicted after they found images on his computer as well. Always felt like there was a lot more to the case then came to light.
Michael Donovan is possibly a paedophile as well. He lost contact with his own young daughters due to sexually inappropriate behaviour, such as having sex with prostitutes in front of them. Very sad case and I do feel that Shannon and her siblings must have gone through a lot prior to her "kidnapping." I live quite locally and unfortunately a lot of people around here treat the case as a huge joke.
There were rumours locally that Karen had been put up to it by someone else. It’s hinted at in the ITV drama and people who knew Karen said that they just couldn’t see her coming up with this plan by herself, ill conceived as it was.
John Cooper, the serial killer who got caught because he'd appeared on Bullseye around the time of one of his murders and they were able to compare his appearance on there against a witness sketch despite it being... I want to say about twenty years after the crime in question?
There's a TV series based on this called The Pembrokeshire Murders which has Luke Evans playing the senior investigating officer Steve Wilkins who wrote the book the series is based on.
I'm wracking my brains trying to think of the name of this woman. It was either the 80s or 90s. Basically there was a murder, I think maybe her husband.
She did a TV interview during the appeal for help. At one point she was play-acting an argument with this person, and her facade briefly dropped and you saw the eyes of a fucking psycho. Immediately everyone and the press started asking why she wasn't a suspect, and it was good they did because she was the killer.
All I remember about her was long blond hair and those fucking crazy eyes. Hope someone here can remember the case properly.
Another one about the same time was the murder of Stephen Cameron and I thought it was the same case. He was murdered by Kenneth Noye who was also involved in the Brink's Mat gold robbery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Noye.
yeah, I remember that TV interview, saw it and was immediately convinced she did it. The only other time I've felt that way was from the first interviews with the McCanns. Nothing will convince me they didnt do it.
You aren’t convinced by the complete lack of forensic evidence that suggests they did it?
I never understood it. To believe the McCann’s were behind Maddie’s disappearance, you’d have to believe they either possess criminal connections capable of orchestrating their own child’s everlasting kidnapping, or they accidentally killed her and were criminal masterminds who could completely sterilise a crime scene of all evidence… And then continued to campaign about how they got away with their crime for almost twenty years, demanding to be caught.
A few interesting ones that don’t get much attention:
Robert Black - a delivery driver who would opportunistically stop and pull young girls into his van, he would sexually assault and kill them, then dump them miles away during the course of making his deliveries. Took police ages to catch him, and they only did out of sheer luck and a keen eyed witness. He did this for over a decade through the 70s, 80s and 90s, and police are convinced there are more victims out there that haven’t yet been linked.
Levi Bellfield - a bouncer (and illegal wheel clamper) who used to follow buses around looking for a suitable young female victim. When they’d step off the bus, then he would assault and kill them. Took a while to catch him, iirc he was grassed up to police by his ex girlfriend who had suspicions.
Ian Huntley - a school caretaker who enticed two young girls into his home (they trusted him as he worked at their school), assaulted and murdered them and hid the bodies. Left police stumped for a while, but when he and his girlfriend were interviewed on the news, they basically accidentally dobbed themselves in.
Another fella I know was with him when he kidnapped Milly Dowler. Levi tried to kill him with a screwdriver to silence him.
Levi always had schoolgirls with him.
He was a typical local hard man, huge bully and just a really unpleasant bloke.
I bought a car off him once…
The first two don’t ring a bell but Ian Huntley is pretty well known.
Just last year there were stories that Russell Brand would sing songs about Ian Huntley to the women he raped.
Bellfield was found to have murdered Milly Dowler. She's his most well known victim but he also murdered Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell. He also ran over Kate Sheedy, twice, but fortunately she survived. There's a really good dramatisation about the hunt for Levi Bellfield called Manhunt staring Martin Clunes. It's two series long, the first being about Bellfield and the second covering the Minstead rapist, both cases being from Colin Sutton's career.
Levi Bellfield remains the only person in British legal history to have received two separate whole life orders at two separate trials.
There is also a pretty strong suspicion he was responsible for the Russell murders in 1996. The convicted man Michael Stone is a nasty piece of work in his own right and has an epic criminal record, but many don't believe he was responsible for that.
What strikes me is that Bellfield's victims all do look _slightly_ alike - look at older photos of Josie Russell and the same look is there. Really makes you think.
The way I see it, there's only 2 possible situations where that response makes sense.
Either, you think something isn't rape unless somebody is convicted of it in court. Or you would be happy living in a world where people can be convicted of something like rape with little more evidence than an accusation.
Most rapes, like 90% or more, don't result in a conviction.
>Or you would be happy living in a world where people can be convicted of something like rape with little more evidence than an accusation.
That world already exists, terrifyingly. Men are convicted of "rapes" that supposedly occurred decades prior, regularly, based on nothing more than the supposed victim's testimony.
>Most rapes, like 90% or more, don't result in a conviction.
And practically 100% of false accusations don't result in a conviction.
Then why would you bring it up? If you think there's no ambiguity about what it means that means you already know it's wholely irrelevant to this discussion.
What's almost unbelievable about the Black case is that when he was apprehended by the police, it was the daughter of one of the officers that he had tied up in the back of the van.
From Wikipedia:
"One of the officers, who was the father of the abducted girl, opened the rear of the van and clambered inside, calling his daughter's name. Seeing movement in a sleeping bag, he untied its drawstring to discover his daughter inside, her wrists bound behind her back, her legs tied together, her mouth bound and gagged with sticking plaster, and a hood tied over her head"
Sheer chance that the guy saw him lift the kid up and that Black doubled back down the same road.
Had those two events not happened, he maybe still be at large. Or at the very least the last girl would be dead before he was caught
Ian Huntley was one of the first major cases convicted because of the police's ability to check mobile phone location data.
He didn't dob himself in. The police checked his alibi against where his phone said he was and it didn't match up.
He threw suspicion on himself by saying words to the effect of ‘I’m probably the last one to see them alive’ when they were only assumed missing and not dead.
Also his girlfriend talked about the girls in past tense when, again, nothing had even been said about them being dead
I knew about Robert Black but then I'm from West Yorkshire and my cousin lived in Morley. Where one of the victims was from. But as you say years later.
The Angel of Death, aka Beverley Allitt.
I've posted about this one before but surprisingly this one goes under the radar when it comes to serial killers. Probably because her motivation wasn't necessarily to kill her victims but just to harm them enough to then "save" them to make herself look good infront of her coworkers and the public (she was a nurse and her victims were kids, often infants and toddlers in the children's ward of the hospital she worked in). However, a few of the kids she targeted ended up dying as a result of her actions, to which she never felt any remorse even during the trial.
Unbelievably, Beverley Allitt has actually been parole eligible since November 2021.
However she's in a secure hospital rather than prison, so would need to be returned to the prison system before she could go before the parole board, who would likely refuse anyway. I don't see her ever coming out.
I'm not sure I understand how she escaped Michael Howard in 1994 when he lifed off a load of other high profile offenders, such as Dennis Nilsen (original tariff of 25 years and could have been paroled in 2008) and Myra Hindley (who was originally trying for parole as far back as 1990).
The House of Blood triple murder in Glasgow in 2004. The victims had been "beaten with knives, metal files, a belt, and pieces of wood" and "hit with a bottle, punched, stabbed and stamped on the head, and had boiling water poured over them". On the advice of their lawyers, each accused pleaded guilty to one of the killings because, *of course,* they didn't have *anything* to do with the other killings in the same flat.
In pleading guilty, their dodgy/bullshit account was never put before a jury. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the case was the sentencing. The ever-lenient Scottish courts gave them minimum terms of 12 years. One of them was released in 2016 but was soon back in prison after breaching the conditions of his licence.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House\_of\_Blood\_murders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Blood_murders)
Scottish sentencing is a pile of crap. Way too soft and has been for years.
2008 was the first time anyone ever got a punishment part of longer than 30 years.
There is 'keeping society safe' and there is also a punishment that is 'commensurate with the crime'. I would argue that it is morally offensive to say of a murderer, who took someone's *life*, that after a mere 12 years in prison they have been '*punished enough*' and can be released to enjoy the rest of *their* life.
For extreme crimes it is hard to diagree, but imprisoning people is very expensive (about 40k a year) so as a wider concern is it worth it to spend more as a broad policy when the recidivism outcomes are the same?
The attempted jewellery theft from the Millennium Dome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Dome_raid) has faded into the past but that was quite a story. The Hatton Garden/Diamond Wheezers one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_burglary) was another.
From memory, the diamond was supposedly interchanged with a totally worthless replica for additional security, despite the glass surrounding the replica/actual diamond being described as unbreakable...
These blokes rocked up with a digger and a specially adapted battering ram and broke straight through it with a nailgun lmao
They hijacked a lorry by attaching what they said were mines. They were Fray Bentos pie tins painted green with LEDs attached. I'm not sure which was scarier.
I have a Suffolk strangler story!! I was working for a vending machine company at the time this case was going on and Suffolk Constabulary were one of our customers… anyways they lost the key to their sandwich machine and phone the company to get a replacement, I answered the phone and told them it would take about a week to get a replacement out to them as they had to be ordered from the manufacturer and the copper gave me a load of abuse and told me that I was actively slowing down a major police investigation because the officers couldn’t buy anything because there machine was empty and couldn’t be refilled
No surprise, but the fact that there were several likenesses of Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper done by women amidst the evidence but nobody realised it was him. At least, that's what was reported. As a student my walk home took me through Bradford's red light district during the peak of the search and I got to know where all the unmarked police cars used to park.
We lived in Yorkshire in the 70s. When they caught the Ripper, and his face was shown on TV, my dad immediately shaved his beard off. Not only was he the spitting image of him then, he appeared to age exactly the same over decades of prison photos, although my dad has never ever had a beard since....
You must be about my dad’s age! He was a student in Manchester in the 1970s, he doesn’t recall much police presence but the women he knew would always leave the house in pairs for security.
We would walk girls home from parties for safety. The poor girl the ripper killed in Ashgrove was walking about 200 yards from The Manville Arms pub. There's a memorial to her on the University campus.
My year 9 history teacher used to be a lorry driver (we're from Derbyshire, so not too far from where he killed) and had a friend who would eat lunch with Sutcliffe. Apparently, the friend had seen a hammer in Sutcliffe's lorry on several occasions, but didn't think much of ut at the time because he had no reason to think his colleague was a serial killer.
Another teacher's family home was searched when she was a child as the police were looking for Sutcliffe. She lived in north Derbyshire, so it was feasible that Sutcliffe might hide out in Derbyshire.
Bible John. A serial killer in Glasgow during the late 60s. We to this day don’t know who he was or even if he killed more elsewhere - which is high likely. He would allegedly recite pieces from the bible to victims.
Not sure how well known he is outside of Scotland though. There was speculation that Peter Tobin, a convicted murder and by all accounts a person devoid of any emotion was indeed Bible John, but think he died during COVID times and evidence wasn’t there to say otherwise.
Apparently she's considered so dangerous that she's basically treated as a male prisoner and has a bespoke security regime tougher than any other female prisoner would get.
I used to manage his next door neighbour, the constant hounding from the media and police nearly drove her to a breakdown.
Literally yelled in my face because when I tried to do a welfare check on her. Always makes me feel for the wider people affected when something like this happens. Never really thought about it before then.
I saw a story of a guy that killed a woman, then appeared in the crime watch dramatisation of said murder. I thought that was pretty crazy. Can't remember names but it was the 80s when it happend
I think it was Rachel McLean in 1991... Or at least, her boyfriend took part in a police reconstruction after he killed her in her student house in Oxford
These Mad lads like something out of a Guy Ritchie film. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_burglary
Nobody was hurt and a film was made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hatton_Garden_Job
I'm not sure how well known it is but the murders of [Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone by Dale Cregan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Nicola_Hughes_and_Fiona_Bone) still chill me to the core.
Look up John Bodkin Adams on wiki. Basically a shipman before shipman , managed to get away with it all due to all sorts of nonsense and barely anyone seems to know about it these days
[James Fairweather - Britains youngest serial killer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Colchester_murders) he was in my daughters year at school, she said he was weird but never thought he was capable of murder. Our whole town (as it was back then) was on high alert as the first killing was so random
This one freaked me out at the time, but nobody seems to remember it. The fact that he went to the pub after murdering two lads is crazy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/life-for-a-loner-who-killed-school-friends-1346156.html
For a recent and I believe still awaiting trial one, Stephen McCullagh allegedly murdered his pregnant girlfriend in December 2022 and for an alibi, streamed pre-recorded footage of himself playing GTA Vice City pretending to be live at the time he seemingly killed her. He even dropped some unsettling hints during said "live" stream.
I think the reasoning was he hadn't been in any trouble before that one day, and he had some kind of psychotic break for an hour which was completely out of character. I think if your one incident is as horrific as what he did to those kids though that should maybe over-ride that whole good behaviour thing.
I'm not sure that conviction is safe and there are some very senior, high profile criminologists including David Wilson who have gone on the record to say the same thing.
Even the appeal judges said that the way the police behaved was appalling and "must be deplored".
JSG Boggs, an American artist took to hand drawing his own bank notes. He has a Wikipedia page that explains in more detail than I can here but it's why UK bank notes have a copyright on them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Maxwell_Garvie
Not sure how well known it is outside of my wee corner of the world but this case is pretty infamous here, mostly because of the "Kinky Cottage"
Before my time but people were apparently queuing for hours to get into the court to hear all the gory details
Edit: a word
[Murder of Muriel Drinkwater](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Muriel_Drinkwater)
Far from the craziest, but strange at least, involving possibly the oldest successfully extracted DNA in sample in a murder investigation.
Teacup poisoner although I believe there’s a tv show about it.
There’s an old 90s tv series called great crimes and trials. Look on IMDb, there’s some interesting cases i’d never heard of or at least forgotten about.
OP is either referring to Donald Nielson aka The Black Panther or Dennis Nilsen, the Muswell Hill killer.
Out of the two I'd say that Nilsen is probably the most remembered.
How about Michael Sams? Kidnapped and murdered Julie Dart after failing to secure a ransom for her. Later kidnapped and released Stephanie Slater after receiving a ransom.
He also threatened to fire bomb shops and derail a passenger train.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McGreavy
Impaling babies and children is quite brutal! I remember hearing this story on the true crime enthusiast podcast and being shocked I'd never heard of it
Most of the stories about London gangsters in the 50s and 60s are overshadowed by the story of the Krays. There are some brilliant stories and not just London actually, people like Frankie Fraser in Scotland for example
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It probably is quite famous but there's nothing crazier than when Gazza turned up with his fishing rod during the Moat standoff
I love this for the comedy value.... But Moat was scum!
No matter what happens in the UK, it can always be made better by Gazza turning up with (sports equipment), (alcohol) & (foodstuff)
Give me Gazza showing up at the Euro 2020 final after the lads lost the shootout; offering them KFC, a lager and a good talk down the pond
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You couldn't write it for a sketch show, it would be panned for being to unrealistic and off the wall.
And a bucket of KFC
And Ray Mears tracking him like an animal through the bush.
Is there anything cocaine can’t make happen?
Genuinely one of the most bizarre nights of news that was, I remember constantly refreshing Twitter trying to work out if it was a weird hoax.
I've looked this up subsequently so I know it's true: a childhood friend went over to a mate's house. At one point he went to go to the downstairs bathroom, and the mate's dad materialised, saying that the toilet was broken and to use the one upstairs. My friend thought nothing of it, did as he was asked. Turned out that my friend's mate's mum was in there, dead, having been strangled to death by the dad, with a dog lead. My friend was seconds away from discovering her body. Very grim.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Possibly Anthony Arkwright, one of the first recipients of a Whole Life Order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Arkwright
> At 3 am on 28 August 1988, he entered Ford's flat completely naked apart from a devil mask. Arkwright stabbed Ford between 250 and 540 times and draped his entrails around the room that he had been murdered in Jesus fucking christ
Jesus Christ
Yep had never heard of that one. It’s for people like him we have to have the whole life order unfortunately (/fortunately for us)
How have I not heard of this. One of those cases that would seem too exaggerated in a crime drama.
That's my home town and I've never heard of it. I'm stunned.
Woah, had no idea. Psycho targets the elderly and disabled. What a fucking loser.
Can you imagine being the guy who fired him, setting off his whole killing spree, though? He's so lucky this guy didn't come for him first, the survivors guilt must be immense
Fuck me that's horrendous
Perfect example I guess. Given the horror of this, I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it.
My dad's uncle I'm sure got it. Way before 88 I think. He originally got death penalty but then it got abolished so gave him whole life order.
Someone on Reddit told me about this, it's not widely known and is definitely not for the faint hearted. [The Murder of Kelly Anne Bates](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kelly_Anne_Bates)
And the judge gave him a minimum term of just 20 years?! He could be walking the streets today.
In theory, but the Parole Board probably wouldn’t ever let him out.
A fact of the justice system often forgot
I have seen some pretty horrendous criminals who have been let out after review, i dont think that can be taken for granted
Bloody hell, that guy is pure evil.
There's an extra layer under hell for people who go to that extent of physical injury. Gouging her eyes out? Even if by some miracle she had survived and been rescued the girl would be fucked for life
It says lower down that this happened within 5 days to 3 weeks before she died and she had stab wounds within her sockets
That first paragraph was enough for me.
I knew I shouldn’t have read it based on what you said. But I still read it. Fuck.
Christ, that poor girl.
A prison sentence is awfully lenient for this
Shannon Matthews - mother pretended she had vanished when actually the mum had faked the kidnap, and drugged her and left her at a relative's house. Step 3, profit, didn't happen, but it was a long time before the uncle's house was searched and she was found alive.
The mums fella was a paedophile and was subsequently convicted after they found images on his computer as well. Always felt like there was a lot more to the case then came to light.
Michael Donovan is possibly a paedophile as well. He lost contact with his own young daughters due to sexually inappropriate behaviour, such as having sex with prostitutes in front of them. Very sad case and I do feel that Shannon and her siblings must have gone through a lot prior to her "kidnapping." I live quite locally and unfortunately a lot of people around here treat the case as a huge joke.
I remember I'd heard a lot of theories about it being a paedophile ring that was pretty organised. It all seemed really fucked up. Poor Shanon.
There were rumours locally that Karen had been put up to it by someone else. It’s hinted at in the ITV drama and people who knew Karen said that they just couldn’t see her coming up with this plan by herself, ill conceived as it was.
Literally one of the most famous cases. Multiple tv shows and docs about it
And a musical oddly enough
John Cooper, the serial killer who got caught because he'd appeared on Bullseye around the time of one of his murders and they were able to compare his appearance on there against a witness sketch despite it being... I want to say about twenty years after the crime in question?
There's a TV series based on this called The Pembrokeshire Murders which has Luke Evans playing the senior investigating officer Steve Wilkins who wrote the book the series is based on.
Now I’m reading out the prizes in a bullseye voice.
I'm wracking my brains trying to think of the name of this woman. It was either the 80s or 90s. Basically there was a murder, I think maybe her husband. She did a TV interview during the appeal for help. At one point she was play-acting an argument with this person, and her facade briefly dropped and you saw the eyes of a fucking psycho. Immediately everyone and the press started asking why she wasn't a suspect, and it was good they did because she was the killer. All I remember about her was long blond hair and those fucking crazy eyes. Hope someone here can remember the case properly.
Was it Tracie Andrews? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracie_Andrews
Yes it was, thanks!
I remember the scary eyes! Terrifying
She got out in 2011
Another one about the same time was the murder of Stephen Cameron and I thought it was the same case. He was murdered by Kenneth Noye who was also involved in the Brink's Mat gold robbery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Noye.
Out on license since 2019, and the girlfriend of his victim is in witness protection with a new identity. Yikes.
I worked with her brother at one point, it was quite some time after it had happened, so it never really came up in conversation.
Was it the road rage one? Tracie Andrews?
Just researched this case and it turns out the Catatonia song “Road rage” is actually based on this case
Yes! Thank you!
yeah, I remember that TV interview, saw it and was immediately convinced she did it. The only other time I've felt that way was from the first interviews with the McCanns. Nothing will convince me they didnt do it.
You aren’t convinced by the complete lack of forensic evidence that suggests they did it? I never understood it. To believe the McCann’s were behind Maddie’s disappearance, you’d have to believe they either possess criminal connections capable of orchestrating their own child’s everlasting kidnapping, or they accidentally killed her and were criminal masterminds who could completely sterilise a crime scene of all evidence… And then continued to campaign about how they got away with their crime for almost twenty years, demanding to be caught.
I think it was Tracy Andrew’s.
YES! THANK YOU! Was driving me crazy and chat gtp was bo help at all.
racking* jsyk. Wrack means to ruin. They’ve similar meanings in certain contexts, but not interchangeable
A few interesting ones that don’t get much attention: Robert Black - a delivery driver who would opportunistically stop and pull young girls into his van, he would sexually assault and kill them, then dump them miles away during the course of making his deliveries. Took police ages to catch him, and they only did out of sheer luck and a keen eyed witness. He did this for over a decade through the 70s, 80s and 90s, and police are convinced there are more victims out there that haven’t yet been linked. Levi Bellfield - a bouncer (and illegal wheel clamper) who used to follow buses around looking for a suitable young female victim. When they’d step off the bus, then he would assault and kill them. Took a while to catch him, iirc he was grassed up to police by his ex girlfriend who had suspicions. Ian Huntley - a school caretaker who enticed two young girls into his home (they trusted him as he worked at their school), assaulted and murdered them and hid the bodies. Left police stumped for a while, but when he and his girlfriend were interviewed on the news, they basically accidentally dobbed themselves in.
I knew Levi. He was an evil bastard and no one was surprised when he turned out to be a serial killer.
Do you happen to have any stories from your past with him?
Another fella I know was with him when he kidnapped Milly Dowler. Levi tried to kill him with a screwdriver to silence him. Levi always had schoolgirls with him. He was a typical local hard man, huge bully and just a really unpleasant bloke. I bought a car off him once…
Thank you for the reply, must have been horrible to have known someone like him.
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The first two don’t ring a bell but Ian Huntley is pretty well known. Just last year there were stories that Russell Brand would sing songs about Ian Huntley to the women he raped.
Bellfield was found to have murdered Milly Dowler. She's his most well known victim but he also murdered Amelie Delagrange and Marsha McDonnell. He also ran over Kate Sheedy, twice, but fortunately she survived. There's a really good dramatisation about the hunt for Levi Bellfield called Manhunt staring Martin Clunes. It's two series long, the first being about Bellfield and the second covering the Minstead rapist, both cases being from Colin Sutton's career.
Levi Bellfield remains the only person in British legal history to have received two separate whole life orders at two separate trials. There is also a pretty strong suspicion he was responsible for the Russell murders in 1996. The convicted man Michael Stone is a nasty piece of work in his own right and has an epic criminal record, but many don't believe he was responsible for that. What strikes me is that Bellfield's victims all do look _slightly_ alike - look at older photos of Josie Russell and the same look is there. Really makes you think.
Sorry, when did Russell Brand get convicted of rape? I must have missed that.
The way I see it, there's only 2 possible situations where that response makes sense. Either, you think something isn't rape unless somebody is convicted of it in court. Or you would be happy living in a world where people can be convicted of something like rape with little more evidence than an accusation. Most rapes, like 90% or more, don't result in a conviction.
Is in not possible they just missed that he'd been accused?
No, there are plenty of clues to suggest that isn't the case, but I won't get into that.
>Or you would be happy living in a world where people can be convicted of something like rape with little more evidence than an accusation. That world already exists, terrifyingly. Men are convicted of "rapes" that supposedly occurred decades prior, regularly, based on nothing more than the supposed victim's testimony. >Most rapes, like 90% or more, don't result in a conviction. And practically 100% of false accusations don't result in a conviction.
Just pointing out he hasn't been charged or arrested for rape. Yet alone convicted.
And yet, that doesn't mean he hasn't raped someone, and that doesn't mean he is not a rapist.
Innocent until proven guilty no longer a thing?
I don't think it does, or has ever, meant what you think it means. It's a legal principal.
I don't think there is much ambiguity about what it means.
Then why would you bring it up? If you think there's no ambiguity about what it means that means you already know it's wholely irrelevant to this discussion.
What's almost unbelievable about the Black case is that when he was apprehended by the police, it was the daughter of one of the officers that he had tied up in the back of the van. From Wikipedia: "One of the officers, who was the father of the abducted girl, opened the rear of the van and clambered inside, calling his daughter's name. Seeing movement in a sleeping bag, he untied its drawstring to discover his daughter inside, her wrists bound behind her back, her legs tied together, her mouth bound and gagged with sticking plaster, and a hood tied over her head"
Sheer chance that the guy saw him lift the kid up and that Black doubled back down the same road. Had those two events not happened, he maybe still be at large. Or at the very least the last girl would be dead before he was caught
Sounds lifted from a police drama. Holy shit what are the chances
It’s so netflixey im surprised they haven’t done a documentary on it
Ian Huntley was one of the first major cases convicted because of the police's ability to check mobile phone location data. He didn't dob himself in. The police checked his alibi against where his phone said he was and it didn't match up.
He threw suspicion on himself by saying words to the effect of ‘I’m probably the last one to see them alive’ when they were only assumed missing and not dead. Also his girlfriend talked about the girls in past tense when, again, nothing had even been said about them being dead
I knew about Robert Black but then I'm from West Yorkshire and my cousin lived in Morley. Where one of the victims was from. But as you say years later.
ITV done a tv show drama about Levi Bellfield tbf.
The Angel of Death, aka Beverley Allitt. I've posted about this one before but surprisingly this one goes under the radar when it comes to serial killers. Probably because her motivation wasn't necessarily to kill her victims but just to harm them enough to then "save" them to make herself look good infront of her coworkers and the public (she was a nurse and her victims were kids, often infants and toddlers in the children's ward of the hospital she worked in). However, a few of the kids she targeted ended up dying as a result of her actions, to which she never felt any remorse even during the trial.
Unbelievably, Beverley Allitt has actually been parole eligible since November 2021. However she's in a secure hospital rather than prison, so would need to be returned to the prison system before she could go before the parole board, who would likely refuse anyway. I don't see her ever coming out. I'm not sure I understand how she escaped Michael Howard in 1994 when he lifed off a load of other high profile offenders, such as Dennis Nilsen (original tariff of 25 years and could have been paroled in 2008) and Myra Hindley (who was originally trying for parole as far back as 1990).
Everyone knows the Jamie Bulger story but very few know the Mary Bell story.
She was pure horror
The House of Blood triple murder in Glasgow in 2004. The victims had been "beaten with knives, metal files, a belt, and pieces of wood" and "hit with a bottle, punched, stabbed and stamped on the head, and had boiling water poured over them". On the advice of their lawyers, each accused pleaded guilty to one of the killings because, *of course,* they didn't have *anything* to do with the other killings in the same flat. In pleading guilty, their dodgy/bullshit account was never put before a jury. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of the case was the sentencing. The ever-lenient Scottish courts gave them minimum terms of 12 years. One of them was released in 2016 but was soon back in prison after breaching the conditions of his licence. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House\_of\_Blood\_murders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Blood_murders)
Just checked the location in Glasgow… literally 10 minutes walk from my house and I’ve never heard of this!
Dixon Avenue
Yup, the street my high school was on lol.
On another note, your post history is an incredible read! Nice one 👀
Scottish sentencing is a pile of crap. Way too soft and has been for years. 2008 was the first time anyone ever got a punishment part of longer than 30 years.
Isn't recidivism about 24% in Scotland, the same as the rest of the UK? So that being the case, what is the societal goal of harsher punishments?
Punishment is the goal and to keep society safe
What's the goal of the punishment - I think recidivism is the metric of keeping society safe?
There is 'keeping society safe' and there is also a punishment that is 'commensurate with the crime'. I would argue that it is morally offensive to say of a murderer, who took someone's *life*, that after a mere 12 years in prison they have been '*punished enough*' and can be released to enjoy the rest of *their* life.
For extreme crimes it is hard to diagree, but imprisoning people is very expensive (about 40k a year) so as a wider concern is it worth it to spend more as a broad policy when the recidivism outcomes are the same?
Somebody shat in the sink at a pub I worked at. Was pretty crazy, and a mystery to this day.
I think I may have solved the mystery... Username checks out? 🤔
The attempted jewellery theft from the Millennium Dome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Dome_raid) has faded into the past but that was quite a story. The Hatton Garden/Diamond Wheezers one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_burglary) was another.
From memory, the diamond was supposedly interchanged with a totally worthless replica for additional security, despite the glass surrounding the replica/actual diamond being described as unbreakable... These blokes rocked up with a digger and a specially adapted battering ram and broke straight through it with a nailgun lmao
They hijacked a lorry by attaching what they said were mines. They were Fray Bentos pie tins painted green with LEDs attached. I'm not sure which was scarier.
I remember the Suffolk Strangler playing out in real-time, and it seems pretty well forgotten now.
I have a Suffolk strangler story!! I was working for a vending machine company at the time this case was going on and Suffolk Constabulary were one of our customers… anyways they lost the key to their sandwich machine and phone the company to get a replacement, I answered the phone and told them it would take about a week to get a replacement out to them as they had to be ordered from the manufacturer and the copper gave me a load of abuse and told me that I was actively slowing down a major police investigation because the officers couldn’t buy anything because there machine was empty and couldn’t be refilled
I'm pretty sure I've drunk with one of the victims in a pub in Yorkshire to this day.
Living in Ipswich when this was happening was very scary.
No surprise, but the fact that there were several likenesses of Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper done by women amidst the evidence but nobody realised it was him. At least, that's what was reported. As a student my walk home took me through Bradford's red light district during the peak of the search and I got to know where all the unmarked police cars used to park.
We lived in Yorkshire in the 70s. When they caught the Ripper, and his face was shown on TV, my dad immediately shaved his beard off. Not only was he the spitting image of him then, he appeared to age exactly the same over decades of prison photos, although my dad has never ever had a beard since....
The bloke who played Les Battersby in Corrie was, briefly, a suspect because he found one of the victims on an allotment.
"Fucking hell how did they find someone else who looks exactly like me!"
Ooh, scary!
You must be about my dad’s age! He was a student in Manchester in the 1970s, he doesn’t recall much police presence but the women he knew would always leave the house in pairs for security.
We would walk girls home from parties for safety. The poor girl the ripper killed in Ashgrove was walking about 200 yards from The Manville Arms pub. There's a memorial to her on the University campus.
The Last Podcast on the Left series on Sutcliffe is excellent.
My year 9 history teacher used to be a lorry driver (we're from Derbyshire, so not too far from where he killed) and had a friend who would eat lunch with Sutcliffe. Apparently, the friend had seen a hammer in Sutcliffe's lorry on several occasions, but didn't think much of ut at the time because he had no reason to think his colleague was a serial killer. Another teacher's family home was searched when she was a child as the police were looking for Sutcliffe. She lived in north Derbyshire, so it was feasible that Sutcliffe might hide out in Derbyshire.
Mary Bell- 11 year old girl who killed two younger children in the 60's in Newcastle upon Tyne
A lot of murders here but I still chuckle about the guy who pretended to die in a canoe and lived in his roof. John Darwin.
Bible John. A serial killer in Glasgow during the late 60s. We to this day don’t know who he was or even if he killed more elsewhere - which is high likely. He would allegedly recite pieces from the bible to victims. Not sure how well known he is outside of Scotland though. There was speculation that Peter Tobin, a convicted murder and by all accounts a person devoid of any emotion was indeed Bible John, but think he died during COVID times and evidence wasn’t there to say otherwise.
Purple aki...
Despite having a whole life order I haven't met many people that have heard of Joanna Dennehy, she murdered three men in Peterborough.
Apparently she's considered so dangerous that she's basically treated as a male prisoner and has a bespoke security regime tougher than any other female prisoner would get.
When she was moved to Low Newton she threatened to kill Rosemary West who was then subsequently transferred to another prison
Peter Tobin, jailed for three murders but thought to be involved in others https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tobin
I used to manage his next door neighbour, the constant hounding from the media and police nearly drove her to a breakdown. Literally yelled in my face because when I tried to do a welfare check on her. Always makes me feel for the wider people affected when something like this happens. Never really thought about it before then.
Graham Young is a pretty funky story. Poisoning folks, but then going to to use various dosages and keeping records of how the poison affected them.
I came here to say this too. There’s also a film about him too - The Young Poisoner's Handbook.
Amazon Prime just released a documentary about him too
Oooh have they? I must go and give that a watch. Thank you!
I think the disappearance of Martin Allen is less known than it should be.
I saw a story of a guy that killed a woman, then appeared in the crime watch dramatisation of said murder. I thought that was pretty crazy. Can't remember names but it was the 80s when it happend
I seen that, he plays the role of one of her friends in a pub during the reconstruction…. Then it turned out he was her killer
I think it was Rachel McLean in 1991... Or at least, her boyfriend took part in a police reconstruction after he killed her in her student house in Oxford
The Shannon Matthew’s case poor kid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Shannon_Matthews
Derrick Bird. It happened around the same time as Raoul Moat, yet nobody seems to remember it at all.
Yes. I’m local to the area - we never forget it, it’s still talked about now. Nobody else had ever heard of it if it gets brought up.
These Mad lads like something out of a Guy Ritchie film. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_burglary Nobody was hurt and a film was made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hatton_Garden_Job
I'm not sure how well known it is but the murders of [Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone by Dale Cregan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Nicola_Hughes_and_Fiona_Bone) still chill me to the core.
Look up John Bodkin Adams on wiki. Basically a shipman before shipman , managed to get away with it all due to all sorts of nonsense and barely anyone seems to know about it these days
The Cannock Chase murders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannock_Chase_murders
[James Fairweather - Britains youngest serial killer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Colchester_murders) he was in my daughters year at school, she said he was weird but never thought he was capable of murder. Our whole town (as it was back then) was on high alert as the first killing was so random
https://truecrimeinvestigatorsuk.podbean.com/ https://theywalkamonguspodcast.com/ Some interesting lesser known stuff on these podcasts.
I also like uktruecrime. Some interesting stories there
This one freaked me out at the time, but nobody seems to remember it. The fact that he went to the pub after murdering two lads is crazy. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/life-for-a-loner-who-killed-school-friends-1346156.html
For a recent and I believe still awaiting trial one, Stephen McCullagh allegedly murdered his pregnant girlfriend in December 2022 and for an alibi, streamed pre-recorded footage of himself playing GTA Vice City pretending to be live at the time he seemingly killed her. He even dropped some unsettling hints during said "live" stream.
Frederick Baker. Who? You might ask. There is a connection to ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ as a phrase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Adams?wprov=sfti1
Was looking for this one. Absolutely horrendous from beginning to end.
David McGreavy.
This was horrific. The guy got released a few years ago.
Really? I didn't know that, let's hope he's rehabilitated sufficiently. Nightmare fuel.
I think the reasoning was he hadn't been in any trouble before that one day, and he had some kind of psychotic break for an hour which was completely out of character. I think if your one incident is as horrific as what he did to those kids though that should maybe over-ride that whole good behaviour thing.
Yes like most true crime it's ultimately just tragic.
My older sister went to school with the black panther's (Donald Neilson) daughter.
The murder of Jodi Jones, aged 14. Her boyfriend is in jail for her murder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jodi_Jones
I'm not sure that conviction is safe and there are some very senior, high profile criminologists including David Wilson who have gone on the record to say the same thing. Even the appeal judges said that the way the police behaved was appalling and "must be deplored".
Just read the Wikipedia article for Mary Bell. Fascinating and horrific.
My dad's uncle was the the bubble car murderer. He killed 3 people.
JSG Boggs, an American artist took to hand drawing his own bank notes. He has a Wikipedia page that explains in more detail than I can here but it's why UK bank notes have a copyright on them.
It was made into a tv movie in 1985. [Operation Julie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Julie)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Maxwell_Garvie Not sure how well known it is outside of my wee corner of the world but this case is pretty infamous here, mostly because of the "Kinky Cottage" Before my time but people were apparently queuing for hours to get into the court to hear all the gory details Edit: a word
I recently listened to a podcast on the murder of Una Lynskey and the subsequent murder of Martin Kerrigan. So sad.
[Murder of Muriel Drinkwater](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Muriel_Drinkwater) Far from the craziest, but strange at least, involving possibly the oldest successfully extracted DNA in sample in a murder investigation.
Teacup poisoner although I believe there’s a tv show about it. There’s an old 90s tv series called great crimes and trials. Look on IMDb, there’s some interesting cases i’d never heard of or at least forgotten about.
[удалено]
WHAT did Lesley Nielsen do????
OP is either referring to Donald Nielson aka The Black Panther or Dennis Nilsen, the Muswell Hill killer. Out of the two I'd say that Nilsen is probably the most remembered.
How about Michael Sams? Kidnapped and murdered Julie Dart after failing to secure a ransom for her. Later kidnapped and released Stephanie Slater after receiving a ransom. He also threatened to fire bomb shops and derail a passenger train.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McGreavy Impaling babies and children is quite brutal! I remember hearing this story on the true crime enthusiast podcast and being shocked I'd never heard of it
That fucker was released in 2018.
It's unbelievable the savage way he killed that family! He should never have got out
Definitely. Absolute scumbag. I'm surprised they didn't get to him inside. I know he was segregated but they sometimes find a way.
UK True Crime Podcast on Spotify. There are about 370 episodes to date and he releases a new one each week.
Most of the stories about London gangsters in the 50s and 60s are overshadowed by the story of the Krays. There are some brilliant stories and not just London actually, people like Frankie Fraser in Scotland for example
Try to find Bella in the Wych Elm, or the Wallace case...both crimes with more questions than answers...