Born To Kill? Experts Delve Inside The Minds Of Britain's 5 Worst Serial Killers | Absolute Crime

foreign Island would terrorize London's gay community it is one of the most horrific and demanding murder inquiries for years over three months five innocent men would die at the hands of this cold and calculating killer he said the man he'd killed was gay why are you doing this Colin Island would be christened the gay Slayer and had set himself a unique goal he makes a New Year's resolution to himself that he's going to become a serial killer Ireland would snuff out the lives of his unsuspecting victims in a series of cruel and bizarre crimes seeing that let us there was just one of horror never seen anything like it before or since so was the gay Slayer made into a monster or was he born to kill the reasonable human being most of the time there is that side of my character that is negative it's quite cold and calculating [Music] foreign [Music] this is the confession of Colin Island I strangled him a little bit of cold in 1993 he would take the lives of five men in a killing spree that frustrated police and struck fear into London's gay community your advice to the gay community tonight yes quite simple be careful don't pick up a stranger don't go out on one night stands it's dangerous you could be next the methods and motives for his evil actions would not be revealed until this Frank and disturbing interview I went and got a plastic bag the kitchen and I stuck it over his head Ireland's life and crimes give us a unique insight into the mind of a serial killer and the 40-year journey that led him to make the cruelest of New Year's resolutions I think in some moods are quite happy to burn the world down as possible Colleen Island was born on March the 16th 1954 and from day one his life would be full of disappointment and failure Colin Island's father wanted no part in bringing up a child and left before he was even born Ireland never knew his biological father and I think that's quite an important thing to note because we have to remember what England was like in the early 1950s where that kind of birth out of wedlock would be regarded very badly by the local community his 17 year old mother was left with no money and no choice but to move back in with her parents in Myrtle Road Dartford his mother was a very poor person on a number of occasions um Ireland's mother would move him in the hope that she would be able to settle with him in other accommodation she appeared to be very much into wanting to give him something that was good wanting to make things good for him but it didn't work out [Music] Collin Island's formative years were an unhappy time filled with extreme hardship upheaval and poverty rent problems would sometimes lead to sudden moves I think he was probably really hurt by it I'm sure any child would be coming home from school and finding that their home is no longer their home and their mother is as moved off somewhere so we've got a young man whose pattern of early life is characterized by movement disruption and an anxiety that somehow he doesn't quite fit in and that there are people talking about him thank you in 1970 at the age of 16 Ireland fled to London where he began to hang around at an amusement arcade with an unsavory reputation we now know this is a particularly [Music] um disreputable Amusement arcade because it's targeted and frequented by pedophiles who will particularly Target young boys what I think we begin to see is Ireland's association with sexual subcultures most serial killers men who kill men are themselves gay most heterosexual serial killers kill women what often happens in a case like this is that Ireland himself may be homosexual or may have a strong aspect of homosexuality to his personality but can't accept it he doesn't want to accept that and so there's a part of him that he hates and by killing others he's sort of reassuring himself that he's not gay that's not part of his personality [Music] Ireland's later teens were also to prove turbulent and he began racking up an impressive criminal record spending many periods in and out of both Boston and prison I think in a list of about 50 or 30 Court appearances all relatively minor advantages to begin with TDA burglary deception he wasn't your gbh Merchant you know he wasn't your rapist he wasn't your armed robber in between stints of incarceration Ireland tries his hand at various jobs but none lasted one in particular though would yet again provide Ireland with a vital key to a specific Community later on in life I believe he was a bouncer on a gay club in one job it's almost impossible to determine whether or not he himself was gay what matters is Ireland's understanding of a number of gay sexual subcultures it was around 1981 when Colin met his first wife and whilst he was working as a security guard he befriended fellow worker Colin Brown he was the biggest guy now um it seemed pretty quiet then once we got to know each other then he started chatting and everything and that was when I started going to his flat in Holloway Colin's wife was in a wheelchair of Victoria he seemed like he goes over and that you know I mean he couldn't do it enough for her when I went there it was it was a pleasant home life you know what I mean I think it's quite interesting that his first wife is disabled and he instead can dominate her because he's providing a caring Service as he would see it Ireland had seemingly got his life on track and was doing all he could to be a respected member of the community he and another man would Patrol the local area where they were living we would go at late in the evening and we would have a torch in that and if there was anything that we saw that maybe wasn't we reported to the local police [Music] there's always the sense of a kind of perverted moral hierarchy a desire to be someone in a community and of course performing the role as an informal neighborhood patrol officer would give Ireland that sense of paying something back that sense of having some standing nevertheless the harmonious respectable life Ireland had constructed for himself crumbled just five years later after he was caught having an affair but no one could foresee the tragic and brutal consequences of Colin Island's turbulent youth criminal career and brushes with London's gay community in 1993 Colin Island would take the lives of five innocent gay men but what was his motive for murder was the man who became known as the gay Slayer Born To Kill Ireland had an unstable childhood and a failed marriage then in 1989 on a survival weekend in Devon he meets his second wife to be Janet Young Colin Island when I owned the globin Pub where I live and he came in as customer and he stood in the doorway dressed in camouflage a very impressive figure the conversation just stopped dead in the pub as he came in the door Janet quickly falls for the stranger although not everybody is immediately so keen on him my bar mate at the time she didn't like him at all she wore me off him right from the word to go she said no there's something not right but um I didn't feel that I felt he was ideal for me and my situation so he gradually moved in the customers didn't warn to Colin behind the bar and neither did he feel happy serving them he hated being behind the bar he wasn't really a very good mixer although he was friendly I think people in the pub found him a little bit scary because he was very tall big man he was with me for about three months before he asked me to marry him I wasn't sure that I wanted to get married but he said if we don't trust one another then what's the point of being together we had a small reception and a really fun day it fitted in really well my children were prepared to accept him being there he liked being with them I think it made him feel accepted and normal [Music] however four months into the marriage he proves that everything is far from normal Ireland drives Janet and the kids to her mother's home for the weekend they would never see each other again Ireland conforms to a classic psychopath always taking from somebody what he needs to have so as to continue in the lifestyle that he wants besides my character not all of me my only things I've been I've probably 60 70 quite the reasonable human being most of the time there is that side of my character that is negative that's quite cold and calculating Ireland now has Janet and the kids safely out of the way Ireland will go back to the pub and take money from the pub enough to set himself up again I was just shocked I didn't I didn't know what had happened to him I thought he'd been killed run over in hospital arrested with over ten thousand pounds of Janet's cash and their wedding photo album Colin abandons her and his life behind the bar of the globe Inn I realized he was probably just a con man all along and I fell for it and he was just looking for his opportunity to get what he could and go traveling to South End on sea Ireland once again begins to build a new life for himself in 1991 he applies to be a volunteer at a local homeless shelter the moment Colin arrived at the nice shelter as a volunteer I do remember because he's a very very large man and [Music] he stood in the doorway and just advised me that he'd been sent by another agency he was very passionate about the work that he did um probably more passionate than any of the other volunteers we had and he genuinely felt that he was paying Society back after having behaved in various ways that he himself omitted were were not very good for almost six months life at the shelter seemed to be providing Ireland with all he needed to lead a fulfilled existence but true to form it wasn't to last Colin was a very calm person but he was also a person that you felt immediately that you wouldn't want to upset other volunteers don't like his manner find him quite overbearing find him frightening volunteers and Ireland remain at loggerheads over the coming months until one final incident seals his fate the assistant manager came to me and felt that Colin's behavior on occasions wasn't appropriate and she was rather concerned about this that matter was taken to the committee and they decided then that it probably would be a good idea to let Colin go he felt that his dismissal was unfair and unjustified he also felt that he he had given back something to society and basically that hadn't been recognized once again he finds himself rejected and on the fringes of society for Colin Island It's the final straw I believe it that getting dismissed from the knife shelter was crucial to his future it was an absolutely crucial part of what happened to him and why he went on to do what he did to become the somebody he's always craved to be Ireland will have to try a different tag [Music] he had read a book written by Robert wrestler called whoever fights monsters and therefore Island says he's going to become famous he's going to become a somebody in the community at that point he makes a New Year's resolution to himself that he's going to become a serial killer [Music] on the 8th of March 1993 Colin Island arrives at the colhern pub tonight he will begin his campaign of violence back in the early 90s the colhern was hugely popular with the gay community and in particular the center of a thriving s m scene colhern back in the early 1990s of an evening would be absolutely heavy and you'd have people in here clientele who would identify whichever sexual proclivity was was there to their taste which made targeting by pollen Island extremely easy there were a whole series of signals if you were into this you'd wear this color handkerchief if you were into that you'd wear another one if you had it in one pocket or another most heterosexual men would feel uncomfortable going into a gay bar and speaking to someone who was gay getting them to come with you you would have to have some degree of comfort or experience in doing that and so it's his understanding of that subculture which gives him the passport to enter areas in London which were quite secret and it's his understanding of that having that passport which allows him to kill repeatedly Time After Time in a unique insight into a Serial Killer's mind Colin Island explains during his police confession how the horrific events unfolded that evening when he killed and tortured his innocent victim s I felt if I was approached five one's a group type that tended to trigger these things and made item is masochistic men um I felt that at the time I felt there was a likelihood that I would kill it's not long before Ireland is approached by theater director Peter Walker they strike up a conversation and traveled back to Walkers flat together [Music] you know I tied into the bed before killing Peter Walker Ireland demands money from his now helpless victim forcing Walker to reveal his bank card and pin number by burning his testicles with a lighter I went and got a plastic Bay kitchen carry it back and I stuck it over his head [Music] as Dawn approached Colin Island left Walkers flat withdrew 200 pounds from a cash machine and returned to his life in South End Ireland was looking forward I imagine to reading about the death of Peter Walker in the in the papers for it to be on the news whether the it was the local news or the national news and of course when his murder isn't when Peter's murder doesn't make front page news in fact isn't even reported upon Ireland takes it upon himself to do two things first he phones the Samaritans and secondly he phones the Sun newspaper I've personally taken thousands upon thousand phone calls I've never taken a phone call like that the guy sounded very normal very ordinary and was just started talking about two dogs locked in a flat and I kept politely saying I'm really sorry but it's not a story for the Sun and then he just suddenly dropped this bombshell that the reason he was actually phoning us was that he wanted the dogs to be freed because he'd killed their owner he didn't know it at the time but the call malinsky had just received marked the beginning of a vicious Killing Spree by one of Britain's coldest and most calculating serial killers he said the man he killed was gay and that he was he was interested in kinky sex was the way he put it I tried to keep him talking to get as much information as I could [Music] the police were alerted and detective Martin Finnegan rushed to the scene the door had been opened by the caretaker so we got in without having to break any Doors Down the dogs are in the lounge and the bedroom was in disarray as if it had been man saying the sort of thing you'd expect from a burglary it soon becomes apparent the phone call is no hoax before them lies the dead body of Peter Walker the body was discovered in in the bed and we knew that he had died as another person's hand the one other thing that the the murderer had mentioned to me on the phone he said he trust him up like a chicken is what he said to me on the phone he had a condom on his nose condom in his mouth he had two teddy bears placed on his chest in what was sort of 69 position from the postmortem we found out he died xfixia in halung's own vomit so he'd been suffocated at some point and we knew that ligatures have been removed after he was dead so we're dealing with somebody who's a cool customer there the mysterious caller may have wanted to alert police to his crimes but that didn't mean he wanted to be caught he had left no clues and seemingly had committed the perfect murder with the media finally reporting on Peter Walker's death and an investigation underway Ireland lies low during the following weeks in most serial killing sprees there is usually a wider gap between the first and the second murder usually the serial killer in that first murder gains psychologically what it is that he wants to gain out of that murder and therefore doesn't feel the need to kill again particularly quickly the police struggled to find conclusive evidence to catch Walker's murderer and for the time being the investigation stalls So Satisfied he has got away with it Ireland returns to London to continue on his horrifying quest to become a serial killer foreign having made a New Year's resolution to become a serial killer Colin Island had already brutally murdered his first victim and was now ready to kill again moving one step closer to his goal on May 28 1993 Christopher Dunn a 37 year old librarian approached Colin Island at the bar of the colhern Christopher Dunn is also somebody who is gay interested in sadomasochism is also somebody who frequents the colehern pub the pub where Ireland is going to have a passport to because he understands the codes the subculture in his confession Ireland would reveal just what a terrifyingly cold and calculated killer he'd become and I've gone quite prepared this time to kill them and I bought a very inexpensive handcuffs I was carrying small torch a magnet and a couch and a couple of other things a lot knife which is like a multi-tool device and I've got a book a pain and I was going to have him repeat his pin number um and uh I strangled him a little bit of cold [Music] um on both of those occasions I stayed with the police until six half or six in the morning that was a vulnerable time because I still had stuff on me um that would have been a bit you know a bit awkward Republic stopped by policeman as Dawn approached Colin Island left the home of the now dead Christopher Dunn on the 28th of May the body of Christopher Dunn was found in his home at Whetstone again this the scene was very staged he was lying in a um harness naked except for the harness eat suffered literature strangulation even though before them lay a corpse at the time police didn't suspect Foul Play and I understand that that inquiry led the police to believe that was a sex game that had gone tragically wrong and there was no suggestions to believe there's anything other than pure accident and it was treated as such it was not treated as a murder with two separate detective teams investigating the Walker and Dunn murders the similarities between the cases were overlooked six days later and Ireland was back cruising the culhern he had seemingly got away with murder for a second time and was looking for a new victim this time it was 33 year old Perry Bradley who caught his eye Ireland had to persuade Bradley that um that he should allow Ireland to tie him up we went back to the flight [Music] and I don't think it was so much into the assignment that I said it's going to be a long night I said I'll suggest you get some sleep if you can and I just sat and listened to the radio and he actually went to sleep and while he was asleep I told him with the news and he already struggled Ireland again sat up all night with just a corpse for company to quite a degree I think made me a kind of security has been gone [Music] these bodies for sort of like um five or six hours on some closings watching gradually sort of get blotchy as they do and cold and it wasn't it wasn't something that I don't think I could cope with to be honest with him to deal with it too well in his quest to commit the perfect murder Ireland treated the crime scenes carefully revealing during his police confession how he had emulated a scene out of the TV police drama the bill swell off the bill and that was taking the batteries out of the torch and wiping Brits off of those and put them back in the clubs on um if you want to burn that program um when Colin Island left the crime scene he took with him every single thing that he touched so he doesn't want to leave blood semen hair fibers fingerprints as Ireland travels back to South End on sea he disposes of incriminating items he removed from the Home of Dunn by throwing them out of the moving train where they would blend in with rubbish on the track below Colin Island's New Year's resolution was coming together he was fast approaching the serial killer status which in his mind would catapult him into a world of infamy and repute Colin contacted me after he'd left the night shelter and asked if he could pop around for a cup of tea occasionally just to keep in touch he told himself and my wife at the time that he was going on Survival technique weekends we subsequently found out that that wasn't the case he was going to London to murder people on the 7th of June just three days after Christopher Dunn's murder Ireland again traveled by train from South End to London where he made his way to a familiar haunt the kolhan for Colin Island to go back to the colhern again just shows his degree of confidence he had in getting away with it he clearly established a formula it identified the secretive lifestyle of the clientele that frequented the coal Hearn and with some confidence could say that his approach worked 33 year old Andrew Collier Faithfully approached Colin Island they struck up a conversation and soon left for Collier's flat there Ireland would engage in his most shocking Behavior yet [Music] when he eventually got into the flats at Andrew Collier's place the scene that met us there was just one of horror never seen anything like it before or since Andrew Collier was laying on his back with the cat draped across his chest he was naked in his mouth with two condoms and on the cat's tail was a condom and his penis had been put inside the cat's mouth and closed if you can try and picture that it was just so so strange not until Ireland's eventual confession did investigators truly understand why he had left the scene in such a bizarre way I felt real anger towards him because he thought there was going to be a normal sexual encounter which there wasn't going to be the man had eyes I was on a sort of almost like a roller coaster thing and I I just I felt you know there was there was more I was doing you know while searching Andrew Collier's flat Ireland discovers medical documents that reveal Collier is HIV positive he therefore as a consequence of that knowledge strangles Andrew Collier as cat and he's going to engage in post-death behaviors in ways which are frankly quite disgusting Ireland is trying to buy the Public's Sympathy by saying this man was not only gay and interested in say domesticism he was also HIV positive [Music] Colin Island had now brutally murdered four gay men but there was still no media outcry he was being denied recognition for his hard work and Ireland could keep his silence no longer Ireland again injects himself into the police investigation he's going to phone the police when Colin spoke to my colleague against the Audi officer Battersea he wanted to know why we'd stop the investigation into Peter Walker he was losing out on Fame and notoriety so he named all of the victims and was quite adamant about the fact that he had killed all four what are you doing this but why in particular homosexuals Colin said I'm going to keep going to them courts I'll do another one I've always dreamed of doing the perfect murder the impact on police was absolutely immense this was a huge inquiry now the police begin one of the biggest investigations in recent history determined to catch the killer it was not only targeting gay men but also taunting the police as he did so it is one of the most horrific and demanding murder inquiries for years Scotland guards suddenly went into this dramatic mildly absurdly dramatic midnight press conference and this dramatic announcement the serial killer of gay men was at large rise to the gay community tonight yes quite simple be careful don't pick up a stranger don't go out on one night stands it's dangerous you could be next [Music] by the middle of June 1993 despite the police's best efforts Ireland has already struck again taunting the police with yet another phone call Ireland suggests they look for a corpse at a house fire [Music] eventually a phone call came in from the police down in lewisham saying that there's a flat with blackened windows and smoke billowing out and inside was the body of a man who turned out to be manual to his fifth victim is a Maltese Chef called Emmanuel spiteri and Ireland is going to make a mistake because he goes back yet again to the coherent Pub to talk to you man I'll swim on the Tuesday he said it to me a couple of times in the car and he was interested physically we went via a couple of different trying Journeys two is flat I I put a dose around his neck I don't have reached a point where I'd I can just stop myself anyway it was almost like a steamroller effect or whatever again um all the same methodology was used the ligatures the handcuffs they were all removed after the murder but this time before he left he stacked all the bedding and clothing in the center of them and set fire to it again it was to heighten that impact on the investigators I'm sure that's what it was for if you look at the crime machines from number one to number five when he set fire to the house to spitelli's house this was building up so he was he said he was on a roller coaster and I'm sure he wasn't a roller coaster but now the once careful killer was getting sloppy he'd become uncontrollably addicted to murder police hunting the killer of five homosexual men in London have been appealing for help at a big gay rights demonstration in the capital Colin Richardson the then editor of Gay Times remembers the effect the police investigation had on the gay community I vividly recalled the pride festival that year tens of thousands of homosexuals streamed through Central London in their annual gesture of Pride and identity but this year it was against the somber background police and stewards handed out thousands of leaflets appealing for information about the serial killer who's murdered five times and is terrorizing London's gay community there really was a palpable sense of fear the Press of course were making it much worse um I don't remember which paper it was but one of them had a headline which was fairy Liquidator another a lot of them latched onto the phrase gay Slayer that's a bottom line is that we need help to catch him now the gay community was on high alert but despite the massive police hand underway Colin Island was still at Large at the beginning of 1993 Colin Island made a cold and twisted New Year's resolution to become a serial killer six months later he has murdered five men in London and has so far managed to evade the huge police investigation that has been mounted against him [Music] I believe it was around about June that year um Colin came in he sat down we were watching TV uh the news was on and there was a report about the uh the the killings in London and Colin turned to me and said you know what do you think of this thing and my reply was oh there's another Nutter on the loose had no idea that it was him [Music] with the gay community on high alert and a profile of the killer beginning to emerge the police get a break they so desperately need from a witness via the London gay policing group Gallup he gave us Vital Information around what he saw on the night in question that switali was killed he said it was a trading cross that he saw he saw them both together that they sat on a train there was two girls on the train as well so on the train journey down the Heather Green from Charlene cross the Witnesses on the carriage on the train gave us an excellent effort and gave us a good description of spiteri and and using the witness information the police now know the route Ireland and spiteri took on their return journey home it's not long before they get a CCTV image of spiteri accompanied by a large man the footage and efit are both immediately made public s Ireland's former colleague remembers his friend's odd behavior on what was to be his last visit he came into the house it was an evening I believe it was a Sunday evening he was very anxious he'd be he behaved very strangely and we were really quite disconcerted by it made to feel rather uncomfortable and we really just wanted him to leave gave him a lift back to where he was living at the time and he was talking in the third tents talking very strangely he was he was muttering and mumbling and very uncomfortable to be around and we just wanted to get away from him basically [Music] Ireland began to realize that it wouldn't be long before someone identified him from the images in the media and decided he had to take action Colin Island at this stage perhaps the scene of it on the wall made contact to the police through solicitor he had a prepared statement where it said yes I was the man with spirit I did go to his home in Heather green but there was another man indoors I didn't want to threesome so I slept in the local churchyard and then came back to South End so what we did is um got some very fast cars down south end so he was actually arrested at the solicitors office finally the police are confident they have their man in custody but Ireland believes detectives have nothing to go on [Music] he never opened his mouth he stared unblinking at me the whole time it was very very unnerving only reaction I got was when I told him we had a fingerprint of his at Andrew Colliers during the Andrew Collier murder Ireland had made a massive mistake at some point during the evening of Collier's death there had been a disturbance outside the flat Ireland had gone to the window to see what was happening leaving behind a fingerprint we've been out here where the disturbance took place Drew Andrew Collier and Corona into the window and where caught an island left that fingerprint for police to find when he was confronted with the fingerprint evidence at the Andrew Collier scene that picture would have told the story of guilt to the jury I've got no doubt whatsoever because he was totally flummogast he he just couldn't believe that he had made a mistake whilst on remand Colin island has time to assess his situation he thought he'd been so careful not to leave any forensic evidence but the fingerprinted Andrew Collier's flat had been a blow the police are going to charge him with the murders of Andrew Collier and Emmanuel espateri but may not have enough evidence to charge him for the other three he was on remand I think for about four weeks when I think it it probably contemplated on where does he go now because it's falling out of the Limelight um and he hasn't got the label that he wanted as a serial killer because he's only been charged with two murders this just wasn't good enough for him so he informed the prison officers that he wanted to talk police he wanted to admit all five and that's exactly what he did and there he got his label as a serial killer Colin Island begins his full and chillingly honest confession to the murders of five men from London's gay community there's a clear narcissistic quality to Ireland he uh he wanted to take credit for this and he was very proud of what he did as are many of these uh serial killers they're very pleased with themselves [Music] when this comes to trial any Judge worth is sold is gonna find me guilty and he will imprison it and by studying so allow me to uh [Music] not offend again for some time [Music] Ireland's ultimate confession is simply because he wanted to achieve the goal that he set out to achieve through his December 1992 New Year's resolution he wanted to become famous during the interviews I think Colin Island had a certain amount of self-satisfaction that he was able to tell us even at that late stage things we didn't know only he could illuminate us into that and he did and I think that gave him a sense of um importance achievement possibly even superiority on the 20th of December 1993 at the Old Bailey Colin Island pleads guilty to the murder of all five men a serial killer who preyed on homosexuals has been jailed for life for murdering five men in London earlier this year the judge recommended that he never be released saying to take one human life is an outrage to take five is Carnage so what was it that drove Colin Island to kill a man who patrolled the streets of his neighborhood who helped out at a homeless shelter lots of people would see that he was a nice Colin Island who who worked at the shelter in south end and would never think anything of him like that it was another person it just really slightly done you know that's all I can say really what I knew most about his mind is that he he did like to be in control if you think about serial killers one of the things they have in their sense is that that they are helpful and kind they just are again mimicking what they see the world expecting them to do I often wonder whether Colin Island was born to kill or whether a result of this certainly early life now something must have happened a year two years before that to trigger in his mind that here he is I'm going to kill he wanted to achieve a goal that many serial killers want to achieve which is that they want status whatever the reason for Ireland's senseless murders in the end even he agreed he was a danger to the world Colin Island had snuffed out the lives of five innocent unsuspecting men on the 21st of February 2012 in prison he would die with the dignity he had denied his victims age 58 of natural causes Cromwell Street Gloucester England an ordinary house in an ordinary Street number 25 was the home of a local Builder and his wife bustling with children and topped up to the brim with Lodgers the only thing that distinguished number 25 from the others was the amount of people that came and went Fred West liked company he also liked to maim molest and murder but was this seemingly ordinary man driven to the slaughter of at least 12 women and children or was Fred West born to kill thank you [Music] foreign [Music] West was described by Richard Ferguson Prosecuting QC at the trial of Rosemary West as a man devoid of compassion consumed with sexual lust a sadistic killer and someone who adopted out of the human race the very epitome of evil but who was Fred West [Music] if you passed Fred West in the street you wouldn't give him a Second Glance you had a wife and had six children Red West was a comedian his neighbors would have told you that he was a very hard-working likable friendly chap on the face of it was a completely ordinary Builder handyman a very jovial fellow who got on well with everybody [Music] 10 with with flow of life even though he was profoundly abnormal many people would be taken in by him because he was plausible and Charming [Music] so the last thing in your mind is that he might actually Harbor terrible evil [Music] a great mystery of the whole thing is what drove them to do this you're talking about two people who literally but plumbed the depths of human depravity some people have the ambition to you know to become a great politician to to succeed in the world of Art he had the ambition to succeed in sadistic sexual homicide [Music] but on this act as a an amiable row but it was only to put up some kind of Disguise and underneath that look this monster [Music] someone may have evil written all over his face and yet people miss it Fred West's evil would be missed by very many people [Music] foreign Frederick Stephen West was born on the 29th of September 1941 in the rural Hereford Village of much Markle [Music] a tiny agricultural Community cut off from Metropolitan Life this rural Idol would be where the young West grew up foreign of six siblings Fred was a striking child with the shock of curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes but how did this blue-eyed boy turn into one of history's most vicious and heinous serial killers [Music] what kind of landscape obviously you can see a sense of freedom and he will have had a lot of freedom more freedom than most people would have had but then again this kind of landscape is also very brutal and what goes with it is the kind of activities he had such as clubbing to death rabbits to watch his mother shotgunning rats this kind of like physical and very kind of um harsh environments it's widely believed that Fred's father Walter was a child abuser and he seemed unashamed and unrepentant about his behavior Fred was very much the apple of his mother's eye and her love could be described as more than overprotective apparently for years they'd been having sort of sexual games together and the minute he was capable of doing anything more than that she initiated him he was also abused by his father and it was a family in which incest was taken fairly much as normal he was highly sexualized from a very young age and sex became very much part of his motivation [Music] he would talk constantly about sex Fred's School career was short and unproductive he left school at 14 barely able to read and write his IQ was later measured at just 80. the problem there obviously lies that lots and lots of doors are then closed and the doors that were open to Fred and his industrious possibly Attention Deficit Hyperactive traits would be channeled into things like chasing girls petty theft problematic Behavior violent little petty acts of violence and and possibly other activities that we don't yet know about this would have turned him into a Survivor a lad that would live off the land crude get by as I can get what I can that he would be like a fox and he didn't need good literacy skills to survive he could survive on his wits like many young boys West became fascinated by motorbikes he saved hard to buy his first machine but his pride and joy was soon to become a nightmare on the evening of November 28 1958 whilst West was riding along this road he collided with a girl riding in the opposite direction precise details of the accident remain a mystery but West suffered multiple injuries including a serious head wound he lay unconscious in hospital for seven days like many unfortunate children Frederick West did inherit certain brain abnormalities from his parents who had problems themselves this reached a very much of a crescendo on this very Road which not only caused Great damage to his body and the shortening of a leg but delivered a massive amount of damage to his head and therefore to his brain and the part of the brain that gets the head on particular damage is the frontal cortex here the frontal lobe which contains the elements of what makes us a moral person that will give you a sense of revulsion if that is a particularly horrific act now for Fred these were damaged so someone who was already a little bit Psychopathic suddenly had the brakes taken off completely and made him into a real danger to society French recovery was slow and humiliating his nose was broken he walked with a pronounced limp and now suffered from violent mood swings he did lose a lot of his good looks there was damage to his nose and other configurations and from being quite a charmer and and a crudely a good-looking lad in the village he lost a lot of that edge Fred compensated for the loss of his looks by taking a much more aggressive approach with the local girls if Fred wanted sex he effectively would um would rape young girls in that community it would have been very much a kind of grab and grope situation and he pretended then obviously to use girls for the only kind of comfort that really ever existed for Fred in his entire life and that was sex and control one girl Fred couldn't control was Catherine Costello better known as Rina she was a 16 year old prostitute who'd moved to Gloucester from her native Glasgow Fred married Rina despite her being five months pregnant with another man's child I think Fred saw Irene as certain elements of his mother he was a strong person who would control him and he was put in his place if you like for the first time probably in his life by a female but I don't think he was ever comfortable with her he was never really some someone that he could see as a soul mate she was really a mother substitute Charmaine West was born in the march of 1963 and was soon followed by a little sister Anne-Marie childhood for the two little girls was far from traditional Rena he had a very on and off and off sometimes they weren't sometimes he had both the children sometimes these children were in foster care occasionally Arena took the children mostly if they weren't in care they were with Fred Fred found a succession of young women to look after them it was a very um up and down Strange Life this turbulent relationship finally reached breaking point in 1965. Rina feared for her own safety and fled back to Scotland France had been happy to let her go but not the children and he'd already recruited 16 year old Anna McFall to act as their Nanny and at fall and Fred always maintained was the in his words the love of his life In fact when he was in prison awaiting trial before he committed suicide he wrote a great big sort of um catalog of his relationship with Emma for um which he entitled um I loved an angel but the angel was soon to fall when she became pregnant with West's child became effectively a problem to be afraid an obstruction who had to be removed it sounds extraordinary callous but Fred was the kind of man who if a woman presented a problem she effectively would be removed from his life Anna McFall was last seen in the July of 1967. Fred West would have thought that people were disposable because as far as he was concerned other people were instruments to be used so there would be no ethical boundaries he decided that he'd had enough of her and that she was a surplus tourist requirements and as cold blooded this may seem he destroyed her and buried her 27 years later the remains of Anna McFall were discovered in this field on the outskirts of Fred's home Village much Markle in herefordshire the body had been decapitated and dismembered and was found with the skeleton of her unborn child he would not have had the same sense of revulsion that you and I would have had of stripping the body and deciding how to dispose of it he would be very industrious about this and this would have set him apart from many many attempted killers and attempted serial killers in that he was very energetic very industrious about the way he went about things Anna McFall had been the last of the victims to be recovered but she'd been the first to die she'd signaled a turning point in the murderous career of Frederick West [Music] Fred West was just 12 years old when in November 1953 a young girl was born who was destined to be his partner in life and in death the young Rosemary West's childhood was tragically similar to that of Fred her mother Daisy suffered from both severe depression and the attentions of a violent schizophrenic husband her father was very very abusive to his daughters and the other daughters wouldn't tolerated and moved out in fact I think the mother moved out at one stage but from an early age he would have been having sex with her and she would be accepting it the relationship with the father continued after Fred and Rose got together and in fact Rose's father would turn up at Cromwell Street even after Rose had four children to have sex with her and then Fred would send her into the bedroom with Anne-Marie when Fred met Rose he recognized what one might call a soul mate and that's why he was attracted to her they are kind of interlocking Psychopathology and background so that they played off each other and their fantasies coincided probably [Music] Fred and Rose met in the quiet Village of Bishop's cleave gloucestershire England despite the age Gap they soon started a relationship and it was not long before 17 year old Rose was living with Fred and his two children Charmaine and Anne-Marie in their new home at 25 Midland Road Gloucester that the two Geralds sexually um probably almost from the off really probably saved Rose her life to start off with I think she could have easily become another victim uh she's using him for what she wants a little perks he's driving around in his calm and she's feeling much older she can tell her girlfriends at school or wherever it is on my boyfriend's older all the time learning from Fred who was a willing teacher and enjoying every minute of it this was the cocktail that was going to start to put the bomb together that would soon explode Rose was soon pregnant and gave birth to Heather Ann in October 1970. motherhood didn't come naturally this was very very new to Rose she was very young however she did like children but possibly not in the way that most adults would like children for Rose she'd always had a kind of learning disability and a slight intellectual Challenge and she found it much easier to sort of deal with small children and she didn't like the kind of conflict of being challenged so therefore she would treat children more as kind of dolls toys they were kind of still objectified don't remember asking her or whether she ever breastfed and she said oh no tits were for [ __ ] not for you know breastfeeding children so you know there was this thing that made me wonder about uh you know mother's milk it was something alien to Rose rose was a very very strict disciplinarian for all the the West children their upbringing was very very regimented they were taken off to school they were never ever encouraged to to make friends in the community Rose rule the the West children with a with an iron rod [Music] tragically the child that suffered the most was eight-year-old Charmaine sometime in the June of 1971 while Fred West was coming to the end of a nine-month prison sentence for theft Charmaine disappeared once Rose had killed her men then she is of course equally guilty so she could not claim just to be an unwilling accomplice once she's done that she has to continue this was as it were a shared experience it is incredibly bonding but in this case bonding in immorality because having disposed of a problematic challenging child which might have disrupted the relationship between Fred and Rose then as it were nothing could be ruled out in terms of eliminating other factors that could threaten their relationship one of these factors was charmaine's real mother Rina she came looking for her child and that I'm afraid sealed her fate because if you could not for Charmaine was not there Charmaine was dead the only solution was to murder Rina was last seen alive in the Autumn of 1971. her dismembered remains were found in letterbox field in much Markle Anna McFall already lay next door degraded and discarded by West for Frederick West this will have been his little playground this would be an area he was very familiar with an area that he probably played in as a child and it's an area that he can find readily it has practical reasons it has a tree it has a signpost and it can be found easily and he'd want that because he'd want to be able to control these corpses even though they were not alive he wants access he wants to feel that he can actually be part of this area and they are part of this area this is his private graveyard with Rina out of the way Fred was free to marry and he and Rose cemented their murderous relationship in the January of 1972. they moved across the park from Midland Road and into a street that was set to become infamous 25 Cromwell Street became the most famous address in in the world with his bed set land it's inhabited by a moving population of sort of people who are drifting around or they've left home for some reason or they they couldn't easily be traced and that was one of the reasons why Fred remained undetected for so many years this Anonymous neighborhood provided the perfect cover for the West's lustful and murderous nature it was the ideal layer into which they trapped their prey Fred and Rose now set about spinning their web Fred on his own was a charmer and he would try and you know chat people upon street corners or bus stops or what have you but having Rose around in a vehicle completely puts people at ease and you can see that they slowly but surely crafted this into a refined Scavenging predatory stalking family sort of unit that could as it were take people off the streets very very efficiently [Music] [Applause] in November 1972 17 year old Caroline Owens was hitchhiking from Tewkesbury to her home in Cindy Cinder she'd been on a red already see her boyfriend and was waiting for her usual lift from a friendly telephone engineer it was then that a gray Ford car Drew up and a young couple offered her a lift s cheerful she you know she said where are you going to and I said sin deferred and she said we're from Gloucester but don't worry we'll take you all the way back [Music] they started telling me about their family and asked me if I'd like to be a Nutty because they said they are three little girls at home and I was really excited because I I'd always dreamed of being a children's nanny I loved children you know everything seemed quite uh romantic and glamorous to me I was gonna Escape my home and go and live with this lovely family and it was like a big fairy tale and we can meet in them I moved in but Caroline's fairy tale began to turn into a nightmare when Fred LED slip a shocking revelation one day it turned around and he said the Armory had lost her virginity and I mean she was a little girl of eight and I didn't think that was a funny thing to say and I just said to him quite accusingly what you mean why why are you saying she's lost virginity what's happened to her and he said um well um she had an accident on her push bike and the saddle came off and it penetrated her and she was damaged by that came a bit wear them you know I'd been sexually abused as a child myself so it was almost like I could now recognize that her behavior was probably being beaten up by her stepmother and being abused Maybe by her father events got out of hand when Fred propositioned Caroline he said you know we've got we've got sex circles me and Rose and a few other men we'd like you to join it and I started getting quite angry because by this time I got a bit fed up of things he used to come out with and I I said I don't know what you're on about it don't want nothing to do with it a disgusted Caroline fled the house vowing never to return a couple of months later she was standing in her usual hitchhiking spot [Music] when she noticed a familiar car First Institute was to run away I didn't when they pulled up besides me Rose was like apologizing sorry you laughed and the children are really missing you can we give you a lift down and as much as I didn't want to I felt like I couldn't be nasty to them so I got in the car if it was fine we went just through a glass to do most of it was like the children had missed me in that kind of conversation as soon as we got out of Gloucester going more towards where I live Fred said to me if you had sex tonight Caroline and I went no and I was kind of like oh no don't start that kind of conversation off again and he said oh go and have a field Rose see if she's wet and with that she just like grabbed around in my crunch we started fighting about two miles outside of Gloucester past the roundabout uh Fred pulled his car up on the side and Out rose by turning around in his seat and punched me inside the air until I was unconscious [Music] thread out the door open he was on his knees he'd already tied my hands beyond my back with my scarf and he was roughing like parcel tape all the way around and around and around my face as a gag and they turned the car around and they went back and ran around the roundabout and took me to Cromwell Street they eventually arrived at the house Caroline still bound and gagged was taken into a bedroom 12 hours [Applause] [Music] talking about my genitalia and all that as if they were doctors you know this is a bit strange or thus so and so I thought they were going to get a knife and just start cutting at me so I was absolutely terrified but it got it it's about off his jeans and he'd folded it over and was whipping between the leg with his butt and then she started doing something else sexual towards me while he watched and then she invited him to join in she was doing something to me and he was having sex with her from behind at the same time to be quite honest at that time I I would have been up here off dead after a night of harrowing abuse a terrified Caroline was eventually left alone with Fred I thought he was just going to take me down to the cellar but he obviously aren't second thoughts he just raped me and then he started crying she said to me you know if you promise that you won't I've touched you he said and you'll come back here to live so I'll let you go and of course you know considering I thought it was on my way down to the cellar I was just so relieved and I said yeah okay I'll do that [Applause] Caroline had a remarkable escape and went straight to the police but for Fred and Rose this signaled a significant change in the balance of their relationship I think the Escape of Caroline Owen owed a lot to the fact that Fred and Rose were still experimenting with sexuality now Fred had already picked up or at least imposed on the relationship something that he carried forward from his mother the idea that it was okay to engage in things if Mother approved but outside of what mother approved it was grab and try and get away with as best you could and make sure she didn't find out the same applied to Rose exactly Rose dictated what went on as far as Fred's sexual Adventures were concerned and hence most of his actual activities sexual activities with other people were hidden from Rose the wests pleaded guilty to the kidnap and sexual assault of Caroline with their victim too scared to give evidence Fred and Rose were never charged with rape find 25 pounds each they were allowed to go free I think the the 25 pound fines sent a very clear message that even if you do slip up and you make a mistake that you're really not going to carry the can fully for what you've done so it sent the signal that providing you make sure that you tidy up you probably will never get caught and that just basically sealed the fate of future victims by then they're hooked on this it becomes like a drug you know and then the more you have the more you need have to make a cold-blooded decision if we do this again we can't allow somebody to go away because they go to the police and they'll come back again we have to dispose of the bodies friend already knew about disposing of bodies because you've done it before some but not all future victims would conveniently come from society's margins Fred West would have realized that there are plenty of people around who will not be missed they use the same technique actually as certain religious groups that go around finding vulnerable people they were very good at the kind of girl who would fall into a category that we kind of use the phrase less than dead in other words someone if they were killed disappeared they would probably be less missed less noticed and a lot less police force than the average person such as prostitutes runaways gills of very sort of mixed repute who did not have very strong family ties [Music] once Fred and Rose has selected their prey they would take them back to Cromwell Street and down into the cellar the events in the cellar in the as it were the Chamber of Horrors um can be only really speculated on but by bits and pieces that were left over clearly a certain amount of sexual torture and abuse had progressed these victims may have been stripped and hung and left for long periods of time in extreme pain you have to remember that Fred at least had very little restraint when it came to the revulsion of what his his physical Acts were so you know to actually inflict almost intolerable continuous and protracted pain and injury on a person would not have created the same revulsion that it does in URI Fred fitted a beam across and there were hooks on it he talked about girls being hung there for days and bodies mummifying and we don't know exactly what happens we do know that in the course of of the time that they were there they were killed um their bodies were dismembered um and they were buried and then when he had filled the cellar with girls he concreted over the floor and then turned the cellar into the bedroom for his children Fred and Rose West had now perfected their mode of operation and over the next 14 years would kidnap rape torture and murder almost at will but each murder would require them to push the boundaries of sadosexual behavior further and further she had to be abusive she had to be in control of the situation and for a Fred there had to be as it were bizarre episodes of sadism and bondage Etc I always wanted something more they want to scream a little bit more they want to cut a bit deeper they want they know what causes more pain than something else and to be bound and ganged poked and stabbed the cat beaten the sexually abused probably just not even seeing what was going on half the time with them these two monsters cackling and laughing because the most terrifying experiences Beyond human comprehension Fred and Rose were now sinking to such depths of depravity that it was entirely possible that one of them could end up as the next victim I think there must have been an absolute element of competition between them that grew up in terms of the other person may kill me therefore I am at risk therefore I must show myself to be as tough as sadistic as hard and as progressively homicidal as the other person otherwise you know I may be the next victim as it were rather than the next perpetrator [Music] by June of 1987 Fred and Rose's eldest daughter Heather was 16. she'd suffered both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her parents all her life and now this teenage girl was becoming a problem she was murdered one day when the other children had gone to school there's no evidence or belief that she was sexually abused she was simply murdered and her body was got rid of in the classic Fred West way and buried under what subsequently became a patio I don't think for one moment he would have even shared a tear I think that's how cold-blooded this man was he was disposing a cane of something but he had no further use for if Heather had been able to survive and continue she may have brought the whole facade down one way or another and that could not be allowed so to some degree in the they committed as it were a very risky murder a murder that was done to show that they were in control to the rest of their children and unfortunately that probably led to their undoing Heather lay undiscovered under the patio in the garden of Cromwell Street for eight years yet the wests became careless and her disappearance had become the subject of a sick joke bread and Rose will tell the children you know to behave themselves otherwise they'd end up under the patio like Heather which was a Macabre joke you know obviously looking at the reality of the situation the persistent rumors about Heather eventually reached the ears of a local policewoman detective Constable Hazel Savage had always been aware that there were these rumors and persuaded her bosses that that patio is going to have to be dug up on the morning of the 24th of February 1994 a police search team knocked at the door of 25 Cromwell Street and set in motion an investigation that would stun the world the murderous career of Fred West was about to come to an end [Music] as the police started digging in the back Garden of 25 Cromwell Street they could have no idea of what they were about to find Fred and Rose West's daughter Heather had been missing since 1987 and she was the focus of their search when they Unearthed a female thigh bone they were confident they'd found what they were looking for but it fell to pathologist Bernard Knight to break the news to detective superintendent John Bennett that there may be more than one body under the patio and I still remember John Bennett's face when I got down his hole in the garden looked up and said either you've got more than one or she had three legs because another two thigh bones I think gobsmacked it would fit John's face fairly well at that time because say they expected to find Heather I think there were three bodies in the backyard and then what was it six in the house Fred West was arrested despite the mounting evidence against him he seemed remarkably unperturbed his 54 year old man and he's had a long run he's got away with it all his life his mindset is one of you know I'm probably caught but who gives a damn now believing it and not believing it at the same time not really fully appreciating the enormity of what happened and it probably took a few weeks before the penny dropped he probably you know you know went to pick up his coat a few times thinking he was probably on his way home in a few days because you know well you know they found them now and it's not really that important so therefore he was actually entering quite a severe um sort of state of delusion where he actually didn't think you know that this this was that important despite West's ambivalence to his crimes he knew the game was up he offered to show the police where to dig he went back to the house and he did indicate certain places where the police might dig in the garden but he never admitted that there were six other bodies under the house and there was speculation that Fred didn't want to point that out because he was very proud of his house and how he built it and Incorporated various interesting features into it uh he he didn't think the police would go as far as knocking the house down in order to find evidence [Applause] [Music] but the police did knock the house down and after recovering a total of nine bodies from Cromwell Street they switched their interest to Midland Road where the body of eight-year-old Charmaine was discovered the lengthier search of the two fields at much Markle was to drag on for months but they were to give up the remains of Rina Costello and Anna McFall the police now faced the harrowing task of identifying all the victims Professor Bernard Knight made the startling discovery that the skeletons were incomplete there's a lot of hand and toe bones missing but you actually rarely find every bone if you dig up the skeleton one reason why there may be a Sinister aspect is that two babies two fetuses present and their tiny little bones were there most of them even tiny rib bones size of a Matchstick and yet they were big but bigger bones missing from the adults as one shoulder blade missing that's a bit difficult to imagine how if you can get a tiny fetal bone surviving whereas this big shoulder leg gone of course the The Sensational aspect of the explanation would be that they were taken off the some form of fetish and even cannibalism was mentioned but I mean I think that's a pure speculation but certainly a lot of Bones missing he may have had some bizarre paranoid ideation so in the beginning perhaps he was cutting up bodies to make them smaller taking away the fingers and toes in case they were identified um it could have been you know a paranoid state that was superstitious he had to keep these various little objects close to him so that he knew that he was safe that he had some control over these dead victims it may have become a very habitual thing it is known for for Psychopathic Killers to keep trophies of their victims he may have kept one or two bones as kind of mementos in order to be able to keep his work with him on June 30th 1994 Fred and Rose West appeared at Gloucester magistrates Court jointly charged with nine murders it was four months since the police had started digging their victims had now been identified as Linda Goff Lucy Paddington Carol Cooper Juanita Knox Shirley Hubbard Therese secantala Alison Chambers Charlene Robinson and Heather West Fred was also charged with a further two murders that of his first wife Catherine Costello and his stepdaughter Charmaine West Anna McFall Fred's first victim was yet to be identified this was the first time Fred and Rose had seen each other since their arrest Fred was devastated when Rose rejected him in court [Music] he would have been distraught the confidence would have gone his face would have sagged he would have lost that confident jovial demeanor and and he had very little else left to live for six months later on New Year's Day 1995 whilst waiting to stand trial at Winston green prison in Birmingham Fred West hanged himself and they were saying oh that's Justice isn't it and I said no it's not really and I was absolutely gutted I wanted him to pay the proper price um it's like took his own way out and had his own way about what happened to him he was in control right to the end [Music] Rose was now left alone to face trial for 10 murders she was in probably a bit of a State of Shock actually this blanket denial came down pretty well on the whole the way it remained Bros at that point is is only really protecting one person herself and that would that would so she would then progressively try to look as though she was a useful member of society potentially okay that it wasn't really hair even if the evidence was against her and that she wasn't that complicit in what went on but the court thought otherwise and she was convicted of 10 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment the investigation was now closed but had the police found all the victims rumors persist of many more bodies we have to regard the kind of dark matter of Fred's life and he's kind of killing career if you like that there are a lot of black spots which I'm sure may be filled with with other poor unfortunates who have disappeared and not been registered and not been connected with the West's uh there was a young child supposedly killed accidentally when Fred was driving an ice cream Lori and Glasgow there was a young boy who supposedly committed suicide um not far from Gloucester but really if that had been more carefully investigated I think they would have been interested to talk to Fred [Applause] [Music] it is possible as we know with personality disordered individuals that their characteristics both Fred and Rose would have eased off and perhaps their their interest in this would have would have slowed a little as they approach middle age and is it where they were going into sort of homicidal retirement but the chances are there would be other victims but unfortunately due to the logistics we will probably never know 25 Cromwell Street was demolished in an attempt to erase the memory of West's atrocities foreign Owens forgetting her ordeal will not be so easy they've took it all down now and turned it into this walkway some people wanted a Garden of Remembrance but others thought it wouldn't be respected as such so they decided to turn it into a walkway and now I'm actually walking where the ice was um and some of the girls would have been buried under this area here and some in the patio over in that area um brings back quite a few sad feelings bad feelings for me I don't like being here um I just I just see it as a grave for all the girls and I'm just glad it's all over and they're all out of here it's almost like a near 11 years right you can hear and laugh and it's almost I'm laughing and joking about the patio and stuff it feels like you're still here I don't think they took enough of this place away foreign West committed some of the most evil and heinous crimes in history a gruesome and disturbing Legacy but was he really born to kill given his basic biological background at Birth this chap was not going to escape the genetics the psychopathy which probably affected his brother as well he was not going to escape the family environment which was going to reaffirm these characteristics that were already in the parents you have to look back and say basically that his crimes to some degree were inevitable that the degree and and the frequent nature of the crimes may have been adjusted by aspects of his life but indeed Fred was born with the characteristics that would make it reasonably easy for him to turn into a killer I can understand you I ask you to start filming from the feet slowly up to the head and you would sit for sit pan bloody hell don't you don't ever watch movies you'll see thousands of movies you must know what it's like the training chimpanzee is a Cape Canaveral that operator can't anybody can do it these are the home movies of a murderer can you go back a bit I mean you're you're far too near a man who in the 1980s would be uncovered as the most prolific serial killer in British history and you ain't seen nothing yet a civil servant whose extraordinary Behavior would see him named with cruel irony the kindly killer batteries have run out that's why the camera went up the creek okay fair enough you think you know how to use it all you do is point it down then you press a button but was this murderer of young men driven by nature or nurture was the kindly killer Born To Kill [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] in the early winter of 1983 we had a problem arise in the muswell Hill area of London it was initiated by us receiving a call for a blocked toilet number 23 cranley Gardens had been split into flats and bed sets the residents had experienced problems with the plumbing for days [Music] an engineer at the time went to attend the block toilet cleared the toilet but did remark to us afterwards that it never smelled such a bad smell in an apartment before in his life still lavatories of the property continued to block [Music] a plumber was sent around very urgent leader on Saturday morning and he looked down in the drains beneath the house and he saw what he knew was not what should be there [Music] he observed what he said looked like some butcher's prepared meat and a few bones [Music] he discovered that what was blocking the toilets where it was actually human flesh [Music] on the 9th of February 1983 sitting in my office uh minding my own business and suddenly got a phone call from Peter Slade who was the early turn uniform inspector and he asked me if I'd go up to cranley Gardens he had a bit of a problem up there and I just got into the CID car and drove up there I always remember it's bitterly cold it had been snowing and we stood outside this awful house um and looked down the uh the pit where the the drains were and he showed me four little pieces of Flesh each about three inches by half an inch maybe an inch and also three bones with a knuckle at each end and my first thought when I saw them was that they were from a human hand the drains were blocked over halfway up the building so we knew that the blockage was originating from the very top the tenant of the top flat was a 37 year old executive officer at a nearby job center Dennis Andrew Nielsen he was due to return from work at 5 30. when my two colleagues and I walked up to the front door of the place in order to wait for him inside we had no idea what we were going to find we knew we had a killer but we didn't know what he'd done Nielsen walked in bang on cue at Harper's five and leading up to that I had been thinking for two or three hours about what I was going to face I knew that for someone to have flushed a dead body down the loo in small pieces it was going to be somebody a little bit different when Nielsen came in through that front door I'd already made a decision to be very light-hearted with him and I remember saying to him Mr Nielsen and he said yes that's me and I said I'm detective Chief Inspector Jay I've come about your drains and a little smile came across his face and he said well since when have police been interested in Block trains and I said to him well you take me up in your flat and I'll tell you all about it the first thing that caught me was the smell of decomposing flesh I said to him I'm here because she drains were blocked with human remains and he said oh my God how awful and I just got a little bit closer to him face to face and looked him straight in the eyes and said don't mess me about where's the rest of the body and he just paused momentarily and he said in plastic bags in the other room [Music] Nielsen was immediately arrested and taken to the station for questioning my Deputy detective inspector Steve mccuska sat in the back of the police car and I drove and I don't know what prompted Steve to do this but he suddenly said to Nielsen are we talking about one body here or maybe two and Nielsen said neither he said I think it's 16. [Music] oh well I can remember the steering wheel in the car sort of shaking in my hands the police hardly could believe their ears because this was all said in a very matter-of-fact voice very dispassionate why dispassionate because this is a man without passion his only passion came when he was in a murderous impulse when he was overtaken by the other self in Nelson's wardrobes were two black plastic bags and several air fresheners the bags contain dismembered body parts and two severed heads in a tea chest was found another torso bones and a skull under a draw in the bathroom were legs and a pelvis it constituted the remains of three men [Music] in the garden of an address in cricklewood investigators would identify the fragmented remains of at least eight more he told me off the Record that if it hadn't have been 15 it would have been 150 if we hadn't caught him when we did because there was no stopping the whole thing was just totally bizarre [Music] thank you Dennis Nielsen was born in 1945 in fraserburgh a remote fishing community in Northeast Scotland his mother's family had lived there for Generations his father was a visiting Norwegian Soldier he was one of three children the middle child he had an older brother a younger sister he never really knew his father Nielsen as a child was a bit of a loner he didn't really have friends because everybody thought he was adored his mother said she could never cuddle him he didn't have tactile relationships with anyone except his grandfather Nielsen's father is absent from the household and so he had formed a bond with his grandfather they would walk together fish together and so forth the boy's grandfather would often be away for weeks at a time trawling the fishing grounds of the North Sea one day he came home from school and his mother said to him oh do you want to see your granddad he said oh he didn't know he was there even so he was very pleased about that and he went into the kitchen and there on the kitchen table was a long box and in it was his grandfather [Music] nobody had prepared him for the fact that he was dead [Music] Nielsen's grandfather had died at sea and his corpse had been brought home for burial he had this picture in his mind imprinted of seeing his grandfather white as a sheet and I think that affected him deeply Nielsen would later say that when he saw his grandfather laid out in the front sitting room after his grandfather's death that this was when Nielsen first began to associate love with death an inert body from that moment I'm convinced I can't prove it but I'm convinced that his idea of love and his idea of death fused and became linked inextricably linked [Music] when his mother said to him your granddad's gone to a better place he the little boy age six thought well if he's gone to a better place why didn't you take me with him it would sometimes even go out into the sea and simulate drowning as a means of being with him aged 15. Nielsen would leave his home behind Nielsen would join the Army specifically he joined the catering Corps which is of course where he'd learn his butchering skills skills that we're going to be put to use in a different context when he's back in civilian life in 1983 the discovery of human flesh blocking the drains at 23 cranley Gardens had led to the arrest of civil servant Dennis Nielsen he claimed to have taken the lives of at least 15 young men [Music] investigators learned that he'd had a lonely childhood punctuated by the death of a beloved grandfather [Music] at 15 years old he joined the army catering Corps [Music] early on the young Nielsen would stand out from his fellow new recruits he was quite argumentative in as much as not picking an argument in a nasty sort of way but if you said that photograph is black and white you didn't know he was saying it was white and black and so forth he was quite contrarious a person really we used to sit listening to The Beatles Rolling Stones we'd read the parade magazines which are like girly magazines of the day and he'd probably be reading broadsheets and he'd also listen to classical music remember there was once a scrap in the mirror crew and I think he scratched and slapped it in the thump like the rest of us I remember somebody saying oh you're Nielsen you're weird the teenage Nielsen harbored a secret what's interesting about the Army experience is that it would be have been impossible for Nielsen to have shared the fact that he was gay with any office colleagues basically they just didn't accept homosexuals at all so if somebody was gay they'd keep very very quiet about it during his time in the Army Nielsen began a lifelong interest in photography he maintained he was a it was his hobby photography but it was much more important than a hobby it was self-realization he used to get his colleagues in the Army to pretend that they were corpses as if they'd been slain in battle and he would take photographs of that they thought this was a bit odd but they went along with it Nielsen would spend 11 years in the armed forces catering Corps rising to the rank of corporal thinking it was a bit of a bully underneath with his rank you know once he was in charge of a room sort of thing I think he tended to be I think he tended to bully a bit but just before his 27th birthday Nielsen would reject the familiarity and Order of army life and strike out on his own in 1970s London he found a thriving gay scene he's living in a large Urban metropolitan area where clearly there are gay pups that he would be able to visit for the first time more friendlier back then people were Road chatting and life in London was exciting at that time he wasn't a bad lucky man and he seemed quite educated quite quite good to talk to he chooses his words well fluently but after a few minutes you'd realize that he's not talking to you or with you but he's talking to himself because he doesn't pay attention to anything is it what he himself is saying what are you doing switching the bloody thing on and off for you never make a cameraman you know no no no no no no no I'm not gonna do anything pornographic Nielsen joined the Metropolitan Police This Is Not Unusual for these individuals to seek out a profession of authority whether it's a police officer or some other civil servant type job where they could have control over someone else this is what is so stimulating to them he's living a double life he's living a life of the police Constable but at the same time he's also living a double life talking about being able to express his sexuality and of course that inevitably would lead to conflict after 11 months Nielsen tired of the police and quit he was also becoming disillusioned with the transient nature of the gay scene began to seek more permanent companionship what he was looking for was a relationship somebody to share his life with he didn't go out to find companionship in the club you just went out to pick up that's what generally people did they weren't there for an affair or a relationship they just wanted a one-night stand he got a job with Manpower services in the heart of the West End but the opinionated young Scot struggled to bond with anyone he's not somebody who's going to make friends very easily he's not somebody who's going to be the life and soul of the party he's far too self-centered he's far too self-obsessed harassed commuter harassed London tenant being screwed by the Department of Employment London transport big chain stores supermarkets can you like cut there let me think so he's got this quite isolated existence in which he finds it difficult to make friends in which it's very difficult for him to socialize in any normal way and that isolation would mean that he would return to his home and lose himself in alcohol he was a drunk frankly I'm not sure he was alcoholic but he did like to get drunk beard I cannot stand I got it for free at the bottle party no and he would listen intently to music [Music] Nielsen was more at ease with machines and objects than he was with people so music was a way of controlling what was being heard you can't control a person you can't control what he's going to say and how he's going to react and how he's going to respond but you can control the record player here's to you Mrs Robinson [Music] in 1976 Nielsen meets a young Drifter called David Gallatin galashian is unemployed and living in a hostel and although they're seemingly unsuited Nielsen seeks out a flat for them both to set up home together yeah okay come on a minute I gotta sign on what's going on today playing on again she does have Bloody dogs but during my slippers again it is showing your slippers I give it I'll ring is bloody not going to catch it again Melrose Avenue was a very old kind of building um it was it had lots of furniture in it that likes it would have been bought during the war really it was quite old the carpets went very nice and it was kind of run down building sleep train go without me here have a look at that right look at a state of that whole bloody ceiling falls down falls down on me for a start straight across hits the door pull off push but she goes up big rail that wakes you up as well great chunks bloody great chunks and Masonry I mean you could kill something they had French Windows which led into a garden nobody from upstairs could get into the garden he only he had the entrance through the French windows [Music] stand up Nielsen's overpowering and controlling nature would drive a wedge between the companions David Gallatin walked out on him after about 18 months and that really hurt Nielsen I'm sure it did oh she was essentially a lonely man by virtue of the fact that he bought everyone and they all left him [Music] so the thing he's searching for is companionship a relationship and it's the one thing that psychologically sociologically he's not set up to be able to do twinkle [Music] and then he used to invite more and more people back hoping that someone would stay he did ask me to move in but I said I don't think I can put up with you in the bottle the bottle comes between us it's too much of it you've got to stop that if you stopped it you'd be a lovely decent guy to live with but he couldn't stop that he couldn't stop that you seem to be very into himself it was all him him he never hardly asked anything about me I don't mind anything good you find in this kitchen is probably attributed to my having purchased it love your light doesn't even go on can you go back a bit I mean you're you're far too near that's [Music] the lonely Nielsen increasingly took refuge in his morbid private fantasies [Music] he used to Lion on the floor in front of a mirror and put Blue on his lips and make his eyes look bloodshot and he got satisfaction out of regarding himself in the mirror in that way not I don't think an emotional satisfaction but a deep requirement of his nature which was obviously perverted he would make a he passed out and would fall to the floor you know when you go rushing up to him and he'd just be laying there but I actually know that he wasn't asleep he wasn't out he wasn't passed out he was awake and um and he would stay then he would stay then you'd sit down you could you could cook a meal you could watch Danny we can still be there but I know that he wasn't asleep you just know and it would be in this position of a kind of arms outstretched position I believe he was pretending to be dead all the while Nielsen continued to play the role of the unremarkable civil servant he gets up in the morning he's a civil servant he goes to work he comes home at night he tends his garden he cooks for himself he has a dog which he calls bleep come on come on so there's a sense in which these are the banality the ordinariness of suburban life but of course Nielsen doesn't really have a sense of how an ordinary life is actually what most people experience because Nielsen wants to be extraordinary [Music] damage [Music] on New Year's Day 1979 33 year old Dennis Nielsen woke up next to a teenager he'd met in a pub the night before the lonely Manpower services employee later claimed he couldn't face the thought of the sleeping boy leaving there came a moment when the murder was impulse to keep this man not to let him go overtook him Nielsen took a tie wrapped it around the boy's neck and pulled he was astonished at his strength at the moment of the murder he was amazed at how strong he was because he was not normally a very strong man once the murder had occurred and Nielsen had before him a corpse he then in a very peculiar fashion looked after the course now for the first time Dennis Nielsen had the means to live out his darkest and most secret fantasies he would run a bath he would basic clean it he would then make it comfortable he would dry it put it into the bed put it into an armchair Nielsen lived with the corpse for a week he then placed the naked body under the floorboards where it remained for almost eight months if you have this body you have to find some way to get rid of it and you certainly don't want it to be identified as quickly as you possibly can Nilsson was efficient he couldn't relate to a person emotionally which could relate to a corpse as something that had to be disposed of it was a a problem that had to be solved that's much easier than dealing with people and their emotions Nielsen's Garden would provide the solution he burned his body in the garden of Melrose Avenue obliterating him and spreading his Ashes to the Four Winds it was not until 2005 that the victim would be identified as 14 year old Stephen Holmes his murder would prove to be merely the beginning I think the first murder that any serial killer commits is always the revealing murder he enjoyed doing it and I think it's that enjoyment that he got from that first murder that propelled him to kill again and again and again well this is uh Soho and the Heart of Soho Old Compton Street and this is the area that Nielsen used to favor and he'd come out in his spare time to this kind of area and to gay pubs in particular in order to make contact with with people so he had contact with a lot of youngsters who were coming to London thinking the streets were paved with gold and who were probably no fixed abode may have run away from home uh dropouts that kind of person the the people that Nelson went to meet were people he instinctively with an uncanny Knack recognizes people who were um lonely and would be most likely to accept an invitation to go home often there is no record of these people being reported as missing and therefore he's tackling a particularly vulnerable group that many other serial killers Target yeah while living at Melrose Avenue Dennis Nielsen would pick up and strangle to death a further 11 young men if you strangle someone you feel it you can touch it you just grab whatever is at hand and pull I have always suspected that Nielsen would strangle the people that he really didn't want to go at midnight or one o'clock in the morning the ones that he wanted to stay the ones he didn't particularly want to be with they'd just go at the end of the night [Music] that may be true to some extent but I would look at it in a very different way I would say that he wanted the bodies to be there because it assured him how in control he was of other people this is what is arousing to an individual like Nielsen to be in complete control and domination of others Nielsen used the bodies of his victims sexually and in other ways Nielsen wanted to stay close to these bodies almost as if they were a form of trophy he wants to express his power his complete and utter domination of these young men even after they're dead after he killed them he would sometimes bring them out and put them in a chair and have conversations with them as if they were still alive they can watch television with him he can talk to them he even would go so far as to come home from work and find the corpse sitting in the same armchair that he'd left him in that morning and saying to him guess what happened to me today so this was a substitute for real human company Nielsen is so self-obsessed so desperate for his opinion to be the only opinion that counts and matters he finds it easier to relate to have a conversation with a dead young man who isn't capable of answering back he would then keep the calls for quite a few days until they became unbeatable he would eviscerate them he would be put into the garden the um spleen and stuff which might be proved impossible to live with and then put the what was left with the Corpus under the floorboards an obsessive compulsive personality where somebody is attuned to details and orderliness and so on is very common in prolific serial killers because that personality trait will help them elude uh law enforcement uh they're aware of forensic evidence they'll clean things up meticulously uh and so on ultimately the bodies that were serving as Nielsen's companions would become an annoyance to him they were in the way he needed to get rid of them for a variety of reasons firstly they'd smell also they were an annoyance to him because he keeps wanting to bring more live young men back to his flat I would actually stay there for the night or maybe for the weekend or whatever all I can say is that the smell the smell from Melrose Avenue which you put down to dry rot or whatever rising down I don't know animal smells it's not awful ready to smoke nasty but nothing other than this really stood out nothing at all with no further room under the floorboards the decomposing corpses were removed cut into manageable pieces and taken into the garden in the middle of the night he would have a huge bonfire in his garden burning the remains disguising the smell with rubber tires and the local children came and danced around the bonfire because they thought it was all rather fun having not the faintest idea what was going on really Dennis Nielsen had murdered and disposed of 12 young men without a rousing suspicion in 1981 he moved to a new address where his behavior would become increasingly more bizarre Between 1979 and 1981 civil servant Dennis Nielsen had murdered and disposed of 12 young men at his flat in cricklewood in October of 81 he moved to a rented top floor flat at 23 cranley Gardens muswell Hill where his Disturbed fantasies would take a new twist 21-year-old Carl stotter Met the seemingly kind and friendly Nielsen the black cap in Camden he um took me about three space he was a nice guy he didn't have murderer tattooed across his face or anything like that it was nice and I slept with him what he did was first of all attack him from behind with a tie and throttled him he killed me he um strangled me he thought he was dead but he wasn't and then he drowned in a bath box up while he thought he was dead he got himself a rum and coke and lit another cigarette and said to himself oh my God here we go again as if this had been done by somebody else he described it as being almost in a trance that he was doing this act without even realizing that he was doing it and it that's fairly typical serial murderers will talk about almost waking up and realizing that oh my gosh what are they doing when he realized the man was alive he then got extra blankets out he rubbed his legs to get the blood circulating properly I put on an extra fire heart massage resuscitation he brought me back to life and I was there for three days you've got a classic example of Nielsen initially killing trying to kill believing he's killed the victim but then realizing that the young man is actually still alive and then Nielsen going into Good Samaritan mode trying to help the young man get better Nielsen is able to kind of inhabit a kind of parallel universe in which he no longer sees himself as being someone who's doing wrong but actually can interpret his actions as somebody who's doing good he told me that um what happened was um I've got caught up in the sleeping bag set and that was it and and I believe him because you don't think that somebody's gonna try and kill you anyway he did Carl stotter would not be the only recipient of Nielsen's Good Samaritan Act at least three more young men would be strangled and then allowed to live the attacks would remain uninvestigated by the police most of the police would say while you were in a bondage game and it's your fault you participated and the absolute humiliation of saying oh gosh I don't want to be known for this kind of behavior really protects the serial murderer it appears Nielsen's odd behavior was not only reserved for strangers I fell asleep on the floor I wouldn't get into the bed I woke up and he was straddled over me he had what I call an apple knife but behind him there was smoke and there was a gas heater that used to be on the wall had apparently fallen off now I couldn't possibly um have knocked that off with my feet and it was quite bad the room was full of smoke and I I said what's the knife for he said he was trying to cut it trying to get it right off the wall in case there was an explosion and I'm positive that when I went to sleep that gas fire wouldn't have been on because he was already asleep and because it was quite a very mild night that's all I remember thinking but then again thought no more of it I have to believe that he was going to to do something he was he was trying to asphyxiate me but not everyone would escape with their lives with every serial murderer although they start out slowly they then become more frenetic and they will start killing a lot more people a lot more close in time the addiction becomes so overwhelming that it's uh the corpses piled upon one another at cranley Gardens three men would suffer the same fate as the twelve at Melrose Avenue but unlike his previous residence Nielsen's top floor flat had no space under the floorboards he would boil their skulls to get all the flesh off and then he would chop them up into little bits to him the people were just about the same and equivalent to the meat he was chopping up in the Army had absolutely no reason or meaning emotionally to him it was just something he did [Music] half of one was under the boss pieces of another were in the wardrobe in black bags on the day that I went back there on the very last day and he wouldn't let me into the flat he was in the strangest mood I've ever seen him in he was completely flustered and I couldn't I couldn't understand what was happening and the dog ran down the stairs he said hold the door but don't go in and I thought Charming I thought I've known you all this time you won't let me into your flat I said he doesn't trust me obviously if he brought the dog back up and he said to me he didn't go in I said no I'm just standing standing here aren't I and I couldn't write that out Nielsen's desperate efforts at disposal would be his undoing foreign on the 9th of February blocked drains would lead to his Discovery and arrest Scotland Yard launched its biggest murder investigation today after a pathologist confirmed that human remains found in a sewer Outlet were parts of three bodies for some strange reason the minute they said must were Hill they gave no address they gave nothing I seem to know that this is him it's him I don't know why I would think that and then an hour later I was listening more intently and then they said in Trinity Gardens and it was the house I've [Music] it's tough at a second [Music] in custody Nielsen would describe the murder of 15 young men in minute detail these are no reason to get worked up about it all right if you've arrested me you've arrested me so let's get on with it Nelson gave us every bit of information that he could think of I mean we interviewed him 16 times over the next few months throughout the interviews Nielsen was totally matter of fact quite cold there was no remorse there was no indication of any remorse at all in November Dennis Nielsen was sentenced to life imprisonment Over a four-year period he had taken the lives of 15 young men but was the so-called kindly killer born to kill yeah this loss was clearly born with the gene which was flawed and which was bound to cause problems in one way or another just as some people are born with the gene which makes them prone to anger or to jealousy nobody is born with an inevitability about his future the future is shaped by the experience it may shape the gene which is flawed but that is not the same thing as saying that there is evil inherent so Nielsen could have turned out to be a completely different person not a stable person because of the inherited Gene he would still be flawed but he need not have become a murderer the idea that he was born evil is nonsense he was brought up in a relatively banal ordinary circumstances there were certain elements of his life which were odd or which were difficult for him to overcome but the circumstances of his childhood and the sum that the trials and tribulations of his childhood were not something that were unique to Dennis Nielsen but were common to many hundreds of thousands of young people and if Dennis Nielsen was born to kill so would those hundreds of thousands of young people who had similar circumstances that they had to deal with when they were growing up so no I don't believe that Dennis Nielsen was born to kill you can be born with the flaw which you've got to keep under control if you don't keep it under the control it's your fault [Music] I don't think he was born to kill but certain circumstances made him that way desert and necrophiliac he was control freak I think if he couldn't get what he wanted from a person like some nights he couldn't with me then he would if he wanted it and he was drunk and he was in the mood for it and I mean sex then he would do something to get it go out of his way to get it he would whatever it took foreign I think all of these people are just a large degree born to kill it's a biopsychosocial problem but biology in my judgment has a very large component we don't know exactly what the specific biology or neurobiological problem is whether it's genetic hormonal chemical electrical brain damage a combination of factors but there has to be a number of things to go wrong in order for a Serial sexual murderer to be created Nielsen himself claimed to have wrestled to find a reason for his crimes it amazes me that I have no tears for these victims I have no tears for myself of those bereaved by my actions am I a weak person constantly Under Pressure who just couldn't cope with it and escapes to wreak revenge against Society through the haze of a bottle of spirits or maybe it's because I was just born an evil man self-serving crap for me this is just specious nonsense self-serving nonsense to try and justify his behavior he's nothing he's a liar he's taken human lives [Music] I feel sorry for his mother to give birth to such a monster laughs he was kind thoughtful friendly pathological liar at the time when would have said an answer to prayer are you just what we needed access to death dealing drugs [Music] always well monitored they reply perfect predator good company outside and extremely popular with everybody Trust of the victims he was a nice guy he was a good guy perfect killing machine [Applause] [Music] [Music] his patients were mainly elderly women living alone and vulnerable they adored their doctor Harold Fred Shipman and even when their contemporaries began dying in unusually high numbers patients remained loyal the number of patients that Dr Shipman murdered is still unknown but his murderous roll call eclipses the toll of any other serial killer caught to date did events in his life turn him to murder or more simply was Harold Shipman born to kill Harold Frederick Shetland is an interesting case to examine the very remarkable nature of his case is the fact that he was not remarkable we could say he can't be a killer because he's a bit like us Harold Shipman fitted in with Society to a great degree and this was the very important feature which made it possible for him to go on and on to be one of the most prolific serial killers of all time for his victims death came in the afternoon but for Harold Frederick Shipman it came in the early hours of the morning at Wakefield prison on Tuesday the 13th of January 2004 prisoner cj8199 the expert in death had timed his final Act well he was beyond saving he had been alive at 5am when the last check was made on him and he knew the next check was not for another hour as a doctor he also knew that four minutes was the maximum time he needed what he has done is he's taken to his grave the um reason and the motivation behind his killing and left everybody guessing in relation to that and sort of perplexed forevermore [Music] suicide Shockwave through Hyde the town in Greater Manchester where most of his victims and their families lived Hyde was such a lovely Town it was a proper old-fashioned where where from the parents doorsteps and they all live near each of them they'll understood each other it was a very close Community with a warm heart so for shipment to be able to kill so many people in such a a small Safe Community was doubly devastating over the years doctors funeral directors and even pharmacists had raised suspicions about Dr Shipman but such worries were swept under the carpet I found out that the police had actually investigated shipment before in March 1998 and quite soon after breaking the story I spoke to Dr Linda Reynolds and she was the GP who courageously went to the local coroner John Pollard and told him that she was worried that Shipman had killed his patients [Music] on that basis I then instructed the police to make an investigation and that is what has now been referred to as the failed investigation because the police came back to me about a fortnight later and said and quite frankly they could find nothing wrong the fact is they came back to Dr Linda Reynolds and told her she was mistaken that Shipman was a pillar of the community and you know she must be careful what she's saying about such people and um shipment went on to kill three more women after that Dr Shipman might have carried on killing for years if it had not been for the suspicious death of Kathleen Grundy on the 24th of June 1998. the last person to see her alive was Dr Harold Shipman when he'd gone to her home to take routine blood samples when Kathleen Grundy died she left a will that Will was made out in favor of Dr Sherman but her daughter Angela Woodruff I got this copy of a will and she was absolutely astonished because if you look at the actual will it's so amateur if you're gonna fall afford your will then you've got about two out of 10 for forgery it simply wasn't very good Kathleen Grundy's daughter believed that the signature was not actually her mother's so consequently the document needed to be examined the officer who was given the case to handle started talking to a couple of people he knew one of them being the local Undertaker Alan Massey who said well I've been really worried about the number of commission certificates of mentioned it to people before they'd taken their interest but as so many of them there was the fact that Shipman's fingerprint appeared on the will when in actual fact and interview shipment denied that he'd ever seen the will the fact that shipment actually owned the typewriter that the will had been typed on and that in interview he suggested that Mrs Grundy used to borrow the typewriter but he couldn't suggest to us who had returned it to him after the will have been prepared it was decided that Kathleen's body needed to be exhumed and forensically examined to discover the true cause of her death the investigation into Kathleen Grundy's death was undertaken in the knowledge that there had been an earlier investigation into Dr Shipman's activities that had involved 19 deaths about a fortnight into the inquiry there was interest from a local newspaper my news desk at the Manchester Evening News was tipped off about the death of Kathleen Grundy and the fact that police were investigating her GP I rang the police and they didn't want to comment any further the police decided that the families of the 19 people who died should become aware of the reinvestigation before the story broke but then went into hide to find out more about the case on the people who knew Kathleen Grundy almost immediately I bought into two old ladies and they said Oh you mean Dr Death there and I said a beg your pardon and they said well they say he's a good dot but you don't last lots of old ladies have died with DOT ship the family members then told us very similar stories to the story that we had already uncovered in relation to Kathleen Grande that is when I started to realize that this was much bigger than one death that Dr Shipman had been involved in [Music] we carried out the examination and a pathologist actually performed a post-mortem Shipman of course had certified the death at the time it had occurred as being an old age he could not confirm the cause of death that shipment had put and consequently we sent um samples off for analysis there were levels of dimorphine in the body of the disease which was sufficient to have led to her death of course Mrs Grande had not been suffering from any serious illnesses that required her to be administered diomorphine at that stage I was totally convinced that they were on to someone here who had committed many heinous crimes the community were absolutely wholeheartedly behind odd shipment at this point he'd he'd groomed that community so that they truly believed in him and thought that he was looking after them when in fact he was by the hundred [Music] foreign [Music] people and what we call the category of less than dead in other words the kind of people that if they've passed away you don't actually notice so well um they're not the kind of people that are going to cause a big fuss because almost it's expected and in fact um counter to most serial killers he's one of the few people who could probably get the relatives or the council to take away the body for him the way in which the victims were found was in itself quite disturbing many of them were found fully clothed in the middle of the daytime often sitting upright in a chair or on a sofa [Music] in some of those cases shipment had actually certified on The Cremation form that he'd carried out a full external examination of the body and yet the victim was still sitting there fully closed shoes on you know the sleeves buttoned down to the wrist dresses that button to the neck well how you can carry out a full external investigation in those and I just don't understand often in the medical notes which he'd made up suggesting that these people had had heart conditions for example when they hadn't really and then saying well they must have had a heart attack of course somebody having a heart attack doesn't just simply fall asleep sitting in a chair looking very relaxed [Music] life just isn't like that police investigated Shipman's book of death certificates they made a list of 15 deaths that they decided to be investigated as a priority of the victims on this list nine had been buried and six cremated more exhumations were ordered police also learned that Dr Shipman had often encouraged the relatives of his victims towards cremation in each of the exhumations that took place tests were carried out and in most of those morphine was discovered in the body and that led to a prosecution in relation to that death the police inquiry would also reveal Shipman's modus operandi he would often kill his victims most of whom were elderly with an injection of morphine and then returned to his office to falsify their medical records on his computer to exaggerate their poor health in the case of Kathleen Grundy he had backdated several entries to suggest she had become addicted to morpheme the thought of an 80 odd year old former lady mayor ass of the town of Hyde scoring bags of heroin in the back streets of Manchester seems to meet ludicrous and ridiculous and a gross insult to her memory quite frankly being a GP placed Harold Shipman in a position where in public he can actually carry out the very activities in private he wished to carry out and actually project them in the community and wander around the community and Nikki quite clear to people that you know I am a great doctor on the 7th of September 1998 Shipman was arrested on suspicion of murder [Music] who was the real Dr Shipman [Music] a monster in order to actually find out about this actual behavior and how it develops we have to look back in time very closely [Music] in September 1998 Harold Shipman was convicted for 15 murders the shipment inquiry now documents that he killed 284 people over a period of 30 years before he aroused suspicion however no one really knows the true number of his victims the shipment case is unusual there was no highly publicized tray of bodies no madman on the loose until Shipman was arrested in connection with the Kathleen Grundy case no one could have known just how many murders had taken place if we wish to find out where the Harold shipment was in fact born to kill we need to examine Early Childhood looking for patterns of behavior which would indicate that they carry trades that their temperament is different with Harold we realize that on the surface it seems like a very ordinary childhood a very ordinary background but if we dig deeper we know that there are going to be Clues as to why he ended up where he did Harold Frederick Shipman nicknamed Fred or Freddie was born into a working-class family on June the 14th 1946 in Nottingham he was a distant and slightly aloof child maintaining a distance between himself and his contemporaries mainly due to the influence of his mother Vera I think his mother certainly encouraged him to the uh not the path of righteousness but she thought Fred was special she wanted him to be special and now he was the middle child the Elder Sister Pauline at last school at 15 was no great academic his brother Clive wasn't as bright as younger brother but Fred brought him in a decent and fairly new Council estate in Nottingham passage 11 plus he got into the local grammar school harrylands which was extremely prestigious to do so he studied hard he didn't mix very much with local Cairns and his parents like my parents like lots and lots of other working class parents would have would have been so proud our boy is going to the grammar school Shipman's school days at high pavement were largely unspectacular like so many other grammar school entrants he went from being one of the bright kids at Junior School to being run-of-the-mill amongst so many other clever boys Fred was very serious and I think it may be that um you had to work harder than the the most and I know he had a real respect first family and I think he thought that they'd made an effort his parents had made perhaps of sacrifice his mother really really want Fred to be as it were in this area and have the same kind of career as other boys and having him Focus exclusively on his studies meant that Fred was not really integrated into the real world and he was allowed to build up fantasies fantasies of power and Fantasies that perhaps might have had a sexual connotation because Fred was not really allowed to develop socially and sexually normally Vera decided who Fred could play with and when she wanted to distinguish him from other boys she was more ambitious for Harold than her other children perhaps because you seemed more much mature you seem that much older and when certain incidents occurred at school which perhaps had it been anybody else you'd had a good laugh and let him pay for it with Freddie didn't one of the best examples of that is the aerobic Club dancers that we thought we had this sister and they used to dance together and it's strangely uncoordinated way totally different and I think she was taller than him as well we just respected him it's strange good the fact that Fred got respect from his friends is a little bit surprising because of his social alienation however by playing it by the rules by creating an act Fred just simply coexisted with these people and formed no real problem in relating to other people so he was able if it were as it were just to slot in he didn't really have any difficulty because he didn't create any difficulty [Music] on Friday the 21st of June 1960 when Fred was just 17 his mother Vera died of lung cancer an illness that he had kept strangely secret from his classmates the family GP visited the house regularly in the weeks before Vera's death giving her welcome injections of morphine in ever decreasing dosages he met schoolmate Michael Heath on his way to school the following Monday morning when he told him his tragic news most days Fred would be coming walk on to School on one of those mornings Monday morning I met him point just I'm just just for the weekend is having his and he said my mama died his mother died Fred never said anything to me other than once on a bus I seem to remember him saying my mum's not very well but that could have been that she'd got a cold but that's been terrible what what did you do how'd you cope and he said got my gear on went for a run and he ran pouring rain so he must have been absolutely saturated he grieved in a very strange way he ran months amongst amounts all through the night in the school running shorts and t-shirts and it was quite an amazing thing he just seemed same as he did any other day but he must have been going through hell for weeks months before Fred would be the one who sat with her and waited for the doctor to come around and to give her an injection of morphine the Rosetta bedside when she died and that was a moment that obviously infected on him rightly here's a schoolgate what was the score um this there's 10 minutes on on that particular morning that he told me that it was not going to die but awkward just did to say the least and admit for us to go in separate ways it's interesting that he'd shown no interest in medicine or said he wanted to be a doctor until after his mother passed away many have drawn the comparison between Fred's experience of his mother dying under morphine and his later use of morphine to actually execute the old ladies now there has to be a connection and very few people have actually drawn why one leads to the other if you look back in Fred's history he constantly used exercise exercise generates what we call endorphins endorphins are extremely powerful opiates a hundred sometimes a thousand times more powerful than heroin now Fred was accustomed to this if you like when his mother passed away he experienced what many people experience when a family member finally passes away after a grueling period he felt relief he felt a certain lifting and this experience was then compounded because went out for whatever reason and ran all night and that extra opioid running around his body will have given Fred a euphoric High hence this situation was likely to be repeated as give him pleasure in the future Fred failed to get the grades he needed to study medicine at Leeds medical school with many serial killers with lower self-esteem they always aspire to be better than they want to be up with their peers to you know they they Envy their peers cannot be angry their horse Randall always wanted to be a cop everybody all his schoolmates are all succeeding rounding with good grades he was a failure they're always scrabbing to get out scrabbling to get somewhere after resetting his exams the following year he was eventually accepted into Leeds medical school in 1965. did Shipman decide to become a doctor to save people or to have the power to kill them first went to Leeds he regularly got a bus into Leeds every morning and Oman sent us with there was a young girl called primrosextube who like Chapman had earned a rather austere upbringing she left school at 15 without any qualifications and she got on to an art and design course at a college in Leeds and on that bus it was very good looking at the time and they headed off but very quickly after meeting after about six months she was pregnant shipment was careless Reckless for the first time in his life married at a register office there isn't even a photographing exists into the wedding Shipman qualified from Leeds Medical University and went on to pontefract General infirmary to train as a junior after 12 months he was duly licensed to practice medicine according to the shipment inquiry this was where his first recorded murder took place the shipment inquiry found that he killed a four-year-old girl for example and and she was very very ill and and dying and her mother left the room saying please be kind to her and he took that as his cue to kill her he might have pretended that that was euthanasia and that he was doing that child a favor but he wasn't because that child didn't die in her mother's arms her mother was having a cup of tea in the hospital Cafe so I think even then he had a very cruel streak that wanted to end lives Come What May it is absolutely uncertain exactly where Harold Shipman began to kill people it may have been the case of the four-year-old girl but we do know that as he approached that time Harold will have had some swelling and some strangely unexplicable pleasurable feelings that were probably associated with the event with his mother and he would suddenly start to feel he was in that powerful role that controller of life and death in a way it harks back to that very moment when he thought he should be that GP by his mother's bedside by 1974 he was a father of two and had joined a medical practice in the Yorkshire town of todmodon in this North English setting Fred seemed to change character he became an outgoing respected member of the community in the eyes of his fellow Medics and patients a general practice as Julia partner was clearly very attractive and he went and worked at the Abram omarod practice in tottmada where there was illness among the farmers and Dr Michael grave welcomed him with open arms he was extremely good almost manic in the way he carry out his duties and brought us all the latest techniques and kept us very much up to the mark he was really at the time when would have said an answer to prayer are you just what we needed the doctors did not choose their patience the patients chose the doctor that they liked and Fred had quite a devoted following who felt that he loves to bee's knees and would do the best for them in all circumstances Harold Shipman underwent a metamorphosis he changed from being the very asocial mummy's boy who didn't really get on very well with people into a GP establish himself in this area and find that suddenly he could relate to people and grow if you like as a pillar of the community however Harold Shipman did have a different agenda but the staff in the medical offices where he worked saw a different side of the young practitioner he wouldn't delegate he wouldn't let the nurses give injections for him for instance he wouldn't let the pathology technicians when they came out once a week to take blood samples for patients now Fred would insist on doing all these himself nobody heard any idea that he was guilty of any kind of malpractice although it would emerge later in tonmedan that there was an innocence were three patients of his died in one day and for a long time one of them Eva Lions was thought to be his very first victim [Music] thank you but the village doctor wasn't as perfect as the fellow gp's thought it was discovered that he had a drug addiction one of the other doctors in the practice hand to be in the pharmacist and shield the book and said look at this you know and there were scores of entries and he'd amass huge amount of path a day clearly not for patience but for himself well he said he was addicted to pathogen because they were told um you shouldn't give your patient anything that you haven't tried yourself and finding that it sustained him in his manicester because he was quite manic in what he would do he'd take on these enormous loads and get through them and perhaps the president was not enabled him to do it and he was so sorry for a job to go and he booted his medical back across the surgery whether under the window and off he went he thought that I was the devil incarnate and I never spoke to him again [Music] killer is confronted with the Orpheus they Retreat either with the excuse societies fitted me up it's not my fault all they explode and that's what shipment was basically doing how dare these little doctors these little people these these people who are lower than me how dare they question me how dare they because he believed slower than me my mother's always taught me this way how dare they interrogate me who are they Shipman was ultimately forced out of the practice and into a York drug rehabilitation center in 1975. two years later his many convictions for drug offenses prescription fraud and forgery cost him a surprisingly low fine of 600 pounds after about a year or so he saw an advert for a junior partner in a practice and hard and he applied for it and when he went there he was totally open about his previous drug habits into lock and completely clean I was under enormous stress the General Medical Council was going to allow me to carry on working as a doctor and I'd love another chance and they believed him and took him in in 1977 he was accepted to practice in the Donnybrook Medical Center in Hyde and it was here that he felt free to kill you know Harry's not a very big town and obviously we had a shop we knew lots of people that were threads patients and everybody seemed to have the same opinion that he was a caring guy you know he just seemed a normal guy again he played the role of the dedicated hard-working and community-minded Doctor highly respected in the area and making many friends we went to a couple of social functions with them they were good company outside and extremely popular with everybody that was there given the impression to God he's just a normal guy you know Harold Shipman found it very much more comfortable to kill and be in hide and Hyde was a fairly small naive Community where he would be accepted this you know tweed-wearing friendly local GP character Harold Shipman had had what we call Career Development as a killer he she developed as a killer to the stage of being Dr God [Music] I think Shipman went into single-handed practice purely to continue killing clearly if he worked on his own nobody would know exactly what he was up to most times it was okay but the odd time he was a bit off offish so you know you tend to wonder what were those days were those days maybe when something happened you don't know [Music] it makes you think [Music] because of the nature of the shipment case it may never be possible to document the exact number of murders he committed the number and patterns of deaths in Dr Shipman's practice was examined when it was compared with those of other practitioners significant differences appeared notably that the rate of deaths of elderly patients was disproportionately high other variations appeared deaths were often clustered at certain times of the day patients records and previous symptoms were mismatched and Dr Shipman was usually in attendance the question remains why wasn't he stopped earlier [Music] to ascertain why Harold did what he's doing you have to examine those little chinks those flaws that show a glimmer under the surface of this projection as the good doctor as the average man [Music] in this Macabre tale Dr Shipman's former patients are grateful he was finally stopped could they have been next and there's little doubt that some owe their lives to a determined and intelligent woman named Angela Woodruff determination to solve a mystery about her mother's will helped ensure that on Monday the 31st of January 2000 the jury at Preston Crown Court found shipment guilty of murdering 15 of his patients and forging the will of Angela's beloved mother Kathleen Grundy it's difficult to believe that we were friends with um Fred Chipman who was one of the biggest serial killers in Great Britain but uh when he's such a normal guy he just fooled everybody [Music] should be doing many of his victims lived on their own um a lot of them um used to regard his visits to them as being something to look forward to there were many instances of them being dressed in their best clothes as if they were getting a visitor and it was something to look forward to and therefore you know let's put on something nice because the doctor's coming to visit laughs that was all part of this um great power trip that he was on that their last words would have been thank you doctor mistake number one Shipman's use of the drug morphine morphine is one of the few poisons that can remain in body tissues for centuries there are other substances which he could have used which would have been either less traceable or even not traceable at all within the body why he chose to use dimorphine I don't know one reason might be that he was simply not quite as clever as he thought he was and didn't realize that it would be so traceable so easily the other reason maybe that he actually was quite willing and wanted to be found out at some stage mistake number two the typewriter and the badly forged will so when Shipman murdered Mrs Grundy and the forged a will what was happening did he want to get caught uh was he looking for a way I am so want having killed 283 people and he comes to Catherine Grundy well anybody's fair game he's not being found out so far so far even though we must certainly should have been but the fact is he was a hospital doctor and a GP it was never challenged I was very surprised to see that will and what a mess it was so I think at that point maybe he wanted to get caught on the other hand maybe he felt invincible [Music] I think that Harold was becoming a little bit paranoid as to whether he was in safe territory and he was testing the ground to find out whether or not people were suspicious of him and also to prove to himself that he could talk his way out of this amongst these people that were his intellectual inferiors his actual reason for doing it I'm not sure I must be honest I really don't know I think he expected to set but instead he faced a series of setbacks he got Primrose pregnant while he was a medical student he became addicted to pethidine and was caught so in the end he was quite disappointed with what he appeared to be he was quite small and lowly um quite a small man and I think that disappointment field and anger and an addiction to killing certainly there is grandiosity involved he acted like a Supreme Being A Godlike figure who clearly had the power of a life and death and he chose to kill people at a time when he wanted to kill them so why did he kill some speculate he hated older women citing comments he made about the elderly being a drain on the health system others feel he was recreating his mother's death scene in order to satisfy some deep masochistic need I think his mother's death informed the murders and gave him a theme but I think it's the reason a lot of people lose their mothers when they're teenagers too cruel and painful diseases and we don't all go out and start killing hundreds of people I think he had a personality disorder to start with but the fact that his mother used to wait for him to return from school sitting in the window with a cup of tea and the dots would turn up and give her a morphine and that was her relief from the terrible pain of the cancer I think that was very important to him when he did start killing the first time that Harold Shipman actually killed someone it is probable that in his mind there was Rising pleasure associated with the incidence of his mother's death at that point he will have felt a certain amount of power and control and a certain calmness associated with the Euphoria with his mother this would have been rewarding enough to propel him forward but I feel that that form of euphoria in contrast to many other serial killers would have died out fairly quickly after the incident [Music] despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt Harold Shipman continued to maintain his innocence and shield the motives of his crime even in prison when Fred first went into prison my wife started to correspond for them because you know she firmly believed that he was innocent draft around about 25 letters which were written in all the letters there's obviously no reference to the fact that he's admitting to anything at all it was definitely trying to keep as much normality a Belle is actions as he possibly could so that anything that people might come up with about what he's supposed to have done seemed totally illogical into a house roll the sleeve up administered morphine killed her that's what happened is it's a doctor no it was Harold always maintained his innocence to me um he never once as far as I know to it to me or any of the other prisoners admitted to the guilt of actually emerging any of the patients the levels are such as this woman actually died from toxicity of morphine not as you wrongly diagnosed play speaking he murdered them now when doctor was finally convicted my wife was very upset and they all said well there's only one thing you can I said you can't write to the guy I said I think you know judging by the amount of evidence has been put forward and the time it's taken I said I think it's pretty conclusive that he is guilty I remember when they first tried charging him for 218 mergers on top of what they already accused him of that was the first song I'd ever actually seen him reaction to his title on what was going on and I remember when he came back from Court he just broke down into his um which explains to me what I've gone and he said the China opinion over 218 murders on top of me yeah but I don't know where it's coming from or where they're getting no evidence from or anything you know where they're getting these stories used to call them um and that was the first time that's the sinner reaction from him you smash yourself up actually you just love berserk Harold Shipman never admitted to his crimes not to prison warders not to prison inmates Harold Shipman maintained the act that he'd started in childhood where he as it were acted out the role of a social person where he acted out the role of the good doctor he could not at the end of his existence change that because if he had admitted that he had done this he would unpick and undo the fabric of his in his entire life which was built on a facade in an extraordinary turn of tables Shipman saved his cellmate's life because of the reputation the rest of the prisoners used to as it sends me that's that not to use that doctor that's killed all them patients like I mean I was in fee from your life so much I attempted to take me on life himself because I was I was that much scared like I mean he got me down and it should save me but after that we seemed to get on pretty well if you saw intent on murder that was his pleasure why didn't he leave me to die shipment had a particular victim type with a method of killing them that he was comfortable with in locations again either the victim's territory or somewhere where he was in control the guy he revived was most certainly not um sick in in the clinical sense he um was not the preferred victim type of shipment and I think Shipman probably did thin the only decent thing he'd ever did is becoming a doctor sort of Taking Lives he saved one I was still confused because like I can't understand as a nun such as Harold like I said to me is offend I'll he could have gone about doing it all those people I mean it's not not something I mean it's not a natural thing is it to take human life to many of Dr Shipman's victims his suicide is a final betrayal not only did he kill their loved ones but he escaped the punishment of spending the rest of his natural life in prison I think Fred planned his suicide I think he knew exactly what he was doing I think he knew about the fact that Primrose would be financially better off if he died before a certain age he made sure Primrose as well looked after and again he was winning the game and he was he was beating the authorities not only that he was taking his secrets to the Grave [Music] I think one of the main issues with regard to Harold Shipman was that he was a doctor we all learned from a very early age that doctors are to be trusted from the evidence we have the question is was Harold Shipman Born To Kill when we look back at his early life we see a trait that seems to run through that trait seems to make him objectify people stops him feeling the feelings of others in the way that we do and call empathy he also seems to have prevented him from normal childhood development to created a world of fantasy to actually have led and helped certain in his life where he adopted the role of a GP of a trusty person who then went on to kill people rather than prolong their lives yes it would seem that without that early characteristic none of the other events would have had sufficient impact to actually lead to that line of behavior therefore it would seem that Harold Shipman was in fact Born To Kill and I fell towards him now different quite intelligent young girl very devious [Music] plodding through life in the 60s he resolved for himself he's one evil so-and-so innocent vulnerable need of love and care and attention she's an evil cow what she's got the devil in it she's the devil itself wasn't we lucky the little ones that got away [Music] [Applause] [Music] at the crimes committed by Moore's murderer Myra hindley shocked the nation Hindi has been demonized as the most evil woman in Britain another Ian Brady hindley took part in the abduction sexual abuse torture and murder had five innocent children she was sentenced to life imprisoned endless supporters claimed that she would not have been capable of murder without the influence of braiding [Music] profiler David Holmes the end to delve into the mind as this Infamous killer was Henry indoctrinated into the embraid his murderous world but was she quite simply Born To Kill when it comes to the born to kill argument Mara hendley is very interesting because she is actually reputed to have had a very normal childhood and then have met his very Macabre stranger who then transformed her life into one of evil now that is a very simple story which requires further examination Myra hindley died in prison on November 15 2002 after serving 33 years she was 60 years old Myra and Ian might have carried on torturing sexually assaulting and killing children if it had not been for one man David Smith and his confession at Hyde police station on October the 7th 1965. David had witnessed Ian brutally murdering their fifth victim Edward Evans the final murder they committed was that of Edward Evans he was a teenager and Brady and hindley had met him on Central Station and persuaded him to come back to the house with them Myra said that Ian picked him up for gay sex they brought Edward Evans back and the next and most interesting thing about this death and the thing that actually stops the whole cycle of killing is that Ian told Myra to go and fetch David Smith David Smith had the reputation of being a neighborhood hard man he'd started dating Myra's sister Maureen they got married and moved to the nearby hattersby estate close to Ian and Myra the four of them spent a lot of time together David was impressed by Ian's right-wing views slowly he became indoctrinated into Ian's perverse view of life I went and brought Dan Dave Smith aboard in a very very brutal fashion he was much bigger it was much harder to kill him there was blood everywhere it was a very very nasty death Brady had been grooming Myra's brother-in-law for several months and was confident he could trust the 17 year old to not only keep a secret but also to become actively involved in their murderous plans but Brady miscalculated David eventually Edward Evans was killed and he was his body was parceled up and wrapped up and they took him upstairs with great difficulty and locked him in a bedroom how much Damon Smith was involved in the actual killing he says not but he said he had to do certain things because Ian was controlling it and forcing him to he said he had to do what he had to do clean up in Elmira and in any in that night and he had any welcome to do everything to save his own neck and he went back home and told Maureen what happened with a large carving knife to protect them they went down to the phone box and they phoned the police and they stood in that phone box until the police arrived and the pair of them were really really terrified and horror struck David Smith gave an account of what had happened on that evening Myra wasn't present during the physical Murder She was actually in the kitchen but she was certainly involved in the cleaning up of the house afterwards because as you imagine there's a an awful lot of blood and I think it's fair to say that David Smith had certain views about her thoughts at the time they were flippant remarks about Blood and Tissue around the room the crime scene of the murder of Edward Evans was a grossly blood splattered Affair in the midst of which Myra hindley was projecting herself a laughing gay busy housewife tidying up a normal domestic scene she normalized what was grossly abnormal killer scene it helped her to distance herself from the reality the horror of what she was engaging with David and Maureen's story was taken seriously by the police two dozen officers were called to Ian and Myra's house David Smith had warned them that there were guns on the premises they decided that they would do this in a sort of undercover way so when the knocker went and Myra Henley answered the door was not a policeman on her doorstep it was a breadman with a basket of bread lived Myra said we don't have bread and then he said but I'm a policeman they went inside the police insisted on searching the house which they resisted but eventually they of course had to succeed in the body of Edward Evans was found little did they realize but the police were about to stumble across one of Britain's most notorious criminal cases the Moore's murders straight away and Brady was arrested but Myra Henley was having been questioned she was allowed to go home they didn't believe she was involved however because of David Smith's insistence that there were probably more children more murders involved the police continued to investigate and they searched the house very thoroughly they actually found a list of which Ian said was was the planning for a robbery and it had enigmatic initials on it and one of them was PB and eventually down the spine of a prayer book they found a ticket for a left luggage office at a station in Manchester and they found out which one it was and claimed a suitcase back majority of serial killers take some form of trophy of their crimes away for them where there could be Rings or it could be jewelry it can be your hair and it was in this suitcase that they found all the photographs and the tapes of Leslie and down his last few minutes on Earth and Brady and Henley were not unusual they take recordings of the torture and the murder in the pleadings of Leslie and Downey ten-year-old Leslie Anne Downey had mysteriously gone missing from the area six months earlier David Smith told the police that Ian had joked about burying children on the Moors eventually with the use of the photographs that have been have been up on the Moors they managed to actually find a place where they thought that they might fruitfully start digging for bodies Myra was arrested and charged a few days after Ian um her dog puppet was also taken into custody because the police knew that if they could establish the age of the dog they would be able to establish when some of these photographs were actually taken a vet put the dog under a general anesthetic and was trying to establish the age from its teeth and tragically puppet died and Mayra hindley Was Heard to scream around the police station murderers laughs [Music] as a result of the tip-off that they were digging on the balls I was very young reporter and my job was to drive around at night in the in the night sea police digging saddle with more is quite a an eerie place at the best of times but to be up there in the early hours in the dark knowing that that you know there could be at that stage could be children buried out there was quite weird quite frightening really looking back [Music] was it a whole Cavalcade of press um parked down the hill and not allowed to get near and they tried to do as much of it as they could under cover of sort of Dawn and and dusk but it was very difficult because you have to have light on the Moors the Moors are vast and spooky places police believe that the bodies of four missing children might have been buried on the Moors their fears were well founded on the 10th of October 1965 the body of Leslie Anne Downey was discovered 11 days later the body of 12 year old John cool Brian was also uncovered John had disappeared without a trace on November the 11th 1963 in 1965 a case like this was unique for the first time in British history a woman had been implicated in a killing partnership that involved the serial sex murders of children what a turn Myra into such a monster was it a question of nature not nurture as the details began to emerge particularly in in her community there was a sense of outrage I think if some people could have got their hands on Mara hindley and imbrady here today quite a difficult to comprehend what they got up to and got away with for so long to satisfy the born to kill question but I think Mario hindley you have to examine the whole of the period of the killing but perhaps more importantly you have to examine the childhood and the aspects of childhood and you're looking for little events that might say that this person was showing signs prior to the crime period of being born to killed had she not met him Brady I'm absolutely convinced that Murray hindley would he not vulnerability have led a normal life [Music] good foreign [Music] Brady and Myra hindley were sadosexual Killers these particular murderers become hooked on inflicting torture on their victims their pleasure is gained in a perverse game of Captain planets stalkings entrapment and killing of their Quarry in the case of Brady and hindley their favored prey were children what normal an everyday person could watch a man sexually abuse a child tortured him strangle them murder them and dig a shallow grave on the Moors and put them in it and walk away and sleep at night which she did for many years so how did a seemingly normal child grow into an adult so perverse that she would gain pleasure and sexual abuse and murder of children when looking at serial killers such as Myra hindley you have to very carefully examine not only the period when the crimes were being committed but look very carefully at the childhood in order to separate out those things which may be clearly environmental those things that may have been biologically there all the time and those interactions between them foreign was born on Thursday July the 23 1942 just another child in a world of terraced houses and factories in the poor working class area of Gorton in Manchester England she was part of a close Northern Community she knew everybody in the street she knew the people at the shops she everybody knew everybody that she went to the same school as all her friends it was very supportive loving local community Myra was the first child of Bob and Nelly hindley initially a Placid child who was no trouble when her sister Maureen was born four years later the situation changed Mr and Mrs hindley found bringing out two children too difficult and sent Myra off to live with her grandmother some people try to make a lot of the fact that she didn't actually live at home with mum and dad but she lived you know in the next street with Grandma the two houses could see each other from the bedroom windows and she spilled between the two houses it was a very very loving life Mara went to the local state school she went to the Junior School where she was bright and only narrowly failed her 11 plus granny was very susceptible to allowing her to have a day off if she wanted one and and Myra's attendance record was very poor and had she gone she probably would have passed for the grammar school as it was she went to ride a brow secondary modern she was in the top class she did extremely well she was in that Vanguard of youth culture and she was very aware of it it was the beginning of teenagers as a phenomenon rock and roll was there Beatles were coming she changed her image slowly but surely thick makeup like a Dusty Springfield the hair got blunder big curls in the hair the skirts eventually got shorter always had all the top fashions well it was fantastic peroxide blonde always did very well for the lads Myra had one friend of the opposite sex from quite early on a little boy called Michael Higgins she was quite taken with the idea that she had the same initials as her and they used to hang out together go everywhere together um she used to be sort of almost looked after him [Music] Myra felt she'd made a lifelong friend one sunny afternoon Michael asked Myra to go swimming with him at the local Reservoir she was unable to go tragically Michael drowned an unfortunate event that local boy Lawrence Jordan witnessed Michael Higgins came with some friends and they were swimming over that side [Music] and then all of a sudden there was a flurry of excitement one or two young kids running around saying I see him I can't see him somebody must have dialed the police because two or three policemen came running up and we saw them diving well the child said there's somebody under the water [Music] somebody then shouted oh they got him and I saw them bringing out this this sharp white body but you see the whiteness of the body because the blue really Falls of the police and his arms were outstretched almost in a crucifix the horridly then puts him in the mortuary belt and the van then passed us going out where you could get down to it the the path came to there it must have been really a traumatic for motor Henley because if she was a friend of his and she saw him being brought out that would obviously stay with her for the rest of her life because it certainly stayed with me [Music] and after that she went in a shell for a while which was absolutely devastated of the fact that he died um she wasn't the same girl for months and months after that in fact it was a year or so yeah and a long time she went and visited his parents his mother all the time and she actually converted to Catholicism Michael had been a Catholic and she actually converted in the wake of his death with Michael she invested quite a lot and lost quite a lot and to some degree although she might have blamed herself she also blamed everyone else and this was the beginning of the distancing of her from other people and also within this she would hide in religion this was another step away from humanity and towards a new kind of aim and career it was not long after Michael's death that Myra left school on her 17th birthday hindley became engaged to Ronnie Sinclair a local boy who worked at the co-op however Myra's apparent contentment with her ordinary life didn't last long half the time I wanted there's a classic and two kids was around her aspire to buy tip there's another part of it that really didn't want to do that being brought up by her grandmother to have a certain sense of self-importance Myra hindley did require more from life than simply 2.4 children and a marriage this would not be regulating to her for some women they require a certain amount of violence a certain s m quality to their relationship and Maya was of this type eventually she landed a job as a typist secretary at millwards which was the place where she ultimately met Ian Brady Ian Brady was working in the office at the time he completely ignored her for many many months uh he was aloof she describes him as an extremely good looking individual individual he was always well dressed Ian was a quite an attractive handsome he used to have this big monster bike that everybody wanted to sort of like go around when your kids and have a go of it or look at it and you know I think he was just mesmerized by it wasn't you really yeah it wasn't very many motorbikes in God at the time she very very quickly came to be absolutely fascinated by him and the perfect example of this is she kept this very childish diary in which she wrote things like he looked at me today Ian spoke to me today Ian is in a bad mood today he's not looked at me today he has looked at me today will it take me out a weekend at best Ian Brady was bisexual and probably rather more homosexual than heterosexual so she was very much on the periphery of his vision until the famous Christmas party when they uh they got together and became an item from there on in and it was at that stage that he started to to indoctrinate her into his uh his views on politics life sex and so on that first night Brady took her to see the Nuremberg trials as the weeks went by he played her records of Hitler's marching songs and encouraged her to read some of his favorite books mind Camp Crime and Punishment and the works of the monkey design hindley happily confined she had waited for so long for something different and now here it was Myra's family were not keen on Ian from the very word go Anne's background had been more dysfunctional than Mars he was born in center of Glasgow as a result of an affair between his mother a waitress and a man whose identity we've never been completely sure about and he was fostered when he was about to to a family who were living nearby [Music] and they brought him up to the best of their ability however when he became a teenager he began to get involved in crime eventually the courts in Glasgow said that he had to go and live with his mother and his mother at this stage was living in Manchester so basically Glasgow shipped its problem out Brady became hindley's first lover and she was soon totally besotted with him soaking up all of his distorted philosophical theories she went from this epic oh lucky girl to not wanting to speak to anybody not wanting to be with anybody it was always your shout Auntie Myra because as I say everybody's answering you'd shout to her and she'd completely ignore you she became involved in all his strange sadomasochistic sex he he didn't have um a normal sexual appetite [Music] Brady told hindley there was no God so she stopped going to church when he told her that rape and murder was the Supreme pleasure she did not question it her personality had become totally fused with his I don't think he was in love with Myra I think it was just what he was doing really I think he was playing cat and mouse like he's done all the way along early in 1963 Brady put hindley's blind acceptance of his ideas to the test he began planning a bank robbery and needed her to be his getaway driver immediately Hindu began driving lessons joined the local Rifle Club and purchased two guns the robbery was never carried out but Brady's purpose had been fulfilled Myra had shown herself to be a willing partner in crime he had so many wonderful dreams and schemes and she was obviously very very impressed by him um unfortunately what Brady actually had in mind was the destruction and torture of children and she got swept along with it and the poison infected her and that was how they embarked on their first murder Pauline Reed was on her way to a dance she left home dressed in her pink party dress Myra knew her Myra pulled up in in the car alongside her and asked um Pauline if she would come and help her look for a glove and it transpired that Myra drove her up to the Moors with Ian Brady following on his motorbike close behind and what we do know is that Pauline got out of the car presumably went to look for the glove with Myra as far as we know hitter will spade and killed her and sexually assaulted her [Music] to kill Pauline and to walk around the community knowing that everybody was looking for Pauline an elder head eye and even blinked she didn't nobody had an inkling or anything almost Pauline was a dangerous one because they did have some connection with her he knows that the way to do the murders is to pick up children because they're easy married to do the picking up because that is much the easiest way of doing it and to do children that they do not know so that takes them on to meeting John Kilbride John was Elvis child he was almost 12 when he went missing the last time I saw in the village on was in 1963 on a Saturday morning as I got up what I used to do every Saturday was going out the market saw all his Peck away they just never come on that night half past six because he was always on for six anyway and I mean he was always on for after 20 to a long sort of thing it was missing it was posted all over the Thames far and wide and Ferry John's face on the lamp pause TWIC cards shop winners have you seen this boy there was a pub on the corner called the Bessemer and there was um photographs of missing children in the area at the time have you seen these children and she used to go to the bar and have a drink none of them children was there and knowing she knew exactly where he was in that statement they said they picked him up at Ashton Market she led him to bird his car and again he was sexually assaulted he was found with his underpants tied down at the bottom of his legs and buried again close to the road I think after just a few weeks we all realized he wasn't coming home is when when you weren't going away and we knew something like that into him what we didn't know not for two years the role that Murray Hindi played was always one of the initial contact with the child uh sometimes Brady was was absent and came along later or I'll never Brady was behind on the motorcycle and he was flashing the headlamp to tell there's one coming up now stop and talk to this individual here last time I was located on the 16th of June 1964. their method of abducting and killing children worked Myra and Ian were driven to try it again six months later they chose 12 year old Keith Bennett [Music] and he didn't get there [Music] he was walking down Plum Shaw West acrossed up Port Road and into on the South Streets she seen him at the top end of the entrance so she went round and colored in a bit about said so much to him and he went in the car washing because they thought it was doing a good service and weather so when my mum come down on the 16th of June I said where's he she said I don't know I said well I should have been at your house and then I thought well I better go to the police station and tell them and they said it'd give you 48 hours to get back I said well where could he be I said he's not going with any medicines and he never does that I think silicone straight over from school another but it disappeared and that was it [Music] two month after the police ones is always Brady and endless water he said well we think it's possible that these have had so much to do with case you know with Keith Urban there is a slight difference with Keith because they take him deep onto the Moors at least three quarters a mile which is quite a long way for a small child yeah nuts him out and then put a machine called rub around his neck and broke his neck and [Music] actually assaulted him afterwards and left the clothes at the Sand by the buried him he didn't know he was going to his death by this stage Ian was living with Myra and her granny in hassisley which is an overspill town near Hyde just outside Manchester and they moved in and the neighbors were very impressed by them because Ian got stuck into making the garden did up the house the word Yuppie didn't exist in those days but if it had these would have been seen as I couldn't upwardly mobile young couple a further six months passed before the next abduction Clan Downey a young girl that they picked up at a fun fair in Manchester and Myra again persuaded her to come in the car and they took her home this one is different because they took her back to their house in hattersley and there hasn't been an enormous amount of scope for torture and taking photographs and making to recordings but now that they've got a victim actually in their own house they can indulge in all of that and they ran a tape recorder and this tape recording is in fact perhaps one of the most shocking things you will ever hear but it's also the thing that completely condemned Myra hindley in court her voice is heard on the tape um and it is telling the little girl to be quiet because clearly she was very distressed indeed and they she explained that she was very worried at the time that the neighbors might hear the little girls crying and that was the the concern and Leslie and Downey is pleading with her Please Mum she calls her mum all the way through her so by appealing to Mara's maternal instincts she might make this whatever awful things are happening but Myra is gagging her ties a gag around her um we don't know what abuse happened Myra claims that there was no sexual abuse um there probably was foreign up to the Moors and buried her [Music] killing of Leslie and Downey marked a significant change in The Killing career of Myra hendley the risk and the confidence to actually kill somebody within feet and inches of neighbors rather than out here on the Moors it would be another 10 months before Leslie Anne's body was discovered on the Moors in a shallow grave with her clothing at her feet even with the damning evidence mounting against them Brady and hindley denied murdering Leslie Anne as in the case of Edward Evans they attempted to implicate David Smith they claimed that Smith had brought the girl to the house so that Brady could photograph her as far as they were concerned Leslie Anne had left their house unharmed with Smith Ian Brady tried to protect Myra and it's true that if Myra had played it the way he wanted it to she would probably have been charged with being accessory and possibly being out of prison after seven or eight years but she was determined that she was in this with Ian all she said was Ian is innocent and I am innocent and she said this over and over again the evidence that linked Brady and hindley to the murder of John Kilbride while not as overwhelming was sufficient to charge them they found the name John Kilbride in Brady's handwriting written in his notebook and a photograph of hindley on John's grave on the Moors I actually got ready myself to go and help on the Dig and I was uh more or less locked in the bedroom by my father a couple of days after the police came with a shoe minimum identified he was being Jones and defend young body then despite all their efforts the police were unable to find the bodies of the other two missing children or any evidence to link Brady and hindley to their disappearance Ian Brady was charged with the three murders of the ones that the police had the bodies of that was Leslie and Annie John Kilbride and Edward Evans Myra was charged with Leslie and Downey and Edward Evans accessory to the killing of jungko bride Ian Brady received three life sentences and Mario received two Myra was taken to Holloway prison I put them all in a big enough old to bury the bloody lot of them throw acid on him and then throw the cell on soften them burn them alive because that's all they need for them kind of people are not worthy Souls of the Earth as far as I'm concerned anyway in order to evaluate and Brady had on Mario hindley's criminality Allah to examine the point at which they were separated Mario hindley's behaviors will indicate whether or not was the causal factor or whether or not Myra hindley was born to kill David Myra hindley continued for the first few years of their incarceration they constantly wrote to each other and even requested permission to marry the rift the development between them was gradual stemming mainly from their differing responses to their imprisonment Brady quickly accepted his sentence and soon settled into prison life whereas hindley continued to assert her innocence maintaining her claim that Brady and Smith were responsible for the murders and I really said she didn't have any involvements on her in her words at the town was acquiring the children for being really but she was distinctly heard on the tip of Leslie undone telling little girl to shut her mouth [Music] well birdie was God knows what he was doing to do her mother was convinced she was innocent her sister was convinced she was innocent everybody around her was convinced by Myra that Myra had just been Ian Brady's dupe Myra handle his mind the story was in place regardless of our innocence and she would gather together anyone who would listen give her time and certainly anyone who would give out any publicity that might support her plea of in [Music] 1970 hindley broke off all contact with Brady his hold on her was completely broken by the realization that she would never see him again seven years later more than 10 years after her imprisonment hindley began a campaign to win her Freedom a crusade that continued until the day she died and bread is never actually applied for parole he was willing to serve his sentence but at least he knew what he'd done and he didn't want to come out of prison applied for parole on a regular basis just to torment the families as far as I'm concerned hindi's application for parole was delayed for a further three years when hindley's plea was finally heard in 1985 20 years since she was first in prison it was rejected the Home Secretary announced that hindley's case would not be heard again for at least another five years ultimately she hoped she would be able to get out of prison and that was probably her long-term objective at the end of 1986 hindley changed her tactics instead of continuing to plead her innocence she made a full public confession [Music] whether in Myra's life she had a solicit list of everything admit it and then possibly down the line parole will be possible at the same time she was being counseled by Lord Longford to to make a confession she also received a letter from Winnie Johnson the mother of Keith Bennett when I wrote so she said she was very sorry that she couldn't help me in any way she was watching out for Brady on The Hill and she wasn't she was as bad as him she watched some kids murder and she wants them being raped and at the same moment because Ian Brady had made a sort of confession to a journalist the home office ordered greater Manchester police to reopen the investigation well the aim was to review the case and see whether there were any fresh lines of inquiry we could pursue with a view to first and foremost finding out whether two children might have been buried and secondly of course gaining confessions she now admitted both the knowledge of and involvement in all five murders including those of Pauline Reed and Keith Bennett she was cooperative right from the word go and said that she was prepared to point out to us areas of interest to Brady on settle with more which was really code for giving us a pretty good stairs to where bodies may be when it emerged in the 80s that there could be two more bodies on the Moors and there was a likelihood of either hindley or Brady turning up to try and pinpoint them the there was what you would call a newspaper frenzy many newspapers I had helicopters I was up there it was chaotic she was very keen on trying to help us I have no doubt about that at all you have to realize that for Myra hindley this was actually keyed off by her lawyer saying that unless she did appear to the public as a reform character that hair release would probably never ever happen therefore can you disentangle her self-interest in doing this from any genuine apparent remorse that was revealed she pointed out or identified the areas that we'd already been searching was not until the following spring that we actually started Excavating those two areas and of course in the summer of the following year we found Pauline Reed's body in one of the areas that she'd highlighted and they found Pauline Reed and she's a lovely person oh she was a lovely person and she used so say to me when it they will find Keith I know it they've got to find him and they will find him he's been missing now for 41 years this summer I dealt with able to find his body because they say that the landscape moves and changes in in that time and kiss mom Winnie is absolutely obsessed by this she says she can't rest until she lays her boy she has even been up there with a spade in in that full on hope that she could find her find her I love it up here because I know if he's up here watching other than that I won't come up but I know he's up here and I know he knows I am with him he knows I'm putting flowers on them defense for them no matter what hell they'll find I'll have him back [Music] [Music] he shouldn't have been open in the first place I've been up on them always cry a lot in my lifetime and it's it's just not nice feeling it's not a nice feeling at all but at least where I've got over John where we can go and visit Winnie Johnson still looking for some after four years you're still looking for a song Keith's body has never been found but hendley's confession has given his family some indication of how he died hindley had lured him into the car with a request for assistance in loading some boxes once at saddleworthmore Brady had taken Keith down to the Gully where he raped and then strangled him burying him somewhere nearby at the time of her confession endless solicitor expressed his belief that her chances of parole were greatly enhanced by her display of remorse in 1988 she approached me to see if I could represent her at a time when she was making a number of important legal challenges to the high court a people said well look Andrew you've got to be careful this is the most manipulative woman in the country but be careful she doesn't manipulate you well I've had many clients over the years seek to manipulate me I can say Myra never did I randomly far as I could see it was an extremely clever and manipulative woman who managed to play The Establishment to her own ends and draw people to her cause the criminal justice system was always recognized that if you change and if you reform you should be granted parole all the experts were of the opinion that she had reformed if you want to understand Mira Hindi you have to compare her prison career with that of Ian Brady who became a tortured man and Myra hindley did not she became a well-spoken articulate defender of her own innocence but I believe that she changed back from that evil Persona to a genuinely sorry woman for the Dreadful crimes that she had committed to braiding what she ought Again by applying for the pool I don't know because she could actually have been charged with the murders of two more children and this is what I'd have pushed for I should have got put on whilst in prison Myra rediscovered her faith in Catholicism she continued to express remorse for her crimes I asked people to judge me as I am now and not as I was then a lot of people turn to religion in prison to impress one group of people in particular and that is the parole board Killers every killer in America must be on a journey into the light must have seen Christ and the first thing they do on a Sunday is queue up for team biscuits in the church the aiming life was to walk free for you very long another loved it I'd have loved it for him to do up with our lasting Market or every time I filmed [Music] another surf time for I'm certain in my mind that if Myra Henley had never met Ian Brady she would never have been involved in murder she would have moved to have a nurse to do anything um to please him you could call it a tragic love story but I don't think you could put the word love in this not when you think what they did without the influence of Ian Brady it is very very unlikely that Myra hindley would have killed another person however her searching for a stimulating exciting life and may have ended up with her being with some drug dealer some bank robber who would give her an exciting life but wouldn't necessarily have involved her in one-to-one killing just haven't got words to explain how I feel about her that sort of thing just didn't open where we lived on November the 15th 2002 at the age of 60 Myra hendley died from respiratory failure arising from a serious chest infection she'd suffered a suspected heart attack two weeks earlier he's got the devil in it she's the devil itself [Music] clear instance Myra Henley was not born to kill but she was placed in a circumstance where an element that she was born with enabled her to continue and kill him it was to say she could be here Maureen David all of them could be here you know still living in Garden decided to be married yeah of course she could have been here as well she could have been here [Music]

Channel: Absolute Crime

Views: 2,592,224

Keywords: Absolute Crime, Behavioral Analysis, Crime Documentary Series, Crime Scene Investigation, Crime Scene Reconstruction, Criminal Justice System, Criminal Minds Behind Bars, Criminal Minds Explored, Criminal Minds Revealed, Criminal Minds Unraveled, Criminal Profiling, Dark Psychology Analysis, Evil Minds Analysis, Killer Beginnings Analysis, Psychopathy Insights, Serial Killer Psychology, Serial Killer Study, True Crime Channel, True Crime Investigation, True Crime Podcasts

Id: ArRiVhlY9Ag

Length: 226min 16sec (13576 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023