ESCAPED CHILD KILLER'S MURDER SPREE

so today's video is going to be another solved true crime kiss another case from the uk today we're going to be talking about britain's longest serving prisoner who was in prison for a total of 55 years this record has since been beaten 55 years in three months god i'm bad at my job but this record has since been beaten but for the time he was the longest serving prisoner in the uk but before we get into this case i just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible magellan tv magellan tv is a documentary streaming service that i personally love they have a bunch of genres from science history space earth and of course true crime with thousands of titles for you to choose from that are updated every week so there's always something new for you to sink your teeth into they take deep dives into different stories true crimes the world's most notorious villains the paranormal even conspiracy theories so like yetis bigfoot aliens one of the documentaries that i watched recently 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now let's get into the case but before we do i just want to give my usual disclaimer that i mean absolutely no disrespect to anyone that i talk about in this video this video is for educational purposes and everything that i'm about to say is just information that i have found on the internet and i'm compiling into one video but just before we start talking about this one i just want to give a content warning that this case does involve children and also themes of sexual assault so if that's not something that you want to watch feel free to click out this video and i'll see you in another one so this case takes place in bath in south england in 1951. bath by all accounts is a nice place to live in england and it was in the 1950s however all of that changed in 51 when young girls began disappearing from the streets the first was five-year-old brenda goddard a bright-eyed naive little girl she'd been out picking flowers on the day that she went missing july 15 1951 when her foster parents noticed that she was no longer outside they did what any other parent would do and they ran outside looking for her they were shouting her name looking everywhere until eventually they contacted the police and reported her missing a huge search party formed within a matter of just a couple of hours there were neighbours coming out of their houses volunteers coming to help look for this little girl however it wouldn't be too long until the family got some answers just three hours into the search five-year-old brenda goddard was found dead in a nearby woods her cause of death was quite clearly strangulation she still had marks around her neck from where she'd been compressed of course her family and the whole community were devastated this kind of thing was unheard of in that area who could do this to an innocent five-year-old girl and why what had been the possible motive here she was so innocent she would never do anything to anyone to provoke this what did the killer get out of this was it a sexual motive there wasn't any clear sexual assault to her body i mean this was 1951 so the scientific tests for that kind of thing weren't that good but officially in the ruling there was no sign of sexual assault to her body but that doesn't rule out a sexual motive completely this might have given the killer some sort of sexual gratification even if they didn't perform a sex act in the moment whatever had happened brenda's parents brenda's whole community was now left to deal with this police did what they could to try to find a killer but they knew that this was gonna be so hard because no one saw a thing that day there were no witnesses no one noticed brenda leave no one watched anyone walk down the street with her no one saw anything so police decided to look into some similar cases of you know potentially other women or girls going missing or being assaulted in that area they were going to try and connect the cases maybe the same person that had done this one had done a similar crime previously but this brought up nothing they couldn't find anyone that could have done this some older men were arrested and interviewed however these interviews didn't really lead anywhere police couldn't get any solid evidence to be able to charge any of these men so they were all let free and the case continued police never gave up however around four weeks later they had another kiss on their hands a case that was very very similar to this one another young girl had gone missing from the area this time nine-year-old cicely batstern she'd gone out to the cinema on august 8th alone to go and watch a film however she never returned from that cinema trip and her worried parents did the exact same thing that brenda's had done a few weeks prior they went out to the streets looking for her they reported her missing to the police again a huge search party of volunteers gathered and they were searching into the night police that were on the night shift looking for sicily turned into police on the day shift so the ones on the night shift went home day shift came in and the search continued and this shift in the offices that were working from the night shift to the day shift is actually what led to sicily being found the next morning one of the day shift officers got the news about this case that he was going to be on for the day and as he was getting ready in the morning he told his wife about this nine-year-old girl that had gone missing in the area the day prior and that was when this police officer's wife said oh well i saw a nine-year-old girl walking with an older man in a meadow yesterday maybe that's the same girl at the time she thought this young girl and the older man were a little bit of a strange pairing because the man wasn't quite old enough or didn't seem quite old enough to be her father she thought maybe it's her brother but it wasn't so strange in the moment that she stopped and thought hang on that's weird but it was kind of one of those things that lingers on your mind and so she decided to tell her husband this just in case it could help with this search and so he said all right okay let's go to the meadow where you saw this happening this meadow was on the outskirts of bath it was a place called tumps locally so searches took place at this meadow as well as in the town more close to where sicily was last seen and the cinema that she went to in the meadow police were looking under hedges under bushes until eventually there they found sicily batstern's corpse again the cause of death was very apparent this one was also strangulation just as it was with brenda goddard however police were hesitant to connect the two murders at this point in the case i'm not entirely sure why but they didn't connect them maybe because of the distance this one her body was found on the outskirts of bath whereas brenda goddard was probably found more in the middle so now a second murder investigation is launched and police began retracing cicely batster's steps on the day that she went missing so they went to the cinema and spoke with cinema staff and people that saw the same movie that she saw now a couple of people in the cinema that day did recall seeing sicily and they saw her speaking with an older man they placed this man in his early 20s and the police officer's wife that saw this young girl with an older man in the meadow also placed that older man in his early twenties so now this connects that man to the man at the cinema there were actually a lot of witnesses in this case a lot of people saw the two of them at the cinema together of course the police officer's wife who saw them in the meadow there was also a young couple that were having a bit of a picnic in the meadow they saw sicily and an older man but no one ever really suspected anything was off there didn't seem to be a sinister nature about this jeweler of course the ages just seemed a little bit strange but you know there's plenty of explanations maybe it's her brother or an uncle but sicily didn't seem uncomfortable with this man she didn't seem scared and so no one had intervened no one had gone over and spoken to are rescued her there were a lot of witnesses prior to the murder but there were no witnesses once again of the actual murder taking place no one saw anything suspicious and none of these people that had seen this man could identify him no one knew a name no one knew who he was that was until police looked further into where sicily had been that day police had a breakthrough when one person that saw the two of them at the cinema told police that he'd watched the two of them get on a bus and go somewhere now police knew exactly which direction the bus was going in and the general time that this was so they could identify the bus driver of that particular bus on that day so police went to speak with this bus driver who said that he knew this man that had gotten on the bus with this younger girl he said it was a man that he used to work with at an old job and he even gave police a name john straffen now this wasn't the first time that police had heard the name john straffen because straffen was actually a petty criminal in the area they'd spoken with him in relation to a lot of thefts burglaries things like that and they also knew that he was an outpatient at the local mental institution and he was actually questioned in relation to the first murder of brenda goddard however when police couldn't find any concrete physical evidence to connect him with it he was let free so on that same day that cecily batstone's body was found police drove to john strathen's home and arrested him on suspicion of this murder they took him back to the police station and when he arrived he told police that he wanted to make a statement this statement being a confession to the murder of sicily batstern and he was telling police exactly in detail how he'd done it he told them how he'd strangled her from behind she was much smaller than him so it was quite easy for him to do and for him to overpower her and police even asked him for a demonstration which he happily did for them so he got up and went and stood behind one of the offices and demonstrated how he'd strangled this porn nine-year-old girl but that wasn't the only confession that john stratham was about to make but before we get into that i just want to give you a little bit on his history so john thomas strathan was born on february 27 1930 in hampshire england he was the youngest of three children to his father john stratham senior and his mother who i couldn't find the name of and while there's not much information about his mother out there it is implied in a lot of sources that she was quite a standoffish mother rather unaffectionate she didn't seem to really have much time for her children or much care she wasn't very nurturing there was a history of very severe mental illness or disorders in his family his sister suffered very greatly with some kind of mental disorder again i couldn't quite pinpoint it but she was in different institutions all her life she did eventually die young again i couldn't find the cause of her death i don't know if this was related but this means that john strathan will have dealt with the loss of his sister his older sister when he was probably in his teenage years his father was stationed in the army and that was why their family lived in hampshire when john stratham was born and that's because his father was stationed in borden camp however when john was just two years old his father was changed and stationed in india so the whole family just packed up and moved to india and that was where john spent the next six years when he was eight years old his father was discharged from the army and the whole family moved back to the uk this time living in bath which is where he lived for the rest of his life and it was around this time when stratham moved back to the uk that he began acting up and this got progressively worse as the months went by he began skipping school committing petty crimes like theft multiple times a week it actually got so bad that his parents had to refer him to a child's behavioral clinic when he was just eight years old however that didn't really do much the crimes continued skipping school continued it actually got worse with time when he was 13 years old he had his first proper run-in with the law so police had spoken to him before in the past and just given him warnings but when he was 13 he actually stole a girl's purse now this was his first serious serious crime i mean all of them were serious crime is serious but for this one he had to go to court and he was actually given two years of probation and from this point on strathan had a hatred of the police in his eyes they were the reason that his life was kind of falling apart at this stage they were the reason that he was on probation he thought it was all their fault they were making his life miserable and as he got into trouble for more crimes later on as you'll see this only got worse and he felt like they were out to get him it was personal it wasn't like he didn't understand that they were the police and they were there to police everyone he saw this as a personal attack on himself now this probation officer that he was given as he was talking to straffen and he saw this obvious hatred between you know strafing and himself he realized that there must be a deeper issue for this this wasn't the the normal way that people react to police it was clear that he also didn't understand the concept of the law the concept of belongings and why you can't take other people's belongings he didn't even understand what probation really was and his probation officer was looking at him and thinking this kid isn't the typical just bad kid just someone that is just misbehaving there's something deeper he doesn't understand this in his head and for this exact reason his probation officer decided to refer him to a psychiatrist to see what was going on however this probation officer actually had to take him to this appointment himself because like i said his mother didn't seem to really care she was taking a back seat in parenting the probation officer was more of a parent to him at this point in his life than either of his actual biological parents were and it was in this psychiatric assessment that john straffen was diagnosed with being a mental defective which was later clarified to be a certain learning disability i don't know which specific learning disability it was and the terminology has probably changed a lot since the 1950s anywhere strathan had an iq of 58 which is way below average and at the age of 10 his mental age was found to be just six years old following this he was moved to a boarding school for children on a special education program he was there for two years and there was a lot of stigma in the area about this school it was known as a school for backwards children which is awful and this very much affected his self-esteem he didn't like being seen as a mental defective i don't know if that's proper terminology but it's the terminology that was used in this case and he was very insecure about this so much so that he eventually went to you know just a standard senior school when he was older he no longer wanted to be on a special education program he wanted to be in school where all the other kids in the area went but even then straffen was still behaving and very concerning ways very dangerous ways when he was just 14 years old he was accused of strangling two geese to death it was also noted at this point in his life that strathan was very sensitive very quick to anger and he was he was quite a learner he didn't have many friends in the school he didn't have any any friends in general when he was 16 years old he had a follow-up psychiatric assessment to evaluate where he was now that he was a little bit older and now his mental age was found to be six years and nine months so that had only gone up by nine months in six years when he finished his schooling strathan bounced between a few jobs and then eventually ended up being a machinist at a clothing factory and i say that he bounced around between a few jobs and that was because he got fired from a lot of jobs for being either very angry or very anti-social he just wasn't a very calm and easy to work with co-worker and so he lost a lot of jobs and then eventually he found this machinist job where he didn't really have to talk to many people so this was a job that he got on with well still even now in his late teens when he has this job he doesn't have much else going on in his life because he doesn't have any friends he doesn't you know hang around with anyone he doesn't socialize he didn't have much going on in his life and so he picked up a hobby but a rather unconventional hobby he began burglarizing homes burglar burgling i don't know anyway strafing began breaking into local homes and stealing small items however he wouldn't take them home with him he wouldn't sell them he wouldn't give them to other people he would simply steal these small things from the home and then hide them like bury their mar you know just throw them in a bush it really seemed like he was just doing this for the sake of it just for the thrill just for something to do when john straffen was 17 years old he was reported to the police for his first violent assault on a woman well i say a woman this was a 13 year old girl it was actually a child this girl had told police that strathan had covered her mouth and said what would you do if i killed you i've done it before now stefan didn't like the fact that this girl had told the police about this incident i don't know what led to the incident i don't know the circumstances surrounding it but he was angry at this girl in his revenge strathan then snuck round to the girl's home in the middle of the night and strangled five of her family's chickens to death for some odd reason he wasn't actually arrested for the assault on the girl however he was arrested for this for strangling five of her chickens and when they brought him back to the police station police got quite a shock when jon strathan sat there and began confessing to a bunch of crimes that they didn't even know that he committed either crimes that they had no idea about or crimes that they hadn't even suspected him for things like burglaries break-ins thefts everything like that he was given another psychiatric assessment following this arrest and once again he was diagnosed with having a learning disability although this time it was just a much more offensive language i'm not sure why he needed to be diagnosed a second time i don't know if police had access to his old records but you know he was diagnosed with the same thing he was then sent to hotham idiot colony it was called which was essentially just another psychiatric hospital this time for violent offenders it was kind of a rehabilitation kind of thing it was mainly for people with learning disabilities and other mental illnesses and things of the like you know people that commit violent crimes not because they want to but because of their brain wiring in some way or another and so this colony was to help them kind of train to control that and you know get them ready for for reintegrating back into normal life once they've served their sentence it was an open facility which meant that he was there during the night however during the day he was free to go out and get a job and be a working citizen so he continued his job at the clothing factory as a machinist and stratham was actually doing so well on this program that the authorities deemed him capable of moving to a lower security facility he didn't need to be in this home any longer however this didn't last very long because within a couple of months of moving to this lower security facility strathan was caught stealing a bag of walnuts and so he was sent right back to hawthorne a bag of walnuts and then things got even worse for him when he was caught trying to escape hawthorne now bear in mind this isn't the most restrictive or secure place anywhere so it was kind of easy for him to escape he just kind of tried to leave and and move back home without permission that's what is meant by escape police went to try and get him back he resisted a rest it was a whole mess eventually they got him back to hawthem and now he was under even more strict supervision because of what had just happened so this just worked against him completely so as part of this whole deal him being in hawthorne he had to be reassessed every few months and in 1951 he was found to have some physical abnormalities with his brain he was noted as having a wide and severe damage to his cerebral cortex now this is believed to have been caused due to inflammation of the brain when he was just six years old so when he was in india he must have gotten seriously ill with whatever this was that made his brain so inflamed and they just didn't catch it at the time and it left him with lasting physical damage on his brain the whole time he had no idea that this had happened to him his family had no idea that this had happened to him maybe they just thought it was a headache at the time in july of 1951 just five days before the murder of brenda goddard john straffen was reassessed he was now found to have a mental age of 10 years old as opposed to six years and nine months which it was in his previous assessment and around this time he was admitted back to hawthorne i think for some time he'd been staying with his mother on a kind of test maybe a test contract i don't quite know how it worked i think he was at home for a while but they kind of knew that he was going to go back to hawthorne eventually anyway he was back in hawthorne now and this whole time through his whole life so now he's in his early 20s but through his whole life this intense hatred of the police had just been boiling up and getting more and more and more and now it was his every working thought that he hated police and he wanted to get back at them anyway skip forward a month and now he is in police custody and he's just confessed to the murder of sicily batster but that wasn't all that he was confessing to her he then went on to say the other girl i did her the same in reference to brenda goddard's murder so now he had confessed to the murder of this five-year-old girl and this nine-year-old girl so he was charged with both murders but now police want to find a motive why had this 21 year old man seemingly suddenly turned into a child killer well it's been theorized that maybe it was this hatred of police he felt that police were making his life a misery and they were just causing all these inconveniences in his life and so he wanted to cause inconveniences for them and it seems that his method of causing an inconvenience for police was inspired by another crime that he'd read about in the paper on the day of his last psychiatric assessment which was five days before the murder of brenda goddard it's believed that john straffen picked up a newspaper and saw an article about the murder of a little girl in windsor so not too far from bath where he lived he saw the murder investigation that followed this and he saw how much police were struggling to find the killer and how much effort and money was being put into this case and he felt that that was probably the best method to cause police so much trouble and work and inconvenience was to murder a child and this particular murder that he'd read about in the newspaper was of a seven-year-old girl named christine butcher she was a huge boxing fan particularly this american boxer named sugar ray robinson and he was actually in the uk at the time he was over here to fight another boxer named dick turpin and christine really badly wanted to meet sugar ray robinson so much sir that she was gonna go and find him by herself and so for that reason she set off a learn from her house on july 8 1951. she was just seven years old and she was walking the streets trying to find the hotel that sugar ray robinson was staying at however she would never make it to the hotel that day that evening when her parents couldn't find her they raised the alarm with police a huge search party was formed and within a few hours christine was found dead the poor girl had been raped and then murdered and then raped again and her body was left by a river close to windsor castle i believe that that case is actually still unsolved to this day possibly won't ever be solved and like i said strathan read about this in the papers and he saw how much police were doing to solve that case and protect the community and he saw that as a good way of causing inconvenience for the police where he lived and he replicated this case almost entirely just apart from the kind of sexual aspect to it he decided to go for young female victims just like christine butcher he decided to strangle his victims just like christine so five days later as he was walking to the cinema as he did every single week he saw five-year-old brenda goddard picking flowers on the side of the road he approached brenda and said that he knew of a place where even better flowers grew and he could take her there if she wanted and she accepted and so the two of them walked off to find these nicer flowers the two of them walked to the end of the street until they reached this fence and that was when straffen told brenda that on the other side of that fence there was a wooded area and there were nice flowers in there so they just needed to jump the fence get into there and they could pick flowers so first he lifts brenda up and over the fence and then when he jumped the fence he said he got down on the other side and noticed that brenda had fallen and hit her head and she was now unconscious he then decided while she was unconscious on the ground that he was gonna kill her and so he put his hands around her neck and strangled her until she stopped breathing and when he was sure that she was dead he just upped and left he didn't do anything he didn't try to move or hide the body he didn't do anything he just left this scene exactly as it was he then carried on his walk to the cinema and actually got there in time to catch his movie which was called shock proof so he sat through this whole movie feeling no anxiety no guilt no shame no anything he was calm and cool enjoying his film on the way home he picked up some fish and chips from a nearby food van and walked down those exact streets that he'd walked with brenda he said that as he did he actually saw brenda's foster mother frantically looking around the streets shouting for her but he didn't stop he didn't speak to her or anything he just walked straight past that night he went back home and slept sound as ever in his bed with his teddy named rupert he was in bed by 10 p.m which was the curfew that was set by his mother and he slept sound with his teddy despite murdering a child that day like i said he was questioned in relation to this murder because of what brenda's foster mother had seen she'd seen him walking down the street that day however police couldn't find any concrete evidence to connect him so he was let free however the news did get round to his employer at the factory that he was being questioned in relation to this child murder case and his employer of course didn't really want to take any chances on having a potential child killer on their payroll and so they let him go they fired him from this job and this only made john straffen even more angry he resented the police even more now he felt like they were ruining his life they were making his life such an inconvenience making him spend all this time in half them and now he'd lost his job because of them he felt like this was still a personal attack against him and this links back to his low iq and his mental age of 10 he doesn't understand that crimes have punishment and this is the same for everyone this is what happens to anyone that commits these kind of crimes he didn't understand that you can't just do what you want in this world that there are rules that there are laws his brain just couldn't grasp the concept of that less than a month later strathan went to the cinema once again alone on his weekly trip and that was when he met nine-year-old cecily batstern at the viewing of this particular film the two of them got speaking and of course because john straffen's mental age is around 10 years old and cecily was nine the two of them had a lot in common so to him this wouldn't have been a weird relationship of him being more than double her age to him in his mind they're on the same wavelength the two of them get speaking they become friends and he actually offers sicily to come and watch another film with him at a different cinema and so the two of them get on the bus and go to another cinema and watch another film and this is where this person saw the two of them getting on the bus together after that second film the two of them got on another bus together this time going to that meadow on the outskirts of bath and this was eventually where he strangled her and left her body in a bush so now these two murder cases went to trial and straffen's defense actually included his doctor from hawthorne who said that he didn't believe that john straffen was mentally able to plead in this case because of his mental disability he couldn't understand what he was doing he couldn't understand the whole court process he didn't you know he couldn't consent to anything legally and the judge actually agreed and was quoted saying in this country we do not try people who are insane you might as well try a baby in arms if a man cannot understand what is going on he cannot be tried instead of a prison sentence the judge sentenced john straffen to broadmoor psychiatric hospital which is a notorious high security hospital for the criminally insane or at least it used to be the criminally insane in the uk i think now it's just you know a hospital whereas then it was kind of for people that have committed serious violent crimes so there's a lot of murderers a lot of serial killers in there i've covered a lot of cases where the the killer has ended up in broadmoor hospital people like the yorkshire ripper the devil's daughter serious serious criminals and there he was given a job as a cleaner and you know he was doing well he was behaving well he wasn't acting up and you know he was actually doing a lot better than they expected him to do in this hospital however this didn't last very long on april 29th 1952 when john stratham was 22 years old he hadn't even been in broadmoor hospital for a year yet he decided that he was going to try to escape from this high security hospital pretty much a prison escape essentially but it's just a hospital and he had the perfect plan on how he was going to do this so part of his job as a cleaner at the hospital included cleaning some of the outbuildings so different sheds and stuff that they had outside which he thought would make the perfect opportunity for him to try to jump the 10-foot wall that surrounded the whole hospital so on this day john strathan snuck off to the laundry room first thing in the morning and he stole some normal clothes from that room he put those clothes on first and then he put his boiler suit his kind of cleaning clothes over the top so that when he got out of the hospital once he jumped the wall he could take off the boiler suit and he just looked like a normal guy that afternoon he went out into the yard with one other patient and i think a supervisor and they were doing their jobs cleaning this this and that and then as they were going back inside he made an excuse to the other two as to why he just had to stay outside a couple more minutes he had to shake off his duster or something like that of course the other two didn't think much of it he was a cleaner at the end of the day and so they went inside and left john straffen outside alone and once he was he snuck off to one of these outbuildings managed to climb up on top of it onto the 10-foot wall and jump over the other side he was out of the hospital and now john straffen this escaped mental patient was on the run he took off this boiler suit ditched it in a bush and ran as fast as he possibly could to the nearest town broadmoor hospital is surrounded by fields and woodlands so he just started running and just hoped for the best hope that he was gonna hit housing soon and once he reached the nearest village he began knocking on doors asking to go in for a cup of tea and unbelievably a few people let him like a few people just invited this strange man that was out of breath into their house for a cup of tea they had no idea who he was and this happened a couple of times this wasn't just one it was a few different houses in these villages that he was walking through he walked a fair way like seven miles on this dare and he was just nipping into houses on the way through asking for a glass of water or a cup of tea the first woman whose house he actually went and sat in and had a cup of tea with he was talking to her about like where she lived it was a really nice area and then he said is it not weird or scary living close to broadmoor hospital like what if the patients escape which is so eerie because that's exactly what he'd done was he like hinting at what he'd just done or this woman didn't think anything of it and he just left and between all the houses that he was going in and having drinks and you know about to eat he was just taking a leisurely stroll through all these villages he wasn't in any kind of rush to hide or flee he was just enjoying his time out the next house that he went into it was actually quite a large house and the owners seemed to be rather wealthy and it was that actually their mid or their nanny that answered the door and he said oh can i come in for a drink and this nanny went and asked the person that owned the house and the person invited him in he was sat there having a drink with them and then he mentioned that he wanted to go to a nearby town and he asked where the closest bus stop was for him to be able to get there and this person that owned the house liked john struffin enough over this conversation that she actually offered to give him a lift to the nearest bus stop she was going to drive him there so she and this child killer that she had no idea was a child killer hopped in her car and drove to the nearest bus stop however when they got down there john strathan started acting really weird he was he was really skittish really jumpy and he was like oh is that police at the bus stop and this woman looked over and she saw two people stood at the bus stop in broadmoor uniforms these were broadmoor hospital you know nurses or security so she turned to john stratton and she was like i don't think they're police but they're definitely some kind of official and she noticed that john was really you know put off they said this had changed his whole mood either way she kind of pulled over let john out of the car and when she did he started running in the complete opposite direction and through a field when he'd asked to be dropped off at this bus stop of course he knew that he couldn't be seen by these two broadmoor workers because they'd been in the hospital when he disappeared so they probably knew that he was on the run and they would recognize him if they saw him so he knew that he had to run in the opposite direction and this woman that had just dropped him off she thought that this was all really really strange and she thought that she probably needed to mention it to these two people because it was very clear that it was these two people that had triggered this complete change in in how he was acting so this woman went over and told these two broadmar workers what just happened however at this point in time the news that one of the patients had escaped from broadmoor hadn't leaked into the local towns you know there'd been no announcement no news no one knew at this point other than people that worked at broadmoor so these two workers got straight on the phone with police and told them what had just happened meanwhile jon straffen was of course out of sight by now there was no point trying to chase after him because he was probably in the next village overall the next town over by now they had no idea where he was but at this point the news had begun to trickle over into the villages and towns that a patient had escaped from broadmoor and that was when a local couple in the area noticed that they hadn't seen their daughter in a while their daughter that was playing out on the street five-year-old linda burya was learning to ride her bike out on the street outside and she was just doing lengths of the street up and down getting her practicing you know gaining her balance whatever her stepfather had been out earlier in the day teaching her to ride the bike and then he'd gone inside and just kind of left her outside to practice he thought that she was safe out on the street however when he and linda's mother went outside linda was gone so the parents alerted the police and they kind of gathered together a group of volunteers neighbors friends family to go out and try and look for linda meanwhile police had set this case uh extremely high priority because they were aware that a child killer had escaped from the local psychiatric unit and was now on the loose in the area this was extremely high priority and linda boya this missing girl matched his exact victim profile young girls under the age of 10. manual searches went on all the way through the night and into the next morning when linda boyer's body was eventually found she was laying under a tree in a field and her bike that she'd been riding up and down the street was ditched in a hedge just 30 yards away from her body her cause of death just as police feared was strangulation the hallmark of a john stratton murder and everything else was consistent with his previous two kills as well there was no sexual assault there was no effort made to try to hide or conceal the body at all this had to have been john stratton meanwhile police had been receiving a lot of leads a lot of calls from the townspeople because now they knew what they were looking for now they knew that someone had escaped from broadmoor and they'd been calling in all night and eventually police located john straffen they detained him and brought him back to broadmoor at this point they didn't make it known to him that they knew that a child had been murdered they didn't mention this at all they didn't accuse him they literally just didn't say a single word they acted as though they were simply picking up a patient that had escaped the hospital in turtle he was on the run for four hours and five minutes and he'd actually managed to travel over seven miles away from the hospital and most of that was on foot the following morning police went to broadmoor hospital to speak with straffen about his escape so not about the murder but they knew that they were gonna bring it up eventually but they started the conversation just about his escape kind of asking him what he got up to you know because obviously this was a crime to escape from the hospital that he was by law a patient in but their plan was to encourage a confession of the murder without accusing him because they didn't want him to kind of go defense murdered they wanted to kind of coax it out of him so the police begin this interview with straffen and they must have been asking a lot of leading questions they hadn't mentioned linda burlier or her murder or her disappearance or anything but they were asking a lot of leading questions and that was when john strathan snaps at them and says i didn't kill the little girl and that was when police pointed out to him that they hadn't accused him of killing a little girl they hadn't actually mentioned anything about a little girl they were simply asking questions that kind of alluded to that or implied that but no one had accused him or said anything like that that was just john stratham's guilty mind going straight to that thinking oh god they know about the little girl that i killed and that was his defense mode that he put up so police had caught him out here they hadn't mentioned the girl and yet he was bringing it up first saying that he didn't kill a little girl when he wasn't accused or asked about killing a little girl and when police said that to him stratham replied oh well i know what you police men are like suggesting that they were potentially trying to set him up or frame him or you know something along those lines but at the end of the day straffen had just accidentally confessed to this crime no one in broadmoor knew that a little girl had been found murdered the news hadn't gotten into broadmoor hospital yet so there was no possible way that any of the patients would have known that a little girl was murdered in the local towns unless they were the killer he also mentioned at some point during this this questioning he snapped again and said i didn't kill the little girl on the bike again no one had mentioned a bike no one would have known that linda was on a bike apart from the police and the killer because that hadn't even been mentioned in police reports yet and i suppose that was just that last little piece of extra evidence that they didn't really need at this point because they had an accidental confession and that just completely confirmed this to police that it was john straffen that murdered linda burlier on july 21st of 1952 22 year old john stratham was charged and in his trial he pled not guilty to this third murder by reason of insanity although the jury didn't accept this plea of insanity although he was in broadmoor hospital sent there by a judge because he was deemed to be insane the jury said that he wasn't insane and he was actually perfectly coherent in his mind when he committed this murder and for that reason he was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death john straffen was to be hung in the gallows for the murder of linda burya and when the news of this finding in the court when the news of this sentencing went nationwide it was all over the newspapers and everything people were outraged this was a man with an intellectual disability as recognized by the court because that's the exact reason that the judge in the last trial didn't even let him plea because his mental age is 10. that was the exact reason he was in broadmoor hospital to begin with so how can he now be sentenced to death for the same thing that he was not even able to plea for in a previous trial what how can his mind how can his mental disability have changed so drastically in the course of a year that meant he was now capable of knowing what he was doing as he was murdering someone you know people also blamed broadmar as a hospital saying well if they had better security this would have never happened this was a murderer that was sent to broadmob because he wasn't safe to be in society and for that exact reason their security should be tip top no one should be able to escape from broadmoor because a lot of them are vicious violent criminals so how had this been able to happen because broadmoor didn't have good communication at all they must have realized that john stratham was missing but how long did it take for that news to get down to the local towns and villagers had that news gotten down to the villages faster maybe linda boya wouldn't have been out on the street maybe her parents would have known that a child killer had escaped the local psychiatric unit and they would have brought their child inside and she would have been safe they were criticized a hell of a lot for their substandard security measures and substandard communication of course there was the thing about communication with the locals but also patients shouldn't be left alone in that hospital and given the opportunity to you know escape at any chance they should be watched at all times especially when they're close to the wall this 10-foot wall that a lot of them could easily jump and so for that exact reason broadmoor had a siren fitted this incredibly loud alarm that they would set off in the case of you know one of their patients escaping and this would be an immediate warning to the nearby towns and villagers that you know someone had escaped and that they need to all be on lockdown pretty much this alarm is actually still tested every week every monday morning to this day and the reason it exists is because of linda's murder so anyway due to the national outrage surrounding john stratton's sentencing of you know execution this case was actually taken back to court back to the sentencing level the old sentencing was thrown out and this time he was sentenced to life in prison of course it's understandable why broadmoor is no longer an option for john straffen he needed to be in a high security prison where people are kept not where people are treated where people are locked up and john stratham served his time in prison from 1952 all the way to his death however somewhere along the line in 1997 so he'd been serving for around 45 years at this point and he served 55 in turtles so this was 10 years before he died stratham was now 67 years old and he had something to say to police this whole time strathan had maintained his innocence in the linda burya murder whereas with the first two he'd freely admitted to them given you know all the tiny little details surrounding each murder this time he completely denied anything to do with linda boyer's murder he was adamant that he didn't do it and this whole time there had been conspiracy theories you know on the outside of people looking into this case thinking oh well maybe he didn't do it after all this was a man with a very low iq a very low mental age was he capable of holding up a lie for this long if he was responsible for linda boyer's murder is he capable of maintaining this fake innocence for so long for 45 years a theory that some people discuss is that maybe linda boyer's murder was a domestic murder maybe strathan wasn't responsible and maybe her murderer was someone in her family and this seems possible when you look into her family's statements of the timeline of her murder they said that they hadn't seen her since 6 p.m on the night that she died when she was out playing on her bike in the street however they didn't actually report her missing until 11 p.m that night five hours and this is a five-year-old girl that you're just leaving to be missing for five hours without contacting police this five-year-old girl was outside alone in the dark with no supervision for five hours as the family were getting news that a local psychiatric unit had a child killer escape just hours prior and then not even contacting police about their daughter's disappearance given the circumstances especially with john straffen escaping why didn't her family inform police sooner some people looking into this case believe that maybe the family killed linda boyer for some reason maybe she was acting out and maybe they killed her in the heat at the moment and maybe they used john straffen's escape as a scapegoat maybe they used him to blame the murderer on this is all speculation remember i'm not accusing anyone of anything these are just conspiracy theories and some people believe that there is actually evidence to back this conspiracy theory so when linda boyer's body was found there were actually nail marks on her neck now john straffen at the time as he'd been in broadmoor hospital he'd bitten his fingernails pretty much right down to the bottom he didn't have any so he didn't have nails to leave nail marks on a victim his first two victims didn't have the nail marks because he was a nail biter so where did these nail marks come from but not only that there were also none of john straffen's fingerprints found on linda bury's bike which would be practically impossible if he had done this murder if he had committed this murder because her killer had taken the bike and ditched it in a hedge they would have had to pick it up and throw it in the hedge so how is it possible that none of his fingerprints are on this bike and there's also a lot of debates on whether the timeline of linda boyer's murder really adds up because a lot of the neighbors in the area where she was actually killed said that they heard screaming like screams from a young girl around 7 p.m that night so that places her murder around 7 p.m however by 7 p.m john strathan was already found detained and back in broadmoor hospital so how could you have killed her if she was last seen at 6 00 p.m and he was caught just after 6 p.m how could he have killed her and for those reasons at this point in the case in 1997 john stratham was nearly 70 years old and he was trying to appeal his conviction this appeal was ultimately denied and officially by law john straffen is linda bowie as murderer that's never changed in the eyes of the law however these conspiracy theories are always talked about in relation to this case a lot of people that look into it kind of think that that one is a little bit off for me it's mainly the fact that he freely admitted to the first two and told about them in detail because like i said his iq is very low he does have a mental disability he doesn't realize that what he's done is so wrong he probably knows that it's wrong but he probably doesn't understand why it's wrong and that's why he's open to talking about them all in such detail but the fact that he maintained to the day that he died that he wasn't responsible for linda's murder i just think it's not consistent i think if he had killed linda boyer he would have admitted to it somewhere down the line was he really capable of keeping up this fake innocence for so long john straffen died in prison in durham age 77 on november 19 2007 after serving 55 years in prison at the time this was the longest serving prisoner in uk history and this title was eventually overtaken by ian brady of the moors murders and that is all i have on this case let me know what you think about this one especially relating to that third murder and all the conspiracy theories surrounding it i really want to know you guys opinions i'm gonna be reading the comments of this video all night there are some things that so clearly point to him being the killer about him saying i never killed the girl or i didn't kill the girl on the bike but did he actually say that because police in the 1950s maybe they were a little bit corrupt that was their evidence to say that he did it was that he confessed maybe he didn't actually confess i don't i don't know i don't know what i think about that last one of course in the eyes of the law he's responsible for that murder and that's all i can really say thanks again to magellan tv for sponsoring this video remember if you want to get a month free then you can sign up using the link down below in the description you are welcome huge thank you to all of my channel members for helping me decide the cases that i cover especially my tier 2 members whose names are all on screen right now if you want to become a channel member you can just click the join button on a desktop or there'll be a link in the description of this video but yeah that's all i have on this one thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed make sure you leave a thumbs up down below if you want to subscribe you can click right here if you want to subscribe to 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Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,314,995

Rating: 4.9473195 out of 5

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, eleanor neale makeup, mystery, unsolved, unsolved mystery, true crime, solved, documentary, killer, murder, serial killer, buzzfeed, buzzfeed unsolved, podcast, true crime podcast, bbc, itv, netflix, storytime, forensic files, 2020, crime watch daily, dateline, interview, news, creepypasta, horror, john straffan, broadmoor, broadmoor hospital, broad, moore, moor, ian brady, john, straffan, john straffen, straffen, sharon carr, the yorkshire ripper

Id: 2AF_Y5S_jkI

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021