Murdered For 'Being a Goth'

sophie and robert were a self-described goth couple and they lived and breathed the goth culture they loved the music the style the values everything but they received considerable backlash just for expressing themselves in this way backlash that would soon lead to harassment that would soon lead to physical assaults that would soon lead to murder so today's video is going to be another solved true crime case today we're going to be discussing the attack on sophie lancaster and robert maltby this is a case that i have wanted to cover probably since i started my channel so this one's been a long long time coming but quickly before we get into the actual case i do just want to thank our sponsors for making this video possible magellan tv you guys already know how much i love magellan tv it's a documentary streaming service that i have been a loyal subscriber of for years now one of the main reasons i love magellan tv is because their true crime section is so niche and unique and original 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what because they have so many documentaries on there in so many different categories and they're always adding new ones they add between 15 and 20 hours of content every single week so you're not gonna get bored it's completely ad free so you won't get interrupted as you're watching your documentaries and you can watch on pretty much any device that you have so you might as well try it and they're very kindly offering you guys a one month free trial when you click the link down below in the description of this video so i highly recommend go click it thanks again to magellantv for sponsoring this video now before we get into it i do 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 just a couple of content warnings before we actually get into the case this case is considered a hate crime a hate crime against the alternative community like that kind of subculture so if that is something you don't want to hear about right now there's also going to be quite graphic descriptions of injuries and the attack it does get very very graphic so that's your warning now if any of that is something that you don't want to hear right now i completely understand click out this video hopefully i'll get to see you again some other time with a different case but with all that being said let's get into the case sophie lancaster was a 20 year old woman from lancashire in the northwest of england she was born on november 26 1986 and lived with her mother sylvia her dad john and her older brother adam growing up sophie was a generally happy kid especially when she was at home when she would go out in public she was a bit more like quiet timid shy she was quite an anxious kid but overall she was happy but yeah she was a very introverted girl she much preferred to stay in the house and read a book rather than like go out and play in the street and play sports and stuff like that her mother remembered coming home from work and nearly every single day sophie would already be sat down with a snack and a drink and a book that was like her daily routine sophie really looked up to her mother she was a care worker she was a very very kind sweet and strong woman and ever since she was a little girl sophie had always looked up to her mother they were super super close to be fair the whole family was very close but there was just something about her mum maybe it was because she was the only other woman in the family but she just was in awe of her mother she wanted to be just like her when she grew up and so when it came time that like people would be asking this little girl so what do you want to be when you're older what do you want to do when you grow up she would always say a youth worker just like her mum as she grew up sophie became a little bit more chatty she was less introverted i think it was as she got into her teenage years she really like came out of a shell she was a lot more like sarcastic and making jokes at home she was very quick-witted her family said that she was really quite confident at home she would have everyone in stitches at the dinner table like she was not afraid to be herself at home but everywhere else like school and you know any other public social situation sophie just was not growing that same confidence she was anxious as ever she she didn't do a lot of things she turned a lot of things down because because she was so anxious but then when she hit kind of her mid-teenage years sophie lancaster discovered the world of punk rock music and it was like love at first listen as soon as she stumbled across this community she found herself really really identifying with it and like resonating with it on a level that she'd never really connected with with any kind of pop culture before like this was this was a big deal she was really into all this music and everything her favorite bands were white snake and pixies and she would buy karang magazine every single week so did i girl and she also wanted her physical appearance to reflect you know the kind of stuff that she was into and so she starts dyeing her hair all these crazy colors well actually first she went like jet black dark dark black hair and then she well she had dreadlocks and she would take a few of the dreadlocks and dye them crazy colors like she would go neon green she would go bright red with a few of them it looked really really cool to be fair she got piercings she started doing dark makeup she would wear like super baggy clothes and fishnets and ripped things and she was just really going for that like edgy cool gothic style she looked really cool but more importantly than how she looked sophie felt happy she felt herself she felt comfortable she felt finally able to kind of have a voice without needing a voice if that makes sense her appearance spoke for itself so she didn't need to speak in social situations which was something that she really really struggled with this was aware for her to tell the world exactly who sophie lancaster was but not everyone was on board with sophie lancaster's new look and she started to get picked on a little bit at school people would leave her out people thought she was a bit weird and so they wouldn't involve her in things she really noticed a difference in how people treated her but to be fair she didn't really mind that much because she was finding friends elsewhere she didn't need these friends at school because now sophie was able to find friends through music she would go to all these like rock band gigs even like smaller gigs of local bands and that was where she would make her friends like friends that would show up to the goth scene and be at all these different gigs finding new small underground bands so yeah she's going to all these shows with her friends and she starts to make a like a group of other goth friends people from all over the town that go to different schools and there was one particular person in this group that really liked sophie his name was robert maltby he was a year older than sophie and he was pretty much the exact same person they were like the same person but in a boy's body and in a girl's body not only did they like all the same music they dressed the same they had all the same values they were all well into this this goth culture but also the way that they were you know with their very introverted personalities they were quite shy timid both of them struggled in the exact same way robert found it quite hard to be social and he too had found comfort and found his voice in the way that he looked that is how the two of them found this community and now found each other so the two of them started dating and sophie's family loved robert they really approved of this boy because he seemed so nice he stayed out of trouble just like their sophie did and they could tell that he really really loved their daughter and she really loved him too he made her really happy and their friends saw it too they all described them as soul mates like they were made for each other there was no one more perfect for sophie lancaster than robert maltby and just like sophie did robert also struggled with other people's opinions of how he dressed and how he presented himself just like sophie he would get funny looks from people when he would go out in the street and now that the two of them were dating and they would go out together those funny looks only increase but sophie and rob always handled this really well like they just thought it was so stupid that people cared about how they looked like they would just laugh at it if they got funny looks in the street or if someone shouted something at them they would just laugh it off they didn't care about the rest of the world's opinions because to be honest they were both so happy they were on cloud nine now that they'd found each other and they were just they they didn't care they didn't care what other people had to say they thought they looked cool and they did but soon this judgment in the street would become quite hard for them to ignore because on three separate occasions it escalated into harassment and physical assault and every single time it was because they were goths it was because of the way that they looked it was because of the way that they dyed their hair the piercings the clothes that they wore other people didn't like that so much that they wanted to physically assault these people because of the clothes that they put on their body make it make sense every time that this would happen sophie and rob would just get themselves out of the situation as quickly as they could they never fought back they never argued back they literally just ignored it put their head down just kept on walking got themselves out of the situation they weren't confrontational people they didn't want a fight they thought this was so stupid that people had a problem with the way that they looked they weren't going to entertain it in any way shape or form this was quite common in the 2000s in fact researcher rachel found a really interesting study on this it's actually quite a horrifying study it showed that seven in ten people who were part of a subculture so that's like goth emo any kind of alternative subculture seven in ten of those people had been harassed or assaulted in some sort of way simply because they were part of an alternative subculture i don't know when that study was actually done in the 2000s i don't think it was the 2010s yet but around that time it was so so prevalent and like i said this is this case is technically categorized as a hate crime but these kind of crimes would very often go unreported because people thought that they wouldn't be classed as hate crimes if you know what i mean because people think hate crime and they think racism homophobia they don't think being physically assaulted because of the way that you're dressed you know and to be honest these kind of attacks are not classed as hate crimes everywhere um only in a few different places in the uk is this now considered a hate crime but still yeah at the time very rarely reported to police because they just didn't think that the police were really gonna do much about it and that was the same with sophie and rob they didn't tell anyone when this would happen they didn't even tell like their parents they would tell their friends because their friends could relate i mean it happened to their friends as well because they were all goths but yeah sophie's family didn't quite know how bad it was they knew that she would get funny looks and sometimes things shouted at her in the street but they didn't know that it was turning into physical assault in september of 2006 the time came for sophie and rob to start thinking about going off to university and the two of them had quite different plans robert multby was due to start an art degree at a university in manchester whereas sophie was actually going to take a gap year and then the next year she was going to start an english degree so when robert moved away to manchester for uni sophie practically moved with him she didn't like officially move with him but she was always with him because they were like inseparable they were so in love and while they were there they were just as happy as ever robert was loving his course because to be fair a lot of the art that he was making was very much his style a lot of it was quite like gothic and dark and actually sophie would be the inspiration for a couple of his pieces they lived in manchester together for about a year and at this point they'd been in a relationship for three years so now sophie lancaster is 20 and robert maltby is 21. the summer of 2007 was a lovely one it seems from what i could find in my research sophie and rob spent a lot of it just going to different concerts with friends going out just generally having a great time being young being out in the sun having a fun time and then came friday august 10th 2007. sophie and rob's friend jonathan was throwing a house party and well it wasn't really a house party it was more of a gathering it wasn't going to be a late one people weren't getting like absolutely wasted but they were going to have a few drinks get a little bit tipsy in his house so sophie and rob went they had a few drinks they were drinking vodka and coke that was their drink of choice and then it got to just before midnight and the two of them decided that they were gonna call it a night because they were walking home and they lived about two miles away which at that time it's you know it's a long enough walk that you don't really want to be doing it in the middle of the night you know so just before midnight the two of them left jonathan's house to walk back to their flat and they were a bit tipsy they weren't drunk but they were certainly in good spirits if you know what i mean so they're walking for about 20 minutes and they pass this 24-hour shop it's like a garage and so the two of them drop in they go and buy some cigarettes they buy some more alcohol for the walk home and then as they're leaving this shop they bump into a group of teenage girls and these girls are fascinated with the way that sophie looks they're obsessed with her hair and her clothes they're complimenting her asking her questions i think these girls outside the shop were also a bit drunk so the the conversation was flowing they were all talking they were having a great time joking with each other i think okay so there's two different versions of this story and it really doesn't matter either way i think they keep walking with this group of girls i think this group of girls walk them all the way to the park there's another version of events that say they leave this group of girls and then they end up meeting up with another group of kids i'm just confusing it anyway they get to a park called stubby lee park it's about 1am when they arrive at stubby lee park and this was kind of a shortcut for them to get to their flat if they go through the park it was quicker than going like roadways so they start walking towards the entrance of the park but as they did there was a group of teenage boys standing by the entrance and immediately sophie and rob could tell that these are the kind of teenage boys that were going to judge them based on the way that they were dressed they could already tell they could already feel the vibe so the two of them just kept their heads down didn't make eye contact just tried to just tried to get past these boys but all of a sudden they heard the boys shouting things at them just verbal abuse based on the way that they looked we don't know exactly what these boys were saying but things along the lines of like goth emo moshe weird or freak you know sophie and rob had experienced this enough now that they knew what to do just just keep walking don't retaliate don't pay attention to it and eventually they'll just give up but they didn't as sophie and rob kept walking they kept their heads down but these boys were following them and they just kept shouting at them they weren't giving up and this went on for about 10 minutes these boys were not giving in they followed them all the way to the skate park section of stubby lee park and then all of a sudden the couple heard one of the boys behind them shout he's a mosher hit him and then one of the boys ran over to robert and just punched him straight in the face and rob was really taken aback by this this was literally out of nowhere so unprovoked and he was pretty flippin scared as well and so he like stumbled back with the force of it and he did like a little bit of a nervous laugh or maybe it wasn't a nervous laugh maybe it was a genuine laugh because the two of them did used to laugh at people that did stuff like this they thought they were stupid either way rob laughed and the boys didn't like that and then one of them said something along the lines of he's laughing hit him again and so they did and they kept hitting him and then all of a sudden all of these boys were ganging up on robert maltby and before they knew it he was on the floor and they were just punching him kicking him stomping on him and sophie is completely helpless looking on at this situation this group of boys have just started beating up her boyfriend it's five against one and she can't do anything about it all she is doing is just screaming and crying she knows she can't throw herself into that situation otherwise she would just get beaten too and soon robert maltby fell unconscious on the ground and even then these boys didn't stop they were still kicking him stamping on his head jumping on his neck and he was just completely limp on the ground not reacting at all eventually the boys grew bored and they backed off robert he didn't do anything he didn't move of course he's completely knocked out cold and so the boys just walked off sophie was in hysterics she was traumatized by what she'd just seen and as these boys were walking away she ran over to her boyfriend flung herself down on the floor grabbed hold of his head she was like cradling him rocking like crying sobbing screaming but all of this commotion had alerted the attention of the attackers who had turned around seen surfy now on the ground and decided that they were gonna go back for her a couple of them approached her and as she was still holding robert's head in her arms they started beating her too exactly the same way that they had just done to robert maltby they were kicking her punching her stamping on her head literally jumping up and down on her head fortunately a 15 year old girl had heard all of this taking place and saw her and her friends had run to the park to see what was going on and she saw a little bit of this attack take place and so this girl called the emergency services she was very very distressed on the phone crying in fact and she told the operator poor guy i don't know him and i'm crying my eyes out i think he's dead she also tells the operator what she vaguely knows about this situation because she hadn't seen it all take place but she'd seen and heard a little bit of it she said we need an ambulance at baker park this musha has just been banged because he's a moshe so this girl's on the phone she's crying sobbing hysterically trying to tell them everything meanwhile there's a boy that can be heard in the background we don't know who this boy is but he's saying things like get the [ __ ] off him now please he's on the floor man he's practically [ __ ] dead so it's presuming that as this girl was on the phone this this guy was probably one of her friends and the attack was still going on these boys were still kicking and jumping on sophie lancaster as this call was going on the girl tells the operator that sophie and rob are both laying on the floor she said they're still breathing but they're full of blood the blood is pouring out of their heads the operator then tries to talk the girl through like a bit of a procedure to try and stop the bleeding this girl even took off her own shirt and used it she was wrapping it around their wounds trying to trying to stem the bleeding she says on the phone it's all over their hands all coming out of their eyes all out their nose and everything please just help us quit at one point robert even started choking on his own blood and so this girl was instructed how to put him in the recovery position when ambulances arrived paramedics were quickly able to identify robert maltby because his id was in his wallet in his pocket so you know they easily had his name but they had an unidentified female victim with him and they had no idea who sophie was at this point in time but that wasn't really important right now all they needed to do was get these two victims to the hospital for emergency treatment so as they were being rushed off in the ambulances police stayed at the crime scene to question these witnesses one of the witnesses told police that they'd heard this group of boys as they were leaving the park that they believed to be the attackers and they were saying that they'd done something good and then they told a passerby there's two moshe's dead by bearcut park you want to see them they're a right mess the kids that were at the park that witnessed it told police that they'd seen the attackers literally jumping up and down on sophie lancaster's head they likened it to watching them kicking a football about and this had done serious serious damage to both of the victims the ambulance staff really struggled to well before they could id robert they actually really struggled to tell who was the female victim and who was the male victim because their faces were so swollen that that they weren't identifiable from each other at all by the time the two of them arrived at the hospital they both already slipped into comas and as soon as their wounds and their injuries were assessed doctors realized that there would be a very very slim chance that either of them would survive this attack and if they did by some kind of miracle survive this attack they would definitely be left with some level of brain damage some level of brain injury that would affect them for the rest of their lives so they were both sent straight into emergency surgery where their like immediate wounds were sorted and then they were sent to the intensive care unit where they were both put on life support and we're being constantly supervised by hospital staff so now police have an incredibly serious case on their hands this is one of the most severe assaults they have ever seen and it is nearly murder because hospital staff are very doubtful that both of these victims will make it through so this is potentially going to be a murder case but first they needed to figure out who their victims were by now they had identified robert maltby but not the female victim that was found with him so the way that police decided to try and identify her was to go and speak to robert's family and just ask well who do you think this could be and of course they said that is more than likely his girlfriend sophie lancaster so police immediately went to sophie's house to go and speak with her parents and you know inform them of the situation but when they arrived and they knocked on the door there was no answer i think her mum was at work or something and so police put a card through the letterbox that basically said it's urgent please call the police station as soon as you get this card later that day sophie's mother sylvia arrived home from work she came in through the front door picked up this card saw that it said urgent ring up now so she went to go and get her phone because she left her mobile phone at home during the day when she was at work she went over picked up her phone and immediately saw like 10 missed calls texts everything from her son adam and so instead of calling the police straight away she picks up the phone to add him and this was the first that sylvia had heard of sophie's attack adam is on the phone saying mom i'm coming home now have you heard about sophie she's been attacked she's in hospital she's in intensive care so with that sophie's mother flew straight to the hospital and went to be by her daughter's side in the icu so now police were going full speed on this case and they were interviewing every and any witness that they could possibly get their hands on in the first few days of this investigation they questioned over a hundred witnesses most of these witnesses were young people because backup park was quite a a hot spot for like teenagers hanging out especially like drinking underage and stuff like that so there were a lot of witnesses that were in the park at different times that night that police wanted to speak to but questioning these youngans was proving quite difficult because well for a number of reasons police thought that a lot of these kids were not telling them everything they knew because well maybe they were friends with the perpetrators or maybe they were scared of the perpetrators scared that the perpetrators might then attack them if they say anything they know there was a lot of potential reasons why these kids might have been holding back in interviews and police knew they needed to do something about it so the tactic they came up with they sent in all their junior officers so like the youngest ones on the whole police force to go and question these teenagers because well maybe it'd maybe it'd make them a bit more comfortable maybe these kids would feel as though they could trust the the young officer more than they could like what a 40 50 60 year old man that that just can't relate to them you know and you know what it worked to a degree uh the kids started talking a little bit more and it seemed that the ones that did see the attack or heard it they all said that it was completely unprovoked like this wasn't a two-sided fight it wasn't sophie and rob versus these teenage boys it was sophie and rob minding their own business being attacked out of nowhere and they also knew exactly why sophie and rob were attacked because a lot of these witnesses heard the teenage boys shouting things like goth and moshe and emo freak weirdo as they were beating up sophie and rob after speaking with all these different witnesses police started putting together a suspect list and eventually it was whittled down to five names there was 17 year old daniel mallett there were two brothers 17 year old joseph and 16 year old danny holm and the two youngest were 16 year old ryan herbert and 15 year old brendan harris so immediately all five of these boys were arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm to robert mulbey and they were all brought into the police station and they were questioned for hours but none of these boys seem to be taking any of this seriously at all they were just laughing joking like they they were even joking about what they were there for and oh my god brendan harris the the youngest one of all these boys his mum was even joking with him in the interview and the boys really weren't saying much in these interviews at all nothing of interest came up and so police let them all out on bail only to re-arrest them a week later and charge them with gbh but this time for sophie so now there's two counts of gbh and then after this round of interviews only three of them were let back out on bail the three oldest ones police decided to keep in the two younger ones 16 year old ryan herbert and 15 year old brendan harris because they were a little bit more suspicious of those two than they were the other ones i mean they were suspicious of all of them they were all suspects but especially the little ones the main reason that they were a little more suspicious of these two younger ones was because police had done their research at this point and they'd found that this wasn't the first violent crime that these two boys had been accused of the two of them had carried out an eerily similar attack not long before this it was nowhere near as bad as the attack on sophie and rob but it was similar in the way that it was completely unprovoked these two boys just started punching kicking abusing a random person in public so it very much seemed like it would be in their character to have done this to sophie and rob meanwhile staff in the icu are caring for sophie and rob and they're very pleased to see that robert maltby seems to be making a swift recovery they've been very very worried for days now that robert wasn't gonna come around because he had suffered some major major injuries he had like a bleed on the brain internal bleeding elsewhere like he wasn't making any progress for a while so they were scared but after about 10 days robert multby woke up from his coma but doctors were right his brain was affected by his injuries i don't know to what capacity i don't know if he was left with brain damage or what but he certainly didn't have any memory of the days leading up to the attack or the attack at all so he couldn't tell police anything sophie lancaster on the other hand was just not making any progress whatsoever her injuries were even worse than rob's whose were life-threatening his were life threatening so imagine what hers were like if they were worse than his eventually she actually had to be transported to like a specialist neurology unit in salford because the hospital that she was at it was one of the best in the area but it still wasn't quite equipped to deal with her severity of a case when she arrived at this new hospital this new unit a lot of notes were made on her appearance they said that well more than just her appearance her general state but a lot of it refers to her appearance they said that if she did survive this she would be left with severe severe brain damage but we already knew that the nurse on her appearance stated that she had very visible bruises in the shape of shoe prints on both sides of her face her ears had been kicked so many times that they were black and full of puss they were extremely swollen lords of her hair had been torn out and so much so that a chunk of her scalp was actually missing her neck was completely black with bruising as well and now that sophie was at this new unit the doctors decided to send her in for a bunch of different tests and scans and stuff that the other hospital weren't able to do that there's a reason she was transferred it so that they could do all these tests and scans one of the first tests that sophie was sent for was a scan to monitor her brain activity and there was none her brain was practically dead it was practically impossible for her to recover from this coma and survive the injuries that her brain had sustained it was looking like it just could not happen and so on august 24th 2007 sophie lancaster was withdrawn from life support and passed away at the age of 20. that was 13 days after the attack took place she had been on life support for 13 days and around this same time actually robert multby was discharged from the hospital he was out of his coma he had pretty much recovered his physical injuries but now he was going home without his girlfriend with the knowledge that she had died almost protecting him and now that sophie lancaster had passed away all five of those suspects were brought back into the police station and now charged with murder police plan to reinterview all the boys all five of them but they were particularly more suspicious of the younger two fifteen-year-old brendan harris and sixteen-year-old ryan herbert so much so in fact the police got a search warrant to be able to collect a few things from those two boys houses the main thing that they were interested in actually i think this could have been the only thing that they collected but they wanted the boys clothes that they were wearing on the night of the attack they were hoping that they could send them off to the lab and perhaps find like traces of maybe sophie's blood or robert's blood to connect them to this attack but actually when they went and picked up these clothes the lab testing was hardly even necessary because one of the boy's jeans had visible blood splashes all over the front of him he hadn't washed his jeans since he had committed this attack regardless both outfits were sent off to the lab so that they could fully analyze them find out how much blood whose blood it was and when these results came back it was found that there was blood all over both boys outfits and it belonged to both sophie lancaster and robert mulbey and if this didn't have police convinced enough they practically got an admission out of one of the boys but not directly while he was in police custody the older of the two boys ryan herbert was using one of his allowed phone calls to talk to his mother but he didn't think that police would be listening in and recording it for some reason stupid because they were and they overheard a conversation between ryan and his mum basically where she's saying look don't worry if you had nothing to do with this death like you say you didn't then you've got nothing to worry about they won't find anything against you and ryan responds but i did he literally admitted to having a part in the assault and murder but he didn't know the police had heard that but anyway like i said now that this was a murder investigation police were reinterviewing all five of these boys and now that the stakes were raised a few of the boys were a lot more willing to talk than they had been before it seemed that the ones that had less to do with the attack on sophie wanted police to know that so they were willing to say exactly who did what to sophie lancaster the three older boys said that the attack specifically on sophie was done by the two younger boys more so by ryan herbert brendan harris was involved but it was mainly ryan in telling police this these three older boys therefore had to admit that they had had a part in the assault of robert maltby something that they hadn't confessed to at all this whole time but now when there was the chance that they could get put down for murder or for assault they would much rather tell the truth and get the lesser charge of assault so these three older ones are there saying look yes we beat up robert we we admit to the part against robert but the murder of sophie we had nothing to do with that that was the two younger ones more specifically ryan herbert so now police had their two main suspects and they wanted to build up some evidence against them but ryan herbert was a lot harder to crack than brendan harris ryan gave absolutely nothing aware he was no comment uh you know that was all he would say in his interviews which is no comment he wasn't saying anything but brendon was a bit more willing to talk because well same thing with the other boys because he had less to do with the attack on surfy he was more willing to say what he did do because it didn't look as bad as ryan brendan told police a little bit of information but still not enough they knew they weren't getting a full story out of either brendan or ryan they needed to do more if they wanted to get evidence against these boys so in an attempt to do this police decided because at one point they had to transfer these two boys to a youth detention center they were going to have to put them in a police van why not audio rig the van let's let's bug it so then we can listen into the conversations that these two boys have when they think they're alone and these audio recordings were exactly what police had been hoping for very clear communication between these two boys about what they did to sophie lancaster at one point ryan even made a comment about how he kicked her head like a football which perfectly lines up with all the witness testimonies we have so now all five of these boys are charged with sophie lancaster's murder and time came for the trial of course ryan herbert was looking at potentially the worst outcome of this whole trial because it seemed that he was central to the attack he was the main perpetrator well in sophie's murder at least but ryan's legal team were actually gunning to try and get him the lesser charge of manslaughter rather than murder on the grounds of diminished responsibility because they believed he had autism so the prosecution were like all right prove it so they got an autism expert to come in and evaluate ryan herbert and at the end of this assessment they didn't think he had autism they didn't think he was on the autism spectrum at all so the manslaughter thing was out the window and ryan herbert would be up for murder along with the other four boys as planned so the trial began on march 10 2008 and on the very first day ryan herbert did the unexpected he stood up there and confessed to the murder of sophie lancaster this whole time ever since the attack he'd been denying it he had been maintaining his innocence doing the whole no comment thing but no now now he just admitted it on the first day of the trial so i'm good but this admission kind of sent shockwaves through the rest of the case it really affected everything else and police now had to look at the other boys charges and kind of re-evaluate it they had to they had to recharge them since it was now clear that ryan had the main hand in sophie lancaster's murder did this make all the other boys less guilty if they were less responsible does that mean they need lesser charges well they certainly thought this about the three older boys at least daniel mallett and joseph and danny hulme they believed that the three older boys were actually the main perpetrators in robert maltby's assault and the two younger ones were the main perpetrators in surfies that's how this group is kind of divided so therefore the older three boys had the murder charges dropped against them and now they were just facing the gbh charge for robert mulberry brendan harris on the other hand who was the youngest of the whole lot just 15 years old at the time of the attack police didn't drop his charge they believed that he and ryan were both responsible for sophie's murder and they would be tried for him so the prosecution in this trial they laid out a theorized version of events based on all the witness testimonies different things different clues and physical evidence that they had found they believe that it was actually 15 year old brendan harris that kicked everything off that night he was the first one to throw a punch at robert maltby and practically straight after that the other four boys joined in and they were all beating robert multby like i said until he was passed out on the floor and then eventually they gave up they started walking away that was when sophie got down on the floor with robert and then the boys turned back and came for her although it's believed now the three older boys kind of hung back a little bit while the two younger ones came over to sophie and brutally attacked her at the end of the trial both of these boys were found guilty of sophie's murder brendan harris was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 18 years ryan herbert was also sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 16 years and three months although this was later appealed and he won the appeal so it was reduced to a minimum of 15 years and six months and the two-year difference between their initial uh sentences is because obviously ryan pled guilty right at the start of the trial so so he gets rewarded for that doesn't he the other three lads all pled guilty to their gbh charges daniel mallett was sentenced to four years and four months in prison whereas the brothers joseph and danny holm they were both sentenced to five years and 10 months i wonder what they did that was more than daniel that gave them more time in prison i'm not too shy on that one so that was the outcome of the trial justice was served although sophie's family felt that more needed to be done in her memory because sophie was so innocent sophie and rob they were literally just walking the streets minding their own business and these five boys were so offended by the way that sophie and her boyfriend looked that they took it upon themselves to to murder her it broke everyone's hearts but of course sophie's family who knew just how wonderful and amazing and sweet and innocent she was she didn't deserve to have her life torn away from her like this no child does and her mother wanted to make sure that this wasn't happening to any other kids she wanted to be able to protect the other goth kids just like her daughter and just like her daughter's friends she didn't want anyone else to have to go through this and so her mother decided to set up a charity this charity is called the sophie lancaster foundation or just surfy which is an acronym that stands for stamp out prejudice hatred and intolerance everywhere the main goal of this charity is to educate educate young kids on on tolerance and prejudice and hate in the hopes that if they are more educated they will make better choices they won't do horrible horrible things to other people and this charity has also made some change in the way that police go about crimes like this hate against like alternative subcultures is now considered a hate crime in seven different police forces across the uk which is better than it was before when it was zero so any future attacks just like the one that happened to sophie and robert will now be considered at the same level as like racist attacks and homophobic attacks in 2014 sophie's mother sylvia was awarded an obe for all of her amazing work and campaigning to help protect alternative communities sadly she passed away just earlier this year in april but she had done some amazing amazing work some amazing campaigning and i'm glad that that was recognized but yeah that is all i have for this video thank you so so much for watching and thanks again to magellan tv for sponsoring this video remember they're offering you guys a one month free trial when you click the link down below in the description of this video you don't want to miss out on that a huge thank you to all of my channel members for supporting the channel and helping me decide the cases that i cover all of my tier 2 members are on screen right now so thank you so much if you want to become a channel member you can click the join button down below but yeah thank you so so much for watching if you enjoyed please leave a thumbs up down below that would really help me out if you want to subscribe you can click this circle right here or if you want to watch another one of my videos i'll leave you one right there okay bye

Channel: Eleanor Neale

Views: 1,387,909

Keywords: eleanor, neale, eleanor neale, eleanor neale true crime, mystery, unsolved, true crime, solved, documentary, serial killer, podcast, true crime podcast, netflix, 2022, sophie lancaster, sophie, lancaster, goth, emo, mosher, punk, robert maltby, robert, maltby, killed, murdered for being a goth, killed for being a goth, boyfriend, drama, movie, alternative, alt, the sophie lancaster case, the case of sophie lancaster

Id: uilAYdwJO9c

Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 11 2022