A serial killer was on the loose in London, terrorising the gay community. During a 12 week killing spree in 1993 he strangled five homosexual men he had picked up in bars.
The telephone call to the newsroom of The Sun newspaper in London was brief and anonymous. A man's voice told a reporter: 'I have murdered a man.' He then gave an address in Vicarage Crescent, Battersea, south-west London.
Speaking in a gruff London accent, he continued: 'I am calling you because I am worried about his dogs. I want them to be let out. 'It would be cruel for them to be stuck there. They need food and water.' Then the voice added chillingly: 'I tied him up and I killed him and I cleaned up the flat afterwards. I did it. It was my New Year resolution to kill a human being. Is that of any interest to you? He was a homosexual and into kinky sex' Then he hung up.
The paper alerted the police, who went round to the flat on 9 March 1993. When they knocked on the door there was no reply, but they could hear dogs barking in the background. After forcing the door, the officers found the owner of the two dogs, a Labrador and a German shepherd, lying dead on his four-poster bed. He was spread-eagled and naked, with his wrists and ankles tied by cord to each corner post. A plastic bag had been tied tightly over his head.
Peter Walker was a 45-year-old theatre director who had been openly gay since his early 20s. He had spent his life working in show business, and when he died he was the assistant director of the West End hit musical City of Angels.
Detectives made a close examination of the scene to discover whether Mr Walker had been murdered, or had died accidentally during a sado-masochistic sex session. The police and pathologists had seen it many times before: sex games featuring bondage together with restricted breathing that had gone too far and had fatal consequences. Sometimes there was no one else involved, the victim having tied themselves up with complex knots before accidentally dying from the sudden unexpected tightening of a strategic ligature around the neck.
This time detectives decided that the victim could not have tied himself to the posts of his bed and then secured the plastic bag over his head. Someone else had to be involved. It could still have been an accident - except the anonymous caller to the newspaper indicated that he had killed Walker on purpose. Checks also revealed that in the hours after Walker had died his cash card had been used to withdraw £200 from his bank account. His death was classified as murder.
Enquiries revealed that Mr Walker had no regular partner, preferring instead to make casual brief acquaintances with men he met in some of London's best-known gay clubs. Detectives discovered that on the evening of his death Peter Walker had gone to a popular pub - the Coleherne in Brompton Road - where he had almost certainly met his killer.
Single-minded ambition
Unbeknown to police at the time, the man they were seeking was not himself a homosexual. He was a man with the single-minded intention of getting himself into the record books by becoming a serial killer. As a multiple murderer who had decided that homosexuals were an easy target for his twisted ambitions, he was to return to the Coleherne many times. By 28 May he was ready to kill again, and it was to the bustling Victorian pub that he went to select his next victim.
By day, 37-year-old Christopher Dunn was a soberly dressed librarian, but by night he liked to dress rather more flamboyantly, often wearing black leather trousers and jacket, with a studded black leather collar around his throat. On 28 May he went to the Coleherne. He probably had no more than one drink with the man who struck up conversation with him before they left the pub and headed for Dunn's flat in Wealdstone, north-west London.
When Christopher Dunn failed to arrive at work the next day and did not report in sick, friends and colleagues became worried and alerted the police. Officers who forced the door of his home were greeted by the sight of Mr Dunn naked on his bed, tightly bound hand and foot, and with a plastic bag over his head.
A post-mortem revealed that he had died from asphyxiation. There was one other bizarre injury: his testicles showed signs of having been scorched with a lighted match or cigarette lighter. But detectives based at Wembley concluded that he had not been deliberately killed. They decided that Christopher Dunn had died accidentally during some extreme sado-masochistic sex ritual and that the burns had been caused as part of the act. As a consequence all enquiries ceased.
Murdered and robbed
But the police had been deceived. What they didn't know at the time was that Christopher Dunn had died in agony, not ecstasy. He was another murder victim, and like Peter Walker he too had been robbed of £200 - taken from his bank account using his cash card. Dunn had not received his burns as part of some sexual ritual. It had been a cruel torture devised by the killer to get his victim to reveal his cash card's Personal Identification Number (PIN).
On 4 June the killer struck for the third time. Once again he returned to the Coleherne, where he met and chatted up a wealthy 35-year-old American, Perry Bradley, who was living in Britain as European sales director of a US-based adhesives company.
Bound and strangled
Bradley hailed from Texas, where few friends and business associates had realised he was homosexual, but had a flat in Kensington within walking distance of the Coleherne. It was at his home the following day that his body was found naked, bound and strangled.
Before leaving, the murderer had helped himself to £100 in cash from his victim's wallet, and then used Bradley's cash card to take the usual £200 from his bank account. This time the killer appeared to have had no need to torture his victim to obtain his PIN number.
Fired up by his urge to kill and the ease with which he had found it possible, the killer waited only three days before he murdered for the fourth time. Again he returned to the Coleherne.
The victim this time was 33-year-old housing supervisor Andrew Collier. Within an hour of the first words being spoken between them the couple set off to Collier's flat in Stoke Newington, north London. There the same cruel ritual was played out. Collier, who was a carrier of the HIV virus that leads to AIDS, willingly submitted to what he believed was going to be a sado-masochistic sex session. But this time there was an outlandish twist in the killer's modus operandi.
After killing Collier, the killer caught hold of his victim's pet cat. Tying a noose made of sailing cord around its neck, he cruelly tossed the terrified animal over a door, hanging it to death. Then in a macabre finishing touch, he took its still twitching body, placed a condom over its tail, and arranged it in an obscene pose on the naked body of his human victim.
After the murder of Perry Bradley police started looking at the serious possibility that his death was linked with the killing of Peter Walker three months earlier. The flurry of publicity around the case resulted in the first of a series of phone calls from the killer to the police.
Ambition to be a serial killer
In the first call, received by the Bradley investigation incident room at Kensington police station, the murderer indicated his intention to become a serial killer. He told a detective that he had read a book by former FBI agent Robert Ressler on serial killers entitled the Crime Classification Manual. He said: 'I know what it takes to become one. You have to kill one over four to qualify, don't you? I plan to kill five. I have already killed three. It started as an exercise, I wanted to see if it could be done, to see if I really could get away with it.’ He then asked the officer: 'Have you found Christopher Dunn yet? I killed him too. I haven't seen anything in the papers’
It was the first time that the dead librarian's name had been mentioned in the enquiry. The killer could not understand why he had not read anything about the case in the newspapers. The answer was simply that no articles had appeared because the death of Christopher Dunn had been wrongly identified as an accident and had therefore not been considered newsworthy.
The caller then told the police how he had murdered Perry Bradley. To prove that he really was the killer and not just a hoaxer, he gave the listening officer a description of the inside of Bradley's flat.
This included how he had turned a collection of family photographs on the mantelpiece to face the wall before throttling the bachelor businessman. His message complete, the killer hung up. His call had lasted less than a minute, and there had been no time to trace it.
The second call came after the discovery of Andrew Collier's corpse. It was made to Arbour Square police station in the East End, where detectives investigating the Collier murder were based. In it the caller restated his intention of killing at least five victims.
He also explained why he had killed the cat. He said that a newspaper article that had appeared in The Sun shortly after his tip-off phone call about the murder of Peter Walker had described the anonymous caller as 'an animal lover'. The caller told the policeman: 'I don’t want anybody to get any wrong ideas about me. I am not an animal lover; that's why I killed the cat.'
The revelation that a serial killer was targeting homosexual men spread panic through London's gay community. While homosexuals in the police volunteered to go undercover looking for leads, many gays formed self-protection groups and shunned dates with strangers. But at night-time and weekends the Coleherne was still thronging with men of all ages.
The Coleherne connection
It was because of the Coleherne connection that the multiple murder enquiry, which now involved detectives from four different areas of London, was centred at Kensington under the overall command of Detective Chief Superintendent Ken John.
From the police's enquiries so far it was clear that all four victims were regular visitors to the pub. According to witnesses it was almost certain that Walker, Bradley and Collier had been in the Coleherne on the nights they had died, but it was unclear whether Dunn had been there.
Despite the huge wave of fear generated by the murders, the fifth victim of the killer also spent his last night alive in the Coleherne public house.
Emmanuel Spiteri was a familiar face in the pub, and on Saturday 12 June, just five days after Andrew Collier's murder, he had gone there for a drink. The slightly built 43-year-old Maltese-born chef, who always dressed in black leather bondage clothing, left the pub alone. But at Earl’s Court underground station, just a five-minute walk from the Coleherne, he made eye contact with a stranger. They spoke to each other, and the two men travelled together to Charing Cross. Here Spiteri had to change to an overground train to take him to Catford in south London, from where his flat in Hither Green Lane was within walking distance.
Flat set on fire
Emmanuel Spiteri's body was found three days later, on Tuesday 15 June, after the killer had phoned the police yet again. When officers forced open the front door they found the chef tied up, naked, on his bed. He had been strangled, and an attempt had been made to set fire to his flat. Furniture had been piled in the centre of a room and set alight but after the killer had left the flames had gradually petered out.
Detective Superintendent Ian Crampton, who surveyed the scene, spoke to colleagues at Kensington and was convinced he was dealing with the fifth murder by the serial killer. The man the police were hunting had achieved his goal - he had taken the number of lives that according to psychologists working for the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI in the 1970s, fulfilled the criteria needed for a murderer to be classified as a serial offender. But he had made a major slip-up.
Killer caught on camera
On checking Emmanuel Spiteri's movements police discovered the route he would have taken to get home from the Coleherne. At Charing Cross they discovered that the concourse and platforms were covered by video surveillance cameras. Within a short time of receiving the film from the British Transport Police, detectives spotted Spiteri several times. In each shot he was accompanied by a heftily-built man, around 95kg and well over 1.8m tall, aged in his thirties, with short cropped hair receding at the temples. The pictures were not very clear, but if they were released it was possible someone might recognise him.
It was a big decision for the detectives to make. If the pictures were published they might get an instant response that would lead them to their man before he was able to take another life. But on the debit side the killer might radically change his appearance, presenting them with possible identification problems, or go to ground altogether, never to be traced.
The police decided to release the pictures, and they appeared on television and were published in the London Evening Standard. But nobody contacted the police to say they recognised the suspect. By 21 July detectives feared their quest had failed. The grainy indistinct video image had not brought the response they so badly wanted.
On that day in Southend-on-Sea in Essex, a heavily-built man walked into a solicitor’s office and said his name was Colin Ireland and he needed a lawyer.
At Kensington police HQ, with his solicitor at his side, Ireland started by denying that he was the killer. He agreed that he was the man on the video, but said he had parted from Emmanuel Spiteri shortly after the pictures were recorded. The police, however, had an ace up their sleeve. Despite his care, Ireland had made a second major error, leaving a single fingerprint at the home of Andrew Collier. It was a perfect match with prints already on Scotland Yard's files taken from Ireland during his many arrests for petty crime over the previous 20 years.
Faced with this damning piece of scientific evidence, Ireland changed his story. He was soon reeling off a full confession that took nearly two days to record. Speaking clearly and without emotion, 39-year-old Ireland carefully explained how an angry argument with a homosexual at the night shelter where he had worked in Southend had led to him getting the sack the Christmas before his killing spree began. The incident had been the trigger that led him to make a New Year resolution to earn himself notoriety as a mass killer. He told detectives: 'I just wanted to see if it could be done.' He went on to tell them: 'At first I considered killing women, but then I decided on homosexuals because I thought there would be less public sympathy for them.'
Detectives were astonished to discover that Ireland was not a homosexual himself. There had been an assumption by many officers that a killer selecting his targets from the gay community would probably be gay himself. But Ireland had prided himself on being a ladies' man. He had had two broken marriages and a string of relationships with attractive women, and was adamant he had never had a homosexual encounter.
Hatred of gays
Another part of his loathing for homosexuals had come from periods in his life when he had worked as a nightclub doorman at gay clubs. During this time he learned to differentiate between the various ‘specialist interest' groups in the gay community.
Ireland described his feelings during his killing spree as: 'Like riding a roller-coaster. The more I killed, the more of that feeling I got. You are not thinking like a normal person when you do something like this.
'I think that sitting there with these bodies for several hours after the killing affected me mentally to quite a degree. I think if I had just killed these people and gone it would not have affected me so much.'
Colin Ireland went on trial at the Old Bailey in December 1993, charged with five counts of murder. He pleaded guilty to them all. John Nutting QC, prosecuting, said: 'These murders were premeditated and meticulously planned. He was very thorough.’
Sentencing him to five life sentences, the judge, Mr Justice Sachs, made a recommendation that he should never be released. He told him: 'You are an exceptionally frightening and dangerous man. In cold blood and with great deliberation you have killed five of your fellow men. You killed them in grotesque and cruel circumstances. You should never be released. To take one life is an outrage; to take five is carnage.'
After the case DS Albert Patrick, who had headed the Collier investigation, said he did not believe Ireland would have stopped at five killings. He explained: ‘Ireland was an experienced criminal. He knew that once he had been caught on video and his picture published he might be recognised, so he went to a solicitor with a cover story hoping that we would not have enough evidence to pin the murders on him.
'Before he did he cleared his digs of every trace of anything that might link him to the crimes. He was very thorough, but he had made one crucial slip-up: he had left a fingerprint at the home of his fourth victim.'
'If he hadn't been caught then I am convinced he would have carried on murdering more victims.
THE VICTIMS
Peter Walker
Theatre director Peter Walker was the first victim of the killer dubbed by the press the 'gay slayer'. Police found his strangled body tied to the four-poster bed in his flat in Vicarage Crescent, after an anonymous caller had telephoned The Sun newspaper.
Christopher Dunn
Eleven weeks after the first murder, friends of 37-year-old librarian Christopher Dunn contacted police when he failed to arrive at work. His strangled body, tied up with a black leather harness and belts, was discovered in his flat. Police initially thought he had suffocated accidentally, and his death was not reported in the newspapers.
Perry Bradley
Police came within a few feet of the killer when they were called to a disturbance at a flat in Brechin Place, Kensington. In one of the neighbouring apartments American businessman Perry Bradley had just become the third victim of the warped murderer.
Andrew Collier
After the murder of HIV carrier Andrew Collier at his home in Dalston Lane, Stoke Newington, the killer rang the police and told them: ‘I will keep going until I am caught. I will do another one. I have always dreamed of doing the perfect murder.’
Emmanuel Spiteri
Emmanuel Spiteri, a chef, was the fifth and final victim of the sadistic murderer. He was strangled after inviting his killer back to his flat in Hither Green Lane, south London. But it was from this murder that police received a vital clue - the killer had been caught on CCTV.
Gay lifestyle
The sexual lifestyle of many homosexuals, just like that of many young people, revolves around clubs, bars and pubs. It is a lifestyle not without its dangers, however. The police say that at any one time in the UK there are between 40 and 50 unsolved murders of homosexuals on their files. Colin Ireland hoped to add to this tally by targetting gay men in his evil ambition to become an infamous serial killer.
Early days - Petty Crime
Colin Ireland was born in Kent in 1954, and at an early age embarked on a life of petty crime. Due to his disruptive behaviour he was taken out of the normal school system when he was only 12 and sent to a special establishment. He was forced to leave this after being suspected of attempting to burn the place down.
A solitary drifter
He was sent to Borstal in his teens after a number of convictions for burglary. After this he spent a lot of time drifting around the country - but he never seemed able to avoid conflict with the law for very long.
A spell in the army failed to straighten him out, and he left only to go straight back to a life of crime. More short prison terms and a failed marriage followed and then in 1981 he was jailed for two years for robbing a cinema manager of £850.
He then moved to Devon, where he married for the second time. The couple ran a thriving pub, and for a while it looked as if Ireland was settling down. But the marriage broke up and Ireland drifted again until he found himself in Southend.
Survival training
Detectives discovered he was proud of his reputation as a self-sufficient loner. He had learned survival training in the army, and after moving to the Essex town he would often spend nights living rough on the Thames estuary marshes; snaring rabbits and birds to eat and building rough shelters to sleep in.
The Killing Spree
Describing the night he killed Peter Walker, Colin Ireland told police how he had caught a train to London with the intention of finding a man to kill. He told them: ‘I went to the Coleherne that night feeling that if I was approached by a man I recognised as triggering particular feelings in me - men liking masochistic sex - I felt there was a likelihood I would kill.’
He explained how after positioning himself near a lavatory door Walker made the approach by deliberately brushing against him and spilling some drink on his coat as he passed by. He told them: ‘I knew he was looking for masochistic sex. He wanted to be tied up and that suited me fine, because once he was tied up I would be in complete control.
‘I am going to die’
'Once he was tied to his four-poster it was apparent my intentions were different to his. I got a plastic bag from the kitchen and put it over his head and just pretended to suffocate him. I took it away and told him how easy it would be to end it for him.
‘He said to me, ‘I am going to die.’ I just replied, Yes, you are'.
‘I killed him with the plastic bag. I just put it over his head.' He told detectives that he spent all night with the body, and then left early in the morning. He was concerned that if he was seen walking the streets late at night with a bag he ran the risk of being stopped by an inquisitive policeman. The bag he carried contained his murder kit, lengths of sailing cord and gloves, and he also used it to take away anything he had touched without gloves or anything he wanted to steal from the victim's home.
Ireland told police that he had robbed his victims simply because he needed the money. He explained that because he wanted to make things as difficult as possible for the police if they did catch up with him, after every killing he destroyed the training shoes and gloves he had worn; he also needed new rope and money for travel expenses.
After murdering Walker he told police, killing Christopher Dunn had been easier. He said: ‘I went out quite prepared to kill. I knew when I saw the right man that would be it. I would have him.
‘After I tied Dunn up I found his bank card. I asked him for his PIN number but he refused to tell me it. That is when I burned his testicles with my cigarette lighter to force him to tell me what I wanted.'
Ireland spoke chillingly of how he had murdered Perry Bradley. He told the police: ‘I tied him up. I asked him for his PIN number and told him I would torture him if he didn't give it to me. He told me he was quite happy to give me anything. I told him I was just a professional thief and all I wanted from him was money. ‘I told him, “It's going to be a long night you might as well get some sleep if you can," I just sat and listened to the radio and he actually dropped off to sleep.
‘There was no way I was going to allow him to wake up again. My plan was always to kill him. I put a noose round his neck and tied it to something. Then I went round to his side of the bed and strangled him. He hardly struggled.'
Police scare
After this murder Ireland said he had a major scare when he heard police sirens in the street outside. Looking out of the window, he saw police rushing into the building. Convinced they were after him, he waited for the knock on the door. But the police had come to a disturbance in another flat in the same block and soon left.
The murder of Andrew Collier was the only one where Ireland said he felt angry with his victim. It was also the only one where he left a forensic clue linking him to the crime. Ireland said: 'When he was dead I went through his papers and discovered he was HIV. He had gone back with me to his place expecting a normal sexual relationship but he had not told me he was an AIDS carrier I was the killer but he could have killed me. That annoyed me.'
Explaining why he had killed the cat, he told them: 'It was part anger but also to increase the thrill of killing. You are not thinking normally when you do a thing like this. It was like a signature, I suppose, to let you know that I had been there.’
Describing his fifth and final murder, Ireland spoke of seeing Emmanuel Spiteri outside the Coleherne, then of seeing him again at Earl’s Court tube station, where the two men started talking. When they got off the train at Catford he said that a third man had actually approached them to ask if he could join them in a threesome.
A very brave man
He told police: When I tied him up he started to get little suspicious. Everyone was talking about the gay murders. He was either a very brave man or a very stupid one who took a stranger home. But he was very brave. I told him I could be the killer for all he knew and he just said, “Do what ever you want with me".
‘I asked him for his PIN number. I told him it wasn’t my intention to kill him, I just needed money. But of course I couldn't let him stick around to identify me so I put a noose round his neck and throttled him. Before leaving I tried to set the place alight to get rid of any evidence.’
Ireland prided himself on his thoroughness in destroying traces of evidence from his victims’ homes. At Perry Bradley’s flat he had taken away and destroyed some wine glasses they had used when they first got there. From Andrew Collier’s place he took a coffee mug and got rid of it. But it was from a window frame at Collier’s flat that police discovered the only fingerprint they could link to Ireland in the whole enquiry.
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