Asked how he felt about the four young men who lost their lives, his father Mr Port said: "I don't know nothing about that, I don't think about that at all. I don't want to know. His son is due to appear at the Old Bailey on Wednesday, but Mr Port said he and his wife Joan, 74, have no plans to go, saying "I'm in no way fit". Describing his son, he said: "He was ordinary, like any other person. He was quiet. He was just normal like anyone else.
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- Introduction.
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- UPCOMING EVENTS.
Champions League. Rugby Union. Horse Racing. A List. ES Magazine. It seemed, well, dodgy. Then, on September 20, Denham, the dog walker who found Kovari, came across another body propped up in the same place as before. Like the previous body, this one was "virtually sitting upright, in virtually exactly the same spot.
It was the body of Daniel Whitworth, a year-old trainee chef from Gravesend in Kent, south east England. Only six days earlier, Whitworth had tweeted a smiling picture of himself apple-picking in the sun-dappled Kent countryside.
London's most recent and most notorious serial killers - MyLondon
A week later, a report in the Barking and Dagenham Post said that following autopsies on the bodies of Kovari and Whitworth, police were not looking for suspects in either death. The article also mentioned the death of year-old Mushud Ahmed, whose body had also been discovered near to the churchyard, but who appears to have died as the result of an existing health problem.
At the time in , police were not linking the deaths of Kovari in August and Whitworth in September to that of Walgate in June. Detective Chief Inspector of Barking and Dagenham Police, the lead detective in the deaths of Kovari and Whitworth, described the incidents as "unusual and slightly confusing, but not suspicious. The Post 's story hinted at the possibility that Kovari and Whitworth were homeless, telling readers: "It has not been ruled out, that both men were living rough within the walls of the Abbey, which provide some shelter.
DCI Kirk said his team had seen clothes hanging out to dry in the grounds. Serial killings—officially defined as the murders of three or more people over a period of over three months by the same person—are uncommon in the UK. About one in every homicides in the UK is linked to a mass, serial, or spree chain of killings. In most cases of serial killings, the victims are from marginalized or minority communities , such as sex workers or gay men. These groups tend to be vulnerable targets for homicidal predators because the victims' deaths are more likely to go unnoticed and undetected.
It's not only the killers who see these people as expendable. In , at the start of the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, Attorney General of Britain Sir Michael Havers remarked of Sutcliffe's 13 victims: "Some were prostitutes, but perhaps the saddest part of the case is that some were not. The last six attacks were on totally respectable women.
The trend isn't just limited to the UK. Franklin is currently on trial for murdering 10 women, and is suspected of killing up to in South Los Angeles between and Most of the women killed were sex workers, and the film criticizes the police for a slow investigation and failing to raise the alarm. In Britain, the police's track record in solving serial killings involving gay men is as wretched as it is for those of sex workers.
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- UPCOMING EVENTS.
Dennis Nilsen, who killed 15 mostly young, gay, or homeless men between and after inviting the victims back to his North London home, was not caught as a result of dedicated detective work, but because his neighboring tenants could not flush their toilets due to the multiple body parts Nilsen had disposed of down the drains. A man who survived a murder attempt by Nilsen very early on in the serial killer's career—he awoke in Nilsen's home, tied to a chair while being strangled with his own tie—alerted police, but was ignored because officers believed Nilsen when he told them the incident was merely "a homosexual lover's tiff.
Police were similarly slow to act when Michele "Michael" Lupo strangled and mutilated four gay men over an eight-week stretch in The Italian-born flower shop owner from Chelsea—technically a "spree" killer because he murdered over a period of less than three months—met his victims in gay bars. The police were criticized after officers delayed examining the body of Lupo's second victim, stalling the investigation, because the deceased was HIV positive.
So pitiful was the police response to the notorious Gay Slayer killings—in which Colin Ireland brutally strangled to death five gay men over three months in —that Ireland actually began leaving clues for law enforcement. After carefully cleaning each crime scene, the killer started putting condoms in the dead men's mouths and placing toys, including two teddy bears in a 69 position, on their corpses.
Despite these clues, police still failed to link the murders; in the end, Ireland himself had to call them up and tell them that the murders were the work of a serial killer. A review into the Metropolitan Police's investigation of 10 killings and attacks on LGBT people concluded that the police's work on such cases was influenced by institutional homophobia.
The review, published by the independent police advisors LGBT Advisory Group, condemned the Gay Slayer police investigation as a "serious failure of policing. In fact, one of the world's foremost experts on serial killers, the British criminologist David Wilson, says that the gay community receives "at best, a patchy service from the police. While somewhere between one and ten percent of the UK population is LGBT, since Nilsen's conviction in , gay men have accounted for all or most of the victims of five out of the 14 serial killers since active in the UK.
By , China and Kiera had become frustrated with the police's approach in investigating the death of Walgate. They were inconsistent, unhelpful and unsympathetic. The impression we had is that the police thought, 'It's a boy from Hull, no one's going to push it, they'll lie down and accept our version of events.
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The women claim that one of the officers inadvertently let slip that police suspected foul play in Walgate's death and that a killer would never be found, telling them that, "at the end of the day, there are only two people who will ever know what happened on that night and one of them is dead. As police continued to deny, when questioned by victims' friends, that the deaths of Walgate, Kovari and Whitworth were linked, John contacted the veteran British LGBT civil rights activist Peter Tatchell, who suggested John contact Nick Duffy, editor of the online gay newspaper, PinkNews.
Duffy agreed to express their concerns that the deaths were not being widely reported, and that whatever was behind the murders, the community should be warned. Duffy approached police in January but was told there was nothing suspicious and no need to cause undue alarm.
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PinkNews decided not to run a story on the killings. The only logical conclusion as to what made the police sure the three deaths were not the work of a serial killer was the discovery, clutched in Daniel Whitworth's hand, of a suicide note. In June , at Kovari and Whitworth's inquests at Walthamstow Coroner's Court, a statement from Kovari's family said that the young man was a gifted artist who had wanted to make a difference. Whitworth's father Adam described his son as a happy man who loved gardening.
The coroner then read out the suicide note found on Whitworth. It described a narrative in which Kovari and Whitworth had become involved in London's underground chemsex scene—sex parties facilitated by dating apps such as Grindr and drugs including GHB, crystal meth, and mephedrone. The suicide note stated that Kovari and Whitworth had known each other, and that, at a sex party, Whitworth had accidentally given Kovari an overdose of GHB, a drug notorious for having a very steep dosing curve , making overdose a real hazard.
Because of his grief, the note said, Whitworth poetically killed himself with the same drug a month later, in the same spot he had dumped his dead friend.
Part of Whitworth's note read:. I took the life of my friend Gabriel. We were just having some fun at a mate's place and I got carried away and gave him another shot of G. It was an accident. I know I will go to prison if I go to the police. I have taken what G[HB] I had left, with sleeping pills.
If it does kill me it's what I deserve. This way I can at least be with Gabriel again. The report did not mention the death of Anthony Walgate.
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The serial killer theory was just idle gossip. Case closed. Except that the killer was not finished. Three months after the inquest, on September 14, , a fourth body, that of year-old forklift driver Jack Taylor, was discovered lying in North Street, Barking, close to where the other three bodies had been found. Taylor had been out with friends on the evening of September He returned home, but called a cab and went out again in the early hours of September Security camera footage showed Taylor meeting a man in Barking between 2 AM and 3 AM, and the pair walking off together in the direction of the churchyard.
Initially, Taylor's death was not linked to the previous three. In October, the investigations into all four deaths were taken out of Barking's control and referred to the Metropolitan Police's homicide and major crime command. On October 19 , police announced they had charged Stephen Port, a year-old chef from Barking, with fatally poisoning, abusing, and dumping all four men after meeting them on dating sites.
Police allege Port killed his victims with drinks spiked with large doses of GHB. The Metropolitan Police announced it had referred its handling of the case to the Independent Police Complaints Commission IPCC because of what the agency called "potential vulnerabilities in the response" to the four deaths. Whoever murdered these four young men—and a jury will decide whether Stephen Port is guilty at his trial in October of this year — the police investigation was disastrous. Despite numerous warnings , the police refused to believe the almost identical Barking murders were the work of a serial killer, because of a note they had found in Whitworth's hand.
The police were too ready to believe the scenario outlined in the note because it was credible: It gave them a plausible story, of young gay men at sex parties, lethal drugs, and guilt that would have seemed more likely than the far-fetched theory of a forged suicide note.
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This was not an Agatha Christie novel, this was Barking, they must have thought. When I asked the Met Police why it too so long to link the murders and alert the gay community, a spokesman told me they could not comment because of the upcoming trial. Colin Sutton is a former Detective Chief Inspector who snared the high-profile serial killer Levi Bellfield, a man convicted of the murders of three young blonde women, including year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler, in West London in the s. He says the suicide note should have been a critical part of the investigation.
If it's a fake, it's murder," Sutton said. It's a very important call that someone needs to make. So I would imagine any detective worth his or her salt would quickly ascertain whether it is genuine or not.
Senior police officer wants to give evidence during serial killer inquest
In concluding that all four men were murdered, it would appear police have subsequently decided that the suicide note was a fake. There is a chance that the initial investigation may not have forensically linked the note to Whitworth, instead relying on handwriting analysis. Moreover, there appears to be no evidence that Whitworth and Kovari ever met, let alone that they were lovers who took GHB at sex parties.
How crucial the role of dating apps played in these murders is hard to fathom.