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How Natural Causes Freed Anthony Hardy? · Crime Night

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: All right, let's start today by setting a scene. I
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: want you to picture this. It's freezing cold, yeah, biting cold.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: We're talking December thirtieth, two thousand and two, Camden, North London.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: It's that kind of morning where the sky just feels
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: low and gray.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: And the city is just barely waking up. But our
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: focus isn't on the commuters or the shops. We're looking
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: at something much more hidden.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: We're looking at the back of a residential block on
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: College Place. It's gritty urban, specifically the communal waste bins.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: And the person who starts this whole thing, this huge investigation,
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: is a homeless man.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: He's not looking for trouble. He's just looking for food.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: The sources say he's digging through the bins around nine
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: thirty in the morning.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: Which is a really crucial detail for the timeline later,
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: but for now it's just it's just desperation. He's pushing
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: his side trash, digging down to.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: The bottom, and his hand hit something heavy, a black
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: trash bag. He pulls it open. He's probably hoping for
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: I don't know, clothes, leftover, food, anything.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: Instead, he's staring at human legs.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: That's the moment that's when this ordinary Monday morning just shatters.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: He screams. Police descend on the scene, you know, sirens,
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: tape the whole procedural circus. But as they're taping off
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: the area, the scope of this just.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Explodes because it's not just the one bag. They start
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: searching the other three bins right there in the row, and.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: After about an hour of digging through freezing garbage, they
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: find a second bag.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: This is where the police realize this is not a
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: standard homicide investigation.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: No, the second bag, it contains an upper torso and
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: two more legs.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: So immediately the math is just horrifying.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: Two bags, oh four legs. They're dealing with two separate victims, and.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: The condition of the remains, it tells a story. It's
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: a story about trying to erase someone completely.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: There are no heads, there are no hands. The killer
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: has taken very deliberate steps to strip these women of
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: their identity. He wanted them to be nothing more than
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: just biological material.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: And attempt to create nameless ghosts, as one of the
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: reports put it, but even without faces or fingerprints, the
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: pathology report it started building a profile at the killer
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: almost right away.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Exactly. This is where the science starts to outsmart the
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: killer's plan. So the coroner confirms, yes, both victims were women.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: But the most chilling detail from that initial autopsy was
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: the time of death.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: They weren't killed at the same time.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: No, and not just by a few hours. There was
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: a significant gap. One victim had been dead for about
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: forty eight hours, longer than the other.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Which implies something just terrifying.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: It's a domestic horror story. Yeah, it means the killer
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: murdered the first woman, kept her body or parts of
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: her body in his home for two full days.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: And during that time he went out, found a second victim,
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: killed her, and brought her back.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: It speaks to a level of comfort with the dead.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: That is, it's almost unheard of. He wasn't in a
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: panic to get rid of the first body. He was patient.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: He was actively hunting while living in what was essentially
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: a slaughter.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: House, and we know he didn't go far to dump them.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: You mentioned the timeline earlier. The bins were emptied daily
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: at nine zero am. The man finds the bodies at
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: nine thirty.
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: That thirty minute window is the first huge break in
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: the case. The killer didn't drive these bags to some
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: remote forest in the middle of the night.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: No, he walked them out to his own communal bins
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: in broad daylight, minutes before they were found.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: That level of confidence, it's just staggering.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about identifying the victims, because this is
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: a perfect example of how bureaucracy can sometimes catch what
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: biology can't. They identified the first victim, Bridget, pretty quickly
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: with DNA right right.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: Bridget was thirty four, a sex worker with a history
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: of minor drug efenses, so her DNA was already in
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: the national database. They got to match almost instantly.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: But the second victim, Elizabeth, she was a ghost. She
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: wasn't in the system, no fingerprints even if they'd had
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: her hands, no DNA on file.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: She was completely unidentifiable until the medical examiner took a
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: closer look at the torso they found silicone rest implants.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: And this is that ghost in the machine moment.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Isn't it. It is medical devices like that are strictly regulated.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: These implants had serial numbers etched onto them. Suddenly the
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: police didn't need a face, they just needed a manufacturer's log.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So they traced the serial numbers.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: All the way to a cosmetic surgery clinic in Germany,
• 4:17
  Speaker 2: and that clinic had the patient records.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: They had her name Elizabeth, aged twenty nine, also a
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: sex worker.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: And both of these women had been missing for weeks.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: But because they lived on the margins of society, their
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: disappearance is just trashed. They didn't trigger a massive man hunt,
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: not until now.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Okay, So we have the victims, we have the timeline
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: late December two thousand and two. Now we need the killer.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: And that disposal method, dumping the bags by hand. That
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: really narrowed it down.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: It's just basic physics. Human remains are incredibly heavy. If
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: you're carrying two large bags full of well full of
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: what he was carrying, you are not walking a mile,
• 4:54
  Speaker 2: You're walking a few hundred yards max.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: And they had eyes on the scene, didn't they.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: The CCTV grainy, low frame rate footage from two thousand
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: and two is awful quality, but it was enough. They
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: spot a figure, a man in a cap, his faces obscured,
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: walking calmly towards the bins.
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  Speaker 1: And he's carrying two heavy black bags by hand.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: No car.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: That's the confirmation.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: That was it, That confirmed he was a local. He
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: lived in the immediate vicinity, so the police could apply
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: this massive filter, they weren't looking for anyone in London anymore.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: They were looking for a man living within a stone's
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: throw of college.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: Place and likely living alone, was some kind of history
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: of instability, and.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: When they ran that filter, one name just floated right
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: to the top, Anthony Hardy.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: And this is where the story shifts, because up to
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: this point it sounds like a standard, if you know,
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: gruesome who done it? But when that name came up,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: the police realized this never should have been a who
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: done it at all.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: This is the part of the research that just makes
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: you want to throw the file.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: Across the room, because this wasn't the first time police
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: had been to Anthony Hardy's flat.
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: Not even close. To really get the magnitude of this tragedy,
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: you have to rewind the clock eleven months January two
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: thousand and two, same building, same man.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Hardy was known as the neighbor from Hell, wasn't he?
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: And then some a neighbor reported him for pouring acid
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: on her front door. He was vandalizing mailboxes, screaming through
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: the walls. The police went to his flat to investigate
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: basically vandalism and a hate crime and.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: When they walked in, the atmosphere was just off.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: He was disturbingly calm. Hardy was just sitting at his
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: kitchen table, and right in the middle of the table
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: he placed a single key.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: He didn't even wait for them to find it.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: No, when the officers asked about it, he just pointed
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: and said, that is for the locked room.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's a horror movie trope playing out in
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: a London council flat. The police take the key, they opened.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: The door, and on the bed they find the body
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: of a woman, Seally White. She had visible head wounds.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: She was dead.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Okay, so just let's break this down. You have a violent,
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: unstable man pouring acid on doors. He has a locked room.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: Inside that room is a dead woman with a head
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: in injury. He's arrested for murder. End of story.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: It should have been. It absolutely should have been. Hardy
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: even gave this bizarre statement claiming Sally White died of
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: natural causes, but then she woke up as a zombie
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: to attack him and he had to hit her in
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: self defense.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: He's talking about zombies. There is a body. Why wasn't
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: he locked up for life right then and there?
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: This is the systemic blindness we were talking about. The
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: whole case came down to one person, the pathologist. They
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: examined Sally White's body and despite the obvious head wound,
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: they found evidence of coronary heart disease, and.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: They've had the heart disease was the main factor.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: They ruled her death as natural causes. They decided the
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: head wound was either post mortem or just not severe
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: enough to have been fatal. They essentially bought his story
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: that she just dropped dead.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: That seems like such a massive leap of faith for
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: a medical examiner to make, especially when the suspect is
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: talking about zombies.
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  Speaker 2: It was a catastrophic pathology error, and because of that
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: ruling natural causes, the Crown Prosecution Service couldn't charge him
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: with murder. They couldn't prove he killed her, so they
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: charged him with the vandalism, and because of his erratic behavior,
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: they sectioned him under the Mental Health Act.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: So he goes to a psych facility, not prison.
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: For ten months he's in the system. But then we
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: hit the second systemic failure in November two thousand and two,
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: just one month before Bridget and Elizabeth were found in
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: those bins. The doctors decided Hardy was stable, they had
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: his bipolar disorder managed. They deemed him a.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: Low risk, and they released him.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: They released him, and not just as some halfway house.
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  Speaker 2: They released him back to his Independent Council flat, the
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: exact same flat where he'd been found with the dead body.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: That's just it's unbelievable. He goes right back to the
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: lair and you have.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: To think about the psychological effect that had on Hardy.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: We talked about the god complex and serial killers for him.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: He had killed a woman. The authorities examined the body
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: and they basically said no crime here.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: He must have felt like permission.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: It was validation. He must have felt he was smarter
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: than the police, smarter than the doctors, untouchable. So when
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: he got back to that flat in November, he wasn't rehabilitated.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: He was escalating. He got away with it once he
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: knew he could do it again, which.
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: Brings us back to January two thousand and three. The
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: police have linked Hardy to the bin bags. They know
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: who he is. They raid the.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: Flat and the scene inside is just it's jarring. The
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: police break down the door. They're expecting chaos, a mess.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Instead The flat is aggressively clean, spotless.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: But the walls, the walls tell a different story.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: The walls are covered in symbols, occult drawings, these strange,
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: incoherent scribbles. It's like a visual representation of his fractured mind.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: And just like eleven months before, there is a locked.
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Room history just repeating itself.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: There's a damp towel stuffed under the door to block
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: the smell. The police force it open and inside they
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: find the rest of the victims. They find a torso,
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: and they find a bag containing four severed hands. He
• 9:51
  Speaker 2: kept the hands he did, and nearby laid out almost
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: like surgical tools, were a hacksaw and knives. The scene
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: suggested he was interrupted. He's probably in the middle of
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: getting rid of this final evidence when he realized the
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: net was closing in.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: You said the flat was spotless, but forensics had ways
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: of seeing things even back then.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: Luminal. Yeah, it's a chemical that reacts with the iron
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: and hemoglobin, So even if you bleach a crime scene,
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: the iron stays. When the forensics team sprayed the flat
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: and cut the lights, the place just lit up blue. Everywhere,
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: the bathroom, the kitchen, the hallways, Washington blood. He had
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: turned that flat into an avatar.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: But Hardy himself, yeah, he was gone.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: He was on the run. But ironically, his own biology
• 10:32
  Speaker 2: was his undoing. In his hasty get out of there,
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: he left something critical in the kitchen counter, a vial
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: of insulin. He was diabetic, insulin dependent, and that starts
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: a countdown clock. You can hide from the police, you
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: can change how you look, but you can't survive without insulin.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: And in the UK you can't just buy that at
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: a pharmacy. You need a prescription.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: So the police knew he had to surface at a
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: medical facility.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: They flooded the system. Every single hospital in London got
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: his photo. Yage nurse was told if a man matching
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: this description comes in asking for insulin, stall him and
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: call us.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: It's such a strange end to a man hunt. The
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: man who thought he was a genius is brought down
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: because he needs his meds.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: It took two days. Hardy walked into University College Hospital,
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: went up to the counter, asked for his prescription and
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: was arrested on the spot.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Did he put up a fight, No.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: He was calm. He denied everything at first, tried to
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: blame some stranger who had access to his flat, that
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: same old dissociation.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: But once they had him and they processed the evidence
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: from the flat, the motive became so much darker. They
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: found a camera, didn't.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: They an old film camera, And when they developed the role,
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: it confirmed this was never just about killing. Hardy had
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: posed the bodies of Bridget and Elizabeth posed them, He
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: had dressed them up. In some of the photos, the
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: victims are wearing the same baseball cap that Hardy wore
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: in the CCTV footage. Yeah, he was treating them like dolls.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: It points directly to necrophilia.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: It does. It suggests his primary drive was total possession,
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: total control. He had a history of obsession with pornography,
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: but this was the ultimate escalation. He wanted partners who
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: couldn't leave, couldn't speak, couldn't reject him.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: And when you look at his history, the violence didn't
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: just start with Sally White, did it. This wasn't a
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: sudden break from reality.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: Not at all. Years before this he lived in Australia,
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: he had a wife, children, but he tried to drown
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: his wife. He was deported back to the UK. The
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: violence was always there, simmering, the bipolar diagnosis. It explains
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: the erratic behavior, the shouting, the writing on the walls.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: But we have to be so careful not to let
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: that be the excuse. Bipolar disorder doesn't make you buy hacksaw.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: It doesn't make you pose dead bodies for photographs. That
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: was a separate, predatory evil inside him.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: Hardy eventually pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to a whole
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: life order, which means he would never be released. He
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: died in prison in twenty twenty.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: But the arrest isn't really the end of the story,
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: is it. It's the what if that just hangs over this
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: whole case.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: The what if is the part that keeps you up
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: at night.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: When police analyzed his flat, his notes, the setup of
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: his kill room, it was clear he wasn't finished. He
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: was just getting started. If that homeless man hadn't looked
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: in that specific bin, if the garbage truck had come
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: ten minutes earlier, Hardy could have gone on for months.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: He had the method, he had the location, and he
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: had a system that had already proven it would look
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: the other way.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: That is the absolute tragedy at the heart of this.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: Sally White was the warning shot. It was a massive
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: red flare that everyone just ignored. A medical error, a
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: lack of institutional curiosity, a bureaucratic need to just close
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: a file that one natural causes ruling cost Bridget and
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: Elizabeth their lives.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: It really forces you to let that the safety nets
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: we think are in place. We assume that if someone
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: is truly dangerous, the system will stop them.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: But here the system held the door wide open for him.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: It just shows how thin that line is between safety
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: and danger. Sometimes the only thing standing between a predator
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: and his next victim isn't the police or the courts,
• 14:00
  Speaker 2: It's just a homeless man looking for breakfast in a
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: frozen bin.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: That is a heavy thought to leave you with, but
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: a necessary one. The system is only as good as
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: the people checking the boxes.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this deep dive, Stay curious, stay skeptical,
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: and pay attention to what gets thrown away until next time.