Latest / True Nightmare Stories / He Decided to Kill on New Year's - Hunting the Gay Slayer
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: On the morning of March 10th, 1993, a man called
- 0:07Speaker 1: the news desk at the sun. He told them there
- 0:10Speaker 1: was a body in a flat in Battersea. He gave
- 0:12Speaker 1: them the address. Then he asked if someone could check
- 0:15Speaker 1: on the dogs. He wasn't reporting a crime he had witnessed.
- 0:18Speaker 1: He was reporting a crime he had committed. And the
- 0:21Speaker 1: request about the dogs, that small, almost domestic detail, is
- 0:25Speaker 1: the part that never quite leaves you. There is something
- 0:28Speaker 1: in this story that kept pulling at the edges of
- 0:30Speaker 1: the obvious. A killer who studied invisibility and then demanded
- 0:34Speaker 1: to be seen. A hunting ground hidden in plain sight.
- 0:37Speaker 1: Five men found dead across London in just over three months,
- 0:41Speaker 1: investigated by three separate police teams who never once compared notes.
- 0:46Speaker 1: This case has a name most people have heard, and
- 0:48Speaker 1: a logic that almost no one has fully traced. That
- 0:51Speaker 1: logic is what makes it genuinely disturbing. Not the violence,
- 0:55Speaker 1: but the calculation behind it. and the calculation started exactly
- 0:59Speaker 1: 71 days before that phone call. On the first day
- 1:03Speaker 1: of January, 1993, Colin Ireland made a resolution, not the
- 1:08Speaker 1: usual kind. He was 38 years old, broad-shouldered, physically imposing,
- 1:13Speaker 1: a man who had spent decades cycling through convictions for robbery, theft,
- 1:18Speaker 1: and deception without ever quite becoming what he apparently wanted
- 1:21Speaker 1: to be. That night, according to his own later account,
- 1:24Speaker 1: he decided what that would be. he would become a
- 1:27Speaker 1: serial killer. He had a target community in mind. He
- 1:30Speaker 1: had read an FBI profiler's manual on how investigators think,
- 1:34Speaker 1: and he had already identified where to begin. The pub
- 1:37Speaker 1: was called the Colahiran Arms on Old Brompton Road in
- 1:41Speaker 1: Earls Court, West London. In 1993, it was one of
- 1:45Speaker 1: the most well-known leather bars in Europe, a place where
- 1:49Speaker 1: gay men who practiced sadomasochism met partners. established trust signals
- 1:54Speaker 1: through dress codes and pocket handkerchiefs, and left together. Ireland
- 1:58Speaker 1: understood the culture well enough to pass as a dominant participant.
- 2:02Speaker 1: He was tall enough to command attention. He lived 45
- 2:05Speaker 1: minutes away by train in Southend-on-Sea, which meant he could arrive,
- 2:10Speaker 1: find a victim, and disappear back into a different county
- 2:13Speaker 1: before anyone thought to look. He carried a rucksack. Inside it, rope, gloves,
- 2:19Speaker 1: and whatever else the knight required. He had thought through
- 2:22Speaker 1: how forensic evidence was gathered. He wore gloves at crime scenes.
- 2:26Speaker 1: He cleaned surfaces. After his first kill, he dropped the
- 2:29Speaker 1: murder weapons from a moving train into a river. The
- 2:32Speaker 1: Kohler and Arms in 1993 was a place built on
- 2:36Speaker 1: a specific kind of trust. The trust required when physical
- 2:40Speaker 1: vulnerability is part of the encounter. The men who went
- 2:43Speaker 1: there were not naive. They were adults operating within a
- 2:46Speaker 1: subculture that had its own codes and its own cautions.
- 2:50Speaker 1: What those codes could not account for was a man
- 2:52Speaker 1: who had studied how to appear to belong. Ireland's first
- 2:56Speaker 1: victim was Peter Walker, 45 years old, a theatre director.
- 3:00Speaker 1: They met at the Colahearn on the 8th of March.
- 3:03Speaker 1: Walker brought Ireland back to his flat in Battersea. What
- 3:06Speaker 1: happened there fit the shape of what Walker would have
- 3:08Speaker 1: expected that evening. Until it didn't. Walker was suffocated. Ireland
- 3:13Speaker 1: staged the scene with a particular deliberateness. Two teddy bears posed.
- 3:18Speaker 1: Condoms placed on Walker's face, pubic hair burned. Then he left.
- 3:22Speaker 1: Then he called the sun. The call is the detail
- 3:25Speaker 1: that resists easy explanation. Ireland had just committed his first murder.
- 3:29Speaker 1: He had planned it methodically, executed it with forensic awareness,
- 3:33Speaker 1: and then immediately undermined his own invisibility by announcing it
- 3:37Speaker 1: to a national newspaper. He asked about the dogs because
- 3:40Speaker 1: Walker owned dogs, and Ireland... apparently did not want them
- 3:44Speaker 1: to suffer. That detail, the murder kit, the cleanup, the
- 3:48Speaker 1: phone call, the dogs, tells you something about what kind
- 3:51Speaker 1: of thinking was operating here. And what it tells you
- 3:54Speaker 1: is not reassuring. Walker's body was found that same day,
- 3:57Speaker 1: the 10th of March. The colleague and caretaker who found
- 4:00Speaker 1: him assumed something. They were wrong. Three weeks passed between
- 4:04Speaker 1: the death of Peter Walker and the next killing. Three
- 4:07Speaker 1: weeks in which London's Metropolitan Police had a staged crime scene.
- 4:11Speaker 1: an anonymous tip to a national newspaper, and absolutely no
- 4:14Speaker 1: idea what was coming. Christopher Dunn, 37 years old, worked
- 4:19Speaker 1: as a librarian in North London. He was found on
- 4:21Speaker 1: May 30th in his flat in Willstone, strangled. The scene
- 4:25Speaker 1: carried none of the elaborate staging Ireland had used on Walker.
- 4:29Speaker 1: No posed objects, no burned details, nothing that announced itself
- 4:33Speaker 1: as theatre. Investigators noted it. They filed it under a
- 4:36Speaker 1: phrase that would haunt this case for months. Possible accidental
- 4:40Speaker 1: perverse act. The logic followed its own internal grammar. A
- 4:44Speaker 1: man found dead in circumstances suggesting a sexual encounter gone wrong.
- 4:49Speaker 1: It happened. There was a category for it. The category
- 4:52Speaker 1: was wrong. Twelve days later, Perry Bradley III was dead.
- 4:56Speaker 1: Bradley was 35, an American businessman visiting West Kensington. He
- 5:01Speaker 1: was found on June 7th, strangled with no defensive injuries,
- 5:06Speaker 1: no struggle, no sign he had fought back, or even woken.
- 5:10Speaker 1: Ireland had strangled him while he slept. The pathologist's report
- 5:13Speaker 1: would confirm what the scene suggested. Bradley never had a
- 5:16Speaker 1: moment to understand what was happening to him. Three separate
- 5:20Speaker 1: Metropolitan Police teams were now holding three separate cases. They
- 5:24Speaker 1: were not talking to each other. There was no shared
- 5:26Speaker 1: database flagging the pattern. There was no pattern, officially. There
- 5:31Speaker 1: were three incidents, filed under three different classifications. investigated by
- 5:36Speaker 1: three different groups of detectives who had no reason to
- 5:38Speaker 1: believe they were all looking at the same man. This
- 5:41Speaker 1: was not a failure of resources, it was a failure
- 5:44Speaker 1: of architecture. The same day Bradley's body was found. June 7th,
- 5:49Speaker 1: Andrew Collier was killed. Collier was 33, a warden in Dalston.
- 5:54Speaker 1: Ireland had met him at the Coleran Arms, the same
- 5:57Speaker 1: pub in Earl's Court where he had met Walker, Dunn,
- 5:59Speaker 1: and Bradley. The same corner of London, the same hunting
- 6:03Speaker 1: ground used four times and never flagged as a pattern
- 6:05Speaker 1: What Ireland did to Collier's flat was different from anything
- 6:08Speaker 1: that had come before. Not in the method of killing
- 6:11Speaker 1: ligature and noose, but in what he left behind. Collier's
- 6:15Speaker 1: cat was dead. Ireland had killed it and placed the
- 6:17Speaker 1: animal across Collier's body. A condom had been placed on
- 6:20Speaker 1: the cat's tail. Another connected both of them in a
- 6:23Speaker 1: configuration so deliberately constructed that it could not have been accidental,
- 6:28Speaker 1: could not have been explained as a sexual encounter gone wrong,
- 6:31Speaker 1: could not have been filed under any existing category and
- 6:34Speaker 1: made to fit. And then Ireland made a mistake. One
- 6:37Speaker 1: fingerprint left on a window frame in Collier's flat. Ireland
- 6:41Speaker 1: had worn gloves throughout the crime scene. He had studied
- 6:44Speaker 1: forensic countermeasures from an FBI profiler's manual. He had disposed
- 6:48Speaker 1: of weapons from a moving train. But somewhere in that flat,
- 6:52Speaker 1: a single surface had been touched with an ungloved hand.
- 6:55Speaker 1: Detective Inspector Albert Patrick, the lead on the Collier case,
- 6:59Speaker 1: recovered the print. It could not be dated. It placed
- 7:03Speaker 1: someone at the scene, but not at the time. Still,
- 7:07Speaker 1: it was a fingerprint with no match in the database.
- 7:09Speaker 1: It was something. Five days later, Emmanuel Spiteri was dead.
- 7:14Speaker 1: Spiteri was 41, a Maltese chef, and he died on
- 7:18Speaker 1: June 12th in Catford. Ireland had forced him to give
- 7:21Speaker 1: up his cash card pin before killing him. After the murder,
- 7:25Speaker 1: Ireland attempted to burn the flat. The fire self-extinguished. The
- 7:29Speaker 1: room ran out of oxygen before the flames could spread.
- 7:32Speaker 1: The landlady found Spiteri's body on June 15th. That same day,
- 7:37Speaker 1: Ireland called the police, not to confess, to make sure
- 7:41Speaker 1: they knew. A CCTV camera at Heron Cross Station had
- 7:44Speaker 1: recorded something. The footage showed two men leaving together on
- 7:49Speaker 1: the night of June 12th. One was approximately six foot one.
- 7:53Speaker 1: The other was approximately five foot two. The height difference
- 7:56Speaker 1: made them unmistakable as a pair. The taller man's face
- 7:59Speaker 1: was visible in multiple frames. Investigators enhanced the image. They
- 8:04Speaker 1: published it. London's gay community recognized a shorter man immediately,
- 8:08Speaker 1: Emmanuel Spadieri, who frequented the Colaharan Arms, who friends had
- 8:13Speaker 1: seen leave with a stranger that night. The taller man
- 8:16Speaker 1: remained unidentified, but he was on camera. He knew it.
- 8:21Speaker 1: On July 19th, Colin Ireland walked into a solicitor's office.
- 8:25Speaker 1: He told the solicitor he was the man in the
- 8:27Speaker 1: CCTV footage. He had been with Spidery, he said, but
- 8:31Speaker 1: he had left before entering the flat, when he noticed
- 8:34Speaker 1: another man was also there. The solicitor passed Ireland's name
- 8:38Speaker 1: to the police. Ireland had identified himself. He had done
- 8:42Speaker 1: it voluntarily with a cover story prepared, apparently confident that
- 8:46Speaker 1: a prepared alibi was stronger protection than continued anonymity. He
- 8:50Speaker 1: was wrong about that, but the logic tells you something
- 8:53Speaker 1: about what was driving him by this point. He was
- 8:56Speaker 1: arrested on July 20th, He was charged with Collier's murder
- 9:00Speaker 1: on July 22nd, with Spiteri's on July 23rd. He said nothing.
- 9:05Speaker 1: He had legal representation, a prepared statement, and a month
- 9:09Speaker 1: of silence ahead of him. The fingerprint from Collier's flat
- 9:12Speaker 1: had now been matched to the man in the CCTV footage.
- 9:16Speaker 1: Two cases, one man, two different kinds of evidence. The
- 9:19Speaker 1: investigators began pulling threads. On August 19th, Ireland asked to confess.
- 9:24Speaker 1: He walked back into Edmonton Police Station, sat down in
- 9:28Speaker 1: front of Detective Inspector Patrick, and described all five murders
- 9:32Speaker 1: in sequence. The tone of the recorded confession was described
- 9:35Speaker 1: by those present as matter-of-fact. He did not express remorse.
- 9:39Speaker 1: He described the killings as accelerating. His word, a verb
- 9:43Speaker 1: that functions more like a physics term than an emotional one,
- 9:47Speaker 1: He blamed the victims. He had prepared for this conversation
- 9:50Speaker 1: the way he had prepared for the murders themselves, methodically, completely,
- 9:54Speaker 1: with no apparent awareness that the absence of visible distress
- 9:57Speaker 1: was itself the most disturbing detail in the story. the room.
- 10:00Speaker 1: He slept between interview sessions. The rational explanation stopped working here.
- 10:06Speaker 1: Not in the gothic sense. No locked door without a key.
- 10:10Speaker 1: No voice from an empty room. What stopped working was
- 10:13Speaker 1: the explanatory framework that investigators, criminologists, and the public had
- 10:17Speaker 1: been applying to Cullen Ireland. From the moment the cases
- 10:19Speaker 1: were connected, the framework said, a predator operates from compulsion,
- 10:24Speaker 1: from disorganized impulse, from escalating fantasy that eventually overrides caution.
- 10:30Speaker 1: The framework had a shape, and Ireland did not fit it.
- 10:33Speaker 1: He had made a New Year's resolution. On January 1st, 1993,
- 10:39Speaker 1: he had written a goal the way a person might
- 10:41Speaker 1: write down a plan to run a marathon or clear
- 10:43Speaker 1: a debt. He had then methodically worked toward it. He
- 10:47Speaker 1: studied the literature. He assembled a kit. He identified a
- 10:50Speaker 1: hunting ground. He practiced forensic discipline that held for four
- 10:54Speaker 1: murders without a single traceable error. The man who left
- 10:58Speaker 1: one fingerprint on one window frame in four crime scenes
- 11:01Speaker 1: was not escalating into carelessness. He was operating at a
- 11:04Speaker 1: level of sustained cold precision that the behavioral models of
- 11:07Speaker 1: the time had no category for. Every rational explanation produced
- 11:12Speaker 1: a worse question underneath it. Investigators asked, Why did he
- 11:16Speaker 1: call the son after Walker's murder? The standard answer, the
- 11:20Speaker 1: killer craves attention, applies to a disorganized offender who cannot
- 11:24Speaker 1: control the impulse. Ireland was not disorganized. He had called
- 11:28Speaker 1: the paper the same morning the body was found. The
- 11:30Speaker 1: call was planned. It served a purpose he had decided
- 11:34Speaker 1: on in advance. The forensic psychologist advising the Metropolitan Police,
- 11:38Speaker 1: Mike Barry, warned investigators not to antagonize the caller. Barry
- 11:42Speaker 1: also warned that further killing was likely. Both assessments were correct,
- 11:47Speaker 1: and neither of them explained why a man capable of
- 11:49Speaker 1: this level of planning was simultaneously making moves that increased
- 11:53Speaker 1: his exposure. There is no version of this story where
- 11:56Speaker 1: everything makes sense. The contradiction at the center of the
- 11:58Speaker 1: case is structural, not incidental. Ireland spent six months building
- 12:03Speaker 1: an architecture of invisibility. Gloves. Trained disposal, staged scenes, forensic countermeasures,
- 12:10Speaker 1: and spent the same six months dismantling it from the outside.
- 12:14Speaker 1: The Calls. The solicitor visit, the voluntary identification on camera,
- 12:18Speaker 1: the confession requested by the subject himself. A later psychiatric
- 12:22Speaker 1: assessment described him as bad, not mad. Legally, that distinction
- 12:27Speaker 1: mattered enormously. As a description of what drove the pattern
- 12:31Speaker 1: of behavior, it explains almost nothing. What the evidence does
- 12:35Speaker 1: show is this. The invisibility was never the goal. Being
- 12:39Speaker 1: seen on specific terms, in specific ways, at a moment
- 12:43Speaker 1: of his own choosing, was what the entire architecture was
- 12:46Speaker 1: built around. The murders were the credential. The recognition was
- 12:50Speaker 1: the point. A 2007 report by an independent LGBT advisory
- 12:55Speaker 1: group found that the Metropolitan Police's investigation had been materially
- 13:00Speaker 1: hampered by limited knowledge of London's gay seeing. Three separate teams,
- 13:04Speaker 1: no shared intelligence, classification errors that burned weeks. The structural
- 13:09Speaker 1: failure of the investigation and the structural contradiction inside the
- 13:13Speaker 1: killer were working in the same direction at the same time.
- 13:16Speaker 1: That is what made the five deaths possible. On December 20th, 1993,
- 13:22Speaker 1: Colin Ireland walked into the Old Bailey and pleaded guilty
- 13:24Speaker 1: to all five murders. No trial, no cross-examination of witnesses,
- 13:30Speaker 1: no moment where the evidence was laid out publicly and
- 13:32Speaker 1: the community could watch it tested. He removed that entirely,
- 13:36Speaker 1: the same way he had removed every other variable he
- 13:39Speaker 1: could not control. The judge sentenced him to five life terms,
- 13:43Speaker 1: one for each man. Ireland scanned the courtroom as the
- 13:46Speaker 1: sentences were read. Occasionally, according to those present, there was
- 13:50Speaker 1: something close to a smirk. Not satisfaction, exactly. Something more
- 13:54Speaker 1: like acknowledgement. He had come to London from Southend-on-Sea, 38
- 13:59Speaker 1: times over those months to find someone who would see him.
- 14:02Speaker 1: The court, the cameras, the reporters, they were the audience
- 14:05Speaker 1: he had always been building toward. The five life terms
- 14:08Speaker 1: were already unusual. What happened 13 years later was rarer still.
- 14:13Speaker 1: On December 22nd, 2006, the Home Office upgraded Ireland's sentence
- 14:17Speaker 1: to a whole life order. No review, no possibility of
- 14:21Speaker 1: release at any point. In British law, this designation is
- 14:24Speaker 1: reserved for cases of exceptional gravity. Ireland sat in Wakefield
- 14:29Speaker 1: Prison knowing the calculation was permanent. He died there on
- 14:32Speaker 1: February 21st, 2012. He was 57 years old. No statement
- 14:34Speaker 1: was released. No family members spoke to the press. The
- 14:42Speaker 1: man who had phoned a national newspaper to announce a
- 14:44Speaker 1: murder and ask someone to check the victim's dogs died
- 14:48Speaker 1: without a final word that anyone recorded. The victim's families
- 14:51Speaker 1: had no equivalent silence. Peter Walker's colleagues, the ones who
- 14:55Speaker 1: found his body in that flat in March, had carried
- 14:57Speaker 1: that image for 19 years by the time Ireland died.
- 15:00Speaker 1: Christopher Dunn's death had been initially classified as a possible accident.
- 15:05Speaker 1: His family lived inside that ambiguity until the confession removed it.
- 15:09Speaker 1: Perry Bradley III had traveled from the United States. His
- 15:13Speaker 1: family learned what had happened to him from a foreign
- 15:15Speaker 1: police investigation through translators and diplomatic channels. Andrew Collier had
- 15:19Speaker 1: been a warden, responsible for housing and safety, and the
- 15:24Speaker 1: staging of his death had been designed to humiliate him
- 15:26Speaker 1: in the most deliberate way imaginable. Emanuel Spidery's landlady had
- 15:31Speaker 1: found his body on June 15th. She had gone to
- 15:34Speaker 1: check on him, There is a 2007 report by an
- 15:37Speaker 1: independent LGBT advisory group that examined the Metropolitan Police's handling
- 15:42Speaker 1: of the case. It found that the investigation had been
- 15:44Speaker 1: materially hampered by the officers' limited knowledge of London's gay scene.
- 15:49Speaker 1: Three separate teams had worked the murders without connecting them.
- 15:52Speaker 1: The Coleran Arms was a known gathering place, but its
- 15:55Speaker 1: regulars were not treated as a community with useful information.
- 15:58Speaker 1: They were treated as a population to be managed carefully,
- 16:02Speaker 1: which is a different thing. The report did not use
- 16:04Speaker 1: the word failure, but the architecture of what it described was. 1.
- 16:09Speaker 1: Ireland had understood something about that gap. He had studied invisibility.
- 16:13Speaker 1: He had read the FBI profiler's manual not because he
- 16:16Speaker 1: admired law enforcement, but because he wanted to know exactly
- 16:20Speaker 1: how much space the system left for someone who knew
- 16:22Speaker 1: where to stand. The gap between three investigation teams who
- 16:26Speaker 1: never compared notes was not an accident of bureaucracy. It
- 16:30Speaker 1: was a structural feature of how the gay community in
- 16:32Speaker 1: London was regarded by the institutions that were supposed to
- 16:35Speaker 1: protect it. The Collier and Arms closed in 2008. The
- 16:39Speaker 1: building still stands on Old Brobton Road. People walk past it.
- 16:43Speaker 1: There is one detail from Ireland's confession that his interviewer
- 16:47Speaker 1: Detective Inspector Albert Patrick mentioned afterward. Ireland had described his
- 16:52Speaker 1: decision to become a serial killer as a New Year's resolution.
- 16:55Speaker 1: He had set the date, acquired the tools, studied the methodology,
- 16:59Speaker 1: and then executed the plan with the discipline of someone
- 17:02Speaker 1: who had been rehearsing it for years. Patrick said that
- 17:05Speaker 1: what stayed with him was not the violence. It was
- 17:08Speaker 1: the calm. Ireland slept between interview sessions. He ate. He
- 17:12Speaker 1: answered questions in the same register he might have used
- 17:15Speaker 1: to describe a commute. He had told detectives that the
- 17:18Speaker 1: killings were accelerating, by which he meant each one came
- 17:21Speaker 1: more easily than the last. He was not describing distress.
- 17:25Speaker 1: He was describing progress. What does it mean that a
- 17:29Speaker 1: man could set that as a goal on the first
- 17:31Speaker 1: day of a year and spend the next six months
- 17:33Speaker 1: achieving it? And the mechanism that stopped him was not detection,
- 17:36Speaker 1: but his own need to be seen. The fingerprint at
- 17:39Speaker 1: Andrew Collier's flat was one error in a sequence of
- 17:42Speaker 1: otherwise meticulous preparation. But the phone calls to the son,
- 17:46Speaker 1: to the police, those were not errors. Those were the point.
- 17:50Speaker 1: He needed the murders to be attributed to him. A
- 17:52Speaker 1: killing no one knew about was not the credential he wanted.
- 17:56Speaker 1: The five men he killed were not abstractions in a plan.
- 17:59Speaker 1: Peter Walker was 45. He directed theater. Christopher Dunn was
- 18:04Speaker 1: a librarian. Perry Bradley had flown from America. Andrew Collier
- 18:08Speaker 1: looked after people who needed housing. Emmanuel Spiteri cooked. They
- 18:12Speaker 1: had each made the same ordinary decision on the night
- 18:15Speaker 1: they died, to trust someone they had met in a pub.
- 18:18Speaker 1: That trust did not fail them. It was weaponized against
- 18:21Speaker 1: them by someone who had specifically chosen them because of
- 18:24Speaker 1: what they were and specifically chosen that place because it
- 18:27Speaker 1: was where they gathered. Ireland had said he bore no
- 18:30Speaker 1: ill will toward gay men. He said he had chosen
- 18:33Speaker 1: them because they were, in his assessment, less likely to
- 18:36Speaker 1: be reported missing promptly and less likely to be taken
- 18:40Speaker 1: seriously when reported. He had done the calculation and they
- 18:43Speaker 1: were the answer it produced. He was not wrong about
- 18:46Speaker 1: the calculations. He was wrong about one window frame in
- 18:49Speaker 1: one flat in Dalston, where he pressed his hand against
- 18:52Speaker 1: the glass without his glove on, and left the only
- 18:55Speaker 1: trace of himself that he had not planned to leave.
- 18:57Speaker 1: It was enough. But it came after five men were
- 19:00Speaker 1: already dead, and after a community had spent four months
- 19:04Speaker 1: being told, implicitly and explicitly, that its losses were not
- 19:08Speaker 1: the same kind of losses as other losses. The last
- 19:11Speaker 1: confirmed image of Colin Ireland in public was in that
- 19:14Speaker 1: courtroom on December 20th, 1993, scanning the room, the smirk,
- 19:20Speaker 1: or what looked like one. A man checking whether the
- 19:23Speaker 1: audience was the size he had hoped for. The room
- 19:25Speaker 1: was full. He had made sure of it. This show
- 19:28Speaker 1: is made by Oba Media.