Town note
Mexborough lies at the north-eastern end of a dike called the Roman Ridge, thought to have been built by Brigantes in the first century AD against a Roman invasion, or after the fifth century against the Angles.
about 0:07:28The story
His childhood was unsettled. There were behavioural problems at home and at school, and he was taken into care, returned, and moved between foster homes. A rumour went round the town that the man raising him was not his father, and a crueller version said his real father was his mother's own father. He was described as a disturbed child who said creepy things, and he was expelled from school. By his teens he was a petty criminal: burglary, stealing bicycles, shoplifting and at least one arson of an unoccupied building.
When he came out for the last time he moved into a council flat on Edmon Road in Wath upon Dearne. He could not hold a job. Through 1988 he worked for a few months as a general labourer at a scrapyard in the Mexborough area, and on 26 August 1988 he was sacked for being late, drunk and mouthy. He took his last pay, drank all afternoon and was stumbling drunk by four o'clock. In that state he decided to confront his grandfather about the old rumour. He went to the old man's house, found nobody in, and walked to his allotment, where the sixty-eight-year-old Lithuanian immigrant was tending his vegetable patch. The first wound clipped his spinal cord and left him unconscious and paralysed but alive. He locked the shed and went to his grandfather's house for money, taking £3,000 in life savings. While he was there the housekeeper, seventy-two-year-old Elsa Conradite, came in. He smashed her skull with an axe and left her dead in the kitchen.
That night he went on a pub crawl, buying drinks with the stolen money, trying to start fights and dropping hints about what he had done. He told a neighbour he was going to kill that bastard Marcus Law.
At eight the next morning the police knocked on his door. They had nothing to do with the murders. He went back to drinking. The following night he killed Marcus Law at his home, stabbing him more than seventy times, slicing open his stomach and wedging one of his own crutches inside, then stuffing cigarettes into his mouth, nose, ears and eye sockets after popping out his eyes. He later said the body looked like a birthday cake.
She knew that made no sense, went to her son's house and found the body. In the interview he shuffled a pack of playing cards and ignored the detectives until he reached the four of hearts. He held it up and said he could read the future from the cards. This, he said, was the master card. It meant four bodies and a madman on the loose. He could see Marcus Law, but the others were indescribable, too horrible to describe. Then he stopped talking.
Detectives went to Raymond Ford's house as a follow-up to the burglary. A constable climbed through the broken window, where a bin had been thrown through, and found empty cider bottles, a devil mask, the television on and the central heating pumping in August. Blood led him to the bedroom. His internal organs were scattered through the hallway and his intestines were draped around the room like bunting. One knife had shattered.
Police then went to the grandfather's house and found Elsa Conradite dead on the kitchen floor. A neighbour suggested the allotment, and in the shed they found the grandfather's body. That was the fourth. Six days had passed since the first murders, in summer heat.
He refused to admit killing Elsa Conradite, insisting he had stood over her body with an axe but that a different axe had done it. One doctor later called him the sanest person in the building. He also told police there was a fifth victim near a lake in a drainage ditch, sending them searching for days for nothing, and he smeared his cell with excrement in what he called dirty protests.
The judge, Justice Boreham, called the killings offences of sadistic cruelty, cruelty for its own sake, said his deprived childhood was no excuse and found him a serious danger to the public.
In 2003 David Blunkett changed the law so that life meant life for certain killers. He had been twenty-one when the crimes were committed and was reported to be the youngest person in England given a whole life tariff. In 2019 a television company was casting actors to play the police officers who worked on his case.