Town note
There has been human activity and settlement in the area of the village since the Neolithic era, 4,000 to 2,000 BC.
about 0:07:03The story
They lived in a bungalow with her partner Alan, a former Ministry of Defence fireman. Teachers and neighbours described the boy as remarkably normal, well behaved and good at art. He was dyslexic, quiet and not very sociable, and from the age of 13 to 16 he delivered newspapers around the village. In 2001 he left school and began a course in art and design at Coleg Menai in Bangor. Around the same time he became preoccupied with vampires, reading books about vampire legends and visiting websites about vampirism and forensic science.
In September 2001 he was in the bedroom of a 16-year-old German exchange student, telling her that Llanfair PG was a perfect place for vampires because so many residents were elderly and would not be noticed if they died. Her parents called the police, and when officers confronted him he begged them to bite him too, saying he wanted to become a vampire and be immortal. He was taken to hospital and nothing further was done.
On Saturday 24 November 2001 he smashed a window at the home of Mabel Leyshon, a 90-year-old widow who lived alone three houses away, and attacked her from behind as she sat watching television. He stabbed her 22 times with a kitchen knife he had brought with him, cut the arteries in her legs and drained the blood into a saucepan, which he drank while it was still warm. He then cut open her chest, removed her heart, wrapped it in newspaper and placed it in the saucepan on an ornate silver platter beside her. He arranged two brass fireplace pokers at her feet in the shape of a crucifix and left candles burning before walking away.
The following afternoon a volunteer from the Anglesey council meals service found the door unanswered and saw the smashed rear window, and called the police. Officers found the body in the living room, facing the door. The detective leading the case called the scene totally macabre. The heart was not identified until the items reached the mortuary. A quantity of blood remained in the saucepan and lip marks were found on its rim, and there were deep cuts at the neck, wrists and legs where blood would flow.
Police said they were looking for someone with considerable knowledge of physiology, perhaps from medical training or the butchery trade, and consulted experts in the occult and psychological profilers. When a man set fire to himself and jumped from the Menai Bridge, and a woman was found dead in a local cemetery, rumours of an occult cult spread through the community, though police quickly ruled out any link between the three deaths. Detectives read about the exchange student incident, learned that he had delivered Leyshon's newspaper, and found he had lied about working at a hotel that night. DNA from the scene matched blood on a knife found in his bedroom, and his shoes matched footprints on the patio outside the broken window. Only 22 pairs of the trainers had been sold in the country.
He was calm, friendly and unfazed, happy to discuss vampires and forensic websites but denying the killing, and he offered no explanation when told the DNA matched. A psychiatrist concluded he had no mental illness and said the killing came from a desire to belong.
The defence did not raise insanity. He was given life with a minimum of 12 years. The German exchange student ran from the courtroom in tears, and his mother called from the balcony that she loved him.
His family have campaigned since. She said he was a gentle, generous boy who adored his elderly grandparents, that she visits him every three weeks, and that he is studying for his GCSEs in art, English and maths. He has never admitted the killing.