![]() Moira, a receptionist, managed to pay her son’s way through Queen Elizabeth (serial killer John George Haigh had won a scholarship to the posh school years earlier).īut as a young man Griffiths developed a history of both crime and mental illness. He was born in Dewsbury, and grew up with two siblings and his mother, Moira, in Wakefield after his father, Stephen, left. He’d had a normal enough early childhood. Stephen Griffiths had even predicted that he’d kill. He dumped the chopped up bodies in the river Aire - except for the bits he ate cooked or raw. He killed three women and dismembered them in his bathtub. Many of them later reported that he had seemed harmless and even clueless, and a couple have admitted that they stole from him.īut in 2009, Stephen Griffiths picked up a crossbow and turned on his neighborhood’s prostitutes. He’d cook for them, wash their clothes, let them stay with him if they needed it. Like Valentine, Griffiths befriended the neighborhood’s sex workers. Among his academic specialties was Kenneth Valentine, a Bradford man who’d once rented the bedroom in his own apartment in the same building (called Soho Mills before it was renamed to blur its violent past) to prostitutes so he could spy on their liaisons - until one of the whores rejected his advances and Valentine killed her. Griffiths lived on the top floor of Holmfield Court, a building that had once been a Victorian textile factory. In the years since Sutcliffe’s arrest, the scene had changed, and not necessarily for the better: Prostitution had been pushed to the seediest sections of the city, the pimps (and the degree of protection they’d offered) disappeared, and a drug epidemic had ravaged the streetwalkers. Bradford is the old industrial English city where the infamous Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe committed his series of terrors against prostitutes in the 1970s. He was enrolled part-time in a PhD program in criminology at Bradford University. Stephen Griffiths lived in Bradford for over a decade before beginning his short but notorious criminal career. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |