Crossbow cannibal jailed for 'wicked and monstrous' prostitute murders - Telegraph

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Stephen Griffiths pleaded guilty to murdering Suzanne Blamires, 36, by firing a crossbow bolt into her head when she tried to run away from him in May this year. He also admitted murdering Shelley Armitage, 31, and Susan Rushworth, 43, but police believe he might also be responsible for three unsolved murders after he indicated in an interview that he had killed six women in total. He claimed he had cooked and eaten parts of his first two victims, boiling one in a pot, and ate the third one raw. He pleaded guilty to three counts of murder at Leeds Crown Court this morning. The judge, Mr Justice Openshaw, described Griffiths' crimes as "wicked and monstrous" as he told him he would never be released. Griffiths stood in the dock to enter his pleas surrounded by five security guards. Related Articles Victim profiles: three 'likeable' women who fell for killer's lies 21 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal may have killed six women, police fear 21 Dec 2010 Daughter of victim: 'why was it my mum?' 28 May 2010 Prostitute murder 'the crossbow cannibal' attempts suicide 11 Sep 2010 Student charged with prostitutes' murders: police statement 27 May 2010 Why Britons love a turf war21 Dec 2010 Dressed in a grey tracksuit, he said "yes" when asked to confirm his name. He then said "guilty" in a quiet voice when the clerk put each of the three charges to him. Griffiths then sat with his head on his chest. The judge told the court the defendant's mental health had been carefully examined and there was "no question that he was fit to plead". Prosecuting, Robert Smith QC said Griffiths had admitted to killing Ms Blamires in the flat and dismembering her by hand, while power tools had been used on the other victims. "It was just a slaughterhouse in the bathtub," he told officers. He told police he was studying for a PhD in homicide and he had "cut himself off from society" and a "civil war" was going on in his head. Mr Smith also told the court 81 different pieces of Ms Blamires were found in or by the River Aire in Shipley. A broken knife and a crossbow bolt were embedded in her severed head. Family members sobbed in court as the prosecutor revealed gruesome details of the murders. Griffiths’ macabre crimes were uncovered after a security guard checked silent CCTV footage from the third-floor corridor in the flat where he lived during a routine check for any evidence of petty crimes. It showed Griffiths firing a bolt into his last victim’s head, before “toasting” the death by raising a can of drink to the CCTV camera. Griffiths videoed another of the killings on his mobile phone, the Daily Telegraph has learnt. He had lost it on a train, someone had picked it up and it had twice been sold on before it was traced by police. Still on it was video footage which one senior detective described as the most disturbing he has ever seen. It showed a dead woman thought to be Miss Armitage, naked in a bath and also “hog-tied” on cushions with her hands tied behind her. She had been sprayed with black paint with the words “My Sex Slave” on her back. Griffiths gave a running commentary saying: “I am Ven Pariah, I am the Bloodbath Artist. Here’s a model who is assisting me.” It allowed police to establish that Miss Armitage must have died before 1am on April 28. A small piece of her spine was found in the same stretch of river as Miss Blamires’ remains were found. The only evidence relating to Miss Rushworth, who is thought to have been killed with a hammer, is a trace of blood found in Griffiths’ bathroom. Griffiths was arrested by armed police immediately after they were alerted to the CCTV recording showing Miss Blamires’ death at the block of housing association flats in Holmfield Court, Bradford, in May. It showed Griffiths walking into his one-bedroom flat with Miss Blamires, who worked locally as a prostitute. Within minutes she ran out and he gave chase, armed with a crossbow, before felling her and firing a bolt into her head. Griffiths then turned to the camera and held the crossbow aloft in both hands in triumph before dragging the body out of view. He re-emerged with the drink can which he showed in a celebratory way to the camera while putting one finger in the air and is later seen carrying bin bags and a rucksack in and out. The previous night he had written on his MySpace social networking page, under the unexplained pseudonym Ven Pariah, that he had “finally emerged into the world”. Griffiths wrote: “What will this pseudo-human do, one wonders. Poor Stephen, pretended to be me, but he was only the wrapping. “He knew towards the end, that I supplied the inner core of iron. Hatred Bound Tightly In Flesh. At very long last, the time has come to act out.” When his flat was searched, two crossbows and bolts were recovered from the flat, along with books on serial killers, and attempts made to clean-up with carpets lifted and tiled removed around the bath. The next day a member of the public discovered female body parts, including a head in a rucksack, in the River Aire five miles away in Shipley. They were identified as those of Miss Blamires, the third prostitute to be reported missing in the area within 11 months. Also found nearby was a “killer’s kitbag”, a case containing hacksaws and knives which could be used to dismember bodies. Griffiths was later to confess in interview: “I or part of me is responsible for killing Susan Rushworth, Shelley Armitage and Suzanne Blamires, who I know as Amber.” Detectives have found no evidence to corroborate his claims of cannibalism, which they believe were made in an attempt to increase his own notoriety. Griffiths was quick to seize on a tabloid headline when he made his first appearance in court accused of triple murder, stunning everyone present by giving his name as “Crossbow Cannibal”. He also referred to himself as the “SF” killer, which again has not been explained. Scenes of crimes officers were able, however, to discover blood traces from all three of his victims in the flat.

Both creative and derivative - it's very pomo, isn't it?

I wonder how he managed to do the thing with the spray paint. If you hold the can too far away the writing'll be too big to fit on/illegible, and if you hold it too close it'll drip everywhere. If I was doing it I think I'd opt for too close and try to catch the drips, but I still don't think the result'd be readable on a video camera.

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The gruesome murders carried out by Stephen Griffiths, the so-called "Crossbow Cannibal", have brought untold heartache to the family and friends of the three women he is known to have killed, dismembered and eaten. But how much worse it must be to discover that Griffiths had been identified as a potential risk who had long harboured desires of becoming a serial killer. Could he have been stopped? When he was just 17, Griffiths was given three years' youth custody for a violent attack on a supermarket manager, whom he slashed with a knife. He was diagnosed as a "sadistic, schizoid psychopath" and later spent time at Rampton high-security hospital, but was not deemed mentally ill. He told probation officers that he saw himself becoming a killer in later life, and a psychiatrist said he displayed a "preoccupation with murder – particularly multiple murder". In 1992, he was given a two-year prison sentence for affray and possession of an offensive weapon after holding a knife to the throat of a young girl for no apparent reason. The following year, he was put on probation for possessing a knife in public and given a suspended prison sentence for possessing two air pistols. Here, then, was an obviously disturbed and dangerous individual, who most people will have been horrified to discover was free to carry out his perverted fantasies, with appalling consequences. Could he have been – should he have been – locked away in a mental institution? The question of what to do with people who are socially dangerous but are not, in the strictest sense, mentally ill has been a source of controversy for hundreds of years. In the past, these so-called "moral defectives" were certifiable if they had "strongly vicious or criminal propensities and require care, supervision and control for the protection of others". A similar definition, by now called a "psychopathic disorder", was included in the 1959 Mental Health Act and retained in its 1983 successor. Related Articles Crossbow cannibal: killer diagnosed as a psychopath 19 years ago22 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal Stephen Griffiths will die in jail22 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal jailed for 'wicked and monstrous' prostitute murders22 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal serial killer: Stephen Griffiths admits murdering three prostitutes22 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal victims: three 'likeable' women who fell for Stephen Griffiths' lies22 Dec 2010 Crossbow cannibal may have killed six women, police fear22 Dec 2010 However, this Act also required that anyone detained under its provisions – now known as being sectioned – had to be treated in a way "likely to alleviate or prevent a deterioration of their condition". But an argument arose over whether these psychopaths were, in the unfortunate phrase, "not bad but mad". After all, unlike schizophrenics and other mentally ill individuals, whose problems can be improved by drugs and other therapies, their condition could not be alleviated, and was therefore not treatable. This issue entered the political arena in 1998, with the conviction of Michael Stone for the murders of Lin and Megan Russell in Kent. Stone had a long history of offending and had been diagnosed as having a psychopathic personality disorder. But because psychiatrists did not regard this as treatable, he could not be detained. Ministers in the last government said that Stone should have been in a secure hospital, simply because he was a danger to others, and decided to plug what they saw as an unacceptable loophole in the law. So they set off on a long and tortuous legislative journey to amend the 1983 Act. Their aim was to do away with the treatability provision, so that a small group of potentially dangerous people who were at liberty could be removed from society, because they might be a risk to others in future. Once identified, these individuals would be assessed by a team of experts and – if deemed sufficiently dangerous – would be locked away in a hospital or in a purpose-built institution, possibly for ever. The psychiatric community was appalled. It did not want to act as police officers, judges and jailers to people who might, or might not, commit a crime in future. So, for the next eight years, there was much heated debate: special committees were established, umpteen consultations took place and the proposed Bill was redrafted three times. By the time the new Mental Health Act became law, in 2007, it had been substantially watered down from the original plans, which critics said were simply unacceptable on civil liberties grounds. The Act removed the old requirement that treatment had to involve making someone better, and brought in a new test under which people with a personality disorder could be compulsorily detained if "appropriate medical treatment" was available. The aim was to enable psychiatric hospitals to section people previously considered bad, though not mentally ill – but many experts think that the change from the previous law is marginal. In Griffiths's case, the decision to keep him in a mental hospital arguably should have been taken in 1991, when he was first assessed. But the old treatability rules still applied then – and it is by no means clear that the new ones would have made any difference. He does not appear to have had any recent contact with psychiatrists that might have led to a diagnosis which would have got him locked away. And without one, how can anyone know? The court was told that since then, Griffiths had displayed no signs of psychotic illness or a treatable mental disorder. He was, in that old-fashioned term, pure evil – and sadly, we have yet to devise a way of removing that strain from the human psyche.

Crossbow Cannibal: No one is safe from the menace of pure evil - Telegraph

Like with the spray paint it's the small stuff in this that I find most puzzling. I can understand anyone going nuts and killing a bunch of people, I can't understand why anyone would tell a prison psychiatrist that they were interested in multiple murders. I suppose maybe if you actually liked being in there - I suppose people get institutionalised etc.

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