Allan Grimson killed two young men on the same date, a year apart. Eleven years before the first of them, on the same date again, a teenage sailor disappeared in Gibraltar, and Grimson was among the last people seen with him.
The date is December 12.
Nicholas Wright was eighteen, a naval rating from Leicester, and he met Grimson on a Royal Navy firefighting course in November 1997. Grimson taught on it. He began offering to drive Wright home to Leicester at weekends, and Wright and his family were suspicious enough of the offer that he was told to be careful.
In December 1997 Wright was on shore leave from HMS Edinburgh. On the night of the 12th he was seen drinking with Grimson, and the two of them were seen leaving a Portsmouth nightclub together. At the flat on London Road, by Grimson's own account, he tried to kiss Wright and was pushed away. He punched him, struck him several times with a baseball bat, and cut his throat with a carving knife in the bath. Military police questioned Grimson that year. He lied to them, and they left him alone.
He described the feeling to detectives two years later. "Such a good feeling. I have never had that feeling. It was a feeling of power, a good feeling. Better than sex." He insisted there had been nothing sexual in the killing itself. What he had wanted was the power.
Sion Jenkins was twenty, from Newbury in Berkshire. He had spent a short time in the navy and was working as a barman at the Hogs Head pub in Portsmouth. On December 12, 1998 he met Grimson at a nightclub called Joanna's and went back to the flat drunk. Grimson punched and threatened him and forced him into sex. In the morning Jenkins said he wanted to go. Grimson wanted the feeling from the year before. He tied Jenkins to the bath and beat him to death with the bat.
Grimson was born in North Shields, on the Tyne, in 1958 or 1959; the Crown Prosecution Service gives his date of birth as October 5, 1959. He joined the navy in 1978 and served twenty-two years, rising to petty officer. He had sailed on HMS Illustrious, and at Portsmouth he taught firefighting at the Royal Navy school on Horsea Island, part of HMS Excellent, where a steady stream of recruits in their late teens passed through his hands under strict naval discipline.
Nothing happened for nearly two years after Jenkins died. Then, in October 1999, police received a tip-off. In December Grimson confessed and took them to both bodies, which had been lying undiscovered beside country roads north of Winchester, a few miles apart. Wright had been left beside the A272 near Cheriton and Jenkins beside the A32 at West Tisted; some accounts place Wright at West Tisted instead.
Under questioning he said something that changed the shape of the inquiry. He had gone through the ranks of trainees and cadets passing through his courses, choosing the best-looking ones, so that he could dominate and kill them. He said he would kill again. In the same interviews he described sexual assaults on other young men. Because he was already facing life for murder, no one charged him with them.
At Winchester Crown Court on March 27, 2001 he pleaded guilty to both murders. Judge Peter Cresswell told him he was "a serial killer in nature if not in number" and "a highly dangerous serial killer who killed two young men in horrifying and appalling circumstances." He imposed two life sentences with a minimum term of twenty-two years and recommended that Grimson never be released. The psychologists who assessed him were divided about his mental health, though most held him responsible for his actions; one said he was the worst psychopath he had come across in two hundred and fifty murderers.
The tariff moved twice. Later that year the Home Secretary raised it to twenty-five years. On May 23, 2008 the High Court brought it back to twenty-two, taking account of his plea, his time on remand and his personality disorder, and describing the original term as eminently justified. His counsel had argued for sixteen years and two hundred and sixty-two days.
Simon Parkes was an eighteen-year-old radio operator on HMS Illustrious. He vanished on shore leave on December 12, 1986, at Gibraltar, the last stop of the carrier's world deployment. Grimson was serving on the same ship, and witnesses placed the two men together that night. Parkes has never been found. Gibraltar police began looking at a link in April 2001, days after the Winchester plea.
Whether Grimson ever admitted killing him is itself disputed. One account has him confessing in May 2002 that he killed Parkes and buried him in Gibraltar, and refusing to say where. When the BBC broadcast The Search for Simon Parkes and an edition of Crimewatch in 2005, Grimson complained through his solicitor to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom that the programs had left out his strenuous denials and treated him unfairly beside other suspects. Ofcom upheld neither complaint. He has never been charged.
Police flew to Gibraltar with sniffer dogs and searched the sewers. In 2003 and again in November 2019 they dug at the Trafalgar Cemetery, removing about eighty tons of earth, and searched the botanical gardens. Human remains recovered at both sites proved not to be Parkes. Detectives have said they fear Grimson is playing games with them.
Simon Parkes's mother, Margaret, asked him publicly to tell the truth. "In December 1986 our world stopped. Not knowing what happened to Simon has haunted us for sixteen years. We know he isn't alive but we cannot begin to grieve." Twenty years later, at seventy-six, she was still asking. "We hope the truth about Simon's death will come out before we go to our graves."
The dates are why police went looking further. Under Operation Thornhill they examined around twenty cases worldwide and spoke of the possibility of between eleven and twenty unidentified victims. That was an estimate rather than a finding, and no further killing has been established.
One of the cases they looked at is in New Zealand. In 1998 Grimson was at the Royal New Zealand Navy base at Devonport on a firefighting exchange when a twenty-nine-year-old Japanese woman, Kayo Matsuzawa, was found dead in a fire alarm cupboard in a stairwell in central Auckland. He was one of several people considered, because he was friendly with the building manager, who said he had seen Grimson in the building several times. Investigators noted that every one of his known victims was a man. The case is unsolved.
By 2019 Grimson had been moved to an open prison. In October 2022 the Parole Board, his minimum term served, listed him for an oral hearing. Margaret Parkes said she did not want him out. "I think he's a dangerous person. How can someone with that mentality change?" A hearing due in February 2024 was adjourned for six months while searches continued.
What stopped his release was a journalist. Ros Astengo of GBC, Gibraltar's broadcaster, asked police to review the case of one of the young men Grimson had described abusing in 1999, and the referral reopened all four. In February 2025, living at the open prison at Hollesley in Suffolk, he was charged with one count of rape, eleven counts of indecent assault and one count of taking an indecent photograph of a child, all between February 1994 and November 1999.
The four complainants had been fourteen to nineteen. Several were naval recruits; one was a schoolboy. Prosecutor John Price KC told the jury at Winchester that when police first spoke to the boy at his school he had denied anything had happened, and that after Grimson was sent to prison for life he telephoned them himself. Asked why he had changed his account, the boy, then sixteen, said: "Cause I safe." The court heard that Grimson had admitted wanting to kill at least one of the young men, and had been frustrated with himself for letting him leave the flat alive.
Grimson denied every charge. His barrister, John Femi-Ola KC, accused Astengo of coaching the complainant and said the prosecution had been revived to keep his client from parole. Price answered that police and prosecutors had each investigated independently before charging. After a four-week trial the jury convicted Grimson on all thirteen counts on July 27, 2026. He was remanded in custody, and sentencing was set for November 6, 2026 at Winchester Crown Court.
The Sion Jenkins killed here was a twenty-year-old barman. He is not the Sion Jenkins who was convicted of the murder of his foster daughter Billie-Jo Jenkins and later cleared, a different man in an entirely different case.