Anthony John Hardy was born in Burton upon Trent on May 31, 1951, took an engineering degree at Imperial College London, married and worked in Australia and Canada. His marriage ended in 1986 amid violence, and he was afterwards diagnosed with bipolar disorder, spent periods in psychiatric hospitals, and drifted into homelessness and drink in north London, living latterly in a council flat in Royal College Street, Camden.
In January 2002 the body of Sally White, a thirty-eight-year-old sex worker, was found in his bedroom, naked, with a bite mark on her thigh and a head injury, and the door locked from the outside. The pathologist recorded death by heart attack. Hardy was charged with criminal damage relating to a neighbour's door, sectioned, and released later that year. The London press called him the Camden Ripper.
In December 2002 a man scavenging in bins outside the flat found bags of human remains. Elizabeth Valad, twenty-nine, and Bridgette MacClennan, thirty-four, had been dismembered with a saw; their hands and heads were never recovered, and Valad was identified from the serial numbers on her breast implants. Hardy had gone, and was arrested days later at a hospital where he had gone for insulin.
He was charged with all three deaths and pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey in November 2003. The judge gave him a whole-life order. A subsequent NHS inquiry examined why he had been released after Sally White's death, and the Metropolitan Police reviewed a number of unsolved deaths of women in north London against him. He remains convicted of three.