In January 2002 police went to a block of council apartments on Royal College Street in Camden because a neighbor said Anthony Hardy had vandalized her front door. Inside his flat they found a locked room. Hardy said he had no key to it. He had one. On the bed lay the naked body of Sally White, a thirty-eight-year-old sex worker, with cuts and bruises to her head and a bite mark on her thigh.
The pathologist, Freddy Patel, recorded death by heart attack. Patel later came under scrutiny for this and other findings, including his post-mortem on Ian Tomlinson in 2009, and in 2012 the General Medical Council struck him off. Hardy pleaded guilty to criminal damage to the neighbor's door and said drink had left him with no idea how the woman came to be in his flat. He was transferred to a psychiatric hospital under section 37 of the Mental Health Act and stayed there until November 2002.
On December 30, 2002 a homeless man scavenging in school bins found black bin liners holding human remains. Elizabeth Valad, twenty-nine, and Bridgette MacClennan, thirty-four, had been cut up with a saw. Their hands and heads were never recovered, and Valad was identified from the serial numbers on her breast implants. When police searched Hardy's flat they found old bloodstains that showed both women had been killed and dismembered there over Christmas. The London press called him the Camden Ripper.
Hardy had gone. He was caught days later when an off-duty police officer spotted him at University College Hospital, where he had come to collect insulin. Officers found him hiding behind bins in the hospital grounds, and he fought. One officer was knocked unconscious. Another was stabbed through the hand and had his eye forced from its socket, and still held Hardy until help arrived.
In interview he answered every question with "no comment." He was charged with the murders of Valad and MacClennan, and of Sally White, whose death had been put down to natural causes.
The man in the dock had once looked like a success. Hardy was born in Burton upon Trent on May 31, 1951, did well at school and took an engineering degree at Imperial College London. He became a manager with a large company, married a woman named Judith, had three sons and a daughter, and worked in Australia and Canada. In 1982 he was arrested in Tasmania for trying to drown his wife; the charges were dropped. She divorced him in 1986.
After the divorce he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and passed through psychiatric hospitals across London, treated for depression, drug-induced psychosis and alcohol abuse. He lived in hostels and collected convictions for theft and for being drunk and disorderly. In 1998 a sex worker accused him of rape, and the charge was dropped for lack of evidence. By the time he was given the council flat on Royal College Street he was an alcoholic and a diabetic.
His trial opened at the Old Bailey in November 2003. On November 25, having refused to cooperate with police for most of a year, he abruptly changed his plea to guilty on all three counts and was sentenced to life imprisonment. An independent inquiry into his psychiatric care was announced. Press reports that month described him as obsessed with pornography, and said he posed and photographed the women's bodies; the BBC suggested the photographs were the point of the killings. He was also diagnosed with a personality disorder.
Mr Justice Keith found that this was one of the exceptionally rare cases in which no minimum term could properly be set. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 came into force three weeks after the plea, before the Home Secretary had notified Hardy of any minimum period, so the question went to the High Court. In May 2010 Keith ruled that Hardy should never be released. "This is one of those exceptionally rare cases in which life should mean life."
Police had told the press from the start that he was a suspect in any unsolved killing of a woman whose body had been cut up and dumped. The list included two sex workers found dismembered in the Thames and five or six other deaths. One of them, Paula Fields, whose remains were found in Regent's Canal in 2001, was solved in 2011 when John Sweeney was convicted of her murder.
Another was Zoe Parker, twenty-four, also known as Cathy Dennis, who worked west London between Isleworth, Feltham and Hounslow and was last seen in Hounslow in early December 2000. Her torso was found in the Thames by Chelsea Harbour on December 17, eleven days after she disappeared, and the lower half of her body was never found. Two further deaths linked to him were in Nottinghamshire. In a 2013 documentary the criminologist David Wilson examined claims that Hardy could be tied to the murders of Sharon Hoare in Fulham in 1991 and Christine McGovern in Walthamstow in 1995, and in 2021 police looked at a theory, raised in a Facebook group, that an unidentified man found in Burton upon Trent in 1971 was his victim. He was never charged with any of them.
Hardy died of pneumonia at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham on November 25, 2020, aged sixty-nine, seventeen years to the day after he was sentenced.