Anthony John Hardy pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court in London on November 25, 2003, to the murders of three women who worked as sex workers in Camden Town: Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan. The judge, Mr Justice Keith, sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count and concluded that no minimum term could properly be set. In May 2010, sitting in the High Court, the same judge made a whole life order, so that Hardy would never be released. He died in hospital on November 25, 2020, aged 69, while a prisoner of HMP Frankland in County Durham.
The case drew attention for what happened before the last two killings. In January 2002 police found Sally White's body in Hardy's flat while they were looking into damage to a neighbour's door. A pathologist gave the cause of death as heart disease, a coroner recorded natural causes, and no action was taken over her death. Hardy spent most of 2002 detained in psychiatric hospital for the damage to the door. He was discharged in November. By the end of December two more women were dead, and the London press was calling him the "Camden Ripper."
Hardy was born in 1951. The Irish Examiner, reporting on his arrest in January 2003, said he was born in Burton-on-Trent, the son of a miner, and trained as a mechanical engineer. The same report said he married in London, had four children, and moved with his family to Australia in the 1970s. The marriage broke down and he came back to Britain, and by 2003 he had no contact with his family, the paper said.
The High Court judgment of 2010 describes him in similar terms: a university graduate who had worked for a number of years before he was made redundant in the 1980s. He and his wife separated in 1986. After that, Mr Justice Keith wrote, his life went into decline. He received psychiatric treatment for depression, and by the time of the first killing he was an alcoholic who lived alone in Camden Town. The Camden New Journal, looking back in 2023, wrote that Hardy had a history of violence against women and that in Australia he had tried to kill his wife. No conviction for that attempt was reported.
Community Care, the social work magazine, reported that Hardy had been under the care of the Camden and Islington mental health and social care trust since 1995. The Irish Examiner said he had lived in his Camden council flat for about three years before his arrest and had stayed in hostels before that. He was diabetic. Later reports describe a long list of diagnoses. The Camden New Journal said he had schizophrenia and a personality disorder. Psychiatrists who reported for his 2003 case found a personality disorder that amounted to an abnormality of mind, and after he was sentenced he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, according to the High Court judgment.
On January 20, 2002, police went to Hardy's flat in Camden Town. A neighbour had complained that battery fluid had been squirted through her letterbox, and her door had been damaged. In the flat officers found the body of Sally White, a local woman who worked as a sex worker. The Camden New Journal described her as a woman with a drug addiction. Its reports give her age as 38; the Yorkshire Post and Channel 4 News gave it as 31.
Hardy said he did not know how she came to be in his flat. According to the Camden New Journal, he told police that drink had left him in a blackout and that he could not remember how her body got into the room. The High Court judgment records that he declined to answer questions.
Dr Freddy Patel, the pathologist who carried out the post-mortem examination, found no positive evidence of the cause of death but concluded that she had died of a heart attack. The coroner, Dr Stephen Chan, held the inquest at St Pancras Coroner's Court. The Camden New Journal reporter Richard Osley, who attended as a junior reporter, wrote in 2011 that it lasted about 15 minutes. A statement from her father was read by a court official, a housing worker's report was heard, and Dr Patel gave evidence. Hardy was not called. The coroner recorded that she had died of natural causes, accepting coronary artery disease as the medical cause.
What the coroner did not hear became the subject of later criticism. Police supplied only basic details, mainly to secure the release of her body for burial. A detective sergeant from the serious crime group wrote that there was no evidence Hardy was responsible, and the matter was classed as "No Crime." According to the Camden New Journal, the 2005 health authority review of Hardy's care found that the police statement left out key facts, among them Hardy's false claim that he had no key to the room where she lay. The Metropolitan Police later said detectives were never asked to attend the inquest, and accepted that the wider concerns had not been fully put to the coroner. Detective Inspector Alan Bostock, interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary The Hunt for the Camden Ripper, said he investigated suspicious deaths, not natural ones, and that the decision on how to classify a death was not his to make.
The review also found that mental health staff privately suspected that Hardy had killed her even after the post-mortem result. One nurse called it "just a gut feeling," the Camden New Journal reported.
Hardy was charged only over the damage to his neighbour's door. On March 12, 2002, he pleaded guilty to racially aggravated criminal damage. The court made a hospital order under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983, so that instead of going to prison he was detained in hospital for treatment. He was held at St Luke's Hospital in Muswell Hill, north London, according to Community Care and the Camden New Journal.
On November 4, 2002, he was discharged from the hospital order, the High Court judgment records. Community Care reported that he left St Luke's in early November. The Camden New Journal wrote that he was released about six weeks before he killed his last two victims. Community Care later reported that the review panel that decided on his release did not have reports suggesting he was at risk of violence. The trust that cared for him said his services had last seen him on December 30, 2002, and that his next appointment had been due in early January.
Elizabeth Valad, known as Liz, was 29. She came from Nottingham, according to the Camden New Journal, and the Irish Examiner described her as a woman from Nottinghamshire. She had a daughter, and her mother later campaigned for a public inquiry into how the man who killed her had been free to do so. Bridgette MacLennan was 34. Both women worked as sex workers in Camden, and little else about their lives was reported.
Elizabeth Valad was last known to be alive on December 19, 2002, the High Court judgment records. Hardy told police that Bridgette MacLennan died on Christmas Day. The judge found that he had killed both women and had then cut up their bodies so that he could dispose of them quickly. Not all of their remains were recovered, so the exact cause of death could not be established.
On Monday, December 30, 2002, a homeless man in Camden Town found human remains and raised the alarm, the Irish Examiner reported. The remains of the two women were found in Camden Town on December 30 and 31, according to the High Court judgment. Hardy was gone.
The Metropolitan Police began what the High Court later called a nationwide search. Police were concerned for other women. They had feared for a young woman who had been seen on Camden High Street on Boxing Day with a man matching Hardy's description, but her family then said she was alive and well and had been in touch; Scotland Yard said its concern for her safety was "substantially reduced," the Irish Examiner reported.
Hardy was diabetic and needed medication. The Irish Examiner reported that he had been caught on camera trying to get medication at University College Hospital the night before his arrest, and that he was then arrested near Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital by officers from Scotland Yard's Territorial Support Group. The Camden New Journal later described him as on the run for three days before his arrest at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where he had gone for diabetes medication. By January 3 he was being questioned at a north London police station.
Police identified the first of the two women within days, the Irish Examiner reported. Divers searched the Regent's Canal and officers used remote cameras to search the drains at the flat. Police checked the national missing persons records for other possible victims and did not rule out more.
Community Care reported that he was charged with three murders: those of the two women found in December and of Sally White, whose death had been recorded as natural. When he was interviewed, Hardy refused to answer any of the questions put to him, according to the High Court judgment. Police developed a roll of film that he had posted to a friend, telling the friend to keep the photographs "at all costs." The pictures showed both of the December victims after their deaths.
Hardy never disputed that the three women died at his hands, the High Court later noted, but he did not admit murder until the last moment. His lawyers at first said that only a defence of diminished responsibility would be put forward. On November 25, 2003, the day his trial was due to begin at the Central Criminal Court, he pleaded guilty to all three murders.
The pleas were entered on a stated basis that the prosecution did not accept. Through his counsel, Hardy said the three women had died during sexual activity that was consensual but extreme, that he had meant to cause them serious harm by restricting their breathing but not to kill them, and that in Sally White's case this had set off a heart condition no one had diagnosed. He also gave an explanation for the way he had photographed the last two women.
Mr Justice Keith rejected that account for the two December killings. In his 2010 ruling he wrote that it was too improbable that all three deaths were unintended results of an intention to cause serious harm, and he found that Hardy had intended to kill Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan during sadistic sexual activity to which they had not consented, even if they had agreed to sex. Whether he killed them for the reason the prosecution put forward, the judge said, was a matter of speculation. The prosecution's reason is not stated in the published judgment.
Psychiatric reports prepared for the case found that Hardy had a personality disorder amounting to an abnormality of mind. By pleading guilty to murder, the judge noted, Hardy accepted that it had not substantially impaired his mental responsibility for the killings. That ruled out the partial defence his lawyers had first raised.
The judge sentenced him to life imprisonment for each murder. He went further, concluding that there was no minimum term that could properly be set. In effect, the Camden New Journal later reported, he ruled on the day of sentence that Hardy should never be freed. Hardy was 52.
Under the system then in force, life prisoners were notified of their minimum term by the Home Secretary. The Yorkshire Post reported that no minimum term was set for Hardy in 2003 because a European court ruling meant the Home Secretary could no longer set them. On December 18, 2003, Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 came into force. Under it, life prisoners who had not yet been told their minimum period by the Home Secretary had their cases referred to the High Court. Hardy had not been told, so the Home Secretary referred his case under paragraph 6 of the schedule.
Hardy's case was one of about 700 that had to go back to court for the term to be fixed, the Yorkshire Post reported. The High Court had two choices: an order that the early release provisions should never apply to him, or an order allowing the Parole Board to consider his release after a set period.
Mr Justice Keith gave his ruling on May 14, 2010. He explained that the danger a prisoner might pose on release is a matter for the Parole Board, not the judge. The question for the court was punishment and deterrence. For murders of two or more people, each involving sexual or sadistic conduct, the normal starting point is a whole life order, and he found that Hardy's case clearly fell into that category.
He weighed what could be said for Hardy: his early acceptance that the women had died at his hands, the personality disorder from which he suffered at the time, his guilty pleas and the remorse he had expressed through his counsel. In a case of this gravity, the judge said, those points carried little weight. He gave particular weight to the fact that Hardy "killed, and killed again" his last two victims at a time when he must have believed he had got away with the murder of the first, and to the treatment of their bodies afterward. A long fixed term would not be enough. "I therefore make a whole life order in his case," he concluded.
The Yorkshire Post quoted the judge as calling it one of the "exceptionally rare" cases in which life should mean life. Hardy, then 58, was one of only a small number of convicted killers in Britain told there was no prospect of release, the Camden New Journal reported.
After he was sentenced Hardy was first sent to HMP Wakefield, according to the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman. He was then transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, a high security psychiatric hospital, under the Mental Health Act. There he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. When a Mental Health Review Tribunal looked at his detention in March 2008 it found his mental state had improved, but still described him as psychotic, apathetic and withdrawn, the High Court judgment records. He continued to hold delusional beliefs about his world and predicted his own death.
He spent about 15 years at Broadmoor before he was moved to HMP Frankland in County Durham on November 6, 2019. The Ombudsman's report does not say why he was moved. By then he was in poor health. He had poorly controlled type 2 diabetes, heart disease and heart failure, chronic kidney failure and incontinence, he fell often, and a psychiatrist noted memory problems that might have been neurological or a sign of dementia. Staff judged that he still had the capacity to make decisions about his health. He was not given a health screen when he arrived at Frankland, and he missed some medication in his first days there. He sometimes lived in the prison's healthcare unit.
During the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic Hardy was identified as at high risk and was shielded from April 17, 2020. He stopped shielding in July and began again in late August. On November 17, 2020, he collapsed on his way back from collecting his medication. He was tested and isolated in the healthcare unit, and the next day the test came back positive for COVID-19. The Ombudsman concluded that he caught the virus inside the prison, since he had not left it during the incubation period.
His condition got worse, and on November 23 he was taken to hospital as an emergency, escorted by a custodial manager and two prison officers. He was put in a single handcuff and an escort chain, reduced to the chain alone the next day. He died in the early hours of November 25, 2020, and his death was certified at 5.27 a.m. He was 69. The hospital certified the cause of death as COVID-19 pneumonia, with type 2 diabetes and heart failure as contributing conditions. The coroner accepted the certificate and no post-mortem examination was held.
The Acting Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, Kimberley Bingham, published her investigation in September 2022. An independent clinical reviewer found that his physical healthcare at Frankland had not always been equal to what he could have expected in the community. The report criticized the delayed health assessments, gaps in his clinical observations, and the failure to pass his insulin and warfarin doses to the ambulance service. The Ombudsman said she was concerned that he had remained restrained while gravely ill and receiving treatment, and that the restraints were removed only after he died.
The report also recorded an error over his next of kin. The family liaison officer could not reach the woman listed, and police went to her home; she turned out to be the partner of another prisoner with the same surname. The Ombudsman called this unacceptable. Two of Hardy's sons contacted the prison on November 27 after reading about his death in a newspaper.
Other reports gave slightly different accounts of the cause. The Camden New Journal wrote in 2023 that he died of Covid. The cause of death, the place and the date are those given in the Ombudsman's report.
Dr Freddy Patel, the pathologist who had recorded Sally White's death as natural, later faced disciplinary proceedings. He was suspended from Home Office duties in July 2009, Channel 4 News reported. The Camden New Journal reported that he had been suspended from a government list of pathologists and that the General Medical Council placed conditions on his registration that barred him from working for the police and from post-mortems in suspicious deaths. The National Policing Improvement Agency reviewed his conclusions in Sally White's case and in that of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper seller who died at the G20 protests in London in 2009, and in whose case Patel had concluded that a heart attack was the cause of death.
At first the White case was left out of the fitness to practise hearing. In July 2010 the panel chairman, Richard Davies, ruled that hearing it would be unfair to Patel because investigators had taken five years to tell him they were looking at it, and in the meantime Patel had shredded his papers, the Camden New Journal reported. Patel told the panel that he could rule out suffocation and strangulation.
The case was later heard. In March 2011 a General Medical Council panel found that Patel had failed to give proper thought to the circumstances in which Sally White's body was found and to other possible causes of death, including asphyxia, Channel 4 News reported. It found that his failures were liable to bring the profession into disrepute, and that he had been dishonest about an entry on his curriculum vitae. The panel said he had taken an "inflexible approach" and had given only "superficial" consideration to strangulation, according to the Camden New Journal. On March 31, 2011, the panel suspended him for four months.
In August 2012 a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel struck Patel off the medical register over his work in the Tomlinson case, Channel 4 News reported. The 2005 health authority review had referred to him only as "Dr Y," the Camden New Journal noted.
The North Central London Strategic Health Authority and the London Borough of Camden commissioned an independent review of Hardy's care and treatment, chaired by Robert Robinson, a lawyer. Several agencies, including the mental health trust, Camden Council and the police, also held internal reviews, Community Care reported. The charity Sane said the case raised serious questions about how patients were discharged into the community.
The review was held in private and its report was published in September 2005. It cleared the health and social care agencies. It found that his mental state was clinically stable when he was discharged and that the hospital managers had been right to release him. His mental illness had no bearing on the killings, which the review judged could neither have been foreseen nor prevented. It found some shortcomings in his care but none that was connected to the murders. "This is an important report because it finds that the man committed the murders, not the mental illness," said Erville Millar, chief executive of the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust, as quoted by Community Care. The Camden New Journal summed up the review's view as "bad, not mad."
Elizabeth Valad's mother campaigned for a full public inquiry and later called the process a "whitewash," the Camden New Journal reported. An application brought in the name of Elizabeth's daughter reached the Royal Courts of Justice in 2005. Mr Justice Bennett ruled that the government had met its obligations through the health authority's independent review, and the family's case was dismissed. Because Hardy pleaded guilty there was no trial at which the evidence was heard in public, and no fresh inquests were held into the deaths.
Writing in 2011 and again in 2023, Richard Osley of the Camden New Journal argued that the failures that allowed Hardy to remain free after Sally White's death had never been examined in public. By 2023, he wrote, the case had become material for websites, podcasts and documentaries that dwelt on its details rather than on what had gone wrong.
Hardy was convicted of three murders and no others. Several other deaths have been linked to him in the press or by commentators. None led to a charge, and the Metropolitan Police said in 2013 that the possibility he had committed other murders "was fully investigated at the time" and that "no evidence to support this was uncovered."
Paula Fields. In January 2003, while Hardy was being questioned, the Irish Examiner noted that police were also looking again at the unsolved death of Paula Fields, a sex worker whose remains had been found in the Regent's Canal in February 2001. Some newspapers linked her death to Hardy. It was solved with another man's conviction. In April 2011 an Old Bailey jury found John Sweeney guilty of murdering Paula Fields and Melissa Halstead, and he was given a whole life term, the Islington Tribune reported. At that trial Sweeney's defence suggested that Hardy might have been responsible. Paula Fields was a mother of three from Highbury who had worked in a launderette, and her sister told the court she was 29 when she died.
Sharon Hoare and Christine McGovern. In April 2013 the criminologist David Wilson, in the Channel 5 programme Killers Behind Bars, named Hardy as a prime suspect in two unsolved cases and called for both to be reopened, the Camden New Journal reported. Sharon Hoare, a sex worker who had come to London from Bristol, was murdered in Chelsea in 1991 after she was last seen getting into a minicab. Christine McGovern was found dead in Walthamstow in 1995. Wilson argued that both deaths resembled the Camden killings, that a photofit of a man who attacked sex workers in west London in the 1990s looked like Hardy, that Hardy was working as a minicab driver around the time of the Hoare killing, and that he had used the same magazine adverts as Christine McGovern. Wilson accepted that the leads were circumstantial. Other men had been named in connection with the Hoare case before, with nothing coming of it. Sharon Hoare's father told the programme he would love to have closure. The Metropolitan Police said there would be no further action.
Hardy is not legally responsible for any of these deaths. They remain suspicions, not findings.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: the murders of Sally White, Elizabeth Valad and Bridgette MacLennan, and in 2002 the racially aggravated criminal damage to his neighbour's door.
Contested at sentencing: Hardy's account that all three women died during consensual sexual activity that he did not intend to be fatal. The prosecution did not accept it, and in 2010 the High Court rejected it for the two December killings. The court made no finding on his motive.
Never proven in court: the claim that Hardy tried to kill his wife in Australia, reported by the Camden New Journal in 2023. No conviction for it was reported.
Never charged: the deaths of Sharon Hoare and Christine McGovern. The death of Paula Fields was the subject of another man's conviction.
Details that vary between sources: Sally White's age (38 or 31); Elizabeth Valad's age (29, or about 30 in the first report before she was named); the spelling of Bridgette MacLennan's name (MacLennan in the High Court judgment, MacClennan in most press reports, with Brigitte and Brigette also used); the place of his arrest (near Great Ormond Street Hospital in two press accounts, after he had been seen at University College Hospital the night before); his mental illness (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and personality disorder are named in different sources); and the cause of death (COVID-19 pneumonia in the Ombudsman's report, Covid in the Camden New Journal).
1951: Anthony John Hardy is born in the Burton upon Trent area, Staffordshire.
1970s: having trained as an engineer and married, he moves with his family to Australia; the marriage later breaks down.
1980s: made redundant.
1986: separates from his wife.
1995: comes under the care of Camden and Islington mental health services.
January 20, 2002: police called over damage to a neighbour's door find Sally White's body in his flat; the post-mortem gives heart disease and an inquest records natural causes.
March 12, 2002: pleads guilty to racially aggravated criminal damage; hospital order under section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
November 4, 2002: discharged from the hospital order; leaves St Luke's Hospital, Muswell Hill.
December 19, 2002: Elizabeth Valad last known to be alive.
December 25, 2002: the day Hardy told police Bridgette MacLennan died.
December 30 and 31, 2002: the remains of the two women are found in Camden Town; Hardy has gone.
Early January 2003: arrested near Great Ormond Street Hospital after a nationwide search; refuses to answer questions; charged with three murders.
November 25, 2003: pleads guilty to all three murders on the day of trial at the Central Criminal Court; life sentences from Mr Justice Keith.
December 18, 2003: Schedule 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 comes into force; his case is later referred to the High Court.
After sentence: held at HMP Wakefield, then transferred to Broadmoor Hospital.
2005: the Valad family's challenge seeking a public inquiry fails at the Royal Courts of Justice.
September 2005: the independent review of his care is published.
March 2008: Mental Health Review Tribunal reviews his detention at Broadmoor.
May 14, 2010: Mr Justice Keith makes a whole life order in the High Court.
July 2010: the Sally White case is at first excluded from Dr Freddy Patel's General Medical Council hearing.
March 2011: a GMC panel finds against Patel over the Sally White post-mortem and suspends him for four months.
April 2011: John Sweeney is convicted of the murder of Paula Fields, a death once linked to Hardy in the press.
August 2012: Patel is struck off over the Ian Tomlinson case.
April 2013: David Wilson names Hardy as a suspect in two unsolved deaths; police say there will be no further action.
November 6, 2019: moved from Broadmoor to HMP Frankland.
November 17 and 18, 2020: collapses and tests positive for COVID-19.
November 23, 2020: taken to hospital as an emergency.
November 25, 2020: dies in hospital, aged 69.
September 2022: the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman publishes its investigation into his death.